Obama Has It Backwards: U.S. Has Been the State Sponsor of Terror Against Cuba!

The news that Obama has an "imminent inclination" to remove Cuba from a State Dept. -based "sponsors of state terror"  list almost makes for sarcastic laughs. It certainly has the media and many political pundits  yapping,  but mostly about the wrong issues.  While hysterics and the historically-challenged believe this to be a seriously bad idea, most of us who aren't brainwashed really want to know how the dopes missed the true issue: Cuba has been the historical victim of U.S. state-sponsored terror but never instigated any against the U.S.

The true fact here? Cuba was the victim of the worst state-terror attack in the western hemisphere before 9/11 and it came from the U.S. This was instigated by the CIA on Oct. 6, 1976 using a Venezuelan- based former CIA asset (Luis Posada)  to blow up Cubana Airlines Flight 455 killing all 73 on board.

Certainly the event is just as emblazoned in Barbadian neurons as the 9-11 attack for those in New York. Maybe worse,  since the scale of Barbados is radically smaller than New York, or the U.S. On a national scale of devastation, that Cubana Airline bombing took out a percentage of people equal to 0.03% of the total populace, while numerically as a %, 9-11 took out roughly 0.0001%. Thus, in purely proportionate numerical terms, Cubana 455 was much deadlier. But sadly, it's not on most citizens' radar - certainly not in the US Of A.

I was at the Paradise Beach on the southwest coast of the island with my five nieces when it occurred. We witnessed the plane come down, and wondered what the hell had happened – then watched in horror barely an hour and a half later as bloody body parts began to wash ashore. Even now, as adult women, they're unable to venture anywhere near that particular beach.

The prevailing thought at the time was some malfunction occurred and the plane just blew up more or less by accident. It was only years later that it was ascertained that the two questioned in Barbados were hired thugs commissioned by anti-Castro extremist Cubans and the CIA . As former federal agents Warren Hinckle and William Turner noted in their excellent book, ‘Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination of JFK’ (p. 384, Thunders Mouth Press, 1992):

“Two men who had deplaned in Barbados, Freddy Lugo and Hernan Ricardo Lusano, were interrogated after joking about the bombing in a Barbados taxicab. The two were employed by Luis Posada…and confessed that Posada and (Orlando) Bosch had supplied them with two bombs, which they planted on the Cubana aircraft.”

Luis Posada  - state-sponsored  (by the U.S.) Venezuealan terrorist, who was allowed U.S. sanctuary by George Bush Jr. and never extradited for trial in Venezuela.


According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in  Alpha 66 terrorist Orlando Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela’s intelligence agency, DISIP. On his arrival, Bosch was met by a CIA operative and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch’s honor. “A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details,’” the CIA report said.

Meanwhile, those of us living in Barbados at the time had no remote notion of the bloody act to come, nor of the U.S. complicity in it, or that the same right wing Cuban renegades - whose associates conspired in the JFK assassination -  were part of it. The CIA Report went on to read:

“Following the 6 October [1976] Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory.”

(Note the CIA's  sanitizing of language, the use of "crash" instead of bombing, or what we call "collateral language.)

Meanwhile, Venezuelan police began rounding up suspects. Two right wing Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo Lusano and Freddy Lugo, who got off the Cubana plane (Flight 455) in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb and they named Bosch and Posada as the architects of the attack. A search of Posada’s apartment in Venezuela turned up bomb-making instructions, some materials as well as Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents.

Posada and Bosch were charged in Venezuela for the Cubana Airlines bombing, but the case soon became a political tug-of-war, since the suspects were in possession of sensitive Venezuelan government secrets that could embarrass President Andres Perez. Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison where he was awaiting trial in 1985. In his autobiography, Posada thanked Miami-based Cuban activist Jorge Mas Canosa for the $25,000 that was used to bribe guards who allowed Posada to walk out of prison. Another Cuban exile who aided Posada was former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, who was close to then-Vice President Bush.

To make a long story short, Posada became the beneficiary of assistance of not only a somnolent, uninterested media (which expressed more outrage at the Pan Am 103 downing in 1988) and a friendly Bush Junior Administration - but also Miami's Cuban community which provided safe harbor for a number of years while investigations were ongoing.

Years earlier, the U.S. had planned massive terror attacks not only on Cuban soil but in the U.S.  - to blame on Fidel Castro, in order to foment a full scale war and invasion of the island. We have the records that document  the extent of it, e.g.                                                          












































This was none other than Operation Northwoods.  In Operation Northwoods the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military planned a campaign of terror, to include the sinking of refugee boats (carrying Cuban refugees) on the high seas, as well as the killing of innocent citizens on American cities’ streets, plus random bombings carried out in Washington, DC, Miami and other places. What was the  motivation? Author James Bamford shows (Body Of Secrets, pp. 82-83) it was to incite an invasion and war against Cuba and enable the U.S. to invade and overthrow Fidel Castro.

But the documents to support suspicions of this (failed) conspiracy were only released years later – though many smelled a ‘rat’. When I first heard of Northwoods, I had trouble processing how any U.S. government agency or entity could remotely conceive of such foul deeds, far less carry them out. Then I quickly recalled the blowing up of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 over Barbados, on October 6. 1976 by Luis Posada, Freddie Lugo and other renegades sponsored in the extremist Alpha 66 enclave by the CIA.

Flash forward to Obama's announcement which is more than welcome by the dozens of Latin American nations that already have diplomatic and trade relations with Havana, and who never could understand the U.S. isolationist stance. We do well to applaud this advance but also bear in mind the generosity here is not all on the part of the high and mighty U.S. but also the Cuban people who have been able to forgive the diabolical attack on their own nearly 40 years ago.

See also the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uspkEV_fFzs

61 % of 'Muricans Believe Snowden Should "Stand Trial". They Are Paper Patriots!

"America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat"- blogger writing on SmirkingChimp in July.


It boggles the rational mind to comprehend how a people who once valued liberty and had enough education to see through vapid PR, now can't tell their asses from holes in the ground. Such is the case as a new CBS poll has found 61 percent of Americans demand Edward Snowden stand trial, compared to 23 percent who believe Obama ought to grant him amnesty.

This follows on from an earlier (July) Washington Post- ABC News poll. According to the poll's finding:

"The American people, who once defended Edward Snowden’s leaks of sensitive intelligence information gathered by the U.S. government, are starting to turn against him."


If we take common sense for granted in this sampled population (and that is not a foregone conclusion by any means) then one would expect people who are reasonably educated to be aware that their privacy rights are bound up intimately with their 4th amendment rights - to be free of lawless search and seizure. As I noted in previous blogs to do with this issue, while the specific right to privacy isn’t specifically listed in the Constitution,  the Founders understood that as time went on new rights would emerge which they might not be able to think of (e.g. to health care), hence bundled these into the unenumerated rights under the 9th amendment..

We also expect them to be informed enough to grasp the extent of NSA's unconstitutional mass data collection. And hence to realize that if NSA can snatch their email address books, Google searches and content, web browsing histories, Twitter messages, and cell phone calls as well as all telephone call logs, they are in the condition described by Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, who described the NSA programs to the Guardian thusly:

"The Snowden revelations have made clear that there has been an intrusion on our right to privacy of unprecedented scope, yet the government is dismissing any complaints about our right to privacy as irrelevant."

Roth said that from a human rights perspective, one of the biggest missteps the US administration had committed was to insist that there was a difference between the content of private communication and "metadata" – information about where, when and between whom the communication takes place. This distinction was based on a 1979 court case from the pre-digital era, which Human Rights Watch described as "troglodyte".

Roth said: "I used to be a prosecutor – I used to put pen registers on people's phones, collecting the numbers that you dial – but I had to manually compile the numbers. It was very labor intensive, and hence self-limiting. Today, the computer can piece together your entire personal life in a matter of seconds."


Roth also went on to invoke the following analogy for  any recalcitrant or too forgiving (of the NSA)  goobers who can't grasp the extent to which they've been deprived of their privacy:

"Imagine the government putting a video camera in your bedroom and saying 'don't worry, the feed will only go into a government computer, which we won't look at unless we have reason to believe that wrongdoing is taking place'. Would you feel your privacy is being respected? Of course not. But that's exactly what the government is doing."


So really, Americans ought to be getting on their damned knees and THANKING Snowden for revealing what he has about the disgusting trampling of their 4th amendment rights.  To have 61% instead calling for a trial - which any person of even average intellect would understand to be rigged from the outset - is to demonstrate stupidity beyond all bounds. Worse, it evokes memories of the "good Germans" who after WWII had to be dragged into the concentration camps to be shown what they turned a blind eye to during Hitler's reign.

Recall also, for the memory deprived, that the Judges at the Nuremberg War Crime trial told all the Nazi defendants that "following orders" (or oaths) was NO excuse! They were obliged to follow a higher conscience and to disobey unlawful orders or oaths. THIS is exactly what Snowden did.

For those who shudder at giving him amnesty let me also provide another memory jog: The two terrorists who blew up a Cubana Airlines flight (over Barbados in Oct. 1976) Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch walked Scott free thanks to the two Bush presidents.  See e.g. http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/042606.html

Excerpt:

"Not only did the first Bush administration free Bosch from jail a decade and a half ago, the second Bush administration has now pushed Venezuela’s extradition request for his alleged co-conspirator, Posada, onto the back burner."

This is one of the murderous rats, Luis Posada - taking 73 lives in the worst terror act in the hemisphere before 9/11


Can 'Muricans be so deaf, dumb, blind and stupid to accept this rat's ass fucker deserves amnesty or pardoning but not Snowden? Then these Americans don't deserve liberty! They deserve to be tossed into some damned Gulag - for their gross stupidity if nothing else.

When the interviewer asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the plane crashed off the coast of Barbados, Bosch responded,

“In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach.”

And this turd gets a pardon??!

So hear me out - IF two TERRORISTS can be given relative freedom by the 2 Bush presidents, then Obama can sure as shit pardon Ed Snowden for fulfilling the duty of a real citizen and whistle blowing on government transgressions of the Constitution! See also:
: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-scheer/51088/restore-honor-and-pardon-edward-snowden

I am hoping to learn that this poll was in some way bogus or defective in sampling technique. I refuse to believe so many MORONS can live in this country and call themselves Americans!

See also:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/23/nsa-barack-obama-phone-data-collection-illegal-privacy-board

Thousands of 4th Amendment Violations? Time to Put a Leash on the NSA!

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” – Samuel Johnson

"The fundamental reason for the conversion of the state into a gigantic spy apparatus is the nature of deeply destructive domestic and foreign policies which the government has so forcefully pursued. The vast expansion of the police state apparatus is not a response to the terror attack of 9/11. The geometrical growth of spies, secret police budgets, and the vast intrusion into all citizen communications coincides with the wars across the globe. The decisions to militarize US global policy requires vast budgetary re-allocation , slashing social spending to fund empire-building. 

Mass spying is designed to identify the citizens who oppose both imperial wars and the destruction of domestic welfare.”       – James Petras, in an article on American loss of liberty

“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged” –  Cardinal Richelieu

The  news from The Washington Post that the National Security Agency has "broken privacy rules" (transl. the 4th Amendment!)  or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, has civil libertarians hopping mad again. And demanding the cowardly congress get off their keysters for once and put a leash on this super snoop agency which Sen. Frank Church once described as being a path to all out tyranny if not reined in. Why should ANY citizen in the true sense have a difficult time grasping this? Anyone who's ever studied the U.S. Constitution ought to process this and how these transgressions of the 4th amendment are intolerable as well as exposing those politicos who have not upheld their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution!

Yet we still have looney tunes blaming Edward Snowden and calling for his head, when HE was the one that provided the channels to expose this law breaking! The guy should be awarded a fuckin' medal for god's sakes! Also, if Obama has any balls left by the time he leaves office, he ought to issue an executive pardon for Snowden - which will allow his return to the U.S. and free of sanctions! 

Look, let's clear the air here for any stupid hypocrites: two CIA-hire terrorists orchestrated the destruction of  Cubana Airlines Flight  455  off the southwest coast of Barbados on Oct. 6, 1976. (The actual 'mechanics', i.e.  planters of the bombs,  were Freddy Lugo and Hernan Ricardo Lusano who joked about it while deplaning in B'dos).  I was at Paradise Beach with my nieces when it occurred, and they are still as traumatized as when the bloody body parts first washed ashore in the aftermath. The two terrorists, Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch have walked Scott free thanks to the two Bush presidents.  See e.g. http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/042606.html

Excerpt 1:

"Not only did the first Bush administration free Bosch from jail a decade and a half ago, the second Bush administration has now pushed Venezuela’s extradition request for his alleged co-conspirator, Posada, onto the back burner."

Luis Posada Carriles: A Terrorist long before bin Laden!

Excerpt 2:

"Reporter Juan Manuel Cao interviewed Bosch, who had been jailed for illegally entering the United States but was paroled in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush at the behest of his eldest son Jeb, then an aspiring Florida politician.

“Did you down that plane in 1976?” Cao asked Bosch.

“If I tell you that I was involved, I will be inculpating myself,” Bosch answered, “and if I tell you that I did not participate in that action, you would say that I am lying. I am therefore not going to answer one thing or the other.”

But when Cao asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the plane crashed off the coast of Barbados, Bosch responded, “In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach.”

Tell that to the families of those victims, you degenerate! Tell it to my nieces who still are traumatized and can't sleep as the bloody images of floating heads,  arms, legs and torsos - seep into their brains in the dead of night! Tell it to my wife who worked at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital at the time and had to perform radiographic identification when some bodies were too mangled to allow effective ID.  And when you do make sure you understand WE who were there regard you rat fuckers as every BIT the terrorists that al Qaeda and bin Laden have been, and I don't give a shit what excuses or rationalizations you come up with. And oh, btw, the loss of life as a percentage of national population was vastly greater than that wrought by 9/11 in the U.S. and Barbados didn't go batshit crazy taking away its citizens'  rights!

So hear me out - IF two TERRORISTS can be given relative freedom by the 2 Bush presidents, then Obama can sure as shit pardon Ed Snowden for fulfilling the duty of a real citizen and whistle blowing on government transgressions of the Constitution! See also: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-scheer/51088/restore-honor-and-pardon-edward-snowden

Anyway, the NSA's violations have been exposed as a result of an internal audit and other top secret documents. (Thanks to Snowden, a 4th amendment HERO!)  Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that result in interception of U.S. emails and telephone calls.

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And then we wonder why congress can't do proper oversight over this most dangerous and threatening agency of them all! Again, bear in mind Sen. Church's words here:

"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America. And we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.” -


Is anybody paying attention? The capacity to make tyranny total? Every red-blooded real American ought to be on his congress critters to get a regulatory oversight leash - a real one- to deal with these guys. They are out of control!  "National security" is their cover. Asked about this information, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court told The Washington Post that the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often government surveillance breaks the court's rules that aim to protect the privacy of Americans. Without drastic steps, it also cannot check the veracity of government claims that all the violations its staff reports are unintentional mistakes, the judge said.

But let's be clear about a couple things here:

1) The only reason this is even an issue is because the original (1978) FISA law was trashed and the Bushies illegal mass wiretaps were made legal retroactively! But see, the Bush II lawbreakers didn't want to be slowed up in grabbing warrants. They wanted it done wholesale despite the fact the 4th amendment specifically mandates separate warrants with each manjack identified and the reasons set out. Too much trouble? Tough SHIT! That is the Constitution! And I will damned sure defend the 4th to the hilt as much as the 2nd amendment gun guys defend their right to own Glocks, Bushmaster .223s and AR 15s despite the fact that when the 2nd was written only single load muskets were common arms!

2) If the 4th were followed according to the letter as opposed to being trashed by a bastardized Patriot Act "retread" version - validated by weasels in congress,  there'd be no need to have additional funds or resources. This is because the time trajectory would be too stringent for the technology the NSA uses, i.e. to scoop up personal data. My point? You can't have faithful adherence to the 4th amendment and also the PRISM and XKeyscore technologies to grab data indiscriminately. In other words, the technologies used are precisely what's violating the 4th amendment.


In a response this morning over CBS News, the NSA offered the excuse that they were "only human" and hence could make mistakes.  But this only reinforces my point that they need a strong leash with constitutional oversight instead of the usual pussy footing around it our congress critters have been doing.  Any agency that can make such mistakes, especially in terms of repeatedly exceeding its authority - then lying about it like Clapper did to the Senate back in March  - needs to be brought under a stronger hand, which is what congress is supposed to do. They are not supposed to roll over like beaten whelps.

"Aw me, oh my! I wanna be protected from them bad guys!" At the cost of the Constitution? If so,  you don't deserve to call yourself an American! See e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/07/too-many-americans-dont-deserve-liberty.html

The tragic fact is that the more we let a crew of troglodytes like the NSA break our most fundamental amendment, the more clear it becomes that bin Laden and al Qaeda have won the so called "terror war". They have beaten our butts to a bloody pulp by getting we the citizens to do to ourselves what the robed loonies couldn't do on their own in a million years!

Should anyone need to get their brain adjusted more clearly on this, I suggest reading Ted Koppel's excellent article  ('Nine Years After 9/11 Let's Stop Playing Into Bin Laden's Hands'  ) in The Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/09/AR2010090904735.html 

For more on the Cubana Airlines terrorism, go to:

http://morallowground.com/2012/10/06/on-this-day-1976-the-bombing-of-cubana-airlines-flight-455/   

Questions for John Brennan (II): About Those DRONES

Should drones like this Predator even be allowed in U.S. skies, given a GAO report that expressed doubts  about their unreliable performance and sense-and-avoid technology that could avoid collisions? It’s also been found in tests that they can be electronically ‘hijacked’!

Rachel Maddow in her Tuesday night show came forward with pointed questions on the use of drones and targeted drone kills that “keep her up at night”. She observed that these questions were originally put to John Brennan by Dem Senator Ron Wyden. Basically the questions can be summarized, as Rachel put it, with: “Can the President order you dead? How do they determine who’s the bad guy?”

This is germane, irrespective of WHO is in the White House. As a nation ruled by laws (and Obama is a former Constitutional law professor), we cannot have the executive branch doing anything it wants, without parameters. Simply declaring an American an “enemy combatant” and hence invoking a license to kill is not good enough and one could argue it violates precepts inherent in the Constitution – including the right to trial by one’s peers before execution. Hence, Rachel’s questions weren’t spawned in vacuo.

Her questions are then as follows, based on Sen. Wyden’s written questions to Brennan:

1) How much evidence does the President need to determine that a particular American can be lawfully killed?

And the ones that "keep Rachel up at night":

2) Does the President have to provide individual Americans with the opportunity to surrender before killing them?

3) Does this obligation change if the President’s determination that a particular American is a valid target has not been publicly announced or publicly reported?

As Rachel put it:

"Think about that. If you’re an American citizen and the President is going to kill you, do you have the right to give yourself up instead so you don’t get killed?”


And: “How do you know you should do that if the President’s decision to kill you is a secret decision that nobody ever tells you?”

Brennan’s answers yesterday were not particularly awe- inspiring and basically could be summarized with the catchall: “I’ll get back to you on that.” Let us hope he does, since currently the U.S. government's position is that it declines on national security grounds to declassify the full legal justification for its covert drone attacks. This can mean only one of two things: 1) they have no genuine legal justification that can withstand hard scrutiny, or 2) there are inflammatory 'justifications' embedded that will have the entire American Left on their case, as well as the International Court of Law in The Hague. (Interestingly, btw, it is the Senate Democrats that pressed Brennan for more openness and clarity, while the Repukes chastised him for possibly giving away too much. Methinks the Reeps are ok with their future prez being able to kill "socialists, leftists, communists" at will like Hitler did with his own methods.)

More daunting a question – when configured with the previous ones, is:

4) Are there any geographic limitations on the intelligence’s community’s authority to use lethal force against Americans? (Do any intelligence agencies have the authority to carry out lethal operations inside the United States?)

Some background here:

Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick in their book ‘The Untold History of the United States’ note on p. 572 that:

“Pakistani press reports over three years (2006 to 2008) killed over 700 civilians to only 14 terrorists or 50 civilians to one terrorist”. The authors note the ratio was lowered somewhat (to 15:1) after Pakistani photographer Noor Behram held a graphic 2011 exhibition in London, of 27 drone air strikes.”

Such results helped explain the radicalization of Muslims in Pakistan given 97% viewed drones negatively according to the authors (p. 573) while the number who saw the U.S. as an enemy climbed from 64% in 2009 to 74% in 2012. (Ibid.) Hence, the evidence supports the notion that we are creating more terrorists rather than de-populating them

Adding fuel to the fire is the recent news report (ABC, Feb. 6th) that the U.S. has a drone base in Saudi Arabia from which drone strikes have been launched into 6 countries. This is unsettling. Recall the 9/11 blowback from al Qaeda was based on using Saudi Arabia as a base for U.S. operations in the Gulf War.. Thus, the 9/11 attacks were blowback (according to author Chalmers Johnson, in his book Blowback) for defiling the holiest Muslim nation - the ancestral home of the Wahabbi sect and the host nation for the holiest Muslim shrine of Mecca. Johnson basically attributed the 9/11 blowback to U.S. foreign policy, which antagonized too many groups over decades. Stone and Kuznick in their own book, essentially concur with this assessment.

Stone and Kuznick also note the near universal criticism that drones are “a cowardly form of warfare” even quoting the Thailand Nation newspaper (p. 576) that these aerial robots are merely used to "satisfy the lily –livered need to eavesdrop kill and destroy without the slightest chance of reciprocation”.


Morally this troubled Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair who: “tried to curb drone attacks and other CIA covert activities believing them a blot on America’s reputation” (p. 577)

He was replaced by retired Lt. Gen. James Clapper in 2010.

The latest issue of TIME (Feb. 11) in its drone cover story, notes (p. 30) that the UK Bureau Of Investigative Journalism estimates that up to 891 civilians were killed in Pakistan since 2004 by drone strikes. TIME goes on to note that Brennan has argued that drone attacks are lawful under a 2001 authorization that allows “use of force” for those responsible for the 9/11 attacks – but technically all those perps are dead and gone including Osama bin Laden. Hence, one can argue that the authorization for the use of the drones is now expired.

Beyond that the continued use of such attacks presents the dangerous element of unintended consequences and expanded use beyond that originally intended. This has been the argument made by Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU. Interestingly, on January 24 the UN announced a special investigation into civilian deaths arising from drone attacks.

But  the radicalizing nature of drone attacks goes far beyond the immediate killing to their unsettling and pathological effects on targeted populations’ psyches. (By ‘targeted population I mean all of those affected if a drone is covering x square miles and its ominous noise is being received as a kind of inflicted terror in its own right.) People quoted in the ABC News report, for example, reported the constant anxiety (as well as sleeplessness) in their own homes induced from the incessant whine of the drones circling outside. Imagine - if you will - the Chinese putting thousands of these fuckers in OUR skies and monitoring us every second then justifying kills based on their own judicial precepts. Would you not go ape shit? I believe most 'Muricans would reach for their Bushmasters or AKs.

We know there’ll likely be over 3.5 million drones in operation in U.S. skies by 2017, so what are they all going to be doing? Perhaps the Predator drones will be mandated to kill U.S. citizens for any number of reasons, and not necessarily by an Executive decision. A disturbng case cited in TIME (p. 32) is that of a North Dakota Sheriff who in June, 2011, called in a Predator drone from a local Air Force Base to hunt for three men believed associated with some missing cows. The drone spotted the men and could have killed them on the spot with a Hellfire missile, but ascertained they were unarmed, so they were just arrested. But who's to say this couldn't have suddenly gone south on another occasion? Three dead guys and they may not even know why they've been vaporized.

 Hell, maybe a hard core Tea Party repuke like Marco Rubio is in power and he mandates the CIA to off all JFK researchers plumbing into the assassination who are digging into why the files weren’t released as scheduled. Or maybe this guy of Cuban descent doesn’t want us mucking around into Luis Posada’s terror background and connections to the Bay of Pigs Brigade 2506. We don’t know unless the parameters for targeted kills are judicially spelled out. Maybe a hard core fundie like Paul (Moron) Broun is elected Prez and has commandeered all atheists and evolutionists be drone-killed for promoting ideas and “theories from the pit of Hell”. We don’t know! Not with the flimsy and vague criteria as given, or rather not given.

Oh, as a sideline, I had to laugh hard and long at a remark in the recent TIME article on drones (Feb. 11, p. 28), when the author noted he was pulled up by critics for using the word “drone”. As he put it (p. 29):

“I’ve been corrected and upbraided by drone users and manufacturers, military and civilian, for failing to use terms like ‘unmanned aerial vehicle’ or ‘unmanned aircraft system’ or ‘remotely piloted vehicle’. While technically accurate these terms have a clumsy, euphemistic feel"

Give me a break, already! Again, these sort of complaints about using direct language is part of why American brains are now so deformed and irrational, and incapable of coherent argument. Hell, they’ve been gutted by the substitution of collateral language (see the book by the same title).

But let's return to the core issue here: Killing people in other countries with which we are not at war. This again shows me that this nation - to regain its moral footing - needs to return to congressional declarations of war. If there is no such declaration, then NO ....you cannot launch ersatz wars, nor can we have any more "wars" such as VietNam and Iraq  based on idiotic "resolutions". I would go even further, and say unless taxes are mandated to pay for the declared war, it isn't on. Period! We cannot continue to exploit our own loose interpretation of international law and order to make ourselves policeman of the world with no consequences.

Rachel in her Thursday night show cited the main theme of the (1978) Church Committe Report and I quote from it:

“The evidence establishes that the United States was implicated in several assassination plots. The Committee believes that, short of war, assassination is incompatible with American principles, international order and morality. It should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy.”

This led Gerald Ford to issue an Executive Order banning assassinations.

Indeed, one can make the case, as I did earlier, that targeted assassinations in other nations is a counterproductive foreign policy in that it succeeds in creating more terrorists than it diminishes! It also erodes the moral basis of the nation and exposes it as an enclave of hypocrisy. For example, why haven’t right wing terrorists been targeted to the same extent? How the fuck is it that Luis Posada Carriles is still walking around alive and not dead from a Hellfire missile, while assorted accused other Americans (e.g. Anwar al-Alwaki) have been offed? Has there been the same degree of justification for the latter kills, as for the terrorist bone fides for Posada? I don’t believe so!

Add to that all the dead civilians as collateral damage and we’re really on shaky moral, legal grounds.


As Sen. Wyden noted last night on Rachel: Americans have a right to know if and when a President wants to kill them. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Right wing Alpha 66 terrorist like Luis Posada Carriles, or a run of the mill al-Qaeda tool like al-Awaki.

Wyden’s other ancillary point is equally crucial: that laws need to be public, not kept secret or private. We are either a society and a nation of laws and accountability or we’re no different from the Nazis with their special “Reich laws”.

We better decide and soon if we're going to continue to take the easy, lazy (I'd add cowardly) and expeditious path that leads to perdition, or if we will adhere to the American principles of yesteryear, so well enunciated in Kennedy's American University ('Pax Americana') speech in June, 1963. It's our choice and we better damned sure make the right one!

Questions to Ask John Brennan(I): About Those JFK Files

The arch-terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, harbored in Miami for a number of years. We need to know also his role in the CIA-engineered bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 off Barbados in October, 1976.


As former Assistant CIA Director John Brennan gets set to be grilled in his now (CIA Director) confirmation hearings, some questions need to come front and center. I will deal with several of the main ones in this and a subsequent blog. I believe this is crucial because Brennan was Assistant  CIA Director when the Bushie torturers were running amuck and the stage was being set to create even more terrorists with drone strikes that often took out civilians, women, kids. Never mind Obama’s often saying “we need to put this behind us” – the moral tenor of a genuinely moral nation demands accountability and responsibility.  If we ignore that, or let it pass out of expediency, we're no better than the Third Reich.


So let me begin with question 1: If confirmed, are YOU going to release the remaining JFK assassination files – especially the ones on George Joannides which would show conclusively how Lee Oswald was being played as a patsy?

This is especially germane now, as the news has come forth (Jan. 13, in assorted AP releases to dozens of papers) that two of Robert F. Kennedy’s offspring, Rory and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. related to Charlie Rose in an interview (conducted at the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas) that their dad never bought into the Warren Commission Report. According to Robert Kennedy Jr., his father thought “the Warren Commission which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone was a ‘shoddy piece of craftsmanship” and he added that he too questioned the report.

Well, I mean, seriously – WHO wouldn’t? 200 material witnesses never called to testify, including: the reporter who found the alleged sniper’s nest, the woman who saw Officer J.D. Tippitt shot and by a heavy set short man – not Oswald, a soldier who felt the air percussion of a bullet whiz by as he stood with his camera on the grassy knoll, and at least five witnesses, including an Air Force officer – that observed an Oswald double.

Then we have the added poppycock of a supposed bullet making seven wounds in two men and emerging pristine or nearly so, on a Parkland Hospital stretcher. Then we had the spectacle of a bullet-pocked limo being disassembled and dispatched to Ohio and the brain disappearing between Parkland in Dallas, and Bethesda. Add to that an alleged assassin's rifle (6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano) which had to be substituted for to try to replicate the alleged shots in WC trials, since the purported original had shims out of whack in azimuth - so couldn't hit the broad side of a barn! How many coincidences have to occur before people are given credit for some basic common sense?

So, no, the Warren Commission was never set up as a “government commission” but as LBJ’s creature, to enable his full oversight-control and to provide an expedient political resolution by which assorted covert players and special interests could all wipe their paws clean. The nation, and especially the power brokers, could then  move on without getting into messy conspiracies, made especially easy after Oswald was shot and killed.

In the aftermath, those of us in deep politics also were aware that because Bobby never bought into the Warren hogswill, he sought independent outlets to do their own research. Through contacts assisted by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, he met with French Intelligence who provided their own report that later emerged in 1968 as the book ‘Farewell America’ written under the pseudonym of’ James Hepburn’. Readers can access the book here: http://www.jfk-online.com/farewell00.html


After Bobby was himself assassinated in June 1968, CIA and other black ops sought to tar the book and its basis, as they have done the past 45 odd years with all other rigorous works disclosing conspiracy.

This is why getting hands on the CIA's  Joannides files is so very important, especially in this 50th anniversary year. We’ve waited too long as it is and the American people deserve the truth concerning what was effectively a coup d’etat which saw the takeover of the U..S. and its executive branch by a massive Military Industrial complex and national security state.

Those of us in the research community also know that most of the "Oswald-Castro did it" tricks emerged at the time George Johannides was the Chief of Psychological Warfare branch of the CIA's JM/WAVE station in Miami . Almost all his energy was directed to: a) implicating Oswald in the assassination by a strategy of "sheepdipping" (see John Newman's excellent 'Oswald and the CIA') and b) processing disinformation from pseudo -double agents and deliberate false sources to implicate Castro, the Soviets, Oswald or all three.

The entire effort was to set up assorted straw men to take the eyes off the real culprits, and most of us believe the CIA was a key player – certainly in the subsequent cover up and disinformation campaign. One of the most recent disinfo efforts incarnated in Brian Latell’s book: 'Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine'. It bears the veneer of some new insider info, but in fact is merely another in a long line of CIA DISINFO, churned out over the years, and supported by CIA assets and networks to try to convince the American people there was no conspiracy in the JFK assassination and Lee Oswald was the lone gunman.

We also know some enclaves of the entertainment industry are part of the disinformation process, as confirmed by the plan to televise a 13 -part HBO series later this year (produced by Tom Hanks) that will attempt to bolster Vince Bugliosi's obsessive hack baloney in his 1600+ page "Rewriting History' that Oswald acted alone. Has Hanks had CIA assistance, (as well as Bugliosi’s) in creating his 13- part bull pockey? We don’t know, but what we DO know is that the CIA had agents seeded in the news media for decades, putatively acting as “journalists” (actually as anti-conspiracy 'gate-keepers'), and documented by Kathryn Olmstead in her book Challenging the Secret Government (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996)

In the midst of all this BS all we ask is that Brennan, if and when he becomes Director, release those files!
Brennan’s answers are also important given the National Archives basically told JFK Assassination researchers to go take a long walk on a short pier, (see e.g. http://www.brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/06/national-archives-to-jfk-file-seekers.htmlafters) seeking specific records mandated for release.

The records were originally requested by the nonprofit Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), will now remain secret until at least 2017, when the 1992 JFK Records Act mandates public release of all assassination files in the government’s possession. Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, writing a book about the impact of JFK’s assassination on American politics, remarked after the National Archives(June, 2012) refusal to release files this year :

“This is a deeply disappointing decision that deprives everyone of a fuller understanding of the JFK assassination The 50th anniversary of that terrible event is the perfect opportunity to shed more light on the violent removal of a president. This adds to the widely held public suspicion that the government may still be hiding some key facts about President Kennedy’s murder.”

Hence, the main question we need at least one spined Senator to put to Brennan.

A second ancillary question is whether Brennan plans to release the files concerning the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 in October, 1976 off Barbados’ SW coast. All other existing files, including from Venezuelan intelligence, point to CIA involvement and featuring hired anti-Castro thugs from Alpha 66 – a notorious Miami bunch that has worked in league with the CIA for decades . According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in Alpha 66 creator Orlando Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela’s intelligence agency, DISIP.


The Oct. 14 cable said Bosch arrived in Venezuela in late September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, a close Washington ally who assigned his intelligence adviser Orlando Garcia “to protect and assist Bosch during his stay in Venezuela.”

On his arrival, Bosch was met by Garcia and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch’s honor. “A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details,’” the CIA report said. Meanwhile, those of us living in Barbados had no remote notion of the bloody act to come, nor of the U.S. complicity in it, or that the same Cuban renegades whose associates (from the Bay of Pigs invasion)  conspired in the JFK hit were part of it. The CIA Report went on to read:


“"Following the 6 October [1976] Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory.”

Note in the preceding the sanitizing of the language, the use of "crash" instead of bombing, or what we call "collateral language". Warren Hinckle and William Turner note in their excellent book, ‘Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination of JFK’ (p. 384, Thunders Mouth Press, 1992) go on to note that:

“Two men who had deplaned in Barbados, Freddy Lugo and Hernan Ricardo Lusano, were interrogated after joking about the bombing in a Barbados taxicab. The two were employed by Luis Posada…and confessed that Posada and (Orlando) Bosch had supplied them with two bombs, which they planted on the Cubana aircraft.”

The authors added  that “the CIA hand in the terrorist destruction of the Cubana airliner materialized two weeks later” when a CIA double agent named Ignacio Rodriguez-Mena blew the whistle on them, evidently enraged as he might have been on the flight except his wife was late arriving at the departure terminal. Interestingly, Rodriguez -Mena was also the person former CIA spook Latell tried to implicate as sending a hidden signal to off Kennedy, back in 1963.  Kennedy's own words in a Nov. 18, 1963 Miami speech:  "the small band of conspirators" was to be the "green light" for a 'go'. Retrospective vendetta? Who knows?  

But researcher James Douglass has exposed this subterfuge in his book ( JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters , p. 251:

“The CIA, by reversing the meaning of Kennedy's speech to motivate its own hired assassin, created a dogma of disinformation that it would disseminate for decades.....that the Miami speech was meant as an encouragement for murder, not dialogue".

THIS is why we need answers, otherwise we will continue to inhabit a fool's paradise where the elites spout bromides about "freedom" but the national security interests can do whatever....whenever.

For a solid account of the Cubana Airliner bombing (including a video) and why no one should ever believe squat on what the CIA or its lackeys has to say about Castro being involved in the JFK assassination, go to:

http://morallowground.com/2012/10/06/on-this-day-1976-the-bombing-of-cubana-airlines-flight-455/