Eric Zuesse
OpEds

Of humble beginnings, and a devout anticommunist, Missourian Harry Truman left his mark in history, for the worse, but, as usual, larger forces determined the nation's course.

Dr. Marco Soddu’s excellent 13 December 2012 study of “Truman Administration’s Containment Policy in Light of the French Return to Indochina” makes clear that (unlike FDR) President Truman’s historical understanding was poor and vulnerable to shaping by advisors who themselves had poor understanding, or perhaps ulterior motives.

President Roosevelt was far more of a strategic thinker than Truman was, and therefore was far less manipulable. In his 1 January 1945 Memorandum for the Secretary of State (Stenttinius, whom Truman viewed as being soft on communism and therefore Truman replaced him on 28 June 1945, even before deciding irrevocably to start a Cold War), FDR made clear that, “I still do not want to get mixed up in any Indochina decision. It is a matter for post-war.” And, “I made this very clear to Mr. Churchill. From both the military and civil point of view, action at this time is premature.” The aristocracies of both Britain and France were obsessed to continue their empires post-war. FDR held them off, but Truman was strongly inclined to yield to them whenever doing so would be “anti-communist.” He was simply manipulable. He never really understood what FDR’s vision was of the post-war world, nor cared. In fact, on 29 August 1945, in a conversation between Madam Chiang Kai-shek and Truman, “Madame Chiang recalled that President Roosevelt had spoken of a trusteeship for Indo China, whereupon the President stated that there had been no discussion of a trusteeship for Indo China as far as he was concerned.” This far, just a month, into the Cold War (supposedly against communism instead of for forming an all-inclusive global U.S. empire) that he now was committed to, he still had never even thought about what FDR’s vision for the post-WW2 world had been. To Truman, communists personified evil: to him, they were psychopaths and demons — end of story.

By contrast, here was the reason why FDR strongly favored for existing colonies to become taken over, after the War, by the U.N. (which FDR had, since August 1941, been planning to be quite different from what Truman made it), as trusteeships of the U.N., on the road quickly to independence (and Chiang knew at least something about this but Truman either didn’t, or else lied to say he didn’t):

history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1944v03/d708
Memorandum, President Roosevelt to the Secretary of State

FDR—Though a plutocrat by birth and acculturation, he was as decent and visionary as a bourgeois statesman can be.

January 24, 1944

I saw Halifax last week and told him quite frankly that it was perfectly true that I had, for over a year, expressed the opinion that Indo-China should not go back to France but that it should be administered by an international trusteeship. France has had the country — thirty million inhabitants — for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning. As a matter of interest, I am wholeheartedly supported in this view by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and by Marshal Stalin. I see no reason to play in with the British Foreign Office in this matter. The only reason they seem to oppose it is that they fear the effect it would have on their own possessions and those of the Dutch. They have never liked the idea of trusteeship because it is, in some instances, aimed at future independence. This is true in the case of Indo-China. Each case must, of course, stand on its own feet, but the case of Indo-China is perfectly clear. France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indo-China are entitled to something better than that.
F[ranklin] D. R[oosevelt]]

Another sign of bad faith on the part of the United States against the Soviet Union — besides the Marshall Plan and Operation Gladio (both instituted by Truman) — seems to have been America’s public refusal to accept as being anything other than ‘communist tricks’ the repeated efforts by the Soviets to restore the U.S.-U.S.S.R. joint national-security cooperation that had existed prior to 25 July 1945. America’s responses to each of those Soviet initiatives were insults, instead of welcoming the Soviet proposals and working behind the scenes with them to obtain progress toward the type of world order that FDR had intended — a world order policed by the United Nations, not by the united imperialistic fascists. For example, on 19 September 1959 at the U.N. General Assembly, the Soviet Representative headlined “Declaration of the Soviet Government on General and Complete Disarmament” and presented a series of proposals including:

https://undocs.org/A/4219
“Declaration of the Soviet Government on General and Complete Disarmament”

September 19, 1959
P. 14:
The Soviet Government proposes that the programme of general and complete disarmament should be carried out within as short a time-limit as possible — within a period of four years.
The following measures are proposed for the first stage:
The reduction, under appropriate control, of the strength of the armed forces of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China to the level of 1.7 million men, and of the United Kingdom and France to the level of 650,000 men;
The reduction of the armed forces of other states to levels to be agreed upon at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly or at a world conference on general and complete disarmament;
The reduction of the armaments and military equipment at the disposal of the armed forces of States to the extent necessary to ensure that the remaining quantity of armaments corresponds to the level fixed for the armed forces.
The following is proposed for the second stage:
The completion of the disbandment of the armed forces retained by States;
The elimination of all military bases in the territories of foreign States; troops and military personnel shall be withdrawn from the territories of foreign States to within their own national frontiers and shall be disbanded.
The following is for the third stage:
The destruction of all types of nuclear weapons and missiles;
The destruction of air force equipment;
The entry into force of the prohibition on the production, possession and storage of means of chemical and biological weapons in the possession of States shall be removed and destroyed under international supervision;
Scientific research for military purposes and the development of weapons and military equipment shall be prohibited;
War ministries, general staffs and all military and paramilitary establishments and organizations shall be abolished;
All military courses and training shall be terminated. States shall prohibit by law the military education of young people.
In accordance with their respective constitutional procedures, States shall enact legislation abolishing military service in all of its forms — compulsory, voluntary, by recruitment, and so forth. …
(4) Conclusion of a non-aggression pact between the member States of NATO and the member States of the Warsaw Treaty

The U.S. response came a few months later at the “Conference of the Ten Nation Committee on Disarmament”:
s3.amazonaws.com/unoda-web/documents/library/conf/TNCD-PV6.pdf
“Conference of the Ten Nation Committee on Disarmament”

22 March 1960
Final Verbatim Record of the Sixth Meeting
Held at the Palais des Nations, Geneva
P. 36:
Mr. Eaton (United States of America): I have no intention of entering into this discussion on foreign bases. I think the discussions that we have had here this morning have indicated that we shall run into political problems at the very earliest stage, problems on which earlier conferences have foundered. I would only say that the forces of my Government are only employed outside my own country and within my own country for the purpose of defending both ourselves and those of our allies who wish to be associated with us, who welcome our troops as a part of theirs and as a part of the allied defences, and for no other reason. Whenever the time comes when these troops need not be employed, for defensive purposes only, there need be no doubt in the mind of anyone here that those forces will be withdrawn.
s3.amazonaws.com/unoda-web/documents/library/conf/TNCD-PV46.pdf
“Conference of the Ten Nation Committee on Disarmament”
24 June 1960

Final Verbatim Record of the Forty-Sixth Meeting, Held at the Palais des Nations, Geneva, p. 4:
Mr. Nosek (Czechoslovakia): What did Mr. Eaton propose? He proposed the introduction of control measures. … exclusively with measures of control, that is with the old and well-known requirement of the United States — the introduction of control over armaments. Apparently with a view to misleading world public opinion, which requires a concrete discussion of general and complete disarmament, the United States representatives are beginning to prefer — for tactical reasons — to call those measures not “partial measures” but “initial steps” on the road to general and complete disarmament under effective international control.

b-ok.cc/book/5398150/073f73
“The United Nations and Space Security: Conflicting Mandates” p. 17:

This [obfuscation and evasion by the U.S. (which on p. 16 was referred to as merely “proposals directed towards the establishment of control without disarmament”)] ultimately led [on 28 June 1960] to the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Romania not attending the 48th meeting of the Ten-Nation Committee, which signalled the end of these discussions in the Committee.

The U.S. Government refused to discuss the Soviet Union’s proposal for all war-weaponry to be placed under U.N. command, and decision-making only by the U.N., to enforce only U.N. laws — no longer under the command of individual nations (such as by the U.S. regime’s “international-rules-based [i.e., not international-law-based] order.”

Who benefited from America’s refusal even to discuss what had been U.S. President FDR’s aim for the post-WW-II world? The beneficiaries are what Eisenhower when leaving office called the “military industrial complex,” and are basically America’s hundred largest military contractors, especially the owners of the largest weapons-manufacturing firms such as Lockheed. Ike had served them well, and then three days before leaving office warned the public about them so as not to be blamed (along with Truman) by historians, for having created it.

Meanwhile, the German industrialists (such as this) who were likeliest to have been the individuals who had funded Hitler’s rise to power, were let off scot-free at the Nuremberg Tribunals after the war was over. Furthermore, as Bishnu Pathak documented in his 21 September 2020 “Nuremberg Tribunal: A Precedent for Victor’s Justice”, those Tribunals were, even at the time, widely condemned even by the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and by the chief U.S. Prosecutor at the Tribunals, as being a “sanctimonious fraud,” a “high-grade lynching party” and nothing more than victors’ ‘justice’, instead of any respectable precedent-setter for the U.N., but Truman and the other leaders of the victor-powers simply did not care — and the U.N. became built upon that acceptance of victors’ ‘justice’: no improvement. One cannot say whether FDR would have caved to that if he had not died first, but certainly the U.S. that followed after him has been the type of tyranny that he had always been scheming to prevent both for the U.S. and for the world.

Nuremberg defendants—The trials seemed to mete out some harsh justice but in reality the Anglo-Americans and the French did their best to save and incorporate Nazis into the global anti-communist crusade, the first "Cold War". This pattern of high-handed hypocrisy continues to this day, with consequences that have put the world on the brink of a nuclear Armageddon.

Furthermore, the OECD or Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development was set up in 1948 nominally in order ‘to stimulate economic progress and world trade,’ but actually to administer the Marshall Plan. The OECD was just another anti-Soviet U.S. organization, but, since the cash that it was distributing was going to Europe, its initial membership was those countries and it was headquartered in Paris, so as not to seem to be an extension from the U.S. Government. The organization changed its name to OECD in 1961 so as to hide from historians that it had previously been called the OEEC, which was clearly traceable to the Cold War. The CIA-edited and written Wikipedia says that “In 1948, the OECD originated as the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC),[7] led by Robert Marjolin of France, to help administer the Marshall Plan (which was rejected by the Soviet Union and its satellite states).[8]” However, it wasn’t “rejected by” them, but instead rejected them — just like the Marshall Plan itself rejected them.

The 1989 masterpiece by Christopher Simpson, Blowback: The First Full Account of America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on The cold war, Our Domestic and Foreign Policy, documented the U.S. regime’s comprehensive employment of ‘ex’-Nazis in order to assist its goal of conquering ‘communism’ but really Russia. Then, on 7April 2024, I headlined a supplementary account, “How & Why the UK, U.S., and Canada, Governments imported Nazis into Canada”, which I closed by saying: “And this is how it came to be that the pro-Nazi Ukrainians in Canada have been organized and effectively represented while the others (the non-Nazi Ukrainians) were suppressed; and, above all, how it came to be the case that America’s armaments-manufacturers and their NATO have thrived while coup-after-coup and invasion-after-invasion have continued to expand the U.S. empire up till the present moment.” All of this was an extension from Truman’s private decision on 25 July 1945, and its extension by Bush’s secret decision on 24 February 1990 to continue it even after communism in Russia would be ended in 1991. Furthermore, my 23 March 2024 “How Germany Is Still Controlled by Nazis” documented yet further, that as regards the anti-Russian aspect of Hitler’s nazism, there was no real change in Germany when the U.S. regime took it over from Hitler (and the rest of it from Gorbachev), other than the necessary cosmetic changes in the new unified Germany, which, of course, required outlawing any public displays of anti-Semitism (as-if Hitler had hated only Jews — Jews were instead his main hatred, but he also hated — and aimed to enslave — all Russians, and, indeed, all Slavs).

I especially recommend reading Christopher Simpson’s masterpiece, because it’s the best book yet done on the then and continuing fraudulence of the U.S. regime’s allegations that the comprehensive denazification of Germany’s Government, which FDR had been intending, and which was central to his planning for the post-WW2 world — and which all three of the Allies, FDR, Stalin, and Churchill, had supported — was carried out, instead of effectively aborted, by Truman and by Eisenhower (with Churchill’s support of aborting it), and by all successive U.S. Presidents and European stooges since then. The inside-the-book excerpts at the Amazon site for Simpson’s masterpiece, give a fair indication of the book, including its “Series Introduction,” by Mark Crispin Miller, which says that, “For over half a century, America’s vast literary culture has been disparately policed, and imperceptibly contained, by state and corporate entities well placed and perfectly equipped to wipe out wayward writings,” including the history that this book documents.

The U.S. Government’s National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had very reluctantly commissioned it, with an obligation to publish it, but then refused to publish the work because NARA’s top official refused to allow it. The team of investigators, headed by the work’s author, Simpson, finally found a publisher for the work, which was then, and since, suppressed. On 13 November 2010, Eric Lichtblau, whose chaotic anecdotal narrative book The Nazi Next Door was to be published in 2015, was the New York Times reporter headlining “Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says”, and the newspaper introduced it by saying that, “An internal history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation provides gripping new evidence about some of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades. The Justice Department kept the 600-page report secret for the last four years, releasing a heavily redacted version last month to a private research group that sued to force its release. A complete version was obtained by The New York Times.” The 600-page complete unredacted secret report, titled “The Office of Special Investigations: Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust”, by Judy Feigin from the U.S. Department of Justice, and dated December 2006, was linked-to in the online version of the article, and it stated, flat-out, on its page 33, that “Congress’ overriding concern at the time was in helping refugees escape communist rule.” In other words: the U.S. Government’s ‘anti-communist’ (actually pro-U.S.-empire) obsession, ever since Truman took over, included assisting Nazis and their supporters to become “refugees” in America and in its (after WW2) colonies (‘allies’). And this has continued, likewise secretly, ever since U.S. President GHW Bush on 24 February 1990 started telling America’s European stooges to secretly continue the ‘Cold War’.

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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Garland Nixon

Garland Nixon

---

GAZA, UKRAINE, AND POLITICAL REALIGNMENT - WITH DR TONY MONTEIRO

Garland Nixon
Streamed live on Mar 6, 2024

Jedaal English
with

Mohammad Marandi

What is next for Iran? Retaliation or Strategic Patience? In conversation with Mohammad Marandi

Jedaal English
Streamed live 6 hours ago
Prof. Marandi explains the tough options Iran's leadership faces due to Israel's reckless provocations, and why any move may spark a regional and even global conflagration which could quickly escalate to a nuclear showdown. However, Iran has some narrow flexibility in the timing and nature of the escalation, and the US is making noises proclaiming that Washington is not interested in an all out war. 

News 2739

• If you approve of this article, please share it with your friends and kin.
• Help us expand our reach. Defeat appalling hypocrisy. Lies cost countless lives.
• We must act together to smash the VILE Western disinformation machine.
• This is the Lying Machine that protects the greatest evil humanity has ever seen.
• YOU know what we are talking about.

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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By Robert Parry
Annotated by Patrice Greanville
Consortium News.com,
fraternal websites
ALL CAPTIONS BY THE GREANVILLE POST

Greanville Post Editor's Note

Wittingly or unwittingly, the film's publicity lies from the start: the movie is not based on truth, but its deliberate manipulation. When it comes to active complicity in the heinous crimes of the empire, Hollywood is like Sodom and Gomorrah: it's impossible to find a single Biblical "just person", an actor or director that is without guilt.

A newly discovered document undercuts a key storyline of the anti-Soviet Afghan war of the 1980s – that it was “Charlie Wilson’s War.” A note inside Ronald Reagan’s White House targeted the Texas Democrat as someone “to bring into circle as discrete Hill connection,” Robert Parry reports.

Official Washington’s conventional wisdom about Afghanistan derives to a dangerous degree from a Hollywood movie, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” which depicted the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s as a fight pitting good “freedom fighters” vs. evil “occupiers” and which blamed Afghanistan’s later descent into chaos on feckless U.S. politicians quitting as soon as Soviet troops left in 1989.

The Tom Hanks movie also pushed the theme that the war was really the pet project of a maverick Democratic congressman from Texas, Charlie Wilson, who fell in love with the Afghan mujahedeen after falling in love with a glamorous Texas oil woman, Joanne Herring, who was committed to their anti-communist cause.

Roberts and Hanks using their star power in a disgraceful film. Did they ever have second thoughts?

However, “Charlie Wilson’s War” – like many Hollywood films – took extraordinary license with the facts, presenting many of the war’s core elements incorrectly. That in itself might not be a serious problem, except that key U.S. policymakers have cited these mythical “facts” as lessons to guide the current U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan.

The degree to which Ronald Reagan’s White House saw Wilson as more puppet than puppet-master is underscored by a newly discovered document at Reagan’s presidential library in Simi Valley, California. I found the document in the files of former CIA propaganda chief Walter Raymond Jr., who in the 1980s oversaw the selling of U.S. interventions in Central America and Afghanistan from his office at the National Security Council.

handwritten note to Raymond appears to be initialed by then-National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and instructs Raymond to recruit Wilson into the Reagan administration’s effort to drum up more Afghan war money for the fiscal 1985 budget. The note reads:

“Walt, Go see Charlie Wilson (D-TX). Seek to bring him into circle as discrete Hill connection. He can be very helpful in getting money. M.” (The notation may have used the wrong adjective, possibly intending ”discreet,” meaning circumspect and suggesting a secretive role, not “discrete,” meaning separate and distinct.)

Raymond appears to have followed up those instructions, as Wilson began to play a bigger and bigger role in unleashing the great Afghan spending spree of 1985 and as Raymond asserted himself behind the scenes on how the war should be sold to the American people.

Raymond, a 30-year veteran of CIA clandestine services, was a slight, soft-spoken New Yorker who reminded some of a character from a John le Carre spy novel, an intelligence officer who “easily fades into the woodwork,” according to one Raymond acquaintance. But his CIA career took a dramatic turn in 1982 when he was reassigned to the NSC.

Amiable fascists: Bill Buckley with Reagan: like two peas in a pod. As a former actor, dissembling was easy for Reagan.

At the time, the White House saw a need to step up its domestic propaganda operations in support of President Reagan’s desire to intervene more aggressively in Central America and Afghanistan. The American people – still stung by the agony of the Vietnam War – were not eager to engage in more foreign adventures.

So, Reagan’s team took aim at “kicking the Vietnam Syndrome” mostly by wildly exaggerating the Soviet threat. It became crucial to convince Americans that the Soviets were on the rise and on the march, though in reality the Soviets were on the decline and eager for accommodations with the West.

Yet, as deputy assistant secretary to the Air Force, J. Michael Kelly, put it, “the most critical special operations mission we have … is to persuade the American people that the communists are out to get us.”

The main focus of the administration’s domestic propaganda was on Central America where Reagan was arming right-wing military juntas engaged in anti-leftist extermination campaigns. Through the CIA, Reagan also was organizing a drug-tainted terrorist operation known as the Contras to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.

To hide the ugly realities and to overcome popular opposition to the policies, Reagan granted CIA Director William Casey extraordinary leeway to engage in CIA-style propaganda and disinformation aimed at the American people, the sort of project normally reserved for hostile countries. To oversee the operation – while skirting legal bans on the CIA operating domestically – Casey moved Raymond from the CIA to the NSC staff.

Raymond formally resigned from the CIA in April 1983 so, he said, “there would be no question whatsoever of any contamination of this.” But from the beginning, Raymond fretted about the legality of Casey’s involvement. Raymond confided in one memo that it was important “to get [Casey] out of the loop,” but Casey never backed off and Raymond continued to send progress reports to his old boss well into 1986.

It was “the kind of thing which [Casey] had a broad catholic interest in,” Raymond shrugged during a deposition given to congressional Iran-Contra investigators in 1987. Raymond offered the excuse that Casey undertook this apparently illegal interference in domestic politics “not so much in his CIA hat, but in his adviser to the president hat.”

Raymond also understood that the administration’s hand in the P.R. projects must stay hidden, because of other legal bans on executive-branch propaganda. “The work down within the administration has to, by definition, be at arms length,” Raymond noted in an Aug. 29, 1983, memo.

As one NSC official told me, the campaign was modeled after CIA covert operations abroad where a political goal is more important than the truth. “They were trying to manipulate [U.S.] public opinion … using the tools of Walt Raymond’s trade craft which he learned from his career in the CIA covert operation shop,” the official said.

From the NSC, Raymond organized inter-agency task forces to bombard the U.S. public with hyped-up propaganda about the Soviet threat in Central America and in Afghanistan. Raymond’s goal was to change the way Americans viewed these dangers, a process that the Reagan administration internally called “perception management.”

Lost History.]

Even after the Iran-Contra scandal was exposed in 1986 and Casey died of brain cancer in 1987, the Republicans fought to keep secret the remarkable story of this propaganda apparatus. As part of a deal to get three moderate Republican senators to join Democrats in signing the Iran-Contra report, Democratic leaders dropped a draft chapter on the CIA’s domestic propaganda role.

Iran-Contra’s Lost Chapter.”]

Raping Russians

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]iding the unspeakable realities of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan was almost as high a priority as concealing the U.S.-backed slaughter in Central America. Reagan’s pet “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan as in Nicaragua were tainted by the drug trade as well as by well-documented cases of torture, rape and murder.

Yet, Raymond and his propagandists were always looking for new ways to “sell” the wars to the American people, leading to a clash with CIA officer Gust Avrakotos, who was overseeing the Afghan conflict and who had developed his own close ties to Rep. Charlie Wilson.

According to author George Crile, whose book Charlie Wilson’s War provided a loose framework for the movie of the same name, Avrakotos clashed with Raymond and other senior Reagan administration officials when they proposed unrealistic propaganda themes regarding Afghanistan.

One of Raymond’s ideas was to get some Russian soldiers to “defect” and then fly them from Afghanistan to Washington where they would renounce communism. The problem, as Avrakotos explained, was that the Afghan mujahedeen routinely tortured and then murdered any Soviet soldier who fell into their hands, except for a few who were kept around for anal rape.

“For Avrakotos, 1985 was a year of right-wing craziness,” Crile wrote. “A band of well-placed anti-Communist enthusiasts in the administration had come up with a plan they believed would bring down the Red Army, if the CIA would only be willing to implement it. The leading advocates of this plan included Richard Perle at the Pentagon. … [NSC aide] Oliver North also checked in briefly, but the man who set Avrakotos’s teeth on edge most was Walt Raymond, another NSC staffer who had spent twenty years with the CIA as a propagandist.

“Their idea was to encourage Soviet officers and soldiers to defect to the mujahideen. As Avrakotos derisively describes it, ‘The muj were supposed to set up loudspeakers in the mountains announcing such things as “Lay down your arms, there is a passage to the West and to freedom.”’ Once news of this program made its way through the Red Army, it was argued, there would be a flood of defectors. …

“Avrakotos thought North and Perle were ‘cuckoos of the Far Right,’ and he soon felt quite certain that Raymond, the man who seemed to be the intellectual ringleader, was truly detached from reality. ‘What Russian in his right mind would defect to those fuckers all armed to the teeth,’ Avrakotos said in frustration. ‘To begin with, anyone defecting to the Dushman would have to be a crook, a thief or someone who wanted to get cornholed every day, because nine out of ten prisoners were dead within twenty-four hours and they were always turned into concubines by the mujahideen. I felt so sorry for them I wanted to have them all shot.’

“The meeting [with Raymond’s team] went very badly indeed. Gust [Avrakotos] accused North and Perle of being idiots. … Avrakotos said to Walt Raymond, ‘You know, Walt, you’re just a fucking asshole, you’re irrelevant.’”

However, as Crile wrote, Avrakotos “greatly underestimated the political power and determination of the group, who went directly to [CIA Director] Bill Casey to angrily protest Avrakotos’s insulting manner. The director complained to [CIA operations official] Clair George, who responded by forbidding Avrakotos to attend any more interagency meetings without a CIA nanny present. …

“Avrakotos arrived for one of these White House sessions armed with five huge photographic blowups. … One of them showed two Russian sergeants being used as concubines. Another had a Russian hanging from the turret of a tank with a vital part of his anatomy removed. … ‘If you were a sane fucking Russian, would you defect to these people?’ he had demanded of Perle.

“But the issue wouldn’t go away. Perle, Raymond, and the others continued to insist that the Agency find and send back to the United States the many Russian defectors they seemed to believe, despite Avrakotos’s denials, the mujahideen were harboring. …

“It had been almost impossible to locate two prisoners, much less two defectors. The CIA found itself in the preposterous position of having to pony up $50,000 to bribe the Afghans to deliver two live ones. ‘These two guys were basket cases,’ says Avrakotos. ‘One had been fucked so many times he didn’t know what was going on.’”

But the Reagan administration did calculate correctly that Wilson from his key position on a House Appropriations defense subcommittee could open the spigot on funding for the Afghan muj.

Learning Wrong Lessons

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hile it’s not unusual for Hollywood to produce a Cold War propaganda film, what was different about “Charlie Wilson’s War” was how it was treated by Official Washington as something close to a documentary. That attitude was somewhat a tribute to the likeable Tom Hanks who portrayed the womanizing and hard-drinking Charlie Wilson.

Yet, perhaps the biggest danger in viewing the movie as truth was its treatment of why the anti-Soviet jihad led to Afghanistan becoming home to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorists in the 1990s. The movie pushed the myth that the United States abruptly abandoned Afghanistan as soon as the Soviet troops left on Feb. 15, 1989.

All across Official Washington, pundits and policymakers have embraced the lesson that the United States must not make that “mistake” again – and thus must leave behind a sizeable force of U.S. troops.

lead editorial on May 1, 2012, criticized President Barack Obama for not explaining how he would prevent Afghanistan from imploding after the scheduled U.S. troop withdrawal in 2014, though the Times added that the plan’s “longer-term commitment [of aid] sends an important message to Afghans that Washington will not abandon them as it did after the Soviets were driven out.”

Ryan Crocker and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, as they explained the rise of the Taliban in the mid-1990s and al-Qaeda’s use of Afghanistan for plotting the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001.

In late 2009, Defense Secretary Gates reprised this phony conventional wisdom, telling reporters: “We will not repeat the mistakes of 1989, when we abandoned the country only to see it descend into civil war and into Taliban hands.” However, that narrative was based on a faux reality drawn from a fictional movie.

Gates knew the real history. After all, in 1989, he was deputy national security adviser under President George H.W. Bush when the key decisions were made to continue covert U.S. aid to the mujahedeen, not cut it off.

The truth was that the end game in Afghanistan was messed up not because the United States cut the mujahedeen off but because Washington pressed for a clear-cut victory, rebuffing Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s proposals for a power-sharing arrangement. And we know that Gates knows this reality because he recounted it in his 1996 memoir, From the Shadows.

The Real History

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]ere’s what that history actually shows: In 1988, Gorbachev promised to remove Soviet troops from Afghanistan and sought a negotiated settlement. He hoped for a unity government that would include elements of Afghan President Najibullah’s Soviet-backed regime in Kabul and the CIA-backed Islamic fundamentalist rebels.

Gates, who in 1988 was deputy CIA director, opposed Gorbachev’s plan, disbelieving that the Soviets would really depart and insisting that – if they did – the CIA’s mujahedeen could quickly defeat Najibullah’s army.

Inside the Reagan administration, Gates’s judgment was opposed by State Department analysts who foresaw a drawn-out struggle. Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead and the department’s intelligence chief Morton Abramowitz warned that Najibullah’s army might hold on longer than the CIA expected.

But Gates prevailed in the policy debates, pushing the CIA’s faith in its mujahedeen clients and expecting a rapid Najibullah collapse if the Soviets left. In the memoir, Gates recalled briefing Secretary of State George Shultz and his senior aides on the CIA’s predictions prior to Shultz flying to Moscow in February 1988.

“I told them that most [CIA] analysts did not believe Najibullah’s government could last without active Soviet military support,” wrote Gates.

After the Soviets did withdraw in February 1989 – proving Gates wrong on that point – some U.S. officials felt Washington’s geostrategic aims had been achieved and a move toward peace was in order. There also was mounting concern about the Afghan mujahedeen, especially their tendencies toward brutality, heroin trafficking and fundamentalist religious practices.

However, the new administration of George H.W. Bush – with Gates moving from the CIA to the White House as deputy national security adviser – rebuffed Gorbachev and chose to continue U.S. covert support for the mujahedeen, aid which was being funneled primarily through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI.

At the time, I was a Newsweek national security correspondent and asked my CIA contacts why the U.S. government didn’t just collect its winnings from the Soviet withdrawal and agree to some kind of national-unity government in Kabul that could end the war and bring some stability to the country. One of the CIA hardliners responded to my question with disgust. “We want to see Najibullah strung up by a light pole,” he snarled.

Back in Afghanistan, Najibullah’s regime defied the CIA’s expectation of a rapid collapse, using Soviet weapons and advisers to beat back a mujahedeen offensive in 1990. As Najibullah hung on, the war, the violence and the disorder continued.

Gates finally recognized that his CIA analysis had been wrong. In his memoir, he wrote: “As it turned out, Whitehead and Abramowitz were right” in their warning that Najibullah’s regime might not fall quickly. Gates’s memoir also acknowledged that the U.S. government did not abandon Afghanistan immediately after the Soviet departure.

“Najibullah would remain in power for another three years [after the Soviet pull-out], as the United States and the USSR continued to aid their respective sides,” Gates wrote. Indeed, Moscow’s and Washington’s supplies continued to flow until several months after the Soviet Union collapsed in summer 1991, according to Gates.

Crile’s Account

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nd other U.S. assistance continued even longer, according to Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War. In the book, Crile described how Wilson kept the funding spigot open for the Afghan rebels not only after the Soviet departure in 1989 but even after the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991.

Eventually, the mujahedeen did capture the strategic city of Khost, but turned it into a ghost town as civilians fled or faced the mujahedeen’s fundamentalist fury. Western aid workers found themselves “following the liberators in a desperate attempt to persuade them not to murder and pillage,” Crile wrote.

U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Robert Oakley began to wonder who were the worse bad guys, the Soviet-backed communists or the U.S.-supported mujahedeen.

“It was the leaders of the Afghan puppet government who were saying all the right things, even paying lip service to democratic change,” Crile reported. “The mujahideen, on the other hand, were committing unspeakable atrocities and couldn’t even put aside their bickering and murderous thoughts long enough to capture Kabul.”

In 1991, as the Soviet Union careened toward its final crackup, the Senate Intelligence Committee approved nothing for Afghanistan, Crile wrote. “But no one could just turn off Charlie Wilson’s war like that,” Crile noted. “For Charlie Wilson, there was something fundamentally wrong with his war ending then and there. He didn’t like the idea of the United States going out with a whimper.”

Wilson made an impassioned appeal to the House Intelligence Committee and carried the day. The committee first considered a $100 million annual appropriation, but Wilson got them to boost it to $200 million, which – with the Saudi matching funds – totaled $400 million, Crile reported.

“And so, as the mujahideen were poised for their thirteenth year of war, instead of being cut off, it turned out to be a banner year,” Crile wrote. “They found themselves with not only a $400 million budget but also with a cornucopia of new weaponry sources that opened up when the United States decided to send the Iraqi weapons captured during the Gulf War to the mujahideen.”

But even then the Afghan rebels needed an external event to prevail on the battlefield, the stunning disintegration of the Soviet Union in the latter half of 1991. Only then did Moscow cut off its aid to Najibullah. His government finally fell in 1992. But its collapse didn’t stop the war – or the mujahedeen infighting.

The capital of Kabul came under the control of a relatively moderate rebel force led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, an Islamist but not a fanatic. However, Massoud, a Tajik, was not favored by Pakistan’s ISI, which backed more extreme Pashtun elements of the mujahedeen.

Rival Afghan warlords battled with each other for another four years destroying much of Kabul. Finally, a disgusted Washington began to turn away. Crile reported that the Cross Border Humanitarian Aid Program, which was the only sustained U.S. program aimed at rebuilding Afghanistan, was cut off at the end of 1993, almost five years after the Soviets left.

Rise of the Taliban

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hile chaos continued to reign across Afghanistan, the ISI readied its own army of Islamic extremists drawn from Pashtun refugee camps inside Pakistan. This group, known as the Taliban, entered Afghanistan with the promise of restoring order.

The Taliban seized the capital of Kabul in September 1996, driving Massoud into a northward retreat. The ousted communist leader Najibullah, who had stayed in Kabul, sought shelter in the United Nations compound, but was captured. The Taliban tortured, castrated and killed him, his mutilated body hung from a light pole – just as the CIA hardliners had wished seven years earlier.

The triumphant Taliban imposed harsh Islamic law on Afghanistan. Their rule was especially cruel to women who had made gains toward equal rights under the communists, but were forced by the Taliban to live under highly restrictive rules, to cover themselves when in public, and to forgo schooling.

The Taliban also granted refuge to Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, who had fought with the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets in the 1980s. Bin Laden then used Afghanistan as the base of operations for his terrorist organization, al-Qaeda, setting the stage for the next Afghan War in 2001.

So, the real history is quite different from the Hollywood version that Official Washington has absorbed as its short-hand understanding of the anti-Soviet Afghan war of the 1980s.

The newly discovered document about bringing Charlie Wilson into the White House “circle as discrete Hill connection” suggests that even the impression that it was “Charlie Wilson’s War” may have been more illusion than reality. Though Wilson surely became a true believer in the CIA’s largest covert action of the Cold War, Reagan’s White House team appears to have viewed him as a useful Democratic front man who would be “very helpful in getting money.”

Most significantly, the mythology – enshrined in the movie and embraced by the policymakers – obscured the key lessons of the 1980s: the dangerous futility of trying to impose a Western or military solution on Afghanistan as well as the need to explore negotiation and compromise even when dealing with unsavory foes. It wasn’t the mythical U.S. “abandonment” of Afghanistan in February 1989 that caused the devastation of the past two decades, but rather the uncompromising policies of the Reagan-Bush-41 administrations.

First, there was the ascendance of propaganda over truth. The U.S. government was well aware of the gross human rights crimes of the Afghan “muj” but still sold them as honorable “freedom fighters” to the American people. Second, there was the triumphalism of Gates and other war hawks, who insisted on rubbing Moscow’s nose in its Afghan defeat and thus blocked cooperation on a negotiated settlement which held out the promise of a less destructive outcome.

Those two factors – the deceit and the hubris – set the stage for the 9/11 attacks in 2001, a renewed Afghan War bogging down tens of thousands of U.S. troops, America’s disastrous detour into Iraq, and now a costly long-term U.S. commitment to Afghanistan that is expected to last at least until 2024. With a distorted account of “Charlie Wilson’s War,” Tom Hanks and Hollywood didn’t help.

click here.]

ABOUT ROBERT PARRY
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

Robert Parry, consortiumnews.com, 2018 

By Patrick Lawrence and Cara Marianna
Scheer Post.

‘AUTOMATED MURDER’: ISRAEL’S ‘ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE’ IN GAZA

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Above photo: Gazan street during Operation Swords of Iron. Yairfridman2003 / Wikimedia Commons.

Technological change, while it helps humanity meet the challenges nature imposes upon us, leads to a paradigm shift: It leaves us less capable, not more, of using our intellectual capacities. It diminishes our minds in the long run. We strive to improve ourselves while risking a regression to the Stone Age if our ever more complex, ever more fragile technological infrastructure collapses.

That is Hans Köchler, an eminent Viennese scholar and president of the International Progress Organization, a globally active think tank, addressing an audience here last Thursday evening, April 4. The date is significant: The day before Köchler spoke, +972 Magazine and Local Call, independent publications in Israel–Palestine, reported that as the Israel Defense Forces press their savage invasion of the Gaza Strip, they deploy an artificial intelligence program called Lavender that so far has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as kill targets. In the early weeks of the Israeli siege, according to the Israeli sources +972 cites, “the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.”

Chilling it was to hear Köchler speak a couple of news cycles after +972 published these revelations, which are based on confidential interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have been directly involved in the use of AI to target Palestinians for assassination. “To use technologies to solve all our problems reduces our ability to make decisions,” Köchler asserted. “We’re no longer able to think through problems. They remove us from real life.”

And this is the country that our repugnant political class favors as exemplary.

Köchler titled his talk “The Trivialization of Public Space,” and his topic, broadly stated, was the impact of technologies such as digital communications and AI on our brains, our conduct, and altogether our humanity. It was sobering, to put the point mildly, to recognize that Israel’s siege of Gaza, bottomlessly depraved in itself, is an in-our-faces display of the dehumanizing effects these technologies have on all who depend on them.

Let us look on in horror, and let us see our future in it.

We see in the IDF, to make this point another way, a rupture in morality, human intelligence, and responsibility when human oversight is mediated by the algorithms that run AI systems. There is a break between causality and result, action and consequence. And this is exactly what advanced technologies have in store for the rest of humanity. Artificial intelligence, as Köchler put it, is not intelligence: “It is ‘simulated intelligence’ because it has no consciousness of itself.” It isn’t capable, he meant to say, of moral decision-making or ethical accountability.

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Mind-numbing destruction everywhere you look. Sadists' work, for sure.

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In the Lavender case, the data it produced were accepted and treated as if they had been generated by a human being without any actual human oversight or independent verification. A second AI system, sadistically named “Where’s Daddy?”—and how sick is this?—was then used to track Hamas suspects to their homes. The IDF intentionally targeted suspected militants while they were with their families, using unguided missiles or “dumb” bombs. This strategy had the advantage of enabling Israel to preserve its more expensive precision-guided weapons, or “smart” bombs.

As one of +972’s sources told the magazine:

We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity… . On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.

Once Lavender identified a potential suspect, IDF operatives had about 20 seconds to verify that the target was a male before making the decision to strike. There was no other human analysis of the “raw intelligence data.” The information generated by Lavender was treated as if it was “an order,” sources told +972—an official order to kill. Given the strategy of targeting suspects in their homes, the IDF assigned acceptable kill ratios for its bombing campaigns: 20 to 30 civilians for each junior-level Hamas operative. For Hamas leaders with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, +972’s sources said, “the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.”

In other words, Israeli policy, guided and assisted by AI technology, made it inevitable that thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, would be killed.

There appears to be no record of any other military deploying AI programs such as Lavender and Where’s Daddy? But it is sheer naïveté to assume this diabolic use of advanced technologies will not spread elsewhere. Israel is already the world’s leading exporter of surveillance and digital forensic tools. Anadolu, Turkey’s state-run news agency, reported as far back as February that Israel is using Gaza as a weapons-testing site so that it can market these tools as battle-tested. Antony Lowenstein, an author Anadolu quotes, calls this the marketing of “automated murder.”

And here we find ourselves: Haaretz, the Israeli daily, reported on April 5 that “intelligent” weapons proven effective in Gaza were major attractions when Israel marketed them last month at the Singapore Airshow, East Asia’s biggest arms bazaar.

Hans Köchler, who has studied the impact of digital technologies for many years, did not seem to have read the +972 Magazine report before he spoke here last week. This made his remarks all the more disturbing. He was not describing—not specifically—the murderers operating Lavender and other such technologies in Gaza. We will all live and die by these Faustian technologies: This, our common fate, was Köchler’s topic. Over the past six months, this is to say, Israel has announced the dehumanization that awaits all of us in that AI systems are technologies against which we have little defense. “Self-determination gives way to digital competence,” Köchler said. “We can’t distinguish between virtual reality and reality.”

Along with the +972 report on the use of AI came others in a week notable for its stomach-churning news of Israeli depravity. In its April 3 editions The Guardian revealed that the IDF intentionally deploys snipers and quadcopters—remotely controlled sniper drones—to target children. The evidence of this comes from U.S. and Canadian doctors who, while serving in Gaza, treat many children with wounds consistent with and easily identified as caused by snipers’ bullets. These are larger than the ammunition generally used in combat because they are intended to kill rather than wound.

The Biden regime never addresses these barbaric developments, and our corporate media, with rare exceptions such as The Guardian piece just cited, tell us almost nothing of them. Official and media accounts of events in Gaza, their “narratives,” are utterly at odds with these realities. How, we are left to ask, do they get away with these day-in, day-out dishonesties? This was the obvious question last week, given the extremes to which the IDF’s criminality now extends.

If you Google “Lavender” and “The New York Times,” you get “Lavender Oil Might Help You Sleep” and similarly frivolous headlines.  Neither has The Times made any mention of the +972 investigation. If you read detailed accounts of the April 1 air attacks on the World Central Kitchen’s three food-delivery vehicles, which killed seven aid workers, it is inescapable that the Israeli military systematically targeted them, one truck to the next, until all three were destroyed—this after WCK had carefully coordinated its deployment of the vehicles with Israeli authorities. These killings are entirely in line with the directive Yoav Gallant, Israel’s repulsive defense minister, issued Oct. 9: “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed.”

And what did we read of this incident in mainstream media?

Per usual, the Israeli military was authorized to investigate the Israeli military—an absurdity no U.S. official and no media account questioned. On April 5 the IDF announced that two officers were dismissed and three other reprimanded for “mishandling critical information.” President Biden declared he was “heartbroken.” The New York Times called the attack “a botched operation,” explaining that the IDF’s top officers “were forced to admit to a string of lethal mistakes and misjudgments.” Over and over we hear the refrain that Israel “is not doing enough to protect civilians.”

So it was a regrettable accident, we are led to conclude. Israel is doing its best. It has all along done its best. Put this against the raw statistic: The IDF has killed more than 220 humanitarian workers since it began its siege last October, to go by the U.N.’s count. How can one possibly believe that these were 220–plus accidents? “Let’s be very clear. This is not an anomaly,” an Oxfam official, Scott Paul, said after the WCK attack. “The killing of aid workers in Gaza has been systemic.”

There is reality and there is meta-reality, a term I have used previously in this space. How do the two stand side-by-side? How does the latter, the conjured “reality,” prove so efficacious? How do so many accept the 220–plus-accidents “narrative?” Why, more broadly, do so many accept propaganda and lies when they know, subliminally, they are constantly fed lies and propagandized?

I go back once again to Hans Köchler. In his speech and in various of his many books, he argues that electronic media—television chief among these—have conditioned people to rely for information on pictures and images instead of reading. “They lose the ability to analyze text, and so the ability to understand problems,” he said here. “People come to live in virtual worlds.”

We cannot think of a better description of the “narratives” advanced by the Biden regime and disseminated in corporate media: They present us with a virtual world—fully aware that, our minds habituated to pictures and images, most of us will mistake this virtual world for reality, just as Köchler warns. As a member of the audience here put it, “How is it possible to watch a genocide in real time and no one says anything? Knowledge no longer has any value. Anything goes, and if anything goes, nothing goes.”

The Biden regime supplies Israel with weaponry to prosecute its criminal siege of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians. It gives the apartheid state diplomatic cover at the United Nations and legal cover at the International Court of Justice. It distorts and obscures the IDF’s “Stone Age” conduct. All of this requires us to speak now not of Israel’s genocide but of the Israeli–U.S. genocide.

But the Biden regime is culpable in inflicting these multiple wounds on humanity in one other dimension we must not miss. With its incessant attempts to suspend us in a virtual reality of its making, distant from what it is doing in our names, it leads us into the dehumanized, grotesquely technologized future Köchler describes just as surely as the Israelis do as they murder human beings wholesale with AI weapons and kill innocent children with remotely controlled sniper drones.

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Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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