Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton’s Tutor in War and Peace

[Octafish]

You can tell a lot about a person by seeing who their friends are.

Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton’s Tutor in War and Peace

(During debate), Clinton once again praised a man with a lot of blood on his hands.

By Greg Grandin
The Nation, Feb. 5, 2016

Clinton just can’t quit him. Even as she is trying to outflank Bernie on his left, Hillary Clinton can’t help but stutter the name of Henry Kissinger. Last night in the New Hampshire debate, Clinton thought to close her argument that she is the true progressive with this: “I was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better than anybody had run it in a long time.”

Let’s consider some of Kissinger’s achievements during his tenure as Richard Nixon’s top foreign policy–maker. He (1) prolonged the Vietnam War for five pointless years; (2) illegally bombed Cambodia and Laos; (3) goaded Nixon to wiretap staffers and journalists; (4) bore responsibility for three genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; (5) urged Nixon to go after Daniel Ellsberg for having released the Pentagon Papers, which set off a chain of events that brought down the Nixon White House; (6) pumped up Pakistan’s ISI, and encouraged it to use political Islam to destabilize Afghanistan; (7) began the US’s arms-for-petrodollars dependency with Saudi Arabia and pre-revolutionary Iran; (8) accelerated needless civil wars in southern Africa that, in the name of supporting white supremacy, left millions dead; (9) supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America; and (10) ingratiated himself with the first-generation neocons, such as Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, who would take American militarism to its next calamitous level. Read all about it in Kissinger’s Shadow!

SNIP...

 As first lady, Hillary Clinton spent the early months of her husband’s administration drafting healthcare-reform legislation, only to see it put on the back burner by the North American Free Trade Agreement. Kissinger, in his role as a global consultant, had played a critical role in bringing the various parties who would write that trade treaty together during the previous George H.W. Bush administration. Kissinger continued his NAFTA advocacy with Bill Clinton. As Jeff Faux writes in his excellent The Global Class War, Kissinger was “the perfect tutor” for Clinton, who was “trying to convince Republicans and their business allies that they could count on him to champion Reagan’s vision.”

By September 1993, Hillary’s healthcare bill was ready to be presented to the public and to Congress. But so was NAFTA. All of Kissinger’s allies in the White House, including Mack McLarty, who would soon join Kissinger Associates, pushed Clinton to prioritize NAFTA over healthcare. Clinton did. It was Kissinger who came up with the idea of having past presidents stand behind Clinton as he signed the treaty. Reagan was sick and Nixon still non grata, but “flanked by former presidents Bush, Carter and Ford at a White House ceremony, Mr. Clinton delivers an impassioned speech,” The Wall Street Journal reported. No such presidential backdrop was assembled to help support Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposal. By August 1994, healthcare was dead.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thenation.com/article/henry-kissinger-hillary-clintons-tutor-in-war-and-peace/

Reading is hard, but it's a good way to learn a lot, fast.

[NurseJackie]

1. News Flash:

[Wilms]

2. What a nasty, nasty, woman.

The judge, that is.

[cpwm17]

11. Authoritarians like her.

She would never be allowed to act that way in a real court.

[Octafish]

3. What do you think her private emails to Kissinger reveal?

Is that something Judge Judy or President Obama would want to know?

Based on what we know about WTO and free trade, I'd like to know if they discussed TPP.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

4. I think they reveal that she

was the second gunman on the grassy knoll, working for the BFEE, in conjunction with the underpants gnomes!

[bettyellen]

7. And she farts chemtrails!

[Dr Hobbitstein]

8. Chemtrails supplied by the BFEE. nt

[Octafish]

19. Bill Clinton, the Lippo Group, and Jackson Stephens of Little Rock, Arkansas (5th Version) 1999

Going by what you write, you probably never heard of Mark Lombardi, a New York artist who created graphic ways of seeing and understanding the connections between the world's high rollers, arch criminals, warmongers, banksters and various states and organizations. Never mentioned by Corporate McPravda and Lackadaemia, we used to talk about him a bit on DU. Here's one of his works, based on social network diagrams and turned into what he called "Narrative Structures."



Bill Clinton, the Lippo Group, and Jackson Stephens of Little Rock,Arkansas (5th Version) 1999
Colored pencil and graphite on paper by Mark Lombardi

SOURCE: http://www.pierogi2000.com/2011/03/mark-lombardi-at-pierogi/lombardibillclintonlippo5/

MORE: http://www.flashpointmag.com/mlpic.htm

BACKGROUND: BCCI IN THE UNITED STATES

George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens c. 1979-90, 5th Version (1999)

For those new to the story: Mark Lombardi chronicled the Bush-Bath-bin Ladin connection in 1999. The next year he was dead, a suicide. After September 11, the FBI showed up at the gallery to photograph his work. Where James R. Bath fits in.



George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens c. 1979-90, 5th Version (1999)

"Obsessive—Generous"

Toward a Diagram of Mark Lombardi

by Frances Richard
wburg.com

Who is James R. Bath?

A nodal point in Mark Lombardi's drawing George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens c. 1979-90, 5th Version, 1999, James R. Bath appears in the upper lefthand corner of the 16 1/2" x 41" piece of paper. The spatial syntax of Lombardi's drawings—which map in elegantly visual terms the secret deals and suspect associations of financiers, politicians, corporations, and governments—dictates that the more densely lines ray out from a given node, the more deeply that figure is embroiled in the tale Lombardi tells. Thirteen lines originate with or point to James R. Bath, more than any other name presented. Among those linked to this obscure yet central character are George W. Bush, Jr., George H.W. Bush, Sr., Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, Governor John B. Connally of Texas, Sheik Salim bin Laden of Saudi Arabia, and Sheik Salim's younger brother, Osama bin Laden.

The drawing is done on pale beige paper, in pencil. It follows a time-line, with dates arrayed across three horizontal tiers. These in turn support arcs denoting personal and corporate alliances, the whole comprising a skeletal resume of George W. Bush's career in the oil business. In other words, the drawing, like all Lombardi's work, is a post-Conceptual reinvention of history painting, a document of factually verifiable yet extremely pared-down relationships limned in a double light of international fame and cryptic realpolitik. Or rather, the light is triple. For, though he possessed the instincts of a private eye and the acumen of a systems-analyst, Lombardi was of course an artist, and from the raw material of wire-service reports and books by political correspondents, he drew not only chronicles of covert, high-stakes trade, but technically pristine and sensually compelling visual forms. His project's sources are profoundly art-historical, even as they are obviously journalistic, and the creative tension between abstracted, self-propelling image and direct verbal communication propels his work. Delicately balanced and gracefully enlaced, these lines and circles read from across the room as purely retinal explorations of two-dimensional space. Their stylized complexity, however, lures the eye in, to a point where language registers as legible and referentiality asserts itself through the scrim of form. A narrative emerges. Looking shifts toward reading, and Lombardi's one-two punch lands.

James R. Bath, it turns out, is a Texas businessman, a sometime aeronautics broker whose firm, Skyway Aircraft Leasing, LTD., was a Cayman Islands front amassing money for use by Oliver North in the Iran-Contra affair. Bath also served as an agent minding American interests for a quartet of Saudi Arabian billionaires, one of whom was Sheik Salim bin Laden, the oldest son and heir of Sheik Mohammed bin Laden, father of fifty-four children including Osama. According to reports by the Houston Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal, Time, and others, Bath did business in his own name but with the Saudis' money; tax records indicate that he collected a fee of 5% on their multimillion dollar American investments. In 1979, Bath contributed $50,000 to Arbusto Energy, a limited-partnership controlled by George W. Bush. As Bath had little capital of his own, oil insiders trace the funds to his silent partners, specifically Salim bin Laden. Such cash infusions from Bath's client sheiks and George H.W. Bush's cartel cronies could not, however, prop Arbusto up. The venture collapsed in 1981 and merged into the Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation. Spectrum—still with W. at the helm—evolved through more near-failures and mergers into Harken Energy, which, in 1990, embarked upon a sweetheart deal to drill oil wells in Bahrain—this regardless of the fact that Harken had never drilled an overseas well, nor a marine well of any kind. Oil industry cognoscenti again assume that the Bahrain contract was orchestrated as a favor from the Saudis to the American chief executive and his family. The favor paid. On June 20, 1990, George W. Bush sold two-thirds of his Harken stock at $4 per share. Eight days later, Harken finished the second quarter with losses of $23 million; the stock promptly lost 75% of its value, finishing at just over $1 per share. Two months later, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the Gulf War began. All these events are cited in Lombardi's drawing.

Meanwhile, another Bath associate, Sheik Khalid bin Mafouz, was involved in the collapse (in July, 1991) of the Bank of Credit and Commerce, International, better known as BCCI. Among the sins of the Pakistani-owned BCCI were money-laundering on behalf of Colombian druglords, arms brokering, bribery, and aid to terrorists; when this cabal came unglued, millions of investors in seventy-three countries lost their life-savings. Although Bath was not personally implicated in the BCCI fiasco, an estranged business partner claims that that he, Bath, had been recruited to the CIA in 1976-77 by George Bush, Sr., after serving in the Texas Air National Guard as the buddy of George Bush, Jr. (in 1972, the two young men narrowly escaped arrest for cocaine possession). Bath's putative CIA connections, the Agency's operations in the Middle East, and the adventures of BCCI thus compose a kind of symmetry. The byzantine saga of BCCI's demise is plotted in the drawing that is perhaps Lombardi's masterwork, BCCI-ICIC-FAB, c. 1972-1991, (4th Version), 1996-2000. Unveiled in the landmark P.S. 1 exhibition "Greater New York" in 2000, this piece signaled Lombardi's arrival at the cusp of art world fame; it is now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum. A wall-size panel schematizing twenty years of suspect alliances amongst scores of players, BCCI-ICIC-FAB… was the last major work the artist made before his death.

For those who followed the BCCI scandal—or the Harken Energy/insider trading scandal, or the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro scandal, or the Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal, or any of Lombardi's pet juggernauts—these diagrams summarize rather than amend available knowledge. He was always careful to explain that he did not conduct primary investigations, but culled his information exclusively from the public record; a basic Internet search yields multiple references to the Bath/Bush/bin Laden connection. However, ferreting out and adding up in one's own head the myriad fragments scattered across the infotainment megascape is a very different experience from standing before Lombardi's rhythmic plots. In the strangely contemplative and yet galvanizing presence of these images, the graphic equilibrium with which he invests his subjects is transformative. To track these events in the context of the drawings is to experience their import freshly, to undergo a shock of mixed recognition and surprise.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wburg.com/0202/arts/lombardi.html

A particularly relevant detail:



More detail on the artist and his work:

Mark Lombardi and the Ecstasy of Conspiracy

Michael Bierut

With the 40th anniversary of the assassination of JFK freshly behind us, our abiding romance with conspiracy theories seems more ardent than ever. And one of the most remarkable expressions of that romance is on view at The Drawing Center in New York, "Global Networks," an exhibition of the work of Mark Lombardi. In an age where we all dimly sense that The Truth Is Out There, Lombardi's extraordinary drawings aim to provide all the answers.

Although Lombardi's work has combined the mesmerizing detail of the engineering diagram and the obsessive annotation of the outsider artist, the man was neither scientist nor madman. Armed with a BA in art history, he began as a researcher and archivist in the Houston fine arts community with a passing interest in corporate scandal, financial malfeasance, and the hidden web of connections that seemed to connect, for instance, the Mafia, the Vatican bank, and the 1980's savings and loan debacle. His initial explorations were narrative, but in 1993 he made the discovery that some kinds of information are best expressed diagrammatically.

The resulting body of work must be seen to be believed — an admittedly oxymoronic endorsement of subject matter of such supreme skepticism. Lombardi's delicate tracings, mostly in black pencil with the occasional red accent, cover enormous sheets of paper (many over four feet high and eight feet long), mapping the deliriously Byzantine relationships of, say, Oliver North, Lake Resources of Panama, and the Iran-Contra operation, or Global International Airways and the Indian Springs State Bank of Kansas City. Because the work visualizes connections rather than causality, Lombardi was able to take the same liberties as Harry Beck's 1933 map for the London Underground, freely arranging the players to create gorgeous patterns: swirling spheres, hopscotching arcs, wheels within wheels.

Lombardi was indeed an enthusiastic student of information design, a reader of Edward Tufte and a collector of the charts of Nigel Holmes. But if the goal of information design is to make things clear, Lombardi's drawings, in fact, do the opposite. The hypnotic miasma of names, institutions, corporations and locations that envelop each drawing demonstrates nothing if not the inherent -- the intentional -- unknowability of each of these networks. Like Rube Goldberg devices, their only meaning is their ecstatic complexity; like Hitchcockian McGuffins, understanding them is less important than simply knowing they exist.

Lomardi, who was born in 1951 and died in 2000, did not live to see today's historical moment, where his worldview seems not eccentric but positively prescient. His drawing BCCI-ICIC & FAB, 1972-91 (4th version) was studied in situ at the Whitney Museum by F.B.I. agents in the days after 9/11; reportedly, consultants to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security previewed the current show at the Drawing Center. One wonders whether he would have felt vindicated or alarmed by this kind of attention.

The catalog for the exhibition, which was organized by Robert Hobbs and Independent Curators International, cannot possibly do the drawings justice. But it may be worth it for the extended captions alone, each one of which could serve as an outline for a pretty decent John leCarre novel. And in what other art catalog could you find an index where (under the Cs alone) one finds Canadian Armament and Research Development Establishment; capitalism; Capone, Al; Castro, Fidel, and conceptual art? And it is in the catalog that one finds, tossed away almost casually in a footnote, the following fact: "The police report cited suicide by hanging as the reason for Mark Lombardi's death. The door to his studio was locked from the inside." That last detail is an all-too-common device in mystery novels, where it inevitably raises the same question: yes, that's how it seems, but what really happened? Mark Lombardi's work tries, valiantly, to answer that very question.

11.24.03

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/000072.html

Hope this fills in some blanks for you.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

22. Clears up everything.

[Octafish]

35. Your post reflects your level of understanding, Dr Hobbitstein, not mine.

Show where I'm wrong in the OP or anywhere on the thread. I'll be happy to apologize.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

48. I don't have the time to debunk your pages and pages

of conspiracy theories taken from questionable websites, by whatever questionable author you decide to promote this week (like your obsession with white supremacist and all around asshole Paul Craig Roberts). Nearly every one of your posts are a bunch of unrelated BS that you thinly tie together, claiming it to be a grand conspiracy by the BFEE.

Conspiracy theorists will believe any conspiracy. Even made up ones. Science proved that gem, as much as you hate it.
http://theweek.com/articles/559101/conspiracy-theorists-truly-believe-anything-says-science

[Octafish]

49. No theory: Dr Hobbitstein can't find anything wrong.

What is it called when a person makes stuff up to smear another person?

Hint: You know that one.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

70. You support white supremacist Paul Craig Roberts. Your argument is invalid. nt

[Octafish]

71. Not true.

I quoted an article where Roberts supported Don Siegelman:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022073759

I later quoted an article where Roberts talked about JFK:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=7829154

Nowhere do I "support white supremacist Paul Craig Roberts." I think you know that, but you want to create a wrong impression about me.

I think you've actually shown DU what kind of person you are, Dr Hobbitstein.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

72. And you've shown DU that you'll believe any far-fetched conspiracy and bring it back to the BFEE.

My dearest foily 'fish. But I'm a paid BFEE operative. Watch for the black helicopters, we know you're on to us and we're not happy.

[Octafish]

75. So why continue to make stuff up? It makes you look really small.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

76. I haven't made anything up.

You have defended your posting of a white supremacist asshat many times. Argued with myself and Sid Dithers about it as well, many times. You've never met a conspiracy theory you didn't like. You've consistently proven yourself on the wrong side of science and reason. And you attack ANYONE who calls you out.

[Octafish]

77. Show where I defend a racist, Dr Hobbitstein. That's a smear.

And while you're at it, show where I have attacked anyone on DU who hasn't smeared me first, including SidDithers.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

79. I hope I've shown DU that I'm not scared to call out supporters of white supremacists,

kooks, conspiracy theorists, and other crazed asshats.

That's what kind of person I am.

[Octafish]

82. It's only in your mind, as you can't show any of that.

Otherwise you would.

So, as you can't show where I support a white supremacist on this or any other thread, all you got is a smear.

And coming from you, that's nothing.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

84. I don't give a fuck who PCR stood up for,

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=6101684

You promoted is vapid, white supremacist ass, then defended doing so. Oh, and look... Another white supremacist you've promoted at DU, Gordon Duff.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=5866956

And to quote long-time DUer, SidDithers: "And that's not a smear, octafish. It's the fucking truth."

You'll never find me quoting white supremacists on DU, but we can always count on you to do it, Octafish of DU.

[Octafish]

87. No need to go frothy. Like I told SidDithers of DU...

...one of the many times he uses that smear:

I've asked you, repeatedly over the years, to show what you term my "propensity for promoting and legitimizing the work of noted bigots, racists, homophobes and conspiracy theorist lunatics. You're a guy who thinks white-nationalist Paul Craig Roberts and insane homophobe Wayne Madsen are credible, and appropriate sources for use on a progressive message board."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026178887#post110

Seeing how SidDithers and you fail to actually show any of that, I want these to be in the record for all DU to see:

Where I quoted Roberts when he supported Don Siegelman:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022073759


Where I quoted Madsen recently to document the business links between Bush and bin Laden:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=6059251


Where I first quoted Madsen on DU2 in 2003 (earlier examples exist, but none so illustrative):

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x610051


Where you smear Naomi Klein, making me think the practice is your speciality:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=5318151


You will note that I did not support any theory, smear, or lie; I only posted what these people wrote. And as far I as I knew or know, none of these people are anything like what you describe, SidDithers of DU.

What's a person called who repeats something that is not true, Dr Hobbitstein?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026178887#post110

As for your link, DUers who go there will see what I quoted from Duff.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

88. You keep saying smear.

It's not a smear if it's true. You have posted the words and articles of white supremacists on DU. You have doubled down on it. I supplied links you still deny the truth.

If a white supremacist said the sky was blue, I wouldn't quote them on DU. You seem to like what they say, though, which leads back to my gullibility charge: you'll believe damn near any conspiracy theory, and cry foul when called out on being wrong. It's not a smear if it's true.

[Octafish]

91. Smear, move the goalposts, invent crap, make me waste time defending it.

Show where I'm wrong in the OP or any post on the thread. You can't.

As for quoting somebody, it's a lot different than having to defend their character. It's clear you don't know much about that, either.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

93. List of times Octafish was right.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

90. Wait, where did I smear Naomi Kline?

I'm not even on that thread. Looks like the only one with unfounded accusations here is YOU, Octafish of DU.

And what do you call someone who keeps repeating something that's not true? Octafish.

[Octafish]

94. That was SidDithers of DU.

SidDithers of DU reported she ''was a bit of a drinker'' at U-T.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022146890#post82

Made me sad to know he would report something like that. Tough shit if it was included in the links above.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

97. You put it in the response to me,

and didn't treat it as a quote, but as a direct response.

FUDers gotta FUD, eh?

[bobthedrummer]

95. You are really quite a specimen, Doc.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

96. Says the poster who posts bullshit from anti-semites.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022073542

Linking to Operation Morningstar. Of course you and the 'fish are friends.

[bobthedrummer]

101. Here's a more current link for your analysis Doc-its still open for those that can read.

Ernst Rudin: The Founding Father of Psychiatric Genetics
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016159262

[Dr Hobbitstein]

109. A conversation with yourself about woo sites? I'll pass (as did everyone else).

[Octafish]

111. I remember you, now.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026074805#post74

Calling someone a "conspiracy theorist" or "Better Believe It" is some kind of code for asshole.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

112. No, it's code for Conspiracy Theorist. I never called anyone Better Believe It nt

[Octafish]

115. Which is a smear.

Seeing how you didn't back up your words then or now.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

127. Ok. Whatever you say, my dearest Octafish. nt

[Octafish]

131. Seeing how you don't show where I'm wrong, you bother me.

Especially the smears of racist and anti-Semite. Here's something you must have missed, and you're welcome to check for accuracy:

Know your BFEE or "Hey, America! Wake Up and Smell the Sulfur!"

Few today remember a most heinous terrorist act: The assassinations of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and American Ronnie Karpen Moffit.



Ms. Moffit was an American citizen murdered by agents of a foreign government on U.S. soil. Her only crime was being with Orlando Letelier, whose crime was to speak out against the military coup that toppled the democratically elected Chilean government he served. Because he refused to turn over the Chilean secret police and their American contacts, these assassinations were allowed, if not sanctioned, by George Bush, then director of central intelligence and head of the CIA.

As with all things having to do with the BFEE, the world get worse. So, a reminder:

October will mark the 30th anniversary of another most heinous terrorist act: The bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner that killed 73 passengers and crew. The pilots reported the blast caused their aircraft to catch fire and they were burning up as they attempted an emergency landing. The plane crashed into the Caribbean, a few miles west of Barbados. All aboard perished, including a close friend of the Great DUer malaise.



Cubana Airlines DC-8 like the one bombed by BFEE members Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. Both turds have been protected by Poppy and Baby Doc Bush and the CIA, which strangely has been loyal to them rather than to various presidencies before and in-between.

Here’s an excellent essay based on the facts:

The Charmed Life of a Mass Murderer

Posada Carriles and Bush's Anti-Terror Hoax

By SAUL LANDAU
Counterpunch June 9, 2005

President George W. Bush has emphasized that if one of the myriad of U.S. police agencies even suspect someone of planning, abetting or carrying out a terrorist act, he will, at a minimum, get tossed into a dark hole. Indeed, Bush has thrown the Magna Carta into the garbage heap when it comes to Muslims suspected of pernicious thoughts toward the United States.

But if suspected terrorists turn their rage toward the detested Fidel Castro, these rules don't apply.

Indeed, those who try to bomb Cuban targets, or those related to Cuba, receive special treatment. This double-standard casts a shadow over the president's commitment to fight terrorism.

For example, TV footage showed Homeland Security cops arresting Posada in mid May. But the arresting officers didn't even handcuff the Western Hemisphere's most notorious terrorist. (Remember how Bush's pal Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay ­ ENRON's CEO ­ got handcuffed?) Justice Department spokespeople said they plan to charge the foremost terrorist in the western hemisphere with "illegal entry into the United States."

The FBI has reams of files on Posada, affectionately called "Bambi" by his terrorist friends. Former FBI Special Agent Carter Cornick told New York Times reporter Tim Weiner that Posada was "up to his eyeballs" in the October 1976 destruction of a Cuban commercial airliner over Barbados. All 73 passengers and crew members died. Recently published FBI and CIA documents not only confirm Cornick's statement, but also reveal that U.S. agencies had knowledge of the plot and did not inform Cuban authorities or try to stop the bombing.

SNIP…

One wonders: Did Posada announce his illegal presence in the United States with the idea that U.S. government complicity in aiding and abetting his past acts of terrorism would protect him? U.S. authorities didn't inform Cuba or try to stop the 1976 air-bombing plot, and in 1971, as Veciana stated, the CIA made the gun that Posada's agents placed inside the camera to assassinate Castro. And Ollie North has knowledge of Posada's covert activities for U.S. intelligence as well.

CONTINUED…

http://www.counterpunch.org/landau06092005.html

[font color="red"]What ties these two events together is the involvement of George Herbert Walker Bush, as then-CIA director, in their cover-up as crimes and in the protection of their perpetrators, as in the person of one Luis Posada Carriles, Orlando Bosch and their colleagues-in-terror.[/font color]

Think about it: A murder-forgiving CIA director Bush went on to become President of the United States. Today, Bush’s son, George, acts as president. The younger Bush has used his office from Day One to protect and cover-up the crimes of his father.

That’s what Hugo Chavez was talking about when he smelled the sulfur and called Bush “The Devil.”

America needs to wake up and smell the sulfur, too. Here’s some background on the above:

LUIS POSADA CARRILES
THE DECLASSIFIED RECORD

CIA and FBI Documents Detail Career in International Terrorism; Connection to U.S.

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 153

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153 /

Don’t forget to check out Orlando Bosch, while you’re at it. GOOGLE with Jeb Bush for some interesting connections to the present day.

Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez interviewed National Security Archive’s Peter Kornbluh and Letelier’s son, Francisco:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/21/153...

Another important point to remember, is Kissinger's close association with Operation CONDOR, the assassination program run out of "The Cone" to silence democrats, liberals, union leaders, progressives, socialists, communists or anyone who stood for justice and equality.

Chile security chief was CIA informer

BBC Tuesday, 19 September, 2000, 23:24 GMT 00:24 UK

Recently declassified documents in the United States show that the former head of the secret police in Chile, Manuel Contreras, was a paid informant for the US intelligence agency, the CIA.

The report, comprising CIA documents requested by the US Congress, show that contact with Contreras began in 1974 - a year after the military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power.

Contreras oversaw the much-feared security service DINA

The report adds that the contact was maintained until 1977 - a year after Contreras plotted the killing of the then Chilean Foreign Minister and foe of General Pinochet, Orlando Letelier, in Washington.

A BBC correspondent in Washington, Nick Bryant, says the documents reinforce the view that the US turned a blind eye towards political repression in Chile during the Pinochet era and that the CIA was complicit in many human rights abuses.

Pinochet's confidant

As head of the security service, DINA, Contreras became the one of the most feared men in Chile, second only to General Pinochet.

The general's iron rule was underpinned by the tactics of brutal repression that saw thousands die and thousands more flee into exile. Others disappeared or were tortured.

CONTINUED…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/932897.stm

Of course, there are even more sulferous friends than these…

Bush s Longstanding Criminal Mexican Amigos

The disturbing ties of some of George W. Bush's Latino advisors

More on Bush-Amigos links in PBS Frontline interview with Gary Jacobs

By Julie Reynolds
Research assistance by Victor Almazán and Ana Leonor Rojo

LOS AMIGOS DE BUSH

“Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres. (Tell me who you side with and I will tell you who you are.)” – “George W. Bush for President” web site

Those who say that George W. Bush has scant knowledge of foreign affairs don't understand his family's relationship with Mexico.

If one event could be said to make that relationship visible, it had to be the state dinner given eleven years ago by President Bush for Mexico's president, Carlos Salinas. It was an elegant yet boisterous gala, where the biggest movers and shakers in Texas and Mexico congregated and celebrated. This group was to become W's Mexican legacy, a gift of ties and connections passed on from the father to his son.

SNIP…

The Mexican president had spent a long day with President Bush signing trade pacts, the precursors of NAFTA. Salinas brought his so-called Dream Team: his commerce secretary, finance minister, and his personal Machiavelli, Jose Córdoba. It would later be astounding to see, as the decade unfolded, how many of that administration's proud men and women fell shamefully from grace - some exiled, some imprisoned and some assassinated.

No one knew it then, but many at that banquet would survive to one day help young W beat a path back to the White House. There were loyal "Bushfellas" who were old friends of the family: Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher Sr., General Colin Powell, and George Bush Senior's ever-present friend, Secretary of State James Baker. Gary Jacobs, whose Texas bank was about to be bought by the son of Mexico's billionaire-politico Carlos Hank González, was also a guest. Tony Garza, then a young judge, is now a Bush cabinet contender. Today, all are advisors or contributors to W's campaign.

Hidden among the glitterati were two relative unknowns. They were, however, familiar to the group at hand. They were the loyal "Amigos de Bush" from San Antonio: criminal defense lawyer Roy Barrera Jr. and car dealer Ernesto Ancira Jr. In contrast to the Salinas group, the ties of Barrera and Ancira to drug cartels would remain unnoticed for another decade. Their ties to George W. would grow stronger.

CONTINUED…

GOOGLE cache:

http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:Th5_dq9beuYJ:www.el...

May also be at:

http://www.newsmakingnews.com/contents10,2,00.htm

Henry Kissinger and Agusto Pinochet

“I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” -- Henry A. Kissinger

Remember: If the guy W wanted to appoint head of the 9-11 Commission feels that way about democracy in Chile, what’s there to make us think he and those for whom he toils believe differently about democracy in the United States of America?

[Dr Hobbitstein]

137. Gish Gallop.

Gish Gallop. Gish Gallop. Gish Gallop.

[Octafish]

138. Every word is sourced.

Gish gallop all day long, which is about the nicest thing I can say for a smear artist.

[bobthedrummer]

121. That "wrecked him", once again, Sir!

[Octafish]

58. I messed you up by saying you support Karl Rove over Don Siegelman, didn't I?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016139494#post25

Don't be mad, bro.

[Octafish]

14. Why not address the Clintons' real-life connections to Kissinger in the OP?

For instance, NAFTA:

With NAFTA, U.S. Finally Creates a New World Order

By Henry A. Kissinger
Op-Ed, 18 July 1993, Los Angeles Times

Before the end of summer, President Bill Clinton will ask Congress to approve the North American Free Trade Agreement, linking the United States with Canada and Mexico in a free-trade area comprising a population of 370 million and a gross national product of $6 trillion.

It will represent the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War, and the first step toward the even larger vision of a free-trade zone for the entire Western Hemisphere.

And yet, recent polls show that barely half the American people have even heard of it.

SNIP...

The sole dictatorship remaining in the Western Hemisphere is Cuba; state-run enterprises are being privatized; nationalistic, protectionist methods of economic management are replaced by export-oriented economies hospitable to foreign investment and supportive of open trading systems.

SNIP...

As the only nationally elected U.S. leader, Clinton is in the best position to put NAFTA into a broad strategic framework and explain why it serves the national interest. He must not permit the treaty’s opponents to define NAFTA as a problem of economic arithmetic.
In this task, the President is entitled to bipartisan support. NAFTA’s key provisions were concluded during the Bush Administration; its supplementary agreements are being negotiated in the Clinton Administration. But NAFTA is so vital to prospects for global progress that it merits a demonstration of nonpartisan unity.

SNIP...

When all the major Latin American countries have raised their sights to a new partnership based on values the U.S. has espoused for decades, a retreat from it by America would be a shattering blow.
Most studies suggest the nation would gain more jobs than it would lose - though the problem is that those who lose jobs are not usually the ones who benefit from gains in employment.

Nonetheless, let us not delude ourselves: The movement of U.S. industry to Mexico, cited by many NAFTA critics, has occurred despite current tariff barriers, which are already low. What the critics are seeking is not just a defeat of NAFTA, but an increase in tariffs against Mexico. Such a policy would put an end to any hope of a new Western Hemisphere relationship and encourage the rise of nationalism.
For Mexico has been in the vanguard of the revolution sweeping the Western Hemisphere. Not so long ago, its foreign policy was defined by anti-US rhetoric and its economic policy by statist leftwing attitudes.

CONTINUED...

For some strange reason, the original doesn't show up on the LA Times website. Interested people who can read, can see it as published: http://en.calameo.com/read/0001117908ece0e23ea97

Those interested in learning may want to read Greg Palast's article on WTO: Larry Summers and the Secret End-Game Memo.

[Octafish]

69. Nice smear.

Clinton campaign chair: Americans 'can handle the truth' about UFOs

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/clinton-campaign-chair-americans-can-handle-the-truth-about-ufos/ar-BBrwmu5?ocid=ansmsnnews11

So, who's crazy, rjsquirrel? Me, for pointing out the facts; or you, for resorting to smears and name calling?

[Dr Hobbitstein]

73. He has stock in ALCOA. nt

[Octafish]

78. What wit.

It reminds me of what the other side of the political fence says: http://conservativecave.com/index.php?topic=103627.0

[Dr Hobbitstein]

80. The BFEE made me do it. nt

[Octafish]

134. You really know how to hurt a guy.

You remind me of somebody's father, a guy who didn't want his boy to grow up weird.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027828660#post3

[Gomez163]

126. That you can't get over it

[Kelvin Mace]

26. Tell that to their victims

[saidsimplesimon]

128. I have no idea why you are so militant.

Who are you really?

[NurseJackie]

130. It's unclear where you're going with this.

Who are you really?

Why do you need to know? Why is it important to you?

[Sheepshank]

5. How come you are not trotting out the Trump/Hillary wedding pictures any more?

this picture means about the same amount of relevance.

[Octafish]

10. Serve one oligarch and you served them all, eh?

That must be why George W Bush and Bill Clinton now work at UBS, with ex-Sen. Phil Gramm who helped repeal Glass-Steagall and stuff, work in the "Wealth Management" department.



UBS: An amazing story. Do you think they help a lot of poor Democrats become rich ones?

[Sheepshank]

13. I suppose you think the best way to govern is with a stick?

typical of those that think the only way is the purist way.

I'm sure many world leaders hat each other too...but it's not how things get done. You are attempting to promote the McConnell form of never get along, obstruct everything, never conceded, never give way. And you would be wrong on that menality. Post every picture you want of political oppositionals appearing to get along in one moment in time, it means absolutely nothing in the real world.

[Octafish]

15. No picture can do justice for what they've done.

It's no stick. Here are the facts: UBS is a Swiss bank that is enjoying better days, thanks to the US taxpayer and a number of key US political leaders, including its current employees Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Phil Gramm.

Here's their official UBS website.



Of course, it helps who one's connected to when it comes to getting things really done.

Hillary Helps a Bank—and Then It Funnels Millions to the Clintons

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

by CONOR FRIEDERSDORF, The Atlantic, JUL 31, 2015

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. The Wall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

Then reporters James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus lay out how UBS helped the Clintons. “Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”

The article adds that “there is no evidence of any link between Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the case and the bank’s donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or its hiring of Mr. Clinton.” Maybe it’s all a mere coincidence, and when UBS agreed to pay Bill Clinton $1.5 million the relevant decision-maker wasn’t even aware of the vast sum his wife may have saved the bank or the power that she will potentially wield after the 2016 presidential election.

SNIP...

As McClatchy noted last month in a more broadly focused article that also mentions UBS, “Ten of the world’s biggest financial institutions––including UBS, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs––have hired Bill Clinton numerous times since 2004 to speak for fees totaling more than $6.4 million. Hillary Clinton also has accepted speaking fees from at least one bank. And along with an 11th bank, the French giant BNP Paribas, the financial goliaths also donated as much as $24.9 million to the Clinton Foundation––the family’s global charity set up to tackle causes from the AIDS epidemic in Africa to climate change.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/hillary-helps-a-bankand-then-it-pays-bill-15-million-in-speaking-fees/400067/

About UBS Wealth Management

It's Buy Partisan

After his exit from the US Senate, Phil Gramm found a job at Swiss bank UBS as vice chairman. He later brought on former President Bill Clinton. What a coincidence, they are the two key figures in repealing Glass-Steagal. Since the New Deal it was the financial regulation that protected the US taxpayer from the Wall Street casino. Oh well, what's a $16 trillion bailout among friends?



It's a Buy-Partisan Who's Who:

President William J. Clinton
President George W. Bush Heh heh heh.
Robert J. McCann
James Carville
John V. Miller
Paula D. Polito
Anthony Roth
Mike Ryan
John Savercool

SOURCE: http://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/revitalizingamerica/SenatorPhilGramm.html

One of my attorney chums doesn't like to see his name on any committees, event letterhead or political campaign literature. These folks, it seems to me, are past caring.

Some of why DUers and ALL voters should care about Phil Gramm.



The fact the nation's "news media" isn't really following this story should also be of great concern -- for the 99-percent.

[Herman4747]

6. Incredible that some at DU are supporting a candidate...

...who is a star pupil of Henry Kissinger!!!

It is truly unbelievable.

And to show how well she learned from her master, Hillary backs the coup in Honduras, leading to more bloodshed and pain.

[Lord Magus]

9. Yes, TRULY unbelievable because it's not true.

It's a baseless smear. Acquaintance does not = pupil.

[Herman4747]

12. Just for you, a learning experience:

Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton’s Tutor in War and Peace

[Lord Magus]

17. "It's on the Internet so it must be true!"

Just because somebody writes and article doesn't mean the claims in that article are accurate.

[Octafish]

18. So, show the first you find in what I've posted on this or any thread that's not true.

If I'm in error, I'll apologize and correct the record.

You've made the claim before that I post lies.

So, please, show the first thing you find that is not true in the OP or anywhere I've posted.

[Raster]

27. Don't hold your breath. He has nothing.

[RufusTFirefly]

29. The author was a Pulitzer finalist, so he's obviously just a hack.

Clearly, no match for the unimpeachable authority of Lord Magus!

[Loudestlib]

31. Get your head out of the sand.

[apcalc]

106. Exactly

Some of these people are absolutely deranged, lost all sense of reason....

[Octafish]

16. It's important for those interested in Democratic Action, not Kissinger Action.

Kissinger and his bosses weaponized money.



Warfare via Banking

Milton Friedman and the Rise of Monetary Fascism

The Dark Age of Money

by JAMES C. KENNEDY
CounterPunch Oct. 24, 2012

EXCERPT...

Monetary Fascism was created and propagated through the Chicago School of Economics. Milton Friedman’s collective works constitute the foundation of Monetary Fascism. Knowing that the term ’Fascism’ was universally unpopular; Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics masquerade these works as ‘Capitalism’ and ’Free Market’ economics.

SNIP...

The fundamental difference between Adam Smith’s free market capitalism and Friedman’s ‘free market capitalism’ is that Friedman’s is a hyper extractive model, the kind that creates and maintains Third-World-Countries and Banana-Republics, without geo-political borders.

If you say that this is nothing new, you miss the point. Friedman does not differentiate between some third world country and his own. The ultimate difference is that Friedman has created a model that sanctions and promotes the exploitation of his own country, in fact every country, for the benefit of the investor, money the uber-wealthy. He dressed up this noxious ideology as ‘free market capitalism’ and then convinced most of the world to embrace it as their economic salvation.

SNIP...

Monetary Fascism, as conceived by Friedman, uses the powers of the state to put the interest of money and the financial class above and beyond all other forms of industry (and other stake holders) and the state itself.

SNIP...

Money has become the state and the traditional state is forced to serve money’s interests. Everywhere the Financial Class is openly lording over sovereign nations. Ireland, Greece and Spain are subject to ultimatums and remember Hank Paulson’s $700 billion extortion from the U.S. Congress. The $700 billion was just the wedge. Thanks to unlimited access to the Discount Window, Quantitative Easing and other taxpayer funded debt-swap bailouts the total transfers to the financial industry exceeded $16 trillion as of July 2010 according to a Federal Reserve Audit. All of this was dumped on the taxpayer and it is still growing.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/24/the-dark-age-of-money/

Think this is history or something in far-off Faroffia? Think again.

President Clinton and the Chilean Model.

By José Piñera

Midnight at the House of Good and Evil

"It is 12:30 at night, and Bill Clinton asks me and Dottie: 'What do you know about the Chilean social-security system?'” recounted Richard Lamm, the three-term former governor of Colorado. It was March 1995, and Lamm and his wife were staying that weekend in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.

I read about this surprising midnight conversation in an article by Jonathan Alter (Newsweek, May 13, 1996), as I was waiting at Dulles International Airport for a flight to Europe. The article also said that early the next morning, before he left to go jogging, President Bill Clinton arranged for a special report about the Chilean reform produced by his staff to be slipped under Lamm's door.

That news piqued my interest, so as soon as I came back to the United States, I went to visit Richard Lamm. I wanted to know the exact circumstances in which the president of the world’s superpower engages a fellow former governor in a Saturday night exchange about the system I had implemented 15 years earlier.

Lamn and I shared a coffee on the terrace of his house in Denver. He not only was the most genial host to this curious Chilean, but he also proved to be deeply motivated by the issues surrounding aging and the future of America. So we had an engaging conversation. At the conclusion, I ventured to ask him for a copy of the report that Clinton had given him. He agreed to give it to me on the condition that I do not make it public while Clinton was president. He also gave me a copy of the handwritten note on White House stationery, dated 3-21-95, which accompanied the report slipped under his door. It read:

Dick,
Sorry I missed you this morning.
It was great to have you and Dottie here.
Here's the stuff on Chile I mentioned.
Best,
Bill.

Three months before that Clinton-Lamm conversation about the Chilean system, I had a long lunch in Santiago with journalist Joe Klein of Newsweek magazine. A few weeks afterwards, he wrote a compelling article entitled,[font color="green"] "If Chile can do it...couldn´t North America privatize its social-security system?" [/font color]He concluded by stating that "the Chilean system is perhaps the first significant social-policy idea to emanate from the Southern Hemisphere." (Newsweek, December 12, 1994).

I have reasons to think that probably this piece got Clinton’s attention and, given his passion for policy issues, he became a quasi expert on Chile’s Social Security reform. Clinton was familiar with Klein, as the journalist covered the 1992 presidential race and went on anonymously to write the bestseller Primary Colors, a thinly-veiled account of Clinton’s campaign.

“The mother of all reforms”

While studying for a Masters and a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, I became enamored with America’s unique experiment in liberty and limited government. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the first volume of Democracy in America hoping that many of the salutary aspects of American society might be exported to his native France. I dreamed with exporting them to my native Chile.

So, upon finishing my Ph.D. in 1974 and while fully enjoying my position as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and a professor at Boston University, I took on the most difficult decision in my life: to go back to help my country rebuild its destroyed economy and democracy along the lines of the principles and institutions created in America by the Founding Fathers. Soon after I became Secretary of Labor and Social Security, and in 1980 I was able to create a fully funded system of personal retirement accounts. Historian Niall Ferguson has stated that this reform was “the most profound challenge to the welfare state in a generation. Thatcher and Reagan came later. The backlash against welfare started in Chile.”

But while de Tocqueville’s 1835 treatment contained largely effusive praise of American government, the second volume of Democracy in America, published five years later, strikes a more cautionary tone. He warned that “the American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” In fact at some point during the 20th century, the culture of self reliance and individual responsibility that had made America a great and free nation was diluted by the creation of [font color="green"] “an Entitlement State,”[/font color] reminiscent of the increasingly failed European welfare state. What America needed was a return to basics, to the founding tenets of limited government and personal responsibility.

[font color="green"]In a way, the principles America helped export so successfully to Chile through a group of free market economists needed to be reaffirmed through an emblematic reform. I felt that the Chilean solution to the impending Social Security crisis could be applied in the USA.[/font color]

CONTINUED...

http://www.josepinera.org/articles/articles_clinton_chilean_model.htm

The Future holds more of the Same, unless We the People do something about it.

5 WikiLeaks Revelations Exposing the Rapidly Growing Corporatism Dominating American Diplomacy Abroad

One of WikiLeaks' greatest achievements has been to expose the exorbitant amount of influence that multinational corporations have over Washington's diplomacy.

By Rania Khalek / AlterNet June 21, 2011

One of the most significant scourges paralyzing our democracy is the merger of corporate power with elected and appointed government officials at the highest levels of office. Influence has a steep price-tag in American politics where politicians are bought and paid for with ever increasing campaign contributions from big business, essentially drowning out any and all voices advocating on behalf of the public interest.

Millions of dollars in campaign funding flooding Washington's halls of power combined with tens of thousands of high-paid corporate lobbyists and a never-ending revolving door that allows corporate executives to shuffle between the public and private sectors has blurred the line between government agencies and private corporations.

This corporate dominance over government affairs helps to explain why we are plagued by a health-care system that lines the pockets of industry executives to the detriment of the sick; a war industry that causes insurmountable death and destruction to enrich weapons-makers and defense contractors; and a financial sector that violates the working class and poor to dole out billions of dollars in bonuses to Wall Street CEO's.

The implications of this rapidly growing corporatism reach far beyond our borders and into the realm of American diplomacy, as in one case where efforts by US diplomats forced the minimum wage for beleaguered Haitian workers to remain below sweatshop levels.

In this context of corporate government corruption, one of WikiLeaks' greatest achievements has been to expose the exorbitant amount of influence that multinational corporations have over Washington's diplomacy. Many of the WikiLeaks US embassy cables reveal the naked intervention by our ambassadorial staff in the business of foreign countries on behalf of US corporations. From mining companies in Peru to pharmaceutical companies in Ecuador, one WikiLeaks embassy cable after the next illuminates a pattern of US diplomats shilling for corporate interests abroad in the most underhanded and sleazy ways imaginable.

While the merger of corporate and government power isn't exactly breaking news, it is one of the most critical yet under-reported issues of our time. And WikiLeaks has given us an inside look at the inner-workings of this corporate-government collusion, often operating at the highest levels of power. It is crystal clear that it's standard operating procedure for US government officials to moonlight as corporate stooges. Thanks to WikiLeaks, here are five instances that display the lengths to which Washington is willing to go to protect and promote US corporations around the world.

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/story/151370/5_wikileaks_revelations_exposing_the_rapidly_growing_corporatism_dominating_american_diplomacy_abroad

Explains why rightwing asswipes hate DU. Makes me happy to know there are DUers who grok why we need Liberal, Progressive Democratic Action.

[Electric Monk]

20. K&R

[Octafish]

38. Kissinger on Democracy in Chile

"The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves... l don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people." -- Henry Kissinger on the US-backed coup d'etat in Chile.

And to think we wonder why the US keeps moving to the right, even when we vote in leaders who promise to move things to the left.

[bigwillq]

21. Kick (nt)

[Octafish]

39. The Last Man of the Junta: Open Letter to Henry Kissinger from One of Pinochet's Political Prisoners

An Open Letter to Henry Kissinger from One of Pinochet's Political Prisoners

The Last Man of the Junta

by FERNANDO A. TORRES
CounterPunch, DECEMBER 12, 2006

All of the original members of the military junta that overthrew Allende and his government with the knowledge and the direct support of the US government, are now gone.

Nixon is gone and Kissinger is left alone on this earth.

Now we will never know the number of secrets or the details that they took to their graves with them. Nor will we ever know the whereabouts of the missing ones— every single one of them. I also wonder if justice will prevail and will catch up with Kissinger, the last man of the Junta? F.T.

"I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." – Henry Kissinger

An open letter to Henry Kissinger

I was not an "irresponsible" Chilean sir, but I did pay the heavy price of your words.

Mr. Henry Kissinger
Kissinger Associates.
New York

I do remember your reprimand to Chileans when they elected socialist Salvador Allende in 1970: "We cannot allow a country to go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible"

Although we were used to this kind of rhetoric coming out from the White House those years, we couldn’t imagine that those opprobrious words of yours would eventually seal the future of Chile in one of the most horrendous episodes in Latin America’s history. Yes, I can say we underestimated you sir.

Bombs falling from the skies, towers and buildings destroyed, hundreds of people butchered. Thousands missing and soccer stadiums converted into concentrations camps. Do you remember this, your own 9/11?

Since day one; since before Allende was ratified by Chilean parliament as its legitimate President, you, Secretary of Sate and National Security Advisor, Mr. Kissinger, were plotting the overthrow of Allende. You conjured up the assassination of General Rene Schneider — who supported the Chilean Constitution — to provoke an early military coup.

You plotted a "two track" policy toward this small country aimed, on the one hand, to isolate Allende internationally and, on the other (more dirty) hand, to provoked a military coup through assassinations, political subversion and economic sabotage.

Your goal, Mr. Kissinger, in uniting military leaders in neighboring countries to pressure Chile, later became "Operation Condor", which was the coordination of the secret political police forces to carry out exchange of information and prisoners, kidnappings, torture, and political assassination such as the one against Orlando Letelier and his aide Ronni Moffit carried out in Washington DC by Chilean and Cuban terrorists lead by CIA agents Michael Townley and Novo Sampol [who later was convicted in Panama for various terrorists attack and an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro, but was eventually freed at the behest of the United States, which pulled the strings on the outgoing puppet president, Mireya Moscoso].

You, Mr. Kissinger, and Nixon lied to Congress, given misleading information and assuring the US played no role in Chile’s democracy deceased. You may know that at the time there was no danger of the elusive "weapons of mass destruction" but the "danger" of the spread of communism in the southern cone. You believed Chile’s "irresponsible" people were prescribing a wrong example; Chile was a dangerous "dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica," as you put it. A dagger that needs to be removed at any cost. Allende must be stopped even at the expense of democracy itself.

Because 9/11/1973 is of your absolute responsibility Mr. Kissinger, we the "irresponsible" people of Chile are naming you the Chilean version of Osama Bin laden, to say the least.

Mr. Kissinger, I was not an "irresponsible" Chilean because I was a 14 year old kid that couldn’t vote, but I did have to fully pay the heavy and bloody price of your words, sir. However thinking about your role not only in Chile but in Indochina, East Timor, Cyprus, your betrayal of the Kurds in Iraq, your unconditional support of South Africa’s Apartheid, etc. etc., I can say something you cannot: my hands are clean.

Sincerely

FERNANDO A. TORRES

FERNANDO A. TORRES was a political prisoner in Chile when he was sent to exile in 1977. He is now a freelance journalist.

SOURCE: http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/12/12/the-last-man-of-the-junta/

DU: This is not old news. Kissinger and his brethren are bringing this type of government -- where might and money make right -- to the United States today.

Doubt me? Consider Bush wins SCROTUS 5-4 and the Banksters rip off millions of homes and get off with fines for a fraction of what they stole. Disaster capitalism, Chile-Style is another name for the Austerity that We the People are going to have to get used to, even during a time of the greatest wealth in human history and its greatest concentration on record.



The only way to stop is to be aware of what is going on and to make our voices heard in opposition. While Kissinger and his bosses won't call their support for right-wing death squad tyranny for what it is for public consumption and modern marketing purposes, know it by its real name: fascism. It is my sincere hope Ms. Clinton understands it, as well.

[amborin]

23. K&R Embracing an evil war criminal: all one needs to know (combined with record of reckless Neo Con

regime change, obstructing Syrian peace accord in 2013, supporting illegal coup in Honduras, aligning with right wing regime in Colombia that brutalized union organizers, etc.)

[Octafish]

37. Kissinger helped Nixon commit treason in 1968, derailing Paris peace talks.

George Will Confirms

Nixon’s Vietnam Treason

by BOB FITRAKIS & HARVEY WASSERMAN
CounterPunch, Aug. 13, 2014

Richard Nixon was a traitor.

The new release of extended versions of Nixon’s papers now confirms this long-standing belief, usually dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” by Republican conservatives. Now it has been substantiated by none other than right-wing columnist George Will.

Nixon’s newly revealed records show for certain that in 1968, as a presidential candidate, he ordered Anna Chennault, his liaison to the South Vietnam government, to persuade them refuse a cease-fire being brokered by President Lyndon Johnson.

Nixon’s interference with these negotiations violated President John Adams’s 1797 Logan Act, banning private citizens from intruding into official government negotiations with a foreign nation.

Published as the 40th Anniversary of Nixon’s resignation approaches, Will’s column confirms that Nixon feared public disclosure of his role in sabotaging the 1968 Vietnam peace talks. Will says Nixon established a “plumbers unit” to stop potential leaks of information that might damage him, including documentation he believed was held by the Brookings Institute, a liberal think tank. The Plumbers’ later break-in at the Democratic National Committee led to the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/13/nixons-vietnam-treason/

THIS is why Kissinger, the PNAC crew, the neocons/neoliberal and all the crooks of the Secret Government are evil: they believe money and power trump peace and human life.

[Agony]

24. Kick!

thanks for being here...

[Octafish]

40. Operation CONDOR

Unsealed Documents Show Pinochet 'Directly' Involved in Capitol Hill Assassinations. Pinochet was Henry and Poppy's fiend.



Unsealed Documents Show Pinochet 'Directly' Involved in Capitol Hill Assassinations

Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt became 'symbols of the broader human rights catastrophe of the Pinochet dictatorship'

by Sarah Lazare, staff writer
CommonDreams, Oct. 8, 2015

Loved ones have long charged that U.S.-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet had a direct hand in the 1976 assassination of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his Institute for Policy Studies colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt. Now, they may finally be vindicated.

The administration of President Barack Obama on Thursday publicly released documents that appear to show that Pinochet was behind the murders of Letelier and Moffitt, who have become "symbols of the broader human rights catastrophe of the Pinochet dictatorship," Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at IPS, told Common Dreams.

The materials, which include CIA papers, were given to Chilean President Michelle Bachelet on Tuesday by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

SNIP...

Letelier’s son, Chilean Senator Juan Pablo Letelier, is one of the few people who has reviewed the trove and confirmed to the Guardian that they conclusively show Pinochet directly ordered the killing. In addition, the documents reportedly reveal that Pinochet had intended to cover up his role in the assassination by killing his spy chief.

"In (Pinochet’s) predisposition to defend his position he planned to eliminate Manuel Contreras to keep him from talking," Senator Letelier told the Mesa Central show on Tele13 Radio.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/10/08/unsealed-documents-show-pinochet-directly-involved-capitol-hill-assassinations

From 2006: Know your BFEE: Los Amigos de Bush

What they do overseas, invariably, they unleash on those who oppose them in The Homeland.

PS: You are most welcome, Agony. Your friendship really means the world.

[AzDar]

25. K & R

[Octafish]

44. General Pinochet at the Bookstore

General Pinochet at the Bookstore

Santiago, Chile, July 2004

The general’s limo parked at the corner of San Diego street
and his bodyguard escorted him to the bookstore
called La Oportunidad, so he could browse
for rare works of history.

There were no bloody fingerprints left on the pages.
No books turned to ash at his touch.
He did not track the soil of mass graves on his shoes,
nor did his eyes glow red with a demon’s heat.

Worse: His hands were scrubbed, and his eyes were blue,
and the dementia that raged in his head like a demon,
making the general’s trial impossible, had disappeared.

Desaparecido: like thousands dead but not dead,
as the crowd reminded the general,
gathered outside the bookstore to jeer
when he scurried away with his bodyguards,
so much smaller in person.

-- Martín Espada

[RufusTFirefly]

28. Poor Bernie. Apparently, he never learned how to "evolve"

In the debate, hosted by CNN and PBS, Clinton cited praise from Kissinger as evidence that she'd make a good president. Sanders hammered her for it, saying "I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country."

He went on to say:

(Clinton) talked about getting the approval or the support or the mentoring of Henry Kissinger. Now I find it kind of amazing, because I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country.

I'm proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend.

I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger. And in fact, Kissinger's actions in Cambodia, when the United States bombed that country, over — through Prince Sihanouk, created the instability for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to come in who then butchered some 3 million innocent people — one of the worst genocides in the history of the world. So count me in as somebody who will not be listening to Henry Kissinger.

Thanks for the thread, Octafish!

[840high]

30. .+1

[Octafish]

65. ''I'm proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend.''

"Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, 'The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.' (laughter) But since the Freedom of Information Act, I'm afraid to say things like that." -- March 10, 1975 in the Turkish Capital of Ankara with Mehli Esenbel, Turkey's Foreign Minister.

"It is firm and continuing policy that (the democratically elected government of) Allende be overthrown by a coup.... We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG (United States Government) and American hands be well hidden." -- October 1970 cable to CIA operatives in Chile from Henry Kissinger's "Track Two" group

What a guy: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/HKissinger.html

You are most welcome, RufusTFirefly! Thank you for not evolving!

[redstateblues]

32. All I can say about this post and BSS is

Misery loves company. Just lean into the pain.

[Fumesucker]

34. Indeed, Kissinger has brought a great deal of misery into this world

Good of you to recognize that.

[Octafish]

81. Thank you.

Very much appreciate it.

What was the name of the guy who George W Bush wanted to head the 9-11 whitewash until he found out he'd have to reveal his client list?

People have interests, like nations!

[Fumesucker]

98. I came of age in the Deep South in the later 60's

I can't think of a single one of my peers, my cohort who didn't loathe Kissinger, he was as close to a universally despised person at that time as I can think of.

DU these days is significantly to the right of a bunch of 60's Southern teenagers/young adults as far as war criminals are concerned.

[Octafish]

102. It's how we were raised.

No one talks about Kissinger's criminality on the tee vee.

Mostly, though, CNN seemed amused that Sanders would bring up Clinton’s connection to perhaps the Republican Party’s most famous foreign policy theorist: “Bernie Sanders may have won the 1976 part of the debate bringing up Henry Kissinger,” host John Berman quipped on CNN‘s Early Show (2/12/16). “Not resonating with millennials,” co-host Christine Romans chided.

-- Paul Naureckas, FAIR http://fair.org/home/kissinger-kissinger-who/

I was raised in Michigan. I turned 18 around when Nixon resigned. All my friends were happy, too. We played Frisbee on the beach well into the night. Gosh. We really thought the future would be different.

[nationalize the fed]

119. + a few million

We really thought the future would be different

Yes we did indeed. Very sad to see what has happened.

Too bad Chalmers Johnson isn't around to help explain. It's too late now. The forces are in unstoppable motion. Watch what happens.

The Blowback series



Johnson believed that the enforcement of American hegemony over the world constitutes a new form of global empire. Whereas traditional empires maintained control over subject peoples via colonies, since World War II the US has developed a vast system of hundreds of military bases around the world where it has strategic interests. A long-time Cold Warrior, he applauded the dissolution of the Soviet Union: "I was a cold warrior. There's no doubt about that. I believed the Soviet Union was a genuine menace. I still think so."

At the same time, however, he experienced a political awakening after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, noting that instead of demobilizing its armed forces, the US accelerated its reliance on military solutions to problems both economic and political. The result of this militarism (as distinct from actual domestic defense) is more terrorism against the U.S. and its allies, the loss of core democratic values at home, and an eventual disaster for the American economy. Of four books he wrote on this topic, the first three are referred to as The Blowback Trilogy:

Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalmers_Johnson

The Boomers and their offspring have left a total mess.

[PJMcK]

33. Let me ask you a question

Hi, Octafish. For years, I've read your posts with enjoyment and respect. Even when I haven't agreed with your point of view, I've learned something significant from your posts. This post, however, hits me with a level of importance that I feel obligated to respond to.

May I respectfully ask you a question based on my own experience?

Isn't it useful to get information from every source you have available? Even if you don't agree with their observations or their history, doesn't the best decision making come from getting information from the broadest possible sources? The person you vehemently disagree with can offer a gold nugget of an idea. There have been several occasions in my professional career where someone I loathe has made an observation that I completely disagreed with. Yet, upon reflection, there was a tiny idea in their comments that solved a major issue.

Perhaps it's not so bad if our governmental officials have healthy dialogues with their predecessors. I remember an episode near the end of the run of "The West Wing" called "Institutional Memory." The theme of the show was that the government has to continue functioning even as administrations change.

So my question is this: If Hillary Clinton is elected President of the United States, are there any advisors that you believe she should never seek advice from?

[Octafish]

36. Gen. Patton said if everybody's thinking alike, nobody's doing any thinking.

He wanted his staff to discover and recommend better strategy, better tactics, better plans than what he alone could think up. Confident in his faculties, Patton did not mind loyal officers standing in opposition to him when they had reason.

I believe Hillary is usually the smartest person in the room. I don't think she always listens to opposing views.

One whose views I fear she still considers is Larry Summers. He's the guy who helped convince Bill to sign the repeal of Glass Steagall. Larry also is the fellow Joseph Stiglitz reported was wont to ask "What would Goldman think?"

Larry Summers: Goldman Sacked

By Greg Palast
Reader Supported News, September 16, 2013

Joseph Stiglitz couldn't believe his ears. Here they were in the White House, with President Bill Clinton asking the chiefs of the US Treasury for guidance on the life and death of America's economy, when the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers turns to his boss, Secretary Robert Rubin, and says, "What would Goldman think of that?"

Huh?

Then, at another meeting, Summers said it again: What would Goldman think?

A shocked Stiglitz, then Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, told me he'd turned to Summers, and asked if Summers thought it appropriate to decide US economic policy based on "what Goldman thought." As opposed to say, the facts, or say, the needs of the American public, you know, all that stuff that we heard in Cabinet meetings on The West Wing.

Summers looked at Stiglitz like Stiglitz was some kind of naive fool who'd read too many civics books.

CONTINUED...

http://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-goldman-sacked/

I hope I answered your question, PJMcK. Thank you for asking and caring about Democracy.

[G_j]

42. Brilliant thread

ring that bell loud !

[Octafish]

85. Seems the Pentagon suspected Nixon and Kissinger were traitors.

The Nixon Cover-Up You Never Heard About

History untaught and unreported: The admiral on the right in the picture below ran a spy operation on the president at left.



The reason? He thought Nixon and Kissinger were going soft on communism.

Al Haig, The NSC and the White House Spy Ring: The Nixon Story You Never Heard

Joan Hoff
Montana State University, Jan. 2014, M

EXCERPT...

Over three decades ago on December 21, 1971, Richard Nixon approved the first major cover-up of his administration. He did so reluctantly at the behest of his closest political advisers, Attorney General John Mitchell, Domestic Counselor John Ehrlichman, and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman. The public remains ignorant of this seminal event in Nixon’s first term and journalists and historians have largely ignored it. The question is why? A recently released Nixon tape transcribed from an enhanced CD produced by the Nixon Era Center provides the clearest answer to this thirty-year-old Nixon secret.

On that December day Nixon agreed to cover-up a criminally insubordinate spying operation conducted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff inside the National Security Council because of the military’s strong, visceral dislike of Nixon’s foreign policy. In particular, the JCS thought Nixon gone “soft on communism” by reaching out to the Chinese and Russians, and they resented Vietnamization as a way to end the war.

[font color="green"]As early as 1976 Admiral Elmo Zumwalt publicly made these military suspicions and resentment abundantly clear in his book, On Watch: A Memoir. “I had first become concerned many months before the June 1972 burglary,” Zumwalt wrote, “(about) the deliberate, systematic and, unfortunately, extremely successful efforts of the President, Henry Kissinger, and a few subordinate members of their inner circle to conceal, sometimes by simple silence, more often by articulate deceit, their real policies about the most critical matters of national security.” In a word, Zumwalt, like many within the American military elite, thought that Nixon’s foreign policies bordered on the traitorous because they “were inimical to the security of the United States.”[/font color]

This atmosphere of extreme distrust led Admiral Thomas Moorer, head of the JCS, to first authorize Rear Admiral Rembrandt C. Robinson and later Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander, both liaisons between the Joint Chiefs and the White House’s National Security Council, to start spying on the NSC. For thirteen months, from late 1970 to late 1971, Navy Yeoman Charles E. Radford, an aide to both Robinson and Welander, systematically stole and copied NSC documents from burn bags containing carbon copies, briefcases, and desks of Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and their staff. He then turned them over to his superiors.

SNIP...

The most striking aspect of this tape is the passive role played by Nixon–the so-called original imperial president. First, he is out-talked by the others throughout this fifty-two-minute conversation. Toward the end of tape, the president can be heard saying to his advisers in a loud voice that the JCS spy activity was “wrong! Understand? I’m just saying that’s wrong. Do you agree?” A little later he called it a “federal offense of the highest order.” Up to this point, however, John Mitchell told the president that “the important thing is to paper this thing over” because “this Welander thing . . . Is going to get right into the middle of Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

In other words, Nixon would have to take on the entire military command if he exposed the spy ring. Moreover, this expose would take place in an election year and when the president had scheduled trips to both China and the Soviet Union to confirm improved relations with these countries–which the military opposed. Taking on the military establishment with such important political and diplomatic events on the horizon could have proven disastrous for the president’s most important objectives and revealed other back-channel diplomatic activities of the administration. Later in his memoirs the president said that the media would have completely distorted the incident and exposure would have done “damage to the military at time when it was already under heavy attack.”

In contrast, at the time all three men agreed with Nixon about the seriousness of the crime committed by the JCS. Mitchell even compared it to “coming in (to the president's office) and robbing your desk.” However, they advised him to do no more than to inform Moorer that the White House knew about the JCS spy ring, to interview Welander (who was later transferred to sea duty), and to transfer Radford. Moorer subsequently denied obtaining any information from purloined documents, fallaciously claiming that Nixon kept him fully informed about all his foreign policy initiatives. If this had been true there would have been no need for Moorer to set up a spy ring. Welander, for his part according to this tape, had initially refused to answer questions about the spying he was supervising on the questionable grounds that he had a “personal and confidential relationship” with both Kissinger and Haig.

CONTINUED...

http://spikethenews.blogspot.com/2014/01/al-haig-nsc-and-white-house-spy-ring.html

Yeoman Radford stole from Henry Kissinger's briefcase on secret trip to China...



...in all he may've copied more than 10,000 documents.

"I didn't know he screened through the thing, but I knew he did carry 'em to me and I just returned from San Clemente and I had been told every damn thing that was in there...I gave the things back to (Alexander) Haig." -- Thomas H. Moorer, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

SOURCE: http://nixontapes.org/welander.html

History shows that the brass hats who run the Pentagon are just as liable as any lowly journalist to forget for whom they work. Thanks to NSA and all the rest of the oxymoronic alphabet soup of an Military Industrial Intelligence Community, while we don't need to remind them what we think of that, as they're listening and reading just about everything that's transmitted, they know. We do need to remind them of who's the boss. And as long as there's a Constitution, We the People will.

PS: Thank you for your kind words, G_j. I mean it when I say your friendship means the world.

[G_j]

107. I thought you were going to say the sabotaging

of the Vietnem peace talks. Quite a history...

Thank you friend, I am always inspired by your dedication and patience here. Onward!

[brooklynite]

41. Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero...

[Octafish]

43. Won't change the truth.

Nor can all the money in the world make a lie into the truth.

Kissinger? Kissinger who?

by Jim Naureckas
FAIR, Feb.

Last week, presidential challenger Bernie Sanders attacked his rival Hillary Clinton live on US television for taking advice from Nixon-era Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whom he accused of paving the way for genocide with his bombing of Cambodia.

You know who wasn’t impressed? US television.

According to a search of the Nexis news database, there were exactly two references to Kissinger following the debate on the major broadcast networks. CBS‘s Gayle King (Early Show, 2/12/16) reported that “Sanders questioned why Clinton would praise former secretary of State Henry Kissinger,” and then played an excerpt from the exchange:

SANDERS: Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state. Count me in as somebody who will not be listening to Henry Kissinger.

CLINTON: I know journalists have asked who you do listen to on foreign policy and we have yet to know who that is.

SANDERS: Well, it ain’t Henry Kissinger, that’s for sure.

CLINTON: That’s fine. That’s fine.

On NBC‘s Today show, Andrea Mitchell (2/12/16) played an even shorter excerpt (beginning with “journalists have asked you…”) as an illustration of how the candidates “hammered each other…on foreign policy.”

CONTINUED...

http://fair.org/home/kissinger-kissinger-who/

Corporate McPravda is afraid of telling the truth about Kissinger. That's also why you resort to censor. You can't change the truth and you fear people knowing it.

[brooklynite]

46. Six of one; half dozen of another...

[Octafish]

55. One. As in: ''I am the one-percent.''

Obama admits 95% of income gains gone to top 1%

http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/15/news/economy/income-inequality-obama/

That's not very democratic.

[Fumesucker]

74. Extremely Democratic though

The very best Democracy money can buy.

[Go Vols]

99. Not surprising tho after he said this,

"Obama says he'd be seen as moderate Republican in 1980s"

[John Poet]

83. Counting down the days until we can no longer post

the truth about Hillary, eh?

I don't blame you. The truth about Hillary is pretty ugly and damning,
and awfully difficult to refute, which is why hardly anyone bothers to try.

[John Poet]

45. Hillary dealt with Honduras just like a Kissinger.

And at the request of a couple right-wing senators... well, she didn't let them down.

Yet her supporters have the nerve to call her a 'progressive'--
Yeah, just as 'progressive' as Henry Kissinger was.....

[Octafish]

63. That is the take-away.

One picture is worth a thousand journalists.



Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was reported to be fond of Diego Rivera's mural, Glorious Victory, which tells the story of the CIA-led 1954 coup d'etat in Guatemala, using it for a Christmas card one year.

Today, we can substitute the name of a modern day Secretary of State for John Foster Dulles and plop in Honduras 2009 in place of Guatemala into the painting. History repeats, sickeningly.

One Diego Rivera mural is worth a thousand newspaper articles. Study Guide in PDF.



It starkly reminded me of how Jean-Bertrand Aristide got The USA Special Treatment in Haiti:

Aristide told me the Generals ran Dope, Inc. on Haiti. Personally.

Posted by Octafish in General Discussion (Through 2005)
Sat Mar 20th 2004, 06:49 PM

Sorry if the following is an old read. The thing held true then and holds true still…

I met Jean-Bertrand Aristide after he was deposed by the generals in the early 90s. He came to metro Detroit and spoke before the Cranbrook Peace Foundation.

The newspaper I then worked for didn’t see any reason for sending me to cover Aristide’s speech. The editors weren’t BFEE, but the events on a Caribbean island just weren’t “local” enough for their budget. So, I went on my own time.

The Cranbrook people were happy to see me. They wanted, of course, as much coverage as possible. So, they invited me and the other interested reporter types to have at him for an hour before his address.

I’m ashamed to report, at an important event in two nation’s larger media market, only a couple of CBC radio reporters out of Windsor and one local Detroit TV crew bothered to show. I was the lone print guy. Anyway…

Aristide answered every question asked in English or French. He also told us about life in Haiti, where there were four doctors to care for 4 million people. Another interesting stat: One percent of the population own 99-percent of the property.

I asked Aristide what the United States could do to help him restore democracy to Haiti? Aristide said all Poppy Doc Bush had to do was pick up the phone, call the generals and say, “Get out,” and they would quit their coup and the first democratically elected leader of Haiti in 75 years would be returned to power. Bush didn't and Aristide wasn't until Clinton sent the US Marines, many years and many Haitian lives later.

The reason for Bush Senior's inaction? Aristide said he didn’t know the answer, but he suspected Bush’s politics favored the landowners over the masses. (“Sounds familiar,” I then thought and still think today.)

Aristide said that the generals were deep into the wholesale cocaine importation business. Now who would be their partner in all that? Besides the wealthy landowners, for whom the Generals worked, I mean.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Octafish/785

Which is why it matters.

[Fuddnik]

108. I have a pretty strong camel.

But, Honduras was the last of many straws that broke it's back.

It wouldn't be much of an overstatement to say that Kissinger has damn near as much blood on his hands as Stalin. There's not a level of hell deep enough for him.

[Darb]

47. Gumby-like over-reach.

But you knew that.

[Octafish]

68. Can Hillary Clinton Renounce Henry Kissinger?

By Barbara Myers
TruthDig, May 29, 2016

EXCERPT...

Hillary’s Quandary

The critical question at this juncture is what this portends for Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy.

Kissinger is mentor and confidante to our presumptive Democratic nominee for president, whose own foreign policy—particularly her liking for regime change—mirrors Kissinger’s more than would be expected of someone claiming the mantle of “progressivism.”

Clinton referenced “differences” with Kissinger in her review of “World Order,” and, on the debate stage, performed a lukewarm distancing from a perpetrator of so many prosecutable crimes.

There is still time for our presumptive nominee to set her administration of foreign policy apart from the pack—or for the public to demand it with a resounding peace vote for Bernie Sanders in the remaining primaries. The alternative is perpetuation of the “liberal international world order” as writ most eloquently by Kissinger and perpetuated in Clinton’s own practice, most openly in regime change in Libya and her heretofore ignored support for the coup in Honduras.

If she declines to pursue a new foreign policy paradigm, Clinton, while not stooping like Trump to the demonization of nearly 25 percent of the world’s population, shows little promise of advancing the “progress” she claims to embrace.

CONTINUED...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/page3/can_hillary_clinton_renounce_henry_kissinger_20160529

So, yes, there is that.

[jzodda]

50. One more week

Then all the kooky HRC conspiracy theories along with their adherents will all be gone!

Then we can concentrate on whats important- beating racist scum Trump.

[Octafish]

54. Rather than the CT strawman, show where I've posted something in error.

If you want to go to the heart of the matter: Start with UBS, where these two work in the Swiss bank's Wealth Management department for the once rightwing Sen. Phil Gramm.



After his exit from the US Senate, Phil Gramm immediately found a job at Swiss bank UBS as its Vice Chairman. Gramm today works in the Wealth Management department, where he brought on, among others, former President Bill Clinton, former pretzeldent George W Bush and one James Carville.



See for you'self.

It's a Buy-Partisan Who's Who:

President William J. Clinton
President George W. Bush Heh heh heh.
Robert J. McCann
James Carville
John V. Miller
Paula D. Polito
Anthony Roth
Mike Ryan
John Savercool

SOURCE: http://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/revitalizingamerica/SenatorPhilGramm.html

Who would have thought President Clinton and Sen. Gramm -- the two key figures in repealing Glass-Steagall -- would work together in Wealth Management at a Swiss bank?

Since the New Deal, Glass-Steagall had protected the US taxpayer from the Wall Street casino by law. After its repeal, the US taxpayer got put on the hook for, among other things, the most recent $16 trillion Wall Street bailout.

In September 2008 on DU2 I described the situation: Know your BFEE: Phil Gramm, the Meyer Lansky of the War Party, Set-Up the Biggest Bank Heist Ever.

Those interested may also enjoy what Robert Scheer thinks about Phil Gramm.



https://panamapapers.icij.org/20160403-panama-papers-global-overview.html

Until the Panama Papers, this information wasn't much interest to the USA's "news media." They don't like to disturb their owners and operators any more than they have to.

[jzodda]

60. I am going to simplify things

Because I don't believe in guilt by association. I have some right wing friends. Good people! We argue and discuss. I learn stuff at times and (hopefully) so do they.

I won't hold it against somebody for jobs they took or associations from the past.

We have a nominee so I am now focused on winning because the stakes are VERY high. President's Obama's executive orders (all of them), the Supreme court and more all under threat. The ACA and countless regs.

If she loses it will be almost as if President Obama didn't serve at all because they will attempt to undo all of it!

[Rose Siding]

56. Hard for some to look past guilt by association

[Octafish]

67. Emails expose close ties between Hillary Clinton and accused war criminal Henry Kissinger

Emails expose close ties between Hillary Clinton and accused war criminal Henry Kissinger

Kissinger met regularly with Secretary Clinton, and applauded her hawkish foreign policy in a handwritten message

BEN NORTON AND JARED FLANERY
Salon, Jan. 16, 2016

“I greatly admire the skill and aplomb with which you conduct our foreign policy,” wrote Henry Kissinger in a 2012 letter to “the Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton.” The compliment was included as a handwritten postscript added to the printed letter.

SNIP...

Yet Kissinger’s intimate handwritten note is just one sign of the close ties between the accused war criminal and Clinton, who is herself notorious for advocating a similarly aggressive, hawkish foreign policy.

In her glowing review of Kissinger’s new book “World Order” in The Washington Post in September 2014, Clinton returned the favor, expressing admiration for Kissinger. She proclaimed that Kissinger’s foreign policy analysis and approach “largely fits with the broad strategy behind the Obama administration’s effort.” Adopting Kissingerian language, the bellicose secretary of state said she yearns for “sustaining America’s leadership in the world.”

“Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state,” Clinton revealed in the review. “He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels.”

Several emails provide more insight into the cozy relationship between Clinton and Kissinger.

In a June 2009 email titled “Startegy memo,” Clinton mentions an upcoming dinner she will be having with Kissinger — along with Cold War-era statesman and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who pushed for the U.S. to arm Islamic extremist mujahideen militants in Afghanistan in order to fight the Soviet Union, giving rise to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

CONTINUED...

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/12/emails_expose_close_ties_between_hillary_clinton_and_accused_war_criminal_henry_kissinger/

Excellent point, Rose Siding. "Guilt by Association" is wrong. That's why the background and FOIA.

BTW: Do you think Nelson Mandela ever got the full story on what the CIA did to him in 1962? We've learned a lot more since then.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

53. I would respond to this calumny in my inimitable way but Skinner asked me to be nice.

[Octafish]

57. Calumny implies smear, slander, and libel. What's false in what I posted?

“Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state,” Clinton revealed in the review. “He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels.” -- http://www.salon.com/2016/01/12/emails_expose_close_ties_between_hillary_clinton_and_accused_war_criminal_henry_kissinger/

Seems to be a concerted effort this morning to discredit this post and me, personally. So, please, show where I'm in error.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

59. I would respond to this calumny in my inimitable way but Skinner asked me to be nice.

Seven more days!

[Octafish]

61. Do you ever wonder what Hillary and Erik Prince talk about?



Lawmakers Ask Hillary Clinton to Explain Erik Prince’s Mercenaries in the UAE

“The implications of allowing a US citizen to assemble a legion in any foreign country, and especially in a combustible region like the Middle East, are serious and wide-ranging,” they allege.

By Jeremy Scahill
MAY 23, 2011

 Five members of Congress have called on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to clarify if Blackwater founder Erik Prince’s recently disclosed deal to provide a small mercenary army to the United Arab Emirates complies with US law and export regulations. “We question whether private US citizens should be involved in recruiting and assembling forces, as well as providing military training and support to foreign governments and militaries,” wrote the lawmakers, led by Representative Jan Schakowsky, a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “The implications of allowing a US citizen to assemble a foreign legion in any foreign country, and especially in a combustible region like the Middle East, are serious and wide-ranging.”


On May 14, the New York Times revealed that Prince was leading an effort to build an army of mercs 800 strong—including scores from Colombia—in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. They would be trained by US, European and South African special forces veterans. Prince’s new company, Reflex Responses, also known as R2, was bankrolled to the tune of $529 million from “the oil-soaked sheikdom,” according to the Times, adding that Prince was “hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi” Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan.

According to the lawmakers, under US law, Prince’s company is exporting a defense product and therefore falls under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), requiring him to “first seek the approval of the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls before the defense services are provided.” The DDTC is controlled by the State Department. “Has Mr. Prince, or any of the other Americans involved in the training contract, received such approval from DDTC?” the lawmakers ask Clinton in the May 23 letter [PDF], a copy of which was obtained by The Nation. Past attempts by The Nation to obtain certain DDTC records on Blackwater-affiliated companies have been rejected by the State Department.

They further ask Secretary Clinton for “any clarification as to US policy toward private US citizens who recruit, assemble, or train foreign militaries, and toward foreign countries that hire private US citizens to train their militaries.” They add: “We have long expressed concerns about the US government continuing to do business with Blackwater, despite that company’s growing list of misconduct, and we are concerned that Mr. Prince is now exporting his services. In addition, the Emirati regime’s use of an American-created and trained force of foreign troops has the potential to introduce further instability and suspicion into an already volatile region (and at a particularly sensitive time).” In addition to Schakowsky, the other signers of the letter are: John Conyers, Maurice Hinchey, James Moran and Peter Welch.

SOURCE: http://www.thenation.com/article/lawmakers-ask-hillary-clinton-explain-erik-princes-mercenaries-uae/

I can't find the answer online. Maybe if State had had an inspector general they could have asked Mark Penn about that. Maybe you could help, but I know you're busy with the strawman.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

62. "Do you ever wonder what Hillary and Erik Prince talk about?"

Do you ever wonder what it is going to be like for some posters in seven days:

[Octafish]

64. Can't address the question, so you threaten via the Jackson 5.

Don't you think that says a lot more about you, DemocratSinceBirth, than me?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

66. I am trying to help you. I want you around after we go into G E mode

[Fuddnik]

110. Wrong album. "Lives In The Balance" would be more appropriate.

[senz]

135. They don't care, Octafish.

They lost some essential part of their humanity.

[bobthedrummer]

86. K&R#43

Bill Clinton pardon controversy (Wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controversy

[Octafish]

89. Banksters! BCCI and Marc Rich were two of those thousand points of green light.

Kind of overlapped Big Time through Jackson Stephens Inc of Little Rock, Arkansas.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x3328656

[bobthedrummer]

92. We certainly aren't the only people that love the truth here, are we?

[Octafish]

100. It's what Democracy needs and why the First Amendment.

Like a November Surprise in Oz...

ASIO chief defied Gough Whitlam's order to cut ties with the CIA in 1974

Latest volume of Asio’s official history sheds light on the lowest point of US-Australian relations in the turbulent years of the Whitlam government

by Paul Daley
The Guardian, Oct. 15, 2015

EXCERPT...

After Cairns was sworn in as deputy PM, a senior US embassy official visited Barbour in his office at America’s request. The American official said secretary of state Henry Kissinger and defence secretary James Schlesinger viewed Cairns as “a radical with strong anti-American and pro-Chinese sympathies”.

“The American wanted to know whether the elevation of Cairns entailed him being granted access to American intelligence and if so, whether he could be trusted with its security.”

By early 1975 America had become even more concerned about Australia as an ally.

“US embassy officials confided to Asio that the ‘maintenance of the ALP Government in power is essential to Soviet planning for this area and their activities in Australia would be tempered by this consideration’,” Blaxland writes.

On 8 November 1975, as pressure mounted on Kerr to sack the Whitlam government over the continuing Senate impasse on budget supply, Asio’s senior liaison officer in Washington was summoned to see the CIA’s East Asia division chief, Theodore Ted Shackley.

CONTINUED...

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/oct/16/asio-chief-defied-gough-whitlams-order-cut-ties-cia-1974

...should have been big news. But, it was classified.

Who's Ted Shackley?

Before the collapse, CIA saw writing on the wall. Which is why they didn't "predict the collapse."

1980 campaign:

Agents for Bush

by Bob Callahan*
Covert Action Information Bulletin, Number 33 (Winter 1990)

EXCERPT...

Bush and Terrorism

The Bush presidential campaign not only set the tone for the role and structure of the intelligence apparatus in the new Reagan administration, it also took up a new foreign policy theme which would reap huge political dividends in the years to come. This new theme was terrorism/counterterrorism.

In July 1979 George Bush and Ray Cline attended a conference in Jerusalem where this theme was given its first significant political discussion before leaders of Israel, Great Britain and the United States.

It would take an enormously important event to keep a major American presidential candidate away from campaigning on the Fourth of July weekend. For George Bush, the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism was such an event. The Jerusalem Conference was hosted by the Israeli government and, not surprisingly, most of Israel’s top intelligence officers and leading political (figures) were in attendance. (6)

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin rose to the podium on July 2, 1979 to provide the conference with its opening address. By the summer of 1979, even Menachem Begin was willing to join in the bashing of his old Camp David friend, Jimmy Carter – a practice which had become almost endemic by the fall of 1979.

The Israelis were angry with Carter because his administration had recently released its Annual Report on Human Rights wherein the Israeli Government was taken to task for abusing the rights of the Palestinian people on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel’s new anti-Carter tone was mile, however, compared to the rhetoric of the two separate U.S. delegations which attended the conference. The first delegation was led by the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington. It included the noted black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin; Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute; and Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter of Commentary Magazine. The members of this delegation were registered Democrats, yet all became very active in neo-conservative politics during the Reagan years.

The Republican delegation was led by George Bush. It included Ray Cline and two important members of Bush’s Team B form his CIA days – Major General George Keegan, a Bush supporter who had served as intelligence chief for the United States Air Force; and Harvard professor Richard Pipes. (7)

Looking for a mobilizing issue to counter the Carter-era themes of détente and human rights, the Bush people began to explore the political benefits of embracing the terrorism/anti-terrorism theme.

As Jonathan Marshall of the Oakland Tribune explains: “At the conference, Ray Cline developed the theme that terror was not a random response of frustrated minorities, but rather a preferred instrument of East bloc policy adopted after 1969 when the KGB persuaded the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to accept the PLO as a major political instrument in the Mideast and to subsidize its terrorist policies by freely giving money, training, arms and coordinated communications.(8)

In Ray Cline’s imagination, terrorism had now hardened into a system – an international trouble making system. Richard Pipes elaborated on the Cline hypothesis. “The roots of Soviet terrorism, indeed of modern terrorism,” Pipes states, “date back to 1879….It marks the beginning of that organization which is the source of all modern terrorist groups, whether they be named the Tupamaros, the Baader-Meinhoff group, the Weathermen, Red Brigade or PLO. I refer to the establishment in 1879 of a Congress in the small Russian town of Lipesk, of an organization known as Narodnaya Volya, or the People’s Will.”(9)

According to Philip Paull, who wrote his master’s thesis on the subject of the Jerusalem Conference, “If Pipes was to be believed, the Russians not only support international terrorism, they invented it!”(10)

The Bush/Cline/Pipes definition of terrorism was of course both expeditious and powerfully political. “Left out of their equation,” Jonathan Marshall comments, “was any mention of terrorist acts by CIA-trained Cuban exiles, Israeli ties to Red Brigades, or the function of death squads from Argentina to Guatemala. Soviet sponsorship, real or imagined, had become the defining characteristic of terrorism, not simply an explanation for its prevalence. Moreover, there was no inclination whatsoever to include, under the rubric of terror, bombings of civilians, or any other acts carried out by government forces rather than small individual units.” (11)

Within days after the conference the new propaganda war began in earnest. On July 11, 1979, the International Herald Tribune featured a lead editorial entitled "The Issue is Terrorism," which quoted directly from conference speeches. The same day Congressman Jack Kemp placed selected quotes from the conference in the Congressional Record. In his syndicated column of July 28, 1979, former CIA employee William F. Buckley blasted two of his favorite targets in one single mixed metaphor: “No venture is too small to escape patronage by the Soviet Union,” Buckley stated, “which scatters funds about for terrorists like HEW in search of welfare clients.” Then in August, George Will, who also attended the conference, wrote about it in the Washington Post.

Before the year was out Commentary, National Review, and eventually New Republic writers would all church out yard after yard of copy on this theme. Soon after, Claire Sterling, who had also attended the conference, would create the first "bible" of this new perspective with the publication of her highly controversial book, The Terror Network.(12)

With the help of George Bush and Ray Cline, the Jerusalem Conference had managed to start a propaganda firestorm.

In the following decade, the theme of terrorism/counter-terrorism would grow increasingly important to George Bush. He would become the ranking authority on this subject in the Reagan White House. Indeed, it would be Bush’s own Task Force – the Vice President’s Task Force on Combatting Terroris, -- which would eventually provide Oliver North back channel authorization through which he would bypass certain dissenting administration officials in his ongoing management of the Reagan/Bush Secret War against Nicaragua.(13)

CONTINUED...

PDF: https://archive.org/details/GeorgeBushTheCompanysMan-CovertActionInformationBulletinNo.33

Thus the warmongers held the fort long enough for Putin and Xi to get their houses of enemies in order for the return of business as usual. And that is how the money trumps peace crew got to live happily ever after.

[tonyt53]

103. An intelligent person listens to ALL opinions. It helps in not repeating those same mistakes.

It really does make a person a better decision maker when it really does matter.

[Octafish]

123. I don't need a war criminal to tell me war is wrong.

Even if he's a Republican.

[Ferd Berfel]

104. Dead on once again Octafish

[Octafish]

139. Realpolitik means millions dead are ''worth it.''

Henry Kissinger’s War Crimes Are Central to the Divide Between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders

by Dan Froomkin
The Intercept, Feb. 12, 2016

EXCERPT...

First, let’s review what happened at the debate. Here’s the video, followed by the transcript:

SANDERS: Where the secretary and I have a very profound difference, in the last debate — and I believe in her book — very good book, by the way — in her book and in this last debate, she talked about getting the approval or the support or the mentoring of Henry Kissinger. Now, I find it rather amazing, because I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country.

(APPLAUSE)

I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger. And in fact, Kissinger’s actions in Cambodia, when the United States bombed that country, overthrew Prince Sihanouk, created the instability for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to come in, who then butchered some 3 million innocent people, one of the worst genocides in the history of the world. So count me in as somebody who will not be listening to Henry Kissinger.

(APPLAUSE)

IFILL: Secretary Clinton?

CLINTON: Well, I know journalists have asked who you do listen to on foreign policy, and we have yet to know who that is.

SANDERS: Well, it ain’t Henry Kissinger. That’s for sure.

CLINTON: That’s fine. That’s fine.

(LAUGHTER)

You know, I listen to a wide variety of voices that have expertise in various areas. I think it is fair to say, whatever the complaints that you want to make about him are, that with respect to China, one of the most challenging relationships we have, his opening up China and his ongoing relationships with the leaders of China is an incredibly useful relationship for the United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

So if we want to pick and choose — and I certainly do — people I listen to, people I don’t listen to, people I listen to for certain areas, then I think we have to be fair and look at the entire world, because it’s a big, complicated world out there.

SANDERS: It is.

CLINTON: And, yes, people we may disagree with on a number of things may have some insight, may have some relationships that are important for the president to understand in order to best protect the United States.

(APPLAUSE)

SANDERS: I find — I mean, it’s just a very different, you know, historical perspective here. Kissinger was one of those people during the Vietnam era who talked about the domino theory. Not everybody remembers that. You do. I do. The domino theory, you know, if Vietnam goes, China, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. That’s what he talked about, the great threat of China.

And then, after the war, this is the guy who, in fact, yes, you’re right, he opened up relations with China, and now pushed various type of trade agreements, resulting in American workers losing their jobs as corporations moved to China. The terrible, authoritarian, Communist dictatorship he warned us about, now he’s urging companies to shut down and move to China. Not my kind of guy.

(APPLAUSE)

CONTINUED w/links etc...

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/

[apcalc]

105. Are you friendly with ONLY those you agree with?

Do you and your friends agree on everything?
Can you learn from only your friends?


If you are in public life, and a good listener , you will make friends with many people and learn something from them all.

It is a good quality to have. Glad Hillary has it.
She'll make a great Prez.

[Octafish]

124. What conservatives say about Henry Kissinger...

The Messy Legacy of Kissinger’s Middle East Interventions

How Nixon's top diplomat inadvertently radicalized the Muslim world's petrostates.

By GREG GRANDIN
The American Conservative • September 28, 2015

The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the Shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key figure in Nixon and Kissinger’s move into the Middle East, wanted to be dealt with as a serious person. He expected his country to be treated with the same respect Washington showed other key Cold War allies like West Germany and Great Britain. As Nixon’s national security adviser and, after 1973, secretary of state, Kissinger’s job was to pump up the Shah, to make him feel like he truly was the “king of kings.”

Reading the diplomatic record, it’s hard not to imagine his weariness as he prepared for his sessions with the Shah, considering just what gestures and words would be needed to make it clear that his majesty truly mattered to Washington, that he was valued beyond compare. “Let’s see,” an aide who was helping Kissinger get ready for one such meeting said, “the Shah will want to talk about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, the Kurds, and Brezhnev.”

During another prep, Kissinger was told that “the Shah wants to ride in an F-14.” Silence ensued. Then Kissinger began to think aloud about how to flatter the monarch into abandoning the idea. “We can say,” he began, “that if he has his heart set on it, okay, but the President would feel easier if he didn’t have that one worry in 10,000 [that the plane might crash]. The Shah will be flattered.” Once, Nixon asked Kissinger to book the entertainer Danny Kaye for a private performance for the Shah and his wife.

The 92-year-old Kissinger has a long history of involvement in Iran and his recent opposition to Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, while relatively subdued by present Washington standards, matters. In it lies a certain irony, given his own largely unexamined record in the region. Kissinger’s criticism has focused mostly on warning that the deal might provoke a regional nuclear arms race as Sunni states led by Saudi Arabia line up against Shia Iran. “We will live in a proliferated world,” he said in testimony before the Senate. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed co-authored with another former secretary of state, George Shultz, Kissinger worried that, as the region “trends toward sectarian upheaval” and “state collapse,” the “disequilibrium of power” might likely tilt toward Tehran.

SNIP...

“We are looking for a navy,” the Shah told Kissinger in 1973, “we have a large shopping list.” And so Kissinger let him buy a navy.

CONTINUED...

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-messy-legacy-of-kissingers-middle-east-interventions/

PS: Agree about Hillary having what it takes. I hope she uses it wisely.

PPS: This piece by Grandin appeared first in Tom Dispatch, liberal and progressive as the day is long, but goes to show how important stuff can be reprinted by people with whom we don't necessarily agree.

[treestar]

113. Makes too much of it

You'd think he was the only influence in her life ever.

You can disagree with his policy and still learn a lot from him. Life is never that simple. He would know a lot about the process.

[Octafish]

117. She is her own person.

If Sec Sen First Lady Clinton becomes our next President, I know she listens to the better angels of her nature counsel.



When these two are dine together, there's no question of who's the smartest person in the room.

"Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory will swell when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature." - Abraham Lincoln

Of course in the same speech, Lincoln earlier had said, quoting his own rhetoric:

"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

So, while I get confused, I remember to never, ever like what banksters and war criminals do with my tax dollars in my name.

[treestar]

132. That is just one second in her life too

Because they can socialize does not mean she is influenced by him at all. The right wingers could equally fear the same thing - she's turning him into a liberal!

[2cannan]

114. If Kissinger has a house in the DR that he, Hillary and Bill go to for holidays, why can't they

arrest his sorry ass for war crimes there?

[Octafish]

116. Is that the Democratic Republic of the Congo or the Republic of Congo?

One of the things Democrats everywhere most desire is Justice, including that for the the people of all nations in Africa. President Kennedy, one figure Kissinger's friends never mention out loud when considering advice on legal or foreign policy questions, actually considered Congo as an essential nation for showing the world that the United States' way of peace and respecting the democratic aspirations of a people was superior to that the of the communists, let alone colonialist capitalist cronies of crown royalty. So, JFK backed Patrice Lumumba. Here's JFK's reaction when he heard news of Lumumba's murder at the hands of the allies of Allen Dulles' CIA:



DUer Ichingcarpenter has an outstanding thread on the subject: The story behind the JFK facepalm picture

Even if neither one is a People's Republic in the best sense, like you, 2cannan, I'm for Justice. We the People require it more than ever, especially seeing how guns continue to win out, just like George W Bush, one of the colonialist capitalist cronies of crown royalty said, "Money trumps peace."

[Uncle Joe]

118. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Octafish.

[Octafish]

120. The Once and Future Kissinger

A little reminder from us old folks who still remember Nixon and Vietnam:


With George W. Bush in Austin, Texas, July 2000.

The Once and Future Kissinger

As another failed war threatens to tarnish his legacy, Henry Kissinger attempts to clarify his record—by evading, skirting, stretching, hedging, and stonewalling like the diplomatic master he is.

By Joe Hagan
New York Magazine, Oct. 24, 2007

EXCERPT...

You can see why this Iraq business so vexes Kissinger. He hardly needs another quagmire around his neck—especially after he played this one so carefully. When the neoconservatives began driving foreign policy after 9/11, the consummate realist hedged his bets and supported the decision to invade Iraq. There were caveats galore, of course: Kissinger said postwar reconstruction of Iraq would require U.N. involvement and international diplomacy and that he was opposed to occupying a Muslim nation in order to “reeducate the country.” He also said preemptive war as a doctrine was a bad idea, except in rare instances.

His standing on Iraq was so nuanced the New York Times included him in a list of prominent Republicans who objected to the war—only to print a tortured editor’s note amending the report after right-wing critics attacked the paper for misrepresenting his views. “I’m not sure the Times got it wrong,” says Walter Isaacson, the president of the Aspen Institute, a former Time managing editor, and the author of the biography Kissinger. “They just pinned him down when he wanted to stay unpinned.”

At New York dinner parties before the invasion in 2003, Kissinger related to friends that he was “very concerned that there was no plan for what happens after they bring it down and topple it,” recounts one associate. “He predicted to a group of people at a dinner that it would end in civil war.”

SNIP...

In the vetting process, however, Kissinger ran into a snag. Five years after he left office, the former secretary of State had founded the consulting firm Kissinger Associates and established himself as a kind of diplomatic fixer who could work the back rooms of Moscow, Beijing, and Riyadh for corporations needing influence. He charges $200,000 (a reported $50,000 just to walk through the door) to consult for companies like Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc., a mining company with assets in Indonesia. As much as Kissinger wanted to be the nation’s healer, he valued his business interests more. When Congress requested that he reveal his consulting firm’s client list, he stepped down from the commission.

Nonetheless, Kissinger remained a favorite administration ally, appointed by Donald Rumsfeld to the Defense Policy Board, the outgoing secretary of Defense’s personal think tank. And Cheney told Woodward last year that George W. Bush is a “big fan.” He’s not alone, of course. Kissinger is, after all, a foreign policy genius emeritus, whose exacting skills as a strategic thinker have made him an indispensable adviser to many leaders of the free world. And he’s certainly the guy you call when you’re planning to wage war in the world’s most complicated geopolitical hot spot.

CONTINUED...

http://nymag.com/news/people/24750/index2.html

You are most welcome, Uncle Joe. Thank you for grokking -- and thank you for caring.

[Ferd Berfel]

122. In Henry's hands both War and Peace

involved other peoples Blood and sacrifice

He should have been the Hague for the rest of his miserable life..

[Octafish]

125. The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and A Forgotten Genocide

One almost needs a supercomputer to keep track of all the blood and suffering.

Book Review:

The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and A Forgotten Genocide

by Gary J. Bass

Winner of the 2014 Lionel Gelber Prize for Foreign Affairs, The Blood Telegram chronicles how Nixon and Kissinger supported Pakistan’s military dictatorship as it brutally quashed the results of a historic free election. Gary J. Bass argues that the United States’ embrace of the military dictatorship in Islamabad went on to mould Asia’s destiny for decades. This book has the potential to fuel international lawyers to research the legal consequences of the passive stance taken by Nixon and his underlings, writes Lenneke Sprik (for the London School of Economics).

When we think of genocide, the first examples that come to mind are often the holocaust, Rwanda, and Srebrenica. Who would mention the mass murder of up to three million Bengalis in the East of Pakistan in 1971 in this regard? And how many people are aware of the culpable passive role of the United States in this genocide? Gary Bass convincingly unravels the rather shocking truth of the American position in the Pakistan crisis in a well-written narrative that contains a strong condemnation of United States’ bystander role.

When the pro-independence Awami League were elected in 1969, the separation of Pakistan and with that, the independence of the Bengalis living in East-Pakistan, was seen as a threat to the future of the country as a whole. General Yahya Khan, leader of the Pakistani army, took over control before the Awami League could claim its power and started his genocidal campaign against the Bengali population of East-Pakistan in March 1971. Over the course of nine months, millions of Bengalis (mainly Hindus) were killed. International responses to these events were heavily influenced by Cold War rhetoric. Bass’ account of the genocide in Pakistan shows how a precarious balance of power had to be kept in place, which obstructed a united stance against Yahya’s objectionable policies. Ultimately, India – under Indira Ghandi’s leadership – intervened in December 1971, which put an end to the genocide. Nixon and Kissinger have proven to be strategic practitioners of Realpolitik in this matter. Their friendship with Yahya, and their support of the genocide through arms supplies, leads Bass to justly criticise the American role in the Pakistani genocide.

By quoting some of the controversial opinions expressed by Nixon and Kissinger, the author not only provides a detailed overview of the factual happenings in Pakistan in the early 1970s, but more than that he reveals the reproachable attitude of the American statesmen towards the humanitarian crisis in Asia. Specifically striking in Bass’ story is the reflection of the condescending language used by Nixon and Kissinger regarding the Indian people. Their personal sentiments in this matter unequivocally influenced their stance towards the Pakistani crisis. Accordingly, Bass depicts Nixon’s friendship with the Pakistani dictator Yahya as characteristic for Nixon’s foreign policy: he was nothing more than a useful bridge in Nixon’s master plan to get closer to China. It is this picture of the republican president that Bass paints effectively. In doing so, this book raises awareness of how international politics are often governed by national and personal interests rather than moral interests; something that can be considered a timeless phenomenon in times where states are still hesitant to intervene in other states’ affairs to halt mass atrocities.

In his reconstruction, Bass uses the personal experiences of US general consul Archer Blood as a key figure throughout the book, whose dissenting voice was silenced by Nixon. Blood’s telegram asking the State Department for immediate action against the mass atrocities in East Pakistan was neglected and therefore became illustrative of Nixon’s bystander conduct. Bass even cited several sources arguing that this makes them ‘complicit to genocide’. At one point Bass refers to Kissinger’s clear attitude towards international humanitarian crises by referring to one of his comments in which he pointed out that ‘a humanitarian concern is not necessarily an American concern’. Bass could not have made that picture clearer had he not used the sources the way he did.

Throughout the book, the reader wonders why Nixon and the likes took this position towards Pakistan and the Bengali crisis. Bass correctly observes three goals that contributed to the controversial stance taken by the president. First, he explains that Nixon wanted to avoid the destruction of the West-Pakistani army. Second, above all Nixon wanted to maintain his bridge through China (Yahya); and third, the American president feared the collapse of the balance of power if any of the great powers would intervene in Pakistan’s domestic affairs, which he wanted to prevent at all costs.

SNIP...

If there were any doubts that Nixon’s presidency was everything except undisputed, this historical account will convincingly dispel them. That humanitarianism had to give way to the political interests of Nixon and Kissinger is the main conclusion drawn from this revealing account of the US stance in the genocide that took place in East-Pakistan in the early 1970s. Whether interested in American foreign policy, international relations, Asian history, or genocide studies, this book will appeal to a wide audience. In a world that focuses more and more on international legal remedies to fight injustice, it might even fuel international lawyers to research the legal consequences of the passive stance taken by Nixon and his underlings.

SOURCE: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2014/07/27/book-review-the-blood-telegram-nixon-kissinger-and-a-forgotten-genocide-by-gary-j-bass/

"Many soldiers are led to faulty ideas of war by knowing too much about too little." -- Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.

[Ferd Berfel]

129. WOw

[Octafish]

136. Who knows what the future holds? She may have tapped his brain's good parts?

If so, who knows? We may live in peaceful, prosperous times yet!

I'm so old I remember Wener Von Braun. Now there was a NAZI. The fellow helped get us to the moon.



As a fellow Bernie-ite, I'm gonna give her my full support. As a fellow Democrat and loyal American, I'll hold her Doc Martins to the fire.

ETA: If she's the nominee, that is!

[bobthedrummer]

140. Another learning curve kick for the real DU reality-based community. n/t