quiet american (vietnam) - ph

 The Quiet American (novel)
by Graham Greene

The Quiet American (film / movie, of the same name as the novel, DVD, publicly available)
who
Vietnam timeline

2nd century B.C.
Chinese general Zhao Tuo conquers the kingdom of Au Lac, bordering the south of China in what is now northern Vietnam.  He named it Nam Viet.  Over the next 2000 years, Vietnam would remain in flux between national independence and Chinese foreign occupation.

During this time, the country expands south into the Mekong Delta and west along the present-day Cambodia and Laos.
   ____________________________________

19th century
After a long period of Vietnamese civil war, a French Catholic Bishop assists ousted heir Nguyan Anh to reclaim Vietnam under a new, unified dynasty.

Resistance to the new regime is met brutally, and religious persecution harsh.
   ____________________________________

1858
Under the pretext of Catholic persecution, France and Spain invade Vietnam.

By 1887, France conquers Vietnam and incorporates it into its Southeast Asian colonies, known as French Indochina.
   ____________________________________

1940
Germany defeats France during World War II.

After the French surrender to the Germans, the Japanese invade Vietnam.

This occupation supplants the French government, and replaces France's reign of power.

Ho Chi Minh leads resistance against both the French and their Japanese masters.  He founds the Vietminh organization to liberate Vietnam and push for democratic reforms.

In an effort to undermine the Japanese presence, the U.S. sends a group of elite O.S.S. officers, known as the “Deer Team”, to arm and train the Vietminh.  The Vietminh had previously been fighting against the French in an effort to gain Vietnamese independence from French colonial rule.
   ____________________________________

1945
September 2, 1945
World War II ends.  Japan surrenders.  
[in August 1945, the history of the world was altered abruptly. The first atomic bomb hit Hiroshima on 6 August. The second hit Nagasaki on the 9th., source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSS_Deer_Team]

Ho Chi Minh proclaims Vietnam independent.  O.S.S. Officers known as the “Deer Team” are part of the celebrations in Hanoi as U.S. planes fly overhead.

In his address to the public, Ho Chi Minh borrows from the American Declaration of Independence, stating:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident ...”

France, unwilling to let go of its colonial holdings, drives the Vietminh out of South Vietnam.

With the future of Vietnam at stake, the Vietminh and French spend over a year in negotiation.

The Vietminh demand a free, unified country, while the French insist on control over South Vietnam.
   ____________________________________

1946
November 1946
France shells the city of Haiphong.

6,000 Vietnamese civilians are killed and war begins in an attempt to regain control over Vietnam.
   ____________________________________

1947

March 12, 1947

In a speech to Congress, President Truman separates world between governments of “free peoples” and those of “terror and oppression”.  The Cold War begins.  Communism, in whatever form it may take, has become the new enemy of the United States.
Despite the fact that Ho Chi Minh is not anti-American, nor evidence found that he is working for the SOviet Union, he is condemned for being a communist.

Ho Chi Minh implores the United States to help Vietnam in its struggle for freedom.

Not only does the Truman Administration ignores these requests, it also begins secretly funneling aid to France.
   ____________________________________

1950
March 10, 1950
President Truman officially recognizes France's colonization of Southeast Asia, including Vietnam.


Soon thereafter, the U.S. sends military aid and a Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) to Saigon.  This group was to assist French in their fight against the communists.

Over the next four years, the U.S. sends more than $4 billion in aid for France's war on Vietnam.
   ____________________________________
[ June 25, 1950:  North Korea invades South Korea (the forgotton war) ]

1954
March 1954
The Vietminh surround and lay siege to the remote French garrison of Dien Bien Phu.

12,000 French soldiers remain trapped inside.

April 7, 1954
In a historic press conference, President Truman makes the case for containing communism in Indochina.  The “Domino Theory” stated that if Vietnam were to become communist, then the rest of Asia would follow, ending with Japan becoming a communist country.

Despite criticism, the “Domino Theory” would guide the U.S. in its crusade against communism in Vietnam, and throughout the world.

May 7, 1954
After months of holding out, France finally surrenders Dien Bien Phu.  It marks the pivotal end of war for France.  A cease-fire is called, followed by France's eventual withdrawal from Vietnam.  

June 1954
France and Vietnam agree to terms of peace under the Geneva Accords.  The 17th parallel temporarily separates the country into two:  to the NOrth the communist Vietnamese government of Ho Chi Minh, to the South the American installed government of Ngo Dinh Diem.  Elections are to be held in two years to unite the country.

Installed by the U.S., Diem ruled over South Vietnam as an authoritarian power.

Already fragmented with rivalries and factions, South Vietnam suffered under massive corruption, religious oppression and poor leadership.

In Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh faced his own problems.  Dissidents were executed, and the military was used to put down uprising in North Vietnam.
   ____________________________________

1956
Fearing a communist win, South Vietnamese Premier Diem and the U.S. block elections scheduled to reunite Vietnam.  American military advisors are stepped up in South Vietnam.

American pours money into South Vietnam to prop up its economy.  Premier Diem institutes oppressive measures to root out communists in the South and continue his rule.
   ____________________________________

1959
January 1959
North Vietnam officially sanctions force in its struggle to unite the country.  Military attacks and assassinations are stepped up against the South.

The Ho Chi Minh trail is established as a military route to South Vietnam.
   ____________________________________

1961
December 1961-1962

President Kennedy authorizes a drastic increase in the number of military advisors sent to Vietnam.

Within a year, 9,000 advisors are directly assisting South Vietnam in fighting against Communists.

Agent Orange is used to defoliate the countryside.
   ____________________________________

1963
Buddhists protest religious presecution in South Vietnam, garnering worldwide attention when monks self-immolate themselves on the streets of Saigons.

With American approval, the South Vietnamese military stages a coup, murdering Diem and his brother.

Three weeks after Diem's murder, President Kennedy is assassinated.  Vice President Johnson assumes the reins of power.

The following year, another coup rocks South Vietnam.

In the years following, SOuth Vietnam undergoes more the five coups and changes of leadership.
   ____________________________________

1964
August 2, 1964
North Vietnam attacks a U.S. warship in the Gulf of Tonkin.  A second attack, conceived by the U.S., though not actually occurring, provides the impetus for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

Congress overwhelmingly passes the resolution, giving the President broad powers to wage war.
   ____________________________________

1965
January 1965
Attacks against the South Vietnamese and their American advisors intensify, Americans die in battle and sabotage.

Consequently, President Johnson initiates Operation Rolling Thunder, a series of sustained bombing attacks against the North which would last 3 years and kill over 180,000 civilians.

March 1965
Johnson deploys the first American combat troops to Vietnam.

By the end of the year, their numbers would grow to 160,000

The first “teach-ins” are held at American universities to protest the war.  A growing anti-war movement includes veterans, politicians and foreign leaders.

1965-1967
American troop strength builds as the war insensifies.  By the end of 1967, American troop strength is at more than half a million with expenditures of over $2 billion a month.

The U.S. drops more tonnage of bombs than it had in all the World War II.

Resistance to the war increases, with a march on Washington number 100,000 strong.

White House staff members resign, draftees dodge the war and public opinion in favor of the President drops.
   ____________________________________

1968
January 1968
Taking advantage of the lunar New Year of Tet, the Communists launch a massive assault on South Vietnam.

The North suffers huge losses as a result, with approximately 30,000 killed, but the United States is stunned by the effort.

Two months later, Lyndon Johnson announced on television that he will make efforts at peace with Vietnam, and more shockingly, will not seek re-election.

In the village of My Lai, American troops massacre approximately 200 civilians.
   ____________________________________

1969
President Nixon begins secret bombing raids into neighboring Cambodia, a neutral country used by North Vietnam to infiltrate south.  The resulting destabilization of the country eventually would lead to a genocidal Cambodian dictatorship which murdered millions of its own people.

A policy of “Vietnamization” is announced, in which the South Vietnamese would be expected to take up more of the fighting while the U.S. de-escalated its ground war.

At the same time, Nixon steps up the bombing, averaging one ton of bombs dropped every minute.

On September 4th, Ho Chi Minh dies of a heart attack in Hanoi.
   ____________________________________

1970
Americans protest Nixon's invasion of Cambodia.  Massive protests are held throughout the country.  At Kent State University and Jackson State University, protests are shot and killed by the National Guard.

U.S. troop size in Vietnam falls to 280,000.  Approximately 65,000 servicemen are using easily available drugs.  Nixon announces the draft will end in 1973.
   ____________________________________

1971
June 1971
Congress repeals the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, restricting the President's war-making powers.  It also restricts further attacks into Cambodia.  Instead, Nixon steps up invasions into neighboring Laos.

Nixon announces the withdrawal of 100,000 troops from Vietnam by the end of the year.  Public opinion against the war reaches an all-time high, with 71 percent of the public believing it was a misake.
   ____________________________________

1972
May 1972
While American ground troops decrease, Nixon initiates Operation Linebacker, a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam.

New “smart” bombs are also used:  computer-controlled bombs mounted with television cameras for precise targeting.  Massive casualties ensure.

October 1972
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger signs terms for a cease-fire with North Vietnamese representatives.

Kissinger's announcement that “peace is at hand” is undercut by South Vietnam's opposition to the agreement.

December 1972
Nixon initiates what would become known as the “Christmas Bombings”, dropping more tonnage of bombs in 12 days than in the entire period from 1969 to 1971.

The attacks draw worldwide condemnation.  Nixon's popular approval rating sink.  Congress calls for an end to the war.
   ____________________________________

1973
January 1973
Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese representative Le Duc Tho meet in Paris to sign terms of “peace with honor”.

The war continues without direct U.S. military involvement.
   ____________________________________
William R. Clark, Petrodollar warfare, 2005                                 [ ]
p.21  (pdf - page 42/289)
   In May 1973, with the dramatic fall of the dollar still vivid, a
   group of 84 of the world's top financial and political insiders met
   at Saltsjobaden, Sweden, the seclude island resort of the Swedish
   Wallenberg banking family. This gathering of [the] Bilderberg
   group heard an American participant, Walter Levy, outline a ‘scenario’
   for an imminent 400 percent increase in OPEC petroleum
   revenues. The purpose of the secret Saltsjobaden meeting WAS NOT
   TO PREVENT THE EXPECTED OIL PRICE SHOCK, BUT RATHER TO PLAN HOW TO MANAGE
   THE ABOUT-TO-BE-CREATED FLOOD OF OIL DOLLARS, a process US Secretary
   of State Kissinger later called ‘recycling the petrodollar flows.’
   [emphasis added]

                       -- F. William Engdahl, A Century of War43
   (Petrodollar warfare : oil, Iraq and the future of the dollar, William R. Clark, 2005, )
   ____________________________________

1975
April 30, 1975

The last Americans evacuate Saigon as North Vietnamese forces roll into the capital.

The war is finished.  Nearly 30 years after Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnam's independence with the words of Thomas Jefferson, Vietnam is unified under a communist government.
   ____________________________________

Post-war
58,015 Americans died in the conflict.

It is estimated that over one and a half million Vietnamese lost their lives.
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->

The OSS Deer Team was established by the United States Office of Strategic Services on May 16, 1945 to attack and intercept materials on the railroad from Hanoi in central Vietnam to Lạng Sơn in northeast Vietnam with the hope of keeping Japanese military units from entering China. They sent intelligence reports to OSS agents stationed in China. The team provided training, medical and logistical assistance to Hồ Chí Minh and the Việt Minh in 1945.

The first mission of OSS Deer Team was to help train 50 to 100 Việt Minh guerrillas to help drive Japanese soldiers out of French Indochina. Deer Team worked closely with Hồ Chí Minh and Võ Nguyên Giáp, whom they knew only as "Mr. Hoo" and "Mr. Van".[1]

Hồ Chí Minh      "Mr. Hoo"
Võ Nguyên Giáp   "Mr. Van"

The two groups were friendly and fought as comrades-in-arms to capture the Japanese garrison at Tan Trao, and celebrated that victory by getting drunk together.[2]


When Hồ Chí Minh discovered a French agent sent with the Deer Team who was apparently part of it: "This man is not an American. Look, who are you guys trying to kid? This man is not part of the deal." Lieutenant Montfort was arrested and deported to China.[3] Two other undercover French–Vietnamese agents suffered the same treatment.[4] The OSS remained on good terms with Hồ Chí Minh until the United States began overtly supporting France's occupation of Indochina in the late 1950s.

Then, in August 1945, the history of the world was altered abruptly. The first atomic bomb hit Hiroshima on 6 August. The second hit Nagasaki on the 9th. The Japanese informally announced their willingness to sue for peace the next day. On the 15th, Emperor Hirohito made his announcement to the Japanese people, ordering them to stand down. With that a power vacuum was created in Vietnam. Within a month Ho Chi Minh would seize power in Hanoi and declare independence for all of Vietnam. In the south, events in Saigon played out differently with the net result being a French comeback. The events of these crucial days set the French and the Vietminh on the collision course that ended in war.


source:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSS_Deer_Team
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->

Vietnam: The OSS and Ho Chi Minh, 1945


Tonkin and Annam

rubber and rice rich Cochinchin

Cochinchina should be part of a unified Vietnam.

In the midst of these events a terrible famine had been raging since the fall of 1944. Ho Chi Minh was later to tell OSS Major Archimedes Patti that a million Vietnamese died of starvation during the autumn and winter of 1944-45. Other eyewitness accounts detail peasants eating roots and bark and bodies littering city streets and the countryside.

Grasping for a new strategy, Helliwell turned to Major Archimedes Patti. The American Major was a veteran intelligence officer who had fought along side the French Resistance behind enemy lines in France. It didn’t take him long to discover that the only group left in northern Vietnam with a well organized covert network was the Vietminh! He initiated a meeting with Ho Chi Minh in Kunming and agreed in principle to support the Vietminh with a Special Operations Team in return for intelligence.  The result was the Deer Team, composed  of a dozen elite OSS operatives under the leadership of  Major Allison B. Thomas. Deer parachuted into the Viet Bac in Northern Vietnam on 16 July, 1945 and began training Ho’s cadres.

He did so by masterfully executing the popular front strategy. By directing the focus of the disparate factions on a common goal, Ho was able to rally the insurrection around the ideal of Vietnamese nationalism. It worked. Then, in time, Ho and his Communists slowly gained complete control of the Vietminh– primarily through bloodshed and intimidation.

In popular front fashion the congress was open to all denominations: Catholics, Communists, Nationalists and VNQDD veterans to name a few.

 The Colt .45 automatic was a symbol of US military might; possibly the best military hand gun in the world at the time.  

At the Vietminh Congress the goal of seizing power in Hanoi was approved. To that end Vo Nguyen Giap was dispatched, along with his Armed Propaganda Team, for Hanoi. This rag tag bunch of insurgents were the seed from which the Peoples Army of Vietnam (PAVN) would grow. But that was in the future, in 1945 they were still green. Major Thomas ordered his Deer Team to accompany Giap and his men, they actually engaged in combat with the Japanese along the way. He did so in direct violation of OSS orders not to engage. The march took more than a week. Giap’s arrival in Hanoi accompanied by Thomas and the Deer Team once again reinforced the popular impression that the U.S. was assisting the Vietminh.

On August 17 the communists invaded a rally in Hanoi organized by supporters of Bao Dai. There were over 25,000 people at the rally. The Communist agitators rushed the stage, grabbed the microphone, and ran the government sympathizers off the stage.  The crowd was there looking for any kind of leadership available in a time of crisis, so the gathering quickly became a Vietminh rally. Vietminh speakers were energized by events and quickly called for independence from the defeated Japanese.

In reality, the Japanese were still in control of the city, but, curiously did nothing to interfere.

The Deer Team was not the only American outfit operating in northern Vietnam in the summer of 1945. They were preceded by an Air Ground Aid Service (AGAS) team deployed to set up escape and evasion networks for downed American flyers. They were part of a long-term intelligence operation known as Gordon-Bernard-Tan (GBT), begun earlier in the war in the Pacific with the aid of some Texaco employees.

At this moment, while General Giap and Major Thomas were leading their men through jungle and fighting on the road to Hanoi, the first Americans arrived in Hanoi. Major Archimedes Patti landed with a combined OSS /AGAS team at Gia Lam airport on August 22nd. The OSS agent was accompanied by a team of five Frenchmen under Major Jean Sainteny, head of French intelligence in Kunming. Patti immediately moved to recognize the Vietminh as the de facto government with Ho Chi Minh as it’s head. That did not sit well with the French interlopers. And soon after, the French officers were identified as enemies by the Vietminh. Sainteny and his men were promptly tracked down put under house arrest by the Vietminh. When the French Major appealed to Patti for help he was largely rebuffed by the emboldened American agent. For their part, the Vietminh jailers insisted they were confining the French for their own safety, to protect them from the murderous sentiments of their former subordinates. If the French were upset at this treatment, they would soon be infuriated when Patti refused to force the Japanese to release the 4,500 French POWs captured in the March coup de main.

Patti argues in his memoirs that had we recognized Ho’s government and forced the French to do the same, a democratic Vietnam would have emerged from the chaos following World War II. It is arguable, we shall never know.

source:
        https://parallelnarratives.com/vietnam-vignette-the-oss-and-ho-chi-minh-1945/


Sources:
         https://parallelnarratives.com/vietnam-vignette-the-oss-and-ho-chi-minh-1945/
         Bartholomew-Feis, Dixie. The OSS and Ho Chi Minh.

         Duiker, William J. Ho Chi Minh.

         Fall, Bernard. Street Without Joy.

         LaCouture, Jean. Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography.

         Marr, David. Vietnam 1945.

         Patti, Archimedes. Why Vietnam?.
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->

Boer War (1899-1902) (Britain, Boers' territory)

Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966                                     [ ]

p.213 (pdf page 226)
   This Dual Alliance of France and Russia became the base of a triangle whose other sides were “ententes”, that is, friendly agreements between France and Britain (1904) and between Russia and Britain (1907).

p.215 (pdf page 228)
The subsequent destruction of that Russian fleet by the Japanese and the ensuing of victory of Britain's ally [Japan] in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 made clear to both parties that agreement between them was possible.  German naval rivalry with Britain  and the curtailment of Russian ambition in Asia as a result of the defeat by Japan made possible the agreement of 1907.

([
   Thesis:  Britain's forced occupation of the Boers' territory and violence conflict with the Boer farmers resulted in a British treaty with Japan.  
   This treaty between Britain and Japan enable the Japanese military to beat the Russian military in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, which led Russia to pull back from Asia, which made [it] possible for Britain and Russia agreement, because of Britain wanted to be friendly with Russia with the possible threat of Germany rising power.  All of which would have been less likely without the Boer War (1899-1902).

    ])

p.213 (pdf page 226)
   This Dual Alliance of France and Russia became the base of a triangle whose other sides were “ententes”, that is, friendly agreements between France and Britain (1904) and between Russia and Britain (1907).

p.136 (pdf page 151)
  The Boer War (1899-1902) was one of the most important events in British imperial history.  The ability of 40,000 Boer farmers to hold off ten times as many British for three years, inflicting a series of defeats on them over that period, destroyed faith in British power.  Although the Boer republics were defeated and annexed in 1902, Britain's confidence was so shaken that it made a treaty with Japan in the same year providing that if either signer became engaged in war with two enemies in the Far East the other signer would come to the rescue.  This treaty, which allowed Japan to attack Russia in 1904, lasted for twenty years, being extended to the Middle East in 1912.  

p.214 (pdf page 227)
Britain
Her difficulties with the Boers in South Africa, the growing strength of Russia in the Near and Far East, and Germany's obvious sympathy with the Boers led Britain to conclude the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 in order to obtain support against Russia in China.

   (Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: a history of the world in our time, first published in 1966, second printing 1974, p.33 (pdf page 48))
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Sharon Weinberger, The imagineers of war : the untold history of DARPA, the pentagon agency that changed the world, 2017

p.68
Le Viet Minh,

p.68, p.69
John Melby, the American diplomat who co-headed the mission with Erskine, saw the trip as “a piece of blackmail” the French used to pull America into Vietnam.

p.69
“There was not one single Officer in that Embassy who spoke a word of Vietnamese”, reported Melby, who wrote a ten-page single-spaced telegram back to Washington.  In Melby's view, the decision to provide economic aid was a “terrible mistake” that would slowly lead to disastrous involvement.

p.69
Godel recognized that the United States was more likely to face small-scale insurgent wars in regions like Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

p.71, p.72
Pentagon's Office of Special Operations
a new era of warfare.
In the late 1950s,
Samuel Vaughan Wilson, an army officer,
Wilson, then a lieutenant colonel and director of instruction at the U.S. Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina,
“Counterguerilla warfare”
“Counterinsurgency.”

  (The imagineers of war : the untold story of DARPA, the Pentagon agency that changed the world / by Sharon Weinberger., New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, united states. defense advanced research projects agency──history. | military research──united states. | military art and science──technological innovations──united states. | science and state──united states. | national security──united states──history. | united states──defenses──history., U394.A75 W45 2016 (print) | U394.A75 (ebook) | 355/.040973, 2017, )
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Marc Ambinder (and) D. B. Grady, Deep State, 2013                           [ ]

Deep State
inside the government secrecy industry

Marc Ambinder
     and
D. B. Grady

2013

pp.91-93
p.91
On August 2, 1964, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats engaged the USS Maddox in the Gult of Tonkin. The Maddox had been collecting signals intelligence.

p.91
The incident ended with three crippled North Vietnamese vessels and no Americans harmed.

p.91
(The South Vietnamese government wanted total retaliation, but SIGINT suggested that the attack was a one-off by an overly aggressive North Vietnamese commander.)

p.91
    Two nights later, a Marine signals intelligence team transmitted a warning that North Vietnamese PT boats were maneuvering in a way eerily similar to those of August 2.

pp.91-92
Meanwhile, the Maddox and the USS Turner Joy (sent to provide support) picked up a series of incomplete radar returns suggesting a North Vietnamese air and sea presence closing in fast, and received a priority alert from an NSA listening post warning of an imminent attack.

p.92
When sonar operators detected signals suggesting hostile vessels closing fast, the two destroyers unleashed weapons on the radar blip for three and a half hours. They reported two North Vietnamese boats destroyed.

p.92
   Hours later, acting on the advice of the secretary of defense, President Johnson authorized airstrikes against North Vietnam.

p.92
Meanwhile, the on-site commanders grew alarmed that no evidence of an attack subsequently presented itself. Neither the Turner Joy nor the Maddox took damage. There was never a visual confirmation of North Vietnamese vessels; the attack was precipitated and directed by radar and sonar, and bad weather may have confused instruments and crew.

p.92
Signals intelligence that was initially certain now seemed ambiguous at best.

p.92
And one key word was mistranslated: the North Vietnamese had said that two “comrades” were lost, not two “ships”. An error like this is common in the din of battle, but with the U.S. military leadership already shifting to a war posture, ...

p.92
   In 1964, the NSA covered up its role in mistakenly reporting that two U.S. ships had been attacked. Through 2001, the NSA insisted that a second attack did in fact occur two days later, and for years this story didn't change. But it was a lie perpetuated by secrecy.

p.93
One agency historian suggests that it was embarrassed by its mistakes; that its leaders wanted to believe that a pattern of aggressive action by the North Vietnamese was emerging; and that the system set up to analyze the signals intelligence was confusing, compartmentalized, and unreliable.

   (Deep State : inside the government secrecy industry, Marc Ambinder (and) D. B. Grady, 2013, )
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->

The Gulf of Tonkin incident (Vietnamese: Sự kiện Vịnh Bắc Bộ), also known as the USS Maddox incident, was an international confrontation that led to the United States engaging more directly in the Vietnam War. It involved both a proven confrontation on August 2, 1964 and a claim of a second confrontation on August 4, 1964 between ships of North Vietnam and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. The original American report blamed North Vietnam for both incidents, but the Pentagon Papers, the memoirs of Robert McNamara, and NSA publications from 2005, suggest that the dismissal by Department of State and other government personnel of legitimate concerns regarding the veracity of the second incident was used to justify an escalation by the US to a state of war against North Vietnam.[5][6][7]

On Sunday, August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox, while performing a signals intelligence patrol as part of DESOTO operations, was claimed to have been approached by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats of the 135th Torpedo Squadron.[1][5] The North Vietnamese boats attacked with torpedoes and machine gun fire.[5] One U.S. aircraft was damaged, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed, with six more wounded. There were no U.S. casualties.[8] Maddox was "unscathed except for a single bullet hole from a Vietnamese machine gun round".[5]

The National Security Agency originally claimed that another sea battle, the Second Gulf of Tonkin incident, occurred on August 4, 1964, but instead evidence was found of "Tonkin ghosts"[9] (false radar images) and not actual North Vietnamese torpedo boats.  In the 2003 documentary The Fog of War, the former United States Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara admitted that the August 2 USS Maddox attack happened with no Defense Department response, but the August 4 Gulf of Tonkin attack never happened.[10][better source needed]  In 1995, McNamara met with former Vietnam People's Army General Võ Nguyên Giáp to ask what happened on August 4, 1964, in the second Gulf of Tonkin Incident.  "Absolutely nothing", Giáp replied.[11] Giáp claimed that the attack had been imaginary.[12]

The outcome of these two incidents was the passage by US Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted US President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "communist aggression". The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for deploying U.S. conventional forces and the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam.

In 2005, an internal National Security Agency historical study was declassified; it concluded that Maddox had engaged the North Vietnamese Navy on August 2, but that there were no North Vietnamese naval vessels present during the incident of August 4.

source:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
  [ skip ]

    Bạch Hổ oil field (White Tiger oilfield) 
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%A1ch_H%E1%BB%95_oil_field
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Kudryavtsev 
 
  [ read.me ]
    Bạch Hổ oil field (White Tiger oilfield) 
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%A1ch_H%E1%BB%95_oil_field
   ____________________________________
  [ skip ]

energy slaves: 400 Gallons of Petroleum per Person per Year 2008
Crash Course: Chapter 17a - Peak Oil (2 of 2) by Chris Martenson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoFTNurAcws
Dec 29, 2008
04:10
   ____________________________________

    1938
    Fossils
    By Eileen R. Meyer
    Insects, feathers, shells, and bones
    Silent secrets cast in stone
    Tiny foot prints from a bird
    Stories shared without word!
   ____________________________________
  [ skip ]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin

History of the abiogenic hypothesis

The abiogenic hypothesis is usually traced to the early part of the 19th century. At the time, the chemical nature of petroleum was not known.
Alexander von Humboldt was the first to propose an inorganic abiogenic hypothesis for petroleum formation after he observed petroleum springs in the Bay of Cumaux (Cumaná) on the northeast coast of Venezuela.[7] In 1804 he is quoted as saying, "petroleum is the product of a distillation from great depth and issues from the primitive rocks beneath which the forces of all volcanic action lie." Abraham Gottlob Werner and the proponents of neptunism in the 18th century believed basaltic sills to be solidified oils or bitumen. While these notions have been proven unfounded(??), the basic idea that petroleum is associated with magmatism persisted. Other prominent proponents of what would become the abiogenic hypothesis included Mendeleev[8] and Berthelot.
   ____________________________________
  [ skip ]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Kudryavtsev 

Nikolai Alexandrovitch Kudryavtsev (Russian geologist)
Russian geologist Nikolai Alexandrovitch Kudryavtsev proposed the modern abiotic hypothesis of petroleum in 1951. On the basis of his analysis of the Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta, Canada, he concluded that no "source rocks" could form the enormous volume of hydrocarbons, and that therefore the most plausible explanation is abiotic deep petroleum. However, humic coals have since been proposed for the source rocks.[9] Kudryavtsev's work was continued by Petr N. Kropotkin, Vladimir B. Porfir'ev, Emmanuil B. Chekaliuk, Vladilen A. Krayushkin, Georgi E. Boyko, Georgi I. Voitov, Grygori N. Dolenko, Iona V. Greenberg, Nikolai S. Beskrovny, and Victor F. Linetsky.

Astronomer Thomas Gold was the most prominent proponent of the abiogenic hypothesis in the West until his death in 2004.[1] More recently, Jack Kenney of Gas Resources Corporation has come to prominence.
··<---------------------------------------------------------------------------->

THE SECRET TEAM

The CIA and Its allies in control of the United States and the world

L. FLETCHER PROUTY
Col. U.S. Air Force (Ret.)

copyright © 1973, 1992, 1997 by L. Fletcher Prouty
all rights reserved

But the action above is serious international business, because at the very root of the plan is the intent to violate the sovereignty of another nation.  Wars have been started by such events.  When a nation feels that it must resort to clandestine activities, it does so with great caution and then only with agents who are specially prepared for such work.  In no case, or in the very rarest cases, are members of the diplomatic service and of the uniformed military service ever used for such acts.  Honor and honesty in the society of nations demands that the diplomatic corps and the military services be beyond reproach.  The paragraph quoted above from McNamara's March 16 report not only proposed more or less routine covert activity against Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, but it added that the United States should plan for “overt military pressure” against North Vietnam, thus carrying though the momentum of action initiated with his December 21, 1963, report.  The die was cast.  The Gulf of Tonkin incident occurrect on August 4, 1964, and from that time on to the President's announcement of the massive build-up of forces, there could be no doubting the course laid out for the United States in Indochina.

     This course was set by the winds of change as this Government responded to and reacted to various intelligence-data inputs from as far back as 1945.  Vietnam was not so much a goal as it was a refuge and backlash of everything that had gone wrong in a quarter-century of clandestine activities.  There can be no questioning the fact that Vietname inherited some of the Korean leftovers; in inherited the Magsaysay team from the Philippines with its belief in another Robin-Hood-like Magsaysay in the person of Ngo Dinh Diem; it fell heir to the Indonesian shambles; it soaked up men and materials from the Tibetan campaign and from Laos in particular, and it inherited men and material, including a large number of specially modified aircraft, from the Bau [Bay] of Pigs disaster.  In its leadership it inherited men who had been in Greece in the late forties or during the Einsenhower era and who felt that they knew Communist insurgency when they saw it.  The nation of South Vietnam had not existed as a nation before 1954, rather it was another country's piece of real estate.  South Vietnam has never really been a nation.  It has become the quagmire of things gone wrong during the past twenty-five years.

     In the August 7, 1971, issue of The New Republic, the Asian scholar Eugene G. Windchy says, “What steered the nation into Vietnam was a series of tiny but powerful cabals”.  What he calls a sense of tiny but powerful conspiracies, this book puts all together as the actions of the Secret Team.  That most valuable book David Wise and Thomas B. Ross calls this power source “The Invisible Government”, and in the chapter on the various intelligence organizations in the United States they use the term “Secret Elite”.

     The CIA did not begin as a Secret Team, as a “series of tiny but powerful cabals”, as the “invisible government”, or as members of the “secret elite”.  But before long it became a bit of all of these.  President Truman was exactly right when he said that the CIA had been diverted from its original assignment.  This diversion and the things that have happened as a result of it will be the subject of the remainder of this book.  


“”
http://www.ratical.com/ratville/JFK/ST/ST.html

http://www.ratical.com/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp1.html
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
THE SECRET TEAM

The CIA and Its allies in control of the United States and the world

L. FLETCHER PROUTY
Col. U.S. Air Force (Ret.)

copyright © 1973, 1992, 1997 by L. Fletcher Prouty
all rights reserved

http://www.ratical.com/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp4.html

During World War II there were reasons for clandestine operations, and
much essential information was obtained by such means. However, as many
students and researchers in this area have discovered, the value of such
clandestine means was relatively small. As soon as World War II was over,
President Truman dissolved the OSS to assure that clandestine operations
would cease immediately. Six months later, when he founded the Central
intelligence Group, he expressly denied a covert role for that authority and
restricted the DCI to a coordinating function. During the debates leading up to
the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 (NSA/47), proponents of a
clandestine role for the CIA were repeatedly outmaneuvered and outvoted in
Congress. In his book The Secret War, Sanche de Gramont reports: "The
NSA/47 replaced the CIG with the CIA, a far more powerful body. From the
hearings on the NSA/47 it is evident that no one knew exactly what the nature
of the beast would be." At that time a member of the House, Representative
Fred Busby, made the prophetic and quite accurate remark: "I wonder if there is
any foundation for the rumors that have come to me to the effect that through
this CIA they are contemplating operational activities." That congressman
knew what he was talking about, and as we look back upon a quarter-century of
the CIA it seems hard to believe that he wasn't sure that was exactly what they
were up to in the first place.

[[ book The Secret War, Sanche de Gramont ]]

When the law was passed, it contained no provision whatsoever either for
collection of intelligence or for clandestine activities. However it did contain
one clause that left the door ajar for later interpretation and exploitation. The
CIA was created by the NSA/47 and placed under the direction of the NSC, a
committee. This same act had established the NSC at the same time. Therefore,
the CIA's position relative to the NSC was without practice and precedent; but
the law was specific in placing the agency under the direction of that
committee, and in not placing the Agency in the Office of the President and
directly under his control. In conclusion, this act provided that among the duties
the CIA would perform, it would:

. . . (5) perform such other functions and duties related to
intelligence affecting the National Security as the NSC may from
time to time direct.

This was the inevitable loophole, and as time passed and as the CIA and
the ST grew in power and know-how they tested this clause in the Act and
began to practice their own interpretation of its meaning. They believed that it
meant they could practice clandestine operations. Their perseverance paid off.
During the summer of 1948 the NSC issued a directive, number 10/2, which
authorized special operations, with two stipulations: (a) Such operations must
be secret, and (b) such operations must be plausibly deniable. These were
important prerequisites.

The CIA really worked at the achievement of this goal toward unlimited
and unrestrained covert operations.


Chapter 4: From the Word of the Law to the Interpretation: Presid...dy Attempts to Put the CIA Under Control, "THE SECRET TEAM", 1997

http://www.ratical.com/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp4.html (4 of 23) [9/15/2000 23:38:23]


In its earlier years the directors, Admiral Souers and General W. B. Smith, were preoccupied with the task of getting the Agency organized, with beating down the traditional opposition of the older members of the community, and with performing their primary function, that of coordinating national intelligence.  However, with the advent of the Allen Dulles era, ever-increasing pressure was placed on the restraints that bound covert operations.  Dulles succeeded in freeing the Agency from these fetters to such an extent that five years after his departing from the Agency the retiring DCI, Admiral Raborn, was so conditioned to the CIA "party line" that he could not quote the law correctly.


http://www.ratical.com/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp4.html
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Vietnam war
gold standard in 1973
President Nixon had contributed to inflation by ending the gold standard in 1973.
As the result of the war spending in Vietnam, United States ended the gold standard in 1973 -- disabling the ability to exchange a U.S.D. currency for U.S. gold reserve.

Vietnam War {November 1955 to April 1975 (19 years, 180 days)}
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->

history of
narcotics trafficking
drug trafficking
money laundering

       https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/index.html

       https://ips-dc.org/the_cia_contras_gangs_and_crack/
       https://ips-dc.org/drug_trafficking_and_money_laundering/

       https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/08/29/cia-addiction-to-afghanistan-war/

       https://history.wisc.edu/publications/the-politics-of-heroin-cia-complicity-in-the-global-drug-trade/

       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_trafficking
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking

       https://www.paperdue.com/essay/drug-trafficking-in-the-united-states-54264

       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIA_controversies
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_to_Osama_bin_Laden

       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Opium_War
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_opium_in_China

       https://ips-dc.org/the_cia_contras_gangs_and_crack/
       https://www.history.com/topics/crime/history-of-drug-trafficking
   ____________________________________

       https://politicalvelcraft.org/2018/03/12/cia-is-worlds-biggest-drug-trafficking-organization-expert-warns/
   ____________________________________

       Robert Finlayson Cook (28 February 1946 – 6 August 2005)

In a column for the Guardian four weeks before his death, Cook caused a stir when he described Al-Qaeda as a product of a western intelligence:

    Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by Western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.[23]
 
    https://rasica.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/robin-cook-2.jpg

    "The truth is there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaeda.  Any any informed intelligence officer knows this.  But there is propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the devil only in order to drive TV watchers to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism.  The country behind this propaganda is the U.S...."
     --- Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook    

       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Cook
   ____________________________________
DRUG FALLOUT: The CIA's forty-year complicity in the narcotics trade

August 1997

Written by Alfred W. McCOY

Last August, The San Jose Mercury News reported that Nicaraguan dealers connected to the CIA-backed contra rebels had sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles's street gangs during the mid-1980s, sparking an explosive controversy over CIA links to drug lords. The product of a year's work by investigative reporter Gary Webb, the three-part "Dark Alliance" series stated that one contra-connected dealer was "the Johnny Appleseed of crack in California" -- the man who introduced cheap crack cocaine to the poor black neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles.
To accompany the series, the San Jose Mercury News ran an editorial that said "the contra-run drug network opened the first conduit between Colombia's . . . cartels and L.A.'s black neighborhoods." The paper concluded that "it's impossible to believe that the Central Intelligence Agency didn't know about the contras' fundraising activities in Los Angeles." Going beyond the story itself, political activists and callers on black talk radio charged that the CIA had targeted their communities for crack.

This May, after months of controversy, the San Jose Mercury News published a remarkable apology. In a signed column, executive editor Jerry Ceppos criticized the story and undermined some of its claims. "Although members of the drug ring met with contra leaders paid by the CIA, I feel that we did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship," he wrote.

The Washington Post responded by lauding Ceppos -- and by condemning "the monstrousness of the charge that a secret government agency had created a national drug epidemic." In an op-ed in The New York Times, John Deutch, the recently retired director of the CIA, used the occasion to issue a carefully and cleverly worded denial that "the CIA has never directed or knowingly condoned drug smuggling into the United States." He added that "dedicated" CIA analysts and agents who "frequently run personal risks in fighting drugs deserve to have the allegations put fully to rest."

But before we issue the blanket absolution that Deutch demands, we need to take a hard look at the CIA and its practice -- in country after country -- of allying with drug traffickers and providing them with de facto protection from prosecution.

Throughout the forty years of the Cold War, the CIA joined with urban gangsters and rural warlords, many of them major drug dealers, to mount covert operations against communists around the globe. In one of history's accidents, the Iron Curtain fell along the border of the Asian opium zone, which stretches across 5,000 miles of mountains from Turkey to Thailand. In Burma during the 1950s, in Laos during the 1970s, and in Afghanistan during the 1980s, the CIA allied with highland warlords to mobilize tribal armies against the Soviet Union and China.

In each of these covert wars, Agency assets -- local informants -- used their alliance with the CIA to become major drug lords, expanding local opium production and shipping heroin to international markets, the United States included. Instead of stopping this drug dealing, the Agency tolerated it and, when necessary, blocked investigations. Since ruthless drug lords made effective anti-communist allies and opium amplified their power, CIA agents mounting delicate operations on their own, half a world from home, had no reason to complain. For the drug lords, it was an ideal arrangement. The CIA's major covert operations -- often lasting a decade -- provided them with de facto immunity within enforcement-free zones.

In Laos in the 1960s, the CIA battled local communists with a secret army of 30,000 Hmong -- a tough highland tribe whose only cash crop was opium. A handful of CIA agents relied on tribal leaders to provide troops and Lao generals to protect their cover. When Hmong officers loaded opium on the CIA's proprietary carrier Air America, the Agency did nothing. And when the Lao army's commander, General Ouane Rattikone, opened what was probably the world's largest heroin laboratory, the Agency again failed to act.

"The past involvement of many of these officers in drugs is well known," the CIA's Inspector General said in a still-classified 1972 report, "yet their goodwill ... considerably facilitates the military activities of Agency-supported irregulars."

Indeed, the CIA had a detailed knowledge of drug trafficking in the Golden Triangle -- that remote, rugged corner of Southeast Asia where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge. In June 1971, The New York Times published extracts from another CIA report identifying twenty-one opium refineries in the Golden Triangle and stating that the "most important are located in the areas around Tachilek, Burma; Ban Houei Sai and Nam Keung in Laos; and Mae Salong in Thailand." Three of these areas were controlled by CIA allies: Nam Keung by the chief of CIA mercenaries for northwestern Laos; Ban Houei Sai by the commander of the Royal Lao Army; and Mae Salong by the Nationalist Chinese forces who had fought for the Agency in Burma. The CIA stated that the Ban Houei Sai laboratory, which was owned by General Ouane, was "believed capable of processing 100 kilos of raw opium per day," or 3.6 tongs of heroin a year -- a vast output considering the total yearly U.S. consuption of heroin was then less than ten tons.

By 1971, 34 percent of all U.S. soldiers in South Vietnam were heroin addicts, according to a White House survey. There were more American heroin addicts in South Vietnam than in the entire United States -- largely supplied from heroin laboratories operated by CIA allies, though the White House failed to acknowledge that unpleasant fact. Since there was no indigenous local market, Asian drug lords started shipping Golden Triangle heroin not consumed by the GIs to the United States, where it soon won a significant share of the illicit market.

I took leave from graduate school in 1971 to investigate the Asian heroin trade. When I went to Laos, I was able to meet the Lao army commander, General Ouane, who graciously showed me his opium trafficking ledger - titled Controle de Opium au Laos. By contrast, the U.S. mission attempted a cover-up, insisting that the general and his subordinates were not involved in the drug trade. After I hiked into a remote Hmong village to investigate opium shipments on Air America, CIA Hmong mercenaries ambushed my research team, firing bursts from automatic weapons and forcing my local guards to return fire so we could escape to safety. Several days later, a CIA operative, George Cosgrove, threatened to kill my Lao interpreter, Phin Manivog, unless I stopped asking questions.

When my book The Politics of Heroin was in press, the CIA's deputy director for plans pressured my publisher to suppress it. And the Agency's general counsel demanded the right to prior review of my still-unpublished manuscript. In writing to request a copy of the galley proofs, CIA counsel Lawrence Houston assured my publisher that he "could demonstrate to you that a considerable number of Mr. McCoy's claims about this Agency's alleged involvement are totally false and without foundation."

To encourage compliance, he closed with his rather chilling view that no "responsible publisher would wish to be associated with an attack on our Government involving the vicious international drug traffic." After my publisher capitulated and the CIA reviewed my manuscript for a week, the Agency's general counsel wrote back, insisting that the "CIA has never been involved in the drug traffic and is actively engaged in fighting against it." In the midst of making his case that my book was unworthy of publication, he admitted that CIA agents had recently interviewed most of my sources in Laos, including General Ouane, and they had, as one would expect, retracted statements attributed to them in my manuscript.

After my book was published unaltered, the Agency mounted a successful disinformation campaign to discredit my findings that its Laotian allies were trafficking in opium and heroin. The CIA persuaded the House Foreign Relations Committee that my allegations were baseless.

Simultaneously, however, the CIA's own Inspector General conducted a classified internal investigation that eventually confirmed my allegations of drug-dealing by CIA assets. Five years later, long after my charges had been forgotten, a Senate Committee published a few revealing fragments from this secret report buried in the back pages of its massive investigation into CIA assassinations.

The Inspector General had, back in 1972, expressed "some concern" that "local officials with whom we are in contact ... have been or may be still involved in one way or another in the drug business. ... What to do about these people is a particularly troublesome problem, in view of its implications for some of our operations, particularly in Laos." In something akin to a reprimand of the Vientiane station, the Inspector General suggested that "the station will need additional guidance from headquarters" in understanding "the possible adverse repercussions" of its ties to Lao drug dealers. "The war has clearly been our overriding priority in Southeast Asia, and all other issues have taken second place," the Inspector General concluded in defense of the Agency's long history of inaction on drugs in Laos. "It would be foolish to deny this, and we see no reason to do so."

By the mid-1970s, Golden Triangle heroin syndicates were supplying an estimated 30 percent of U.S. demand. But Asia was too far away and the connections were too indirect for allegations of CIA complicity to pack any political punch. Most Americans did not see the equation between Agency alliances with distant Asian drug lords and heroin-dealing in their own cities.

Within a few years, the currents of global geopolitics then shifted in ways that pushed the CIA into new alliances with drug traffickers. In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Sandinista revolution seized Nicaragua, prompting two CIA covert operations with some revealing similarities.

During the 1980s, while the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, the CIA, working through Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence, spent some $2 billion to support the Afghan resistance. When the operation started in 1979, this region grew opium only for regional markets and produced no heroin. Within two years, however, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979 to 5,000 in 1981 and to 1.2 million by 1985 -- a much steeper rise than in any other nation.

CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujaheddin guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests.

In May 1990, as the CIA operation was winding down, The Washington Post published a front-page expose charging that Gulbudin Hekmatar, the CIA's favored Afghan leader, was a major heroin manufacturer. The Post argued, in a manner similar to the San Jose Mercury News's later report about the contras, that U.S. officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies "because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there."

In 1995, the former CIA director of the Afghan operation, Charles Cogan, admitted the CIA had indeed sacrificed the drug war to fight the Cold War. "Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets. We didn't really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade," he told an Australian television reporter. "I don't think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout. ... There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan."

Again, distance and complexity insulated the CIA from any political fallout. Once the heroin left Pakistan's laboratories, the Sicilian mafia managed its export to the United States, and a chain of syndicate-controlled pizza parlors distributed the drugs to street gangs in American cities, according to report by the Drug Enforement Agency. Most ordinary Americans did not see the links between the CIA's alliance with Afghan drug lords, the pizza parlors, and the heroin on U.S. streets.

In Central America, proximity simplified the political equation. According to sections of the San Jose Mercury News story that the mainstream press have not contested, this "dark alliance" began in the early 1980s when the contra revolt against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government was failing for want of funds. In 1981, the CIA hired ex-Nicaraguan army Colonel Enrique Bermudez to organize what became the main contra guerrilla army, the Nicaraguan Democratic Front. Bermudez then accepted funds from two Nicaraguan exiles active in the crack trade to supplement meager Agency funding.

In California, Danilo Blandon, the former director of Nicaragua's farm-marketing program, used his business skills to open a new drug-distribution network. Blandon allied with the rising young black drug dealer "Freeway Rick" Ross to convert tons of cocaine into low-cost crack for a growing market among the city's poor African Americans. With supplies of cheap cocaine from Central America, Ross undercut rival dealers and built a booming drug business that spread up the California coast and across the Midwest. Ross and Blandon avoided arrest for years. But in the late 1980s, the operation lost its contra connection. Both dealers were soon arrested on drug charges. Freeway Rick started serving a ten-year sentence, while the Justice Department intervened to free the contra-connected Blandon and send him home as a well-paid Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) informant.

Other responsible sources have made similar allegations about contra involvement in cocaine smuggling to the United States. In December 1985, the Associated Press issued a story about the contra alliance with cocaine smugglers. "Nicaraguan rebels operating in northern Costa Rica have engaged in cocaine trafficking," wrote AP reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger, "in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua's leftist government, according to U.S. investigators and American volunteers who work with the rebels." As evidence, the reporters cited a CIA intelligence report noting "the contras in Nicaragua had bought aircraft with drug profits."

After lengthy investigations, a U.S. Senate subcommittee chaired by John Kerry, the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, issued a report in 1988 concluding that "individuals associated with the contra movement" were traffickers; cocaine smugglers had participated in "contra supply operations"; and the U.S. State Department had made "payments to drug traffickers ... for humanitarian assistance to the contras, in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted ... on drug charges."
During this decade of contra operations from bases in southern Honduras, the region was effectively closed to narcotics investigations. In 1983, at the height of the contra war, the DEA suddenly shut down its Honduran office even though the agent there, Tomas Zepeda, had, in his words, "generated a substantial amount of useful intelligence" about Honduran military involvement in the cocaine traffic to the United States. "The Pentagon made it clear that we were in the way," an anonymous DEA agent explained. "They had more important business." As host to the main contra bases and the CIA's supply operation, the Honduran military, like the commander of the Royal Laotian Army and Pakistani Intelligence, were spared investigation of their involvement in drug trafficking.

Looking back on these tangled, covert-action alliances, I do not believe that the CIA actually targeted any group of Americans for drug use --- whether GIs in South Vietnam or African Americans in South Central.

But it is indisputable that the CIA allied with warlords, colonels, and criminals who used the Agency's protection to deal drugs. CIA agents regarded narcotics as mere "fallout." For CIA agents in Laos, the heroin epidemic among GIs in Vietnam was only "fallout." For agents in Pakistan and Central America, drug shipments to America were just "fallout."

For Vietnam vets and African Americans who live with the pain of this fallout, such CIA involvement remains profoundly disturbing. And no amount of CIA blanket denials, no amount of backpedaling from the executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News, no amount of handwringing from The Washington Post, can make that pain go away.



Alfred W. McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, is the author of "The Politics of Heroin: The CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade."
   ____________________________________
Dear Readers:

  1. Collectively, the information - you are about to be exposed to - should be considered an unproven pattern of activities -- maybe, a conspiracy theory; individually, each section (selection - copy & paste TEXT) stands on its own.  

  2. the proto and traditional definition of terror and terrorism is The Government -- the state -- engaging in terror activities; the terror activities are usually visited upon the general population or an attack against a specific target list; later the terror's definition has suffered from mission creep, and the definition has morphed into the current terror, terrorism usage.  

  3. you should be suspect of the numbers (Hindu-Arabic numbering and notation).

  4. you should not 100% trust the dates, the timeline, or some of the names.

  5. The strongest statement I can make, in my opinion, is that numerous officials and people knew that some thing was going to happen, they were given general warning, plan was changed, rescheduling, some were given specific warning, not what is going to happen, because most likely they would not know anything about that, but maybe a strong nudge like, why don't you go on an over night trip to the country side outside of the city for awhile; IMHO, the 11 September 2001 incidents and sub-incidents were allowed to happen, ...;

  6. the following is not in dispute: the 11 September 2001 incidents dramatically changed the U.S. intelligence community, the national security structure, and initiated the United States invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq -- never mind the blood, lives, treasury, human power, and resources (take note of all transport activities - military, civilian, others) devoted to the aftermath.    

  7. establish a baseline (historical level of the budget and spending before the 11 September 2001); follow the money; monitor, track, and document the activities (the flow: inflow, outflow) of each line item (new and old line item), project (new and old project), program (new and old program), agency, organization (new and old organization), and re-organization.

  8. in my opinion, because of 11 September 2001, and other planes crash, I do not believe it is safe to fly; if you can, look to other transport; of course, people fly all the time and they got to their destination with no problem; for international travel, if you want to get there in reasonable time, you have to  fly; some airlines are more safe than others; some airports are inherently dangerous - frequent bad weather for landing and take off, low visibility, small valley surrounded by mountains, etc.; some pilots are just better -- has more experience; with recent news about Boeing, some airplanes are inherently dangerous -- especially when they are operated by non-U.S. company; weather is always a big factor.  

  9. the strongest counter argument is this:  what if they knew about 11 September 2001 incident, what if they block and stop 11 September 2001 from happening, what would the year 2021 world look like; if you can image that alternative reality, then you have an idea why I believe (with high confidence) they (the new Secret Team) allowed 11 September 2001 to happen.  It is a crazy world.

 10. another thing that is worth mentioning:  I don't know about you, and I don't know much about building demolition, but When I saw One (1) World Trade Center, and TWo (2) World Trade Center collapsed in a pancake-like-fashion on television, I thought nothing of it.  I thought nothing of it, that is until I read they publicly denied that it was a controlled demolition.  And then I heard about Seven (7) World Trade Center, on the same day 11 September 2001, collapsing like-a-pancake, in a controlled demotion like fashion.  With that piece of new information, the plot thickens.  Then I heard about this architecture guy making a big deal about 1 & 2 World Trade Center steel beam construction, and how it took real effort and work to cut those steel beams just so that they collapse like a pancake, aka controlled demolition and, then, and this {architecture guy} video was on youtube.com, just as he {architecture guy} was talking in the video, a clean cut young man in sunglasses, came by and made a short comment like, you should be careful or stay safe, that sort of comment; the video was being taped in a public space on the side walk somewhere.  Then I started to do a bit of imaginative guessing, building 1 & 2 world trade centers are big buildings - maybe two of the tallest  buildings in the world at the time (2001).  It must take a lot of work to placed all them explosive [shaped charge], wired them all up, placed them just right, and then to detonate the explosive such that the steel beam and the concrete reinforce support column would loose their ... .  The list of people with that kind of technical know how, expertise, and experience to do some thing of that sort is probably no bigger than 100-300 people in the entire world, I say.  Not one building, but two building on the same day.  And then with building 7 (seven) world trade centers, that is three buildings to be demolish on one day.  Imagine the permitting process, the environmental impact report, the paper work, the disruption, if they were to go through the normal process of demolition.  How much explosive, what kind of explosive, how much wiring, the manpower to do all the work, the information you would have to gather (pre-planning), the blueprint, the structure engineering information and knowledge specific to the three buildings.  This is not an 8 hours work day job.  You would need at least 24 hours of pre-planning, planning, coordination, and work to do all this.  Again, I repeat, the controlled demolition of three building, 1, 2, 7 WTC (World Trade Center).  Imagine for a moment, while all those people are leaving the buildings, we have people entering the buildings, with explosive, wiring, equipment, going to specific places in each of the building to place the explosive just right on the load bearing steel beam, wiring them all up, and then to later demolish the buildings on 11 September 2001.  With all those thoughts - imaginative guessing - I determine that there must be preknowledge of the 11 September 2001 incident.  At least 24-48-27 hours of preknowledge of what is going to happen to 1, 2, 7 WTC (World Trade Center) building and the surrounding demolition zone.  Of course, I could be wrong.  Maybe there is a crack military task force, or a civilian contractors specializing in controlled demolition, that is on-called, that can bring down three buildings on a short notice like that.  Maybe there are files, on a shelf, or in a metal cabinet with the all necesssary information needed to demolish the three buildings in easy to access places.

 11.  So the question is not if they know.  The questions are who know, who know what, how much did they know, and what did they know.  It comes down to the usual suspects:  Mister Who, Mister What, Mister When, Mister How-much, Mister How, Mister How-long, Mister Why, Mister For-what, and Mister Why-not.   
  <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
If you want to see if a thing is possible, plausible, and ..., you can use the “Golden Fish Method” or Ideal-Real Transition Method, as one way to see if the sequence of events, before, at the time, and after 11 September 2001 make sense for you.    

Semyon D. Savransky., Engineering of creativity, 2000

pp.181-182
“Golden Fish Method” or
Ideal-Real Transition Method
One of the main characteristics of inventive thinking is the ability to see the unusual within the usual and vice versa. Every fantasy or inventive situation consists of two parts: real things and fantastic grain. The aim of the Ideal-Real Transition Method (often called “Golden Fish Method” in honor of the famous tale) is to extract this fantastic grain. In order to do this, a fantastic situation is divided, step by step, into two parts -- real and fantastic -- until it cannot be divided any more. This indivisible part is called the “fantastic grain.” Altshuller gave a recurrent formula for resolving every fantastic situation

                           F0 = R1 + F1,

                      F1 = R2 + F2 (F2 < F1 < F0),

                      F2 = R3 + F3 (F3 < F2 < F1)

     Here R is the real part, and F is the fantastic part. The equation recurs until Fi will be so small that we may not consider it an unbelievable fantasy.
     Let's see how this method works on the example of the “tale of the golden fish.”
       The old man came to the sea and began to call the golden fish. The fish got to him and ask by human voice...


     Let's analyze this situation:
     Could an old man go to the sea? Yes, he could. So that part is real.
     We remove that part and are left to consider.

       The old man began to call the golden fish. The fish got to him and asked by human voice...


     Could an old man call the golden fish? Yes, he could. So that is also real. We are now left with

       The fish got to him and asked by human voice...


     Could some golden fish (we know that there are such fish) get near the old man? Yes, they could. So this bit is also real.

       The fish asked by human voice...


     Could the old man hear a voice from the fish? Yes, he could! We know that some fish make sounds. So that part is also real!

       human ...
 

     Could this voice be human? No, this could not. That is it! The fantastic grain of the situation is that the voice of the fish was human.
     But if we take even this fantasic thing of the golden fish story, we cannot consider it, because it can have a real explanation: Could it seem to an old man who does not hear well because of age that the golden voice is human?        Note that if the situation were a technical one, we would come to the physical contradiction determining the fantastic grain of the situation. For example, take the problem of creating pressure by a liquid, with the help of centrifugal forces, on a cylinder that is placed on the axis of the centrifugal rotation. The fantastic grain of the situation is that the direction of the centrifugal force is opposite to the direction of the needed pressure. One can easily formulate the physical contradiction now and then find its solution in the list of physical effects. (Try to do it yourself!)
     This method builds mastery of skills in the backward search of a problem's solutions that is important for some TRIZ instruments.

    ( Savransky, Semyon D., Engineering of creativity : introduction to TRIZ methodology of inventive problem solving / by Semyon D. Savransky., 1. engineering--methodology., 2. problem solving--methodology., 3. creative thinking., 4. technological innovations., 2000, )
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
WWII

Anderson and Knox offered eight specific plans to aggrieve the Japanese Empire

Commander McCollum was central to U.S. policy in the immediate pre-war period. Stinnett claims the memo suggests only a direct attack on U.S. interests would sway the American public (or Congress) to favor direct involvement in the European war, specifically in support of the British.

The memo outlined the general situation of several nations in World War II and recommended an eight-part course of action for the United States to take in regards to the Japanese Empire in the South Pacific, suggesting the United States provoke Japan into committing an "overt act of war"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollum_memo

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/McCollum/index.html

The Eight-Action plan
The McCollum memo contained an eight-part plan to counter rising Japanese power over East Asia:
   
  A. Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore
    
  B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies
    
  C. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang-Kai-Shek
    
  D. Send a division of long range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore
    
  E. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient
    
  F. Keep the main strength of the U.S. fleet now in the Pacific[,] in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands
    
  G. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil
    
  H. Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/McCollum/page4.gif
   ____________________________________
The McCollum Memo (Reality Bytes Episode 1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFdefBRRzVo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFdefBRRzVo

Published on Jul 14, 2014

Everyone knows the story of how the US was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941. It was a surprise attack that caught the US off guard. Was it really a surprise? Is there evidence that we should have known, and been ready? The McCollum Memo, also know as the Eight Actions Memo throws into question how the US became involved in WWII.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_advance-knowledge_conspiracy_theory

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/13/obituaries/capt-eric-nave-94-broke-japan-s-code-before-pearl-harbor.html

http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2013/11/20/u_s_in_world_war_ii_how_the_navy_broke_japanese_codes_before_midway.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_non-interventionism

Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, head of the Far East desk of the Office of Naval Inteligence (ONI)
   ____________________________________

Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, by Robert B. Stinnett

Robert Stinnett, Day of Deceit, 2001

http://mailstar.net/pearl-harbor.html
   ____________________________________

Bina Venkataraman., The optimist's telescope : thinking ahead in a reckless age, 2019

p.234
As Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach have pointed out, the attack on Pearl Harbor, though its timing was a surprise, was actually expected,

p.234
In 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt moved the Pacific naval fleet from its base in San Diego to Hawaii as a direct response to Japanese aggression. (No game, it seems, anticipated the kamikaze pilots.)

  (The optimist's telescope : thinking ahead in a reckless age / Bina Venkataraman., New York : Riverhead books, 2019., decision making──social aspects. | risk──sociological aspects. | forecasting., ddc 153.8/3──dc23, https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046076, 2019, )  
   ____________________________________

 University academics in the humanities today see their role as "deconstructing" the hidden power structures, but in the process they seemed to have dissolved the social glue which kept us all together; unfortunately these same academics have erected their own power structures, whose "deconstruction" they resolutely resist.

In short, acknowledging the power structures seems to destroy them (??); that is why, in whatever social system one is in, those who attempt this revealing are resisted and persecuted. It follows that there can never be a utopia; yet we keep on trying to reveal what is hidden, and in this way, old structures are transcended and new ones created.

http://mailstar.net/johnson.html

Consider Chalmers Johnson's analysis of the 1997 "Asia Crisis", at johnson.html; is it not conspiratorial? This great illuminator of the Japanese miracle also revealed that the West has its own forms of occluded power structures even more sophisticated than those of Japan Incorporated. Taken together, Mushakoji and Johnson, these greatest of social scientists, agree that the power structures of both East Asia and the West are occluded. As disclosers of occluded structures, they are forced to work somewhat in the dark.

source:
        http://mailstar.net/asia.html
   ____________________________________

Bina Venkataraman., The optimist's telescope : thinking ahead in a reckless age, 2019

p.219
Weapons change over decades and centuries
But he believes the drivers of war are immutable ── the same as they have been since the Trojan war
“Nations go to war over fear, over honor, and over interest”, he said, paraphasing his own favorite line from Thucydides.
Keeping history alive in collective memory, he believes, could help countries defend their interests more wisely.

p.219
Thucydides, oft-cited history of Peloponnesian war between Sparta and Athens that “the present, while never repeating the past exactly, must inevitably resemble it. Hence, so must the future.”

p.220
The Siege of Kut-al-Amara, about the defeat of the British-Indian garrison south of Baghdad by Ottomans in World War I.  The siege endured more than five months. 

  (The optimist's telescope : thinking ahead in a reckless age / Bina Venkataraman., New York : Riverhead books, 2019., decision making──social aspects. | risk──sociological aspects. | forecasting., ddc 153.8/3──dc23, https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046076, 2019, ) 
   ____________________________________

Kilcullen, David.
The accidental guerrilla : fighting small wars in the midst of a big one / David Kilcullen.
1. guerrilla warfare.
2. counterinsurgency.
3. military history, modern--20th century.
4. military history, modern--21st century.
5. Afghan War, 2001-06. Iraq war, 2003-07. War on Terrorism, 2001-08. United States--Military policy.

p.34
...  The escort commander was a young Punjabi major, a city boy from Lahore who now found himself up in the mountains commanding a unit of people who language he didn't speak and whose culture, history, and outlook were distinctly different from his own.  One afternoon, when we were eating together, after a long hot day in the hills, and discussing the latest developments with al Qa'ida, I used the term "foreign fighters."  He said, "You know, we Punjabis are the foreigners here on the frontier. Al Qa'ida has been here for 25 years, their leaders have married into the tribes, they have children and businesses here, they've become part of local society. It's almost impossible for outsiders, including the Pakistan army, to tell the terrorists apart from anybody else in the tribal areas, except by accident."  By ACCIDENT.  His word resonated in my mind, and I realized I now had a name for the phenomenon I had long recognized.

pp.40-41
   The most intriguing thing about this battle was not the Taliban, though; it was the behavior of the local people.  One reason the patrol was so heavily pinned down was that its retreat, back down the only road along the valley floor, was cut off by a group of farmers who had been working in the fields and, seeing the ambush being, rushed home to fetch their weapons and join in.  Three nearby villages participated, with people coming from as far as 5 kilometers away, spontaneously marching to the sound of the guns.  There is no evidence that the locals cooperated directly with the Taliban; indeed, it seems they had no directly political reason to get involved in the fight (several, questioned afterward, said they had no love for the Taliban and were generally well-disposed toward the Americans in the area).  But, they said, when the battle was right there in front of them, how could they not join in?  Did we understand just how boring it was to be a teenager in a valley in central Afghanistan?  This was the most exciting thing that had happened in their valley in years.  It would have shamed them to stand by and wait it out, they said.4
   4.  Uruzgan interview, September 27, 2006.

pp.43-44
   These leaders would have done well to remember the words of Sir Olaf Caroe, a famous old hand of the North-West Frontier of British India, ethnographer of the Pashtuns, and last administrator of the frontier province before independence, who wrote in 1958 that "unlike other wars, Afghan wars become serious only when they are over; in British times at least they were apt to produce an after-crop of tribal unrest [and] ... constant intrigue among the border tribes."8  Entering Afghanistan and capturing its cities is relatively easy; holding the country and securing the population is much, much harder: as the Soviets (with "assistance," and a degree of post-Vietnam schadenfreude, from Washington) discovered to their cost, like the British, Sikhs, Mughals, Persians, Mongols, and Macedonians before them.

p.186
For the Pathan saying is: "First come one Englishman, as a traveller or for shikar [hunting]; then come two and make a map; then comes an army and takes the country. It is better therefore to kill the first Englishman."
               Colonel G. J. Younghusband, The Story of the Guides (1908)

pp.227-232

          "ALL THE WORLD WAS GOING GHAZA"
Churchill was describing the operation of the Malakand Field Force around the village of Damadola, in Bajaur Agency, during the Great Frontier War of 1897--a tribal uprising inspired and exploited by religious leaders who co-opted local tribes' opposition to the encroachment of government authority (an alien and infidel presence) into their region.  This intrusion was symbolized by the building of roads into Gilgit, Chitral, and Dir, bringing British military garrisons closer to Bajaur, which borders on Afghanistan's Kunar valley, which I discussed in the context of another road-building program in chapter 2.  Ironically, this increase in government presence was driven by British fear of Russian expansionism across the Pamir ranges, not by a desire to control the independent tribes.  Members of tribal society were, in effect, pawns in a classic Great Game conflict driven by a geopolitical contest between imperial Russia and British India on the one hand and on the other, indigenous religious leaders (most notably Hazrat Sadullah Khan, from Buner in Swat, known to the British as the Mad Mullah) striving to cement their positions of influence.  A very similar situation applies today.
   The Malakand Field Force fought several major battles in the valleys around Dmadola, killed hundreds of tribal fighters, and destroyed dozens of houses in the village, many by burning and others through heavy artillery bombardment.100  Following the military compaign, political officers accompanying the force conducted punitive negotiations with the tribes, according to Churchhill's eyewitness account:

   Mr. Davis [the political officer] conducted the negotiations with the
   Màmunds.  On the 26th a Jirgah from the tribe came into camp [at Inàyat
   Qala, just under 3 miles from Damadola].  They deposited 4000 rupees
   as a token of submission, and brought in fifty firearms.  These, however,
   were the of the oldest and most antiquated types, and were obviously not the
   weapons with which so many soldiers had been killed and wounded.
   This was pointed out to the tribal representatives.  They protested that
   they had no others.... The political officer was firm, and his terms were
   explicit.  Either they must give up the 22 rifles capture from the
   35th Sikhs on the 16th, or their villages would be destroyed.  No other
   terms would he accept.  To this they replied, that they had not got the
   rifles.  They had all been taken, they said, and I think with truth, by the
   Afghan tribesmen from the Kunar Valley [who had participated in the
   battle of September 16, 1897, alongside the Mamunds].  These would
   not give up them up.  Besides--this also with truth--they had been taken
   in "fair war." ... They admitted to having sent their young men to attack
   the [British Forward Operating Bases at] Malakand and Chakdara.  "All
   the world was going ghaza [becoming warriors for the faith]," they said.
   They could not stay behind.  They also owned to having gone five miles
   from their valley to attack the camp at Markhanai.  Why had the Sirkar
   [government] burnt their village? They asked.  They had only tried to get
   even--for the sake of their honour.101

All the elements of Churchill's account will immediately be familiar to anyone who has served in Afghanistan or Pakistan in the "War on Terrorism."  Honor (nang)--driven behavior, tribal solidarity, cultural institution of revenge, generalized reciprocity and balanced opposition, placement of immense value on weapons, the jirga pleading an inability to account for the acounts of its young men or to control its tribal allies, crossborder raiding, advancement of religious justification for tribal militancy, coalescing of rival tribes in a temporatry alliance against external intrusion, and a harsh and alienating government response--all these elements of "Frontier tradition" are strongly in evidence in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) today.
   Indeed, the elders' comments to the British political officer in 1897 echo the words of the Afghan villagers interviewed by Americans in 2006 after the ambush I described in chapter 2, who argued that "it would have shamed them to stand by and wait the battle out."  Back in 1897, negotiation eventually failed, and in the consequence the British "destroyed all the villages in the centre of the valley, some 12 or 14 in number, and blew up with dynamite upwards of thirty towers and forts. The whole valley was filled with smoke."109
   Punitive raiding, collective punishment, and destruction of houses and villages 103 are still features of life on the Frontier, though the means have changed.  More than 110 years since being burned by the British, the same village of Damadola was the scene of an alleged CIA airstrike on January 13, ?006, using armed MQ-I Predator uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) against suspected AQ militants, which destroyed a house and killed 18 people, provoking widespread violent protests across Pakistan.104  The strike was launched against a dinner party celebrating the Muslim festival of Eid ul-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice, one of the two holiest feasts of the Sunni Islamic calendar.105  Though initially there were claims that Ayman al-Zawahiri was in the house and that one of his close relatives was killed in the attack, Pakistani and U.S. official later admitted that no senior militants were present and that only local villagers were killed, including women and children.106
   ____________________________________

[Nine Eleven - Afghanistan - Iraq timeline 1979, 2001]

December 1979 – February 1989
Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan (December 1979 – February 1989)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan
27 December 1979 – 15 February 1989 (9 years, 50 days)
The mujahideen found military and financial support from a variety of sources including the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Egypt, China and other nations. The Afghan war became a proxy war in the broader context of the late Cold War.

2000 July       the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, issued an extraordinary edict. It banned poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, calling drug production un-Islamic. Few in international law enforcement took Omar’s edict seriously
                As a result of this ban, opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan was reduced by 91% from the previous year. The ban was so effective that in Helmand Province, Afghanistan there was recorded no poppy cultivation during the 2001 season.
                ([ yes, in 2000, not 2001, Mullah Mohammed Omar outright banned poppy cultivation in Afghanistan; more than 365 days before 11 September 2001, and before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan ])
                source:  ???
 

[2000]
[September 24, 2000]  
According to page 28 of Clark’s book (William R. Clark, “Petrodollar warfare”):
       On September 24, 2000, Saddam Hussein allegedly “emerged from a meeting of his government and proclaimed that Iraq would soon transition its oil export transactions to the euro currency.”
On page 31, Clark adds   
      “CNN ran a very short article on its website on October 30, 2000, but after this one-day news cycle, the issue of Iraq’s switch to a petroeuro essentially disappeared from all five of the corporate-owned media outlets.”
      Was America’s goal to bring “democracy” to Iraq actually a guise for making an example of Iraq for threatening the petrodollar system? I don’t claim to know. However, the more that you consider the data, the more compelling the argument becomes.

2001 May    US Consul in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, U.S. introduced the Visa Express program; this program allowed Saudi Arabian residents, including non-citizens, to get valid visas through a travel agency using a much less restrictive standard than would have otherwise been required. They did not have to submit a proof of identity, but only had to provide a photograph and fill out a short form.
                At least three of the Saudi operatives entered the US using this method.
                B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeed_al-Ghamdi
                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_al-Nami
                source:  ???

2001 September  Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Northern Alliance Tribal Chief, Afghanistan, died from the injury of an exploding TV camera carried by two North African Arab reporters (possibly Tunisians), for an interview about his fight against the Taliban.
                source:  ???

2001 Sep 11     Two passenger jet planes crash into WTC twin skycrappers,  (google loose change, for the unofficial narrative on Nine11operation, counter-operation)

2001 Sep 11     WTC building 1, 2, 7 collapsed under controlled demolition

2001 Sep 11     The firefighters' radio channel was congested. Many communications overlapped and were impossible to understand.[24] After the South Tower fell, the Fire Department (FDNY) did issue an evacuation order for the North Tower. Some FDNY radios did not pick it up because radio communications were impeded in the high-rise building. In other cases, the channel was sufficiently noisy to drown out the order.[25] The Times concluded, "No other agency lost communications on Sept. 11 as broadly, or to such devastating effect, as the Fire Department."[26]
                source:  (Chapter 10 - Communication during Crises, Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies, by Susan Landau, 10.1 What Types of Communications Function in Crises?, p.?)


After math of 2001 Sep 11
                (The Americans & British military force invaded Afghanistan and the drugs trade flourished like never before?)
                {since the downfall of the Taliban in 2001, based on UNODC data, there has been more opium poppy cultivation in each of the past six growing seasons (2004-2009), than in any one year during Taliban rule. Also, more land is now used for opium in Afghanistan, than for coca cultivation in Latin America. In 2007, 93% of the opiates on the world market originated in Afghanistan}
                source:  ???
   ____________________________________
   ____________________________________
WTC 7, wtc 7, wtc seven, WTC Seven, Seven WTC, 7 WTC, 7 wtc
WTC Building 7
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_World_Trade_Center
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tenants_in_Seven_World_Trade_Center
Fl#     Companies
47     —
46     Salomon Smith Barney
45     Salomon Smith Barney
44     Salomon Smith Barney
43     Salomon Smith Barney
42     Salomon Smith Barney
41     Salomon Smith Barney
40     Salomon Smith Barney
39     Salomon Smith Barney
38     Salomon Smith Barney
37     Salomon Smith Barney
36     Salomon Smith Barney
35     Salomon Smith Barney
34     Salomon Smith Barney
33     Salomon Smith Barney
32     Salomon Smith Barney
31     Salomon Smith Barney
30     Salomon Smith Barney
29     Salomon Smith Barney
28     Salomon Smith Barney
27     Salomon Smith Barney, Standard Chartered Bank
26     Salomon Smith Barney, Standard Chartered Bank
25     Internal Revenue Service, Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency
24     Salomon Smith Barney, Internal Revenue Service Regional Council
23     Salomon Smith Barney, New York City Office of Emergency Management
22     Salomon Smith Barney, Federal Home Loan Bank
21     Salomon Smith Barney, First State Management Group, Inc, ITT Hartford Insurance Group
20     Salomon Smith Barney, ITT Hartford Insurance Group
19     Salomon Smith Barney, ITT Hartford Insurance Group, NAIC Securities
18     Salomon Smith Barney, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
17     —
16     —
15     —
14     —
13     Salomon Smith Barney, Provident Financial Management, American Express Bank International, Securities & Exchange Commission, Standard Chartered Bank
12     Securities & Exchange Commission
11     Securities & Exchange Commission
10     U.S. Secret Service, Standard Chartered Bank
9     U.S. Secret Service
8     American Express Bank International
7     American Express Bank International, Provident Financial Management
6     Salomon Smith Barney
5     Salomon Smith Barney
4     Salomon Smith Barney
3     Salomon Smith Barney
2     Salomon Smith Barney
1     Salomon Smith Barney
G     Salomon Smith Barney

http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/background/tenants.html

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/tenants7.html
 Building: 7 World Trade Center
Tenant                     Square Feet
                        Leased             Floor             Industry

Salomon Smith Barney     1,202,900     GRND,1-6,     Financial Institutions
                                        13,18-46
Internal Revenue
Service
Regional Council     90,430             24,25             Government

{{ Department of Defense and the CIA shared the 25th floor with the IRS of 7th  world trade center }}

U.S. Secret Service     85,343             9,10             Government

American Express Bank
International             106,117     7,8,13             Financial Institutions

Standard Chartered Bank 111,398     10,13,26,27     Financial Institutions

Provident Financial
Management             9,000             7,13             Financial Institutions

ITT Hartford Insurance
Group                     122,590     19-21     

First State Management
Group, Inc             4,000             21             Insurance

Federal Home Loan Bank     47,490             22             Financial Institutions

NAIC Securities     22,500             19             Insurance

Securities & Exchange
Commission             106,117     11,12,13     Financial Institutions

Mayor's Office
of Emergency Mgmt     45,815             23             Government
                    
????                                    14,15,16,
                                        17,

Tenant List provided by CoStar Group, Inc.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-cia-lost-office-in-wtc/
    The undercover station was in 7 World Trade Center, ...
    A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the existence of the office, which was first reported in Sunday's editions of The New York Times.
    The [CIA] New York station was behind the false front of another federal organization, which the Times did not identify. The station was a base of operations to spy on and recruit foreign diplomats stationed at the United Nations, while debriefing selected American business executives and others willing to talk to the CIA after returning from overseas.
    The agency is prohibited from conducting domestic espionage operations against Americans, but it maintains stations in a number of major United States cities, where CIA case officers try to meet and recruit students and other foreigners to return to their countries and spy for the United States.
    The New York station was believed to have been the largest and most important CIA domestic station outside the Washington area.
   ____________________________________
Sept 10, 2001: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announces that by some estimates the Department of Defense "cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions." CBS later calculates that 25% of the yearly defense budget is unaccounted for. A defense analyst says, "The books are cooked routinely year after year." [DOD, 9/10/01, CBS, 1/29/02]  This announcement was buried by the next day's news of 9/11.

Sept 11, 2001: In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, a US intelligence agency (the National Reconnaissance Office or NRO) was all set for an exercise at 9 AM on September 11th in which an aircraft would crash into one of its buildings near Washington, DC. [AP, 8/22/02] Four wargames were also in progress at the time of the attacks. [C-SPAN Congressional Testimony, 3/11/05, more]

Sept 11, 2001: 5:20 PM: WTC building 7 collapses. [CNN, 9/12/01] Though the media claims fires brought the building down, the building's owner Larry Silverstein later recounts the story of the collapse of this 47-story skyscraper in a PBS documentary America Rebuilds, "I remember getting a call from the fire department commander. ... I said ... maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it. And they made that decision to pull, and then we watched the building collapse." Over 3,000 architects and engineers later claim that contrary to the U.S. government's official story, it must have been controlled demolition. [PBS Documentary, 2nd PBS Documentary, more]

source:
        https://www.wanttoknow.info/911/9-11-facts
   ____________________________________
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings
    2001, September 11:
        American Airlines Flight 11,
        United Airlines Flight 175,
        American Airlines Flight 77,
        United Airlines Flight 93,
      were hijacked on the morning of September 11 by [[Al-Qaeda-affiliated extremists ???]].
     Flight 11 and 175 were deliberately crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center,
     Flight 77 was crashed into the Pentagon and Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after hijackers crashed the plane due to a revolt by passengers. Both towers of The World Trade Center collapsed; in total 2,996 people, including the 19 hijackers, were killed and over 6000 people were injured. The attacks led to the War on Terror.

 • Flight 11
    • American Airlines  Flight 11 , Boeing 767-223ER, registration number N334AA
    • American Airlines flight 11 hit 1 world trade center
    • The impact zone was between the 93rd and 99th floors (1 world trade center).
    • American Airlines
    • domestic flight
    • daily (M,Tu,W,Th,F) scheduled
    • morning transcontinental service
    • Source:      Logan International Airport, in Boston, Massachusetts,
    • Destination: to Los Angeles International Airport, in Los Angeles, California.
    • alleged hijackers:
       • Mohamed Atta        (Egyptian)
       • Waleed al-Shehri    (Saudi Arabian)
       • Wail al-Shehri      (Saudi Arabian)
       • Abdul aziz al-Omari (Saudi Arabian)
       • Satam al-Suqami     (Saudi Arabian)

         Abdulaziz Alomari
    USAF School of Aerospace Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas: The Washington Post reported that Abdulaziz Alomari (American Airlines 11) graduated from the school. Gannett News Service reported that Abdulaziz Alomari attended.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulaziz_al-Omari

Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi (9/11 hijackers supposedly id by Able Danger; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Danger)


 • Flight 175
    • United Airlines    Flight 175, Boeing 767-200, registration number N612UA
    • United Airlines flight 175 hit 2 world trade center approximate 17 minute later
    • United Airlines Flight 175 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight
    • domestic
    • scheduled flight
    • Source: from Logan International Airport, in Boston, Massachusetts,
    • Destination: to Los Angeles International Airport, in Los Angeles, California.
    • alleged hijackers:
       • Marwan al-Shehhi  (United Arab Emirates)
       • Fayez Banihammad  (United Arab Emirates)
       • Mohand al-Shehri  (Saudi Arabian)
       • Hamza al-Ghamdi   (Saudi Arabian)
       • Ahmed al-Ghamdi   (Saudi Arabian)

 • Flight 77
    • American Airlines  Flight 77 , Boeing 757-223 (registration N644AA)
    • Flight 77 was crashed into the Pentagon
    • The Boeing 757-223 aircraft was flying American Airlines' daily scheduled morning transcontinental service from Washington Dulles International Airport, in Dulles, Virginia to Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, California.
    • daily scheduled
    • source: from Washington Dulles International Airport, in Dulles, Virginia
    • destination: to Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, California.
    • alleged hijackers:
       • Hani Hanjour       (Saudi Arabian)
       • Khalid al-Mihdhar  (Saudi Arabian)
       • Majed Moqed        (Saudi Arabian)
       • Nawaf al-Hazmi     (Saudi Arabian)
       • Salem al-Hazmi     (Saudi Arabian)

 • Flight 93
    • United Airlines    Flight 93 , Boeing 757–222, registration N591UA
    • Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania
    • The aircraft involved, a Boeing 757–222, was flying United Airlines' daily scheduled morning domestic flight from Newark International Airport in New Jersey to San Francisco International Airport in California.
    • domestic flight
    • daily scheduled
    • source: from Newark International Airport in New Jersey
    • destination: to San Francisco International Airport in California.
    • alleged hijackers:
       • Ziad Jarrah       (Lebanese)
       • Ahmed al-Haznawi  (Saudi Arabian)
       • Ahmed al-Nami    (Saudi Arabian) (B-1/B-2 visa in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
       • Saeed al-Ghamdi  (Saudi Arabian) (B-1/B-2 visa in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)

                B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeed_al-Ghamdi
                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_al-Nami
                source:  ???
   ____________________________________
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziad_Jarrah

    http://infowars.net/articles/february2007/250207Hijackers.htm

    http://www.wanttoknow.info/050407hijackersmilitarytraining911.shtml

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x367297
    Lt. Col. Steve Butler
     When they arrived in the United States, five of the hijackers received training at secure military installations. This was reported as early September 16, 2001 by The New York Times. Mohammed Atta attended the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force in Alabama. Saeed Alghamdi studied at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey,

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeed_al-Ghamdi
     Lt. Col. Steve Butler was vice chancellor for student affairs while Alghamdi was a student. In a letter published May 26, 2002, Butler charged "Bush knew of the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism. What is...contemptible is the President of the United States not telling the American people what he knows for political gain." Butler was removed from his position and threatened with court martial.
     According to its web site, the Defense Language Institute provides foreign language services to "Department of Defense, government agencies and foreign governments" to support "national security interests and global operational needs." Why was Alghamdi there? Why did he enter the US through a visa office run as a CIA operation? And what are we to make of the French Intelligence reports of the CIA meeting bin Laden himself in a Dubai hospital in July 2001?

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/06/offi-j21.html
    “The Defense Department said Mr. Atta had gone to the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama; Mr. al-Omari to the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas; and Mr. al-Ghamdi to the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio in Monterey, Calif.”
    The Knight Ridder news service also reported that Saeed Alghamdi had been to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey and the Associated Press cited Air Force sources indicating that more than one of the hijackers may have received language training at the installation.
   ____________________________________
 • Flight 11
    • American Airlines  Flight 11 , Boeing 767-223ER, registration number N334AA
    • American Airlines flight 11 hit 1 world trade center
    • The impact zone was between the 93rd and 99th floors.
    • list of passengers on the flight (their calendar and schedule)
    • crews, pilot, co-pilot on the flight (their schedule)

 • Flight 175
    • United Airlines    Flight 175, Boeing 767-200, registration number N612UA
    • United Airlines flight 175 hit 2 world trade center approximate 17 minute later
    • list of passengers on the flight (their calendar and schedule)
    • crews, pilot, co-pilot on the flight (their schedule)

 • Flight 77
    • American Airlines  Flight 77 , Boeing 757-223 (registration N644AA)
    • Flight 77 was crashed into the Pentagon
    • list of passengers on the flight (their calendar and schedule)
    • crews, pilot, co-pilot on the flight (their schedule)

 • Flight 93
    • United Airlines    Flight 93 , Boeing 757–222, registration N591UA
    • list of passengers on the flight (their calendar and schedule)
    • crews, pilot, co-pilot on the flight (their schedule)
   ____________________________________
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor_Fitzgerald
    Cantor Fitzgerald's corporate headquarters and New York City office,[7][8] on the 101st–105th floors of One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan (2–6 floors above the impact zone of a hijacked airliner), were destroyed during the September 11, 2001 attacks.
    • The impact zone was between the 93rd and 99th floors (1 world trade center).

http://www.fact-index.com/c/ca/cantor_fitzgerald_securities.html

Cantor Fitzgerald Securities
Cantor Fitzgerald Securities is an investment bank specializing in bond trading. It owns the eSpeed network.

Its New York office, on the 101st-105th floors of One World Trade Center, lost 685 employees in the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack, considerably more than any other employer, including the FDNY. This was about 2/3 of its employees.

eSpeed had sponsored the U.S. Naval War College "NewRuleSets" research program, which used the two towers of the World Trade Center with a lightning bolt through them as its logo. It had been known since an earlier attack on the WTC in 1993 that it was a major target of asymmetric warfare and terrorism.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050829170056/http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/projects/newrulesset/NewRuleSets_Project%20Summary%20Page.htm

See also: One World Trade Center tenants

http://www.fact-index.com/o/on/one_world_trade_center_tenants.html

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Carville
    At the beginning of the Clinton administration in the early 1990s, adviser James Carville was stunned at the power the bond market had over the government. If he came back, Carville said: I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.
    Wall Street Journal (February 25, 1993, p. A1)
   ____________________________________
http://911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/guardian2/wtc/clifton.htm
    One curious aspect of the South Tower collapse was that almost all the staff and 940 registered guests of the 22 floor Marriott World Trade Center Hotel (WTC3) apparently anticipated the collapse and evacuated, even though no one had as yet predicted the collapse of the South Tower. Two staff and one guest died in the collapse. The hotel was totally obliterated when debris from the South Tower rained down upon it.
   ____________________________________

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_World_Trade_Center
   ____________________________________

http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=anthraxattacks&anthraxattacks_other=anthraxattacks_patriot_act

http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/2007/09/918.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks
    October 2-4, 2001: Senators Daschle and Leahy Raise Concerns about Newly Introduced Patriot Act

The “anti-terrorism” Patriot Act is introduced in Congress on October 2, 2001 (see October 2, 2001), but it is not well received by all. [US Congress, 10/2/2001] One day later, Senate Majority Leader and future anthrax target Tom Daschle (D-SD) says he doubts the Senate will take up this bill in the one week timetable the administration wants. As head of the Senate, Daschle has great power to block or slow passage of the bill. Attorney General John Ashcroft accuses Senate Democrats of dragging their feet. [Washington Post, 10/3/2001] On October 4, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman and future anthrax target Patrick Leahy (D-VT) accuses the Bush administration of reneging on an agreement on the bill. Leahy is in a key position to block or slow the bill. Some warn that “lawmakers are overlooking constitutional flaws in their rush to meet the administration’s timetable.” Two days later, Ashcroft complains about “the rather slow pace…over his request for law enforcement powers… Hard feelings remain.” [Washington Post, 10/4/2001] The anthrax letters to Daschle and Leahy are sent out between October 6-9 as difficulties in passing the Patriot Act continue (see October 6-9, 2001).

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=141x1719

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001–present)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Terror
   ____________________________________
   ____________________________________
1817

By 1817, the British hit upon counter-trading in a narcotic, Indian opium, as a way to both reduce the trade deficit and finally gain profit from the formerly money-losing Indian Colony.
Opium was produced in traditionally cotton-growing regions of India under British East India Company monopoly (Bengal) and in the Princely states (Malwa) outside the company's control. Both areas had been hard hit by the introduction of factory produced cotton cloth, which used cotton grown in Egypt. The opium was sold on the condition that it be shipped by British traders to China.


1834

A turning point came in 1834.
Americans introduced opium from Turkey, which was of lower quality but cheaper. Competition drove down the price of opium and increased sales.
   ____________________________________
"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy"

IMF
First you open up the capital markets. That is, you sell off your local banks to foreign banks. Then you go to what's called market-based pricing. That's the stuff like in California where everything is free market and you end up with water bills - we can't even imagine selling off water companies in the United States of America. But imagine if a private company like Enron owned your water. So then the prices go through the roof. Then open up your borders to trade - complete free marketeering. And Stiglitz who was the chief economist, remember he was running this system, he was their numbers man and he was saying it was like the opium wars. He said this isn't free trade; this is coercion trade. This is war. They are taking apart economies through this.

Yea, he called it briberization, which is you sell off the water company and that's worth, over ten years, let's say that that's worth about 5 billion bucks, ten percent of that is 500 million, you can figure out how it works. I actually spoke to a Senator from Argentina two weeks ago. I got him on camera. He said that after he got a call from George W. Bush in 1988 saying give the gas pipeline in Argentina to Enron, that's our current president. He said that what he found was really creepy was that Enron was going to pay one-fifth of the world's price for their gas and he said how can you make such an offer? And he was told, not by George W. but by a partner in the deal, well if we only pay one-fifth that leaves quit a little bit for you to go in your Swiss bank account. And that's how it's done.

Political-economic Warfare 101:
the four core ideas of economic warfare

  free flow of capital -- enable speculation (boom & bust)
       /\
       ||
       ||
       \/
  weapon against [democracy]
       /\
       ||
       ||
       \/
  financial liberisation* (code & core idea)
       ||
       ||
       \/
  undermine [democracy] *4


Joseph Stiglitz’s whistle blowing about the IMF PLAN

IMF four-steps program:

1. Privatization 'Briberization.'

2. IMF/World Bank capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out the "Hot Money" cycle.

3. Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gasm - "The IMF riot."

4. IMF and World Bank call their "poverty reduction strategy": Free Trade.

*3   The long version.
     Written by Gregory Palast

 1. Privatization 'Briberization.'
     Step One is privatisation. Stiglitz said that rather than objecting to the sell-offs of state industries, some politicians - using the World Bank's demands to silence local critics - happily flogged their electricity and water companies. 'You could see their eyes widen' at the possibility of commissions for shaving a few billion off the sale price.
     And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of the biggest privatisation of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. 'The US Treasury view was: "This was great, as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We DON'T CARE if it's a corrupt election." '
     Most sick-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that national output was cut nearly in half.

 2. IMF/World Bank capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out the "Hot Money" cycle.
     After privatisation, Step Two is capital market liberalisation. In theory this allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money often simply flows out.
     Stiglitz calls this the 'hot money' cycle. Cash comes in for speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days.
     'The result was predictable,' said Stiglitz. Higher interest rates demolish property values, savage industrial production and drain national treasuries.
 
 3. Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas - "The IMF riot."
     At this point, according to Stiglitz, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: market-based pricing - a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls 'the IMF riot'.
     The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, 'down and out, [the IMF] squeezes the last drop of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up,' - as when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots.
     There are other examples - the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and, this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank.
     The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by bullets, tanks and tear gas) cause new flights of capital and government bankruptcies.  This economic arson has its bright side - for foreigners, who can then pick off remaining assets at fire sale prices.

 4. IMF and World Bank call their "poverty reduction strategy": Free Trade.
     Now we arrive at Step Four: free trade. This is free trade by the rules of the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank, which Stiglitz likens to the Opium Wars. 'That too was about "opening markets",' he said. As in the nineteenth century, Europeans and Americans today are kicking down barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa while barricading our own markets against the Third World 's agriculture.
     In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades. Today, the World Bank can order a financial blockade, which is just as effective and sometimes just as deadly.
     Stiglitz has two concerns about the IMF/World Bank plans. First, he says, because the plans are devised in secrecy and driven by an absolutist ideology, never open for discourse or dissent, they 'undermine democracy'. Second, they don't work. Under the guiding hand of IMF structural 'assistance' Africa's income dropped by 23%.

(From Gregory Palast writing; Sunday April 29, 2001; The Observer; ‘How crises, failures, and suffering finally drove a Presidential adviser to the wrong side of the barricades’; )
   ____________________________________
Ha-Joon Chang, Economics : the user's guide, 2014

first published 2014
this paperback edition published 2015

pp.222-223
   In 1982, Chile got into a major banking crisis, following the radical financial market liberalization in the mid-1970s under the Pinochet dictatorship
   late 1980s, the Saving and Loans (S&L) companies in the US got into massive troubles,
   the 1990s started with banking crisis in Sweden, Finland and Norway, following their financial deregulation in the late 1980s,
   Then there was the ‘tequila’ crisis in Mexico in 1994 and 1995.
   This was followed by crisises in the ‘miracle’ economies of Asia ─ Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea ─ in 1997, which had resulted from their financial opening up and deregulation in the late 1980 and the early 1990s.
   On the heels of the Asian crisis came the Russian crisis of 1998.
   The Brazilian crisis followed in 1999 and the Argentinian one in 2002, both in part the results of financial deregulation.

p.238
; this is known as the reference group.  We actually don't really care that much how well people who do not belong to our own reference groups are doing.*

p.39
The fact is that capitalism developed first in Western Europe.

p.41
this expansion involved expropriating land, resources and people for labour from the native populations through colonialism.

p.42
   Beginning with Portugal in Asia and Spain in the Americas from the late 15th century, the Western European nations ruthlessly move out.  By the middle of the 18th century, North America was divided up between Britain, France and Spain.  Most Latin American countries were ruled by Spain and Portugal until the 1810s and the 1820s.  Parts of India were ruled by the British (mainly Bengal and Bihar), the French (the south-eastern coast) and the Portuguese (various coastal areas, especially Goa).  

Ha-Joon Chang, Economics : the user's guide, 2014
 <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
http://247wallst.com/2011/02/10/the-12-most-profitable-international-crimes/
http://247wallst.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/cocaine-flow.jpg

1. Illicit Drugs
> Annual Revenues From Illicit Trade: $300 billion
> Source Countries: Mexico, Myanmar, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Afghanistan
> Destination Countries: The United States, Canada, Western Europe, Russia, China
> Interesting Fact: In 2009, Afghanistan produced nearly 7,000 tons of opium, well more than double it’s pre-war output.

According to the 2010 United Nations Office on Drugs And Crimes (UNODC) World Drug Report, Marijuana and Amphetamines are typically produced and sold without crossing international borders. This leaves cocaine and opiates to make up the $300 billion a year international drug trade. The majority of both of these drugs are produced in developing nations. Almost all cocaine is produced in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. The UNODC estimates the global cocaine trade is worth $88 billion per year.  Afghanistan produces roughly 75% of the world’s opiates, with Mexico and Myanmar contributing most of the balance. The UN estimates the international drug trade to be worth $65 billion per year. Of the $35 billion in profits made from selling cocaine to Americans, only $500 million were realized by coca farmers, while dealers within the U.S. made more than $29 billion.

source: ???
   ____________________________________
opium,
heroin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
The Opium Wars refer to:
    * The First Opium War (1839–1842), fought between Britain and China
    * The Second Opium War (1856–1860), fought by Britain and France against China
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Opium_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

Qing officials believed that trade incited unrest and disorder, promoted piracy, and threatened to compromise information on China's defences.

Qing officials believed that trade incited unrest and disorder, promoted piracy, and threatened to compromise information on China's defences.[5] The Qing instituted a set of rigid and incomplete regulations regarding trade at Chinese ports; setting up four maritime customs offices (in Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu) and a sweeping 20 percent tariff on all foreign goods. These policies only succeeded in establishing a system of kickbacks and purchased monopolies that enriched the officials who administered coastal regions.

assigned them "tributary" status with missions limited at the will of the imperial court.

This arrangement became increasingly unacceptable to European nations, in particular the British.
   ____________________________________

[p.24]
On 30 June 1997, Hong Kong was officially handed back to China by its last British governor, Christopher Patten.  Many British commentators fretted about the fate of Hong Kong's democracy under the Chinese Communist Party, although democratic elections in Hong Kong had only been permitted as late as 1994, 152 years after the start of British rule and only three years before the planned hand-over.  But no one seems to remember how Hong Kong came to be a British possession in the first place.
    Hong Kong became a British colony after the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the result of the Opium War.  This was a particularly shameful episode, even by the standards of 19th-century imperialism.  The growing British taste for tea had created a huge trade deficit with China.  In a desperate attempt to plug the gap, Britain started exporting opium produced in India to China.  The mere detail that selling opium was illegal in China could not possibly be allowed to obstruct the noble cause of balancing the books.  When a Chinese official seized an illicit cargo of opium in 1841, the British government used it as an excuse to fix the problem once and for all by declaring war.  China was heavily defeated in the war and forced to sign the Treaty of Nanking, which made China 'lease' Hong Kong to Britain and give up its right to set its own tariffs.
    So there it was - the self-proclaimed leader of the 'liberal' world declaring war on another country because the latter was getting in the way of its illegal trade in narcotics.  The truth is that the free movement of goods, people, and money that developed under British hegemony between 1870 and 1913 - the first episode of globalization - was made possible, in large part, by military might, rather than market forces.  Apart from Britain itself, the practitioners of free trade during this period were mostly weaker countries that had been forced into, rather than had voluntarily adopted, it as a result of colonial rule or 'unequal treaties' (like the Nanking Treaty), which, among other things, deprived them of the right to set tariffs and imposed externally determined low, flat-rate tariffs (3-5%) on them.8
    (Chang, Ha-Joon., HF1713.C5185 2008, 382.71--dc22, copyright © 2008)
(Bad samaritans: the myth of free trade and the secret history of capitalism / Ha-Joon Chang., 1. free trade, 2. capitalism, p.24 )
   ____________________________________
Johnson, Chalmers A.
Nemesis : the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson.

p.77
    ...  For example, both Ferguson and the Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire skip lightly over the fact that the empire operated the world's largest and most successful drug cartel.  During the 19th century, Britain fought two wars of choice with China to force it to import opium.  The opium grown in India and shipped to China first by the British East India Company and after 1857 by the government of India, helped Britain finance much of its military and colonial budgets in South and Southeast Asia.  The Australian scholar Carl A. Trocki concludes that, given the huge profits from the sale of opium, "without the drug, there probably would have been no Britsh empire." 66
     (Johnson, Chalmers A., copyright © 2006)
(Nemesis : the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson., 1. united states--foreign relations--1989, 2. united states--military policy--, 3. united states--politics and government--1989, p.77)
   ____________________________________

Vietnam War {November 1955 April 1975 (19 years, 180 days)}

Southeast Asia's "Golden Triangle" opium region
The Golden Triangle (parts of Burma, Thailand and Laos)
During 1950s to early 1970s, U.S. military involvement in Laos and other parts of Indochina, Air America flew opium and heroin throughout the area. A laboratory built at CIA headquarters in northern Laos was used to refine heroin. After a decade of American military intervention, Southeast Asia had become the source of 70 percent of the world’s illicit opium and the major supplier of raw materials for America’s booming heroin market. Australia still smells with the drug money which poured into the continent during 1973 to 1980 through The Nugan Hand Bank of Sydney which was a CIA bank in all but name.
overlaps the mountains of four countries of Southeast Asia: Burma, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Along with Afghanistan in the Golden Crescent and Pakistan, it has been one of the most extensive opium-producing areas of Asia and of the world since the 1920s. Most of the world's heroin came from the Golden Triangle until the early 21st century when Afghanistan became the world's largest producer.
The Golden Triangle also designates the confluence of the Ruak River and the Mekong river
   ____________________________________

Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan (December 1979 – February 1989)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan
27 December 1979 – 15 February 1989 (9 years, 50 days)
The mujahideen found military and financial support from a variety of sources including the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Egypt, China and other nations. The Afghan war became a proxy war in the broader context of the late Cold War.
   ____________________________________
http://www.voxfux.com/features/cia_drug_trafficking2.html

In August of last year, the San Jose Mercury newspaper in the San Francisco Bay Area reported that a syndicate allied with Nicaragua's CIA-backed contras had delivered tons of cocaine to Los Angeles gangs during the 1980s. The Mercury concluded, "The contra-run drug network opened the first conduit between Colombia's cartels and L.A.'s black neighborhoods. It's impossible to believe that the CIA didn't know." . . . . The Congressional Black Caucus demanded an investigation.

Marseilles Corsicans, Lao generals, Thai police, Nationalist Chinese irregulars, Afghan rebels, Pakistani intelligence, Haitian colonels, Mexican police units, Guatemalan military

Asian opium zone that stretches for five thousand miles from Turkey to Thailand, making these rugged, opium-producing highlands a key

the CIA and allied agencies found that ethnic warlords were its most effective covert action assets.

the steady increase in America's drug problem since the end of World War II, I can thus discern periodic increases in drug supply that coincide, if only approximately, with covert operations in the drug zones.

The sudden growth of the Golden Triangle opium production in the 1950s appears in retrospect a response to two stimuli: prohibition and protection.

Responding to pressures from the UN, Southeast Asia's governments abolished legal opium sales. They closed the legal opium-smoking dens between 1950 and 1961, thereby creating a sudden demand for illicit opium in the cities of Southeast Asia.

The second factor: protection. An alliance of three intelligence agencies, Thai, American and Nationalist Chinese, played a catalytic role in promoting the production of raw opium on the Shan Plateau of northern Burma. During the early 1950s, the CIA covert operations in northern Burma fostered political alliances that inadvertently linked the poppy fields of northern Burma with the region's urban drug markets. After the collapse of the Nationalist Chinese government in 1949, some of its forces fled across the border into Burma, where the CIA equipped them for several aborted invasions of China in 1950.

To retaliate against Communist China for its intervention into the Korean War, President Truman had ordered the CIA to organize these Nationalist elements inside Burma for an invasion of China. The idea was that the masses of southwestern China would rise up in revolt against communism and China would evidently pull its troops out of Korea, and our troops in Korea would be saved. The logic was bizarre, and the records for this operation remain secret, I suspect, because it was one of the most disastrously foolish operations mounted by any agency of the U.S government.

After their invasions of 1950 were repulsed with heavy casualties, these Nationalist troops camped along the border for another decade and turned to opium trading to finance their operations. Forcing local hill tribes that produced opium, the Nationalist troops supervised a massive increase of opium production on the Shan Plateau of Burma. After the Burmese army evicted them in 1961, the Nationalist forces established a new base camp just across the Burma border in Thailand and from there dominated the Burma opium trade until the mid-1980s. By the early 1960s, when this CIA operation finally ended, Burma's opium production had risen from fifteen to three hundred tons, thus creating the opium zone that we now call the Golden Triangle.

During their own Vietnam War, French military integrated opium trafficking with covert operations in a complex of alliances that the CIA would later inherit. After abolition of the opium monopoly in 1950, French military imposed centralized covert controls over an illicit drug traffic that linked the Hmong tribal poppy fields of Laos with the opium dens then operating in Saigon, generating profits that funded French [covert] operations during their Vietnam War from 1950-1954.

When America replaced the French in Vietnam after 1954, the CIA took over the covert alliances and their involvement in opium trading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Connection

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IndoChina1886.jpg
   ____________________________________
Opium and Afghanistan: Reassessing U.S. Counternarcotics Strategy
Authored by Lieutenant Colonel John A. Glaze.
October 22, 2007
Cultivation and production of opium in Afghanistan have skyrocketed since the Taliban were toppled in 2001 such that Afghanistan now supplies 92 percent of the world’s illicit opium.
   ____________________________________
http://www.intheknowzone.com/heroin/history.htm

History of Opium, Morphine, and Heroin

As long ago as 3400 B.C., the opium poppy was cultivated in lower Mesopotamia. The Sumerians called it as Hul Gil, the 'joy plant.' The Sumerians’ knowledge of poppy cultivation passed to the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and ultimately, the Egyptians.

By 1300 B.C. the Egyptians were cultivating opium thebaicum, named for their capital city of Thebes. From Thebes, the Egyptians traded opium all over the Middle East and into Europe. Throughout this period, opium’s effects were considered magical or mystical.

Some eight hundred years later, the Greek physician, Hippocrates, dismissed the idea that opium was "magical." Instead, he noted its effectiveness as a painkiller and a styptic (a drug used to staunch bleeding.)

Around 330 B.C. Alexander the Great introduced opium to the people of Persia and India, where the poppies later came to be grown in vast quantities. By A.D. 400, opium thebaicum was first introduced to China by Arab traders.

During the Middle Ages in Europe, when anything from the East was linked to the Devil, opium went unmentioned and unused in Europe. However, the surge of seafaring and exploring reintroduced the drug in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Portuguese sailors are thought to have been the first to smoke opium, around 1500. As with any drug, smoking opium has an instantaneous effect, contrasted with eating or drinking the drug.

Laudanum, an alcoholic solution of opium, was first compounded by Paracelsus about 1527. The preparation was widely used up through the 19th century to treat a variety of disorders. The addictive property of opium (or laudanum) was not yet understood. A leading brand of laudanum, Sydenham's Laudanum, was introduced in England in 1680.

Purely recreational use of opium gained some prevalence in the early 1600s in Persia and India, where it was either eaten or drunk in various mixtures. The heavy traffic of trade and exploration by sea continued to spread the traffic of opium around the world during this period. Opium was traded everywhere from China to England. In fact, in 1606 ships chartered by Elizabeth I were instructed to purchase the finest Indian opium and transport it back to England.

The eighteenth century saw greater incursions of the opium trade into China, along with the practice of smoking the drug in pipes. The British undertook creating a demand for opium in China in order to create a trade balance for all off the tea from China they required. The opium problem became widespread enough to inspire a Chinese ban, in 1729, of the use of opium for anything other than licensed medical use. Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, the British East India Company dominated the opium trade out of Calcutta to China.

The amount of opium sold into China was approximately two thousand chests of opium per year by 1767, and by 1858, that number had risen to 70,000 chests of opium. By the end of the century, the British East India Company had a complete monopoly on the Indian opium trade. In 1799, all opium trade was banned in China, but by then millions of Chinese were addicted. In some coastal provinces, 90% of Chinese adults were opium addicts by the mid-1830s.

Not to be outdone, the British Levant Company began, in 1800, to purchase nearly half of all of the opium coming out of Smyrna, Turkey for export to Europe and the United States.

In 1803, Friedrich Sertuerner of Germany synthesized morphine (principium somniferum) for the first time, and discovered the active ingredient of the opium poppy, which Linnaeus had first classified in 1753 as papaver somniferum. The discovery of morphine was considered a milestone. The medical community declared that opium had been "tamed." Morphine’s reliability, long-lasting effects, and safety were extolled. In fact, despite its potential for addiction, morphine is still the premier drug used for extreme pain in hospitals and for end-of-life care.

Following the 1799 ban on opium in China, opium smuggling began to be a crowded industry, with several well-known Americans entering the trade. Charles Cabot and John Cushing, of Boston, worked separately to amass opium-smuggling wealth. John Jacob Astor of New York City smuggled ten tons of opium into China under his American Fur Company banner, but later confined his opium selling to the English trade.

English artists, writers, and other luminaries were famously experimenting with and becoming addicted to opium in the early 19th century. By 1830, British use of opium for both medicinal and recreational purposes was at an all time high. 22,000 pounds of opium were imported from Turkey and India that year.

Laudanum continued to be popular, and was actually cheaper than beer or wine. Patent medicines (non-prescription "cures" of all descriptions,) and opium preparations such as Dover's Powder were readily available. The incidence of opium dependence grew steadily in England, Europe, and the United States during the first half of the 19th century by means of these treatments. Working-class medicinal use of products containing opium as sedatives for children was especially common in England. Those using opium for recreational purposes seem to have been primarily English literary and creative personalities, such as Thomas de Quincey, Byron, Shelley, Barrett-Browning, Coleridge, and Dickens.

The First Opium War between China and England began in 1839 as a result of a Chinese ban on opium traffic, and an order for all foreign traders to surrender their opium. In 1841, the British defeated the Chinese and took possession of Hong Kong as part of their bounty. The Second Opium War of 1856 finally made the importation of opium into China legal again, against the wishes of the Chinese government.

Dr. Alexander Wood of Edinburgh discovered the technique injecting morphine with a syringe in 1843. The effects of injected morphine were instantaneous and three times more potent than oral administration.

Heroin (diacetylmorphine) was first synthesized in 1874 by English researcher, C.R. Wright. The drug went unstudied and unused until 1895 when Heinrich Dreser working for The Bayer Company of Germany, found that diluting morphine with acetyls produced a drug without the common morphine side effects. Heroin was considered a highly effective medication for coughs, chest pains, and the discomfort of tuberculosis. This effect was important because pneumonia and tuberculosis were the two leading causes of death at that time, prior to the discovery of antibiotics. Heroin was touted to doctors as stronger than morphine and safer than codeine. It was thought to be nonaddictive, and even thought to be a cure for morphine addiction or for relieving morphine withdrawal symptoms. Because of its supposed great potential, Dreser derived his name for the new drug from the German word for `heroic.'

After decades of promoting the consumption of opium, Britain in 1878 passed the Opium Act to reduce opium consumption in China, India, and Burma. Under the new regulation, the selling of opium was restricted to registered Chinese opium smokers and Indian opium eaters.

In 1886, the British acquired Burma's northeast region, the Shan state. Production and smuggling of opium along the lower region of Burma thrived despite British efforts to maintain a strict monopoly on the opium trade. To this day, the Shan state of Burma (now known as Myanmar) is one of the world’s leading centers of opium production.

During the early years of the 20th century, the Chinese leadership worked in a variety of ways to stop the flow of opium into their country. In 1910, after 150 years of failed attempts to rid the country of opium, the Chinese were finally able to convince the British to dismantle the India-China opium trade.

Despite the 1890 U.S. law-enforcement legislation on narcotics, which imposed a tax on opium and morphine, consumption of the drugs, along with heroin, grew rapidly at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Various medical journals of the time wrote of heroin as a morphine step-down cure. Other physicians argued, on the other hand, that their patients suffered from heroin withdrawal symptoms as severe as morphine withdrawal.

Finally, in 1905, the U.S. Congress banned opium. The following year, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which required pharmaceutical companies to label their patent medicines with their complete contents. As a result, the availability of opiate drugs in the U.S. significantly declined. In 1909, Congress banned the import of opium. In 1914, Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Act, which aimed to curb drug abuse and addiction. It requires doctors, pharmacists, and others who prescribed narcotics (cocaine and heroin) to register and pay a tax.

In 1923, the U.S. Treasury Department's Narcotics Division (the first federal drug agency) banned all legal narcotics sales, forcing addicts to buy from illegal street dealers. Soon, a thriving black market opened up in New York's Chinatown.

In the 1920s and 30s, the majority of illegal heroin smuggled into the U.S. came from China. In the 1940s, Southeast Asia, (Laos, Thailand and Burma, referred to as the 'Golden Triangle,') became a major player in the profitable opium trade. In fact, during World War II, the French occupiers of Southeast Asia encouraged Hmong farmers to expand their opium production so that the French could retain their opium monopoly. After the war, Burma gained its independence from Britain, and opium cultivation and trade began to flourish in the Shan state.

In the U.S., the heroin trade between 1948 and 1972 was dominated by Corsican gangsters and U.S. Mafia drug distributors. The raw Turkish opium was refined in Marseilles laboratories (the "French Connection,") and sold to junkies on New York City streets. In the 1950s, the U.S. preoccupation with stopping the spread of Communism ([cover, pretext, brand marketing]) led to alliances with drug producing warlords in the Golden Triangle. The U.S. and France supplied the drug warlords and their armies with ammunition, arms, and air transport for the production and sale of opium. The result was an explosion in the availability and illegal flow of heroin into the United States and into the hands of drug dealers and addicts. During the U.S. war in Vietnam, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) set up a charter airline, Air America, to transport raw opium from Burma and Laos. During this period, the number of heroin addicts in the U.S. reached an estimated 750,000.

After the Vietnam War, the heroin epidemic in the U.S. subsided somewhat. Until 1978, "Mexican Mud," temporarily replaced "China White" heroin as the most common source of heroin in the U.S. In 1978, the U.S. and Mexican governments cooperated to eliminate the source of Mexican opium. They sprayed the poppy fields with Agent Orange. The amount of "Mexican Mud" in the U.S. drug market declined rapidly. Another source of heroin cropped up in its wake, from the Golden Crescent area of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

During the 1970s and 80s, officials tried to eradicate marijuana, coca, and opium poppy farms by introducing crop substitution programs in the Third World, but the technique produced very disappointing results.

In the late 80s, the establishment of a dictatorship in Burma increased the production of opium in that country. The world’s single largest heroin seizure was made in 1988 in Bangkok. The 2,400-pound shipment of heroin, en route to New York City, was suspected to have originated in the region controlled by the Burmese drug warlord, Khun Sa. Khun Sa was indicted in the U.S. in 1990 on heroin trafficking charges, but was still at-large in Burma.

In 1992, Colombia's drug lords introduced a high-grade form of heroin into the United States at prices that severely undercut Asian sources. Despite a 1993 joint operation between the Thai army and U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, among others, efforts to eradicate opium at its source remained unsuccessful in the mid-90s. The new U.S. focus adopted the approach of attempting to "[strengthen] democratic governments abroad, [to] foster law-abiding behavior and promote legitimate economic opportunity."

In 1995, the Golden Triangle region of Southeast Asia was the leader in opium production, yielding 2,500 tons annually. According to U.S. drug experts, there were new drug trafficking routes from Burma through Laos, to southern China, Cambodia, and Vietnam. In January 1996, the Burmese warlord Khun Sa "surrendered" to the ruling junta of Burma. The junta allowed Khun Sa to retain control of his opium trade if he would end his 30-year-old revolutionary war against the government. In 1998, it appeared that approximately 18% of the heroin smuggled into the U.S. came from the Golden Triangle.
   ____________________________________
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/1995/2241_golden_crescent.html
October 13, 1995
On May 27, 1986, a Soviet cargo ship, the Kapitan Tomson, was busted by Dutch authorities in Rotterdam with 220 kilos of pure heroin aboard. At the time, it was the largest heroin seizure in European history. The container with the heroin originated in Kabul, where the drug was hidden among 30 tons of raisins. The shipment was trucked overland across the Soviet Union, and placed on the ship at either Leningrad or Riga.

drug enforcement
   ____________________________________
golden triangle
Southeast Asia's "Golden Triangle" opium region
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Triangle_(Southeast_Asia)
It is an area of around 367,000 square miles (950,000 km2) that overlaps the mountains of four countries of Southeast Asia: Burma, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Along with Afghanistan in the Golden Crescent and Pakistan, it has been one of the most extensive opium-producing areas of Asia and of the world since the 1920s. Most of the world's heroin came from the Golden Triangle until the early 21st century when Afghanistan became the world's largest producer.
The Golden Triangle also designates the confluence of the Ruak River and the Mekong river, since the term has been appropriated by the Thai tourist industry to describe the nearby junction of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar.
   ____________________________________
The Golden Crescent
the Golden Crescent region, encompassing the mountain valleys of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, emerged as one of the world's two biggest sources of opium, for several years even surpassing the contiguous Golden Triangle
the majority of poppy fields were in areas like the Helmand Valley in southern Afghanistan that were in the hands of the mujahideen, especially the Hezb-i-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, which also controlled a string of heroin laboratories just across the Pakistani border at Koh-i-Soltan
By the late 1980s, the DEA reported that Pakistan's annual revenue from heroin sales was $8-10 billion, one-fourth of the country's Gross Domestic Product. Most of the raw opium processed into heroin at the hundreds of clandestine laboratories in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and in the area around the Khyber Pass, came from Afghanistan

In Pakistan, factional struggle over the dope business broke out in 1988

Ghulam Ishaq Khan had been General Zia's liaison to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, serving as the president of the BCCI Foundation, the "charity" through which drug money was laundered, and bribes were paid out.

The DEA's most recent annual study of the supply of illicit drugs to the United States reported that opium production and processing in Afghanistan has increased, and that a crime syndicate based in Quetta, Pakistan has emerged as a major channel for Afghani heroin into the United States and western Europe.
   ____________________________________
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html
The Golden Crescent Drug Triangle

The history of the drug trade in Central Asia is intimately related to the CIA's covert operations. Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war (1979–1989), opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was no local production of heroin. 11 In this regard, Alfred McCoy's study confirms that within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, "the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979... to 1.2 million by 1985 -- a much steeper rise than in any other nation":12

    CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests ... U.S. officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies `because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.' In 1995, the former CIA director of the Afghan operation, Charles Cogan, admitted the CIA had indeed sacrificed the drug war to fight the Cold War. `Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets. We didn't really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade,'... `I don't think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout.... There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.'13

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanistan
Drug trafficking and impact around the world
According to EU agencies, Afghanistan has been Europe’s main heroin supplier for more than 10 years.[22] Heroin enters Europe primarily by two major land routes: the long-standing ‘Balkan route’ through Turkey; and, since the mid-1990s, the ‘northern route’, which leaves northern Afghanistan through Central Asia and on to Russia (and is sometimes colloquially referred to as the ‘silk route’). Estimated number of problem opioids users in EU: 1.5 million (1.3–1.7 million), average prevalence between 4 and 5 cases per 1,000 adult population (aged 15–64).[22] In 2005 there were around 7,000 acute drug deaths, with opioids being found in around 70 % of them.[22] There was a minimum of 49,000 seizures resulting in the interception of an estimated 19.4 tonnes of heroin. Countries reporting the largest number of seizures (descending order): UK (2005), Spain, Germany, Greece, France. Countries reporting the largest quantities of heroin seized in 2005 (descending order): Turkey, UK, Italy, France, the Netherlands.[22]

In 2010, Russia accused United States of supporting the opium production in Afghanistan.[23] Presently with resurgence of high output production of opium and heroin in post-Taliban Afghanistan, there is an ongoing heroin addiction epidemic in Russia which is claiming 30,000 lives each year, mostly among young people. There were two and half million heroin addicts in Russia by 2009.

Opium Smuggling into Iran
"Opium prices are especially high in Iran, where law enforcement is strict and where a large share of the opiate consumption market is still for opium rather than heroin. Not surprisingly, it appears that very significant profits can be made by crossing the Iranian border or by entering Central Asian countries like Tajikistan."
Iran currently has the largest prevalence of opiate consumption in its population globally. Iran also accounts for 84% of total opiate seizures by law enforcement agencies in the world, interdicting tens of thousands of tons of opiates annually.[38] The Iranian government has gone through several phases in dealing with its drug problem.
"There are an estimated 68,000 Iranians imprisoned for drug trafficking and another 32,000 for drug addiction (out of a total prison population of 170,000, based on 2001 statistics)"
"Tehran also has spent millions of dollars and deployed thousands of troops to secure its porous 1,000-mile border with Afghanistan and Pakistan... a few hundred Iranian drug police die each year in battles with smugglers."
"You have drug groups like guerrilla forces, [who] ... shoot with rocket launchers, heavy machine guns, and Kalashnikovs."
Iran has also alleged that large quantities of Acetic anhydride and Hydrochloric acid are brought to Afghanistan from Europe to be used in manufacturing of drugs as Afghanistan does not have the chemical industry to produce the compounds locally.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanistan
   ____________________________________
   ____________________________________
Sharon Weinberger, The imagineers of war : the untold history of DARPA, the pentagon agency that changed the world, 2017

pp.156-157
Iran
the market for illegal drugs
the biggest challenge was opium smuggling

p.157
Iran
one popular method for drug smuggling at the time was to use water trucks:  the front of the truck would be carrying water, and a back partition would contain opium.
APRA demonstrated how, by using infrared sensors, it was possible to spot temperature differences in the trucks that indicated if they were carrying opium.
Eventually, however, ARPA was told by the Iranian government to stop its work on detecting heroin smuggling because it had “gotten too close to top level traffickers”,

p.157
Iran
the shah himself lifted the ban on opium cultivation in 1969.

pp.290-291
p.290
White House of National Drug Control Policy in the mid-1990s funded DARPA's simulation experts to create a model of drug tafficking to see if there might be ways of cutting off the drug cartels in South America.

p.291
“The big issue was and still is the movement of cocaine from Central and South America into the United States”, explained Dennis McBride, who was in charge of the effort.  He named the project after Iolaus, who in Greek mythology had helped Heracles battle Hydra.  The name ended up more appropriate than he had imagined.

p.291
  “We built this incredible complex end-to-end model from seed planting down in South America through the changing to a product at a wholesale level, the transportation across myriad modes of transportation, ultimately into warehouses in the United States of America”, McBride said.  Yet the more DARPA modeled the problem, the worse it looked.  If one cartel was defeated, it ended up just strengthening another cartel.  Like the Greek Hydra, if you cut off one head, two more rose in its place.  DARPA came up with answers, but the answers did not fit what the White House wanted.  If the Drug Enforcement Administration put more aircraft in the air, it did not help, because the cartels still had more planes.  No matter which way DARPA modeled the drug war, it could not come up with a scenario that cut off the supply.  “We built this very big model. We played with it every way we could. We said, ‘Let's do this’, and ‘Let's do that’. At the end, this huge model would say here's the result and it was not good news.”

p.291
  The simulation showed the limits of technology to solve what was essentially a policy problem:  simulation was not going to teach anyone how to win the drug war, it could only demonstrate that it was unwinnable, and that was not a message the government wanted to hear.  The reaction was denial:  law enforcement would just have to try harder.  “I don't know if we're a hell of a lot better off that we now kind of understand the problem because we have the simulation”, McBride reflected. “It's like a massive wounds all over the body; blood is pouring out from everywhere. We can understand that, but there is nothing we can do about it.”

p.291
  The counter-drug simulation failed because technology hit up against the limits of policy.

  (The imagineers of war : the untold story of DARPA, the Pentagon agency that changed the world / by Sharon Weinberger., New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, united states. defense advanced research projects agency──history. | military research──united states. | military art and science──technological innovations──united states. | science and state──united states. | national security──united states──history. | united states──defenses──history., U394.A75 W45 2016 (print) | U394.A75 (ebook) | 355/.040973, 2017, )
   ____________________________________
   ____________________________________
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
Alfred W. McCoy
Alfred W. McCoy (Author)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_W._McCoy

Although the drug pandemic of the 1980s had complex causes, the growth in global heroin supply could be traced in large part to two key aspects of U.S. policy: the failure of the DEA's interdiction efforts and the CIA's covert operations."

"transformed southern Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin."

every attempt at interdiction has only resulted in the expansion of both the production and consumption of drugs

Turkey's role as a major supplier of First World markets

growing tolerance for narcotics as an informal weapon of covert warfare

the political economy of illegal narcotics, with its often useful underworld connections and expanded instruments of repression, is simply too powerful a tool for empire builders of any stripe to surrender
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->

1979    Three Mile Island nuclear accident
1979 - Iran hostage crisis begins

1981 Ronald Reagan became the President of the United States of America
     George Bush, Elder became Vice President of the United States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombing
    October 23, 1983
    The Beirut Barracks Bombings (October 23, 1983, in Beirut, Lebanon) occurred during the Lebanese Civil War when two truck bombs struck separate buildings housing United States and French military forces—members of the Multinational Force (MNF) in Lebanon—killing 299 American and French servicemen.
    23 October 1983

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Grenada
    25 October 1983
    The invasion commenced at 05:00 on 25 October 1983, two days after the 23 October 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, which killed 241 American servicemen. American forces refuelled and departed from the Grantley Adams International Airport on the nearby Caribbean island of Barbados before daybreak en route to Grenada.[17]

Iran–Contra Scandal (1985-89)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Contra_affair

1989 The Presidency of Ronald Reagan ended
   ____________________________________
Allan J. McDonald with James R. Hansen, Truth, lies, and o-rings, 2009      [ ]

p.155
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
      --Arthur Schopenhauer

p.194
Their subcommittee, they emphasized, needed to know what I knew about the circumstances that led up to the decision to launch Challenger; it was important for them to get to the bottom of this. Senator Hollings was particularly concerned that President Reagan may have been at the root of the problem, by insisting on launching Challenger because he was supposed to give his State of the Union address later that same day and had planned on mentioning Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher in space. Hollings asked if I knew anything about the Reagan involvement, and I told him I did not.

   (McDonald, Allan J., Truth, lies, and o-rings : inside the space shuttle challenger disaster / Allan J. McDonald with James R. Hansen., 1. challenger (spacecraft)--accidents., 2. whistle blowing--united states., 3. space shuttles--accidents--invesetigation., 4. united states. national aeronautics and space administration., 5. united states--politics and government., 2009, )
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
p.233
Veritas temporis filia.
Truth is the daughter of Time.
    ——Latin

    (Quotations of wit and wisdom: know or listen to those who know / John W. Gardner & Francesca Gardner Reese, copyright © 1975, 808.882, ——, )
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency


“What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn’t that true?”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency


“It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion on them.

On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
  On sentient horses, in Chapter 1, p. 6 jib head


source:
        https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1042123-dirk-gently-s-holistic-detective-agency
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Iran–Contra Scandal (1985-89)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Contra_affair

Senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to the Khomeini government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo.[2] The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress.

The official justification for the arms shipments was that they were part of an operation to free seven American hostages being held in Lebanon by Hezbollah, a paramilitary group with Iranian ties connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.[3] Some within the Reagan administration hoped the sales would influence Iran to get Hezbollah to release the hostages. However, the first arms sales authorized to Iran were in 1981, prior to the American hostages having been taken in Lebanon.[4]
   ____________________________________
movie, film, Tom Cruise, America Made (look-up this movie)
related to central America, Iran-Contra, CIA, drugs running, drugs smuggling,
CIA front, (Mena, Arkansas), use the additional income from the drugs smuggling operation to supplement and turbo charge the budget of the baseline operation,  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Made_(film)
inspired by the life of Barry Seal,
The small town gradually becomes wealthy as the hub of U.S. cocaine trafficking.
   ____________________________________
skimming money for personal use
skimming money for insurance, security, and saving
burgary & stealing money to finance the operation
burgary & stealing money to finance the surveillance
burgary & stealing money ...
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->

1962: America's top military leaders draft plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in US cities to trick the public into supporting a war against Cuba in the early 1960s. Approved in writing by the Pentagon Joint Chiefs, Operation Northwoods even proposes blowing up a US ship and hijacking planes as a false pretext for war. [ABC News, 5/1/01, Pentagon Documents]
source:
        https://www.wanttoknow.info/911/9-11-facts
   ____________________________________

Operation Northwoods was a proposed false flag operation against the Cuban government that originated within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) of the United States government in 1962. The proposals called for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or other U.S. government operatives to both stage and actually commit acts of terrorism against American military and civilian targets,[2] blaming them on the Cuban government, and using it to justify a war against Cuba. The possibilities detailed in the document included the possible assassination of Cuban immigrants, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas,[2] hijacking planes to be shot down or given the appearance of being shot down,[2] blowing up a U.S. ship, and orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.[3] The proposals were rejected by President John F. Kennedy.[4][5][6]
source:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

source:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
        https://www.wanttoknow.info/911/9-11-facts
   ____________________________________
   ____________________________________

Operation Himmler, also called Operation Konserve or Operation Canned Goods, was a 1939 false flag project planned by Nazi Germany to create the appearance of Polish aggression against Germany. That was then used by the Germans to justify their invasion of Poland.

The operation included the undercovered German personnels wearing Polish military uniform with the appropriate patches and rank.  The operation was arguably the first act of the Second World War in Europe.[1]

source:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Himmler
   ____________________________________
   ____________________________________

The Mukden Incident, or Manchurian Incident, was a false flag event staged by Japanese military personnel as a pretext for the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria.[1][2][3]

On 18 September 1931, Lieutenant Suemori Kawamoto of the Independent Garrison Unit of the 29th Japanese Infantry Regiment (独立守備隊) detonated a small quantity of dynamite[4] close to a railway line owned by Japan's South Manchuria Railway near Mukden (now Shenyang).[5] The explosion was so weak that it failed to destroy the track, and a train passed over it minutes later. The Imperial Japanese Army accused Chinese dissidents of the act and responded with a full invasion that led to the occupation of Manchuria, in which Japan established its puppet state of Manchukuo six months later.

     ••••   •••   ••••

The bombing act is known as the Liutiao Lake Incident (simplified Chinese: 柳条湖事变; traditional Chinese: 柳條湖事變; pinyin: Liǔtiáohú Shìbiàn, Japanese: 柳条湖事件, Ryūjōko-jiken), and the entire episode of events is known in Japan as the Manchurian Incident (Kyūjitai: 滿洲事變, Shinjitai: 満州事変, Manshū-jihen) and in China as the September 18 Incident (simplified Chinese: 九一八事变; traditional Chinese: 九一八事變; pinyin: Jiǔyībā Shìbiàn).

source:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident
        https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Mukden_incident
  <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Michael Pillsbury, The hundred-year marathon : China's secret strategy to replace America as the global superpower, 2015

p.134
The fictional year was 2030, and the officer who spoke for the secretary of defense was on a team playing a war game at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.  For more than seven decades [70 years], many similar strategy games had been conducted in this room.  Some concerned peacetime competitions testing diplomatic prowness.  Others simulated military invasions, naval blockades, and war on a global scale.  It was in this room, now ...., that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was first foretold ── and then ignored.

   (Michael Pillsbury, The hundred-year marathon, The hundred-year marathon : China's secret strategy to replace America as the global superpower / Michael Pillsbury., 1. strategic planning ── china., 2. china ── history. 3. national security ── china., 4. china ── politics and government., 5. china ── foreign relations., 6. united states ── foreign relations ── china., 7. china ── foreign relations ── united states., JZ134.P55  2014, 327.1'12095──dc23, 2015, )
   ____________________________________

Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi (9/11 hijackers supposedly id by Able Danger; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Danger)
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the center of the storm : my years at the CIA, 2007

p.302
Tough questions should never be a problem ── so long as you don't change the answer from what you believe to what you think the inquisitor wants to hear.  And we never did.

p.302
Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Richard Perle were among 18 people who had signed a public letter from a group they named “The Project for the New American Century” calling for Saddam's ouster.

p.303
America's promise to topple Saddam remained the law of this land from halfway through Bill Clinton's second term right up until U.S. troops invaded in March 2003.
p.304
Rather, our analysis concluded that Saddam was too deeply entrenched and had too many layers of security around him for there to be an easy way to remove him.  Whenever we talked to Iraqis, either expatriates or those still living under Saddam's rule, the reaction was always: “CIA, you say you want to get rid of Saddam. You and whose army? If you are serious about this, we want to see American boots on the ground.”

p.306
To his amazement, Feith said the words to the effect that the campaign should immediately lead to Baghdad.

p.308
One of our senior analysts subsequently told me that the impression given was that the issue of “should we go to war” had already been decided in meetings at which we were not present.  We were just called in to discuss the “how” and occasionally the “how will we explain it to the public”.

p.310
“C”, “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”

p.310
it was never about “fixing” the intelligence itself but rather about the undisciplined manner in which the intelligence was being used.

p.311
DoD visitors, who apparently were Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode of Doug Feith's staff.
sounded like an off-the-books covert-action program
without the appropriate presidential authorizations, normally run through the CIA, and without congressional notification,

p.312
This started to give the appearance of being “Son of Iran-Contra”.

p.317
Tab P, a paper CIA analysts had produced three weeks earlier.
August 13, 2002, “The Perfect Storm: Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq”

p.318
worst-case scenarios that might emerge from a U.S.-led regime-change effort

p.343
Libby and the vice president arrived with such detailed knowledge on people, sources, and timelines that the senior CIA analytic manager doing the briefing that day simply could not compete.  We weren't ready for this discussion.

p.343
We determined that from that moment on we would have multiple lower-level subject-matter expert analysts ── people who knew a lot about a narrow range of topics ── meet with them.

p.343
  By November 2002, we were ready for another visit from the vice president and his team.  There was extensive preparation, practice sessions called “murder boards”, and

pp.343-344
The November meeting was described by a participant this way:

Scooter Libby approached it like an artful attorney. An analysts would make a point and Libby would say, okay this is what you say. But there are these other things happening. So if this were true, would it change your judgment?  And the analyst would say, well if that was true, it might.  And Libby would say, well, if that's true, what about this?  And six “if that were trues” later, I finally had to stop him and say, “Yes, there are other bits and pieces out there. We've looked at these bits and pieces in terms of the whole. And the whole just does not take us as far as you believe. And everything else is just speculation. That was a push by policy makers to see how far we would go.”

p.344
  Some analysts viewed this kind of grilling as being pressured, but most did not.

p.345
  Despite the fact that some of our analysts felt we had gone too far, many in the administration, such as Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby, believed that the
“Murky Relationship” paper had not gone far enough.


p.347
  Feith's team, it turned out, had been sifting through raw intelligence and wanted to brief us on things they thought we had missed.  Trouble was, while they seemed to like playing the role of analysts, they showed none of the professional skills or discipline required.  Feith and company would find little nuggets that supported their beliefs and seize upon them, never understanding that there might be a larger picture they were missing.  Isolated data points became so important to them that they would never look at the thousands of other data points that might convey an opposite story.

pp.390-391
The Kurds were exasperated at the delay.  “Where are the weapons you promised us?” they asked over and over again.  We had no satisfactory answer.  Finally, in February 2003, about a month before the start of the war, Tom S., the head of our NILE team in Suleimaniya, was told by the local PUK representative, “Never mind”.  He was stunned to watch as trucks rolled up to a warehouse only fifty feet from this base and tons of weapons were delivered to the Kurbs by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

p.391
In turn they would be kept apprised of what was going on in Washington.  In one conversation, operations officers in Washington told the field of a major development back home.  The Starbucks at CIA headquarters had just switched over to a 24-hour-a-day operation.  Agency officers in the field speculated that this move signaled an imminent start to the war, and they were right.

p.420
U.S. troop strength was sufficient to defeat the Iraqi army, but woefully inadequate to maintain the peace ── just as Gen. Rick Shinseki, the former army chief of staff, had predicted.

p.425
Iraq's history of foreign occupation, first the Ottomans then the British, has left Iraqis with a deep dislike of occupiers.

p.472
so I went to see Steve Hadley before the briefing and handed him copies of the memos.  As he read them, I could see his face go ashen.

p.472
As I recall, the vice president and Hadley also stayed behind when the briefing was over.
  Afterward, I waited in Andy's office for what seemed like an hour, a highly unusual circumstance.  When he finally showed up, I handed him copies of the two memos.

p.473
  “Why are you giving me these memos only now?” Andy asked.  He looked stunned.
  “I wanted to double-checked on my end to make sure that not only did we write the memos, but that they were received as well. I had my staff confirm with the folks who keep the secure fax machine logs that the memos were in fact sent and received”, I said.
  Just to remove any doubt, I passed Andy a slip of paper indicating the precise times each memos had arrived at the White House Situation Room.
  “Besides”, I said, “I presumed you were doing the same thing around here ── looking for the facts. If I have the memos, surely you staff gave them to you, too, didn't they?”
  Andy shook his head and simply said, “I haven't been told the truth.”

p.473
CIA's involvement with attempts to get the yellowcake [uranium and uranium oxide] information out of presidential speeches.
p.474
Apparently, we had earlier raised our concerns and were trying to persuade them to drop that segment of the speech.

p.474
  I don't believe that this earliest attempt to get the yellowcake information in the president's mouth has ever been publicly mentioned before.

p.474
Either people overwhelmed with data and meetings had simply forgotten, or, for the White House speechwriters, the third time was the charm.

p.474
the fact that Iraq's effort to procure the yellowcake was not particularly significant to its nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already had in inventory a large stock, 550 tons, of uranium oxide.

p.474
our two October memos,

p.475
In that brief period, my relationship with the administration was forever changed.

p.482
We were both in shorts and T-shirts; my security detail was waiting outside.  I explained my thinking, and we discussed my dilemma standing there in the middle of the A&P, our carts blocking the aisle.  Louis first tried to talk me out of resigning.  I looked at him and said, “I can't stay. Trust has been broken.”  Louis finally said to me, “You're right. It is time to leave. Now, here's how you do it.”
  To begin with, Louis said, you pick the date; no one else does.

pp.482-483
  “Okay, Thursday.  You go in to see the president late Wednesday night.  You ask to see him alone.  You tell him that it is your intention to resign and to issue a public statement the following morning, and you ask him to keep this between the two of you until that occurs.  Then, once he announces you're leaving, you announce it to your workforce.  The key thing is to allow no more than 10 to 12 hours to separate your conversation with the president and your announcement to your own people.  That's why you don't see him earlier in the day or in the middle of the day.  You see him as late as you can possibly see him because you want to keep this buttoned up.  The worst thing that could happen is that word reaches your people before you tell them.  You don't want to be in that position.”
  I shook hands with Louis when he was through and went back to the house feeling terrific.

p.483
As for me, I slept great that night, better than I had slept in months, maybe in years.

p.483
For Stephanie,
She got a great deal of comfort from Louis and from the way he reinforced that this was the right thing to do, by the time we set off that afternoon to drive back to Washington, she had come into camp, too.  Louis Freeh swore me into office in 1997, and now he was telling me how to quit.  Life had come full circle.

p.486
As much as John Micheal appreciated that, he also expressed the fear that the president would be mad at him for causing my departure.  I told the president that story when we met Wednesday evening.  Thursday afternoon, after my resignation, the president called John Michael from Air Force One to assure him that, oo, he wasn't mad at him and to tell him that his father had done an outstanding job.  
   That wasn't the first time George Bush had gone the extra mile for my son.  

p.486
Back in February 2004, three months before I left for good, I had told the president that John Michael was having an especially rough time watching me get pummeled, and the president invited him down to the White House to a chat.  John Michael never told us about their conversation, but he came home feeling a lot better about life.

George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the center of the storm : my years at the CIA, 2007
   ____________________________________
   ____________________________________

Angler: the Cheney vice presidency, Barton Gellman, 2008

p.79  Ari Fleischer, Bush White House, Charles E. Walcott
By temperament the president was very nearly the reverse of his description by spokesman Ari Fleischer.  “He likes to have strong people who have a lot of opinions to share, and he will put them in the room and listen to them, and he wants to hear a cacophony of ideas”, Fleischer said as Bush prepared to take office.  Actually, Bush generally hated it when advisers disagreed, demanding that they get their acts together.  At decision time, according to Cheney aide Ron Christie, Bush wanted to hear that “your senior advisers believe X”. Political scientist Charles E. Walcott, who has studied every White House since Nixon's said Bush valued not only consensus but finality. “Once he's made up his mind, controversy ceases, so getting to him at just the right time is extremely important”, Walcott said.
   That was what happened on the Jeffords question.  The president wanted unanimity, and unanimity was what Cheney brought.  

p.80  Aaron Friedberg, Princeton professor, Asia, Far East, Chinese economic and military prospects

pp.265-266   a piece of truth
War with Iraq would cost 1 to 2 percent of the gross domestic product.
Lawrence Lindsay
                         4 to 8 percent of GDP
As Bush and Cheney prepared to leave office, the war's financial toll quadrupled Lidsay's worst-case estimate.

p.39
Stephen J. Hadley
David Gribbin
deputy assistant secretary, Paul Hoffman

p.40
p.42   Fiction
The Apprentice, I. Lewis Libby
A Man Called Intrepid

p.44    I. Lewis Libby
“Scooter” Libby
OVP, office of the vice president
chief of staff and national security advisor
assistant to the president

p.53
When the president attends, that gathering is called the National Security Council

p.54   Richard Haass on Cheney's method
three bites on every decision
1. one w/ the president
2. participation in the Principals Committee
3. staff role, from the deputies on down

p.55
Cheney intended to get involved sooner, long before the moment of decision.

p.243
Like other senior officials, Edelman received daily transcripts from the NSA that touched on subjects of his responsibility, delivered in a manila envelope with his name on a white cover page.
Eric Edelman

p.243
Richard Haass
Hillary Mann
“Be careful”, the friend warned. “Your name is coming up in intercepts Protect yourself.”

p.384
the thing about vice president cheney is his decisionmaking ─ or his recommendations about my decisionmaking ─ are based upon a core set of principles that are deeply rooted in his very being. And he is predictable in many ways, because he brings a set of beliefs.”  Bush stopped, pursed his lips, and made tight little nod.  “And, uh, they're firm beliefs.”

p.203
Cheney to Sue Ellen Wooldridge, over a phone call
  “If we're going to put a bunch of farmers out of business, we've got a problem. We've got a massive problem.”

p.203
  “I never got any directives”, Wooldrige said, only questions: “What is the status?  What is happening?  What decisions do you need to make?  What discretion do you have?”

p.138    Jack Goldsmith
         he [Cheney] has never hidden the ball.
         The amazing thing is that he does what he says.    
         It was impressive, even if it was bizarro.
         It was a will to power.”

p.4
Keating filling out the questionaire, handed over volumes of his most confidential files.
p.4
In time he would have cause to regret that.

p.1   Frank Keating

p.12
These were not the disclosures that Keating came to regret.
p.12-13    Jack Dreyfus
p.29
I mean, Dick Cheney coming into my life has been like a black cloud.

pp.29-30
  “Dick Cheney knows more about me than my mother, father, and wife”, [Bill] Frist told the Washington Post.

pp.1-30
Frank Keating, 25-30, 40, 343
1-4, 6, 10-14, 20, 21, 22, 28

    (Angler: the Cheney vice presidency, Barton Gellman, 2008, )
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
THE SECRET TEAM

The CIA and Its allies in control of the United States and the world

L. FLETCHER PROUTY
Col. U.S. Air Force (Ret.)

copyright © 1973, 1992, 1997 by L. Fletcher Prouty
all rights reserved

     ••••   •••   ••••

As this one world infrastructure emerges it increases the percentage of our total dependence upon remote food production capacity to the mass production capability and transport means of enormous companies operating under the global policy guidance of such organizations as the Chartered Institute of Transport in London, and the international banking community.  As individuals, few of us would have any idea where to get a loaf of bread or yard of fabric other than in some supermarket and department store ... and we are all dependent upon some form of efficient transport, electric power, gasoline at the pump, and boundless manufacturing capacity and versatility.  Let that system collapse, at any point, and all of us will be helpless.  

     ••••   •••   ••••

     At the same time the traditional family farm, and even community farms and industries, have all but vanished from the scene.  This has created, at least in what we label, the advanced nations, a dearth of farmers and of people who have that basic experience along with that required in the food and home products industries.  Furthermore, as this trend is amplified, the transport of farm produce has become increasingly assigned to the trucking industry,

     ••••   •••   ••••

     As a result, something as simple as a trucking industry strike that keeps trucks out of any city for seventy-two hours or more, will lead to starvation and food riots.  None of us know where to get food, if it is not in the nearby supermarket; and if we do have a stored supply of food locked in the cellar, we shall simply be the targets of those who do not.  Food is the ultimate driving force.  

     ••••   •••   ••••

     Man must eat, and the only way he can obtain adequate food supplies is through cooperation and the means to transport and distribute food and other basic necessities.  This essential role is being diminished beyond the borderline.  The lack of food supplies has already resulted in a form of covert genocide in many countries.  Other essential shortages unavoidably follow.

     ••••   •••   ••••

Eisenhower era, National Security Council Directive No. 5412/2, March 15, 1954.

     ••••   •••   ••••

     I pointed out, years ago in public pronouncements, that the CIA's most important “Cover Story” is that of an “intelligence” agency.  Of course the CIA does make use of “intelligence” and its assumed role of “intelligence gathering”, but that is largely a front for its primary interest,

     ••••   •••   ••••

In this sense, the CIA is the willing tool of a higher level High Cabal, that may include representatives and highly skilled agents of the CIA and other instrumentality's of the government, certain cells of the business and professional world and, almost always, foreign participation.

     ••••   •••   ••••

First, on Feb. 7, 1972
“White House Conference on the Industrial World Ahead, A Look at Business in 1990.”'
three-day meeting
more than 1500 of the country's leading businessmen, scholars, and the like
summary statement by Roy L. Ash, president of Litton Industries:

.. state capitalism may well be a form for world business in the world ahead; that the western countries are trending toward a more unified and controlled economy, having a greater effect on all business; and the communist nations are moving more and more toward a free market system.  The question posed during this conference on which a number of divergent opinions arose, was whether ‘East and West’ would meet some place toward the middle about 1990.

     ••••   •••   ••••

“One World” speech by this same Roy Ash
Proceedings of the American Bankers Association National Automation Conference in New York City,
May 8, 9, 10, 1967.

     ••••   •••   ••••

“USA USSR Trade and Economic Council.”
David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank and his associates,

     ••••   •••   ••••

they have been able to operate under the canopy of an assumed, ever-present enemy called “Communism”.

     ••••   •••   ••••

--L. Fletcher Prouty
  Alexandria, VA 1997

http://www.ratical.com/ratville/JFK/ST/STpreface97.html 

   ____________________________________
Bina Venkataraman., The optimist's telescope : thinking ahead in a reckless age, 2019

p.220
The Siege of Kut-al-Amara, about the defeat of the British-Indian garrison south of Baghdad by Ottomans in World War I.  The siege endured more than five months. 

p.220
  It's best to use multiple historical analogies when making a decision, not rely on single past precedents.
p.221
  France's invasion of Vietnam in 1954 as a historical analogy for the U.S. war in Vietnam.

p.221
  The lessons, it seems, is to look at many historical events as possible precedents for the future.

p.221
imagine how its decision would be viewed over the course of history.

p.221
  Kennedy had also learned from his mistakes during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion; he recused himself from conversations to create more opportunity for open disagreement during the missile crisis.

p.221
 To keep any single history from dominating the collective view of the future.

  (The optimist's telescope : thinking ahead in a reckless age / Bina Venkataraman., New York : Riverhead books, 2019., decision making──social aspects. | risk──sociological aspects. | forecasting., ddc 153.8/3──dc23, https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046076, 2019, ) 
 <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Original TEXT Written by Robert Steele
I've come to the conclusion, after thirty years in this business, that there are four CIA's:   

there are at least four different slices of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

(1) White House sychophants;   
A small slice does what the White House wants, including black bag jobs.

(2) Wall Street support via Carlyle Group and a small network of retired inter me diaries;   
A small but more important slice does what Wall Street wants, and helps Wall Street with access to financially relevant information that (which the public pays for) the CIA does not get. Buzzy Krongard, until recently Executive Director of the CIA, comes to mind as the most recent leader of this section.
economic espionage
Wallstreet Bankers and Lawyers

(3) a multination al  "dirty deeds" arm that does terribly immoral and illegal things with Saudi money, Egyptian sodomy of children  (photographed so as to force them to spy on their fathers), and so on.  
A larger slice, that does covert action off the books with funding from Saudi Arabia and others, sometimes called the Safari Club, sometimes having off-shoots like Ted Shackley's Southern Air Transport, and so on. This slice can provide the intersection between criminal activities, white collar crime profits, illegal White House activities, and plain profiteering.
to include using funding from transporting (trafficing) of drugs to fund off the books operations, there is black(covert) operation, and then there is off the book covert(black) operation

(4) the "front" of earnest people working out of official installations, incapable of actually doing serious spying (I was part of this group);
Finally, 90% of the CIA, folks like me that did not realize they were simply going through the motions and giving the local counterintelligence service a full-time rabbit to follow while the commercial clandestine boys and girls looted the bank in bright daylight.

Robert David Steele is a retired Marine Corps Reserve infantry and intelligence officer who served four years active duty and the remainder in the Individual Ready Reserve. After joining the CIA in 1979, he served three back-to-back tours in Latin America as a clandestine case officer, including one tour as one of the first officers focused full time on terrorism. He is the author of three books about intelligence and the the chief executive of OSS.net.
   ____________________________________
Human Experiments
     (1) dragged a barge through San Francisco Bay, leaking a virus, to measure this technique for crippling a city
     (2) launched a whooping cough epidemic in a Long Island suburb, to see what it would do to the community if all the kids had whooping cough
     (3) put light bulbs in the subways in Manhattan, that would create vertigo - make people have double vision, so you couldn't see straight - and hid cameras in the walls - to see what would happen at rush hour when the trains are zipping past - if everybody has vertigo and they can't see straight and they're bumping into each other
     (4) launched the swine fever epidemic in Cuba, in the hog population, trying to kill out all of the pigs - a virus.
     (5) experimented in Haiti on the people with viruses.
   ____________________________________
David Bevan, Darrell Eubanks, and John Lewis. All died when their plane crashed while carrying out a mission for Air America, the CIA’s Vietnam-era "airline," in Laos in 1961.

Mark S. Rausenberger
48-year-old Mark S. Rausenberger, who was with the agency for 18 years and died while serving overseas. Details about the circumstances of his death are classified, but a notice from a funeral home in Virginia said Rausenberger died on May 23, 2016, while working in the Philippines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Mackiernan

Because he was the first CIA officer operating under diplomatic cover as a State Department employee to be killed, the CIA had not yet established procedures about pensions; ultimately his wife and children were denied a CIA pension. In 1950, Peggy Mackiernan was awarded a small pension by the State Department, much smaller than her pension would have been if she had received the CIA pension that was due to her.

 Ted Gup, in 2001
 Thomas Laird, 2003,
   ____________________________________
http://www.streetwisejournal.com/central-intelligence-agency-discloses-deaths-of-5-officers/

the CIA has also added 3 stars to honor David W. Bevan, Darrell A. Eubanks, and John S. Lewis. The men were killed on August 13, 1961, when their transport plane, a Curtiss C-46F aircraft, crashed near Pha Khao in Laos. Two other crew members were also killed.

“They came to the Agency by way of the Smokejumpers – brave firefighters who parachute into remote areas to combat wildfires,” the CIA said. “CIA has benefited from the service of many former Smokejumpers, including for its Air America program.”

Air America was owned by the CIA and secretly posed as a passenger and cargo airline. The plane that crashed in Laos in 1961 was dropping cargo in support of General Vang Pao’s Hmong army when they apparently experienced a mechanical problem, according to Smokejumper magazine in 2004.
  <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
(copy & paste)
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwightdeisenhowerfarewell.html

Dwight D. Eisenhower
Farewell Address
delivered 17 January 1961

We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.
We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States cooperations -- corporations.
Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded.

in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.

must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength.

To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration: We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its few spiritual blessings. Those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibility; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; and that the sources -- scourges of poverty, disease, and ignorance will be made [to] disappear from the earth; and that in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.
  <---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
War Is a Racket is a speech and a 1935 short book, by Smedley D. Butler, a retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit, such as war profiteering from warfare. He had been appointed commanding officer of the Gendarmerie during the United States occupation of Haiti, which lasted from 1915 to 1934.

After Butler retired from the US Marine Corps in October 1931, he made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s giving his speech "War is a Racket". The speech was so well received that he wrote a longer version as a short book published in 1935. His work was condensed in Reader's Digest as a book supplement, which helped popularize his message. In an introduction to the Reader's Digest version, Lowell Thomas praised Butler's "moral as well as physical courage".[2] Thomas had written Smedley Butler's oral autobiography.

According to the HathiTrust online library, the book published in 1935 is in the public domain. A scanned copy of the original 1935 printing is available for download, in part or in whole, on the HathiTrust website, along with a detailed description of the copyrights.[3]

     ••••   •••   ••••

In the booklet's penultimate chapter, Butler recommended three steps to disrupt the war racket:

 1. Making war unprofitable. Butler suggests that the means for war should be "conscripted" before those who would fight the war:

        It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labour before the nation's manhood can be conscripted. […] Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our ship-builders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted — to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

 2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it. He also suggests a limited referendum to determine if the war is to be fought. Eligible to vote would be those who risk death on the front lines.

 3. Limitation of militaries to self-defense. For the United States, Butler recommends that the Navy be limited, by law, to operating within 200 miles of the coastline, and the Army restricted to the territorial limits of the country, ensuring that war, if fought, can never be one of aggression.


source:
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
   ____________________________________
   ____________________________________
 BY

SMEDLEY D. BUTLER

Major General, United States Marines
(RETIRED)



ROUND TABLE PRESS, INC.
NEW YORK 1935




PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY SELECT PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. War Is a Racket

II. Who Makes the Profits?

III. Who Pays the Bills?

IV. How to Smash this Racket!

V. To Hell with War!




WAR IS A RACKET



Chapter One

WAR IS A RACKET

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

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

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

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

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

And what is this bill?

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

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

Again they are choosing sides. France and Russia met and agreed to stand side by side. Italy and Austria hurried to make a similar agreement. Poland and Germany cast sheep's eyes at each other, forgetting, for the nonce, their dispute over the Polish Corridor. The assassination of King Alexander of Jugoslavia complicated matters. Jugoslavia and Hungary, long bitter enemies, were almost at each other's throats. Italy was ready to jump in. But France was waiting. So was Czechoslovakia. All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people—not those who fight and pay and die—only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.

There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.

Hell's bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?

Not in Italy, to be sure. Premier Mussolini knows what they are being trained for. He, at least, is frank enough to speak out. Only the other day, Il Duce in "International Conciliation," the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said:

"And above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace.... War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it."


Undoubtedly Mussolini means exactly what he says. His well trained army, his great fleet of planes, and even his navy are ready for war—anxious for it, apparently. His recent stand at the side of Hungary in the latter's dispute with Jugoslavia showed that. And the hurried mobilization of his troops on the Austrian border after the assassination of Dollfuss showed it too. There are others in Europe too whose sabre rattling presages war, sooner or later.

Herr Hitler, with his rearming Germany and his constant demands for more and more arms, is an equal if not a greater menace to peace. France only recently increased the term of military service for its youth from a year to eighteen months.

Yes, all over, nations are camping on their arms. The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose.

In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russia and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan. Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the "open door" policy in China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.

Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and to go to war—a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.

Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit—fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.

Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they? It pays high dividends.

But what does it profit the masses?

What does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit the men who are maimed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?

What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?

Yes, and what does it profit the nation?

Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn't own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became "internationally minded." We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our Country. We forgot Washington's warning about "entangling alliances." We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twenty-five-year period was about $24,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely financial bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.

It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people—who do not profit.


source:
        http://gutenbergcanada.ca/ebooks/butlersd-warisaracket/butlersd-warisaracket-00-h.html
   ____________________________________

 CHAPTER TWO

Who Makes The Profits?

The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven't paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children's children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.

The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits -- ah! that is another matter -- twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent -- the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let's get it.

Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulders to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket -- and are safely pocketed. Let's just take a few examples:

Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people -- didn't one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn't much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let's look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.

Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump -- or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!

Or, let's take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.

There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let's look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.

Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.

Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.

Let's group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.

A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.

Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren't the only ones. There are still others. Let's take leather.

For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,000,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That's all. The General Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year. Came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. a leap of 1,400 per cent.

International Nickel Company -- and you can't have a war without nickel -- showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,000,000 yearly. Not bad? An increase of more than 1,700 per cent.

American Sugar Refining Company averaged $2,000,000 a year for the three years before the war. In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.

Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.

And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public -- even before a Senate investigatory body.

But here's how some of the other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.

Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only one pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought -- and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.

There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn't any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit in it -- so we had a lot of McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.

Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting. They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches -- one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!

Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam.

There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in those days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France. I suppose, if the war had lasted just a little longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.

Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else was getting theirs. So $1,000,000,000 -- count them if you live long enough -- was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplane engines that never left the ground! Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France. Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100, or perhaps 300 per cent.

Undershirts for soldiers cost 14¢ [cents] to make and uncle Sam paid 30¢ to 40¢ each for them -- a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer. And the stocking manufacturer and the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturers and the steel helmet manufacturers -- all got theirs.

Why, when the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equipment -- knapsacks and the things that go to fill them -- crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them -- and they will do it all over again the next time.

There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.

One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 48-inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls. Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.

Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn't ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride on horseback. One has probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding in a buckboard. Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels! Not one of them was used. But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit.

The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit. More than $3,000,000,000 worth. Some of the ships were all right. But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn't float! The seams opened up -- and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits.

It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.

The Senate (Nye) committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface.

Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying "for some time" methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee -- with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator -- to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn't suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.

Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses -- that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life.

There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed.

Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.


source:
        https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
  <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Theodore Modis., Prediction : society's telltale signature reveals the past and forecasts the future, 1992.

pp.182-184
Peace Planning
1967, a little book was published by Dial Press titled Report from Iron Mountian on the Possibility and Desirabilty of Peace.
Leonard C. Lewin,
p.182
“to serve on a commission ‘of the highest importance’. Its objective was to determine, accurately and realistically, the nature of the problems that would confront the United States if and when a condition of ‘permanent peace’ should arrive, and to draft a program for dealing with the contingency.”10
 
p.182
The report was eventually suppressed both by the government committee and by the group itself.

p.183
Lasting peace, while not theoretically impossible, is probably unattainable; even if it could be achieved, it would almost certainly not be in the best interests of a stable society to achieve it.
  That is the gist of what they say.  Behind their qualified academic language runs this general argument:  War fills certain functions essential to the stability of our society; until other ways of filing them are developed, the war system must be maintained ── and improved in effectiveness.

p.183
  In the report itself, after explaining that war {economy} served a vital subfunction by being responsible for major expenditures, national solidarity, and a stable internal politcal structure, Does goes on to explore the possibilities of what may serve as a substitute for war, in as much as the positive aspects of it are concerned.

p.183
“Whether the substitute is ritual in nature or functionally substantive, unless it provides a believable life-and-death threat it will not serve the socially organizing function of war.”

p.183
They must be “wasteful”
they must operate outside the normal supply-demand system.
the magnitude of the the waste must be sufficient to meet the needs of a particular society.

p.183
When the mass of a balance wheel is inadequate to the power it is intended to control, its effect can be self-defeating, as with a run away locomotive.  

p.183
our record of cyclical depressions
All have taken place during periods of grossly inadequate military spending.

p.183
alternatives to war {economy}:
war on poverty,
“the credibility of an out-of-our-world invasion threat”
space research,
war on pollution

p.184
The White House conducted an inquiry and concluded that the work was spurious.

p.184
Then in 1972 Lewin admitted authorship of the entire document.  

p.184
  What I intended was simply to pose the issue of war and peace in a provocative way.  To deal with the essential absurdity of the fact that the war system, however much deplored, is never-the-less accepted as part of the necessary order of things.  To caricature the bankruptcy of the think tank mentality by pursuing its style of scientific thinking to its logical ends.  And perhaps, with luck, to extend the scope of public discussion of “peace planning” beyond its usual stodgy limits.

  (Prediction : society's telltale signature reveals the past and forecasts the future / Theodore Modis.,  1. forecasting., 2. creation (literary, artistic, etc.), 3. science and civilization.,  CB 158.M63, 303.49--dc20, 1992, )

   ____________________________________
 • three other programs for bottomless money pit
   • social welfare program (in comparison with corporate welfare program)
     • subsidize and price support for family owned farms, as one example 
       • a family
     • versus subsidize and price support for corporate owned farms
       • a faceless corporation
     • “... production and disposition of the economic surplus.”, G. William Domhoff, April 2005, ‘Power structure research and the hope for Democracy’,        • WhoRulesAmerica.net,
   • war on poverty
   • health care (national single payer) and sickness prevention program
   • public private social program (The program)
     • government sponsored public private housing program
     • job banks, career counseling, education, training program
     • public transportation program
     • community health program
     • community health clinic and sickness prevention program
     • community integration and social program (community farm 150)
   • if the solution is to simply spend enough money
     • and what you spend the money on does not matter so much
     • then a war economy will do
     • space research and exploration
     • energy research and development (like atomic fusion) 
     • weapons research and development
     • materials research and development
     • terra forming the desert, the ecosystem and other biosphere on Earth
     • of course, a labor intensive program would be better because we need to absorb the excess labor force in the economy
     • government sponsored religious convent and monastary program (to redirect the labor force)
     • government sponsored farming program
     • price support program
       • rent subsidy (housing)
       • food subsidy (food, agriculture, farming)
       • gas subsidy (transport)
       • education subsidy (???)
       • places of worship subsidy (religion)
       • child care (family support)
       • elder care (family support)
     • the truth of the matter is you need a balance economy
     • if any one part of the industrial sector, like unregulated monopoly, not enough or no enforcement from regulators and supervisors, or reluctant of regulators to carry out enforcement for some reasons or others, then you would eventually get distorted incentives in the system, where one industrial sector would be disproportionately over weight; this could and would create problems - causing crisis, distress, deaths, and suicides. 
     • “For Marxists, who begin with the assumption that power structures are rooted in the ownership and control of income-producing property, studies of the upper class can be relevant and useful because they reveal the consciousness and policy preferences of the capitalist class in its conflict with the working class over the production and disposition of the economic surplus.”, G. William Domhoff, April 2005, ‘Power structure research and the hope for Democracy’,
        • WhoRulesAmerica.net,
        • http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/methods/power_structure_research.html 

   ____________________________________
 • three other programs for bottomless money pit
   • social welfare program (in comparison with corporate welfare program)
     • subsidize and price support for family owned farms, as one example 
       • a family
     • versus subsidize and price support for corporate owned farms
       • a faceless corporation
     • “... production and disposition of the economic surplus.”, G. William Domhoff, April 2005, ‘Power structure research and the hope for Democracy’,        • WhoRulesAmerica.net,
   • war on poverty
   • health care (national single payer) and sickness prevention program
   • public private social program (The program)
     • government sponsored public private housing program
     • job banks, career counseling, education, training program
     • public transportation program
     • community health program
     • community health clinic and sickness prevention program
     • community integration and social program (community farm 150)
   • if the solution is to simply spend enough money
     • and what you spend the money on does not matter so much
     • then a war economy will do
     • space research and exploration
     • energy research and development (like atomic fusion) 
     • weapons research and development
     • materials research and development
     • terra forming the desert, the ecosystem and other biosphere on Earth
     • of course, a labor intensive program would be better because we need to absorb the excess labor force in the economy
     • government sponsored religious convent and monastary program (to redirect the labor force)
     • government sponsored farming program
     • price support program
       • rent subsidy (housing)
       • food subsidy (food, agriculture, farming)
       • gas subsidy (transport)
       • education subsidy (???)
       • places of worship subsidy (religion)
       • child care (family support)
       • elder care (family support)
     • the truth of the matter is you need a balance economy
     • if any one part of the industrial sector, like unregulated monopoly, not enough or no enforcement from regulators and supervisors, or reluctant of regulators to carry out enforcement for some reasons or others, then you would eventually get distorted incentives in the system, where one industrial sector would be disproportionately over weight; this could and would create problems - causing crisis, distress, deaths, and suicides. 
     • “For Marxists, who begin with the assumption that power structures are rooted in the ownership and control of income-producing property, studies of the upper class can be relevant and useful because they reveal the consciousness and policy preferences of the capitalist class in its conflict with the working class over the production and disposition of the economic surplus.”, G. William Domhoff, April 2005, ‘Power structure research and the hope for Democracy’,
        • WhoRulesAmerica.net,
        • http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/methods/power_structure_research.html
 <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
p.18
Analysis focuses on STRUCTURE; it reveals HOW THINGS WORK. Synthesis focuses on FUNCTION; it reveals WHY THINGS OPERATE AS THEY DO. Therefore, analysis yields KNOWLEDGE; synthesis yields UNDERSTANDING. The former enables us to DESCRIBE; the later, to EXPLAIN.
     Analysis looks INTO things; synthesis looks OUT of things.

 analysis-structure::how things work
synthesis-function ::why things operate the way they do

 analysis--yields knowledge, describe how things work
synthesis--yields understanding, explain why things operate the way they do

 analysis--look into
synthesis--look out of

  (Ackoff's best : his classic writings on management, Russell L. Ackoff., © 1999, hardcover, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., p.18)

Expand
pp.19-20
In systems thinking, increases in understanding are believed to be obtain-able by expanding the systems to be understood, not by reducing them to their elements. Understanding proceeds from the whole to its parts, not from the parts to the whole as knowledge does.

  (Ackoff's best : his classic writings on management, Russell L. Ackoff., © 1999, hardcover, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., pp.19-20)

pp.18-19
     This orientation derives from the preoccupation of systems thinking with the design and redesign of sytems. In system design, parts identified by analysis of the function(s) to be performed by the whole are not put together like unchangeable pieces of of a jigsaw puzzle; they are designed to fit each other so as to work together harmoniously as well as efficiently and effectively.
     <skip one paragraph>
     <skip first sentence of paragraph> To a large extent this book is devoted to illuminating these differences. One such difference is worth nothing here. It is based on the following systems principle:

     If each part of a system, considered separately, is made to operate as efficiently as possible, the system as a whole will NOT operate as effectively as possible.

     <skip one paragraph about assembling an automobile using the best parts that are available from other autombiles, up to next to the last sentence.> The performance of a system depends more on how its parts inter-act than on how they act in-dependently of each other.
     Similarly, an all-star baseball or football team is seldom if ever the best team available, although one might argue that it would be if its members are allowed to play together for a year or so. True, but if they became the best team it is very unlikely that all of its members would be on the new all-star team.

  (Ackoff's best : his classic writings on management, Russell L. Ackoff., © 1999, hardcover, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., pp.18-19)
   ____________________________________
p.11  one thing

   One thing of which we become aware very early in the human learning process is that structures have parts, and that an important aspect of the systematic structure of things is that the relationship among its parts is an important element in the structure and behaviour of any system.

     (Boulding, Kenneth Ewart, 1910-, The world as a total system., “This volume is based on a series of lectures presented at the United Nation University, Tokyo, Japan, January/ February 1984.”, “September 1984”, 1. civilization--addresses, essays, lectures, 2. social system--addresses, essays, lectures, 3. system theory--addresses, essays, lectures, 1985, HM 201.B68 1985, p.11)
   ____________________________________
    “By structure I mean the elements in a system and the connections
between the elements — who has what information, who is connected to whom,
and, what decisions are made and where.”;――Jay W. Forrester, June 27-29, 1994, part of Keynote Address for Systems Thinking and Dynamic Modeling Conference
for K-12 Education at Concord Academy, Concord, MA, USA.
   ____________________________________
There are three common ways of restricting human consciousness:
 (1) one is to restrict access to knowledge;
 (2) another is to introduce false ideas (including religious ideologies) to create confusion;
 (3) a third is to create conflict.

... The principal devices used to control the dialectic process in the past two decades have been
(a) information,
(b) debt and
(c) technology.

(America's Secret Establishment, An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones, Antony C. Sutton, How The Order creates War and Revolution, Trine Day, Update Reprint 2002, April 1984)
      © 1983, 1986, 2002 Antony C. Sutton
   ____________________________________
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
    ――Eric Hoffer
    - More quotations on: [Enemies] [Fear]

  4. Battle Royale

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Royale
     • Japanese novel
     • Koushun Takami
        • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koushun_Takami
        • http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/03/the-hunger-games-a-japanese-original/
     • Originally completed in 1996, it was not published until April 1999.
     • Plot:  From time to time, fifty randomly selected classes of secondary school students are forced to take arms against one another until only one student in each class remains. The program was created, supposedly, as a form of military research, with the outcome of each battle publicized on local television. A character discovers that the program is not an experiment at all, but a means of terrorizing the population. In theory, after seeing such atrocities, the people will become paranoid and divided, preventing another rebellion.
     • translated into English by Yuji Oniki and published by Viz Media in 2003
     • The Hunger Games
     • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_massacre
     • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Aurora_shooting
     • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting
     • other mass shooting (FBI classified mass shooting as when there is four or more death in a single shooting incident with fire arms.  However, it seems not all mass shooting events are included in the fire arm incidents database.)
     • conspiracy theory
     • "The Most Dangerous Game," "The Running Man," or "The Lord of the Flies,"
     • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Running_Man_%28novel%29

* "[[The Most Dangerous Game]]", a 1924 short story about a big game hunter who fell of a cruise ship, swam onto an isolated island, and get hunted down by another big game hunter like himself

* [[Lord of the Flies]], a 1954 dystopian novel about a group of British boys stuck on an uninhabited island

* [[The Running Man (novel)]], a 1982 science fiction dystopian novel in which contestants, allowed to go anywhere in the world, are chased by "Hunters" employed to kill them.
   ____________________________________
synthetic terror

[The requested URL was not found on this server.]
http://www.american-buddha.com/911.syntheticterrorch1.htm

In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, “just to keep the people frightened.” Orwell, 1984, 127.
   ____________________________________
"access to information is not enough, because a framework of understanding is required" ~Noam Chomsky, 2008, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988 by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky)
1915
   ____________________________________
WhoRulesAmerica.net
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/methods/power_structure_research.html (retrieved February 28, 2012)

Power structure research and the hope for Democracy
by G. William Domhoff
April 2005

Floyd Hunter's Community Power Structure (1953)
C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite (1956)

Community Power Structure (1953).
The book gave the field its name and offered a new method for discovering power networks and their functioning through systematic interviews.
(See http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/atlanta.html for a detailed overview of the book.)
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/atlanta.html

Robert A. Dahl's Who Governs? (1961)

Mills' The Power Elite (1956)
Claiming that the great mass of Americans were dominated by a small triumvirate of corporate rich, political insiders, and military warlords, who came together at the top of their institutional pyramids as an interlocking and overlapping “power elite”,

Lurking beneath the angry metaphors was a new theory of power that challenged both pluralists and Marxists, a theory which took seriously the vast corporate, military, and administrative hierarchies of 20th-century America.  Moreover, this theory was buttressed by information on the social and economic connections of those in position of authority in each of his three domains.

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/methods/four_networks.html

Power Structures Are Based in Organizations

Charles Perrow, Organizing America: wealth, power, and the origin of corporate capitalism (2002).
  big private organizations that rose to power in the last part of the 19th century,
  • wage dependence
  • centralize profits
  • shape their “environments”, i.e. communities and governments.
  • concentration of wealth and power.

As indicated earlier, there are three methods by which the networks of the power structure can be constructed: positional, reputational, and decisional.  They lead to three indications of power:
  • Is there a group or class that is over-represented in positions of authority, as compared to its percentage of the population, which implies the group is powerful?  This is the who sits?  indicator.
  • Who receives the most nominations from those interviewed in reputational studies?  This is the who stands out?  indicator.
  • Who has the final say-so, in terms of proposing or vetoing policy changes, on a variety of issues?  This is the who wins?  indicator.

The Five Substantive Areas of Power Structure Research
five very different aspects of the social structure,
There five areas of interest are:
  1.  the social upper class
  2.  corporations
  3.  non-profit organizations such as foundations, think tanks, and policy-discussion groups
  4.  political parties and elections
  5.  The “state” or government

class-dominance theorits of both Marxists and non-Marxist

For Marxists, who begin with the assumption that power structures are rooted in the ownership and control of income-producing property, studies of the upper class can be relevant and useful because they reveal the consciousness and policy preferences of the capitalist class in its conflict with the working class over the production and disposition of the economic surplus.

For non-Marxists, ownership of profitable private property is one important basis among several for upper-class domination.

it socialization practices, its social cohesiveness, its continuity, and its class consciousness

women of the upper class (Daniels, 1988; Kendall, 2002; Ostrander, 1984).

focused on corporations and their power structure studies,

intertwined nature of the upper class and the corporate community,

Power structure researchers, however, believe that most, if not all, of these organizations have a class or corporation bias in their values and policies due to their histories, current funding, or present leadership.
 
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/nonprofits_in_social_conflict.html

This is necessary because it cannot be assumed that the state always serves the interests of a dominant social class.

a rival theory group
  rival group theory

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulersamerica/methods/power_structure_research.html (retrieved February 28, 2012)
 <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->

[ Saddam Hussein ]

[Boom and Bust cycle in the economy]
[United States presence in Vietnam ]

THE SECRET TEAM

The CIA and Its allies in control of the United States and the world

L. FLETCHER PROUTY
Col. U.S. Air Force (Ret.)

copyright © 1973, 1992, 1997 by L. Fletcher Prouty
all rights reserved

http://www.ratical.com/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp3i.html
     These plans, which were made for the development of a United States presence in Vietnam to replace the French after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu and to create a new leader to replace the French puppet, Bao Dai, had been primarily developed by the operational CIA, almost as a natural follow-on of their production of Magsaysay.

     Ngo Dinh Diem was a selection and creation of the CIA, as well as others such as Admiral Arthur Radford and Cardinal Spellman, but the primary role in the early creation of the “father of his country” image for Ngo Dinh Diem was played by the CIA -- and Edward G. Lansdale was the man upon whom this responsibility fell.  He became such a firm supporter of Diem that when he visited Diem just after Kennedy's election he carried with him a gift “from the U.S. Government”, a huge desk set with a brass plate across its base reading, “To Ngo Dinh Diem, The Father of His Country.”  The presentation of that gift to Diem by Lansdale marked nearly seven years of close personal and official relationship, all under the sponsorship of the CIA.

     It was the CIA that created Diem's first elite bodyguard to keep him alive in those early and precarious days.  It was the CIA that created the Special Forces of Vietnamese troops, which were under the tight control of Ngo Dinh Nhu, and it was the the CIA that created and directed the tens of thousands of paramilitary forces of all kinds in South Vietnam during those difficult years of the Diem regime.  Not until the U.S. Marines landed in South Vietnam, in the van of escalation in 1964, did an element of American troops arrive in Vietnam that were not under the operational control of the CIA.

     From 1945 [in August 1945, the history of the world was altered abruptly. The first atomic bomb hit Hiroshima on 6 August. The second hit Nagasaki on the 9th., source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSS_Deer_Team] through the crucial years of 1954 and 1955 and on to 1964, almost everything that was done in South Vietnam, including even a strong role in the selection of generals and ambassadors, was the action of the CIA, with the DoD playing a supporting role and the Department of State almost in total eclipse. 

http://www.ratical.com/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp3i.html
   ____________________________________
   ____________________________________
 Can connections be made between the following:
 • Saudi Arabia (majority of the 11 September 2001 hijackers were Arabs),
    • 15  (Saudi Arabian)
    •  1  (Egyptian)
    •  2  (United Arab Emirates)
    •  1  (Lebanese)
   • source: ??? their visa record?    
 • Afghanistan (Afghanistan was the first place the U.S. invaded after 9/11)
    • the opium poppy field is grown in Afghanistan
 • the bond market, Cantor Fitzgerald
    • the first plane striked between the 93rd and 99th floors (1 world trade center).
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor_Fitzgerald
    Cantor Fitzgerald's corporate headquarters and New York City office,[7][8] on the 101st–105th floors of One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan (2–6 floors above the impact zone of a hijacked airliner), were destroyed during the September 11, 2001 attacks.
    • The impact zone was between the 93rd and 99th floors (1 world trade center).
    • it is written that the impact zone of the first airplane is the location of Cantor Fitzgerald's data center for securities and bond trading. (source: ???)   
    http://www.fact-index.com/c/ca/cantor_fitzgerald_securities.html

    Cantor Fitzgerald Securities is an investment bank specializing in bond trading.
 • World Trade Center buildings (the hijackers first targets)
 • what are the connections, if there are any, between Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, the bond market, Cantor Fitzgerald, the World Trade Center building 1, 2, 3, and 7, and the United States of America (U.S. Government, The Pentagon, U.S. businesses at the World Trade Center buildings). 

   ____________________________________

 • The connections: maintain US dollar (USD) hegemony [as the World Reserve Currency][instead of the alternative denomination, for example, a weighted basket of currencies] for US deficits to be viable, fossil fuel (oil & gas), and petrodollar cycle.

source #1:
William R. Clark, Petrodollar warfare, 2005                                 [ ]

       p.115  (pdf - page 136/289)
There were only two credible reasons for invading Iraq: control over oil and preservation of the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

       -- John Chapman, “The Real Reasons Bush Went to War”,
                             the Guardian (UK), July 2004  88

p.20  (pdf - page 41/289)
David Spiro's book, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony

pp.20-21  (pdf - page 41/289)
   In typical understatement Spiro noted that, “clearly something more than the laws of supply and demand ... resulted in 70 percent of all Saudi assets in the United States being held in a New York Fed account.”42

p.120  (pdf - page 141/289)
Secret, unilateral US agreements with Saudi Arabia in 1974 thwarted movement toward a basket of multiple currencies for international oil trades.

2003 invasion of Iraq is the first major proxy battle in the new, third phase of securing American dominance.

According to page 28 of Clark’s book (William R. Clark, “Petrodollar warfare”):
   
       On September 24, 2000, Saddam Hussein allegedly “emerged from a meeting of his government and proclaimed that Iraq would soon transition its oil export transactions to the euro currency.”

On page 31, Clark adds:
   
      “CNN ran a very short article on its website on October 30, 2000, but after this one-day news cycle, the issue of Iraq’s switch to a petroeuro essentially disappeared from all five of the corporate-owned media outlets.”
      Was America’s goal to bring “democracy” to Iraq actually a guise for making an example of Iraq for threatening the petrodollar system? I don’t claim to know. However, the more that you consider the data, the more compelling the argument becomes.

   (Petrodollar warfare : oil, Iraq and the future of the dollar, William R. Clark, 2005, )

source #2:
George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the center of the storm : my years at the CIA, 2007

p.302
Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Richard Perle were among 18 people who had signed a public letter from a group they named “The Project for the New American Century” calling for Saddam's ouster.

p.303
America's promise to topple Saddam remained the law of this land from halfway through Bill Clinton's second term right up until U.S. troops invaded in March 2003.

p.306
To his amazement, Feith said the words to the effect that the campaign should immediately lead to Baghdad.

p.310
“C”, “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”

p.345
  Despite the fact that some of our analysts felt we had gone too far, many in the administration, such as Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby, believed that the “Murky Relationship” paper had not gone far enough.

 p.347
  Feith's team, it turned out, had been sifting through raw intelligence and wanted to brief us on things they thought we had missed.  Trouble was, while they seemed to like playing the role of analysts, they showed none of the professional skills or discipline required.  Feith and company would find little nuggets that supported their beliefs and seize upon them, never understanding that there might be a larger picture they were missing.  Isolated data points became so important to them that they would never look at the thousands of other data points that might convey an opposite story.

p.420
U.S. troop strength was sufficient to defeat the Iraqi army, but woefully inadequate to maintain the peace ── just as Gen. Rick Shinseki, the former army chief of staff, had predicted.

p.425
Iraq's history of foreign occupation, first the Ottomans then the British, has left Iraqis with a deep dislike of occupiers.

p.473
CIA's involvement with attempts to get the yellowcake [uranium and uranium oxide] information out of presidential speeches.
p.474
Apparently, we had earlier raised our concerns and were trying to persuade them to drop that segment of the speech.

p.474
  I don't believe that this earliest attempt to get the yellowcake information in the president's mouth has ever been publicly mentioned before.

p.474
Either people overwhelmed with data and meetings had simply forgotten, or, for the White House speechwriters, the third time was the charm.

p.474
the fact that Iraq's effort to procure the yellowcake was not particularly significant to its nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already had in inventory a large stock, 550 tons, of uranium oxide.

George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the center of the storm : my years at the CIA, 2007

source #3:
William R. Clark, Petrodollar warfare, 2005                                 [ ]

p.28 (pdf - page 49/89)
  The answer is simple:  the dollar's unique role as a petrodollar has been the foundation of its supremacy since the mid 1970s.  The process of petrodollar recycling underpins the US' economic domination that funds its military supremacy.  Dollar/petrodollar supremacy allows the US a unique ability to sustain yearly current account deficits, pass huge tax cuts, build a massive military empire of bases worldwide, and still have others accept its currency as medium of exchange for their imported good and services.  The origins of this history are not found in textbooks on international economics, but rather in the minutes of meetings held by various banking and petroleum elites who have quietly sought unhindered power.

([ transition the dollar as World Reserve Currency to a basket of currencies ])
([ list of other stable currencies ])

p.30 (pdf - page 51/89)
By January 1974 the price of OPEC's benchmark oil stood at $11.65 per barrel (up from $3.01 in early 1973).  Furthermore, it is also a matter of historical record that, during this time, the US had engaged in secret negotiations with the Saudi Arabia Monetary Authority to establish a petrodollar recycling system via New York and London banks.

p.39 (pdf - page 60/89)
Eurasia
Anglo-American alliance

Oil and gas are not the ultimate aims of the US [in Iraq].  It's about control.  If the US controls the sources of energy of its rivals ── Europe, Japan, China, and other nations aspiring to be more independent ── they win.
                       ── Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, January 2002

p.40 (pdf - page 61/89)
In essence, the Iraq war was about dollars, euros, oil, and geostrategic power in the 21st century.

   (Petrodollar warfare : oil, Iraq and the future of the dollar, William R. Clark, 2005, )
   ____________________________________
[skip]

Mihajlo Mesarovic and Eduard Pestel, Mankind at the turning point, 1974     [ ]
1973
p.178
(see Table III C-1).*
                        Table III C-1
                                            Cost in U.S. Dollar
                                                        Technical
Energy source                           capital cost    unit cost

Persian Gulf                              100-300       0.10-0.20
Nigeria                                   600-800       0.40-0.60
Venezuela                                 700-1000      0.40-0.60
North Sea                                2500-4000      0.90-2.00
Large deep-sea reservoirs                over 3000?     2.00-?
New U.S. reservoirs (not too remote)     3000-4000      2.00-2.50
Easy part of Alberta tar sands           3000-5000      2.00-3.00
High-grade oil shales                    3000-7000      3.00-4.50
Gas synthesized from coal                5000-8000      3.00-6.00
Liquid synthesized from coal             6000-8000      3.00-6.00
Liquid natural gas (landed)              6000-9000      3.00-6.00

* A. B. Looius, "Energy Resources," paper at the UN symposium on population, resources, and environment, Stockholm, 1973.

 (Mankind at the turning point, Mihajlo Mesarovic and Eduard Pestel, The Second Report to The Club of Rome, 1974, p.178)
   ____________________________________
[skip]
   William R. Clark

   A Macroeconomic and Geostrategic Analysis of the Unspoken Truth
   by William Clark 
      Original Essay January 2003
        -Revised March 2003
        -Post-war Commentary January 2004
   https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html
   https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html

   Background on Hydrocarbons and US Geostrategy
   ____________________________________
[skip]
George Soros, The new paradigm for financial markets, 2008                  [ ]

p.108   Vietnam war
        August 15, 1971, suspended
        August 11, 1971
p.110   explosion of international credit between 1973 and 1979
        first oil shock, recycling of petro-dollar,
        Euro-dollar market
p.113   England 1974 (1973-1979)
p.114   Collective System of Lending
p.116   The international lending spree of the 1970s
        turned into the international banking crisis in 1982

   (The new paradigm for financial markets : the credit crisis of 2008 and what it means / George Soros., 1. financial crises──united states., 2. united states──economic policy., 3. united states──economic conditions──21st century., 4. credit──united states., HB3722.S673  2008, 332.0973──dc22, 2008, ) 
 <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
 • Flight 11
    • American Airlines  Flight 11 , Boeing 767-223ER, registration number N334AA
    • alleged hijackers:
       • Mohamed Atta        (Egyptian)
       • Waleed al-Shehri    (Saudi Arabian)
       • Wail al-Shehri      (Saudi Arabian)
       • Abdul aziz al-Omari (Saudi Arabian)
       • Satam al-Suqami     (Saudi Arabian)

 • Flight 175
    • United Airlines    Flight 175, Boeing 767-200, registration number N612UA
    • alleged hijackers:
       • Marwan al-Shehhi  (United Arab Emirates)
       • Fayez Banihammad  (United Arab Emirates)
       • Mohand al-Shehri  (Saudi Arabian)
       • Hamza al-Ghamdi   (Saudi Arabian)
       • Ahmed al-Ghamdi   (Saudi Arabian)

 • Flight 77
    • American Airlines  Flight 77 , Boeing 757-223 (registration N644AA)
    • alleged hijackers:
       • Hani Hanjour       (Saudi Arabian)
       • Khalid al-Mihdhar  (Saudi Arabian)
       • Majed Moqed        (Saudi Arabian)
       • Nawaf al-Hazmi     (Saudi Arabian)
       • Salem al-Hazmi     (Saudi Arabian)

 • Flight 93
    • United Airlines    Flight 93 , Boeing 757–222, registration N591UA
    • alleged hijackers:
       • Ziad Jarrah       (Lebanese)
       • Ahmed al-Haznawi  (Saudi Arabian)
       • Ahmed al-Nami    (Saudi Arabian) (B-1/B-2 visa in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
       • Saeed al-Ghamdi  (Saudi Arabian) (B-1/B-2 visa in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
   ____________________________________

   ____________________________________
 • Khalid al-Mihdhar  (Saudi Arabian)
 • Nawaf al-Hazmi     (Saudi Arabian)

 • Flight 77
    • American Airlines  Flight 77 , Boeing 757-223 (registration N644AA)
    • Flight 77 was crashed into the Pentagon
    • American Airlines' daily scheduled morning transcontinental service from Washington Dulles International Airport, in Dulles, Virginia to Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, California.
    • alleged hijackers:
       • Hani Hanjour       (Saudi Arabian)
     • Khalid al-Mihdhar  (Saudi Arabian)
       • Majed Moqed        (Saudi Arabian)
     • Nawaf al-Hazmi     (Saudi Arabian)
       • Salem al-Hazmi     (Saudi Arabian)
   ____________________________________
 • Khalid al-Mihdhar
 • Nawaf al-Hazmi

Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi (9/11 hijackers supposedly id by Able Danger; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Danger)
   ____________________________________
 • Khalid al-Mihdhar, p.32, James Bamford., The shadow factory, 2008
 • Nawaf al-Hazmi, pp.16-17, James Bamford., The shadow factory, 2008

James Bamford., The shadow factory : the ultra-secret NSA from 9/11 to the eavesdropping on America, 2008

pp.16-17
NSA had had Nawaf's full name and other detail in its database for nearly a year, no one thought to do a computer search before sending a report
the report went out with first name only.
three suspects were suddenly on the move to another part of the world.
State department
Jedda, American embassy in Jedda, Saudi Arabia

p.19
FBI watchlist
Central Intelligence Report (CIR)
without Wilshire's approval, Miller could not pass on the information, even verbally
Wilshire, deputy chief of Alec station
(1 of 3) Miller, FBI agent attached to Alec station
         Mark Rossini, FBI
State department watch list

p.32
Mihdhar (identified as “Khalid” in NSA intercepts)

  (The shadow factory : the ultra-secret NSA from 9/11 to the eavesdropping on America / James Bamford., 1. united states. national security agency──history., 2. intelligence service──united states., 3. electronic surveillance──united states.
4. united states──politics and government──2001─, UB256.U6B38  2008, 327.1273──dc22, 2008, )
   ____________________________________
 • Khalid al-Mihdhar, p.195, p.204, George Tenet, At the center of the storm, 2007
 • Nawaf al-Hazmi, p.197, p.197, p.204, George Tenet, At the center of the storm, 2007

George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the center of the storm : my years at the CIA, 2007

p.160
  Six days later, on September 10, a source we were jointly running with a Middle Eastern country went to see his foreign handler and basically told him that something big was about to go down.  The handler dismissed him.  Had we known it at the time, however, it would have sounded very much like all the other warnings we received in June, July, August, and early September ── frightening but without specificity.

p.195
CIR (Central Intelligence Report)
  What never happened was a formal transmission to the FBI, in a report called CIR (Central Intelligence Report), documenting what everyone believed had already occurred, the sending of al-Mihdhar's photo and visa data.  An FBI officer assigned to CIA, known as a “detailee”, in fact initiated the drafting of the formal report, but it was never cleared for transmission.

p.196
NSA report on some of the Malaysia meeting's participants,

p.196
CIA should have placed them on a watchlist that might have prevented their entering the United States.

p.196
We later discovered that there was inadequate staff training on how to handle watchlist submissions.  Officers in the field, where primary responsibility for watchlisting resided, thought headquarters would do it, and vice versa.

p.197
connected the name Nawaf al-Hazmi with the meeting of 8 weeks before.

p.197
linking Khallad to the phone number in Yemen that had been associated with the Kuala Lumpur meeting.

p.197
Kuala Lumpur meeting

p.197
By the end of November 2000, CIA and FBI both knew Khallad's full name, Khallad bin Attash, had his picture,  

p.197
Khalid al-Mihdhar (who was at the Malaysia meeting the previous January)

p.204
The famous Phoenix memo, outlining concerns about terrorists being trained at flight schools, was not shared.

p.204
  CIA did not watchlist al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar until August 23, 2001.

George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the center of the storm : my years at the CIA, 2007
   ____________________________________
   ____________________________________
 • the U.S. has big military (probably the biggest in the world)
 • military's spending keeps the economy afloat
 • military's spending keeps the economy from going into a depression
 • the spending creates its own problem
 • the military's spending creates and enable a mindset, mental model, and attitude about the world (military industrial complex - the same one from the 2nd world war - the current military industrial complex is bigger)

 

Johnson, Chalmers A.
Nemesis : the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson.

NEMESIS - In Greek mythology, [Nemesis is] the goddess of retribution, who punishes human transgression of the natural, right order of things and the arrogance that causes it.

p.59
    The United States took many of its key political principles from its ancient predecessor.  Separation of powers, checks and balances, government in accordance with the constitutional law, a toleration of slavery, fixed term in office, the presidential "veto" (Latin for "I forbid")--all of these ideas were influenced by Roman precedents.  John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams often read Cicero and both spoke of him as a personal inspiration.  The architects of the new American capital were so taken with Rome that they even named the now filled-in creek that flowed where the Mall is today the "Tiber River." 16  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, in writing the Federalist Papers to argue for the ratification of the Constitution, signed their articles with the pseudonym "Publius Valerius Publicola"--who was the third consul of the Roman Republic and the first to personify its values.
     (Johnson, Chalmers A., copyright © 2006)
(Nemesis : the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson., 1. united states--foreign relations--1989, 2. united states--military policy--, 3. united states--politics and government--1989, p.59)

p.69
SPQR--senatus populus que Romanus (the Senate and the people of Rome)
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will watch the watchers?)

p.128
    The main base for these aircraft is a remote corner of Johnson County Airport in Smithfield, North Carolina, where they are serviced by Aero Contractor Ltd., a company founded in 1979 by Jim Rhyme, a legendary CIA officer and the former chief pilot for Air America. 108  The airport is convenient to nearby Fort Bragg, headquarters of the Special Forces, and has no control tower that would allow unauthorized persons to see into the enclave.  The fact that Aero's aircraft have permission to land at any U.S. military base worldwide is a dead giveaway to their provenance, since, according to the Chicago Tribune's John Crewdson, "Only nine companies [including Premier Executive Transport Services] ... have Pentagon permission to land aircraft at military bases worldwide." 109
    p.298
    9.  Among the recommended books on the agency's past activities are William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995); Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004); Frederick H. Gareau, State Terrorism and the United States (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2003); Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan, 2006); Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: American's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); John Kenneth Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival (New York: Public Affairs, 1999); James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and he Bush Administration (New York: Free Press, 2006); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999); Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, expanded ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Richard H. Schultz Jr., The Secret War Against Hanoi (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); and Paul Todd and Jonathan Bloch, Global Intelligence: The World's Secret Services Today (London: Zed Books, 2003).
    109.  Crewdson, "Mysterious Jets."
     (Johnson, Chalmers A., copyright © 2006)
(Nemesis : the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson., 1. united states--foreign relations--1989, 2. united states--military policy--, 3. united states--politics and government--1989, p.128)

p.150
    ...  This is called "burden sharing."  Japan spends by far the largest amount of any nation--$4.4 billion in 2002--and every year tries to get its share cut.  Perhaps whenever Japan finally succeeds in lowering its "host nation support," the Pentagon will start moving our troops and airmen out of the numerous unneeded locations there.  Until then, however, Japan's American outposts are too lucrative and comfortable for the Pentagon to contemplate relocating them.  On a per capita basis, the small but rich emirates of the Persian Gulf are the biggest spenders on this form of protection money.  Bahrain pays a total of $53.4 million, Kuwait $252.98 million, Qatar $81.3 million, and the United Arab Emirates $217.4 million. 25
    The Overseas Basing Commission noted that Germany paid $1.6 billion in 2002 dollars for its U.S. bases, Spain $127.6 million, Turkey $116.8 million, and the Republic of Korea $842.8 million.  Yet these are the key nations the Pentagon wants to punish for their lack of cooperation on Iraq.  If the United States actually brings its troops home, the host-nation support will have to come from the U.S. taxpayer.
     (Johnson, Chalmers A., copyright © 2006)
(Nemesis : the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson., 1. united states--foreign relations--1989, 2. united states--military policy--, 3. united states--politics and government--1989, p.150)

pp.169
    Back in 1982, the United States had helped General Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay's dictator from 1954 to 1989, to build a massive military airfield near the town of Mariscal Estigarribia, which now has a population of about two thousand, of whom three hundred are Paraguayan soldiers.  The airfield has runways long and strong enough to take B-52 bombers and C-5 Galaxy transports, plus a fully equipped radar system, large hangars, and an air traffic control tower.  It is actually bigger than the international airport in the capital, Asuncion.  The only thing of note that ever happened at Estigarribia before the American troops arrived was Pope John Paul II's landing there, in May 1988.  In the summer of 2005, the Americans immediately set about refurbishing and further enlarging the base.
    American troops are free to do almost anything they want in Paraguay.  In the May 26, 2005, agreement, the Bush administration extracted a provision exempting its officials and military from the jurisdiction of both the local judicial system and the International Criminal Court.  The Special Forces are not subject to customs duties and are free to transport weapons and medical supplies anywhere in Paraguayan territory. 92  This is important for various reasons.  Under the terms of Mercosur, the agreement among Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, and Paraguay creating a southerncone trading bloc, all parties pledge to inform each other about international developments and to coordinate their foreign policies.  Like virtually all other nations in Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay have rejected Bush administration demands for Article 98 Agreements protecting Americans from being turned over to the International Criminal Court.  The United States has cut off all forms of aid to the three as a result.  In 2004, despite the presence of the Manta base, Ecuador, to, forfeited $15.7 million in U.S. aid, much of it for military equipment, rather than go along with America's pressure tactics. 93  By giving the United States carte blanche in its country, Paraguay is breaking ranks with its neighbors, which has led to speculation that the United States wants to destroy [and/or degrade, disrupt] Mercosur.
     (Johnson, Chalmers A., copyright © 2006)
(Nemesis : the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson., 1. united states--foreign relations--1989, 2. united states--military policy--, 3. united states--politics and government--1989, p.169)

pp.223-224
    ...  In 1986, the renowned Russian physicist and winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, Andrei Sakharov, advised the Soviet government that Reagan's strategic defense initiative could easily be fooled and/or overwhelmed simply by firing decoys along with Soviet missiles and increasing the number of missiles in any assault.  There was no reason, he said, to waste money trying to match an American ABM system. 46  Twenty years later, nothing has happened that would alter his conclusion in any way.
p.322
    46.  See Fritz Gerald, Way Out There, pp.408-11.

pp.271-272
    Even a severe reduction in our numerous deficits (trade, governmental, current account, household, and savings) would still not be enough to save the republic, because of the unacknowledged nature of our economy--specifically our dependence on military spending and war for our wealth and well-being.  Ever since we recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s via massive government spending on armaments during  World War II, we have become dependent on "military Keynesianism," artifically boosting the growth rate of the economy via government spending on armies and weapons.
    "Keynesianism" is named for the English economist John Maynard Keynes, author of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936, and other influential books.  In his writings and his public career, Keynes developed a scheme to save capitalist economies from cycles of boom and bust as well as the severe decline of consumer spending that occurs in periods of depression.  He was less interested in what causes these cycles or in whether capitalism itself promotes under-employment and unemployment, than in what to do when an inequitable distribution of income causes people to be unable to buy what their economy produces.  To prevent the economy from contracting, a development likely to be followed by social unrest, Keynes thought that the government should step in and, through deficit spending, put people back to work, even if this meant creating jobs  artificially.  Some of these jobs might be socially useful, but Keynes also favored make-work tasks if that proved necessary, simply to put money in the pockets of potential consumers.  Conversely, during periods of prosperity, he thought government should cut spending and rebuild the treasury.  He called his plan counter-cyclical "pump-priming."
     (Johnson, Chalmers A., copyright © 2006)
(Nemesis : the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson., 1. united states--foreign relations--1989, 2. united states--military policy--, 3. united states--politics and government--1989, pp.271-272)

  • Conservative capitalists feared ... too much government intervention would delegitimate and demystify capitalism as an economic system that works by allegedly quasi-natural laws.

  • More seriously, too much spending on social welfare might ... shift the balance of power in society from the capitalist class to the working class and its unions.77

  • For these reasons, establishment figures tried to hold back counter-cyclical spending until World War II unleashed a torrent of public funds for weapons.

pp.272-273, p.330
    pp.272-273
    During the New Deal in the 1930s, the United States tried to put Keynesianism into practice.  Through various schemes the government attempted to restore morale--if not full employment. 76  These included "social security" to provide incomes for retired people; giving unions the right to strike (the Wagner Act); setting minimum wages and hours and prohibiting child labour; creating jobs for writers, artists, and creative people generally (the Works Projects Administration); financing the building of dams, roads, schools, and hospitals across the country, including the Triborough Bridge and Lincolm Tunnel in New York City, the Grand Coulee Damn in Washington, and the Key West Highway in Florida (the Public Works Administration); organizing projects for young people in agriculture and forestry (the Civilian Conservation Corps); and setting up the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide flood control and electric power generation in a seven-state area.
    The New Deal also saw the rudimentary beginning of a backlash against Keynesianism.  Conservative capitalists feared, as the German political scientist and sociologist Jurgen Habermas has noted, that too much government intervention would delegitimate and demystify capitalism as an economic system that works by allegedly quasi-natural laws.  More seriously, too much spending on social welfare might, they feared, shift the balance of power in society from the capitalist class to the working class and its unions. 77  For these reasons, establishment figures tried to hold back counter-cyclical spending until World War II unleashed a torrent of public funds for weapons.
    p.330
    76  See the discussion by Doug Dowd, "U.S. Military Expenditure: Beneficial or Harmful? Or, Who benifit and Who Pays?"  State of Nature, Winter 2006, http://www.stateofnature.org/milex.html.  See also Robert B. Reich, "John Maynard Keynes: His Radical Idea that Government Should Spend Money They Don't Have May Have Saved Capitalism," Time, March 29, 1999, http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/keynes.html.
    77  Wikipedia, "Permanent Arms Economy," February 10, 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_arms_economy.
     (Johnson, Chalmers A., copyright © 2006)
(Nemesis : the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson., 1. united states--foreign relations--1989, 2. united states--military policy--, 3. united states--politics and government--1989, pp.272-273, p.330)

p.273
    In 1943, the Polish economist in exile Micha Kalecki coined the term "military Keynesianism" to explain Nazi Germany's success in overcoming the Great Depression and achieving full employment.  Adolf Hitler did not undertake German rearmament for purely economic reasons; he wanted to build a powerful German military.  The fact that he advocated governmental support for arms production made him acceptable to many German industrialists, who increasingly supported his regime. 78  For several years before Hitler's aggressive intentions became clear, he was celebrated around the world for having achieved a "German economic miracle."
    Speaking theoretically, Kalecki understood that government spending on arms increases manufacturing and also has a multiplier effect on general consumer spending by raising workers' incomes.  Both of these points are in accordance with general Keynesian doctrine.  In addition, the enlargement of standing armies absorbs many workers, often young males with few skills and less education.  The military thus becomes an employer of last resort, like the old Civilian Conservation Corps, but on a much larger scale.  Increased spending on military research and development of weapons systems also generate new infrastructure and advanced technologies.  Well-known examples include the jet engine, radar, nuclear power, semiconductors, and the internet, each of which began as a military project that later formed the basis for major civilian industries. 79  By 1962-63, military outlays accounted for some 52 percent of all expenditures on research and development in the United States.  As the international relations theorist Ronald Steel puts it, "Despite whatever theories strategists may spin, the defense budget is now, to a large degree, a jobs program.  It is also a cash cow that provides billions of dollars for corporations, lobbyists, and special interest groups." 80
     (Johnson, Chalmers A., copyright © 2006)
(Nemesis : the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson., 1. united states--foreign relations--1989, 2. united states--military policy--, 3. united states--politics and government--1989, p.273)

p.274
    By the mid-1940s, everyone in the United States appreciated that the war boom had finally brought the Great Depression to an end, but it was never understood in Keynesian terms.  It was a war economy.  State expenditures on arms in 1944 reached 38 percent of gross domestic product (the sum total of all goods and services produced in an economy) or GDP, which seemed only appropriate given the nation's commitment to a two-front war.  There was, however, a profound fear among political and economic elites as well as  the American public that the end of the war--despite all the promises of future peacetime wonders like TVs, cars, and washing machines--would mean a return to economic hard times.  Such reasoning lay, in part, behind the extraordinary expansion of arms manufacturing that began in 1947.  The United States decides to "contain" the USSR and, in the early 1950s, to move from the production and use of atomic bombs to the building and stockpiling of the much larger and more destructive hydrogen bombs.
    Between the 1940s and 1996, the United States spent at least $5.8 trillion on the development, testing, and construction of nuclear weapons possessed some 32,500 deliverable bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used.  But they perfectly illustrated Keynes's proposal that, in order to create jobs, the government might as well decide to bury money in old mines and then pay unemployed workers to dig it up.  Nuclear bombs were not just America's secret weapon but also a secret economic weapon.  As of 2006, we will have 9,960 of them.
    The Cold War contributed greatly to the country's sustained economic growth that began in 1947 and lasted until the 1973 oil crisis.  Military spending was around 16 percent of GDP and the United States during the 1950s. In the 1960s, the Vietnam War sustained it at around 9 percent, but in the 1970s, strong economic competition from the free riders, Japan and Germany, forced a significant decline in military spending with a consequent U.S. decline into "stagflation" (a combination of stagnation and inflation).
     (Johnson, Chalmers A., copyright © 2006)
(Nemesis : the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson., 1. united states--foreign relations--1989, 2. united states--military policy--, 3. united states--politics and government--1989, p.274)

pp.276-277
    To understand the real weight of the military Keynesianism in the American economy, one must approach official defense statistics with great care.  They are compiled and published in such a way as to minimize the actual size of the official "defense budget."  The Pentagon does this to try to conceal from the public the real cost of the military  establishment and its overall weight within the economy.  There are numerous military activities not carried out by the Department of Defense and that are therefore not part of the Pentagon's annual budgets.  These include the Department of Energy's spending on nuclear weapons program ($16.4 billion in fiscal 2005), the Department of Homeland Security's outlays for the actual "defense" of the United States against terrorism ($41 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs' responsibilities for the lifetime care of the seriously wounded ($68 billion), the Treasury Department's payment of pensions to military retirees and widows and their families (an amount not fully disclosed by official statistics), and the Department of State's financing of foreign arms sales and militarily related developmental assistance ($23 billion).
    In addition to these amounts, there is something called the "Military Construction Appropriations Bill," which is tiny compared to the other expenditures--$12.2 billion for fiscal 2005--but which covers all the military bases around the world.  Adding these non-Department of Defense expenditures, the supplemental appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military construction budget to the Defense Appropriations Bill actually doubles what the administration calls the annual defense budget.  It is an amount larger than all other defense budgets on Earth combined. 85  Still to be added to this are interest payments by the Treasury to cover past debt-financed outlays going back to 1916.  Robert Higgs, author of Crisis and Leviathan and many other books on American militarism, estimates that in 2002 such interest payments amounted to $138.7 billion. 86

([ who are holding to the war bonds for these interests payment ])
([ $138.7 billion worth of interest payment in 2002 are going to whom ])
([ if the U.S. Treasury can buy back these war bonds, the U.S. budget can save $138.7 billion worth of interest payment in 2002. ])
([ do you ever wonder that Congress can authorized the U.S. Treasury to bailout the Financial_crisis_of_2007–2008  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007–2008 
yet there seems to be little interest in retiring the war bonds debt that can save the U.S. $138.7 billion worth of interest payment in 2002, a recurring yearly interest payment; 
  ])
([ at 3% interest rate, a $138.7 billion annual interest payment would be about $4,623.33 billion principal, is that right? ])

     (Johnson, Chalmers A., copyright © 2006)
(Nemesis : the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson., 1. united states--foreign relations--1989, 2. united states--military policy--, 3. united states--politics and government--1989, pp.276-277)
   ____________________________________
http://www.alternet.org/story/47998/737_u.s._military_bases_%3D_global_empire/

 By Chalmers Johnson / Metropolitan Books

The following is excerpted from Chalmers Johnson's new book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" (Metropolitan Books).

     ••••   •••   ••••

In some cases, foreign countries themselves have tried to keep their U.S. bases secret, fearing embarrassment if their collusion with American imperialism were revealed. In other instances, the Pentagon seems to want to play down the building of facilities aimed at dominating energy sources, or, in a related situation, retaining a network of bases that would keep Iraq under our hegemony regardless of the wishes of any future Iraqi government. The U.S. government tries not to divulge any information about the bases we use to eavesdrop on global communications, or our nuclear deployments, which, as William Arkin, an authority on the subject, writes, "[have] violated its treaty obligations. The U.S. was lying to many of its closest allies, even in NATO, about its nuclear designs. Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, hundreds of bases, and dozens of ships and submarines existed in a special secret world of their own with no rational military or even 'deterrence' justification."

     ••••   •••   ••••

From the book NEMESIS: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson. Reprinted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2006 by Chalmers Johnson. All rights reserved.
Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a non-profit research and public affairs organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and international relations in the Pacific.
 <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Tragedy and Hope, by Carroll Quigley, 1966

p.33 (pdf page 48)
For example, we can divide a society into six aspects: military, political, economic, social, religious, intellectual.

The Organization of Power

organization of force, The military
organization of wealth, the economic
organization of power, the political

   The military level is concerned with the organization of force, the political level with the organization of power,
and the economic level with the organization of wealth.
By the "organization of power" in a society we mean the ways in which obedience and consent (or acquiescence) are obtained.
The close relationships between levels can be seen from the fact that there are three basic ways to win obedience:
  by force,
  by buying consent with wealth, and
  by persuasion.
Each of these three leads us to another level (military, economic, or intellectual) outside the political level. At the same time, the organization of power today (that is, of the methods for obtaining obedience in the society) is a development of the methods used to obtain obedience in the society in an earlier period.

  (Tragedy and Hope, by Carroll Quigley, 1966, p.33)
 <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
 <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->

Kenneth E. Boulding, The world as a total system, 1985                      [ ]

p.29  nature of interactive relationships
A rough classification of the nature of interactive relationships among persons is into threat relationships, exchange relationships, and integrative relationships, which include such things as identification with a community, persuasion, legitimacy, love, hate, and so on. Threat relationships (you do something I want or I will something you do not want) are particularly important in political structures. Exchange relationships (you do something I want and I will do something you want) are particularly important in economic relationships. Integrative relationships (you do something because of who you are and I am or what we both belong to) are important in the arts, religion, family, social groups, and organization. All organizational structures participate in all three of these relationships, though to different degrees.

     (Boulding, Kenneth Ewart, 1910-, The world as a total system., “This volume is based on a series of lectures presented at the United Nation University, Tokyo, Japan, January/ February 1984.”, “September 1984”, 1. civilization--addresses, essays, lectures, 2. social system--addresses, essays, lectures, 3. system theory--addresses, essays, lectures, 1985, HM 201.B68 1985, p.29)
   ____________________________________
Kenneth E. Boulding, The world as a total system, 1985                      [ ]

p.83
   The social system can be divided into three large, overlapping, and interpenetrating subsystems, which are distinguished by different modes of interaction of human beings, usually assisted by various artifacts, each of which has a certain rationale of its own that is also part of the human learning process. These three systems I have called the threat system, the exchange system, and the integrative system. All actual human institutions and relationships involve mixtures of all three in varying proportions.

p.83
A threat system originates when A says to B, “You do something I want or I will do something you don't want.” It could be stated in negative terms; “You refrain from doing something that I don't want and I will refrain from doing something that you don't want.” The law is often couched in these terms.

p.84
At least five broad classes of response can be distinguished.  The first is submission or acquiescence, ... .  Second comes defiance, ... has to decide whether to carry out the threat or not, or make new threats.  A third possibility is flight, ... .  This has been quite important historically and accounts for a lot of the spread of the human race over the globe.  A fourth possibility is counter-threat: ... .  This may lead to deterrence, in which neither threat is carried out, or it may lead into breakdown and the carrying out of the threats. It may also lead into a progressive increase in the threats, as in an arms race.  A fifth possibility is threat reduction, in which B makes himself or herself a suit of armor or hides in a castle or bunker and so diminishes A's ability to carry out the threat.

p.84
Threat systems, of course, are particularly important in political relationships, in the law and criminal justice, and in taxation. Most people pay their taxes because the state or political authority threatens them with various unpleasantness if they do not. And, of course, threat is overwhelmingly important in war.

p.84
Exchange is the main instrumentality of economic life, as we shall see. It is also present a good deal in political life, in legislative logrolling, in political bargains of all kinds. It is found also in the family and, indeed, in virtually all human relationships that involve some sense of reciprocity. In any relationship there is a sense of what is given up and what is received, and if these are not in some sense equivalent, there will be dissatisfaction with the relationship.

p.85
   The integrative system is a looser concept, harder to define, and may involve many different concepts. It involves such things as legitimacy, status, a sense of identity, morality, community, affection, and, at the other end of the scale, illegitimacy, enmity, community breakdown, and the like. Legitimacy is a particularly important concept here. I have argued that if we are trying to find any single dynamic system on which the rest of society hangs--and I am not at all sure that we should even try to find such, for society is so interrelated--legitimacy is a good candidate, simply because if any system, practice, person, or organization loses legitimacy, either in its own eyes or the eyes of others, it becomes virtually impossible to continue functioning.
   There are, of course, many forms and sources of legitimacy, and its dynamic processes are actually very puzzling. Just why some things lose legitimacy--which sometimes they do quite suddenly--as others gain it is a real puzzle, but it is an essential part of the social system. Without legitimacy--that is, widespread acceptance--governments cannot function.

p.85
Terrorists are soldiers without a government, for they are usually regarded as illegitimate by others, but they must regard themselves as legitimate or they could not continue to function. Exchange cannot function either without legitimacy.

p.85  legitimacy
Property, however, has a certain implicit threat behind it, and unless it is legitimated, exchange cannot take place. Thus slavery became illegitimate as human beings were no longer regarded as legitimate objects of property and exchange.

p.85
    We can roughly classify institutions and organisations in regard to the proportions of threat, exchange, and integrative elements they involve. The “social triangle” (Figure 4.1) illustrates these proportions. T shows 100 percent threat; I, 100 percent integrative structure; and E, 100 percent exchange.

p.86
<see book for Figure 4.1>
Figure 4.1  The social triangle

T (100% Threat)      : police, armed forces, bandit, taxes
I (100% Integration) : monastery, commune, church, family
E (100% Exchange)    : corporations, banks, stock markets, auctions

All actual human institutions and relationships involve mixtures of all three in varying proportions.

     (Boulding, Kenneth Ewart, 1910-, The world as a total system., “This volume is based on a series of lectures presented at the United Nation University, Tokyo, Japan, January/ February 1984.”, “September 1984”, 1. civilization--addresses, essays, lectures, 2. social system--addresses, essays, lectures, 3. system theory--addresses, essays, lectures, 1985, HM 201.B68 1985, pp.83-86)
 <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Tragedy and Hope, by Carroll Quigley, 1966

The close relationships between levels can be seen from the fact that there are three basic ways to win obedience:
  by force,
  by buying consent with wealth, and
  by persuasion.

(Tragedy and Hope, by Carroll Quigley, 1966, p.33)
   ____________________________________
Kenneth E. Boulding, The world as a total system, 1985   

p.86
<see book for Figure 4.1>
Figure 4.1  The social triangle

T (100% Threat)      : police, armed forces, bandit, taxes
I (100% Integration) : monastery, commune, church, family
E (100% Exchange)    : corporations, banks, stock markets, auctions

All actual human institutions and relationships involve mixtures of all three in varying proportions.

     (Boulding, Kenneth Ewart, 1910-, The world as a total system., “This volume is based on a series of lectures presented at the United Nation University, Tokyo, Japan, January/ February 1984.”, “September 1984”, 1. civilization--addresses, essays, lectures, 2. social system--addresses, essays, lectures, 3. system theory--addresses, essays, lectures, 1985, HM 201.B68 1985, pp.83-86)
   ____________________________________
(1.) Russell L. Ackoff and the ancient Greece philosophers
     
   4POM (four pursuits of man)
   ancient Greece
   p.139
     The philosophers of ancient Greece divided the pursuits of man into four major categories:
     1. The scientific——the pursuit of truth
     2. The political-economic——the pursuit of power and plenty
     3. The ethical-moral——the pursuit of goodness virtue
     4. The aesthetic——the pursuit of beauty

(Ackoff's best : his classic writings on management, Russell L. Ackoff., © 1999, hardcover, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., p.139)
 <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/EP-primer.html
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/steen/cogweb/ep/EP-primer.html

website translator
https://www.ipvoid.com/website-translation-tool/
http://itools.com/tool/google-translate-web-page-translator
https://translate.yandex.com/translate


Evolutionary Psychology index
        
The Fallacy of Fitness Maximization
Evolutionary Psychology :  A Primer
Leda Cosmides & John Tooby
Co-Directors
Center for Evolutionary Psychology
University of California, Santa Barbara

     ••••   •••   ••••

[Principle 4.]
Principle 4. Different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems.

     ••••   •••   ••••

Evolved problem-solvers, however, are equipped with crib sheets: they come to a problem already "knowing" a lot about it. For example, a newborn's brain has response systems that "expect" faces to be present in the environment: babies less than 10 minutes old turn their eyes and head in response to face-like patterns, but not to scrambled versions of the same pattern with identical spatial frequencies (Johnson & Morton, 1991). Infants make strong ontological assumptions about how the world works and what kinds of things it contains -- even at 2 1/2 months (the point at which they can see well enough to be tested). They assume, for example, that it will contain rigid objects that are continuous in space and time, and they have prefered ways of parsing the world into separate objects (e.g., Baillergeon, 1986; Spelke, 1990). Ignoring shape, color, and texture, they treat any surface that is cohesive, bounded, and moves as a unit as a single object. When one solid object appears to pass through another, these infants are surprised. Yet a system with no "privileged" hypotheses -- a truly "open-minded" system -- would be undisturbed by such displays. In watching objects interact, babies less than a year old distinguish causal events from non-causal ones that have similar spatio-temporal properties; they distinguish objects that move only when acted upon from ones that are capable of self-generated motion (the inanimate/animate distinction); they assume that the self-propelled movement of animate objects is caused by invisible internal states -- goals and intentions -- whose presence must be inferred, since internal states cannot be seen (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Leslie, 1988; 1994). Toddlers have a well-developed "mind-reading" system, which uses eye direction and movement to infer what other people want, know, and believe (Baron-Cohen, 1995). (When this system is impaired, as in autism, the child cannot infer what others believe.) When an adult utters a word-like sound while pointing to a novel object, toddlers assume the word refers to the whole object, rather than one of its parts (Markman, 1989).

Without these privileged hypotheses -- about faces, objects, physical causality, other minds, word meanings, and so on -- a developing child could learn very little about its environment. For example, a child with autism who has a normal IQ and intact perceptual systems is, nevertheless, unable to make simple inferences about mental states (Baron-Cohen, 1995). Children with Williams syndrome are profoundly retarded and have difficulty learning even very simple spatial tasks, yet they are good at inferring other people's mental states. Some of their reasoning mechanisms are damaged, but their mind-reading system is intact.

Different problems require different crib sheets. For example, knowledge about intentions, beliefs, and desires, which allows one to infer the behavior of persons, will be misleading if applied to inanimate objects. Two machines are better than one when the crib sheet that helps solve problems in one domain is misleading in another. This suggests that many evolved computational mechanisms will be domain-specific: they will be activated in some domains but not others. Some of these will embody rational methods, but others will have special purpose inference procedures that respond not to logical form but to content-types -- procedures that work well within the stable ecological structure of a particular domain, even though they might lead to false or contradictory inferences if they were activated outside of that domain.

The more crib sheets a system has, the more problems it can solve. A brain equipped with a multiplicity of specialized inference engines will be able to generate sophisticated behavior that is sensitively tuned to its environment. In this view, the flexibility and power often attributed to content-independent algorithms is illusory. All else equal, a content-rich system will be able to infer more than a content-poor one.

Machines limited to executing Bayes's rule, modus ponens, and other "rational" procedures derived from mathematics or logic are computationally weak compared to the system outlined above (Tooby and Cosmides, 1992). The theories of rationality they embody are "environment-free" -- they were designed to produce valid inferences in all domains. They can be applied to a wide variety of domains, however, only because they lack any information that would be helpful in one domain but not in another. Having no crib sheets, there is little they can deduce about a domain; having no privileged hypotheses, there is little they can induce before their operation is hijacked by combinatorial explosion. The difference between domain-specific methods and domain-independent ones is akin to the difference between experts and novices: experts can solve problems faster and more efficiently than novices because they already know a lot about the problem domain.

William James's view of the mind, which was ignored for much of the 20th century, is being vindicated today. There is now evidence for the existence of circuits that are specialized for reasoning about objects, physical causality, number, the biological world, the beliefs and motivations of other individuals, and social interactions (for review, see Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994). It is now known that the learning mechanisms that govern the acquisition of language are different from those that govern the acquisition of food aversions, and both of these are different from the learning mechanisms that govern the acquisition of snake phobias (Garcia, 1990; Pinker, 1994; Mineka & Cooke, 1985). Examples abound.

     ••••   •••   ••••

For this reason, evolutionary psychology is relentlessly past-oriented. Cognitive mechanisms that exist because they solved problems efficiently in the past will not necessarily generate adaptive behavior in the present. Indeed, EPs reject the notion that one has "explained" a behavior pattern by showing that it promotes fitness under modern conditions (for papers on both sides of this controversy, see responses in the same journal issue to Symons (1990) and Tooby and Cosmides (1990a)).

     ••••   •••   ••••

[Principle 1.]
Principle 1. The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.

[Principle 2.]
Principle 2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history.

[Principle 3.]
Principle 3. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; most of what goes on in your mind is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious experience can mislead you into thinking that our circuitry is simpler that it really is. Most problems that you experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve -- they require very complicated neural circuitry.

[Principle 4.]
Principle 4. Different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems.

[Principle 5.]
Principle 5. Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.

     ••••   •••   ••••

The Five Principles are tools for thinking about psychology, which can be applied to any topic: sex and sexuality, how and why people cooperate, whether people are rational, how babies see the world, conformity, aggression, hearing, vision, sleeping, eating, hypnosis, schizophrenia and on and on. The framework they provide links areas of study, and saves one from drowning in particularity. Whenever you try to understand some aspect of human behavior, they encourage you to ask the following fundamental questions:

 1. Where in the brain are the relevant circuits and how, physically, do they work?
 2. What kind of information is being processed by these circuits?
 3. What information-processing programs do these circuits embody? and
 4. What were these circuits designed to accomplish (in a hunter-gatherer context)?

Now that we have dispensed with this preliminary throat-clearing, it is time to explain the theoretical framework from which the Five Principles -- and other fundamentals of evolutionary psychology -- were derived.

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/EP-primer.html
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/steen/cogweb/ep/EP-primer.html

     ••••   •••   ••••
   ____________________________________
Piero Sraffa, an Italian economist teaching at Cambridge University during the middle part of the 20th century, made a very strong argument that the neoclassical theory of the competitive firm as price taker is nonsensical, in a 1926 Economic Journal article.

Mainstream economists do not encourage the study of real cost curves, because they prefer to assume the truth rather than discover it.

But a few critical studies have looked at actual cost curves and found that the textbook case is very unlikely, just as Sraffa argued.

There is no such thing as markets free of private power.

James H. Nolt is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and author of “International Political Economy”.  This article was originally published by the World Policy Institute.
   ____________________________________

“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”

― Fred Rogers
   ____________________________________
Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, 2017

p.80
“We Americans may differ, bicker, stumble, and fall; but we are at our best when we pick each other up, when we have each other's back. Like any family, our American family is strongest when we cheris what we have in common and fight back against those who would drive us apart.”

"I want to talk [with] you today about the stories that we tell our selves, the way we view the world, and the way we all feel as Americans.", p.47, Thom Hartmann, Cracking the Code, 2007, 2008
we are at our best when we pick each other up, when we have each other's back, when we look out for our neighbor's interest as well as our own, when we listen to that sacred bond that binds every member of the society together, when we all sit together as equal around the kitchen table as one great big family; we are better and stronger together, than when we are apart.  I am running for the President of the United States of American, to make the economy work for you and for every American, ...  

"I want to talk [with] you today about the stories that we tell our selves, the way we view the world, and the way we all feel as Americans.";
we are stronger and better together, than when we are apart; we are at our best when we pick each other up, when we have each other's back, when we look out for our neighbor's interest as well as our own, when we listen to that sacred bond that binds every member of the society together, when we all sit together around that kitchen table sharing stories of our pain, retelling our stories of the   struggle, and remembering the stories of our joy;

   (Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, 2017, )
   ____________________________________
Thom Hartmann, Cracking the Code, 2007, 2008                                [ ]

A Note to the Reader
This book is written in a new language.  Every word mean precisely what it says.  The tools of communication revealed herein are also used in its writing.  You man spot many of these on your first read through, although they will probably be most visible, most clearly heard, and most easily picked out on a subsequent reading.

   ( Cracking the Code: How to win hearts, change minds, and restore America's original vision, by Thom Hartmann, © 2007, 2008; )
   ____________________________________
[expectations]
[loss - real and/or perception of loss]
Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, 2017                                 [ ]

p.442
   I went back to de Tocqueville. After studying the French Revolution, he wrote that revolts tend to start not in places where conditions are worst, but in places where expectations are most unmet. So if you've been raised to believe your life will unfold a certain way──say, with a steady union job that doesn't require a college degree but does provide a middle-class income, with traditional gender roles intact and everyone speaking English──and then things don't work out the way you expected, that's when you get angry. It's about loss.

   (Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, 2017, )
   ____________________________________
[reference group]
Ha-Joon Chang, Economics : the user's guide, 2014

p.238
; this is known as the reference group.  We actually don't really care that much how well people who do not belong to our own reference groups are doing.*

Ha-Joon Chang, Economics : the user's guide, 2014
   ____________________________________
[cheat]
cheater, cheating, scam, con, ponzi scheme, fairness in a cheating context, plus others  

Evolutionary Psychology index
        
The Fallacy of Fitness Maximization
Evolutionary Psychology:  A Primer
Leda Cosmides & John Tooby
Co-Directors
Center for Evolutionary Psychology
University of California, Santa Barbara

     ••••   •••   ••••

Two major categories of social conditionals are social exchange and threat -- conditional helping and conditional hurting -- carried out by individuals or groups on individuals or groups. We initially focused on social exchange (for review, see Cosmides & Tooby, 1992).

     ••••   •••   ••••

For example, to show that people who ordinarily cannot detect violations of conditional rules can do so when that violation represents cheating on a social contract would constitute initial support for the view that people have cognitive adaptations specialized for detecting cheaters in situations of social exchange. To find that violations of conditional rules are spontaneously detected when they represent bluffing on a threat would, for similar reasons, support the view that people have reasoning procedures specialized for analyzing threats. Our general research plan has been to use subjects' inability to spontaneously detect violations of conditionals expressing a wide variety of contents as a comparative baseline against which to detect the presence of performance-boosting reasoning specializations. By seeing what content-manipulations switch on or off high performance, the boundaries of the domains within which reasoning specializations successfully operate can be mapped.

The results of these investigations were striking. People who ordinarily cannot detect violations of if-then rules can do so easily and accurately when that violation represents cheating in a situation of social exchange (Cosmides, 1985, 1989; Cosmides & Tooby, 1989; 1992). This is a situation in which one is entitled to a benefit only if one has fulfilled a requirement (e.g., "If you are to eat those cookies, then you must first fix your bed"; "If a man eats cassava root, then he must have a tattoo on his chest"; or, more generally, "If you take benefit B, then you must satisfy requirement R"). Cheating is accepting the benefit specified without satisfying the condition that provision of that benefit was made contingent upon (e.g., eating the cookies without having first fixed your bed).

When asked to look for violations of social contracts of this kind, the adaptively correct answer is immediately obvious to almost all subjects, who commonly experience a "pop out" effect. No formal training is needed. Whenever the content of a problem asks subjects to look for cheaters in a social exchange -- even when the situation described is culturally unfamiliar and even bizarre -- subjects experience the problem as simple to solve, and their performance jumps dramatically. In general, 65-80% of subjects get it right, the highest performance ever found for a task of this kind. They choose the "benefit accepted" card (e.g., "ate cassava root") and the "cost not paid" card (e.g., "no tattoo"), for any social conditional that can be interpreted as a social contract, and in which looking for violations can be interpreted as looking for cheaters.

     ••••   •••   ••••

source:
       http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/EP-primer.html
       http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/steen/cogweb/ep/EP-primer.html
   ____________________________________
Thom Hartmann, Cracking the Code, 2007, 2008                                [ ]

A Note to the Reader
This book is written in a new language.  Every word mean precisely what it says.  The tools of communication revealed herein are also used in its writing.  You man spot many of these on your first read through, although they will probably be most visible, most clearly heard, and most easily picked out on a subsequent reading.

Chapter 3     cracking the sensory code   39

p.46
Psychologist David Lemure found that 75 percent of adult learners in America are primarily visual.  
Having worked in aboriginal and indigenous societies on five continents, I've found that between 75 to 95 percent of these folks are primarily kinesthetic.  
Yet when they move from the "the reservation" into "the city" and grown up going to "European" schools, they very often become primarily visual or auditory, like the average American.
This tells me that kinesthetics represent the "natural" human way of being, probably our most functional and useful way of being, but also a way of being that's changed or distorted by the experience of our public school and early life, where virtually 100 percent of information is presented either auditorily (teachers lecturing or by reading books) or visually (through metaphor, pictures, and TV).
([
Why It's Called A 'Gut Feeling' ―― .... ... paying ... attention to the way nerve cells in the gut interact with the brain, .... "The gut has more nerve cells than the spinal cord. And although researchers don't yet know why, there do seem to be people who experience emotions and insights more at the gut level than others." says G. Richard Locke, Md., a gastroenterologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and vice president of the Functional Brain-Gut Research Group.

Those intestinal nerve cells contain most of the body's serotonin, a neurotransmitter that influences the cardiovascular and gastrointestinal systems, as well as our emotional and psychological well-being. ... the particular receptor these gut cells use to process serotonin is identical to the receptor used in the portions of the brain where intuitive thinking occurs. ... how that helps us, ... learning more about the continual interaction between the brain and the belly may lead us to more balanced decisions.

Published July 24, 2006
Sarah Mahoney
c. 2006 Rodale Press Inc.
Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate

    ])
([
Reasons to listen to your gut
Bacteria in our intestines may play a major role in the health of our minds and bodies. German researchers have discovered that just as each human being has a specific blood type, each of us also has one of three separate families of bacteria residing in our guts. A person's "enterotype" likely establishes itself in infancy and appears to affect everything from how well food is digested to how drugs are absorbed. The discovery of the three distinct gut ecosystems "was a surprise, and it's good news," says researcher Peer Bork. The finding could help physicians diagnose and treat serious digestive disorders, and also help explain why the effects of medicines and nutrients vary widely from person to person. Further studies have shown that ingesting a bacteria species found in certain yogurts and cheeses calms stressed-out mice — pointing to the prospect of treating psychiatric disorders with microbes instead of drugs.

    ])
p.47
kinesthetic person, use language and metaphor that likewise evoke physical experience, touch, and feelings

"I see"
"I hear you"
"Feels good..."

"I want to talk to you today about the stories that we tell our selves, the way we view the world, and the way we all feel as Americans."

Cracking the Code (BIGGER FONT)
How to win hearts, change minds, and restore America's original vision
by Thom Hartmann

Chapter 4     the body's secret language  53
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
    ――Marianne Williamson

p.53
I discovered that once you decode the way that human beings make decisions――how our neurons fire――you can shape your language to take advantage of that code.  The National Security Agency (NSA) knows this code.  So does Madison Avenue.  (I've done training for both.)  And no one has cracked the communication code more effectively than modern Republicans.

   ( Cracking the Code: How to win hearts, change minds, and restore America's original vision, by Thom Hartmann, © 2007, 2008; )
--

NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C., section 107, some material is provided without permission from the copyright owner, only for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of federal copyright laws. These materials may not be distributed further, except for "fair use," without permission of the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
   ____________________________________
 → Because I don't know what lies behind something, I cann't keep up, and at something of a disadvantage.  And that's no way to live.  To be uninformed and entirely at someone else's mercy. (Netflix streaming show, The Crown, first season, episode 7, “Scientia Potentia Est”)  
   ____________________________________