Replies to post #107309 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[sortagreen]

That's quite a piece.

[SilverSurfer]

http://www.swans.com/library/art11/ga192.html

"You've all seen this quotation cited countless times on Web sites, listservs and other mailing lists, from the left to the right, and everything in between. Simply google George Kennan, PPS23, and you'll get an idea... Problem is, it's a truncated quotation, patched together from various parts of the original text with ellipses, and taken out of context. It is more than time to debunk this little assemblage. One should not have to resort to this kind of fabrication, either out of sloppiness or willfulness, to elaborate on conjectural analysis. To use and reuse this misquotation does a disservice to all. Please, people, can you check your sources?"


referring to the schlock in Thompson diatribe.. wonder what else is fabricated? Politically, he only refers to Reagan but weren't there Democrat Presidents and Legislators in Washington D.C. the years he writes about?

[wall_rus]

Thnx for the article. Truth can be a punch in the gut.

[StephanieVanbryce]

... that's the BEST post of the year! thanks for finding it and then posting it for us here.. we NEED these reminders ..atrocities grow dim over time ..ulterior plans of the shadow government keep flitting off our radar ..little exposure here as in the eighties ..then silence for years except for little dots off and on, here or there ....I thank Mohada for this post.

[ordinarydude]

Interesting article.

Do you happen to have the link to the top-secret report (see below)?

"... part of a declassified and now widely available 1948 top-secret report (PPS 23) written by George Kennan, head of the State Dept. Policy Planning Staff after World War II."

Thanks.

Ordinary

[fuagf]

Excellent post, F6, it's always more poignant to see personal experiences written, could only read half yesterday before
being fed up and too emotional about it all .. reminded me of Smedley Butler, who we all know so well, which led me to these ..

.. excerpt .. IxCimi -- oh come on, this all goes back to long before 1963 -- I trust you've heard of Smedley Butler? -- and before that, the 'Gilded Age'? -- as your own comment re the 'march on Rome' suggests, this ongoing back-and-forth, this extremely fundamental dialectic of social reality, between the powerful seeking absolute dominion and the rest of us fighting back for a better deal, is seemingly eternal, at least throughout the history of so-called 'Western civilization' .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=24850647&txt2find=smedley|butler

.. excerpt .. The list is not endless — but it is instructive.

Air Force General LeMay — who broke with Kennedy over the Cuban Missile Crisis — and was retired.

Army General Edwin Anderson Walker — who started passing out John Birch Society leaflets to his soldiers.

Marine General Smedley Butler — who revealed to Congress the makings of a plot to remove FDR as
President — and for merely being approached by the plotters, was phased out of the military hierarchy.

These careers were ended because the line between the military and the civilian is… not… to… be… crossed!
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=23047752&txt2find=smedley|butler

in toto .. The great error of nearly all studies of war... has been to consider war
as an episode in foreign policies, when it is an act of interior politics... ~Simone Weil

The chain reaction of evil--wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or
we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the
most profitable, surely the most vicious. ~General Smedley Butler

Imperialism is an institution under which one nation asserts the right to seize the land
or at least to control the government or resources of another people. .. ~John T. Flynn
http://antiwar.com/quotes.php

.. excerpt .. It is crucially important that public attention is shifted away from the confining official narrative of the war, parroted by the corporate media and political pundits, to the economic crimes that have been committed because of this war, both in Iraq and here in the United States. It is time to make a moral case for restoring Iraqi oil and other assets to the Iraqis. It is also time to make a moral case against the war profiteers’ plundering of our treasury, or tax dollars. To paraphrase the late General Smedley D. Butler, most wars could easily be ended—they might not even be started—if profits are taken out of them. .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=19715309&txt2find=smedley|butler

War, Foreign Policy, and the Church .. excerpt ..

So what should the United States do? In the words of the late Murray Rothbard, the United States should "abandon its policy of global interventionism," "withdraw immediately and completely, militarily and politically, from everywhere," and "maintain a policy of strict political ‘isolation’ or neutrality everywhere." Political isolation is the only isolation we desire. Once we bring the troops home from around the globe, strict limits should be set to keep them home. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler recommended a Peace Amendment that would prohibit the removal of the Army from U.S. soil, limit the distance that Navy ships could steam from our coasts, and limit the distance that military aircraft could fly from our borders.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=20745242&txt2find=smedley|butler

The last bit is interesting .. lol .. though perhaps a bit extreme.

[F6]

Argentine Folk Icon Facundo Cabral Killed in Guatemala



A spokesman for the Guatemalan president’s office said that the 74-year-old Cabral, who had been in the country for a week, was killed by gunfire and that his security team was unable to fend off the attack

[July 9, 2011]

GUATEMALA CITY – Argentine folk singer and poet Facundo Cabral, an iconic figure known for his protest songs, social commitment and spiritual reflections, was gunned down Saturday by assailants while riding with his promoter from his hotel to the Guatemala City airport.

The spokesman for the Guatemalan president’s office, Ronaldo Robles, said that the 74-year-old Cabral, who had been in the country for a week, was killed by gunfire and that his security team was unable to fend off the attack.

“It was a direct attack against him by assailants wielding assault rifles,” Robles said.

The spokesman said Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom is “distraught over this cowardly act” and has assigned three specialized investigative teams to solve the murder.

The singer’s concert promoter, Henry Fariña, also was seriously wounded in the attack and is listed in critical condition at a hospital in the Guatemalan capital.

Local media, citing eyewitnesses, reported that the gunmen traveling in two late-model vehicles tried to halt Cabral’s automobile and became engaged in a gun battle with members of the singer’s security detail.

In fleeing the attack, the driver of the vehicle in which Cabral was riding ended up parked outside a fire station.

Author of the internationally famous hit “No soy de aqui, ni soy de alla” (I’m Not from Here nor There), Cabral gave two concerts before hundreds of fans during his fateful last trip to Guatemala, one in Guatemala City and the last one Friday night in the western city of Quetzaltenango.



Cabral, who began singing at the age of eight, was born into a poor family in La Plata, a city in the Argentine province of Buenos Aires, on May 22, 1937.

He said in interviews that at the age of nine he stopped the official vehicle of then-President Juan Domingo Peron and his wife, Evita, to ask for work for his mother, Sara.

That led to his family moving to the city of Tandil, where Cabral worked as a farmworker and had his first exposure to folk music but also to alcohol and criminal activity.

After a stint in a reform school, Cabral had an encounter with a vagabond named Simon that would lead him to God and push him into a career in music.

A few years later, he moved to the tourist city of Mar del Plata, where the owner of a hotel gave him the chance to sing in public for the first time.

In 1970, he penned the song, “No soy de aqui, ni soy de alla” that brought him international fame.

Cabral, who talked frequently in public about Jesus Christ, Gandhi and Mother Teresa of Calcutta, also expressed through his songs a message of social protest and that led to his fleeing his native Argentina in 1976, when a right-wing dictatorship took power, and continuing his musical career in Mexico.

He met the “love of his life” at the age of 40 in New York, a woman 20 years his junior who died along with their daughter a few years later in a plane crash.



Finding him depressed after the tragedy, Mother Teresa herself challenged Cabral to find another outlet for his love and that led him to make the trip to India to work with lepers at a home for people suffering from that illness in Calcutta.

He returned to Argentina in 1984, after the return to democracy, and continued to enjoy success as an artist, selling albums and filling theaters and stadiums.

Known for his countless anecdotes and intense work schedule, he had lived for many years at a hotel in Buenos Aires – nearly blind but never ceasing to create music and communicate his art.

Appointed by UNESCO as a Messenger of Peace and nominated a few years ago for a Nobel Peace Prize, Cabral had said he did not fear the type of violence that would eventually take his life.

“If you are filled with love you can’t have fear because love is courage. I grew up among violence ... later came the dictatorship, the abandonment of my father,” Cabral said last year in an interview in Mexico when asked if he was afraid of performing in a country with a widespread organized crime problem.

Condemnation of the killing poured in from across the region.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a leftist leader who often makes religious references during his diatribes against capitalism and U.S. foreign policy, expressed his condolences on Twitter.

“How painful! They killed the great troubadour of the Pampas! Long live Facundo Cabral!,” Chavez wrote.

Another prominent left-wing president in the region, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, said in his weekly Saturday address that the crime will only serve to immortalize Cabral as a singer-songwriter who was committed to the poor and critical of dictatorships in the Americas.

Copyright Latin American Herald Tribune - 2011 ©

http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=405612&CategoryId=10718

[fuagf]

Kerry, Hagel On Cuba: Cabinet Nominees Could Help Ease Relations, Lift Trade Embargo

By PAUL HAVEN 01/26/13 02:51 PM ET EST AP



HAVANA -- The nominee for U.S. Secretary of State, Sen. John Kerry, once held up millions of dollars in funding for secretive U.S. democracy-building programs in Cuba. Defense Secretary hopeful Chuck Hagel has called the U.S. embargo against the communist-run island "nonsensical" and anachronistic.

Both men are now poised to occupy two of the most important positions in President Barack Obama's Cabinet, leading observers on both sides of the Florida Straits to say the time could be ripe for a reboot in relations between the longtime Cold War enemies – despite major obstacles still in the way.

Kerry's confirmation hearing was held last Thursday, with Hagel's likely to begin next Thursday. In a day marked by platitudes and praise from his longtime colleagues, the Massachusetts Democrat up for top U.S. diplomat sidestepped two questions on Cuba without giving any hint of his opinion on bilateral relations.

Yet Kerry's record has showed some openness to relaxing the tough U.S. stance on Cuba.

"I think having a secretary of state and secretary of defense who understand and are willing to speak publicly that isolation is counterproductive is a very good start," said Tomas Bilbao, executive director of the nonpartisan Cuba Study Group, which advocates using engagement to spur democratic change. "I'm optimistic about the opportunity."

Carlos Alzugaray, an ex-Cuban ambassador to the European Union and the author of several studies about Cuba-US relations, said that if both men are confirmed, no Cabinet since the Carter administration would have such high-level voices in favor of rapprochement.

At the same time, the composition of Cuban-Americans in Florida is evolving, with younger voters less emotionally attached to the issue than their parents and grandparents. Exit polls showed 49 percent of Cuban-Americans in the state voted for Obama, roughly the same percentage as four years ago, an indication the group no longer plays the make-or-break role it once did in presidential politics.

The atmosphere is changing in Cuba as well.

Alzugaray noted that the island has taken many steps that would normally be welcomed by Washington such as freeing dozens of political prisoners, opening the economy to limited capitalism, hosting peace talks for war-torn Colombia and eliminating most restrictions on travel for its own citizens.

"Cuba is changing, and it is changing in the direction that the United States says Cuba must change," Alzugaray told The Associated Press in an interview in his Havana apartment.

The greatest obstacle to better ties is undoubtedly the continued imprisonment of U.S. contractor Alan Gross, who is serving a 15-year sentence for crimes against the state after he was caught setting up clandestine Internet networks as part of a U.S. Agency for International Development democracy-building program.

Havana has insisted the 63-year-old Gross will not be released unless Washington considers freeing five Cuban agents held in the United States. One is out on supervised release but was ordered to remain in the country, and the other four are still incarcerated.

Critics of engagement, including several prominent Cuban-American legislators, say none of the reforms Cuba has made brings the island closer to being a democratic state after 54 years of rule by brothers Fidel and Raul Castro.

Dissidents are still detained and harassed, they say, the Cuban news media is not free, elections are restricted to approved candidates and the Cuban parliament acts as little more than a rubber stamp for decisions made by the island's aging leaders.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Havana-born Florida Republican and staunch critic of the Castros, told the AP she was deeply concerned about both Cabinet nominees.

"I think both are bad for strengthening the U.S.-Cuba embargo," she said. "They would work for an appeasement policy. They would work to normalize relations. That is their philosophy. But they won't be able to achieve it."

Ros-Lehtinen said she hoped Kerry's likely replacement as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Cuban-American Democrat Bob Menendez of New Jersey, would block any attempt to take a softer line.

As committee chairman in 2011, Kerry held up millions of dollars in funding for the same program that Gross was involved in, out of concern that it was ill-conceived and a waste of money. He later cut a deal with Menendez to free up the money. At the hearing on Thursday, Kerry said that as secretary of state, he would support such programs worldwide, but did not mention Cuba.

Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, has termed the 50-year-old trade embargo an "outdated, unrealistic, irrelevant policy" and said the U.S. should engage with the island, just as it does with other communist countries such as Vietnam and China.

In his first term, Obama eliminated restrictions on the number of times Cuban-Americans can visit their relatives on the island, and the amount of money they can send back in remittances. He also has made it much easier for American travelers to get licenses to visit the island on cultural, educational and religious exchanges, though tourism is still barred.

Since 2009, the number of Americans traveling to Cuba has nearly doubled from 52,000 per year to 103,000 in 2012, according to statistics compiled by the firm the Havana Consulting Group. Trips by Cuban-Americans to visit their relatives rose from 335,000 to 476,000 a year during the same period. The surge puts the United States second only to Canada as the source of travelers to the island.

But just as American officials have met Cuban reforms with lukewarm indifference, Cuban leaders have dismissed Obama's overtures as window-dressing, saying he has in many ways strengthened the embargo by going after companies that do business with the island.

Cuban officials have been reluctant to talk about the Kerry and Hagel nominations for fear their words will be used by opponents. But a pro-government Web site, Cubasi, published an opinion piece Thursday detailing both men's past opposition to America's Cuba policy.

"Chuck Hagel has no problem with Cuba," wrote the author, well-known columnist Nicanor Leon Cotayo. "On the contrary, he has demonstrated common sense to do away with one of the White House's most anachronistic foreign policies."

Cotayo added that Obama has "real and legal options to maneuver and diminish tension in bilateral relations."

Others say they are not holding their breath for any change.

Alzugaray, the longtime Cuban diplomat, threw up his hands and shrugged when asked why he was not more optimistic that the stars would align for better relations this time around.

"That dog has bit me several times," he laughed. "I've often thought that now is the time, the possibilities are there, but always something has complicated things."
____

Associated Press writer Christine Armario in Miami contributed to this report.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/26/kerry-hagel-cuba-us-trade-embargo_n_2559023.html

mojada's [ http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/author/mojada ] [ from yours ] article is one of the best ever, and will look forward to reading it 'til the sun stops shining for me .. just over half-way down there was this bit .. "Ah, but poor Cuba." .. lol, some places drift from view, there are so many things to think about, and i wondered why the embargo had not been lifted before now .. the answer is above, no, oh no, not in the upper atmosphere where some still belief a woan created kooky God resides .. just above .. up there .. lol ..

Oh .. the 1st of 3 links in this one ..
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=87811801 .. got me here this time ..

[F6]

the article in the post to which this is a reply presently available at https://shadowproof.com/2010/08/26/blues-for-america/