Posted on 08/02/2013 3:31:53 PM PDT by Kaslin
According to a CNN report by Jake Tapper the CIA and the U.S. State Department may have been trying to supply Syrian jihadists with Libyan arms from Benghazi when the operation blew up in their face last September.
The UK Telegraph summed it up best: “The CIA has been subjecting operatives to monthly polygraph tests in an attempt to suppress details of a US arms smuggling operation in Benghazi that was ongoing when its ambassador was killed by a mob in the city last year, according to reports.”
“Same as it ever was,” say some Cuba-watchers. “Déjà vu all over again say,” say others.
“Me and my staff were all Fidelistas,” boasted Robert Reynolds, the CIA’s “Caribbean Desk’s specialist on the Cuban Revolution” from 1957-1960. Reynolds was visiting Cuba and chumming it up with Fidel himself at the time of his boast, during a conference” in 2001.
“Everyone in the CIA and everyone at State was pro-Castro, except (Republican) ambassador Earl Smith.” (CIA operative in Santiago Cuba 1957’59, Robert Weicha.)
“Don’t worry. We’ve infiltrated Castro’s guerrilla group in the Sierra Mountains. The Castro brothers and Ernesto “Che” Guevara have no affiliations with any Communists whatsoever.” (crackerjack Havana CIA station chief Jim Noel 1958.)
Oh, I know, I know: for over half a century your professors, Hollywood, the media, etc. have all hammered away that Batista was “a U.S. backed dictator!” and that, while fighting Batista, the Castro rebels also fought heroically and David-like against brutal and Goliath-like “Yankee imperialism!” But actually:
"Without U.S. help Fidel Castro would never have gotten into power,” flatly testified former U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, Earl T. Smith during Congressional testimony in 1960.
“I think it is a form of a cover-up, and I think it's an attempt to push it under the rug, and I think the American people are feeling the same way," says (Republican) Congressman Frank Wolf who represents the district that contains CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia about the Benghazi attack. "We should have the people who were on the (Benghazi) scene come in, testify under oath, do it publicly, and lay it out. And there really isn't any national security issue involved with regards to that.”
Indeed. And something very similar happened two years after the State Department and CIA’s darlings took power in Cuba and quickly converted the island into a Soviet satrapy and armory, and playground for Che Guevara’s KGB-mentored firing squads.
Senator DODD. “Well, would you say that these things that occurred also showed that the State Dept. was anxious to replace Batista with Castro?
(Former U.S. Amb. To Cuba) GARDNER. “I think they were.”
Arthur Gardner and Earl Smith were the two U.S. ambassadors to Cuba who warned about Castro and Che Guevara’s covert Communism (and thus lost their jobs.) In 1960 they testified under oath to the Media/State Department collusion and campaign that brought Castro to power:
Senator DODD. You have been quoted, Mr. Gardner, as referring to, "Castro worship" in the State Department in 1957. ... you are quoted as saying you fought all the time with the State Department over whether Castro merited the support or friendship of the United States. Would you explain....
Mr Gardner: "I feel it very strongly, that the State Department was influenced, first, by those stories by (the New York Times') Herbert Matthews, and soon (support for Castro) became kind of a fetish with them."
Senator Dodd: (in preparation for his post) your successor as Ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith was actually (sent by his State Dept. superiors) to be briefed by New York Times' Herbert Matthews?
Mr. GARDNER. "Yes, that is right."
Senator Eastland: "Mr Smith, you had been warning the State Department that Castro was a Marxist?'
Mr. Smith: "Yes, sir....
Senator Eastland: "Would you say that the American Government then, including all of its agencies, was largely responsible for bringing Castro to power?"
Mr Smith: "The State Department played a large part in bringing Castro to power. The press, and other Government agencies (CIA), members of Congress are also responsible.”
Oh I know, I know, Steven Soderbergh’s critically- acclaimed (and publicly-snubbed) movie Che shows one scene where, amidst the thunder of bombs and hail of bullets, Che Guevara laments how the U.S. is intervening on Batista's side. In fact: at the very time of Che's lament as depicted in the movie, the Batista regime was under a U.S. arms embargo! Batista was subsequently denied exile in the U.S. and banned from even setting foot in the country that “backed” him.
The movie also shows Che Guevara broadcasting his Pattonesque military triumphs over “Radio Rebelde.” This sophisticated radio equipment was in fact smuggled into Cuba and presented to Che Guevara in the fall if 1957 by the CIA!
Sounds insane, I know. But full documentation appears in a spanking new book.
“But come on. Humberto?!” Some say. “What about all those CIA assassination attempts against Castro? Hunh?!”
Thought you’d never ask. So here’s the late E. Howard Hunt, who while code-named "Eduardo" was head of the CIA "Cuba Project's" political division in the early 60's. "So far as I have been able to determine no coherent plan was ever developed within the CIA to assassinate Castro, though it was the heart's desire of many exile groups."
No here’s some other interesting (but seriously under-reported) findings from the famous Frank Church Committee: “In August 1975, Fidel Castro gave Senator George McGovern a list of twenty-four alleged attempts to assassinate him in which Castro claimed the CIA had been involved…The Committee has found no evidence that the CIA was involved in the attempts on Castro’s life enumerated in the allegations that Castro gave to Senator McGovern.”
Can we just be frank here for a moment.
What is really going on here?
CNN doesn’t give a flying fig about the U. S. supplying guns to people Obama wants to have them. Anyone that doesn’t understand this should stay in the 14” wading pool.
This is CNN trying to act like the CIA has gone rogue, and that is intended to do two things. It is intended to make us forget Obama was AWOL on 09/11/2012. It is intended to take our eyes off the ball, that Hillary Clinton was the one driving operations that night.
CNN IS NOT doing us any favors here folks. Quite jumping up and down acting like they are.
Obama’s policy is to arm the Syrian rebels. There’s nothing here going to singe him. This isn’t a fruitful fork in the road.
Well put.
Castro’s commie sympathies were well known, although that didn’t, for example, stop Ed Sullivan from shooting one of his shows from Cuba and being greeted by Castro.
The Bay of Pigs recruitment began during the Eisenhower administration within days or weeks of Batista’s overthrow, and JFK kept it building (and the training area got moved at least once, from one Central American nation to another, after a US newspaper ran a front page story about the operation), but then let it go forward without the planned air cover.
The Brigade never got off the beach; at least one of the rebels swam out to a US destroyer during the night. The US vessels had painted out their numbers and struck the colors and were just out of range of the Cuban guns, one of the US sailors I used to know said the watched the tracers drop into the water (he also gave me some of those other details).
https://www.google.com/search?q=ed%20sullivan%20and%20castro
Frank Sturgis (of Watergate infamy), standing on the fresh mass grave of Batistianos he’d just gunned down to impress Castro:
http://media.hamptonroads.com/cache/files/images/blogs/50611.jpg
http://hamptonroads.com/2010/07/mysterious-disappearance-frank-sturgis
I don’t think I’d ever heard of the Sullivan Castro interview.
Wow, that’s a real blast from the past.
Didn’t we support Castro at first? I thought he turned on us after a while.
It wasn’t Sullivan going there to chum it up with a leading commie was it? I tend to doubt it in those days. Gosh, chumming it up with a commie in those days would have just about ruined your career. It did end many a career for that matter.
Castro had that swingin’ single vibe, and romantic Latin vibe, and that postwar commie vibe, and all of that resonated with at least part of the population. By the time Ed went to Cuba, Joseph McCarthy was toast.
McC’s across-the-aisle friend and colleague JFK took up the anti-commie mantle during his Senate career and in his Presidency, and yet also, during his Senate days, scrutinized and apparently opposed the fairly low-level US military assistance in “Lay-OS” and the rest of IndoChina.
JFK campaigned in 1960 on the Missile Gap, wanted (and got) the same kinds of federal tax cuts that Reagan got 20 years later, and spoke of “brushfire wars” to stop commie expansion. It’s tough to argue, knowing what we now know, that Nixon would have made a better president from ‘61-’63, but we also know that LBJ was a disaster, and Nixon would have been better from ‘63-’69, and obviously wouldn’t have turned into a train wreck in the early 1970s.
As I posted on another thread, there is more to this than the transfer of out of date obsolete Russian weapons.
Forcing CIA people to take multiple polygraph tests, making them swear not to talk to Congress, moving them out of sight and even giving them false ID’s, lying to Congress, etc., is not something the administration would do over a few old rusty rifles.
My guess is that under the cover of old weapons, they are gun running sophisticated weapons that are classified as secret and that they are sending them to groups that are potential/actual enemies of the US.
All of which is illegal and treasonous.
Why else would there be such dangerous and expensive efforts to hide the facts?
This is CNN trying to act like the CIA has gone rogue, and that is intended to do two things. It is intended to make us forget Obama was AWOL on 09/11/2012. It is intended to take our eyes off the ball, that Hillary Clinton was the one driving operations that night.
I think what is driving this is that the Marxist/jehadist in the White House is deathly afraid that CIA operatives are going to turn into whistle blowers; that they are torn between obedience to their leaders and love of their country (patriotism) and that is why they are under so much pressure by top people to toe the line. That is why all of the polygraphs and forced contracts.
Yeah, he screwed up the Bay of Pigs. JFK took public responsibility, even coined a phrase that he claimed was an old saying — “victory has a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan”. To free the captured Brigade, he had diplomats negotiate an aid package for Castro, “Tractors for Peace” — perhaps thinking that Castro would then reject the USSR. Didn’t work. The Brigade was freed, and they presented their flag to JFK in a public ceremony, where he stated that it would be returned to them “in a free Cuba”.
JFK wasn’t literally in the trenches, he was a PT boat veteran. When the boat was blasted to splinters, and he’d injured his back, he swam around getting his unconscious buddies face up in the water. He served with honor, as millions did and still do.
Because of that injury, he went on crutches during his early Senate career, and scheduled his back surgery to coincide with the vote to condemn — it wasn’t technically a censure — Joe McCarthy, because he couldn’t be on record voting on either side of that one; his voters in Mass wouldn’t have accepted a vote to condemn, and his fellow Demwits wouldn’t have accepted the other.
Miiltary advisers shoot back when they’re shot at, nothing odd about that. And 16,000 was a drop in the bucket compared with the peak months of LBJ’s escalation.
His philandering was revolting, and naturally the media shills clammed up about it. I think it was Bernard Kalb who 20 or 25 years later mentioned seeing JFK chasing some laughing female staffer into an office in the evening hours, and claiming that kind off thing was never considered anything but off-limits.
It’s probably safe to say that JFK wasn’t the first — even boring old Warren G Harding was a womanizer while in office, but managed to keep that secret, and it probably wasn’t at the level of JFK and his fellow lanceman RFK. It’s difficult to believe that their wives remained blissfully unaware.
We’d better be careful about defending Nixon around here. :’)
Nixon was easily in the upper tier of US presidents, and that’s impressive considering the fact that he was impeached but not convicted because he resigned in disgrace. During the Frost interviews Nixon was answering a question about his political roots as it were, and even his eyes widened when he said the name “Adlai Stevenson” — the fact is, Nixon wasn’t a finishing school elite prig, but he was brilliant.
The media was against him in general because of his 1962 “won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more” farewell speech. He spent a few years as the attorney for Pepsico, even travelled to the USSR on that gig, and tried to visit his “Kitchen Debates” adversary Khruschev, still living as a non-person under house arrest. Nixon described the burly female armed guard who stood in his way as he tried to knock on the door.
I recall that he was one of the footstompers cheering Goldwater during the 1964 Pubbie convention; and of course, his 1968 return was one of the all-time political success stories, and should be remembered and taught as such. Humphrey lost by a slightly wider margin in 1968 than Nixon had lost in 1960, but Nixon was reelected in a massive landslide in 1972; the only President who won all of the Electoral College votes was Washington, in a much smaller nation, and Nixon (as of 1972) was in the number two slot (maybe still is).
He ended Johnson’s war in Vietnam by bombing Hanoi to the peace table; he engineered the Shanghai Communique and opened China; he tried to get Congress to balance the budget and got one year’s worth of surplus instead; when the national debt exceeded the value of the federal stockpile of bullion, he initiated the modern currency system (and boy, are some people still sore about that). And he managed to do this with Demwit majorities in both houses of Congress.
After the Bay of Pigs, and his mea culpa broadcast, JFK had a lot of people in the project disciplined and/or canned. A bit later, RFK found out about the continuing attempts to assassinate Castro — the CIA was contracting with the mob, which had lost its casinos and whorehouses in Cuba — and the efforts were ordered terminated.
And of course, barely a year went by and the US Navy was again around Cuba for the blockade to eject the Soviet missiles. The same friend was still in the Navy at that time, said he was expecting to reach his discharge when everyone was given a six month extension. Confronting the Soviets about those missiles was 100% necessary, but it also served as a rehab for JFK’s reputation.
During WWII Joe Jr was toasted at a family and friends gathering as “a future President of the United States” by his father. As a flyer serving out of England, he volunteered for a risky mission, which consisted of flying a plane loaded with high explosive into a terminal dive to destroy the German bunkers where the “London Guns” were under construction. The pilots were supposed to eject of course. This had been tried before this, and none of the attempts had succeeded. Asked by one of his buddies if he had insurance, he just grinned and said, “Kennedys don’t need insurance”. During a routine radio transmission, listeners back in England could hear a hissing noise in the background. Observers saw a blinding flash of light, and after the travel time the sound reached too; I’ve seen it described as “the most powerful non-nuclear explosion of all time”, but I’m pretty sure that is an exaggeration. Same result for him though.
When JFK got the news, he was in the Pacific; he told a buddy, “I can feel pappy’s eyes on me.” Joe Sr’s plan was 8 years of Jack, 8 years of Bobby, then 8 years of Teddy — and Fatso dumped that timetable when he refused to run in 1976. He was so pissed about Carter than he challenged him in 1980 and got has ass handed to him — how bad is that? Oh, I was outcampaigned by an incompetent bum who was being used as toilet paper by the Ayatollah.
I hadn’t heard how Jack died. I suppose it was about as instantaneous as it could have been. He died valiantly.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a must, I agree. I do think we came a lot closer to a nuclear exchange than folks think.
I will also say, it was very disconcerting to hear about ten years ago, that John had a very powerful set of drugs to take for back pain during that period.
The Kennedy’s were quite young. Things turned out pretty much alright though.
I don’t believe in assassinations. I wouldn’t want Obama to leave the Oval Office that way. If we’re stupid enough to vote the guy in, we deserve what we get.
I say that, because Kennedy didn’t deserve to die that way. It’s a real shame he did.
:’) That was Joe, not Jack. There was also a sister who died in WWII Europe, plane crash I think, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, the sib with whom Jack was closest.
The price controls were mostly voluntary, iow, they were an appeal to TBAOON; since the price of gas supply was choked off by OPEC (uh-oh, I’d better watch out, there are pro-OPEC trolls around from time to time) and gas prices rocketed up from about 40 cents to about 1.50 a gallon in next to no time, and cars mostly got 10 or 12 MPG, price controls a) had to be voluntary and b) weren’t going to work.
Sheikh Yamani (commoner, the title was an honorarium) said, many years after the fact, that the embargo was a huge mistake, as the proven reserves worldwide tripled in a few years, and had risen nearly tenfold in a decade. Later on he made the somewhat famous statement, “the Stone Age didn’t end because mankind ran out of stones.”
What he must have noticed was, yes, the price of oil shot up and enriched his employers in the Kingdom, but all those things they thought they’d buy for everyone in the place suddenly got very expensive. Why, it’s almost as if the prices of things are set by market forces rather than the dictates of the despots. :’)
Interesting detail, btw, that SDA people were around there and helped him.
Right now the gun running would be incidental. The important thing is that we've got more potential witnesses to question about the attack, and possibly events leading up to it.
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