Gitmo Sgt blows whistle: Prisoner “suicides” were murder

Major piece in February’s Harper’s. Hats off to them.

The center does not hold.

Obama has done nothing but talk on this.

Yoo tries to speak

Wow. Sounds like a little boy.

His bland loyalty to Daddy perhaps explains North Korea.

The Nation:
Blackwater and the Khost bombing

For files.

QUOTE

It’s just astonishing that given the track record of Blackwater, which is a repeat offender endangering our mission repeatedly, endangering the lives of our military and costing the lives of innocent civilians, that there would be any relationship,” Schakowsky said.

“That we would continue to contract with them or any of Blackwater’s subsidiaries is completely unacceptable.”

Fletcher Prouty’s Introduction to the Assassination Business

Most of Colonel Prouty’s writings are archived by heroic Len Osanic at Prouty.org — but not this one: an article from Gallery magazine and 1975, chatting about the “assassination business.”

Shop talk done, the author then wanders back to the watershed — both his and the Republic’s — of November 1963, when first President Diem of Vietnam and then President Kennedy of the U.S.A. were dispatched.

One bothers to post Prouty’s piece now in support of Roger Craig’s moving last testament — for Prouty’s piece focuses on the technique of suiciding targets in places, like Washington D.C., where moblike drive-by blasts wouldn’t do.

Craig was deemed to have died — months after filming his testament — by a suicidal rifle blast to the chest.

But that was then, surely. Not now …

Well. The Prouty piece emphasizes his conviction that the fix was in at the Secret Service in Dallas.

And one can’t help but note the odd event at the White House last week, when the Secret Service allowed — for no reason yet public — an oddball couple sans invitation to enter the White House grounds, then the building and then the East Room, where a State Dinner was in progress, and shake hands with the President.

Is it merely funny that this happened just days before Obama’s long-awated All Things Considered speech in which his decision as to the future of the National Security Apparat’s venture in Pakghanistan will be revealed?

Might a little slip in security just be a way to remind the young Prez who’s got his back, and why?

Read Prouty here — then place comments below.

JFK: Dallas Deputy Sheriff
Roger Craig speaks again

I was so busy a week ago that I forgot to observe the 46th anniversary of the murder that, to my mind, marks the end of the American republic and the germination of what blossomed so wonderfully under Bush-Cheney. Call it what you will. Likely four years hence it’ll be in our face again.

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It’s always worth remembering what Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig had to say, and how he said it. Among other things, he:

– was on the Grassy Knoll within moments of the murder, and

– was present when the rifle of the Book Depository was found and identified by Seymour Weitzman as a Mauser of a different caliber than the old Italian soldier’s rifle that the Warren Commission reported found and attributed to Oswald.

Pressing these and other conflicts with the official story across the years seemed to cost Mr Craig his life:

In 1973 a car forced Craig’s car off a mountain road. He was badly injured but he survived the accident.

In 1974 he surviving another shooting in Waxahachie, Texas.

The following year he was seriously wounded when his car engine exploded. Craig told friends that the Mafia had decided to kill him.

Roger Craig was found dead on 15th May, 1975. It was later decided he had died as a result of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

(From the Spartacus vault maintained by John Simkin in England. Even better, visit his massive Education Forum, on the web, re these matters.)

Craig’s suiciding prompted the attorney Mark Lane, author of two of the most important books on the first Kennedy murder, to stitch together the documentary linked above, based on a filmed interview Craig gave in 1974.

One supposes one might suppose a causal connection between the interview of 1974 and the faux suicide months later. The gunshots were plural, to the chest, with a rifle.

So lend Mr Craig your eyes and ears. Five parts of nine minutes or so, all there on youtube.

It’s hard, is it not, to always look away?

Italian court convicts 23 CIA goons for kidnapping etc

Forza Italia!

Must read: Philip Wilan’s Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy.

And then, for elaboration but also pleasure, Midnight in Sicily by Peter Robb.

One comes away with a clear picture of not only what we did to Italy in the postwar era, but prudent guesses as to what we are doing to ourselves, having seen the enemy …

Armies destroy everything,
build nothing, neither communities nor nations

The USA: No longer a country for man, woman or beast.

Great documentary:
The New American Century

MUST WATCH, unfortunately …

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9/11, the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex, and what 50 years of same has done to American society.

Here’s Part One at youtube.

The other nine are there too. About 100 minutes total.

Can buy a copy here.

The producers include Wim Wenders — a fave.

Most of what the film has to say is familiar. But the last two parts (on youtube) have revived basic despair about not only our owner-operator class but the young soldiers, who seem as alien and rabid as the teen zealots of 1917 did to so many Russians.

It’s only a few baby steps from shooting civilians for fun in Iraq to the same in American cities. I guess we will see this sooner than later, perhaps even before election day 2016 if Romney beats Obama in 2012.

And of course I don’t mean to imply that it’s okay in Iraq. It’s so NOT okay that … words elude.

And thoughts of leaving the country intrude.

I mean only to gauge the degradation of our people — our enemy met that is us — raised on video games and patriotic television. We mirror the owner-operators with gruesome fidelity.

And have deprived ourselves of sound basis for complaint should one day a city of our own go up in smoke.

Reformed wingnut forecasts domestic terrorism from Christian Right

Must read, unfortunately.

Frank Schaeffer was the son of a famous right-wing Christian preacher-activivist. Became one himself. But then saw the light and went Left.

His simple scorn for the movement is bracing.

But his certainty as to its essential violence — that violence itself, born of long resentment within a civilization that passed it by, is its aim — is ominous.

There has been good solid journalism about this threat throughout the decade, of course. This is a quick, sharp reminder.

And when one considers the black boy who was beaten to death in Chicago weeks ago — that horror that seems to have largely escaped notice …

One realizes how difficult the tightrope this President must walk shall be.

The Generals vs Cheney:
Four Days in September

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You can’t fight in here …!”

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The story of September converges from four corners:

1. Weeks ago — on 9/11 — two top-drawer generals, Charles Krulak and Joseph Hoar, came out of retirement to blast Cheney on torture in the Miami Herald.

The timing and some particulars struck me as odd, portentous and a tiny bit ominous: Why this and why now?

Hoar was the commander of the Pentagon’s Central Command, which oversees the mideast, from 1991 to 1994.

And his co-author is a former Commandant (top dog) of the Marines and — curious — is the son of another General Krulak, Victor, who once was an ally of JFK in his struggle with the Pentagon over Vietnam policy. (See last link above.)

2. Nine days later, September 20, President Obama, during a whirlwind tour of five Sunday talk shows, went off topic (health care) to talk about Pakghanistan — and for the first time publicly cast doubt upon the policy that he had cheerleaded without reservation during the long campaign, and had then inherited:

He said before he decided whether to send more troops, he needed to determine whether the United States was pursuing the proper military strategy.

“The first question is, are we doing the right thing?” Mr. Obama said on CNN’s State of the Union. “Are we pursuing the right strategy?”

The next morning 66 pages from General Stanley McChrystal appeared in the Washington Post, predicting “failure” in Afghanistan unless the Pentagon’s request for tens of thousands of new pairs of boots were soon granted.

3. Five days later, we noted remarks by General Michael Lenhert — who built and for a time ran the Bush-Cheney Gitmo prison — denouncing the prison as a bad idea from Day One. He didn’t name Cheney (in reports I’ve seen) but, simultaneously, Cheney was telling think tanks that Obama is wrong to try to shut the prison down.

Harpers also noticed Lenhert’s remarks and quickly put out a piece that extends them to explicitly target the former vice president: “The Generals vs The Cheneys.”

Krulak & Hoar on torture. Lenhert on Gitmo. Three big guns, trained upon Cheney as he bellows about the speaking circuit. Curious …

It seemed curious that such men would suddenly raise their profiles and such a ruckus, merely to blast a retired, old and disgraced vice president, on issues that the new president had already turned around.

Or … Was Dick speaking for more than himself — for something yet vital in the power scheme?

4. Days later (early this week), NewsMax.com, which feeds Fox News fodder, published an elaborate memo explaining why a military coup to solve the “Obama problem” was “not unrealistic” and not a bad idea.

Chris Matthews jumped in, and appropriately so. See the Hardball clip embedded in the Harpers link in item 3 above.

And note that the clip comes from Human Rights First — and that the two military men Matthews talks with — including Lt General Henry Soyster, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, criticizing Cheney’s fear-mongering and his Gitmo campaign — are explicitly associated with Human Rights First on its webpage.

And note that Generals Krulak and Hoar, too, associate themselves with HRF.

Reading the Krulak-Hoar piece alone, in its oddness, provoked a question: Do these high generals sniff something unpatriotic fermenting within the wide circles of their brassy acquaintance?

However that may be, that a roomful of such men suddenly gathered to speak loudly against Cheney in September is reason to not summarily dismiss the NewsMax blip as lunatic-fringe fantasy signifying nothing.

The Beer Hall Putsch was lunatic fri — HA !

Matthews goes on to mention MacArthur — versus Truman! — in the same breath as McChrystal — and then asks his brassy guests if we’ve seen this movie and it’s Seven Days in May — HA !

A fortiori forsooth: It seems that sometime this summer a bevy of high-brow brass was organized to oppose a right-wing call-it-what-you-will — movement? — the poster children of which are Cheney and, for the moment, McChrystal.

Gathering under a Human Rights banner to grapple with Dick, blow by blow, topic by topic, might be a way for august generals to tell their wide acquaintance the Preakness pool has been closed until further notice.

That President Obama would sooner or later have to face down the Pentagon he inherited with so little complaint (disturbing neither Gates nor Mullen nor their vision for victory in Pakghanistan) — and would then tred paths parallel to those of JFK and LBJ — was apparent and a worry during the interregnum last winter.

Vegas odds remain stacked against deposing any president with an army.

But the bile-laden bullet points in the NewsMax memo itemize real thoughts inspiring right-wingers with rage. JFK’s inner circle initiated the production of the Seven Days in May film, and saw the work through with unprecedented support — evacuating the White House to make way for the film crew — because by 1963 they knew the novel was not fantasy.

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