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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 10:58 AM
Original message
Vietnam and Iraq Wars Started by Same People
The same small group of very wealthy Americans is responsible for wars in Iraq and Vietnam. For want of better term, I’ve called them the Bush Family Evil Empire, the BFEE. This is somewhat misleading, as the Bushes are mere servants to this monied class. A truer description would be “The War Party.”

To the point:

Both Iraq wars were started by Bush and his father. George Herbert Walker Bush practically INVITED Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait then never gave him a chance to pull out.

George Walker Bush INVENTED a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9-11 and LIED to Congress and the American people, stating Hussein threatened America with Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Averell Harriman, business associate of Prescott Bush (a Senator, father and grandfather to the two presidents Bush), was the catalyst for America’s involvement in the disastrous Vietnam War. The historical record shows Harriman OK'd the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem. America's right wing has long-tried to smear President John F. Kennedy for that murder.

Small world, huh? Too small -- especially for war.

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anarchy1999 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 11:05 AM
Response to Original message
1. Well, finally someone points it out. Last week, in a bar, a good friend
set me up against a "rightwinger". He set me up by telling me this was his "good friend" who had turned him into a "leftie" but had now gone to the dark side.

I just asked "how could you"? Where are you from, how old are you, do you remember Iran/Contra? He left the table and then the bar. Turns out he had always been a rightwinger and one of our dear, long time posters here at DU had a good laugh at my expense.

He knew just exactly how I would respond and wanted to see it happen, "just for fun".

Why isn't this more of a main topic in our "liberal media"?
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 11:17 AM
Response to Reply #1
3. Right-wingers are real brave when someone else does the fighting.
Same goes for thinking.

Sorry to hear a friend would do that for kicks, anarchy1999.

The reich-wing media won't touch this because they know it would lead to their loss of jobs, priviledge and -- most likely -- freedom.

Here's what Corporate McPravda's missed regarding Averell (My widow financed the Arkansas fellow's campaign) Harriman's involvement in Vietnam:

Who changed the coup into the murder of Diem, Nhu and a Catholic priest?

From The Secret History of the CIA by Joseph Trento"

Who changed the coup into the murder of Diem, Nhu and a Catholic priest accompanying them? To this day, nothing has been found in government archives tying the killings to either John or Robert Kennedy. So how did the tools and talents developed by Bill Harvey for ZR/RIFLE and Operation MONGOOSE get exported to Vietnam? Kennedy immediately ordered (William R.) Corson to find out what had happened and who was responsible. The answer he came up with: “On instructions from Averell Harriman…. The orders that ended in the deaths of Diem and his brother originated with Harriman and were carried out by Henry Cabot Lodge’s own military assistant.”

Having served as ambassador to Moscow and governor of New York, W. Averell Harriman was in the middle of a long public career. In 1960, President-elect Kennedy appointed him ambassador-at-large, to operate “with the full confidence of the president and an intimate knowledge of all aspects of United States policy.” By 1963, according to Corson, Harriman was running “Vietnam without consulting the president or the attorney general.”

The president had begun to suspect that not everyone on his national security team was loyal. As Corson put it, “Kenny O’Donnell (JFK’s appointments secretary) was convinced that McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor, was taking orders from Ambassador Averell Harriman and not the president. He was especially worried about Michael Forrestal, a young man on the White House staff who handled liaison on Vietnam with Harriman.”

At the heart of the murders was the sudden and strange recall of Sagon Station Chief Jocko Richardson and his replacement by a no-name team barely known to history. The key member was a Special Operations Army officer, John Michael Dunn, who took his orders, not from the normal CIA hierarchy but from Harriman and Forrestal.

According to Corson, “John Michael Dunn was known to be in touch with the coup plotters,” although Dunn’s role has never been made public. Corson believes that Richardson was removed so that Dunn, assigned to Ambassador Lodtge for “special operations,” could act without hindrance.

SOURCE:

“The Secret History of the CIA.” Joseph Trento. 2001, Prima Publishing. pp. 334-335.

Big book. Big bore as far as Big Media are concerned.
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hector459 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Mar-01-05 12:28 PM
Response to Reply #1
25. Major General Smedly Butler: just a confirmation on whay you say
Edited on Tue Mar-01-05 12:29 PM by hector459
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/war_is_a_racket_033103.htm

"War Is A Racket

It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few -- the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out."

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JDPriestly Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 11:06 AM
Response to Original message
2. How true!
And each war was instigated in the same fashion. The instigators weaved a web of lies, sold it to the media and the powerful in Congress and business. Meanwhile, they invested heavily in industries that make war material and Bingo, hit it big moneywise. It works every time. Only this time, many more of us see the process than ever before. Thanks for the post.
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 11:27 AM
Response to Reply #2
4. Phony Photos Showed Saddam Armies Across Border from Saudia Arabia
Just one Big BFEE Lie in 1990 was that Saddam's armies threatened the Saudi Arabian oil fields. They even manufactured spy satellite photos to show massed troops, tanks, etc. were ready to invade. Ostensibly, these shots were to convince the Saudis to allow US forces into their country. In reality, they were used to help get Congress to sign-off on their war plans.

http://www.representativepress.org/LiesAboutIraq.html

PS: Another lie that no one remembers is Hill & Knowlton's PR genius at work. They arranged to have the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter testify before Congress as "a 15-year-old Kuwaiti." She made out that Saddam's troops emptied neonatal ICU incubators and left the babies to die on the cold hospital floor. Poppy brought it up all the time. Some gag, huh?

http://www.unitedstatesgovernment.net/sellingthegulfwar.htm
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 12:20 PM
Response to Reply #2
5. You're welcome, JDPriestly!
Sorry I missed including that above.



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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 12:23 PM
Response to Original message
6. Don't forget Eugenics...
War kills people. Little people, according to some philosophies.

From EugenicsWatch.com

Edward Henry Harriman (1848-1909) made his fortune speculating on the stock market. In 1897, he took over the bankrupt Union Pacific Railroad, and then went on to build a railroad empire in the West. When he died, his wife inherited his money. The following year, she provided $500,000 to found the Eugenics Record Office. The Eugenics Record Office was involved in the forced sterilization campaigns and the anti-immigration laws.

In 1932, the Third International Eugenics Congress was held in New York, at the Museum of Natural History. (The First International Eugenics Congress had been in 1912 in London, and the Second was in New York.) Mrs. E. H. Harriman was among the sponsors, along with Mrs. H. B. DuPont and Dr. J. Harvey Kellogg, among others.

http://www.eugenics-watch.com/roots/chap12.html

Treasure Trove of Links at:

Eugenics of Prescott Bush
& George Herbert Walker


FIRST we must establish the networks of connectedness, that lying criminals and murderers were connected together as organized crime, and that they took contol of government to hide their criminal history and to keep on doing more. The most recent four generations of Bush Family members have publically advocated for mass murder, forced sterilizations, elimination of the weak members of the human race. Three of the last four generations also masterbated in the nude in a coffin surrounded by a large group of men, in the dark cult using a pirate flag insignia called "Skull and Bones". There are no "christians" in the Bush family.

http://ecosyn.us/Bush-Hitler/Bush_Eugenics.html



Gee. The historical record shows the Bushes and Harrimans go waaaaaaay back, especially in philosophy regarding the, um, Untermenschen.
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Karenina Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 01:15 PM
Response to Reply #6
7. Sie GLAUBEN
daß sie ÜBERMENCSHEN sind. One of those ideas passed down through the generations...
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 02:34 PM
Response to Reply #7
10. Vielen dank, K. Ich studiere krieglieber Scheißkopfen...Friendly Fascists
Why do you think they support the likes of Francisco Franco, Papa Doc Duvallier, Agosto Pinochet and on and on.

Hitler? He was the same. And that’s why Averell Harriman, the Dulles Brothers and Prescott Bush and the rest of their Wall Street ilk supported – and continue to support – like-minded turds as these.

What's the future hold? If we don't wake the heck up and do something about it...


Fascism With A Smile

Part I
By John W. Whitehead
The Rutherford Institute
1-17-5

"As I look at America today, I am not afraid to say that I am afraid." -- Bertram Gross

No matter how much money George W. Bush allocates or how many great things he says about America in his State of the Union Address, the reality is that this country is in dire straits. And as it now stands, things will only worsen.

Unfortunately, most Americans do not realize the gravity of the problem because they are lost in a haze of drugs, alcohol and entertainment distractions -- numbed to the crumbling foundations beneath their feet. And our leaders are not advancing any real solutions to the disorder that surrounds us.

Such chaos eventually brings change. In the past, it has inevitably included authoritarian government -- which some fear is raising its ugly head in the U.S.

Former NYU professor Leonard Peikoff, for example, has argued that the trends toward authoritarian government of the Nazi kind are too apparent to be ignored. These were set forth in his 1982 book The Ominous Parallels. "The similarities," writes Peikoff, "cannot be shrugged off. America is moving toward a Nazi form of totalitarianism. It has been doing so for decades."


CONTINUED...

http://www.rutherford.org/

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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 01:46 PM
Response to Original message
8.  God's Away On Business


I'd sell your heart to the junkman baby
For a buck, for a buck
If you're looking for someone
To pull you out of that ditch
You're out of luck, you're out of luck

The ship is sinking
The ship is sinking
The ship is sinking
There's leak, there's leak,
In the boiler room
The poor, the lame, the blind
Who are the ones that we kept in charge?
Killers, thieves, and lawyers

God's away, God's away,
God's away on Business. Business.
God's away, God's away,
God's away on Business. Business.

Digging up the dead with
A shovel and a pick
It's a job, it's a job
Bloody moon rising with
A plague and a flood
Jain the mob, jain the mob
It's all over, it's all over, it's all over
There's a lick, there's a lick,
In the boiler room
The poor, the lame, the blind
Who are the ones that we kept in charge?
Killers, thieves, and lawyers
God's away, God's away, God's away
On Business. Business.
God's away, God's away,
On Business. Business.


Goddamn ther's always such
A big temptation
To be good, To be good
Tere's always free cheddar in
A mousetrap, baby
It's a deal, it's a deal
God's away, God's away, God's away
On Business. Business.
God's away, God's away, God's away
On Business. Business.
I narrow my eyes like a coin slot baby,
Let her ring, let her ring
God's away, God's away,
God's away on Business.
Business...

TOM WAITS
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 04:03 PM
Response to Reply #8
17. There's Big Money to be Made in War. Big, Big, Big Money.
Consider the Cold War:

It's Time to Bench 'Team B'

by Lawrence J. Korb
August 18, 2004

The reports of the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence miss the real problem facing the intelligence community. The real problem is not organization or culture, but the Team B concept which began in 1976, and the real villains are those hardliners who refuse to accept the unbiased and balanced judgments of intelligence professionals about the threats facing the country.

On May 6, 1976, then Director of Central Intelligence George H.W. Bush created a Team B to assess a 1975 National Intelligence Estimate by his agency on Soviet Strategic Objectives. Because the NIE did not endorse a worst-case scenario of Soviet capabilities, outsiders demanded access to the same classified intelligence used by the CIA in preparing the report so they could come to their own conclusions. The concept of a Team B competitive analysis had been opposed by William Colby, a career professional and Bush's predecessor as CIA director. But Bush, under pressure from President Ford, who was facing a strong challenge from right-wing Republicans in that year's primary, and Rumsfeld's Pentagon, which was trying to undermine support for Kissinger's détente with the Soviet Union, caved in.

The outside experts on Team B were led by Harvard Professor Richard Pipes and included such well-known hawks as Paul Nitze, William Van Cleave, and Paul Wolfowitz. Not surprisingly, Team B concluded that the intelligence specialists had badly underestimated the threat because they relied too heavily on hard data, instead of extrapolating the Soviets' intentions from ideology.<1> According to some Team B members, "the principal threat to our nation, to world peace, and to the cause of human freedom was the Soviet drive for dominance based upon an unparalleled military buildup."<2>

Although the Team B report contained little factual data, it was enthusiastically received by conservative groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger, whose members included Ronald Reagan, and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. But the report turned out to be grossly inaccurate. For example, it said that the Soviets would have 500 intercontinental Backfire bombers capable of striking the United States by 1984. In reality, only 235 were deployed. Team B also claimed that the Soviets were working on an anti-acoustic submarine, though they failed to find any evidence of one. The hawks explained away this lack of evidence by stating that "the submarine may have already been deployed because it appeared to have evaded detection."<3>

Team B was right about one thing. The CIA estimate was indeed flawed. In 1989, the agency published an internal review of the threat assessments from 1974 to 1986. The report concluded that the Soviet threat had been "substantially overestimated" every year. In 1978, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the selection of Team B members yielded a flawed composition of political views and biases.<4> Consequently, the Team B analysis was deemed a gross exaggeration and completely inaccurate.

CONTINUED...

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF...

Remember what happened to Reagan at Reykjavik, Sladdie? Pruneface wanted to scrap ALL the nukes. Gorby said, "Da. Da!" Then -- POOF! a couple of weeks later. Hasenfus is shot down and all the papers are talking about is Iran-Contra and the possible impeachment of the Geritol guzzler. Of course, you know who would've ascended to the pretzelduncy...
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understandinglife Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 02:03 PM
Response to Original message
9. Recommended. Please cross-post to the DU PNAC/NeoCON group.



"DO YOU ENJOY BEING A CITIZEN OF THE ROGUE SUPER_POWER?"
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 05:08 PM
Response to Reply #9
18. Thanks, understandinglife! Didja ever hear about NSAM 263 and NSAM 273?
These National Security Action Memoranda really spell out the sea-change in the US Government before and after the murder of President Kennedy.

I'd bet this is old news to you, but for those who are just learning about the military-industrial complex and its toadies, the Bush Gang:


THE SECOND BIGGEST LIE

by Michael Morrissey

The biggest lie of our time, after the Warren Report, is the notion that Johnson merely continued or expanded Kennedy's policy in Vietnam after the assassination.

1. JFK's policy

In late 1962, Kennedy was still fully committed to supporting the Diem regime, though he had some doubts even then. When Senator Mike Mansfield advised withdrawal at that early date:

The President was too disturbed by the Senator's unexpected argument to reply to it. He said to me later when we talked about the discussion, "I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely, and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him (Kenneth O'Donnell and Dave Powers, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1970, p. 15).

By the spring of 1963, Kennedy had reversed course completely and agreed with Mansfield:

"The President told Mansfield that he had been having serious second thoughts about Mansfield's argument and that he now agreed with the Senator's thinking on the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam.

'But I can't do it until 1965--after I'm reelected,' Kennedy told Mansfield....

CONTINUED...

http://eserver.org/govt/gulf-war/jfk-lbj-and-vietnam.txt
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understandinglife Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 06:23 PM
Response to Reply #18
21. Yes, indeed. I am posting links to the two NSAM documents, just...
....so those not familiar can access them easily:

http://www.jfklancer.com/NSAM263.html

http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/NSAMs/nsam273.asp

Kennedy was definitely on the path of getting the US out of Vietnam and, imho, would have done so had he not been assassinated.

Peace.


"DO YOU ENJOY BEING A CITIZEN OF THE ROGUE SUPER_POWER?"
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Lone Pawn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 02:47 PM
Response to Original message
11. Not quite. Both Bushes were catalysts, but
the wars were actually started by a group of liberals who advocated an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy against the USSR. They called themselves paleoliberals at first, to distinguish themselves from the liberals of the Great Society. They soon found intellectual alliance with centrist conservatives disaffected with the isolationism rampant in the GOP. They then merged and formed the neoconservative movement. Actually, ironically, you can trace the neocon movement back to the pro-war liberals in WWII. But anyway, proto-neocons--MacNamara is a good example--started Vietnam, and neocons started Iraq. Bushes just happened to be there.
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mopinko Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 03:04 PM
Response to Reply #11
12. care to name some names?
Edited on Mon Feb-28-05 03:05 PM by mopinko
provide some links? or do you just spit out gobbledy gook?
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Lone Pawn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 03:14 PM
Response to Reply #12
13. It's common knowledge, but if you need a beginner's lesson,
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mopinko Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 03:28 PM
Response to Reply #13
15. saying "commom knowledge" and a link to wiki
isn't much of an argument. especially when you are defending the bushes.
name some names, put some meat on your argument.
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Lone Pawn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 03:50 PM
Response to Reply #15
16. Look, I'm not defending the Bushes.
Edited on Mon Feb-28-05 03:54 PM by Lone Pawn
1. You wanted me to name names for the liberal-rooted history of the neocons. I provided you with a wiki article that explains it better than I could. It really isn't anything surprising. Hell, I went to a Fukuyama lecture a month ago and he spent half his time explaining how the liberals and the neocons split ways after the Vietnam war, and how he felt the neocon belief in the progression of History towards democracy had its roots in Marxist beliefs of History as a force. I myself was a neocon from the mid-nineties up until this war, mostly due to what I felt was an appropriate response to China. Neocons come from the interventionist liberals in Kennedy's Best and Brightest. It is a fact. They admit it. The left admits it. I cannot understand how you would not. Just think logically if you won't read even a simply article presented to you. Once upon a war, the left were isolationists and the right were interventionists. But a generation prior, the roles were reversed. Tell me which is more logical.
A. The interventionists all became pacifists and vice versa, or
B. The interventionists switched political affiliations because their party wasn't listening to them anymore.

2. If you seriously think that Bush had more to do with this war than Pearle did, if you think Cheney did more than Feith, if you'd blame Rove before Kristol, you're quite simply not paying attention. And if you think Prescott Bush had a greater role than Kennedy's staff in Vietnam, you've been paying some sort of anti-attention, and I have neither the patience or inclination to forcibly teach you 50 years of American political thought.
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 03:26 PM
Response to Reply #12
14. Maybe Scoop Jackson?
Edited on Mon Feb-28-05 03:37 PM by seemslikeadream
The principals have also assisted each other down through the years. Frequently. In 1973 Richard Perle used his (and Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson's) influence as a senior staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee to help Wolfowitz obtain a job with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. In 1982, Perle hired Feith in ISP as his Special Counsel, and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Negotiations Policy. In 2001, DOD Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz helped Feith obtain his appointment as Undersecretary for Policy. Feith then appointed Perle as Chairman of the Defense Policy Board. In some cases, this mutual assistance carries risks, as for instance when Perle's hiring of Bryen as his Deputy in ISP became an extremely contentious issue in Perle's own Senate appointment hearings as Assistant Secretary.

Every appointment/hiring listed above involved classified work for which high-level security clearances and associated background checks by the FBI were required. When the level of the clearance is not above generic Top Secret, however, the results of that background check are only seen by the hiring authority. And in the event, if the appointee were Bryen or Ledeen and the hiring authority were Perle, Wolfowitz or Feith, the appointee(s) need not have worried about the findings of the background check. In the case of Perle hiring Bryen as his deputy in 1981, for instance, documents released in 1983 under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that the Department provided extraordinarily high clearances for Bryen without having reviewed more than a small portion of his 1978-79 FBI investigation file.



RICHARD PERLE: A HABIT OF LEAKING

Perle came to Washington for the first time in early 1969, at the age of 28, to work for a neo-con think tank called the "Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy." Within months, Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson offered Perle a position on his staff, working with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And within months after that--less than a year--Perle was embroiled in an affair involving the leaking of a classified CIA report on alleged past Soviet treaty violations.

The leaker (and author of the report) was CIA analyst David Sullivan, and the leakee was Richard Perle. CIA Director Stansfield Turner was incensed at the unauthorized disclosure, but before he could fire Sullivan, the latter quit. Turner urged Sen. Jackson to fire Perle, but he was let off with a reprimand. Jackson then added insult to injury by immediately hiring Sullivan to his staff. Sullivan and Perle became close friends and co-conspirators, and together established an informal right-wing network which they called "the Madison Group," after their usual meeting place in--you might have guessed--the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop.

more
http://www.counterpunch.org/green02282004.html

Some of the other neo-conservatives to have worked with
Scoop Jackson are William Kristol (son of Irving Kristol),
Elliott Abrams (son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz) and
Frank Gaffney. Perle and Abrams, working out of
Jackson's office, used the issue of Jewish emigration from
the Soviet Union to undermine U.S.-Soviet détente.
Jackson sponsored legislation that made the Soviet
Union's gaining "most favoured nation status" contingent on
an increase in Jewish
emigration.
http://www.philosophynotes.com/politics/neocon_ascendency6.htm

The cause of death was a heart attack. Jackson had
been recovering from a chest cold for the previous week to
two weeks. He had just returned home from a
meeting pertaining to the Korean Airliner that was shot down
by the Soviets. He represented the manufacturer of that
airliner, which had been shot down over Korea. He had
returned from Seattle by driving, got home and had a heart
attack a few hours
later.

Jackson had no heart history, had never smoked, was fit
and industrious. He was born in 1912 and was 71 years old
at the time of his heart attack at home. H'ed driven home
from Seattle after he returned from the trip to China and Korea
a week to two weeks previously, during which he'd caught
a chest cold from which he was thought recovered.
The Democratic Senator from Washington state had chaired
the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and the
Committee on Energy and Natural
Resources.

The detailed data on Senator Jackson's seat was also
not easily or readily available. Only a curiosity on my part as
to the fate of Senator Jackson and the nature of
the circumstances of his 1983 heart attack caused me to look
far enough into it that I consulted the local library. They
referred me to Time's somewhat obscure article. It showed
me that Evans' third party activity must definitely be factored in
as part of the determination of which party won that
November 1983 Senate election in Washington state:
neither.

http://home.att.net/~m.standridge/farnaway.htm


Many people recall the Watergate scandal of 1972,
when Republican President Nixon’s operatives broke into
the Democratic National Committee headquarters. But
few know of other Nixon antics, including the planting of lies
in the media about Democratic presidential candidates.
For instance, Nixon’s team spread false rumors that
Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson was a homosexual (See
Almost America "The Impeachment of
Nixon").

The road the U.S. traveled to Baghdad was paved by 'Scoop' Jackson

It was then, 40 years ago, that Jackson began to be
linked directly, if furtively, to some of the uglier and little-
known origins of the war on Iraq in 2003. Overseeing the
CIA's "black budget" for covert operations and interventions
from a subcommittee of Armed Services, he was one of
a handful of senators who gave a nod to two U.S.-backed
coups in Iraq, one in 1963 and again in 1968. Those
plots brought Saddam Hussein to power amid bloodbaths
in which the CIA, exacting the price for its support,
handed Saddam and his Baath Party cohorts lists of
supposed anti-U.S. Iraqis to be
killed

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/115505_focus06.shtml
http://www.deanhartwell.com/page269626_files/archivesnew/Lie%20Cheat%20Steal%20It's%20the%20Republican%20Way.htm


This is from Tinoire


Senator Scoop Jackson(-D) Father of the Neocons, Father of the DLC


many of whom are still Democrats. Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz are still registered Democrats TO THIS DAY. Some of his proteges left and went to the Republicans, some stayed behind. The Coalition for a Democratic Majority, forerunner of the DLC was founded by Scoop's people too. There's so much info available if you have the time to read: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2004-37%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=%22Coalition+for+a+Democratic+Majority%22&btnG=Search
I'd suggest people start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_for_a_Democratic_Majority if they want to examine the connections between the DLC and CDM. By the way, these are the same people who brought us the war against Yugoslavia... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_Action_Committee Don't any of you buy that that was any more of a humanitarian mission than Iraq. There's not a damn humanitarian bone in these people's bodies- they just spun it better because people were asleep and no one questioned the media's lies.

Sick stuff. All of this is real sick stuff.

Scoop Jackson... How big do we want that tent?

Dear Scoop was also father of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority http://rightweb.irc-online.org/groupwatch/cpd.php
which is the forerunner of the DLC.

Figure it out, it's not that hard...

Frank Gaffney is another "Scoop" traitor.




These were heady times in Washington for the hawks. It wasn't long before young Wolfowitz quit a teaching post at Yale University in order to join them: In 1973, he arrived to work at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The nexus of the antidisarmament network in those days was the office of Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the hawkish Democratic senator from Washington; Perle quickly amassed tremendous power as Jackson's top aide. Wohlstetter's two prize pupils soon became friends and allies in the crusade against arms control--and for the eventual ascension of Ronald Reagan. While Perle established himself on Capitol Hill through repeated bureaucratic attacks on disarmament advocates and Pentagon budget-cutters, Wolfowitz served on "Team B"--a study group drawn largely from the ranks of the Committee on the Present Danger that, once given access to classified CIA data, used a highly politicized methodology to conclude that the Soviet Union was militarily poised to overwhelm the United States.


Somewhat bizarrely, Wolfowitz was still seeing red after the Soviet Union's collapse: In 1992, during his waning days as undersecretary of defense in George H.W. Bush's administration, Wolfowitz penned a secret memo that earnestly depicted the Russia of Boris Yeltsin as the direst threat to American national security and further called for war between the Russians and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization if the former tried to menace the newly liberated Baltic nations. During the Gulf War, Wolfowitz was infuriated with then?General Colin Powell and others who believed that once the UN mandate of expelling Saddam's forces from Kuwait was fulfilled, the war was effectively over; Wolfowitz wanted to go to Baghdad and destroy Saddam completely. Prior to September 11, he was talking up China as the new threat.

http://www.pnac.info/blog/archives/000018.html


Some see a Northwest connection to the PNAC planners. Roger Morris, a former senior staffer at the National Security Council, told KOMO 4 News: "Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and the people who have been their disciples over the past few years all trace back to Henry Scoop Jackson."

For 30 years, Jackson was a Democratic powerhouse in the U.S. Senate from Washington. Morris added: "This foreign policy which you are seeing being enacted by George W. Bush is very largely, in my view, the policy of Scoop Jackson. This was made in Snohomish County, in Everett."
http://www.komotv.com/news/story.asp?ID=24043


Committee on the Present Danger

(snip)
The revitalization of the CPD grew out of an independent group called Team B. Team B was authorized in 1976 by President Gerald Ford and organized by then-CIA chief, George Bush. The purpose of Team B was to develop an independent judgment of Soviet capabilities and intentions. Team B was headed by Richard Pipes and included Paul Nitze, Foy Kohler, William Van Cleave, Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham (ret. ), Thomas Wolf of RAND Corp and Gen. John Vogt, Jr. (ret. ). Also a part of Team B were five officials still active in government: Maj. Gen. George Keegan, Brig. Gen. Jasper Welch, Paul D. Wolfowitz of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and Seymour Weiss of the State Department. (2,6) Team B was housed in the offices of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority. (6)

The political base for CPD II was in the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, a group formed in 1972 by the hard-line, anti-Soviet wing of the Senate, led by Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson. (6) These conservative Democrats contended that communism was a great evil and that the U.S. had a moral obligation to eradicate it and foster democracy throughout the world. (2) The 193 individual members of the revitalized CPD comprise a who's who of the Democratic Party establishment and a cross-section of Republican leadership. (1,2) Eventually, 13 of the 18 members of the Foreign Policy Task Force of the CDM, lead by Eugene V. Rostow, joined the CPD. Notable among them were Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leon Keyserling, Max Kampelman, Richard Shifter, and John P. Roche. (6)

(snip)

Activities:

CPD plays a significant role in public relations for conservative democrats. CPD works with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Coalition for Peace Through Strength (CPTS) on the issues surrounding containment militarism. (1) Forty-six members of the CPD advised the Reagan transition team. (1)

(snip)


http://rightweb.irc-online.org/groupwatch/cpd.php


====

the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), founded in 1972 by the likes of Richard Perle, Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, among others; the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), founded in 1976 by Richard Perle, Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, et al.; and the Committee for the Free World (CFW), founded in 1981 by exactly the same crew. Rounding out the picture, CFW's chairman was Dick Cheney's Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.

Nowadays, the CDM/CPD/CFW are associated with the Republican Party—particularly with those neo-conservative devotees of Leo Strauss around the Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal. But these organizations are the direct antecedents to the Democratic Leadership Council, and CDM's veterans maintain close coordination with the DLC to ensure that the Democratic Party does nothing effectively to stop the imperial policy of pre-emptive war—even pre-emptive nuclear war—that the Cheney/Rumsfeld gang has laid out. The DLC, and its affiliates—the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) and the New Democratic Network (NDN)—are on a full-scale campaign to destroy every other faction in the Democratic Party, and silence criticism of the Iraq War.

The "missing link" between the "Democratic" DLC and the now-"Republican" CDM/CPD/CFW neo-cons, is the notorious Social Democrats-USA, (SDUSA), whose chairman, Penn Kemble, was the Executive Director of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority in 1972, until he brought in Richard Perle's underling Stephen Bryen to take his place. Bryen, who created the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) in the early 1980s, when he served as Perle's aide at the Department of Defense, is another leading member of the neo-conservative gang that wants to go to war against the entire Arab world in the name of anti-terrorism. Providing daily coordination between Perle and Bryen would be Joshua Muravchik, a fixture at nearly every American Enterprise Institute event—but also a leader of SDUSA since its creation.

(snip)

Staying Behind as 'Democrats'
For his part, Kemble has been a neo-con insider since the 1960s, but in 1978-79, he worked directly with Cheney's Iraq warriors—Abram Shulsky of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council, and Gary Schmitt of the Project for a New American Century—when they were all on the staff of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) By the 1980s, Kemble was deeply involved in the Project Democracy operations of Ollie North, and the Iran-Contra network that ran a covert gun- and drug-running operation out of the White House.

(snip)

===


Jackson and Moynihan: The Missing Links

To show exactly what the DLC's and Brazile's invoking the legacy of Scoop Jackson means, a brief look at the 1970s, when the neo-conservatives in the Democratic Party grouped themselves into the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), is necessary. The CDM's two leading lights in Congress were the Democratic Senators Jackson and Moynihan. The Cold Warrior and fanatically pro-Israel Jackson remains the model for the DLC crowd today. The DLC's former President, Sen. Joe Lieberman declares he is proud to be identified as a " 'Scoop' Jackson Democrat." It was these two Senators' offices that housed the Leo Straussian "Children of Satan" behind the no-exit Iraq War.

From Jackson's staff came:


* Paul Wolfowitz, now Deputy Secretary of Defense and a leading Straussian chicken-hawk;


* Richard Perle (on Jackson's staff from 1969 until going into the Defense Department in 1981), and until his recent forced resignation, chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board. It is reported that Perle maintains Democratic Party membership to this day, out of fealty to Scoop. Perle later brought along Doug Feith, now Rumsfeld's Undersecretary for Policy, who has been a Perle "groupie" since the late 1970s, largely due to Feith's family background deep in the terrorist movement founded by Zionist fascist Vladimir Jabotinsky. In the 1980s, Feith financed Perle through the International Advisers Inc., a firm in which Feith was the only stockholder;


* Frank Gaffney, who heads the Center for Security Policy, a "private" neo-con group which cheerleads for imperial wars and brutally anti-Palestinian policies;


From Moynihan's office came:


* Elliott Abrams, an Iran/Contra convict who now tries to shape Administration Middle East policy from the National Security Council staff;


* Abram Shulsky, who heads the Office of Special Plans under Feith in the Pentagon, which concocted fraudulent intelligence estimates used by the Administration to justify the Iraq War;


* Gary Schmitt, the head of the empire-promoting Project for a New American Century and a close collaborator of Shulsky. Schmitt worked under Roy Godson of the National Strategy Information Center in the early 1980s. Anti-LaRouche operative Godson was active in the CDM in the 1970s, narrowly escaped prosecution in the Iran-Contra scandals of the 1980s, and now is a consultant to Feith and Shulsky's Office of Special Plans.


Other leaders in the CDM were:


* Stephen Bryen, who became Executive Director of CDM and then of JINSA, after being kicked off the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for passing classified Pentagon documents to Israeli officials.


* Penn Kemble, the first Executive Director of CDM, who paved the way for Bryen to take the job over.

http://www.leftgatekeepers.com/articles/MissingLinkHowRightWingNeoConsCreatedDemocraticLeadershipCouncilByMicheleSteinberg.htm


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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 05:45 PM
Response to Reply #11
19. Disagree. Harriman was catalyst in Vietnam, Bush Sr and Jr in Iraq I & II
Gen. Douglas MacArthur counseled President John F. Kennedy, stating the US could not win a land war in southeast Asia. The CIA reports from the field confirmed the general. JFK was first and foremost interested in keeping the US out of World War III.

Author Joseph Trento reported it was Averell Harriman who ordered the events that led to the chaos that became America in Vietnam:

Who changed the coup into the murder of Diem, Nhu and a Catholic priest accompanying them? To this day, nothing has been found in government archives tying the killings to either John or Robert Kennedy. So how did the tools and talents developed by Bill Harvey for ZR/RIFLE and Operation MONGOOSE get exported to Vietnam? Kennedy immediately ordered (William R.) Corson to find out what had happened and who was responsible. The answer he came up with: “On instructions from Averell Harriman…. The orders that ended in the deaths of Diem and his brother originated with Harriman and were carried out by Henry Cabot Lodge’s own military assistant.

Please see the Reply #3 for more info and sourcing info.

Along those lines...-


JFK TAPE DETAILS HIGH-LEVEL VIETNAM COUP PLOTTING IN 1963;

DOCUMENTS SHOW NO THOUGHT OF DIEM ASSASSINATION;

U.S. OVERESTIMATED INFLUENCE ON SAIGON GENERALS.



Washington D.C., November 5, 2003 - A White House tape of President Kennedy and his advisers, published this week in a new book-and-CD collection and excerpted on the Web, confirms that top U.S. officials sought the November 1, 1963 coup against then-South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem without apparently considering the physical consequences for Diem personally (he was murdered the following day). The taped meeting and related documents show that U.S. officials, including JFK, vastly overestimated their ability to control the South Vietnamese generals who ran the coup 40 years ago this week.

The Kennedy tape from October 29, 1963 captures the highest-level White House meeting immediately prior to the coup, including the President's brother voicing doubts about the policy of support for a coup: "I mean, it's different from a coup in the Iraq or South American country; we are so intimately involved in this…." National Security Archive senior fellow John Prados provides a full transcript of the meeting, together with the audio on CD, in his new book-and-CD publication, The White House Tapes: Eavesdropping on the President (New York: The New Press, 2003, 331 pp. + 8 CDs, ISBN 1-56584-852-7), just published this week and featuring audio files from 8 presidents, from Roosevelt to Reagan.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Diem coup, a critical turning point in the Vietnam war, Dr. Prados also compiled and annotated for the Web a selection of recently declassified documents from the forthcoming documentary publication, U.S. Policy in the Vietnam War, to be published in spring 2004 by the National Security Archive and ProQuest Information and Learning. Together with the Kennedy tape from October 29, 1963, the documents show that American leaders discussed not only whether to support a successor government, but also the distribution of pro- and anti-coup forces, U.S. actions that could be taken that would contribute to a coup, and calling off a coup if its prospects were not good.

"Supporting the Diem coup made the U.S. responsible for the outcome in South Vietnam in exactly the way Bobby Kennedy feared on October 29," said Dr. Prados. "Ironically, though, as the conversation continued, he and the other doubters abandoned these larger considerations and concentrated only on whether a coup would succeed - nothing else mattered."

The posting today also includes the transcript of Diem's last phone call to U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, inquiring "what the attitude of the U.S. is" towards the coup then underway; Lodge dissembled that he was not "well enough informed at this time to be able to tell you."

CONTINUED...

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB101/

With all DU respect, I appreciate the "works" of Perle, Wolfowitz and the rest of Scoop Jackson's clan. Kennedy was not listening to them, however. Lyndon Johnson, OTOH...
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starroute Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 05:58 PM
Response to Reply #11
20. There was an equally strong proto-Neocon tradition on the right
I'm in the middle of trying to sort all this out, so I can't write about it completely coherently. But here are a few of the important pieces:

1. In the course of World War II, a fair part of the right wing switched over from isolationism to interventionism. The Hearst papers and Henry Luce's Time Magazine were leaders in this change. An Austrian refugee named Stefan Possony, who reached America in 1940, was also influential. There's an article on this transition at the site of the libertarian Mises Institute: http://www.mises.org/journals/lar/pdfs/2_1/2_1_6.pdf

2. In the early 50's, there was an extensive debate going on between isolationism and interventionism in the pages of a right-wing magazine called The Freeman. Since then, the right has been primarily in favor of interventionism, with only a few libertarians and Paleocons holding out against it.
http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=1462
http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?issueID=6&articleID=66

3. Possony himself had a long and complicated career as a strategic analyst and expert in psychological warfare. He is considered to have been a leading proto-Neocon and is sometimes called the intellectual father of Star Wars.

4. The military-industrial complex of which Eisenhower warned was strongly rooted in two groups. One was the American Security Council, founded in 1955 by General Robert E. Wood. The other was the Institute for American Strategy, founded in 1956 by Frank Barnett, who was director of research for the Smith Richardson Foundation. Both Robert E. Wood and Smith Richardson were former members of the isolationist America First Committee and good friends of the Bush family.

5. The Committee on the Present Danger was also a major center for the interventionist agenda. Founded it 1950, it helped pressure Truman into putting the country on a permanent wartime footing. In the 70's, it reemerged out of George H.W. Bush's Team B and included members from both parties. (And somebody posted just the other day that it's now come back for a third go-round.)

As I say, I haven't yet managed to put together all the pieces of this particular puzzle. And the question of the right-wing switch from the isolationism of the America First Committee in 1940 to the interventionism of the war years seems particularly in need of clarification.

But one thing which is blatantly obvious is that the right-wing interventionists were not "centrist conservatives." Instead, they were people who had been closely associated with pro-German business interests before World War II and -- to a striking degree -- with the Bush family.

No, I don't think the Bushes were the secret masterminds behind it all. But they were very closely tied to more than one component of the interventionist right.
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Mar-01-05 09:13 AM
Response to Reply #20
23. Thanks, starroute! Hey! Didja read SPLC's review of 'Roots of the Right'?
Thank you for your sharing your research. The picture is much more complex than a simple "This bad man did that bad thing." Because so little has been put to paper, we must make inferences and connect the historical dots in order to make the important step of defining who the traitors are. Surprisingly, almost all consider themselves patriots.

Here's a book review from the Southern Poverty Law Center of

Roots of the Right

A Harvard history professor re-examines the impact of conservatism in California's Orange County


By Heidi Beirich

Much has been written about the mobilized left in the 1960s. Its colorful flower children, longhaired hippies and successful anti-war movement captured the imaginations of many people, especially American academics, who wrote volumes about the era. Lisa McGirr, an associate professor of history at Harvard, sets her sights on a less studied, but just as radical political movement that arose at the same time: Goldwater conservatism.

McGirr focuses tightly on the rise of this movement in Orange County, Calif., where a suburban counterculture arose that mixed hardcore conservatism, libertarian opposition to government, fervent anti-Communism and religious traditionalism into a potent, radical and fairly wacky stew that would eventually put Ronald Reagan into the California governor's mansion and, ultimately, the White House.

SNIP...

Walter Knott, inventor of the boysenberry and owner of the amusement park Knott's Berry Farm, ran a right-wing foundation from the park's premises that distributed materials to visitors on topics such as "The Socialist Plan for Conquest" and "Communism on the Map." And it was in Orange County that the John Birch Society, named after a Baptist missionary killed by Chinese communists, really took off, spreading its message of impending communist revolution and United Nations plots to destroy the U.S.

Probably because of intense paranoia about communism expressed by Orange County conservatives, the few scholars who did investigate the rise of this movement explained it in psychological terms. American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that these kinds of conservatives were simply paranoid and suffering from "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy." Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset argued that they suffered from "status anxiety," meaning that they felt that their social group was rapidly losing ground to other groups

SNIP...

McGirr ultimately doesn't poke around enough. Her interview techniques lead her to discount far too much the importance of race to conservatism and the parallels between Southern conservatism and Orange County conservatism of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

CONTINUED...

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=49

Interesting how so few on the right consider themselves racists. But they're that, too.

The book reviewed above:

"Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right," by Lisa McGirr; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, 395 pp., $18.95

Nixon was a son of Orange County.
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Igel Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Mar-01-05 01:39 PM
Response to Reply #23
26. You've got to be kidding.
... Probably because of intense paranoia about communism expressed by Orange County conservatives, the few scholars who did investigate the rise of this movement explained it in psychological terms. American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that these kinds of conservatives were simply paranoid and suffering from "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy." Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset argued that they suffered from "status anxiety," meaning that they felt that their social group was rapidly losing ground to other groups

I like that quote.
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starroute Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Mar-01-05 05:01 PM
Response to Reply #23
27. The book's high on my to-read list, but I haven't gotten to it
There are mysteries within mysteries concerning the rise of the right in the 1960's and 1970's -- not least being the connection between the respectable establishment conservatives and the Birchers, racists, and other wackos on the extreme right. The relationship has always been far closer than either side likes to admit publicly, but just who was exploiting whom and to what ends remains very much up in the air.

It's no different today. Are the Neocon types really running the Bush administration and just tossing the religious right and other extremists an occasional bone to insure their support? Or is the extreme right using its opportunities to worm its way further and further into the centers of real power until it can insist on a Republican presidential candidate and an agenda of its own choosing?

It's an interesting puzzle and will no doubt be resolved only when push comes to shove between them.
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Karenina Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-28-05 11:08 PM
Response to Original message
22. Kick!
:kick:
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Mar-01-05 11:41 AM
Response to Reply #22
24. Thanks, Karenina! Hey! Didja ever hear about 'Christian Fascism'?
George Bush and the rise of Christian Fascism

by Rev. Richard Lang

EXCERPT...

Reconstructed Fascism

First and most basic is that Dominion Theology wants to replace democracy with a theocratic elite that would govern according to a very literal and peculiar interpretation of Biblical law. The disciples of Jesus are to have "dominion" over all of creation. It is the role of the Church to rule over the wicked and bring them into the obedience of faith.

In a "reconstructed society" democracy would be heresy. The division between sacred and secular would be abolished. A new insistence on conformity to moral rules would replace the pluralism we now know. The purpose of the Federal government would be to enforce morality through military and police functions. Society would be regulated by a theocratic elite: in the words of Pat Robertson: "just as the Supreme Court justices place a hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution, so they should also put a hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible."

We see this at play in the leanings of Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Thomas. Against the common assumption that we are a secular state Mr. Scalia has said (in a FIRST THINGS: May 2002 ) "government ... derives its moral authority from God. Government is the minister of God with powers to revenge, to execute wrath, including wrath by the sword."

SNIP...

The point I'm trying to make is that we are not dealing simply with politics when it comes to the Bush administration. The progressive left, which often pays little attention to Christianity, and the moderate middle, which thinks "these things will balance out"; will be making a huge mistake if they overlook the religious ideology at the core of Mr. Bush personally and the movement he represents. And we are talking about a "movement" (a movement of 'the people' not just the elites). We are seeing today the emergence of a "fascist movement". It is bankrolled and organized by Corporations, and articulated through the ideology of neo-conservatism. But the troops come out of the right wing church. And that church, drawing upon the Holiness/Holy War Biblical narratives of Apocalyptic-Dominionism theology, is growing in this country. This is not a battle between intellectual and institutional elites. It is far more intimate than that. It's a battle in our homes, our families, friendships, neighborhoods and within our faith communities. Let me make a rather audacious prophecy: WHOEVER CONTROLS THE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE WILL CONTROL THE FUTURE OF THIS NATION. In other words it's the vision of Pat Robertson or Martin Luther King.

CONTINUED...

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=15261
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-02-05 11:06 AM
Response to Original message
28. Vietnam War escalated by a LIE.
Ever hear of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident?

It was a Big Lie to help "nudge" America to war.

Deceit in American Government: Gulf of Tonkin

By BEN BRADLEE

I would like to talk about government lying. Calculated lies. The willful deception of the public for political end, especially under the disguise of national security, and what an awful price we pay for such lies under any name: misinformation, disinformation, deceit, deception, or just plain dishonesty.

In America, the press is curiously shy, even embarrassed when faced with the need to use some form of the verb 'to lie' even now when public tolerance for the unexplained and for the unbelievable explanation is wearing thin. We seem to drop quickly into a defensive crouch, when even, as now, we are accused of abusing our power by not accepting explanations which often defy acceptance. We are, too often, close enough to the Establishment ourselves to be comfortable in calling a lie, a lie. I am not talking about little lies as in Vice-Admiral Poindexter asked to give up his job as National Security Adviser to return to active duty in the Navy. Little lies as in we did not trade the Soviet spy TK Sakharov for the American journalist Nick Danilov. Little lies like Margaret Heckler has been promoted from Secretary of Health and Human Services to be Ambassador to Ireland. Little lies like that take forever to damage the bonds of confidence that link the people and the press and public policy.

Let us talk about the big lies, lies that change history. Two of them have to do with Vietnam, that war that so outraged Jimmy Cameron. Let me take you back to December 1963 and Tan Son Hut airport in Saigon. At the end of his first fact finding trip to Vietnam for the New American President Lyndon Johnson, the Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was holding a press conference. He told reporters that he was 'optimistic as to the progress that had been made and could be made during the coming year' in the fight against the Vietcong. This was duly reported to an anxious world on that night's television and in next day's newspapers.

Landing at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington next day, he told another press conference: 'We have every reason to believe that (US military plans for 1964) will be successful. ' And he disappeared into a helicopter for the White House lawn, and a one-on-one session with the President in the Oval Office. Also duly reported.

For 7 1/2 years, there was no report of that conversation. Not until July, 1971 and then only after the Nixon administration took the New York Times and the Washington Post all the way to the Supreme Court in a vain effort to keep them from publishing the so-called Pentagon Papers, did we hear what McNamara really felt.

Buried in those Pentagon papers (which so few people ever read) lay the revelation that McNamara had told President Johnson exactly the opposite of what he had told the press and through us, the world. The Secretary of Defense returned from Vietnam 'laden with gloom' according to documents in the Pentagon papers. 'Vietcong progress had been great,' he reported to the President, 'With my best guess being that the situation has in fact been deteriorating to a far greater extent than we realize. The situation is very disturbing.'

CONTINUED...

http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/Gulf-of-Tonkin.htm

This stuff really gets me mad. Furious, actually.
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