CIA

Ray McGovern discusses Seymour Hersh’s story on Nord Stream attack by U.S.

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from Consortium News
February 12, 2023

Ray McGovern discusses Seymour Hersh’s story, “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline” on Garland Nixon and Wilmer Leon’s radio show, The Critical Hour. (With transcript).

Transcript

Garland Nixon

Sy Hersh has a piece at his Substack account entitled How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline. The New York Times called it a, quote unquote mystery. But the United States executed a covert C.I.A. operation that was kept secret until now. For insight into this, let’s turn to our first guest. He works with Tell the World, The publishing arm of the Ecumenical Church of the Savior in inner city Washington; has 27 year career as a C.I.A. analyst, serving as chief of the Soviet foreign policy branch and preparing the president’s daily brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and he is, of course, Ray McGovern. As always, Ray, welcome back.

Ray McGovern

Thanks for having me.

Garland Nixon

So Sy Hersh writes, last June, the Navy divers operating under the cover of a widely publicized midsummer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that three months later destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines. This is according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning. 

What I’ll say, Ray, is usually when we hear of unknown sources, we tend to question the veracity or validity of the piece.

But if it’s Sy Hersh, I got to give it its due. Ray McGovern.

Ray McGovern

I know Sy Hersh.

Garland Nixon

I know you do.

Ray McGovern

I know him to be a meticulous reporter, winner of five Polk Awards, Pulitzer Prize, you name it. Back in the day when honest reporters were so honored. This piece has all the earmarks of Sy’s meticulous approach, and he clearly has a very good source who felt, well, he felt a constitutional obligation to honor his or her oath to the Constitution of the United States, which is the supreme oath any of us take. And that is to make sure that you tell the truth, especially when the Constitution is being violated. 

Now, this was an act of war, pure and simple. Curiously enough, it was against Germany. And curiously enough, President Joseph Biden, at a press conference in the presence of the chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, said this is going to happen if Russia invaded Ukraine. And, of course, he was asked, well, how do you do this? I mean, how can you how can you be so confident that Nord Stream will be killed and Biden said, well, just, you know, trust me, it’s going to happen. 

And so she, bilingual, the Reuters reporter, turned to Scholz – and this is not widely available now for obvious reasons – and she said, well, I mean, do you agree with that? I mean, hello, how do you feel about this? And this hack, this political hack said: we do everything together. We do everything together. We will be together on this now. So that’s available now. It’s available. Not Sy Hersh’s piece yet, but that interview is available in Germany.

You know, I describe Olaf Scholz as kind of the epitome of the abused spouse. Stands there and is abused not only by his master, Joe Biden, but also by this hack that he has as foreign minister. Her name is [Annalena] Baerbock. She is the the most vociferous of all the people saying that we are at war. That’s what she said. We are at war with Russia. 

So the question will be: it has been 90 years, count them, nine zero years since the Nazis were making a push for power in Germany. What happened? The Reichstag, the German parliament building was burned down at the end of January, 1933. What happened? The Germans caved. The Nazis didn’t have a majority, but they scared the living daylights out of German citizens.

First of all, Social Democrats gave in. Next to fall, the Zentrum party, the Catholic Party. No one spoke up. We know the rest of the story. All right. Now, sometimes history is replete with ironies. Here it is exactly to the month, 90 years later. Will the German people acquiesce in their industry, and then their bodies being frozen out this winter? Or will they rise up and say: “Look, Mr Scholz, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, and neither does Baerbock. Get out of here!”, and replace that government? 

Now, the key to all this, of course, is the fact I have already mentioned. Sy Hersh’s piece has not been published in Germany. The New York Times hasn’t published it. The major media haven’t published. Where did Sy have to publish this? On Substack. Now, at one point he had a friend at the German newspaper, Die Welt, and they published an incredible exposé on Syria. It turned out to be true, but Sy couldn’t get it published anywhere else. He used to publish in The New York Times, then in The New Yorker. He has been banned. 

So the question is, will it be possible to inform not only the American people, but more important, the German people that they’ve been had? Okay? This is depriving them of livelihoods and industry. Will they, unlike 90 years ago, act like adults, stand up and say: “Now we’ve had it. Blowing up our our gas pipeline, that’s too far. We’re going to look at things differently. First and foremost, our involvement in Ukraine.”

Garland Nixon

Ray, domestically. Here. In this piece, if it is to be believed – which, I believe it and it certainly warrants an internal investigation here – the Biden administration admitted that what they were doing was an act of war, which means they understood that only Congress could, in fact, constitutionally clear that action. And they, with malice and aforethought, took action to mitigate their accountability to the Constitution and Congress.

And Joe Biden was the head guy there. He was the man that… eventually they decided rather than just put explosives on it, apparently Biden wanted to give the word for when it was done. This is an impeachable offense. This is a requirement of Congress, to act on it. Your thoughts on Congress not acting on it? I don’t suspect they will. And if there will be ultimately in the long term, any ramifications for that? Your thoughts on that anyway Ray.

Ray McGovern

Well, again, if the big tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it fall, does it make a sound? It is incredible how The New York Times – actually I’ve taken to calling The New York Times The New Yellow Times, after yellow journalism, which as most people know is what you do when you exaggerate or slant things beyond the truth.

The New Yellow Times can prevent this from being heard, and more important now, prevent corroboration from being a voice. We have corroboration now from Gil Doctorow in Brussels, Larry Johnson in Tampa, it’s coming in. And so I applaud the source that told Sy Hersh all this information. I believe it implicitly. Sy has never been wrong on really important issues like this. As I say, he’s meticulous, and he was distraught – and I know this personally – distraught at all this stuff about Russiagate.

He and Bob Parry used to – my mentor, Robert Parry, Consortium News – used to commiserate on the phone and, you know, what’s happened to the to the media? So here again, we have the media right in the middle of this thing. Only Tucker Carlson has had the cajones so far to play this story. Will it go further? I suspect… well, I don’t know but I like to try to be the optimist. Can The New York Times and the major media suppress this indefinitely? Well, I suppose they can. They’ve suppressed other stories, equally important, like the fact that the Russians are proven not to have hacked into the DNC, and that the ‘Russian offensive’ there with Facebook amounted to nothing.

So if they can deceive the American people, as the American people are willing to be deceived, then you know this will not have its desired effect. The fact that that Sy had to go on Substack to do this is really a lurid manifestation of the fact that not even the most prized, the most meticulous investigative reporter in the United States, could not get this published elsewhere.

That speaks volumes.

Garland Nixon

Part of this piece, Sy discusses meetings that Victoria Nuland and Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan held in the executive office of the President, where they debated options for an attack on the pipeline. And he writes that the C.I.A. argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. And at the time, the C.I.A. was directed by Bill Burns, as Sy describes him, a mild mannered former ambassador to Russia. I know you know Burns well. He says that Burns quickly authorized a C.I.A. working group whose ad hoc members included someone who was familiar with the capacity of these Navy deep sea divers. Your thoughts on Burns’s involvement in this?

Ray McGovern

I do know Burns. He let me, well, in effect shame James Clapper by pointing out to an audience that Clapper had admitted that he fudged the evidence on weapons of mass destruction before the attack on Iraq. Burns was, some of us hoped, that he might be the adult in the room, but Burns is the epitome of a cog in the wheels of the system. He’s a state Department type. He got to be number two in the State Department and you don’t get to be number two in the State Department unless you salute. Whether it’s a harebrained scheme or not you salute. Well, here you have the epitome of a harebrained scheme. Did did Burns salute? Yes, as soon as the president said do it. He turned to his people and he said, Do it.

And they they rubbed their hands and said: Oh, man, this is going to be fun! We can do this. We can work with the Navy. We can do it. Okay. Now, what do the analysts say? Well, Burns didn’t give a rat’s patootie about what his analysts say, but Sy Hersh includes the notion that some of them said: You know, this is really crazy, this is really stupid. This is going to come back to bite us. 

That’s what we always used to say on cockamamie schemes like this. What’s the point here? The point here is that the operations people at C.I.A. get all the money, get all the attention and get all the influence over whatever director comes in and another side lesson here is that if you’re going to pick a director for the C.I.A., don’t go to the State Department for a yes man. You don’t go to the Congress for somebody who compromises, for God’s sake. You find somebody like Admiral Stansfield Turner, four star, who had made his own his own mark on life and was not going to take any crap from nobody else, is going to tell the truth. He’s the last guy we had like that. God forbid we keep having these, well, these bureaucrats that salute when the president says jump.

Garland Nixon

One thing I did want to ask you, I had some thoughts. You know, the last – interesting – the last sentence where, you know, whoever the source is says, Oh, yeah, they did this thing. It was a brilliant operation, blah, blah, blah. He says the only flaw was the decision to do it. Here’s what it seems to me. I’m guessing it seemed like it came from somebody in the Pentagon, based on the knowledge. They basically said: You know, these idiots in the executive department, they have not a good move.

And C.I.A. was not real smart. State Department, bad move. The Pentagon wasn’t mentioned. And there are generally, I have heard recently, there are some pragmatists. It almost seems like there may. Well, anyway, your thoughts on the origins of this, if you have any?

Ray McGovern

Well, all I can say is that Sy Hersh has proven for about 40 years now that he is a trusted journalist. And when someone – and I suspect it aptly pertained to this particular source – when someone sees that an act of war has been has been committed by our government against all the… well, against the Constitution, maybe not against the U.S. designed “rules based order,” but, you know, we all swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Now this guy took that seriously. I suspect he went to that little corner in that bar where Sy meets his – I know where that is – meets his sources and told him this whole story. Sy said it only took him three months. I believe that. And American people… it’s eminently believable. The question is the fallout and whether the mass media can prevent this story from sneaking into the consciousness of Americans who have been taught, who have been brainwashed over the last seven years. Okay? Seven years now, to hate Russia. 

Okay. Will Rogers had that wonderful aphorism, the comedian way back a century or two ago. Will Rogers put it this way. He said: “The problem is this: it’s not what people know. It’s what people know that ain’t so.” That’s the problem. And the people think that the Russians are just evil to the core. That Putin… Here’s an example. Okay? At the time when Sy Hersh’s story is going out, here’s The New York Times on February ninth. A yellow journalism piece by a fellow named Constant Méheut – a Frenchman, apparently – and it shows that Vladimir Putin was personally responsible for killing the 298 aboard Malaysian Airlines MH 17 over Ukraine in July of 2014. Now it says that in the title; it says that in the first paragraph; and third paragraph it says: Well, we can’t prove that Putin was really… Give me a break! Okay. So this is a day when they should have been featuring Sy’s research. They’re still at it. Blackening Putin, first and foremost, the rest of the Russians, and, you know, this was consequential. 

Let me remind you that after the coup in Kiev, after the annexation of Crimea, the U.S. could still not get the Europeans to shoot themselves in the foot by sanctions. It was only after Malaysian Airlines MH 17 was downed – according to The New York Times, by Vladimir Putin himself – that they could get real sanctions that bit the Europeans more than they bit anyone, including the Russians. So this was consequential. This was the beginning of really strict sanctions. And I just wonder if the West Europeans and the East Europeans will wake up and say: “You know, this is a this is a bad deal to get involved with, what the U.S. wants, because they want war with Russia. And this is going to come to, as the Chinese used to call it, a no good end.”

Garland Nixon

Ray McGovern, as always, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate that analysis and we look forward to having you back.

Ray McGovern

Aye and most welcome.

The views expressed are solely those of the speakers and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/02/12/listen-nord-stream-attack-an-act-of-war/

How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline

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By Seymour Hersh
February 8, 2023

Referenced article with photos, video, and map at
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream

The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now

The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.

The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.

Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.

Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.

There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.

President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.

The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.

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It started over lunch: investigating and exposing the Iran-Contra scandal, amid news media silence

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From Consortium News
April 16, 2018

The following are remarks at the memorial for Bob Parry delivered on Saturday by Brian Barger, who shared many bylines with Bob (and a drink or two) at the Associated Press, uncovering the Iran-Contra scandal, and provoking the ire of AP editors, nervous about what the two friends were finding out.

By Brian Barger

I remember it was a pleasure to meet Bob in 1984. The CIA was ramping up its covert war in Nicaragua. News reports from the region documented atrocities committed by President Reagan’s “freedom fighters” and their CIA handlers. Congress was starting to take notice, and was threatening to cut off US aid.

I got a call from Betsy Cohn, a Latin America scholar from Georgetown University, saying I should meet this guy from the AP. Over lunch we shared notes. I’d done much of my reporting from Central America and Miami, and Bob from Washington. We agreed there was a lot of low-hanging fruit on this story, and we talked about why there was such reluctance to cover it, particularly among the Washington press corps. We agreed that this could be a good reporting partnership.

And it was in these early days that I learned some important lessons about journalism from Bob.

It started over that lunch, when Bob politely reminded me that I’d buried the lede in a recent story that should have received wide attention – but didn’t. This was Bob Parry journalism lesson number one: Don’t bury the lede.

The story was about a blue, cloth-covered manual produced by the CIA and distributed to contra commanders in Honduras. Bob wanted a copy. So, Bob Parry journalism lesson Number Two: Be persistent. I gave it to him, and Bob produced a deeply reported piece on what thereafter was known as the CIA assassination manual. Lesson number three: Make those ten extra phone calls before calling it a day.

This was the beginning of an enduring friendship that lasted 35 years. It was also the beginning of an enduring work relationship. Over the next two years, we peeled back the story about White House aide Oliver North and the White House role orchestrating a secret war in Nicaragua.

For the rest of the story: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/04/16/it-started-over-lunch-and-ended-with-the-exposure-of-one-of-the-greatest-scandals-in-u-s-history/

Billions of dollars’ worth of weapons brought into Syria, “arms traffic organized by CIA and Pentagon”

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By Thierry Meyssan
Global Research, July 20, 2017
Voltairenet.org 18 July 2017

Over the last seven years, several billion dollars’ worth of armament has been illegally introduced into Syria – a fact which in itself is enough to disprove the myth according to which this war is a democratic revolution. Numerous documents attest to the fact that the traffic was organised by General David Petraeus, first of all in public, via the CIA, of which he was the director, then privately, via the financial company KKR with the aid of certain senior civil servants. Thus the conflict, which was initially an imperialist operation by the United States and the United Kingdom, became a private capitalist operation, while in Washington, the authority of the White House was challenged by the deep state. New elements now show the secret rôle of Azerbaïdjan in the evolution of the war.

During the liberation of Aleppo and the capture of the Saudi military staff who were on site, Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva noted the presence of weapons from her country in nine warehouses abandoned by the jihadists. She carefully noted the information on the boxes, and once she returned home, she investigated the way in which the weapons had been delivered to Syria.

Since 2009 – with the short exception of the period between March 2013 to November 2014 – Bulgaria has been governed by Boïko Borissov, a highly colourful character allegedly with links to one of Europe’s main criminal organisations, the SIC. Let’s remember that Bulgaria is a member of both NATO and the European Union, and that neither of these two organisations offered the slightest criticism concerning the accession to power of a Mafia lord who had been identified as such a long time previously by the international police services.

It is therefore clearly at the risk of their lives that Dilyana Gaytandzhieva uncovered the organisation, and the editors of the Sofia daily, Trud, published her article [1]. While Bulgaria was one of the main arms exporters to Syria, it received help from Azerbaïdjan.

The gigantic CIA arms traffic against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and India

Since the beginning of the Arab Springs, a gigantic arms traffic was organised by the CIA and the Pentagon in violation of a number of resolutions by the UNO Security Council. All the operations that we will be mentioning here are illegal under international law, including those organised publicly by the Pentagon.

As far as arms traffic is concerned, even when individuals or private companies are used as shields, it is impossible to export sensitive equipment without the authorisation of the governments concerned.

All the weapons we will be mentioning, apart from the electronic intelligence systems, are ’Soviet-type’. By definition, even if we pretend that the armies supplied with NATO-type weapons are indeed the final recipients, this is an impossibility. These armies serve only to cover the traffic.

We already knew that the CIA had contacted the SIC, and that Boïko Borissov had been called upon to manufacture an emergency quantity of Captagon destined for the jihadists, first in Libya, then in Syria. Since Maria Petkova’s investigation, which was published in the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), we knew that between 2011 and 2014, the CIA and the SOCOM (Pentagon Special Operations Command) had bought 500 million dollars’ worth of weapons from Bulgaria on behalf of the jihadists. Then, later, we learned that other weapons were paid for by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and transported by Saudi Arabian Cargo and Etihad Cargo [2].

According to Krešimir Žabec, of the Zagreb daily Jutarnji list, at the end of 2012, Croatia delivered 230 tonnes of weapons to the Syrian jihadists for a value of 6.5 million dollars. The transfer to Turkey was handled by three Ilyushins from Jordan International Air Cargo, and the weapons were then parachuted by the Qatai Army [3]. According to Eric Schmitt of the New York Times, the whole system had been created by General David Petraeus, director of the CIA [4].

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How America armed terrorists in Syria

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From Consortium News

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” to curb weapons going to Al Qaeda-linked jihadists in Syria, has attracted only 14 co-sponsors pointing to hypocrisy in the “war on terror,” as Gareth Porter explained at The American Conservative.

By Gareth Porter
June 23, 2017

Three-term Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a member of both the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, has proposed legislation that would prohibit any U.S. assistance to terrorist organizations in Syria as well as to any organization working directly with them. Equally important, it would prohibit U.S. military sales and other forms of military cooperation with other countries that provide arms or financing to those terrorists and their collaborators.

President Barack Obama walks along the Colonnade at the White House with then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Dec. 7, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Gabbard’s “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” challenges for the first time in Congress a U.S. policy toward the conflict in the Syrian civil war that should have set off alarm bells long ago: in 2012-13 the Obama administration helped its Sunni allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar provide arms to Syrian and non-Syrian armed groups to force President Bashar al-Assad out of power. And in 2013 the administration began to provide arms to what the CIA judged to be “relatively moderate” anti-Assad groups — meaning they incorporated various degrees of Islamic extremism.

That policy, ostensibly aimed at helping replace the Assad regime with a more democratic alternative, has actually helped build up al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise al Nusra Front into the dominant threat to Assad.

The supporters of this arms-supply policy believe it is necessary as pushback against Iranian influence in Syria. But that argument skirts the real issue raised by the policy’s history.  The Obama administration’s Syria policy effectively sold out the U.S. interest that was supposed to be the touchstone of the “Global War on Terrorism” — the eradication of al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates. The United States has instead subordinated that U.S. interest in counter-terrorism to the interests of its Sunni allies. In doing so it has helped create a new terrorist threat in the heart of the Middle East.

The policy of arming military groups committed to overthrowing the government of President Bashar al-Assad began in September 2011, when President Barack Obama was pressed by his Sunni allies — Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar — to supply heavy weapons to a military opposition to Assad they were determined to establish. Turkey and the Gulf regimes wanted the United States to provide anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to the rebels, according to a former Obama administration official involved in Middle East issues.

Obama refused to provide arms to the opposition, but he agreed to provide covert U.S. logistical help in carrying out a campaign of military assistance to arm opposition groups. CIA involvement in the arming of anti-Assad forces began with arranging for the shipment of weapons from the stocks of the Gaddafi regime that had been stored in Benghazi.

Shipments from Benghazi

CIA-controlled firms shipped the weapons from the military port of Benghazi to two small ports in Syria using former U.S. military personnel to manage the logistics, as investigative reporter Sy Hersh detailed in 2014. The funding for the program came mainly from the Saudis.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testifies before Congress on Jan. 23, 2013, about the fatal attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11. 2012. (Photo from C-SPAN coverage)

A declassified October 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report revealed that the shipment in late August 2012 had included 500 sniper rifles, 100 RPG (rocket propelled grenade launchers) along with 300 RPG rounds and 400 howitzers. Each arms shipment encompassed as many as ten shipping containers, it reported, each of which held about 48,000 pounds of cargo.

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CIA’s eternal military occupation and crimes

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From Space4Peace, Organizing Notes

By Bruce Gagnon
May 1, 2017

I recently bought this book and immediately began to read it.  Douglas Valentine has been writing about the CIA’s role in counterinsurgency for many years.  That word, to be properly understood though, needs much more definition.

Valentine undertook a detailed study and analysis of the CIA’s ‘Phoenix‘ program of counterinsurgency in Vietnam.  He interviewed many of the key players who created and directed Phoenix.  Then Valentine took what he learned from the Vietnam program and shows how it has been refined and implemented in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and more recently in Ukraine.  He illustrates how the mainstream media plays its role in furthering CIA lies and ensuring a docile American public.

Here are a few illustrative bits from the book:

This [American] ruling class within the National Security Establishment, represented most perfectly by Hillary Clinton, knows that its enemies, foreign and domestic, must be suppressed ideologically as well as militarily.  Thus they have embraced the Phoenix concept of employing implicit and explicit terror to control, organize and pacify societies.

The success of the Phoenix doctrine is most evident in the ability of its advocates in the ruling class to corrupt Congress and force it to divert massive amounts of public money into the militarization of foreign and domestic policy.

Now that the corrupt and corrupting Phoenix institutional structure is firmly in place in America, it is only a matter of time until we enter the next Phoenix phase of explicit terror here at home.

The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy.

The CIA was protecting the major opium producers in the Golden Triangle [during the Vietnam War], just like they’ve been protecting the major drug dealers in Afghanistan for the last fifteen years. They were funneling heroin and opium to their warlords in South Vietnam as a payoff for advancing the US policies that were detrimental to their own country.

The truth about US wars is less about combating Islamic terrorism or ‘protecting the homeland’ than it is about the dark side of the American psyche, rooted in slavery and the genocidal conquest of a continent.  For American businessmen, the global War on Terror with its relentless bombing campaigns and extra-legal methods shrouded in official secrecy, translates into big profits.

The Afghan people hate the Americans more and more, year after year.  And that makes the CIA happy, in so far as it spells protracted war and increased profits for its sponsors in the arms industry.

Afghan anger means more resistance.  And more resistance provides a neat pretext for the eternal military occupation of a disposable nation strategically located near Russia, [Iran] and China.

But it also means spiritual defeat for America, as it descends ever further into the black hole of self-deception, militarism and covert operations.

Valentine names the names of those who developed this global counterinsurgency operation.  He also names some of the ‘progressive’ activists and alternative media that play ball with the ruling oligarchy here at home by taking money to run their operations.

The book is endorsed by highly respected figures like NSA whistleblower John Kiriakou, academic Peter Dale Scott who came up with the tag ‘deep state’ and the truth-telling Robert Parry at Consortium News (which happens to be one of my favorite sources for news and analysis).

If you want to see the big picture of US empire, understand how it works, understand who many of the insiders are (or have been), and get a glimpse into what is coming to America in the near future – then I highly recommend this book.

http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2017/05/cias-eternal-military-occupation-and.html

Former CIA agent Philip Agee: President Truman invented Soviet/Russian threat to justify militarizing economy

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From Space4Peace Blogspot

By Bruce Gagnon
February 16, 2015

…I had the great fortune to meet Agee twice – the first time organizing a speaking event for him in Orlando in the 1990’s that drew folks from across Florida.  The second time I visited his home in Hamburg, Germany in 1995 while on a speaking tour against NASA’s Cassini plutonium launch.

Agee is one of my heroes – he was a man of true conscience who left the CIA after serving for about a dozen years in Latin America.  He was determined to publish a book exposing the wicked work of the CIA and after a difficult four-year period he was able in 1974 to release his book entitled Inside the Company.

From that day on, Agee was marked by the CIA as its enemy.  He was hunted, arrested, threatened, expelled from country after country (often illegally) and sometimes prosecuted.  He tells this riveting story in the 1987 book entitled On the Run.  This is the book Agee gave me when I visited him in 1995 and began rereading last night.

…When I visited Agee in Hamburg he took me on a walking tour of parts of the city…We had fascinating discussions about his life-long efforts to expose the crimes of the CIA. He was a very humble and ordinary guy and I really grew to admire him tremendously.

In his later years Agee moved to Cuba and started a travel business to help people make the trip to that ‘forbidden nation’.  He died there in 2008.

Agee was truly in the mold of Ellsberg, Snowden, Manning and other such remarkable whistle blowers.

In On the Run Agee wrote:

I would try to show how our [CIA] operations help sustain favorable operating conditions for US-based multi-national corporations.  These conditions, together with political hegemony, were our real goals.  So-called liberal democracy and pluralism were only means to those ends.  “Free elections” really meant freedom for us to intervene with secret funds for our candidates.  “Free trade unions” meant freedom for us to establish our unions.  “Freedom of the press” meant freedom for us to pay journalists to publish our material as if it were the journalists’ own.  When an elected government threatened US economic and political interests, it had to go.  Social and economic justice were fine concepts for public relations, but only for that.

http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2015/02/remembering-philip-agee.html

MIT professor exposes ‘egregious error’ & evidence tampering in US report on Syria sarin incident

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From RT

April 14, 2017

A closer look at photos from the town of Khan Shaykhun shows that the chemical attack site was tampered with and that the US report blaming the Syrian government can’t be true, says the MIT professor skeptical of the White House narrative.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Theodore Postol, who wrote a preliminary review of the US government claims earlier this week and shared his findings with RT, examined photographs of the attack site and concluded that the report endorsed by the White House “could not be true.”

Senior US administration officials who briefed the media on Tuesday admitted the White House intelligence was partly “based on the pro-opposition social media reporting,” which “tells a very clear and consistent story about what we think happened.”

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Idlib, Syria April 4, 2017. © Ammar AbdullahWhite House claims on Syria chemical attack ‘obviously false’ – MIT professor (VIDEO)

Postol’s six-page addendum, made public on Thursday evening, “unambiguously shows that the assumption in the [White House report] that there was no tampering with the alleged site of the sarin release is not correct.”

That assumption was “totally unjustified,” wrote Postol, “and no competent intelligence analyst would have agreed that this assumption was valid.”

By implication, the report was not reviewed and released by competent intelligence experts – “unless they were motivated by factors other than concerns about the accuracy of the report,” the professor added.

Postol’s key argument is a series of photographs of the crater where the container holding sarin was supposedly air-dropped. He pointed to a photograph of several men inspecting the site, wearing loose clothing and medical gloves.

“If there were any sarin present at this location when this photograph was taken everybody in the photograph would have received a lethal or debilitating dose of sarin,” he wrote. “The fact that these people were dressed so inadequately either suggests a complete ignorance of the basic measures needed to protect an individual from sarin poisoning, or that they knew that the site was not seriously contaminated.”

© Theodore Postol

Another photo shows the crushed contained half-buried in the crater, while in other photos is has been dug up and repositioned.

On Thursday, CIA Director Mike Pompeo confirmed that it was his agency which concluded that the Syrian government was responsible for the chemical weapons attack in Khan Shaykhun, which persuaded Trump to fire 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase last week.

“We were good, and fast,” Pompeo said at an event in Washington, DC, “and we got it right.”

The US missile attack caused tensions between Washington and Moscow, leading to a suspension of a military hotline intended to “deconflict” operations over Syria and the US-led coalition scaling back its strikes against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL.)

The Syrian government has denied using or even possessing chemical weapons. Syria’s compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention was certified by international observers in 2013, the Russian General Staff said, noting that this did not include two sites on territory controlled by the rebels.

https://www.rt.com/usa/384800-syria-gas-professor-addendum/

How U.S. flooded the world with psyops — newly declassified documents from the Reagan presidential library

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“[T]he planned use of communications to influence attitudes or behavior should, if properly used, precede, accompany, and follow all applications of force…
Military psychological operations are an important part of the ‘PSYOP Totality,’ both in peace and war. … We need a program of psychological operations as an integral part of our national security policies and programs. … The continuity of a standing interagency board or committee to provide the necessary coordinating mechanism for development of a coherent, worldwide psychological operations strategy is badly needed.”
“Military Psychological Operations and U.S. Strategy”, 1983
Col. Alfred R. Paddock Jr.
–
By
Global Research, March 27, 2017
Consortiumnews 25 March 2017

Newly declassified documents from the Reagan presidential library help explain how the U.S. government developed its sophisticated psychological operations capabilities that – over the past three decades – have created an alternative reality both for people in targeted countries and for American citizens, a structure that expanded U.S. influence abroad and quieted dissent at home.

The documents reveal the formation of a psyops bureaucracy under the direction of Walter Raymond Jr., a senior CIA covert operations specialist who was assigned to President Reagan’s National Security Council staff to enhance the importance of propaganda and psyops in undermining U.S. adversaries around the world and ensuring sufficient public support for foreign policies inside the United States.

Raymond, who has been compared to a character from a John LeCarré novel slipping easily into the woodwork, spent his years inside Reagan’s White House as a shadowy puppet master who tried his best to avoid public attention or – it seems – even having his picture taken. From the tens of thousands of photographs from meetings at Reagan’s White House, I found only a couple showing Raymond – and he is seated in groups, partially concealed by other officials.

But Raymond appears to have grasped his true importance. In his NSC files, I found a doodle of an organizational chart that had Raymond at the top holding what looks like the crossed handles used by puppeteers to control the puppets below them. Although it’s impossible to know exactly what the doodler had in mind, the drawing fits the reality of Raymond as the behind-the-curtains operative who was controlling the various inter-agency task forces that were responsible for implementing various propaganda and psyops strategies.

Until the 1980s, psyops were normally regarded as a military technique for undermining the will of an enemy force by spreading lies, confusion and terror. A classic case was Gen. Edward Lansdale — considered the father of modern psyops — draining the blood from a dead Filipino rebel in such a way so the dead rebel’s superstitious comrades would think that a vampire-like creature was on the prowl. In Vietnam, Lansdale’s psyops team supplied fake and dire astrological predictions for the fate of North Vietnamese and Vietcong leaders.

Essentially, the psyops idea was to play on the cultural weaknesses of a target population so they could be more easily manipulated and controlled. But the challenges facing the Reagan administration in the 1980s led to its determination that peacetime psyops were also needed and that the target populations had to include the American public.

Walter Raymond Jr., a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist who oversaw President Reagan’s “perception management” and psyops projects at the National Security Council. Raymond is partially obscured by President Reagan and is sitting next to National Security Adviser John Poindexter.. (Photo credit: Reagan presidential library)

The Reagan administration was obsessed with the problems left behind by the 1970s’ disclosures of government lying about the Vietnam War and revelations about CIA abuses both in overthrowing democratically elected governments and spying on American dissidents. This so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” produced profound skepticism from regular American citizens as well as journalists and politicians when President Reagan tried to sell his plans for intervention in the civil wars then underway in Central America, Africa and elsewhere.

While Reagan saw Central America as a “Soviet beachhead,” many Americans saw brutal Central American oligarchs and their bloody security forces slaughtering priests, nuns, labor activists, students, peasants and indigenous populations. Reagan and his advisers realized that they had to turn those perceptions around if they hoped to get sustained funding for the militaries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras as well as for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, the CIA-organized paramilitary force marauding around leftist-ruled Nicaragua.

So, it became a high priority to reshape public perceptions to gain support for Reagan’s Central American military operations both inside those targeted countries and among Americans.

A ‘Psyops Totality’

As Col. Alfred R. Paddock Jr. wrote in an influential November 1983 paper, entitled “Military Psychological Operations and US Strategy,”

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Wikileaks releases ‘CIA espionage orders’ for 2012 French presidential election

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From RT
February 16, 2017

Wikileaks has released three classified CIA espionage orders revealing details of an alleged seven-month long spying campaign by the agency ahead of the 2012 French presidential election.
TrendsViral

The documents disclose that all of France’s major political parties were targeted for infiltration by the CIA’s human (“HUMINT”) and electronic (“SIGINT”) spies.

WikiLeaks

✔@wikileaks

RELEASE: CIA espionage orders for the last French presidential electionhttps://wikileaks.org/cia-france-elections-2012/#Press%20Release%20%28english%29 …

9:39 AM – 16 Feb 2017

The CIA assessed that President Nicholas Sarkozy’s UMP party was not assured re-election and ordered officers to find out Sarkozy’s private deliberations “on the other candidates” as well as how he interacted with his advisors, according to the documents.

The agency also reportedly outlined orders specific to the UMP (Union for a Popular Movement), including obtaining the party’s “Strategic Election Plans” and gleaning private thoughts within the party on Sarkozy’s campaign strategies.

WikiLeaks

✔@wikileaks

RELEASE: Full text of CIA orders targetting French presidential election including Hollande, Sarkozy & Le Pen https://wikileaks.org/cia-france-elections-2012/document/2012-CIA-FRANCE-ELECTION/ …9:54 AM – 16 Feb 2017

The agency also outlined orders specific to the UMP (Union for a Popular Movement), including obtaining the party’s “Strategic Election Plans” and gleaning private thoughts within the party on Sarkozy’s campaign strategies.

According to the papers, the CIA justification for seeking detailed information on the inner workings of the party was to assist “analysts assess and prepare US key policymakers” for the post-election French political landscape and the potential impact on US-France relations.

Another secret CIA order included in the leaks entitled, “Non Ruling Political Parties and Candidates Strategic Election Plans,” demands information on rising party leaders and emerging political parties.

The information sought ranged from party strategies, opinions on the US and efforts to reach out to other countries, including Germany, UK, Libya, Israel, Palestine, Syria and Cote d’Ivoire.

The CIA also requested details on how candidates were funded, their views on the French economy, and the Greek debt crisis the documents indicate. The agency was also interested in French political opinions on the German model of export-led growth and any specific proposals that would help solve the Eurozone crisis.

READ MORE: Thousands of dossiers on French presidential contenders available in archives – WikiLeaks

The documents indicate that the CIA operation initially ran for 10 months from November 21, 2011, to September 29, 2012, and continued after the April-May 2012 French presidential election and into the formation of the new government.

The revelations are contained within three alleged CIA tasking orders, totaling seven pages, and published by WikiLeaks as context for its forthcoming ‘CIA Vault 7 series’. Wikileaks began tweeting about the mysterious ‘Vault 7’ series earlier this month, sending speculation into overdrive online over what the cryptic tweets indicated.

https://www.rt.com/usa/377619-wikileaks-cia-election-france/