CIA Director/Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Richard Helms was recruited
out of the press corps by his own supervisor at the United Press International’s Berlin Bureau to join in the OSS’s fledgling “black propaganda” program.
Frank Wisner maintained the top secret “Propaganda Assets Inventory,” better known as
“Wisner’s Wurlitzer”—a virtual rolodex of
over 800 news and information entities prepared to play whatever tune Wisner chose. “The network included journalists, columnists, book publishers, editors, entire organizations such as Radio Free Europe, and stringers across multiple news organizations.”
Psychological operations in the form of journalism were perceived as necessary to influence and direct mass opinion, as well as elite perspectives.
By the mid-to-late 1950s, Darrell Garwood points out, The Agency sought to limit criticism directed against covert activity and bypass congressional oversight or potential judicial interference by “infiltrat[ing] the groves of academia, the missionary corps, the editorial boards of influential journal and book publishers, and any other quarters where public attitudes could be effectively influenced.” Darrell Garwood, Under Cover: Thirty-Five Years of CIA Deception, New York: Grove Press, 1985, pg. 250.
07/19/2018: FACT CHECK: DID JOHN BRENNAN ONCE VOTE FOR THE COMMUNIST PARTY? Brennan ADMITS he voted for a communist presidential candidate as a college student, something he has described as "an act of rebellion".
Brennan voted for Gus Hall, the presidential candidate for the Communist Party USA, in 1976.
THE CIA WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO ENGAGE IN DOMESTIC SPYING ON AMERICANS, BUT, AT LEAST SINCE THE 1970s, WE'VE SEEN THE CIA DOING JUST THAT, OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
The CIA is not permitted legally to collect intelligence concerning the domestic activities of U.S. citizens.
A 1981 Executive Order 12333 restricts the CIA from collecting intelligence on US citizens.
However, there's a loophole: if an individual is communicating with 'dangerous terrorists' in a foreign country that the CIA is monitoring (and they monitor them ALL), they can obtain 'senior approval' for domestic surveillance on such Americans.
The CIA claims the right to conduct domestic surveillance on an American inside the U.S. who is suspected of espionage or international terrorist activities.
Remember these?
--1953,
Operation Ajax, President Eisenhower discovered that the CIA could overthrow elected governments who refused to bow to Western commercial and geopolitical interests and used them in a coup against Iran's president.
--
Operation Gladio, the well-documented collaboration between Western spy agencies, including the CIA, and NATO involving coordinated terrorist shootings and bombings of civilian targets throughout Europe from the late 1960s through the 1980s
--The burglary of the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic Party was carried out by former CIA officers,
--The Iran-Contra affair arms/drugs smuggling scandal.
--The Plame affair (also known as the CIA leak scandal and Plamegate) was a political scandal that revolved around journalist Robert Novak's public identification of Valerie Plame as a covert Central Intelligence Agency officer in 2003.
--The 2004 CIA/U.S. coup to depose President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti.
--The CIA's use of misinformation and manipulation of media to gain support for the Invasion of Iraq.
--The involvement of the CIA in the newly coined "War on Terror" post 9/11.
--CIA and 'Fast and Furious'.
--CIA-controlled drone strikes in Pakistan that killed civilians.
--Use of CIA's illegal, covert vaccination programs to obtain DNA samples in Pakistan.
--CIA’s covert support of Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria.
--CIA and the opium trade in Afghanistan.
That's just a few of hundreds that anyone can find by web search using any search engine besides Google and Bing.
MEDDLING IN UKRAINE IS NOT NEW.
In 2014, Ukraine's former security chief, Aleksandr Yakimenko, reported that the CIA coup-plotters who overthrew the elected government in Ukraine, "basically lived in the (U.S.) Embassy.They were there every day."
CIA: Undermining and Nazifying Ukraine Since 1953
[THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN IN MAY, 2016, BEFORE THE ELECTION.] "The recent declassification of over 3800 documents by the Central Intelligence Agency provides detailed proof that since 1953 the CIA operated two major programs intent on not only destabilizing Ukraine but Nazifying it with followers of the World War II Ukrainian Nazi leader
Stepan Bandera.
The CIA programs spanned some four decades. Starting as a paramilitary operation that provided funding and equipment for such anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR); its affiliates, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), all Nazi Banderists.
The CIA also provided support to a relatively anti-Bandera faction of the UHVR, the ZP-UHVR, a foreign-based virtual branch of the CIA and British MI-6 intelligence services. The early CIA operation to destabilize Ukraine, using exile Ukrainian agents in the West who were infiltrated into Soviet Ukraine, was code-named
Project AERODYNAMIC.
The CIA front company was
Prolog Research and Publishing Associates, Inc., which later became known simply as Prolog.
The CIA merged the activities of Prolog Munich and the Munich office of the Ukrainian exiled nationalist "Suchasnist" journal. The Munich office also supported the "Ukrainische Gesellschaft fur Auslandstudien".
AERODYNAMIC continued into the 1980s as operation QRDYNAMIC, which was assigned to the CIA’s Political and Psychological Staff’s Soviet East Europe Covert Action Program."
AND YET THE DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS, WHO WERE AWARE OF ALL THIS, CALLED CIA AGENTS "STAR WITNESSES" TO PROVE 'RUSSIAN COLLUSION' AND THAT TRUMP HAD BLACKMAILED UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTS?
ISN'T THAT LIKE CALLING IN A FOX TO GUARD A HEN HOUSE?
CIA SPYING ON AMERICANS?
SURE, GRANTED, BECAUSE THE TERRORISTS ARE COMING!
Following the September 11th attacks of 2001, domestic and international mass surveillance capabilities grew immensely, mostly by exec orders and idiots in Congress who bought that "Bin Laden did it" propaganda. The terrorists were coming again, we were told and we have to make allowances to stop them.
FEAR gave the instant okay for anything the spy agencies wanted to do.
Contemporary mass surveillance relies upon annual presidential executive orders declaring a continued State of National Emergency, first signed by George W. Bush on September 14, 2001 and then continued on an annual basis by President Barack Obama, and upon several subsequent national security Acts including the USA PATRIOT Act and FISA Amendment Act's PRISM surveillance program.
Critics and political dissenters currently describe the effects of these acts, orders, and resulting database network of Fusion centers as forming a veritable American police state that simply institutionalized the illegal COINTELPRO tactics used to assassinate dissenters and leaders from the 1950s onward.
IT'S WORSE THAN THAT.
"
It’s long been the case that CIA, FBI and NSA operatives tried to infiltrate and shape domestic news, but they at least had the decency to do it clandestinely.
In 2008, the New York Times’ David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for
exposing a secret Pentagon program in which retired Generals and other
security state agents would get hired as commentators and analysts and then – unbeknownst to their networks –
coordinate their messaging to ensure that domestic news was being shaped by the propaganda of the military and intelligence communities.
But now it’s all out in the open. It’s virtually impossible to turn on MSNBC or CNN without being bombarded with former Generals, CIA operatives, FBI agents and NSA officials who now work for those networks as commentators and, increasingly, as reporters."
FINALLY, A FEW PRESENT-DAY JOURNALISTS ARE COMING FORWARD TO SHOW US WHAT WE SUSPECTED ALL ALONG; MAINSTREAM MEDIA LIES TO PROTECT WAR MONGERS WHO MAKE MEGA-FORTUNES SUPPLYING WAR MACHINES, AND ROGUE 'INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES' ARE DICTATING WHAT MAKES HEADLINE NEWS.
THERE IS ALSO THAT VERY OLD CIA CONNECTION THAT WAS REVEALED WAY BACK WHEN 'OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD' WAS FIRST INITIATED.
[THE VERY SHORT PDF OF RELEASED, REDACTED DOCUMENTS ON MOCKINGBIRD CAN ALSO BE FOUND
<HERE>].
SUCH A THING DESERVES AND NEEDS SOME BACKGROUND INFO, BUT IF YOU PREFER NOT TO READ ANY OF THAT, SCROLL DOWN TO THE DOUBLE RED ASTERISKS
** TO SEE THE MOST RECENT REVELATIONS.
HOW IT BEGAN
Harry Truman can be credited with Mockingbird though it came about after he created the NIA, signed his National Security Act on July 26, 1947, and had left office.
The existence of the National Security Agency (NSA), established by President Truman by way of a National Security Council Intelligence Directive 9, dated Oct. 24, 1952, was not known to the American people because these memorandums creating the spy agencies by Truman were classified top secret.
Despite opposition from the military establishment, the United States Department of State and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Truman had established the National Intelligence Authority (NIA) on January 22, 1946, also by presidential directive.
The NIA and its operational extension, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), were created within 20 months of each other.
Truman appointed Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter as Director. He had a background in Naval Intelligence, and seems to have been an honorable man, but
he also alleged there was a government cover-up about UFOs.
Maybe he wasn't such a god choice after all?
When the CIA was created, it was largely staffed by former OSS agents.
The CIA’s predecessor was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), founded June 13,1942, and said to have been disbanded in September, 1945 at the end of WWII.
[ODD THEN THAT SOME MEN KNOWN TO BE OSS WENT DIRECTLY FROM KOREA IN THE EARLIEST DAYS OF THE 1950s TO BECOME "MILITARY ADVISERS" IN VIETNAM UNDER 'IKE', ISN'T IT?]
Lawrence Houston, the first General Counsel of the CIG, and, later, the CIA, had many concerns about the lack of a
congressional mandate and began a serious push to get Congress to make it all 'legal'.
With the support of Director Hoyt Vandenberg he became a principle draftsman of the National Security Act of 1947 which, on September 18, 1947, established both the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 1949, Houston, along with his two assistant general counsels, helped draft the Central Intelligence Agency Act, (Public law 81-110)
which authorized the agency to use confidential fiscal and administrative procedures, and exempted it from most of the usual limitations on the use of Federal funds.
It also exempted the CIA from having to disclose its "organization, functions, names, official titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed."
It also created the program "PL-110", to handle defectors and other "essential aliens" who fall outside normal immigration procedures, as well as giving those persons cover stories and economic support INSIDE the USA. The CIA conducted a “formal training program” during the 1950s for the sole purpose of instructing its agents to function as newsmen.
Mockingbird continues to this day.
IT'S A REAL PIECE OF WORK, THE CIA.
Operation JEDBURGH:
“Surprise, kill, and vanish.”
- Motto of the Jedburgh teamsParachuting behind enemy lines in the cover of night, the OSS'
elite Jedburgh teams were special operations paratroopers sent into Nazi-occupied France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to coordinate airdrops of arms and supplies, guide local partisans on hit-and-run attacks and sabotage, and assist the advancing Allied armies to defeat the Third Reich.
One of the most famous Jedburghs was William Colby, who would later become Director of the CIA from 1973 to 1976.
Dwight Eisenhower, 1953, appointed Allen Dulles to head the CIA; his brother, John Foster Dulles, was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. The Dulles brothers were from a prominent East Coast family and were corporate lawyers, Allen being a Princeton graduate. Allemn had served in the OSS during WWII, and was, like his brother, an interventionist neocon before the term began to be used.
Allen also became the head of the Council for Foreign Relations (CFR), a very special club for members of our 'ruling elite'.
Dulles was responsible for a good deal of disastrous CIA meddling in the internal affairs of other nations, including the failed Bay of Pigs operation against Cuba, following which JFK fired him.
Operation Mockingbird began in 1950, organized by Allen Dulles and Cord Meyer.
[CORD MEYER HAS A VERY INTERESTING HISTORY. HIS EX-WIFE WAS LINKED TO JFK AND WAS MURDERED, AN UNSOLVED 'MYSTERY'. READ MORE ABOUT MEYERS
<HERE>]
According to
Alex Constantine (author of 'Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA'), in the 1950s, "some
3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in media propaganda efforts".
Henry Luce, the owner of a large media empire, via TIME magazine, became a very willing and key figure in Operation Mockingbird.
“Agency files contain written agreements with former foreign correspondents and stringers for both the weekly news magazines,” according to Carl Bernstein. “Allen Dulles often interceded with his good friend, the late Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, who readily allowed certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience.” Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.”
[IF YOU DON'T THINK TIME IS STILL A CIA MOUTHPIECE, READ THE 2009 "FIX-IT" ARTICLE, The CIA Scandals: How Bad a Blow? Feb. 03, 2009]
.
Luce also owned Fortune and Life Magazines, Sports Illustrated and 'House and Home'.
Luce used his magazines to get Dwight D. Eisenhower elected as president. In 1953 Eisenhower appointed Henry's second wife, Clare Booth Luce, as ambassador to Italy; the first American woman ambassador to a major country.
Claudio Accogli, a Italian historian, argues that Luce was heavily involved in covert anti-communist activities with local CIA personnel.
In August, 1952, the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations (the espionage division) were merged to form the Directorate of Plans (DPP).
Frank Wisner became head of this new organization and
Richard Helms became his chief of operations. Mockingbird was now the responsibility of the DPP.
Wisner was also able to restrict newspapers from reporting about certain events; for example, the CIA plots to overthrow the governments of Iran and Guatemala.
AFTER KENNEDY'S ASSASSINATION AND THE RUMORS FLEW THAT THE CIA WAS BEHIND THAT, A VERY FEW POLITICIANS ACTUALLY GATHERED THE INTESTINAL FORTITUDE TO START ASKING QUESTIONS.
in 1971, Senator Frank Church began an investigation into the programs that became known as
the Church Committee.
The committee sought to investigate intelligence abuses throughout the 1970s. Following a report provided by the committee outlining egregious abuse, in 1976 Congress established the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It would later be joined by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 1978.
The institutions worked to limit the power of the agencies, ensuring that surveillance activities remained within the rule of law.
THEY FAILED AND THEY KNOW THEY CAN NEVER STOP WHAT WAS ALLOWED TO START 7 DECADES AGO.
OUR "NEWS AGENCIES" ARE MERELY PUPPETS AND PAID PROSTITUTES, WELL-GREASED PROPAGANDA MACHINES FOR 'THE POWERS BEHIND THE THRONES'.
Due to a central server and 'backbone monitoring', many of the spying programs carried out by all our "intelligence agencies" overlap and interrelate among one another.
These 'programs' are often done with the assistance of U.S. entities such as our own State Department of Justice and the FBI, and are 100% sanctioned by U.S. laws, such as the [UNCONSTITUTIONAL] FISA Amendments Act, and the necessary court orders for them which are signed by the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
In addition to this, many of the NSA's programs are directly aided by national and FOREIGN intelligence services, Britain's
GCHQ and Australia's
DSD, as well as by large private telecommunications and internet corporations, such as Verizon, Telstra, Google and Facebook (
by the cooperation of actually nine US internet giants through
the PRISM program).
OF COURSE, ALL NAMED AS PART OF PRISM WENT INTO FULL-BLOWN DENIAL.
ENTER EDWARD SNOWDEN AND THE REVELATIONS HE HANDED US.
On 6 June 2013, Britain's The Guardian newspaper began publishing a series of revelations by an unnamed American whistleblower, revealed several days later to be
former CIA and NSA-contracted systems analyst Edward Snowden. Snowden gave a cache of internal documents in support of his claims to two journalists: Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Greenwald later estimated that the cache contains 15,000 – 20,000 documents, some very large and very detailed, and some very small.
On June 9, 2013, Snowden told The Guardian:
"They (the NSA) can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer."
IF EVER YOU DIVE INTO SERIOUSLY RESEARCHING THE CREATION OF AND ROGUE STATUS OF OUR INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES AND HOW TIGHTLY THEY'RE CONNECTED TO 'BIG MONEY', HOW THEY CONTROL OUR LYING MAINSTREAM MEDIA, OPERATE ON BEHALF OF POLITICAL PARTIES, HOW THEY INTERFERE INCESSANTLY IN FOREIGN POLICY, HAVE EVEN BEEN
CAUGHT HACKING CONGRESS' COMPUTERS AND INVENTING THINGS LIKE "
HEART ATTACK GUNS", YOU MIGHT BEGIN TO SEE HOW TRAPPED WE ARE, HOW COMPLETELY AT THE MERCY OF THESE ORGANIZATIONS WE ALL ARE.
** WHICH BRINGS US UP TO THE MORE RECENT REVELATIONS BY A SMALL HANDFUL OF JOURNALISTS WHO GOT SICK OF THE MANIPULATIONS AND MEDIA LIES.
HERE ARE THE TOP FOUR LATEST REVELATIONS.
1- WAR IN AFGHANISTAN IS UNWINNABLE
On December 9, 2019, the Washington Post published what is touted as 'a bombshell report' titled
“The Afghanistan Papers,” highlighting the degree to which the American government lied to the public about the ongoing status of the war in Afghanistan.
Within the thousands of pages, consisting of internal documents, interviews, and other never-before-released intel, is a vivid depiction of a Pentagon painfully aware of the need to keep from the public the true state of the conflict and the doubts, confusion, and desperation of decision-makers spanning almost 20 years of battle.
THE INTEL AGENCIES FED THE FAKE NEWS TO THE MSM WHO DIDN'T QUESTION IT, HAVING BEEN TRAINED FOR 70 YEARS TO PRINT WHAT THEY'RE TOLD.
"The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war, that war is inseparable from propaganda, lies, hatred, impoverishment, cultural degradation, and moral corruption.
It is the most horrific outcome of the moral and political legitimacy people are taught to grant the state.
They underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.
With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their war-fighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation....
The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting."
AS OTHERS HAVE POINTED OUT SINCE WE SENT TROOPS TO AFGHANISTAN, IT'S ABOUT THE OPIUM FOR THE CIA, AND BLOCKING RUSSIA FROM EASY ACCESS TO THE CASPIAN SEA OIL BY MEANS OF A PIPELINE THROUGH AFGHANISTAN.
NEITHER OF THOSE REASONS ARE WORTH THE THOUSANDS OF LIVES LOST SINCE BUSH LIED AND THE CIA AND THE PENTAGON BACKED HIM UP.
2- THE FAIRY TALE OF RUSSIAN COLLUSION WITH TRUMP'S CAMPAIGN AND THE SET-UP OF AMERICAN CITIZENS BY A SECRET COURT.
December 12, 2019, by Glenn Greenwald
"The Mueller investigation closed
without a single American being charged with criminally conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election.
Wednesday’s issuance of the
long-waited report from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General reveals that years of major claims and narratives from the U.S. media
were utter frauds.
In sum, the IG Report documents multiple instances in which the FBI – in order to convince a FISA court to allow it spy on former Trump campaign operative Carter Page during the 2016 election – manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating evidence, and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.
If you don’t consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is?
But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that’s what these security state agencies are.
They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course.
In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it. It’s brimming with proof of FBI subterfuge and deceit, all in service of persuading a FISA court of something that was not true: that U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign official Carter Page was an agent of the Russian government and therefore needed to have his communications surveilled.
The IG Report went much further, documenting a multitude of lies and misrepresentations by the FBI to deceive the FISA court into believing that probable cause existed to believe Page was a Kremlin agent. The first FISA warrant to spy on Page was obtained during the 2016 election, after Page had left the Trump campaign but weeks before the election was to be held.
About the warrant application submitted regarding Page, the IG Report, in its own words, “found that FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are ‘scrupulously accurate.’” Specifically, “we identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.”
It’s vital to reiterate this because of its gravity:
we identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.
The specifics cited by the IG Report are even more damning.
Specifically, “based upon the information known to the FBI in October 2016, the first application contained seven significant inaccuracies and omissions.”
Among those “significant inaccuracies and omissions”:
the FBI concealed that Page had been working with the CIA in connection with his dealings with Russia and had notified CIA case managers of at least some of those contacts after he was “approved as an ‘operational contact’” with Russia;
the FBI lied about both the timing and substance of Page’s relationship with the CIA; vastly overstated the value and corroboration of Steele’s prior work for the U.S. Government
to make him appear more credible than he was; and
concealed from the court serious reasons to doubt the reliability of Steele’s key source.
Moreover, the FBI’s heavy reliance on the Steele Dossier to obtain the FISA warrant –
a fact that many leading national security reporters spent two years denying occurred – was particularly concerning because, as the IG Report put it, “we found that
the FBI did not have information corroborating the specific allegations against Carter Page in Steele’s reporting when it relied upon his reports in the first FISA application or subsequent renewal applications.”
To spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of an election, one who had just been working with one of the two major presidential campaigns, the FBI touted a gossipy, unverified, unreliable rag ('Buzzfeed') that it had no reason to believe and every reason to distrust,
but it hid all of that from the FISA court, which it knew needed to believe that the Steele Dossier was something it was not if it were to give the FBI the spying authorization it wanted.
If it does not bother you to learn that the FBI repeatedly and deliberately deceived the FISA court into granting it permission to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign, then it is virtually certain that you are either someone with no principles, someone who cares only about partisan advantage and nothing about basic civil liberties and the rule of law, or both.
There is simply no way for anyone of good faith to read this IG Report and reach any conclusion other than that this is yet another instance of the FBI abusing its power in severe ways to subvert and undermine U.S. democracy. If you don’t care about that, what do you care about?"
3- SYRIA DID NOT USE POISON GAS ON ITS OWN PEOPLE.
JULIAN ASSANGE MAY BE IN JAIL FOR EXPOSING GOVERNMENT LIES AND DIRTY SECRETS, BUT WIKILEAKS STRIKES AGAIN WITH
THE RELEASE OF A NEW CACHE OF MULTIPLE DOCUMENTS THAT MAY BE THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG ON MEDIA'S PART IN COVER-UPS AND MANIPULATION OF THE OPINIONS OF THEIR READERSHIP.
THE MAIN STORY SEEMS TO BE THAT SYRIA, TARGETED FOR OVER 60 YEARS BY THE USA/CIA IN THEIR DRIVE TO OWN THE MIDDLE EAST AND ITS OIL RESERVES, WAS BLAMED FOR CHEMICAL WEAPONS ATTACKS THAT WERE NOT COMMITTED BY SYRIA.
[I POSITED SYRIA'S INNOCENCE QUITE AWHILE BACK IN A BLOG THAT MOST SEEMED UNWILLING TO BELIEVE.]
JUST DAYS AFTER THE ARTICLES ABOUT THE "HEINOUS CHEMICAL WEAPONS ATTACK" APPEARED IN MULTIPLE MAINSTREAM MEDIA HEADLINES AROUND THE WORLD, AMERICA, UNDER BARACK OBAMA AT THE TIME, BOMBED THE SUPREME HELL OUT OF SYRIA AND DOUBLED-DOWN ON DEPOSING ASSAD,
A MAN WHO, UP TO ABOUT 2009 WAS LAUDED BY MANY NATIONS AS A MAN OF NOBLE CHARACTER, FRIENDLY TO "THE WEST'.
THERE WAS EVEN TALK IN BRITAIN ABOUT OFFERING HIM A KNIGHTHOOD.
OBAMA'S 15 MINUTES OF LIES AND THE OLD 'HARD-SELL' TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO PRIME US TO ACCEPT HIS ATTACK ON THE SYRIAN PEOPLE CAN BE SEEN ON VIDEO
<HERE>.
LIES.
WE'VE BEEN LIED TO FOR DECADES BY MAINSTREAM MEDIA AND OUR GOVERNMENTS THAT THRIVE ON ILLEGAL*, UNDECLARED WARS TO GRAB THE NATURAL RESOURCES OF POORER NATIONS.
THOSE LIES HAVE COST THE U.S. AND OTHER NATIONS MANY THOUSANDS (SOME SAY MILLIONS) OF INNOCENT LIVES.
Stephen Johnson, an expert on weapons and chemical explosives at Cranfield Forensic Institute,
said, after viewing what we now know were staged videos of alleged victims, that there were inconsistencies among the patients' symptoms.
A first-year medical student would most likely have spotted those very inconsistencies.
"There are, within some of the videos, examples which seem a little hyper-real, and almost as if they've been set up. Which is not to say that they are fake but it does cause some concern. Some of the people with foaming, the foam seems to be too white, too pure, and not consistent with the sort of internal injury you might expect to see, which you'd expect to be bloodier or yellower," Johnson said.
BBC producer drops bombshell by saying footage of 2018 Douma chemical attack was STAGED.
There were no fatalities, not even the 40 that were claimed.
Syria: Boy in White Helmets' FAKE Chemical Attack Video Reveals Truth
The TV channel also broadcast an interview with a doctor who was in the hospital when the White Helmets filmed their fake video. He said that no patients with signs of chemical weapons-related injuries arrived that day, but there were many people with respiratory problems
due to smoke and dust from the recent bombing.
All doctors were busy taking care of them and didn’t have time to react to
the White Helmets’ film crew.
WHO ELSE NOTICED THAT THOSE WHITE HELMETS WERE TRANSPORTING AND 'TREATING THE VICTIMS' WITHOUT ANY TYPE OF PROTECTIVE GEAR OR CLOTHING AND NONE OF THEM WERE AFFECTED BY SUCH A "DEVASTATING NERVE AGENT"?
The White Helmets is a Syrian NGO, financed by several Western countries, and is associated with staging and filming false-flag chemical attacks.
They have been seen several times working with terrorist groups in Syria.
Several Syrians tried very hard to make the media listen to them and change the lies of their hesdlines, but the "fix" was in and the bombings began and are ongoing today.
THE CIA IS AN OLD HAND AT FILM PRODUCTION.The CIA actively promotes a desirable public image of its history and function by advising the production of Hollywood vehicles, such as Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. The Agency retains “entertainment industry liaison officers” on its staff that “plant positive images about itself (in other words, propaganda) through our most popular forms of entertainment,” Tom Hayden explains in the LA Review of Books.
“So natural has the CIA–entertainment connection become that few question its legal or moral ramifications. This is a government agency like no other; the truth of its operations is not subject to public examination.
When the CIA’s hidden persuaders influence a Hollywood movie, it is using a popular medium to spin as favorable an image of itself as possible, or at least, prevent an unfavorable one from taking hold.” [Tom Hayden, “Review of The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television by Tricia Jenkins,” LA Review of Books, February 24, 2013,]
Trump tried three times to withdraw our forces from Syria but had to retract all three times because the war mongers want undeclared wars.
Being just another puppet of the U.S. military-industrial-central banks complex, Trump hears and obeys.
Wars mean big profits for the companies who build the machines of war, and that money buys a lot of politicians.
Caught in the lie, U.S and "allies" hurriedly bombed Syria
the night before international inspectors arrived who would have proven
before the bombing that the allied forces had NO 'just cause', that there was no gas attack as we had all been told.
The inspectors team, as shown by the leaked documents, INITIALLY concluded that either the victims were poisoned with some unknown gas
which wasn't chlorine (or sarin), or there was no chemical weapon at all.
"The inconsistency between the presence of a putative chlorine-containing toxic chocking or blood agent on the one hand and the testimonies of alleged witnesses and symptoms observed from video footage and photographs, on the other, cannot be rationalized," the unredacted first draft reads.
THAT is what one of the Wikileaks documents show, without a shadow of a doubt.
ONE OF THE CHIEF PUPPETS IN MULTIPLE COVER-UPS WAS NEWSWEEK.
"
Thanks to Tareq Haddad, formerly of the IBTimes, Hull Daily Mail, and most recently Newsweek, we have a pretty clear idea of what happens to those few journalists who dare question the unquestionable.
According to Haddad, Newsweek refused to publish the story based on some very dubious justifications.
HASSAD HAS BLOWN PERHAPS THE LOUDEST WHISTLE WITH HIS REVELATIONS ABOUT THAT MAJOR PROPAGANDIST PROSTITUTE.
**
International Lawyers: Strike Against Syria Illegal **
April 11, 2018
"In this statement released Wednesday, a group of international law experts warn that a U.S. military strike on Syria would be illegal if not in self-defense or with U.N. Security Council authorization.
We are practitioners and professors of international law. Under international law, military strikes by the United States of America and its allies against the Syrian Arab Republic, unless conducted in self-defense or with United Nations Security Council approval, are illegal and constitute acts of aggression.
The unlawful killing of any human being without legal justification, under every legal system, is murder. And an act of violence committed by one government against another government, without lawful justification, amounts to the crime of aggression: the supreme international crime which carries with it the evil of every other international crime, as noted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946.
In 1986, in The Nicaragua Case, the International Court of Justice reprimanded the United States for arming and supporting contra militias and combatants, and for mining Nicaragua’s harbors, acts which violated the U.N. Charter and international law.
Perhaps the Syrian crisis would look differently today if the United States and its allies had consistently respected law for the last several years.
They have not."
4- Using both the Ukraine and Russia to "stop Trump".America’s Coup Machine: Destroying Democracy Since 1953
[Please note" The following article was written in 2014 before Trump had announced he'd run for president in 2016. It was written while Obama, via the CIA, was deposing a democratically elected president of a foreign nation.]
"The main thing that distinguishes the U.S. coup in Ukraine from the majority of previous U.S. coups was the minimal role played by the Ukrainian military. Since 1953, most U.S. coups have involved using local senior military officers to deliver the final blow to remove the elected or ruling leader.
The officers have then been rewarded with presidencies, dictatorships or other senior positions in new U.S.-backed regimes.
The U.S. military cultivates military-to-military relationships to identify and groom future coup leaders, and President Obama's expansion of U.S. special forces operations to
134 countries around the world suggested that this process is ongoing and expanding, not contracting.
The creation and grooming of opposition forces and the spread of violence in the streets are deliberate strategies to create a state of emergency as a pretext for removing an elected or constitutional government and seizing power.
Once the coup leaders have been trained and prepared by their CIA case officers, U.S. officials have laid their plans and street violence has broken down law and order and the functioning of state institutions, all that remains is to strike decisively at the right moment to remove the government and install the coup leaders in its place.
In Iran, faced with hundreds of people being killed in the streets, Mohammad Mosaddegh resigned to end the bloodshed.
In Chile, General Pinochet launched air strikes on the presidential palace.
In Haiti in 2004, U.S. forces landed to remove President Aristide and occupy the country.
In Ukraine, Vitaly Klitschko announced that parliament would open impeachment proceedings against Yanukovich, but, later that day, lacking the 338 votes required for impeachment, a smaller number of members
simply approved a declaration that Yanukovich "withdrew from his duties in an unconstitutional manner," and appointed Oleksandr Turchynov of the opposition Fatherland Party as Acting President.
Right Sector seized control of government buildings and patrolled the streets.
Yanukovich refused to resign, calling this an illegal coup d'etat. The coup leaders vowed to prosecute him for the deaths of protesters, but he escaped to Russia.
Arseniy Yatsenyuk was appointed Prime Minister on February 27th, exactly as Nuland and Pyatt had planned.
In Ukraine, the U.S. has worked since [Ukraine's] independence in 1991 to promote pro-Western parties and candidates, climaxing in the "Orange Revolution" in 2004.
But the Western-backed governments of Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko became just as corrupt and unpopular as previous ones, and former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich was elected President in 2010.
The U.S. employed all its traditional tactics leading up to the coup in 2014.
The U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has partially taken over the CIA's role in grooming opposition candidates, parties and political movements, with an annual budget of $100 million to spend in countries around the world.
The NED made no secret of targeting Ukraine as a top priority,
funding 65 projects there,
more than in any other country.
The NED's neoconservative president, Carl Gershman, called Ukraine "the biggest prize" in a
Washington Post op-ed in September 2013, as the U.S. operation there prepared to move into its next phase."
A [major] feature of CIA-led coups is the role they assign Western media in publicizing official cover stories and suppressing factual journalism.
This role has been consistent since 1953, but it has evolved as corporate media have consolidated their monopoly power.
By their very nature, coups are secret operations and U.S. media are prohibited from revealing "national security" secrets about them, such as the names of CIA officers involved.
By only reporting official cover stories, they become either willing or unwitting co-conspirators in the critical propaganda component of these covert operations."
NO MATTER WHERE YOU LOOK, THERE ARE CIA FINGERPRINTS.
A well-known fact is that broadcast journalist
Anderson Cooper interned for the CIA while attending Yale as an undergraduate in the late 1980s. Cooper’s great uncle, William Henry Vanderbilt III, was an Executive Officer of the Special Operations Branch of the OSS under the spy organization’s founder William “Wild Bill” Donovan.
In 1999 the CIA established
In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm seeking to “identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge information technologies that serve United States national security interests.”
The firm has exercised financial relationships with internet platforms Americans use on a routine basis,
including Google and Facebook.
“If you want to keep up with Silicon Valley, you need to become part of Silicon Valley,” says Jim Rickards, an adviser to the U.S. intelligence community familiar with In-Q-Tel’s activities.
“The best way to do that is have a budget because when you have a checkbook, everyone comes to you.”
At one point IQT “catered largely to the needs of the CIA.” Today, however,
“the firm supports many of the 17 agencies within the U.S. intelligence community, including the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate.”
[Matt Egan, “
In-Q-Tel: A Glimpse Inside the CIA’s Venture Capital Arm,” FoxBusiness.com, June 14, 2013.]
"The Washington Post was in many ways like other "companies," as Walter Lippmann called the news organizations, fighting deadlines, living uneasily with unions, suffering with "technical conditions (that) do not favor genuine and productive debate."
But the Post was also unique among news companies in that its managers, living and working in Washington, thought of themselves simultaneously as journalists, businessmen, and patriots, a state of mind that made them singularly able to expand the company while promoting the national interest.
Their individual relations with intelligence had in fact been the reason that the Post Company had grown as fast as it did after the war; their secrets were its corporate secrets,
beginning with MOCKINGBIRD.
Philip Graham's commitment to intelligence gave his CIA friends Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles an interest in helping to make the Washington Post the dominant news vehicle in Washington, which they did by assisting with its two most crucial acquisitions, the Times-Herald and WTOP.
The Post men most essential to these transactions, other than Phil, were Wayne Coy, the Post executive who had been Phil's former New Deal boss, and John S. Hayes, who replaced Coy in 1947 when Coy was appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission."
[Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great (1979)]
The U.S. corporate media have turned vice into virtue, military invasions and bombings into "aid to attain democracy" in every nation that has been attacked, made excuses for instead of indictments against CIA involvement in undeclared wars.
YESTERDAY'S CIA-INFILTRATED NEWSPAPERS ARE TODAY'S TV CHANNELS
Politico’s media writer Jack Shafer wrote in 2018, in an article entitled “The Spies Who Came Into the TV Studio”:
"In the old days, America’s top spies would complete their tenures at the CIA or one of the other Washington puzzle palaces and segue to more ordinary pursuits. Some wrote their memoirs. One (G.H.W. Bush) ran for president. Another (William Casey) died a few months after surrendering his post.
But today’s national-security establishment retiree has a different game plan. After so many years of brawling in the shadows, he yearns for a second, lucrative career in the public eye.
He takes a crash course in speaking in soundbites, refreshes his wardrobe and signs a TV news contract. Then, several times a week, waits for a network limousine to shuttle him to the broadcast news studios where, after a light dusting of foundation and a spritz of hairspray, he takes a supporting role in the anchors’ nighttime shows. . . .
[T]he downside of outsourcing national security coverage to the TV spies is obvious. They aren’t in the business of breaking news or uncovering secrets.
Their first loyalty—and this is no slam—is to the agency from which they hail.
Imagine a TV network covering the auto industry through the eyes of dozens of paid former auto executives and you begin to appreciate the current peculiarities.
In a perfect television world, the networks would retire the retired spooks from their payrolls and reallocate those sums to the hiring of independent reporters to cover the national security beat.
Let the TV spies become unpaid anonymous sources because when you get down to it, TV spies don’t want to make news—they just want to talk about it."
The CIA also secretly bought or created its own media companies.
It owned 40 percent of the Rome Daily American at a time when communists were threatening to win the Italian elections.
Worse, the CIA has bought many domestic media companies. A prime example is Capital Cities, created in 1954 by CIA businessman William Casey (who would later become Reagan’s CIA director).
Another founder was Lowell Thomas, a close friend and business contact with CIA Director Allen Dulles.
Another founder was CIA businessman Thomas Dewey.
By 1985, Capital Cities had grown so powerful that it was able to buy an entire TV network: ABC.
TOO LATE, EISENHOWER GOT CONCERNED
In 1955 President Dwight Eisenhower established 'the 5412 Committee' in order to keep a check on the CIA's covert activities. The committee (also called the Special Group) included the CIA director, the national security adviser, and the deputy secretaries of State and Defense and had the responsibility to decide whether covert actions were "proper" and in the national interest.
It was also decided to include Richard B. Russell, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. However, as Allen W. Dulles was later to admit, because of "plausible deniability"
planned covert actions were not referred to the 5412 Committee.
Eisenhower became more concerned about CIA covert activities and in 1956 appointed David Bruce as a member of the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities (PBCFIA).
Eisenhower asked Bruce to write a report on the CIA. It was presented to Eisenhower on 20th December, 1956.
Bruce argued that the CIA's covert actions were "responsible in great measure for stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exists in many countries in the world today."
Bruce was also highly critical of Mockingbird. He argued: "what right have we to go barging around in other countries buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that, or the other office."
After Richard Bissell lost his post as Director of Plans in 1962,
Tracy Barnes took over the running of Mockingbird.
According to Evan Thomas (in the book, 'The Very Best Men') Barnes planted editorials about political candidates who were regarded as
pro-CIA.
In 1963, John McCone, the director of the CIA, discovered that Random House intended to publish
'Invisible Government' by David Wise and Thomas Ross. McCone discovered that the book intended to look at his links with the
Military Industrial Congress Complex.
The authors also claimed that the CIA was having a major influence on American foreign policy. This included the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran (1953) and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954).
The book also covered the role that the CIA played in the Bay of Pigs operation, the attempts to remove President Sukarno in Indonesia and the covert operations taking place in Laos and Vietnam.
McCone called in Wise and Ross to demand deletions on the basis of galleys the CIA had secretly obtained from Random House. The authors refused to make these changes and Random House decided to go ahead and publish the book.
The CIA considered buying up the entire printing of 'Invisible Government' but this idea was rejected when Random House pointed out that if this happened they would have to print a second edition. McCone now formed a special group to deal with the book and tried to arrange for it to get bad reviews.
'Invisible Government' was published in 1964. It was the first full account of America's intelligence and espionage apparatus. In the book Wise and Ross argued that the "Invisible Government" is made up of many agencies and people, including the intelligence branches of the State and Defense Departments, of the Army, Navy and Air Force".
However, they claimed that the most important organization involved in this process was the CIA.
McCone also attempted to stop Edward Yates from making a documentary on the CIA for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). This attempt at censorship failed and NBC went ahead and broadcast this critical documentary.
In June, 1965, Desmond Fitzgerald was appointed as head of the Directorate for Plans. He now took charge of Mockingbird.
At the end of 1966 Fitzgerald discovered that 'Ramparts', a left-wing publication, was planning to publish that
the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association.
Fitzgerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for his book, 'The Very Best Men': "I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off."
Although many people think that the CIA’s primary mission during the Cold War was to "deter communism," Noam Chomksy correctly pointed out that its real mission was "deterring democracy." Chomsky calls William Blum's classic,
'Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II', "Far and away the best book on the topic."
From corrupting elections to overthrowing democratic governments, from assassinating elected leaders to installing murderous dictators, the CIA has virtually always replaced democracy with dictatorship.
It didn’t help that the CIA was run by businessmen, whose hostility towards democracy is legendary.
The CIA has historically literally bought into foreign media.
Since the early 1950s the CIA “has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both English and foreign language—which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives,” Carl Bernstein reported in 1977. “One such publication was the Rome Daily American, forty percent of which was owned by the CIA until the 1970s.” Carl Bernstein, “
The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
In the summer of 2014 a $600 million computing cloud developed by Amazon Web Services for the CIA began servicing all 17 federal agencies comprising the intelligence community. “If the technology plays out as officials envision,” The Atlantic reports, “it will usher in a new era of cooperation and coordination, allowing agencies to share information and services much more easily and avoid the kind of intelligence gaps that preceded the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”
[“
The Details About the CIA’s Deal With Amazon,” The Atlantic, July 17, 2014.]
The reason the CIA has tried to overthrow so many democracies is because the people usually voted for policies that multi-national corporations didn't like: land reform, strong labor unions, nationalization of their industries, and greater regulation protecting workers, consumers and the environment.
Journalism is a perfect cover for CIA agents to manipulate the minds of the populace everywhere.
Too bad REAL journalism has been effectively killed and so many REAL journalists have died trying to expose CIA control of the media.
From all of the above, who can't see the interweavings between the CIA, Wall Street, political parties and politicians, the "Justice Department", Congress and the goal of global governance?
__________________________________
END NOTES AND FURTHER READING
--The 'geniuses' at the CIA failed to predict the communist takeovers of Romania and Czechoslovakia, the Soviet blockade of Berlin, the Soviet atomic bomb, the invasion of South Korea by North Korea, and the Chinese entry into the Korean war. During that war, the CIA had some 200 officers in Seoul, not one of whom could speak, read, or write Korean.
In the First Gulf War the U.S. bombed an Iraqi civilian bomb shelter because
the CIA misidentified it as a military target.
The CIA engineered coups in Iran and Guatemala, and
there is no evidence that these operations or any of the other CIA meddling in any way made Americans freer, more prosperous, or more secure.
The CIA was behind the notorious
MK Ultra mind control operation, which involved in effect the torture and murder of US and Canadian civilians, and the (almost certain) murder of Frank Olsen, one of their own whom they apparently suspected was about to go public, and who knew too much about their misdeeds.
The CIA’s private airline, we now know, did fly heroin from Southeast Asia into the US, and, more recently, investigative reporter Gary Webb, writing for the San Jose Mercury News, claimed that the CIA was bringing cocaine into the US. The paper fired him and he was later said to have committed “suicide” with two shots to the head.
-- This list does not include a roughly equal number of failed CIA coups, nor coups in Africa and elsewhere in which a U.S. role is suspected but unproven:
Guatemala(1954); Thailand (1957); Laos (1958-60); the Congo (1960); Turkey (1960, 1971 & 1980); Ecuador (1961 & 1963); South Vietnam (1963); Brazil (1964); the Dominican Republic (1963); Argentina (1963); Honduras (1963 & 2009); Iraq (1963 & 2003); Bolivia (1964, 1971 & 1980); Indonesia (1965); Ghana (1966); Greece (1967); Panama (1968 & 1989); Cambodia (1970); Chile (1973); Bangladesh (1975); Pakistan (1977); Grenada (1983); Mauritania (1984); Guinea (1984); Burkina Faso (1987); Paraguay (1989); Haiti (1991 & 2004); Russia (1993); Uganda (1996);and Libya (2011).
The U.S. coup machine is still at work in Venezuela, where it already failed once in 2002.
--The CIA and U.S. special forces use proxies and covert operations to overthrow governments and suppress movements that challenge America's insatiable quest for global power. A coup is the climax of such operations, and it is usually only when these "low-intensity" methods fail that a country becomes a target for direct U.S. military aggression. Iraq only became a target for U.S. invasion and occupation after a
failed CIA coup in June 1996. The U.S. attacked Panama in 1989 only after
five CIA coup attempts failed to remove General Noriega from power. After long careers as CIA agents, both Hussein and Noriega had exceptional knowledge of U.S. operations and methods that enabled them to resist regime change by anything less than overwhelming U.S. military force.
But most U.S. coups follow a model that has hardly changed between 1953 and the latest coup in Ukraine in 2014. This model has three stages:
1) Creating and strengthening opposition forces
2) Violent street demonstrations
3) The coup d'etat.
--Shortly after the appearance of
journalist Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series in the San Jose Mercury News chronicling the Agency’s involvement in drug trafficking, the CIA’s public affairs division embarked on a campaign to counter what it termed “a genuine public relations crisis for the Agency.”
Webb was merely reporting to a large audience what had already been well documented by scholars such as Alfred McCoy and Peter Dale Scott, and the 1989 Kerry Committee Report on Iran-Contra—
that the CIA had long been involved in the illegal transnational drug trade.
Such findings were upheld in 1999 in a study by the CIA inspector general. Nevertheless, beginning shortly after Webb’s series ran, “CIA media spokesmen would remind reporters seeking comment that this series represented no real news,” a CIA internal organ noted, “in that similar charges were made in the 1980s and were investigated by the Congress and were found to be without substance. Reporters were encouraged to read the “Dark Alliance’ series closely and with a critical eye to what allegations could actually be backed with evidence.” [SEE:
http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/DOC_0001372115.pdf]
On December 10, 2004 investigative journalist Gary Webb died of TWO .38 caliber gunshot wounds to the head, ONE WHICH WOULD NOT HAVE NECESSARILY BEEN FATAL, ONE WHICH DEFINITELY WAS.
The coroner ruled the death a suicide.
“Gary Webb was MURDERED,” concluded FBI senior special agent Ted Gunderson in 2005. “He (Webb) resisted the first shot [to the head that exited via jaw] so he was shot again with the second shot going into the head [brain].” Gunderson regards the theory that Webb could have managed to shoot himself twice as “impossible!”
--OTHERS IN THE WaPo SERIES ON AFGHANISTAN MENTIONED ABOVE.PART 1
At war with the truth
U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.
PART 2
Stranded without a strategy
Bush and Obama had polar-opposite plans to win the war. Both were destined to fail.
PART 3
Built to fail
Despite vows the U.S. wouldn’t get mired in “nation-building,” it has wasted billions doing just that.
PART 4
Consumed by corruption
The U.S. flooded the country with money — then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled
PART 5
Unguarded nation
Afghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruption.
PART 6
Overwhelmed by opium
The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn.
INTERVIEWS AND MEMOS
Explore the documents
Key insiders speak bluntly about the failures of the longest conflict in U.S. history.
POST REPORTS
‘We didn’t know what the task was’
Hear candid interviews with former ambassador Ryan Crocker and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
THE FIGHT FOR THE DOCUMENTS
About the investigation
It took three years and two federal lawsuits for The Post to pry loose 2,000 pages of interview records
//WW
The bush fire crisis has exploded on a scale never experienced in New South Wales. 
