[Cross-posted from European Tribune – where dissent is NOT troll rated!]
From the days the blog community was NOT an echo chamber and independent thought was a prerequisite to be part of a lively debate at the Pond. Fascism hasn’t just crept into Washington DC politics bot also how people deal with one another. The brown shirts make comments and debate impossible. What a fu**ing shame.
From one of the best bloggers participating @BooMan … Real History Lisa. Still appreciate her contribution, she is second to none and the Pond has seen many excellent contributors move on.
○ Video of Jim Douglass, Oliver Stone, Robert Ellsberg and Lisa Pease
Tim Weiner’s “history” of the CIA cross-posted @BooMan
I just finished listening on C-SPAN to Tim Weiner being interviewed by David Ignatius re his new book on the CIA. Weiner is remarkably misleading about the CIA’s record, especially in relation to the Kennedys. This is not surprising, however, since Weiner has been a favored reporter of the CIA’s for years now.
Weiner’s point he most wants to convey is that — far from being the “rogue elephant” that Frank Church called it — the CIA has always been ultraresponsive to Presidents. But that is provable untrue.
I’m shocked he would open with a quote from Richard Helms, and then return to him on the subject of Kennedy’s assassination, given Helms’ willingness to lie under oath (he was charged with perjury for denying the CIA’s role in the Chilean operations).
Continued below the fold …
Let’s look at how “responsive” the CIA has been to the president over the years:
Truman wanted an information agency. The CIA essentially blackmailed itself into existence (see CIA officer Miles Copeland ‘s veiled account of this in his book “The Real CIA.”) So right off the bat, the CIA was doing something Truman didn’t want. After Kennedy’s assassination, Truman wrote a letter that was published in the Washington Post, in which he stated:
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue-and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda … the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people. …
But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field-and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.
The CIA was clearly not created to serve only the President. It was created to serve the interests of Wall Street, and if you follow their pattern of covert action around the globe, you’ll see who benefitted. The Guatemalan coup in 1954 benefitted the United Fruit Company. The Iranian coup in the early fifties benefitted the oil barons (access to oil was listed as the first explicit goal of the coup in the summary of that operation.) The CIA was created from the OSS, itself a creation not of the government so much as of Wall Street. The top officers all came from children of lawyers, bankers, and other money men. The OSS’s nickname was “Oh So Social” due to its high profile roster.
The CIA has often run an agenda counter to what the president wished. This is easy to document in the Kennedy administration – they were at odds at nearly every turn. But it wasn’t only the Kennedy adminstration that had difficulty with the CIA.
Under the Eisenhower administration, for example, Eisenhower was set to meet with Khrushchev to discuss a mutual reduction in arms. The CIA didn’t want to see any such accommodation. So in express defiance of Eisenhower’s request that no such flights be made, the CIA flew the U2 over the Soviet Union. As the “official” story goes, the Soviets shot it down. As people close to those events have said in print and elsewhere, there’s good evidence that the flight was deliberately sabotaged by the CIA so that it would crash over the Soviet Union, preventing a peace treaty. Even CIA director Allen Dulles stated the plane was not shot down. As Dulles testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 31, 1960:
“We believe that it was not shot down at its operating altitude of around 70,000 feet by the Russians. We believe that it was initially forced down to a much lower altitude by some as yet undetermined mechanical malfunction.”? “It is obvious to us that the plane was not hit. If the plane had been hit by a ground-to-air missile, in our belief, it would have disintegrated.”
While Eisenhower later claimed responsibility for the overflight, the evidence is strong that he was surprised, and upset, that the CIA would risk upsetting the all-important peace conference. I believe that incident is part of the reason Eisenhower gave us that famous warning as he prepared to leave office:
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
(Looks like we failed that call.)
What a ‘Liberal Media’ might look like
I’m surprised that otherwise intelligent people continue to believe the myth that the media is “liberal.” I think it’s worth discussing what a liberal media would look like if we had one, so we can better understand that we don’t have one.
Let’s imagine a fictional cable network called LNN – the Liberal News Network. What might the morning news on such a channel be?
The show might lead with pictures of starving children all over the world, so that while you sat down to breakfast, you’d be reminded of just how lucky you were to have been born in the U.S., and how others are still very much in need.
Viewers would be encouraged to send in at least some of their morning latte money to feed a baby[1] for a week. Each morning, the number of children who had been moved out of poverty would also be shown. If there were truly a liberal media, that number would be growing, daily, by leaps and bounds.
You would see pictures of the war – really horrible, tragic pictures, showing not just death, but the maiming, the suffering, the devastation to innocents we currently think of solely as “collateral damage.” Each day, the grievances of both sides would be fully aired.
We’d hear not only from our own soldiers but from soldiers we were fighting, so we could start to understand why they are fighting back. If we are truly the good guys, there’d be no reason for anyone to oppose us.
A truly liberal media would allow us to hear the other side so we could better understand how our actions are affecting others, and what we could do to improve relations with the ultimate goal of ending all wars.
Truly, fostering better communication skills, deploring greed, and promoting fairness would be keystones of this network.
The commentators would be drawn from not merely all nationalities, but all walks of life. Instead of recycling the same news and intelligence and government figures, commentators would be sought among farm workers and blue-collar workers as well as low-level white-collar workers. The view from the socio-economic top would be balanced by the view from the bottom.
On LNN, union issues would be a regular discussion. Are workers getting a fair shake? Are unions really helping their membership or are they getting too close to management? When do unions go too far?
The ecological “state of the planet” would also be a regular discussion. Audiences would learn the science behind pollution, so that they’d make the link between the chemical elements in the products they buy and the environmental damage caused at every point in the production chain.
Corporations that were finding a way to offset their environmental damage would be recognized as heroes, while those whose policies amounted to a hit-and-run on the environment would be publicly castigated at ever turn.
Truly educational information about child rearing would be offered. Are those soft drinks making your children obese? No amount of advertiser action would stop LNN from exposing such a connection.
…
A liberal media would not make us feel good all the time, but would poke at us and challenge us to be better parents, better neighbors, better people.A liberal news channel would have a regular report about working conditions around the world. Would you still buy that piece of clothing if you knew it was sown under essentially slave-labor conditions, sometimes by children working 12 hours a day?
Would you admire China’s economy if you realized its coal-powered growth made it one of the most polluted places in the world? Would you travel to Thailand if you understood how much of the tourist economy depends on sex-slave trafficking dollars?
Or might you spend that money instead on a country that plowed the money received from tourism into a public fund from which all citizens who shared that country could benefit? Would you enjoy flowers sent to you on Valentine’s Day if you found those flowers had been picked by forced labor on farms where women routinely faced sexual harassment?
If we had a liberal media, we’d be hearing about other economic models around the world. When does capitalism work best? Would the answer be like what we hear from CNBC anchors who say capitalism should be unregulated – or “self-regulating” – allowing monopolies to take over, which then can raise prices and strangle our options?
MAChildren’s Fund – link in original diary [1]
Our Board of Directors
Daniel Levine, President and Board Chairman – [63 Lamplighter Drive] Shrewsbury, MA
Dan came up with idea of creating a charity specifically geared towards the thousands of babies and toddlers in our area., and as a result, the Massachusetts Children’s Fund was born. He has served as a WAFTY Board Member, and is founder and president of SHS@SHS, a youth mentoring group at Shrewsbury High SchoolAccount suspended … Whoa .. whois Daniel Levine!
[Just another typical example of my close scrutiny on what I select to publish – Oui]
From the archives, Arthur Gilroy solely wrote a diary about Tim Weiner in 2017 …
○ The Washington Post? An Unbiased Purveyor Of News? PLEASE!!!
Related my recent diaries about yesteryear’s and today’s Operation Mockingbird … of course I got troll rated @BooMan 🙂
○ I Refuse To Be A Mockingbird
○ Creeping Despotism Log #1 by THE Twank @EuroTrib on Feb 13th, 2017
[Update-1]
Enters oncorhynchus with his harassment in the diaries of Arthur Gilroy. Harassment is defined as repeated bullying over time. When it becomes an obsession, or a compulsion, go see a psychiatrist. Repeating the same old tiresome accusations of lies where he expects AG to reply until he is satisfied. OAB never will be satisfied.
oaquabonita – the obsessive heckler here, here, here and here.
