Ray McGovern — The Deep State’s JFK Triumph Over Trump

That the CIA and FBI are still choosing what we should be allowed to see concerning who murdered John Kennedy may seem unusual, but there is hoary precedent for it. After JFK’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, the well-connected Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy had fired as CIA director after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFK’s murder.

By becoming de facto head of the Commission, Dulles was perfectly placed to protect himself and his associates, if any commissioners or investigators were tempted to question whether Dulles and the CIA played any role in killing Kennedy. When a few independent-minded journalists did succumb to that temptation, they were immediately branded – you guessed it – “conspiracy theorists.”

And so, the big question remains: Did Allen Dulles and other “cloak-and-dagger” CIA operatives have a hand in John Kennedy’s assassination and subsequent cover-up? In my view and the view of many more knowledgeable investigators, the best dissection of the evidence on the murder appears in James Douglass’s 2008 book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.

After updating and arraying the abundant evidence, and conducting still more interviews, Douglass concludes that the answer to the big question is Yes. Reading Douglass’s book today may help explain why so many records are still withheld from release, even in redacted form, and why, indeed, we may never see them in their entirety....

Going "there." Pretty incendiary for an ex-CIA officer. You've probably heard it all before, but when an high ranking former CIA officer says it, it's no longer just a "conspiracy theory."

Consortium News
The Deep State’s JFK Triumph Over Trump
Ray McGovern | CIA analyst who prepared the President’s Daily Brief for Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, and conducted the one-on-one morning briefings from 1981 to 1985

Zero Hedge — Meet The Real "Fake News"

Tyler Durden strikes back. Serious smackdown ensues.

Zero Hedge
Meet The Real "Fake News"
Tyler Durden

This is even more revealing.

Who’s the Biggest Peddler of Fake News?

George Washington

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria

Must-read. A tale of intrigue and perfidy necessary to understand the background of the situation in the Middle East post WWII.

Revealing. How Washington, beginning in 1949, plotted to overthrow governments and create jihadism — Ike actually used the term "holy war"— to exclude Soviet influence and gain control of petroleum resources.

A choice piece:

A charismatic young murderer named Saddam Hussein was one of the distinguished leaders of the CIA’s Ba’athist team. The Ba’ath Party’s Secretary, Ali Saleh Sa’adi, who took office alongside Saddam Hussein, would later say, “We came to power on a CIA train,” according to A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite, by Said Aburish, a journalist and author. Aburish recounted that the CIA supplied Saddam and his cronies a murder list of people who “had to be eliminated immediately in order to ensure success.” Tim Weiner writes that Critchfield later acknowledged that the CIA had, in essence, “created Saddam Hussein.”…

At the same time, the CIA was illegally supplying Saddam’s enemy, Iran, with thousands of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to fight Iraq, a crime made famous during the Iran-Contra scandal.…

Fast forward:

…our war against Bashar Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil protests of the Arab Spring in 2011. Instead it began in 2000, when Qatar proposed to construct a $10 billion, 1,500 kilometer pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. Qatar shares with Iran the South Pars/North Dome gas field, the world’s richest natural gas repository. The international trade embargo until recently prohibited Iran from selling gas abroad. Meanwhile, Qatar’s gas can reach European markets only if it is liquefied and shipped by sea, a route that restricts volume and dramatically raises costs. The proposed pipeline would have linked Qatar directly to European energy markets via distribution terminals in Turkey, which would pocket rich transit fees. The Qatar/Turkey pipeline would give the Sunni kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America’s closest ally in the Arab world. Qatar hosts two massive American military bases and the U.S. Central Command’s Mideast headquarters.…

Of course, the Russians, who sell 70 percent of their gas exports to Europe, viewed the Qatar/Turkey pipeline as an existential threat. In Putin’s view, the Qatar pipeline is a NATO plot to change the status quo, deprive Russia of its only foothold in the Middle East, strangle the Russian economy and end Russian leverage in the European energy market. In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally.”
Assad further enraged the Gulf’s Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian-approved “Islamic pipeline” running from Iran’s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would make Shiite Iran, not Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran’s influence in the Middke East and the world. Israel also was understandably determined to derail the Islamic pipeline, which would enrich Iran and Syria and presumably strengthen their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.…

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Read the whole thing.

The conclusion:

But, if we are to have an effective foreign policy, we must recognize the Syrian conflict is a war over control of resources indistinguishable from the myriad clandestine and undeclared oil wars we have been fighting in the Mideast for 65 years. And only when we see this conflict as a proxy war over a pipeline do events become comprehensible. It’s the only paradigm that explains why the GOP on Capitol Hill and the Obama administration are still fixated on regime change rather than regional stability, why the Obama administration can find no Syrian moderates to fight the war, why ISIL blew up a Russian passenger plane, why the Saudis just executed a powerful Shiite cleric only to have their embassy burned in Tehran, why Russia is bombing non-ISIL fighters and why Turkey went out of its way to shoot down a Russian jet. The million refugees now flooding into Europe are refugees of a pipeline war and CIA blundering.…

Politico.eu
Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Joseph Fronczak — Allen Dulles and the Cold War Within the National Security State

After the CIA first set up detention centers at black sites overseas, the agent overseeing the program bluntly explained the logic of holding interrogations outside U.S. territory in an internal memorandum: doing so would allow the agency to conduct “certain activities which were not permitted by the United States government.”

The agent’s language is striking not only for its bluntness, but also for its assumption that moving offshore legitimized its behavior. Even more striking is the agent’s choice of words, which implied that the CIA existed somehow outside of “the United States government” and was empowered to operate outside its purview. But today, what is perhaps most striking about the memo is that it was written in 1951.

Its author was Allen Welsh Dulles, who became the CIA’s director two years after he wrote his memo on “Interrogation Techniques,” in which he went on to discuss “the possibilities of augmenting the usual interrogation methods by the use of drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc…” The ellipses are his; Dulles was an elliptical man and he is the titular devil in David Talbot’s new book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.…

"A few bad apples" — at the very top. The story of constructing "he state within the state," "deep state," or "shadow government." I would call it "the rogue state." There seems to be little question who is really in charge.

In These Times
Allen Dulles and the Cold War Within the National Security State
Joseph Fronczak

Patrick Smith interviews Ray McGovern — A veteran CIA agent spills the goods on the Deep State and our foreign policy nightmares

You prolly want to read this. Some bombshells.

Salon
“Intelligent people know that the empire is on the downhill”: A veteran CIA agent spills the goods on the Deep State and our foreign policy nightmares

Patrick Smith, Salon’s foreign affairs columnist and former foreign correspondent or the International Herald Tribune and The New Yorker, interviews Ray McGovern, twenty-seven year CIA veteran turned dissident.

Ben Terrall — From the Shadows of the Cold War: the Rise of the CIA

Another short review of The Devil's Chessboard.

Counterpunch
From the Shadows of the Cold War: the Rise of the CIA

Ben Terrall

David Swanson — Why Allen Dulles Killed the Kennedys

Further thoughts on David Talbot's new book, The Devil’s Chessboard.

This is moving past conspiracy theory.
Washington's Blog
Why Allen Dulles Killed the Kennedys
David Swanson

Jon Schwarz — A New Biography Traces the Pathology of Allen Dulles and His Appalling Cabal

Meet the architect of the American deep state and the American empire. And, of course, he was not alone. His brother just happened to be US secretary of state, for example. Nor was the US alone, either. Gripping story of international intrigue in which people like Allen Dulles were the movers rather than James Bond.

As Talbot points out, Dulles stated his worldview publicly and explicitly in 1938 during his only run for political office: “Democracy only works if the so-called intelligent people make it work. You can’t sit back and let democracy run itself.” Unsurprisingly, homilies like this did not carry him to victory. But so what? He went on to wield far greater power than most elected officials ever have. And while Dulles is the star of The Devil’s Chessboard, he’s surrounded by an enormous supporting cast...

Yes, there is an amorphous group of unelected corporate lawyers, bankers, and intelligence and military officials who form an American “deep state,” setting real limits on the rare politicians who ever try to get out of line. They do collaborate with and nurture their deep state counterparts in other countries, to whom they feel far more loyalty than their fellow citizens. The minions of the deep state hate and fear even the mildest moves towards democracy, and fight against it by any means available to them. 

They’re not all-powerful and don’t get exactly what they want, but on the issues that matter most they almost always win in the end. And while all this is mostly right there in the open, discernible by anyone who’s curious and has a library card, if you don’t go looking you will never hear a single word about it.

Our ghouls versus their monsters.

The Intercept
A New Biography Traces the Pathology of Allen Dulles and His Appalling Cabal

Jon Schwarz

See also

Salon
“Every president has been manipulated by national security officials”: David Talbot exposes America’s “deep state”

Liam O'donoghue

Lisa Pease — Checkmate on ‘The Devil’s Chessboard’

More on the creation of the deep state and the role of the Dulles brothers in it.

Talbot and his research associate Karen Croft, to whom he dedicated his book, have found all sorts of nuggets in Allen Dulles’s papers, his appointment calendar, oral histories, and other less-used sources. In addition, Talbot infuses his book with anecdotes from interviews he personally conducted. While I found some points I could nitpick in various episodes, overall this is a worthy addition and a much-needed perspective that elucidates how we came to have two governments: the elected one and the one that doesn’t answer to the elected one.

Scary stuff.

Consortiums News
Checkmate on ‘The Devil’s Chessboard’

Lisa Pease

Also

Hillary up to her eyeballs. Et tu, Bernie? Tell us it isn't so.

Bowing to Silly US Propaganda

Rick Sterling

Don Quijones — The Devil’s Chessboard: The Rise of America’s Secret Government

First civilian CIA director Allen Dulles, set the tone for the development of the CIA and its intimate relationship with State through his elder brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Somewhat ironically, their other brother Avery was a Jesuit priest. At least they had their own confessor for all the murders and mayhem they committed by proxies.

Bill Casey perfected its use as a primary tool of neoliberalism, neo-imperialism, and neocolonialism, "because freedom."

Raging Bull-Shit
The Devil’s Chessboard: The Rise of America’s Secret Government
Don Quijones

Ray McGovern — Truman's True Warning on the CIA

Intelligence services out of control?

Truthout
Truman's True Warning on the CIA
Ray McGovern, Consortium News | Op-Ed

Truman warned about the CIA. Ike warned about the military-idustrial complex. Anyone listening? Apparently not.