Showing posts with label iran-contra. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iran-contra. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 04, 2013

A Giant Step Towrd the National Security State: The Dirty Secrets of George H. W. Bush

Although, I'm always a little leery of ex-CIA or ex-intelligence, as I find it hard to believe former intelligence officials are allowed to expose anything, this documentary on former President George H. W. Bush is very interesting.

Recorded December 10, 1988



Here are some of the questions that former CIA Station Chief in Angola under Director George H. W. Bush, and author of "In Search of Enemies", John Stockwell addresses:

How does the United States economic and political system really work?

Why doesn't anyone expose the corruption/scandal?

How did the establishment ensure Jesse Jackson's failure in the 1988 primaries?

Ronald Reagan gave us the most corrupt administration in history with almost 200 people indited or jailed for corruption, so why didn't the Democrats--Governor Michael Dukakis--fight harder to win the 1988 election?

Why did Bush choose Dan Quayle? Impeachment insurance?



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Monday, March 18, 2013

Sonny Bono, Iran Contra, and Animal Puppets.

In the early 1980s Bob Fletcher owned a toy factory, called "Animal Factory" that created hand puppets made from real rabbit fur, called spring animals that became very popular in the early 1980s. He moved into a full manufacturing facility, a brand new building laid out exclusively for his company, in the Marietta Georgia area about 15 miles north of Atlanta.

Soon after, Fletcher went to New York City to a giant marketing show with 35,000 buyers from all over the world. After arriving home, he noticed a business card with an address not 40 feet from his business  in Georgia, close to the Lockheed Dobbins Air Force base. He contacted the guy on the business card, Gary Best, and later merged his operations with Best's company, VISTA USA.  Best also had another company called VISTA Distributions where he imported and sold watches to 7-11 stores, as well as many other companies prefaced with the word, VISTA,  functioning out of this one building

So "Animal Factory” became "VISTA Animal factory."  The reason for the  "VISTA" preface--Fletcher later found out--was  to kite, bounce checks, etc., between all of these different companies without raising suspicion

Anyway, Best introduced Fletcher to high ranking military officers including: Major General John Kirk Singlaub, a founding member of the CIA; Brigadier General Harry Clay (Heinie) Aderholt, who ran Air America, the covert drug smuggling and weapons branch during the Vietnam war, and Lt Col. James Gordon "Bo" Gritz. It turned out that Gary Best was an arms dealer who supplied weapons for covert operations, worldwide for the NSA, CIA wars that were/are carried on constantly since Vietnam and the Generals were his partners in that business. Fletcher also found out Best also stole a $13 million oil company (amongst many other companies) in order to set up in Azerbaijan later on.

Finally, after Fletcher consistently saw that this merger had nothing to do with the sale of his toys, he went to see Best, who told him, “we sell armament”and handed him a brochure for a hell-fire missle. About a year and a half after the original merger, Fletcher wanted to sue for the quarter of a million dollars they owed him laid out in the contract they both signed. His lawyer did a FOIA search which came back with a presidential executive order classifying his toy factory and all of the information out of the toy factory as a national security threat.

At the same time, Fletcher began to hear the beginning of the Iran Contra investigations on the radio, mentioning the same generals in his toy factory. He contacted John Kerry’s office and reported what had happened to him. He was told he was right in the middle of it. He then became a federal witness in the Iran Contra hearings He later discovered that the main investigator was completely in bed with the biggest Iran Contra operatives and that's why nothing much came of the hearings.

For the next decade, in addition to running for Congress in 1990 in Orlando, Florida, Fletcher wore the hat of investigator, assisting Henry Gonzales with the banking fraud, Senator John Kerry in Iran Contra, Congressman Dante Fissel of Miami with the October surprise, and later appeared before the Senate Intelligence committee with Bill Alexander from Arkansas, regarding drugs, money laundering. While there he met Sonny Bono’s administrative director, Frank Cohen, relative to the WACO investigations which supposedly freaked Sonny out.

In 1997 Fletcher gathered together all the documentation and information in VHS format--because he had some of the biggest drug operators in the world naming names on video--  from over the last decade and gave it to Sonny Bono and Congresswoman Maxine Waters in 1997. When Sonny finally got a chance to go over the report, in December of 1997, he was livid, so he decided that he would use his brand new position on the intelligence committee of Congress, which gave him subpoena power to summon the witnesses mentioned in Fletcher’s report. Sonny was going to start right away when Congress convened in January. Ten days later Sonny Bono was dead. The official story: a freak skiing accident.

Since 1987, Fletcher had seen huge numbers of witnesses who were about to step forward suddenly die right before they were about to testify. Lots of strange accidents. Ron Brown, dead on an aircraft with a bullet in the middle of his head, Senator John Tower, who was about to spill the beans on the October Surprise, and who had just written a book, died in a plane crash; Senator Hunt died in a plane crash, Bill Casey former head of the CIA, had a stroke the day before he was to testify on Iran Contra. Casey had made the statement “I’m tired of the whole thing…I’m just going to come clean and get this off my chest.” The next day he had a stroke, dying a few days later.

After Sonny supposedly ran into the tree of death, Frank Cullen, Fletcher's main contact and friend, refused his phone calls. Now remember, it was just ten days earlier that Cullen was very eager to pursue the witnesses listed in Fletcher’s report. Fletcher then tried to get Sonny’s autopsy report. He couldn’t. He found out Sonny’s mother couldn’t get it until she got a lawyer. It took Fletcher a year before he could get the autopsy

The autopsy:

Sonny’s wounds were reported to be over his right eye, the right side of his forehead and to his right temple, yet blood soaked through four layers of clothing, including his coat, to his back, but there were no wounds on his back. The autopsy also reported no trauma to his neck, internally or externally. Moreover, he had no contra coup injury, which is an injury that occurs to the opposite side of the brain from impact, for example, when someone's head hits the windshield in a car accident when the body strikes a solid object like a tree at 30mph. It’s not common when someone strikes another person with an object. In addition, Sonny did not put his hands up in front of his face, an involuntary reaction to stop the blow. Ski instructors teach that if you’re losing control, to sit down.

Furthermore, the skiing conditions that day were excellent and Sonny was considered an excellent skier. His body was found approximately 125 feet into the tree line and away from the path, as if Sonny accidentally veered off the path hundred feet. 10 feet…20 feet…maybe, but 125 feet, for an expert skier, no way. Also, he was lying on his stomach, to the right side, with his right head, where he was injured, down in the snow, close to the tree, with his right arm, with the ski pole attached, up and around the tree. Wouldn't you think, at the speed he was supposedly going, he would've been knocked backwards?

The autopsy reported no debris in his wounds. As a kid, I ran into a tree in the dark, and particles of the bark were embedded into the skin on my face. Not only that, there were indentured curvature wounds to the bone of his skull in a couple of places indicating, according to Fletcher, that he was probably hit with a fairly small rounded curved object, something like the barrel of a pistol, either a .45 or a 9mm. The size of the configurations described in the autopsy would fit perfectly if let's say he was pistol whipped to death. So, where did the blood from his back come from? Perhaps, Sonny bloodied somebody’s nose in a scuffle, maybe he gave an elbow to the nose, and someone else's blood drenched and soaked through four layers of clothing.

The bottom line is they, the evil ones, had to stop Sonny before the investigation began because if it began it would’ve had continue in some shape or form. Not to mention, everyone's heard of Sonny Bono, even children. If Sonny carried through with his promise, far too many people would tune in.

Sonny Bono grills former Attorney General Janet Reno over the death of the children at Waco.

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Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Once Again the U.S. is Fomenting War.

The United States is sending heavy weapons--mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles -- from Libya to jihadist Syrian rebels.  Not that this should come as any surprise considering our history of covertly facilitating upheaval, unrest and destabilization of nations, from Operation Gladio, which, controlled by the CIA and Britain’s MI6, orchestrated terrorist attacks in Western Europe, which were blamed on Communist entities to Operation Cyclone, the program to arm and finance the Mujahideen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989, to Iran-Contra where the Reagan administration used proceeds from arms sale to Iran to fund the right-wing Contras in an effort to overturn Nicaragua’s democratically elected, Sandanista government. 

"The Americans have bought some of the weapons from the stockpiles of Muammar Gadaffi, the Libyan dictator killed last year. They include SA-7 missiles, which can be used to shoot down aircraft.
According to Fox News, Ambassador Chris Stevens, murdered on the anniversary of 9/11, while on a highly secretive U.S. mission in Benghazi was really there to "to negotiate a weapons transfer in an effort to get SA-7 missiles out of the hands of Libya-based extremists."

Moreover, supposedly, leaked documents from the Saudi Interior Ministry show that criminals convicted of drug trafficking, murder and rape have been given a choice to fight in Syria. Documents show that 105 Yemenis, 21 Palestinians, 212 Saudis, 96 Sudanese, 254 Syrians, 82 Jordanians, 68 Somalis, 32 Afghans, 194 Egyptians, 203 Pakistanis, 23 Iraqis, 44 Kuwaitis had taken up the offer of a death row pardon.

After arming Libyan rebels and taking out their leader, we're now arming Syrian rebels.  Why are we supporting Islamic extremists--the very people the U.S. government pegs as terrorists--to overthrow Assad? 

Again, this is nothing new. The not-so-mainstream media has been reporting this for a very long time.

Links:

'Annex' hit in Libya terror attack was CIA post, officials say

CIA Takes Heat for Role in Libya


Rep: 'Blissful silence' from Pentagon on questions over arms shipments from Libya to Syria

NATO-backed terrorists along Turkish-Syrian border establish Al Qaeda-style "Virtue, Vice Police," heralding the West's true designs for Syria.

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Monday, July 09, 2012

Ronald Reagan: A Cheerleader of Baby Kidnapping, Mother Murdering Thugs.

The Reagan administration was very much aware of a scheme to murder mothers in Argentina and give their infants to military personnel often complicit in the killings. And to think so many Americans idolize this man.

An Argentine court has convicted two of the nation’s former right-wing dictators, Jorge Rafael Videla and Reynaldo Bignone, in a scheme to murder leftist mothers and give their infants to military personnel often complicit in the killings, a shocking process known to the Reagan administration even as it worked closely with the bloody regime.

Testimony at the trial included a videoconference from Washington with Elliott Abrams, then-Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, who said he urged Bignone to reveal the babies’ identities as Argentina began a transition to democracy in 1983.

Abrams said the Reagan administration “knew that it wasn’t just one or two children,” indicating that U.S. officials believed there was a high-level “plan because there were many people who were being murdered or jailed.” Estimates of the Argentines murdered in the so-called Dirty War range from 13,000 to about 30,000, with many victims “disappeared,” buried in mass graves or dumped from planes over the Atlantic.

A human rights group, Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, says as many as 500 babies were stolen by the military during the repression from 1976 to 1983. Some of the pregnant mothers were kept alive long enough to give birth and then were chained together with other prisoners and pushed out of the planes into the ocean to drown.

Despite U.S. government awareness of the grisly actions of the Argentine junta, which had drawn public condemnation from the Carter administration in the 1970s, these Argentine neo-Nazis were warmly supported by Ronald Reagan, both as a political commentator in the late 1970s and as President once he took office in 1981.

When President Jimmy Carter’s human rights coordinator, Patricia Derian, berated the Argentine junta for its brutality, Reagan used his newspaper column to chide her, suggesting that Derian should “walk a mile in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them.

Reagan understood that the Argentine generals played a central role in the anti-communist crusade that was turning Latin America into a nightmare of unspeakable repression. The leaders of the Argentine junta saw themselves as something of pioneers in the techniques of torture and psychological operations, sharing their lessons with other regional dictatorships.

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Friday, May 25, 2012

Did You Know a Hunger Strike Can Label You a Terrorist in the USA?

Brian Willson tries too late to get out of the way of oncoming train.
1n 1986, the FBI declared Vietnam Veteran (Air Force Captain) turned activist, and attorney, Brian Willson a domestic terrorist. Why? Because, after witnessing the carnage, resulting from Reagan’s policies of destruction and wonton murder in Nicaragua and El Salvador, he and Vietnam veterans, George Mizo, founder of the Vietnam Friendship Village Project near Hanoi (and in US) for Vietnamese victims of the US War against Vietnam, mostly Agent Orange victims, including the birth-deformed offspring of chemically effected parents, Charlie Liteky, a Catholic chaplain who won the Congressional Medal of Honor for saving the lives of over 20 of his comrades who had come under heavy fire, and World War II veteran Duncan Murphy participated in a “water-only” hunger strike on the steps of the Capitol building for 47 days protesting Reagan's illegal aid to fund Contra paramilitary activities seeking to overthrow the sovereign Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

On June 27, 1986, the International Court of Justice formally ruled that the United States had intervened by "training, equipping, financing and supplying the contra forces or otherwise encouraging, supporting and aiding military and paramilitary activities in and against" the Republic of Nicaragua, and had used "force" by "certain attacks on Nicaraguan territory," violating "sovereignty" by "authorizing overflights of Nicaraguan territory" while interrupting "peaceful maritime commerce." The Court declared that the US was "under a duty immediately to cease and refrain from all such acts" and "to make reparation to the Republic of Nicaragua for all injury caused to Nicaragua by the breaches of obligations under customary international law enumerated" herein. (Nicaragua v. United States of America), Merits, Judgment 27 June 1986 (I.C.J. Reports 1986, p. 14).

Brian Willson,  committed to non-violent struggle, non-violent tactics, and a non-violent way of life had no idea that the FBI had labeled him a terrorist. A year after the hunger strike, in the summer of 1987, two veterans and Wilson decided to go to Concord Naval Base in California to protest, once again, Reagan's policies of destruction. The men started a 40-day hunger strike on the three mile span of tracks where a 5-mile an hour train transports loaded munitions from the bunkers to the ships, in Reagan’s attempt to overthrow a revolutionary government in Nicaragua and stop protests in El Salvador.

The three men knew, or thought they knew, the protocol - $5,000 fine and one year in jail – for dealing with protesters who block the munitions. After all, the naval base had a history of hosting protesters, without casualties, dating back to the 1960s.

So, on September 1, 1987, never expecting the train to exceed the 5 mph speed limit, three times over, to 17 mph, Wilson was sitting on the tracks as the train approached. He tried to escape the oncoming train, with two train-spotters looking straight at him. He failed. Four days later he awoke to find himself with no legs, one ear missing, 19 broken bones, a fractured skull, and a case of retrograde amnesia, leaving him with no memory of the event. The other two men barely escaped as they were standing at the time of the oncoming train. 40 people, five photographers and one videographer, documenting the hunger strike, witnessed the incident, capturing it on camera. Despite the abundant evidence, the military claimed it did not know the men were on the tracks.

The amazing thing about Brian Willson is that this horrendous attempt to take his life made him even more determined to "stand up" to the all powerful military industrial complex, strengthening his identity with millions of unnamed victims of U.S. policy around the world.

Rejected by 33 publishers, Mr. Wilson finally found a publisher for his book, “Blood on the Tracks: The Life & Times of S. Brian Willson”.
"We are not worth more, they are not worth less." This is the mantra of S. Brian Willson and the theme that runs throughout his compelling psycho-historical memoir. Willson's story begins in small-town, rural America, where he grew up as a "Commie-hating, baseball-loving Baptist," moves through life-changing experiences in Viet Nam, Nicaragua and elsewhere, and culminates with his commitment to a localized, sustainable lifestyle.
Decorated Vietnam veteran George Mizo (lower left),
sits on the east steps of U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.,
An Important Lesson - by George Mizo
You, my parents, taught me that it was wrong to kill . . . except in war.
You, my church, taught me that it was wrong to kill . . . except in war.
You, my teachers, taught me that it was wrong to kill . . . except in war.
You, my government, taught me that it was wrong to kill . . . except in war.

Then you sent me to war
And when I had no choice . . . except to kill,
Then you told me I was wrong!

And now I will tell you . . . my parents.
. . . my church.
. . . my teachers.
. . . my government.
It is not wrong to kill . . . except in war.
It is wrong to kill period!

And this you have to learn . . .
Just as I had to!

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Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Funding Sunni Groups In Order to Stifle Shiites?

New Yorker columnist Seymour M. Hersch says the Bush administration is trying to stifle the growth of Shiite influence in the Middle East by funding violent Sunni groups with money that was not authorized by congress.

Iran-Contra, anyone?

The Bush Administration’s reliance on clandestine operations that have not been reported to Congress and its dealings with intermediaries with questionable agendas have recalled, for some in Washington, an earlier chapter in history. Two decades ago, the Reagan Administration attempted to fund the Nicaraguan contras illegally, with the help of secret arms sales to Iran. Saudi money was involved in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, and a few of the players back then—notably Prince Bandar and Elliott Abrams—are involved in today’s dealings.

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