Waiting for the Dust to Settle After the New Release of JFK Documents

It is all something to behold this morning on  X (Twitter). Numerous people, many assisted by AI are trying to make sense of the JFK assassination documents released at the direction of Donald Trump. I'd already seen credible accounts that suggest many CIA connections to JFK's assassination. An excellent place to start is The Devil's Chessboard, by David Talbot. Glenn Greenwald comments: Reading Talbot's book is like getting a kick in the stomach. I'm partway through the book and I am convinced more and more that JFK's assassination was a CIA coup. And I am more and more convinced that most of our presidential elections have been orchestrated by the CIA through the use of powerful tools of propaganda and censorship that heavily influence (if not outright control) legacy "news" outlets. [More . . . .]

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History Didn’t Begin in 2024: A Short History of the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex

Legacy media fails in SOOO many ways these days. They refuse to offer links to primary sources relating to their stories, for instance. Matt Taibbi explains that this is not an accident. They also refuse to give historical context for the "stories" they report. So often, we only hear of the crisis de jour. That's how it is with the Ukraine War. RFK, Jr. did offer this short history of the American Military Industrial Complex. It's real and it is responsible for much of the worldwide dysfunction we read about, including the War in Ukraine. Kennedy:

“We are the military-industrial complex.”

“Washington ... is like a Kabuki theatre of democracy.”

It’s about ending the trauma that the US military-industrial complex has put the world through since 1963.

RFK Jr: JFK’s 1,000 days in office were a “constant fistfight with the military-industrial complex to keep the country out of war.”

“Three days before [JFK] took office, President Eisenhower gave what I think we should today regard as the most important speech in American history.”

“He warned Americans against the domination of this emerging military-industrial complex that would turn us into an imperium abroad and a security state at home.”

“[JFK] takes office three days later.”

“They tried to get him to go into Laos, he refused.”

“They tried to get him to go into Cuba in ‘61 and again in ‘62 during the missile crisis, and he wouldn’t.”

“They tried to get him to go into Berlin in ‘62, and he wouldn’t.”

“They tried to get him to go into Vietnam … and he said it can’t be our fight.”

“In October 1963 … [JFK] signed National Security Order 263 ordering all military personnel out of Vietnam.”

“Thirty days after he signed that order, he was murdered. And a week after that, President Johnson remanded the order and then sent 250,000 troops in.” “My father ran against the war in ‘68. He wins the California primary, meaning he’s on his way to the White House, and he’s shot that night.”

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Jeffrey Sachs Discusses the Real World Game of Risk Featuring Deadly U.S. Foreign Policy

Jeffrey Sachs has calmly delivered short presentations that give context to the the Ukraine War that you will never hear on Corporate media. For most self-declared Democrats I know, the history of the Ukraine War started in 2022. They are off by a few decades, as Sachs Discusses (I created this transcript based on the following video:

Yesterday was the most important day for peace in maybe decades. Actually, this war in Ukraine resulted from a very bad idea of the United States taken in 1994 it's a project. The project was a project to expand NATO forever, anywhere. Just keep moving east. Keep moving, not only to the first wave, which was the Prime Minister's country, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia, but then move eastward, closer to the former Soviet Union, into the former Soviet Union, surround Russia in the Black Sea region, go all the way to little country in the south caucuses, Georgia. It was mind boggling. Clinton signed onto that in 1994 it became what we call the deep state project, meaning it didn't really matter who the President was. Each president would come and basically would be informed NATO is moving eastward, you're part of that process.

So Clinton started it in 1994 and as Prime Minister Orban said, he mentioned briefly in 1990 on February 9, 1990 in unequivocal, clear as can be terms the United States, and said to President Michel Gorbachev NATO, will not move one inch eastward. And if you have any doubt about it, all the documents are now online available. You can scrutinize everything. Hans Dietrich Genscher, the US, the German foreign minister said the same thing same day. He's on tape actually explaining, no, no, I don't just mean within eastern Germany. I mean anywhere to the east. Clinton, being Clinton and the US Deep State, being the US Deep State, started this project in 1994 they already had the idea, by the way, in 1991 92 as soon as the Soviet Union ended, aha. Now we move now we move eastward. Now we control everything. Now we are the sole superpower.

So this has gone on for 30 years, and each president got into it. Under George Bush Junior, seven more countries were added, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania. Nine, in 2004 then in 2007 President Putin said at the summit that's taking place right now, the Munich Security Summit said, Stop! You told us no expansion, not an eastward expansion, even an inch, you said. You've now done 10 countries. Stop! Perfectly reasonable. Stop.

I don't think our president, Donald Trump, would much like to see China and Russia building their military bases up from Central America. You know, this was how the Russians saw this. Why are you coming to our border when you told us you weren't going to move? And there was one other thing that was very important in this which is probably the most decisive thing and almost not even recognized in 2002 the US did something really, really, really destabilizing, and that is it unilaterally left the anti ballistic missile treaty that was a core strategy to stop a nuclear war between the two super powers. Because . . . [More . . . ]

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The U.S. Role on Producing Heroin in Afghanistan

Why was USAID funding the production of heroin in Afghanistan?

John Kiriakou, who exposed the CIA and went to prison for it: "I went to Afghanistan to do a study on on the heroin Poppy crop. And I'll tell you, nobody liked it. Afghanistan used to be a net food exporter, and as soon as the US takes over, they're producing 93% of the world's heroin. That's right. I'd like to know how the fuck that happened. I get to Bagram Air Base and I said, I'm gonna need a helicopter to Lashkar. We get down there, and it's a god-awful place, but man, I'm telling you, as far as your eye can see, all there is, is Poppy. So I make an appointment to go to this DEA secret site, and they were like, you're in over your head. "There are very powerful forces that want that Poppy to be cultivated." And I said, "Why? It's 93% of the world's heroin." And they said, "Because almost all of that heroin goes to Iran and to Russia, and we want them to be addicted to heroin. It weakens their societies." I'm writing all this up. And [John] Kerry's like, "We're not we're not publishing that." And I was like, ah, they got to him too."

Mike Benz offers the details and they include connections with USAID:

And more details from Benz, including connections to the innocent-sounding "US Institute for Peace:

"And why is USAID’s network partner, the US Institute of Peace, lobbying the Taliban to keep 95% of the world’s heroin supply flowing while taking $56 million from US taxpayers each year?"

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Why Neocon Foreign Policy Fails Over and Over

This goes for the Neocons who taok over Republic foreign policy and also those how commandeered the cabinets of Democrats such as Obama and Biden. Mike Dimino, a former CIA analyst and a fellow at Defense Priorities. He has been involved in Mideast policy, particularly under the Trump administration, where he has served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East. He hammers it here:

We could talk about sort of the military analysis all day, and I think it's really important to do that. But the bigger point here has to be, you know, we have now seen 20 years worth of evidence in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, and Afghanistan that we cannot force liberal democracy at the end of a gun. Okay? Iran is a nation of 90 million people. Enough of the people in that country have to overcome what many sociologists and political scientists have called the collective action problem, right? The cost benefit analysis of organic political change, that calculation has to get to a point where change can happen. And that's how it has to work if it's going to last and if it's going to be meaningful. This idea that the United States should be using its military to go around the world and depose every single tin pot dictator that we find and bog ourselves down there to the tune of trillions of dollars to 1000s of American lives with no real goal or or purpose, where we are squandering our national resources in our bandwidth that need to be directed on far more pressing issues is just not really in America's interest. And that's, again, the biggest point that I would make here, is that, you know, this idea that you can, you know, send a couple of, you know, American stealth bombers, you know, over the border and kill all the ayatollahs and some kind of cinematic cutscene. And then, you know, some young woman stands up in a pantsuit and goes, you know, I'm ready to be the president of Iran now. I mean, life is not a Marvel movie and life is not, it's not Harry Potter. So as somebody that has spent a lot of time in the region and has worked on these issues as an intelligence officer, I could just tell you the idea that something like that is possible, I think, is what is in the heads of a lot of people like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, and even a lot of the, you know, the Persian diaspora elsewhere, that is very against the regime. Again, I'm against the regime too, but it just doesn't work that way, where there's going to be some sort of perfect cutscene ending, and there's going to be, you know, overnight, some kind of new regime in Iran, we have learned that the world just doesn't work that way.

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