"American Made" - the Tom Cruise movie that changed my life, in a bad way.

I just had one of those vertigo-inducing moments when you realize that just about everyone around you is utterly clueless about the "hidden history" of the US Deep State (DS) and is willing to swallow whatever bilge Hollywood is offering as long as it includes lots of violence and babes. This moment happened when I watched a 2017 Tom Cruise movie called "American Made", about the CIA agent/drug smuggler, Barry Seal.

I knew the movie was going to be "heavily redacted" (i.e., a pack of lies) when in the opening ten minutes they claimed that Seal had been recruited by the CIA in the 1970s, when he was a pilot with TWA; and that they spotted him because he was smuggling Cuban cigars. What a complete lie!

Every DS-watcher knows that the go-to book on Barry Seal is Barry and the Boys, by Daniel Hopsicker

In this book Hopsicker documents, as have many others, that Barry Seal was in the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol from the age of 15, where he met the infamous David Fairie and the doomed Lee Harvey Oswald. Seal was flying guns into Cuba, first for Castro, then for the anti-Castro rebels - all before the age of 25, all before 1963 - 15 years before the bullshit the movie is trying to sell you. Also omitted was the fact that Seal was arrested in 1972 for transporting tons of C4 explosive to Mexico for sale to anti-Castro rebels. (Hopsicker claims the sale was to raise hush money for the Watergate defendants, and Seal's arrest was the CIA sabotaging Nixon.)

The smuggling charge (which he, of course, beat) is what caused Seal to be fired from TWA. He didn't quit because he was bored and was made an attractive offer, as the movie suggests. Also unmentioned was the fact that TWA was owned by Howard Hughes, who was joined at the hip to the CIA (remember his Glomar Explorer trying to raise the Russian sub?). TWA pilots regularly did off-the-books work for the CIA. The overall point here is that the "recruited in the late 1970s" setup of the movie is a complete lie.

Well, you might argue that Hollywood movie makers are just clueless, including Doug Liman, the producer of American Made. Except for the fact that Doug's father, Arthur Liman, was lead counsel in the US Senate's Iran-Contra investigation. And, the Harvard-educated Arthur was a mafia groupie and lawyer for the mobbed up Steve Ross who bought out Time-Warner.

This is all covered on Hopsicker's blog: Keeping it in ‘The Family:’ Director’s Mobbed-Up Dad

That, for me, tied the whole purpose of the movie up in a bow. The son of a mobbed up lawyer, who was involved in "investigating" Iran-Contra, makes a movie that creates a largely fictitious story about Iran-Contra that fails to blame the CIA for anything except carelessly hiring Seal. Its the version of Dark Alliance that Gary Webb would have written if he were a CIA asset. Nothing to see here move along.

The movie wants to pretend that the CIA never dealt directly with the Medellin cartel, that Barry Seal made the Medellin contact on his own and became a middleman between the cartel and the CIA, who merely agreed to look the other way. It never traces the flow of drugs beyond Seal. It never mentions Southern Air Transport, Richard Secord, or John Singlaub, who ran the rest of the arms and drugs smuggling logistic train for the Nicaraguan war and the Cocaine Blizzard of the 1980s. Only if you have read Barry and the Boys, or other books that encompass the CIA's role in American politics and foreign policy, will you know about these facts.

The CIA and Drugs

The truth is that the CIA and the mob have been in business together since the CIA's predecessor, the OSS, ran heroin out of China to pay for its operations against Mao there. In the mid 1950s, the CIA stole control of the heroin trade in South Viet Nam from the Corsican Mafia. In the 1960s it took control of the Laotian opium trade, and it used the proceeds of that trade to run the Secret War in Laos - the first completely off-the-books full scale war run by the CIA. It ran those drugs into the US by using Santo Trafficante's organization. (Just FYI, Santos is one of the prime candidates in the plot to kill JFK.) By the time of the 1980s Cocaine business, drug dealing in cahoots with the mob was part of the DNA of the CIA. It funded their operations and made them completely independent from government oversight. They banked their drug profits in dodgy banks like Nguyen-Hand in Australia, and later BCCI, which imploded publicly and messily without ever causing any trouble for the CIA.

At this point, I realize I am deep into the "hidden history" of the Deep State. I would not be surprised if readers are starting to feel like they are in the "utterly clueless" category themselves. I could try to list a bibliography, but TL-DR. The shorthand is that it all goes back to the Bay of Pigs. When Castro went Communist, the CIA partnered with and supported the mad-dog Cubans and the Mafia. Alan Dulles, the founder and first head of the CIA, set up the Bay of Pigs to force JFK to invade Cuba. JFK refused and became a marked man, dead within two years - despite firing Dulles and several other high-ranking covert ops CIA officers.

As one reads more about Deep State activities since the founding of the CIA, the same cast of characters keeps showing up. They are charter members in the CIAs escape from any governmental control by any means necessary.

An entire Cuban cadre now emerged from the Bay of Pigs. The names Howard Hunt, Bernard Barker, Rolando Martinez, Felix Rodriguez and Eugenio Martinez would, in the next quarter century, poop up, often decisively, over and over again in the most dangerous American foreign policy crises. There were Cubans flying missions for the CIA in the Congo and even for the Portuguese in Africa; Cubans were the burglars of Watergate; Cubans played key roles in Nicaragua, in Irangate, in the American move into the Persian Gulf.

- Georgie Anne Geyer, quoted in Barry and the Boys, pp 212-3.

These people were lowly field agents for the CIA. The CIA leadership was, from its creation, part of the Nazi-loving, Wall St. elite that founded the OSS and then the CIA. They rehabilitated the Nazi/Ukranian Gehlen Organization to spy on Russia for the West, not caring that they were dirty. They recruited heavily among the WASP elite. The best friend of Alan Dulles was Preston Prescott Bush, the father of Poppy Bush.

Preston's Prescott's offspring, Poppy Bush, Jeb Bush, and George W. Bush, were completely in bed with the Saudis. (See Russ Baker, House of Bush House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties) During the abortive late 1970s investigations and attempt to houseclean the CIA, the Saudis wound up creating an alternative CIA (the safari club) because President Carter and Admiral Turner had the effrontery to try to control the CIA. Of course, Carter was done in by the hostage crisis. That crisis was exacerbated and prolonged by the scheming William Casey, who became head of the CIA under Reagan. The hostage crisis led directly to the Iran part of the Iran-Contra Scandal. Of course, not a word about Iran is ever mentioned in this movie.

We are already at the point where the internecine connections between our formal, public government and the Deep State become so large and so tangled that it isn't worth trying to trace the details. Instead, we need to look at the big picture.

The end of democracy in the US

The big picture is that the US is not a democracy, and hasn't been since at least when JFK was killed. Not a democracy. Elections are rigged. Your vote doesn't matter, except to preserve the illusion of democracy. The media - the Mighty Wurlitzer, in the phrase of CIA director, Frank Wisner - has been owned by the CIA since the 1950s. The left no longer exists in the US. Generations of it have been serially murdered: first by the 1920s Palmer Raids, next by the 1950s Red Scare, and finally by the hysterical anti-Communism and union-busting of the 1980s Reagan Revolution that began to dismantle government regulation (like the Fairness Doctrine) and progressive taxes.

America today is clearly run by the Deep State, which is composed of elements of the CIA, the mob, the oil business, Wall St., the neocon Israelis, the Saudis, and recently, the Silicon Valley surveillance state. None of these people gives a rats ass about America, about the American people, or about democracy. They are murderous gangsters with the resources of the most powerful governments and financiers on the planet behind them.

I have expressed all these opinions in the past; but now, I viscerally feel the lack of democracy. I feel that the corporate media is nothing but propaganda. Each lie feels like a slap in the face from an arrogant Nazi. But, most of all, I feel almost completely alone - except for the tiny band of people who come to places like c99p.

Watching this complete lie of a movie, and being aware of yet another recent whitewash movie "The Post"[NOTE], I feel that the Deep State has won the propaganda war. The voice of truth, the testimony of eyewitnesses to the murder of American democracy, has been buried or drowned out by the corporate media. Those eyewitnesses who did not die suspiciously in the 1960s are now in their 70s and 80s, and the truth is dying with them. The younger generations are battling for economic survival, and have little time for this "ancient history". Opponents of the Deep State are few today. When they write about what really happened, they are trashed and ridiculed not only by paid hacks, such as Gerald Posner, but by the New York Times and the Washington Post. This triumph of propaganda is at the core of my feelings of impending disaster for the people that live in the country that used to be the First Republic of America.

I feel that we live in a military dictatorship that is pretending (less and less every day) to be a democracy. I feel that our elected officials, of either duopoly party, are nothing more than servants of the super-rich. I feel that our country is a gangster nation that threatens world peace abroad and runs the biggest prison/slave labor system on the planet at home.

We know that it is oligarch opinion, not public opinion, that drives the passage of laws in the US. We watch more and more of the government being privatized (that is, sold on the cheap to insiders and removed from public control). We see ever larger military, intelligence, police, and prison budgets. Along with this, we see top bracket tax cuts, while less and less spent on infrastructure, education, and healthcare. Our foreign policy is run by a former head of the CIA, and that policy is to foment wars and revolutions, and to apply economic sanctions when wars are unfeasible. And nothing changes, no matter whom we vote for. That is the death of democracy.

All these feelings can be summed up into one overarching feeling. I now feel that, for longer than my entire adult life, American politics has been a sham and a farce. Since JFK, our Presidents have either been crooked or clueless. LBJ was in on the JFK assassination via the Warren Commission farce. Nixon fought with the CIA for control over drugs, not to block them. Ford, Carter, and George W. Bush were clueless. Reagan was a senile puppet who had been groomed and spoon fed by General Electric for 20 years. Poppy Bush really ran the show - and then became president himself. Poppy Bush was one of the ringleaders of the whole CIA racket. He was the director of the CIA in 1976. A CIA director becoming president was unprecedented, and the first public indication that the CIA runs America. Bill Clinton was up to his eyeballs in the drug running through Arkansas.

Its the drugs, stupid

Which brings me back to the point that set off my feelings in the first place: this movie continues the media avoidance of how the US has been flooded with drugs ever since the creation of the CIA. We know the CIA and the Mafia work hand in glove. We know that the CIA funds its many operations with untraceable drug money. In short, drug money runs the US. Wall St. launders drug money. The Pentagon protects poppy fields in Afghanistan. Every aspect of our shitty country is corrupted by drugs.

Its sort of fitting that the US's biggest competitor is China - a great civilization that was deliberately ruined by the opium pushed onto it by the Western powers. There must be some schadenfreude for the Chinese to watch the West get destroyed by drugs peddled by its own people.

Drugs exacerbated the pernicious rural-urban divide: Increased money for “traders” meant the ability to buy more land and become even richer, which meant the ability to move to the cities and run your affairs from far away via a local bully, which dissolved the ancient, much-needed bond between landlord and tenant. This may have been the deepest socio-economic effect.

...drugs fueled not just poor governance, but ultimately the anti-government sentiment which is now a hallmark of today’s neoliberal form of capitalism. If the government “sucks”, to use the parlance of our times…then getting rid of it as much as possible is smart, right?

The rise of drug money created the resources for traders and the gentry to bribe officials at all levels, further reducing the central government’s ability to govern properly. And that’s even among those pubic servants who actually tried: For example, when the central government tried in 1884 to fix the tax system it was quickly abandoned. The only reason for such poor policy is corrupt, inept government – corruption techniques clearly permitted the interests of the new local drug-lord bourgeois to win out.

The trade was also so lucrative it provided local “warlords” with resources to provide their own government services, making them appear superior to the central government. Thus “big government” begins to be fairly disparaged as being staffed by lazy, incompetent and / or immoral people – echoing today’s complaints – even though these new local “leaders” made their money off drugs, instead of real work.

- R. Mazaheri Once China got off drugs: the link between opium and ‘liberal strongman’ Macron

The US is pretty far down the road to collapse that played out in China. Its government has been wrecked. Its citizens are increasingly uneducated, unhealthy, and unemployed. Drug dealers are in charge. Society is disintegrating, as people withdraw into opiod drugs, as well as into the electronic opium of video games and social media. Nuclear weapons and the Digital Panopticon protect the cabal running this country from any threat, foreign or domestic. I feel that the whole situation will continue to go downhill until some environmental catastrophe or some critical resource shortage causes either a nuclear war or a societal breakdown/martial law/anarchy.

I really feel that these are the only options in front of us, because the formal political system is completely under the control of the Deep State. IMHO, all that those who are still awake can do is to preserve the truth, try to make others aware of the truth, and to be ready to act when the system break occurs - so that the break doesn't just turn into Disaster Capitalism on steroids.

Have a nice day. Sad

---

NOTE: While I'm on the subject of movies that whitewash the CIA, let's discuss Watergate. The Watergate story has always smelled fishy, what with Bob Woodward moving straight from the Office of Naval Intelligence to the Washington Post just in time for Watergate. But, it turned downright stinking when Deep Throat turned out to be Mark Felt, the number two guy at the CIA FBI. Felt had been passed over for J. Edgar Hoover's job - twice. He had an axe to grind. He wanted to make the FBI under the guy who got "his" job, L. Patrick Gray, look bad. Its all discussed by another eyewitness, Pat Buchanan, in a 2012 story The Outing of Deep Throat.

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Amanda Matthews's picture

54280C6E-A8DC-47FB-80E5-3B7DC5D03922.jpeg

Photo 3: This is a photo taken January 22nd, 1963. This is a group of assassins, gun runners and drug smugglers known as “Operation 40” – a special assassination squad originally formed to kill Fidel Castro. It is taken in the Mexico City nightclub, La Reforma.

Leaning over the table in the left front is long time CIA agent Felix Rodriguez. Rodriguez helped the CIA capture and kill Che Guevara, flew guns and drugs with Seal in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and (like Seal himself) has ties to Iran Contra and Bush Sr.. Behind Rodriguez is Porter Goss – head of the CIA under George W. Bush. Behind him is Barry Seal.

Two back from Seal is Juan Restoy, a man who organized some of his fellow Bay of Pigs veterans into a drug smuggling operation responsible for a large percentage of cocaine and the lion’s share of the heroin coming into the U.S. The 1970 bust of this operation – known as “Operation Eagle” – was the biggest drug bust in history. On the other side of the table in the front sits CIA agent William Seymour and either CIA agent Tosh Plumlee or CIA agent Frank Sturgis, it’s hard to tell because his face is partially covered.

https://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2017/10/02/american-made-photos-...

So much corruption around one table.

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

arendt's picture

@Amanda Matthews

This picture, taken so early in the CIA's march of conquest through the US government, should make alarm bells ring. The Watergate burglars and the future head of the CIA (from Florida, where else) in the same picture?

But very few people have ever seen it. It sure isn't going to make it onto the corporate media.

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mhagle's picture

Sadly, I think you are right.

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Marilyn

"Make dirt, not war." eyo

snoopydawg's picture

looking at Brennan, Clapper, Mueller and other deep state agents as the good guys and forgetting what they knew about their actions during the Bush administration. Why? Because they want them to vindicate their thinking that the only way Her lost and Trump won was because he had outside help. There is no other way she could have lost.

Deep State has won the propaganda war. No doubt about this. I just didn't realize how long ago they did.

Great essay! Now don't forget to vote! Nea

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

arendt's picture

@snoopydawg

Its by erasing all the early dirty business of the CIA that people can be bamboozled into thinking such a "made man" as Robert Mueller is on the side of democracy. Bob in Portland recited chapter and verse on Mueller here a few weeks ago.

The public only sees the propaganda, not the dirty laundry of the CIA/Mob/MIC.

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Amanda Matthews's picture

From the OP:

The best friend of Alan Dulles was Preston Bush, the father of Poppy Bush

Poppy Bush’s pappy:

Prescott Sheldon Bush Sr. (May 15, 1895 – October 8, 1972) was an American banker and politician. After working as a Wall Street executive investment banker, he represented Connecticut in the United States Senate from 1952 to 1963. A member of the Bush family, he is the father of President George H. W. Bush and the grandfather of President George W. Bush and Governor Jeb Bush.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescott_Bush

58B49D96-4239-4A78-8DEE-881ED0F3B68D.jpeg

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

arendt's picture

@Amanda Matthews

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ggersh's picture

The Bushs go deep into who controls the country
when Dubya said the constitution is only a piece
of paper it confirmed pretty much what you state
and this coming from a guy who only got appointed
the presidency cause of hanging chads....UFB.

the democracy/republic is long gone from being
of,by, for the people.

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

by these sick people are just too much to contemplate.

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dfarrah

Creosote.'s picture

Basically I cannot write, but I resonate with your statement that "the whole situation will continue to go downhill until some environmental catastrophe or some critical resource shortage causes either a nuclear war or a societal breakdown/martial law/anarchy."

Not a soul I know understands a bit of this, and it's an ongoing agony to realize we are already in the catastrophe while for most it is still fully papered over with ice cream, sports, and a profound absence of curiosity.

So glad to read you here.

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arendt's picture

@Creosote.

Yes, that's the feeling I wanted to get across with this essay - the sense that after fifty years, the concrete of history has pretty well set, and set in a way that gives the CIA a free pass for wrecking our democracy.

One can recite the true facts (as opposed to the CIA spin) all day long, and most people are too busy and too dumbed down to care about what happened in a time that is, to them, so long ago. Then, there are the junior bullies, the ones who get a kick out of calling people CTers, the ones who suck up to the powerful by being the enemy of their enemies. The CIA doesn't even have to pay them.

It is a case of "he who controls the present controls the past". The CIA has controlled the present for fifty years. They have won - until the whole corrupt edifice rots from within enough for other powers, like China and Russia, to break free of the neoliberal/neocon death grip.

It is all so depressing, after 50 years of holding onto the truth like a shipwrecked person clutching a life preserver, to see the complete lack of comprehension among the younger populace. And, that populace has been conditioned to see complaints about the CIA as nothing more than hippie/boomer privilege and self-centeredness. A freebie of promoting inter-generational warfare is to discredit the strong anti-CIA feelings of the boomers.

Thanks for validating my sense of being almost alone.

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wendy davis's picture

@Creosote.

part III of my next climate chaos series will be on Water. as in: potable water availability.

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arendt's picture

@wendy davis

Agribusiness has drawn millions of years of water from the Ogala aquifer in under 75 years. It will run out and half the midwest will turn back into the Dust Bowl. California burned through immense amounts of irreplacable ground water in the drought a few years ago. Meanwhile frackers are running through millions of gallons of potable water AND polluting the ground water table. Finally, salt water encroachment from rising sea levels and depleted aquifers is making drinking water systems in coastal towns unusable.

Its all short-term, me-first and screw the rest thinking. Multiple tragedies of the commons in parallel, because they have destroyed government regulation.

It looks like "hydraulic despotism" is about to make a big comeback. Of course, the arid Middle East has already reached the point of desperation. It was a massive drought, which drove farmers off the land and into the cities, that started the Syrian "Civil" War. China also has water problems - because they polluted the crap out of their supplies. I read that something like 40% of their water is undrinkable or unusable for agriculture.

As you say, the globalists (like Nestle) have been buying up water rights and stand to make out like bandits as water resources fall behind population growth. Looks like TPTB are cheering for Thomas Malthus.

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wendy davis's picture

@arendt

i needn't bring the diary then, lol.

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arendt's picture

@wendy davis

than some off the top of my head factoids.

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wendy davis's picture

@arendt

i've been working on this series for weeks. kinda closin' in on it. sorry i don't have time to answer your other comments this evening; perhaps tomorrow, depending...

best to you,
wd

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Creosote.'s picture

@wendy davis

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LeChienHarry's picture

and well researched. The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America's Secret Government.

All the players mentioned here are in this book plus others. The number of times Dulles and his brother did what they wanted to inspite of or in back of the president of the time, is amazing. The connections of Allen Dulles to Nazis from his perch in Bern, Switzerland is astonishing.

Dulles’s decade as the director of the CIA—which he used to further his public and private agendas—were dark times in American politics. Calling himself “the secretary of state of unfriendly countries,” Dulles saw himself as above the elected law, manipulating and subverting American presidents in the pursuit of his personal interests and those of the wealthy elite he counted as his friends and clients—colluding with Nazi-controlled cartels, German war criminals, and Mafiosi in the process. Targeting foreign leaders for assassination and overthrowing nationalist governments not in line with his political aims, Dulles employed those same tactics to further his goals at home, Talbot charges, offering shocking new evidence in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

I have been loaning the book to UK friends and they are beginning to get what the US is really like. Many have trouble believing we are not a country that is a shining light on the hill. The discussion of Obama with British or French friends is difficult indeed. They want to believe.

The comments in Good Reads looks interesting.

Thanks for putting this all together.

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You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again you did not know. ~ William Wiberforce

If you can donate, please! POP Money is available for bank-to-bank transfers. Email JtC to make a monthly donation.

arendt's picture

@LeChienHarry

The Devil's Chessboard, as well as "Brothers". Focussing only on the JFK hit, JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglas opens new doors about the corruption inside the protective services. Another good read is Stephen Kinzer's "The Brothers". Tom Hartmann has written two encyclopediac tomes about the two assassinations - he favors Santo Trafficante and Ted Shackley as the organizers of the JFK hit.

But, this is all preaching to the choir. If the truth can't break out of the ghetto, it will become lost, become a myth, and a hundred years from now (should the human race survive that long) it will be completely forgotten.

Thanks for talking to people, even if they are not Americans. As I said at the end,

all that those who are still awake can do is to preserve the truth, try to make others aware of the truth, and to be ready to act when the system break occurs

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lotlizard's picture

@arendt  
This one by Ron Unz of the Unz Review website.

http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-part-i-wha...

http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-part-ii-wh...

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arendt's picture

@lotlizard

that site always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. YMMV, but I think the guy has an axe to grind. Don't get me wrong, It is legitimate for you to point to this piece. I read it myself. I just don't buy it.

First, the unz site has as many frothing anti-Semite articles and posters as ZH - the whole nine yards: JewNitedStates, ZOG, etc. So, the place has a track record of extreme takes on Israel. IMHO, this kind of over-the-top bigotry innoculates people against taking a serious look at the genuine bad behavior of Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians and the Arab world.

Second, MEANS, motive, and opportunity. I will grant their nuke program as motive. As for means and opportunity, while he cites a lot of stuff that happened YEARS after Nov 63 - like the attack on the USS Liberty - he gives absolutely ZERO information on exactly HOW and by WHOM the Israelis masterminded and drove the 1963 plot.

In JFK and the Unspeakable, we read how there were several attempts set up very similar to the Dallas hit. One in Chicago and one in Miami. I simply don't buy that all this deeply inside the US behavior was being stage managed and controlled by the "almighty" Mossad. He offers not one name, not one contact or instance where this control might have been exerted. Exactly what contacts were there between the Mossad and the anti-Castro Cubans in 1963? Israel became deeply involved in Latin America in the 1980s, not the 1960s.

Furthermore, in Tom Hartmann's book, he convincingly lays a trail to the door of Santos Traficante. Traficante was being tormented by Bobby Kennedy. At one point, IIRC, Bobby had Traficante kidnapped and dumped in rural Mexico. People either loved RFK or hated him with a white heat. Traficante hated him. Traficante didn't need to be puppeted by the Mossad to want JFK dead. According to Hartmann, Traficante killed JFK to get RFK off his back. According to Hartmann, in the 1980s Traficante confessed to a prison informer who was wearing a wire. Compared to Hartmann's massively researched and documented book, Unz is spitballing it.

Traficante clearly had motive. He also had means and opportunity, since he was up to his eyeballs in the anti-Castro activities. The mob was big in Chicago, Miami, and Dallas - the three sites that are mentioned in JFK and the Unspeakable.

Bottom line: I just don't see any linkages (i.e., means) that are more compelling than the idea that the mob organized the hit. I think Unz is building a post-facto just-so story. The thing feels like the way the Russians today are blamed for anything bad that happens. And, if there is no evidence, that itself is evidence of how clever they are. That, in essence, is what Unz is arguing.

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Creosote.'s picture

@arendt
one regular, one electronic

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gulfgal98's picture

This essay goes hand in hand with Bob in Portland's essay on Robert Mueller. There is a relatively small evil cabal, going way back, who run things in this country. Like many here, I knew some of this stuff, but not the whole picture. You have filled out that picture very well and it is a horrifying one to see. The Deep State owns us lock, stock, and barrel.

Thank you for such an outstanding essay. This should be required reading.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

arendt's picture

@gulfgal98

It is said that WW1 was started by no more than 25 warmongers at the top of the aristocratic/royalist pecking order of the various Empires. The Russian Revolution was done by Lenin and his cabal. We just watched 25 neocons start the second Iraq War.

Secrecy is the enemy of democracy. WW2 put secrecy ahead of everything else, and his remained frozen that way ever since - thanks in no small part to the CIA.

I think the lesson to be learned is that the current mechanisms of democracy are fatally susceptible to the kinds of actions that a CIA can take. Our democracy is not equipped to handle massive bribery, subversion, disinformation, domestic propaganda, the bogus claims of "national security" - the tools of the trade of government overthrows. Until we find a form of democracy that cannot be played, the only answer is to respond in kind - which is how we got the CIA. We were afraid of Nazi and Soviet secret agents. So we took in the Nazi and Ukranian spies (Gehlen), and infected ourselves.

And, given the current low and decreasing state of political sophistication in this country, I don't see anyone fixing our vulnerabilities to CIA games. Hell, they've even weaponized genuine, Alinsky-style protest movements as vehicles for government overthrow. They call it "Hybrid War".

Thanks for your awareness and your many activities. It is all an individual can do in this corrupt country.

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of the american security apparatus for as long as I can remember. That does not mean I am unaware or don't care. I accept the fact that the truth is officially hidden, cloaked under 'national security'. Doesn't mean I like it. It does spoil their attempts to fool me, though. I share with all able to hear.

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arendt's picture

@QMS

I explicitly excluded c99p folks from the "clueless" category.

That said, I take your point. Many polls show bipartisan majorities for decreasing our military spending, our foreign bases, our economic warfare abroad and at home. There is a "silenced" majority out there.

They are like Soviet citizens, who knew that Pravda was bullshit. They know they are being lied to, but they can't do much about it - except stay aware. They learned the important news was buried on page 12, and other tricks that braindead Americans need to learn. Also, Russians made wonderfully sarcastic comments about the communist system, such as: "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.", which seems to have become adopted in America today.

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@arendt They pretend it's a democracy and we just play along. The 'silent majority' is perceived as such mostly because our majority voice and opinion are given no traction in what used to be news. And practically every poll published for our enlightenment is either a fabrication or skewed beyond belief. We the people paying attention know all this. The official line is scripted for the actors, not the audience, imo.

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arendt's picture

@QMS

Agree completely. They make up BS, run it through the corporate media food chain, and declare it to be truth and wisdom.

The narrative must be protected, because it protects the elites.

The only accurate gauge of citizen sentiment that I can see are the numbers about how Congress has 9% or so approval, lower than used car salesmen.

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arendt's picture

In my OP, I mentioned Frank Wisner, who coined "The Mighty Wurlitzer". Apparently, he had his fingers in a lot of pies. I was unaware of his strong connection to the Trotskyite, James Burnham - who led former communists into a rightwing position, capturing many intellectuals like Irving Kristol (father of Bill Kristol, the neocon cheerleader).

The quote below comes from a story by Alistair Crooke, former member of MI-6, former UK ambassador - a quite well-connected objector to the conventional wisdom. The key point is that globalism is, from the get-go, a CIA plot to control the world. Such a tiny little world spookdom is.

Its roots lie with figures such as James Burnham, an anti-Stalin, former Trotskyite, who, writing as early as 1941, advocated for the levers of financial and economic power being placedin the hands of a management class: an élite – which alone would be capable of running the contemporary state - thanks to this élite’s market and financial technical nous. It was, bluntly, a call for an expert, technocratic oligarchy.

Burnham renounced his allegiance to Trotsky and Marxism, in all its forms in 1940, but he would take the tactics and strategies for infiltration and subversion, (learned as a member of Leon Trotsky’s inner circle) with him, and would elevate the Trotskyist management of ‘identity politics’ to become the fragmentation ‘device’ primed to explode national culture onto a new stage, in the Western sphere. His 1941 book, “The Managerial Revolution,” caught the attention of Frank Wisner, subsequently, a legendary CIA figure, who saw in the works of Burnham and his colleague a fellow Trotskyite, Sidney Hook, the prospect of mounting an effective alliance of former Trotskyites against Stalinism.

But, additionally, Wisner perceived its merits as the blueprint for a CIA-led, pseudo-liberal, US-led global order. (‘Pseudo’, because, as Burnham articulated clearly, in The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom, his version of freedom meant anything but intellectual freedom or those freedoms defined by America’s Constitution. “What it really meant was conformity and submission”).

In short, (as Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould have noted), “by 1947, James Burnham’s transformation from Communist radical, to New World Order American conservative was complete. His Struggle for the World, [converted into a memo for the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner of CIA)], had done a ‘French Turn’ on Trotsky’s permanent Communist revolution, and turned it into a permanent battle plan for a global American empire. All that was needed to complete Burnham’s dialectic was a permanent enemy, and that would require a sophisticated psychological campaign to keep the hatred of Russia alive, "for generations".

The Beginning Of The End Of The Bilderberg/Soros Era

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wendy davis's picture

and thank you for it and your diligence. i'd rebut or amend a few things, i think, but i had wanted to mention that both NGOs USAID and National endowment for democracy for some (NED) are both CIA fronts. as for CIA whistleblowing, see Philip Agee here, here, and here (wrong kind of green used to have a better one about this length; seems it's no longer at their website:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjtj9h4mrO]

i went in search of just how far george soros and his color revolution organization is up NEDs ass, so your title 'The Beginning Of The End Of The Bilderberg/Soros Era' may explain, but it's far too long to read in the limitd time i have. but suffice it to say that otpor, gene sharpe, are interwoven in them all.

i was glad that you'd included this sentence: "“America today is clearly run by the Deep State, which is composed of elements of the CIA, the mob, the oil business, Wall St., the neocon Israelis, the Saudis, and recently, the Silicon Valley surveillance state.”

it's been my contention that there are indeed several 'deep states' afoot, sometimes competing, sometimes in coordination, including the US military coup that Boss Tweet's installed...by appointment. and the duopoly in congress approved all of them, save for bolton, whose position didn't need senate confirmation.

but in my haste to find any coverage of the several deep states, i found this by greg grandin, didn't care for all of grandin's assertions, but his list is a worthy one, imo. i especially loved this outtake, as my very favorite meme since T's election is 'how liberals learned to love the CIA', although he turns that on it's head, and no, not just lovin' the FBI and mueller:

"Slippage between theme and content seems like a nice way of describing the hope held by many liberals that a CIA program of domestic destabilization will save us all from Donald Trump."

but i wonder if you might not think about submitting this awesome work to dissident voice?
here's their submission page.

best to you, and thank you.

p..n edit: a café commenter loves jay dyer's hollywood film reviews; last time i'd checked for someone his CIA tab was at least 12 pages long, lol, so no big surprise on the cruise thing.

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wendy davis's picture

@wendy davis

it was *after* wikieaks published CIA vaults 7 and 8...that former cia director pompeo (and beauregard sessions) ratcheted up the pressure on the UK and ecuador's lenin moreneo to not only silence him, but warn him his stay is NOT forever.

also: a 2015 (old news, but great!) mark ames exposé on omidyar's funding the putsch in ukraine by funding by way of usaid, ned, and centre, ua, etc. one's reaction to greenwald's 'response' will be quite variable, but i know what mine was...and still is.

but as the nazis in ukraine are ramping up their presence, neoliberal privatization's on the upswing, it's even more interesting and noteworthy. but i'll try to get a post about it up sorta soonish. private capital can move moutains!

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arendt's picture

@wendy davis

Regarding Vault 7, there is an interesting story up at Zero Hedge today:

In short, Comey killed advanced negotiations with the WikiLeaks founder that would have safeguarded the lives of CIA agents who are now at risk, while also providing key evidence in the ongoing Russia investigations. For the longer version, keep reading.


Why Did James Comey Issue "Stand Down" Order On Imminent Deal With Julian Assange?

The dirty hands of James Comey, yet again.

Regarding Omyidar, I have a mental note that The Intercept is no longer trustworthy. Perhaps Greenwald still is, but "verify, don't trust". The Ukranian connection is news to me, since I rarely visit The Intercept.

It seems that the minute any alternative news site gets any traction, it is either smashed by the corporate media and the Silicon Valley censorship squad; or it turns out to actually be run by insiders pretending to be outsiders. This just adds to the general level of paranoia among leftwing writers and readers.

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wendy davis's picture

@arendt

clicked in; now i understand the gist of it:

but about the same time is this one that i’ll link to so the subtweets can be seen in a stand-alone:

Deport refugee! Revoke asyum! Letter from U.S. Democratic Senators Diane Feinstein, Mark Warner, Bob Menendez, Durbin, Blumenthal, Markey, Bennet, Coons, Manchin & Shaheen demands @VP Mike Pence tell Ecuador to revoke @JulianAssange's asylum.
...and a link to this pdf senate (intel?) dreck :
https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/6-27-18%20RM%20letter%20to%...

oh, the carrots and sticks offered to the neoliberal lenin moreno! assholes.

but some morons in the subtweets seem to believe wikileaks is suporting that, and has been taken over by...the deep state.

no, the intercept does not report on omidyar, that piece was by pando press. i have no respect at all left for greenwald. none. obfuscation, misdirection, and hitting against julian assange over and over as the “bad whistleblower”, not uttering a word when the freedo the the press foundation cut wikiLeaks loose from their anonymizing funding. oh, yes, now he's all for Assange in his current life-threatening predicament.

as for ‘the intercept’ and it’s rather apt name, there are untold numbers of ‘fearless investigative journalists’ lassoed into their stable. one might ask: why IS that? and GG never thought to check out ‘pierre’; how could he know that his paypal billionaire funder had blockaded wikiLeaks, anyway? pffft.

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arendt's picture

@wendy davis

I appreciate it when commenters add info that I left out. USAID and NED are known bad actors. IIRC, someone actually admitted NED was created to do stuff the CIA used to do.

The whole Deep State thing is an octopus that reaches everywhere. You could spend the rest of your life trying to document all its schemes, and still be unable to keep up. I tried to keep the focus on drugs, Cubans, and the mob. A unified theme. Without a theme, essays get overloaded with too many stories and way too many references.

I completely agree that the Deep State itself is riven with factions. This was documented as early as the 1970s, by Carroll Quigley (who taught Bill Clinton). He called the factions of his time Yankees and Cowboys. Yankees were polished globalists with a European focus. Cowboys were Western oil men and other nouveau riche, who were nationalist and crude.

I think the nationalist versus globalist trope still works as a way to characterize the fight that is going on today. Trump got the backing of the nationalists, which includes large parts of the military, including the DIA. They hate the CIA because the military gets pulled into no-win proxy quagmires that the CIA creates. That's not to say that the military is not totally in favor of more conventional wars. They want lots of expensive and obsolete hardware. (Carriers that hypersonic missiles will vaporize. F-35 boondoggles.)

I looked at the Grandin article. As you say, don't completely agree with it. I think Mike Lofgren has done a great job from an insider POV with his book, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of the Shadow Government

Regarding submitting this elsewhere: I will check out their information policy. I prefer to keep a low internet profile. I prefer not to have my handle and its email splashed around a lot. If they will accept just a firewall email that I use, OK.

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That would seem to be the implication of the following statement:

" . . . . the formal political system is completely under the control of the Deep State. IMHO, all that those who are still awake can do is to preserve the truth, try to make others aware of the truth, and to be ready to act when the system break occurs - so that the break doesn't just turn into Disaster Capitalism on steroids."

So, I guess you don't believe we can VOTE our way out of this predicament, do you? I guess we should then probably abandon any hope for the next progressive electoral hero to rescue us in 2020?

Boy, there are a lot of people on this site that aren't going to like or agree with what you've written. If fact, they reject what you've written (Doesn't that bother you?) Especially in view of the fact that we Americans have been taught since birth that we live in a democracy, that we are "free," and that our government, as imperfect as it may be, presents us with the last best hope for the common citizenry to change things for the better through that wonderful mechanism called "the ballot box."

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arendt's picture

@SoylentGreenisPeople

I decided that you are being serious. So here is my serious response. (Apologies if you were just being snarky.)

So, I guess you don't believe we can VOTE our way out of this predicament, do you? I guess we should then probably abandon any hope for the next progressive electoral hero to rescue us in 2020?

Short answer: No, I don't.

Long answer:

First, voting for president is useless without voting in a progressive Congress. Have you looked at what is going on in the 2018 Democratic Congressional primaries? The DNC is backing corporate assholes and CIA Dems across the board, and it is actively sabotaging progressive Dems. Despite all the Identity Politics BS from the Hillary camp, they are supporting corrupt Cuomo over progressive Cynthia Nixon. So far, I think (I don't follow closely because primary voting is a scripted farce.) that progressives have won a very small number of primaries compared to DNC candidates.

Bottom line: if 2018 is a dress rehearsal for 2020, the progressives are losing to the corpo Dems badly.

As for 2020, lots of people want Bernie to run. That's fine. He has said some useful things and moved the so-called Overton Window. But, when push came to shove in 2016, its quite clear they showed him the Bill Hicks movie (which, BTW, is a CIA reference) and/or made him an offer he couldn't refuse (which, BTW, is a Mafia reference). IMHO, he's a sheepdog now. And despite two years of trying, progressives have failed to gain any leverage inside the party. Donations are down, but the DNC doesn't care. As Bernie said, they are happy to go down on the Titanic as long as they have a first class cabin.

There are no "progressive heroes" out there. There are people who mistakenly think they can do something about the massive corruption inside the Democratic Party. There are people who that voting can accomplish something in the face of the Silicon Valley surveillance state that is, as I write, clamping censorship down on every leftwing site out there.

Given all the above, I will not be voting Democratic or Republican. The whole duopoly is a joke. They are completely owned by the super-rich. I will vote for any Third Party candidates I can find. I know they are as powerless as the progressive Dems; but at least they don't have to fight their own party to be allowed to run.

Boy, there are a lot of people on this site that aren't going to like or agree with what you've written. If fact, they reject what you've written (Doesn't that bother you?) Especially in view of the fact that we Americans have been taught since birth that we live in a democracy, that we are "free," and that our government, as imperfect as it may be, presents us with the last best hope for the common citizenry to change things for the better through that wonderful mechanism called "the ballot box."

I love how you speak for "a lot of people on this site". None of them, except you, have said one word about how they don't like what I've written. So check back when those folks show up on this thread.

As for what "Americans have been taught since birth", you clearly haven't understood my OP. What we have been taught since birth has been a complete fucking lie since 1963. Since then, the CIA has called the tune in this country. The whole point of the OP is to wake people up to that fact. Clearly you haven't stopped snoozing.

Voting is a joke these days. The primary/superdelegate system makes sure that only people with lots of money and the approval of billionaires, like Haim Saban, will get to be candidates. Gee, did you notice that that particular big mover and shaker in the Democratic Party - huge friend of Bill and Hil - is another dual Israeli/US citizen, just like all the fucking neoncons? Just like Trump's guy, Sheldon Adelson? No Deep State action there, no sir. Its good old American democracy all the way.

I stand by my statement:

the formal political system is completely under the control of the Deep State. IMHO, all that those who are still awake can do is to preserve the truth, try to make others aware of the truth, and to be ready to act when the system break occurs - so that the break doesn't just turn into Disaster Capitalism on steroids.

I am with Chris Hedges. The political system serves the rich, not the people. The only thing left for people to do is to demonstrate (where it can be effective, as opposed to merely useless feelgood, like PussyHats), and to get ready for the system break.

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arendt's picture

@SoylentGreenisPeople

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