The 5 creepiest things about how the Koch brothers engineered the shutdown

This weekend, The New York Times revealed how the Koch Brothers and [font color=red]Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese[/font] engineered this here shutdown we’re dealing with right now, and how they’d been planning it ever since Obama was reelected. I wasn’t especially shocked by it, myself. Hell, half of the Tea Party people in the House actually campaigned on it. Which is why I have been annoyed as hell with the whole “Oh, well, it’s really both parties at fault here!” line of reasoning that some people have been trying to take...

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/207311/the-5-creepiest-things-about-how-the-koch-brothers-engineered-the-shutdown/

...When he introduces Garrison's investigation it is essentially more of the same. For instance, about the arrest of Clay Shaw, Talbot writes, "But to Garrison, he was a CIA-linked international businessman. . .."

Today, there can be no "buts" about it. Shaw was not just "linked" to the CIA, he worked for them. We have this not just from the declassified files, but from FBI agent Regis Kennedy, who said, in referring to Shaw's association with Permindex, that Shaw was a CIA agent who had worked for the Agency in Italy. (Let Justice Be Done, by William Davy, p. 100)

To further downplay the importance of what Garrison uncovered, Talbot quotes former RFK aide, Ed Guthman. Guthman was working as an editor for the Los Angeles Times in early 1967. He tells Talbot that he sent his ace reporters to New Orleans and they discovered that Garrison had no evidence for his charges. Guthman calls them "great reporters". If Talbot would have dug a little deeper he would have found out a couple of interesting things these "great reporters" had done.

One of the "great" reporters was Jack Nelson. Nelson's source for Garrison not having any evidence was former FBI agent and Hoover informer Aaron Kohn. Kohn was, among other things, an unofficial assistant to Shaw's defense team. Another of Guthman's "great" reporters was Jerry Cohen. Cohen cooperated with FBI informant Larry Schiller in keeping Garrison from extraditing Loran Hall. This cooperation extended up to flying with Hall to Sacramento to speak to [font color=red]Edwin Meese[/font]. Further, Cohen kept up a correspondence with Shaw's lawyers and even Shaw himself. This is great reporting? ...

http://www.ctka.net/brothers.html

@MichiganHist: Senator Robert Kennedy touring 12th st area affected by riot - 5/1968 Detroit News pic (WSU Lib) #DetroitHistory

Andrew Kaczynski @BuzzFeedAndrew · This NYT front page from August 14, 1965.

...McCloy asked President Carter to allow the Shah to live in the United States. Carter refused because he had told by his diplomats in Iran that such a decision might encourage the embassy being stormed by mobs. As a result McCloy made preparations for the Shah to stay in the Bahamas. David Rockefeller arranged for his personal assistant at Chase Manhattan, Joseph V. Reed, to manage the Shah's finances.

Rockefeller also established the highly secret, Project Alpha. The main objective was to persuade Carter to provide a safe haven for Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (code-named "Eagle&quot . McCloy, Rockefeller and Kissinger were referred to as the "Triumvirate". Rockefeller used money from Chase Manhattan Bank to pay employees of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy who worked on the project. Some of this money was used to persuade academics to write articles defending the record of Pahlavi. For example, George Lenczowski, professor emeritus at the University of California, was paid $40,000 to write a book with the "intention to answer the shah's critics".

Kissinger telephoned Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to Carter, on 7th April, 1979, and berated the president for his emphasis on human rights, which he considered to be "amateurish" and "naive". Brzezinski suggested he talked directly to Jimmy Carter. Kissinger called Carter and arranged for him to meet David Rockefeller, two days later. Gerald Ford also contacted Carter and urged him to "stand by our friends".

McCloy, Rockefeller and Kissinger arranged for conservative journalists to mount an attack on Carter over this issue. [font color=darkred]On 19th April, George F. Will wrote about Carter and the Shah and said;[/font] [font color=blue]"It is sad that an Administration that knows so much about morality has so little dignity."[/font]

On 19th April, Rosalynn Carter wrote in her diary: "We can't get away from Iran. Many people - Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Howard Baker, John McCloy, Gerald Ford - all are after Jimmy to bring the shah to the United States, but Jimmy says it's been too long, and anti-American and anti-shah sentiments have escalated so that he doesn't want to. Jimmy said he explained to all of them that the Iranians might kidnap our Americans who are still there." ...

http://spartacus-educational.com/USAmccloyJ.htm

http://sync.democraticunderground.com/10025293372#post58

Jimmy Hoffa and the Church Committee

A little off topic here but it was interesting last night that PBS' History Detectives investigation concluded that Hoffa was killed to prevent him from testifying to the Church Committee.

Ostensibly to keep him from spilling the beans any further about Russell Bufalino's (Philly/NY mob boss) ties to the CIA. Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli were silenced in the Summer of 75 too (apparently for the same reason).

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025277060#post33

[font color=green]Dave Davies:[/font] The scandal that brought Nixon down, the Watergate scandal, kind of left Anderson behind in some ways. I mean other reporters really took the lead on that as well as, of course, congressional investigators and federal prosecutors. But it was fascinating to read in your book that Anderson himself was almost way ahead of this story.

[font color=blue]Mark Feldstein:[/font] Yes. Jack Anderson was ahead of the Watergate story in two respects. First, he exposed what was really the precursor to Watergate, which is known as the ITT scandal. This was a scandal where he got a smoking gun document from Dita Beard, the Washington lobbyist for ITT, one of the largest corporations, International Telephone and Telegraph, of its time, and he and his young leg man at the time, Brit Hume, who, of course, later became famous as an anchor man for Fox News, they broke this story in essence of how the Nixon administration took a bribe - or how the Republican Convention took a bribe, $400,000 was pledged by ITT, and in exchange they dropped antitrust action, watered down antitrust action, against ITT. And Anderson and Hume obtained the smoking gun document that proved it, which the lobbyist herself admitted it.

This threatened Nixon more than any of Anderson's national security secrets because it got to the heart of the corruption at the center of the Nixon re-election campaign. And Nixon's men went into overdrive trying to contain this scandal. They decided to plant false documents with Anderson, they plotted about breaking into his office, typing up documents on White House stationery on his typewriter, leaking it to him so that when he published it they could trace it to his typewriter and accuse him of forging documents. They, according to testimony I have in my book, concocted false photographs to put Anderson in photos to implicate him in wrongdoing. They engaged in all kinds of dirty tricks to try to stop Anderson from this - punish Anderson for this expose. And this was really the precursor to Watergate. And this was when they, you know, came up with a plot to actually assassinate Jack Anderson.

[font color=green]Dave Davies:[/font] Well, I wanted to talk about that, because after Nixon's re-election in 1972, they decided they really had to deal with Anderson. And the notion that there had been talk of assassinating Anderson, that was revealed a couple of decades ago. What did you learn about how serious an effort this was to kill him?

[font color=blue]Mark Feldstein:[/font] The plot to assassinate Anderson turned out to have been much more serious than anyone realized. There are documents in the National Archives that have never been released before in which prosecutors discuss this, investigated this. And I got what amounted to a confession from one of the conspirators, Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglar, before his death in 2003, where he admitted for the first time what his co-conspirator, Gordon Liddy, had already admitted - that the two of them plotted to assassinate Anderson.

In fact, they went beyond merely plotting. They actually conducted surveillance of Anderson. They tailed him from his work spot, garage, to his house. They staked out his house. They looked at it for vulnerabilities, how they could break in, how they could plant poison in his aspirin bottle - that was one of the methods they discussed using. They talked about how they could spike his drink and [font color=red]they talked about smearing LSD on his steering wheel so that he would absorb it through his skin and die in a hallucination-crazed auto crash[/font]. They met with an agent from CIA who was a specialist in poisons.

They met just a block from the White House at the Hay-Adams Hotel on March 24th 1972, and they pumped this CIA operative - former CIA operative - for information about what kind of toxins, what kind of poisons would be best to use so it would not be discovered in an autopsy. So the plot to assassinate Jack Anderson that emanated from the Nixon White House was very real.

And it was ultimately called off because they decided instead that they needed Hunt and Liddy to break into the Watergate apartment complex and office building and that, of course, led to their arrest and the downfall of the regime...

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=130192940

Title: Telephone Recordings: Dictation Belt 17B.1. Keeping CIA out of the Peace Corps (Item 17A.4 Continued)

Date(s) of Materials: 2 April 1963

Physical Description: item 1 on 1 dictation belt (2 minutes, 13 seconds)

Copyright Status: Public Domain

Description: The recording of this conversation begins on Dictation Belt 17A.4. Sound recording of part of a telephone conversation held on April 2, 1963, between President John F. Kennedy and Sargent Shriver, Director of the Peace Corps. They discuss speaking to Richard M. Helms about the suspicion that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is trying to place people in the Peace Corps. They also discuss facilitating the movement of members of the Peace Corps into the Foreign Service. Machine noise follows the conversation.

Transcript included. This sound recording was originally recorded on Dictation Belt 17B, which contains additional sound recording(s) following this one. To hear all of the recordings on the Dictation Belt, see Digital Identifier: JFKPOF-TPH-17B, Title: Telephone recordings: Dictation Belt 17B.

Contributor(s):

Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963
Shriver, Sargent (Robert Sargent), 1915-2011

Series Name:

Presidential Recordings.

Subseries Name:

Telephone Recordings [Original accession].

http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-TPH-17B-1.aspx

...Evan Thomas, the author of The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA (1995), argues that the Alsop brothers worked very closely with Frank Wisner, the first director of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the CIA. He points out that he "considered his friends Joe and Stewart Alsop to be reliable purveyors of the company line in their columns". In 1953 the brothers helped out Edward Lansdale and the CIA in the Philippines: "Wisner actively courted the Alsops, along with a few other newsmen he regarded as suitable outlets. When Lansdale was manipulating electoral politics in the Philippines in 1953, Wisner asked Joe Alsop to write some columns warning the Filipinos not to steal the election from Magsaysay. Alsop was happy to comply, though he doubted his columns would have much impact on the Huks. After the West German counterintelligence chief, Otto John, defected to the Soviet Union in 1954, Wisner fed Alsop a story that the West German spymaster had been kidnapped by the KGB. Alsop dutifully printed the story, which may or may not have been true." ...

At the end of 1966, Desmond FitzGerald, Directorate for Plans, discovered that Ramparts, a left-wing publication, were planning to publish an article that the International Organizations Division had been secretly funding the National Student Association. FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for his book, The Very Best Men: "I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off." This dirty tricks campaign failed to stop the magazine publishing this story in March, 1967. The article, written by Sol Stern, was entitled NSA and the CIA. As well as reporting CIA funding of the National Student Association it exposed the whole system of anti-Communist front organizations in Europe, Asia, and South America.

Stewart Alsop, who was now working for the Saturday Evening Post, asked Thomas Braden, the former head of the International Organizations Division (IOD) to write an article for the Saturday Evening Post in response to what Stern had written. The article, entitled, [font color=darkred]I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral[/font] , appeared on 20th May 1967. Braden defended the activities of the IOD unit of the CIA. Braden admitted that for more than 10 years, the CIA had subsidized Encounter through the Congress for Cultural Freedom - which it also funded - and that one of its staff was a CIA agent.

Hugh Wilford, the author of The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008) has argued: "It was a well-worn technique of the CIA to blow the cover of covert operations when they were no longer considered desirable or viable, and there were a number of reasons why, by April 1967, the Agency might have tired of its alliance with the non-communist left. For one, the NCL had become a far less reliable instrument of U.S. foreign policy than it had been a decade earlier. With their propensity for criticizing the war in Vietnam. ADA-style left-liberals such as the Reuther brothers were increasingly perceived in Washington as a hindrance rather a help in the prosecution of the Cold War." ...

http://spartacus-educational.com/NDstewart_alsop.htm

...“About five years ago it struck me that there were so few stories of young women who traveled together and became really good friends,” Ganis, one of the show’s executive producers, told Wired.com ahead of the show’s Sunday premiere. “My biggest frustration in our business is how uninformed people are about the world. I thought this would be a good vehicle for people to see our common humanity.”

So Ganis, a Pan American World Airways stewardess from 1968 to 1976, spent hours upon hours meticulously researching her former employer and getting jet-age stories from other past employees.

She ended up with tales of not only young women on far-flung journeys, but also of Pan Am’s involvement in State Department operations, behind-the-scenes missions prior to the Six-Day War and dangerous liaisons in Africa — all stories she hopes to work into future episodes...

http://www.wired.com/2011/09/tv-fact-checker-pan-am/