From: CLG_News
Subject: Former NSA analyst claims intel community will go 'nuclear' against Trump, ensure he will 'die in jail'
News Updates from CLG on 21 February 2017, http://www.legitgov.org/
All links are here: http://www.legitgov.org/#breaking_news
A 'Deplorable' Professor Explains Why Campuses Are So Radical | 20 Feb 2017 | NYU Professor and CLG Founder Michael Rectenwald is interviewed by Robert Samuel for Bill O'Reilly's Podcast, "The Contributing Factor," on politically correct authoritarianism on college campuses. [To subscribe to the CLG Newsletter, click here.]
Former NSA analyst claims intel community will go 'nuclear' against Trump, ensure he will 'die in jail' | 15 Feb 2017 | John Schindler, a former National Security Agency analyst and current columnist for the New York Observer, said Wednesday that the intelligence community will go "nuclear" against President Donald Trump. The national security columnist also quoted a senior intelligence official telling him that Trump "will die in jail." "Now we go nuclear. [Intelligence community] war going to new leveals. Just got an [email from] from senior [intelligence community] friend, it began: 'He will die in jail,'" Schindler tweeted. The Observer columnist has for months taken a strong stance against Trump.
(More articles followed, but deleted to have MPEN newsletter shorter. You can read them through the link above!)
From: National Popular Vote
Subject: New Mexico Senate Passes National Popular Vote 26-16
On February 20, the New Mexico Senate became the 35th state legislative chamber to approve the National Popular Vote bill. The vote was 26-16. The bill now goes to the New Mexico House of Representatives.
Here are some things you can do to help pass the National Popular Vote bill in your state, and thereby guarantee the Presidency to the candidate receiving the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC.
- Please send an email to your state legislators using our convenient email system asking them to support the National Popular Vote bill.
- Please share this email with your friends by clicking on the small Facebook or Twitter logo at the top of this email.
- Please share the National Popular Vote home page (www.NationalPopularVote.com) with your friends on Facebook or other social networks. Please ask your friends to tell their state legislators to support the National Popular Vote bill in their state. Your friends can do this conveniently using our email system.
- Contribute to National Popular Vote.
- Visit your state legislators at their local office or state capitol offices to emphasize your support. Or, phone them. You can find their office address, phone, and web page by entering your zip code and address at www.NationalPopularVote.com/write and then clicking on "contact info for my legislators and officials."
- Like us on Facebook
- Follow us on Twitter
- Write a letter-to-the-editor to newspapers.
- Show your friends the videos about National Popular Vote found on YouTube.
- Get a local group to host a guest speaker, panel discussion, or debate on the topic of the method of electing the President.
- Add your "two cents" to published items on the web by agreeing with favorable articles, or correcting the errors in opposing articles. You can follow the ongoing debate on the web by signing up for free Google alerts for "electoral college" or "national popular vote"
- Learn more about National Popular Vote from Chapter 9 of our book Every Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote. The entire book is free to read or download. You can purchase the book for $4.95 on Amazon.
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
The shortcomings of the current method of electing the President stem from state winner-take-all laws. Under these state laws, all of a state's electoral votes are awarded to the candidate receiving the most popular votes in each separate state.
Because of these state winner-take-all laws, five out of our 45 Presidents have come into office without winning the most popular votes nationwide. In this current era of close presidential elections, undemocratic outcomes will happen again if these state laws are not changed. The average margin in the national popular vote has been only 5% since 1988.
Current state winner-take-all laws create another problem in every presidential election. The vast majority of Americans get ignored because candidates only campaign in a handful of closely divided "battleground" states. Candidates write off states where they are hopelessly behind. They take for granted states where they are safely ahead. There were 399 campaign events in the 2016 general-election campaign, but
- Over half (57%) of the events were held in just 4 states (Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio).
- Virtually all (94%) of the events were in just 12 states (containing only 30% of the country's population). Details.
As presidential candidate Scott Walker (R) bluntly said in 2015: "The nation as a whole is not going to elect the next president. Twelve states are." Video
Fortunately, the U.S. Constitution contains a built-in method by which the states can remedy this situation. Article II says: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors...."
Thus, it does not take an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to change state winner-take-all laws. These laws may be changed in the same way that they were originally passed -- namely by action of your state legislature.
The winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes was used by only three states in the nation's first presidential election in 1789 (and repealed by all three by 1800). It was never debated at the Constitutional Convention, and never mentioned in the Federalist Papers. It did not become predominant until 1880 -- almost a century after the U.S. Constitution was written.
Under the National Popular Vote bill, the national popular vote winner will receive all of the electoral votes of the enacting states. The bill will take effect when enacted by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes -- enough to elect a President (270 of 538). Then, when the Electoral College meets in mid-December, the national popular vote winner will become President because the enacting states will represent at least 270 electoral votes. Thus, the Electoral College will represent the will of the voters in all 50 states (and DC).
A national popular vote for President is an achievable political goal that can be in place in time for the 2020 election. The bill has already been enacted into law in 11 states possessing 165 electoral votes. It will take effect when enacted by additional states having 105 electoral votes. The bill has previously passed one chamber in 12 additional states with 96 electoral votes. In 2016, the bill was approved by unanimous bipartisan committee votes in two states with an additional 26 electoral votes. A total of 2,955 state legislators have endorsed it. In New Mexico, the bill previously passed the House of Representatives in 2009. See status in states.
Recently, the National Popular Vote bill received bipartisan support in
- 40-16 vote in the Republican-controlled Arizona House
- 28-18 vote in the Republican-controlled Oklahoma Senate
- 57-4 vote in the Republican-controlled New York Senate
- 37-21 vote in the Democratic-controlled Oregon House
The National Popular Vote bill will make every voter in every state politically relevant in every presidential election.
From: Dr. Jerome L. Reide; Regional Field Director, NAACP Midwest Region III
Subject: Fw: NAACP ELECTS LEON W. RUSSELL AS CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
NEWS PRESS RELEASE / FEBRUARY 21, 2017
The NAACP elected Leon W. Russell as the Chairman of the Board of Directors at its annual board meeting on February 18 in New York. He replaces Roslyn M. Brock, who decided to step down as chairman after seven years of leadership.
NAACP ELECTS LEON W. RUSSELL
AS CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
FEBRUARY 21, 2017
Chairman Roslyn M. Brock Steps Down After Seven Years
Mississippi State President Derrick Johnson Elected as Vice Chair
NEW YORK, NY – The NAACP elected Leon W. Russell as the Chairman of the Board of Directors at its annual board meeting on February 18 in New York. He replaces Roslyn M. Brock, who decided to step down as chairman after seven years of leadership.
"I am honored to have served seven years as chairman of the nation's most important civil rights group," said Roslyn M. Brock, NAACP Chairman of the Board since 2010. "Leon W. Russell is a stalwart NAACP civil and human rights leader who is prepared to lead the NAACP into the future. Mr. Russell has been the chief architect in the development of the NAACP's strategic plan and champion of its organizational policy and resolutions process. His commitment to the Association's mission of protecting civil rights for all Americans remains unquestioned," she added.
Chairman Brock who succeeded the late Chairman Emeritus and civil rights icon H. Julian Bond in 2010 has been a powerful advocate for social justice and the reintegration of young people into key aspects of the organizational planning and policy objectives. She served as the fourth woman and youngest individual elected to the position of chairman in the organization's esteemed history. In honoring Ms. Brock's leadership and 32-year volunteer service to the NAACP, she was elected Chairman Emeritus by the Board and presented with an NAACP Image Award. Chairman Emeritus Brock was also re-elected to a three year At-Large term on the Board of Directors and will support the new Board leadership with health care reform, youth leadership recruitment and engagement and external relations.
"Roslyn M. Brock will forever be noted in the legacy of the NAACP as a powerful and forward-thinking leader. We are forever indebted to her contributions and unrelenting commitment," said NAACP President/CEO Cornell William Brooks.
"I am proud to welcome Leon W. Russell as the new chairman of the NAACP board. His lifelong commitment to civil rights and human rights as a member of the NAACP and leader in the state of Florida, represent a rigorously solid foundation for taking the platform of social justice to greater heights. I cannot think of a better successor to the stewardship of the organization than Mr. Russell," added President Brooks.
Mr. Russell most recently served as Vice Chair of the Board and has been a board member for over 27 years. He served as President of the Florida State Conference of Branches of the NAACP from 1996-2000, after serving for fifteen years as the First Vice President. He is also the former assistant secretary of the Board and the former Director of the Office of Human Rights for Pinellas County Government, Clearwater, Florida from 1977-2012, where he was responsible for implementation of the county's human rights and affirmation action ordinances.
"This is a most prestigious, yet humbling honor and one that escalates in importance as we move into a new era of increased challenges against civil and human rights," said Chairman Russell. "I am indebted to the work and leadership of Chairman Emeritus Brock and President Brooks for inheriting a powerful organization that after 108 years, still remains the most relevant and influential civil rights organization in our nation. I assure you that I will keep watered the seeds of activism and social justice that the NAACP's legacy spouts from," he said.
The recipient of numerous civic awards and citations, Mr. Russell was also elected for two terms as the President of the International Association of Official Human Rights Agencies. The IAOHRA represents civil rights agencies from the US and abroad responsible for enforcing state and local civil rights laws and the promotion of inter-group relations.
He is also a member of the International City Management Association; the National Forum for Black Public Administrators; the Board of Directors of the Children's Campaign of Florida; past Board Member of the Pinellas Opportunity Council, past President, and Board Member of the National Association of Human Rights Workers; and the Blueprint Commission on Juvenile Justice with responsibility for recommending reforms to improve the juvenile justice system in the state of Florida.
The 64-member board also elected Mississippi NAACP State President Derrick Johnson as the Board's Vice-Chairman to replace Mr. Russell.
"I look forward to working in partnership with Chairman Russell in advancing the agenda of the Association" said Derrick Johnson. "It is an honor to serve the hardworking volunteers who sacrifice daily to make Democracy work for all."
Mr. Johnson currently serves as State President of the Mississippi NAACP and as Executive Director of One Voice Inc. A former Mel King Community Fellow with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Mr. Johnson also serves on the Board of Directors of the Congressional Black Caucus Institute, Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, and as an adjunct professor at Tougaloo College.
From: Judy Burnette
Subject: Truthdig l "James Baldwin and the Meaning of Whiteness
James Baldwin and the Meaning of Whiteness
[I've often wondered how much more good President Obama might have accomplished if he was not half-white...!]
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/james_baldwin_and_the_meaning_of_whiteness_20170219/
Posted on Feb 19, 2017 By Chris Hedges
The work of James Baldwin, pictured here in 1969, is as relevant today
as in his time. The essayist, novelist, poet and social critic died in 1987.
Raoul Peck's "I Am Not Your Negro" is one of the finest documentaries I have ever seen—I would have stayed in the theater in New York to see the film again if the next showing had not been sold out. The newly released film powerfully illustrates, through James Baldwin's prophetic work, that the insanity now gripping the United States is an inevitable consequence of white Americans' steadfast failure to confront where they came from, who they are and the lies and myths they use to mask past and present crimes.
Baldwin's only equal as a 20th century essayist is George Orwell. If you have not read Baldwin you probably do not fully understand America. Especially now.
History "is not the past," the film quotes Baldwin as saying. "History is the present. We carry our history with us. To think otherwise is criminal."
The script is taken from Baldwin's notes, essays, interviews and letters, with some of the words delivered in Baldwin's voice from audio recordings and televised footage, some of them in readings by actor Samuel L. Jackson. But it is not, finally, the poetry and lyricism of Baldwin that make the film so moving. It is Peck's understanding of the core of Baldwin's message to the white race, a message that is vital to grasp as we struggle with an overt racist as president, mass incarceration, poverty gripping half the country and militarized police murdering unarmed black men and women in the streets of our cities.
Whiteness is a dangerous concept. It is not about skin color. It is not even about race. It is about the willful blindness used to justify white supremacy. It is about using moral rhetoric to defend exploitation, racism, mass murder, reigns of terror and the crimes of empire.
"The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure," Baldwin wrote.
"Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing."
America was founded on the genocidal slaughter of indigenous people and the holocaust of slavery. It was also founded on an imagined moral superiority and purity. The fact that dominance of others came, and still comes, from unrestrained acts of violence is washed out of the national narrative. The steadfast failure to face the truth, Baldwin warned, perpetuates a kind of collective psychosis.
Unable to face the truth, white Americans stunt and destroy their capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism. They construct a world of dangerous, self-serving fantasy. Those who imbibe the myth of whiteness externalize evil—their own evil—onto their victims. Racism, Baldwin understood, is driven by moral bankruptcy, narcissism, an inner loneliness and latent guilt. Donald Trump and most of those around him exhibit all of these characteristics.
"If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have needed to invent and could never have become so dependent on what they still call 'the Negro problem,' " Baldwin wrote. "This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them; and this not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role a guilty and constricted white imagination has assigned to the blacks."
"People pay for what they do, and, still more for what they allowed themselves to become," Baldwin went on. "And they pay for it very simply by the lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For, in the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today."
Footage in the Peck documentary of past murder cases including the 1955 lynching of the 14-year-old Emmett Till is interspersed with the modern-day lynching of young black men such as Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. Images of white supremacist parades from the 1960s, with young men carrying signs proclaiming "Keep America White," shift directly to footage of Ferguson, Mo.
This juxtaposition is almost too much to bear. If it does not shake you to the core you have no heart and no understanding of who we are in America.
The film begins with Baldwin's 1957 return from France, where he had been living for almost a decade. He comes back to join the nascent civil rights movement. He was deeply disturbed by a photograph of Dorothy Counts, 15, surrounded by a mob of whites spitting and screaming racial slurs as she walked into a newly desegregated high school in Charlotte, N.C.
"I could simply no longer sit around Paris discussing the Algerian and the black American problem," he said. "Everybody was paying their dues, and it was time I went home and paid mine."
In short, he returned to the United States so that black children like Dorothy Counts would not have to walk alone through a sea of racial hatred.
He spoke and participated in hundreds of events for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, however, largely held him at arm's length. Baldwin was too independent and outspoken about the truth. His words made King's Northern white liberal supporters uncomfortable. Baldwin was supposed to speak at the 1963 March on Washington, but King and the other leaders of the march replaced him with the actor Burt Lancaster.
Baldwin steadfastly refused to be anyone's "negro."
Baldwin was, like Orwell, an astute critic of modern culture and how it justifies the crimes of racism and imperialism. In his book "The Devil Finds Work" he pits Hollywood's vision of race against the reality.
The Peck documentary shows clips from films Baldwin critiqued in the book including "The Birth of a Nation" (a 1915 movie Baldwin called "an elaborate justification of mass murder"), "Dance, Fools, Dance" (1931), "The Monster Walks" (1932), "King Kong" (1933), "Imitation of Life" (1934), "They Won't Forget" (1937), "Stagecoach" (1939), "The Defiant Ones" (1958), "Lover Come Back" (1961), "A Raisin in the Sun" (1961) and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967). In film after film Baldwin pointed to the ingrained racial stereotypes of African-Americans in popular culture that sustain the lie of whiteness.
Blacks were, and often still are, portrayed by mass culture as lazy and childlike, therefore needing white parental supervision and domination, or as menacing and violent sexual predators who needed to be eliminated. These Hollywood stereotypes, Baldwin knew, existed as foils for an imagined white purity, decency and innocence. They buttressed the myth of a nation devoted to the ideals of justice, liberty and democracy. The oppressed, because of their supposed character defects, were the architects of their own oppression. Oppression was for their own good. Racism was a form of benevolence. Baldwin warned that not facing these lies would see America consume itself.
In "The Devil Finds Work" Baldwin also wrote about the film "A Tale of Two Cities" (1935). He had read the novel by Charles Dickens "obsessively" as a boy to understand "the question of what it meant to be a nigger." This novel and other novels he consumed, such as "Crime and Punishment," spoke of the oppressed.
He knew that the oppression of the characters in these stories had "something to do with my own." The books "had something to tell me." He wrote:
I was haunted, for example, by Alexandre Manette's document, in A Tale of Two Cities, describing the murder of a peasant boy—who, dying, speaks: "I say, we were so robbed, and hunted, and were made so poor, that our father told us it was a dreadful thing to bring a child into this world, and that what we should most pray for was that our women might be barren and our miserable race die out!" ("I had never before," observes Dr. Manette, "seen the sense of being oppressed, bursting forth like a fire.")
Dickens has not seen it all. The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be coerced) by the population-control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dispossessed and starving laboring in the fields which others own with their transistor radios at their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the Pope, one of the heads of the civilized world, forbids to the civilized that abortion which is being, literally, forced on them, the wretched.
The civilized have created the wretched quite coldly, and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death; these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world. There is a "sanctity" involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child's arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the "vital interest" of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child.
Nearly all African-Americans carry within them white blood, usually the result of white rape. White slaveholders routinely sold mixed-race children—their own children—into slavery. Baldwin knew the failure to acknowledge the melding of the black and white races that can be seen in nearly every African-American face, a melding that makes African-Americans literally the brothers and sisters of whites. African-Americans, Baldwin wrote, are the "bastard" children of white America. They constitute a peculiarly and uniquely American race.
"The truth is this country does not know what to do with its black population," he said. "Americans can't face the fact that I am flesh of their flesh."
White supremacy is not defined, he wrote, by intelligence or virtue. The white race continues to dominate other races because it has always controlled the most efficient killing mechanisms on the planet. It used, and uses, its industrial weapons to carry out mass murder, genocide, subjugation and exploitation, whether on slave plantations, on the Trail of Tears, at Wounded Knee, in the Philippines and Vietnam, in cities such as Baltimore and Ferguson or in our endless wars across the Middle East.
The true credo of the white race is we have everything, and if you try to take any of it from us we will kill you. This is the essential meaning of whiteness. As the white race turns on itself in an age of diminishing resources it is in the vital interest of the white underclass to understand what its elites and its empire are actually about. These lies, Baldwin warned, will ultimately have fatal consequences for America.
"There are days, this is one of them, when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it," Baldwin said. "How precisely you're going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here. I'm terrified at the moral apathy—the death of the heart—which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don't think I'm human."
© 2017 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
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From: Judy Burnette
Subject: In case you missed this from 1987: PEERS l "The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis"
THE SECRET GOVERNMENT – The Constitution In Crisis
"The National Security Act of '47 gave us the National Security Council. Never have we had a National Security Council so concerned about the nation's security that we're always looking for threats and looking how to orchestrate our society to oppose those threats. National Security was invented, almost, in 1947, and now it has become the prime mover of everything we do as measured against something we invented in 1947."
-- U.S. Navy Admiral Gene La Rocque in PBS Documentary "The Secret Government" (view free)
In the highly revealing 22 minutes of the PBS video documentary The Secret Government available for free viewing below, host Bill Moyers exposes the inner workings of a secret government much more vast that most people would ever imagine. Though originally broadcast in 1987, it is even more relevant today. Interviews with respected top military, intelligence, and government insiders reveal both the history and secret objectives of powerful groups in the hidden shadows of our government.
Watch this engaging documentary and further explore the vast amount of reliable, verifiable information on WantToKnow.info and you will very likely come to the conclusion that there is a powerful shadow or secret government which manipulates global politics behind the scenes. Government bureaucracies are known for their inefficiency, yet it is through their very well-organized and hierarchical military and intelligence services that those involved with the secret government are able to implement their hidden agendas.
The text of "The Secret Government" is also provided below for your convenience. Please help to strengthen democracy and educate others by spreading this important information. And for suggestions on how each of us can work towards a better way, click here. Together, we can and will build a brighter future for us all.
http://personalgrowthcourses.net/video/secret_government - "The Secret Government"
http://www.pbs.org/now/series/billmoyers2.html - PBS website's brief bio of Bill Moyers
For another powerful, highly revealing documentary on the manipulations of the secret government produced by BBC, click here (view free at link provided). The intrepid BBC team clearly shows how the War on Terror is largely a fabrication. For those interested in very detailed information on the composition of the shadow or secret government from a less well-known source, take a look at the summary available here.
Transcript
THE SECRET GOVERNMENT – The Constitution In Crisis
Bill Moyers, Secret Government, PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) 1987
Moyers: "The Secret Government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spies, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and superpatriots, who, for a variety of motives, operate outside the legitimate institutions of government.
Presidents have turned to them when they can't win the support of the Congress or the people, creating that unsupervised power so feared by the framers of our Constitution. Just imagine that William Casey's dream came true. Suppose the enterprise grew into a super-secret, self-financing, self-perpetuating organization. Suppose they decided on their own to assassinate Gorbachev or the leader of white South Africa. Could a President control them and what if he became the enterprise's public enemy Number One? Who would know? Who would say no?"
"World War II was over. Europe lay devastated. The United States emerged as the most powerful nation on earth. But from the rubble rose a strange new world, a peace that was not peace, and a war that was not war. We saw it emerging when the Soviets occupied Eastern Europe. The Cold War had begun."
Winston Churchill: "An Iron Curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe."
Moyers: "The Russians had been our ally against the Nazis, an expedient alliance for the sake of war. Now they were our enemy. To fight them we turned to some of the very men who had inflicted on humanity the horrors of Hitler's madness. We hired Nazis as American spies. We struck a secret bargain with the devil."
Erhard Dabringhaus: "One that I know real well is Klaus Barbie. He was wanted by the French as their number one war criminal, and somehow we employed a man like that as a very secretive informant."
Moyers: "Erhard Dabringhaus was employed in the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps and assigned to work with Nazi informants spying on the Russians. One of them was Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon', who had tortured and murdered thousands of Jews and resistance fighters. The Americans did not turn Barbie over to the French when they finished with him. They helped him escape to Bolivia.
Other top Nazis were smuggled into the United States to cooperate in the war against the new enemy."
"So began the morality of the Cold War. Anything goes. The struggle required a mentality of permanent war, a perpetual state of emergency. It had met a vast new apparatus of power that radically transformed our government. Its foundations were laid when President Truman signed into law the National Security Act of 1947."
Admiral Gene La Rocque: "Now that National Security Act of 1947 changed dramatically the direction of this great nation. It established the framework for a national security state."
Moyers: "Admiral Gene La Rocque rose through the ranks from Ensign to become a Strategic Planner for the Pentagon and now heads the Center of Defense Information, a public interest group."
Admiral Gene La Rocque: "The National Security Act of '47 gave us the National Security Council. Never have we had a National Security Council so concerned about the nation's security that we're always looking for threats and looking how to orchestrate our society to oppose those threats. National Security was invented, almost, in 1947, and now it has become the prime mover of everything we do as measured against something we invented in 1947. The National Security Act also gave us the Central Intelligence Agency."
Moyers: "This is the house the Cold War built – the CIA. The core of the new secret government. Its chief legitimate duty was to gather foreign intelligence for America's new role as a world power. Soon it was taking on covert operations, abroad and at home. As its mission expanded, the CIA recruited adventuresome young men like Notre Dame's 'All American,' Ralph McGehee."
Ralph McGehee: "I look back to the individual that I was when I joined the agency. I was a dedicated Cold Warrior who felt the agency was out there fighting for liberty, justice and democracy and religion around the world. And I believed wholeheartedly in this. I just felt proud every day that I went to work because I was out at the vanguard of the battle against the international evil empire – international Communist evil empire."
Moyers: "Iran, 1953: the CIA mounted its first major covert operation to overthrow a foreign government. The target was the Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mosaddeq. He held power legitimately, through his country's parliamentary process, and he was popular. Washington had once looked to him as the man to prevent a Communist takeover. But that was before Mosaddeq decided that the Iranian state, not British companies, ought to own and control the oil within Iran's own borders. When he nationalized the British run oil fields, Washington saw red."
"The Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles and his brother Alan, Director of the CIA, decided with Eisenhower's approval, to overthrow Mosaddeq and reinstate the Shah of Iran. The mobs paid by the CIA, and the police and soldiers bribed by the CIA, drove Mosaddeq from office."
Newscaster: "Crown Prince Abdullah greets the Shah as he lands at Baghdad airport after a seven-hour flight from Rome."
Moyers: The King of Kings was back in control and more pliable than Mosaddeq. American oil companies took over almost half of Iran's production. U.S. arms merchants moved in with $18 billion of weapons sales over the next 20 years. But there were losers."
Kenneth Love (former New York Times reporter): "Nearly everybody in Iran of any importance has had a brother, or a mother, or a sister, or a son, or a father, tortured, jailed, deprived of property without due process. I mean an absolutely buccaneering dictatorship in our name that we supported. SAVAK was created by the CIA!"
Moyers: "SAVAK, the Shah's Secret Police, tortured and murdered thousands of his opponents. General Richard Secord and Albert Hakim were among those who helped supply the Shah's insatiable appetite for the technology of control. But the weapons and flattery heaped by America on the Shah blinded us to the growing opposition of his own people. They rose up in 1979 against him. "Death to the Shah!" they shouted. "Death to the American Satan."
Kenneth Love: "Khomeni is a direct consequence, and the hostage crisis is a direct consequence, and the resurgence of the Shi'a is a direct consequence of the CIA's overthrow of Mosaddeq in 1953."
Moyers: "Guatemala 1954. Flushed with success America's Secret Government decided another troublesome leader must go. This time it was Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala. Philip Roettinger was recruited from the Marines to join the CIA team."
Colonel Philip Roettinger (Ret.) U.S. Marine Corps: "It was explained to me that it was very important for the security of the United States that we were going to prevent a Soviet beach-head in this hemisphere, which we have heard about very recently of course, and that the Guatemalan government was Communist, and we had to do something about it."
Moyers: "President Arbenz had admired Franklin D. Roosevelt and his government voted often with the American position at the United Nations. But in trying to bring a new deal to Guatemala, Arbenz committed two sins in the eyes of the Eisenhower administration. First, when he opened the system to all political parties he recognized the Communists too."
Roettinger: "Well, of course there was not even a hint of Communism in his government. He had no Communists in his Cabinet. He did permit the existence of a very small Communist party."
Moyers: "Arbenz also embarked on a massive land reform program. Less than 3 per cent of the land owners held more than 70 per cent of the land. So Arbenz nationalized more than 1 1/2 million acres, including land owned by his own family and turned it over to peasants. Much of that land belonged to the United Fruit Company, the giant American firm that was intent on keeping Guatemala, quite literally, a banana republic. United Fruit appealed to its close friends in Washington, including the Dulles brothers, who said that Arbenz was openly playing the Communist game. He had to go."
Roettinger: "This was sudden death for him. There was no chance of him winning this fight because of the fact that he had done this to the United Fruit Company. Plus the fact, that he was overthrowing the hegemony of the United States over this area. And this was dangerous, it could not be tolerated. We couldn't tolerate that."
Moyers: "From Honduras, the same country that today is the Contra staging base, the CIA launched a small band of mercenaries against Guatemala. They were easily turned back. So with its own planes and pilots the CIA then bombed the capital. Arbenz fled and was immediately replaced by an American puppet, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas."
Roettinger: "He overturned all of the reformist activities of President Arbenz. He gave the land back to the United Fruit Company that had been confiscated. He took land from the peasants and gave it back to the land owners."
Moyers: "The CIA had called its covert action against Guatemala, Operation Success. Military dictators ruled the country for the next 30 years. The United States provided them with weapons and trained their officers. The Communists we saved them from would have been hard pressed to do it better. Peasants were slaughtered. Political opponents were tortured. Suspected insurgents were shot, stabbed, burned alive or strangled. There were so many deaths at one point that coroners complained they couldn't keep up with the work load. Operation Success."
Roettinger: "What we did has caused a succession of repressive military dictatorships in that country and has been responsible for the deaths over 100,000 of their citizens."
Moyers: "Success breeds success, sometimes with dreary repetition. Mario Sandoval Alarcon began his career in the CIA's adventure in Guatemala. Today he's known as the Godfather of the Death Squads. In 1981, after lobbying Ronald Reagan's advisors for military aid to Guatemala, Sandoval Alarcon danced at the Inaugural Ball."
"Richard Bissell, another veteran of the Guatemalan coup, went on to become the CIA's Chief of Covert Operations. I looked him up several years ago for a CBS documentary. He talked about a secret report prepared for the White House in 1954 by a group of distinguished citizens headed by former president Herbert Hoover."
Report Quote: "It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto accepted norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, longstanding American concepts of fair play must be reconsidered. We must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, more effective methods than those used against us."
Moyers: "Cuba, 1961, seven years after Operation Success in Guatemala, Bissell was planning another CIA covert operation."
Newscaster: "The assault has begun on the dictatorship of Fidel Castro."
Moyers: "On April 17, 1961, Cuban exiles trained by the CIA at a base in friendly Guatemala landed on the southern coast of Cuba, at the Bay of Pigs. The U.S. had promised air support, but President Kennedy cancelled it. The invaders, left defenseless, surrendered.
Seven months after the disastrous invasion, Kennedy delivered a major foreign policy address."
President John F. Kennedy: "We cannot, as a free nation, compete with our adversaries in tactics of terror, assassination, false promises, counterfeit mobs and crisis."
Moyers: "The President was not telling the truth. Even as he spoke, his administration was planning a new covert war on Cuba. It would include some of the dirty tricks the President said we were above. The Secret Government was prepared for anything."
Moyers interview with Richard Bissel: "At one time, the CIA organized a small department known as Executive Action, which was a permanent assassination capability."
Bissel: "Well, it wasn't just an assassination capability. It was a capability to discredit or get rid of people, but it could have included assassination."
Moyers: "And it did. There were at least eight documented attempts to kill Castro. He says there were two dozen. And there was even one effort to put LSD in his cigars. To help us get rid of the Cuban leader, our Secret Government turned to the Mafia, just as we once made use of Nazis. The gangsters included the Las Vegas Mafioso, John Roselli, the Don of Chicago, Sam Giancana, and the Boss of Tampa, Santo Traficante."
"If I read you correctly you are saying it is the involvement in the Mafia that disturbed you and not the need or decision to assassinate a foreign leader."
Bissel: "Correct."
Moyers: "It is a chilling thought made more chilling by the assassination of John Kennedy. The accusations linger. In some minds, the suspicions persist of a dark unsolved conspiracy behind his murder. You can dismiss them, as many of us do. But knowing now what our secret government planned for Castro, the possibility remains. Once we decide that anything goes, anything can come home to haunt us."
"Vietnam, 1968: American soldiers are fighting and dying in the jungles of Southeast Asia. But the Vietnam War didn't start this way. It started secretly off the books, like so many of these ventures that have ended disastrously.
The CIA got there early, soon after the Vietnamese won their independence from the French in 1954. Eisenhower warned that the nations of Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes if the Communists, led by Ho Chi Min, took over all Vietnam. To hold the line, we installed in Saigon a puppet regime under Ngo Dinh Diem. American-trained commandoes were used to sabotage bus and rail lines and contaminate North Vietnam's oil supply. Vice President Nixon lent moral support to Diem, but the situation kept getting worse."
"President Kennedy sent the Green Berets to Vietnam and turned to full scale counter-insurgency. He had once said that Vietnam was the ultimate test of our will to stem the tide of world Communism. By the time of his death, there were 15,000 Americans there. They were called "advisors." The secret war was leading only to deeper involvement and more deception."
President Lyndon Johnson: "It is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States, to take action and reply."
Moyers: "This President was not telling the truth either. The action at the Gulf of Tonkin was not unprovoked. South Vietnam had been conducting secret raids in the area against the North and the American destroyer, ordered into the battle zone, had advanced warning it could be attacked. But Johnson seized the incident to stampede Congress into passing the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. He then used it as a blank check for the massive buildup of American forces."
"April, 1965: Two battalions of Marines land in South Vietnam. The first of more than 2 1/2 million Americans to fight there with no Congressional declaration of war. The dirty little war that began in secret, is reaching full roar. Free-fire zones, defoliation, the massacre at My Lai, napalm, and the CIA's Operation Phoenix to round up, torture and kill suspected Viet Cong."
Ralph McGehee: "We were murdering these people, incinerating them."
Moyers: "Ralph McGehee was there for the CIA and helped set up South Vietnam's secret police."
McGehee (Notre Dame "All American"): "My efforts had resulted in the deaths of many people, and I just – for me it was a period when I guess I was – I considered myself nearly insane – I just couldn't reconcile what I had been and what I was at the time becoming."
Moyers: "Many of the secret warriors in Southeast Asia had no such doubts or regrets. Some of the team that later joined the Iran-Contra enterprise, helped to run the secret war in Laos. As General Richard Secord later put it, 'Laos belonged to the CIA.'
Looking back, it is stunning how easily the Cold War enticed us into surrendering popular control of government to the National Security State. We've never come closer to bestowing absolute authority on the president. Setting up White House groups that secretly decide to fight dirty little wars, is a direct assumption of the war powers expressly forbidden by the Constitution."
"Not since December, 1941, has Congress declared war. Since then, we've had a police action in Korea, advisors in Vietnam, covert operations in Central America, peacekeeping in Lebanon and low intensity conflicts going on right now from Angola to Cambodia.
We've turned the war powers of the United States over to, well we're never really sure who, or what they're doing, or what it costs, or who is paying for it. The one thing that we are sure of is that this largely secret global war carried on with less and less accountability to democratic institutions, has become a way of life. And now we are faced with a question brand new in our history. Can we have the permanent warfare state and democracy too?"
"In 1975 as the war in Vietnam came to an end, Congress took its first public look at the Secret Government. Senator Frank Church chaired the Select Committee to study government operations.
The hearings opened the books on a string of lethal activities. From the use of electric pistols and poison pellets, to Mafia connections and drug experiments. And they gave us a detailed account of assassination plots against foreign leaders and the overthrowing of sovereign governments. We learned, for example, how the Nixon administration had waged a covert war against the government of Chile's president, Salvador Allende, who was ultimately overthrown by a military coup and assassinated."
Senator Church: "Like Caesar peering into the colonies from distant Rome, Nixon said the choice of government by the Chileans was unacceptable to the president of the United States. The attitude in the White House seemed to be – if in the wake of Vietnam, I can no longer send in the Marines, then I will send in the CIA."
Moyers: "The powers claimed by presidents and national security have become the controlling wheel of government, driving everything else. Secrecy then makes it possible for the president to pose as the sole competent judge of what will best protect our security. Secrecy permits the White House to control what others know, and that's power."
"This is the ultimate weapon of the secret government – the National Security Decision Directive – the NSDD.
Every president since Harry Truman has issued them. They're not published in any government register. Ronald Reagan has signed at least 280 such directives. They cover everything from outer space to nuclear weapons to covert operations in Iran and Nicaragua. In essence, by an arbitrary and secret decree, the president can issue himself a license to do as he will, where he will. And the only ones who need to know are the secret agents who carry it out – the knights of the Oval Office."
"This remains for me the heart of the matter. The men who wrote our Constitution, our basic book of rules, were concerned that power be held accountable. No party of government and no person in government, not even the President, was to pick or choose among the laws to be obeyed. But how does one branch of government blow the whistle on another? Or how do the people cry foul when their liberties are imperiled, if public officials can break the rules, lie to us about it, and then wave the wand of national security to silence us?"
"Can it happen again? You bet it can. The apparatus of secret power remains intact in a huge White House staff operating in the sanctuary of presidential privilege.
George Bush has already told the National Security Council to take more responsibility for foreign policy, which can of course be exercised beyond public scrutiny. And a lot of people in Washington are calling for more secrecy, not less, including more covert actions. This is a system easily corrupted as the public grows indifferent again, and the press is seduced or distracted.
So one day, sadly, we are likely to discover once again that while freedom does have enemies in the world, it can also be undermined here at home, in the dark, by those posing as its friends. I'm Bill Moyers. Good night."
Special Note: The above text and videos are excerpts of the full 90-minute version of "The Secret Government." To see the entire broadcast, search for the 90-minute version here.
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From: Tessa Levine, CREDO Action
Subject: Signature needed: Remove Bannon from the National Security Council
| Tell Congress: Stop Bannon: No white supremacist on the National Security Council | The petition to Congress reads:
Donald Trump's decision to seat right-wing white supremacist Steve Bannon on the National Security Council is dangerous for America and the world. Support legislation to keep Bannon off the National Security Council. Add your name: | Dear Munsup, Right-wing puppet master Steve Bannon has gotten himself appointed to the inner circle of Trump's National Security Council (NSC),1, 2 an appointment generally reserved for senior military and intelligence officers. Bannon, Trump's anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, white supremacist, domestic abuser top adviser should not be in the White House at all. However, his seat on the NSC is unheard of, and the consequences for our nation could be horrific. That's why we are joining a coalition of progressive organizations to call on Congress to pass legislation removing him from the NSC immediately, before Bannon's influence becomes even more bloated and dangerous. Tell Congress: Stop Steve Bannon's national security takeover. Act immediately to remove Bannon from the NSC. Trump and his administration have been playing fast, loose and reckless with our security since day one, and the results are horrifying. Trump's National Security Advisor Michael Flynn resigned in disgrace last week after reportedly lying to the Vice-President and the FBI about his treasonous communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States.3 Flynn's dangerous behaviour is a symbol of Trump's poor judgement. His decisions make all of us unsafe, and Bannon's appointment to the NSC is one of the most dangerous and irresponsible decisions he has made since taking office. It is clear that in the White House, Bannon is the one running this presidency. He is one of the masterminds behind the unraveling of the Affordable Care Act, the unconstitutional Muslim ban, the anti-immigrant border wall, and the sweeping abortion restrictions coming out of Congress.3 And now, as long as he remains on the NSC, he has the power to say who among us should be protected and who should be targeted. Bannon believes in the dangerous lie that the United States is at war with Islam and that America should be the center of a new movement of right-wing populism centering on white nationalism.4 He also believes that the apocalypse is coming and a new world order is upon us.5 It is ludicrous that this conspiracy-theory touting white nationalist is guiding our president's actions. Congress cannot allow a dangerous white supremacist to drive our national security policy. It has the legislative power to stop Bannon. Congress created the NSC and passed legislation regulating it as recently as last year.6 Recently, Representative Stephanie Murphy – a former national security specialist at the Department of Defense and a current member of the House Armed Services Committee – introduced legislation that would protect the independence of the NSC from Bannon's political meddling by removing him from the council.7 Now is the time for all members of Congress – Democrats and Republicans – to choose a side. They either take a stand against Bannon's vile racist and xenophobic agenda or they trust our national security to a white nationalist political operative with a reckless, apocalyptic worldview. We need a massive public outcry to make sure the members of Congress know that we expect them to act in the best interest of our nation. Will you join us in demanding that Congress stop Bannon's national security takeover and act immediately to remove him from the NSC? Click the link below to sign the petition. https://act.credoaction.com/sign/Bannon_NSC?t=6&akid=21781.10312106.Ztn8Un Thank you for fighting back, Tessa Levine, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets Add your name: 
|
References:
1. Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, "Bannon Is Given Security Role Usually Held for Generals," The New York Times, Jan. 29, 2017.
2. "Report: Trump not fully briefed on exec order that gave Bannon seat at NSC meetings," Fox News, Feb. 6, 2017.
3. Pamela Brown and Eli Watkins, "White House was warned Flynn could be blackmailed by Russia," CNN, Feb. 14, 2017.
4. Zack Beauchamp, "Steve Bannon, the Trump adviser who helped craft the "Muslim ban explained," Vox, Jan. 29, 2017.
5. Jalal Baig, "Steve Bannon's war with Islam: Trump may not even understand his adviser's apocalyptic vision," Salon, Feb. 5, 2017.
6. Paul Blumenthal and JM Rieger, "Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is Coming And War Is Inevitable," The Huffington Post, Feb. 8, 2017.
7. S.V. Date, "Trump Will Be Limited To A Smaller National Security Council Staff," The Huffington Post, Dec. 8, 2016.
8. Christina Cauterucci, "Rep. Stephanie Murphy Joins Unofficial Team of Women Against Trump With Anti-Bannon Bill," Slate, Feb. 2, 2017. |
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