Everyone has their hits and faves from the past like the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time (with Citizen Kane at #1). TomDispatch is no exception. While the AFI has 100 years of film to work with, we have a more modest 10 years of “Tomgrams,” but that doesn’t stop us. Each summer as the heat builds and vacation time arrives, we offer a few TD “classics” of our own. Think of many of them as part of a series with a rubric like: the top 10 nightmares of our truncated “American Century.”
Without any question, among them, the late, great Chalmers Johnson’s 2004 account of how we fought our first Afghan war and so created a world ripe for our second Afghan War (still ongoing) ranks high. After all, seldom has anyone answered better than Johnson did seven and a half years ago questions like: Why, for 20 of the last 32 years, have we ended up fighting wars in a country to which few Americans had previously paid the slightest attention? How could we have armed and supported a whole crew of Islamic fundamentalists in the first of those wars who would be our enemies in the second? How did we end up with hijacked planes taking down towers on American soil in 2001? How, in response, did we launch a “global war on terror” that shows no sign of ending?
And here’s the saddest part of the story, if you even care to think about it (and these days few Americans do): we’re not done yet. The Afghan War goes on and on. Yes, the security forces we’re building up in that country are regularly deserting or blowing away our trainers and advisers; our reconstruction projects are, as they’ve long been, as they were in Iraq, a joke; the U.S. military has proven incapable of suppressing the minority insurgency it faces; and the corruption our money has engendered is staggering in an otherwise still poverty-stricken land. And yet our leaders are planning to leave U.S. trainers, advisors, and bases in Afghanistan until at least 2020.
We’re living amid the detritus of a world changed radically by Washington’s Afghan decisions of the 1980s, and who knows whom exactly we’re arming at staggering cost (or blowing away) these days, laying the groundwork for yet more nightmares. Too bad no one listened to Johnson, who would have been 81 on August 6th, when he first put the word “blowback,” originally a term of CIA tradecraft, into our vocabularies with his trademark bestselling book of the same name. If he were alive today, he would be grimly amused by a nation that preferred the possible road to bankruptcy and disaster to calling it quits and licking its wounds. He, like Gore Vidal, was a crucial analyst of of American imperial decline and he’s sorely missed. But today, briefly, he’s back with us, offering a history that, sadly, is as relevant now as it was in 2004. Tom
Abolish the CIA!
By Chalmers JohnsonSteve Coll ends his important book on Afghanistan by quoting Afghan President Hamid Karzai: "What an unlucky country." Americans might find this a convenient way to ignore what their government did in Afghanistan between 1979 and the present, but luck had nothing to do with it. Brutal, incompetent, secret operations of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, frequently manipulated by the military intelligence agencies of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, caused the catastrophic devastation of this poor country. On the evidence contained in Coll's book Ghost Wars, neither the Americans nor their victims in numerous Muslim and Third World countries will ever know peace until the Central Intelligence Agency has been abolished.
It should by now be generally accepted that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979 was deliberately provoked by the United States. In his memoir published in 1996, the former CIA director Robert Gates made it clear that the American intelligence services began to aid the mujahidin guerrillas not after the Soviet invasion, but six months before it. In an interview two years later with Le Nouvel Observateur, President Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski proudly confirmed Gates' assertion. "According to the official version of history," Brzezinski said, "CIA aid to the mujahidin began during 1980, that's to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality, kept secret until now, is completely different: on 3 July 1979 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention."
Asked whether he in any way regretted these actions, Brzezinski replied: "Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: 'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.'"
Nouvel Observateur: "And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?"
Brzezinski: "What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"
Even though the demise of the Soviet Union owes more to Mikhail Gorbachev than to Afghanistan's partisans, Brzezinski certainly helped produce "agitated Muslims," and the consequences have been obvious ever since. Carter, Brzezinski and their successors in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, including Gates, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Colin Powell, all bear some responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees, and 10 million unexploded land-mines that followed from their decisions. They must also share the blame for the blowback that struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. After all, al-Qaida was an organization they helped create and arm.
A Wind Blows in from Afghanistan
The term "blowback" first appeared in a classified CIA post-action report on the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, carried out in the interests of British Petroleum. In 2000, James Risen of the New York Times explained: "When the Central Intelligence Agency helped overthrow Muhammad Mossadegh as Iran's prime minister in 1953, ensuring another 25 years of rule for Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the CIA was already figuring that its first effort to topple a foreign government would not be its last. The CIA, then just six years old and deeply committed to winning the Cold War, viewed its covert action in Iran as a blueprint for coup plots elsewhere around the world, and so commissioned a secret history to detail for future generations of CIA operatives how it had been done . . . Amid the sometimes curious argot of the spy world -- 'safebases' and 'assets' and the like -- the CIA warns of the possibilities of 'blowback.' The word . . . has since come into use as shorthand for the unintended consequences of covert operations."
"Blowback" does not refer simply to reactions to historical events but more specifically to reactions to operations carried out by the U.S. government that are kept secret from the American public and from most of their representatives in Congress. This means that when civilians become victims of a retaliatory strike, they are at first unable to put it in context or to understand the sequence of events that led up to it. Even though the American people may not know what has been done in their name, those on the receiving end certainly do: they include the people of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959 to the present), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Vietnam (1961-73), Laos (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-73), Greece (1967-73), Chile (1973), Afghanistan (1979 to the present), El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua (1980s), and Iraq (1991 to the present). Not surprisingly, sometimes these victims try to get even.
There is a direct line between the attacks on September 11, 2001 -- the most significant instance of blowback in the history of the CIA -- and the events of 1979. In that year, revolutionaries threw both the Shah and the Americans out of Iran, and the CIA, with full presidential authority, began its largest ever clandestine operation: the secret arming of Afghan freedom fighters to wage a proxy war against the Soviet Union, which involved the recruitment and training of militants from all over the Islamic world. Steve Coll's book is a classic study of blowback and is a better, fuller reconstruction of this history than the Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the "9/11 Commission Report" published by Norton in July).
From 1989 to 1992, Coll was the Washington Post's South Asia bureau chief, based in New Delhi. Given the CIA's paranoid and often self-defeating secrecy, what makes his book especially interesting is how he came to know what he claims to know. He has read everything on the Afghan insurgency and the civil wars that followed, and has been given access to the original manuscript of Robert Gates' memoir (Gates was CIA director from 1991 to 1993), but his main source is some two hundred interviews conducted between the autumn of 2001 and the summer of 2003 with numerous CIA officials as well as politicians, military officers, and spies from all the countries involved except Russia. He identifies CIA officials only if their names have already been made public. Many of his most important interviews were on the record and he quotes from them extensively.
Among the notable figures who agreed to be interviewed are Benazir Bhutto, who is candid about having lied to American officials for two years about Pakistan's aid to the Taliban, and Anthony Lake, the US national security adviser from 1993 to 1997, who lets it be known that he thought CIA director James Woolsey was "arrogant, tin-eared and brittle." Woolsey was so disliked by Clinton that when an apparent suicide pilot crashed a single-engine Cessna airplane on the south lawn of the White House in 1994, jokers suggested it might be the CIA director trying to get an appointment with the President.
Among the CIA people who talked to Coll are Gates; Woolsey; Howard Hart, Islamabad station chief in 1981; Clair George, former head of clandestine operations; William Piekney, Islamabad station chief from 1984 to 1986; Cofer Black, Khartoum station chief in the mid-1990s and director of the Counterterrorist Center from 1999-2002; Fred Hitz, a former CIA Inspector General; Thomas Twetten, Deputy Director of Operations, 1991-1993; Milton Bearden, chief of station at Islamabad, 1986 -1989; Duane R. "Dewey" Clarridge, head of the Counterterrorist Center from 1986 to 1988; Vincent Cannistraro, an officer in the Counterterrorist Center shortly after it was opened in 1986; and an official Coll identifies only as "Mike," the head of the "bin Laden Unit" within the Counterterrorist Center from 1997 to 1999, who was subsequently revealed to be Michael F. Scheuer, the anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.
In 1973, General Sardar Mohammed Daoud, the cousin and brother-in-law of King Zahir Shah, overthrew the king, declared Afghanistan a republic, and instituted a program of modernization. Zahir Shah went into exile in Rome. These developments made possible the rise of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, a pro-Soviet communist party, which, in early 1978, with extensive help from the USSR, overthrew President Daoud. The communists' policies of secularization in turn provoked a violent response from devout Islamists. The anti-Communist revolt that began at Herat in western Afghanistan in March 1979 originated in a government initiative to teach girls to read. The fundamentalist Afghans opposed to this were supported by a triumvirate of nations -- the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia -- with quite diverse motives, but the U.S. didn't take these differences seriously until it was too late. By the time the Americans woke up, at the end of the 1990s, the radical Islamist Taliban had established its government in Kabul. Recognized only by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, it granted Osama bin Laden freedom of action and offered him protection from American efforts to capture or kill him.
Coll concludes: "The Afghan government that the United States eventually chose to support beginning in the late autumn of 2001 -- a federation of Massoud's organization [the Northern warlords], exiled intellectuals and royalist Pashtuns -- was available for sponsorship a decade before, but the United States could not see a reason then to challenge the alternative, radical Islamist vision promoted by Pakistani and Saudi intelligence . . . Indifference, lassitude, blindness, paralysis and commercial greed too often shaped American foreign policy in Afghanistan and South Asia during the 1990s."
Funding the Fundamentalists
The motives of the White House and the CIA were shaped by the Cold War: a determination to kill as many Soviet soldiers as possible and the desire to restore some aura of rugged machismo as well as credibility that U.S. leaders feared they had lost when the Shah of Iran was overthrown. The CIA had no intricate strategy for the war it was unleashing in Afghanistan. Howard Hart, the agency's representative in the Pakistani capital, told Coll that he understood his orders as: "You're a young man; here's your bag of money, go raise hell. Don't fuck it up, just go out there and kill Soviets." These orders came from a most peculiar American. William Casey, the CIA's director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called "Maryknoll," on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on anyone who asked his advice. Once settled as CIA director under Reagan, he began to funnel covert action funds through the Catholic Church to anti-Communists in Poland and Central America, sometimes in violation of American law. He believed fervently that by increasing the Catholic Church's reach and power he could contain Communism's advance, or reverse it. From Casey's convictions grew the most important U.S. foreign policies of the 1980s -- support for an international anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan and sponsorship of state terrorism in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
Casey knew next to nothing about Islamic fundamentalism or the grievances of Middle Eastern nations against Western imperialism. He saw political Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in the counter-strategy of covert action to thwart Soviet imperialism. He believed that the USSR was trying to strike at the U.S. in Central America and in the oil-producing states of the Middle East. He supported Islam as a counter to the Soviet Union's atheism, and Coll suggests that he sometimes conflated lay Catholic organizations such as Opus Dei with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian extremist organization, of which Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant, was a passionate member. The Muslim Brotherhood's branch in Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami, was strongly backed by the Pakistani army, and Coll writes that Casey, more than any other American, was responsible for welding the alliance of the CIA, Saudi intelligence, and the army of General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan's military dictator from 1977 to 1988. On the suggestion of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) organization, Casey went so far as to print thousands of copies of the Koran, which he shipped to the Afghan frontier for distribution in Afghanistan and Soviet Uzbekistan. He also fomented, without presidential authority, Muslim attacks inside the USSR and always held that the CIA's clandestine officers were too timid. He preferred the type represented by his friend Oliver North.
Over time, Casey's position hardened into CIA dogma, which its agents, protected by secrecy from ever having their ignorance exposed, enforced in every way they could. The agency resolutely refused to help choose winners and losers among the Afghan jihad's guerrilla leaders. The result, according to Coll, was that "Zia-ul-Haq's political and religious agenda in Afghanistan gradually became the CIA's own." In the era after Casey, some scholars, journalists, and members of Congress questioned the agency's lavish support of the Pakistan-backed Islamist general Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, especially after he refused to shake hands with Ronald Reagan because he was an infidel. But Milton Bearden, the Islamabad station chief from 1986 to 1989, and Frank Anderson, chief of the Afghan task force at Langley, vehemently defended Hekmatyar on the grounds that "he fielded the most effective anti-Soviet fighters."
Even after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988, the CIA continued to follow Pakistani initiatives, such as aiding Hekmatyar's successor, Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban. When Edmund McWilliams, the State Department's special envoy to the Afghan resistance in 1988-89, wrote that "American authority and billions of dollars in taxpayer funding had been hijacked at the war's end by a ruthless anti-American cabal of Islamists and Pakistani intelligence officers determined to impose their will on Afghanistan," CIA officials denounced him and planted stories in the embassy that he might be homosexual or an alcoholic. Meanwhile, Afghanistan descended into one of the most horrific civil wars of the 20th century. The CIA never fully corrected its naive and ill-informed reading of Afghan politics until after bin Laden bombed the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on August 7, 1998.
Fair-weather Friends
A co-operative agreement between the U.S. and Pakistan was anything but natural or based on mutual interests. Only two weeks after radical students seized the American Embassy in Tehran on November 5, 1979, a similar group of Islamic radicals burned to the ground the American Embassy in Islamabad as Zia's troops stood idly by. But the US was willing to overlook almost anything the Pakistani dictator did in order to keep him committed to the anti-Soviet jihad. After the Soviet invasion, Brzezinski wrote to Carter: "This will require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and, alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our non-proliferation policy." History will record whether Brzezinski made an intelligent decision in giving a green light to Pakistan's development of nuclear weapons in return for assisting the anti-Soviet insurgency.
Pakistan's motives in Afghanistan were very different from those of the U.S. Zia was a devout Muslim and a passionate supporter of Islamist groups in his own country, in Afghanistan, and throughout the world. But he was not a fanatic and had some quite practical reasons for supporting Islamic radicals in Afghanistan. He probably would not have been included in the U.S. Embassy's annual "beard census" of Pakistani military officers, which recorded the number of officer graduates and serving generals who kept their beards in accordance with Islamic traditions as an unobtrusive measure of increasing or declining religious radicalism -- Zia had only a moustache.
From the beginning, Zia demanded that all weapons and aid for the Afghans from whatever source pass through ISI hands. The CIA was delighted to agree. Zia feared above all that Pakistan would be squeezed between a Soviet-dominated Afghanistan and a hostile India. He also had to guard against a Pashtun independence movement that, if successful, would break up Pakistan. In other words, he backed the Islamic militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan on religious grounds but was quite prepared to use them strategically. In doing so, he laid the foundations for Pakistan's anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir in the 1990s.
Zia died in a mysterious plane crash on August 17, 1988, four months after the signing of the Geneva Accords on April 14, 1988, which ratified the formal terms of the Soviet withdrawal. As the Soviet troops departed, Hekmatyar embarked on a clandestine plan to eliminate his rivals and establish his Islamic party, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, as the most powerful national force in Afghanistan. The U.S. scarcely paid attention, but continued to support Pakistan. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the implosion of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. lost virtually all interest in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar was never as good as the CIA thought he was, and with the creation in 1994 of the Taliban, both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia transferred their secret support. This new group of jihadis proved to be the most militarily effective of the warring groups. On September 26, 1996, the Taliban conquered Kabul. The next day they killed the formerly Soviet-backed President Najibullah, expelled 8,000 female undergraduate students from Kabul University, and fired a similar number of women schoolteachers. As the mujahidin closed in on his palace, Najibullah told reporters: "If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a center for terrorism." His comments would prove all too accurate.
Pakistan's military intelligence officers hated Benazir Bhutto, Zia's elected successor, but she, like all post-Zia heads of state, including General Pervez Musharraf, supported the Taliban in pursuit of Zia's "dream" -- a loyal, Pashtun-led Islamist government in Kabul. Coll explains:
"Every Pakistani general, liberal or religious, believed in the jihadists by 1999, not from personal Islamic conviction, in most cases, but because the jihadists had proved themselves over many years as the one force able to frighten, flummox and bog down the Hindu-dominated Indian army. About a dozen Indian divisions had been tied up in Kashmir during the late 1990s to suppress a few thousand well-trained, paradise-seeking Islamist guerrillas. What more could Pakistan ask? The jihadist guerrillas were a more practical day-to-day strategic defense against Indian hegemony than even a nuclear bomb. To the west, in Afghanistan, the Taliban provided geopolitical 'strategic depth' against India and protection from rebellion by Pakistan's own restive Pashtun population. For Musharraf, as for many other liberal Pakistani generals, jihad was not a calling, it was a professional imperative. It was something he did at the office. At quitting time he packed up his briefcase, straightened the braid on his uniform, and went home to his normal life."
If the CIA understood any of this, it never let on to its superiors in Washington, and Charlie Wilson, a highly paid Pakistani lobbyist and former congressman for East Texas, was anything but forthcoming with Congress about what was really going on. During the 1980s, Wilson had used his power on the House Appropriations Committee to supply all the advanced weapons the CIA might want in Afghanistan. Coll remarks that Wilson "saw the mujahidin through the prism of his own whisky-soaked romanticism, as noble savages fighting for freedom, as almost biblical figures." Hollywood is now making a movie, based on the book Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile, glorifying the congressman who "used his trips to the Afghan frontier in part to impress upon a succession of girlfriends how powerful he was." Tom Hanks has reportedly signed on to play him.
Enter bin Laden and the Saudis
Saudi Arabian motives were different from those of both the U.S. and Pakistan. Saudi Arabia is, after all, the only modern nation-state created by jihad. The Saudi royal family, which came to power at the head of a movement of Wahhabi religious fundamentalists, espoused Islamic radicalism in order to keep it under their control, at least domestically. "Middle-class, pious Saudis flush with oil wealth," Coll writes, "embraced the Afghan cause as American churchgoers might respond to an African famine or a Turkish earthquake": "The money flowing from the kingdom arrived at the Afghan frontier in all shapes and sizes: gold jewelry dropped on offering plates by merchants' wives in Jedda mosques; bags of cash delivered by businessmen to Riyadh charities as zakat, an annual Islamic tithe; fat checks written from semi-official government accounts by minor Saudi princes; bountiful proceeds raised in annual telethons led by Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh." Richest of all were the annual transfers from the Saudi General Intelligence Department, or Istakhbarat, to the CIA's Swiss bank accounts.
From the moment agency money and weapons started to flow to the mujahidin in late 1979, Saudi Arabia matched the U.S. payments dollar for dollar. They also bypassed the ISI and supplied funds directly to the groups in Afghanistan they favored, including the one led by their own pious young millionaire, Osama bin Laden. According to Milton Bearden, private Saudi and Arab funding of up to $25 million a month flowed to Afghan Islamist armies. Equally important, Pakistan trained between 16,000 and 18,000 fresh Muslim recruits on the Afghan frontier every year, and another 6,500 or so were instructed by Afghans inside the country beyond ISI control. Most of these eventually joined bin Laden's private army of 35,000 "Arab Afghans."
Much to the confusion of the Americans, moderate Saudi leaders, such as Prince Turki, the intelligence chief, supported the Saudi backing of fundamentalists so long as they were in Afghanistan and not in Saudi Arabia. A graduate of a New Jersey prep school and a member of Bill Clinton's class of 1964 at Georgetown University, Turki belongs to the pro-Western, modernizing wing of the Saudi royal family. (He is the current Saudi ambassador to Great Britain and Ireland.) But that did not make him pro-American. Turki saw Saudi Arabia in continual competition with its powerful Shia neighbor, Iran. He needed credible Sunni, pro-Saudi Islamist clients to compete with Iran's clients, especially in countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, which have sizeable Shia populations.
Prince Turki was also irritated by the U.S. loss of interest in Afghanistan after its Cold War skirmish with the Soviet Union. He understood that the U.S. would ignore Saudi aid to Islamists so long as his country kept oil prices under control and cooperated with the Pentagon on the building of military bases. Like many Saudi leaders, Turki probably underestimated the longer term threat of Islamic militancy to the Saudi royal house, but, as Coll observes, "Prince Turki and other liberal princes found it easier to appease their domestic Islamist rivals by allowing them to proselytize and make mischief abroad than to confront and resolve these tensions at home." In Riyadh, the CIA made almost no effort to recruit paid agents or collect intelligence. The result was that Saudi Arabia worked continuously to enlarge the ISI's proxy jihad forces in both Afghanistan and Kashmir, and the Saudi Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the kingdom's religious police, tutored and supported the Taliban's own Islamic police force.
By the late 1990s, after the embassy bombings in East Africa, the CIA and the White House awoke to the Islamist threat, but they defined it almost exclusively in terms of Osama bin Laden's leadership of al-Qaida and failed to see the larger context. They did not target the Taliban, Pakistani military intelligence, or the funds flowing to the Taliban and al-Qaida from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Instead, they devoted themselves to trying to capture or kill bin Laden. Coll's chapters on the hunt for the al-Qaida leader are entitled, "You Are to Capture Him Alive," "We Are at War," and "Is There Any Policy?" but he might more accurately have called them "Keystone Kops" or "The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight."
On February 23 1998, bin Laden summoned newspaper and TV reporters to the camp at Khost that the CIA had built for him at the height of the anti-Soviet jihad. He announced the creation of a new organization -- the International Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders -- and issued a manifesto saying that "to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilian or military, is an obligation for every Muslim who is able to do so in any country." On August 7, he and his associates put this manifesto into effect with devastating truck bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The CIA had already identified bin Laden's family compound in the open desert near Kandahar Airport, a collection of buildings called Tarnak Farm. It's possible that more satellite footage has been taken of this site than of any other place on earth; one famous picture seems to show bin Laden standing outside one of his wives' homes. The agency conceived an elaborate plot to kidnap bin Laden from Tarnak Farm with the help of Afghan operatives and spirit him out of the country but CIA director George Tenet cancelled the project because of the high risk of civilian casualties; he was resented within the agency for his timidity. Meanwhile, the White House stationed submarines in the northern Arabian Sea with the map co-ordinates of Tarnak Farm preloaded into their missile guidance systems. They were waiting for hard evidence from the CIA that bin Laden was in residence.
Within days of the East Africa bombings, Clinton signed a top secret Memorandum of Notification authorizing the CIA to use lethal force against bin Laden. On 20 August 1998, he ordered 75 cruise missiles, costing $750,000 each, to be fired at the Zawhar Kili camp (about seven miles south of Khost), the site of a major al-Qaida meeting. The attack killed 21 Pakistanis but bin Laden was forewarned, perhaps by Saudi intelligence. Two of the missiles fell short into Pakistan, causing Islamabad to denounce the U.S. action. At the same time, the U.S. fired 13 cruise missiles into a chemical plant in Khartoum: the CIA claimed that the plant was partly owned by bin Laden and that it was manufacturing nerve gas. They knew none of this was true.
Clinton had publicly confessed to his sexual liaison with Monica Lewinsky on August 17, and many critics around the world conjectured that both attacks were diversionary measures. (The film Wag the Dog had just come out, in which a president in the middle of an election campaign is charged with molesting a Girl Scout and makes it seem as if he's gone to war against Albania to distract people's attention.) As a result Clinton became more cautious, and he and his aides began seriously to question the quality of CIA information. The U.S. bombing in May 1999 of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, allegedly because of faulty intelligence, further discredited the agency. A year later, Tenet fired one intelligence officer and reprimanded six managers, including a senior official, for their bungling of that incident.
The Clinton administration made two more attempts to get bin Laden. During the winter of 1998-99, the CIA confirmed that a large party of Persian Gulf dignitaries had flown into the Afghan desert for a falcon-hunting party, and that bin Laden had joined them. The CIA called for an attack on their encampment until Richard Clarke, Clinton's counter-terrorism aide, discovered that among the hosts of the gathering was royalty from the United Arab Emirates. Clarke had been instrumental in a 1998 deal to sell 80 F-16 military jets to the UAE, which was also a crucial supplier of oil and gas to America and its allies. The strike was called off.
The CIA as a Secret Presidential Army
Throughout the 1990s, the Clinton administration devoted major resources to the development of a long-distance drone aircraft called Predator, invented by the former chief designer for the Israeli air force, who had emigrated to the United States. In its nose was mounted a Sony digital TV camera, similar to the ones used by news helicopters reporting on freeway traffic or on O.J. Simpson's fevered ride through Los Angeles. By the turn of the century, Agency experts had also added a Hellfire anti-tank missile to the Predator and tested it on a mock-up of Tarnak Farm in the Nevada desert. This new weapons system made it possible instantly to kill bin Laden if the camera spotted him. Unfortunately for the CIA, on one of its flights from Uzbekistan over Tarnak Farm the Predator photographed as a target a child's wooden swing. To his credit, Clinton held back on using the Hellfire because of the virtual certainty of killing bystanders, and Tenet, scared of being blamed for another failure, suggested that responsibility for the armed Predator's use be transferred to the Air Force.
When the new Republican administration came into office, it was deeply uninterested in bin Laden and terrorism even though the outgoing national security adviser, Sandy Berger, warned Condoleezza Rice that it would be George W. Bush's most serious foreign policy problem. On August 6, 2001, the CIA delivered its daily briefing to Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, with the headline "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.," but the president seemed not to notice. Slightly more than a month later, Osama bin Laden successfully brought off perhaps the most significant example of asymmetric warfare in the history of international relations.
Coll has written a powerful indictment of the CIA's myopia and incompetence, but he seems to be of two minds. He occasionally indulges in flights of pro-CIA rhetoric, describing it, for example, as a "vast, pulsing, self-perpetuating, highly sensitive network on continuous alert" whose "listening posts were attuned to even the most isolated and dubious evidence of pending attacks" and whose "analysts were continually encouraged to share information as widely as possible among those with appropriate security clearances." This is nonsense: the early-warning functions of the CIA were upstaged decades ago by covert operations.
Coll acknowledges that every president since Truman, once he discovered that he had a totally secret, financially unaccountable private army at his personal disposal, found its deployment irresistible. But covert operations usually became entangled in hopeless webs of secrecy, and invariably led to more blowback. Richard Clarke argues that "the CIA used its classification rules not only to protect its agents but also to deflect outside scrutiny of its covert operations," and Peter Tomsen, the former US ambassador to the Afghan resistance during the late 1980s, concludes that "America's failed policies in Afghanistan flowed in part from the compartmented, top secret isolation in which the CIA always sought to work." Excessive, bureaucratic secrecy lies at the heart of the Agency's failures.
Given the Agency's clear role in causing the disaster of September 11, 2001, what we need today is not a new intelligence czar but an end to the secrecy behind which the CIA hides and avoids accountability for its actions. To this day, in the wake of 9/11 and the false warnings about a threat from Iraq, the CIA continues grossly to distort any and all attempts at a Constitutional foreign policy. Although Coll doesn't go on to draw the conclusion, I believe the CIA has outlived any Cold War justification it once might have had and should simply be abolished.
Chalmers Johnson's books include Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, andNemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, which make up his Blowback Trilogy, and his last book Dismantling the Empire. From 1967 to 1973, Johnson, a TomDispatch regular, served as a consultant to the CIA's Office of National Estimates.
Copyright 2004 Chalmers Johnson
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This piece is adapted from and printed thanks to the permission of the London Review of Books where, in slightly altered form, it appeared on 21 October 2004, pp. 25-28.
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Now let's Review the CIA Information Over Time :
1947 - CIA formally established, although it was claimed that it evolved from OSS during George Washington's days.
1981 - 2012
Executive Order 12333 — Central Intelligence Agency - CIA
Executive Order 12333. United States Intelligence Activities December 4, 1981 (As Amended by Executive Orders 13284 (2003), 13355 (2004) and 13470 ...CIA FOIA - Executive Order 13526
www.foia.cia.gov/eo.aspExecutive Order 13526 (EO) · -> Fees & Waivers ... (b) If there is significant doubtabout the need to classify information, it shall not be classified. This provision ...FAQs — Central Intelligence Agency - CIA
Frequently Asked Questions about the Central Intelligence Agency. ... By direction of the president in Executive Order 12333 of 1981 and in accordance with ...Frequently Asked Questions — Central Intelligence Agency - CIA
www.cia.gov › ... › The Work of a Nation › Items of InterestThe site includes general information about the CIA, current unclassified ... By direction of the President in Executive Order 12333, as amended, and in ...Bush Approves New CIA Methods
Jul 21, 2007 – In an executive order lacking any details about actual interrogation techniques, Bush said the CIA program will now comply with a Geneva ...Executive Order 13491 -- Ensuring Lawful Interrogations | The White ...
All executive directives, orders, and regulations inconsistent with this order, ... but not limited to those issued to or by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from ... the Attorney General shall provide guidance about which directives, orders, and ...Obama Issues Directive to Shut Down Guantánamo - NYTimes.com
Jan 21, 2009 – WASHINGTON — President Obama signed executive orders Thursday directing ... Details of the directive involving the C.I.A. were described by ...Secret 'Kill List' Tests Obama's Principles - NYTimes.com
May 29, 2012 – “He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide ... The day before the executive orders were issued, the C.I.A.'s top ...President Obama To Issue Executive Order Prohibiting CIA "Harsh ...
Jan 22, 2009 – [T]he [executive] orders . . . will also prohibit the C.I.A. from using coercive ... B. Craig, briefed lawmakers about some elements of the orders on ...Executive Order 12333 - Executive Orders - National Archives and ...
Executive Order 12333--United States intelligence activities ... Timely and accurate information about the activities, capabilities, plans, and intentions of .... by the CIA or the staff elements of the Director of Central Intelligence, relevant to the ...History of the CIA
History of the CIA
The United States has carried out intelligence activities since the days of George Washington, but only since World War II have they been coordinated on a government-wide basis. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed New York lawyer and war hero, William J. Donovan, to become first the Coordinator of Information, and then, after the US entered World War II, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1942. The OSS – the forerunner to the CIA – had a mandate to collect and analyze strategic information. After World War II, however, the OSS was abolished along with many other war agencies and its functions were transferred to the State and War Departments.
It did not take long before President Truman recognized the need for a postwar, centralized intelligence organization. To make a fully functional intelligence office, Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 establishing the CIA. The National Security Act charged the CIA with coordinating the nation’s intelligence activities and correlating, evaluating and disseminating intelligence affecting national security.
On December 17, 2004, President George W. Bush signed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act which restructured the Intelligence Community by abolishing the position of Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) and creating the position the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (D/CIA). The Act also created the position of Director of National Intelligence (DNI), which oversees the Intelligence Community and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).
Posted: Apr 10, 2007 08:04 AMLast Updated: Dec 30, 2011 12:48 PMLast Reviewed: Dec 30, 2011 12:48 PM2007 - Federal Judge Ezra bans Greg Wongham's website and this is some of the information about the CIA posted:
Some of Greg Wongham's Highlights ---- Censored Info - Maoliworld
maoliworld.com/.../some-of-greg-wongham-s-highlights-censored-in...Oct 18, 2011 – INHUMANE CIA TERROR TACTICS SPUR CRIMINAL PROBE. WASHINGTON (AP) ... Some of Greg Wongham's Highlights ---- Censored Info.Contact Greg Wongham -- Corruption in Hawaii
Producer/host of a public access (Olelo) TV show called "Corruption in Hawaii." Has spent the last 6 years exposing different aspects of the Hawaii machine.Open justice: Admission to Assange hearing 'by ticket only' | THE ...
blog.indexoncensorship.org/.../open-justice-admission-to-assange-he...Jun 24, 2011 – Media bias once again promoted and limited to only CIAsupporters….Greg Wongham of Corruption in Hawaii stated: “the number-one ...Greg Wongham | LinkedIn
www.linkedin.com/pub/greg-wongham/19/8bb/401United States - --View Greg Wongham's professional profile on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the world's largest business network, helping professionals like Greg Wongham discover ...IOLANI - The Royal Hawk: IOLANIpart4
theiolani.blogspot.com/2012/02/iolanipart4_18.htmlFeb 18, 2012 – Former CIA Director William Colby ~ ~ ~ For more on THE MEDIA, ...DRAGON " ***** Greg Wongham continues his fine work exposing FRAUD ...IOLANI - The Royal Hawk: IOLANIpart6
theiolani.blogspot.com/2012/05/iolanipart6_19.htmlMay 19, 2012 – Former CIA Director William Colby ~ ~ ~ For more on THE MEDIA, ...DRAGON " ***** Greg Wongham continues his fine work exposing FRAUD ...IOLANI - The Royal Hawk: IOLANIpart4
theiolani.blogspot.com/2011/07/iolanipart4_18.htmlJul 18, 2011 – htmGreg states that "the number-one purveyor of broadcast news in this... Former CIA Director William Colby ~ ~ ~ For more on THE MEDIA, ... THE DRAGON " ***** Greg Wongham continues his fine work exposing FRAUD, ...Paradise 808
paradise808.wordpress.com/This is Greg Wongham's Info —note that in 2007 Federal Judge Ezra moved to ......puts mob boss John Gotti and CIA boss Donald Gregg in the middle of contra ...COZY RELATIONSHIPS - Google Sites
BARACK OBAMA & THE CIA · BARACK .... FRANCES FARMER & DAVID C. FARMER & THE CIA ..... Some of Greg Wongham's Highlights ---- Censored Info .DAVID FAIRBANKS & PUNAHOU SCHOOL - COZY RELATIONSHIPS
BARACK OBAMA & THE CIA · BARACK .... FRANCES FARMER & DAVID C. FARMER & THE CIA ..... Some of Greg Wongham's Highlights ---- Censored Info .
Replies
(Note: Osama Bin Ladin in one of his messages said that the Western bankers would be brought down. He blamed them for the problems of the Middle East. Did find out that the Middle East Oil men were told to bank only with certain banks, the investments were documented on bonds...........and after so long, the bonds could be transferred into money......well, that certain agreed upon bank transferred the wealth to other banks, then closed down........leaving the Middle East oil men with worthless bonds. )
(Note: the 911 Twin Towers were owned by the Rockefellers. Part of the buildings were open and not rented out, which means loss of revenue, inability to pay for the tremendous amounts of mortgage for the area. The buildings were insured. The buildings surrounding the site were mostly vacant and up for sale.
The Rockefellers were the pemanent heads of the Standard Oil Company which evolved into EXXON, and operates as the umbrella organization over many other organizations, companies including many of the smaller oil companies, banks, etc. examples are the GW Bush oil companies, Cheney's oil company, and Candoleeza Rice, one of the heads at the EXXON Oil who even had an oil ship/tanker named after her before she went into office.
The Rockefellers gave the land which has the United Nations building ......the United Nations was put together by the U.S., England, and the bankers (Morgan, Bank of England, etc.) who created the CFR/Council on Foreign Relations. The United Nations departed from the Law of Nations (Queen Liliuokalani said that the U.S. breached the Law of Nations) and was formed with the intention of being the basis of the One World government/New World Order.
War was set up for the Middle East since the 1970's for their oil.
Criminal set up for the Middle East is on record.
The 911 destruction was planned ......................a friend's girlfriend was in a meeting on that day when her boss answered a ringing phone and said "yes, here they come now".....as all of them watched a plane flying straight into the building across the way...........her boss turned to the office workers and instructed them to leave the building...........and there are many other documented stories..... ).
Treaty of Verona - Secret Articles
www.biblebelievers.org.au/verona.htm - Cached - Similar
The Evening Light - The Secret Treaty of Verona.
www.eveninglight.org.nz/secrettreatyofverona.html - Similar
1916 - Congress Record - Sen. Owen Treaty of Verona
books.google.com Because I can find no official online primary source for the 1916 Congressional Record, I have linked to a copy of "Where is ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UBXHSFr4bw
(references:
**************************************************************
I don't think there is a more important topic than this. IF our government is in any way complicit in the 9-11 tragedy, we must fight to expose it.
The Big Lie is a propaganda technique. It was defined byAdolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf as a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously".
Report of bin Laden’s death spurs questions from conspiracy theorists
May 2, 2011, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ lifestyle/style/report-of-bin- laden...
While much of America celebrated the dramatic killing of Osama bin Laden, the Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists still had questions. For them and a growing number of skeptics, the plot only thickened. Could the public trust bin Laden’s DNA samples? Why was [his body disposed of] in an undisclosed location in the northern Arabian Sea? “This has not put a single of the 9/11 questions to bed,” said Steven Jones, a retired Brigham Young University physics professor and contributor to the 9/11 Truth Movement. “I don’t know how you can have closure, when there are hundreds of contradictions to the stories that you were told. The story doesn’t end here because we are told bin Laden is dead,” said Mike Berger, who works with 911Truth.org, an organization founded to examine facts around the attack. Alex Jones, a radio personality out of Austin, who gives voice to the 9/11 Truth Movement and runs the Web site Infowars.com, sent out a Web headline, “Red Alert. Inside Sources: Bin Laden Corpse Has Been on Ice for Nearly a Decade.” He lists FBI officials and counterintelligence leaders from Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan who have said for years that bin Laden was dead. Former Council on Foreign Relations member Steve R. Pieczenik even told Jones on the air in 2002 that bin Laden had been dead for months.
Note: For intriguing BBC News reports from 2010 and 2007 which claim bin Laden was already dead at that time, click here andhere. WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin's book establishing the likelihood that Osama bin Laden died in December 2001, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?, is available here.
Osama Bin Laden never charged for 9/11
May 2, 2011, International Business Times
http://www.ibtimes.com/ articles/140099/20110502/ osama-bin-laden-n...
Osama Bin Laden's death is being celebrated, and everyone seems to repeat the old conspiracy theory that he was indeed the mastermind behind the terror attacks of 9/11. But that was never proven, and there is not even evidence hinting at such a connection according to the FBI. Osama Bin Laden was never formally charged, because the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation didn't deliver the necessary evidence to the Department of Justice. Read ... what Rex Tomb, FBI Director of Investigative Publicity, stated in 2006 about the FBI's position: “The FBI gathers evidence. Once evidence is gathered, it is turned over to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice then decides whether it has enough evidence to present to a federal grand jury. In the case of the 1998 United States Embassies being bombed, bin Laden has been formally indicted and charged by a grand jury. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11." The connection between Bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks was made by the Bush-Cheney administration, [on] the morning of the attacks, before the first tower even collapsed. Nearly ten years later, after intensive investigation, a government commission, two wars and the interrogation under torture of some 750 people detained in Guantanamo Bay without charges, no hard evidence could be found that would confirm the initial allegation.
Note: The International Business Times is an online global business newspaper, published in thirteen editions in twelve countries across eight languages. It is among the top-ten online business newspapers in the world. WantToKnow team memberDavid Ray Griffin's book establishing the likelihood that Osama bin Laden died in December 2001, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?, is available here. )
Just for Laffs
Where's Wally?
Edited 5/9/2011 8:34 am ET by MrSammo1
******************************aloha.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9BA6fFGMjI
p.s. If you notice, the same players are involved in criminally assuming the assets of the Hawaiian Kingdom, other nations............... the U.S. with the Masons, England, the bankers............the three (3) groups who formed the League of Nations then the CFR - Council on Foreign Relations then the United Nations set up to move towards ONE WORLD ORDER/NEW WORLD ORDER with the support of the Scottish Rite Masons/Freemasons, the Corporations under the umbrella of the STANDARD OIL COMPANY which evolved into the "mother" organization EXXON CORPORATION with the Rockefellers being the PERMANENT heads/CEO's/Corporate Executive Officers with many multi- organizations operating under their umbrella..............the Rockefellers did grant the lands that the United Nations building sits on and the CIA/FBI with the military Operates as their arm due to the ongoing claims that the U.S. "protects their own"..........the 1822 Secret Treaty of Verona is also alive and well....with Congress supporting the U.S. Presidents unquestionably........for example, even though President Obama was born in Kenya and lied to the American people. (see the latest news about his BIRTH CERTIFICATE, and HIS SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER, etc.)
For the failures of Congress, etc./conspirators/treasonous activities etc., see John Nelson's article at http://myweb.ecomplanet.com/GORA8037 or theiolani.blogspot.com
It's about Truth.............for what happened in Hawaiian History can be seen in the documented history from the Hawaiian history of Ko Hawaii Pae Aina/Hawaiian Kingdom.........for example, those currently operating the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Estates Trusts/Kamehameha Schools etc. are Scottish Rite/Masons/ Freemasons members, etc.
Research incomplete.
aloha.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm1WOqex8jE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG2ci9CyiwI
THE HANA HOU SERIES
Wahine o Hawai`i
© 1999 Kawika Sands
Beginning of the End:
A great water sports enthusiast, King Kalakaua helped to popularize outrigger canoe racing. With a Hawaiian renaissance was underway, Kalakaua wrote songs, poetry, commissioned the building of I`olani Palace, and revived the hula. He loved to play poker and indulged in spirits now and again. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of him "...He is intelligent with and astounding capacity for alcohol...." Kalakaua would often walk the streets of Honolulu cheerfully greeting everyone he met. His happy disposition made him known as "The Merrie Monarch," the name of the hula competition given each year on Hawai`i. Kalakaua urged Hawaiians to "increase the race" while appointing Hawaiians to posts in the government.
However, American businessmen changed the Hawaiian constitution reducing him to a mere puppet. By 1876, they ratified a treaty giving Pearl Harbor to the U.S. in return for the removal of the tariff on their sugar exports. By the end of the 19th century, Haole people owned 4 acres for every one owned by a Hawaiian. Some Westerners wanted more security which could only be accomplished by American annexation. In 1887, American and other Haole business leaders, backed by their own armed militia, imposed on Kalakaua the "Bayonet Constitution" severely limiting his power. It also placed new restrictions on voting rights, requiring voters to have a yearly income of $600 or own property worth $3,000 which disenfranchised about 3/4 of Hawaiian voters. Asian immigrants could not vote at all, but American and European males could vote even if they were not Hawaiian citizens.
In 1891, Kalakaua went to San Francisco for a much needed rest. Hawaiian ali`i often stayed at the old Palace Hotel (now the Sheraton Palace Hotel on Market Street) when they traveled to or through California. While there, he was awarded the "33rd Level" from Scottish Rites in San Francisco, the highest Masonic award bestowed on an individual. A few days later, Kalakaua became ill and died of a stroke leaving his sister, Liliuokalani, to carry on. Outrigger canoe racing, again, went into a decline.
There was growth and progress for everyone in Hawai`i at this time except for the Hawaiians. Poverty, before unknown in Hawaiian culture, was now commonplace. Children lived in ramshackle houses, ate poorly, and died too young. It was not enough for the Hawaiian to adopt the dress, language, and ways of the foreigner. While other children were being taught arts, and letters to prepare them for positions of leadership, Hawaiian children could not hope for so much.
BERNICE PAUAHI BISHOP (1831 - 1884)
As great-granddaughter of Kamehameha the Great (last direct descendant) High Chiefess Pauahi inherited ali`i lands, and helped the Hawaiian people readjust to new ways by example. She even turned down the thrown twice. Her parents did not approve of young Charles R. Bishop, a New Yorker, instead they would have chosen one of the Kamehamehas for her. Nevertheless, she married him.
She was charming and cultured, having been taught with other royal children by the Cookes. They say she had a modest and retiring disposition with ladylike manners and a light complexion, but she was Hawaiian to the core. Before her death, she saw the poverty and despair that enveloped the Hawaiian culture and it's children. Mrs. Bishop knew the answer was education. She wrote her will with a provision that read:
Thus beginning the Bishop Estate. Following his wife's wishes, Charles founded the famous Bishop Museum with his own funds.
PRINCESS KAIULANI (1875 - 1899)
Well cared for and happy as a little girl, she was brought up on her estate in Waikiki called Ainahau. Her father was a Scot, Archibald Cleghorn, and her mother was a Hawaiian princess, Miriam Likelike (pronounced "lee-keh-lee-keh, NOT "like-like"). She had her own peacocks which she often fed by hand. The pikake lei she wore was actually made of flowers called Chinese jasmine. "Pikake" is a Hawaiian word that came from her title "Princess of the Peacocks."
When her mother died at age 12, she was told she would have to attend school in England. Her friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, comforted her beneath her favorite banyan tree as she wept. While in England, she traveled, and was taught arts and letters. Though she never married she almost became betrothed to a Japanese prince.
While she was still in school, Queen Liliuokalani was deposed. She went to Washington D.C. to plead her case for the fallen monarchy. Her guardian, Theopolis Davies, acted as her advisor and issued her appeals. Together they attempted to rouse sympathy to restore control of Hawai`i to the Hawaiians. Though Davies would have benefitted from the provisional government's actions, he nevertheless felt Kaiulani should rule her own land. They met with President Cleveland and his wife, but the President was charmed, and that was all.
She went back to Hawai`i to spend her days as a figurehead. Officiating at ceremonies and presiding at charitable events. After having lost her land, her mother and her lover, some say she had no more will to live. She died at twenty-four, having never ruled. In a going-away poem to her, written not long after Kaiulani went to England, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote:
King Kalakaua
The "Bayonet" Constitution (1887)
Bernice Pauahi Bishop
Princess Kaiulani
Hawaiian Historical Chronology
THE HANA HOU SERIES
Wahine o Hawai`i
© 1999 Kawika Sands
QUEEN LILI`UOKALANI (1838 - 1917)
One of seven children born to Kapaakea and Keohokalole, she was adopted by High Chief Paki and became foster sister of Bernice Pauahi Bishop. Like Mrs. Bishop she was also educated by the missionaries. She married John Owen Dominis in 1862 shortly before he was made governor of O`ahu and inherited the thrown from her brother, King David La`amea Kalakaua, after his death.
The first thing she did was to dissolve the cabinet and appoint a cabinet of her own with (then) fifteen year old Princess Kaiulani as heir to the throne. She wanted Hawai`i to be ruled by Hawaiians and the "Bayonet Constitution" forced on her brother fueled her resentment. She continued to appoint her people to key positions with a plan to eventually delegate the administration of the Hawaiian government back to the Hawaiians.
Economically, the islands were depressed primarily because of the McKinley Tariff Act allowing foreign sugar into the U.S. duty free while charging two cents a pound for sugar grown locally. Annexing Hawai`i to the U.S. would benefit the sugar growers/businessmen immensely. The idea of annexation did not make relations between the Queen and the Americans any better!
Lili`uokalani's remedy was a new constitution. This gave the businessmen the excuse they needed for a revolt. The American businessmen formed the Annexation Club which did not hide its contempt for the crown. Their position was the Queen's attack on the present constitution was treason. To "protect the government" they formed the "Committee of Safety," which created a provisional government AND a militia.
John L. Stevens, the American foreign minister, had 162 troops march through downtown Honolulu to I`olani Palace from the U.S.S. Boston. Soon things deteriorated into violence and armed citizens in the militia stormed government buildings while members of the Committee of Safety took possession and control, and later deposed the Queen. Queen Lili`uokalani sadly surrendered her throne on January 17, 1893.
She wrote a letter in which she yielded to "...the superior forces of the United States...." She pleaded with the U.S. government to "...undo the actions of its representatives and reinstate me in the authority I claim as the Constitutional Sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands...." Meanwhile, the provisional government sent representatives to Washington D.C. to apply for annexation where they drew up a treaty. President Harrison signed it and submitted it to Congress.
Before the Senate could approve the treaty, President Grover Cleveland took office. He had reservations about taking over an independent country and withdrew the treaty. He sent a special commissioner, Colonel James Blount, to Hawai`i to investigate the revolution. Blount reported Minister Stevens conspired with a small group of revolutionaries to overthrow the government and Cleveland replaced Stevens with a new minister.
The new minister told the Queen that if she would grant amnesty to the revolutionists the throne would be restored to her. Some accounts say that she was intent on having them beheaded. Lili`uokalani's own book (Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen) says she never asked for that nor had it ever been practiced by the monarchy as a form of punishment. Hawaiian law DID however prescribe death for traitors which she officially rescinded.
President Dole (of the provisional government) flatly refused to give the government back to the Hawaiians. He told President Cleveland the U.S. had no right to meddle in Hawaii's internal affairs. Congress agreed, and it adopted a "hands off" policy. Dole's new government created an army and held a constitutional convention. On July 4th, 1894, they unveiled the completed constitution and declared the Republic of Hawai`i.
Despite Lili`uokalani's pleas for help, other governments quickly recognized the new republic. In desperation, supporters of the queen collected weapons and made secret plans to overthrow the republic and restore the monarchy. They planned to strike the morning of January 7, 1895, but informers told the provisional government.
At dawn, the rebels slipped ashore at Waikiki, and government soldiers opened fire. A few rebels fell dead or wounded, others surrendered and the government declared martial law. During the next few days, government troops defeated the disorganized rebels in a series of brief but deadly skirmishes. Within two weeks, they completely suppressed the uprising and captured its followers, including Queen Lili`uokalani.
Lili`uokalani and the prisoners were tried for treason and Liliuokalani was forced to sign a document in which she finally renounced all claims to the throne and her land. She was then placed under house arrest in I`olani Palace. After her release, she was allowed to live out her days, as a citizen under the new government, and resided at her home at Washington Place.
From being known as "Lili`u Loloku Wailania Paki Kamaka`eha" at birth, to "Queen Lili`uokalani" (Kalakaua renamed her after he made her heir to the thrown), to simply "Mrs. Lydia Dominis" (the missionaries thought it appropriate to give Lili`u a Christian name, Lydia Paki), she remained a queen in her people's eyes even after she died of a stroke at her home in 1917. Her death marked the end of old Hawai`i. The Queen Lili`uokalani Children's Center (placing and rehabilitating neglected children) remains her legacy. But perhaps her best known legacy, is her song "Aloha `Oe" whose chorus reads:
Liliuokalani timeline
About the U.S. overthrow of Hawai`i
(another) Hawaiian Historical Chronology
http://holoholo.org/hanahou/hhpart35.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77_GoyyjYAQ
Duress, Stress, Coercion, Usurpation, Genocide, Lies, Deceit, Fraud, Piracy(ies), Premeditation, Criminal Claims Perpetuated by Criminal Activists, Criminal Mecca of the U.S.......Hawaii is.....
aloha.
REVIEWING J. EDGAR HOOVER:
J. Edgar Hoover - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
New Insights into J. Edgar Hoover's Role — Central Intelligence - CIA
Behind the Bushes - JFK MURDER SOLVED - Reward
CIA director William Casey's papers opened at the Hoover Institution ...
News for cia head hoover
Kansas City Star
JFK Lancer - President John F. Kennedy News and Research
Was There a Conspiracy? - Time Magazine
The secrets of J. Edgar Hoover - Dateline NBC - NBCNews.com
John Edgar Hoover : Biography
FBI Director Hoover's Dirty Files: Excerpt From Ronald Kessler's 'The ...
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets - Google Books Result
The previous April, CIA Director Richard Helms had asked Hoover to bug the Chilean embassy. When Hoover refused (as he had all such CIA and NSA ...
Late Sen. Byrd's FBI files reveal uproar with CIA in 1960s
Photos
FILE - This Tuesday Nov. 7, 2006 file photo shows the late U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., as he speaks upon winning his ninth term, in Charleston, W.Va. Byrd created a stir in the mid-1960s within the nation's intelligence community when he obtained secret FBI reports leaked by the CIA.
with Totally Local Yellow Pages
Business News
Suggested Stories
From the Web
U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd obtained secret FBI documents about the civil rights movement that were leaked by the CIA and triggered an angry confrontation between the two agencies in the 1960s, according to newly released FBI records.
Byrd, who died in June 2010 at age 92, had sought the FBI intelligence while suspecting that communists and subversives were guiding the civil rights cause, the records show. Decades before he became history's longest-serving member of Congress, or gained the title "King of Pork" for sending federal funds to West Virginia, the Democrat had stalled and voted against major civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s.
He also belonged to the Ku Klux Klan while a young man in the 1940s, and the FBI cited that membership while weighing his requests for classified information, the records show.
"He eventually had a change of heart about a lot of that stuff," said Ray Smock, a former historian for Congress who now oversees Byrd's archives.
Smock said Byrd's hardline belief in law and order played a role in his view of the civil rights movement. Byrd also repeatedly called his time with the hate group a serious mistake, Smock noted.
The FBI released more than 750 pages from its files — many of them with words, sentences or entire paragraphs redacted — in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The Associated Press. The records date to the mid-1950s, when Byrd served in the U.S. House. He was elected to the first of his record nine terms in the U.S. Senate in 1958.
The documents that reveal the September 1966 leak also describe how it sparked outrage among top FBI officials and prompted an internal CIA probe that singled out two agency employees as the culprits.
The episode damaged Byrd's standing with the bureau, though only briefly, the records show. Numerous documents depict him as an outspoken supporter of the FBI and particularly of J. Edgar Hoover, its longtime director, even toward the end of Hoover's tenure as criticism of him mounted.
"Byrd said that the Director's record of public service was unparalleled anywhere and he knew that it would never be possible for any successor to adequately 'fill his shoes,'" one June 1966 memo between top FBI brass said.
The files repeatedly refer to Byrd's "cordial relations" with the bureau, and include numerous thank-you notes and other friendly exchanges between Byrd and Hoover from the early 1960s until Hoover's death in 1972.
Next
Late Sen. Byrd's FBI files reveal uproar with CIA in 1960s
Photos
FILE - This Tuesday Nov. 7, 2006 file photo shows the late U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., as he speaks upon winning his ninth term, in Charleston, W.Va. Byrd created a stir in the mid-1960s within the nation's intelligence community when he obtained secret FBI reports leaked by the CIA.
with Totally Local Yellow Pages
Business News
Suggested Stories
From the Web
U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd obtained secret FBI documents about the civil rights movement that were leaked by the CIA and triggered an angry confrontation between the two agencies in the 1960s, according to newly released FBI records.
Byrd, who died in June 2010 at age 92, had sought the FBI intelligence while suspecting that communists and subversives were guiding the civil rights cause, the records show. Decades before he became history's longest-serving member of Congress, or gained the title "King of Pork" for sending federal funds to West Virginia, the Democrat had stalled and voted against major civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s.
He also belonged to the Ku Klux Klan while a young man in the 1940s, and the FBI cited that membership while weighing his requests for classified information, the records show.
"He eventually had a change of heart about a lot of that stuff," said Ray Smock, a former historian for Congress who now oversees Byrd's archives.
Smock said Byrd's hardline belief in law and order played a role in his view of the civil rights movement. Byrd also repeatedly called his time with the hate group a serious mistake, Smock noted.
The FBI released more than 750 pages from its files — many of them with words, sentences or entire paragraphs redacted — in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The Associated Press. The records date to the mid-1950s, when Byrd served in the U.S. House. He was elected to the first of his record nine terms in the U.S. Senate in 1958.
The documents that reveal the September 1966 leak also describe how it sparked outrage among top FBI officials and prompted an internal CIA probe that singled out two agency employees as the culprits.
The episode damaged Byrd's standing with the bureau, though only briefly, the records show. Numerous documents depict him as an outspoken supporter of the FBI and particularly of J. Edgar Hoover, its longtime director, even toward the end of Hoover's tenure as criticism of him mounted.
"Byrd said that the Director's record of public service was unparalleled anywhere and he knew that it would never be possible for any successor to adequately 'fill his shoes,'" one June 1966 memo between top FBI brass said.
The files repeatedly refer to Byrd's "cordial relations" with the bureau, and include numerous thank-you notes and other friendly exchanges between Byrd and Hoover from the early 1960s until Hoover's death in 1972.
Late Sen. Byrd's FBI files reveal uproar with CIA in 1960s
Photos
FILE - This Tuesday Nov. 7, 2006 file photo shows the late U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., as he speaks upon winning his ninth term, in Charleston, W.Va. Byrd created a stir in the mid-1960s within the nation's intelligence community when he obtained secret FBI reports leaked by the CIA.
with Totally Local Yellow Pages
Business News
Suggested Stories
From the Web
"He certainly was a law and order conservative," said Smock, director of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University in West Virginia. "He had great respect for the Justice Department and for Hoover, as far as I know."
The FBI had provided Byrd only with publicly available information about three unidentified individuals involved in civil rights matters when he revealed the leaked documents to an FBI agent during a September 1966 meeting, a memo to FBI Deputy Director C.D. DeLoach said.
"Why can't a United State Senator, the best friend the FBI has in the Senate, get information directly from the FBI which he has already received from a third party," Byrd was quoted as saying.
The memo said Byrd then showed the agent Xerox copies of two secret FBI investigative reports and one internal memo.
Byrd refused to reveal his source, but markings on the documents led the FBI to conclude they were copies of papers provided to the CIA earlier that year.
"(I)t is believed that the Director of CIA should be fully aware of this situation and if the CIA is guilty, as it appears to be, (Director Richard) Helms should be emphatically impressed with our displeasure for such uncalled-for activity," the memo said.
Several of these typed memos feature handwritten notes underscoring the bureau's anger and concern, some signed with Hoover's initial. "This is outrageous breach of security by CIA," one such note read. Helms, meanwhile, was "decidedly disturbed" when told of the leak, another memo said.
"Helms replied that it was difficult for him to believe that anyone would be so stupid to become involved in such activity, but he has learned through bitter experience that 'anything is possible,'" that document said.
The records show that Helms' security chief, Howard Osborne, ran down the leak: Two CIA employees provided the documents to an unidentified Maryland county law enforcement official, who then handed them off to the senator.
Osborne told the FBI that both "he and Mr. Helms are distressed over the incident and that they intend to make an example of the guilty CIA employees to insure that such an incident never occurs again," a follow-up memo to DeLoach said.
The employees' final fate is unclear, though the memo said Osborne was confident Helms would support firing one or both of the culprits.
J. Edgar Hoover and Friends....read all of the information at this website:
http://itwasjohnson.impiousdigest.com/index.htm
Hoover and the Scottish Rite
J. Edgar Hoover, former FBI Director and 33rd Scottish Rite segregationist mason. He hated the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, slandered them as Communists, and was a key player in undermining all investigations into their assassinations. (see below)
George Washington Fought the Pro-British Tories Who Became the Scottish Rite
According to Thomas Paine (the same whose writings helped inspire the American Revolution) the true Druidic origins of freemasonry are hidden from lower level mason. For more on this, read his treatise The Origin of Freemasonry.) Though American lodges were initially the meetings places for patriots leading the Revolution, a treaty with England allowed Tory masons amnesty after the war, and these same masons- who fought for the British in the Revolutionary War- formed the Scottish Rite and sided with Britain in the War of 1812 and later, with the Confederacy. Americans were allied with French masons, not British, when they fought for independence.
After the Civil War, when Andrew Johnson assumed power, the Scottish Rite had its first American president. But he was also suspect in Lincoln's murder, and it was a major cause of the impeachment of Johnson. Shamelessly, however, many in the Scottish Rite count patriots like George Washington among their own, when their forebears fought against Washington in the Revolutionary War! Not only then, but also in the War of 1812.
In the War of 1812, the Scottish Rite's political apparatus in the north, the Federalists, would make the first bid for the dissolution of the Union. Often called "the second battle of independence", this time Britain actually burned the White House in a march on Washington.
The War of 1812 grew from the practice of impressment, or the seizure of American seamen for service in the British navy. The British government claimed that it only seized subjects of the Crown who sailed under the American flag to avoid wartime service in their own navy. But in fact, the British seized not only their own deserters, but also impressed a sizeable number of United States citizens—estimates suggest 6000 or more.
When President James Madison declared war on Britain, it was vehemently opposed by the Federalists. The reason cited was a fear that such a war would severely harm American trade. The Federalists, who were pro-British, actually led an opposition to the war that was so strong in New England that the governors of Massachusetts and Connecticut refused to call up their militia in response to President Madison's request for troops.
By late 1814, delegates from the New England states, dissatisfied with the handling of the war, had met at the Hartford Convention in Connecticut (December 14, 1814-January 5, 1815). This group, which was dominated by disgruntled members of the Federalist political party, was reported to have formulated demands that amounted to a dissolution of the Union. Ironically, this Federalist attempt to dissolve the Union was decided upon after the War of 1812 was won, and ended with a peace treaty negotiated in Ghent, Belgium, and signed on December 24, 1814.
The Federalists were unaware that a treaty has already ended the war, and just three days after the Hartford Convention adjourned, an outnumbered Andrew Jackson dealt a crushing blow to British forces in New Orleans on January 8, 1814.
Because the meetings of the convention took place behind closed doors, as all masonic meetings are, and because the members were pledged to absolute secrecy, word spread to the effect that the New England states were covertly plotting secession from the Union. This irreparably damaged the reputation of the Federalist Party, already in disfavor because of its pro-British and aristocratic leanings. The party did not survive the presidential election of 1816. But the Scottish Rite did, all it lost was one front among many. The symbol of the Scottish Rite is a double-headed eagle with a British Crown. It's there for a reason.
More about Masons/Freemasons - the Scottish Rite at:
http://maoliworld.com/forum/topics/a-look-at-corporations-from-the-...
excerpts from the book
The Lawless State
The crimes of the U.S. Inteligence Agencies
by Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage, Christine Marwick
Penguin Books, 1976
The Lawless State - conclusion
excerpted from the book
The Lawless State
The crimes of the U.S. Inteligence Agencies
by Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage, Christine Marwick
Penguin Books, 1976
BASIS OF AUTHORITY: PRESIDENTIAL ASSERTION
The clandestine bureaus are the true progeny of the post-war presidency, tracing their legal birthright not to legislation but to presidential assertions of "inherent power." According to bureau spokesmen, the FBI's "authority" to spy on Americans rests upon the "constitutional powers and responsibilities vested in the President." Similarly, the ClA's covert intervention abroad is based not on its legislated charter, but on the president's "inherent foreign policy powers." The National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, bureaus charged with communications and satellite intelligence respectively, were created entirely by secret executive directive, and annually consume over $4 billion without a statute to define their duties. What is true for programs is also true for techniques: the Justice Department has asserted a presidential power to order warrantless . wiretaps, bugs, and "surreptitious entries" (break-ins) against American citizens for intelligence purposes. Even the secrecy that cloaks the intelligence bureaus is based upon a classification system established by executive order, without statutory basis.
The intelligence agencies are assigned the responsibility for routine spying and political policing at home and abroad. Secrecy is necessary, for the primary function of the agencies is to undertake disreputable activities that presidents do not wish to reveal to the public or expose to congressional debate. The agencies also collect secret intelligence information, which helps to justify presidential power by providing it with a claim of special knowledge. The "mysteries of government" do much to still criticism of activities apparently beyond the comprehension of mere citizens or legislators.
Perhaps the most important function of secrecy is to insulate the clandestine agencies from the civil society and government. Wrapped in a secrecy system fastened by security clearances, lie-detector tests, and classification markings, the officials of the secret bureaus develop a unique loyalty and allegiance to the agency. The Senate Intelligence Committee found that the intelligence agencies were a "sector of American government set apart. Employees' loyalties to their organizations have been conditioned by the closed, compartmented and secretive circumstances of their agencies."' The Senate report compared intelligence service with monastic life, with similar rituals, disciplines, and personal sacrifices. In the intelligence bureau, however, the monastic training prepared officials not for saintliness, but for crime, for acts transgressing the limits of accepted law and morality.
p222
Because of the secrecy, the "vicious and unsavory" tactics that are part of the daily routine of the secret agent are hidden from the citizenry, preserving their own sense of decency.
The secret agencies of the president operated for some twenty-five years with few questioning their operations. The national consensus, founded on anti-communism and developed by periodic crises, supported a bipartisan foreign policy and a strong, active presidency. The president's authority to defend the national security was generally accepted, and his instruments went unquestioned. Few reporters, legislators, or citizens even attempted to strip away the veil of secrecy to expose the spy bureaus to review, and the few that tried, failed. In this, the intelligence agencies enjoyed the license of the secret police in a dictatorship: they could spy on others without concern for others reviewing them.
The national consensus, secrecy, and the mantle of the presidency enabled the covert bureaus to operate outside the normal checks and balances of the constitutional system, and above the law itself. For over twenty-five years, Congress simply abdicated its legislative and oversight functions. Perhaps the best example was provided by the late Senator Allen Ellender, a longtime member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which appropriated money to the CIA. When asked in 1971 if the committee had approved financing for the ClA's 36,000-person secret army in Laos, Ellender replied: "I did not know anything about it.... I never asked to begin with, whether there were any funds to carry on the war.... It never dawned on me to ask about it."
For the most part, the congressional ignorance was voluntary. Senator Leverett Saltonstall, for many years ranking Republican on the oversight subcommittee, summarized the widespread feelings on the Hill: "It is not a question of reluctance on the part of CIA officials to speak to us. Instead it is a question of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge on subjects which I personally, as a member of Congress and as a citizen, would rather not have." The Saltonstall attitude was not entirely irresponsible. It may be preferable for legislators to remain ignorant of activities that they dare not control, for in this way they avoid complicity in them. In any case, the Congress operated for twenty-five years in blissful ignorance, appropriating secret funds of untold amounts to the intelligence agencies without even knowing where the money was hidden in the general budget.
Certainly at the height of the cold war, legislative approval for virtually any activity was available if requested. The fact that the agencies did not seek legislation to legitimate their activities indicates both their disdain for congressional authority and the desire of executive officials to claim exclusive monopoly over national security activities.
The courts were no different from the Congress, for secret activities seldom came before them. No criminal prosecutions were brought, simply because no attorney general even considered trying to control the secret bureaus. Indeed, for twenty years, the CIA and the Justice Department had a formal agreement that Justice would refer all cases involving CIA personnel or operations to the agency's general counsel for review. If the counsel decided that CIA sources or methods would be endangered, the Justice Department would drop the case. Needless to say, the vast majority of cases involving CIA personnel were not prosecuted. The formal agreement of the CIA was the informal practice with the FBI. No attorney general dared cross J. Edgar Hoover and investigate the bureau.
p233
THE CRIMES OF STATE
The threat of a covert national security apparatus becomes clear from its operating principles. "National security," "internal security," "foreign intelligence," "in the national interest"-these are empty receptacles into which virtually any substance can be poured. Most important, they are inescapably political terms, requiring subjective political definition. Like all political decisions, the definition of the terms must be done publicly, with open discussion and debate.
When the president and undercover bureaus are left to define the terms in secret, predictable abuses occur. Inevitably, presidents tend to equate dissent with subversion, and opposition to the president with opposition to the national security. As Tom Charles Huston testified:
The risk was that you would get people who . . . would construe political considerations to be national security considerations, to move from the kid with the bomb, to the kid with the picket sign and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposition candidate.
Thus, every postwar president used the clandestine bureaus to collect political as well as "internal security" data. The temptation was simply too great to ignore. Needless to say, the worst corruption came with the Nixon administration, when "national security" became part of the cover-up of the crimes of the president and his aides. The Nixon tapes provide the spectacle of the president, John Dean, and H. R. "Bob" Haldeman inventing a "national security justification" for the break-in at the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who released the Pentagon Papers. When the president asked what could be done if the break-in were revealed publicly, Dean suggested, "You might put it on a national security basis." Later Nixon said, "With the bombing thing coming out, and everything coming out, the whole thing was national security." Dean replied, "I think we could get by on that."
The presidential abuses are paralleled by similar bureaucratic excesses. Like the presidents, each bureau tended to equate criticism of it with criticism of the nation's security. Each secret bureau used its surveillance techniques to watch or harass its domestic critics. The IRS automatically institutes an audit of any public critic of the income tax, and sends informers to attend antitax meetings and take down names. Military intelligence agents were particularly concerned with critics of the military. Hoover was constantly directing the attention of his agents to critics of the bureau; name checks, field investigations, and often more would result.
The bureaucratic corruption was the use of secret political intelligence for institutional or personal purposes. Hoover, for example, was the master of the implied blackmail. He kept in his private office hundreds of "OC" (Official and Confidential) files, which reputedly detailed the private lives of politicians and federal officials. One can envision the scene at which Hoover informed Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy that a bureau wiretap on Sam "Momo" Giancana, the reputed Chicago Mafia capo, had picked up calls between the White House and Judith Campbell, "friend" to both Giancana and John F. Kennedy. Hoover no doubt reassured the young attorney general that not one word about the existence of these tapes need come out, as long as he, Hoover, remained in office. No doubt Kennedy complimented the director on his long and valuable service to his country, and assured him that his position was secure.
Far more serious than these "routine corruptions" is the conflict that occurs over who shall define "threats" to the national security. The secret bureaus consider themselves the repositories of expertise on subversion at home and abroad; it becomes their duty to protect Americans-even against themselves-in a world far crueler than any citizen could imagine. As time goes on, the bureaus thus become less and less responsive to outsiders, whether legislators, cabinet officials, or citizens. Inevitably a gap widens between the practices of the covert bureaus and the beliefs of the citizenry. When the consensus supporting the old policy dissipates-as it did in the jungles of Vietnam and the suites of the Watergate-a crisis ensues.
Thus, when the intelligence investigations started, the bureaus resisted, using every tactic of delay, obstruction, and obfuscation possible. The House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Congressman Otis Pike, concluded in its final report that "if this Committee's recent experience is any test, intelligence agencies that are to be controlled by Congressional lawmaking are, today, beyond the lawmakers' scrutiny." Ironically, this conclusion was penned before the administration and the CIA managed to convince the House to suppress its own committee's report.
The House committee was not alone. FBI Director Clarence Kelley was deeply embarrassed when his sworn testimony that the bureau had terminated all illegal break-ins in 1966 was proved wrong, and break-ins were occurring during his own tenure as director. It seems clear that veteran bureau officials were continuing the activities they considered necessary, without telling even their own director. Similarly, career CIA officials didn't bother to inform CIA directors John McCone and Admiral Raborn-both outsiders to the agency-that the CIA was involved in assassination attempts against Castro, and was maintaining an illegal mail-opening program in the United States. Clearly as outsiders, the two might not recognize the need for such programs as well as intelligence veterans. It is this attitude, slowly built up over years of lawless activity in the nation's "interest," that can indeed threaten the entire notion of a government ruled by law and accountable to people.
"We become lawless in a struggle for the rule of law- semi-outlaws who risk their lives to put down the savagery of others," says Peter Ward, the CIA agent in a novel by E. Howard Hunt. Hunt would probably not understand the irony.
In the 1950s we were told that Communists used Aesopian language, infiltrated and disrupted political groups, subverted the free press and democratic process, and used "fronts" to mask their activities. Afraid of them, we have inevitably come to mirror our own image of them. To protect ourselves from the tyrannous, we have slowly built our own tyranny.
James Madison wrote: "At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle which denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen." In the end, the sides of the dual state, military and civil, secret and open, arbitrary and legal stand, in Edmund Burke's phrase, in "dreadful enmity." Now may be our last opportunity to decide against the nether side of the state.
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The KKK in the Supreme Court
That Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black was in the Ku Klux Klan is well-known to historians. However, according to documents released by the FBI in February 2000; Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, who led the investigation of the Kennedy Assassination, was a leader of in the Ku Klux Klan."Chief Justice [Earl] Warren was the leader of a small local Klan group for several years..." This is an astonishing development with far-reaching implications. Chief Justice Warren headed the long-discredited Warren Commission investigation into the assassination of Catholic President John F. Kennedy. Days before the murder, the FBI received word that a plot to kill Kennedy in Dallas involved elements of the Ku Klux Klan.
"Bureau files indicate that according to The Man from Independence, by Jonathan Daniels, former President Truman paid a $10 membership fee to the Klan in 1924 when he was running for county judge. On this occasion he was asked to pledge that he would not hire Catholics. He replied that he would not make such a pledge and was reported to have taken his $10 membership fee back."
As for Justice Hugo Black: "The September, 1941, issue of "Current Biography" indicates Justice Black was a member of the Robert E. Lee Klan Number 1, Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, from September 11, 1923, until July 9, 1925....Black reportedly resigned on the eve of his campaign for the democratic nomination for United States senator. He was reportedly welcomed back into the Klan and made a life member on September 2, 1926. Black has publicly admitted Klan membership."
Hugo Black was appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a fellow Scottish Rite freemason.
United States Presidents in the Masons/Freemasons:
Abraham Lincoln was not a Freemason. He did apply for membership in Tyrian Lodge, Springfield, Ill., shortly after his nomination for the presidency in 1860 but withdrew the application because he felt that his applying for membership at that time might be construed as a political ruse to obtain votes. He advised the lodge that he would resubmit his application again when he returned from the presidency.
Lincoln never returned. On the death of the president, Tyrian Lodge adopted, on April 17, 1865, a resolution to say "that the decision of President Lincoln to postpone his application for the honours of Freemasonry, lest his motives be misconstrued, is the highest degree honorable to his memory."
Lyndon Johnson received his first degree on October 30, 1937. After receiving the degree he found that his congressional duties (elected in 1937) took so much time he was unable to pursue the masonic degrees.
Ronald Reagan has often been referred to as a Freemason. President Reagan is not a Freemason although he is an honorary member of the Imperial Council of the Shrine. President Reagan has on numerous occasions been involved in Shrine and masonic functions throughout his career.
The confusion as to his membership arises from a ceremony held in the Oval Office of the White House on February 11th, 1988, when a group of Freemasons presented President Reagan with a certificate of honor from the Grand Lodge of Washington, D.C., then he was made an Honourary Scottish Rite mason. The title of Freemason can only be conferred by a Grand Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons. In Reagan's case this was not done, probably because the ceremonies would have taken a full day to confer and the president's time was limited; therefore,President Reagan should only be referred to as a Shriner or Scottish Rite mason. The Shrine and Scottish Rite are concordant bodies and cannot confer the title Freemason on any person.
George Bush has also on numerous occasions been referred to as a Freemason.The confusion as to President Bush being a member arises from the swearing in ceremonies at his inauguration. President Bush took his oath of office on the George Washington Bible which belongs to St. Johns Lodge in New York City. Because the Bible belonged to a Masonic Lodge many writers assumed he was a Freemason. The Bible was used at the request of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies
This Bible was first used on April 30, 1789, by the Grand Master of the Masons in New York, to administer the oath of office to George Washington, the first president. Other presidents who took their oath of office with this Bible are Warren G. Harding, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter.
Reference: http://www.mastermason.com/wilmettepark/pres.html
List of Freemasons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Freemasons
http://www.hamiltonlodge344.com/Famous%20Masons.htm
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