Saturday, January 31, 2009

The Entire Fascist US Game Plan Exposed in a Single Minor Obama Appointment

Or, The Morphing CSIS/PNAC Transformer ... Or, The Obama Regime is the Bush Regime in Liberal Drag ... Or, When "Hope" isn't Enough ... Or, How the Future and Past Shape the Present ...

OR, THE KEY TO EVERY MAJOR POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE US SINCE THE COLD WAR ...

By Alex Constantine
(Revised)

Deconstruct one of Obama's seemingly insignificant bureaucratic appointments, and the entire game plan behind American foreign policy emerges - like an iceberg in the fog ...

Sweet, "innocent" spook Mona Sutphen was recently appointed a deputy White House chief of staff, and her role is managing the foreign policy personnel transition process.

The White House press release doesn't mention that Sutphen holds the key to understanding nearly every major development in US foreign policy in the past 20 years or so, and for the next 20 years to come.

It's all about the CIA's Ray Steiner Cline - only one of the three most important geopolitical strategists in history, an Iran-contra co-conspirator - particularly his work at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Cline developed a mathematical model for predicting shifts in world power, and discovered that as the US deflates economically in the coming decades, Russia and China, primarily, followed by Japan, will rise industrially and claim more of the world's resources.

The Cline Solution

To meet this immense and (to the rich) daunting geopolitical shift, Cline suggested back in the late '80s, America must take control of key resource points on the globe. To further this end, a happy face was painted on Cline's Solution called The CSIS-Based Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and this group burrowed into the DoD and named itself the Office of Special Plans. Iraq was one of the keys to the Cline/CSIS Solution - "we" needed military installations there to maintain access not only to Iraqi oil, but more importantly, Saudi Arabia's. And to justify an invasion of Iraq, "we" needed a 9/11; to sweeten the pot, anthrax terror. Other steps were necessary to position the ruling class for the Big Shift: Tax cuts for the rich, corporate looting, "bailouts" and other steps of wealth transfer ... controlling the "have-nots" and mass media as domestic economic conditions worsen ... militant propaganda ... adoption of intelligence and military functions by privately-controlled contractors who are extra-constitutional, tight with the CIA ... a bolstered intelligence guardian to keep the proles in line and sustain state-sponsored terrorism ...

Zapping Rowdy "Have-Nots" from Space

Recall the Washington Post story that put a chill down our necks a few years ago? Rumsfeld made nerve-wracking predictions in an NMD report. I wrote on June 27, 2006: " ... Vengeful rogue states ... an orbital Pearl Harbor ... the chilling potential for class war. The secretary of defense argued that peasants, the 'have-nots,' may one day rise against the 'haves.' In that eventuality, it's best to be prepared. The obvious solution was space-based reconnaissance and offensive weapons 'to control space,' but more importantly, 'dominate the earth.'"
http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2006/06/adnan-khashoggi-linked-to-911_27.html

More Cline Solution Operatives in the Wings

Ray Cline

Now, Ms. Sutphen will be selecting Obama foreign policy staffers. She is the logical choice for a continuation of the Cline Solution - she wrote a book about it ... and she, too, gave the Solution a happy face. Note that she's a former foreign service officer and national security officer - a spook. (So was Cline. So are others we are about to meet.) ...


Stonebridge International, a Military-Industrial Powerhouse

"Ms. Sutphen is Managing Director of Stonebridge and manages special projects for the firm. A former Foreign Service officer, she served in Asia and in Europe, and while at the White House, worked on a range of policy issues for the National Security Adviser. Before joining Stonebridge, she worked in the financial services industry in the institutional foreign exchange market. She is the co-author of The Next American Century published in January 2008."

Take a closer look at the "happy face," the book (and PLEASE note the plug from none other than Brent "Obama's Yoda" Scowcroft, chairman of the Pacific Forum at, of course, the Center for Strategic and International Studies - and just as significantly, another Iran-contra-arms-for-terrorists alumnus), a popularization, like PNAC's anti-Saddam chest-beating, an exercise of "PUBLIC DIPLOMACY" to drum up popular support for coming foreign policy outrages that execute steps in the Cline prescription (you can read some of Sutphen's book here.):

"The rise of other global powers is most often posed as a sorry tale. The potential loss of our #1 status implies a blow to our safety, economy, and prestige. In The Next American Century, Nina Hachigian and Mona Sutphen show that the “pivotal powers”—China, Europe, India, Japan, and Russia—seek greater influence, but each has an enormous stake in the world economy and a keen desire to thwart common threats."
http://www.stonebridge-international.com/bios/bio30.html

Nina Hachigian, Mona's co-author, ls from the same spook milieu: "Nina Hachigian is a Senior Vice President at the Center for American Progress and a Visiting Scholar of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University [Condoleeza Rice is from CISAC]. Earlier, she was the Director of the Center for Asia-Pacific Policy and a Senior Political Scientist at RAND. From 1998 to 1999, she was on the staff of the National Security Council."
http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Nina-Hachigian/36063538/biography

More on Mona Sutphen's bona fidés:

" ... Ms. Sutphen holds a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College ... She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations ... "
http://www.huliq.com/1/73030/mona-sutphen-jim-messina-added-obama-white-house-staff

"Mona Sutphen is a Managing Director at Stonebridge International LLC, a Washington-based international business strategy firm. ... "
http://authors.aalbc.com/mona_sutphen.htm

Stonebridge/CSIS Tie: Donald G. Gross, a senior advisor Stonebridge International, is a senior advisor/adjunct fellow at Cline's CSIS. And another spook: "He has served as senior Adviser to the Under Secretary for International Security Affairs in the Department of State ..."
http://www.stonebridge-international.com/bios/bio15.html

9/11 Commission Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton - who proved his mettle to Dick Cheney and other criminal Republican power brokers by covering up Iran-contra crimes - at Cheney's request. Hamilton, a Democrat, is on the board of Stonebridge International.

So is Craig L. Fuller: " ... he was President of the Wexler Group until its acquisition by [Iran-contra co-conspirator, CIA-tied] Hill & Knowlton where Mr. Fuller served as President of its U.S. Operations and head of worldwide public affairs. Prior, he was Senior Vice President for Corporate Affairs at Philip Morris Companies and also served as Chairman of the 1992 Republican National Convention. Mr. Fuller has an extensive background in federal affairs, having served as Assistant to the President for Cabinet Affairs for President Ronald Reagan and Chief of Staff to Vice President George Bush. He later served as Co-Director of President-elect Bush's Presidential transition team. ... "
http://www.stonebridge-international.com/pages/page01b.html#ful

So is Roger C. Altman - vice chairman of The Blackstone Group.
http://www.stonebridge-international.com/pages/page01b.html#ful

And what is Altman's raison d' be? The Cline Solution, of course - another happy face (" ... why so serious? ... "):

" ... Fresh off the foreign policy presses, Foreign Affairs magazine’s newest issue has an article by Roger C. Altman analyzing the economic crisis and makes several claims about the decline of the West and the rise of China. ... "
http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/great-power-politics/posts/tag/obama/

Samuel Berger

Altman worked formerly for U.S. National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger - co-chairman of Stonebridge - and he was an advisor to United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson. (The last time we saw Kissinger & Assoc.'s Richardson, of course, Obama was fighting to make the accused felon his commerce secretary.)

Mona Sutphen represents the morph of PNAC/CIA/Bush regime under Obama.

She's doin' the hiring.

The agents are almost all in place. What does all this mean, what's to come? More terror and "inexplicable" foreign policy disasters on the way, sorry to report, and more economic trauma, state repression as the fascist ruling class positions for the Shift. The names may change, but the "game" plan remains the same. We are learning what it is like to live in a Third World nation because that is the outcome. America's covert operators are capable of pretty much anything - even another 9/11. They've done it once, and then, too, it began with operatives of CSIS (read parts 1-3 for a full explanation) ...

Obama has opened the door to more cockroaches. John Brennan is in his element.

Did U.S. Intelligence Assets Kill Antioch College?

Concerning, among others, "Obama's Yoda," Brent Scowcroft ... - AC

18 July 2007
Column: Bob Fitrakis
The Free Press
July 16, 2007

At the time of its announced closure, Antioch College, perhaps America’s most progressive and well-known peace college, had a few visible capitalist hawks on its Board of Trustees.

Bruce P. Bedford, one of only three trustees not a former alum, had been appointed to the board of Arlington, Virginia company GlobeSecNine in 2005. The company is described by a representative of investment corporation Bear Sterns as having "a unique set of experiences in special forces, classified operations, transportation security and military operations."

One can only speculate why the nation’s longest-standing anti-imperialist education institution would appoint a trustee with extensive ties to the military and security industrial complexes.

Business Wire on May 4, 2005 described GlobeSecNine as follows: "GlobeSecNine invests in companies providing U.S. defense, security, global trade management and supply chain solutions to the public and private sectors, and has a strategic alliance with The Scowcroft Group, a business advisory firm headed by former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft."

Bedford served on the GlobeSecNine board of advisors with Scowcroft and co-founder of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center Fred Turco. Others affiliated with the company are tied directly to the prison industrial complex and the anti-liberal "war on drugs," for example Jack Lawn, former Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who serves on the board of directors.

On July 3, 2007, Michael Alexander’s name was removed from the list of Antioch trustees. Two days earlier, he had been sworn in as president of Lasell College in Newton Massachusetts. There has been speculation that Antioch’s campus would make a great retirement community, much like the one at Lasell, known as Lasell Village, "a state-of-the-art eldercare community with the first-of-its-kind built in educational component."

In 1998 Alexander founded AverStar, where he served as chairman and chief executive officer, and did business primarily with NASA and the Defense Department. In 2000, Alexander’s AverStar defense company merged with the Titan corporation.

In March 2005, Titan pled guilty and paid the largest penalty under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in history for bribery and filing false tax returns.

L-3 Communications acquired the Titan Corporation on July 29, 2005. As their corporate website described the company, it "is a leading provider of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) systems, secure communications systems, aircraft modernization, training and government services. The company is a leading merchant supplier of a broad array of high technology products, including guidance and navigation, sensors, scanners, fuzes, data links, propulsion systems, simulators, avionics, electro optics, satellite communications, electrical power equipment, encryption, signal intelligence, antennas and microwave components. L-3 also supports a variety of Homeland Security initiatives with products and services. Its customers include the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, selected U.S. Government intelligence agencies and aerospace prime contractors."

The L-3 Communications Titan Group brags that 8000 of its 10,000 employees have "security clearances" and that they are a leading provider of C4ISR, Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance – "developing and supporting the systems of today and tomorrow for the United States and Allied Militaries and defense-related agencies in order for them to carry out their assigned missions," according to their website.

While Anitoch board members Bedford and Alexander cozied up with U.S. intelligence and Homeland Security, students at the university sponsored a national teach-in to expose the atrocities of Guantanamo Bay on October 5, 2006.

How a college targeted by the FBI and its notorious COINTELPRO operation during the Cold War as a "vanguard of the New Left" managed to place two "spook"-connected trustees on their board is a mystery worth exploring.

Antioch resides in the shadow of the Wright Patterson Air Force Base and its legendary Foreign Technologies Division that reverse engineers weapons systems from other nations. Its larger neighbor to the west, Ohio State University, has long been tied up with the CIA’s favorite nonprofit institution, Battelle, and was one of the 30 or so universities involved in the MK Ultra mind control LSD experiments in the 1960s.

The Dayton Daily News is reporting that a $5 million accounting error caused the radical college to close. Others have pointed to the long-standing rumors of intelligence ties to the Antioch Europe in Transition study program.

If the CIA or U.S. intelligence services were involved in the subversion of America’s most pro-peace college, it wouldn’t be the first time that the progressive college campuses have been infiltrated. The CIA subverted the National Student Association in the late 50s and early 60s. The agency also has been accused of subverting everything from fraternities to Fullbright scholars to Peace Corps workers.

The role of these trustees must be heavily scrutinized. Antioch alumni should be ashamed to allow their college to die until they get to the bottom of this spooky mystery.
*************
Bob Fitrakis is the author of The Fitrakis Files: Spooks, Nukes, and Nazis, on the role of the CIA in Ohio politics. This article was published by http://freepress.org.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0707/S00243.htm

Obama's Angels of Hope

Edited by Alex Constantine

There Goes Another Campaign Promise ...

TOM DASCHLE

Pocono Record
December 28, 2008

" ... Obama said he wouldn't appoint lobbyists in his administration, yet selected for a cabinet post Tom Daschle, who turned lobbyist after he lost his senate seat. ... "

http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081228/NEWS04/812280304
•••
Bob Dole Introduces Bob Dole's Law Partner, Bob Dole's Friend Tom Daschle ...

" ... Robert J. Dole, the former Republican U.S. senator from Kansas, introduced him. ... Daschle and Dole work for the same law firm, Alston & Bird. ... "

Obama Plan for Government Insurance Criticized by GOP (Update2)
By Aliza Marcus

Jan. 8 (Bloomberg) -- President-elect Barack Obama’s plan to have new government health insurance compete with private coverage drew Republican fire at a nomination hearing for Thomas A. Daschle to run the Health and Human Services Department.

“Any new insurance coverage must be delivered through private insurance plans,” said Senator Michael B. Enzi, Republican of Wyoming and his party’s ranking member on the Health committee, in prepared comments for the hearing, the panel’s first session of the year.

... Daschle was welcomed as a former colleague by members of both parties. Robert J. Dole, the former Republican U.S. senator from Kansas, introduced him. ... Daschle and Dole work for the same law firm, Alston & Bird. Dole, 85, a former Senate majority leader like Daschle, said the firm is “where he works and I just show up.”

“There are a lot of areas where I think there is consensus,” Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, told Daschle. ...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=apnTAm1a2i3Q&refer=us
•••
Questions Surround Some Obama Cabinet Picks
www.cbsnews.com

" ... Health and Human Services Pick Tom Daschle had a hearing back on Jan. 8, but he must now appear before the Finance Committee as well; his confirmation process has slowed, the Wall Street Journal reported today, 'as the Republican staff on the Senate Finance Committee staff examines his tax records and his association with an education-loan provider that is separately under committee scrutiny.' ... "

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/01/15/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry4724898.shtml
•••
“Change” vs. “Hair of the Dog”
Daniel Starling
www.kctribune.com

... Speaking of lobbyists…That lauded great head “liberal” of the Obama cabinet, Tom Daschle, former Senate leader, is now hailed as the Wizard of the Office of Health Reform and nominee for Health and Human Services.

Ignore that lobbyist behind the curtain. The Wizard has a not-so-well-kept secret. His wife, Linda Hall Daschle, is one of the most influential lobbyists in Washington D.C. And Daschle himself was a paid “consultant” for the law firm Alston and Bird and sits on the board of several health related industries.

According to a recent investigation by the Washington Post of Senate lobbying reports, Linda Hall Daschle, has aerospace and airline industry clients, but also lobbied for some “health care-related firms in the past.”

The Post article states she had such accounts as the pharmaceutical company Amgen Inc. and cigarette makers Lorillard Tobacco and Philip Morris Cos. in 1999. I didn’t know the “tobacco lobby” was a health-related industry, except for maybe causing “poor health” among its clientele. Oddly enough, Mrs. Daschle has her bases covered: Amgen Inc. manufactures drugs to battle cancer.


Despite these conflicts of interest, Tom Daschle’s appointment is a slam dunk for President Obama. While it’s not actually crossing the line, Daschle’s recent work is close enough to argue the ethics of making a “no lobbyist” pledge to his supporters. ...

http://www.kctribune.com/article.cfm?articleID=18592
•••
Daschle Deja Vu

111th House Democrats Should Dump Pelosi-Do You Agree?

" ... In September, Pelosi joined with Bush to plunder even more of the Treasury for their corporate cronies under the guise of a $700 billion Wall Street bailout. Pelosi with other congressional Democrats stood at the microphones, salivating at the prospect of helping Bush loot the U.S. Treasury. The scene was sickeningly reminiscent of Senate Democratic leaders Tom Daschle and Richard Gephardt, with presidential ambitions on their sleeves, rush to the White House six years earlier embracing Bush and his illegal and immoral preemptive attack on the people of Iraq. ... "
•••
Obama wants House

" ... The 66-year-old House spent the 1970s in D.C., serving under the likes of Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft ... "

By Scott Ross
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28913747/

Webster Bank exec Art House is heeding President Obama's call to service.

House will bring years of experience as a communications expert and in international affairs to his new job as communications director for the Director of National Intelligence, reports The Register Citizen.

"The opportunity, as I see it, is an opportunity to serve the country," House said Tuesday. "Quite honestly, international affairs is my field, and I'm looking forward to becoming re-engaged in it."

The 66-year-old House spent the 1970s in D.C., serving under the likes of Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, and on the staff of three U.S. senators.

House will continue to live in Simsbury, rather than move to Washington.

"The greatest of luxuries is not leaving Connecticut," House said. "That's why they invented Southwest Airlines."
•••
Webster Communications Chief To Take Obama Administration Post
By KENNETH R. GOSSELIN
January 28, 2009

... As communications director, House will work with the House and Senate and the Washington press corps.

"There needs to be some repair work in the perception of how well national intelligence functions, both by the Congress and the public," he said.

House said his salary has not been decided.

House, 66, brings years of experience to the post, having spent all of the 1970s in Washington. That is where he met Blair; they were White House Fellows in the Ford administration. Under Ford, House worked for Brent Scowcroft and with Henry Kissinger as part of the national security staff.

House said he got a call from Blair soon after Obama was elected, saying he had been approached about serving as national intelligence director.

For the past several weeks, House has been splitting his time between Connecticut and Washington, helping Blair prepare for confirmation hearings.

In addition to government service, which included working on the staff of three U.S. senators and an earlier stint as an economist at the World Bank, House has headed corporate communications at Aetna, CIGNA and Tenneco. House has served in corporate communications at Webster for seven years.

"During Art's long affiliation with Webster, it was not uncommon for sitting U.S. senators, candidates for Congress, members of the Washington press corps and the occasional presidential candidate to call for advice on foreign affairs and other matters," Webster's chief administrative officer, Jeffrey Brown, wrote in a recent e-mail to employees announcing House's departure.

House leaves Webster at a time when the company is mired in rising bad loans tied to out-of-market lending. House said he was not seeking to leave the bank, nor was he asked to leave. House said he expects that his position will be filled.

House said he will not move to Washington but commute, coming home to his family in Simsbury on weekends.

"The greatest of luxuries is not leaving Connecticut," House said. "That's why they invented Southwest Airlines."

http://www.courant.com/business/hc-house0128.artjan28,0,5230246.story
•••
www.progress-index

" ... The following cadre or 14, compose an administration of the most solidly entrenched insiders than any previous administration in our history. All three key foreign policy advisors either initially supported the Iraq War or still do. His economic people all maintain close contacts with banking gangsters Bernanke, Rubin, Greenspan, Paulson et al. Obama is himself a member of the Council on Foreign Relations ... "

1. Timothy Geithner - BB, CFR, TC, Head of Private Federal Reserve Bank, NY

2. Paul Volker - BB, CFR, North American Chairman of TC, Associate of Rockefeller’s

3. Rahm Emanuel - Member of Israel: army, investment banker, a director of Freddia Mac

4. Lawrence Summers - BB, CFR, TC, Chief Economist- World Bank, Rockefeller Man.

5. David Axelrod - political fixer

6, Hillary Clinton - BB, TC, CFR, CIA Asset, key figure in MENA ARK Drug Affair.

7. Joseph Biden - BB, CFR. Senator, Zionist. gun grabber

8. Robert Gates - BB, CFR, CIA director, player in Iran-Contra Scandal, named in 1999 lawsuit on Mena Ark. Drug Trafficking Affair

9. Tom Daschle - BB, CFR, CiTi Bank lackey mentored by Robert Rubin

10. Eric Holder - Key person in pardon of racketeer Marc Rich, Deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno and facilitated pardons by Clinton of 12 FALN, Peurto Rican Terrorists

11. Janet Napolitano - CFR, Pro Amnesty and driver’s licenses for illegals, Anita Hill’s attorney against Clarence Thomas, key in the OKC cover-up

12. Gen. James L. Jones - BB, TC, associate of Kissinger, Brzezinski, Bobby Ray Inman, and CIA director John Deutch, memeber of Institute for International Affairs

13. Susan Rice - CFR, member of Aspen Strategy Group (with Richard Armitags, Brent Scowcroft, and Madeleine Albright- all BB, TC, CFR folks), advisorto John Kerry and Michael Dukakis, member of Clinton’s N.S.C.

http://www.progress-index.com/articles/2009/01/19/editorial/doc49747ea8e81f2925542135.txt
•••
Part I - Economic and Budget Policy
By Patrick Martin
www.wsws.org
19 January 2009

Timothy Geithner, treasury secretary

A career government official involved in overseeing financial markets, Geithner is one of three protégés of Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs and until January 9 board member and special counsel at Citigroup) who have been named to top economic and budget positions in the Obama administration. He served in the Clinton administration, helping manage the 1995-96 Mexican peso crisis and the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. He then worked for the International Monetary Fund before his appointment by President Bush to his current position as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which conducts the day-to-day operations of the Fed on Wall Street.

Since the Wall Street meltdown began 18 months ago, with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, Geithner has worked closely with the current treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. During that period, all five of the major New York investment banks—Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns—have been compelled to convert into commercial banks, merged, been taken over or collapsed.

Once confirmed as treasury secretary, Geithner’s first task will be to distribute the second half of the $700 billion bailout for Wall Street approved last year by the Democratic-controlled Congress. Geithner, Paulson and Bernanke headed the bailout effort that funneled the first $350 billion into the coffers of the major banks, as well as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the insurance company American International Group and US auto companies. Geithner will play the lead role in doling out the remaining $350 billion, which was released to the Treasury last week after the Senate defeated a resolution to block further handouts, and is currently involved in plans to further expand the bank bailout.

Lawrence Summers, director of the White House’s National Economic Council

Formerly undersecretary and then secretary of the treasury in the Clinton
administration, Summers was considered the key crisis manager during the Mexican and Asian currency collapses in the late 1990s. A magazine cover at the time depicted Summers, his boss Robert Rubin, then treasury secretary, and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan as “the committee to save the world.” In 1999, the Republican-controlled Congress adopted legislation repealing the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking and imposed other restrictions on banking operations. Summers and the Clinton administration backed this deregulation of financial markets, which contributed to the collapse of 2008.

After leaving government with the end of the Clinton administration, Summers became president of Harvard University, but his stormy tenure came to an abrupt end after a series of clashes with the faculty, which included his now-notorious comments about the supposedly innate differences between male and female students in relation to the most abstract scientific fields, particularly mathematics.

Summers served as a top economic adviser to the Obama campaign but was chosen for the lower-profile White House position, which, unlike treasury secretary, does not require Senate confirmation, in part because of the prospect of contentious questioning about his views on gender. If Fed Chairman Bernanke is not reappointed this year—his term expires next January—Summers is a likely candidate to succeed him.

Paul Volcker, chairman of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board

The 82-year-old former investment banker was the key figure in the Reagan-era onslaught against the working class which, combined with the betrayals of the trade union leadership, destroyed the unions as a significant social force in the United States. Volcker was appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve Board by Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and promptly adopted an inflation-fighting strategy based on driving up interest rates to unprecedented levels (above 20 percent at one point), so that corporations could use the resulting mass unemployment to slash wages and benefits and undermine other hard-won workers’ gains.

During most of Volcker’s eight years at the Fed, he worked in tandem with the Reagan administration in its offensive against the labor movement. He hailed Reagan’s mass firing of the striking air traffic controllers and the destruction of their union, PATCO, as a key turning point in bringing inflation under control. At the worst point in the Volcker-induced recession, in 1982-83, the US unemployment rate approached 10 percent, the highest in the post-World War II era.

In his new position as an Obama adviser, Volcker serves as a guarantor to big business and the financial interests that the new administration will proceed ruthlessly against the working class. The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial last week, suggested that Volcker be given the authority to set new financial regulations. Other business spokesmen have suggested Volcker or someone like him as the new “car czar,” with authority over the bailout of the US auto industry and the accompanying cuts in auto workers’ jobs, wages and benefits.

Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget

The third Robert Rubin acolyte to take a top financial position with Obama, Orszag moves over from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), where he was appointed by the new Democratic majority, elected in 2006. He is regarded as the foremost Democratic Party expert on cutting spending for entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, and has written extensively on the need for fiscal austerity.

Orszag worked in the Clinton White House, first as an economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, then as a special assistant to the president for economic policy. After leaving the Clinton administration, he served as head of the Hamilton Project, a think tank devoted to controlling government spending set up and financed by Robert Rubin.

In an interview on his role at the CBO, he declared, “I have not viewed CBO’s job as just to passively evaluate what Congress proposes, but rather to be an analytical resource. And part of that is to highlight things that are true and that people may not want to hear, including that we need to address health-care costs.”

Mary Schapiro, chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission

A former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) first appointed by Ronald Reagan, Schapiro is a classic case of an industry insider taking over a supposedly independent regulatory agency. After six years on the SEC, Schapiro was appointed chairman of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission by President Clinton in 1994, where she was responsible for regulating the US futures markets in agricultural commodities, metals, energy and financial products. She also served on the President's Working Group on Financial Markets with other top federal officials.

For the past 12 years, after leaving government at the end of Clinton’s first term, Schapiro has worked for the securities industry as an advocate of “self-regulation,” first with the National Association of Securities Dealers, the industry trade association, and most recently as head of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. She served on the board of directors at Duke Energy and Kraft Foods.

A front-page article in the January 15 Wall Street Journal carried the headline “Obama's Pick to Head SEC Has Record of Being a Regulator With a Light Touch,” and noted that “a close examination of Ms. Schapiro's record as a regulator shows she has infrequently pursued tough action against big Wall Street firms.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/cabi-j19.shtml
•••
Who's Who in the Obama Cabinet

Part II - Internal Security

By Tom Eley
20 January 2009

President-elect Obama has assembled a cabinet drawn from the upper echelons of American society and the right wing of the Democratic Party. The right-wing character of the Obama nominees is described by the media under the approving labels of "centrist," "moderate," and—most of all—"pragmatic." This terminology signifies that the incoming Obama team consists entirely of individuals who pass muster with the corporate financial aristocracy.

The New York Times reported Monday that Obama has repeatedly discussed his cabinet selections with his defeated Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, and that McCain has told colleagues "that many of these appointments he would have made himself," according to Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and arch-conservative who has also had input into the formation of the new administration.

McCain, Graham and Co. have a far greater role in the selection of Obama's cabinet than the millions of young people and working people who supported Obama in the belief that he would put an end to the war in Iraq and reverse the right-wing, pro-big business policies of the Bush administration.

Today's series of profiles deals with those cabinet and other high-ranking officials in the incoming administration responsible for the Justice Department, intelligence and Homeland Security—i.e., the domestic repressive functions of the US government.

Eric Holder, attorney general

While Holder is being hailed as the first African-American to hold his position, his selection does not represent a reversal of the anti-democratic policies pursued by the Justice Department under the Bush administration. Holder is a trusted defender of both corporate America in general and the American capitalist state, having served as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration (1997-2001) and then as a high-priced lawyer at Covington & Burling, where he represented an assortment of major corporations.

Most notorious was his role defending the food giant Chiquita Brands International, Inc., whose multimillionaire executives were facing potential charges of aiding terrorism because of their financing and arming of right-wing death squads in Colombia. Using his Justice Department connections—and taking advantage of the Bush administration's sympathy for the Colombian fascists—Holder managed to get Chiquita off the hook with a small fine, despite overwhelming evidence that it had hired gunmen to kidnap, torture and murder Colombian workers, peasants and union officials.

With support emerging from prominent Republicans, it is likely Eric Holder will be confirmed as attorney general in the incoming Obama administration. Holder's nomination has withstood somewhat muted criticism from the Republican right. This related to Holder's involvement, as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, in the presidential pardon for billionaire fugitive investor Marc Rich, as well as in commutations for 16 Puerto Rican nationalists who had been imprisoned for decades on politically motivated convictions for nonviolent crimes.

Republicans announcing their support for Holder include Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who serves on the Judiciary Committee; Mel Martinez of Florida; Frances Townsend, President George W. Bush's homeland security adviser; William P. Barr, attorney general under President George H.W. Bush; and Larry Thompson, who served as attorney general in the current Bush administration. After Holder expressed agreement with Sen. Lindsey Graham that the nation is at war with terrorists, Graham responded, "I'm almost ready to vote for you right now."

Republicans may fondly remember Holder's critical role in expanding an independent counsel's investigation of Bill Clinton that ultimately led to his impeachment over his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Holder advised then-Attorney General Janet Reno to allow for the expansion of the investigation's scope.

Under John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and Michael Mukasey in the Bush administration, the office of attorney general served as a center of conspiracy against democratic rights, authorizing torture, illegal wiretapping, and firing United States Attorneys who did not completely toe the Bush administration line, among other nefarious activities. Holder will attempt to effect a change of image. In congressional hearings, he said that he considered "waterboarding"—that is, drowning—torture. The Bush administration has defended the procedure as a "harsh interrogation method."

However, in other areas, Holder has made clear that he intends to carry on the policies of the Bush administration. He both supported the initial passage of the Patriot Act in 2001 and played a key role in the talks that led to its reauthorization in 2005—when Obama himself voted for it.

As attorney general, Holder would be obliged to investigate the crimes of the Bush administration. In his nomination hearings, he said he would do no such thing. "The decisions that were made by a prior administration were difficult ones," he said. "It is an easy thing for somebody to look back in hindsight and be critical of the decisions that were made." He indicated that, while he favors closing the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, this will be a lengthy process in which prisoners' legal status will remain indeterminate.

Leon Panetta, director of the Central Intelligence Agency

Panetta was a surprise selection to be the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the US spy agency and long a center of counterrevolution, because of his lack of hands-on experience in intelligence work. This was almost a requirement for the job, however, under the current circumstances, since Obama was seeking to rehabilitate the image of an agency that has become identified worldwide with kidnapping, secret imprisonment and torture. Obama initially intended to name a CIA veteran, John Brennan, who was the candidate's top intelligence adviser, but Brennan faced criticism over his role in decisions on interrogation during the Bush administration.

Panetta would play the same political role as George H.W. Bush, another "outsider" but a trusted ruling class figure, brought in to refurbish the agency after the assassination scandals of the early 1970s. He began his political career as a Republican working in the administration of Richard Nixon, but switched to the Democratic Party in 1971, and was elected to the US Congress from California in 1976, serving there for 16 years and specializing in budgetary matters. Clinton chose him as his first director of the United States Office of Management and Budget.

In 1994, Panetta became White House chief of staff, serving in that capacity until 1997, the critical years in which Clinton governed in collaboration with the Republican congressional leadership that took control of Congress in 1994. The single "achievement" of those years was the elimination of the federal welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, in a bipartisan deal.

More recently, Panetta has shifted his focus to foreign affairs, working as a member of the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan establishment group that sought, beginning in 2006, to effect a tactical change in US policies in Iraq.

Also serving on the group were Robert Gates, secretary of defense in both the Bush and Obama administrations, and former secretary of state in the first Bush administration, James Baker.

Admiral Dennis C. Blair, director of National Intelligence

Blair is one of a record four retired military officers chosen for high positions in the Obama administration, and the second Navy man in a row, following retired Vice Admiral Michael McConnell, to hold the position of DNI, created to oversee the entire intelligence establishment in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Blair is a career military man who rose to the rank of commander-in-chief of United States Pacific Command, which is the highest-ranking position for all US forces in the Asia-Pacific region. He also served as director of the joint staff in the Office of the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff. After retiring from the US Navy in 2002, Blair has been involved in US military and foreign policy circles, holding a chair at the US Army War College and serving on and holding a chair at a geo-strategic think tank, the National Bureau of Asian Research. He also served as president of the important US-government think tank, Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA).

Blair could be prosecuted for war crimes in relationship to the 1999 East Timor massacres, which took place during his period as head of the Pacific Command. Apparently, Blair disobeyed orders from the Clinton administration on two occasions. As the massacres against the pro-independence movement in East Timor became an embarrassment for the Clinton administration, which presented its simultaneous imperialist adventure against Yugoslavia as a "humanitarian mission," Clinton called on Blair to meet with General Wiranto, head of the Indonesian military, and order him to end support for the pro-Indonesian militia. Blair instead presented Wiranto with an offer of increased military assistance and invited the Indonesian strongman to be his personal guest in Hawaii. Wiranto took this as an American blessing for an escalation of violence in East Timor.

When State Department officials learned that Blair had not delivered the message to Wiranto, they called on him to do so again. Again he refused. Only several months later, after many more independence supporters had been killed, did Blair act to cut off US military assistance to the Indonesian army.

Blair's career also highlights the incestuous relationship between the military and the defense industry. In 2006, the US Department of Defense inspector general determined Blair had violated IDA's Conflict of Interest regulations by recommending the US government purchase production contracts for F22 Raptors. Blair served as the president of the IDA, which made the recommendation, and on the board of directors for EDO Corporation, which did subcontracting work on the F22. He received only a slap on the wrist, and there is no congressional opposition to his appointment.

Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security

The two-term governor of Arizona, Napolitano has built a reputation for being "pro-business" and a proponent of increased militarization of the US border with Mexico, much of which lies in her state. In state politics, Napolitano supported Arizona's ban on same-sex marriages, opposed restrictions on gun ownership, and supported the death penalty. Her nomination has been warmly received by the Republican Party, with Arizona's two Republican senators, Jon Kyl and John McCain, lobbying on her behalf.

Napolitano has criticized the "Federal government's failure to fulfill its responsibilities in securing our border," and it is her supposed expertise on immigration that was her prime qualification for the Department of Homeland Security. Napolitano made her political name in Arizona through her opposition to immigration, signing into law reactionary legislation that made possible the prosecution of illegal immigrants as felons. She also deployed the Arizona National Guard along the border with Mexico, winning praise from anti-immigration zealots.

In questioning during Congressional hearings related to her nomination, Napolitano spoke in favor of the militarization of the Mexican border, saying that border fences should be used to separate urban areas from Mexico, but that higher technology should be used in the more remote expanses of the border area. She did not oppose the "Real ID program," which would create an internal passport system in the US, saying only that the financial burden it will impose on states needs to be lessened.

Napolitano leaves Arizona just as the state budget has been plunged into crisis by the economic slump, and in particular the housing crisis. The state faces a current deficit of $1.25 billion and a deficit of $2.65 billion for 2010. Napolitano has proposed major cuts to higher education to lessen the deficits. As part of proposed spending cuts of $975 million, $100 million would be cut from the state's university system and $40 million from community colleges. Also, $145 million will be slashed from the state highway fund.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/secu-j20.shtml

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Lying Torture Advocate John Brennan is Obama's Choice for "Counter-Terrorism" Adviser

By Alex Constantine

To our federal parapolitical intelligence agencies, "Counter-Terrorism" means terrorism.

Brennan's colleagues were instrumental in the actual 9/11 covert operation, as opposed to the "Islamo-fascist" farce passed off to the proletariat. As CIA director, he would have been ideally situated to sustain groomed public perceptions and generally advance an agenda that would endanger national security profoundly.

As it is, the CIA poses an enormous national security threat, and holocaust "ethics" will rule so long as these unconscionable "games" are played. Abolishment of the CIA and prosecution of its heinous crimes are the only solution to cockroach rule.

- AC

Brennan is not a mere government employee. Now, to the press that blamed "lying liberal bloggers" and ran with Brennan's phony disavowal that he advocated torture under Bush - he has been promoted to media "Personality":

Personality Spotlight: John Brennan

"WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 (UPI) -- U.S. President-elect Barack Obama said Friday his foreign policy and intelligence adviser, CIA veteran John O. Brennan, will be his counter-terrorism adviser. Brennan was as interim director of the National Counter-terrorism Center immediately after its creation, and since 2005 has served as CEO of The Analysis Corp. .... Since 2007, Brennan has served as chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. ... "

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/01/09/Personality_Spotlight_John_Brennan/UPI-43941231543983/

AFFILIATED COMPUTER SERVICES (ACS - CLOSELY LINKED TO CIA, RESPONSIBLE FOR TORTURE AT GUANTANAMO BAY, AND A HOST OF POLITICAL/TERRORISM SCANDALS) LIKES BRENNAN)

John Brennan Appointed Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security
BY JD KATHURIA
JANUARY 12TH, 2009

President-elect Barack Obama has announced that John Brennan will serve as White House homeland security adviser and deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism. 
 A 25-year veteran of the CIA, Brennan transitioned in recent years to the private sector, where he has worked as president of The Analysis Corporation (TAC). His pick as head homeland security adviser and national security adviser for counterterrorism comes as welcome news to many in the national security and counterterrorism community. Here’s a roundup of what several industry leaders are telling ExecutiveBiz:

Joe Doherty, EVP/Group President, ACS Government Solutions: “Brennan’s private-sector and longtime CIA experience make him uniquely qualified to counsel the president. In addition, his view from the outside, combined with the structure of the appointment … will give Mr. Obama a well-rounded understanding of the realities and role that private contractors play in counterterrorism efforts.” ...

http://blog.executivebiz.com/john-brennan-appointed-deputy-national-security-adviser-for-homeland-security/1146
•••
Bang-bang, shoot-shoot

John Brennan, chief executive officer of the Analysis Corp., [was] rumored to be a possible candidate for CIA director in the Obama administration, reports The Washington Post.

Brennan is a former top CIA official who helped establish the National Counterterrorism Center in 2004. He left the agency in 2005 to become CEO of Analysis Corp. ...

Ironically, in March, an Analysis Corp. employee working at the State Department was accused of improperly accessing Barack Obama’s passport file. In a statement at the time, Analysis Corp. said, “We deeply regret that the incident occurred and believe it is an isolated incident.” ...

He served as an advisor to the Obama campaign on national security and is the head of Obama’s intelligence transition team. ...

http://www.washingtontechnology.com/online/1_1/33920-1.html
•••••••
Re SFA, Inc., Brennan, George Tenet, Bush & the National Review:

... That “consultant,” is John O. Brennan, a veteran intelligence official who served as former CIA Director George Tenet’s right-hand man in both the Clinton and Bush administrations." ...

Brennan is the president and CEO of the national-security consulting firm The Analysis Corp., which is owned by an even larger spook-assistance firm called SFA Inc. — which last year was acquired by a British firm called the Global Strategies Group. ...

John Hillen

The president of Global Strategies Group (USA) LLC is John Hillen, a former high-level State Department employee who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs from 2005-2007 — just prior to being tapped to lead Global Strategies’ U.S. operations.

Hillen also is a former contributor to the neo-con mouthpiece publication the National Review and served as an advisor on defense policy to George W. Bush’ 2000 presidential campaign.

Upon Hillen’s appointment to the State Department post in 2005, National Review ran the following short announcement:

John Hillen, an NR contributing editor, has been nominated by President Bush to be assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs. Hillen earned a Ph.D. at Oxford in international affairs, and a Bronze Star in the Persian Gulf War for his role in leading a cavalry unit that went into Iraq ahead of the main invasion force

We regret that our formal association with him will be suspended, but are delighted that the State Department is getting the services of such a solid conservative and fine foreign-policy mind.

An interview published in the July/August 2004 issue of Duke Magazine, Hillen’s alma mater, offers the following insight into Hillen’s character:
In March 1999, John Hillen testified before the House of Representatives' Committee on Armed Services. "It is well worth thinking now about how to handle an Iraq on the brink of developing nuclear weapons," said Hillen, then a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "A pre-emptive invasion of Iraq might then be our least-worst course of action."

... Hillen is "one of the leading younger defense policy intellectuals in the Republican camp," says Duke political scientist Peter Feaver. "If Bush were to win in 2004, you'd expect he would be positioned to take a post."

"It's possible, it's possible," admits Hillen, who says he has long aspired to become assistant secretary of defense. "I certainly intend to serve again in my career as a public servant."

http://www.campusactivism.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=893&start=90
•••••••
SFA, Inc. and Skadden Arps:

Attorneys at Skadden have long-standing relationships with representatives from the U.S. government, including the executive branch agencies that comprise CFIUS — a critical element to a successful outcome. Skadden attorneys also speak and write frequently on developments regarding the CFIUS review process.

Clients that Skadden has represented in the CFIUS review process during the past several years include the following, among others ...

British-owned Global Strategies Group on its acquisition of SFA, Inc., a leading U.S. defense technology provider

http://www.skadden.com/mobile/index.cfm?pageview=practiceDetail&practiceID=101
•••••••
MICHAEL DELONEY – PRESIDENT, GLOBAL STRATEGIES GROUP (INTEGRATED SECURITY) INC. [Owns SFA, Inc.]

Mike is the President of Global Strategies Group (Integrated Security) Inc. (GUSIS) headquartered in Northern Virginia, USA. ... Prior to GLOBAL, Mike’s previous industry employment was with SAIC, Unisys, Computer
Sciences Corporation (CSC)
and CACI
.

http://www.globalgroup.com/user-assets/Documents/Mike%20Deloney%20-%20Website%20Biography.pdf
•••••••
A Global Securities Group Director was Behind the launch of ManTech

RON JONES – MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS, GLOBAL STRATEGIES GROUP (NORTH AMERICA) INC. AND PRESIDENT, TECHNOLOGY & SYSTEMS

... Prior to GLOBAL, Ron was Senior Vice President, Strategy & Corporate Development, and a member of the Board of Directors for Gray Hawk Systems, Inc. Ron helped build and transform Gray Hawk as a national security technology company, until he initiated, led, developed, and closed the strategic sale of Gray Hawk Systems to ManTech (NASDAQ: MANT), helping them to launch ManTech into the counter-terrorism community ....

http://www.globalgroup.com/user-assets/Documents/Ron%20Jones%20-%20Website%20Biography.pdf

Richard Armitage and ManTech

... Shortly after leaving government in 2005, Richard Armitage was recruited to the board of directors of ManTech International, a $1.7 billion corporation that does extensive work for the National Security Agency and other intelligence collection agencies. He's also since advised two private equity funds with significant holdings in intelligence enterprises. Veritas Capital, where Armitage served as a senior adviser from 2005 to 2007, owns intelligence consultant McNeil Technologies Inc. and DynCorp International, an important security contractor in Iraq. For a time, Veritas also owned MZM, Inc., the CIA and defense intelligence contractor that was caught -- before the Veritas acquisition -- bribing former Republican Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham. ...

Re ManTech: Congressman Rick Renzi (R-AR), "one of House's most vocal advocates for increased funding for the DHS, is the son of the ManTech executive vice-president Eugene Renzi. ManTech was charged with developing an information-sharing system which is called the US public and private partnership (US P3), which links public-sector agencies and private sector to "significantly strengthen the flow of real-time threat information to state, local, and private sector partners, and provides a platform for communities through the classified SECRET level to state offices. ... "
http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2007/07/privatizing-leviathan-immigration-state.html
•••••••
9/11/Post-911 Propaganda

JACQUES S. GANSLER – FORMER UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR ACQUISITION, TECHNOLOGY AND LOGISTICS; MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS, GLOBAL STRATEGIES GROUP (NORTH AMERICA) INC.

Jacques Gansler, former Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, is the first holder of the Roger C. Lipitz Chair in Public Policy and Private Enterprise. As the third ranking civilian at the Pentagon from 1997 to 2001 ...

Prior to his appointment, Dr. Gansler served as the Executive Vice President and Director for TASC Incorporated [a Litton subsidiary], an applied information technology company. He also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Material Acquisition); Assistant Director of Defense Research and Engineering (Electronics); Vice President of LT.T.; Program Manager at the Singer Corporation; and Engineering Manager for the Raytheon Corporation. ...

http://www.globalgroup.com/user-assets/Documents/Jacques%20Gansler%20-%20Website%20Biography.pdf

Partnership: Northrop Grumman Information Technology-TASC, Inc.

Today, they do biometrics.

At the turn of the century, researcher Nico Haupt contends, NGIT-LOGICON-TASC laid the groundwork for 9/11.

On board of General Motors – a SAM holding [Southern Asset Management: financed the controversial Path to 9/11 propaganda video] you find one of the powerbrokers of military industry: Kent Kresa from Northrop Grumman [and NG-Logicon-TASC]. Kresa handled the most important aquisitions of Northrop Grumman.

Logicon (a Northrop-Grumman subsidiary) TASC, Inc. was cobbled together by Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., Titan, Boeing, EDS, manufacturer of e-voting machines, Neil Armstrong's Veridian, and several other tech contractors. Logicon was a partner in the Eagle Alliance, the NSA-revamping group that included ACS, CACI, TRW, ManTech, etc., led by the aforementioned Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC).

These, together with Raytheon and a number intelligence-related high-tech fronts, were instrumental in the 9/11 operation, Haupt maintains.

In bestowing power upon them, ChoicePoint is a critical element here, and CP is directed by Kenneth Langone, the Tricon/Yum! Brands (held by "The Path to 9/11" sponsor SAM) and former NY Stock Exchange director. (Yum! Brands began as Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc. an independent, publicly-traded company that spun-off from PepsiCo, the Tom Kean ((9/11 Commission)) haunt....)

http://truthmovecom.blogspot.com/2008/05/path-to-911-part-8-southeastern-asset.html

JACK DEVINE - FOUNDING PARTNER AND PRESIDENT OF THE ARKIN GROUP LLC; MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS, GLOBAL STRATEGIES GROUP (NORTH AMERICA) INC.

Jack Devine is a founding partner and President of The Arkin Group LLC, which specializes in international crisis management, strategic intelligence, investigative research and business problem solving. ... He is a recognised expert in intelligence matters and has written Op-Ed articles for The Washington Post, The Financial Times and The Miami Herald. He has also made guest appearances on CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Fox News, as well as the History & Discovery channels, PBS & ABC Radio. ...

http://www.globalgroup.com/user-assets/Documents/Jack%20Devine%20-%20Website%20Biography.pdf

Jack Devine and Pinochet

Jack Devine was stationed in Chile during the [Allendé] coup as part of the Agency's Chile task force. He is now a crisis management consultant in New York with the firm The Arkin Group.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x106324

MORE ON JACK DEVINE:

... Mr. Devine served as both Acting Director and Associate Director of CIA’s operations outside the United States from 1993-1995, where he had supervisory authority over thousands of CIA employees involved in sensitive missions throughout the world. From 1995 through 1998, Mr. Devine was the senior CIA representative in Great Britain at the U.S. Embassy in London. In addition, he served as Chief of the Latin American Division from 1992-1993 and was the principal manager of the CIA’s sensitive projects in Latin America.

Between 1990 and 1992, Mr. Devine headed the CIA’s Counternarcotics Center, which was responsible for coordinating and building close cooperation between all major U.S. and foreign law enforcement agencies in tracking worldwide narcotics and crime organisations. From 1985-1987, Mr. Devine headed the CIA’s Afghan Task Force, which successfully countered Soviet aggression in the region. In 1987, he was awarded the CIA’s Meritorious Officer Award for this accomplishment.

Mr. Devine’s international experience with the U.S. government included postings to the United Kingdom, Italy, Argentina, Venezuela, The Dominican Republic, Mexico and Chile. During his more than 30 years with the CIA, Mr. Devine was involved in organising, planning and executing countless sensitive projects in virtually all areas of intelligence, including analysis, operations, technology and management. ...

http://www.globalgroup.com/user-assets/Documents/Jack%20Devine%20-%20Website%20Biography.pdf

DEVINE IS YET ANOTHER CIA PROPAGANDIST:

To ensure national security, strengthen the CIA
Jack Devine and Stanley Arkin
Miami Herald op-ed/22 Jul 04

" ... Instead of trying to run the CIA on the cheap, as we have for 25 years, it is time to bolster its resources -- in terms of people, money and authority ... "
http://www.cicentre.com/CI_NEWS/2004_CI_News_Archive/NEWS_2004_July_18_to_24.htm

DALE DAVIS – MANAGING DIRECTOR, AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST OF GLOBAL STRATEGIES GROUP (MIDDLE EAST) FZE

Davis is the author of The Obligation of Empire: United States' Grand Strategy for a New Century. published by the University of Kentucky Press.

http://www.globalgroup.com/user-assets/Documents/Dale%20Davis%20-%20Website%20Biography.pdf
•••••••
ALSO SEE: "John O. Brennan 9/11 commission statement"

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Profiles of America's Beloved TV Celebrities (32) - Bill Moyers, CIA "Liberal" & Nazi Joseph Campbell

By Alex Constantine

The Power of the Bill Moyers Myth - Who will Tell Amy Goodman?

On PBS, Moyers promotes the work of the late fascist eugenicist Joseph Campbell, a vicious anti-Semite who has proposed relocating Jewish people to the moon. Moyers seems to have no problem with that, though - as long as his audience doesn't know and he continues to reap his share of Campbell's book profits UNDER THE TABLE, a massive perk that he has publicly denied ...


Bill Moyers is the most visible "liberal" in the national media, and Amy Goodman's icon of progressive journalism. The Schumann Foundation, chaired by Moyers for years, has been busily shaping the mass-market progressive press. Television Quarterly, a journal of The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, ranks Moyers among the ten journalists who have most influenced television news. He has won more than 30 Emmys, a George Peabody award, a Ralph Lowell medal and the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel. His documentaries have paid off handsomely in network fund drives. Several of his books have been best-sellers. The avuncular Moyers, a former Baptist minister from Marshall, Texas, has been an Arthur Morse Fellow at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies and a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation's International Social Research Institute.

But Moyers does not exactly fit the traditional liberal profile. Morley Safer of 60 Minutes fame recalls that, as President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary, Moyers was responsible for the FBI's bugging of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the leaking of transcripts to the media. Moyers denied the bugging and leaking allegations in a letter to The New Republic in 1991, but did allow that he leaked "information" only to "officials involved in national security." This much was confirmed by a Senate Intelligence Committee staff report released in 1976: "Moyers expressly approved the circulation within the Executive Branch of a secret FBI report on King."

Moyers was also the instigator of a disgraceful episode at the White House, one that anticipated Nixon's "dirty tricks." His pissing match with Safer began in August, 1965, when CBS News reported that U.S. Marines had torched a village in Vietnam. The story was followed by public indignation and it fed the rising opposition to Johnson's escalation policy. CBS president Frank Stanton was called on the carpet for the exposé at a private meeting with LBJ and his Kennedy-coifed aide. LBJ told Stanton that Moyers had a damaging file on Safer compiled from the records of the FBI, CIA and Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The extortion "file" was an idle threat - it didn't exist. Unless Safer "cleaned up his act," the administration would "go public" with the CBS reporter's "communist ties." Safer scoffed at the accusation and held his job at CBS. Today, Moyers waves off the episode as "a bluff."

McGeorge Bundy

Public television's premiere "liberal" is as practiced at the art of deception as he is blackmail. In October, 1977, Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame reported in Rolling Stone that Bill Moyers ran a "super-secret" CIA task force mustered to study the feasibility of short-waving propaganda to the People's Republic of China. The project was overseen by the CIA's Cord Meyer, McGeorge Bundy, a national security advisor to Johnson, USIA director John Marks and Moyers.

He certainly wore hawk feathers when taped in the White House by LBJ: "Mr. President, I would like to suggest that you really keep pressure on Bundy and Rusk and McCone and others to press forward on what we can do about Cuba - about subversion, espionage and intelligence. Now there are two reasons for this: One, I think we've got to do it. It's necessary. Cuba has got to be dealt with..."

"Moyers regards himself as the "catalyst' of the Johnson administration," Current Biography (1966 edition) reported, "and Johnson has described him as my vice-president in charge of anything.'" Vice President Moyers became Hoover's pipeline to Johnson in 1964, after Walter Jenkins, his predecessor, was busted for "disorderly conduct" in a Beltway men's room.

Moyers dropped from the sinking Johnson administration in 1967 to become publisher of Newsday in Long Island, then owned by millionaire Harry Guggenheim. Two years passed and Guggenheim confided to Moyers his intent in selling the newspaper. In an attempt to save his job, Moyers tried to interest CIA director William Casey, Chase Manhattan Bank, the New York Times and Time-Life in buying it. He moved on to PBS the same year – after Guggenheim reneged on bequeathing him his fortune, as promised – and joined the board of the Rockefeller Foundation where he remained for 17 years. In 1980, Moyers produced The World of David Rockefeller, an unabashed PR whitewash.

In 1976, CBS forgave his White House antics and drafted Moyers to the news division. Employees of the network recall him as "brilliant" ... also "duplicitous," "calculating," "cunning." Gordon Van Sauter, a right-wing CBS executive, recollects "a truly reprehensible human being." The multi-faceted news analyst dropped CBS two years later for PBS.

In 1981, he bugged out once again when his contract at Bill Moyers' Journal expired and returned to CBS News. He passed through the revolving door, from corporate compromise to public pabulum, for years. "Everybody calls me Hamlet," he explains of his own seeming indecisiveness, "but I call it brilliance."

Say what you will of Bill Moyers, his Muckrake Lite approach (fascism in government? No mention of the obvious ...) has actually served the public interest on occasion. His October, 1973 "Essay on Watergate," delivered on a program funded by the Ford Foundation, was a dirge that warmed the republic to Nixon's impending political collapse. His documentaries, What Can We Do About Violence?, Minimum Wages, and The Secret Government (it didn't tell the half the story) served the commonweal in their fashion.

But it is the larceny in his heart that TV Guide does not probe. Nowhere was his dark side more apparent than in his series of highly-publicized interviews with famed mythologist Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). A book based on the series was an immediate best-seller. Ruppert Murdoch's New York Post found it "provocative and inspirational." Truth to tell, The Power of Myth was an inspirational but deceitful promotion of a Nazi occultist and a vicious anti-Semite with ties to the American neo-Nazi underground. Promotion of the book was a display of greed that would put a blush on the face of a fugitive financier.

After the series aired, the September 28, 1989 number of New York Review of Books published an article by Brendan Gill, a long-time friend of Campbell's at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Gill reports that in December 1941, three days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Campbell delivered a talk discouraging students from supporting American entrance into the war with Nazi Germany. Campbell soiled German author Thomas Mann, an exile in the States who had "lost altitude" as a writer by criticizing the Nazi Party. Mann, in a letter to Campbell, responded that he found this rebuke "strange," and pointed out that his books were "forbidden in Germany and in all countries that Germany rules, and whoever reads them or even should sell them, and whoever would so much as praise my name publicly would be put into a concentration camp and his teeth would be bashed in and his kidneys split in two. You teach that we must not get upset about that ... once again, this is strange."

Not necessarily, considering Campbell's acute and unswerving anti-Semitism. Ms Carol Wallace recalled in a letter to NYRB: "In the early 1970s, I worked with Joe Campbell on his Mythic Image at Princeton University Press. It was amazing to me that this man of cosmic vision could harbor such mean-spirited and seemingly unexamined biases against much of humankind. In addition to anti-Semitism, I remember in particular his vexation over blacks' being admitted to Sarah Lawrence."

"When the astronauts landed on the moon," Gill recalled, "Joe made the repellent jest to a member of my family, who was a student of his at the time, that the moon would be a good place to put the Jews..."

A correspondent, Carol Luther of San Anselmo, California, wrote Gill to say that she once "attended a lecture in which Campbell recounted what he called a popular Indian fable (a favorite of Campbell's in old age), the gist of which was that we are not all mere mild grass-eating goats but, instead, are blood-thirsty, carnivorous tigers, who do well to prey upon whatever lower species of animal makes up our natural diet." Incited, Luther "rose shaking from my chair and shouted, 'What about the six million [Jews] who were gassed during World War II?'" In response, Campbell simply shrugged and spat, "That's your problem."

Joseph Campbell not only shrugged off the Holocaust – he was a major force in the racial eugenics movement until his death in 1987. For many years he sat on the editorial board of Mankind Quarterly, the notorious "race journal" subsidized by the notorious Pioneer Fund. The Quarterly's founder, Robert Gayre, held that African-Americans are "worthless." The Quarterly was long published by Roger Pearson, an official of the pro-fascist Northern League, an organization that included among its ranks a number of veterans of Himmler's SS. Other prominent academics who contributed to the journal: Henry Garrett of the White Citizens Council, Ottmar von Verschuer, Josef Mengele's mentor, and Corrado Gini, an Italian biologist under Mussolini, author of The Scientific Basis of Fascism.

But here he was on the "public" airwaves, discussing Buddha and the Burmese Snake Goddess and following his bliss with an obsequious, doe-eyed Bill Moyers.

Even the Campbell approach to myth recalled Nazi Germany – handed down from Carl Jung, a CIA recruit, former editor of the ranking psychiatric journal of the National Socialist Party, whose books, translated in the United States with funding from Edith Rockefeller, reek of proto-Nazi occultism.

The Power of Myth still reaps a windfall in donations to the network and its affiliates. A book based on the series was co-authored and edited with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis by a consultant to the series, Betty-Sue Flowers, a former English professor at the University of Texas and director of the LBJ Library. John Trimble, a UT English professor who has known her for 30 years, calls Flowers "the female Bill Moyers." Like the original, she is comfortable in the boardroom and knows her way around Washington. The Austin American Statesman observed on April 7, 2002 that Flowers travels "in the world of multinational corporations – and once spent a couple of weeks in the Pentagon as a special advisor to the secretary of the Navy. "

The "female Bill Moyers" sits on the boards of Breckenridge Petroleum Co. Also the Arlington Institute, a research center in Virginia with blue-chip corporate and federal clients, a distinction Flowers shares with former CIA director James Woolsey, Gerald Ford appointee George H. Kuper, and Colin Crook, former chief technologist at Citicorp. The institute was founded in 1989 by John Peterson, formerly an official of the Institute for National Security Studies, the office of the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council.

Like Joseph Campbell, Ms. Flowers is enrolled in the Jung school of comparative religion. Besides The Power of Myth, she edited Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (1996), a Jungian romp for corporate executives by tin-horn visionary Joseph Jaworski, son of the Watergate prosecutor appointed by then Attorney General Robert Bork, Leon Jaworski.

Fascination with Nazis is apparently imprinted on the Jaworski phenotype. A repugnant hallmark of Leon Jaworski's career was his release of Nazis to the American intelligence services as a Nuremberg war crimes trial prosecutor.

He also worked with the Red Cross International Rescue Division to relocate SS officers around the world. In exchange, he was made chairman of Houston's Red Cross chapter in 1954. Other blots on the old man's résumé include his legal work for the Warren Commission. Despite a career of collaboration with fascists, he was endowed with every honor the legal profession has to offer. He was "very close" friend of George H.W. Bush, and supported his fellow Houstonian in his 1980 bid for president.

"The constant act of being true to oneself – authentic in thought, work and deed – is what carves the path in front of you, a path you can't predict," Flowers says. Who could predict that the bubbly former beauty pageant contestant, feminist, poet and Jungian from Austin would make a splash promoting the work of a Nazi mystic for PBS, and pouring on a lubricious New Age veneer?

Perdido magazine had it in a review of Synchronicity: "Jaworski begins by telling the story of his father, Leon Jaworski, a nationally prominent litigator, and his role as special prosecutor during the Watergate scandal. 'The Colonel,' as Jaworski called his father, related the dimensions of the conspiracy to his son one day, before the details of the Watergate tapes became public. Watergate marked a significant revelation in Joe Jaworski's life, the realization that a crisis in leadership existed in this country. With an immensely personal style, Jaworski examines the experiences of his life that seemed to transcend the moment, that were guided by some unseen hand." In 1990, Jasworski was hired by Royal Dutch/Shell Oil in London to direct a multinational panel on future "global scenarios."

Jung defined synchronicity as "a meaningful coincidence of two or more events, where something other than the probability of chance is involved."

Synchronicity

Every turn in this story leaves chance begging for something to do. The main beneficiary in the pimping of Joseph Campbell was the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) when presided over by Robert Coonrod. Coonrod was executive VP and chief operating officer of Voice of America for five years. In 1992 ,VOA director Richard Carlson moved to CPB and Coonrod followed. When Carlson set sail in April, 1997 to run King World Public Television, Coonrod was promoted to head up CPB.

Under President George W. Bush, the CPB was overseen for one year by CEO Kathleen Cox. Executive vice president and CEO Ken Ferree succeeded her as interim president in April 2005. Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, told Media Week that Cox’s departure was integral to a plan to bring public television and radio into line with right-wing policies. "The ideologically driven majority on the board is pursuing a zealous campaign to promote conservative/GOP-approved public broadcasting programming,” Chester said. Ferree, who hailed from Michael Powell's FCC, joined the CPB one month before his the promotion was announced. At the FCC, Ferree served as chief of the media division, where he paved the way for greater corporate control of the airwaves.