All B-Cruz: married into the TPP/NAU establishment

Not a US citizen? No problem, it doesn't matter anymore! ¿No un ciudadano estadounidense? ¡No hay problema, no importa más!

If you consider yourself a Cruzer supporter watch where you step. If you think the "tea party" is your safe haven, you'll be disappointed when you find out it's just another appendage for GOP neocon leadership propaganda. 

The mouse trap is baited, don't lunge for the cheese. Promise us all you'll jump off a bridge after you support whom you thought was the 'lesser of two evils', when in fact there is no lesser! The Cruzer and an opponent  worship at other alters than you or me.

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Dr. Joel McDurmon

Mar 10, 2014

 

Good Fellas Blankfein, Goldman CEO and
Head Abortion Meister Buffett

During his CPAC speech this weekend, Senator Ted Cruz took shots at previous Republican presidential candidates Dole, McCain, and Romney, for lacking a “clear distinction” from big-government democrats. Well, I think Mr. Cruz has got some ‘splaining to do. It seems he’s just as married—literally—to the establishment as any of them.

A report from the ever-busy infowars.com reveals that Cruz’s wife, Heidi, has some rather behemoth credentials:

Cruz’s insider connection is a family affair. His wife, Heidi, is a Goldman Sachs vice president in Houston, Texas, according to her LinkedIn profile. She also served as an economic advisor for the Bush administration. In 2011, a Cruz campaign spokesman portrayed Heidi as “an expert on North American trade,” in other words she is savvy when it comes to globalist transnational trade deals like NAFTA, the single most destructive government move against the American worker in history.

She was also a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations (see her bio at Claremont McKenna College), a position that expired prior to her husband’s attack on the globalist organization.

The details come from a page listing Clermont-McKenna College’s Board of Advisors, on which Mrs. Cruz apparently served. In addition to being one of only three of W’s economic advisors,

She also served in the Administration as the economic director for the Western Hemisphere at the National Security Council at the White House, advising the President and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. She also is a former director at the U.S. Treasury Department and was special policy assistant to Ambassador Robert B. Zoellick, then Chief U.S. international trade negotiator.

It also reveals that before Goldman Sachs, she worked for another tentacle of the vampire squid, JPMorgan, “focusing on international structured finance.”

None of this says “Tea Party,” “small government,” “sound money,” and contrary to Cruz’s latest pitch, it also does not much support “standing on principle”—unless that “principle” is fiat money, TARP bailouts, financing wars, revolving doors, etc.

Now perhaps Mrs. Cruz’s career is not representative of the Senator’s views. Or, if it is, perhaps the Senator has changed views in recent years. He did later blast the CFR, but that seems to have come only after his wife’s Term ended, and only when trying to present himself as a Tea Party candidate.

But Cruz has wasted no time showing us to his views. Only a day after falling a distant second behind Ran Paul (Paul 31%, Cruz only 11%) in the CPAC straw poll, Cruz took a swipe, albeit a weak one, at Paul. Breitbart.com reports that despite being a “big fan” of Rand Paul, Cruz stated, “I don’t agree with him on foreign policy.”

There’s no doubt Paul is not an imperialist or a warmonger, but he has certainly deviated from his father’s uncompromising non-interventionism. When Fox News Sunday asked about his foreign policy, Paul answered,

I see my foreign policy in the same line as what came out of, probably, the first George Bush. Henry Kissinger wrote something in the Washington Post two days ago [here] which I agree with. I see it coming out of the mainstream of the Republican position.

I opposed with real fervor the involvement of us in Syria, and that became the dominant position in the country—both Republican and Democrat. There’s not one Republican who’s saying we should put military troops in Crimea, in the Ukraine. So I think I’m right in the middle of that position.

And I think that those who would try to argue that somehow I’m different than the mainstream Republican opinion are people who want to take advantage for their own personal political gain. I’m a great believer in Ronald Reagan. I’m a great believer in a strong national defense. . . .

It’s perhaps not surprising then that in his sideswipe at Paul, Cruz didn’t really give any real specifics, just vague sentimental references:

U.S. leadership is critical in the world. I agree we should be reluctant to deploy military force aboard, but there’s a vital role, just as Ronald Reagan did. When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an Evil Empire, when he stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate and said ‘Tear down this wall.’ Those words changed the course of history. The United States has a responsibility to defend our values.

Of course, Paul seems to share all of these platitudes: who doesn’t believe in “defending our values”? Who doesn’t believe in “U.S. leadership”? So as criticisms these fall flat.

The real questions are things like, “Do we need 800 international military bases to accomplish this?” “Do we need to maintain military bases in 63 countries?” “Do we need standing armies of 255,000 soldiers in foreign countries?” “Can anyone who believes in fiscal responsibility and small government seriously maintain $680+ billions each year in ‘defense’ spending?” And this is all not even considering the biblical doctrines regard the military and war (Paul has hinted at some. Cruz has not, as far as I know).

Since Paul shares the views Cruz mentioned, it seems that Cruz is either uniformed (unlikely), dishonest (harsh), or is engaging in careless political volleys.

Consider the results of CPAC, the latter seems most likely.

In fairness, Cruz was asked about Paul by an interviewer, so he had no choice but answer. But his answer is vague grandstanding on things Paul agrees with.

So, if we are to believe that Cruz’s answer distinguishes him from Paul somehow, then he must have very different definitions of “U.S. leadership” and “defending our values” than those articulated by Paul. For Cruz, these must be euphemisms for “imperialism” and “interventionism.”

If Cruz’s familial associations—Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, W, CFR— are any indication, then I think we know the answer. I suspect there is, therefore, some truth in Infowar.com’s conclusion:

Like the domestication of the Tea Party and the expulsion of its more purist liberty-minded activists, the Cruz the warrior pitted against the establishment motif is another slick subversion directed at the political elite’s most puissant opposition – the real Tea Party and a threatening number of patriot activists gnawing at the edges of the political establishment.

If Cruz gets more prominent for the 2016 primary, I suspect there will be an attempt to scrub these associations.

UPDATE: Paul fires back:

Many forget today that Reagan’s decision to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev was harshly criticized by the Republican hawks of his time, some of whom would even call Reagan an appeaser. In the Middle East, Reagan strategically pulled back our forces after the tragedy in Lebanon in 1983 that killed 241 Marines, realizing the cost of American lives was too great for the mission.

Without a clearly defined mission, exit strategy or acceptable rationale for risking soldiers lives, Reagan possessed the leadership to reassess and readjust.

Today, we forget that some of the Republican hawks of his time criticized Reagan harshly for this too, again, calling him an appeaser. . . .

How many leaders were as great as Reagan, willing to admit their mistakes, learn from them and put their country before their own reputation and legacy?

Today’s Republicans should concentrate on establishing their own identities and agendas, as opposed to simply latching onto Ronald Reagan’s legacy—or worse, misrepresenting it.

Source AmericanVision

US Treasury Bonds,The Godfather Of All Bubbles

Synopsis Charles E Carlson The 30-plus-year-old bull market in US bonds, notes and bills may well be the most destructive man-made “Bubble” in all of recorded history.  It will sooner or later implode because it is unsound to the core.  A puncturing of the bubble may start when any of several huge holders sells.  Its implosion will trigger the sale of other overpriced corporate, municipal and foreign bonds, and the dollar itself may well be replaced as the world reserve currency.  The US bond bubble is the Godfather because it is so large that no other investment market can absorb the mass exodus which will come from it.  It is logical that those who have worked so deliberately to create this debt bubble will fight even harder to prevent its collapse.  When it implodes, it will probably bring down lesser bubbles and excesses, including the function of the dollar as a world exchange currency.  A true “Bubble” must result from a successful, planned deception The handling of US Treasury bonds, notes and bills, (“US debt” hereafter) has all the elements that make it a once-in-a-lifetime bubble.  It is much more than an overvalued investment or an idea that has become an exaggerated fad, like the “Dot Com Bubble”.   We have seen many of these come and go and we have survived each one.  A bubble must have the element of planned deception in order to reach proportions monstrous enough to draw in the money of a large body of public to it.  US debt floats on the unreasonable assumption of inflated value.  It deliberately and falsely promotes itself in the face of reality.  Charles Mackey, a Scottish journalist, first published Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1) in 1841, a study of ancient bubbles.  HIs most famous quote is, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”  The slow regaining of senses is why the bubble takes so long to burst, far beyond what seems reasonable. The eventual loss suffered by Bernie Madoff’s investors was at least $18 billion. “Bubbles” are always recognized by some (one by one) before they finally pop.  This was the case with the scheme of Bernard Madoff, now in prison for life.  Madoff started his famous Ponzi scheme, once called Ascot Partners, which, like the US debt bubble, lasted over 30 years. Several discovered it much earlier and tried to expose Madoff, but no one would listen because of the deep deception Madoff had surrounded himself with.  Madoff even held volunteer positions in regulatory agencies that should have policed him but did not.  He was also designing computer programs to backdate imaginary trades in order to achieve desired results for his customers’ accounts.  He made imaginary investments in real securities, but only on paper, and instead deposited the clients’ funds in his own discretionary account at Chase Bank. [Mechanics of the Madoff Bubble – (2)] Madoff’s reported results exceeded all investment expectations, but investors were too satisfied to worry about it being too good to be true.  Hedge funds, pension plans and mutual funds all invested with Madoff.  His deception was simple: his fund always moved higher and never had a bad year!  This was a sure sign something was wrong, and one by one a few tried to expose him.  The eventual loss suffered by Madoff’s investors was at least $18 billion, although those who got out early reaped gains at the expense of those who stayed in to the end!  Madoff admitted during his March 2009 guilty plea that the essence of his scheme was to deposit client money into a Chase account, rather than invest it.  When clients wanted their money, “I used the money in the Chase Manhattan bank account that belonged to them or other clients to pay the requested funds,” he told the court. A True Bubble requires mass public participation  On April 19, 2015, Bloomberg News reported that public investors, seeking safety, “may sink $350 billion into debt funds globally this year, adding to the $3 trillion they’ve already poured into bonds since 2008.” (3-A) This influx is mostly through banks, mutual finds and managed IRAs. Per a 2015 article, “In U.S.debt auctions this year, bond mutual funds have bought a record 43 percent of newly issued Treasuries, allotment data compiled by Bloomberg show.” (3-A) A bubble-creating deception may be an illegal one, like Madoff’s, or it may be a legitimized deception, such as the Federal Reserve System (FED), enacted by Congress 102 years ago.   The measure of a bubble is not legality, but successful deception.   The modern mutual fund business has learned how to prosper on US debt investments, considered in a previous era to be a dull and prosaic investment.  Mutual funds have added excitement to it by an implied promise of perpetual capital gains on top of meager income.  No word of capital loss potential is every mentioned.  We will detail one such example by fund manager, J P Morgan Chase Bank in this paper. Bloomberg News further points out (3-A), “There are plenty of reasons to be bearish on U.S. government bonds. They pay almost nothing, the Federal Reserve wants to raise interest rates and money managers are largely convinced they’re [bonds] too expensive …[A] record 84 percent of professional investors in a Bank of America Corp. survey released this month said bonds were overvalued.” (3-B) This writer agrees.  Treasury bonds are near the end of a 30 plus year bull market, a “Bubble” based on an unrealistic and  manipulated assumption that US Treasury bonds do or can be made to always sell higher and higher in the market place, translating into ever lower interest payments.  The Treasury keeps its hands clean by looking to the FED to manage the deception that keeps a line of willing lenders ready to loan money to the Treasury at higher and higher prices, (lower interest rates). Three Deceptions that fire the US Debt Bubble The Federal Reserve Bank of NY has its own style of deception, which varies slightly from Madoff’s and is about 1000 times larger.  It is the super-bank franchise dealer for US debt and claims to be the largest single holder of US debt.  But, unlike other buyers, the FED is allowed to purchase without investing capital, which explains why it is the biggest lender. The US debt bubble has been produced by three contrived deceptions.  First, dollars are electronically printed on the books of the FED whenever the Treasury sells US debt directly to the Federal Reserve Bank for its own account. The Treasury then spends these dollars by writing checks on its bank account at the FED.  The deception is that the FED does not put up anything of value to acquire this new US debt, rather it uses electronically created dollars that recently have been conceded to be, and are referred to as “printed” dollars.  Thus the illusion is created whenever needed, that demand is outstripping supply, and that there is a constant shortage of US bonds and notes.  Chase Manhattan Bank and Morgan Guarantee Bank were original major stockholders of the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank (4), before they merged into the present J P Morgan Chase Bank.  Its money management division helps keep the US debt market creeping upward, as will be discussed later. Second, after issuance, the market price for the newly issued US debt is manipulated, always upwardly, by the Open Market Committee of the FED.  It accomplishes this by making additional purchases in the open market, again with electronically printed dollars. The impact of all this new money on the US debt market produces smooth, little-controlled rises in the US debt’s market value year after year.   Because the interest rate paid on US debt and each instrument’s market price are inversely related, Treasury bond interest is currently at a record low, meaning the market price of the debt is at a near all-time record high.  This happens in spite of the clear fact that new debt is constantly being sold into the market, which should make the market go down, not up.  As with Bernie Madoff’s hedge fund, the illusion is created that the market for US debt can go only one way: UP.  Gradually this bubble becomes accepted as reality!  The madness of Charles Mackey’s crowd is achieved. During the course of this manipulation, according to its own report, the FED has accumulated $2.4 trillion in US debt, for which it paid nothing at all. Third, value in US debt comes from “professional” managers of other people’s money (OPMM), who sell the specious notion that the open market value of US debt always rises enough to make up for the minuscule interest rate bonds and notes pay to the investor.  OPMM keep on buying and trading US debt and are the largest holders by far!  We must examine how this is accomplished in a real world of declining purchasing power for these bonds.  We will use as our example, the J P Morgan Chase Bank, whose two predecessor banks were original owners of the FED (4), and probably still are.  [Because the FED is unaudited, its present ownership is unknown to this author.] As in the Madoff Ponzi bubble, manipulating parties, including the self-serving Congress, have contrived an UP, UP, and ever higher market for US debt that is hanging the least suspecting citizens out to dry.  Consider that the Social Security Trust Fund is invested almost entirely in US debt and that, with similar US agency funds, such as the military pension plan, they hold about 1/3 of all federal debt issued.  What would happen to Social Security checks and health care payments if, say, 25% of their assets evaporated in just a few months? The military-banking complex continues to provide the need for vast sales of US debt with its serial wars in the Middle East, which started in 1991.  US debt expansion also destroys the underpinnings of the US Dollar as the world reserve currency because there is no limit as to how much dollar currency there will be in circulation.  This practice of making war, then printing or borrowing the money to pay for it, is surprisingly similar to the British course of action that broke the back of its economy by 1914 and which forced it off the gold standard for good, and in 1931, the world turned away from the Pound Sterling  as a world reserve currency and opted instead for the Dollar. The British Empire destroyed itself by borrowing for foreign wars it never lost England set the standard for brutality in war in the 1895-1910 era when it invaded and destroyed two far away and very different lands.  They moved into Sudan in 1898, followed closely by their invasion of South Africa in 1902.  Both campaigns were covered by youthful reporter/adventurer Winston Churchill. The war to conquer Sudan was unpopular in England, but the British War Department overcame public objections by fashioning a publicity campaign for revenge on Mahdi Muhammad Ahman  because a year earlier he had led an independence movement that captured the garrison at Khartoum and killed a popular British war hero, Charles Gordon.  The war faction in Britain managed to sub-humanize the black Muslim Sudanese.  English gentlemen have long been conditioned to accept the necessity for killing “wogs” going beck to Rudyard Kipling’s India.   In the slaughter at Khartoum, it was British modern military supremacy against a primitively armed Sudanese independence movement. Propaganda-wise, the Sudanese had two ethnic strikes against them: they were both black and Muslim. The British Empire’s bloody success at Omdurman was recorded in a classic book by British author Alan Moorhead, The Blue Nile (1962). England’s next war adventure was the invasion of South Africa in 1902, which in England turned out to be a very unpopular and expensive war. The Boer War was fought for control of South African gold mines.  It became the straw that broke the Empire.   The Boers were white Europeans, and their casualties included some 40,000 Dutch wives and children of the Boer farmer-soldiers.  Under command of Herbert Kitchener first Earl, the wives and kids were gathered into British concentration camps and starved to death, to force the Boer farmers to yield to a treaty.  It worked.  Back home The British heard about this and could not stomach the facts. The detailed and painful account of this last British war for assets is told by Englishman Thomas Pakengham, in his classic, The Boer War (1979). READ MORE View article...

The Whole Story Of Zionist Conspiracy & How the US was Recruited as a pro-Zionist Ally by England - *video*

The US Constitution only permits treaties be undertaken by the US Senate. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 and US obedience to this British abridgement to a foreign land is an illegal treaty and unlawful application of our Constitution.

Espionage, Treason, and the Congressional Fifth Column

Congress canoodles with Israeli spies to undermine Iran deal

by Justin Raimondo, March 25, 2015

The spectacle of virtually the entire Senate GOP caucus mobilizing in support of a foreign power in order to drag us into war with Iran has certainly been instructive. Not since the Federalist party plotted with the British during the War of 1812 has an American fifth column been so open about their treason.

But isn’t the "t"-word a bit hyperbolic? After all, don’t all Americans, even the worst warmongers among us, have the right to free speech? Those members of Congress were merely expressing their opinion – right?

Not so fast:
"Soon after the U.S. and other major powers entered negotiations last year to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, senior White House officials learned Israel was spying on the closed-door talks.

"The spying operation was part of a broader campaign by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to penetrate the negotiations and then help build a case against the emerging terms of the deal, current and former U.S. officials said. In addition to eavesdropping, Israel acquired information from confidential U.S. briefings, informants and diplomatic contacts in Europe, the officials said.

"The espionage didn’t upset the White House as much as Israel’s sharing of inside information with U.S. lawmakers and others to drain support from a high-stakes deal intended to limit Iran’s nuclear program, current and former officials said."

To be clear: the Israelis penetrated our communications, and used other means – including "informants" presumably inside the U.S. government – to uncover details about the emerging deal with Iran, and then passed this information on, perhaps indirectly, to their congressional fifth column, including presidential aspirants Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul, all of whom then signed on to Sen. Tom Cotton’s "open letter" to Tehran.

If this isn’t treason, then the word has no meaning.

Speaker of the House John Boehner, who plotted with Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer behind the President’s back to invite Netanyahu to address Congress, said he was "shocked" and "baffled" by the news. Not by the news they spied on us – it’s well known that the Jewish state is among the most aggressive foreign adversaries our counterintelligence agencies have to fend off – but "by the fact that there were reports in this press article that information was being passed on from the Israelis to members of Congress. I’m not aware of that at all." What’s baffling, however, is Boehner’s behavior during this Israeli incursion onto American territory: why did he suddenly decide to go full wingnut and canoodle with the Israelis to bring Bibi to American shores? And how is it the Speaker has so little knowledge of what’s going on right under his nose on Capitol Hill?

"The White House discovered the operation," reports Adam Entous of the Wall Street Journal, "when U.S. intelligence agencies spying on Israel intercepted communications among Israeli officials that carried details the U.S. believed could have come only from access to the confidential talks, officials briefed on the matter said." Those telling details then somehow found their way into conversations between the Israelis (and their American agents) and "U.S. lawmakers and others," accord to the Journal.

It’s one thing to spy, said a top U.S. official, but "it’s another thing to steal U.S. secrets and play them back to U.S. legislators to undermine U.S. diplomacy." Read More
 

Israelis Killed more Palestinians Last Year than in any Year since 1967

Why do the American people allow and even condone and fund  the slaughter of those who mean us no harm? It is shameful for us to elect those that are tolerant of such human cruelties. This is not American in any form of the past and cannot be America's future.

Sunday, March 29, 2015

A Palestinian man carries an injured girl
into the Shifa hospital following Israeli
strikes in Gaza City (AP Photo)

The year 2014 was a dangerous one to be a Palestinian. More Palestinians were killed by Israel than in any year since the occupation of Palestinian territories began in 1967.

According to a report (pdf) by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in 2,314 Palestinians were killed last year and an estimated 17,125 were injured in fighting with Israeli forces. That compares to 87 Israelis killed in the hostilities. Israeli injuries totaled an estimated 2,629.

Most of the deaths came in the fighting in Gaza between July 7 and August 26. During those hostilities, 2,220 Palestinians were killed, 1,492 of them civilians, 551 of whom were children. This included 142 Palestinian families who saw three or more family members killed because of attacks on their residences. These attacks on residential buildings accounted for 742 deaths.

During the Gaza fighting, 71 Israelis were killed, 66 of them soldiers.

Deaths were also up among West Bank and East Jerusalem Palestinians. There were 58 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces last year, as opposed to 28 in 2013 and eight the year before. Sixteen Israelis were killed as a result of conflict in this region in 2014, compared to four the previous year and none in 2012. Most of the 6,028 injuries were caused by rubber-coated metal bullets or tear gas inhalation.

The U.N. report criticized both sides in the conflict for their failure to adequately distinguish between civilians and combatants. It urged the Israelis to refrain from launching attacks that endanger non-combatants when deaths and injuries to civilians “would be excessive in relation to the military advantage anticipated.” The report urged Palestinian armed groups to “refrain from the indiscriminate firing of rockets and other projectiles at Israel and not endanger civilians by using their neighborhoods to launch attacks and shield combatants.

Although the Israeli Military Advocate General announced criminal investigations into 19 “exceptional incidents,” the authors of the report, based on previous experiences, were not optimistic about the issue of accountability. For example, following the Gaza War of 2008-2009, in which Israeli forces killed an estimated 759 Palestinian civilians, “only three soldiers were convicted, with the longest sentence involving the theft of a credit card.” 

There is no evidence that Palestinian authorities have ever investigated possible human rights violations by Palestinian armed groups.

In a separate report, Amnesty International accused Palestinian armed groups of committing war crimes “by repeatedly launching indiscriminate rockets and mortars towards civilian areas in Israel.” 
A previous report accused the Israelis of committing war crimes.

-David Wallechinsky, Steve Straehley

To Learn More:

Fragmented Lives (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs occupied Palestinian territory) (pdf)

U.S. Only Country of 47 to Vote against Investigating Possible Human Rights Violations during Israeli Occupation of Gaza (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

Washington's Al Qaeda Ally Now Leading ISIS in Libya

 Republican senators McCain & Graham heroes to some, traitors to most. While they will not be punished by congress which acts unlawfully itself, this pair must be removed by the voters of those respective states. 

Additionally, state governors for years have condoned the respective national guard regiments to be deployed in the undeclared overseas wars upon many nations - and lives. Those unlawful acts should be nullified by governors immediately.

March 9, 2015 (Eric Draitser - NEO) - The revelations that US ally Abdelhakim Belhadj is now leading ISIS in Libya should come as no surprise to those who have followed US policy in that country, and throughout the region. It illustrates for the umpteenth time that Washington has provided aid and comfort to precisely those forces it claims to be fighting around the world.

According to recent reports, Abdelhakim Belhadj has now firmly ensconced himself as the organizational commander of the ISIS presence inside Libya. The information comes from an unnamed US intelligence official who has confirmed that Belhadj is supporting and coordinating the efforts of the ISIS training centers in eastern Libya around the city of Derna, an area long known as a hotbed of jihadi militancy.

While it may not seem to be a major story – Al Qaeda terrorist turns ISIS commander – the reality is that since 2011 the US and its NATO allies have held up Belhadj as a “freedom fighter.” They portrayed him as a man who courageously led his fellow freedom-lovers against the “tyrannical despot” Gaddafi whose security forces at one time captured and imprisoned many members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), including Belhadj.

Belhadj served the US cause in Libya so well that he can be seen receiving accolades from Sen. John McCain who referred to Belhadj and his followers as heroes. He was initially rewarded after the fall of Gaddafi with the post of military commander of Tripoli, though he was forced to give way to a more politically palatable “transitional government” which has since evaporated in that chaotic, war-ravaged country.

Belhadj’s history of terrorist activity includes such “achievements” as collaboration with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq, and of course his convenient servitude to the US-NATO sponsored rampage across Libya that, among other things, caused mass killings of black Libyans and anyone suspected of being part of the Green Resistance (those loyal to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya led by Gaddafi). Although the corporate media tried to make a martyr of Belhadj for his alleged torture via the CIA rendition program, the inescapable fact is that wherever he goes he leaves a violent and bloody wake.

While much of this information is known, what is of paramount importance is placing this news in a proper political context, one that illustrates clearly the fact that the US has been, and continues to be, the major patron of extremist militants from Libya to Syria and beyond, and that all talk of “moderate rebels” is merely rhetoric designed to fool an unthinking public.

The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend…Until He Isn’t

There is ample documented evidence of Belhadj’s association with Al Qaeda and his terrorist exploits the world over. Variousreports have highlighted his experiences fighting in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and he himself has boasted of killing US troops in Iraq. However, it was in Libya in 2011 where Belhadj became the face of the “rebels” seeking to topple Gaddafi and the legal government of Libya.

As the New York Times reported:

The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was formed in 1995 with the goal of ousting Colonel Qaddafi. Driven into the mountains or exile by Libyan security forces, the group’s members were among the first to join the fight against Qaddafi security forces… Officially the fighting group does not exist any longer, but the former members are fighting largely under the leadership of Abu Abdullah Sadik [aka Abdelhakim Belhadj].

So, not only was Belhadj a participant in the US-NATO war on Libya, he was one of its most powerful leaders, heading a battle-hardened jihadist faction that constituted the leading edge of the war against Gaddafi. Nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated than when the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) took the lead in the attack on Gaddafi’s compound at Bab al-Aziziya. In this regard, LIFG was provided intelligence, and likely also tactical support, from US intelligence and the US military.

This new information about Belhadj’s association with the suddenly globally relevant ISIS certainly bolsters the argument that this writer, among many others, has made since 2011 – that the US-NATO war on Libya was waged by terrorist groups overtly and tacitly supported by US intelligence and the US military. Moreover, it dovetails with other information that has surfaced in recent years, information that shines a light on how the US exploited for its own geopolitical purposes one of the most active terrorist hotbeds anywhere in the world.

According to the recent reports, Belhadj is directly involved with supporting the ISIS training centers in Derna. Of course Derna should be well known to anyone who has followed Libya since 2011, because that city, along with Tobruk and Benghazi, were the centers of anti-Gaddafi terrorist recruitment in the early days of the “uprising” all through the fateful year of 2011. But Derna was known long before that as a locus of militant extremism. FINISH READING

Neocons Guided Petraeus on Afghan War

March 9, 2015

From the Archive: Before Gen. David Petraeus was caught giving secrets to his biographer-mistress, he was giving special favors and access to influential neocons, one reason why Official Washington was so happy that he received only a hand-slap for his crime, ties that Robert Parry examined in 2012.

By Robert Parry (Originally published on Dec. 19, 2012)

Even after the Iraq War disaster and Barack Obama’s election in 2008, neoconservatives retained their influence over U.S. war policies in Afghanistan through their close ties to George W. Bush’s national security holdovers, such as Gen. David Petraeus who partnered with neocon war hawks in escalating the Afghan War.

How tight Petraeus’s relationship was with two neocons in particular, Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, was explored in a Washington Post article by war correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran who described how Petraeus installed the husband-and-wife team in U.S. offices in Kabul, granted them top-secret clearances and let them berate military officers about war strategy.

Gen. David Petraeus posing before the U.S. 
Capitol with Kimberly Kagan, founder and 
president of the Institute for the Study of 

War. (Photo credit: ISW’s 2011 Annual Report)

Though the Kagans received no pay from the U.S. government, they drew salaries from their respective think tanks which are supported by large corporations, including military contractors with interests in extending the Afghan War. Frederick Kagan works for the American Enterprise Institute, and Kimberly Kagan founded the Institute for the Study of War [ISW] in 2007 and is its current president.

According to ISW’s 2011annual report, its original supporters were mostly right-wing foundations, such as the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, but it was later backed by national security contractors, including major ones like General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and CACI, as well as lesser-known firms such as DynCorp International, which provides training for Afghan police, and Palantir, a technology company founded with the backing of the CIA’s venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir supplies software to U.S. military intelligence in Afghanistan.

In her official bio at the ISW’s Web site, Kimberly Kagan touts her work “in Kabul for fifteen months in 2010 and 2011 as a ‘directed telescope’ to General David H. Petraeus and subsequently General John Allen, working on special projects for these commanders of the International Security Assistance Force.”

In the ISW’s 2011 annual report, Petraeus praises Kagan as “a barracuda at some times,” hails her leadership and poses with her for several photographs, including one in his dress uniform with the U.S. Capitol in the background.

The Post article noted that “For Kim Kagan, spending so many months away from research and advocacy work in Washington could have annoyed many donors to the Institute for the Study of War. But her major backers appear to have been pleased that she cultivated such close ties with Petraeus, who went from Kabul to head the CIA before resigning this fall over his affair with [biographer Paula] Broadwell. …

“On Aug. 8, 2011, a month after he relinquished command in Afghanistan to take over at the CIA, Petraeus spoke at the institute’s first ‘President’s Circle’ dinner, where he accepted an award from Kim Kagan. … ‘What the Kagans do is they grade my work on a daily basis,’ Petraeus said, prompting chortles from the audience. ‘There’s some suspicion that there’s a hand up my back, and it makes my lips talk, and it’s operated by one of the Doctors Kagan.’ …

“At the August 2011 dinner honoring Petraeus, Kagan thanked executives from two defense contractors who sit on her institute’s corporate council, DynCorp International and CACI International. The event was sponsored by General Dynamics. All three firms have business interests in the Afghan war.

“Kagan told the audience that their funding allowed her to assist Petraeus. ‘The ability to have a 15-month deployment essentially in the service of those who needed some help — and the ability to go at a moment’s notice — that’s something you all have sponsored,’ she said.”

Earlier Warning Signs

Though the Post article provides new details about Petraeus’s coziness to Washington’s neocons, there have been warning signs about this relationship for several years. In 2010, I wrote articles describing how Petraeus and other holdovers from George W. Bush’s administration, such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, had trapped the inexperienced Obama into expanding the Afghan War.

On Sept. 27, 2010, I noted that “after his solid victory in November 2008, Obama rebuffed recommendations from some national security experts that he clean house by installing a team more in line with his campaign pledge of ‘change you can believe in.’ He accepted instead the counsel of Establishment Democrats who warned against any disruption to the war-fighting hierarchy and who were especially supportive of keeping Gates. …

“Before Obama’s decision to dispatch [an additional] 30,000 troops [in an Afghan War ‘surge’ in 2009], the Bush holdovers … sought to hem in the President’s choices by working with allies in the Washington news media and in think tanks. …

“For instance, early in 2009, Petraeus personally arranged for Max Boot [a neocon on the Council on Foreign Relations], Frederick Kagan and Kimberly Kagan to get extraordinary access during a trip to Afghanistan. … Their access paid dividends for Petraeus when they penned a glowing report in the Weekly Standard about the prospects for success in Afghanistan – if only President Obama sent more troops and committed the United States to stay in the war for the long haul. …

“‘Fears of impending disaster are hard to sustain, … if you actually spend some time in Afghanistan, as we did recently at the invitation of General David Petraeus, chief of U.S. Central Command,’ they wrote upon their return.

“‘Using helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and bone-jarring armored vehicles, we spent eight days traveling from the snow-capped peaks of Kunar province near the border with Pakistan in the east to the wind-blown deserts of Farah province in the west near the border with Iran. Along the way we talked with countless coalition soldiers, ranging from privates to a four-star general,’ the trio said.”

(Frederick Kagan is the brother of Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, which began the drive in 1998 for invading Iraq. Robert Kagan, now with the Brookings Institution and a columnist for the Washington Post, is married to Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who oversaw last year’s coup in Ukraine. For more on the outsized influence of the Kagans, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama’s True Foreign Policy ‘Weakness.'”)

Trapping the President

How Obama was manipulated by Bush’s holdovers – with the help of the neocons – was chronicled, too, in Bob Woodward’s 2010 book, Obama’s Wars, which revealed that Bush’s old team made sure Obama was given no option other than to escalate troop levels in Afghanistan. The Bush holdovers also lobbied for the troop increase behind Obama’s back.

Woodward’s book notes that “in September 2009, Petraeus called a Washington Post columnist to say that the war would be unsuccessful if the president held back on troops. Later that month, [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Adm. Mike] Mullen repeated much the same sentiment in Senate testimony, and in October, [Gen. Stanley] McChrystal asserted in a speech in London that a scaled-back effort against Afghan terrorists would not work.”

This back-door campaign infuriated Obama’s aides, including White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, Woodward reported. “Filling his rant with expletives, Emanuel said, ‘Between the chairman [Mullen] and Petraeus, everyone’s come out and publicly endorsed the notion of more troops. The president hasn’t even had a chance!’” Woodward reported.

According to Woodward’s book, Gates, Petraeus and Mullen refused to even prepare an early-exit option that Obama had requested. Instead, they offered up only plans for their desired escalation of about 40,000 troops.

Woodward wrote: “For two exhausting months, [Obama] had been asking military advisers to give him a range of options for the war in Afghanistan. Instead, he felt that they were steering him toward one outcome and thwarting his search for an exit plan. He would later tell his White House aides that military leaders were ‘really cooking this thing in the direction they wanted.’”

Woodward identified Gates, Petraeus and Mullen as “unrelenting advocates for 40,000 more troops and an expanded mission that seemed to have no clear end.”

The Bush holdovers even resisted passing along a “hybrid” plan that came from outside their group, from Vice President Joe Biden who had worked with JCS vice chairman, Gen. James Cartwright. The plan envisioned a 20,000 troop increase and a more limited mission of hunting Taliban insurgents and training Afghan government forces.

Woodward reported, “When Mullen learned of the hybrid option, he didn’t want to take it to Obama. ‘We’re not providing that,’ he told Cartwright, a Marine known around the White House as Obama’s favorite general. 

Cartwright objected. ‘I’m just not in the business of withholding options,’ he told Mullen. ‘I have an oath, and when asked for advice I’m going to provide it.’”

Rigged War Game

Later, Obama told Gates and Mullen to present the hybrid option as one possibility, but instead the Bush holdovers sabotaged the idea by organizing a classified war game, code-named Poignant Vision, that some military insiders felt was rigged to discredit the hybrid option, Woodward reported.

According to Woodward’s book, Petraeus cited the results of the war game to Obama at the Nov. 11, 2009, meeting as proof the hybrid option would fail, prompting a plaintive question from a disappointed President, “so, 20,000 is not really a viable option?” Without telling Obama about the limits of the war game, Mullen, Petraeus, Gates and then-field commander McChrystal asserted that the hybrid option would lead to mission failure.

“Okay,” Obama said, “if you tell me that we can’t do that, and you war-gamed it, I’ll accept that,” according to Woodward’s book.

Faced with this resistance from the Bush holdovers – and unaware that their war game may have been fixed – Obama finally devised his own option that gave Gates, Petraeus and Mullen most of what they wanted – 30,000 additional troops on top of the 21,000 that Obama had dispatched shortly after taking office.

Obama did try to bind the Pentagon to a more limited commitment to Afghanistan, including setting a date of July 2011 for the beginning of a U.S. drawdown. Though Obama required all the key participants to sign off on his compromise, it soon became clear that the Bush holdovers had no intention to comply, Woodward reported.

Backstabbing

The incoming Obama administration was warned of this possibility of backstabbing by Gates, Petraeus and other Bush appointees when it was lining up personnel for national security jobs.

As I wrote in November 2008, “if Obama does keep Gates on, the new President will be employing someone who embodies many of the worst elements of U.S. national security policy over the past three decades, including responsibility for what Obama himself has fingered as a chief concern, ‘politicized intelligence.’ … It was Gates – as a senior CIA official in the 1980s – who broke the back of the CIA analytical division’s commitment to objective intelligence.”

More than any CIA official, Gates was responsible for the agency’s failure to detect the collapse of the Soviet Union, in large part because Gates had ridden roughshod over the CIA analysts on behalf of the Reagan administration’s desire to justify a massive military buildup by stressing Soviet ascendance and ignoring evidence of its disintegration.

As chief of the CIA’s analytical division and then deputy CIA director, Gates promoted pliable CIA careerists to top positions, while analysts with an independent streak were sidelined or pushed out of the agency.

“In the mid-1980s, the three senior [Soviet division] office managers who actually anticipated the decline of the Soviet Union and Moscow’s interest in closer relations with the United States were demoted,” wrote longtime CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman in his book, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Instead of heeding these warnings, Obama’s team listened to Establishment Democrats like former Rep. Lee Hamilton and former Sen. David Boren, who were big fans of Gates. [For more on Gates’s role, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

Petraeus was much the same story. A favorite of Official Washington and especially the influential neocons, he was credited with supposedly winning the war in Iraq by implementing the “surge” in 2007, which was advocated strongly by Frederick Kagan and other key neocons.

However, in reality, all Petraeus did was extend that misguided war for another few years – at the cost of nearly 1,000 more U.S. dead and countless more dead Iraqis – thus giving President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney time to get out of Washington before the ultimate failure of the mission became obvious. The last U.S. troops were forced to leave Iraq at the end of 2011.

Begging Boot

Petraeus had such close ties to the neocons that he relied on them to pull him out of difficult political spots. In one embarrassing example in 2010, e-mails surfaced showing the four-star general groveling before Max Boot, seeking the neocon pundit’s help heading off a controversy over Petraeus’s prepared testimony to Congress which contained a mild criticism of Israel.

The e-mails from Petraeus to Boot revealed Petraeus renouncing his own congressional testimony in March 2010 because it included the observation that “the enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests” in the Middle East.

Petraeus’s testimony continued, “Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. … 
Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support.”

Though the testimony was obviously true, many neocons regard any suggestion that Israeli intransigence on Palestinian peace talks contributed to the dangers faced by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan – or by the U.S. public from acts of terrorism at home – as a “blood libel” against Israel.

So, when Petraeus’s testimony began getting traction on the Internet, the general turned to Boot at the high-powered Council on Foreign Relations, and began backtracking on the testimony. “As you know, I didn’t say that,” Petraeus said, according to one e-mail to Boot timed off at 2:27 p.m., March 18. “It’s in a written submission for the record.”

In other words, Petraeus was saying the comments were only in his formal testimony submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee and were not repeated by him in his brief oral opening statement. However, written testimony is treated as part of the official record at congressional hearings with no meaningful distinction from oral testimony.

In another e-mail, as Petraeus solicited Boot’s help in tamping down any controversy over the Israeli remarks, the general ended the message with a military “Roger” and a sideways happy face, made from a colon, a dash and a closed parenthesis, “:-)”.

The e-mails were made public by James Morris, who runs a Web site called “Neocon Zionist Threat to America.” He said he apparently got them by accident when he sent a March 19 e-mail congratulating Petraeus for his testimony and Petraeus responded by forwarding one of Boot’s blog posts that knocked down the story of the general’s implicit criticism of Israel.

Petraeus forwarded Boot’s blog item, entitled “A Lie: David Petraeus, Anti-Israel,” which had been posted at the Commentary magazine site at 3:11 p.m. on March 18. However, Petraeus apparently forgot to delete some of the other exchanges between him and Boot at the bottom of the e-mail.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

source consortiumnews