As the U.S.-Nato military alliance reluctantly acknowledged the catastrophe in Afghanistan and bungled its evacuation of desperate refugees trying to flee from the bigoted savages now ascendant in that shattered land, the journal Defense News published an interview with newly-appointed U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall who made it obvious that he is one of those Best and Brightest of the Pentagon who welcome the opportunity to forget Afghanistan and target China.

It is recorded that Kendall’s financial disclosure form indicated that in the period 2017-2021 he was employed by several defence and technology companies, in that “In addition to his work for Renaissance Strategic Advisors, for which he was paid $113,750, and Leidos, which paid him annual compensation of approximately $280,000 ($125,000 in cash and $155,000 in stock), Kendall was a paid board member of Leonardo Electronics U.S. and QuEST Defense, and he earned consulting fees of $702,319 (plus stock dividends) from Northrop Grumman and $12,575 from Mercury Systems…” In the 1990s he was also vice-president of engineering in the weapon’s manufacturing firm Raytheon which on July 1 signed a contract with the Air Force for some $2 billion “to develop and make a nuclear-armed cruise missile.”

Mr Kendall told Defense News that the Pentagon’s goal should be development of advanced technologies that “scare China” and declared “I’ve been obsessed, if you will, with China for quite a long time now — and its military modernization, what that implies for the U.S. and for security.” What it really implies is expansion of the U.S. military budget and vastly increased profits for such as Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin (which in 2020 was given U.S. government contracts worth $74.2 billion).

China’s land area is about 2.2% bigger than the United States; its population numbers over 1.4 billion as against America’s 333 million. And its military budget is $209 billion compared to Washington’s $715 billion. China has one overseas naval base (Djibouti) while the U.S. has some 750 (+) military bases in about 80 countries.

Yet Mr Kendall is “obsessed” with Beijing’s programme to modernise its defence capabilities.

He is far from being the only prominent U.S. official who finds it attractive and convenient to concentrate on highlighting China as a potential threat to the world, and as the debacle in Afghanistan became a deadly crisis Vice-President Kamila Harris took time away from Washington to trip round to Singapore and Vietnam in order to spread anti-Chinese sentiment. On August 24 she gave a speech in Singapore in which she declared “We know that Beijing continues to coerce, to intimidate and to make claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea. Beijing’s actions continue to undermine the rules-based order and threaten the sovereignty of nations.”

But there is no “rules-based order” in Afghanistan, and as violence and chaos intensified in Kabul it was reported that “conflict, drought and COVID-19 have already pushed millions of children into hunger and misery in Afghanistan – now they could be pushed even closer to the brink of famine.” Meanwhile the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command continued its “Large Scale Global Exercise 21” which is the largest U.S. naval exercise since 1981 and is intended to intimidate those regarded as enemies by the Washington Administration.

Other Nato countries have been engaged in maritime provocation against China, with the British sending an aircraft carrier strike group to the South China Sea and on August 2 even the Germans, usually a voice and example of sanity in the midst of international division and chaos, sent the frigate Bayern to the region. In Berlin the defence minister declared that “The message is clear: we are standing up for our values and interests together with our partners and allies”, and although in terms of U.S.-style power projection the gesture is tiny and militarily futile, it is apparent that Washington has managed to get even the most balanced nation in Europe to join in its confrontation of the Beijing government.

The Washington Post reported that on August 25 Vice-President Harris arrived in Vietnam to announce that for humanitarian reasons the U.S. was going to donate “1 million coronavirus vaccine doses to the pandemic-hit country. But a three-hour delay in her schedule handed China a window of opportunity. Beijing quickly sent its envoy in Hanoi to meet with Vietnam’s prime minister and pledged a donation of 2 million vaccine doses.” Not only was the Washington Administration made to look foolish by a somewhat opportunistic (and most probably cynical) Beijing, it also looked highly selective in its application of compassion to suffering people around the world.

The day after V-P Harris made her vapid gesture, Reuters reported that “hundreds of Afghan families who have been camping in searing heat at a Kabul park after the Taliban overran their provinces begged for food and shelter on Thursday [August 26], the most visible face of a humanitarian crisis unfolding in the war-torn country.” On the same day a lunatic suicide bomber killed over 170 people at Kabul airport and in Hanoi the Vice-President announced that in Vietnam “It is critical that if we are to take on the challenges we face that we do it in a way that is collaborative, that we must empower leaders in every sector, including of course government but community leaders, business leaders, civic society if we are to maximize the resources we collectively have.” Meanwhile, back in Kabul the representative of the UN Refugee Agency said they “are doing the emergency response for people who have been displaced, who need lifesaving assistance immediately; people who ran away from their homes with absolutely nothing. We provide core relief items, we provide shelter, water, healthcare, sanitation, food…”

During her visit to Singapore the vice-president declared that “the United States is a global leader, and we take that role seriously, understanding that we have many interests and priorities around the world” but there wasn’t much evidence of any sort of leadership from Washington during the collapse of the Afghan government when the barbarians of the Taliban took over the country. She reiterated, however, the anti-China refrain that “We need to find ways to pressure and raise the pressure, frankly, on Beijing to abide by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and to challenge its bullying and excessive maritime claims.”

The fact that the U.S. has refused to ratify the Convention on the Law of the Sea is irrelevant in Washington’s interpretation of its never-ending mantra about the international “rules-based order”, because Biden’s people, and not least the Pentagon, have their own priorities. At the moment the prime concern of the Biden Band is to get out of Afghanistan and abandon the desperate citizens who “need lifesaving assistance immediately” while continuing to “raise the pressure” on China.

Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and the rest of the military-industrial complex are laughing all the way to the bank while Afghans are weeping as they face death by starvation or at the hands of ignorant bigoted savages. So much for global leadership.

By Joe LAURIA

Biden administration officials on Thursday said they expected the Taliban to arrive in the Afghan capital in 30 days and were sending in troops to evacuate the U.S. embassy and U.S. civilians. Just three days later the Taliban surprised Washington by arriving in Kabul on Sunday. The Afghan president has fled the country.

How could the U.S. have gotten it so wrong?  How did the U.S. spend $83 billion training and equipping the Afghan army and see it fail so spectacularly?

The answer is that the United States has never understood, or cared to understand, Afghanistan from the first day its troops arrived in 2001 to the last diplomat leaving the country.

No doubt many Afghans fear a resumption of Taliban rule after two decades, with its draconian rules against music, the cinema and girls going to school.

But there is a reason why the Afghan military dissolved before the advancing Taliban, putting up no resistance whatsoever, despite Washington banking on them holding out for at least a month: the Taliban may be rotten but they are Afghans. They may impose an unpopular, repressive regime but they are not a foreign occupation force.

‘Afghan People Will Never Allow It’

Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai used to be derisively called the “Mayor of Kabul.” His authority stopped at the city’s gates. Even while in power he blasted the United States for not caring about the country. “The United States and NATO have not respected our sovereignty. Whenever they find it suitable to them, they have acted against it. This has been a serious point of contention between us…,” he said in 2013.

“They commit their violations against our sovereignty and conduct raids against our people, air raids and other attacks in the name of the fight on terrorism and in the name of the resolutions of the United Nations. This is against our wishes and repeatedly against our wishes,” Karzai said. “The United States and its allies, NATO, continue to demand even after signing the BSA [Bilateral Security Agreement] they will have the freedom to attack our people, our villages. The Afghan people will never allow it.”

The U.S. may condemn Taliban rule, but it was instrumental in its creation by supporting mujahideen in the 1980s against a secular, Soviet-backed government that supported women’s rights. After 2001, propping up rulers in Kabul and warlords with pallets of cash, while trying to militarily conquer the towns and villages scattered across a vast, mountainous land, was doomed to fail. And why should it have succeeded?

Keeping U.S. and NATO forces in the country at best would have prolonged an endless stalemate. Joe Biden is being grilled alive, even by establishment Democrats, for the events unfolding at this moment. It may even be political suicide. But it was the right move to finally pull out.

The Taliban may keep girls out of school and kill civilians, but the U.S. and its NATO allies slaughtered Afghan girls and many thousands of other innocent people in atrocities over its two decades of trying to control the graveyard of empires. Read WikiLeaks‘ Afghan War Diary.

Motives

Americans liked to call Afghanistan the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. Well, Afghanistan is now America’s second Vietnam.

The comparisons are even in the mainstream media: Propping up corrupt regimes in Saigon and Kabul; the Pentagon Papers and the Afghanistan Papers showing how U.S. leaders lied in exactly the same manner about how both wars were progressing; and the latest comparison: the evacuation of the embassies in Saigon and Kabul.

More than 45 years after the U.S. quit Saigon in humiliating defeat there are still questions asked about what the U.S. motive for the war really was. Was it economic, strategic, ideological or all three? The same question can be asked as the U.S. quits Kabul in humiliating defeat.

It seemed a main reason was control of Afghanistan’s vast, untapped mineral wealth. Why would the U.S. leave that behind? Perhaps one should not be surprised in the not-too-distant future to see U.S. companies negotiating for digging rights with the Taliban. In the 1990s, U.S. oil company Unocal flew Taliban leaders to Houston to work on a pipeline deal.

These sorts of things have always seemed more important to U.S. interests than schoolgirls reading a book.

consortiumnews.com

U.S. President Joe Biden said this week that he has “no regrets” about pulling American forces out of Afghanistan as the Taliban militants look set to over-run the entire Central Asian country. The lesson here is: anyone acting as a running dog for Washington does so at the peril of ultimate U.S. betrayal.

The U.S.-backed puppet regime in Kabul has done Washington’s bidding for nearly two decades. After 20 years of futile war at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Afghan lives and trillions of dollars, Uncle Sam has decided to pack up, get out and leave the Afghans to their miserable fate. As the Taliban take over one provincial capital after another, the U.S. intelligence agencies are warning that the Kabul regime could fall within a month. And callously, Biden this week told the Afghans they have to do their own fighting.

Whatever happened to lofty American vows of “nation-building”? Or “fighting terrorism”, “defending democracy”, “protecting women’s rights”?

It’s a sordid story with much historical precedent illustrating how at the drop of a hat Uncle Sam is liable to hang erstwhile “allies” out to dry. As American elder statesman Henry Kissinger once noted, the U.S. doesn’t have permanent allies, it only has interests.

Some 46 years ago, the Fall of Saigon saw the United States scurry away from a corrupt puppet regime it had propped up in South Vietnam as the North Vietnamese communists finally routed the redundant American pawns.

A more recent example of callous betrayal by Washington was the throwing of Kurdish militants to the mercy of Turkey when the latter invaded northern Syria during the Trump presidency. Anyone who accepts American patronage must know that the small print in the contract always reads: to be dumped at any time of Uncle Sam’s choosing and convenience.

Afghanistan is the most glaring proof perhaps since the Fall of Saigon in 1975 of that American treachery.

It’s a cautionary tale for others who incredibly still seem trusting in hitching their wagon to a U.S. alliance.

Ukraine, run by a venal regime in Kiev, appears slavishly willing to place all its fate under Washington’s whim. Centuries of common history with Russia are being sacrificed by the regime in Kiev all for the gain of Washington’s military benevolence. A seven-year civil war bankrolled by $2 billion in American military aid has destroyed the peace and prosperity of Ukraine as well as damage neighborly relations with Russia. We can be sure that when the imperial planners in Washington realize that their use of Ukraine as a pawn against Russia has become futile, then the people of Ukraine will be dropped to sort out the chronic mess.

Likewise the American lackeys in the Baltic states. They act as running dogs for Washington to spoil relations between Russia and the European Union. For years, the Baltic countries have objected to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia, appealing instead for more expensive and environmentally dirty U.S. gas exports. Overnight, Washington has decided such a policy is untenable and not worth antagonizing Germany and the rest of the EU. And just like that, the Baltic lackeys are left out in the cold looking like fools.

They never seem to learn though. This week Lithuania did Uncle Sam’s bidding to provoke China by announcing it would recognize Taiwan. That move infuriated Beijing because it undercuts the international One China Policy of accepting Taiwan as under Beijing’s sovereignty. China recalled its envoy from Vilnius and it has threatened punitive economic measures. As the EU’s top trading partner, it is reckless and self-defeating to incur China’s wrath. Lithuania and the rest of the EU could potentially be hit with economic losses – all for the sake of following Washington’s geopolitical agenda of hostility towards China.

Currently, the biggest caution of U.S. treachery must surely go to the renegade Chinese island territory of Taiwan. Beijing has warned that Washington’s provocative arms sales are fomenting separatist factions on the island. China has declared the right to invade Taiwan militarily and take back control by force. Such a move could ignite a war between the United States and China since Washington has repeatedly vowed to “defend” Taiwan.

But as the Afghan debacle reminds us, the chances are that Washington will leave the Taiwanese to their fate in a military confrontation with mainland China. There would be Chinese blood spilled on both sides before Beijing asserts its authority.

Afghanistan demonstrates with brutal clarity that there is not an iota of principle in Washington’s foreign policy and its military interventions. The lives of ordinary U.S. citizens are as expendable as those of foreign people as long as Washington’s interests of serving its corporate profits are deemed to be met. When those interests stop then the lives lost are flushed down the toilet like a nasty turd.

In July there were senior representatives of the Washington Administration bouncing about the globe like a bunch of ping-pong balls, lecturing in one place, suborning in another and announcing everywhere that the U.S. wants a “Rules-Based International Order”, as Secretary of State Blinken told China last March.

Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin was one of the bouncing balls, and before arriving in Vietnam stopped off in Singapore where on July 27 he declared “We will not flinch when our interests are threatened. Yet we do not seek confrontation.” On the same day, the British aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth (18 U.S.-supplied problem-ridden F-35 strike aircraft, 8 of them British, 10 U.S. Marine Corps), arrived at Singapore en route for the South China Sea to confront any Chinese forces it might meet. (Certainly, the UK carrier group is a joke that could not fight its way out of a paper bag, but it’s the presence that is intended to send the message.) Next day, when Austin arrived in Vietnam, the guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold trailed its coat in the Taiwan Strait in what the U.S. Navy called a “routine” transit that “demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

As can be seen on the site Marine Traffic, the Taiwan Strait is packed all day and night with transiting commercial ships from countless countries, and the right of passage is guaranteed. There is no need whatever for any U.S. guided missile destroyer to “demonstrate freedom and openness.” It was obvious that the Benfold — the seventh U.S. warship to transit the Strait so far this year — had been sent to attempt to provoke China to take action.

Washington has been open about its aggressive China policy, and the State Department’s official notification is that “Strategic competition is the frame through which the United States views its relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The United States will address its relationship with the PRC from a position of strength in which we work closely with our allies and partners to defend our interests and values.” The embrace of challenge could not be clearer, and the Defence Department fully agrees, declaring that U.S. National Defence Strategy is “To restore America’s competitive edge by blocking global rivals Russia and China from challenging the U.S. and our allies” and “To keep those rivals from throwing the current international order out of balance.” In other words, so far as Washington is concerned, U.S. global hegemony is here to stay because it is regarded as beneficial for the world — and above all for America.

But there are some countries that would disagree, including, quite understandably, the People’s Republic of China which objects to such condescending policy statements as “When it is in our interest, the United States will conduct results-oriented diplomacy with China on shared challenges such as climate change and global public health crises.” The world needs diplomacy, not tub-thumping policies that confine international negotiations to national interests, and it was regrettable that one of the bouncing balls visited China to deliver yet another lecture on how that country’s government should behave.

It had been hoped that the visit to China by Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman might open some doors to constructive dialogue, but such was not to be. On July 25-26, as the State Department later announced, “the Deputy Secretary and State Councillor Wang had a frank and open discussion about a range of issues, demonstrating the importance of maintaining open lines of communication between our two countries.” Ms Sherman, according to the State Department, “underscored that the United States welcomes the stiff competition between our countries . . .” but this sort of platitude is entirely at variance with the overall tenor of her presentation to State Councillor Wang and Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng.

As reported by the New York Times, she was mega-critical of China on counts of alleged human rights abuses and “also raised China’s demands over Taiwan, its military operations in the South China Sea, and the accusations last week by the United States and other nations that China’s Ministry of State Security was behind the hacking of Microsoft email systems and possibly other cyberattacks.” She declared that “This is very serious — that the Ministry of State Security would assist criminals to hack Microsoft and potentially others,” adding that “many” countries had joined the United States in saying that “such behaviour is absolutely irresponsible, reckless and has no place in our world.”

Ms Sherman had of course been told what to say at the meeting, presumably approved at the highest level, and it is apparent that Washington had no intention whatever of engaging in meaningful dialogue but was intent on showering China with insults.

It is yet to be understood in Washington that insults, sanctions and aggressive military manoeuvres do not have positive effects on the nations against whom they are directed. They invariably result in anger, resentment and retaliation of some sort. It is as yet unknown for retaliation to take the form of direct military action, because Washington’s targets are generally so weak as to be incapable of such riposte, but in the case of modern China, U.S. pressure and Chinese strength are rising to the extent that this is now a distinct possibility.

On July 28 the newly-appointed Chinese ambassador to the U.S., Qin Gang, said he believes “the door of China-U.S. relations, which is already open, cannot be closed” but no matter Beijing’s good intentions there are many in Washington who want to slam that door because they are confident that the national policy of “blocking global rivals Russia and China from challenging the U.S. and our allies” will succeed.

But it won’t.

During the disastrous visit by Deputy Secretary Sherman to China, Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng said bluntly that the Biden administration’s policies are nothing but a “thinly veiled attempt to contain and suppress China,” which was an extension of Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s cautionary statement that “The United States always wants to exert pressure on other countries by virtue of its own strength, thinking that it is superior to others. However, I would like to tell the U.S. side clearly that there has never been a country in this world that is superior to others, nor should there be, and China will not accept any country claiming to be superior to others. If the United States has not learned how to get along with other countries on an equal footing by now, then it is our responsibility, together with the international community, to give the U.S. a good tutorial in this regard.”

And if the U.S. does not moderate its policy of outright and usually arrogant confrontation in every sphere it is likely that the tutorial will begin very soon. Washington forgets that no matter how much some segments of the Chinese population may disagree with aspects of their government’s policies and performance, they are a proud people who strongly object to their country being insulted and treated as a maverick obstacle to world development. It seems that U.S. provocations in the East will continue and only Beijing knows how much more it will take before there is an explosion.

During the US war in Vietnam, a protester in Providence, Rhode Island set up a tiger cage and lamented that approaching the middle of the decade of the 1970s it was impossible to garner any significant protest against that war from which the US had withdrawn ground troops in 1973.  The Vietnam War ended in 1975. Those who recall will remember that tiger cages were devices of torture that the South Vietnamese government used against its enemies. At play in RI in the middle 1970s was the trend that had swept the US: If a person’s skin wasn’t at risk from the military draft, then protest was no longer chic.

All of the idealism and discussion about the rules of war and atrocities were forgotten by many with the ease of a change in fashion. Being against war was no longer fashionable for some.

Fast forward to the contemporary US where the military enjoys 89% approval. Two issues were recently raised, one about POWs during the Vietnam War and one about the reputation of a member of the Trump administration who received a pardon from Trump for lying to the FBI. The lies had to do with communicating with a Russian official, a whole other ball of wax that deserves separate treatment. The issue of POWs from the Vietnam War involves the late Senator John McCain, and the case of lying to the FBI and a presidential pardon involves retired General Michael Flynn.

It’s a good idea not to lie to the FBI since it’s a felony, but since federal government agencies now know everything about us and all of our communications, why bother to lie. The Patriot Act ended a host of our protections under the Constitution against unreasonable searches and seizures and the idea of the government needing a warrant to search through our communications is a joke. Edward Snowden is living proof of the latter.

CovertAction Magazine reports “New Evidence Reveals That Senator John McCain and Other High-Ranking Vietnam War POWs May Have Lied to the American Public About Being Tortured, “June 21, 2021. This article is intriguing since it documents a much different narrative about the treatment of US POWs at the hands of their Vietnamese captors during the Vietnam War. Additional allegations noted that some POWs intimidated other POWs to toe the line and agree about the purported torture of US POWs to the point of endangering the well-being of some former POWs.

There’s no surprise there since the laundering of the US war in Vietnam began before Ronald Reagan’s “noble cause” propaganda to enable him to launch low-intensity wars in Central American countries and further sanitize the Vietnam War. POW flags became ubiquitous on federal buildings and on some state and local government buildings.

Glorifying past wars is always important in conducting new wars and readying the civilian population to support new wars.

Recently, controversy about an honorary degree granted to the retired general, national security advisor to Trump, and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency under Obama, Michael Flynn, was raised. Flynn, a graduate of the University of Rhode Island, received an honorary degree from the same school in 2014. There was a debate among the trustees of the University, but not a public debate, about his honorary degree following Flynn’s calls for armed rebellion against the government of the US and his conviction and pardon for lying to the FBI about his dealings with Russia during his tenure in the Trump administration.

Taking away an honor from an earlier time makes no sense whatsoever. It’s about as useful as trying to invent a time machine to change what already is. It’s the present that needs attention and not some relic from the past. There’s more concern that the former general has spoken of violent rebellion to remove the present government of the US, then in some fairly meaningless honorary degree (“Michael Flynn suggested at a QAnon-affiliated event that a coup should happen in the U.S.,” New York Times, June 1, 2021).

Why would readers be surprised at any of this bald-faced militarism when the 2021-2022 military budget stands at about $753 billion? It’s no accident that bipartisan sponsorship of militarism has gained such a hold on most in the US beginning with the acceptance of low-intensity warfare of the 1980s to the endless wars of the 2020s. If 89% of respondents have a favorable view of the military, then militarism can go along unchecked with massive profits for the war planners and war makers with no questions asked. Income inequality soars and the environment tanks and we’re all in a sort of Vietnam-era tiger cage. And few want to protest that condition, while the human and material costs of maintaining an empire soar.

Proof of the bipartisan nature of US wars is reflected in “US Carries Out Airstrikes In Iraq and Syria,” (New York Times, June 27, 2021). In that respect, Biden has not missed a step in these attacks against Iranian-supported militias. The New York Times documents that Biden gave George W. Bush the authorization to go to war in  Iraq in 2002. What could be more bipartisan than that? The cycle of violence goes on and on in the empire’s version of an eye for an eye.

counterpunch.org

A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that worries about the COVID pandemic in the United States are at their lowest level since it began. Only half of Americans are either “very worried” (15%) or “somewhat worried” (35%) about the virus, while the other half are “not very worried” (30%) or “not worried at all” (20%).

But the news from around the world makes it clear that this pandemic is far from over, and a story from Vietnam highlights the nature of the danger.

Vietnam is a COVID success story, with one of the lowest rates of infection and death in the world. Vietnam’s excellent community-based public health system prevented the virus from spreading beyond isolated cases and localized outbreaks, without a nationwide lockdown. With a population of 98 million people, Vietnam has had only 8,883 cases and 53 deaths.

However, more than half of Vietnam’s cases and deaths have come in the last two months, and three-quarters of the new cases have been infected with a new “hybrid” variant that combines the two mutations detected separately in the Alpha (U.K.) and Delta (India) variants.

Vietnam is a canary in the pandemic coal-mine. The way this new variant has spread so quickly in a country that has defeated every previous form of the virus suggests that this one is much more infectious.

This variant must surely also be spreading in other countries, where it will be harder to detect among thousands of daily cases, and will therefore be widespread by the time public health officials and governments respond to it. There may also be other highly infectious new variants spreading undetected among the millions of cases in Latin America and other parts of the world.

A new study in The Lancet medical journal has found that the Alpha (U.K.), Beta (South Africa) and Delta (India) variants are all more resistant to existing vaccines than the original COVID virus, and the Delta variant is still spreading in countries with aggressive vaccination programs, including the U.K.

The Delta variant accounts for a two-month high in new cases in the U.K. and a new wave of infections in Portugal, just as developed countries ease restrictions before the summer vacation season, almost certainly opening the door to the next wave. The U.K., which has a slightly higher vaccination rate than the United States, had planned a further relaxation of restrictions on June 21st, but that is now in question.

China, Vietnam, New Zealand and other countries defeated the pandemic in its early stages by prioritizing public health over business interests. The United States and Western Europe instead tried to strike a balance between public health and their neoliberal economic systems, breeding a monster that has now killed millions of people. The World Health Organization believes that six to eight million people have died, about twice as many as have been counted in official figures.

Now the WHO is recommending that wealthier countries who have good supplies of vaccines postpone vaccinating healthy young people, and instead prioritize sending vaccines to poorer countries where the virus is running wild.

President Biden has announced that the United States is releasing 25 million doses from its stockpiles, most of which will be distributed through the WHO’s Covax program, with another 55 million to follow by the end of June. But this is a tiny fraction of what is needed.

Biden has also agreed to waive patent rights on vaccines under the WTO’s TRIPS rules (the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), but that has so far been held up at the WTO by Canada and right-wing governments in the U.K., Germany, Brazil, Australia, Japan and Colombia. People have taken to the streets in many countries to insist that a WTO TRIPS Council meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 8-9, must agree to waive patent monopolies.

Since all the countries blocking the TRIPS waiver are U.S. allies, this will be a critical test of the Biden administration’s promised international leadership and diplomacy, which has so far taken a back seat to dangerous saber-rattling against China and Russia, foot-dragging on the JCPOA with Iran and war-crime-fueling weapons-peddling to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Ending international vaccine apartheid is not just a matter of altruism, or even justice. It is a question of whether we will end this pandemic before vaccine-resistant, super-spreading and deadlier variants fuel even more toxic new waves. The only way humanity can win this struggle is to act collectively in our common interest. 

Public Citizen has researched what it would take to vaccinate the world, and concluded that it would cost only $25 billion – 3% of the annual U.S. budget for weapons and war – to set up manufacturing plants and distribution hubs across the world and vaccinate all of humanity within a year. Forty-two Progressives in Congress have signed a letter to President Biden to urge him to fund such a plan.

If the world can agree to make and distribute a People’s Vaccine, it could be the silver lining in this dark cloud, because this ability to act globally and collectively in the public interest is precisely what we need to solve so many of the most serious problems facing humanity.

For example, the UN Environment Program (UNEP) is warning that we are in the midst of a triple crisis of climate change, mass extinction and pollution. Our neoliberal political and economic system has not just failed to solve these problems. It actively works to undermine efforts to do so, granting people, corporations and countries who profit from destroying the natural world the freedom to do so without constraint.

That is the very meaning of laissez-faire, to let the wealthy and powerful do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences for the rest of us, or even for life on Earth. As the economist John Maynard Keynes reputedly said in the 1930s, “Laissez-faire capitalism is the absurd idea that the worst people, for the worst reasons, will do what is best for us all.”

Neoliberalism is the reimposition of 19th century laissez-faire capitalism, with all its injustices, inequality and oppression, on the people of the 21st century, prioritizing markets, profits and wealth over the common welfare of humanity and the natural world our lives depend on.

Berkeley and Princeton political theorist Sheldon Wolin called the U.S. political system, which facilitates this neoliberal economic order, “inverted totalitarianism.” Like classical totalitarianism, it concentrates ever more wealth and power in the hands of a small ruling class, but instead of abolishing parliaments, elections and the superficial trappings of representative government as classical totalitarianism did, it simply co-opts them as tools of plutocracy, which has proved to be a more marketable and sustainable strategy.

But now that neoliberalism has wreaked its chaos for a generation, popular movements are rising up across the world to demand systemic change and to build new systems of politics and economics that can actually solve the huge problems that neoliberalism has produced.

In response to the 2019 uprising in Chile, its rulers were forced to agree to an election for a constitutional assembly, to draft a constitution to replace the one written during the Pinochet dictatorship, one of the vanguards of neoliberalism. That election has now taken place, and the ruling party of President Pinera and other traditional parties won less than a third of the seats. So the constitution will instead be written by a super-majority of citizens committed to radical reform and social, economic and political justice.

In Iraq, which was also swept by a popular uprising in 2019, a new government seated in 2020 has launched an investigation to recover $150 billion in Iraqi oil revenues stolen and smuggled out of the country by the corrupt officials of previous governments.

U.S.-backed former exiles flew into Iraq on the heels of the U.S. invasion in 2003 “with empty pockets to fill,” as a Baghdad taxi driver told a Western reporter at the time. While U.S. forces and U.S.-trained Iraqi death squads destroyed their country, they hunkered down in the Green Zone in Baghdad and controlled and looted Iraq’s oil revenues for the next seventeen years. Now maybe Iraq can recover the stolen money its people so desperately need, and start using its oil wealth to rebuild that shattered country.

In Bolivia, also in 2019, a U.S.-backed coup overthrew its popular indigenous president, Evo Morales. But the people of Bolivia rose up in a general strike to demand a new election, Morales’ MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) Party was restored to power, and Luis Arce, Morales’ former Economy Minister, is now Bolivia’s President.

Around the world, we are witnessing what can happen when people rise up and act collectively for the common good. That is how we will solve the serious problems we face, from the COVID pandemic to the climate crisis to the terminal danger of nuclear war. Humanity’s survival into the twenty-second century and all our hopes for a bright future depend on building new political and economic systems that will simply and genuinely “do what is best for all of us.”

dissidentvoice.org

By Gareth PORTER

When the Pentagon began gearing up for a future war with China in 2018, Defense Department officials quickly realized that they needed access to Vietnamese territory for troops armed with missiles to hit Chinese ships in a US-China conflict. So they initiated an aggressive campaign to lobby the Vietnamese government, and even Communist Party officials, in the hope that they would eventually support an agreement to provide them the permission.

But a Grayzone investigation of the Pentagon’s lobbying push in Vietnam shows what a delusional exercise it was from its inception. In a fit of self-deception that highlighted the desperation behind the bid, the US military ignored abundant evidence that Vietnam had no intention of giving up its longstanding, firmly grounded policy of equidistance between the United States and China.

Vietnam as a key base in US war strategy

Between 2010 and 2017, China developed intermediate-range missiles capable of hitting American bases in Japan and South Korea. To counter that threat, the Pentagon and military services began working on a new strategy in which US Marines, accompanied by an array of missiles, would spread out over a network of small, rudimentary bases and move continuously from one base to another.

Vietnam was the logical choice for such sites. Australia and the Philippines publicly ruled out hosting US missiles capable of hitting China, and South Korea was considered unlikely to agree. Indonesia and Singapore were too economically dependent on China to be interested.

But as Chris Dougherty, the former Senior Advisor to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development who had written large parts of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, told the Military Times last September, “Vietnam has some wonderful geography. You can have good external lines against the Chinese.” Pentagon strategists also knew that Vietnam had soundly defeated a poorly conceived Chinese invasion in 1979 designed to punish the Vietnamese for their ties with the Soviet Union.

The Pentagon’s focus on Vietnam began when then-Defense Secretary James Mattis visited Vietnam in both 2017 and 2018, meeting several times with Defense Minister General Ngo Xuan Lich, who had previously visited him in Washington. During his January 2018 visit, Mattis waxed enthusiastically about the future of US-Vietnam cooperation, calling the two countries “like-minded partners.”

In April 2019 the Commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Philip S. Davidson visited Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City during a four-day trip. Mattis’s successor, Mark Esper, went even further in a November 2019 trip, meeting not only with the defense minister, Lich, but with Executive Secretary of the Communist Party Tran Quoc Vuong as well. Officials were pleased with what they believed was a breakthrough for the Pentagon, despite the Vietnamese Defense Ministry’s abrupt cancellation of fifteen previously planned “defense engagements” with the United States without public explanation the previous month.

In their pursuit of Vietnam’s active involvement in its new war strategy, however, the Defense Department and military brass were ignoring the fundamental fact that the Communist Party of Vietnam and military leadership were not going to budge from the strategic policy to which it had been publicly committed for two full decades.

The policy was summed up in three fundamental principles: no military alliances, no aligning with one country against another, and no foreign military bases on Vietnamese soil. The Vietnamese commitment to those “three noes”, first made public in a national defense White Paper published in 1998, was repeated in successive White Papers in 2004 and 2009.

Those principles clearly ruled out the kind of military cooperation that the Pentagon sought from Vietnam, but there was apparently too much at stake for top Pentagon officials to let that reality stand in the way of their enthusiasm.

The Defense Department’s main corporate research arm, the RAND Corporation, which was heavily invested in the idea of a viable new military strategy for war with China, was equally unwilling to acknowledge the truth. In January 2019, Derek Grossman, RAND’s specialist on Vietnamese defense policy, publicly reassured the policymakers that Hanoi was not really bound by any of those three “three noes.” On the principle of “no military alliances,” he claimed that Vietnam had “essentially created a major loophole in its own rule” by defining alliance as a military agreement requiring another country to defend Vietnam if it were attacked. He came up with equally creative explanations for why the other “noes” were also loosely defined in practice.

When Vietnam’s long-awaited new National Defense White Paper was published in late November 2019, Grossman discovered new reasons for pressing ahead with the Pentagon’s bid for Vietnam’s cooperation with the new US military against China. He suggested that the Vietnamese had planted “subtle messages of opportunity for Washington” in the document, including its readiness to participate in “security and defense mechanisms in the Indo-Pacific region.”

And he pointed to a new supplement to what had now become Vietnam’s “four noes.” “[D]epending on the circumstances and specific conditions,” it said, “Vietnam will consider developing necessary, appropriate defense and military relations with other countries.” In practice, that merely meant that if Vietnam were seriously threatened by a Chinese attack, it could abandon its commitment to those four “noes”.

But the addendum was hardly a signal of Vietnamese readiness to participate in a US “Indo-Pacific Strategy”. Rather, the “four noes and one depend” in the defense white paper were part of a larger strategy of maintaining equidistance between China and the United States, as first adopted by the Party Central Committee in 2003 as “Resolution 8”.

The Pentagon’s Vietnam bubble bursts

Washington’s optimism about a new era of US-Vietnam defense cooperation against China was based on little more than wishful thinking. By late 2020, it was apparent that the bubble of Pentagon hopes for a breakthrough with Vietnam had burst: there would be no Vietnamese involvement in a US. anti-China military strategy in the region. Nor would there be high level Pentagon or military visits during the year. More importantly, no further US-Vietnam military activities were announced.

The RAND Corporation’s Grossman finally acknowledged in August 2020 that Vietnam had not been poised to begin deeper military collaboration against China after all. He now admitted the reality that Hanoi was taking a “conservative approach” to the “four noes and one depend” that he had marketed only months before as an open door to more US cooperation. Grossman acknowledged Vietnam had carried out a “delicate balancing act,” avoiding any move likely to antagonize China. The country’s careful approach, he wrote, is “disappointing for Washington and should temper American assessments of the extent to which Hanoi might be willing to play a role in the US Indo-Pacific strategy,” obviously implying that the Trump administration’s “high hopes” for a “like-minded partner” strategy in Vietnam were misplaced.

Nguyen The Phuong, a research associate at the Centre for International Studies, National University-Ho Chi Minh City, confirmed in an interview with The Grayzone that the basic Vietnamese policy of maintaining equidistance between China and the United States is not questioned by anyone within the Vietnamese government. He observed that both civilian and military officials believe the US Navy had no effective strategy for curbing Chinese operations in the maritime zone that Vietnam claims.

The only difference of opinion which had arisen within that consensus, he said, was that many Vietnamese diplomats with whom he has talked believe that the US Coast Guard, which is not under the control of Defense Department — but which the US nevertheless considers a military service — would be more effective tool in countering China’s tactics in the contested maritime zone in the South China Sea than the US Navy has been. They also believed that giving the Coast Guard access to Vietnam’s deep-water port at Cam Ranh Bay would not be provocative to China. The military leadership, however, has rejected that idea, according to Nguyen.

But what the Pentagon desired from Vietnam primarily was access to bases for American ground troops with missiles. In September 2O20, after the Defense Department had reached agreement with Palau on bases in that Pacific Island, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia Heino Klinck revealed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that the Defense Department truly sought was “access to places instead of permanent bases.” As the article explained, “US security policy in Asia calls for a heavier presence of American forces, but on a rotational basis, whereby troops switch in and out for training and exercises.”

The Marines that the Pentagon would like to have positioned in Vietnam would otherwise have been sitting ducks for Chinese missiles. But Nguyen The Phuong does not believe that any Vietnamese official, whether civilian or military, would even consider allowing such access. “If the US tried that approach on Vietnam, it would certainly fail,” he said.

The story of the Pentagon’s pursuit of Vietnam as a potential military partner against China reveals an extraordinary degree of self-deception surrounding the entire endeavor. And it adds further detail to the already well-established picture of a muddled and desperate bureaucracy seizing on any vehicle possible to enable it to claim that US power in the Pacific can still prevail in a war with China.

thegrayzone.com

As discussed in part two of this series, the war in Vietnam did not start on its official date, November 1^st, 1955, but rather 1945 when American clandestine operations were launched in Vietnam to “prepare the ground”.

1. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy and was a former Col. in the U.S. Air Force, goes over in his book “The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy,” how the CIA was used to instigate psy-ops and paramilitary (terrorist) activities in Vietnam to create the pretext required for an open declaration of war and for the entry of the U.S. military into a twenty-year-long meat grinder.

This was a strategy reserved not just for Vietnam, but had become the general U.S. foreign policy in all regions that were considered threats to the Cold War Grand Strategy, as seen under the directorship of the Dulles brothers (See Part 1 and Part 2 of this series).

Any country that was observed to hold views that were not aligned with U.S. foreign policy could not simply be invaded in most scenarios, but rather, the ground would need to be prepared to create the justification for a direct military invasion.

This is one of the roles of the CIA which abides by the motto “fake it till you make it.”

Don’t have an actual ‘enemy’ to fight and justify your meddling into another country’s affairs? Not a problem. Just split your paramilitary team into “good guys” and “bad guys” and have them pretend fight. Go village to village repeating this action-drama and you will see how quickly the word will spread that there are “dangerous extremists” in the area that exist in “great numbers.”

Prouty described this paramilitary activity, which is called “Fun and Games,” and how this tactic was also used in the Philippines, resulting in the election of Ramon Magsaysay who was declared a hero against a non-existing enemy. In fact, the Filipino elite units that were trained by the CIA during this period were then brought into Vietnam to enact the very same tactic.

Prouty writes:

“I have been to such training programs at U.S. military bases where identical tactics are taught to Americans as well as foreigners. It is all the same…these are the same tactics that were exploited by CIA superagent Edward G. Lansdale [the man in charge of the CIA Saigon Military Mission] and his men in the Philippines and Indochina.

This is an example of the intelligence service’s ‘Fun and Games.’ Actually, it is as old as history; but lately it has been refined, out of necessity, into a major tool of clandestine warfare.

Lest anyone think that this is an isolated case, be assured that it was not. Such ‘mock battles’ and ‘mock attacks on native villages’ were staged countless times in Indochina for the benefit of, or the operation of, visiting dignitaries, such as John McCone when he first visited Vietnam as the Kennedy appointed director of central intelligence [after Kennedy fired Allen Dulles].”

What Prouty is stating here, is that the mock battles that occurred for these dignitaries were CIA trained agents “play-acting” as the Vietcong… to make it appear that the Vietcong were not only numerous but extremely hostile.

If even dignitaries can be fooled by such things unfolding before their own eyes, is it really a wonder that a western audience watching or reading about these affairs going on in the world through its mainstream media interpreter could possibly differentiate between “reality” vs a “staged reality”?

Not only were the lines between military and paramilitary operations becoming blurred, but as Prouty states in his book, the highest ranking officers who were operating and overseeing the Vietnam situation were all CIA operatives, not only within the U.S. military but including the U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge.

Prouty writes:

“U.S. Ambassador Lodge – had since 1945 been one of the most important agents of the OSS and later the CIA in the Far East. His orders came from that agency.”

Prouty goes further to state in his book that Lodge was brought into the role as Ambassador on August 26^th, 1963 specifically to remove Ngo Dinh Diem President of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), who was seeking a peaceful resolution to the conflict at that point.

Ngo Dinh Diem was killed two months after Lodge’s arrival in Vietnam, on November 1^st, 1963. Twenty one days later John F. Kennedy who was in the process of pulling out American troops from Vietnam, was assassinated. The Vietnam War continued for 12 years more, with the Americans having nothing to show for it. And in 1976, the city of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, was renamed Ho Chi Minh city.

A “Legacy of Ashes”

The militarization of government began to return power to the corporate elite, as captains of industry and finance moved into key government posts. The Eisenhower presidency would see Washington taken over by business executives, Wall Street lawyers, and investment bankers—and by a closely aligned warrior caste that had emerged into public prominence during World War II.

Eisenhower wished to establish U.S. supremacy while avoiding another large-scale shooting war as well as the imperial burdens that had bankrupted Great Britain (to which the U.S. now did its bidding under NSC-75). By leveraging the U.S. military’s near monopoly on nuclear firepower, the president hoped to make war an unthinkable proposition for all American adversaries.

The problem with Eisenhower’s strategy was that by keeping Washington in a constant state of high alert, he empowered the most militant voices in his administration. Eisenhower had made the grave error of choosing Foster Dulles as one of his close if not closest advisers, and thus whether he liked it or not, Allen Dulles – I doubt Eisenhower ever had a free moment from the poisoned honey that was constantly being dripped into his ear.

The line between CIA and military became increasingly blurred, as military officers were assigned to intelligence agency missions, and then sent back to their military posts as “ardent disciples of Allen Dulles,” in the words of Prouty, who served as a liaison officer between the Pentagon and the CIA between 1955 and 1963.

Approaching the end of his presidency, in May 1960, President Eisenhower had planned to culminate a “Crusade for Peace” with the ultimate summit conference with USSR Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Paris. It was Eisenhower’s clear attempt to finally push forward an initiative that was his own and which did not receive its “blessing” by Foster. If Eisenhower were to succeed in this, it would move to dissolve the Cold War Grand Strategy and remove the justification for a military industrial complex.

In preparation for the summit, the White House had directed all overflight activity over communist territory to cease until further notice. Yet on May 1^st, 1960, a high flying U-2 spy plane flown by Francis Gary Powers left Pakistan on a straight-line overflight of the Soviet Union en route to Bodo, Norway, contrary to the Eisenhower orders.

The U-2 crash landed in Sverdlovsk, Russia. Amongst the possessions found in the plane, were of all things, identification of Powers being a CIA agent, something highly suspect for an intelligence officer to be carrying during a supposed covert mission.

The incident was enough to cancel the peace summit, and the “Crusade for Peace” was bludgeoned in its cradle.

Rumours abounded quickly thereafter that it was the Soviets who shot down the plane, however, it was Allen Dulles himself, who gave testimony before a closed-door session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the U-2 spy plane had not been shot down but had descended because of “engine trouble.” (1) This important statement by Dulles was largely ignored by the press.

Later, Eisenhower confirmed in his memoirs that the spy plane had not been shot down by the Soviets and had indeed lost engine power and crash-landed in Russia.

Prouty suspected that the “engine failure” may have been induced by a pre-planned shortage of auxiliary hydrogen fuel and that Powers’ identification items were likely planted in his parachute pack. With only a certain amount of fuel and a straight line trajectory, it would have been easy to calculate exactly where Powers would be forced to make a landing.

Prouty suspected that the CIA had intentionally provoked the incident in order to ruin the peace conference and ensure the continued reign of Dulles dogmatism.

Interestingly, the man who was in charge of the Cuban exile program, Richard Bissell (deputy director of plans for the CIA), was the same man who ran the U-2 program and who, according to Prouty ostensibly sent the Powers flight over the Soviet Union on May 1^st, 1960.

Richard Bissell, who was most certainly acting upon the orders of Dulles, was among the three (Allen Dulles, Director of the CIA and Charles Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA) who were fired by Kennedy as a result of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or more aptly put for their act of treason.

On Jan. 5^th, 1961, during a meeting of the National Security Council, a frustrated and worn down President Eisenhower, put on public record just weeks before Kennedy was to assume office, that the CIA under Dulles, had robbed him of his place in history as a peacemaker and left nothing but “a legacy of ashes for his successor.”

All Eisenhower had left of his own was his farewell address, which he made on Jan. 17^th, 1961, where he famously warned the American people of what had been festering during his eight-year presidential term:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex… The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”

A Phoenix Rising

Eisenhower may have left a legacy of ashes for his predecessor, but out of those ashes would emerge a force that would come to directly challenge the rule of the “power elite”. (2)

In April 1954, Kennedy stood up on the Senate floor to challenge the Eisenhower administration’s support for the doomed French imperial war in Vietnam, foreseeing that this would not be a short-lived war. (3)

In July 1957, Kennedy once more took a strong stand against French colonialism, this time France’s bloody war against Algeria’s independence movement, which again found the Eisenhower administration on the wrong side of history. Rising on the Senate floor, two days before America’s own Independence Day, Kennedy declared:

“The most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile – it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism – and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism. Thus, the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man’s desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our security.” (4)

In September 1960, the annual United Nations General Assembly was being held in New York. Castro and a fifty member delegation were among the attendees and had made a splash in the headlines when he decided to stay at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem after the midtown Shelburne Hotel demanded a $20,000 security deposit. He made an even bigger splash in the headlines when he made a speech at this hotel, discussing the issue of equality in the United States while in Harlem, one of the poorest boroughs in the country.

Kennedy would visit this very same hotel a short while later, and also made a speech:

“Behind the fact of Castro coming to this hotel, [and] Khrushchev…there is another great traveler in the world, and that is the travel of a world revolution, a world in turmoil…We should be glad [that Castro and Khrushchev] came to the United States. We should not fear the twentieth century, for the worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution.” (5)

What did Kennedy mean by this? The American Revolution was fought for freedom, freedom from the rule of monarchy and imperialism in favour of national sovereignty. What Kennedy was stating, was that this was the very oppression that the rest of the world wished to shake the yoke off, and that the United States had an opportunity to be a leader in the cause for the independence of all nations.

On June 30^th, 1960, marking the independence of the Republic of Congo from the colonial rule of Belgium, Patrice Lumumba, the first Congolese Prime Minister gave a speech that has become famous for its outspoken criticism of colonialism. Lumumba spoke of his people’s struggle against “the humiliating bondage that was forced upon us… [years that were] filled with tears, fire and blood,” and concluded vowing “We shall show the world what the black man can do when working in liberty, and we shall make the Congo the pride of Africa.”

Shortly after, Lumumba also made clear, “We want no part of the Cold War… We want Africa to remain African with a policy of neutralism.” (6)

As a result, Lumumba was labeled a communist for his refusal to be a Cold War satellite for the western sphere. Rather, Lumumba was part of the Pan-African movement that was led by Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah (who later Kennedy would also work with), which sought national sovereignty and an end to colonialism in Africa.

Lumumba “would remain a grave danger,” Dulles said at an NSC meeting on September 21, 1960, “as long as he was not yet disposed of.” (7) Three days later, Dulles made it clear that he wanted Lumumba permanently removed, cabling the CIA’s Leopoldville station, “We wish give [sic] every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility resuming governmental position.” (8)

Lumumba was assassinated on Jan. 17^th, 1961, just three days before Kennedy’s inauguration, during the fog of the transition period between presidents, when the CIA is most free to tie its loose ends, confident that they will not be reprimanded by a new administration that wants to avoid scandal on its first days in office.

Kennedy, who clearly meant to put a stop to the Murder Inc. that Dulles had created and was running, would declare to the world in his inaugural address on Jan. 20^th, 1961, “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”

And so Kennedy’s battle with the Leviathan had begun.

La Resistance

Along with inheriting the responsibility of the welfare of the country and its people, Kennedy was to also inherit a secret war with communist Cuba run by the CIA.

The Bay of Pigs set-up would occur three months later. Prouty compares the Bay of Pigs incident to that of the Crusade for Peace, both events were orchestrated by the CIA to ruin the U.S. president’s ability to form a peaceful dialogue with Khrushchev and decrease Cold War tensions. Both presidents’ took onus for the events respectively, despite the responsibility resting with the CIA. However, Eisenhower and Kennedy understood, if they did not take onus, it would be a public declaration that they did not have any control over their government agencies and military.

Further, the Bay of Pigs operation was in fact meant to fail. It was meant to stir up a public outcry for a direct military invasion of Cuba. On public record is a meeting (or more aptly described as an intervention) with CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell, Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, and Navy Chief Admiral Burke basically trying to strong arm President Kennedy into approving a direct military attack on Cuba. Admiral Burke had already taken the liberty of positioning two battalions of Marines on Navy destroyers off the coast of Cuba “anticipating that U.S. forces might be ordered into Cuba to salvage a botched invasion.” (9) (This incident is what inspired the Frankenheimer movie “Seven Days in May.”)

Kennedy stood his ground.

“They were sure I’d give in to them,” Kennedy later told Special Assistant to the President Dave Powers. “They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well they had me figured all wrong.” (10)

Incredibly, not only did the young president stand his ground against the Washington war hawks just three months into his presidential term, but he also launched the Cuba Study Group which found the CIA to be responsible for the fiasco, leading to the humiliating forced resignation of Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell and Charles Cabell. (For more on this refer to my report.)

Unfortunately, it would not be that easy to dethrone Dulles, who continued to act as head of the CIA, and key members of the intelligence community such as Helms and Angleton regularly bypassed McCone and briefed Dulles directly. (11) But Kennedy was also serious about seeing it all the way through, and vowed to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

* * *

There is another rather significant incident that had occurred just days after the Bay of Pigs, and which has largely been overshadowed by the Cuban fiasco.

From April 21-26^th, 1961, the Algiers putsch or Generals’ putsch, was a failed coup d’état intended to force President de Gaulle (1959-1969) not to abandon the colonial French Algeria. The organisers of the putsch were opposed to the secret negotiations that French Prime Minister Michel Debré had started with the anti-colonial National Liberation Front (FLN).

On January 26^th, 1961, just three months before the attempted coup d’état, Dulles sent a report to Kennedy on the French situation that seemed to be hinting that de Gaulle would no longer be around, “A pre-revolutionary atmosphere reigns in France… The Army and the Air Force are staunchly opposed to de Gaulle…At least 80 percent of the officers are violently against him. They haven’t forgotten that in 1958, he had given his word of honor that he would never abandon Algeria. He is now reneging on his promise, and they hate him for that. de Gaulle surely won’t last if he tries to let go of Algeria. Everything will probably be over for him by the end of the year—he will be either deposed or assassinated.” (12)

The attempted coup was led by Maurice Challe, whom de Gaulle had reason to conclude was working with the support of U.S. intelligence, and Élysée officials began spreading this word to the press, which reported the CIA as a “reactionary state-within-a-state” that operated outside of Kennedy’s control. (13)

Shortly before Challe’s resignation from the French military, he had served as NATO commander in chief and had developed close relations with a number of high-ranking U.S. officers stationed in the military alliance’s Fontainebleau headquarters. (14)

In August 1962 the OAS (Secret Army Organization) made an assassination attempt against de Gaulle, believing he had betrayed France by giving up Algeria to Algerian nationalists. This would be the most notorious assassination attempt on de Gaulle (who would remarkably survive over thirty assassination attempts while President of France) when a dozen OAS snipers opened fire on the president’s car, which managed to escape the ambush despite all four tires being shot out.

After the failed coup d’état, de Gaulle launched a purge of his security forces and ousted General Paul Grossin, the chief of SDECE (the French secret service). Grossin was closely aligned with the CIA, and had told Frank Wisner over lunch that the return of de Gaulle to power was equivalent to the Communists taking over in Paris. (15)

In 1967, after a five-year enquête by the French Intelligence Bureau, it released its findings concerning the 1962 assassination attempt on de Gaulle. The report found that the 1962 assassination plot could be traced back to the NATO Brussels headquarters, and the remnants of the old Nazi intelligence apparatus. The report also found that Permindex had transferred $200,000 into an OAS bank account to finance the project.

As a result of the de Gaulle exposé, Permindex was forced to shut down its public operations in Western Europe and relocated its headquarters from Bern, Switzerland to Johannesburg, South Africa, it also had/has a base in Montreal, Canada where its founder Maj. Gen. Louis M. Bloomfield (former OSS) proudly had his name amongst its board members until the damning de Gaulle report. The relevance of this to Kennedy will be discussed shortly.

As a result of the SDECE’s ongoing investigation, de Gaulle made a vehement denunciation of the Anglo-American violation of the Atlantic Charter, followed by France’s withdrawal from the NATO military command in 1966. France would not return to NATO until April 2009 at the Strasbourg-Kehl Summit.

In addition to all of this, on Jan. 14^th, 1963, de Gaulle declared at a press conference that he had vetoed British entry into the Common Market. This would be the first move towards France and West Germany’s formation of the European Monetary System, which excluded Great Britain, likely due to its imperialist tendencies and its infamous sin City of London.

Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson telegrammed West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer directly, appealing to him to try to persuade de Gaulle to back track on the veto, stating “if anyone can affect Gen. de Gaulle’s decision, you are surely that person.”

Little did Acheson know that Adenauer was just days away from singing the Franco-German Treaty of Jan 22^nd, 1963 (also known as the ÉlyséeTreaty), which had enormous implications. Franco-German relations, which had long been dominated by centuries of rivalry, had now agreed that their fates were aligned. (This close relationship was continued to a climactic point in the late 1970s, with the formation of the EMS, and France and West Germany’s willingness in 1977 to work with OPEC countries trading oil for nuclear technology, which was sabotaged by the U.S.-Britain alliance. For more on this refer to my paper.)

The Élysée Treaty was a clear denunciation of the Anglo-American forceful overseeing that had overtaken Western Europe since the end of WWII.

On June 28^th, 1961, Kennedy wrote NSAM #55. This document changed the responsibility of defense during the Cold War from the CIA to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and would have (if seen through) drastically changed the course of the war in Vietnam. It would also have effectively removed the CIA from Cold War operations and limited the CIA to its sole lawful responsibility, the coordination of intelligence.

The same year that de Gaulle and Adenauer were forming a pact to exclude Britain from the Commons Market, Kennedy signed Executive Order 11110 on June 4, 1963, effectively bypassing the Federal Reserve’s monopoly on controlling U.S. currency for the first time since the private central bank was created in 1913. This executive order authorized the U.S. Treasury to issue silver backed notes and “to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury”.

By Oct 11^th, 1963, NSAM #263, closely overseen by Kennedy (16), was released and outlined a policy decision “to withdraw 1,000 military personnel [from Vietnam] by the end of 1963” and further stated that “It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel [including the CIA and military] by 1965.” The Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes had the headline U.S. TROOPS SEEN OUT OF VIET BY ’65.

With the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, likely ordained by the CIA, on Nov. 2^nd, 1963 and Kennedy just a few weeks later on Nov. 22^nd, 1963, de facto President Johnson signed NSAM #273 on Nov. 26^th, 1963 to begin the reversal of Kennedy’s policy under #263. And on March 17^th, 1964, Johnson signed NSAM #288 that marked the full escalation of the Vietnam War and involved 2,709,918 Americans directly serving in Vietnam, with 9,087,000 serving with the U.S. Armed Forces during this period.

The Vietnam War would continue for another 12 years after Kennedy’s death, lasting a total of 20 years for Americans, and 30 years if you count American covert action in Vietnam.

The Last Days of Kennedy

By Germany supporting de Gaulle’s exposure of the international assassination ring, his adamant opposition to western imperialism and the role of NATO, and with a young Kennedy building his own resistance against the Federal Reserve and the imperialist war of Vietnam, it was clear that the power elite were in big trouble.

There is a lot of spurious effort to try to ridicule anyone who challenges the Warren Commission’s official report as nothing but fringe conspiracy theory. And that we should not find it highly suspect that Allen Dulles, of all people, was a member of this commission. The reader should keep in mind that much of this frothing opposition stems from the very agency that perpetrated crime after crime on the American people, as well as abroad. When has the CIA ever admitted guilt, unless caught red-handed? Even after the Church committee hearings, when the CIA was found guilty of planning out foreign assassinations, they claimed that they had failed in every single plot or that someone had beaten them to the punch.

The American people need to realise that the CIA is not a respectable agency; we are not dealing with honorable men. It is a rogue force that believes that the ends justify the means, that they are the hands of the king so to speak, above government and above law. Those at the top such as Allen Dulles were just as adamant as Churchill about protecting the interests of the power elite, or as Churchill termed it, the “High Cabal.”

Interestingly, on Dec. 22^nd, 1963, just one month after Kennedy’s assassination, Harry Truman published a scathing critique of the CIA in The Washington Post, even going so far as to state “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position [as a] free and open society, and I feel that we need to correct it.” (17)

The timing of this is everything.

As Prouty has stated, anyone with a little bit of free time during an afternoon could discover for themselves that the Warren Commission was an embarrassingly incompetent hodge-podge, that conducted itself as if it were a done deal that Oswald killed Kennedy and was disinterested in hearing anything contrary to that narrative.

Not only did the record of Oswald’s interrogation at the Dallas Police Department go up in smoke, likely because he was making the inconvenient claim that he was a “patsy,” but his nitrate test which proved that he never shot a rifle the day of Nov. 22^nd, 1963, was kept secret for 10 months and was only revealed in the final report, (18) which inexplicably did not change the report’s conclusion that Oswald shot Kennedy.

During Garrison’s trial on the Kennedy assassination (1967-1969) he subpoenaed the Zapruder film that had been locked up in some vault owned by Life magazine (whose founder Henry Luce was known to work closely with the CIA (19)). This was the first time in more than five years that the Zapruder film was made public. It turns out the FBI’s copy that was sent to the Warren Commission had two critical frames reversed to create a false impression that the rifle shot was from  behind.

When Garrison got a hold of the original film it was discovered that the head shot had actually come from the front. In fact, what the whole film showed was that the President had been shot from multiple angles meaning there was more than one gunman.

This was not the only piece of evidence to be tampered with, and includes Kennedy’s autopsy reports.

There is also the matter of the original autopsy papers being destroyed by the chief autopsy physician, James Humes, to which he even testified to during the Warren Commission, apparently nobody bothered to ask why…

In addition, Jim Garrison, New Orleans District Attorney at the time who was charging Clay Shaw as a member of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, besides uncovering his ties to David Ferrie who was found dead in his apartment days before he was scheduled to testify, also made a case that the New Orleans International Trade Mart (to which Clay Shaw was director), the U.S. subsidiary of Permindex, was linked to Kennedy’s murder.

Garrison did a remarkable job with the odds he was up against, and for the number of witnesses that turned up dead before the trial…

This Permindex link would not look so damning if we did not have the French intelligence SDECE report, but we do. And recall, in that report Permindex was caught transferring $200,000 directly to the bankroll of the OAS which attempted the 1962 assassination on de Gaulle.

Thus, Permindex’s implication in an international assassination ring is not up for debate. In addition, the CIA was found heavily involved in these assassination attempts against de Gaulle, thus we should not simply dismiss the possibility that Permindex was indeed a CIA front for an international hit crew.

In fact, among the strange and murderous characters who converged on Dallas in Nov. 1963 was a notorious French OAS commando named Jean Souetre, who was connected to the plots against President de Gaulle. Souetre was arrested in Dallas after the Kennedy assassination and expelled to Mexico. (20)

Col. Clay Shaw was an OSS officer during WWII, which provides a direct link to his knowing Allen Dulles, and thus we come around full circle.

After returning from Kennedy’s Nov. 24^th funeral in Washington, de Gaulle and his information minister Alain Peyrefitte had a candid discussion that was recorded in Peyrefitte’s memoire “C’était de Gaulle,” the great General was quoted saying:

““What happened to Kennedy is what nearly happened to me… His story is the same as mine. … It looks like a cowboy story, but it’s only an OAS [Secret Army Organization] story. The security forces were in cahoots with the extremists.

…Security forces are all the same when they do this kind of dirty work. As soon as they succeed in wiping out the false assassin, they declare the justice system no longer need be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder.

America is in danger of upheavals. But you’ll see. All of them together will observe the law of silence. They will close ranks. They’ll do everything to stifle any scandal. They will throw Noah’s cloak over these shameful deeds. In order to not lose face in front of the whole world. In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States. In order to preserve the union and to avoid a new civil war. In order to not ask themselves questions. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out.”

(1) L. Fletcher Prouty, “The Cia, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, ” pg 147
(2) C. Wright Mills, “The Power Elite”
(3) David Talbot, “The Devil’s Chessboard,” pg 304
(4) Ibid, pg 305
(5) Ibid, pg 295
(6) Ibid, pg 319
(7) Ibid, pg 319
(8) Ibid, pg 319
(9) Ibid, pg 337
(10) Ibid, pg 337
(11) Ibid, pg 359
(12) Ibid, pg 350
(13) Ibid, pg 353
(14) Ibid, pg 347
(15) Ibid, pg 354
(16) L. Fletcher Prouty, “The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy,” pg xxxiv
(17) David Talbot, “The Devil’s Chessboard,” pg 201
(18) Jim Garrison, “On the Trail of the Assassins,” pg 116-117
(19) David Talbot, “The Devil’s Chessboard,” pg 72, 128
(20) Ibid, pg 422

The author can be reached at cynthiachung@tutanota.com