Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNoam Chomsky: US Power and the Godfather Principle
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/30397-noam-chomsky-us-power-and-the-godfather-principleTurning to the real world there was a summit coming up in Panama, a hemispheric summit. At the previous hemispheric summit which was in Colombia, the U.S. and Canada were totally isolated from the rest of the hemisphere on two issues and therefore there was no consensus agreement. One was admission of Cuba into the hemisphere which the U.S. and Canada adamantly rejected. The rest of the hemisphere has wanted it for a long time. The second was interesting; it was moves toward de-criminalization of drugs. The U.S. so called drug war is having no effect on availability of drugs and that has been known for forty years, but it does have a lethal effect in Latin America. And here in the U.S. it is basically a technique for locking up black males. So it is part of the control of what is seen as a superfluous population. And Latin America wants to get out of it but the U.S. and Canada wont. That is the background.
The next summit was coming up in a couple of weeks in Panama and it would have been an absolute disaster for the United States unless Obama had made some kind of gesture. So he finally agreed to move toward limited normalization. The embargo remains, Cuban scholars are still not permitted to come to scientific conferences in the United States, and so on. As to the noble effort to bring democracy and freedom to Cuba what was ignored in most of the commentary is mentioned but there is a crushing embargo for fifty years, which is opposed by the entire world. If you look at the votes in the United Nations General Assembly, there is an annual vote, only Israel votes with the United States occasionally a Pacific Island. And on top of that there is a major terrorist war, primarily under Kennedy, but a serious terrorist war that went on into the nineties. The only thing allowed to be mentioned is there were some attempts to assassinate Castro, which is true, but they can be laughed off as CIA shenanigans. They are a footnote. The main thing is the terrorist war; that is the attempt to bring justice and democracy to Cuba.
And we know the reasons but they are unmentionable. It is an open society. We have internal records. The reason was, the concern was, as the State Department put it, Castro is carrying out successful defiance of U.S. policies that go back to 1823, the Monroe Doctrine which declared that the U.S. must dominate the hemisphere. The U.S. was not in a position to do it at the time, but that was the goal. And that has been U.S. policy ever since, and Castros defying it means getting in the way of that, and you cant do that.
International affairs is very much like the mafia. A major principle of international affairs is the Godfather cannot brook disobedience. Here it is given various, kind of euphemisms, so it is called the domino theory, but what it actually amounts to is what Henry Kissinger described very well. He happened to be talking about Allendes Chile, which was a parliamentary democracy moving toward social democracy, and he described it as a virus that might spread contagion. In other words, others might pick up the model of moving through parliamentary means to social democratic policies, and that is extremely dangerous because the system of domination and control might fall apart
InfoView thread info, including edit history
TrashPut this thread in your Trash Can (My DU » Trash Can)
BookmarkAdd this thread to your Bookmarks (My DU » Bookmarks)
1 replies, 860 views
ShareGet links to this post and/or share on social media
AlertAlert this post for a rule violation
PowersThere are no powers you can use on this post
EditCannot edit other people's posts
ReplyReply to this post
EditCannot edit other people's posts
Rec (3)
ReplyReply to this post
1 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
Noam Chomsky: US Power and the Godfather Principle (Original Post)
eridani
May 2015
OP
Octafish
(55,745 posts)1. Dulles and Eisenhower contracted Mafia in 1960 to kill Castro.
Not JFK.
While CIA director Allen Dulles under Eisenhower (and Nixon) contracted the MAFIA to assassinate Castro in 1960, the Reichwing has done all it could to implicate President Kennedy. The efforts continue to the present day.
AUG 1960: Richard Bissell meets with Colonel Sheffield Edwards, director of the CIA's Office of Security, and discusses with him ways to eliminate or assassinate Fidel Castro. Edwards proposes that the job be done by assassins hand-picked by the American underworld, specifically syndicate interests who have been driven out of their Havana gambling casinos by the Castro regime. Bissell gives Edwards the go-ahead to proceed. Between August 1960, and April 1961, the CIA with the help of the Mafia pursues a series of plots to poison or shot Castro. The CIAs own internal report on these efforts states that these plots "were viewed by at least some of the participants as being merely one aspect of the over-all active effort to overthrow the regime that culminated in the Bay of Pigs." (CIA, Inspector General's Report on Efforts to Assassinate Fidel Castro, p. 3, 14)
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/bayofpigs/chron.html
Details on the actual sit-down, which to an amateur democratic detective interested in justice would seem like a lead worth pursuing:
Ever wonder about the sanity of America's leaders? Take a close look at perhaps the most bizarre plot in U.S. intelligence history
By Bryan Smith
Chicago Magazine
November 2007
(page 4 of 6)
EXCERPT...
By September 1960, the project was proceeding apace. Roselli would report directly to Maheu. The first step was a meeting in New York. There, at the Plaza Hotel, Maheu introduced Roselli to O'Connell. The agent wanted to cover up the participation of the CIA, so he pretended to be a man named Jim Olds who represented a group of wealthy industrialists eager to get rid of Castro so they could get back in business.
"We may know some people," Roselli said. Several weeks later, they all met at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. For years, the luxurious facility had served as the unofficial headquarters for Mafioso leaders seeking a base close to their gambling interests in Cuba. Now, it would be the staging area for the assassination plots.
At a meeting in one of the suites, Roselli introduced Maheu to two men: Sam Gold and a man Roselli referred to as Joe, who could serve as a courier to Cuba. By this time, Roselli was on to O'Connell. "I'm not kidding," Roselli told the agent one day. "I know who you work for. But I'm not going to ask you to confirm it."
Roselli may have figured out that he was dealing with the CIA, but neither Maheu nor O'Connell realized the rank of mobsters with whom they were dealing. That changed when Maheu picked up a copy of the Sunday newspaper supplement Parade, which carried an article laying out the FBI's ten most wanted criminals. Leading the list was Sam Giancana, a.k.a. "Mooney," a.k.a. "Momo," a.k.a. "Sam the Cigar," a Chicago godfather who was one of the most feared dons in the countryand the man who called himself Sam Gold. "Joe" was also on the list. His real name, however, was Santos Trafficantethe outfit's Florida and Cuba chieftain.
Maheu alerted O'Connell. "My God, look what we're involved with," Maheu said. O'Connell told his superiors. Questioned later before the 1975 U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (later nicknamed the Church Committee after its chairman, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho), O'Connell was asked whether there had ever been any discussion about asking two men on the FBI's most wanted list to carry out a hit on a foreign leader.
"Not with me there wasn't," O'Connell answered.
"And obviously no one said stopand you went ahead."
"Yes."
"Did it bother you at all?"
"No," O'Connell answered, "it didn't."
CONTINUED...
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/November-2007/How-the-CIA-Enlisted-the-Chicago-Mob-to-Put-a-Hit-on-Castro/index.php?cparticle=4&siarticle=3
Yet, for some reason, the CIA continues to the present day to imply that it was Kennedy who did that.
Spies: Ex-CIA Agent In Raleigh Says Castro Knew About JFK Assassination Ahead Of Time
Former CIA agent and author Brian Latell in Raleigh
By The Raleigh Telegram
RALEIGH A noted former Central Intelligence Agency officer, author, and scholar who is intimately knowledgeable about Cuba and Fidel Castro, says he believes there is evidence that Castros government knew about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 ahead of time.
SNIP...
Robert Kennedy, as the Attorney General of the United States, was in charge of the operation, said Latell. Despite the United States best efforts, the operation was nonetheless penetrated by Cuban intelligence agents, said Latell.
Latell said there were two serious assassination attempts by the United States against Castro that even used members of the mafia to help, but both of them were obviously unsuccessful.
He also said that there was a plot by the United States to have Castro jabbed with a pen containing a syringe filled with a very effective poison. Latell said that he believes the experienced assassin who worked for Castro who originally agreed to the plan may have been a double agent. After meeting with a personal representative of Robert Kennedy in Paris, the man knew that the plan to assassinate Castro came from the highest levels of the government, including John F. and Robert Kennedy.
The plan was never carried out, as the man later defected to the United States, but with so many double agents working for Castro also pledging allegiance to the CIA, Latell said it was likely that the information got back to Havana that the Kennedy brothers endorsed that plot with the pen.
CONTINUED...
http://raleightelegram.com/201209123311
Yet, the Mighty Wurlitzer cough Shenon plays the false tune that Kennedy was the guy who wanted Castro dead.
What the Warren Commission Didnt Know
A member of the panel that investigated JFKs death now worries he was a victim of a massive cover-up.
By PHILIP SHENON
February 02, 2015
EXCERPT...
Slawson feels betrayed by several senior government officials, especially at the CIA, whom he says he trusted in 1964 to tell the truth. He is most angry with one manthen-Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who assured the commission during the investigation that he knew of no evidence of a conspiracy in his brothers death. It is now clear, as I and others have reported, that Robert Kennedy withheld vital information from the investigation: While he publicly supported the commissions findings, Kennedys family and friends have confirmed in recent years that he was in fact harshly critical of the commission and believed that the investigation had missed evidence that might have pointed to a conspiracy.
What a bastard, Slawson says today of Robert Kennedy. This is a man I once had admiration for.
Slawson theorizes that that attorney general and the CIA worked together to hide information about Oswalds Mexico trip from the commission because they feared that the investigation might stumble onto the fact that JFKs administration had been trying, for years, sometimes with the help of the Mafia, to assassinate Castro. Mexico had been a staging area for the Castro plots. Public disclosure of the plots, Slawson says, could have derailed, if not destroyed, Robert Kennedys political career; he had led his brothers secret war against Castro and, as declassified documents would later show, was well aware of the Mafias involvement in the CIAs often harebrained schemes to murder the Cuban dictator. You cant distinguish between Bobby and the CIA on this, Slawson says. They were working hand in glove to hide information from us.
Although there is nothing in the public record to show that Robert Kennedy had specific evidence of a foreign conspiracy in his brothers death, I agree with Slawson that RFK and senior CIA officials threw the commission off the trail of witnesses and evidence that might have pointed to a conspiracy, especially in Mexico. Slawson also now suspectsbut admits again that he cannot provethat Chief Justice Earl Warren, who led the commission that bore his name, was an unwitting participant in the cover-up, agreeing with the CIA or RFK to make sure that the commission did not pursue certain evidence. Warren, he suspects, was given few details about why the commissions investigation had to be limited. He was probably just told that vital national interests were at stakethat certain lines of investigation in Mexico had to be curtained because they might inadvertently reveal sensitive U.S. spy operations.
That might explain what Slawson saw as Warrens most baffling decision during the investigationhis refusal to allow Slawson to interview a young Mexican woman who worked in the Cuban consulate in Mexico and who dealt face-to-face with Oswald on his visa application; declassified CIA records would later suggest that Oswald had a brief affair with the woman, who was herself a committed Socialist, and that she had introduced him to a network of other Castro supporters in Mexico. It was a different time, Slawson says. We were more naïve. Warren would have believed what he was told.
CONTINUED...
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/warren-commission-jfk-investigators-114812_Page2.html#.VN982vnF-UV
Why would CIA not want the Warren Commission, and the American public to which it reported, know the truth about its illegal assassination program?
From the Water is Wet as all Wetwork Department:
If things had gone according to plan, Nixon would've been president during the Bay of Pigs and would've sent in the Marines, along with the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard, making Allen Dulles and Meyer Lansky and all their rich and corrupt friends very, very happy.
President Kennedy, temporarily, put a kibosh on the warmongers' plans during the Bay of Pigs, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and in Vietnam.
Yet, for some reason, Corporate McPravda continues to repeat the lie that's blames JFK for the murderous BFEE Dulles Nixon Mafia conspiracy to the present day.