Podcasts about National Security Archive

Rarely is one of our shows as intricately fascinating and self-disclosing to our guest and ourselves that we cannot adequately describe all that we covered, all that we learned, and all that we began integrating anew into our knowledge as the interview evolved.   Our guest, physician Juliette Engel, was a captive, slave, and experimental subject controlled by the CIA from early childhood until age sixteen. Acting on her own, she then escaped the CIA/MKUltra house of devil worship — a subject we will let her tell you about in the interview. She began her new life as a college student, and to manage her severe post-traumatic stress, she developed amnesia for her horrendous past. As a therapist and researcher, I know this happens, but it requires a powerful mind like Dr. Engel to accomplish it and ultimately to flourish.   Dr. Engel is part of a growing number of people coming forth about their experiences as victims of CIA experiments, which in part were training her to become a part of what I have decided to call, “the global community of abusers without conscience,” a powerful aspect of the global predators and their unholy empires.   Adding incredible background to her personal testimony, she sent us in advance a document released from the National Security Archive on December 23, 2024. The ominous title is “CIA Behavioral Control Experiments Focus of New Scholarly Collection.”   The CIA documents confirm many of Dr. Engel's memories, which only began to unfold much later, after a life of medical reform work in Russia.   Confirming Our Own Experiences with the Deep State and CIA   One huge confirmation for me and Ginger is how much the CIA was indeed focused on defending and supporting the very kind or torturous and inhuman psychiatric treatments that I began openly opposing in the early 1970s, including lobotomy and other forms of psychosurgery and electroshock (ECT) which I have described as an electrical closed-head lobotomy.   Another insight for me was the similarity between the CIA agents and collaborators, as described in the CIA documents, and the global predators we have described in our book, COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey. This is the same profile we continue to explore in our recent columns about America's four current empires: the Western Global Empire, the Eastern Global Chinese Communist Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Caliphate Muslim Empire.   These predators, across a broad spectrum of activities, are primarily motivated by a lust for power over other human beings. They also desire wealth, but mostly as a tool for gaining power. What drives them is the desire to exert power over as many people as possible within their sphere, whether it is a political party, a criminal cabal or conspiracy, a government agency, a nation, an empire, or a global governance.   If they did not lust for power, they would not succeed in their goal of dominating, controlling, exploiting, enslaving, or killing as many people as possible. They must also possess extreme cunning and shrewdness to be able to manipulate and exploit so many people and to compete for power among so many other violent, cunning people. Probably above all else, they must be masters of conspiracy, able to seduce or intimidate others into helping them pursue their evil aims.   These predators must lack identification with the people within their own family,  group, nation, or empire, because seizing and growing enormous power usually requires, as history demonstrates, killing competitors in their own families and their own inner circles of co-conspirators, as well as millions of their own people, as demonstrated by apex global predators from Alexander “the Great” to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the current leaders of Communist China.   These predators must not allow themselves to genuinely love anyone, because such entanglements and feelings would check or inhibit the kind of evil conduct required for fulfilling their primary lust for power. Ultimately, they must not identify with anyone but themselves.   The following excerpts are taken from the vastly important document that our guest, Juliette Engel, MD, first drew to our attention, “CIA Behavior Control Experiments Focus of New Scholarly Collection.”  [The document lacks page numbers, but the excerpts can be located by means of searching the document:]   Excerpt 1 from the CIA Documents   Asked whether the CIA had tried to identify “techniques of producing retrograde amnesia,” Gottlieb said it was something that they “talked about,” but that he could not “remember any specific projects or specific research mounted in response to that question.” Asked if the CIA ever used “psychosurgery research projects,” Gottlieb said his “remembrance is that they did.”   Excerpt 2   The elevation of Allen Dulles to deputy director of central intelligence in 1951 led to an expansion of BLUEBIRD programs under a new name, ARTICHOKE, and under the direction of Gottlieb at TSS. The new program was to include, among other projects, the development of “gas guns” and “poisons,” and experiments to test whether “monotonous sounds,” “concussion,” “electroshock,” and “induced sleep” could be used as a means to gain “hypnotic control of an individual.”[5]   Excerpt 3   Another prominent MKULTRA “cutout” foundation, the Human Ecology Society, was run by Cornell Medical Center neurologist Dr. Harold Wolff, who wrote an early study of communist brainwashing techniques for Allen Dulles and later partnered with the CIA to develop a combination of drugs and sensory deprivation that could be used to erase the human mind. Among the most extreme MKULTRA projects funded through Wolff's group were the infamous “depatterning” experiments conducted by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Cameron's methods combined induced sleep, electroshocks, and “psychic driving,” under which drugged subjects were psychologically tortured for weeks or months in an effort to reprogram their minds.   Except 4   While no new techniques had been discovered, presently known mind control techniques described in the attachment include the use of LSD and other drugs, hypnosis, the use of the polygraph, neurosurgery, and electric shock treatments. However, field testing of these techniques has been handicapped by the “inability to provide the medical competence for a final evaluation and for such field testing as the evaluation indicates. Repeated efforts to recruit medical personnel have failed and until recently the CIA Medical Staff has not been in a position to assist.”   Excerpt 5   The response from TSS lists 17 “materials and methods” that the Chemical Division was working to develop, including:   *substances that “promote illogical thinking,” materials that would “render the induction of hypnosis easier” or “enhance its usefulness,” substances that would help individuals to endure “privation, torture and coercion during interrogation” and attempts at ‘brainwashing,'” *“materials and physical methods” to “produce amnesia” and “shock and confusion over extended periods of time,” substances that would “produce physical disablement, including paralysis, *substances that “alter personality structure” or that “produce ‘pure' euphoria with no subsequent let-down,” and a “knockout pill” for use in surreptitious druggings and to produce amnesia, among other things. [Asterisks and bold added]   Excerpt 6   Gibbons was not fully clear on how the CIA obtained LSD, but most of it came from the Eli Lilly & Company, according to this memo, which “apparently makes a gift of it to CIA.”  [bold added. There are many mentions in the report citing Eli Lilly as the source of massive of amounts of LSD which the CIA then inflicted upon Americans, sometimes as experiments and sometimes for financial gain.]   End of Excerpts   In the current release of CIA documents, many well-known government officials and universities are named as supporting and collaborating with MKUltra and other ghastly CIA experiments. Particularly stunning to me, the CIA bought a new wing for the Georgetown University Hospital, in return for which the CIA was given a special “safe house” inside the medical wing where they were free to inflict their wanton will on involuntary experimental subjects with supportive help from the hospital.   One More Step in Facing the Evil Within   These quotes confirm what I had long suspected and had only limited data to confirm — that the CIA and other government agencies are very protective and supportive of psychosurgery (lobotomy) and electroshock treatment (ECT). They want to research and apply these gross methods of damaging the human brain and mind to facilitate interrogation, to erase memories, to change personalities, and to make people more obedient and robotic. They also want them widely used in society to dumb down and render passive as many people as possible on the way to building the global slave state.   During this interview, we began to more deeply appreciate the involvement of the Deep State in psychiatry and psychology and the strength of their opposition to my reform work going back to the early 1970s. My earliest reform efforts focused on these two treatments, psychosurgery and then electroshock, and finally matured into seeing all psychiatric treatment as an assault on the brain and mind.   In various books and scientific articles, Ginger and I have been pointing to federal agencies pushing lobotomy (DOJ, NIMH), pushing electroshock (CIA, FDA), and pushing psychoactive drugs (FDA, CIA, NIMH, NIH, Department of Education, and others.   Our greatest confrontation with federal agencies came during an intense few years when we educated and organized people to shut down a massive U.S. interagency eugenical program to go into the inner cities to identify supposed biological and genetic causes of violence in black children and youth. The goal was ultimately to justify the widespread diagnosing and drugging of these children, including highly remunerative drugs like antidepressants and stimulants. I had already encountered outright racism, with neurosurgeons and psychiatrists advocating in print for the use of psychosurgery to control the leaders of black uprisings in the 1960s and early 1970s.   We completely defeated the massive eugenics project, causing the cancellation of a major conference and many research projects. We authored a book about it, The War Against Children of Color (1994), which addresses numerous Deep State actors such as the CDC, Department of Justice, FBI, NIMH, NIH, DHHS, and PHS, and names many perpetrators. But we had not yet seen the globalist scope of these activities. Here are links to a few articles about our successful efforts to stop the federal eugenics program.   The Role of Psychiatry in Nazi Germany and the U.S. Violence Initiative. This link contains the written introduction and historical video of Dr. Peter Breggin's presentation to Black leaders and community members in Harlem in the early 1990s about the federal government's plans to biologically “prevent violence” by identifying and drugging Black toddlers and children—a plan ultimately stopped due to the Breggins' exposure of the eugenics program. A biomedical programme for urban violence control in the US: the dangers of psychiatric social control; by Peter R Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin Letter to the Editor, The New York Times by Peter R. Breggin, M.D.: U.S. Hasn't Given Up Linking Genes to Crime.  Excerpt: “Dr. Goodwin estimates that 100,000 children, as young as 5, will be identified for psychiatric interventions. He called the violence initiative the No. 1 funding priority for the Federal mental health establishment in 1994. My organization has since obtained documentation that millions of dollars of Federal funds are being spent on violence initiative research and planning, including studies of both rhesus monkeys and inner-city children. Newly developed psychiatric drugs are being tested for violence prevention in monkey studies, and some psychiatrists are claiming they can be used in humans for the same purpose. It seems inevitable that the violence initiative will involve administering the same drugs to inner-city children. The widespread use of Ritalin to control aggressive children, frequently supported or initiated by public schools, has set a precedent for pharmacological intervention.” Disposable Children in Black Faces: The Violence Initiative as Inner-City Containment Policy; Alfreda A. Sellers-Diamond, UMKC Law Review, 1994. Campaigns Against Racist Federal Programs by the Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology; Peter R. Breggin, Journal of African American Men, 1995. NIH, under fire, freezes grant for conference on genetics and crime; Nature, Vol. 358, 30 July 1992, p357.   It was further hammered home to me in the interview with Dr. Engel that the kinds of individuals who are cunning enough and violent enough to run totalitarian nations and empires have their counterparts running amok within many federal agencies and many other American institutions. And that is the force from within that we are fighting today as we stand up for freedom in America. We must face a former national leadership, and a current Deep State and other institutions riddled with the worst human beings we can imagine and understand — or we will remain vastly hampered in fighting them.     ______   Learn more about Dr. Peter Breggin's work: https://breggin.com/   See more from Dr. Breggin's long history of being a reformer in psychiatry: https://breggin.com/Psychiatry-as-an-Instrument-of-Social-and-Political-Control   Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal, the how-to manual @ https://breggin.com/a-guide-for-prescribers-therapists-patients-and-their-families/   Get a copy of Dr. Breggin's latest book: WHO ARE THE “THEY” - THESE GLOBAL PREDATORS? WHAT ARE THEIR MOTIVES AND THEIR PLANS FOR US? HOW CAN WE DEFEND AGAINST THEM? Covid-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey Get a copy: https://www.wearetheprey.com/   “No other book so comprehensively covers the details of COVID-19 criminal conduct as well as its origins in a network of global predators seeking wealth and power at the expense of human freedom and prosperity, under cover of false public health policies.”   ~ Robert F Kennedy, Jr Author of #1 bestseller The Real Anthony Fauci and Founder, Chairman and Chief Legal Counsel for Children's Health Defense.  

Operations Corrupt America and the World Douglas Valentine Author of three books on CIA operations, Valentine's research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA's elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam.While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA's relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and John Jay College.This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA's ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA's activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States.A common theme is the CIA's ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability.Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.

Why was director Oliver Stone testifying on Capitol Hill today? After his 1991 film "JFK" reignited conspiracy theories about President Kennedy's assassination, Congress authorized the release of millions of classified documents. But it wasn't until this January when President Trump released the supposedly final 80,000 pages related to Kennedy's murder on Nov. 22, 1963. They revealed nothing new about the assassination itself. Lee Harvey Oswald was the killer, and he acted alone. However, the documents are filling in important gaps in our knowledge of what the CIA was up to in the 1960s: assassinations of foreign leaders, coups, election meddling -- and even a break-in at the French embassy in Washington! In this episode, national security experts Peter Kornbluh and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi delve into the fascinating record of CIA covert operations and their disastrous consequences. Further reading: Kennedy Assassination Records Lift Veil of Secrecy by Peter Kornbluh and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi for National Security Archive JFK Papers Reveal CIA Spying Operations in United States by Peter Kornbluh and Michael Evans for National Security Archive

Extended conversation with Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst with the National Security Archive, who has been analyzing the newly declassified files related to the assassination of JFK.

Extended conversation with Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst with the National Security Archive, who has been analyzing the newly declassified files related to the assassination of JFK.

For almost 40 years, Tom Blanton and the National Security Archive have used the Freedom of Information Act to dislodge and declassify U.S. government secrets, from Cold War backchannels to intelligence failures in the Middle East. Blanton's “archival activism” is about seeing the full picture, in hopes that policy makers — and the American public — can learn from past blunders. Oh, and they unearthed the backstory behind that famous picture of President Nixon and Elvis Presley in the Oval Office.Go to audible.com/news where you'll find Peter Bergen's recommendations for other news, journalism and nonfiction listening.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

About the Lecture: The National Security Archive, based at George Washington University, has pioneered the use of the Freedom of Information Act to open classified U.S. files, and then to match those American primary sources with newly opened (and often now closed) archives in the former Soviet Union and countries of the Warsaw Pact. This presentation will draw on materials from the Archive to shed light on major events of recent history, such as the last “superpower summits” (between Gorbachev and Reagan, and later Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush), the miraculous revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, Yeltsin's turn to authoritarianism in Russia in the 1990s together with the “market bolshevism” (Peter Reddaway's phrase) of economic reform, what Gorbachev and Yeltsin heard from Americans and Europeans about NATO expansion, nuclear follies from Semipalatinsk to Pervomaysk, and the existential threats to humanity (nuclear and climate) that make the U.S. and Russia “doomed to cooperate” (in Sig Hecker's phrase). About the Speakers: Tom Blanton is the director since 1992 of the independent non-governmental National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). His books have been awarded the 2011 Link-Kuehl Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, selection by Choice magazine as “Outstanding Academic Title 2017,” and the American Library Association's James Madison Award Citation in 1996, among other honors. The National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame elected him a member in 2006, and Tufts University presented him the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award in 2011 for “decades of demystifying and exposing the underworld of global diplomacy.” His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and the Washington Post, among many other journals; and he is series co-editor for the National Security Archive's online and book publications of more than a million pages of declassified U.S. government documents obtained through the Archive's more than 60,000 Freedom of Information Act requests. Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya is director of Russia programs (since 2001) at the National Security Archive, George Washington University. She earned her Ph.D. in political science and international affairs in 1998 from Emory University. She is the author, with Thomas Blanton, of the book The Last Superpower Summits: Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush, (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016), and editor of the book by the late Sergo Mikoyan, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Missiles of November (Stanford: Stanford University Press/Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2012). Dr. Savranskaya won the Link-Kuehl Prize in 2011 from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, recognizing the best documentary publication over the previous two years, for her book (with Thomas Blanton and Vladislav Zubok) “Masterpieces of History”: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe 1989 (Budapest/New York: Central European University Press, 2010). She is author and co-author of several publications on Gorbachev's foreign policy and nuclear learning and the end of the Cold War, and numerous electronic briefing books on these subjects. She serves as an adjunct professor teaching U.S.-Russian relations at the American University School of International Service in Washington D.C. (since 2001).

The National Security Archive at George Washington University is the largest independent non-government collection of declassified US documents and a goldmine of primary resources for scholars of US-Russia relations. Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, and Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya, a senior analyst and director of the Archive's Russia programs, share what they have uncovered about post-Cold War politics, the context behind Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the US government information classification system itself.

Gangster Death Cocspiracy NOT JFK RelatedThe Ochelli Effect 5-2-2024Carmine and Mike talked with Chuck about the death of a gangster named in many conspiracy narratives. Gilormo Giangana, better known in the literature, History, and Conspiracy Culture as Salvatore Mooney Giancana, MoMo, or plainly Sam Giancana. A Colorful Chicago-Based Gangster Murdered in June 1975,  the 1960s, saw him recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro.If he was killed to silence him, who was worried about the effect of his words? A logical, real-world exploration of the end of the man's life is covered by Carmine as Chuck and Mike add questions and commentary to this podcast.MICHAEL SWANSONBE IN THE KNOW:https://wallstreetwindow.comTWITTER:https://twitter.com/tradermike_1999FACEBOOK:https://www.facebook.com/tradermikeBOOKS BY MICHAEL SWANSON:The War State: The Cold War Origins Of The Military-Industrial Complex And The Power Elite, 1945-1963https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EWLGXHW/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0Why The Vietnam War?: Nuclear Bombs and Nation Building in Southeast Asia, 1945-1961 By Michael Swansonhttps://www.amazon.com/Why-Vietnam-War-Southeast-1945-1961-ebook/dp/B08FHBS17K.CARMINEhttps://tpaak.com/LINKS SPECIFIC TO THIS PODCASTC.A.A. Savastano, April 9, 2024, The Death and Times of a Gangster pt. 2, TPAAK Historical Research, tpaak.comhttps://www.tpaak.com/tpaak-blog/2024/4/9/the-death-and-times-of-a-gangster-pt-2       2. Central Intelligence Agency, n.d., Training File of PBSUCCESS, A Study of Assassination, The National Security Archive, Georgetown University, nsarchive2.gwu.eduhttps://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/docs/doc02.pdfBe the EFFECT support OCHELLIhttps://ochelli.com/donate/Membership Options To Support Ochelli.com Radio and get More RARE content Than Ever Before!!BASIC MONTHLY MEMBERSHIP$10. USD per MonthSupport Ochelli & in 2024Get a Monthly Email that deliversThe 1st Decade of The Ochelli EffectOver 5,000 Podcasts by 2025BASIC + SUPPORTER WALL$150. USD one time gets the sameAll the Monthly Benefits for 1 YearPLUSa spot on The Ochelli.com Supporters WallSIGN-UP @https://ochelli.com/membership-account/membership-levels/Ochelli Link Treehttps://linktr.ee/chuckochelli

Peter Kornbluh is a Senior Analyst who was has worked at the National Security Archive since April 1986. He currently directs the Archive's Cuba and Chile Documentation Projects. He was co-director of the Iran-Contra documentation project and director of the Archive's project on U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. From 1990-1999, he taught at Columbia University as an adjunct assistant professor of international and public affairs. He is the author of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana (UNC Press, 2014), a Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year, and The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, which the Los Angeles Times selected as a "best book" of the year. His articles have been published in Foreign Policy, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He has also worked on, and appeared in, numerous documentary films, including the Oscar-winning "Panama Deception," the History Channel's "Bay of Pigs Declassified," "The Trials of Henry Kissinger," and most recently the Netflix documentary, “Crack: Cocaine, Corruption, Conspiracy."https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/Brazil is going through challenging times. There's never been a more important moment to understand Brazil's politics, society, and culture. To go beyond the headlines, and to ask questions that aren't easy to answer. 'Brazil Unfiltered,' does just that. This podcast is hosted by James N. Green, Professor of Brazilian History and Culture at Brown University and the National Co-Coordinator of the U.S. Network for Democracy in Brazil.Brazil Unfiltered is part of the Democracy Observatory, supported by the Washington Brazil Office. This podcast is edited and produced by Camilo Rocha in São Paulo.https://www.braziloffice.org/en/observatory#activities

Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft Executive Vice President Trita Parsi: Biden Pays High Price for Embrace of Israel's Deadly Gaza AttackPalestinian engineer and social justice activist Salma Abu Ayyash: Indigenous Activists Embrace Palestinian Struggle for Human Rights & Self-DeterminationPulitzer Prize-winning author and Yale history professor Greg Grandin and National Security Archive's Peter Kornbluh: The Dark, Violent Legacy of Henry KissingerBob Nixon's Under-reported News Summary• Saudi Arabia is working to drive up oil demand in Africa• In Michigan's Macomb County, uncertainty over ‘Bidenomics'• How the AR-15 became America's best selling rifleVisit our website at BTLonline.org for more information, in-depth interviews, related links, transcripts and subscribe to our BTL Weekly Summary and/or podcasts. New episodes every Wednesday at 12 noon ET, website updated Wednesdays after 4 p.m. ETProduced by Squeaky Wheel Productions: Scott Harris, Melinda Tuhus, Bob Nixon, Anna Manzo, Susan Bramhall, Jeff Yates and Mary Hunt. Theme music by Richard Hill and Mikata.

Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft Executive Vice President Trita Parsi: Biden Pays High Price for Embrace of Israel's Deadly Gaza AttackPalestinian engineer and social justice activist Salma Abu Ayyash: Indigenous Activists Embrace Palestinian Struggle for Human Rights & Self-DeterminationPulitzer Prize-winning author and Yale history professor Greg Grandin and National Security Archive's Peter Kornbluh: The Dark, Violent Legacy of Henry KissingerBob Nixon's Under-reported News Summary• Saudi Arabia is working to drive up oil demand in Africa• In Michigan's Macomb County, uncertainty over ‘Bidenomics'• How the AR-15 became America's best selling rifleVisit our website at BTLonline.org for more information, in-depth interviews, related links and transcripts and to sign up for our BTL Weekly Summary. New episodes every Wednesday at 12 noon ET, website updated Wednesdays after 4 p.m. ETProduced by Squeaky Wheel Productions: Scott Harris, Melinda Tuhus, Bob Nixon, Anna Manzo, Susan Bramhall, Jeff Yates and Mary Hunt. Theme music by Richard Hill and Mikata.

In this episode, Natalia, Neil, and Niki discuss Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley.  Support Past Present on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pastpresentpodcast Here are some links and references mentioned during this week's show:   ·      Nikki Haley recently secured the backing of the wealthy Koch Brothers, bringing more attention to her presidential run. Natalia referred to this multi-part POLITICO series on Haley's career. Neil drew on this NPR piece, and Niki on this article from The Intercept.   In our regular closing feature, What's Making History: ·      Natalia shared about her most recent MSNBC column, “How Feminists Have Failed Israeli Victims of Sexual Violence.” ·      Neil recommended Sopan Deb's New York Times article, “Nom Nom Nom. What's the Deal With Cookie Monster's Cookies?” ·      Niki discussed the National Security Archive's “Henry Kissinger: The Declassified Obituary.”  

National Security Archive v. CIA

Author of three books on CIA operations, Valentine's research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA's elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam.While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA's relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and John Jay College.This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA's ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA's activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States.A common theme is the CIA's ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability.Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.Buy The Book https://amzn.to/47c6amEThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/1198501/advertisement

61 years ago this month, in October 1962, Americans anxiously heard news for almost two weeks straight about the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, less than 100 miles away from the U.S. Nuclear War was possible, to some imminent. In this encore episode from 2022, we offer a brief history of the Cuban Missile Crisis and, more importantly, a remembrance and reconsideration of the events of October and JFK actions throughout the crisis. JFK has been praised for his firm resolve, courage, and strength in handling the crisis but the reality is that he was provocative and almost caused a war against Russia. In this episode we'll start by giving a background on JFK's aggression toward Cuba, then we'll offer a brief narrative of the crisis, and finally we'll discuss how Kennedy continued his subversion against Castro's government after the Missile Crisis. JFK was not heroic. His recklessness and need for credibility almost caused a nuclear exchange. The media doesn't tell you this story. Green and Red does . . . ---------------------------------- Outro- "We'll Meet Again" By Vera Lynn Links// The best resource for the Missile Crisis is the National Security Archive, at https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/. It's recently put out a series of briefing books with documents on the crisis. Follow Green and Red// **G&R Linktree: https://linktr.ee/greenandredpodcast **https://greenandredpodcast.org/ Support the Green and Red Podcast// **Become a Patron at / greenredpodcast **Or make a one time donation here: https://bit.ly/DonateGandR This is a Green and Red Podcast (@PodcastGreenRed) production. Produced by Bob (@bobbuzzanco) and Scott (@sparki1969). “Green and Red Blues" by Moody. Editing by Isaac.

Nestor Castillo lays out the recent racist media tropes around Honduras, and why they're especially dangerous for immigrants. Nestor's El Tecolote column, "Dear SF Chronicle: No, Hondurans aren't responsible for the City's fentanyl crisis": eltecolote.org/content/en/dear-sf-chronicle-no-hondurans-arent-responsible-for-the-citys-fentanyl-crisis/ Nestor on Twitter: twitter.com/ProfeNessC "The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations" (George Washington University's National Security Archive): nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/index.html "Defensores exigen investigación por crimen de ambientalista del Valle de Siria" (Defensores En Linea): defensoresenlinea.com/defensores-exigen-investigacion-por-crimen-de-ambientalista-del-valle-de-siria/ | Google translation: www-defensoresenlinea-com.translate.goog/defensores-exigen-investigacion-por-crimen-de-ambientalista-del-valle-de-siria/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp "Honduras Defense Official and U.S. Drug War Ally Tied to Narco-Trafficker, Notorious Mercenary Firm" (Jared Olson and John Washington at The Intercept): theintercept.com/2023/08/25/honduras-military-elias-melgar/ "Honduran Ex-President Extradited to U.S. to Face Narcotrafficking Charges" (Democracy Now): democracynow.org/2022/4/22/headlines/honduran_ex_president_extradited_to_us_to_face_narcotrafficking_charges "Gold giant faces Honduras inquiry into alleged heavy metal pollution" (Rory Carroll, The Guardian): theguardian.com/environment/2009/dec/31/goldcorp-honduras-pollution-allegations More Sad Francisco: sadfrancis.co

Summary Steve James (IMDb) joins Andrew (Twitter; LinkedIn) to discuss his new film, A Compassionate Spy. 18-year-old Ted Hall was the youngest physicist working on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos.  What You'll Learn Intelligence Soviet-American relations during WWII The Manhattan Project and the development of the Atomic Bomb  Motivations for atomic espionage The life and story of Theodore Hall Reflections With great power … comes great responsibility State allegiance vs. personal conscience And much, much more  And… Steve James has been nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Documentary Feature in 2018 for Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, and Best Film Editing in 1995 for Hoop Dreams. Steve is the first Oscar nominee to join us on SpyCast since Robert de Niro sat down with our first host Peter Earnest in 2009!  Quotes of the Week “Ted was young and naive in some ways, but his reasons for what he did were not grounded in fantasy … Whether you support what he did or not, I don't know that the U. S. having the bomb all to itself would have been a great thing, given that we are the only nation to have actually dropped the bomb on anyone, period.” – Steve James. Resources  SURFACE SKIM *Headline Resource*  A Compassionate Spy, Steve James, Magnolia Pictures (2022) Available in select theaters and streaming on August 4th *SpyCasts* Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East vs. West with Calder Walton (2023) St. Ermin's Hotel, London – The History of a Legendary Spy Site with Stephen Duffy (2023) Becoming a Russian Intelligence Officer with Janosh Neumann (2022) The Nuclear Doomsday Machine with Sean Maloney on Cold War Emergency Plans (2022) *Beginner Resources* What Was the Manhattan Project?, T. Metcalfe, Scientific American (2023) [Article] U.S.-Russia Nuclear Arms Control (1949-2021), Council on Foreign Relations (n.d.) [Timeline] Theodore Hall: American-born physicist and spy, Encyclopaedia Britannica (n.d.) [Encyclopedia entry] DEEPER DIVE Books Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away, A. Hagedorn (Simon & Schuster, 2021) The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians, C. C. Kelly (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2020)  Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs, N. T. Greenspan (Penguin Books, 2020) Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy, J. Albright & M. Kunstel (Times Books, 1997)  Video Modern Marvels: The Manhattan Project, The History Channel, YouTube (2020)  Science Behind the Atom Bomb, Nuclear Museum, Atomic Heritage Foundation (2013) Primary Sources  Report by the Ad Hoc Committee to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Evaluation of Effect on Soviet War Effort Resulting from the Strategic Air Offensive,” National Security Archive (1949) The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon, Harry Truman Presidential Library (1947) A Petition to the President of the United States from Los Alamos Scientists, Harry Truman Presidential Library (1945)  Albert Einstein to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman Presidential Library (1945) Decision to Maintain Contact with Theodore Hall, National Security Agency (1944) *Wildcard Resource* The development of nuclear weapons not only had a massive impact on history and science – It also inspired new architectural designs and art. Read this Architectural Digest article on the Atomic Age Design and why our brains still register it as “futuristic” 75 years later! 

Ein Kommentar von Wolfgang Effenberger. Fünf Tage nach dem vermeintlichen Putsch des russischen Söldnerchefs Prigoschin erschien am 28. Juni 2023 in "Foreign Affairs" - der Hauspostille des "Council of Foreign Relations" - der Artikel "Russia's New Time of Troubles. It's Not 1917 in Moscow - It's 1604" (Russlands neue Zeit der Wirren. Es ist nicht 1917 - es ist 1604). Autor dieses Artikels ist der in Moskau geborene Historiker Wladislaw Martinowitsch Subok, der nunmehr als Professor für internationale Geschichte an der London School of Economics and Political Science lehrt.Der an der Moskauer Lomonossow-Universität ausgebildete Subok (geb. 1958) gilt im Westen als Experte für den Kalten Krieg, die Sowjetunion, den Stalinismus und die Geistesgeschichte Russlands im 20. Jahrhundert. Nach Abschluss seines Doktoratsstudiums im Jahr 1985 war Subok von 1994 bis 2001 Inhaber eines Forschungsstipendiums („Fellow“) am National Security Archive der George Washington University. Nach Lehraufträgen am Amherst College, der Stanford University und an sonstigen Bildungsstätten in den USA wurde er 2004 ordentlicher Professor an der Temple University in Philadelphia. Heute ist er Professor für Internationale Geschichte an der Londoner "School of Economics and Political Science".Für Subok besteht kein Zweifel daran, dass die Prigoschin-Affäre die Lage in Russland unwiderruflich verändert hat, wobei vieles in Bezug auf den Aufstand und seine Folgen ungewiss bleibt. Klar ist jedoch für Subok,„…dass Putin und seine Kritiker und Gegner mit dem Verweis auf das Jahr 1917 die falsche historische Analogie gewählt haben. Was sich derzeit in Russland abspielt, hat weniger Ähnlichkeit mit den Ereignissen von 1917 als mit denen einer früheren Epoche: der sogenannten Zeit der Unruhen oder Smuta, die von 1604 bis 1613 dauerte“(1)...... hier weiterlesen: https://apolut.net/russland-ueber-400-jahre-angriffe-aus-dem-westen-von-wolfgang-effenberger+++Apolut ist auch als kostenlose App für Android- und iOS-Geräte verfügbar! Über unsere Homepage kommen Sie zu den Stores von Apple und Huawei. Hier der Link: https://apolut.net/app/Die apolut-App steht auch zum Download (als sogenannte Standalone- oder APK-App) auf unserer Homepage zur Verfügung. Mit diesem Link können Sie die App auf Ihr Smartphone herunterladen: https://apolut.net/apolut_app.apk+++Abonnieren Sie jetzt den apolut-Newsletter: https://apolut.net/newsletter/+++Ihnen gefällt unser Programm? Informationen zu Unterstützungsmöglichkeiten finden Sie hier: https://apolut.net/unterstuetzen/+++Unterstützung für apolut kann auch als Kleidung getragen werden! Hier der Link zu unserem Fan-Shop: https://harlekinshop.com/pages/apolut+++Website und Social Media:Website: https://apolut.netOdysee: https://odysee.com/@apolut:aRumble: https://rumble.com/ApolutTwitter: https://twitter.com/apolut_netInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/apolut_net/Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/apolut_netTelegram: https://t.me/s/apolutFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/apolut/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ein Kommentar von Wolfgang Effenberger. Fünf Tage nach dem vermeintlichen Putsch des russischen Söldnerchefs Prigoschin erschien am 28. Juni 2023 in "Foreign Affairs" - der Hauspostille des "Council of Foreign Relations" - der Artikel "Russia's New Time of Troubles. It's Not 1917 in Moscow - It's 1604" (Russlands neue Zeit der Wirren. Es ist nicht 1917 - es ist 1604). Autor dieses Artikels ist der in Moskau geborene Historiker Wladislaw Martinowitsch Subok, der nunmehr als Professor für internationale Geschichte an der London School of Economics and Political Science lehrt.Der an der Moskauer Lomonossow-Universität ausgebildete Subok (geb. 1958) gilt im Westen als Experte für den Kalten Krieg, die Sowjetunion, den Stalinismus und die Geistesgeschichte Russlands im 20. Jahrhundert. Nach Abschluss seines Doktoratsstudiums im Jahr 1985 war Subok von 1994 bis 2001 Inhaber eines Forschungsstipendiums („Fellow“) am National Security Archive der George Washington University. Nach Lehraufträgen am Amherst College, der Stanford University und an sonstigen Bildungsstätten in den USA wurde er 2004 ordentlicher Professor an der Temple University in Philadelphia. Heute ist er Professor für Internationale Geschichte an der Londoner "School of Economics and Political Science".Für Subok besteht kein Zweifel daran, dass die Prigoschin-Affäre die Lage in Russland unwiderruflich verändert hat, wobei vieles in Bezug auf den Aufstand und seine Folgen ungewiss bleibt. Klar ist jedoch für Subok,„…dass Putin und seine Kritiker und Gegner mit dem Verweis auf das Jahr 1917 die falsche historische Analogie gewählt haben. Was sich derzeit in Russland abspielt, hat weniger Ähnlichkeit mit den Ereignissen von 1917 als mit denen einer früheren Epoche: der sogenannten Zeit der Unruhen oder Smuta, die von 1604 bis 1613 dauerte“(1)...... hier weiterlesen: https://apolut.net/russland-ueber-400-jahre-angriffe-aus-dem-westen-von-wolfgang-effenberger+++Apolut ist auch als kostenlose App für Android- und iOS-Geräte verfügbar! Über unsere Homepage kommen Sie zu den Stores von Apple und Huawei. Hier der Link: https://apolut.net/app/Die apolut-App steht auch zum Download (als sogenannte Standalone- oder APK-App) auf unserer Homepage zur Verfügung. Mit diesem Link können Sie die App auf Ihr Smartphone herunterladen: https://apolut.net/apolut_app.apk+++Abonnieren Sie jetzt den apolut-Newsletter: https://apolut.net/newsletter/+++Ihnen gefällt unser Programm? Informationen zu Unterstützungsmöglichkeiten finden Sie hier: https://apolut.net/unterstuetzen/+++Unterstützung für apolut kann auch als Kleidung getragen werden! Hier der Link zu unserem Fan-Shop: https://harlekinshop.com/pages/apolut+++Website und Social Media:Website: https://apolut.netOdysee: https://odysee.com/@apolut:aRumble: https://rumble.com/ApolutTwitter: https://twitter.com/apolut_netInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/apolut_net/Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/apolut_netTelegram: https://t.me/s/apolutFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/apolut/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Summary  This week on SpyCast, Andrew (Twitter; LinkedIn) is joined by former DPRK Agent Kim, Hyun Woo. This is the first time Dr. Kim has stepped out from the shadows to speak.  *EXTENDED SHOW NOTES & FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE* What You'll Learn  Intelligence  The organizational structure of North Korean intelligence The journey of a defector  The training and skills needed to be a DPRK agent North Korean intelligence priorities in the East Reflections  Bravery and courage in the face of danger State conformity vs. Personal convictions  And much, much more …    Quote of the Week  “When I envision reunification, I am envisioning reunified Korea under a liberal democratic system as opposed to say, unified Korea under a more North Korean system – That I oppose. My desire is that in a unified Korea, even North Korean populous or population living in northern parts of the Korean Peninsula will be guaranteed fundamental, standard rights as humans.” – Agent Kim, Hyun Woo. Resources   SURFACE SKIM  *SpyCasts*  Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East vs. West with Calder Walton (2023) The Counterintelligence Chief with FBI Assistant Director Alan Kohler (2023) The Counterterrorism and Counter WMD Strategist with Dexter Ingram (2022) Becoming a Russian Intelligence Officer with Janosh Neumann (2022) *Beginner Resources*  The Current Situation in North Korea, United States Institute for Peace (2022) [Fact sheet] A Brief History of North Korea in 3 Minutes, G. Willson, New York Magazine (2017) [3 min. video] *EXTENDED SHOW NOTES & FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE* DEEPER DIVE  Books  Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights, J. H. Pak (Ballantine Books, 2020)  The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future, V. Cha (Ecco, 2018) In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom, Y. Park (Penguin Books, 2015)  Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History, B. Cumings (W.W. Norton, 2005)  Primary Sources   Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un Delivers Speech at Military Parade, KCNA Watch (2020) Key Issue Paper for Secretary of State-designate Madeleine Albright, Subject: Korean Peninsula Issues, National Security Archive (1994) China: Potential Response to Korean Contingencies, DIA Special Report, National Security Archive (1994) DPRK: Slow-Motion Succession: the Secretary's Morning Intelligence Summary, National Security Archive (1994) Protocol for the Phased Withdrawal of Troops (First Draft), Wilson Center (1954) Mutual Defense Treaty Between the United States and the Republic of Korea, US Forces Korea (1953)  Statement by President Syngman Rhee, Wilson Center (1953) Congratulatory Message [from Mao Zedong] to the Chinese People's Volunteer Army, Wilson Center (1953) Telegram from Stalin to Mao Zedong, Wilson Center (1952) Cable Nos. 408-410, Shtykov to Vyshinsky, Wilson Center (1950)  Statement by the President, Truman on Korea, Wilson Center (1950) *Wildcard Resource*  Inspired by Dr. Kim's love for Sherlock Holmes: His Last Bow is the last chronological short story installment of the Sherlock Holmes series. In this story, Sherlock tracks down a German spy during the First World War! *EXTENDED SHOW NOTES & FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE*

patreon.com/thenickbryantpodcast for the full episode and 2 extra episodes a month. Douglas Valentine is an award-winning author of nine books. His research materials have been archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and John Jay College. His latest book, Pisces Moon, written in the first person, documents his personal odyssey into investigating CIA malfeasance criminality. Buy Pisces Moon today: https://tinyurl.com/27s5d28t https://www.douglasvalentine.com/ nickbryantnyc.com epsteinjustice.com

This week we're traveling back to 1970s Iran with Persepolis! Join us as we learn about Qajar princes, the role of the CIA in the Shah's regime, banned music in 1970s Iran, the Iran-Iraq War, and more! Sources: Afshar v. Department of State (1983). Case text available at https://casetext.com/case/afshar-v-department-of-state Richard T. Sale, "SAVAK: A Feared and Pervasive Force," Washington Post, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/05/09/savak-a-feared-and-pervasive-force/ad609959-d47b-4b7f-8c8d-b388116df90c/ AJ Langguth, "Torture's Teachers," New York Times, June 11 1979, available at https://www.nytimes.com/1979/06/11/archives/tortures-teachers.html "CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup," The National Security Archive, available at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/ Qajar portraits https://asia.si.edu/exhibition/exhibition-highlights/  Miriam Berger, "The divisive legacy of Iran's royal family," The Washington Post (16 January 2020),  https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/01/16/divisive-legacy-irans-royal-family/ Yann Richard, Iran: A Social and Political History since the Qajars (Cambridge University Press, 2019).  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/17/british-spys-account-sheds-light-on-role-in-1953-iranian-coup Eskandari, Mohammad. “Pierre Razoux , The Iran–Iraq War, Trans. Nicholas Elliot (London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015). Pp. 640. $39.99 Cloth. ISBN: 9780674088634.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49, no. 1 (2017): 202–205. Heather Rastovac, "Contending with Censorship: The Underground Music Scene in Urban Iran," Intersections 10, 2 (2009) RT: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/persepolis  Wiki: Kristin Hohenadel, "An Animated Adventure, Drawn From Life," New York Times (21 Jan 2007) https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/movies/21hohe.html  Roger Ebert's review (2008); https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/persepolis-2008  Ranj Alaaldin, "How the Iran-Iraq war will shape the region for decades to come," The Brookings Institute (9 October 2020), https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/10/09/how-the-iran-iraq-war-will-shape-the-region-for-decades-to-come/   Bruce Riedel, "Lessons from America's First War with Iran," The Brookings Institute (22 May 2013), https://www.brookings.edu/articles/lessons-from-americas-first-war-with-iran/ 

Looking back on the Iraq war after 20 years (and 1 month); lingering uncertainty about the reasons for the US invasion; the role (or lack thereof) of groupthink in that decision; the intelligence community's judgment that Iraq had WMD and was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program; why the intelligence community got it wrong; lessons learned for intelligence analysis; the long-term repercussions of the Iraq war; and Marcus puts his cards on the tableAsk a question or leave a comment at cheaptalkpod@gmail.com or www.speakpipe.com/cheaptalk.Further reading:Max Fisher. 2023. “20 Years On, a Questions Lingers About Iraq: Why Did the U.S. Invade?” The New York Times. US Director of Central Intelligence. 2002. “Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction.” National Intelligence Estimate. National Security Archive. “War With Iraq Is Not In America's National Interest.” 2002. The New York Times. “Cobblestone treadmill patent would eliminate running on pesky smooth surface.” 2009. TechCrunch.See all Cheap Talk episodes

Summary This week's episode is the result of a collaboration with The Sound, a recent limited series podcast exploring the so-called Havana Syndrome. The guests are host and investigative journalist Nicky Woolf (Twitter), former senior CIA operations officer and sufferer Marc Polymeropoulos (Twitter), and attorney and advocate Mark Zaid (Twitter). What You'll Learn Intelligence What Havana Syndrome is Who it is affecting Theories to explain it The role of intelligence organizations Reflections The unending search for truth  Humanity in the intelligence field  Quotes of the Week "There's a betrayal I felt when the CIA didn't give me the medical attention that I needed. You know, if you're not feeling well and an employee comes to you, send 'em to the doctor. And they weren't able to do that. And to me, that's just a leadership fail for the ages." – Marc Polymeropoulos. Resources  *SpyCasts* The Past 75 Years: A History of the CIA with Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (2022) Dealing with Russia with Jim Olson (2022) One of the CIA's Most Decorated Field Officers with Marc Polymeropoulos (2021) NatSec and the Law with Mark Zaid (2018) *Beginner Resources* Havana Syndrome: What We Know, B. Tau and W. P. Strobel, The Wall Street Journal (2023) [Short article] What is the “Havana Syndrome?”, Brut America, YouTube (2022) [3 min. video] What is Havana Syndrome?, B. Cuffari, News Medical (2022)  Video Who or What is Behind Havana Syndrome?, Al Jazeera, YouTube (2022) Early Victims of ‘Havana Syndrome' Speak Out About Ongoing Health Struggles, NBC News, YouTube (2021) Primary Sources  Updated Assessment of Anomalous Health Incidents, National Intelligence Council (2023) Anomalous health Incidents: Analysis of Potential Causal Mechanisms, IC Experts Panel (2022) Senate Hearing on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, U.S. Senate (1978) Kissinger Telephone Conversation with Ambassador Dobrynin, National Security Archive (1975) Samuel Koslov Memorandum to the State Department, “Biomedical Phenomena,” National Security Archive (1965) *Wildcard Resource* Havana Syndrome is an example of a toponymic term in the medical field – A name that comes from a geographic place. For more on medical etymology, check out this article that shares the backstory of the name of 7 well-known conditions. 

60 years ago this month, in October 1962, Americans anxiously heard news for almost two weeks straight about the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, less than 100 miles away from the U.S. Nuclear War was possible, to some imminent. In this episode we offer a brief history of the Cuban Missile Crisis and, more importantly, a remembrance and reconsideration of the events of October and JFK actions throughout the crisis. JFK has been praised for his firm resolve, courage, and strength in handling the crisis but the reality is that he was provocative and almost caused a war against Russia. In this episode we'll start by giving a background on JFK's aggression toward Cuba, then we'll offer a brief narrative of the crisis, and finally we'll discuss how Kennedy continued his subversion against Castro's government after the Missile Crisis. JFK was not heroic. His recklessness and need for credibility almost caused a nuclear exchange. The media doesn't tell you this story. Green and Red does . . . ------------------------------- Outro- "We'll Meet Again" By Vera Lynn Links The best resource for the Missile Crisis is the National Security Archive, at https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/ It's recently put out a series of briefing books with documents on the crisis. Follow Green and Red// G&R Linktree: https://linktr.ee/greenandredpodcast https://greenandredpodcast.org/ NEW LINK! Join our Discord community: https://discord.gg/MmvSzjRp Support the Green and Red Podcast// Become a Patron at https://www.patreon.com/greenredpodcast Or make a one time donation here: https://bit.ly/DonateGandR **Our friends with Certain Days now have their 2023 calendar available and we bought ten copies. With a $25 (or more) donation to Green and Red, we'll mail you one! Just contact us at greenredpodcast@gmail.com This is a Green and Red Podcast (@PodcastGreenRed) production. Produced by Bob (@bobbuzzanco) and Scott (@sparki1969). “Green and Red Blues" by Moody. Editing by Isaac.

Photo: No known restrictions on publication. @Batchelorshow 2/2: #Cuba: #US: #USSR: Adlai Stevenson's profound recommendation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Peter Kornbluh, Cuba Documentation Project, National Security Archive. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/16/cuban-missile-crisis-adlai-stevenson-russia-ukraine-nuclear-war-lessons/

Photo: No known restrictions on publication. @Batchelorshow 1/2: #Cuba: #US: #USSR: Adlai Stevenson's profound recommendation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Peter Kornbluh, Cuba Documentation Project, National Security Archive https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/16/cuban-missile-crisis-adlai-stevenson-russia-ukraine-nuclear-war-lessons/

In this video I dive into the history of American involvement in Latin American politics and its effect on immigration to the U.S. #usa #uspolitics #latinamerica #history References Ali, Malik. n.d. “Intervention in Nicaragua.” Teaching American History. Accessed September 11, 2022. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/intervention-in-nicaragua/. Bensaid, Adam. 2019. “The secret history of US interventions in Latin America.” TRT World. https://www.trtworld.com/americas/the-secret-history-of-us-interventions-in-latin-america-23586. Campbell, Duncan. 2003. “Kissinger approved Argentinian 'dirty war' | World news.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/06/argentina.usa. Doyle, Kate, and Carlos Osorio. n.d. “U.S. POLICY IN GUATEMALA, 1966-1996.” The National Security Archive. Accessed September 11, 2022. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB11/docs/. Feierstein, Daniel, Marcia Esparza, and Henry R. Huttenbach, eds. 2010. State Violence and Genocide in Latin America: The Cold War Years. N.p.: Routledge. “Fulgencio Batista (1901-1973) | American Experience | Official Site.” n.d. PBS. Accessed September 11, 2022. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/castro-fulgencio-batista-1901-1973/. Gonzalez, Juan. 2011. Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. N.p.: Penguin Publishing Group. Iber, Patrick J. 2013. ““Who Will Impose Democracy?”: Sacha Volman and the Contradictions of CIA Support for the Anticommunist Left in Latin America.” Diplomatic History 37, no. 5 (April): 995-1028. https://academic.oup.com/dh/article-abstract/37/5/995/357705?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false. Osorio, Carlos. 2013. “OPERATION CONDOR ON TRIAL: LEGAL PROCEEDINGS ON LATIN AMERICAN RENDITION AND ASSASSINATION PROGRAM OPEN IN BUENOS AIRES.” The National Security Archive. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB416/. Skidmore, Thomas E. 1989. The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964-1985. N.p.: Oxford University Press. Tienda, Mara, and Susana Sanchez. 2013. “Latin American Immigration to the United States.” National Library Medicine 142, no. 3 (July): 48-64. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4638184/

Eight months after Reveal's three-part series about the disappearance of 43 Mexican college students in 2014, the government's investigation is in high gear. But parents of the missing still don't have the answers they want. There have been arrests and indictments of high-profile members of the military, and even the country's former attorney general. But no one has been convicted, and the remains of only a handful of students have been identified.  In the first segment, we relive the night of the attack on the students, and chronicle the previous government's flawed investigation into the crime. We meet independent investigators who succeeded in getting close to the truth, then fled the country for their safety.  Then we explore how the election of a new Mexican government led to a new investigation led by Omag Gomez Trejo, a young lawyer who pledged to expose the truth about the crime.  We end with a conversation with Reveal's Anayansi Diaz Cortes and Kate Doyle, from the National Security Archive. They bring us up to date on what's happened with the investigation since we aired our three-part series, After Ayotzinapa.  Support Reveal's journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/weekly Connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

It has been over seven years since 43 students from the  Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College in Guerrero, Mexico, were taken by armed men in the middle of the night. They were never seen again. Their disappearance sparked mass protests, as the 43 became symbols of Mexico's unchecked human rights abuses. In recent decades, tens of thousands of people have gone missing in Mexico, and almost no one has been held accountable. The culture of impunity is so ingrained that families often don't go to police for help, believing they're either corrupt or too afraid to investigate. In a three-part investigation of the Ayotzinapa case, Reveal's Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Kate Doyle from the National Security Archive take us inside the investigation into the attack on the students. They have help from Omar Gómez Trejo – the man the Mexican president tapped to prosecute the crime. For more than a year, he kept audio diaries and had regular conversations with Diaz-Cortes and Doyle, giving them insight into a massive coverup by the previous Mexican administration and efforts by current investigators to piece together the details of the attack and bring to justice those responsible.

Reveal's Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and the National Security Archive's Kate Doyle talk to Al Letson about new proof showing who was involved in the disappearance of 43 Mexican college students in 2014.

Bonus Episode Two: "Henry Kissinger's Radiation Treatment," features an interview with Peter Kornbluh, of the National Security Archive who describes the years of Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union over reports that the Russians were bombarding the U.S. Embassy in Cuba. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

White House officials are telling CNN they have “deep concern” about the documents found at former President Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort. Some documents were found in a basement-level storage facility at Trump's Florida home and officials worry the information they contain could put the sources and methods of the U.S. intelligence community at risk. Tom Blanton is the director at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. He joins AC360 to discuss how dangerous it was to have these documents in a storeroom without a padlock on it. Plus, with midterm elections around the corner, vulnerable Republicans are being told to not be distracted by the former President while on the campaign trail with one saying “I don't say his name, ever.” CNN Senior Political Commentator David Axelrod tells Anderson Cooper whether he thinks that strategy will work for these candidates in November. To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy

In this episode, we found ourselves in the danger zone watching a surprise nuclear weapon plot in the fun movie Top Gun: Maverick (2022) where Tom Cruise needs to teach a crew of hot shot misfits to airstrike a uranium enrichment facility on the Death Star (kind of). Why did Top Gun sequel feel the need to raise the nuclear stakes in the plot? Any real life influence on the story related to airstrikes against similar nuclear facilities? Will this movie series ever run out of teambuilding activities to play on the beach sand? Tim Westmyer (@NuclearPodcast) and co-host/aviation guru Gabe answer these questions and more. Before we request a tower flyby, we recommend: -Hot Shots! (1991 parody of Top Gun) -Amb. Wendy Sherman, Not for the Faint of Heart: Lessons in Courage, Power, and Persistence, 2018 -“Israel Admits Striking Suspected Syrian Nuclear Reactor in 2007,” BBC, Mach 21, 2018 -“Israeli Attack on Iraq's Osirak 1981: Setback or Impetus for Nuclear Weapons,” National Security Archive, June 7, 2021 -“Top Gun – The Need for Speed,” LockheadMartin.com -“Tom Cruise Terrifies James in ‘Top Gun' Fighter Jet!,” The Late Night Show with James Corden channel on YouTube, March 24, 2022 -“Actual TOPGUN, Dave Berke, Reacts to "TOPGUN: Maverick" with Jocko Willink,” Jocko Podcast channel on YouTube, June 3, 2022 Check out our website, SuperCriticalPodcast.com, for more resources and related items. We aim to have at least one new episode every month. Let us know what you think about the podcast and any ideas you may have about future episodes and guests by reaching out at on Twitter @NuclearPodcast, GooglePlay, Spotify, SoundCloud, TuneIn, Stitcher Radio, Facebook, SuperCriticalPodcast@gmail.com, and YouTube. Enjoy!

Family Jewels" is the name of a set of reports detailing illegal, inappropriate and otherwise sensitive activities conducted by the United States Central Intelligence Agency from 1959 to 1973 William Colby the CIA director who received the reports dubbed them the "skeletons in the CIA's closet".Most of the documents were released on June 25, 2007 after more than three decades of secrecy.The non-governmental National Security Archive filed a request for the documents under the Freedom of Information Act 15 years before their release.

Michael J. Abramowitz is president of Freedom House. Before joining Freedom House in February 2017, he was director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Levine Institute for Holocaust Education. He led the museum's genocide prevention efforts and later oversaw its public education programs.He was previously National Editor and then White House correspondent for the Washington Post. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former fellow at the German Marshall Fund and the Hoover Institution. A graduate of Harvard College, he is also a board member of the National Security Archive.On this episode of Outside In Michael talks with Jon about why democracy is important, avoiding complacency, the need for tech transparency and sober dialogue.

If you've ever been faced with an important decision when time was scarce, information was incomplete, or tempers were running high, you'll know that it's difficult to make a good choice. Now imagine a decision that has implications for the entire world, and the people facing that decision are 500 feet below the surface of the ocean in a nuclear-armed diesel submarine that is overheating and running out of power.In this episode of Choiceology with Katy Milkman, we look at decisions under pressure and how our thinking process is affected by stress.We begin in the Sargasso Sea, just off the coast of Florida, in October 1962. It's the height of the Cold War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis is bringing the U.S. and the Soviet Union closer to open conflict. John F. Kennedy has ordered a naval "quarantine" around Cuba after the discovery of Soviet missile installations there, and the Soviets have responded by sending a squadron of submarines to the area. Those submarines were ill-equipped for the warm waters around Cuba, and the squadron had little to no contact with Moscow. And they were being hunted by the American navy. It was a recipe for disaster.Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya tells the story of two of the Russian submariners in the fleet, one who demonstrates the dangers of making decisions under extreme pressure and the other who proves why it's best when cooler heads prevail.Dr. Savranskaya is director of Russian programs at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. You'll also hear an American perspective on this dangerous military interaction from a man who was there. Gary Slaughter served as a communications officer on the USS Cony during the Cuban Missile Crisis and is the author of Sea Stories: A Memoir of a Naval Officer.Next, Dr. Modupe Akinola joins Katy to discuss the mechanics of decision-making under stress. You'll hear how your stress system prepares you to act but also suppresses your ability to think clearly. Dr. Akinola offers ideas on how to prepare yourself for decisions and minimize the negative effects of stress in her paper "Thriving Under Pressure."Modupe Akinola is an associate professor of management at Columbia Business School, director at the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership & Ethics, and host of the TED Business podcast.Finally, Katy presents useful advice on being decision-ready and avoiding the hot-headed choice.Choiceology is an original podcast from Charles Schwab. For more on the series, visit schwab.com/podcast.If you enjoy the show, please leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating or review on Apple Podcasts. Important Disclosures All expressions of opinion are subject to change without notice in reaction to shifting market conditions.The comments, views, and opinions expressed in the presentation are those of the speakers and do not necessarily represent the views of Charles Schwab. Examples provided are for illustrative purposes only and not intended to be reflective of results you can expect to achieve.Investing involves risk, including loss of principal.The book How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. (CS&Co.). Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. (CS&Co.) has not reviewed the book and makes no representations about its content.Apple Podcasts and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.Google Podcasts and the Google Podcasts logo are trademarks of Google LLC.Spotify and the Spotify logo are registered trademarks of Spotify AB.(0522-2U4C)

Support the show and receive bonus episodes by becoming a Patreon producer over at: www.themidnighttrainpodcast.com  Archives of terror Archivos del Terror were found on december 22, 1992 by a lawyer and human rights activist, strange how those two titles are in the same sentence, Dr. Martín Almada, and Judge José Agustín Fernández. Found in a police station in the suburbs of Paraguay known as Asunción.   Fernandez was looking for files on a former prisoner. Instead, stumbled across an archive describing the fates of thousands of Latin Americans who had been secretly kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay with the help of our friendly neighborhood CIA. Known as Operation Condor.   “Operation Condor was a U.S. backed campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of opponents.”   Let's go back a ways toward the beginning. One day, a young guy, wanted to fuck up the world and created the CIA. JK… but not really.   So we go back to 1968 where General Robert W. Porter said that "in order to facilitate the coordinated employment of internal security forces within and among Latin American countries, we are ... endeavoring to foster inter-service and regional cooperation by assisting in the organization of integrated command and control centers; the establishment of common operating procedures; and the conduct of joint and combined training exercises."   According to former secret CIA documents from 1976, plans were developed among international security officials at the US Army School of the Americas and the Conference of American Armies in the 1960s and early 1970s to deal with perceived threats in South America from political dissidents, according to American historian J. Patrice McSherry. "In early 1974, security officials from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia convened in Buenos Aires to prepare synchronized attacks against subversive targets," according to a declassified CIA memo dated June 23, 1976.   Following a series of military-led coups d'états, particularly in the 1970s, the program was established: General Alfredo Stroessner took control of Paraguay in 1954 General Francisco Morales-Bermúdez takes control of Peru after a successful coup in 1975 The Brazilian military overthrew the president João Goulart in 1964 General Hugo Banzer took power in Bolivia in 1971 through a series of coups A military dictatorship seized power in Uruguay on 27 June 1973 Chilean armed forces commanded by General Augusto Pinochet bombed the presidential palace in Chile on 11 September 1973, overthrowing democratically elected president Salvador Allende A military dictatorship headed by General Jorge Rafael Videla seized power in Argentina on 24 March 1976   According to American journalist A. J. Langguth, the CIA organized the first meetings between Argentinian and Uruguayan security officials regarding the surveillance (and subsequent disappearance or assassination) of political refugees in these countries, as well as its role as an intermediary in the meetings between Argentinian, Uruguayan, and Brazilian death squads.   According to the National Security Archive's documentary evidence from US, Paraguayan, Argentine, and Chilean files, "Founded by the Pinochet regime in November 1975, Operation Condor was the codename for a formal Southern Cone collaboration that included transnational secret intelligence activities, kidnapping, torture, disappearance, and assassination." Several persons were slain as part of this codename mission. "Notable Condor victims include two former Uruguayan legislators and a former Bolivian president, Juan José Torres, murdered in Buenos Aires, a former Chilean Minister of the Interior, Bernardo Leighton, and former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 26-year-old American colleague, Ronni Moffitt, assassinated by a car bomb in downtown Washington D.C.," according to the report.   Prior to the formation of Operation Condor, there had been cooperation among various security services with the goal of "eliminating Marxist subversion." On September 3, 1973, at the Conference of American Armies in Caracas, Brazilian General Breno Borges Fortes, the chief of the Brazilian army, urged that various services "expand the interchange of information" in order to "fight against subversion."   Representatives from Chile, Uruguay, and Bolivia's police forces met with Alberto Villar, deputy chief of the Argentine Federal Police and co-founder of the Triple A killing squad, in March 1974 to discuss collaboration standards. Their purpose was to eliminate the "subversive" threat posed by Argentina's tens of thousands of political exiles. Bolivian immigrants' bodies were discovered at rubbish dumps in Buenos Aires in August 1974. Based on recently revealed CIA records dated June 1976, McSherry corroborated the kidnapping and torture of Chilean and Uruguayan exiles living in Buenos Aires during this time.   On General Augusto Pinochet's 60th birthday, November 25, 1975, in Santiago de Chile, heads of the military intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay met with Manuel Contreras, commander of the Chilean secret police, to officially establish the Plan Condor. General Rivero, an intelligence officer in the Argentine Armed Forces and a former student of the French, devised the concept of Operation Condor, according to French writer Marie-Monique Robin, author of Escadrons de la death, l'école française (2004, Death Squads, The French School).   Officially, the targets were armed groups (such as the MIR, the Montoneros or the ERP, the Tupamaros, etc.) based on the governments' perceptions of threats, but the governments expanded their attacks to include all types of political opponents, including their families and others, as reported by the Valech Commission, which is known as The National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture Report. The Argentine "Dirty War," for example, kidnapped, tortured, and assassinated many trade unionists, relatives of activists, social activists such as the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, nuns, university professors, and others, according to most estimates.   The Chilean DINA and its Argentine counterpart, SIDE, were the operation's front-line troops from 1976 forward. The infamous "death flights," which were postulated in Argentina by Luis Mara Menda and deployed by French forces during the Algerian War (1954–62), were widely used. Government forces flew or helicoptered victims out to sea, where they were dumped to die in premeditated disappearances. According to reports, the OPR-33 facility in Argentina was destroyed as a result of the military bombardment. Members of Plan Condor met in Santiago, Chile, in May 1976, to discuss "long-range collaboration... [that] went well beyond intelligence exchange" and to assign code names to the participating countries. The CIA acquired information in July that Plan Condor participants planned to strike "against leaders of indigenous terrorist groups residing overseas."   Several corpses washed up on beaches south of Buenos Aires in late 1977 as a result of extraordinary storms, providing evidence of some of the government's victims. Hundreds of newborns and children were removed from women in prison who had been kidnapped and later disappeared; the children were then given to families and associates of the dictatorship in clandestine adoptions. According to the CIA, Operation Condor countries reacted positively to the concept of cooperating and built their own communications network as well as joint training programs in areas like psychological warfare.    The military governments in South America were coming together to join forces for security concerns, according to a memo prepared by Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America Harry W. Shlaudeman to Kissinger on August 3, 1976. They were anxious about the growth of Marxism and the consequences it would have on their dominance. This new force worked in secret in the countries of other members. Their mission: to track out and murder "Revolutionary Coordinating Committee" terrorists in their own nations and throughout Europe.Shlaudeman voiced fear that the members of Operation Condor's "siege mindset" could lead to a wider divide between military and civilian institutions in the region. He was also concerned that this would further isolate these countries from developed Western countries. He argued that some of these anxieties were justified, but that by reacting too harshly, these countries risked inciting a violent counter-reaction comparable to the PLO's in Israel.   Chile and Argentina were both active in using communications medium for the purpose of transmitting propaganda, according to papers from the United States dated April 17, 1977. The propaganda's goal was to accomplish two things. The first goal was to defuse/counter international media criticism of the governments involved, and the second goal was to instill national pride in the local population. "Chile after Allende," a propaganda piece developed by Chile, was sent to the states functioning under Condor. The paper, however, solely mentions Uruguay and Argentina as the only two countries that have signed the deal. The government of Paraguay was solely identified as using the local press, "Patria," as its primary source of propaganda. Due to the reorganisation of both Argentina's and Paraguay's intelligence organizations, a meeting scheduled for March 1977 to discuss "psychological warfare measures against terrorists and leftist extremists" was canceled.   One "component of the campaign including Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina envisages unlawful operations beyond Latin America against expatriate terrorists, primarily in Europe," according to a 2016 declassified CIA study titled "Counterterrorism in the Southern Cone." "All military-controlled regimes in the Southern Cone consider themselves targets of international Marxism," the memo stated. Condor's fundamental characteristic was highlighted in the document, which came to fruition in early 1974 when "security officials from all of the member countries, except Brazil, agreed to establish liaison channels and to facilitate the movement of security officers on government business from one country to the other," as part of a long-tested "regional approach" to pacifying "subversion." Condor's "initial aims" included the "exchange of information on the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (RCJ), an organization...of terrorist groups from Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay" with "representatives" in Europe "believed to have been involved in the assassinations in Paris of the Bolivian ambassador to France last May and a Uruguayan military attache in 1974." Condor's primary purpose, according to the CIA assessment, was to eliminate "top-level terrorist leaders" as well as non-terrorist targets such as "Uruguayan opposition figure Wilson Ferreira, if he should travel to Europe, and some leaders of Amnesty International." Condor was also suspected by the CIA of being "involved in nonviolent actions, including as psychological warfare and a propaganda campaign" that used the media's power to "publicize terrorist crimes and atrocities." Condor also urged citizens in its member countries to "report anything out of the norm in their surroundings" in an appeal to "national pride and national conscience." Another meeting took place in 1980, and Montensero was apprehended. The RSO allegedly promised not to kill them if they agreed to collaborate and provide information on upcoming meetings in Rio.   So, after all of this mumbo jumbo, let's recap.    50,000 people were killed, 30,000 disappeared, and 400,000 were imprisoned, according to the "terror archives."  A letter signed by Manuel Contreras, the chief of Chile's National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) at the time, inviting Paraguayan intelligence personnel to Santiago for a clandestine "First Working Meeting on National Intelligence" on November 25, 1975, was also uncovered. The presence of intelligence chiefs from Argentina, Bolivia, and Uruguay at the meetings was also confirmed by this letter, indicating that those countries were also involved in the formulation of Operation Condor. Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela are among the countries named in the archives as having collaborated to varying degrees by giving intelligence information that had been sought by the security agencies of the Southern Cone countries. Parts of the archives, which are presently housed in Asunción's Palace of Justice, have been used to prosecute former military officers in some of these countries. Those records were used extensively in Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón's prosecution against Chilean General Augusto Pinochet. Baltasar Garzón interviewed Almada twice after he was a Condor victim.   "[The records] represent a mound of shame and lies that Stroessner [Paraguay's ruler until 1989] used to blackmail the Paraguayan people for 40 years," Almada said. He wants the "terror archives" to be listed as an international cultural site by UNESCO, as this would make it much easier to get funds to maintain and protect the records.   In May 2000, a UNESCO mission visited Asunción in response to a request from the Paraguayan government for assistance in registering these files on the Memory of the World Register, which is part of a program aimed at preserving and promoting humanity's documentary heritage by ensuring that records are preserved and accessible.   Now that we are all caught up, let's talk about a few noteworthy events. First we go to Argentina.   Argentina was ruled by military juntas from 1976 until 1983 under Operation Condor, which was a civic-military dictatorship. In countless incidents of desaparecidos, the Argentine SIDE collaborated with the Chilean DINA. In Buenos Aires, they assassinated Chilean General Carlos Prats, former Uruguayan MPs Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, and former Bolivian President Juan José Torres. With the support of Italian Gladio operator Stefano Delle Chiaie and Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, the SIDE aided Bolivian commander Luis Garca Meza Tejada's Cocaine Coup (see also Operation Charly). Since the release of secret records, it has been revealed that at ESMA, there were operational units made up of Italians who were utilized to suppress organizations of Italian Montoneros. Gaetano Saya, the Officer of the Italian stay behind next - Operation Gladio, led this outfit known as "Shadow Group." The Madres de la Square de Mayo, a group of mothers whose children had vanished, began protesting every Thursday in front of the Casa Rosada on the plaza in April 1977. They wanted to know where their children were and what happened to them. The abduction of two French nuns and other founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in December 1977 drew worldwide notice. Their corpses were later recognized among the deceased washed up on beaches south of Buenos Aires in December 1977, victims of death planes.   In 1983, when Argentina's democracy was restored, the government established the National Commission for Forced Disappearances (CONADEP), which was chaired by writer Ernesto Sabato. It gathered testimony from hundreds of witnesses about regime victims and known atrocities, as well as documenting hundreds of secret jails and detention sites and identifying torture and execution squad leaders. The Juicio a las Juntas (Juntas Trial) two years later was mostly successful in proving the crimes of the top commanders of the numerous juntas that had composed the self-styled National Reorganization Process. Most of the top officers on trial, including Jorge Rafael Videla, Emilio Eduardo Massera, Roberto Eduardo Viola, Armando Lambruschini, Ral Agosti, Rubén Graffigna, Leopoldo Galtieri, Jorge Anaya, and Basilio Lami Dozo, were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.   Following these trials, Ral Alfonsn's administration implemented two amnesty laws, the 1986 Ley de Punto Final (law of closure) and the 1987 Ley de Obediencia Debida (law of due obedience), which ended prosecution of crimes committed during the Dirty War. In an attempt at healing and reconciliation, President Carlos Menem pardoned the junta's leaders who were serving prison sentences in 1989–1990.   Due to attacks on American citizens in Argentina and revelations about CIA funding of the Argentine military in the late 1990s, and despite an explicit 1990 Congressional prohibition, US President Bill Clinton ordered the declassification of thousands of State Department documents relating to US-Argentine relations dating back to 1954. These documents exposed American involvement in the Dirty War and Operation Condor.   Following years of protests by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and other human rights organizations, the Argentine Congress overturned the amnesty legislation in 2003, with the full support of President Nestor Kirchner and the ruling majority in both chambers. In June 2005, the Argentine Supreme Court deemed them unlawful after a separate assessment. The government was able to resume prosecution of crimes committed during the Dirty War as a result of the court's decision.    Enrique Arancibia Clavel, a DINA civil agent who was charged with crimes against humanity in Argentina in 2004, was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the death of General Prats. Stefano Delle Chiaie, a suspected Italian terrorist, is also said to have been involved in the murder. In Rome in December 1995, he and fellow extreme Vincenzo Vinciguerra testified before federal judge Mara Servini de Cubra that DINA operatives Clavel and Michael Townley were intimately involved in the assassination. Judge Servini de Cubra demanded that Mariana Callejas (Michael Townley's wife) and Cristoph Willikie, a retired Chilean army colonel, be extradited in 2003 because they were also accused of being complicit in the murder. Nibaldo Segura, a Chilean appeals court judge, declined extradition in July 2005, claiming that they had already been prosecuted in Chile.   Twenty-five former high-ranking military commanders from Argentina and Uruguay were charged on March 5, 2013, in Buenos Aires with conspiring to "kidnap, disappear, torture, and kill" 171 political opponents throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Former Argentine "presidents" Jorge Videla and Reynaldo Bignone, both from the El Proceso era, are among the defendants. Prosecutors are relying on declassified US records collected by the National Security Archive, a non-governmental entity established at George Washington University in Washington, DC, in the 1990s and later.   On May 27, 2016, fifteen former military personnel were found guilty. Reynaldo Bignone was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Fourteen of the remaining 16 defendants were sentenced to eight to twenty-five years in prison. Two of the defendants were found not guilty.  A lawyer for the victims' relatives, Luz Palmás Zalda, claims that "This decision is significant since it is the first time Operation Condor's existence has been proven in court. It's also the first time former Condor members have been imprisoned for their roles in the criminal organization."    Anyone wanna go to Brazil?   In the year 2000, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso ordered the publication of some military documents related to Operation Condor. There are documents proving that in that year, attorney general Giancarlo Capaldo, an Italian magistrate, investigated the "disappearances" of Italian citizens in Latin America, which were most likely caused by the actions of Argentine, Paraguayan, Chilean, and Brazilian military personnel who tortured and murdered Italian citizens during Latin American military dictatorships. There was a list containing the names of eleven Brazilians accused of murder, kidnapping, and torture, as well as several high-ranking military personnel from other countries involved in the operation.   "(...) I can neither affirm nor deny because Argentine, Brazilian, Paraguayan, and Chilean soldiers [military men] will be subject to criminal trial until December," the Magistrate said on October 26, 2000.   According to the Italian government's official statement, it was unclear whether the government would prosecute the accused military officers or not. As of November 2021, no one in Brazil had been convicted of human rights violations for actions committed during the 21-year military dictatorship because the Amnesty Law had protected both government officials and leftist guerrillas.   In November 1978, the Condor Operation expanded its covert persecution from Uruguay to Brazil, in an incident dubbed "o Sequestro dos Uruguaios," or "the Kidnapping of the Uruguayans." Senior officials of the Uruguayan army crossed the border into Porto Alegre, the capital of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, with the permission of the Brazilian military administration. They kidnapped Universindo Rodriguez and Lilian Celiberti, a political activist couple from Uruguay, as well as her two children, Camilo and Francesca, who are five and three years old.   The unlawful operation failed because an anonymous phone call notified two Brazilian journalists, Veja magazine reporter Luiz Cláudio Cunha and photographer Joo Baptista Scalco, that the Uruguayan couple had been "disappeared." The two journalists traveled to the specified address, a Porto Alegre apartment, to double-check the facts. The armed men who had arrested Celiberti mistook the journalists for other political opposition members when they came, and they were arrested as well. Universindo Rodriguez and the children had already been brought to Uruguay under the table.   The journalists' presence had exposed the secret operation when their identities were revealed. It was put on hold. As news of the political kidnapping of Uruguayan nationals in Brazil made headlines in the Brazilian press, it is thought that the operation's disclosure avoided the death of the couple and their two young children. It became a worldwide embarrassment. Both Brazil's and Uruguay's military governments were humiliated. Officials arranged for the Celibertis' children to be transported to their maternal grandparents in Montevideo a few days later. After being imprisoned and tortured in Brazil, Rodriguez and Celiberti were transferred to Uruguayan military cells and held there for the next five years. The couple were released after Uruguay's democracy was restored in 1984. They confirmed every element of their kidnapping that had previously been reported.   In 1980, two DOPS (Department of Political and Social Order, an official police unit in charge of political repression during the military administration) inspectors were found guilty of arresting the journalists in Lilian's apartment in Porto Alegre by Brazilian courts. Joo Augusto da Rosa and Orandir Portassi Lucas were their names. They had been identified as participants in the kidnapping by the media and Uruguayans. This occurrence confirmed the Brazilian government's active involvement in the Condor Operation. Governor Pedro Simon arranged for the state of Rio Grande do Sul to legally recognize the Uruguayans' kidnapping and compensate them financially in 1991. A year later, President Luis Alberto Lacalle's democratic government in Uruguay was encouraged to do the same.   The Uruguayan couple identified Pedro Seelig, the head of the DOPS at the time of the kidnapping, as the guy in charge of the operation in Porto Alegre. Universindo and Llian remained in prison in Uruguay and were unable to testify when Seelig was on trial in Brazil. Due to a lack of proof, the Brazilian cop was acquitted. Later testimony from Lilian and Universindo revealed that four officers from Uruguay's secret Counter-Information Division – two majors and two captains – took part in the operation with the permission of Brazilian authorities. In the DOPS headquarters in Porto Alegre, Captain Glauco Yanonne was personally responsible for torturing Universindo Rodriquez. Universindo and Lilian were able to identify the Uruguayan military men who had arrested and tortured them, but none of them were prosecuted in Montevideo. Uruguayan individuals who committed acts of political repression and human rights violations under the dictatorship were granted pardon under the Law of Immunity, which was approved in 1986. Cunha and Scalco were given the 1979 Esso Prize, considered the most significant prize in Brazilian journalism, for their investigative journalism on the case.  Hugo Cores, a former political prisoner from Uruguay, was the one who had warned Cunha. He told the Brazilian press in 1993: All the Uruguayans kidnapped abroad, around 180 people, are missing to this day. The only ones who managed to survive are Lilian, her children, and Universindo.   Joo "Jango" Goulart was the first Brazilian president to die in exile after being deposed. On December 6, 1976, he died in his sleep in Mercedes, Argentina, of a suspected heart attack. The true cause of his death was never determined because an autopsy was never performed. On April 26, 2000, Leonel Brizola, Jango's brother-in-law and former governor of Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul, claimed that ex-presidents Joo Goulart and Juscelino Kubitschek (who died in a vehicle accident) were assassinated as part of Operation Condor. He demanded that an investigation into their deaths be launched. On January 27, 2008, the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo published a report featuring a declaration from Mario Neira Barreiro, a former member of Uruguay's dictatorship's intelligence service. Barreiro confirmed Brizola's claims that Goulart had been poisoned. Sérgio Paranhos Fleury, the head of the Departamento de Ordem Poltica e Social (Department of Political and Social Order), gave the order to assassinate Goulart, according to Barreiro, and president Ernesto Geisel gave the permission to execute him. A special panel of the Rio Grande do Sul Legislative Assembly concluded in July 2008 that "the evidence that Jango was wilfully slain, with knowledge of the Geisel regime, is strong."   The magazine CartaCapital published previously unreleased National Information Service records generated by an undercover agent who was present at Jango's Uruguayan homes in March 2009. This new information backs up the idea that the former president was poisoned. The Goulart family has yet to figure out who the "B Agent," as he's referred to in the documents, might be. The agent was a close friend of Jango's, and he detailed a disagreement between the former president and his son during the former president's 56th birthday party, which was sparked by a brawl between two employees. As a result of the story, the Chamber of Deputies' Human Rights Commission agreed to look into Jango's death.   Later, Maria Teresa Fontela Goulart, Jango's widow, was interviewed by CartaCapital, who revealed records from the Uruguayan government confirming her accusations that her family had been tracked. Jango's travel, business, and political activities were all being watched by the Uruguayan government. These data date from 1965, a year after Brazil's coup, and they indicate that he may have been targeted. The President Joo Goulart Institute and the Movement for Justice and Human Rights have requested a document from the Uruguayan Interior Ministry stating that "serious and credible Brazilian sources'' discussed an "alleged plan against the former Brazilian president."   If you thought it wasn't enough, let's talk about Chile. No not the warm stew lie concoction you make to scorn your buddy's stomach, but the country.   Additional information about Condor was released when Augusto Pinochet was detained in London in 1998 in response to Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón's request for his extradition to Spain. According to one of the lawyers requesting his extradition, Carlos Altamirano, the leader of the Chilean Socialist Party, was the target of an assassination attempt. He said that after Franco's funeral in Madrid in 1975, Pinochet contacted Italian neofascist terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie and arranged for Altamirano's murder. The strategy didn't work out. Since the bodies of victims kidnapped and presumably murdered could not be found, Chilean judge Juan Guzmán Tapia established a precedent concerning the crime of "permanent kidnapping": he determined that the kidnapping was thought to be ongoing, rather than having occurred so long ago that the perpetrators were protected by an amnesty decreed in 1978 or the Chilean statute of limitations. The Chilean government admitted in November 2015 that Pablo Neruda may have been murdered by members of Pinochet's administration.   Assassinations   On September 30, 1974, a car bomb killed General Carlos Prats and his wife, Sofa Cuthbert, in Buenos Aires, where they were living in exile. The Chilean DINA has been charged with the crime. In January 2005, Chilean Judge Alejandro Sols ended Pinochet's case when the Chilean Supreme Court denied his request to strip Pinochet's immunity from prosecution (as chief of state). In Chile, the assassination of DINA commanders Manuel Contreras, ex-chief of operations and retired general Ral Itturiaga Neuman, his brother Roger Itturiaga, and ex-brigadiers Pedro Espinoza Bravo and José Zara was accused. In Argentina, DINA agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel was found guilty of the murder.   After moving in exile in Italy, Bernardo Leighton and his wife were severely injured in a botched assassination attempt on October 6, 1975. Bernardo Leighton was critically injured in the gun attack, and his wife, Anita Fresno, was permanently crippled. Stefano Delle Chiaie met with Michael Townley and Virgilio Paz Romero in Madrid in 1975 to plan the murder of Bernardo Leighton with the help of Franco's secret police, according to declassified documents in the National Security Archive and Italian attorney general Giovanni Salvi, who led the prosecution of former DINA head Manuel Contreras. Glyn T. Davies, the secretary of the National Security Council (NSC), said in 1999 that declassified records indicated Pinochet's government's responsibility for the failed assassination attempt on Bernardo Leighton, Orlando Letelier, and General Carlos Prats on October 6, 1975.   In a December 2004 OpEd piece in the Los Angeles Times, Francisco Letelier, Orlando Letelier's son, claimed that his father's killing was part of Operation Condor, which he described as "an intelligence-sharing network employed by six South American tyrants of the time to eliminate dissidents."   Letelier's death, according to Michael Townley, was caused by Pinochet. Townley admitted to hiring five anti-Castro Cuban exiles to set up a booby-trap in Letelier's automobile. Following consultations with the terrorist organization CORU's leadership, including Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, Cuban-Americans José Dionisio Suárez, Virgilio Paz Romero, Alvin Ross Daz, and brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampoll were chosen to carry out the murder, according to Jean-Guy Allard. The Miami Herald reports that Luis Posada Carriles was there at the conference that decided on Letelier's death as well as the bombing of Cubana Flight 455.   During a public protest against Pinochet in July 1986, photographer Rodrigo Rojas DeNegri was burned alive and Carmen Gloria Quintana received significant burns. The case of the two became known as Caso Quemados ("The Burned Case"), and it drew attention in the United States because Rojas had fled to the United States following the 1973 coup. [96] According to a document from the US State Department, the Chilean army set fire to both Rojas and Quintana on purpose. Rojas and Quintana, on the other hand, were accused by Pinochet of being terrorists who lit themselves on fire with their own Molotov cocktails. Pinochet's reaction to the attack and killing of Rojas, according to National Security Archive analyst Peter Kornbluh, was "contributed to Reagan's decision to withdraw support for the regime and press for a return to civilian rule."   Operación Silencio   Operación Silencio (Operation Silence) was a Chilean operation that removed witnesses from the country in order to obstruct investigations by Chilean judges. It began about a year before the "terror archives" in Paraguay were discovered. Arturo Sanhueza Ross, the man accused of assassinating MIR leader Jecar Neghme in 1989, departed the country in April 1991.    According to the Rettig Report, Chilean intelligence officers were responsible for Jecar Neghme's killing. Carlos Herrera Jiménez, the man who assassinated trade unionist Tucapel Jiménez, flew out in September 1991. Eugenio Berros, a chemist who had cooperated with DINA agent Michael Townley, was led by Operation Condor agents from Chile to Uruguay in October 1991 in order to avoid testifying in the Letelier case. He used passports from Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil, prompting suspicions that Operation Condor was still active. In 1995, Berros was discovered dead in El Pinar, Uruguay, near Montevideo. His corpse had been mangled to the point where it was hard to identify him by sight.   Michael Townley, who is now under witness protection in the United States, recognized linkages between Chile, DINA, and the incarceration and torture camp Colonia Dignidad in January 2005. The facility was founded in 1961 by Paul Schäfer, who was arrested and convicted of child rape in Buenos Aires in March 2005. Interpol was notified about Colonia Dignidad and the Army's Bacteriological Warfare Laboratory by Townley. This lab would have taken the place of the previous DINA lab on Via Naranja de lo Curro, where Townley collaborated with chemical assassin Eugenio Berros. According to the court reviewing the case, the toxin that allegedly murdered Christian-Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva could have been created at this new lab in Colonia Dignidad. Dossiê Jango, a Brazilian-Uruguayan-Argentine collaboration film released in 2013, accused the same lab in the alleged poisoning of Brazil's deposed president, Joo Goulart.   Congressman Koch   The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents was released in February 2004 by reporter John Dinges. He reported that in mid-1976, Uruguayan military officers threatened to assassinate United States Congressman Edward Koch (later Mayor of New York City). The CIA station commander in Montevideo had received information about it in late July 1976. He advised the Agency to take no action after finding that the men were inebriated at the time. Colonel José Fons, who was present at the November 1975 covert meeting in Santiago, Chile, and Major José Nino Gavazzo, who led a team of intelligence agents working in Argentina in 1976 and was responsible for the deaths of over 100 Uruguayans, were among the Uruguayan officers.   Koch told Dinges in the early twenty-first century that CIA Director George H. W. Bush informed him in October 1976 that "his sponsorship of legislation to cut off US military assistance to Uruguay on human rights concerns had prompted secret police officers to 'put a contract out for you'." Koch wrote to the Justice Department in mid-October 1976, requesting FBI protection, but he received none. It had been more than two months after the meeting and the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington. Colonel Fons and Major Gavazzo were sent to important diplomatic postings in Washington, D.C. in late 1976. The State Department ordered the Uruguayan government to rescind their appointments, citing the possibility of "unpleasant publicity" for "Fons and Gavazzo."  Only in 2001 did Koch learn of the links between the threats and the position appointments.   Paraguay The US supported Alfredo Stroessner's anti-communist military dictatorship and played a "vital supporting role" in Stroessner's Paraguay's domestic affairs. As part of Operation Condor, for example, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Thierry of the United States Army was deployed to assist local workers in the construction of "La Technica," a detention and interrogation center. La Technica was also renowned as a torture facility. Pastor Coronel, Stroessner's secret police, washed their victims in human vomit and excrement tubs and shocked them in the rectum with electric cattle prods. They decapitated Miguel Angel Soler [es], the Communist party secretary, with a chainsaw while Stroessner listened on the phone. Stroessner asked that tapes of inmates wailing in agony be presented to their relatives.   Harry Shlaudeman defined Paraguay's militarized state as a "nineteenth-century military administration that looks nice on the cartoon page" in a report to Kissinger. Shlaudeman's assessments were paternalistic, but he was correct in observing that Paraguay's "backwardness" was causing it to follow in the footsteps of its neighbors. Many decolonized countries regarded national security concerns in terms of neighboring countries and long-standing ethnic or regional feuds, but the United States viewed conflict from a global and ideological viewpoint. During the Chaco War, Shlaudeman mentions Paraguay's amazing fortitude in the face of greater military force from its neighbors. The government of Paraguay believes that the country's victory over its neighbors over several decades justifies the country's lack of progress. The paper goes on to say that Paraguay's political traditions were far from democratic. Because of this reality, as well as a fear of leftist protest in neighboring countries, the government has prioritized the containment of political opposition over the growth of its economic and political institutions. They were driven to defend their sovereignty due to an ideological fear of their neighbors. As a result, many officials were inspired to act in the interest of security by the fight against radical, communist movements both within and beyond the country. The book Opération Condor, written by French writer Pablo Daniel Magee and prefaced by Costa Gavras, was published in 2020. The story chronicles the life of Martin Almada, a Paraguayan who was a victim of the Condor Operation.   The Peruvian Case   After being kidnapped in 1978, Peruvian legislator Javier Diez Canseco announced that he and twelve other compatriots (Justiniano Apaza Ordóñez, Hugo Blanco, Genaro Ledesma Izquieta, Valentín Pacho, Ricardo Letts, César Lévano, Ricardo Napurí, José Luis Alvarado Bravo, Alfonso Baella Tuesta, Guillermo Faura Gaig, José Arce Larco and Humberto Damonte). All opponents of Francisco Morales Bermudez's dictatorship were exiled and handed over to the Argentine armed forces in Jujuy in 1978 after being kidnapped in Peru. He also claimed that declassified CIA documents and WikiLeaks cable information account for the Morales Bermudez government's ties to Operation Condor.   Uruguay   Juan Mara Bordaberry declared himself dictator and banned the rest of the political parties, as was customary in the Southern Cone dictatorships of the 1970s. In the alleged defense against subversion, a large number of people were murdered, tortured, unjustly detained and imprisoned, kidnapped, and forced into disappearance during the de facto administration, which lasted from 1973 until 1985. Prior to the coup d'état in 1973, the CIA served as a consultant to the country's law enforcement institutions. Dan Mitrione, perhaps the most well-known example of such cooperation, had taught civilian police in counterinsurgency at the School of the Americas in Panama, afterwards renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.   Maybe now we can talk about the U.S involvement? The U.S never gets involved in anything so this might be new to some of you.   According to US paperwork, the US supplied critical organizational, financial, and technological help to the operation far into the 1980s. The long-term hazards of a right-wing bloc, as well as its early policy recommendations, were discussed in a US Department of State briefing for Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State, dated 3 August 1976, prepared by Harry Shlaudeman and titled "Third World War and South America." The briefing was an overview of security forces in the Southern Cone. The operation was described as a joint effort by six Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay) to win the "Third World War" by eliminating "subversion" through transnational secret intelligence operations, kidnapping, torture, disappearance, and assassination. The research begins by examining the sense of unity shared by the six countries of the Southern Cone. Kissinger is warned by Shlaudeman that the "Third World War" will trap those six countries in an ambiguous position in the long run, because they are trapped on one side by "international Marxism and its terrorist exponents," and on the other by "the hostility of uncomprehending industrial democracies misled by Marxist propaganda." According to the report, US policy toward Operation Condor should “emphasize the differences between the five countries at all times, depoliticize human rights, oppose rhetorical exaggerations of the ‘Third-World-War' type, and bring potential bloc members back into our cognitive universe through systematic exchanges.” According to CIA papers from 1976, strategies to deal with political dissidents in South America were planned among international security officials at the US Army School of the Americas and the Conference of American Armies from 1960 to the early 1970s. "In early 1974, security officials from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia convened in Buenos Aires to arrange synchronized attacks against subversive targets," according to a declassified CIA memo dated June 23, 1976. Officials in the United States were aware of the situation.   Furthermore, the Defense Intelligence Agency revealed in September 1976 that US intelligence services were well aware of Operation Condor's architecture and intentions. They discovered that "Operation Condor" was the covert name for gathering intelligence on "leftists," Communists, Peronists, or Marxists in the Southern Cone Area. The intelligence services were aware that the operation was being coordinated by the intelligence agencies of numerous South American nations (including Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia), with Chile serving as the hub. Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, according to the DIA, were already aggressively pursuing operations against communist targets, primarily in Argentina.   The report's third point reveals the US comprehension of Operation Condor's most malevolent actions. "The development of special teams from member countries to execute out operations, including killings against terrorists or sympathizers of terrorist groups," according to the paper. Although these special teams were intelligence agency operatives rather than military troops, they did work in structures similar to those used by US special forces teams, according to the study. Operation Condor's preparations to undertake probable operations in France and Portugal were revealed in Kissinger's State Department briefing - an issue that would later prove to be immensely contentious in Condor's history.   Condor's core was formed by the US government's sponsorship and collaboration with DINA (Directorate of National Intelligence) and other intelligence agencies. According to CIA papers, the agency maintained intimate ties with officers of Chile's secret police, DINA, and its leader Manuel Contreras.  Even after his role in the Letelier-Moffit killing was discovered, Contreras was kept as a paid CIA contact until 1977. Official requests to trace suspects to and from the US Embassy, the CIA, and the FBI may be found in the Paraguayan Archives. The military states received suspect lists and other intelligence material from the CIA. In 1975, the FBI conducted a nationwide hunt in the United States for persons sought by DINA.   In a February 1976 telegram from the Buenos Aires embassy to the State Department, intelligence said that the US was aware of the impending Argentinian coup. According to the ambassador, the Chief of the Foreign Ministry's North American desk revealed that the "Military Planning Group" had asked him to prepare a report and recommendations on how the "future military government can avoid or minimize the sort of problems the Chilean and Uruguayan governments are having with the US over human rights issues." The Chief also indicated that "they" (whether he is talking to the CIA or Argentina's future military dictatorship, or both) will confront opposition if they start assassinating and killing people. Assuming this is so, the envoy notes that the military coup will "intend to carry forward an all-out war on the terrorists and that some executions would therefore probably be necessary." Despite already being engaged in the region's politics, this indicates that the US was aware of the planning of human rights breaches before they occurred and did not intervene to prevent them. "It is encouraging to note that the Argentine military are aware of the problem and are already focusing on ways to avoid letting human rights issues become an irritant in US-Argentine Relations." This is confirmation.   Professor Ruth Blakeley says that Kissinger "explicitly expressed his support for the repression of political opponents" in regards to the Argentine junta's continuous human rights violations.  When Henry Kissinger met with Argentina's Foreign Minister on October 5, 1976, he said, ” Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed. I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems but not the context. The quicker you succeed the better ... The human rights problem is a growing one. Your Ambassador can apprise you. We want a stable situation. We won't cause you unnecessary difficulties. If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better. Whatever freedoms you could restore would help.”   The démarche was never provided in the end. According to Kornbluh and Dinges, the decision not to deliver Kissinger's directive was based on Assistant Secretary Harry Shlaudeman's letter to his deputy in Washington, D.C., which stated: "you can simply instruct the Ambassadors to take no further action, noting that there have been no reports in some weeks indicating an intention to activate the Condor scheme."   President Bill Clinton ordered the State Department to release hundreds of declassified papers in June 1999, indicating for the first time that the CIA, State, and Defense Departments were all aware of Condor. According to a 1 October 1976 DOD intelligence assessment, Latin American military commanders gloat about it to their American colleagues. Condor's "joint counterinsurgency operations" sought to "eliminate Marxist terrorist activities," according to the same study; Argentina developed a special Condor force "structured much like a US Special Forces Team," it said. According to a summary of documents disclosed in 2004, The declassified record shows that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was briefed on Condor and its "murder operations" on August 5, 1976, in a 14-page report from [Harry] Shlaudeman [Assistant Secretary of State]. "Internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys," Shlaudeman cautioned. "We are especially identified with Chile. It cannot do us any good." Shlaudeman and his two deputies, William Luers and Hewson Ryan, recommended action. Over the course of three weeks, they drafted a cautiously worded demarche, approved by Kissinger, in which he instructed the U.S. ambassadors in the Southern Cone countries to meet with the respective heads of state about Condor. He instructed them to express "our deep concern" about "rumors" of "plans for the assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad."   Kornbluh and Dinges come to the conclusion that "The paper trail is clear: the State Department and the CIA had enough intelligence to take concrete steps to thwart the Condor assassination planning. Those steps were initiated but never implemented." Hewson Ryan, Shlaudeman's deputy, subsequently admitted in an oral history interview that the State Department's treatment of the issue was "remiss." "We knew fairly early on that the governments of the Southern Cone countries were planning, or at least talking about, some assassinations abroad in the summer of 1976. ... Whether if we had gone in, we might have prevented this, I don't know", In relation to the Letelier-Moffitt bombing, he remarked, "But we didn't."   Condor was defined as a "counter-terrorism organization" in a CIA document, which also mentioned that the Condor countries had a specific telecommunications system known as "CONDORTEL."  The New York Times released a communication from US Ambassador to Paraguay Robert White to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance on March 6, 2001. The paper was declassified and disseminated by the Clinton administration in November 2000 as part of the Chile Declassification Project. General Alejandro Fretes Davalos, the chief of staff of Paraguay's armed forces, told White that the South American intelligence chiefs engaged in Condor "kept in touch with one another through a United States communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone that covered all of Latin America."   According to reports, Davalos stated that the station was "employed to coordinate intelligence information among the southern cone countries". The US was concerned that the Condor link would be made public at a time when the killing of Chilean former minister Orlando Letelier and his American aide Ronni Moffitt in the United States was being probed."it would seem advisable to review this arrangement to insure that its continuation is in US interest." White wrote to Vance. "Another piece of increasingly weighty evidence suggesting that U.S. military and intelligence officials supported and collaborated with Condor as a secret partner or sponsor." McSherry rebutted the cables. Furthermore, an Argentine military source told a U.S. Embassy contact that the CIA was aware of Condor and had played a vital role in establishing computerized linkages among the six Condor governments' intelligence and operations sections.   After all this it doesn't stop here. We even see France having a connection. The original document confirming that a 1959 agreement between Paris and Buenos Aires set up a "permanent French military mission" of officers to Argentina who had participated in the Algerian War was discovered in the archives of the Quai d'Orsay, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was kept at the offices of the Argentine Army's chief of staff. It lasted until 1981, when François Mitterrand was elected President of France. She revealed how the administration of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing secretly coordinated with Videla's junta in Argentina and Augusto Pinochet's tyranny in Chile.   Even Britain and West Germany looked into using the tactics in their own countries. Going so far as to send their open personnel to Buenos Aires to discuss how to establish a similar network.  MOVIES   https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=military-coup&sort=num_votes,desc&mode=detail&page=1&title_type=movie&ref_=kw_ref_typ https://islandora.wrlc.org/islandora/object/terror%3Aroot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archives_of_Terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20774985 https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB239d/index.htm

Latino USA presents another episode from the In The Thick podcast. In this episode, Maria and Julio are joined by Anayansi Diaz-Cortes, senior reporter and producer at Reveal, and Kate Doyle, senior analyst at the National Security Archive. They discuss Reveal's new series “After Ayotzinapa”, a three-part investigation into the disappearance of 43 students from a Mexican teacher's college in 2014. They also unpack the role of the U.S. in Mexico's drug war, and the human consequences of corruption. You can listen to the full series here. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has launched an illegal, unjustified war against Ukraine and Putin himself is the only person who can stop the war immediately. In this episode, we seek to understand why President Putin has launched this horrific war in order to judge our country's ability to bring the war to a quicker end. Please Support Congressional Dish – Quick Links Contribute monthly or a lump sum via PayPal Support Congressional Dish via Patreon (donations per episode) Send Zelle payments to: Donation@congressionaldish.com Send Venmo payments to: @Jennifer-Briney Send Cash App payments to: $CongressionalDish or Donation@congressionaldish.com Use your bank's online bill pay function to mail contributions to: 5753 Hwy 85 North, Number 4576, Crestview, FL 32536. Please make checks payable to Congressional Dish Thank you for supporting truly independent media! Background Sources Recommended Congressional Dish Episodes CD244: Keeping Ukraine CD186: National Endowment for Democracy CD168: Nuclear Desperation Ukraine Civil War Alan MacLeod. Feb 22, 2022. “Documents Reveal US Spent $22 Million Promoting Anti-Russia Narrative in Ukraine & Abroad.” The Washington Standard. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Oct 8, 2021. “Conflict-related civilian casualties in Ukraine.” United Nations. Andrew Higgins and Peter Baker. Feb 6, 2014. “Russia Claims U.S. Is Meddling Over Ukraine.” The New York Times. NATO Expansion Becky Sullivan. Updated Feb 24, 2022. “How NATO's expansion helped drive Putin to invade Ukraine.” NPR. Henry Meyer and Ilya Arkhipov. Dec 17, 2021. “Russia Demands NATO Pullback in Security Talks With U.S.” Bloomberg. Joe Dyke. Mar 20, 2021. “NATO Killed Civilians in Libya. It's Time to Admit It.” Foreign Policy. NATO. Updated May 5, 2020. “Enlargement.” NATO. 2020. “The Secretary General's Annual Report.” National Security Archive. December 12, 2017. “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard.” Arms Control Association. “The Debate Over NATO Expansion: A Critique of the Clinton Administration's Responses to Key Questions.” “Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker in Moscow. (Excerpts.)” February 9, 1990. National Security Archive. “Ukraine: The Orange Revolution and the Yushchenko Presidency.” In The Encyclopedia Britannica. NATO in Ukraine Xinhua. Nov 14, 2021. “Ukraine, NATO countries hold naval drills in Black Sea.” News.cn Chad Menegay and Aimee Valles. Sept 22, 2021. “US, NATO, Ukraine enhance interoperability with Rapid Trident exercise.” NationalGuard.mil Reuters. April 3, 2021. “Ukraine and Britain to Hold Joint Military Drills.” U.S. News and World Report. NATO Allied Maritime Command. Mar 17, 2021. “NATO forces train with the Ukrainian Navy.” European Deterrence Initiative Paul Belkin and Hibbah Kaileh. Updated July 1, 2021. “The European Deterrence Initiative: A Budgetary Overview” [IF10946.] Congressional Research Service. Weapons Treaties TASS. Feb 21, 2022. “Europe won't understand Kiev talking of regaining nuclear weapons — Russian diplomat.” Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation. Updated March 2021. “Fact Sheet: Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.” Arms Control Association. Last reviewed August 2019. “The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty at a Glance.” General Dynamics General Dynamics. “Corporate Governance: Board of Directors.” Russia-China Alliance Chen Aizhu. Feb 4, 2022. “Russia, China agree 30-year gas deal via new pipeline, to settle in euros.” Reuters. Robin Brant. Feb 4, 2022. “China joins Russia in opposing Nato expansion.” BBC News. Sanctions Matina Stevis-Gridneff. Feb 25, 2022. “European Leaders Agree to a Second Wave of Russia Sanctions.” The New York Times. Congressional Response Joe Gould. Feb 22, 2022. “Emergency funding proposal for Ukraine gets bipartisan backing in Congress.” Defense News. Reuters. Feb 25, 2022. “U.S. providing $600 mln for Ukraine defensive weapons -House Speaker Pelosi.” Reuters. Images State Property Fund of Ukraine USAID Partnership Audio Sources House Speaker Weekly Briefing February 23, 2022 YouTube Version Overview: At her weekly briefing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), along with several of her Democratic colleagues, talked about the situation in Ukraine and President Biden's sanctions after Russia recognized the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas region. Clips 10:25 Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA): Putin is terrified by the prospect of a democracy at his border. A democracy, giving an example to the Russian people of the kind of life and economy they might enjoy if they cast aside their own autocrat. This is, I think, one of the preeminent motivations of Vladimir Putin. 15:32 Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA): I chair the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign operations, which oversees many of the resources to assist the Ukrainian people through this crisis. This includes our economic assistance to Ukraine, including loan guarantees. Economic assistance would come through the economic support accounts for Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia, those of the accounts that would come through. Without getting in too many of the weeds, I wanted to just mention that because it's an effort that we're looking at now in terms of our funding. It also includes humanitarian plans, including funding for refugees, God forbid, and for those internally displaced by conflict. The administration has committed to us that in the event of conflict, there is a need over the next 12 months of at least $1 billion for humanitarian needs. So I support the efforts of the administration also to bolster Ukraine's economy, including the proposed $1 billion in loan guarantees to continue with Ukraine's economic reforms. 22:08 Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): I will just close by saying this: I had the privilege of going with President Clinton, who invited four members of Congress House and Senate, Democrat and Republican, the Senate Democrat was Senator Joe Biden. And we went to the expansion of NATO meeting in Paris. And it was all the heads of state of the then NATO countries who spoke and it was so beautiful because they all spoke in such a positive way about NATO. We thought like we were NATO and they were also NATO, they had ownership and agency in possession of the NATO possibilities. The representative of Russia who was there was Boris Yeltsin. And he was very ebullient, but he was welcoming to what was called was the expansion we had supported in our own country, the Baltic States, Poland, others countries becoming what was called the Partnership for Peace and it included many countries. Now Putin is saying push it back to pre-1997. Don't ever try to add another country and remove weapons out of Eastern Europe. That's what he wanted. No, that was not going to happen. 33:35 Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): What is this about? The people of Hung -- many of us have visited Ukraine and have seen that they love democracy. They do not want to live under Vladimir Putin. He does not want the Russian people to see what democracy looks like. And therefore he wants to bring them under his domain. 35:15 Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): When we talk about the president, he's doing the sanctions. He has a full picture of all this. As I said, he was present there the day of the expansion of NATO. I saw the respect he commanded then, and that was 1997, by the heads of state of all those countries, and of course, that has only grown over time, by his leadership, but also the expansion of NATO. I think we're very well served, I respect his judgement. And again, it's not just about when you do the sanctions, or how you support the people. It's about how the world views what Putin is doing. This is a very evil move on the part of Vladimir Putin. President Biden Remarks on Russia and Ukraine February 22, 2022 YouTube Version Transcript Overview: During an address, President Biden announced new sanctions against Russia in response to President Vladimir Putin sending Russian troops into separatist regions of Ukraine. Clips 1:57 President Biden So, today, I'm announcing the first tranche of sanctions to impose costs on Russia in response to their actions yesterday. These have been closely coordinated with our Allies and partners, and we'll continue to escalate sanctions if Russia escalates. We're implementing full blocking sanctions on two large Russian financial institutions: V.E.B. and their military bank. We're implementing comprehensive sanctions on Russian sovereign debt. That means we've cut off Russia's government from Western financing. It can no longer raise money from the West and cannot trade in its new debt on our markets or European markets either. Starting tomorrow [today] and continuing in the days ahead, we will also impose sanctions on Russia's elites and their family members. They share in the corrupt gains of the Kremlin policies and should share in the pain as well. And because of Russia's actions, we've worked with Germany to ensure Nord Stream 2 will not — as I promised — will not move forward. 3:23 President Biden: Today, in response to Russia's admission that it will not withdraw its forces from Belarus, I have authorized additional movements of U.S. forces and equipment already stationed in Europe to strengthen our Baltic Allies — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Let me be clear: These are totally defensive moves on our part. We have no intention of fighting Russia. We want to send an unmistakable message, though, that the United States, together with our Allies, will defend every inch of NATO territory and abide by the commitments we made to NATO. 4:22 President Biden: Russian forces remain positioned in Belarus to attack Ukraine from the north, including war planes and offensive missile systems. Russia has moved troops closer to Ukraine's border with Russia. Russia's naval vessels are maneuvering in the Black Sea to Ukraine's south, including amphibious assault ships, missile cruisers, and submarines. Russia has moved supplies of blood and medical equipment into position on their border. You don't need blood unless you plan on starting a war. 6:25 President Biden: I'm going to take robust action and make sure the pain of our sanctions is targeted at the Russian economy, not ours. We are closely monitoring energy supplies for any disruption. We're executing a plan in coordination with major oil-producing consumers and producers toward a collective investment to secure stability and global energy supplies. This will be — this will blunt gas prices. I want to limit the pain the American people are feeling at the gas pump. This is critical to me. 7:37 President Biden: Yesterday, the world heard clearly the full extent of Vladimir Putin's twisted rewrite of history, going back more than a century, as he waxed eloquently, noting that — well, I'm not going to go into it, but nothing in Putin's lengthy remarks indicated any interest in pursuing real dialogue on European security in the year 2022. 8:04 President Biden: He directly attacked Ukraine's right to exist. He indirectly threatened territory formerly held by Russia, including nations that today are thriving democracies and members of NATO. He explicitly threatened war unless his extreme demands were met. And there is no question that Russia is the aggressor. Russian President Putin Statement on Ukraine February 21, 2022 YouTube Version Transcript Overview: Russian President Vladimir Putin announced after a Security Council meeting that Russia would recognize the independence of the separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine's Donbas region. Clips 00:15 President Putin: I would like to emphasise again that Ukraine is not just a neighbouring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space. These are our comrades, those dearest to us – not only colleagues, friends and people who once served together, but also relatives, people bound by blood, by family ties. 1:22 President Putin: I would like to start by saying that the modern Ukraine was completely created by Russia. To be more exact, Bolshevist, partially communist Russia. This process started almost immediately after the 1917 revolutions, leading and planning and his group of supporters did it in a rough way. If we talk about Russia, they were alienating parts of historical territories of Russia. And millions of people who live there, obviously no one asked anything. Then before the Great Patriotic War, Stalin added to the USSR and handed over some lands that belonged to Poland and Hungary, and as a compensation gave some ancient German lands to Poland. And the 1960s crucial decision to take Crimea away from Russia and also gave it to Ukraine. That's how the territory of Soviet Ukraine was formed. 3:05 President Putin: We cannot help but react to this real threat, especially since I would like to reiterate that Western backers they can help Ukraine with getting this weapon to create yet another threat for our country because we can see how consistently they are pumping Ukraine with weapons. The United States alone starting from 2014 transferred billions of dollars including the arm supply training personnel. In recent months, Western weapons are sent to Ukraine given ceaselessly in front of the eyes of the entire world 7:05 President Putin: Actually, as I have already said, Soviet Ukraine is the result of the Bolsheviks' policy and can be rightfully called “Vladimir Lenin's Ukraine.” He was its creator and architect. This is fully and comprehensively corroborated by archival documents, including Lenin's harsh instructions regarding Donbass, which was actually shoved into Ukraine. And today the “grateful progeny” has overturned monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. They call it decommunization. You want decommunization? Very well, this suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real decommunizations would mean for Ukraine. 9:31 President Putin: Everything seemed to be working well in conditions of the totalitarian regime, and outwardly it looked wonderful, attractive and even super-democratic. And yet, it is a great pity that the fundamental and formally legal foundations of our state were not promptly cleansed of the odious and utopian fantasies inspired by the revolution, which are absolutely destructive for any normal state. 10:05 President Putin: It seems that the Communist Party leaders were convinced that they had created a solid system of government and that their policies had settled the ethnic issue for good. But falsification, misconception, and tampering with public opinion have a high cost. The virus of nationalist ambitions is still with us, and the mine laid at the initial stage to destroy state immunity to the disease of nationalism was ticking. As I have already said, the mine was the right of secession from the Soviet Union. 13:55 President Putin: Even two years before the collapse of the USSR, its fate was actually predetermined. It is now that radicals and nationalists, including and primarily those in Ukraine, are taking credit for having gained independence. As we can see, this is absolutely wrong. The disintegration of our united country was brought about by the historic, strategic mistakes on the part of the Bolshevik leaders and the CPSU leadership, mistakes committed at different times in state-building and in economic and ethnic policies. The collapse of the historical Russia known as the USSR is on their conscience. 14:39 President Putin: It was our people who accepted the new geopolitical reality that took shape after the dissolution of the USSR, and recognised the new independent states. Not only did Russia recognise these countries, but helped its CIS partners, even though it faced a very dire situation itself. This included our Ukrainian colleagues, who turned to us for financial support many times from the very moment they declared independence. Our country provided this assistance while respecting Ukraine's dignity and sovereignty. According to expert assessments, confirmed by a simple calculation of our energy prices, the subsidised loans Russia provided to Ukraine along with economic and trade preferences, the overall benefit for the Ukrainian budget in the period from 1991 to 2013 amounted to $250 billion. 21:24 President Putin: A stable statehood has never developed in Ukraine; its electoral and other political procedures just serve as a cover, a screen for the redistribution of power and property between various oligarchic clans. Corruption, which is certainly a challenge and a problem for many countries, including Russia, has gone beyond the usual scope in Ukraine. It has literally permeated and corroded Ukrainian statehood, the entire system, and all branches of power. Radical nationalists took advantage of the justified public discontent and saddled the Maidan protest, escalating it to a coup d'état in 2014. They also had direct assistance from foreign states. According to reports, the US Embassy provided $1 million a day to support the so-called protest camp on Independence Square in Kiev. In addition, large amounts were impudently transferred directly to the opposition leaders' bank accounts, tens of millions of dollars. 23:37 President Putin: Maidan did not bring Ukraine any closer to democracy and progress. Having accomplished a coup d'état, the nationalists and those political forces that supported them eventually led Ukraine into an impasse, pushed the country into the abyss of civil war. 26:30 President Putin: In fact, it all came down to the fact that the collapse of the Ukrainian economy was accompanied by outright robbery of the citizens of the country, and Ukraine itself was simply driven under external control. It is carried out not only at the behest of Western capitals, but also, as they say, directly on the spot through a whole network of foreign advisers, NGOs and other institutions deployed in Ukraine. They have a direct impact on all the most important personnel decisions, on all branches and levels of government: from the central and even to the municipal, on the main state-owned companies and corporations, including Naftogaz, Ukrenergo, Ukrainian Railways, Ukroboronprom, Ukrposhta , Administration of Sea Ports of Ukraine. There is simply no independent court in Ukraine. At the request of the West, the Kiev authorities gave representatives of international organizations the pre-emptive right to select members of the highest judicial bodies - the Council of Justice and the Qualification Commission of Judges. In addition, the US Embassy directly controls the National Corruption Prevention Agency, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, and the Supreme Anti-Corruption Court. All this is done under a plausible pretext to increase the effectiveness of the fight against corruption. Okay, but where are the results? Corruption has blossomed as luxuriantly, and blooms, more than ever. Are the Ukrainians themselves aware of all these managerial methods? Do they understand that their country is not even under a political and economic protectorate, but reduced to the level of a colony with a puppet regime? The privatization of the state has led to the fact that the government, which calls itself the "power of patriots", has lost its national character and is consistently leading the matter towards the complete desovereignization of the country. 31:04 President Putin: In March 2021, a new Military Strategy was adopted in Ukraine. This document is almost entirely dedicated to confrontation with Russia and sets the goal of involving foreign states in a conflict with our country. The strategy stipulates the organisation of what can be described as a terrorist underground movement in Russia's Crimea and in Donbass. It also sets out the contours of a potential war, which should end, according to the Kiev strategists, “with the assistance of the international community on favourable terms for Ukraine.” 32:05 President Putin: As we know, it has already been stated today that Ukraine intends to create its own nuclear weapons, and this is not just bragging. Ukraine has the nuclear technologies created back in the Soviet times and delivery vehicles for such weapons, including aircraft, as well as the Soviet-designed Tochka-U precision tactical missiles with a range of over 100 kilometres. But they can do more; it is only a matter of time. They have had the groundwork for this since the Soviet era. In other words, acquiring tactical nuclear weapons will be much easier for Ukraine than for some other states I am not going to mention here, which are conducting such research, especially if Kiev receives foreign technological support. 33:47 President Putin: Foreign advisors supervise the activities of Ukraine's armed forces and special services and we are well aware of this. Over the past few years, military contingents of NATO countries have been almost constantly present on Ukrainian territory under the pretext of exercises. The Ukrainian troop control system has already been integrated into NATO. This means that NATO headquarters can issue direct commands to the Ukrainian armed forces, even to their separate units and squads. The United States and NATO have started an impudent development of Ukrainian territory as a theatre of potential military operations. Their regular joint exercises are obviously anti-Russian. Last year alone, over 23,000 troops and more than a thousand units of hardware were involved. A law has already been adopted that allows foreign troops to come to Ukraine in 2022 to take part in multinational drills. Understandably, these are primarily NATO troops. This year, at least ten of these joint drills are planned. Obviously, such undertakings are designed to be a cover-up for a rapid buildup of the NATO military group on Ukrainian territory. This is all the more so since the network of airfields upgraded with US help in Borispol, Ivano-Frankovsk, Chuguyev and Odessa, to name a few, is capable of transferring army units in a very short time. Ukraine's airspace is open to flights by US strategic and reconnaissance aircraft and drones that conduct surveillance over Russian territory. I will add that the US-built Maritime Operations Centre in Ochakov makes it possible to support activity by NATO warships, including the use of precision weapons, against the Russian Black Sea Fleet and our infrastructure on the entire Black Sea Coast. 36:54 President Putin: Article 17 of the Constitution of Ukraine stipulates that deploying foreign military bases on its territory is illegal. However, as it turns out, this is just a conventionality that can be easily circumvented. Ukraine is home to NATO training missions which are, in fact, foreign military bases. They just called a base a mission and were done with it. 37:16 President Putin: Kiev has long proclaimed a strategic course on joining NATO. Indeed, each country is entitled to pick its own security system and enter into military alliances. There would be no problem with that, if it were not for one “but.” International documents expressly stipulate the principle of equal and indivisible security, which includes obligations not to strengthen one's own security at the expense of the security of other states. This is stated in the 1999 OSCE Charter for European Security adopted in Istanbul and the 2010 OSCE Astana Declaration. In other words, the choice of pathways towards ensuring security should not pose a threat to other states, whereas Ukraine joining NATO is a direct threat to Russia's security 38:10 President Putin: Let me remind you that at the Bucharest NATO summit held in April 2008, the United States pushed through a decision to the effect that Ukraine and, by the way, Georgia would become NATO members. Many European allies of the United States were well aware of the risks associated with this prospect already then, but were forced to put up with the will of their senior partner. The Americans simply used them to carry out a clearly anti-Russian policy. 38:41 President Putin: A number of NATO member states are still very sceptical about Ukraine joining NATO. We are getting signals from some European capitals telling us not to worry since it will not happen literally overnight. In fact, our US partners are saying the same thing as well. “All right, then” we respond, “if it does not happen tomorrow, then it will happen the day after tomorrow. What does it change from the historical perspective? Nothing at all.” Furthermore, we are aware of the US leadership's position and words that active hostilities in eastern Ukraine do not rule out the possibility of that country joining NATO if it meets NATO criteria and overcomes corruption. All the while, they are trying to convince us over and over again that NATO is a peace-loving and purely defensive alliance that poses no threat to Russia. Again, they want us to take their word for it. But we are well aware of the real value of these words. In 1990, when German unification was discussed, the United States promised the Soviet leadership that NATO jurisdiction or military presence will not expand one inch to the east and that the unification of Germany will not lead to the spread of NATO's military organisation to the east. This is a quote. They issued lots of verbal assurances, all of which turned out to be empty phrases. Later, they began to assure us that the accession to NATO by Central and Eastern European countries would only improve relations with Moscow, relieve these countries of the fears steeped in their bitter historical legacy, and even create a belt of countries that are friendly towards Russia. However, the exact opposite happened. The governments of certain Eastern European countries, speculating on Russophobia, brought their complexes and stereotypes about the Russian threat to the Alliance and insisted on building up the collective defence potentials and deploying them primarily against Russia. Worse still, that happened in the 1990s and the early 2000s when, thanks to our openness and goodwill, relations between Russia and the West had reached a high level. Russia has fulfilled all of its obligations, including the pullout from Germany, from Central and Eastern Europe, making an immense contribution to overcoming the legacy of the Cold War. We have consistently proposed various cooperation options, including in the NATO-Russia Council and the OSCE formats. Moreover, I will say something I have never said publicly, I will say it now for the first time. When then outgoing US President Bill Clinton visited Moscow in 2000, I asked him how America would feel about admitting Russia to NATO. I will not reveal all the details of that conversation, but the reaction to my question was, let us say, quite restrained, and the Americans' true attitude to that possibility can actually be seen from their subsequent steps with regard to our country. I am referring to the overt support for terrorists in the North Caucasus, the disregard for our security demands and concerns, NATO's continued expansion, withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, and so on. 43:05 President Putin: Today, one glance at the map is enough to see to what extent Western countries have kept their promise to refrain from NATO's eastward expansion. They just cheated. We have seen five waves of NATO expansion, one after another – Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary were admitted in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004; Albania and Croatia in 2009; Montenegro in 2017; and North Macedonia in 2020. As a result, the Alliance, its military infrastructure has reached Russia's borders. This is one of the key causes of the European security crisis; it has had the most negative impact on the entire system of international relations and led to the loss of mutual trust. The situation continues to deteriorate, including in the strategic area. Thus, positioning areas for interceptor missiles are being established in Romania and Poland as part of the US project to create a global missile defence system. It is common knowledge that the launchers deployed there can be used for Tomahawk cruise missiles – offensive strike systems. In addition, the United States is developing its all-purpose Standard Missile-6, which can provide air and missile defence, as well as strike ground and surface targets. In other words, the allegedly defensive US missile defence system is developing and expanding its new offensive capabilities. The information we have gives us good reason to believe that Ukraine's accession to NATO and the subsequent deployment of NATO facilities has already been decided and is only a matter of time. We clearly understand that given this scenario, the level of military threats to Russia will increase dramatically, several times over. 45:07 President Putin: I will explain that American strategic planning documents confirm the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike at enemy missile systems. We also know the main adversary of the United States and NATO. It is Russia. NATO documents officially declare our country to be the main threat to Euro-Atlantic security. Ukraine will serve as an advanced bridgehead for such a strike. 46:00 President Putin: Many Ukrainian airfields are located not far from our borders. NATO's tactical aviation deployed there, including precision weapon carriers, will be capable of striking at our territory to the depth of the Volgograd-Kazan-Samara-Astrakhan line. The deployment of reconnaissance radars on Ukrainian territory will allow NATO to tightly control Russia's airspace up to the Urals. Finally, after the US destroyed the INF Treaty, the Pentagon has been openly developing many land-based attack weapons, including ballistic missiles that are capable of hitting targets at a distance of up to 5,500 km. If deployed in Ukraine, such systems will be able to hit targets in Russia's entire European part. The flying time of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Moscow will be less than 35 minutes; ballistic missiles from Kharkov will take seven to eight minutes; and hypersonic assault weapons, four to five minutes. It is like a knife to the throat. I have no doubt that they hope to carry out these plans, as they did many times in the past, expanding NATO eastward, moving their military infrastructure to Russian borders and fully ignoring our concerns, protests and warnings. Excuse me, but they simply did not care at all about such things and did whatever they deemed necessary. Of course, they are going to behave in the same way in the future. 47:46 President Putin: Russia has always advocated the resolution of the most complicated problems by political and diplomatic means, at the negotiating table. We are well aware of our enormous responsibility when it comes to regional and global stability. Back in 2008, Russia put forth an initiative to conclude a European Security Treaty under which not a single Euro-Atlantic state or international organisation could strengthen their security at the expense of the security of others. However, our proposal was rejected right off the bat on the pretext that Russia should not be allowed to put limits on NATO activities. Furthermore, it was made explicitly clear to us that only NATO members can have legally binding security guarantees. 48:35 President Putin: Last December, we handed over to our Western partners a draft treaty between the Russian Federation and the United States of America on security guarantees, as well as a draft agreement on measures to ensure the security of the Russian Federation and NATO member states. The United States and NATO responded with general statements. There were kernels of rationality in them as well, but they concerned matters of secondary importance and it all looked like an attempt to drag the issue out and to lead the discussion astray. We responded to this accordingly and pointed out that we were ready to follow the path of negotiations, provided, however, that all issues are considered as a package that includes Russia's core proposals which contain three key points. First, to prevent further NATO expansion. Second, to have the Alliance refrain from deploying assault weapon systems on Russian borders. And finally, rolling back the bloc's military capability and infrastructure in Europe to where they were in 1997, when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed. These principled proposals of ours have been ignored. 50:21 President Putin: They are again trying to blackmail us and are threatening us with sanctions, which, by the way, they will introduce no matter what as Russia continues to strengthen its sovereignty and its Armed Forces. To be sure, they will never think twice before coming up with or just fabricating a pretext for yet another sanction attack regardless of the developments in Ukraine. Their one and only goal is to hold back the development of Russia. 51:06 President Putin: I would like to be clear and straightforward: in the current circumstances, when our proposals for an equal dialogue on fundamental issues have actually remained unanswered by the United States and NATO, when the level of threats to our country has increased significantly, Russia has every right to respond in order to ensure its security. That is exactly what we will do. 51:33 President Putin: With regard to the state of affairs in Donbass, we see that the ruling Kiev elites never stop publicly making clear their unwillingness to comply with the Minsk Package of Measures to settle the conflict and are not interested in a peaceful settlement. On the contrary, they are trying to orchestrate a blitzkrieg in Donbass as was the case in 2014 and 2015. We all know how these reckless schemes ended. Not a single day goes by without Donbass communities coming under shelling attacks. The recently formed large military force makes use of attack drones, heavy equipment, missiles, artillery and multiple rocket launchers. The killing of civilians, the blockade, the abuse of people, including children, women and the elderly, continues unabated. As we say, there is no end in sight to this. Meanwhile, the so-called civilised world, which our Western colleagues proclaimed themselves the only representatives of, prefers not to see this, as if this horror and genocide, which almost 4 million people are facing, do not exist. But they do exist and only because these people did not agree with the West-supported coup in Ukraine in 2014 and opposed the transition towards the Neanderthal and aggressive nationalism and neo-Nazism which have been elevated in Ukraine to the rank of national policy. They are fighting for their elementary right to live on their own land, to speak their own language, and to preserve their culture and traditions. How long can this tragedy continue? How much longer can one put up with this? Russia has done everything to preserve Ukraine's territorial integrity. All these years, it has persistently and patiently pushed for the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 2202 of February 17, 2015, which consolidated the Minsk Package of Measures of February 12, 2015, to settle the situation in Donbass. Everything was in vain. Presidents and Rada deputies come and go, but deep down the aggressive and nationalistic regime that seized power in Kiev remains unchanged. It is entirely a product of the 2014 coup, and those who then embarked on the path of violence, bloodshed and lawlessness did not recognise then and do not recognise now any solution to the Donbass issue other than a military one. In this regard, I consider it necessary to take a long overdue decision and to immediately recognise the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic. I would like to ask the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation to support this decision and then ratify the Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Assistance with both republics. These two documents will be prepared and signed shortly. 54:52 President Putin: We want those who seized and continue to hold power in Kiev to immediately stop hostilities. Otherwise, the responsibility for the possible continuation of the bloodshed will lie entirely on the conscience of Ukraine's ruling regime. Ukraine is 'longing for peace' says Zelensky at Munich Security Conference February 19, 2022 Transcript Overview: Western powers should drop their policy of "appeasement" toward Moscow, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky told a security forum Saturday, as fears mount of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Clips 13:37 Vladimir Zelensky: Ukraine has received security guarantees for abandoning the world's third nuclear capability. We don't have that weapon. We also have no security. 14:37 Vladimir Zelensky: Since 2014, Ukraine has tried three times to convene consultations with the guarantor states of the Budapest Memorandum. Three times without success. Today Ukraine will do it for the fourth time. I, as President, will do this for the first time. But both Ukraine and I are doing this for the last time. I am initiating consultations in the framework of the Budapest Memorandum. The Minister of Foreign Affairs was commissioned to convene them. If they do not happen again or their results do not guarantee security for our country, Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt. President Biden Remarks on Russia-Ukraine Situation February 18, 2022 YouTube Version Transcript Overview: Following talks with NATO allies, President Biden provided an update on Russia-Ukraine tensions and international efforts to resolve the crisis. Clips 3:04 President Biden: You know, look, we have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week — in the coming days. We believe that they will target Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million innocent people.War posturing - Biden US provided record security assistance to Ukraine 4:00 President Biden: This past year, the United States provided a record amount of security assistance to Ukraine to bolster its defensive — $650 million, from Javelin missiles to ammunition. And we also previously provided $500 million in Ukrai- — in humanitarian aid and economic support for Ukraine. And earlier this week, we also announced an additional sovereign loan guarantee of up to $1 billion to strengthen Ukraine's economic resilience. 7:24 President Biden: Well, I don't think he is remotely contemplating nuclear — using nuclear weapons. But I do think it's — I think he is focused on trying to convince the world that he has the ability to change the dynamics in Europe in a way that he cannot. President Biden Remarks on Russia and Ukraine February 15, 2022 YouTube Version Transcript Overview: President Biden gave an update on tensions between Russia and Ukraine, calling for diplomacy to resolve tensions. Clips 1:47 President Biden: The United States has put on the table concrete ideas to establish a security environment in Europe. We're proposing new arms control measures, new transparency measures, new strategic stability measures. These measures would apply to all parties — NATO and Russia alike. 2:14 President Biden: We will not sacrifice basic principles, though. Nations have a right to sovereignty and territorial integrity. They have the freedom to set their own course and choose with whom they will associate. 3:17 President Biden: And the fact remains: Right now, Russia has more than 150,000 troops encircling Ukraine in Belarus and along Ukraine's border. An invasion remains distinctly possible. That's why I've asked several times that all Americans in Ukraine leave now before it's too late to leave safely. It is why we have temporarily relocated our embassy from Kyiv to Lviv in western Ukraine, approaching the Polish border. 4:12 President Biden: The United States and NATO are not a threat to Russia. Ukraine is not threatening Russia. Neither the U.S. nor NATO have missiles in Ukraine. We do not — do not have plans to put them there as well. 4:26 President Biden: To the citizens of Russia: You are not our enemy. And I do not believe you want a bloody, destructive war against Ukraine — a country and a people with whom you share such deep ties of family, history, and culture. 5:52 President Biden: Today, our NATO Allies and the Alliance is as unified and determined as it has ever been. And the source of our unbreakable strength continues to be the power, resilience, and universal appeal of our shared democratic values. Because this is about more than just Russia and Ukraine. It's about standing for what we believe in, for the future we want for our world. 7:25 President Biden: And when it comes to Nord Stream 2, the pipeline that would bring natural gas from Russia to Germany, if Russia further invades Ukraine, it will not happen. 7:35 President Biden: While I will not send American servicemen to fight Russia in Ukraine, we have supplied the Ukrainian military with equipment to help them defend themselves. We have provided training and advice and intelligence for the same purpose. 7:50 President Biden: And make no mistake: The United States will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full force of American power. An attack against one NATO country is an attack against all of us. And the United States commitment to Article 5 is sacrosanct. Already, in response to Russia's build-up of troops, I have sent additional U.S. forces to bolster NATO's eastern flank. Several of our Allies have also announced they'll add forces and capabilities to ensure deterrence and defense along NATO's eastern flank. We will also continue to conduct military exercises with our Allies and partners to enhance defensive readiness. And if Russia invades, we will take further steps to reinforce our presence in NATO, reassure our Allies, and deter further aggression. 9:12 President Biden: I will not pretend this will be painless. There could be impact on our energy prices, so we are taking active steps to alleviate the pressure on our own energy markets and offset rising prices. We're coordinating with major enersy [sic] — energy consumers and producers. We're prepared to deploy all the tools and authority at our disposal to provide relief at the gas pump. And I will work with Congress on additional measures to help protect consumers and address the impact of prices at the pump. Hearing on U.S. Policy Toward Russia Senate Committee on Foreign Relations December 7, 2021 Overview: Victoria Nuland, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, testified at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on U.S. policy toward Russia. She addressed President Biden's earlier call with Russian President Vladimir Putin and said that Russia would suffer severe consequences if it attacked Ukraine. Other topics included the use of sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine, the cooperation of NATO and U.S. allies, Russia's use of energy during conflict, and the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline Clips 10:42 Victoria Nuland: Since 2014 The United States has provided Ukraine with $2.4 billion in security assistance including $450 million this year alone. 30:55 Sen. Todd Young (R-IN): President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov have repeatedly indicated that they seek to deny any potential path to NATO membership for Ukraine and other Eastern European countries. Does the administration view this demand is a valid issue for negotiation? Victoria Nuland: No we do not and President Biden made that point crystal clear to President Putin today that the issue of who joins NATO is an issue for NATO to decide it's an issue for applicant countries to decide that no other outside power will or may have a veto or a vote in those decisions. Foreign Affairs Issue Launch with Former Vice President Joe Biden January 23, 2018 Clips 24:30 Former Vice President Biden: I'll give you one concrete example. I was—not I, but it just happened to be that was the assignment I got. I got all the good ones. And so I got Ukraine. And I remember going over, convincing our team, our leaders to—convincing that we should be providing for loan guarantees. And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn't. So they said they had—they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I'm not going to—or, we're not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You're not the president. The president said—I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars. I said, you're not getting the billion. I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time. Cover Art Design by Only Child Imaginations Music Presented in This Episode Intro & Exit: Tired of Being Lied To by David Ippolito (found on Music Alley by mevio)

Maria and Julio are joined by Anayansi Diaz-Cortes, senior reporter and producer at Reveal, and Kate Doyle, senior analyst at the National Security Archive. They discuss Reveal's new podcast series “After Ayotzinapa”, a three-part investigation into the disappearance of 43 students from a Mexican teacher's college in 2014. They also unpack the role of the U.S. in Mexico's drug war, and the human consequences of corruption. You can listen to the full series here. ITT Staff Picks“It was evident from the beginning that state violence, including enforced disappearances, was a feature, not a bug, of this new war,” writes journalist Ryan Devereaux in this June 2021 piece for The Intercept on Mexico's unsolved disappearances. Reporter Jeremy Kryt unpacks how collusion between police and organized crime led to the disappearances of the 43 students in Ayotzinapa in this piece for The Daily Beast from October 2021. This episode of Latino USA from 2016 dives into the context and immediate aftermath of the students' disappearances in Mexico. Photo credit: AP Photo/Claudio Cruz, File See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

When food alters gene function   Helmholtz Zentrum München, January 30, 2022   As the study shows, a high-fat diet during pregnancy and lactation leads to epigenetic* changes in the offspring. These changes affect metabolic pathways regulated by the gut hormone GIP**, whereby the adult offspring are more susceptible to obesity and insulin resistance, the precursor to type 2 diabetes. Similar mechanisms cannot be ruled out in humans, according to Pfeiffer. As scientists throughout the world observe, children of obese mothers have a higher risk of obesity and metabolic disorders. Recent findings suggest that diet-related epigenetic effects may also play a causal role in this.   (NEXT)   Probiotics Help with Morning Sickness   University of California at Davis, January 28, 2022   A study published by researchers from the University of California, Davis, has found that probiotics are a game changer for moms-to-be who find themselves green at the gills on the daily. After receiving a mix of 10 Lactobacillus probiotic strains and one Bifidobacterium strain over a 16-day period, the low-risk pregnant women in the study, who all had been experiencing nausea and other digestive system complaints, reported a 16% reduction in nausea and a 33% reduction in vomiting episodes.   (NEXT)   Higher dietary fiber intake in young women may reduce breast cancer risk   Harvard School of Public Health, January 31, 2022   Boston, MA – Women who eat more high-fiber foods during adolescence and young adulthood–especially lots of fruits and vegetables–may have significantly lower breast cancer risk than those who eat less dietary fiber when young. The researchers looked at a group of 90,534 women who participated in the Nurses' Health Study II, a large long-running investigation of factors that influence women's health. The women–ages 27-44 at the time–filled out questionnaires about their food intake, and did so every four years after that. The researchers analyzed the women's fiber intake while adjusting for a number of other factors, such as race, family history of breast cancer, body mass index, weight change over time, menstruation history, alcohol use, and other dietary factors.   (NEXT)   Cocoa flavanols may use gut microbiota pathway to ease metabolic syndrome: Review   Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, January 29, 2022   Consuming cocoa flavanols may interact with the gut microbiota as a way of preventing metabolic syndrome or easing the condition's symptoms, a review has concluded. While flavanols from a variety of dietary sources appear promising, cocoa flavanols represent an emerging approach for intervention in metabolic syndrome. Flavanols are compounds found in a variety of plant-based foods and beverages, including tea, apples, grapes, cocoa and nuts. Cocoa is generally regarded as the most concentrated dietary source of flavanols with the strongest antioxidant potential.   (NEXT)   Cruciferous vegetables help the immune system to fight intestinal pathogens   Francis Crick Institute, January 28, 2022   A study in mice shows that eating cruciferous vegetables—including broccoli, kale and cauliflower – helps the immune system to fight intestinal pathogens. The research might have implications for people with inflammatory bowel diseases. A protein called the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) plays a crucial role in protecting us from external pollutants, toxins and pathogens at barrier sites in our body such as the skin, lungs and gut. Studying the role of AhR in the gut, scientists at the Francis Crick Institute have discovered that another protein, known as Cyp1a1, regulates immunity in the gut by providing feedback on AhR signalling by degrading the molecules that activate AhR—known as AhR ligands However, too much Cyp1a1 can deplete AhR ligands altogether. This could result in susceptibility to bacteria like pathogenic E. Coli and might play a role in conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease.   (VIDEO) Klaus Schwab referencing the global leaders groomed by WEF- at Harvard's JFK School of Government, 2017   Quit social media | Dr. Cal Newport | TEDxTysons Social Media – Why it Sickens the Self and Divides Society COVID-19: A Second Opinion (LETTER)   Letter to Joe Rogan   Dear Joe, I am writing in response to your recent clip about the controversy that has arisen over your coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. I have been a media host dealing primarily with medicine and health for 57 years and have been engaged in many media wars and even censorship for over four decades. One lesson I have learned is to never apologize when you are correct.  Although I have not watched all of your programs addressing pandemic-related topics, your guests who have questioned the official government narrative, notably Drs. McCullough and Malone, were correct and were far better prepared to provide supporting scientific references to their claims than were Drs. Gupta and Hotez. That should be evident to your regular viewers. I would like to offer a suggestion. Have your staff make transcripts of your interviews from your pro- and con- guests and send them respectively with a request to provide supporting scientific evidence to their statements. Follow this up by moderating an open dialogue with an invitation to the press and critics to ask questions specific to the actual science and supporting clinical evidence, including the positions of our federal health agencies and the World Health Organization.  This will enable your audience and the greater public to decide.  I can predict with strong confidence that individuals such as Gupta, Osterholm and Hotez will decline to dialogue with those who they have consistently ridiculed. For those in power and whom the dominant narrative protects, it is never in their best interest to publicly debate their critics. Nevertheless your very gesture to advance open debate will be an enormous boon for yourself and a growing audience. Already, Spotify has aligned with the pro-establishment fact checkers to serve as the final arbiters of the content and conversations you conduct henceforth. This new effort is thoroughly non-objective and biased. Now that you have apologized and have exposed a weakness, unless you remain firm with your integrity to weigh out the facts and evidence objectively, they will be certain to further erode your reputation and they will succeed. In the future, whatever you air that can be ruled as misinformation – rightly or wrongly — will be magnified across the media. And it will not cease until your opponents get you off the air. You are surely aware that the assault against your program and person is highly coordinated; however, it seems certain that Spotify also exerted some kind of pressure to have you acquiesce to some demands. You have a remarkable audience, it is my belief that the size of your audience comes from your honesty and integrity, an unflinching character to shout out truth to power. Now you are at the threshold of power shouting back.  Trust your audience, not your enemies. Because no apologies you make will be fully respected because you now represent a clear and present threat to their agenda. I hope you take my comments in solidarity with your courage to question many of the lingering uncertainties, contradictions and vagrant misleading statements that comprise the official Covid narrative. Gary Null, PhD   (OTHER NEWS) Tangled Tale of NATO Expansion at the Heart of Ukraine Crisis Joe Lauria, Consortium News, January 28, 2022   The end of the Cold War with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union two years later presented the United States with a choice: triumphalism or reconciliation. There was hope of a “peace dividend” because the fortune spent on armaments for so long could now be spent on domestic needs. The Warsaw Pact dissolved and there was hope that its counterpart, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, would also pass into history.  Rather its expansion has become a flashpoint in the current standoff over Ukraine. To assent to the reunification of Germany, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ultimately agreed to a proposal from then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker that a reunited Germany would be part of NATO but the military alliance would not move “one inch” to the east, that is, absorb any of the former Warsaw Pact nations into NATO. On Feb. 9, 1990, Baker said: “We consider that the consultations and discussions in the framework of the 2+4 mechanism should give a guarantee that the reunification of Germany will not lead to the enlargement of NATO's military organization to the East.” On the next day, then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said: ““We consider that NATO should not enlarge its sphere of activity.” Gorbachev's mistake was not to get it in writing as a legally-binding agreement.  For years it was believed there was no written record of the Baker-Gorbachev exchange at all, until the National Security Archive at George Washington University in December 2017 published a series of memos and cables about these assurances against NATO expansion eastward.  '” One Jan. 31, 1999 cable from the U.S. embassy in Bonn informed Washington that German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher's speech that day made clear “that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.' Therefore, NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.'” President Bill Clinton's administration investigated the matter and concluded that Yeltsin was wrong and that no NATO expansion eastward was ever promised. According to a 2014 article in Foreign Affairs: “'You say that NATO is not directed against us, that it is simply a security structure that is adapting to new realities,' Gorbachev told Baker in May, according to Soviet records. ‘Therefore, we propose to join NATO.' Baker refused to consider such a notion, replying dismissively, ‘Pan-European security is a dream.'” Since then NATO has held many military exercises Russia has found threatening. TASS reported in December that NATO holds 40 exercises a year near Russian territory. In 2016, a 10-day maneuver was carried out in Poland with 31,000 NATO troops from 24 nations and thousands of  tanks and other vehicles. That year NATO also installed a missile base in Romania that can strike Russia, claiming it was only “defensive” against incoming missiles from Iran, though the weapons can also be used offensively. A similar missile base, previously canceled, is slated to be operational in Poland later this year. Six years after NATO promised Ukraine would one day become a member, the U.S. led a coup in Kiev that overthrew a democratically-elected president who leaned towards Moscow. The U.S. move seemed to come from Brzezinski's playbook. In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, he wrote: “Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.” Thus U.S. “primacy,” or world dominance, which still drives Washington, is not possible without control of Eurasia, as Brzezinski argued, and that's not possible without control of Ukraine by pushing Russia out.  What Brzezinski and U.S. leaders still view as Russia's “imperial ambitions” are in Moscow seen as imperative defensive measures against an aggressive West.   (NEXT)   Sweden decides against recommending COVID vaccines for kids aged 5-11   Reuters, January 28, 2022   Sweden has decided against recommending COVID vaccines for kids aged 5-11, the Health Agency said on Thursday, arguing that the benefits did not outweigh the risks. “With the knowledge we have today, with a low risk for serious disease for kids, we don't see any clear benefit with vaccinating them,” Health Agency official Britta Bjorkholm told a news conference.

It has been over seven years since 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College in Guerrero, Mexico, were taken by armed men in the middle of the night. They were never seen again. Their disappearance sparked mass protests, as the 43 became symbols of Mexico's unchecked human rights abuses. In recent decades, tens of thousands of people have gone missing in Mexico, and almost no one has been held accountable. The culture of impunity is so ingrained that families often don't go to police for help, believing they're either corrupt or too afraid to investigate. In the first part of a three-part investigation of the Ayotzinapa case, Reveal's Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Kate Doyle from the National Security Archive take us inside the investigation into the attack on the students. For parts two and three, go to the Reveal podcast feed.

Discover the incredible story of Vasili Arkhipov, the Soviet Navy officer who prevented nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Learn how Arkhipov persuaded fellow officers not to launch a nuclear attack, in what Thomas Blanton, former director of the National Security Archive, describes as a moment that 'saved the world.' #CubanMissileCrisis #ColdWar #VasiliArkhipov #nuclearwarprevention #SovietNavy #historicalevents #ThomasBlanton #NationalSecurityArchive Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It has been over seven years since 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College in Guerrero, Mexico, were taken by armed men in the middle of the night. They were never seen again. Their disappearance sparked mass protests, as the 43 became symbols of Mexico's unchecked human rights abuses. In recent decades, tens of thousands of people have gone missing in Mexico, and almost no one has been held accountable. The culture of impunity is so ingrained that families often don't go to police for help, believing they're either corrupt or too afraid to investigate. In a three-part investigation of the Ayotzinapa case, Reveal's Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Kate Doyle from the National Security Archive take us inside the investigation into the attack on the students. They have help from Omar Gómez Trejo – the man the Mexican president tapped to prosecute the crime. For more than a year, he kept audio diaries and had regular conversations with Diaz-Cortes and Doyle, giving them insight into a massive coverup by the previous Mexican administration and efforts by current investigators to piece together the details of the attack and bring to justice those responsible.

From the National Security Archive at George Washington University This episode is also available as a blog post: https://transnational.live/2022/01/11/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-2/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/transnational-foundation/message

Show Notes With last week's general discussion of the plot of Char's Counterattack out of the way, it's time to start diving deep on specific aspects of the film. This week: environmental justice advocate Colin joins us to discuss the environment, and environmentalism, in Char's Counterattack. Plus in the research Thom explores what it might mean that the Federation is headquartered in Lhasa while Nina looks at how a 1988 audience might have responded to talk of 'nuclear winter'. From the Talkback In preparation for our conversation, Colin had us read "Principles of Environmental Justice" by the Delegates to the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held on October 24-27, 1991, and "The Progressive Plantation" by Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin. You can find Colin on Twitter at @padgettish and listen to them co-host for Wow! Cool Robot!!'s coverage of Zeta Gundam, or their own much less serious podcast about Medabots at Medawatch. They also recommended the Environmental Justice Network as a resource. Lhasa, Tibet Timeline of major events in Tibetan history from the BBC. Tibetan history via Britannica. Wikipedia pages for the history of Tibet, Lhasa, the 5th Dalai Lama, Tibet under Qing rule, and Mongol invasions of Tibet. General Tibetan history: “Tibetan Nation: A History Of Tibetan Nationalism And Sino-tibetan Relations,” by Warren Smith. Routledge. 1997. Tourist guide to the Potala Palace (which definitely appears in the movie) and the Jokhang Temple (which probably does). By She Jingwei for China Global Television Network, Mar. 26, 2019. Available at https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d514d30496a4e33457a6333566d54/index.html. Recent History: Tibet and China: “Tibet, China and the United States: Reflections on the Tibet Question.” By Melvyn C. Goldstein for The Atlantic Council of the United States. 1995. Available at https://web.archive.org/web/20061106021854/http://cc.purdue.edu/~wtv/tibet/article/art4.html. Topgyal, Tsering. “Identity Insecurity and the Tibetan Resistance Against China.” Pacific Affairs 86, no. 3 (2013): 515–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43590713. “The Monastery as a Medium of Tibetan Culture,” Donald S. Lopez, Jr. For Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine. March 1988. Available at https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/monastery-medium-tibetan-culture. “Timeline of Destruction of Tibetan Buddhist Monasteries in China,” by Alexander Berzin. 1994. Available at https://studybuddhism.com/en/advanced-studies/history-culture/buddhism-in-east-asia/timeline-of-destruction-of-tibetan-buddhist-monasteries-in-china “Threat from Tibet? Systemic Repression of Tibetan Buddhism in China,” by Ryan Cimmino for Harvard International Review. Sept. 16, 2018. Available at https://hir.harvard.edu/repression-tibetan-buddhism-china/. “Genocide in Tibet,” by Maura Moynihan for the Washington Post, Jan. 25, 1998. Available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1998/01/25/genocide-in-tibet/27c0891c-57f1-4a7c-b873-a1071d93cbfd “'Prosecute them with Awesome Power' - China's Crackdown on Tengdro Monastery and Restrictions on Communications in Tibet.” Human Rights Watch. July 6, 2021. Available at https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/07/06/prosecute-them-awesome-power/chinas-crackdown-tengdro-monastery-and-restrictions International Resolutions and Recognition on Tibet (1959 to 2004), assembled by Lobsang Nyandak Zayul for the Department of Information and International Relations, Central Tibetan Administration. Available at https://tibet.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/International-rsolutions-on-Tibet.pdf The Dalai Lama: “Chronology of Events [in the Dalai Lama's life].” From the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Available at https://www.dalailama.com/the-dalai-lama/events-and-awards/chronology-of-events “14th Dalai Lama,” by Britannica. Available at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dalai-Lama-14th/Life-in-exile “Dalai Lama caught in the middle as India and China reboot ties,” by Sugam Pokharel for CNN. March 30, 2018. Available at https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/30/asia/india-tibet-china-dalai-lama-intl/index.html “Dalai Lama opens exhibit of Tibetan art at Ueno,” by Ray Mahon for Stars and Stripes. Sept. 28, 1967. Available at https://www.stripes.com/news/dalai-lama-opens-exhibit-of-tibetan-art-at-ueno-1.18977. The 1980s Negotiations: Norbu, Dawa. “China's Dialogue With the Dalai Lama 1978-90: Prenegotiation Stage of Dead End?” Pacific Affairs 64, no. 3 (1991): 351–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/2759468. “Tibet 1985: The Last Fact-Finding Delegation - A Personal Account” by Tenzin Phuntsok Atisha.” 2020. Available at https://www.atc.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Tibet-1985-EBOOK.pdf. A report about the 1980s negotiations, based on declassified documents created by US officials at the time. “U.S. Officials Hoped Chinese Liberalization Program for Tibet in Early 1980s Would Bring Significant Improvements,” by Robert A. Wampler for National Security Archive. Feb. 28, 2013. Available at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB414/. Press release: “Sino-Tibetan Contacts to Resume,” by Chhime R. Chhoekyapa from the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, including an annexed timeline of negotiations between the Dalai Lama and Beijing. May 2, 2008. Available at https://www.c3sindia.org/geopolitics-strategy/sino-tibetan-contacts-to-resume/ Additional relevant Wikipedia entries on the "Great Game," the 1959 Tibetan uprising, Tibetan unrest 1987-1989, the Tibet Autonomous Region, Chushi Gangdruk, the Tibetan independence movement, the Convention of Lhasa, and the Seventeen Point Agreement. Japan, Chernobyl, & Nuclear Anxiety Wikipedia pages for the Chernobyl disaster, its effects, and its cultural impact, Page on the Chernobyl accident from the World Nuclear Association. About the "Red Forest." Page on the "Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident." Wikipedia pages for the band The Blue Hearts (ザ・ブルーハーツ), and for "On Your Mark," the Change and Aska song with the Ghibli/Miyazaki AMV (anime music video). Radiophobia. Specific pages on the nuclear-power debate, the anti-nuclear movement (in general and in Japan), and anti-nuclear organizations. Japanese-language page on the anti-nuclear movement. Website for the Citizens Nuclear Information Center (原子力資料情報室) (shortened to CNIC), a Japanese anti-nuclear organization (in Japanese), History and timeline for CNIC (in English). CNIC English-language newsletters, Oct. 1987, Dec.1987, and Jan-Feb 1988. Contemporary articles the Chernobyl disaster: Silk, L. (1986, May 02). Economic scene|: Chernobyl's world impact. New York Times (1923-) Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/economic-scene/docview/110930284/se-2?accountid=35927 Hudson, Richard L., Terence Roth. "Chernobyl: Coping with Consequences --- Lingering Fallout: A Year Later, Mishap at Chernobyl Damps Atom-Power Industry --- Siemens Plant-Building Unit Battles Germany's Greens, Seeks to Reassure Public --- in Britain, Cuddly Reactors." Wall Street Journal Apr 23 1987, Eastern edition ed.: 1. ProQuest. 10 Nov. 2021. STUART D. "BIG AREA STRICKEN: SPREAD OF RADIOACTIVITY WAS FAR GREATER THAN INDICATED BEFORE FALLOUT FROM CHERNOBYL DISASTER AFFECTED LARGER AREA THAN FIRST REPORTED." New York Times (1923-) Aug 22 1986: 2. ProQuest. 10 Nov. 2021. Taylor, Robert E. "Scope of Chernobyl Accident is Unclear to West as Fallout Continues to Spread." Wall Street Journal May 05 1986, Eastern edition ed.: 1. ProQuest. 10 Nov. 2021. "Panel Says Japan should Boost Nuclear Power use." Wall Street Journal Jul 21 1986, Eastern edition ed.: 1. ProQuest. 10 Nov. 2021. WEINSTEIN, BERNARD L. and HAROLD T. GROSS. "Japan is Spending Heavily to Avoid Oil." New York Times (1923-), Mar 27, 1988, pp. 1. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/japan-is-spending-heavily-avoid-oil/docview/110543916/se-2?accountid=35927. ERIK E. "After Accident at the Soviet Station, Nuclear Power is Questioned again." New York Times (1923-), May 02, 1986, pp. 1. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/after-accident-at-soviet-station-nuclear-power-is/docview/110943137/se-2?accountid=35927. Other articles and papers: Zhukova, Ekatherina. “Foreign Aid and Identity after the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster: How Belarus Shapes Relations with Germany, Europe, Russia, and Japan.” Cooperation and Conflict, vol. 52, no. 4, Sage Publications, Ltd., 2017, pp. 485–501, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48590276. Okabe, Aki. “Japan Reacts to Chernobyl.” Earth Island Journal, vol. 2, no. 2, Earth Island Institute, 1987, pp. 14–15, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43881866. Great book about film director and screenwriter Honda Ishiro (本多 猪四郎): Ryfle, Steve, et al. Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, from Godzilla to Kurosawa. Wesleyan University Press, 2017. English and Japanese Wikipedia pages for the Kurosawa Akira (黒澤 明) film, 生きものの記録 or "I Live in Fear." About the Stanley Kubrick film "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." Not mentioned in the research but when I was editing and got to the part about Nazi scientists, I remember the existence of this satirical song, "Wernher Von Braun" by Thomas Andrew Lehrer (1965). Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded, and produced within Lenapehoking, the ancestral and unceded homeland of the Lenape, or Delaware, people. Before European settlers forced them to move west, the Lenape lived in New York City, New Jersey, and portions of New York State, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut. Lenapehoking is still the homeland of the Lenape diaspora, which includes communities living in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario. You can learn more about Lenapehoking, the Lenape people, and ongoing efforts to honor the relationship between the land and indigenous peoples by visiting the websites of the Delaware Tribe and the Manhattan-based Lenape Center. Listeners in the Americas and Oceania can learn more about the indigenous people of your area at https://native-land.ca/. We would like to thank The Lenape Center for guiding us in creating this living land acknowledgment. You can subscribe to Mobile Suit Breakdown for free! on fine Podcast services everywhere and on YouTube, visit our website GundamPodcast.com, follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, or email your questions, comments, and complaints to gundampodcast@gmail.com. Mobile Suit Breakdown wouldn't exist without the support of our fans and Patrons! You can join our Patreon to support the podcast and enjoy bonus episodes, extra out-takes, behind-the-scenes photos and video, MSB gear, and much more! The intro music is WASP by Misha Dioxin, and the outro is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio, both licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 licenses. All music used in the podcast has been edited to fit the text. Mobile Suit Breakdown provides critical commentary and is protected by the Fair Use clause of the United States Copyright law. Gundam content is copyright and/or trademark of Sunrise Inc., Bandai, Sotsu Agency, or its original creator. Mobile Suit Breakdown is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Sunrise, Bandai, Sotsu, or any of their subsidiaries, employees, or associates and makes no claim to own Gundam or any of the copyrights or trademarks related to it. Copyrighted content used in Mobile Suit Breakdown is used in accordance with the Fair Use clause of the United States Copyright law. Any queries should be directed to gundampodcast@gmail.com

Author of three books on CIA operations, Valentine's research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA's elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam.While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA's relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and John Jay College.This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA's ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA's activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States.A common theme is the CIA's ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability.Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.

Author of three books on CIA operations, Valentine's research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA's elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam.While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA's relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and John Jay College.This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA's ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA's activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States.A common theme is the CIA's ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability.Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.

Author of three books on CIA operations, Valentine's research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA's elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam.While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA's relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and John Jay College.This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA's ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA's activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States.A common theme is the CIA's ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability.Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.

Today's guest on the Danger Close podcast is Craig Whitlock. Craig Whitlock is a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist who has specialized in reporting on national security issues for The Washington Post since 1998. Since 2001, he has covered the Global War on Terrorism as a foreign correspondent, Pentagon reporter, and national security specialist.  His new book, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War, asks and answers the question every American is asking in the wake of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan: after 20 years of war, thousands of lives lost with even more suffering the physical and emotional trauma of the battlefield, and trillions of dollars spent - what went wrong in Afghanistan?   To gain access to what are now known as The Afghanistan Papers, The Washington Post had to sue the federal government twice under the Freedom of Information Act to force them to release unclassified interviews with 428 generals, diplomats, aid workers and Afghan officials. These documents along with 59,000 pages of Donald Rumsfeld's memos obtained through another Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive at George Washington University and 600 unclassified interviews with veterans of the war conducted by the Army's Combat Studies Institute and another series of interviews with Bush White House officials from the Miller Center at UVA form the foundation of research for Craig's book.   If you suspected that elected and appointed officials, diplomats, government bureaucrats and senior level military leaders have been lying to congress, the tactical level troops, reporters and the American people about the war in Afghanistan for the past 20 years, this book provides you the truth - in their own words.   You can follow Craig on Twitter @CraigMWhitlock. Presented by SIG Sauer. Gear Spotlight: The Life of General Ulysses S. Grant by J.S.C. Abott Petzl Headlamps Ten Thousand “Interval” Short

Wendy Mendez's mother was tortured and disappeared by the military during the Guatemalan civil war — when Mendez was just nine years old. Now, with a trial of 12 alleged death squad members underway in Guatemala City, we talk to Mendez about the chance for justice, and hear about the need for a full account with Kate Doyle, a senior analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America at the National Security Archive in Washington.

La CIA ha tentato di eliminare Raul Castro nel 1960. Secondo documenti declassificati, pubblicati dal National Security Archive di Washington, l'agenzia di intelligence americana ha offerto 10.

Doug Valentine : Cia As Organized Crime / Robert Martinez : WolfPAC NevadaAuthor of three books on CIA operations, Valentine's research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA's elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam.While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA's relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and John Jay College.This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA's ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA's activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States.A common theme is the CIA's ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability.Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.

Doug Valentine : Cia As Organized Crime / Robert Martinez : WolfPAC Nevada Author of three books on CIA operations, Valentine's research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA's elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam.While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA's relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and John Jay College.This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA's ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA's activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States.A common theme is the CIA's ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability.Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.

Doug Valentine : Cia As Organized Crime / Robert Martinez : WolfPAC Nevada Author of three books on CIA operations, Valentine's research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA's elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam.While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA's relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and John Jay College.This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA's ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA's activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States.A common theme is the CIA's ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability.Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.

We are in the process of regime changing Belarus. In this episode, I prove it. Executive Producer: Nich Secord Please Support Congressional Dish – Quick Links Click here to contribute monthly or a lump sum via PayPal Click here to support Congressional Dish via Patreon (donations per episode) Send Zelle payments to: Donation@congressionaldish.com Send Venmo payments to: @Jennifer-Briney Send Cash App payments to: $CongressionalDish or Donation@congressionaldish.com Use your bank’s online bill pay function to mail contributions to: 5753 Hwy 85 North, Number 4576, Crestview, FL 32536 Please make checks payable to Congressional Dish Thank you for supporting truly independent media! Recommended Episodes CD225: Targets of the Free Marketeers CD206: Impeachment: The Evidence CD190: A Coup for Capitalism CD176: Target Venezuela: Regime Change in Progress CD102: The World Trade Organization: COOL? CD068: Ukraine Aid Bill CD067: What Do We Want In Ukraine? Bills Omnibus 2021 Outline Bill Text DIVISION FF - OTHER MATTERS TITLE III - FOREIGN RELATIONS AND DEPARTMENT OF STATE PROVISIONS SUBTITLE C - Support for Human Rights in Belarus Belarus Democracy, Human Rights, and Sovereignty Act of 2020 Sec. 322: Findings "Alyaksandr Lukashenka has ruled Belarus as an undemocratic dictatorship since the first presidential election in Belarus in 1994." "Subsequent presidential election in Belarus have been neither free nor fair..." In response to the 2006 presidential election, "Congress passed the Belarus Democracy Reauthorization Act of 2006" 2006: President George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13405 which authorized sanctions 2011: Senate Resolution 105 condemned the December 2010 elections in Belarus as illegitimate Repeatedly says, "The Government of Belarus, led illegally by Alyaksandr Lukashenka..." Accuses the government of conducting flawed elections, retribution against protestors, the suppression of the media, "a systematic campaign of harassment, repression, and closure of nongovernmental organizations", and pursuit of policies that make Belarus "subservient" to Russia by integrating into a "so called 'Union State' that is under the control of Russia". Accuses the government of arresting journalists, activists, and "3 leading presidential candidates" ahead of the August 2020 election. Accuses the government of conducting a fraudulent election on August 9, 2020, which reelected Alyaksandr Lukashenka and says the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada refuse to recognize Alyaksandr Lukashenka as the legitimate President of Belarus. The opposition candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhaouskaya fled to Lithuania in the days following the election, and from Lithuania, she "announced the formation of a Coordination Council to oversee... a peaceful transition of power..." The government of Belarus is accused of arresting journalists, including six who report for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Alyaksandr Lukashenka has requested security assistance from Russia, which Russia has promised to provide Sec. 323: Statement of Policy "To continue rejecting the invalid results of the fraudulent August 9, 2020 presidential election in Belarus..." "To continue supporting calls for new presidential and parliamentary elections..." "To refuse to recognize Alyaksandr Lukashenka as the legitimately elected leader of Belarus" "To not recognize any incorporation of Belarus into a 'Union State' with Russia..." "To continue calling for the fulfillment by the Government of Belarus of Belarus's freely undertaken obligations as an OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) participating state and as a signatory of the Charter of the United Nations" "To recognize the Coordination Council as a legitimate institution to participate in a dialogue on a peaceful transition of power." "To impose targeted sanctions, in coordination with the European Union and other international partners..." Sec. 324: Assistance to Promote Democracy, Civil Society, and Sovereignty in Belarus Authorizes "Belarusian groups outside of Belarus" to receive assistance Authorizes assistance to be used for "enhancing the development of the private section, particularly the information technology sector, and its role in the economy of Belarus, including by increasing the capacity of private sector actors..." Authorizes "such sums as may be necessary" for fiscal years 2021 and 2022. Sec. 325: International Broadcasting, Internet Freedom, and Access to Information in Belarus Gives the Biden administration's State Department 120 days to submit a strategy, with a cost estimate, for expanding radio, television, live stream, and social network broadcasting and communications in Belarus to provide news and information, to develop and deploy circumvention technologies to allow people in Belarus to communicate on the internet without interference from the government of Belarus, to monitor the cooperation between Belarus and other countries in regards to internet monitoring or censorship capabilities, and "build the capacity of civil society, media, and other nongovernmental organizations and organizations to identify, track, and counter disinformation." Part of this report can be classified Sec. 326: Sanctions Against the Government of Belarus Allows sanctions to be applied to "a member of any branch of the security or law enforcement services of Belarus...", or is "an official in the so-called 'Union State' between Russia and Belarus (regardless of nationality of the individual) and their family members. Articles/Documents Article: Institutional interest in bitcoin sets the latest bull run apart from 2017's retail-driven surge, Goldman's digital asset chief says, By Emily Graffeo, Business Insider, March 9, 2021 Article: The European Deterrence Initiative, By Candela FERNANDEZ GIL-DELGADO, Legal Researcher at Finabel – European Army Interoperability Centre, March 4, 2021 Article: Atlantic Council urges Biden to enforce regime change in Belarus, By Paul Antonopoulos, Aletho News, February 18, 2021 Press Release: Nominations Sent to the Senate, The White House, February 13, 2021 Article: Joe Biden’s Pick of Victoria Nuland Means Relations with Russia Could Get Worse, By Mark Episkopos, The National Interest, January 15, 2021 Article: Opinion: How Biden can undo damage to U.S.-backed news outlets that counter authoritarian propaganda, By Gregory Feifer, Slate, December 18, 2020 Article: Belarus Will Be an Early Challenge for Biden, By Jamie Fly, The Washington Post, December 24, 2020 Article: U.S. Senate Unanimously Approves Julie Fisher As New Ambassador To Minsk, BelarusFeed, December 17, 2020 Article: Opinion: The people of Belarus are still marching against dictatorship. The U.S. can help., By Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, The Washington Post, December 4, 2020 Statement: BELARUS – STATEMENT BY VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN, Joe Biden, October 27, 2020 Statement: Public Companies Have Invested Billions in Bitcoin This Year, By Martin Young, CryptoPotato, October 14, 2020 Press Release: Treasury Sanctions Belarus Officials for Undermining Democracy, U.S. Department of the Treasury, October 2, 2020 Press Release: House Members Introduce Belarus Democracy and Human Rights Act, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, October 1, 2020 Article: What Exactly Is The Coordination Council And What Are Its Plans To Oust Belarus’s Leader?, By Tony Wesolowsky, RadioFreeEurope, RadioLiberty, August 25, 2020 Document: Belarus: An Overview, By Cory Welt, Congressional Research Service, August 24, 2020 Article: The U.S. Was Set to Send an Ambassador to Belarus. Then Came the Crackdown., Robbie Gramer and Amy Mackinnon, Foreign Policy, August 12, 2020 Document: EUROPEAN DETERRENCE INITIATIVE, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, February 2020 Article: The Union State of Russia and Belarus: Searching for a Development Vector, By Sergey Rekeda, moderndiplomacy, December 20, 2019 Article: Why economic reforms in Belarus are now more urgent than ever, By Alex Kremer, World Bank Blogs, June 26, 2019 Article: Yeltsin Shelled Russian Parliament 25 Years Ago, U.S. Praised “Superb Handling”, By Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, National Security Archive, October 4, 2018 Document: Belarus: Background and U.S. Policy Concerns, By Steven Woehrel, Specialist in European Affairs, Congressional Research Service, February 12, 2013 Statement: Statement on the Belarus Democracy Act of 2004, George W. Bush, Office of the Press Secretary, October 20, 2004 Document: Russia’s Economic and Political Transition: U.S. Assistance and Issues for Congress, By Curt Tarnoff, Specialist in Foreign Affairs, Congressional Research Service, May 5, 1999 Article: 1991: Hardliners stage coup against Gorbachev, BBC, August 19, 1991 Books The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein, September 2007 Additional Resources FY 2020 European Deterrence Initiative (EDI) Fact Sheet, U.S. European Command Public Affairs Office Coordination Council Leadership History: Since 1961 Atlantic Council Board of Directors, International Republican Institute Profile: Joanna Rohozinska, LinkedIn Visual References Sound Clip Sources Meeting: Biden and Belarus: A strategy for the new administration, Atlantic Council, January 27, 2021 Authors Dr. Anders Åslund, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, Melinda Haring, deputy director at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, Ambassador John Herbst, director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, and Ambassador Alexander Vershbow, distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, join to present their key findings and ideas for the Biden administration. They are joined by Valery Kovaleuski, an adviser to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, to discuss the report. The event will be moderated by Eurasia Center Nonresident Fellow and Tsikhanouskaya adviser Hanna Liubakova. Watch on Youtube Speakers: Melinda Haring Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center Eurasia Foundation Freedom House National Democratic Institute Council on Foreign Relations John Herbst Director of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council 2003-2006: US Ambassador to Ukraine 2000-2003: US Ambassador to Uzbekistan - played a critical role in the establishment of an American base to help conduct Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan Former Principal Deputy to the Ambassador at Large for the New Independent States Dr. Anders Åslund Senior fellow at the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Bank of Finland Institute for Economies in Transition Former Director of the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Valery Kovaleuski Adviser to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya Transcript: 9:40 Melinda Haring: The problem, though, is that there's all kinds of limitations on moving money into Belarun. It's A, it's a security state, B, we have COVID. And people can't move in and out of the country very easily. So this has to be handled sensitively. The folks that I'm talking to say that cryptocurrencies are the way to do it, but there's a bigger problem. The US government is not very good at moving money. They are tied up in all kinds of reporting requirements. The European Union has the same issues. But we need to be more creative. If we don't think with some new creative energy. This protest movement is going to fizzle out. So it's time to go back to the drawing boards and talk to people who are good at moving money and make it happen now. 14:40 Dr. Anders Åslund: Lukashenko today has only reserves for about one month of imports normally said it should be for three months. And he has a$3 billion of cash he needs $6 billion more to carry, to cover this year. And traditionally there are two sources to get that. One is from the IMF and back is not available because the IMF is not prepared to deal with Lukashenko because he is normally cheating them. And they know that. And the other source is Russia. Putin declared when Lukashenko came to his knees to Putin in Sochi on the 14th of September, but he's ready to give one and a half billion dollars as loans. But, Lukashenko needs much more, and well to Putin hinted at it is that Russian private money can come in and buy the big companies, and the Belarusian economy is quite concentrated to a few big companies. So there are four big companies: two fertilizer plants and two oil refineries that account for two thirds of the Belarus's exports to the west. And then where do they get the raw material from? All the oil comes from Russia, and the gas for one of the fertilizer plants come from Russia. So the natural thing is that the Russian private businessmen by these Belarusian companies, we have seen it before. It has happened with gas assets in Belarus and half of one of the refineries is already bought by Russian companies. But where does the money come from? It comes from Russian state banks. So what Putin is essentially saying it is a couple of my most loyal oligarchs are allowed to get billions of dollars of Russian state bank financing in order to buy Belarusian companies cheaply, and that would completely tie up the Belarusian economy and this is what we have to avoid. 18:07 Valery Kovaleuski: Biden has expressed a lot of interest in the situation in Belarus, he showed himself as fairly well informed about the events in those. And he was very vocal in kind of demanding the action and kind of defining the policy of the United States government. At this stage, I think the most important than the sort of doses are waiting for very specific steps that will be tangible, and that will be impactful. And number one is fast reintroduction of economic sanctions. And you might know that the United States have has imposed the sanctions since long, but they were suspended when Russia invaded Ukraine and the United States and European Union decided to engage with those and normalize relations. And that was one of the steps that they made. They introduced the waiver to the sanctions and now they are in the the suspension state. The other one would be to continue not recognizing Lukashenka's legitimacy as he is not legitimate ruler of Belarus at the moment. Very important would be to start implementation of the those Democracy Human Rights and Sovereignty Act that was adopted just last year, and actually it was, it was adopted in a very kind of fast, fast pace in just three months since in introduction in the house. But the whole Act has as a kind of arsenal of tools and mechanisms to to influence the situation that was to influence, the behavior of Lukashenka. 21:46 John Herbst: The first is to promote the legitimacy of the opposition in Ms. Tsikhanouskaya and the delegitimization of Lukashenko. So, for example, our ambassador when she goes out, Julie Fisher, a wonderful diplomat, should not present credentials to Lukashenko, she should be spending most of our time in Vilnius near Ms. Tsikhanouskaya to wish to organize the US government to manage this crisis. So we should have a senior coordinator to manage sanctions against Lukashenko regime, and maybe against appropriate Russians, and also should have a senior official designated to manage assistance to the opposition and to the people of Belarus. And finally, this this combines both organization and resources, we should double the budget of RFP and RL. So we can get out our message to the people of Belarus. The third category is to increase specific support to the opposition. So for example, Melinda already mentioned the need to get resources to the opposition using cryptocurrency, we should also push to give legitimacy to the opposition. The fourth, the next element is to keep Russia out of the conflict. I mean, they're already in. We've seen what they've done by sending media experts, for example. But this this involves I say, a series of measures that have to be conducted simultaneously. One, we don't want to frighten Russians into thinking that Belarus is is now going to become part of the West. So we would encourage the opposition not to talk about NATO not to talk about the EU talk simply about the need for Belarus to choose its own president to work with the EU should be in dialogue with Moscow about the crisis in Belarus. But three, we should send a very clear signal to Moscow that if they intervene with their repressive opperatives, whether with their secret police, with their regular police with their military, to repress the people of Belarus, or to prop up Lukashenko or Lukashenko-like alternative, there will be serious sanctions against the Russian economy against Russian officials. 43:09 Melinda Haring: I think that Ukraine can definitely play a role here. And you know, there's a lot of Belarusians who are in Ukraine. One of the more interesting things I found in in my section of the report, I focused on the domestic picture, is where Belarusians have gone since August, so Belarusians have gone to give, they've got to Riga, they've got to Vilnius and they've gone to Warsaw. And they're creating massive civil society organizations that are helping people who had to leave quickly. And many of the people in Kiev are students so you can help students, you can, you can send a pizza, you can provide a house for them. You can do very basic things. 55:09 Dr. Anders Åslund: The aim of the sanctions is to put sufficient pressure on a bilateral so that Lukashenko has to go. This is a really a regime change group of sanctions. Meeting: A conversation with Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Atlantic Council, December 7, 2020 Watch on Youtube Speakers: Damon Wilson Executive VP of the Atlantic Council 2007-2009: Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council Former Executive Secretary and Chief of Staff at US Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq 2004-2006: Director for Central, Eastern, and Northern European Affairs at the National Security Council 2001-2004: Deputy Director in the Private Office of NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson - Played a lead role on the Alliance’s response to 9/11 and its operations in Afghanistan and the Western Balkans Melinda Haring Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center Eurasia Foundation Freedom House National Democratic Institute Council on Foreign Relations Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya Transcript: 1:37 Damon Wilson: After her husband was jailed by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenka, while running for President, Svetlana stepped in. Running a historic campaign for change. Much of the world recognizes that she overwhelmingly won the August 9th election, but Tsikhanouskaya was forced to flee the country after the regime threatened her family. The people of Belarus have protested for months demanding that Lukashenka resign, they are the true source of legitimacy. Tsikhanouskaya and the coordination Council for the transition of power which she leads from Vilnius, Lithuania, is recognized by the European Union and many others as the true voice of the Belarusian people. 5:42 Melinda Haring: How can the people of Belarus change the dynamic on the ground and force out Lukashenka? 8:07 Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya: We are asking the west to act faster. In my opinion, Western countries should demand new and fair elections and release of all political prisoners. Belarus democracy Act would serve as timely and extremely helpful step from the head of the US government in support of their brave people. 19:57 Melinda Haring: Look, I wanted to tell our audience if they haven't had a chance to get a copy of The Washington Post. Ms. Tsikhanouskaya has a piece in it this weekend. It's called 'The people of Belarus are Still Marching, Help Us.' And she writes very passionately about the need to pass the Belarus Democracy, Human Rights and Sovereignty Act of 2020. There's two weeks left to pass this act before Congress is out. Ms. Tsikhanouskaya what's in it and why is it important? Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya: The proceeds the bipartisan support received in favor of this act. We hope that this draft bill becomes law as soon as possible, as it would inspire the US to act decisively and urgently to support Belarus. Belarusian peaceful protest is a turning point. People struggle, people suffer. People struggle everyday with great dedication, yet there is a need of support on behalf of the international community. And when the new democracy act becomes low, it would send a strong signal to the Belarusian regime and the rest of the world on non recognition of Lukashenka's legitimacy, call for new presidential elections and oversee standards and demand the release of all political prisoners. You know, in our opinion, the Act would allow prompt US assistance to the civil society, media and urgent actions such as counter internet blockages in Belarus. Meeting: Backing Batka: Russia's strategic economic integration with Belarus, Atlantic Council, November 6, 2020 Watch on Youtube Speakers: Host: John Herbst Director of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council 2003-2006: US Ambassador to Ukraine 2000-2003: US Ambassador to Uzbekistan played a critical role in the establishment of an American base to help conduct Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan Former Principal Deputy to the Ambassador at Large for the New Independent States Dr. Katerina Bornukova, academic director of the BEROC Economic Research Center Professor Vladislav Inozemtsev Senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Dirk Schuebel Ambassador of the European Union to Belarus Dr. Anders Åslund Senior fellow at the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Bank of Finland Institute for Economies in Transition Former Director of the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 5:58 Dirk Schuebel: The pro-democracy movement and Belarus now faces the difficult prospect of dislodging Mr. Lukashenko, the unrecognized President who refuses to leave office. 6:47 Dr. Katerina Bornukova: So, if we take a look at the recent economic growth, over the last 10 years, we will see stagnation, average growth rate was around 1.7% only, which is too low for a developing economy, which needs to catch up. And the reason for this is structural problems, lack of reforms and privatization. As a result, we have a very large state owned sector, which is inefficient and which has accumulated a lot of debt, and this debt was slowly transferred to the government. So, which means that, well, right now, over the years, Belarus has also accumulated public debt. And right now that that is up to 35% of GDP. It's not relatively large, but it's quite difficult to serve because the majority of this debt is nominated in foreign currencies and that means that the liquidity and currency is always a problem with Belarus, and it often turns to Russia to solve this problem. So right now 50% of the debt is held by Russia or Russia associated funds. 10:45 Professor Vladislav Inozemtsev: Even if the government in Belarus changes, Russia will not...it cannot decouple from better because there are a lot of links, which tightens the two countries. First of all, Belarus is a part of the so called union state with Russia existing from like 99. It's a part of the Eurasian Economic Union. And in this case, Russia can allow to lose Belarus. There is a huge difference between Belarus and Ukraine for example, in this case, because Ukraine never was a part of any Russian led organizations but Belarus is. 13:49 Professor Vladislav Inozemtsev: The difference between Ukraine for example and Belarus is that Belarusian economy is state owned, it is not controlled by the oligarchy groups as it is in Ukraine. So therefore, for participating in this privatization for getting this shares or stakes in Belarus enterprise, the Russian private companies should be allowed to do so. So, therefore, there were several moves from the Russian side from the Russian private companies in direction of somehow changing the situation and to being allowed to jump in. 24:40 Dr. Anders Åslund: More money must come. And as we have discussed, all of us, this essentially has to come from the private sector. Ideally, this would be an IMF program, but the IMF is not ready to go for any program way of Lukashenko. They haven't had anything since 2009. Because Lukashenko refuses to do the elementary thing, stop subsidies to state enterprises and deregulated certain prices. So this is out of question. Hearing: Markup Hearing including Belarus bill, U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, October 1, 2020 Watch on Youtube Transcript: 1:18:30 Rep. Chris Smith (NJ): Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank you as well for bringing the Belarus Democracy Human Rights and Sovereignty Act of 2020. And thank you to Ranking Member McCall for his leadership on this Chairman Keating and Mr. Kissinger for their leadership as well. And Marcy Kaptur, who is also one of the co sponsors originals of this bill. 1:20:15 Rep. Chris Smith (NJ): We are now approaching almost two months since the fraudulent poll. And the people of Belarus despite the brutal crackdown, are still organizing rallies of 100,000 people or more demanding that Lukashenko leave power, and lead Belarus to the people to whom it belongs. I would note to my colleagues that according to the UN Special Rapporteur, more than 10,000 peaceful protesters have been detained as of September 18. And they need our help. Recent reports indicate that the police are using now, today increasingly violent tactics against these peaceful demonstrators. We do have a window of opportunity, and we need to seize it with everything that we have. As my colleagues know, the leading opposition presidential candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who won the election by most accounts. Of course, there's not access to the ballots, but it seems clear that she won the election formed the coordination Council. Svetlana is an incredibly brave woman. She ran a brilliant campaign. But today she has an exile in Lithuania, where she continues to rally the Belarusian people and the world. I want to thank Mr. Keating for putting together that WebEx a few weeks ago with her and some of the coordination leaders from the council. We all saw a new and a fresh, just how important it is that we stand behind her. And behind all of the people of Belarus who have aspirations for free and fair elections and for democracy. 1:21:50 Rep. Chris Smith (NJ): This bill today updates the Belarus Democracy Acts of 2004, 2006, and 2011 that I authored, and renews the personal economic and visa sanctions on an expanded list of bad actors in the Belarusian government. And, this is new, Russian individuals complicit in the crackdown. It calls for new elections, it recognizes the coordination council as a legitimate institution to participate in a dialogue on a peaceful transition of power. 1:23:15 Rep. Chris Smith (NJ): So I just want to thank my colleagues. It's a totally bipartisan bill. I want to thank Katie Earle for her work on the bill. I want to thank Jackie Ramos, Pierre Tosi, Patrick, the Doug Anderson, there are just many who have worked together fast, quickly and effectively, and members to put together this bipartisan legislation. Hearing: Protecting Democracy During COVID–19 in Europe and Eurasia and the Democratic Awakening in Belarus, Committee on Foreign Affairs: Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, Energy, and the Environment, September 10, 2020 Watch on Youtube Witnesses: Douglas Rutzen President and CEO of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law Professor at Georgetown University Law Center Advisory Board member of the United Nations Democracy Fund Therese Pearce Laanela Head of Electoral Processes at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance Joanna Rohozinska Resident Program Director for Europe at the Beacon Project at the International Republican Institute Senior program officer for Europe at the National Endowment for Democracy at least as of 2019. She has worked there for about a decade Jamie Fly Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund and Co-Director of the Alliance for Security Democracy Senior Advisor to WestExec Advisors Co-founded by incoming Secretary of State, Antony Blinken Former President and CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 2019 & 2020 Former counselor for foreign and national security affairs for Sen. Marco Rubio from 2013-2017 Former Executive Director of the Foreign Policy Initiative from 2009-2013 Former member of GWB's National Security Council from 2008-2009 Former member of GWB's Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2005-2008 Transcript: 53:30 Joanna Rohozinska: Lukashenko must be held responsible for his choices and actions. Word mating strategies with transatlantic allies should be priority and to call for dialogue, immediate release of political prisoners and support for the political opposition's demands for holding elections under international supervision and beginning negotiations on a Lukashenko transition. 53:56 Joanna Rohozinska: Support for democracy requires patience as well as long term commitment and vision. This has been made possible with the support of Congress to IRI and the family. Thank you and I look forward to your questions. 1:03:05 Therese Pearce Laanela: Institutions that are as strong...What we are seeing... those that are able to safeguard and against disinformation for example, they are working in innovative ways because this isn't a challenge that existed really as much before social media and one of the things that we're seeing is a kind of interagency cooperation, a partnership between private and public. That's really hasn't been seen before. Let me just take Australia as a case, but the working together with social media companies and government agencies and security agencies and election officials for rapid reaction to anything that comes in and that kind of seamless communication between agencies, that is one of the ways in which we can protect. 1:04:15 Jamie Fly: We have tools. Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty has a Bella Russian language service Radio Svoboda which has significant of followers inside Belarus. The problem is that Lukashenko like many other authoritarians have realized that when they face significant pressure, they should take the country offline. And Belarusian authorities have done that on a regular basis, which makes it much more difficult to communicate and allow information to spread freely. So what they really need outlets like Svoboda and other independent media are access to internet circumvention tools, which are also funded by the State Department and the US Agency for Global Media. 1:09:57 Douglas Rutzen: China is providing surveillance technology to countries including Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Serbia. They also provided a $2 billion dollar loan to Hungry to construct a railway which Hungry then classified as a state secret in terms of the construction. 1:19:28 Brian Fitzpatrick: In 2013, in 2000, and he saw large scale protests in Ukraine, following what many believed to be a falsification of elections by their federal officials. So my first question for the entire panel, do you believe that Belarus protests could lead to a revolution similar to the one we saw in Ukraine and secondarily, on Tuesday, President Lukashenko, refused to rule out the idea of holding new elections, and acknowledge that he may have overstayed his time at office, whether or not you see revolutions similar to Ukraine, do you think that these protests could lead to an actual change in leadership? Joanna Rohozinska: So I take it as a question to me. I mean, I think that things have been building up and I would say that with this similarity to Ukraine was that there was also a deep seated frustration with corruption. Here, it's less about corruption. But it's still meets, where you have the accountability and transparency aspect of it that I was mentioning in my testimony. And I think that the frustration with the lack of responsive government and being treated like animals, frankly, is what they say, is what finally boiled over, but there's been, there's been an uptick in protests in Belarus, if you watch these kinds of things over the past two years, over the parasite tax, for example, which was also was a special tax that was put on unemployment, and on to penalize people who are unemployed, is trying to target civic activists, but it ended up reaching far farther than that. So you can see things percolating below the surface for quite a long time. Now. You never know when it's going to blow. Here, I think that there was just the COVID, underlay everything and it mobilized such a broad swath of society, that the trigger event was finally the elections, which again, demonstrating a degree of hubris they decided not to put off right, they figured that holding the elections at the beginning of August was the best thing to do, because there is always a low torque turnout and all this, frankly, because people tend to go out to the countryside. So they simply miscalculated. They did not understand how the people were feeling. And here, you do have a similarity with Ukraine, I think. And in terms of in terms of the other questions to going forward? No, you have to appreciate that this is a country that's never experienced democracy ever. Which means that even the democratic opposition leaders basically know it from textbooks, they don't know what from firsthand practice. And, Lukashenko himself, ironically, has been supporting the notion of sovereignty and independence in the face of the Russian state for the past couple of years. And he only changed his tune a couple of weeks ago, when he started getting backed into a corner. And in terms of, you know, his promises and calling new elections, I would be wary. He does not have a particularly good track record of following through on promises. And so I would probably take that as a lesson learned and be extremely cautious. I personally think he's just buying time. Because he also said that he would consider holding the elections after introducing constitutional changes and the constitutional changes that he's proposing is to introduce term limits. So I mean, he's still looking at the succession. He understands that this is the end of his time in office. I don't know if he wants to do that right, exactly now, however, understanding that this would have been his last term anyways, you're probably preparing for an exit strategy. 1:23:00 Joanna Rohozinska: I would certainly invest in looking at quality early parliamentary elections as being much more significant. Because once you turn the house, once you turn the parliament and then at least you start building up a degree of political capital that can start carrying forward into into the governance. 1:52:37 Therese Pearce Laanela: Your people are excellent. I really want to say that I'm calling in from Sweden. I'm not American myself. But I have worked in this business for 28 years working in different countries in really tough situations. And some of the best experts out there are from organizations that are very close to those of you when you're normally working in Washington. So the United Nations as well based in New York, but also organizations like IFIS, NDI, our colleagues from IRI they are doing excellent work supported by USA ID. So and they've kind of got it figured out how to support institutions for the long term, so you can trust the people that you are supporting. Hearing: Foreign Affairs Issue Launch with Former Vice President Joe Biden, Council on Foreign Relations, January 23, 2018 Speakers: Richard Haass - President of the Council on Foreign Relations Joe Biden State Department Daily Briefing, Department of State, February 6, 2014 Ukraine coup - leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland and Geoffey Pyatt, Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, February 6, 2014 Watch on YouTube Hearing: Economic Aid to New Independent States, Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, January 24, 1994 Witnesses: Brian Atwood Then: USAID Adminstrator Now: NDI board member - Was the first president of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs Stephen Cohen Then: Professor at Princeton with emphasis in Russian studies Married to Katrina Vanden Heuvel Criticized the Obama administration for starting the new Cold War Said in 2014 that Ukraine crisis was a result of US actions, starting with Clinton, aimed at expanding NATO up to Russia's border. Wrote about our role in the 2014 Ukraine coup  Strobe Talbot Then: Deputy Secretary of State Former Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization President of the Brookings Institution for 15 years Member of CFR Transcript: 14:23 Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT): There is no greater United States national security objective today than to assist Russia make a peaceful transition to a stable democratic form of government, an open pluralistic society, a market economy. Such a transition offers the best prospect of a long term cooperative, peaceful relationship with the only other nuclear power capable of destroying the United States. 26:39 Strobe Talbot: Our approach from the beginning, our strategy has been to reinforce those trends in Russian political and economic life that together we believe, constitute the essence of the Great Transformation underway in that country. Those trends are democratization and privatization. They are in fact interlocking. They are mutually reinforcing. The more people work in private enterprise, the more they are likely to participate in the democratic process and the more they are likely to vote for candidates who will support economic as well as political freedom. 27:27 Strobe Talbot: Our bilateral foreign aid program is intended in its essence, to help prime the pump for the flow of much higher levels of support from two other sources from the international business community in the form of trade and investment, and from the international financial institutions in the form of loans to help Russia make the transition from a command to a market economy. 28:25 Strobe Talbot: President Yeltsin needs to have the confidence that if he continues to press forward on a strong economic reform program, Western support will be swift and substantial. But he and his colleagues in both the executive and the legislative branches of the Russian government must also understand something else. And that is the cause and effect relationship between internal reform and outside support. Our support will follow their reform. It cannot be the other way around. 29:30 Strobe Talbot: Privatization involves closing down inefficient state enterprises while the shift to market economics at least initially brings higher prices. The result is social pain, disruption and fear of the future. If they reach critical mass, those ingredients can explode into a political backlash against reform. 1:46:00 Strobe Talbot: The world has capital flows, potential for investment that can move into societies like Russia, where the population is highly educated. It's a tremendous human resource where there are natural resources that can be exploited for the good of Russia and for the entire world economy. 2:23:47 Strobe Talbot: Now we do not know what the future holds. We do not know what kind of Russia we will be sharing the planet with early in the 21st century. We do not know if it will have stayed on a reform path and have continued to move in the direction of integration. 2:53:10 Stephen Cohen: Now, to be fair, this unwise American policy toward Russia began under President Bush in the end of 1991, with the breakup of the Soviet Union, but for a full year now President Clinton has expanded that policy, made it worse and therefore now, it is his policy. 2:54:10 Stephen Cohen: The guiding principle of that policy since 1991 has been, and evidently based on the hearing today remains, an exceedingly missionary and highly interventionist idea that the United States can and should intervene in Russia's internal affairs in order to convert or transform that nation into an American style system at home, and a submissive junior partner of the United States abroad. Cover Art Design by Only Child Imaginations Music Presented in This Episode Intro & Exit: Tired of Being Lied To by David Ippolito (found on Music Alley by mevio)

In this episode Jonathan speaks with Michael J. Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House - an independent watchdog organisation dedicated to the expansion of freedom in the world. As their website states: 'Freedom House is founded on the core conviction that freedom flourishes in democratic nations where governments are accountable to their people.'Before joining Freedom House in February 2017, Mike was director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Levine Institute for Holocaust Education. He led the museum's genocide prevention efforts, including the creation of the "Committee on Conscience", and later oversaw its public education programs. He was previously National Editor and then White House correspondent for the Washington Post.He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former fellow at the German Marshall Fund and the Hoover Institution. A graduate of Harvard College, Michael is also a board member of the National Security Archive.A few Freedom House Publications: Principles for Safeguarding US Democracy (Freedom House) - https://freedomhouse.org/article/prin...Freedom on the Net 2020 - "The Pandemic's Digital Shadow" - https://freedomhouse.org/report/freed...Freedom in the World - https://freedomhouse.org/report/freed...Relevant links:https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2020/pandemics-digital-shadowhttps://freedomhouse.org/https://www.ushmm.org/https://www.washingtonpost.com/

On November 6-7, 1987, The Federalist Society held a symposium at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, DC on "Foreign Affairs and The Constitution: The Roles of Congress, The President, and The Courts". The second panel explored the relationship between "The First Amendment and National Security".Featuring:Floyd Abrams, Cahill, Gordon & ReindelProf. Henry Holzer, Brooklyn Law SchoolDon Oberdorfer, The Washington PostRichard Willard, Department of JusticeModerator: Dr. Suzanne Garment, American Enterprise Institute*******As always, the Federalist Society takes no position on particular legal or public policy issues; all expressions of opinion are those of the speakers.

On November 6-7, 1987, The Federalist Society held a symposium at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, DC on "Foreign Affairs and The Constitution: The Roles of Congress, The President, and The Courts". The second panel explored the relationship between "The First Amendment and National Security".Featuring:Floyd Abrams, Cahill, Gordon & ReindelProf. Henry Holzer, Brooklyn Law SchoolDon Oberdorfer, The Washington PostRichard Willard, Department of JusticeModerator: Dr. Suzanne Garment, American Enterprise Institute*******As always, the Federalist Society takes no position on particular legal or public policy issues; all expressions of opinion are those of the speakers.

Author of three books on CIA operations, Valentine's research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA's elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam.While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA's relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and John Jay College.This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA's ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA's activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States.A common theme is the CIA's ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability.Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.

Author of three books on CIA operations, Valentine's research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA's elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam.While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA's relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and John Jay College.This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA's ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA's activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States.A common theme is the CIA's ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability.Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.

Author of three books on CIA operations, Valentine's research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA's elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam.While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA's relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and John Jay College.This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA's ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA's activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States.A common theme is the CIA's ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability.Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.