Mega Disasters – Amsterdam Air Crash
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Jimmy sums it all up well. Speaking of one of the regular The View panelists, Joy Behar, he says: "These are people who are paid millions of dollars to talk about the news...it's called The View..Joy Behar has access to the Internet just like the rest of us...and she's sitting there saying, Why is Julian Assange helping Trump...Jim Acosta (ditto)...that's how so fucking ridiculous these people are...that's why they are on tv, that's why they are put on tv...because you're NOT a deep thinker, you don't actually know what's going on, and you can only repeat corporate talking points...and that's fucking Joy Behar. She's NOT a fucking progressive, and am not gonna apologise for her!"
TAKEAWAY: CORPORATE MEDIA FIGURES ARE NOT JUST BAD JOURNALISTS. THEY ARE KEY ACCOMPLICES IN THE MOST HORRID CRIMES OF OUR AGE. DAY WILL COME WHEN PEOPLE WILL SEE THAT THEY BELONG IN A NUREMBERG TYPE TRIBUNAL.
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Rick Sanchez presents an incredible video of an Su-27 Russian fighter jet confronting an F-15 in midair at almost supersonic speed and discusses what the encounter illustrates about today’s military technology. Then former naval intelligence officer John Jordan joins to share his insights and expertise.
14 September 2019 • All images TGP screengrabs.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he presidential debate held in Houston Thursday night was a three-hour demonstration of the vast distance between the Democratic Party and the American working class.
The debate was held only 48 hours before the contract expiration for 158,000 autoworkers, in the most important US manufacturing industry. It came only six weeks after the ouster of the governor of Puerto Rico, a US territory, after mass demonstrations of hundreds of thousands directed against the two-party political elite and the Wall Street banks.
But nowhere in the interminable event broadcast by ABC was there any discussion of the conditions of life of the class that comprises the vast majority of the population of the United States. The millionaires seeking the Democratic presidential nomination and the millionaire “journalists” like George Stephanopoulos and David Muir who moderated the event inhabit a different world than the broad mass of working people.
There was zero discussion of the issue that is invariably described as the number one concern in opinion polls: jobs and the economy. There was no discussion of poverty and rising economic inequality. And while two major industries came in for demagogic attack—the health insurance giants and the drug companies—there was not the slightest criticism of the capitalist system.
Instead, there was the usual combination of demagogic promises, canned one-liners and mutual backstabbing, followed by vacuous rhetoric about the need for unity and the desire to serve the people—the baloney offered up in every election cycle. The purpose is to cover up the class realities in America: the capitalist class controls the two major parties, while the working class, the vast majority of the population, is politically disenfranchised. It is given a “choice” in the presidential election between two equally right-wing representatives of the corporate elite.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders began the debate by declaring that he would “tell you what you don’t hear much about in Congress or in the media … this country is moving into an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires control the economic and political life of this country.”
Perfectly true, but while Sanders claimed that “as president, I am prepared to take them on,” he was not even able to “take them on” at the debate in Houston. No other Democrat addressed the issue, and Sanders himself never returned to it.
Nor did the panel of questioners take it up. That silence is predictable given that ABC News is owned by the Walt Disney Company, a media conglomerate with nearly $60 billion in revenue and $12.6 billion in net profits last year.
Sanders plays a specific role in the Democratic Party. He provides a left cover for this right-wing, corporate-controlled organization. His prominence in the presidential campaign is invariably cited as proof that the party has moved to the left, under conditions where the Democratic Party has become the favorite of both Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus.
Particularly since Trump entered the White House, the Democrats have tried to channel all popular opposition to the administration in a right-wing direction. This has taken the form of the anti-Russia campaign, which through bogus allegations that Trump is a Russian stooge has sought to generate popular support for a more aggressive assertion of American imperialist interests against Moscow in the Middle East, Central Asia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe.
In Thursday’s debate, this right-wing imperialist orientation dominated the brief discussion on foreign policy. There was much criticism of Trump’s trade war with China, but purely of a tactical character—poorly organized, erratic, impulsive, etc. There was full agreement that China is the main threat to US world domination and must be fought at all costs.
Former Housing Secretary Julian Castro called for the use of human rights issues as “leverage” against China, claiming that “millions of Uighurs” are “right now are being imprisoned and mistreated” in China. Particularly blunt were the comments of former Vice President Biden: “[W]e’re in a position where, if we don’t set the rules, we, in fact, are going to find ourselves with China setting the rules. And that’s why you need to organize the world to take on China …”
While all the candidates claimed that they would withdraw from Afghanistan—a worthless pledge they made in previous debates—there was silence on Trump’s ratcheting up of economic and military pressure on Iran, his arming of Saudi mass killing in Yemen, the continuing civil war in Syria, and the sharp turn to the right in Israel, including the Trump-Netanyahu policy of annexation of the Golan Heights and, likely after the Israeli elections, large parts of the West Bank.
As for Trump’s campaign of economic and political subversion of Venezuela, there was general support, with Sanders calling President Nicolas Maduro a “tyrant” and being criticized by Castro for not using the word “dictator.” Sanders, who in the 1980s postured as a friend of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, said nothing about the long history of Yankee imperialist intervention throughout Latin America.
The other noteworthy feature of Thursday’s debate was the effusive praise for the record of the Obama administration. Biden, of course, has made his role as vice president under Obama central to his campaign—in large measure to divert attention from his long and thoroughly reactionary record in the US Senate.
In previous debates there had been some criticism of the Obama record, particularly on immigration, but in Houston, every candidate gave at least one shout-out to Obama and pledged to continue the “progress” supposedly made during his eight years in office. Typical was Elizabeth Warren, who said, “We all owe a huge debt to President Obama, who fundamentally transformed health care in America and committed this country to health care for every human being.”
In reality, Obamacare was a bonanza for the insurance companies, designed with their input and backed by the drug companies and for-profit hospital chains. It was part of an overall policy of favoring Wall Street at the expense of working people: Obama bailed out the banks, without a single CEO being prosecuted, and forced through the restructuring of the auto industry with a 50 percent wage cut for new-hires, setting the standard for the rise of new slave-wage empires like Amazon. His foreign policy extended the warmongering of the Bush administration, adding US intervention in Libya, Syria and Yemen to the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
None of the candidates could address the fact that it was the eight years of Obama that made President Donald Trump possible. Hillary Clinton ran in 2016 as the continuator of the Obama administration, the candidate of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, and significant sections of working people either turned to Trump in despair or refused to vote at all.
The Biden campaign, still in the lead according to opinion polls, is based on re-running the 2016 campaign and hoping that Trump has sufficiently alienated voters in a handful of key Midwestern states. Sanders and Warren argue for a dose of “left” demagogy to win votes, knowing full well that the Democratic congressional leadership and the ruling class as a whole will torpedo their reformist proposals.
At the end of the day, no matter who was nominated, what would a future Democratic Party administration look like? It would be right-wing, pursuing the specific foreign policy obsessions of the Democratic wing of the ruling elite, directed against Russia and elevating the danger of war with a nuclear-armed antagonist.
None of the candidates calls for sweeping cuts in the massive military budget or challenges the role of America as the global military superpower, entitled to deploy its forces to every continent.
None is willing to deal with the reality that no serious improvements can be made in living standards and social services for the masses of working people without taking control of the wealth that has been created by labor, but which is now in the hands of the ruling elite.
Neither Sanders nor any of the others calls for confiscating the wealth of the billionaires—not Warren’s “two percent” tax, which would never be collected—and taking control of the banks and major industries, placing them under the democratic control of working people so they produce for the common good, not private profit.
The Democratic Party cannot be the vehicle for such policies. It is no alternative to the ultra-right politics of Trump and the fascistic movement he is seeking to build up.
The Democrats, no less than the Republicans, are a party of big business and American imperialism. The political task facing the working class is to break with the whole corporate-controlled two-party system and build an independent political movement based on a socialist and internationalist program.
For the record—
Snippets from this useless circus.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
[google-translator]
THE DEEP STATE IS CLOSING IN
The big social media —Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter—are trying to silence us.
[This is the script of an episode of China Watch I did for Newsbud in January 2018.]
[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]ou may have heard of the acclaimed documentary Wormwood directed by Errol Morris. The film has focused attention on the mysteries surrounding the death of government scientist Frank Olson. Olson fell 13 stories to his death from a New York hotel window in 1953. He died after—but possibly not because—he was dosed with LSD by the CIA. Why Frank Olson died—and maybe why he had to die—leads us to one of the most persistent controversies of Cold War America.
Did the US use biological weapons during the Korean War? The US government says No. Frank Olson apparently thought otherwise.
In Wormwood and Gall, I look at the story: the facts, the accusations, and the cover-up. And I point to indications of another terrible crime, one that might provide the key to the death of Frank Olson.
If the United States deployed biological weapons during the Korean War, it would be the second time China had experienced biological attack within ten years. And that probably would have been no coincidence.
During World War II, Japan’s notorious Unit 731 biological warfare unit was headquartered near the city of Harbin in Northeast China. Under the command of Colonel Shiro Ishii, Unit 731 conducted horrific experiments on living Chinese detainees and foreign POWs. Iishi wanted to determine the limits of human endurance to extreme temperatures, wounds from conventional weapons…and most importantly, vulnerability to biological attack.
After Japan’s defeat, the United States, instead of prosecuting Colonel Ishi, hired him. Over a period of three years, Ishi and his team negotiated an exchange: in return for immunity from prosecution, Unit 731’s files was handed over to the US Army.
US historians spin this in a backhanded way as evidence of American humanitarianism. The US, after all, could not conduct its own human experiments even though the data might have contributed to saving American lives. So the US Army acquired the data from Ishi and Unit 731.
But Unit 731 was not just a ghoulish research and development project. Unit 731 weaponized and operationalized biological warfare on a massive scale. University of Indiana entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood characterized Unit 731 as equivalent in scale to the Manhattan Project, the US effort to develop the atomic bomb.
During World War II, Unit 731 operations grew to encompass at least 10 field stations throughout China, employing over 10,000 people. It focused on identifying, testing, and growing bacterial strains most lethal to humans. In addition Unit 731 scientists developed strategies for delivery either directly or via insect vectors, and tactics for most effective exploitation.
Dozens of large scale attacks were conducted. In 1940, the Japanese army dropped fleas infected with bubonic plague from aircraft on the east Chinese city of Ningbo. The Ninbgo operation is well-documented thanks to Western witnesses and the enormous efforts taken by the Chinese government to contain the epidemic.
But the most successful Unit 731 operation involved the use of cholera. This campaign required close coordination between the biological warfare units and the Japanese army’s conventional forces. Colonel Ishii realized the most effective to spread cholera was not via infected insects, or by dumping cholera bacteria into a city’s water supply.
The key to a successful cholera attack was breaking down public order and public sanitation. The infected humans had to be forced to flee the city and spread their payload of disease along the path of their flight.
Therefore, in 1942, 54 Japanese bombers attacked the city of Baoshan in Yunnan Province with a mixture of conventional weapons and ceramic shells containing cholera and houseflies. The bombers returned for three more raids over the next week. These raids drove refugees—by now sickened with cholera and incubating the bacteria in their intestines—to enter, infect, and overwhelm the surrounding villages. 60,000 people died of cholera inside Baoshan…and another 120,000 perished in villages within a 125 mile radius of the shattered town.
With a death toll of perhaps 200,000 people, Baoshan is the deadliest single WMD attack in modern history. Together with another operation in China’s Shandong province in 1943, Colonel Ishi’s cholera operation killed 400,000 people —more fatalities than the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
This was the kind of data that Colonel Ishii delivered to the US Army in 1948, after 3 years of negotiation.
Now fast forward to the Korean War.
In 1951 and 1952, the government of the People’s Republic of China was galvanized by local reports of biological weapons attacks against its forces in Korea, and against targets in northeast China…and by published reports that Colonel Ishii had visited Korea.
Chinese alarm made a lot of sense. After all, when it came to biological warfare in Asia, Unit 731 knew the neighborhood, the ecology, and the most effective techniques. And it had a track record of spectacular success. And Colonel Ishii had signed on to the US side.
It is universally accepted that the PRC, at least at first, saw the danger as real. Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong ordered China’s scarce public health resources committed to a massive anti-biological warfare effort.
Then, with the help of the Soviet Union, the Chinese government organized two international commissions to investigate and document claims of biological warfare operations.
These reports supported the PRC’s position and have generated nothing but controversy. The US government and its supporters have labored for decades to discredit the reports as propaganda, hoaxes, and frauds. The US Department of Defense calls biological warfare allegations “the disinformation that refuses to die.”
Well, there are a lot of reasons why it refuses to die.
Reasons like a documentary prepared by al Jazeera in 2010 that piled up testimony and circumstantial evidence supporting allegations of biological weapons operations. Al Jazeera also unearthed home video footage shot by an alumnus of Unit 731 in which he claimed that he had assisted the US in mounting “an attack” in Korea.
There’s also the professional opinion of experts. Like this:
It’s not outside the realm of possibility something was done. During that time there was a very active offensive program…The Americans had a big vector program, so they must have tested it somehow or another. What would have stopped them?
The guy who said this is not some comsymp. He is Colonel Charles Bailey, executive director of the National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Diseases at George Mason University. And Colonel Bailey was previously commander at Fort Detrick.
Fort Detrick is ground zero for US bioweapons research. It has been America’s headquarters for US Army offensive and defensive biowar work for almost a century. It is where the US built up its inventory of anthrax and anthrax bombs. It’s where Colonel Ishii’s secrets from his bioweapons research, development, and operations ended up.
In the Cold War Fort Detrick geared up for a massive research effort into any biological agents that might be useful or harmful to the American military and the CIA. Fort Detrick’s nickname was Fort Doom.
And Fort Detrick is where our story comes full circle.
Because Fort Detrick is where Frank Olson, the tragic figure at the center of the Wormwood documentary, worked.
Olson worked as a biological warfare researcher and administrator. And a CIA employee.
Frank Olson was an unhappy biological weapons researcher and administrator and CIA employee, which was apparently why he was dosed with LSD and maybe why he was thrown out of a window to his death.
What made Frank Olson unhappy?
The Errol Morris documentary Wormwood discusses his motivation almost as a casual aside.
Frank Olson’s son tells Morris:
It was in 2001, very close friend, this guy named Norman Kenoyer, who I had remembered from my childhood, but who I hadn’t seen for decades. He dropped me a note and he said, “Eric, you got everything right except for one thing…Your father had become convinced that the United States was using biological weapons in Korea, and he was pissed.”
This statement is fleshed out in another documentary on US biowarfare black ops and Frank Olson’s death, Code Name: Project Artichoke.
In the documentary, Eric Olson and Norman Kenoyer have this exchange about US biological weapons activities in Korea:
Kenoyer says, “I took an oath when I left the United States Army that I would never divulge that stuff.”
“You divulged it to me.” Says Olson
“You cannot prove it, can you?”
“I can assert it. You told me.”
“Hearsay!”
“So you don't want to say it?”
“No .... I don't want to say it. But, there were people who had biological weapons and they used them. I won't say anything more than that. They used them.”
So Frank Olson believed the US was doing nasty things in biological weapons in Korea. Not because he was reading People’s Daily. Because he was a top researcher in the US bioweapons program at Fort Detrick.
Olson, in fact had run the supersecret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick that worked with the CIA on development of covert biological assets. And he was himself a CIA employee who had security clearances.
Olson presumably knew about the Ishii Unit 731 biological warfare data acquired by the US Army.
And if there had been US biological warfare activity in Korea, from planning to crew training to implementation to after-action evaluation, Olson would have known about it.
And that, for me, at least is the most important takeaway from Wormwood. The United States was doing some sort of biological weapons shenanigans in Korea and Northeast China…
…and US attempts to discredit Chinese and North Korean allegations as a groundless mixture of panic, propaganda, and fraud are bankrupt.
So, did Frank Olson’s knowledge of US biological warfare activity in Korea kill him?
We know Olson was disturbed and upset by his work. Frank Olson did not pursue the upward path open to him in America’s bioweapons bureaucracy. Instead, Olson had resigned his position as head of the Special Operations Division. He said he had ulcers. The CIA regarded him as a potential security risk.
At the time, the CIA regarded LSD as a magic mind control and truth serum elixir. When Frank Olson was attending a retreat at a camp called Deep Creek with his CIA and Fort Detrick colleagues in November 1953, he was secretly dosed with LSD.
However Frank Olson responded, it wasn’t good for Frank Olson. He reacted badly. Presumably Olson was regarded as even more of a liability and security risk after the dosing. Olson was bundled off to New York for meetings with a CIA-affiliated doctor and a CIA-affiliated magician hypnotist just before his fatal plunge from the 13th floor of the New York Statler hotel on November 28, 1953.
Perhaps guilty knowledge of US bioweapons activity in Korea was the key factor in the CIA’s anxieties over Frank Olson.
One problem with that. The Korean War armistice had already been concluded in the summer of 1953. That was months before the encounter at Deep Creek and Frank Olson’s death. Korean war crimes seem a bit bygones.
Another factor in Olson’s state of mind might have been first hand involvement in torture and murder.
Olson’s classified work at the Special Operations Division involved more than biological weapons of mass destruction. It apparently included evaluation of biological agents, that is to say, drugs, for use in interrogation by the CIA.
During a work trip to Germany, Olson had apparently witnessed deeply disturbing CIA activities at a US military base. Suspected Soviet agents were subjected to interrogation involving extreme and inhumane physical and psychological mistreatment.
And drugs. By the end of the process at least one of the detainees, subjects, victims, whatever you want to call them, had died. In front of Frank Olson.
Olson was a softhearted man who took it very hard when a successful bioweapons experiment led to the death of all the subject monkeys in his lab. Maybe witnessing the torture/murder of a human being, even an alleged Soviet agent, drove Olson into open and fatal defiance.
But there’s a third possibility, and it relates to this:
The notorious biowarfare confessions made by captured American airmen during the Korean War.
The US security establishment was horrified by American POWs corroborating allegations that the US had conducted biological warfare attacks during the Korean War. It was also appalled by a wider trend. Of 7200 US prisoners of wars, 5000 either signed a petition calling for the end of the war or confessed to crimes. 21 refused repatriation back to the United States and stayed in North Korea.
The True Story of Brainwashing and How It Shaped America
Instead of accepting the possibility that some draftees imprisoned under miserable conditions might have traded their signature on a petition for better treatment, or some might have had doubts about the US social system, or maybe *gulp* some were confessing to actual crimes, the US establishment became convinced that the POWs were victims of brainwashing.
The CIA and US Army especially feared that returning POWs might be infiltrated by brainwashed human robots programmed to do the will of their Chinese masters and attack America.
There is no evidence the Chinese tried to do this. But the United States itself fantasized about assassin automatons and tried to create them…and later projected the idea on China via the book and film “The Manchurian Candidate”.
When the first group of US POWs was repatriated in April 1953, 20 were segregated as potential brainwashed security risks and placed under armed guard. These “tainted” POWs were flown to Pennsylvania on a prison plane. Then they were sequestered at a mental ward in a hospital at Valley Forge. They quickly recanted their confessions. Maybe it was freedom, maybe it was conscience, maybe the openly wielded threat of prosecution. And maybe more.
Maybe the US effort to get these airmen to quickly recant their confessions involved administering substances less wholesome than American hamburgers and milkshakes and even more sinister than the promise of decades in a military stockade.
The CIA had a longstanding interest in using behavior modification procedures to counter PRC indoctrination of US POWs. According to a 2010 article titled Cries From the Past: Torture’s Ugly Echoes, by researchers Jeffrey Kaye and HP Albarelli, recovered POWs were subjected to various behavioral modification programs, including the use of experimental drugs.
Cries from the Past: Torture’s Ugly Echoes
And some of these experiments had been conducted by the CIA at Valley Forge Army Hospital, where the Korean POWs were quarantined in the summer of 1953.
Maybe drugs were involved in the remolding of the returned Korean POWs. Drugs that Frank Olson was involved in testing and evaluating. Drugs like LSD.
In 1953, the year the POWs returned and Frank Olson died, US official interest in mind control via LSD was at fever pitch.
Fears of a “brainwashing” gap between Communism and the United States fueled a US obsession with LSD as a mind-control superdrug. The US government explored the possibility of acquiring the world’s entire supply of LSD to keep it out of Soviet hands. And it gathered enough LSD to perform extensive experiments on human subjects, some of them uninformed or unwilling, for almost two decades.
America’s LSD mind control effort, which was variously known as Project Partridge, Project Artichoke, and MK-Ultra, was run by the CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb was present at Deep Creek the night Frank Olson was dosed with LSD. Gottlieb’s assistant, Richard Lashbrook, was sharing the hotel room at the Statler the night Olson plunged out the window. And as Olson lay dying on the sidewalk outside, Lashbrook made his first call…to Sidney Gottlieb.
I speculate the dark secret that killed Frank Olson was this:
The US was using LSD to counter-brainwash returned US POWs to obtain retractions of biological warfare confessions. And Frank Olson knew about it.
Maybe Olson had seen film. Maybe he saw film that reminded him of the horrors he had witnessed at the interrogations in Germany.
Only this time the victims of his mind control drugs were American servicemen.
And the drugs were being used to cover up a crime Olson knew about from his classified work at Fort Detrick: that the US had indeed conducted bacteriological warfare operations in Korea.
And this bothered Frank Olson. And it terrified him.
Because when Frank Olson felt the LSD take hold at Deep Creek, he realized that the same thing that had happened to the suspected Soviet agents and the returned POWs was happening to him.
And Frank Olson broke. Or was broken. And ended up dying on the sidewalk in front of the New York Statler Hotel.
Errol Morris takes the title for his documentary, Wormwood, from Revelations to describe God’s biological weapon attack on the waters of the earth at the last judgment.
Then the third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star burning like a torch fell from heaven and landed on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of thestar is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter like wormwood oil, and manypeople died from the bitter waters.
My title Wormwood and Gall, comes from the Book of Lamentations.
Wormwood and gall are two intensely bitter substances.
Jeremiah, gazing upon the ruins of Jerusalem, speaks of
remembering my affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall.
The wormwood is his intense suffering and grief, the gall his profound regret and consciousness of sin…and taken together they yield a yearning for redemption.
Wormwood and gall might have been a good description of Frank Olson’s thoughts and regrets as he entered the last days of his life.
Rest in Peace, Frank Olson.