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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 5, 2012 4:12:42 GMT -7
ENENews.com – Energy News
Russian Gov’t: 14 nuclear reactors dumped in ocean — Some filled with fuel “could reachieve criticality & explode” (VIDEO) Published: September 16th, 2012 at 3:05 pm ET
Title: Russia announces enormous finds of radioactive waste and nuclear reactors in Arctic seas
Source: Bellona Date: Aug 28, 2012
[...] The Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom confirmed the figures in February of this year during a seminar it jointly held with Bellona in Moscow. [...]
The catalogue of waste dumped at sea by the Soviets, according to documents seen by Bellona, and which were today released by the Norwegian daily Aftenposten, includes some 17,000 containers of radioactive waste, 19 ships containing radioactive waste, 14 nuclear reactors, including five that still contain spent nuclear fuel; 735 other pieces of radiactively contaminated heavy machinery, and the K-27 nuclear submarine with its two reactors loaded with nuclear fuel. [...]
Information that the reactors about the K-27 could reachieve criticality and explode was released at the Bellona-Rosatom seminar in February. [...]
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 6, 2012 3:08:28 GMT -7
The Pearl Harbor Betrayal and James Forrestal’s DeathAs told by Walter Trohan If there were a major, influential news organ in the United States today that espoused the old fashioned America-first, anti-interventionist, anti-globalist, antiwar, limited-government conservatism of Rep. Ron Paul, it would look a lot like Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune of the early to mid-20th century. The closest thing we have to that now is on the Internet with web sites like LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com. And if that news organ had a prominent, enterprising White House correspondent with contacts all over official Washington who was not afraid to challenge the President or anyone else, he or she would be a lot like Walter Trohan. Sarah McClendon was similar, but she had a very limited audience, and now she has died. Helen Thomas is, too, but she was unlikely to challenge liberal presidents, and now she has been run off. With both women now gone from the center of media power and with no sign of a Walter Trohan even on the horizon, the Washington press corps is left only with megaphones for the imperial presidency, whichever party is in power. Trohan’s revealing 1975 valedictory is entitled Political Animals: Memoirs of a Sentimental Cynic. Two of the most important events to occur on his watch were the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the mysterious premature death of the just-fired Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal. In terms of his willingness to go against conventional wisdom and the ruling establishment, Trohan’s treatment in his book of these two events stand in stark contrast to one another. Pearl Harbor The following passage begins on page 167 and continues into page 168. The year is 1941 and the person sharing secrets with Trohan is President Roosevelt’s press secretary: Steve [Early] confided to me that we knew every move the Japanese were making. This mental bell was to grow louder in tone in the months ahead. Steve repeated we knew every move as fast as it was made. Because of this knowledge, we had to return at once to Washington; war was imminent. Even then I reasoned that we had to have a spy in the Japanese Government at the highest level, but I didn’t see how he could transmit his reports easily and quickly. So I concluded that we had broken the Japanese diplomatic code. This conclusion was one not requiring any great deductive powers. Everyone knew, but few remembered, that we had broken the Japanese naval code during the naval disarmament conference in Washington in 1921. All this was detailed in a book by the man who directed the breaking, Herbert O. Yardley, The Black Chamber, which I had read and remembered. I read it again with greater interest because it seemed to support my hunch. American intelligence was furious with Yardley for revealing the code-breaking coup, so much so that he was not invited to take any role in cryptology before or during the war. It wasn’t long before my suspicions were confirmed. Friends in the army and navy intelligence acknowledged that the code had been broken. There was nothing I could do about it under censorship, but I did keep after it. For four years I collected bits and pieces of the story, which resulted ultimately in a congressional investigation. The Administration maneuvered the inquiry into a whitewash of Washington responsibility for Pearl Harbor. However, they merely scotched the snake and didn’t kill it, so that Pearl Harbor is becoming to be recognized more and more as FDR’s road to war. I was not to get public credit for the code-breaking story, because J. Loy Maloney, then managing editor of the Tribune, had let himself become involved in a censorship storm, which threatened indictment and even closing of the Tribune. So when John T. Flynn, a great newspaperman and a true liberal in that he detested war, got a corner of the story and asked me about it, I turned over the full story to him and put him in touch with all the witnesses. Flynn put the story into a pamphlet, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, which the Tribune printed after the war ended. The pamphlet launched the congressional investigation. I was awarded the Edward Scott Beck prize, established by our former managing editor, for a story I didn’t write. I did play a role behind the scenes in plotting the strategy of anti-Administration forces in the investigation, so that I knew it all, including the tremendous pressure which was brought to bear to hide Washington responsibility. The entire Pearl Harbor pamphlet is available online at Antiwar.com. Anyone interested in knowing the facts about the Japanese attack, as opposed to the popular myth that the United States was struck by complete surprise while in the midst of peace negotiations, should read the entire thing. For those lacking the time, here is the concluding summary: 1. By January l, 1941, Roosevelt had decided to go to war with Japan. 2. But he had solemnly pledged the people he would not take their sons to foreign wars unless attacked. Hence he dared not attack and so decided to provoke the Japanese to do so. 3. He kept all this a secret from the Army and Navy. 4. He felt the moment to provoke the attack had come by November. He ended negotiations abruptly November 26 by handing the Japanese an ultimatum which he knew they dared not comply with. 5. Immediately he knew his ruse would succeed, that the Japanese looked upon relations as ended and were preparing for the assault. He knew this from the intercepted messages. 6. He was certain the attack would be against British territory, at Singapore perhaps and perhaps on the Philippines or Guam. If on the Philippines or Guam he would have his desired attack. But if only British territory were attacked could he safely start shooting? He decided he could and committed himself to the British government. But he never revealed this to his naval chief. 7. He did not order [General Walter] Short to change his alert and he did not order [Admiral Husband] Kimmel to take his fleet out of Pearl Harbor, out where it could defend itself, because he wanted to create the appearance of being completely at peace and surprised when the Japs started shooting. Hence he ordered Kimmel and Short not to do anything to cause alarm or suspicion. He was completely sure the Japanese would not strike at Pearl Harbor. 8. Thus he completely miscalculated. He disregarded the advice of men who always held that Pearl Harbor would be first attacked. He disregarded the warning implicit in the hour chosen for attack and called to [Navy Secretary Frank] Knox's attention. He disregarded the advice of his chiefs that we were unprepared. 9. When the attack came he was appalled and frightened. He dared not give the facts to the country. To save himself he maneuvered to lay the blame upon Kimmel and Short. To prevent them from proving their innocence he refused them a trial. When the case was investigated by two naval and army boards, he suppressed the reports. He threatened prosecution to any man who would tell the truth. (Shades of LBJ and the USS Liberty attack. – ed.) Trohan resumes discussion of Pearl Harbor on page 182, continuing into page 183: Probably the main reason taps continued on my home and office phones was that it was known that I was continuing an investigation of my own into Washington responsibility for Pearl Harbor. I made it my business to know and question virtually everyone involved in the affair and thus learned of all the attempts to destroy records and change testimony. This became something of an obsession with me, because I was certain that Washington had maneuvered the nation into a war that the people did not want. I knew that Colonel R. S. Bratton attempted to hand over a vital intercept to a code message from Japan which indicated the United States was a target, probably at Pearl Harbor, to general George Catlett Marshall, army chief of staff. Bratton had the message in a locked pouch. He was stopped at Marshall’s office door by Colonel Walter Bedell Smith, who forced Bratton to open the pouch against all precedent for an “eyes only message.” Smith said he would deliver it himself, after he read it. I also knew Colonel Otis K. Sadtler, who also attempted to have something done to warn the army and navy commanders at Pearl Harbor, General Walter Short and Admiral Husband E. Kimmel. Bratton and Sadtler were never promoted although they served throughout the war. Bedell Smith became a lieutenant general and a millionaire industrialist after the war. I won’t say he owed it all to the protection of Marshall, but the protection certainly didn’t injure his career. I learned that Marshall had gone horseback riding, when he should have been warning Short and Kimmel. I knew both commanders. I also knew navy Captain Laurance F. Safford, who played a major role in breaking the Japanese code and who resisted great pressure to have him deny that the key Japanese message “East wind rain,” which spelled attack on the United States, had ever been received. In the course of my investigation I found a call girl who was favored by Marshall. I thought for a time that he might have been in her apartment the night before Pearl Harbor. He claimed to have forgotten where he was that night. He had been found sitting on a log with his head in his hands on a bridle path, when searchers brought him word of the attack. The answer was before my eyes all the time in the files of the Washington Times Herald, but I didn’t know it. Marshall was among guests at a gathering of alumnae [sic] of his alma mater, Virginia Military Institute. For those interested, Marshall’s relations with the call girl were not very exciting; the playing of classical records in his apartment. I talked to Marshall’s secretary and his sergeant. Admiral Harold R. Stark, the chief of naval operations, had been shifted to London, but other naval people were available. I knew that officers were being sent around the world in an attempt to induce many to change their stories. There were times when I despaired of hope that the truth would become known. At this point we need to reconsider our comparison of the Chicago Tribune and Walter Trohan to Ron Paul conservatives. Here the country had a major newspaper and its chief Washington correspondent challenging the official story of the event that propelled the country into World War II. They told us not long after it happened that FDR wanted the U.S. in World War II and Pearl Harbor was his way of accomplishing it. (Pro-Israel lobbyist, Patrick Clawson, then, is essentially correct about FDR’s motives in the former’s infamous recent speech.) It is as though, today, there were at least one major news organ that, from the beginning, gave a voice to the 9/11 truth movement. The closest we have come to that is the recent airing by PBS of a video by Architects and Engineers for 9-ll Truth, but it’s more than a decade late. On page 186 Trohan tells us of the complicity of the Republican opposition in making certain that the truth would not be known “prematurely.” It is the election year of 1944: The Republicans named Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York and Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio. Dewey had joined the interventionist eastern establishment. [Ohio Senator Robert] Taft was not a contestant, having agreed to step aside in order to let Bricker make his pitch for the party nomination. Bricker lost to Dewey. The major issues were the conduct of the war and the plans for peace. Dewey had most of the facts on the Washington responsibility for Pearl Harbor and was prevailed upon by Roosevelt not to use them. I was one of a small knot of speech-writer consultants—not the only one by any means—so I knew. I couldn’t blame Dewey because the war was on and the first thing to do was win it, not question its beginnings. But what are an opposition candidate’s and a journalist’s responsibilities in a free society when the “war” is an interminable one on an abstract noun like our “war on terror”? And by cozying up to the leadership of one of the major parties did not Trohan and his newspaper begin the slide down the slippery slope that pretty soon led them to be, like all the others, just another mouthpiece for the ruling powers that be? The Democrats were unexpectedly still in power in 1949 when James Forrestal went out that window at Bethesda Naval Hospital, but it looks like Trohan and the Chicago Tribune were already too far gone down the slope by that time to do anything but parrot the approved line. James Forrestal At the bottom of page 250, Trohan has just finished a weak defense of Senator Joe McCarthy and the senator’s attempt to cleanse the Truman administration of Communist infiltrators. McCarthy was the first of the “tarnished warriors” to which he refers: Another tarnished warrior of the period was James V. Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, who was my good friend and one of the finest and most dedicated servants I have ever known. Jim came from lower New York State, where his brother won an appointment as postmaster under Farley when he met with difficulty in the Depression. Forrestal entered and graduated from Princeton, where he was a boxer, as a broken nose attested, and a good one. It is my sincere belief that this sport proved to be his undoing, because a boxer must rely on himself rather than on his teammates. He undertook a Wall Street career, becoming head of Dillon, Reed [sic] & Co. From this company he entered government service, first in the Treasury, later as Secretary of Navy and finally was named as the first head of the newly organized and not really united Defense Department. In the Defense Department Jim was convinced that the United States, especially the U.S. Navy, could not operate without Mideast oil. He did not anger the Arabs, which some persons, including a scoundrel in the press, insisted made him anti-Israeli, which he was not. Few men were more misrepresented or vilified in some quarters than this hard-working official. Also his life was domestically and religiously complicated. He had me to functions in the Pentagon when lesser men feared to do so. Also he invited me to breakfast at his Georgetown home, which I refused to join, because I am willing to discuss business or listen to speeches at lunch or dinner, but will not permit anything to intrude on my quiet tea and toast, the only meal that almost always belonged to Carol and myself. Forrestal left the Cabinet in 1949 partly because he did not wish to embarrass Truman, who had recognized Israel and brought his influence on other nations to recognize the new state. He talked of returning to his church, but leaped out of his suite from the tower of Bethesda Naval Hospital, not long after he left the Cabinet, leaving behind him a book in which he had underlined a number of passages of gloomy poetry. It is hard to say that Forrestal’s call for caution in the Middle East was unwise. While the Jews are entitled to a homeland, the creation of the state by Britain and the United States has raised many problems in seeking to solve but one. It is not unlikely that the seeds of World War II may spring from the tensions that have followed the best of intentions. The first thing one notices is that Trohan, even though he doesn’t use the word “suicide”, repeats—although rather poorly—the accepted story completely uncritically in spite of the fact that he counted Forrestal as a “good friend” and supported his political positions. The contrast with his reaction to the official story of the Pearl Harbor attack could hardly be sharper. The second thing that strikes us is how extraordinarily cavalier and sloppy Trohan is with the facts of Forrestal’s professional life and of his death. On page 292 he writes of his own resistance to being made an editor because he thought his gregariousness and inquisitive nature made him best suited to be a reporter. In this instance, his supposed “inquisitive nature” seems to have deserted him completely. One gets the impression that he was afraid that should he have inquired into the actual facts of Forrestal’s death he would have learned more than it was safe to know. Let’s start with the next to last paragraph and work forward. He says that Forrestal underlined passages of gloomy poetry. No one else has ever said that, to my knowledge. The earliest report was that a book was found open at the page where a gloomy poem was found. That was followed closely by a report that he had copied lines from the poem on a sheet of paper. The second report remains the story told us by the press and the historians, although we have since discovered that the transcription was obviously not written by Forrestal and no one was identified in the official investigation as its discoverer. Before that, Trohan says Forrestal “leaped out of his suite from the tower of Bethesda Naval Hospital…” He actually went out of the window of a kitchen across the hall from his room. Furthermore, the accepted story is not that he leaped but that he had attempted to hang himself out the window because a bathrobe belt was found tied around his neck. The first sentence of the paragraph states, “Forrestal left the Cabinet in 1949 partly because he did not wish to embarrass Truman…” No, he might have been talking about leaving, but he was forced to resign by President Truman. The statement at the beginning that “Forrestal entered and graduated from Princeton” is wrong on two points. He first entered Dartmouth and transferred to Princeton. He did not graduate from Princeton, having left one course short of a degree. Trohan’s summary of Forrestal’s career in the government is also wrong. He never worked at the U.S. Treasury. He worked briefly as a White House assistant and then was made Undersecretary of the Navy. From that post he rose to Secretary of the Navy when the incumbent, Frank Knox, died. Trohan is also wrong to say that Forrestal was not anti-Israel. He was strongly opposed to the creation of an ethnic-supremacist state in Palestine controlled by immigrants who were mainly from Europe, which certainly made him anti-Israel. What he was not was anti-Semitic, which is what his detractors then and now like to call him. There were a great number of Jews who agreed with Forrestal’s position on Israel at the time, and many do to this day. Nowhere in Trohan’s discussion of Forrestal’s death do we learn that there was an official investigation and that the results of the investigation were withheld for some six months. Neither do we learn that in the brief conclusions released at that time suicide is not even mentioned. The official Navy review board concluded only that he died from his fall; they do not say what caused the fall. Not having even told us of its existence, Trohan, of course, also fails to tell us that the report was still secret at the time he wrote his book, some 26 years after the fact. We may assume that Forrestal’s “good friend” Trohan, like all the other members of our great “free” press, kept silent about it when the slender conclusions were released but the report proper was kept secret. What are we to make of this truly sorry performance? We have suggested that the contrast with his reporting on Pearl Harbor was a matter of timing in Trohan’s life, that he had begun his slide into the moral cesspool of Washington in 1944 when he collaborated with the Republicans, and by 1949, when his friend Forrestal was clearly assassinated he had reached bottom. But other evidence suggests that there are deeper reasons for the difference in treatment. When it comes to these two important events, Trohan is but a reflection of the opinion molding community in general. After all, journalist Robert B. Stinnett’s 1999 book, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor, received a considerable amount of publicity (although the case can be made that it is a fake opposition book), even getting a mildly favorable review in The New York Times. If we Google “Pearl Harbor conspiracy” we see that a great deal has been written that challenges the official story, including a number of books. Googling the unusual name of “Colonel Otis K. Sadtler,” mentioned by Trohan, produces a particularly strong work by Harry Elmer Barnes. When it comes to James Forrestal’s assassination, on the other hand, the only book that challenges the obviously phony suicide story is one published by the John Birch Society in 1966, The Death of James Forrestal. The anonymous author used the pseudonym, “Cornell Simpson,” and the book has been completely ignored by the mainstream press and by historians. Otherwise, there is only my work, which began in 2002, and some Internet writing inspired by my work by Hugh Turley and the anonymous “Mark Hunter.” The murder of the leading American opponent of the creation of the state of Israel clearly remains very nearly the most sensitive topic in American 20th Century history, right up there with the vicious Israeli assault on the USS Liberty. Walter Trohan was smart enough and well-enough informed and connected in Washington to know at the time what had happened to Forrestal. He certainly knew by the time he wrote his book, but he wanted to get his book published, preferably by a major publisher. He was successful. His publisher was Doubleday and Company. One might even interpret the numerous gratuitous errors he threw into the Forrestal section as a signal to friends and insiders that he knew he was writing poppycock. The editors wouldn’t notice because he had done nothing to rock the boat. David Martin October 4, 2012
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Post by kaima on Oct 6, 2012 21:46:00 GMT -7
By Llewellyn King
Karl Marx said famously that religion was the opium of the masses. Well, jobs are the opium of politicians, and they're inducing delirious speech this election. If you say something produces jobs, you can get politicians' support for just about anything. Conversely if you say something will cost jobs, politicians will be persuaded. For decades, industry has lobbied by using the jobs arguments. If an industry, say pleasure boat manufacturing, doesn't like a regulation or a safety standard, the lobby cries: It will cost jobs; lots of jobs rounded to the nearest hundred thousand or million, depending on the size of the industry. Likewise, if a company fancies a wetland for its next expansion, it will play the jobs card: Nature is nice, but jobs are divine. At a time of sustained and painful unemployment, there should be no surprise that both presidential candidates are in danger of overdosing on jobs rhetoric. President Obama waxes about the new private sector jobs that have been created — nearly 4.6 million in the last 30 months with more to come. GOP contender Mitt Romney flatly declares that he will create 12 million jobs if he is elected. Romney hasn't told us, except in broad flourishes about regulations and taxes, how this is to be done. Both are sure of one thing: The job will be done by small business, and small business needs tax breaks. These are contestable claims. It's true that small business is a giant employer and hires quicker than large business. But there have been studies, notably cited by The Economist magazine, that dispute the conventional wisdom about small business. Be that as it may, small business is more agile in both increasing and trimming its payrolls, which means it holds the key to speeding the recovery. Taxes are something else. Both Obama and to an even greater extent Romney say that tax is the key. Yet small business does not list high taxation as among its problems. From interviewing dozens of small operators (including restauranteurs, printers, graphic artists, builders, boutique retailers, fastener makers, limousine operators, sail makers and travel agents), I can tell you that small business — if you define it as having 50 or fewer employees — isn't inhibited in hiring by taxes. Companies in the 50-employee range are key in job creation because they hire quickly. Alas, they lay off people quickly in a downturn. The common problems of small business are the cost of providing health insurance; the lack of credit; rents; the quality of the workforce; the high cost of professional services, from accountants to lawyers for things like compliance with health and safety regulations. I've had a lifelong fascination with the dynamics and particularly the psychology of small business. I can tell you no one in small U.S. business has ever made an issue to me of the rate of taxation. Retailers complain about collecting sales taxes and small manufacturers hate having to pass these on. But federal income tax never seems to be an issue. Most small operators, especially those with fewer than 50 people, are happy to be doing well enough to pay tax. Also, if you own a small company, even one that employs just a member of your family, you are better off in terms of tax than any wage earner. Make no mistake: There are tremendous advantages in owning a small business because of what you can legitimately write off. Neither Obama nor Romney comes from a small-business family. Obama simply has no business experience. None. As for Romney, he's had the wrong kind. The businesses he understands are those that to small entrepreneurs are predators. Romney boasts about Bain Capital's role in creating Staples, the 2,000-store office supply retailer. This is a success story for him, but it's been Waterloo for thousands upon thousands of small office supply stores. The numbers are hard to calculate, but I know how devastating mass retailing has been among neighborhood hardware stores; about 50 are lost when Home Depot or other monster predator chains arrive. Walmart is worse. Every kind of small business is impacted by the behemoth. If you do get a job as an "associate," which is the fancy name these huge chains use for a salesperson, the American Dream becomes a far-off hallucination. I doubt many if any of Staples' employees are dreaming of starting an office supply store across the street, eh? – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 14, 2012 6:10:14 GMT -7
BBC News Magazine 12 October 2012 Last updated at 21:18 ET Cuban missile crisis: The other, secret oneBy Joe Matthews Journalist Contrary to popular belief, the Cuban missile crisis did not end with the agreement between the US and Soviet Union in October, 1962. Unknown to the US at the time, there were 100 other nuclear weapons also in the hands of Cuba, sparking a frantic - and ingenious - Russian mission to recover them. In November 2011, aware that the 50th anniversary of the most dangerous few weeks in history was less than a year away, my Russian colleague Pasha Shilov and I came across several new accounts that changed our perspective on the Cuban missile crisis and how much we thought we knew about it. Growing up in Berkshire, England, through the nuclear paranoia of the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan's Cruise and Pershing missiles stationed only 30 miles away from my family home, I was inculcated with a keen awareness of Cold War brinkmanship. Pasha grew up in Moscow and described how it was from the Soviet point of view - equally frightening by his account. But what we've now learned about the chilling events of October and November 1962 has put our own experiences into perspective - and maybe given rise to a few more grey hairs along the way. Our investigations took us to St Petersburg and the Soviet Submariners Veterans' Society via the National Security Archive in Washington DC, where Svetlana Savranskaya, the director of the Russian archives, told us an incredible story. There had been a second secret missile crisis that continued the danger of a catastrophic nuclear war until the end of November 1962. This extended the known missile crisis well beyond the weekend of 27-28 October, the time that had always been thought of as the moment the danger finally lifted with the deal between Kennedy and Khrushchev to withdraw the Soviet missiles in exchange for a US promise not to invade Cuba. The secret missile crisis came about through an unnerving mix of Soviet duplicity, American intelligence failures and the mercurial temperament of Fidel Castro. The Cuban leader, cut out of the main negotiations between the superpowers over the fate of the long range Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba, began to cease cooperation with Moscow. Fearing that Castro's hurt pride and widespread Cuban indignation over the concessions Khrushchev had made to Kennedy, might lead to a breakdown of the agreement between the superpowers, the Soviet leader concocted a plan to give Castro a consolation prize. The prize was an offer to give Cuba more than 100 tactical nuclear weapons that had been shipped to Cuba along with the long-range missiles, but which crucially had passed completely under the radar of US intelligence. Khrushchev concluded that because the Americans hadn't listed the missiles on their list of demands, the Soviet Union's interests would be well served by keeping them in Cuba. Kremlin number two, Anastas Mikoyan, was charged with making the trip to Havana, principally to calm Castro down and make him what seemed like an offer he couldn't refuse. Mikoyan, whose wife was seriously ill, took the assignment knowing that the future of relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union were on the line. Shortly after arriving in Cuba, Mikoyan received word that his wife had died, but despite this, he pledged to stay in Cuba and complete negotiations with Castro. In the weeks that followed, Mikoyan kept the detail of the missile transfer to himself while he witnessed the mood swings and paranoia of the Cuban leader convinced that Moscow had sold Cuba's defence down the river. Castro particularly objected to the constant flights over Cuba by American surveillance aircraft and, as Mikoyan learned to his horror, ordered Cuban anti-aircraft gunners to fire on them. Knowing how delicate the state of relations were between the US and Russia after the worst crisis since World War II, US forces around the world remained on Defcon 2, one short of global nuclear war until 20 November. Mikoyan came to a personal decision that under no circumstances should Castro and his military be given control of weapons with an explosive force equal to 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs. He then extricated Moscow from a seemingly intractable situation which risked blowing the entire crisis back up in the faces of Kennedy and Khrushchev. On 22 November 1962, during a tense, four-hour meeting, Mikoyan was forced to use the dark arts of diplomacy to convince Castro that despite Moscow's best intentions, it would be in breach of an unpublished Soviet law (which didn't actually exist) to transfer the missiles permanently into Cuban hands and provide them with an independent nuclear deterrent. Finally after Mikoyan's trump card, Castro was forced to give way and - much to the relief of Khrushchev and the whole Soviet government - the tactical nuclear weapons were finally crated and returned by sea back to the Soviet Union during December 1962. This story has illuminated a chapter in history that has been partially closed for the past 50 years. But it leaves us with a great respect for Mikoyan and his ability to judge and eventually contain an extremely dangerous situation which could have affected many millions of people. Joe Matthews is a producer for Wild Iris TV, which has made a short film about the "secret" Cuban missile crisis Go here for video: www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19930260
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 14, 2012 6:25:01 GMT -7
Well, after all these years, I should really thank this man. If it wasn't for him I would be part of that 100,000 casualties mentioned in GITMO.
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 14, 2012 6:31:28 GMT -7
Here's one I don't recall at all.
BBC News Latin America & Caribbean
12 October 2012 Last updated at 21:39 ET
The massacre that marked Haiti-Dominican Republic ties
By Nick Davis BBC News, Caribbean correspondent
Seventy-five years ago, the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic was the scene of a mass slaughter that has long burned in Haitians' collective memory but was either unknown or forgotten in the wider world.
It earned the name the Parsley Massacre because Dominican soldiers carried a sprig of parsley and would ask people suspected of being Haitian to pronounce the Spanish word for it: "perejil".
Those whose first language was Haitian Creole found it difficult to say it correctly, a mistake that could cost them their lives.
Historians estimate that anywhere between 9,000 and 20,000 Haitians were killed in the Dominican Republic on the orders of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.
Bodies were dumped in the Massacre River, ominously named after an earlier colonial struggle between the Spanish and French.
The killings of 1937 changed the relationship between the two countries on the island of Hispaniola and its effects can still be felt today.
From late September to mid-October that year, men, women and children were rounded up, then beaten or hacked to death for just being Haitian.
Even dark-skinned Dominicans were caught up in the purge that became known as "el corte", the cutting.
Haitian migrants had for generations crossed the informal border region in the north of the island to work as labourers in the sugar plantations of the Dominican Republic.
But during the Great Depression the country's economy began to slump and immigrants became the scapegoat.
US diplomatic cables at the time described the killings as "a systematic campaign of extermination".
The US administration regarded Trujillo as a staunch ally but after the scale of the massacre emerged, President Franklin D Roosevelt's administration made the Dominican Republic pay reparations to the victims' families - money that ultimately never reached its intended recipients.
There is evidence that in many villages Dominicans risked their own lives to help their Haitian neighbours escape.
But in other cases, local people pointed out Haitian immigrants to the authorities.
Shared history
Today, the border is officially open on Mondays and Fridays.
The bridge that connects the town of Dajabon on the Dominican side and Ouanaminthe in Haiti is a sea of people carrying goods to market.
The two towns, filled with the sounds of Spanish and Creole, depend on each other.
"We have more in common than the differences. Trujillo tried to rid the Dominican Republic of its Haitian roots but our cultures and lifestyle are very similar," says Lesly Manigat, a Haitian doctor living in the Dominican town of Santiago.
"The French, the Spanish, the Africans, it's a shared history."
Dr Manigat belongs to a group called Border of Lights that has been marking the anniversary by using art, poetry and social action to bring the communities together.
Church services were held in both towns to remember the dead, and people took part in a candlelight vigil, marching to their respective border fences.
Distant voices of support could be heard as flickering tea lights floated down-river.
There were some, however, who felt that too much time had passed. In the Dominican newspapers, there was concern that marking the event may raise tensions.
But organisers of the commemorations said it was important to remember.
"People have described it as 75 years of silence and this is a chance to talk about it because these wounds are still in us and so we don't repeat the past," said Cynthia Carrion. Joint efforts
However, attitudes marked by the past still haunt both countries.
It is estimated than more than a million illegal Haitian migrants live in the Dominican Republic, and in Dajabon, people-smuggling is rife.
"After 1937, the Dominican culture became exclusive. On a local level people could work together and could accept that we have a society that's mixed, of which Dominicans of Haitian descent are a part," said Dr Edward Paulino, a Dominican-American member of Border of Lights.
"But at the state level there's still this sense of rejection of dark-skinned Haitians."
Recently it was alleged that a Haitian worker in a town near the border, Loma de Cabrera, had killed a Dominican.
Local people told the Haitians to leave within 24 hours.
But many of those taking part in the events to mark the massacre spoke of the unity that exists between people on the border.
"We did a park clean-up on the Haitian side. One of the volunteers couldn't believe we'd come to help his community and I realised that this was a first," said Sady Diaz, one of the organisers.
People in both towns will be coming together again later in the month to paint murals along the border, a lasting tribute to those who died.
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 18, 2012 5:01:59 GMT -7
Let it be known - - - Afghan History Suppressed: Part I: Islamists, Heroin and the CIAApril 10, 2011 — Dean Henderson (Part one of a three-part series excerpted from Chapter 8: Project Frankenstein: Afghanistan: Big Oil & Their Bankers In The Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network [Paperback] Dean Henderson (Author) Afghanistan was founded in 1747 and ruled by a bloodline monarchy with rumored ties to the legendary Roshaniya- the all-seeing ones. In 1933 King Mohammed Zaher Shah took the throne, ruling the country in feudalistic fashion until deposed by his cousin Mohammed Daoud in 1973. [1] In April 1978 Daoud was killed in a popular revolution led by socialist leader Nor Mohammed Taraki, who became President and embarked on an ambitious land reform program to help poor Afghan sharecroppers, who were traditionally forced to work land owned by the king and his cronies. Taraki built schools for women who were banned from education under the monarchy. He opened Afghan universities to the poor and introduced free health care. When counter-revolutionary bandits began to burn down universities and girl’s schools, many Afghan’s saw the hand of the CIA. As the campaign of sabotage intensified, Kabul revolutionaries called on Soviet leader Leonid Brezynev to send troops to repel the bandits. Brezynev refused. In 1979 pro-Taraki militants, convinced of a CIA destabilization plot, assassinated CIA Kabul Chief of Station Spike Dubbs. Indeed, in April 1979, a full seven months before the much-ballyhooed Soviet “invasion” of Afghanistan occurred, US officials met with Afghan warlords bent on overthrowing Taraki. On July 3, 1979 President Carter signed the first national security directive authorizing secret aid to Afghan warlords. Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said he convinced Carter that in his “…opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”[2] Taraki appointed Tabizullah Amin as Cabinet Minister in charge of land reform. Amin, who Soviet KGB Chief Yuri Andropov came to believe was a CIA deep cover agent provocateur, launched a brutal campaign of terror against political opponents. This turned world opinion against the Tariki government. Andropov believes the CIA had Amin infiltrate the Kabul government intent on discrediting the revolutionaries. Taraki traveled to Moscow to consult with the Soviets on a strategy to get rid of Amin. The day he returned to Kabul, Amin had Taraki executed and seized power. A few weeks later CIA-backed warlords massacred dozens of Afghan government officials in the western city of Herat. The combination of these two events finally convinced Brezynev to send troops into Afghanistan. [3] In December 1979 Soviet tanks rolled across the Panshir Valley, while KGB operatives stormed the Royal Palace in Kabul. They assassinated Tabizullah Amin and installed Babrak Karmal as the new leader of Afghanistan. Brzezinski now had the justification he’d been looking for to begin overtly arming counter-revolutionaries in Afghanistan. Though the Afghan conflict killed two million people, Brzezinski later boasted, “That (Carter’s secret directive) was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.”[4] CIA agents streamed into Peshawar in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. The city lay at the foot of Khyber Pass, the gateway to Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of Afghan refugees had flooded into Peshawar to escape the looming war. With help from the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), the CIA scoured the refugee camps looking for modern-day Islamic fundamentalist Assassins who were prepared to intensify the guerrilla war on Kabul’s socialist government and now, to repel the Soviets from Afghanistan. The Company found what it needed in Hezbi-i Isbmi, a force of feudal-minded Islamist fighters assembled and trained by the Pakistani military with CIA oversight. Their leader was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a fanatic who in the early 1970’s had ordered his followers to throw acid into the faces of Afghan women who refused to wear their burkhas. In 1972 Hezbi-i Isbmi murdered hundreds of left-wing students in Afghanistan then fled to Peshawar, where they escaped prosecution under the protection of the US-allied Pakistan military government. [5] The group was feared and despised by Afghans and Pakistanis alike, who viewed them as a terrorist organization. Pakistan became the third largest recipient of US military aid in the world, behind only Israel and Egypt. Much of that aid was going to arm the mujahadeen who launched raids into Afghanistan, seizing large chunks of real estate. A pattern emerged. Each time the Hezbi-i Isbmi secured land, they immediately planted it to poppies. Between 1982-1983 opium harvests along the Afghan/Pakistani border doubled in size and by 1984 Pakistan was exporting 70% of the world’s heroin. [6] During that time the CIA Station in Islamabad – Pakistan’s capital – became the largest spook den in the world. Golden Crescent heroin output surpassed that of the Golden Triangle just as the CIA began its biggest operation since Vietnam. While Hekmatyar’s troops planted poppies, mujahadeen leader Sayed Ahmed Gailani was supplying the Turkish Gray Wolves syndicate with Pathan opium. The Gray Wolves’ Iranian supply had dried up when their good friend the Shah was deposed and Iranian revolutionaries cracked down on the country’s heroin epidemic. Gailani was a wealthy Afghan aristocrat with ties to former King Zaher Shah. He owned the Peugeot dealership in Kabul and his drug smuggling was underwritten by the Saudis. [7] A 1989 State Department report admitted that Afghanistan had become the world’s leading source of heroin. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar followed squarely in the footsteps of Vang Pao, Phoumi Nosavan and Khun Sa – the CIA heroin lords of the Golden Triangle. Soon Hekmatyar was recognized as the world’s heroin kingpin. Alfred McCoy, in his excellent book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, first exposed the CIA’s role in facilitating the guns-for-drugs quid pro quo. He terms the CIA approach “radical pragmatism”. This same approach would seem to belie the CIA’s penchant for backing Islamic extremists. In 1978 Lieutenant General Fazle Haq was appointed governor of Northwest Frontier Province where Peshawar became an arms supermarket for the mujahadeen and home to hundreds of heroin refineries. Haq was one of the largest depositors at the CIA’s Bank of Credit & Commerce International (BCCI). He was President Zia’s closest confidant and a good friend of Zia’s son, who ran the BCCI Karachi branch. Haq became de facto overlord for mujahadeen operations and provided protection for the heroin labs. Hekmatyar himself ran six labs further south in Baluchistan Province. A State Department Narcotics Suppression Officer based in Islamabad accused US Ambassador to Pakistan Ronald Spiers of refusing to forward any evidence of Pakistani military officials’ involvement in the heroin trade to DEA, though it was widely known that Haq and others were key players. [8] In the 1980’s Pakistan became the world’s poster child for political corruption. The Islamabad junta’s unflagging support for Reagan’s mujahadeen was at the root of the corruption. A senior US official stated that, “key Hekmatyar commanders close to the ISI run heroin laboratories in southwest Pakistan and the ISI cooperates in heroin operations”. [9] In September 1985 the Pakistan Herald reported that military trucks belonging to the National Logistics Cell of the Pakistan Army were being used to transport arms from the Port of Karachi to Peshawar on behalf of the CIA, and that those same trucks were returning to Karachi sealed by the Pakistani military and loaded with heroin. The practice, according to the Herald, had been going on since 1981, just as Hekmatyar’s forces began planting poppies. Two high-ranking Pakistani military officers were caught with 220 kilos of heroin, but were never prosecuted. The US had seventeen DEA agents stationed in Pakistan. During their tenure they made zero arrests. Golden Crescent heroin captured 60% of the US market, where bricks of hashish appeared stamped with a logo of two crossed AK-47 assault rifles circled by the words, “Smoke out the Soviets”. From 1982-1992, roughly the period of US involvement in Afghanistan, heroin addiction in the US rose by 50%. [10] There was evidence that President Zia himself was involved in the heroin trade. In 1984 a Pakistani national named Hamid Hashain was caught smuggling heroin into Norway. During a routine search of Hashain, customs officials found original copies of President Zia’s personal bank statements. The incident caused a major scandal in Pakistan, where allegations of Zia’s corruption grew louder. The US increasingly saw him as a liability. In 1988 Zia’s helicopter went down in a ball of fire. Both he and US Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphael were killed. The crash bore an eerie resemblance to the one that killed Panama’s President Omar Torrijos in 1981, which even General Noriega, who rose to power because of Torrijos’ death, later claimed was a CIA assassination. The US blamed the Soviets and US Air Force officials cordoned off the wreckage, barring Pakistani authorities from investigating the crash. Reagan offered his condolences, citing Zia as, “a strong supporter of anti-narcotics activities in Pakistan”. It is no coincidence that virtually all Arab nations which the West considers allies embrace Islamic fundamentalism, a repressive belief system which is quite congruent with global monopoly capitalism. Both are based on a return to rule by feudalistic monarchy and a diminished role for government and thus democracy. Most US Arab enemies embrace secular socialism, which aims to stop the exploitation of oil resources by the Four Horsemen and their Rockefeller/Rothschild owners. Great Arab leaders including the Egyptian Nasser, the Algerian Boumedienne, the Libyan Qaddafi, the Syrian Assad and the Iraqi al-Bakr support(ed) a secular socialism (though Qaddafi proclaims himself precisely to be anarcho-syndicalist), which poses a very real threat to the neo-liberal globalization agenda. Interventions in Libya and Syria follow the same counter-revolutionary template employed by the City of London banksters in Afghanistan.
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 18, 2012 6:14:41 GMT -7
A brief history of Iran and America's relations and the facts that have led to this political gridlock. This is something that as an American you MUST WATCH!
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 19, 2012 5:35:42 GMT -7
The Fix for High Gas Prices
March 19, 2012 — Dean Henderson
Last week cowardly Republicans, pockets lined with oil industry campaign dollars, attempted to blame President Obama for the recent surge in gas prices. Their asinine solution was, as usual, “Drill Baby Drill”.
Oil drilling has been on the rise in the US for the last few years. Hundreds of wells in Louisiana and Texas have been permitted and capped. Germany and Japan – two countries that drill virtually no oil – pay the same as we do at the pump.
But these are mere facts and Republicans are the party of slogans and fear. Facts are meaningless.
Equally lame was the MSNBC-led liberal media response to the attacks on the President. One by one repeater commentators from Ed Schulz to Keith Olbermann laid down the party line that, “there is nothing Obama can do about oil prices”, even citing a Fox News report to bolster their rickety Beltway thinking box.
The oil market, like most markets in this post-free market phase of monopoly capitalism, has nothing to do with supply and demand. It has to do with two things: speculators and an oil cartel I call the Four Horsemen – Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco and Royal Dutch/Shell.
After decades of secret agreements, refinery shutdowns and mergers; this Rockefeller/Rothschild-owned cartel has the citizens of planet earth by the proverbial balls. No amount of drilling will fix this.
Short of nationalizing Big Oil, what is necessary – as I have opined several times before in this space – is simple enforcement of both the Sherman and Clayton Anti-Trust Acts.
Exxon & Mobil should be broken up into separate companies. Ditto Chevron, Texaco and Unocal. Ditto BP, Amoco and ARCO. Ditto RD/Shell and Pennzoil. Ditto Conoco and Phillips.
There is simply no competition in the oil markets.
This cartel now controls the flow of oil from the Saudi Arabian wellhead to the Toledo gas pump. While reactionary Republicans continue to blame environmentalists for the lack of US oil production, it was these oil giants who capped permitted wells in Texas and Louisiana and moved production to the Middle East – where Bangladeshi, Filipino and Yemeni workers are paid $1/day to work the oil rigs.
Four Horsemen control of refineries and pipelines are the key. Recently they have been shutting down refineries to artificially limit oil supply. And it was instructive that shortly after Obama denied permitting for the Keystone Pipeline – from which the US was to get NO oil – the cartel jacked gas prices as a sort of punishment.
I am now convinced that the “peak oil” phenomenon is a complete fabrication designed to justify the trebling of gas prices we have seen in the past decade. It is no coincidence that the “peak oil” fairy tale began to circulate just as the Four Horsemen were formed via a flurry of mergers a decade ago.
The second thing that can be done – short of shutting down the NYMEX oil futures casino – is for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to limit the size of oil futures contract positions. The largest positions are held by the vampire squid Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other parasite investment banks.
The problem, as always, with the phony American political debate, is cowardice. The two parties love to bash one another, all the while ignoring the elephant in the room on a broad set of critical issues.
The pachyderms here are fairly large and thus easy to identify. It’s time for the President, Congress, the media and the American people to grow a pair and demand two simple actions:
(1 Break up the Four Horsemen using existing anti-trust law.
(2 Drastically limit the size of oil futures trading positions
Failing this the American economy will inevitably head back into a recession, the dumb people in the room will win their ridiculous “Drill Baby Drill” argument and Obama will lose the election.
Dean Henderson is the author of Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries and Das Kartell der Federal Reserve.
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 19, 2012 5:58:49 GMT -7
Afghan History Suppressed: Part II: Socialism, al Qaeda and Chevron
April 14, 2011 — Dean Henderson
(Part two of a three-part series excerpted from Chapter 8: Project Frankenstein: Afhanistan: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)
In the mid-1980’s the UN tried to broker a peace deal in Afghanistan involving a complete Soviet withdrawal in return for an end to US and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) support for the Afghan rebels. The Reagan Administration refused the UN deal. It wanted to “give the Soviets their Vietnam” as part of a grander scheme to rip apart the Soviet Union. It also wanted the socialist Karmal government out of Kabul. In 1986 US military aid to the mujahadeen increased dramatically to $1 billion/year.
In 1988 the US and the Soviets signed the Geneva Accords which called for an Afghan arms embargo. Both countries ignored the deal and the fighting continued. Mujahadeen fighters routinely tortured and mutilated captured Russian and Afghan soldiers- often in the presence of American advisers. [1]
In 1989 the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan. Their hand-picked Prime Minister Babrak Karmal had been replaced by the democratically-elected Mohammad Najibullah Ahmadzai in 1986. But Najibullah was also a socialist and democracy was never a State Department priority. He represented the Parchom faction of the Communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan.
Though the Soviets were gone, the US kept funding the guerrilla campaign against the duly-elected government in Kabul. In 1992 Najibullah was overthrown. One of seven fighting mujahadeen factions led by Burhaddin Rabbani took power. Six of the seven rebel groups laid down their arms and got behind Rabbani.
The one that did not was CIA-favorite Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezbi-i Isbmi, which proceeded to soak the streets of Kabul in yet another round of blood. Though the UN now recognized the Rabbani-led faction as Afghanistan’s legitimate government, the CIA still saw Rabbani as too much the leftist.
Hekmatyar’s forces finally seized Kabul. Rabbani and his government fled north into the Mazar-i-Sharif region where, under the command of military chief Sheik Ahmed Shah Massoud, the ousted mujahadeen factions reconstituted themselves as the Northern Alliance. In 1995 Hezbi-i Isbmi suddenly stepped down, ceding Kabul to a new creation of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) already in charge in Kandahar- the Taliban.
More than two million Afghans had died in the decade long war CIA war- its biggest covert operation since Vietnam. US taxpayers spent $3.8 billion prosecuting the genocide. The House of Saud matched that amount and the other GCC monarchs kicked in as well.
The US did nothing to help rebuild Afghanistan and the forces which the CIA created to fight their proxy war were increasingly turning their anger towards the West.
An October 1999 coup brought General Pervez Musharraf to power in Pakistan. Musharraf supported the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. He served on the board of Rabita Trust for the Rehabilitation of Stranded Pakistanis- an Osama bin Laden fundraising front. After the 911 terror attacks on the US, the Bush Administration gave Musharraf thirty-six hours to step down from the Rabita board. When he refused, the State Department simply removed Rabita from its list of groups that sponsor terrorism. [2]
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar joined many other mujahadeen leaders in expressing anger and contempt at the US for abandoning them. During the Gulf War, several ex-mujahadeen commanders supported Iraq. Following the war, the wealthy Saudi Osama bin Laden, who served as the House of Saud’s emissary in recruiting Afghan Arab fighters, while putting his construction background to work in building the CIA’s Khost, Afghanistan mujahadeen training camps in 1986, now called for a jihad against the “Crusader-Zionist Alliance”. [3] Many of his fellow ex-mujahadeen fighters heeded his call and al Qaeda emerged as the ugliest Frankenstein yet.
In 1993 al Qaeda extremists led by Ramzi Yousef attempted to blow up the World Trade Center by planting a bomb in a parking garage below the towers. Six people died. A week prior to the bombing, a FAX was received in Cairo warning of an impending attack on US interests. The FAX was fittingly sent from Peshawar, where the CIA first recruited mujahadeen. It was signed by al-Gamaa al-Islamiya (Islamic Group), a mujahadeen faction.
In March 1993 an ex-mujahadeen member walked up to the security checkpoint at CIA headquarters in Langley and opened fire, killing two agents. In March 1995, two CIA agents working out of the US Embassy in Karachi were gunned down by another mujahadeen veteran. Both assailants used AK-47 assault rifles paid for by the Saudi government and supplied by the CIA. Surplus CIA-supplied mujahadeen hardware including Stinger missiles also made its way to Iran and Qatar.
In 1996 bin Laden operatives bombed Khobar Towers military barracks at a US base in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden Construction had built the facilities. In 1997, two days after a US court convicted the Pakistani responsible for the shootings at CIA headquarters, four auditors with Texas Union Oil Company were gunned down in Karachi.
In 1998 bin Laden loyalists blew up US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania within minutes of one another. Hundreds died. In 2000 al Qaeda operatives crashed a raft full of explosives into the side of the destroyer USS Cole as it docked in Yemen, where bin Laden’s family originated. Twenty-six US sailors died.
The US was finally forced to apply public pressure on the Pakistani government, which was still hosting the CIA Frankensteins. Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey said Pakistan was close to being placed on the State Department’s list of states that sponsor terrorism. This public pressure further angered the Pakistani people, who had watched as the CIA created and grew these narco-terrorists for a decade, using their country as a training ground. Now the US wanted to offload their culpability onto the Pakistani people. The mujahadeen were furious.
Jordanian mujahadeen Abu Taha put it this way, “The United States is a bloodsucker…and Pakistan is the puppet of America.” Another mujahadeen veteran, Abu Saman, said, “We were not terrorists as long as we and the Americans had the same cause- to defeat a superpower. Now it doesn’t suit the American and Western interests so we are branded terrorists.”[4]
In 1994 the Taliban sprang forth from religious schools known as madrassas in Northwest Pakistan. The schools were run by Jamiat-Ulema-i-Islami- an Islamic fundamentalist group with close ties to Pakistani ISI and funded by the Saudi government. The Taliban launched raids from Pakistani soil, just as the mujahadeen had, gaining notoriety when they freed a Pakistani military convoy captured inside Afghanistan. Within a year they controlled one-third of Afghanistan, establishing a provisional government in Kandahar.
The Rabbani government was ousted in Kabul by Hekmatyar’s Hezbi-i Isbmi. In 1995 as Taliban forces advanced on Kabul, Hekmatyar’s troops handed over control of Kabul to the Taliban. A Western diplomat said of the Taliban, “Clearly the Pakistanis are playing some kind of role”. [5]
When the Taliban came to power in 1996, saying they would establish an “Islamic emirate”, planes landed in Kabul carrying Taliban leaders and seven top-ranking Pakistani military officers. [6] Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE immediately recognized the Taliban.
The Four Horsemen (Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco & Royal Dutch/Shell) took a shine to the Taliban, viewing them as a “stabilizing force in the region”. They were eager to convince the feudalists of the importance of building a gas pipeline across Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean from the vast natural gas fields of Turkmenistan, which borders Afghanistan to the north.
The Rabbani government had been negotiating with an Argentinean consortium called Bridas to build the pipeline. This angered the Four Horsemen, who backed a Unocal-led consortium known as Centgas. In 2005 Unocal became part of Chevron. Many citizens of Kabul were convinced that the CIA had brought the Taliban to power on behalf of Big Oil. [7]
The Four Horsemen were busy exploiting their new Caspian Sea oil and gas reserves in the newly formed Central Asian Republics just north of Afghanistan. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan contain vast crude oil reserves estimated at over 200 billion barrels. Neighboring Turkmenistan is a virtual gas republic, containing some of the largest deposits of natural gas on earth. The biggest gas field is at Dauletabad in the southeast of the country near the Afghan border. All told there are an estimated 6.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Caspian Sea region.
The Centgas consortium also planned to build a pipeline which would connect oil fields around Chardzhan, Turkmenistan to the Siberian oilfields further north. [8] Turkmenistan also has vast reserves of oil, copper, coal, tungsten, zinc, uranium and gold.
With Rabbani out of the picture, Centgas began negotiating in earnest with the Taliban for rights to build their pipeline from Dauletbad across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the port of Karachi, where a US Naval base was in the works on a 100-acre site given mysteriously handed over to Omani Sultan Qaboos.
The Four Horsemen brought with them to Central Asia some loyal Saudi business partners. Saudi billionaire Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz- owner of BCCI and National Commercial Bank and an enthusiastic supporter of the mujahadeen- embraced the Taliban. Bin Mahfouz- whose net worth is over $2 billion- controls Nimir Petroleum, a partner with Chevron Texaco in developing a 1.5 billion barrel Kazakhstan oil field. A Saudi Arabian government audit found that bin Mahfouz’ National Commercial Bank had transferred over $3 million to Osama bin Laden charities in 1999. [9]
Saudi-owned Delta Oil was a partner with Amerada Hess in Azerbaijan oil ventures. Delta-Hess is part of a Bechtel-led group building the $2.4 billion Caspian Pipeline Consortium’s trans-Turkey pipeline to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorosisskyk. Delta Oil is also a partner in Centgas.
According to French writer Olivier Roy, “When the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, it was largely orchestrated by the Pakistani secret service (ISI) and the oil company Unocal, with its Saudi ally Delta”. [10]
In January 1998 Centgas agreed to pay the Taliban government $100 million a year to run their gas pipeline across Afghanistan. Centgas arranged high-level meetings in Washington between Taliban officials and the State Department.
Representing Unocal was Zalmay Khalilzad, who was Assistant Undersecretary of Defense in the Bush Sr. Administration and worked at Cambridge Energy Research Associates before working at Unocal. Khalilzad was born in Mazar-i-Sharif to wealthy Afghan aristocrats. His father was an aide to King Zaher Shah. Khalilzad also worked at Rand Corporation- long a CIA asset. [11] Khalilzad left his post at Unocal to join the National Security Council in the Bush Jr. Administration. [12] In 2002 Bush appointed Khalilzad as the first US envoy to Afghanistan in over 20 years. The first item on his agenda was to revive talks on building the Centgas pipeline.
Bin Mahfouz was under investigation for funding Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terror network. He was represented in the US by Washington law firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. The firm represents the House of Saud and the world’s largest Islamic charity- the Saudi-based Holy Land Foundation for Development and Relief. Within three months of the 911 terror attacks, Treasury had frozen the assets of the Saudi foundation. Akin, Gump successfully defended bin Mahfouz when the BCCI scandal broke. Three partners at the firm are good friends of President George W. Bush. Partner James C. Langdon is one of Bush’s closest friends. George Salem was involved in Bush campaign fundraising. Barnett “Sandy” Cress was appointed by Bush to head a White House-sponsored education initiative. [13]
According to French intelligence analyst Jean-Charles Brisard, President Bush Jr. blocked US Secret Service investigations into US-based al-Qaeda sleeper cells while he continued to negotiate secretly with Taliban officials. The last meeting was in August 2001 just five weeks before 911. Bush wanted the Taliban to deliver bin Laden in return for US and Saudi economic aid and support for the Taliban. [14]
Deputy FBI Director John O’Neill resigned his post in July 2001 to protest the Bush Administration’s cozying up to the Taliban. Brisard says O’Neill told him, “the main obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism were US corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia.” O’Neill took a job as Chief of Security at the World Trade Center in New York and was killed during the 911 attacks. [15]
According to the French newspaper Le Figaro, the CIA met with bin Laden several times during the months prior to 911. According to the Washington Post, the CIA met with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar’s envoy Rahmattullah Hashami in July 2001. Hashami offered to hold on to bin Laden until the CIA could capture him but, according to the Village Voice, the Bush Administration turned down the offer. That same month the CIA met with Jamiaat-i-Islami leader Qazi Hussein Ahmed.
The US government gave $43 million in aid to the Taliban in 2000 and $132 million in 2001. The Taliban were told by the Bush White House to hire a Washington PR firm to scrub up their image. The firm was headed by Laila Helms- niece of former CIA Director and BCCI crony Richard Helms. Big Oil representatives were present at the Bush-Taliban negotiations, where one official told the Taliban at that last August meeting, “You either accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”[16]
Even after the 911 terror attacks, President Bush omitted the names of two House of Saud-funded groups- International Islamic Relief Organization and Muslim World League- who financed al Qaeda from a list of groups whose assets would be frozen by the US Treasury. [17]
As French intelligence analyst Brisard noted, “The American addiction to Saudi oil and arms money threatens to undermine national security in the West”.
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 19, 2012 6:06:41 GMT -7
Afghan History Suppressed: Part III: The Central Asian Grand ChessboardApril 17, 2011 — Dean Henderson (Part three of a three-part series excerpted from Chapter 8: Project Frankenstein: Afhanistan: Big Oil & Their Bankers…) In 1997 Trilateral Commission founder Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of the Afghan mujahadeen, wrote a book titled, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geopolitical Imperatives. In the book Brzezinski – who sat on the board at BP Amoco – argues that the key to global power is control of Eurasia and that the “key to controlling Eurasia is controlling the Central Asian Republics”. Brzezinski’s plan called for ruling Central Asia via control of Uzbekistan – which borders Afghanistan to the north. In 1997 Enron attempted to negotiate a $2 billion deal with the Uzbek state-owned Neftegas with help from the Clinton White House. [1] When that effort and other privatization attempts were rebuffed in 1998, CIA-backed Islamist attacks on Uzbekistan’s government were ratcheted up. In 1999 a series of explosions rocked the Uzbek capital of Tashkent. Islamic al-Qaeda-trained militants were to blame. The rebels – who called themselves the Islamic Party of Turkistan – attempted to assassinate socialist President Islam Karimov. They attacked the fertile Fergana Valley in an attempt to disrupt harvests and the Uzbek food supply. Karimov was also attacked by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Hizb-ut-Tahrir. After the “carpet of bombs” began raining down on neighboring Afghanistan in October 2001, Uzbekistan- along with neighbors Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan– were coerced into accepting new US military bases. In 2005 Kyrgyzstan’s nationalist President Askar Akayev was deposed by Islamists in the Tulip Revolution. Within days Donald Rumsfeld was meeting with the new leaders. [2] Karimov had seen enough and ordered US troops out of Uzbekistan. The timing of both Brzezinski’s book and the Bush Jr. Administration “carpet of bombs” threat to the Taliban are instructive since both occurred prior to the 911 attacks, which provided the perfect pretext for the massive Central Asian intervention that Brzezinski, Bush and their City of London bosses were advocating. Dr. Johannes Koeppl – former German Defense Ministry official and adviser to NATO Secretary General Manfred Werner – explained of this rash of “coincidences” in November 2001, “The interests behind the Bush Administration, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberger Group, have prepared for and are now implementing open world dictatorship (which will be established) within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens.” Drugistan Central Asia produces 75% of the world’s opium. According to the UN, the surge in opium production in the region coincided with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which was “encouraged” by the Reagan Administration and the CIA. It also coincided with the Four Horsemen’s (Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco & Royal Dutch/Shell) Caspian Sea oil boom. While the US issued humiliating certifications to judge countries on their ability to stop drug traffic, Big Oil produced 90% of the chemicals needed to process cocaine and heroin, which CIA surrogates process and distribute. CIA chemists were the first to produce heroin. As Ecuadorian Presidential Candidate Manuel Salgado put it, “This world order which professes the cult of opulence and the growing economic power of illegal drugs, doesn’t allow for any frontal attack aimed at destroying narco-trafficking because that business, which moves $400 billion annually, is far too important for the leading nations of world power to eliminate. The US…punishes those countries which don’t do enough to fight against drugs, whereas their CIA boys have built paradises of corruption throughout the world with the drug profits.”[3] The Afghan “paradise of corruption” yielded 4,600 metric tons of opium in 1998. In 1999 the Taliban announced a crack down on opium production in Afghanistan. The move angered the CIA, the Afghan aristocracy and their Turkish Gray Wolves allies, whose smuggling routes mirror those of the Four Horsemen’s Caspian Seaoil pipeline recently opened for business through Turkey. When the Taliban cracked down on opium production, poppy fields bloomed to the north where CIA/ISI-sponsored Islamists were fighting in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya, Dagestan, Armeniaand Azerbaijan. Asia Times writer Pepe Escobar termed the entire region “Drugistan”. [4] Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid says the Saudis- fulfilling their usual “paymaster” role – funded the northward shift in poppy production. [5] It was part of a larger operation run by Western intelligence agencies to encircle Russia, seize oilfields and destabilize the entire Central Asia region using Islamic fundamentalists and heroin proceeds. In 1991 Air America/Iran-Contra super spook Richard Secord showed up in Baku, Azerbaijan under the cover of MEGA Oil. [6] Secord did military training, sold Israeli arms, passed “brown bags filled with cash” and shipped in over 2,000 Islamist fighters from Afghanistan with help from CIA-favorite Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Afghan heroin began flooding into Baku. Russian economist Alexandre Datskevitch said of 184 heroin labs that police discovered in Moscow in 1991, “Every one of them was run by Azeris, who use the proceeds to buy arms for Azerbaijan’s war against Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh”. [7] A Turkish intelligence source claims that Exxon and Mobil (now Exxon Mobil) were behind the 1993 coup against elected Armenian President Abulfaz Elchibey. Secord’s Islamists helped. Osama bin Laden set up an NGO in Baku as a base for attacking the Russians in Chechnya and Dagestan. A more pliant President Heidar Aliyev was installed in Armenia. In 1996, at the behest of Amoco’s (now BP) president, he was invited to the White House to meet President Clinton- whose National Security Advisor Sandy Berger held $90,000 worth of Amoco stock. [8] Not content with the Polish Solidarist-led grab of Eastern Europe and the partitioning of oil-rich Soviet Central Asian republics, the CFR/Bilderberger crowd now used mujahadeen surrogates in Chechnya to further squeeze Russia. In 1994 35,000 Chechen fighters were trained at Amir Muawia camp in Afghanistan’s Khost Province. Osama bin Laden built the camp for the CIA. Now-deceased Chechen commander Shamil Basayev graduated from Amir Muawia and was sent to advanced guerrilla tactics camp at Markazi-i-Dawar,Pakistan. There he met with Pakistani ISI officials. [9] ISI has historically excelled at carrying out the CIA’s dirty laundry. The Chechen Islamists took over a big chunk of the Golden Crescent heroin trade, working with Chechen crime families affiliated with the Russian Alfa Group that did business with Halliburton. They also had ties to the Albanian heroin labs being run by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). A Russian FSB report stated that the Chechens began buying real estate in Kosovo in 1997, just prior to the US-led partition of Kosovo fromYugoslavia. Saudi-born Chechen commander Emir al-Khattab set up guerrilla camps to train KLA Albanian rebels. The camps were funded by the heroin trade, prostitution rings and counterfeiting. Recruits were invited by Basayev and funded by the House of Saud’s Muslim Brotherhood Islamic Relief Organization. [10] In February 2002 sent 200 military advisers and attack helicopters to Georgia to “root our terrorism”. On September 20, 2002, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov stated that the al Qaeda-trained Chechen rebels targeting his country were being given safe-haven by the government of Georgia. The Four Horsemen’s strategic Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline was set to open through the Georgian capital Tblisi. The US deployment was a smokescreen for pipeline protection. In October 2003 Georgian President Eduard Schevardnadze was forced to step down despite the fact that he had been elected to serve until 2005. IMF darling Mikheil Saakashvili was installed to complete the banker coup which was dubbed the Rose Revolution. According to The Guardian, Rose Revolution funders included the U.S. State Department, USAID, National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, International Republican Institute, Bilderberg Group, the NGO Freedom House, George Soros’s Open Society Institute and National Endowment for Democracy (NED). When Gulbuddin Hekmatyar ceded Kabul to the Taliban in 1995, Taliban training camps in Pakistanand Afghanistanwere taken over by Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) who, with help from Saudi Wahhabist clerics, recruited and trained Islamic fundamentalist volunteers to fight wars of destabilization throughout the Balkans and Central Asia. Financed by Golden Crescent heroin, these terrorists shipped out to fight with Chechen rebels, the Kosovo Liberation Army, the Bosnian Muslim Army, the National Liberation Army (Albanian separatists fighting the government of Macedonia) and Chinese East Turkistan Uighur rebels fighting against Beijing. Out of these same camps came Lakshar e-Taiba and Jamiash-i-Mohammed, who in December 2001 attacked India’s Parliament in New Delhi, killing fourteen legislators and provoking the Indians into a massive military deployment along the Pakistani border. In the early 1990’s the CIA had helped Afghan mujahadeen veterans get passports to immigrate to the US. The Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, where many Afghans landed, turned into a CIA recruiting base for wars inYugoslavia and Central Asia. Among those who frequented the center were El Sayyid Nosair, who assassinated far-right Israeli Rabbi Meir Kahane; and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a fundamentalist Egyptian cleric linked to the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. The CIA brought the sheik to Brooklyn as a recruiting tool. [11] His son was killed in December 2001 – a key al Qaeda leader fighting the US in Afghanistan. The CIA arranged for Egyptian al Qaeda leaders to flea to Albania in 1997, where they helped train and fight with the Kosovo Liberation Army. Bin Laden’s #2 man Ayman al-Zawahiri heads Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Al-Zawahiri’s sidekick Ali Mohammed came to the US in 1984. He trained terrorists in Brooklyn and Jersey City on weekends. His regular job was to instruct US Special Forces at FortBragg. In 1998 he helped bomb US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. [12] According to British MP Michael Meacher, in an article for The Guardian, M16 recruited up to 200 British Muslims to fight in Afghanistan andYugoslavia. Meacher says a Dehli-based foundation describes Omar Saeed Sheikh, the man who beheaded US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002, as a British agent. He says it was Sheikh who – at the behest of ISI General Mahmood Ahmed – wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta just prior to 911, a fact confirmed by Dennis Lomel, director of FBI’s financial crimes unit. [13] Restoring Petromonarchy According to Mossad intelligence reports, as of July 1, 2001, 120,000 metric tons of opium was warehoused in Afghanistan awaiting shipment. Two months later the US was bombing Afghanistan. Opium shipments resumed. The US paid several Afghan warlords $200,000 each and gave them satellite phones to lead a surrogate army Northern Alliance-led ground assault on the Taliban. Over $7 million was spent buying off these opium-trafficking warlords, including Uzbek butcher Rashid Dostum. [14] Amnesty International and UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson called for an investigation of an incident at Mazar-i-Sharif where Dostum oversaw the surrender of hundreds of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, who were then massacred in a bombing raid by US aircraft during in an alleged prison uprising. The “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh was among the few survivors. The prisoners had come from Konduz where, according to investigative journalist Seymour Hirsch of The New Yorker, the White House had ordered US Special Forces to create an evacuation corridor whereby Pakistani military aircraft were allowed to fly no less than 2,500 al Qaeda and Taliban fighters – along with their ISI advisers and at least two Pakistani generals – to safety in Pakistan. While the Bush Administration used an alleged al Qaeda/Saddam Hussein alliance as a pretext to turn its guns towards oil-rich Iraq, al Qaeda and Taliban leadership remained unharmed in Pakistan. In Afghanistan US envoy and former Unocal executive Zalmay Khalilzad was busy paving the way for the construction of the Unocal-led Centgas pipeline. Later Khalilzad became US Ambassador to Iraq. US Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlain huddled with Pakistan Oil Minister Usman Aminuddin and the Saudi Ambassador to Pakistan to plan the pipeline, which would run next to Khandahar – home of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. Omar favored the Centgas consortium and remains mysteriously at large. Northern Alliance leader Burhanuddin Rabbani- who had been Afghan Prime Minster until he was deposed by Hekmatyar and the Taliban in 1996 – was quietly dealt out of the new Kabul government, ostensibly for favoring the Argentine-led Bridas pipeline consortium. [15] The World Bank and IMF set up shop in Kabul after a twenty-five year hiatus. Halliburton’s Brown & Root subsidiary and other post-war “reconstruction specialists” lined up for contracts. On December 27, 2002 Turkmenistan, Pakistanand Afghanistan signed a deal paving the way for the Centgas pipeline. The US-handpicked Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai emerged after the assassination of contender Abdul Haq, who walked into a trap inside Afghanistan while supposedly under CIA protection. Haq’s handler was Robert “Bud” McFarlane, Reagan’s National Security Advisor who now runs a K Street oil consulting firm. Haq had no ties to the oil industry and was considered by the CIA to be too cozy with Iran and Russia. Rabbani’s Northern Alliance military commander Sheik Massoud was mysteriously assassinated just two days before 911. According to Iranian, Afghan and Turkish government sources, Hamid Karzai was a top adviser to Unocal during their negotiations with the Taliban. He was also a CIA contact during the Company’s decade-long Afghan War. Bill Casey made sure Karzai’s family was moved safely to the US after anarchy took over inKabul. [16] Karzai is close to King Zaher Shah, who returned to Afghanistan from exile to convene the royalist loya jerga in July 2002. When all other presidential candidates mysteriously dropped out of the race just 24 hours before the election, Karzai got the nod as head of state. His people then shut down debate at the conference, stonewalled on the formation of parliament and refused to appoint a cabinet. Karzai secret police roamed the grounds of the conference looking for dissenters to jail. According to tribal representative Hassan Kakar, delegates disagreeing with Karzai were not even allowed to speak. [17] The Karzai government represents a return of the Afghan monarchy, compliant as ever to international banker interests in the region. In 2005 Chevron Texaco bought Unocal, cementing Four Horsemen control over the trans-Afghan Centgas pipeline. [1] “Central AsiaUnveiled”. Mike Edwards. National Geographic. 2-02 [2] Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan. Michael Griffin. Pluto Press.London. 2001. p.124 [3] “The Geostrategy of Plan Columbia”. Manuel Salgado Tamayo. Covert Action Quarterly. Winter 2001. p.37 [4] “The Roving Eye: Pipelineistan, Part I: The Rules of the Game”. Pepe Escobar. Asia Times Online.1-25-02 [5] Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. Ahmed Rashid.YaleUniversity Publishing.New Haven,CT. 2001. p.145 [6] Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter’s Adventures in a Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post- SovietRepublic. Thomas Goltz. M.E. Sharpe.Armonk,NY. 1999. p.272 [7] “al-Qaeda, US Oil Companies and Central Asia”. Peter Dale Scott. Nexus. May-June, 2006. p.11-15 [8] See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism. Robert Baer. Crown.New York. 2002. p.243-244 [9] “Who is Osama bin Laden?” Michel Chossudovsky. www.copvcia.com12-17-01[10] Ibid [11] “The Road to September 11”. Evan Thomas. Newsweek. 10-1-01. p.41 [12] “Bin Laden’s Invisible Network”. Evan Thomas. Newsweek. 10-29-01. p.42 [13] The Asian News. 9-30-05. www.theasiannews.co.uk[14] “US Paid Off Warlords”. Andrew Bushnell. Washington Times.2-7-02 [15] Michel Chossudovsky. www.globalresearch.ca1-23-02[16] Ibid [17] “Evening Edition”. National Public Radio.6-17-02
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 21, 2012 6:33:25 GMT -7
The Week the World Stood Still
Posted: 10/15/2012 7:10 pm
The Cuban Missile Crisis and Ownership of the World
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
The world stood still 50 years ago during the last week of October, from the moment when it learned that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba until the crisis was officially ended -- though unknown to the public, only officially.
The image of the world standing still is the turn of phrase of Sheldon Stern, former historian at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, who published the authoritative version of the tapes of the ExComm meetings where Kennedy and a close circle of advisers debated how to respond to the crisis. Those meetings were secretly recorded by the president, which might bear on the fact that his stand throughout the recorded sessions is relatively temperate compared to other participants, who were unaware that they were speaking to history.
Stern has just published an accessible and accurate review of this critically important documentary record, finally declassified in the late 1990s. I will keep to that here. “Never before or since,” he concludes, “has the survival of human civilization been at stake in a few short weeks of dangerous deliberations,” culminating in “the week the world stood still.”
There was good reason for the global concern. A nuclear war was all too imminent, a war that might “destroy the Northern Hemisphere,” President Dwight Eisenhower had warned. Kennedy’s own judgment was that the probability of war might have been as high as 50%. Estimates became higher as the confrontation reached its peak and the “secret doomsday plan to ensure the survival of the government was put into effect” in Washington, as described by journalist Michael Dobbs in his well-researched bestseller on the crisis (though he doesn’t explain why there would be much point in doing so, given the likely nature of nuclear war).
Dobbs quotes Dino Brugioni, “a key member of the CIA team monitoring the Soviet missile buildup,” who saw no way out except “war and complete destruction” as the clock moved to “one minute to midnight,” the title of his book. Kennedy’s close associate, historian Arthur Schlesinger, described the events as “the most dangerous moment in human history.” Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wondered aloud whether he “would live to see another Saturday night,” and later recognized that “we lucked out” -- barely.
“The Most Dangerous Moment”
A closer look at what took place adds grim overtones to these judgments, with reverberations to the present moment.
There are several candidates for “the most dangerous moment.” One is October 27th, when U.S. destroyers enforcing a quarantine around Cuba were dropping depth charges on Soviet submarines. According to Soviet accounts, reported by the National Security Archive, submarine commanders were “rattled enough to talk about firing nuclear torpedoes, whose 15 kiloton explosive yields approximated the bomb that devastated Hiroshima in August 1945.”
In one case, a reported decision to assemble a nuclear torpedo for battle readiness was aborted at the last minute by Second Captain Vasili Arkhipov, who may have saved the world from nuclear disaster. There is little doubt what the U.S. reaction would have been had the torpedo been fired, or how the Russians would have responded as their country was going up in smoke.
Kennedy had already declared the highest nuclear alert short of launch (DEFCON 2), which authorized “NATO aircraft with Turkish pilots ... [or others] ... to take off, fly to Moscow, and drop a bomb,” according to the well-informed Harvard University strategic analyst Graham Allison, writing in the major establishment journal Foreign Affairs.
Another candidate is October 26th. That day has been selected as “the most dangerous moment” by B-52 pilot Major Don Clawson, who piloted one of those NATO aircraft and provides a hair-raising description of details of the Chrome Dome (CD) missions during the crisis -- “B-52s on airborne alert” with nuclear weapons “on board and ready to use.”
October 26th was the day when “the nation was closest to nuclear war,” he writes in his “irreverent anecdotes of an Air Force pilot,” Is That Something the Crew Should Know? On that day, Clawson himself was in a good position to set off a likely terminal cataclysm. He concludes, “We were damned lucky we didn’t blow up the world -- and no thanks to the political or military leadership of this country.”
The errors, confusions, near-accidents, and miscomprehension of the leadership that Clawson reports are startling enough, but nothing like the operative command-and-control rules -- or lack of them. As Clawson recounts his experiences during the 15 24-hour CD missions he flew, the maximum possible, the official commanders “did not possess the capability to prevent a rogue-crew or crew-member from arming and releasing their thermonuclear weapons,” or even from broadcasting a mission that would have sent off “the entire Airborne Alert force without possibility of recall.” Once the crew was airborne carrying thermonuclear weapons, he writes, “it would have been possible to arm and drop them all with no further input from the ground. There was no inhibitor on any of the systems.”
About one-third of the total force was in the air, according to General David Burchinal, director of plans on the Air Staff at Air Force Headquarters. The Strategic Air Command (SAC), technically in charge, appears to have had little control. And according to Clawson’s account, the civilian National Command Authority was kept in the dark by SAC, which means that the ExComm “deciders” pondering the fate of the world knew even less. General Burchinal’s oral history is no less hair-raising, and reveals even greater contempt for the civilian command. According to him, Russian capitulation was never in doubt. The CD operations were designed to make it crystal clear to the Russians that they were hardly even competing in the military confrontation, and could quickly have been destroyed.
From the ExComm records, Stern concludes that, on October 26th, President Kennedy was “leaning towards military action to eliminate the missiles” in Cuba, to be followed by invasion, according to Pentagon plans. It was evident then that the act might have led to terminal war, a conclusion fortified by much later revelations that tactical nuclear weapons had been deployed and that Russian forces were far greater than U.S. intelligence had reported.
As the ExComm meetings were drawing to a close at 6 p.m. on the 26th, a letter arrived from Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev, sent directly to President Kennedy. His “message seemed clear,” Stern writes: “the missiles would be removed if the U.S. promised not to invade Cuba.”
The next day, at 10 am, the president again turned on the secret tape. He read aloud a wire service report that had just been handed to him: “Premier Khrushchev told President Kennedy in a message today he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey” -- Jupiter missiles with nuclear warheads. The report was soon authenticated.
Though received by the committee as an unexpected bolt from the blue, it had actually been anticipated: “we’ve known this might be coming for a week,” Kennedy informed them. To refuse public acquiescence would be difficult, he realized. These were obsolete missiles, already slated for withdrawal, soon to be replaced by far more lethal and effectively invulnerable Polaris submarines. Kennedy recognized that he would be in an “insupportable position if this becomes [Khrushchev’s] proposal,” both because the Turkish missiles were useless and were being withdrawn anyway, and because “it’s gonna -- to any man at the United Nations or any other rational man, it will look like a very fair trade.”
Keeping U.S. Power Unrestrained
The planners therefore faced a serious dilemma. They had in hand two somewhat different proposals from Khrushchev to end the threat of catastrophic war, and each would seem to any “rational man” to be a fair trade. How then to react?
One possibility would have been to breathe a sigh of relief that civilization could survive and to eagerly accept both offers; to announce that the U.S. would adhere to international law and remove any threat to invade Cuba; and to carry forward the withdrawal of the obsolete missiles in Turkey, proceeding as planned to upgrade the nuclear threat against the Soviet Union to a far greater one -- only part, of course, of the global encirclement of Russia. But that was unthinkable.
The basic reason why no such thought could be contemplated was spelled out by National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, former Harvard dean and reputedly the brightest star in the Camelot firmament. The world, he insisted, must come to understand that “[t]he current threat to peace is not in Turkey, it is in Cuba,” where missiles were directed against the U.S. A vastly more powerful U.S. missile force trained on the much weaker and more vulnerable Soviet enemy could not possibly be regarded as a threat to peace, because we are Good, as a great many people in the Western hemisphere and beyond could testify -- among numerous others, the victims of the ongoing terrorist war that the U.S. was then waging against Cuba, or those swept up in the “campaign of hatred” in the Arab world that so puzzled Eisenhower, though not the National Security Council, which explained it clearly.
Of course, the idea that the U.S. should be restrained by international law was too ridiculous to merit consideration. As explained recently by the respected left-liberal commentator Matthew Yglesias, “one of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers” -- meaning the U.S. -- so that it is “amazingly naïve,” indeed quite “silly,” to suggest that it should obey international law or other conditions that we impose on the powerless. This was a frank and welcome exposition of operative assumptions, reflexively taken for granted by the ExComm assemblage.
In subsequent colloquy, the president stressed that we would be “in a bad position” if we chose to set off an international conflagration by rejecting proposals that would seem quite reasonable to survivors (if any cared). This “pragmatic” stance was about as far as moral considerations could reach.
In a review of recently released documents on Kennedy-era terror, Harvard University Latin Americanist Jorge Domínguez observes, “Only once in these nearly thousand pages of documentation did a U.S. official raise something that resembled a faint moral objection to U.S.-government sponsored terrorism”: a member of the National Security Council staff suggested that raids that are “haphazard and kill innocents... might mean a bad press in some friendly countries.”
The same attitudes prevailed throughout the internal discussions during the missile crisis, as when Robert Kennedy warned that a full-scale invasion of Cuba would “kill an awful lot of people, and we’re going to take an awful lot of heat on it.” And they prevail to the present, with only the rarest of exceptions, as easily documented.
We might have been “in even a worse position” if the world had known more about what the U.S. was doing at the time. Only recently was it learned that, six months earlier, the U.S. had secretly deployed missiles in Okinawa virtually identical to those the Russians would send to Cuba. These were surely aimed at China at a moment of elevated regional tensions. To this day, Okinawa remains a major offensive U.S. military base over the bitter objections of its inhabitants who, right now, are less than enthusiastic about the dispatch of accident-prone V-22 Osprey helicopters to the Futenma military base, located at the heart of a heavily populated urban center.
An Indecent Disrespect for the Opinions of Humankind
The deliberations that followed are revealing, but I will put them aside here. They did reach a conclusion. The U.S. pledged to withdraw the obsolete missiles from Turkey, but would not do so publicly or put the offer in writing: it was important that Khrushchev be seen to capitulate. An interesting reason was offered, and is accepted as reasonable by scholarship and commentary. As Dobbs puts it, “If it appeared that the United States was dismantling the missile bases unilaterally, under pressure from the Soviet Union, the [NATO] alliance might crack” -- or to rephrase a little more accurately, if the U.S. replaced useless missiles with a far more lethal threat, as already planned, in a trade with Russia that any “rational man” would regard as very fair, then the NATO alliance might crack.
To be sure, when Russia withdrew Cuba’s only deterrent against an ongoing U.S. attack -- with a severe threat to proceed to direct invasion still in the air -- and quietly departed from the scene, the Cubans would be infuriated (as, in fact, they understandably were). But that is an unfair comparison for the standard reasons: we are human beings who matter, while they are merely “unpeople,” to adapt George Orwell’s useful phrase.
Kennedy also made an informal pledge not to invade Cuba, but with conditions: not just the withdrawal of the missiles, but also termination, or at least “a great lessening,” of any Russian military presence. (Unlike Turkey, on Russia’s borders, where nothing of the kind could be contemplated.) When Cuba is no longer an “armed camp,” then “we probably wouldn’t invade,” in the president’s words. He added that, if it hoped to be free from the threat of U.S. invasion, Cuba must end its “political subversion” (Stern’s phrase) in Latin America. "Political subversion” had been a constant theme for years, invoked for example when Eisenhower overthrew the parliamentary government of Guatemala and plunged that tortured country into an abyss from which it has yet to emerge. And these themes remained alive and well right through Ronald Reagan’s vicious terror wars in Central America in the 1980s. Cuba’s “political subversion” consisted of support for those resisting the murderous assaults of the U.S. and its client regimes, and sometimes even perhaps -- horror of horrors -- providing arms to the victims.
The usage is standard. Thus, in 1955, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had outlined “three basic forms of aggression.” The first was armed attack across a border, that is, aggression as defined in international law. The second was “overt armed attack from within the area of each of the sovereign states,” as when guerrilla forces undertake armed resistance against a regime backed or imposed by Washington, though not of course when “freedom fighters” resist an official enemy. The third: “Aggression other than armed, i.e., political warfare, or subversion.” The primary example at the time was South Vietnam, where the United States was defending a free people from “internal aggression,” as Kennedy’s U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson explained -- from “an assault from within” in the president’s words.
Though these assumptions are so deeply embedded in prevailing doctrine as to be virtually invisible, they are occasionally articulated in the internal record. In the case of Cuba, the State Department Policy Planning Council explained that “the primary danger we face in Castro is… in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries… The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the US, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half,” since the Monroe Doctrine announced Washington’s intention, then unrealizable, to dominate the Western hemisphere.
Not the Russians of that moment then, but rather the right to dominate, a leading principle of foreign policy found almost everywhere, though typically concealed in defensive terms: during the Cold War years, routinely by invoking the “Russian threat,” even when Russians were nowhere in sight. An example of great contemporary import is revealed in Iran scholar Ervand Abrahamian’s important upcoming book of the U.S.-U.K. coup that overthrew the parliamentary regime of Iran in 1953. With scrupulous examination of internal records, he shows convincingly that standard accounts cannot be sustained. The primary causes were not Cold War concerns, nor Iranian irrationality that undermined Washington's “benign intentions,” nor even access to oil or profits, but rather the way the U.S. demand for “overall controls” -- with its broader implications for global dominance -- was threatened by independent nationalism.
That is what we discover over and over by investigating particular cases, including Cuba (not surprisingly) though the fanaticism in that particular case might merit examination. U.S. policy towards Cuba is harshly condemned throughout Latin America and indeed most of the world, but “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” is understood to be meaningless rhetoric intoned mindlessly on July 4th. Ever since polls have been taken on the matter, a considerable majority of the U.S. population has favored normalization of relations with Cuba, but that too is insignificant.
Dismissal of public opinion is of course quite normal. What is interesting in this case is dismissal of powerful sectors of U.S. economic power, which also favor normalization, and are usually highly influential in setting policy: energy, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, and others. That suggests that, in addition to the cultural factors revealed in the hysteria of the Camelot intellectuals, there is a powerful state interest involved in punishing Cubans.
Saving the World from the Threat of Nuclear Destruction
The missile crisis officially ended on October 28th. The outcome was not obscure. That evening, in a special CBS News broadcast, Charles Collingwood reported that the world had come out “from under the most terrible threat of nuclear holocaust since World War II” with a “humiliating defeat for Soviet policy.” Dobbs comments that the Russians tried to pretend that the outcome was “yet another triumph for Moscow’s peace-loving foreign policy over warmongering imperialists,” and that “[t]he supremely wise, always reasonable Soviet leadership had saved the world from the threat of nuclear destruction.”
Extricating the basic facts from the fashionable ridicule, Khrushchev’s agreement to capitulate had indeed “saved the world from the threat of nuclear destruction.”
The crisis, however, was not over. On November 8th, the Pentagon announced that all known Soviet missile bases had been dismantled. On the same day, Stern reports, “a sabotage team carried out an attack on a Cuban factory,” though Kennedy’s terror campaign, Operation Mongoose, had been formally curtailed at the peak of the crisis. The November 8th terror attack lends support to Bundy’s observation that the threat to peace was Cuba, not Turkey, where the Russians were not continuing a lethal assault -- though that was certainly not what Bundy had in mind or could have understood.
More details are added by the highly respected scholar Raymond Garthoff, who also had rich experience within the government, in his careful 1987 account of the missile crisis. On November 8th, he writes, “a Cuban covert action sabotage team dispatched from the United States successfully blew up a Cuban industrial facility,” killing 400 workers according to a Cuban government letter to the U.N. Secretary General.
Garthoff comments: “The Soviets could only see [the attack] as an effort to backpedal on what was, for them, the key question remaining: American assurances not to attack Cuba,” particularly since the terrorist attack was launched from the U.S. These and other “third party actions” reveal again, he concludes, “that the risk and danger to both sides could have been extreme, and catastrophe not excluded.” Garthoff also reviews the murderous and destructive operations of Kennedy’s terrorist campaign, which we would certainly regard as more than ample justification for war, if the U.S. or its allies or clients were victims, not perpetrators.
From the same source we learn further that, on August 23, 1962, the president had issued National Security Memorandum No. 181, “a directive to engineer an internal revolt that would be followed by U.S. military intervention,” involving “significant U.S. military plans, maneuvers, and movement of forces and equipment” that were surely known to Cuba and Russia. Also in August, terrorist attacks were intensified, including speedboat strafing attacks on a Cuban seaside hotel “where Soviet military technicians were known to congregate, killing a score of Russians and Cubans”; attacks on British and Cuban cargo ships; the contamination of sugar shipments; and other atrocities and sabotage, mostly carried out by Cuban exile organizations permitted to operate freely in Florida. Shortly after came “the most dangerous moment in human history,” not exactly out of the blue.
Kennedy officially renewed the terrorist operations after the crisis ebbed. Ten days before his assassination he approved a CIA plan for “destruction operations” by U.S. proxy forces “against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships.” A plot to assassinate Castro was apparently initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination. The terrorist campaign was called off in 1965, but reports Garthoff, “one of Nixon’s first acts in office in 1969 was to direct the CIA to intensify covert operations against Cuba.”
We can, at last, hear the voices of the victims in Canadian historian Keith Bolender’s Voices From the Other Side, the first oral history of the terror campaign -- one of many books unlikely to receive more than casual notice, if that, in the West because the contents are too revealing.
In the current issue of Political Science Quarterly, the professional journal of the association of American political scientists, Montague Kern observes that the Cuban missile crisis is one of those “full-bore crises… in which an ideological enemy (the Soviet Union) is universally perceived to have gone on the attack, leading to a rally-’round-the-flag effect that greatly expands support for a president, increasing his policy options.”
Kern is right that it is “universally perceived” that way, apart from those who have escaped sufficiently from the ideological shackles to pay some attention to the facts. Kern is, in fact, one of them. Another is Sheldon Stern, who recognizes what has long been known to such deviants. As he writes, we now know that “Khrushchev’s original explanation for shipping missiles to Cuba had been fundamentally true: the Soviet leader had never intended these weapons as a threat to the security of the United States, but rather considered their deployment a defensive move to protect his Cuban allies from American attacks and as a desperate effort to give the U.S.S.R. the appearance of equality in the nuclear balance of power.” Dobbs, too, recognizes that “Castro and his Soviet patrons had real reasons to fear American attempts at regime change, including, as a last resort, a U.S. invasion of Cuba... [Khrushchev] was also sincere in his desire to defend the Cuban revolution from the mighty neighbor to the north.”
“Terrors of the Earth”
The American attacks are often dismissed in U.S. commentary as silly pranks, CIA shenanigans that got out of hand. That is far from the truth. The best and the brightest had reacted to the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion with near hysteria, including the president, who solemnly informed the country: “The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong... can possibly survive." And they could only survive, he evidently believed, by massive terror -- though that addendum was kept secret, and is still not known to loyalists who perceive the ideological enemy as having “gone on the attack” (the near universal perception, as Kern observes). After the Bay of Pigs defeat, historian Piero Gleijeses writes, JFK launched a crushing embargo to punish the Cubans for defeating a U.S.-run invasion, and “asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to lead the top-level interagency group that oversaw Operation Mongoose, a program of paramilitary operations, economic warfare, and sabotage he launched in late 1961 to visit the 'terrors of the earth' on Fidel Castro and, more prosaically, to topple him.”
The phrase “terrors of the earth” is Arthur Schlesinger’s, in his quasi-official biography of Robert Kennedy, who was assigned responsibility for conducting the terrorist war, and informed the CIA that the Cuban problem carries “[t]he top priority in the United States Government -- all else is secondary -- no time, no effort, or manpower is to be spared” in the effort to overthrow the Castro regime. The Mongoose operations were run by Edward Lansdale, who had ample experience in “counterinsurgency” -- a standard term for terrorism that we direct. He provided a timetable leading to “open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime” in October 1962. The “final definition” of the program recognized that “final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention,” after terrorism and subversion had laid the basis. The implication is that U.S. military intervention would take place in October 1962 -- when the missile crisis erupted. The events just reviewed help explain why Cuba and Russia had good reason to take such threats seriously.
Years later, Robert McNamara recognized that Cuba was justified in fearing an attack. “If I were in Cuban or Soviet shoes, I would have thought so, too,” he observed at a major conference on the missile crisis on the 40th anniversary.
As for Russia’s “desperate effort to give the U.S.S.R. the appearance of equality,” to which Stern refers, recall that Kennedy’s very narrow victory in the 1960 election relied heavily on a fabricated “missile gap” concocted to terrify the country and to condemn the Eisenhower administration as soft on national security. There was indeed a “missile gap,” but strongly in favor of the U.S.
The first “public, unequivocal administration statement” on the true facts, according to strategic analyst Desmond Ball in his authoritative study of the Kennedy missile program, was in October 1961, when Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric informed the Business Council that “the U.S. would have a larger nuclear delivery system left after a surprise attack than the nuclear force which the Soviet Union could employ in its first strike.” The Russians of course were well aware of their relative weakness and vulnerability. They were also aware of Kennedy’s reaction when Khrushchev offered to sharply reduce offensive military capacity and proceeded to do so unilaterally. The president failed to respond, undertaking instead a huge armaments program.
Owning the World, Then and Now
The two most crucial questions about the missile crisis are: How did it begin, and how did it end? It began with Kennedy’s terrorist attack against Cuba, with a threat of invasion in October 1962. It ended with the president’s rejection of Russian offers that would seem fair to a rational person, but were unthinkable because they would have undermined the fundamental principle that the U.S. has the unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles anywhere, aimed at China or Russia or anyone else, and right on their borders; and the accompanying principle that Cuba had no right to have missiles for defense against what appeared to be an imminent U.S. invasion. To establish these principles firmly it was entirely proper to face a high risk of war of unimaginable destruction, and to reject simple and admittedly fair ways to end the threat.
Garthoff observes that “in the United States, there was almost universal approbation for President Kennedy’s handling of the crisis.” Dobbs writes, “The relentlessly upbeat tone was established by the court historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who wrote that Kennedy had ‘dazzled the world’ through a ‘combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated.’” Rather more soberly, Stern partially agrees, noting that Kennedy repeatedly rejected the militant advice of his advisers and associates who called for military force and the dismissal of peaceful options. The events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy’s finest hour. Graham Allison joins many others in presenting them as “a guide for how to defuse conflicts, manage great-power relationships, and make sound decisions about foreign policy in general.”
In a very narrow sense, that judgment seems reasonable. The ExComm tapes reveal that the president stood apart from others, sometimes almost all others, in rejecting premature violence. There is, however, a further question: How should JFK’s relative moderation in the management of the crisis be evaluated against the background of the broader considerations just reviewed? But that question does not arise in a disciplined intellectual and moral culture, which accepts without question the basic principle that the U.S. effectively owns the world by right, and is by definition a force for good despite occasional errors and misunderstandings, one in which it is plainly entirely proper for the U.S. to deploy massive offensive force all over the world while it is an outrage for others (allies and clients apart) to make even the slightest gesture in that direction or even to think of deterring the threatened use of violence by the benign global hegemon.
That doctrine is the primary official charge against Iran today: it might pose a deterrent to U.S. and Israeli force. It was a consideration during the missile crisis as well. In internal discussion, the Kennedy brothers expressed their fears that Cuban missiles might deter a U.S. invasion of Venezuela, then under consideration. So “the Bay of Pigs was really right,” JFK concluded.
These principles still contribute to the constant risk of nuclear war. There has been no shortage of severe dangers since the missile crisis. Ten years later, during the 1973 Israel-Arab war, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert (DEFCON 3) to warn the Russians to keep their hands off while he was secretly authorizing Israel to violate the cease-fire imposed by the U.S. and Russia. When Reagan came into office a few years later, the U.S. launched operations probing Russian defenses and simulating air and naval attacks, while placing Pershing missiles in Germany with a five-minute flight time to Russian targets, providing what the CIA called a “super-sudden first strike” capability. Naturally this caused great alarm in Russia, which unlike the U.S. has repeatedly been invaded and virtually destroyed. That led to a major war scare in 1983. There have been hundreds of cases when human intervention aborted a first strike minutes before launch, after automated systems gave false alarms. We don’t have Russian records, but there’s no doubt that their systems are far more accident-prone.
Meanwhile, India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war several times, and the sources of the conflict remain. Both have refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, along with Israel, and have received U.S. support for development of their nuclear weapons programs -- until today in the case of India, now a U.S. ally. War threats in the Middle East, which might become reality very soon, once again escalate the dangers.
In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Kennedy’s hegemonic demands. But we can hardly count on such sanity forever. It’s a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided. There is more reason than ever to attend to the warning of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, almost 60 years ago, that we must face a choice that is “stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 24, 2012 3:41:30 GMT -7
HO CHI MINH’S FOREIGN LEGION
One intriguing aspects of the Vietnam War, still shrouded in mystery and half-truths, concerns the foreign communist volunteers who assisted the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese forces. During the war thousands of Russian and Chinese advisors were stationed in North Vietnam and South Vietnam. They primarily worked as technical advisors and military engineers, and were usually stationed in the Hanoi-Haipong area. Outside that, there is little or no awareness that these Russian and Chinese advisors, assisted by Cubans, North Koreans, East Germans and other communist influenced nationals also served as advisor to the North Vietnamese forces fighting inside South Vietnam. Although described as ‘advisor’ they also took an active role in combat operations; as a result, some were killed and others were captured.
The full story of these foreign volunteers is difficult the chart; in fact, the complete record of their activities may never be known. Since the war the communist Vietnamese constantly deny these accusations, as do the Chinese, Cubans and all the others who sent their ‘volunteers’ to Vietnam. Even the Pentagon, due to political considerations, has consistently refused to comment. But enough information has emerged from other sources, such as eyewitness accounts, communication intercepts, reports from defectors, and recently declassified documents, to confirm what was previously accepted as rumor.
The first mention of foreign volunteers came during the French-Indochina War (1946-54) when the Chinese newspapers at the time openly boasted that between 20-30,000 men were fighting along side the Viet Minh. They also had had officers attached to the Viet Minh’s General Headquarters. Also there where claims by locals of ex-French Foreign Legionnaires, whom were turncoats and joined the VC as instructors. There was also a international communist unit, mostly made-up of French defectors, called the ‘International Combatants’. During the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, there were frequent rumors of these French defectors who stayed behind and became spies, disguising themselves as Americans newsmen.
By the early 1960s, reports began to surface of Russian advisors assisting the Viet Cong (VC). This came about when South Vietnamese military authorities received hard intelligence that a small Soviet delegation was touring the ‘liberated areas’ in the eastern Mekong Delta. A meticulously planned operation was mounted to capture the Russians, but something went wrong at the last moment, and the VC succeeded in spiriting their guest to safety. However, the South Vietnamese did get to capture several Russian flags, propaganda and magazines which the Soviets had given to their hosts, as well as photographs and a movie film showing the welcome accorded the Russian advisors as the toured through the hamlets in the area. The film provided incontestable evidence that there was a Russian presence in and around South Vietnam. An Army of the Republic of Vietnam Psychological Operation officer who took part in the operation described the film as ‘strictly propaganda’ and said he felt they were intended to show solidarity between socialist countries.
Other evidence soon surfaced. On August 1, 1964, the government of South Vietnam officially complained to the International Control Commission that Chinese advisors were at work in South Vietnam. South Vietnamese government officials claimed that Chinese Communist officers had led the enemy’s 514th and 261st Battalions in an attack on Sung Hieu, in Cai Be two weeks before their report. The South Vietnamese also claimed that commands in Chinese could be heard during the battle and later 43 bodies were found on the battlefield. Eight of the bodies that were found were decapitated and the heads taken away, to prevent their identification as Chinese. The People’s Republic of China did not respond to these charges.
During September 1964, Radio Hanoi began hinting openly at the use of Chinese ‘volunteers’ for combat in South Vietnam, saying tens of thousands had offered their support and service to fight against South Vietnam and its allies. Hanoi also claimed to have received similar offers from volunteers from East Germany and Hungary.
By early 1965, China openly offered its troops as well as material. That the March 25, 1965, edition of Peking’s daily newspaper ‘People’s Daily’ said, “We are ready to send our own men…to fight together with the North Vietnamese people.”
The Chinese were also active in Laos, according to one U.S. Intelligence Information Report. It recounts that in early May 1965 a Chinese mission, referred to as ‘the Embassy’, was located in a cave at coordinates VH 192563, near Sam Neua, in Laos. The mission had its own guards, cooks, and typists. About 80 Chinese in total, they were attached to the Pathet Lao National Military Headquarters, their primary mission was staff-level logistical planning and support. Also, about a thousand to 2,000 Chinese troops and engineers were know to be employed in constructing the ‘New China Road’ a road network in northern Laos. This road network had actually started in 1962. At certain points of the construction the road snaked to within 20 miles of Thailand’s border. This caused concern in that country, that Thai official protested that the road served to link insurgent training camps along their border and provided a supply route to communist guerrillas in northeast Thailand. The East Germans were also known to have fielded an engineer battalion in Laos, these East Germans may have also worked as advisors to communist forces inside South Vietnam.
On July 20, 1966, a unit of South Vietnamese Special Forces penetrated and broke up a high level meeting of the Viet Cong National Liberation Front in Tay Ninh Province. Documents captured during the raid tended to support what many intelligence analysts had believed for some months --- that Chinese personnel were actively advising and even fighting alongside VC units south of the 17th parallel. The raid happened so fast that while VC officials were able to escape across the Cambodian border, they were forced to leave many revealing documents behind. From these documents American and South Vietnamese military intelligence learned that several high ranking Chinese officers were present as military and political advisors to the VC. The captured documents were later turned over to the South Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Although American officials in Saigon and Washington D.C. knew of the existence of the documents, they were never made public in the U.S.
These documents, coupled with eyewitness reports by both Americans and Vietnamese officials, tended to further verify the rumors of direct Chinese involvement in Vietnam. The rumors were most common in the provinces just south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), where many residents claimed first-hand knowledge of Chinese presence. Many locals insisted that Red Chinese soldiers traveled and fought alongside North Vietnamese units in the area. These rumor were especially prevalent among refugees, many of whom cited the traditional Vietnamese fear of the Chinese as the reason for fleeing their homes in the countryside.
The Viet Cong’s willingness to work with the Red Chinese was anathema to many peasants in the northern provinces, and cost the VC much support locally. Resentment towards the VC/NVA increased as rumors of Chinese soldiers in the countryside began to spread.
In late 1966 in Quang Nam Province, many people told reporter David Keene, that they had personally seen Chinese soldiers traveling and working alongside North Vietnamese soldiers. Many also insisted that these same soldiers participated in battles against U.S. and ARVN forces. Some even claimed that Chinese officers, at times, were put in charge of VC/NVA units. American officials in independent reports supported these charges, that VC radio transmissions were often made in Chinese, rather than Vietnamese. Occasionally, enemy orders were intercepted in Chinese instead of in Vietnamese.
There have been allegations that foreign advisors, in this instance Russians, were involved in piloting NVA aircraft on combat missions. In July 1966, an American C-47D was shot down over Laos by a MIG-17 fighter aircraft. This information did not go public until 1978; 12 years later did U.S. officials confirm that a MIG was involved. Some members of the National League of Families, a group of MIA relatives dedicated to a complete accounting of all the U.S. servicemen missing in Southeast Asia, say the cover-up was because the MIG pilot was Russian. It is known that that Russians did fly other aircraft, fixed wing and helicopters, in support missions over Laos in the early and mid-1960s.
The Russians were at work in Laos even prior to their involvement in South Vietnam. William Sullivan, former U.S. Ambassador to Laos, testified before a Senate Subcommittee (U.S. Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad) that as early as 1961, more than 500 Soviet personnel were in Laos, working in air operations, logistical support and as military advisors.
In the fall of 1967, a report from an ARVN Military Intelligence coded source (L-003), told of two VC regiments in Phouc Tuy Province, accompanied by foreign advisors. The source reported that the advisors were from China, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and North Korea. The source also claimed that the VC in Binh Ba village secretary had openly boasted of the foreign advisors and had attended a celebration with them on September 27, 1967. The secretary also told the source that the foreigners had volunteered to work with the VC.
Chinese advisors also served with Vietnamese communist forces in sanctuaries and base camps inside Cambodia. In late 1967 a French planter who worked for the CIA under the code-name ‘Louis’ was sent into the Ream area, close to Sihanoukville, to confirm the location of a suspected underground arms tran-shipment point. While drive through the area, ‘Louis’ was stopped at a roadblock manned by VC guerrillas and taken to a nearby village for interrogation. His interrogator turned out to be a Chinese officer. Not satisfied with his story, the officer turned him over to a squad of Viet Cong, who took turns torturing him. They later released him, and he managed to get to Phnom Penh. He confirmed that Chinese and Eastern European armaments were being brought in by ship and then transferred across the border to VC forces operating inside South Vietnam. This was the first hard evidence of the existence of what came to known as the ‘Sihanouk Trail’.
A report of Russian advisors surfaced again in 1967. Chief Bill Bixby, attached to a Navy SEAL Team working in Kien Giang Province, told of encountering a tall, heavy, breaded caucasian during an ambush along a remote canal. Bixby recalls that day, “He was riding with two VC in a sampan, sitting up front, and when I first spotted him, I couldn’t believe my eyes. For a few minutes I just stared, then I lifted my Stoner and cut loose.” The caucasian was hit in the initial burst of fire and toppled from the sampan into the water. The gunfire had attracted other VC in the area, and the SEAL team was forced to depart without recovering the body. He then notes, “Back at base I filed my report and a couple weeks later I was called over to NILO ( Naval Intelligence Liaison Office) shack and questioned at length on the details of the ambush. Seemed the Viets had picked up intel that the guy I shot was a Russian.” He then goes on to say “The NILO was very interested in the matter, but they told me the report was classified and therefore treat the information with discreet.”
During the November 1970 Son Tay Raid into North Vietnam, Colonel Arthur ‘Bull’ Simons and 22 men from the Special Forces, mistakenly landed at a secondary school site close to the targeted prison compound. This ‘mistake’, however, might have had been responsible for saving the lives of half the Son Tay Raiders. The secondary school turned out to be packed with hostile troops who were not North Vietnamese. Simons’ men never found out who they were, for once they realized the mistake the helicopters and its raiders on board opened up killing between 100-200 men. Later, intelligence reported that these foreigners were engaged in training the North Vietnamese, especially in air defense. It is also darkly hinted that some of these ‘advisor’ were waiting to go south of the 17th parallel.
It was the defection of a high ranking North Vietnamese communist official that lent final substantiation charges of foreign military intervention into South Vietnam
Doctor Dang Tan, an official of the North Vietnamese Defense Ministry, became disillusioned with the communist cause, and decided to defect from his post in September 1969. He was kept under tight wraps by the South Vietnamese for nearly two years and was finally allowed to go public in the spring of 1971. Speaking through an interpreter at his first public interview since his defection, Tan told media representatives that Russian, Chinese, Cubans, East Germans, North Koreans, and even French ‘advisors’ were active in the North Vietnamese military in the north as well as in the south of Vietnam. Tan also said, he personally saw foreign communist advisors at a number of rest stations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail when he traveled through Laos in 1967. During the next two years, while working as a high level cadre in ‘liberated zones’ in Pleiku, he saw four to five groups of foreigners advisor, each group held between four to five men. He noted that these men were armed, usually wore VC attire (black pajamas) and were accompanied by a large security force of NVA soldiers.
He was then asked if some of the foreign advisors he saw might have been Americans, Tan answered, “No, Hanoi’s propaganda says that American GIs are fighting alongside the VC/NVA, but I have never seen this with my own eyes. The men I saw were Russian, Chinese, Cubans, North Koreans, and some French. They came south to study the battlefields and the situation, and to see how they could help us. I have seen them deep in South Vietnamese territory. I have heard them speaking in their native tongue.”
The reference to French military advisors was puzzling to American intelligence analysts. Some felt they might have been radical leftist volunteers who had come to assist their comrades in arms in ‘fighting imperialism’. Others believed they were some of the hundreds of Frenchmen servicemen known to have deserted to the Viet Minh (VC) during the previous war against the French.
As for Dr. Tan, his credentials are impeccable. He joined the Viet Minh at the age of 16 to fight for his country’s independence; three years later he became a communist. He studied medicine at Binh Dinh and later in Hanoi, where he married (his wife was a senior employee in the North Vietnamese Finance Ministry). In 1967, along with 20 other senior official, he was sent south to Pleiku to set up a health system in areas dominated by the VC/NVA. He attributed his decision to defect through gradual disillusionment, saying that he found communism ‘outdated’ and not an equitable system of government for a country.
The North Korean presence in Vietnam is not as well documented as that of the Russians and Chinese. Aside form the allegations made by Dr. Tan, some additional light has been shed on their presence by declassified documents released by the Defense Intelligence Agency back in the late 1970s. The documents were released as a result of the Freedom of Information Act.
According to the information, in April 1971 VC and NVA units in Soi Ba Huyen area, near Phu Cat Air Base, were reported that each unit was accompanied by a contingent of five North Korean, who acted as military advisor. A month later, another reported reached intelligence officers concerning four North Korean officers attached to the NVA’s 11th Battalion in Phu Yen Province. A report from the U.S. National Military Command Center contains information on two North Korean officers who accompanied a Viet Cong general on an inspection tour of communist controlled areas in Quang Nhai Province in June 1971. The source for this information came from a district level VC who was working as a double agent.
North Korean troops are also said to have participated in combat actions inside Cambodia against troops of the Lon Nol government. During the period of 1971-72 several Korean transmissions were monitored and recorded by Khmer Republic Radio’s radio interception technicians. The transmissions were made during actual combat in eastern Cambodia; it dealt with the then-current tactical situation. Some U.S. official were skeptical and insisted that VC/NVA soldier made these transmissions fluent in Korean, to confuse the situation. Others feel that cleverly prepared tapes were used, while other officials believe this is the real thing.
The Chinese also had their hand in the basket, in January 1973 a Pathet Lao rallier told Cambodian and American interrogators of the presence of 700-800 Chinese military personnel in the vicinity of Pathet Lao Headquarter at Ben Na Kay Neua. He claimed the majority of the Chinese troops were engaged in providing air defense for the headquarters complex, and were armed with 37mm air defense guns and surface-to-air missiles. The source also told of unmarked helicopter, thought to be Russian, flying to and from Hanoi and Sam Neua.
The East Germans, who supplied weapons to the VC and NVA, were alleged to having an engineer battalion at work in Laos around 1970, actively assisting the Pathet Lao. The presence of the East Germans was mentioned in many U.S. Special Forces intelligence reports and U.S. cross-border reconnaissance team reports. U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam-Studies and Observation Group (MACV-SOG) personnel also monitored their activities.
The Cuban involvement in Vietnam has been well documented in other reports. It appears that they operated more in the North, around Hanoi, than in the South Vietnam. Fidel Castro, himself acknowledged in January 1973 that a number of Cuban military men had been sent to Vietnam to ‘fight the imperialists’. It appears that some Cuban accompanied VC and NVA troops operating inside South Vietnam, but details are sketchy.
Shortly after the disastrous 1972 NVA Easter Offensive, Castro himself made a trip to North Vietnam. Accompanied by an entourage of Cuban and North Vietnamese security personnel, he also traveled south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) into territory held by the communists in South Vietnam. The trip was disclosed by Hanoi’s Vietnam News Agency (VNA), but did not give the date or the places Castro visited around Hanoi, torturing helpless American prisoners of war (POW) seemed to have been a favorite pastime. More than a dozen former POWs have testified that they were regularly tortured by a team of Cubans while held in a prison outside Hanoi known as the ‘Zoo’. The leader of the team was a Spanish-speaking caucasian dubbed ‘Fidel’. His accomplish, whom filled in as a junior assistant, was nicknamed ‘Chico’. Both men were accorded VIP treatment by the NVA. According to retired Air Force colonel Jack Bomar, as a former POW at the ‘Zoo’ he was regularly tortured by Fidel and friends for over a year. Bomar believes that the Cubans were sent to North Vietnam to obtain useful information and to break Americans to get them to publicly confess to being war criminals. The CIA has since identified the duo as Eduardo Morjon Esteves and Luis Perez Jaen. Both men were assigned to the Cuban Embassy in Hanoi as ‘military attaches’ during 1968-69.
Aside from the foreign communist advisors, there were misguided Westerners determined to assist their VC/NVA comrades. One case involved an amateur journalist turned guerrilla fighter, Johannes Duynisveld, a Dutchmen from Voorschoten, Holland. Duynisveld was an ambitious man with leftist tendencies; he had roamed the world when he ran away from home at the age of 16. After holding various jobs, he eventually wound up in Cambodia, wanting to write about the war.
On September 15, 1970 Duynisveld left Phnom Penh on a self-described ‘secret mission’ to find out what had happened to several of the 17 Western journalists missing in Cambodia since the previous April. He was particularly interested in finding Sean Flynn and Dana Stoner, two of the more prominent members of the group.
According to a dairy found on Duynisveld body at the time of his death, he bicycled to Svay Rieng and allowed himself to be captured by communist troops on September 19. Dairy notations for the next three weeks contains many brief entries, describing how the VC were constantly on the move, trying to avoid air raid and artillery bombardment and life in general in a communist unit. As time goes by it seems that through a subtle combination of flattery, propaganda and indoctrination, the VC had little trouble in signing Duynisveld up for the communist cause. On November 28 he was officially welcomed into the fold. The following entries go on about life in a VC unit and how he transported weapons and ammunition for the VC and repair capture equipment.
Duynisveld’s activities did not go unnoticed by the South Vietnamese and Americans. More than one field report conduct by recon units told of a caucasian working for the enemy along the Cambodia border.
Fate caught up with Duynisveld on the night of December 18, when the VC unit he was part of stumbled into a night ambush position manned by troops of the ARVN 25th Infantry Division, then operating inside Cambodia. His death received widespread media coverage, where it was billed (some say erroneously) as ‘the first verified instance in the War in Indo-China of a Westerner accompanying communist troops as a soldier’. The U.S. Joint Public Affairs Office in Saigon had no comment.
One Department of Defense intelligence report, dated September 26, 1966, tells of a foreigner of undisclosed identity who spoke to a crowd of villagers in a VC controlled area of Bien Hoa Province. Villagers claimed that he stated he was an American who was forced to fight in Vietnam, but now that he had learned the truth and changed sides. This statement about the so-called American has never been proven.
A declassified secret report from a report of the summer of 1967 tells of two unidentified whites said to be Americans working for the VC in Tanoy, Cambodia. The alleged Americans were said to have been working for the VC since 1966 and had been sent to Vietnam by a ‘secret party’ in the U.S. Their assignment was to interrogate American POWs. The source of this report was listed as a defector who had worked as a VC security guard. By 1969 the CIA had many documents as an example of a January 9, 1969 report (CS211/00850-69) tells of a caucasian who spoke Chinese as well as English, working with Pathet Lao units in Xieng Khouang Province.
In the spring of 1971, the U.S. Air Force 1021st Field Activity reported that 16 Occidentals were among the headquarters’ staff of the VC’s 3001st Battalion in An Xuyen Province. The source of this information was a VC acting as a double agent, he also provided intelligence on the unloading of an unidentified submarine off the coast of South Vietnam.
During the month of November 1971, an eyewitness told of three caucasians advisors working with enemy units near Takao, Cambodia. The caucasians were described as wearing military uniforms, carrying sidearms, and conversing in Vietnamese.
In April 1973, three months after the ceasefire, a delegation of five foreigners---American, Australian, Hungarian, and Polish---were spotted traveling through Phuoc Long Province with a NVA security escort. Other sighting involving foreighers working with the VC and the NVA inside the territorial limits of South Vietnam continued right up to the collapse of the country in May 1975.
Unfortunately, official America reaction to charges of intervention by these foreign advisors and volunteers has been ignored, though on occasion when pressed by journalists, they have issued a disclaimer. Despite this there is a fact that there is a real possiblity that some American soldiers lost their lives in the Vietnam conflict, as a result of actions by these red volunteers.
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Nov 6, 2012 5:25:15 GMT -7
Spain's secret support for US in VietnamDocumentary details Franco's discreet involvement in anti-communist war Paloma Marín Madrid 9 ABR 2012 - 16:04 CET1 A still image from the documentary 'Españoles en la guerra de Vietnam'. A new documentary first shown late last month on Spain's Historia cable channel reveals the secret involvement of Spanish army medical corps staff on the side of the United States during the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s. In 1965, after increasing the number of US troops in its fight to prop up the regime in South Vietnam against the communist forces led by Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson asked General Franco to contribute a military contingent to the war effort. After lengthy debate between his ministers, Franco took the advice of General Agustín Muñoz Grandes, a senior member of his government, and the man who had commanded the Blue Division, the 45,000-strong force sent by Franco to support Hitler's invasion of Russia. Muñoz Grandes had close contacts with the US military, and had negotiated agreements with Washington. He saw Spanish participation in the war as an opportunity to further strengthen ties with the United States. But Franco was even more cautious in committing himself to the US cause than he was about Hitler's, and finally decided to send a medical team of around 30 people, and under strict secrecy. Franco didn't want to be seen backing the US' unilateral war" "The expedition was a secret because Franco didn't want military ties with the United States, and much less wanted to be seen to be supporting Washington's unilateral war against Vietnam," says General Antonio Velázquez Rivera, then a 25-year-old lieutenant with the army medical corps. "Vietnam was the first war to be televised, and was soon being cursed around the globe," he adds. The first group of medical soldiers, including four doctors, seven nurses and one officer in charge of military supplies, arrived in Vietnam in 1966 and worked at Truong Cong Dinh hospital in the Go Gong district, about 45 kilometers from the capital, Saigon. From 1966 to 1971 three other groups, totaling nearly 100 Spaniards, worked at the hospital. To avoid being seen to be publicly supporting the United States, General Franco ordered the medics to keep their activities secret. The soldiers, who completed their mission in 1971, were told to remain silent. The secret of the Spanish intervention in Vietnam was discovered by journalist Alejandro Ramírez, who published a book about it in 2005, and which was the basis for the documentary film. Captain Ramón Gutiérrez de Terán was among those who traveled to Vietnam. "We took a civilian flight, and were not wearing military fatigues. Nobody came to see us off. We knew where Vietnam was, more or less, but not where we were actually to be based." Like the others who volunteered, Gutiérrez de Terán says that he saw his mission as a humanitarian one, and that he wanted to travel, to see the war close up. Nobody came to see us off. We knew where Vietnam was, more or less" When the team arrived, its members were transferred to their hospital, which was close to the Ho Chi Minh trail, the supply route used by the communist forces. "It was then when we realized what we had gotten ourselves into: there was a constant coming and going of helicopters and a terrible smell of napalm everywhere," says Gutiérrez de Terán. Máximo Cajal, a Spanish diplomat then based in Thailand, met some of the volunteers. "The group I met had been based in the relative safety of the Western Sahara, and they suddenly found themselves in the middle of a war in the Mekong Delta; it was quite a shock for them," he says. "On the two occasions when I had to see the medical team in Go-Gong I had to travel by helicopter because the roads were all controlled by the Vietcong," the diplomat recalls. Velázquez says that the hospital they worked in was in poor shape. "It was an old colonial building, falling apart, and the hygiene was terrible. There were 150 beds, and at times, up to 400 injured and wounded. We had no medical supplies; we had to scrounge them from either the Americans or the guerrillas," he says. The hospital did not attend solely to military personnel, or civilians caught up in the fighting; the team also performed simple operations on children with cleft palates, or pregnant women with typhoid fever. "The local people were very supportive of us, and recognized our help by dedicating a bridge to us," says Velázquez.
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Nov 6, 2012 5:37:31 GMT -7
SPIEGEL ONLINE 1972 Vietnam War The white ship of hopeGerman Red Cross Floating Hospital: The MS Helgoland was stationed from 1966 to 1972 as a hospital ship in Vietnam to supply victims of the Vietnam War. Germany was also in Vietnam like? Yes, but not with soldiers but with a floating hospital. The hospital ship "Heligoland" was from 1966 to 1972 became a symbol of hope and humanity - even if the press reported better than sex escapades and alcohol excesses Max Riemann has researched the history of the "Helgoland".. ANZEIGE The little girl screamed in pain. Napalm burns had deeply ingrained in their lower legs, the wounds fester already begun. The Mother gave birth to her daughter severely injured from a small village on the border with Laos on board the German hospital ship "Heligoland". Three days had taken the arduous journey to the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon. Several operations were necessary to save the life of a young Vietnamese woman who carries the stigma of war still on her body. She also carries well to thank the doctors from Germany in her heart, which provided time for them. Four and a half years, between September 1966 and January was the "Helgoland" in the ports of Saigon and Da Nang, a floating fortress of humanity in the midst of the Vietnam War Inferno. In just six months, the "Heligoland" was the excursion steamer converted into a hospital ship with 150 beds, three operating theaters and four departments (surgery, internal medicine, gynecology, radiology). A total of 54 doctors and 160 nurses served during use over 11 000 inpatient cases, a further 200 000 patients consulted the connected ambulance. Shelling by the Vietcong Had the girl been in a Vietnamese hospital, she had barely survived. The health and hygiene standards in Vietnam was disastrous, for 17 000 people, there was only one doctor. Correspondingly great was the influx of injured and sick on the "floating hospital", which was at the height of the Vietnam War in Saigon harbor. But the "Heligoland" was not only the best clinic Indochina - it meant for the war-torn people, a piece of hope, not to be alone. The help was bureaucratic, free and independent of political considerations: "We did not ask where they came from," chief physician Christoph nun man dubbed fits his published in book form memories. The German public followed the work closely. Individual stories made for sentimental stories, the -. Fortunately without consequences - shelling by the Vietcong headlines Sex escapades and drunken sailors But above all, the few negative events were exploited by the media and highly rocked: How were (still unconfirmed) rumors of drunken sailors and their sex escapades in Saigon red light district is not without consequences: Rolf Heese, first captain of the "Helgoland", was dismissed. Even so, such reports to the positive image of the Mission harm. Never has the mission of "Heligoland" the German public was questioned, not exploited by the anti-Vietnam war movement for negative propaganda - even though the ship so as a gesture towards the United States was, and there at the same time victims of American napalm attacks were treated. The positives outweighed - in spite of the internal contradiction. Helgoland doctor Klaus Wagner This is explained with the humanitarian character of the use, "humanity was the result of the rejection of military involvement negative attitude to war was the real secret to the success of the mission.". Vietnam then - Afghanistan today Far less than the images and reports of on-site in the German public should be the political background that led to the use of the "white ship of hope." Today, when Defense Minister Franz-Josef Jung (CDU) under pressure from the U.S. and its NATO partners stands, German soldiers set to be ready for combat operations in the war against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan, this episode of the transatlantic relationship gets back a special timeliness. Although it will be young in contrast to the then Chancellor Ludwig Erhard hardly succeed, soldiers of the Federal Republic in the Hindu Kush to protect them from direct contact with the enemy. The impressions According to the Spiegel reporter Matthias Gebauer immediately after the assassination of three army-nationals in May 2007 in the local hospital of the provincial town of Kunduz won is expected also with a comparable medical relief from the German side hardly Mohammed Amshwani, chief of Surgery Spinzar Hospital, had to deal with the sometimes severely injured Afghan victims of a suicide attack in conditions reminiscent of stone-age medicine. The Germans support the Afghan doctor not even through the provision of bandages and painkillers. Undiplomatic threat With "horror" was Chancellor Ludwig Erhard (CDU) responding to the concerns of his correspondent, recalls Ludwig Erhard consultant Horst Osterheld that evening of the 20th December 1965 at the White House in Washington, DC: German soldiers should so desire by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Americans stand on the battlefields of Vietnam. Johnson knew in that situation he his guest he brought it: A deployment of the Bundeswehr in Indochina would have been not only because of the provisions of of the Basic Law and NATO Treaty highly questionable - just twenty years after the Second World War and a decade after the rearmament The chancellor had marching orders for German units can hardly gain. Johnson that he still asked for a contribution in the form of medical and construction battalions, was justified in his personal struggle he had to exist in January 1966 before Congress, the U.S. Congress wanted an increase in the defense budget of active support the GIs in Vietnam made dependent by the allies. To the Germans "convince" of his concerns to the President threatened undiplomatic, deny Erhard will have to drastically reduce the stationed in West Germany U.S. troops to follow. Erhard's "Gift of Love" Erhard strategists quickly began the search for an alternative: Americans should be satisfied at the same time and a domestic crisis can be avoided. A brilliant idea came from the Foreign Office: a hospital ship should be sent to make a contribution to medical care for the civilian population of South Vietnam. The suggestion was in the Cabinet unanimous acclaim - the federal government was able to demonstrate good will and was unsuspicious, to intervene militarily in the Vietnam conflict to want. Erhard's "gift of love" was only symbolic, as the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibiting the treatment of soldiers on board - so no utility value for the Army. Even Erhard himself did not profit: Awesome Johnson thanked him and immediately asked for the immediate benefit of the offset agreement agreed forward compensation payments to build up the U.S. military budget. Politicians of all parties in the Bundestag - and the CDU - saw with the "Helgoland" mission, however, Germany's potential in Vietnam exhausted. The dispute over the offset funds was one of the reasons for the downfall of Chancellor Erhard in the fall 1966th John Max Riemann on the use of "Heligoland" written in 2002 at the University of Dusseldorf his thesis.
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