The Ascent of American Fascism

As historians may recall when they mull our descent into tyranny, the roots of our constitutional crisis are directly traceable to the days of Adolph Hitler when a powerful American elite financed a political vision far different from the one we learned in school. That elite included such names as George Herbert Walker (G.W. Bush’s great grandfather) and son-in-law, Prescott S. Bush (Bush’s grandfather). It included such Nazi collaborators as W. Averill Harriman, the presidential advisor who paved our way into Vietnam, and John Foster Dulles, the former Secretary of State who ratcheted the Cold War after sneaking his Nazi loot out of Berlin. It included Allen Dulles who, with his brother, backed the Nazi Party for a pledge that Hitler would break the unions. And when the war was over, and our servicemen returned to forget the horrors they’d witnessed overseas, many of these same players became instrumental in driving their Nazi vision into the American political mainstream, using fear and the fortunes they’d amassed to waylay our populist traditions.

None of this is new. It’s well documented, almost hackneyed, and could well have been accessed at any time by those curious enough to delve into the backgrounds of our government and its officials. Nevertheless, in light of our waning constitutional grip (and at the risk of flogging a dead horse) we think it timely to review the Bush family’s complicity in international fascism, if only to reconcile our collective naiveté.

So, here goes.

Prescott Bush

In 1918, following the U.S. entry into World War I, Samuel “Prescott” Bush (W’s grandfather) was given a sinecure on the U.S. War Industries Board as Director of the Facilities Division under Bernard Baruch (advisor to Woodrow Wilson) and Clarence Dillon, a Wall Street private banker. Bush’s principal mission was to direct arms sales to Remington Arms, owned by Percy Rockefeller (John D Rockefeller’s brother) and run by Rockefeller’s man, Samuel Pryor. The following year, George Herbert Walker (W’s great-grandfather), a mid-west power broker renowned for his international contacts, formed a private bank with Averill and “Bunny” Harriman, and Percy Rockefeller. That bank was called W.A. Harriman & Co.

Meanwhile, a young Prescott Bush was back from the war and going nowhere―that is, until he met Bert Walker’s daughter. Their union skyrocketed Prescott from a minor executive at a railroad equipment supply house to vice president of W.A. Harriman & Co., the largest private bank in the world.

Small wonder the Bushes embrace the sanctity of marriage.

In 1920, Walker and Harriman gained control of the German shipping line Hamburg-Amerika whose assets had been confiscated by the U.S. after WW I. The deal was made through a William Cuno, who later contributed heavily to the Nazi Party, and Max Warburg of the line’s banking firm, M.M.Warburg. Also involved (not surprisingly) was Rockefeller’s representative, Samuel Pryor. The shipping line was deceptively renamed the American Ship & Commerce Corp. and Pryor was placed on its board of directors. Harriman and Walker now controlled half of the largest shipping line in the world and dominated the other half through the auspices of the Anglo-American occupation of Germany.

Now to foment hostilities.

Fritz Thyssen

In 1922, Germany was looking like a pretty good investment. Harriman established a branch of the W.A. Harriman Bank in Berlin under Walker’s presidency. It was then that he met the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, a multibillionaire whose sprawling steel empire would soon fuel the Third Reich. Thyssen’s father had taken a large hit with the Versailles Treaty and was determined to avoid a similar debacle. He set up network of seemingly unconnected banks for his children. The first was the August Thyssen Bank in Berlin. The second was the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, N.V. in Rotterdam. One son ran the bank in Holland, changing his name to Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza and feigning hatred for Hitler. The other son, Fritz, ran the bank in Berlin, joined the Nazi Party and avidly sang the praises of Mein Fuhrer. Now Fritz needed a third bank in the U.S. to ensure that whatever outcome his shenanigans produced the family empire would remain intact.

Enter Harriman.

Averill Harriman

According to government records, Harriman agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York that would link Thyssen’s bank in Holland and provide clandestine funds for Hitler’s insurgency (and ultimately, profits for all). That bank, the Union Banking Corp, was established in 1924 with George Herbert Walker (Bush’s granddaddy) at the helm. Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin in their book, “George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography,” describe the bank as Hitler’s “de facto bank in New York.” And it was. Funds started pouring back and forth immediately between New York and Rotterdam and into the ready coffers of Hitler’s growing militia. But what isn’t mentioned is the fact that the bank was completely owned by Fritz Thyssen. The importance of this fact cannot be overstated. It means that Bush, Harriman and the entire crew at Union Bank were employees of Thyssen. In other words, they were giving aid and comfort to the enemy in a time of war, a clear-cut act of treason. This deduction is corroborated by a passage from a family history penned by Fritz Thyssen’s nephew, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, in 1979:

“…at the beginning of World War II the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart had become the holding of my father’s companies – a Dutch firm whose only shareholder was a Hungarian citizen. Prior to 1929, it held the shares of .the August Thyssen Bank, and also American subsidiaries and the Union Banking Corporation, New York. The shares of all the affiliates were [in 1945] with the August Thyssen Bank in the East Sector of Berlin, from where I was able to have them transferred into the West at the last moment”

This clearly states that from 1924 to 1929, Thyssen’s bank in Holland was far from a neutral Dutch institution. It was the holding company for Thyssen’s entire financial empire, the spigot through which Hitler’s military machine was funded. It flatly rebukes government records that cast Bush and Walker as unrestrained, almost unwitting, capitalists rather than out and out traitors.

Fritz Thyssen was no run-of-the-mill industrialist. He was the single most important financier for Adolph Hitler as confessed in his book, “I Paid Hitler”. Without Thyssen’s massive financial backing, which he provided from 1923 on, Hitler might never have come to power. And without Hitler, there would never have been a Second World War.

Not good for the arms business.

Friedrick Flick

By 1926, business at W.A. Harriman was so good, Walker made his son-in-law, Prescott Bush, vice president. That same year Bush, Harriman and Dillon established the German Steel Trust (GST) with Thyssen and his partner, Friederich Flick. The GST later provided the Third Reich with much of the explosives, steel plate, wire, pig iron, pipes, tubing and other materials they needed to construct projects like the Atlantic Wall and the 155mm cannons that rained death on our servicemen as they hit the beaches at Normandy. The GST was directly linked to George Bush’s grandfather’s bank in New York and was presided over by Albert Voegler, another German industrialist who paved the way for Hitler’s ascent. Voegler, incidentally, held a directorship on the Hamburg-Amerika Line. Allen Dulles was also on his way up in 1926. That was the year he joined Sullivan and Cromwell, the world’s largest law firm, and became the lawyer for Thyssen’s Rotterdam bank.

Funny how it all links together.

Through Thyssen, Bush, Walker and Harriman were in direct partnership with Flick’s zinc, steel, and coal conglomerate in Germany and Poland. Together they owned one third of Flick’s sprawling empire and renamed it the Consolidated Silesian Holding Co. Between 1930 and 1931, as admitted at Nuremburg, Thyssen arranged with Rudolph Hess for the transfer of 250,000 to 300,000 Deutsche Marks to the Nazi Party through his bank in Holland. During that same period, W.A. Harriman merged with the Anglo-American investment house, Brown Brothers, to create Brown Brothers Harriman. Prescott and two Harriman brothers were made senior partners along with Thatcher Brown and Montagu Norman, the notorious Nazi sympathizer. Brown ran the London office while Prescott ran the New York office. Montagu Norman, who often stayed with Prescott when he came to New York, was not only an ex-Brown partner; his grandfather led the firm during the American Civil War at a time when they were shipping three quarters of the slave cotton to British mills!

Clearly the group had a lot in common.

By 1932, Hitler’s SA and SS troops numbered nearly 400,000 and questions began to surface as to how this madman could have obtained his financing. Yet even as the German government battled Hitler’s brown shirts in the streets, the Hamburg-Amerika Line was funneling propaganda to thwart their efforts, acting as a front for I.G. Farben spies, propaganda and bribery on behalf of the Nazis. When this potentially embarrassing link surfaced in a congressional investigation in 1934, Bush hired Allen Dulles to obscure the trail.

Montagu Norman

In 1933, the concerted efforts of the Nazi financiers paid off and Hitler came to power. That year, Prescott Bush sent Max Warburg to represent the American Ship & Commerce Line on the Hamburg-Amerika’s board of directors. Prescott and Max were old buddies and Warburg was a close friend of Montagu Norman. He was also an executive at Hitler’s Reichsbank. His brothers had run the Kuhn Loeb investment bank that brokered Harriman’s buyout of the bankrupt Union Pacific Railroad back in 1890 when Sam Bush was still head of the Buckeye Steel Casings Co. Warburg was also a close advisor to Hitler’s Economics Minister, Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht and John Foster Dulles (the man for whom Dulles Airport was named), worked closely to arrange an agreement whereby all trade between the United States and Hitler’s Germany would be funneled through the Harriman International Co. under Oliver Harriman.

It’s nice work if you can get it.

Allen and John Dulles’ ties to Nazi Germany are almost too numerous to list. As legal counsel to the U.S. delegation to the Versaille Peace Conference, Allen Dulles argued vehemently against reparations against Germany. He fought for a loophole to allow the powerful DuPonts to continue selling arms to Germany after the Armistice. He was a vocal supporter of Adolph Hitler until 1934 when he was basically told to tone it down. He acted for I.G. Farben, the company that performed ghastly medical experiments on concentration camp victims and developed Tabun, the nerve gas used by the Nazis. He assisted SKF, a company that supplied 60% of the bearings used by the Third Reich. He and brother John acted for the Shroeder Bank in bankrolling Hitler before he assumed power on condition he break the trade unions. He was the OSS Inteligence Chief in Berlin in 1945, the first civilian director of the CIA in 1953 and a member of LBJ’s whitewashing Warren Commission. From 1937 onward the Dulles brothers served Bush, Harriman and Rockefeller in all their business dealings with the Third Reich. He sat on the boards of both Standard Oil (Rockefeller) and I.G. Farben. He set up the notorious BND, Germany’s intelligence-gathering apparatus after the war, with spymaster Reinhardt Gehlen, Hitler’s intelligence chief on the Eastern Front. He recruited Nazi butchers like Gehlen for what soon would become the CIA. It’s widely suspected he played a role in JFK’s assassination or at least had inside knowledge of the conspiracy.

If the Nazification of America could be laid at a single man’s feet, that man would be Allen Dulles.

Of course, Prescott Bush would be a close second. In 1933, Herr Bush, in an act of treason rivaled only by his offspring, approached a Marine Corps general, Major General Smedley Butler, to lead a 500,000-man army of rogue veterans in a military coup against President Roosevelt on behalf of a wealthy group of industrialists and bankers. The group, operating under the sardonic moniker, American Liberty League, included such household names as Heinz, Colgate and General Motors. Their plan was to seize the White House by force and impose a fascist state in America. And by all appearances, Butler was their man. He was revered across America. He was a two-time Medal of Honor recipient. He earned a reputation for protecting business interests overseas by quelling nationalist rebellions, instituting regime changes and leading invasions. By all appearances, he was Their Man. But it turned out Major General Butler was also patriotic. He gathered as much information as he could about the cabalists and promptly reported the ringleaders to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. What Butler didn’t realize, of course, was that the House Un-American Activities Committee was only interested in left-leaning patsies. To his amazement, the committee refused to even question any of the people he implicated and went so far as to strike his testimony completely from the record. Today he’s remembered mostly for his insightful quote, “war is a racket.”

Three years later U.S. Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, wrote a chilling letter to President Roosevelt:

“A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent [on bringing] a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime…. A prominent executive of one of the largest corporations told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there. Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions.”

That letter could have easily been penned today.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Trading With The Enemy Act was enacted and Hapag-Lloyd’s property was confiscated by the U.S. government. Stock shares of Union Banking Corp were also seized and the list of shareholders read like a Who’s Who of Nazi financiers: Prescott S. Bush, (director and largest shareholder);“Bunny” Harriman; Cornelis Lievense (president; responsible for all New York banking finances for the Nazis); H.J. Kouwenhoven (director; helped establish UBC as a conduit to Fritz Thyssen; managed the Holland office during the Nazi occupation in 1940; served as the director of the German Steel Trust), and two other associates of Bush. Other UBC companies were also seized, including the Seamless Steel Equipment Co., long managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law Bert Walker, Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corp and the Holland-American Trading Corp.

The importance of the Holland-American Trading Corp was only recently appreciated, nearly fifty years after the Bush family reclaimed Union Bank from the U.S. Alien Property Custodian (who coincidentally was on the payroll of J Schroeder Bank whose board members included Allen and John Foster Dulles). Its importance was linked by an former U.S. Intelligence officer, William Gowen, who noticed a paragraph from  Thyssen’s investigation files recorded by Paul Manning, an Edward R. Murrow associate.

“Thyssen’s first step in a long dance of tax and currency frauds began [in the late 1930's] when he disposed of his shares in the Dutch Hollandische-Amerikanische Investment Corporation to be credited to the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, N.V., Rotterdam, the bank founded in 1916 by August Thyssen Senior.”

That passage clearly demonstrated that the bank in Holland was founded by Thyssen Sr. (and therefore not neutral( and that the shares of the Holland-America Trading Corp, dumped by Thyssen as part of a money laundering scheme, ended up in the hands of Union Bank and ultimately in the Bush family.

Yet with all the evidence piled against Bush, Roosevelt still pardoned him. Unlike the millions he condemned to death in Europe, Prescott Bush and his Nazi financiers escaped with their lives and fortunes. Yet American voters have elected his children three times.

The fact is, the Bush family has consistently demonstrated contempt for human liberty whenever that liberty comes at the cost of a profit, their sense of entitlement or the financial interests of their wealthy friends.

And liberty, by its very nature, always comes at a cost to the wealthly.

The Pardon Heard Round The World

At the end of World War II, most Germans claimed ignorance of The Holocaust. Americans will likely do the same when it’s our turn. But it will be just so much horseshit. When President Obama announced on April 16, 2009 that neither the CIA nor its agents, nor Bush, nor anyone in his Administration, including contract agents, would face prosecution for the use of torture, his supporters gave a collective sigh and consoled themselves with the notion that Obama had closed a despicable era in American history, one that, God willing, would never be repeated.

But that was the defining moment in President Obama’s Administration. Not when he “bailed out the banks.” Not when Osama bin Laden was killed. Not when he “bailed out” the auto companies. Not when he introduced his healthcare “reforms.” It was his decision to not prosecute George W. Bush, who admitted smugly in his memoir later that he violated international law by personally ordering the torture of detainees, saying “Damn right!” when asked if he authorized torture.

Obama’s decision not to procescute Bush Administration officials like John C. Woo, who provided the “legal justification” for torture, included his decision not to prosecute the CIA or any of its thugs for destroying videotaped evidence of their torture.

It was a clear win for the CIA who have never relinquished power since JFK was assassinated. And it was an immediate loss for Obama whose supporters, even now, fail to realize that no representative of the people can ever override the authority of the military and CIA.

We are not threatened by the spector of a dictatorship. We are governed by one.

I suspect Obama realized this before his election. I also believe, and wrote at the time, that he was hand-picked to act as a “placeholder” for the Bushies, hated in 2007, and to avert a national uprising with speeches of hope and the promise of change. But nothing changes in a military dictatorship.

Except for the worse.

Obama’s pardon was so deflating that his popularity dropped like a rock. His naïve supporters, mostly young, never quite understood that JFK’s death in Dallas ushered a military coup. They thought, hoped, prayed, that a powerful mandate could restore our beseiged democracy. But University of California/ Berkeley Law School Dean, Christopher Edley, Jr., the sixth highest-ranking member of Obama’s 2008 post-election transition, revealed in a forum on 911 that Team Obama feared a military “coup” if he prosecuted Bush & Co.

In other words, whether Obama knew he would be a figurehead in office, as I suspect, or was simply told upon taking the oath that he would be given his orders, it was clear to the world on April 16, 2009 that the American people had lost all control over the military and CIA.

We have entered a chilling period in American history, a period that John F. Kennedy tried to prevent. American “brown shirts” (Tea Baggers), funded with corporate and foreign money (as Hitler was) are merging with police and military groups, sharing information on unionists, dissidents and other “undesirables.” Religions have become increasingly radicalized and coordinated with political (State) apparatus. And the CIA’s Gulag, far from being dismantled as it should have been by the man we elected to do just that, is growing unabated. And why not? There’s no one powerful enough to stop them.

My next article will look at the CIA’s Secret Prisons around the world.

Andrea Hackett is a writer, independent researcher and founder of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance. She is featured in Marc Cooper’s most recent book “The Last Honest Place in America” and may be contacted at andrea.hackett@gmail.com or through her Twitter @andreafed. All rights reserved. 2012.

Reprints by permission only.

A True Memorial Day Hero

In John Frankenheimer’s 1964 film classic, Seven Days in May, General James Mattoon Scott, played by Burt Lancaster, asks Col. Martin “Jiggs” Casey, played by Kurt Douglas, if he “knows his Bible” and asks if he knows who Judas is. Jiggs replies: “Yes I know who Judas is. He was a man I worked for and admired until he disgraced the four stars on his uniform.”

The film presents a chilling, yet ostensibly fictional, plot to oust a sitting president in a coup with the aid of a military unit called Ecomcon. And of course the good guys win.

Like the Manchurian Candidate before it, the film skews the murky period that followed the Second World War by leading us to the unjustified conclusion that right wing attacks on our democracy could happen but haven’t yet. It inspires patriotism rather than fear by striking a cautionary note: be ever vigilant (look for what might happen) but not questioning (instead of what did) and it lulls us into an unwitting complacency by presenting the story as fiction.

Hey, wait a minute! I love that film!

I do, too. But Frankenheimer’s film was not fiction. The screenplay was fictionalized but the supporting facts were quite real. The character of General James Mattoon Scott was based on General Douglas MacArthur, not Gen. Edwin Walker as Wikipedia would have us believe. And the character of Col. “Jiggs” Casey was based on Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, the man hand-picked by Prescott Bush and a cabal of industrialists to rally the military in a coup designed to instill MacArthur as a fascist dictator.

Why bring up a sixty year old film?

Because the political climate today mirrors that of the Great Depression almost exactly. President Obama is far more analogous to FDR than Lincoln, whom he often quotes. FDR forgave the banks in his first hundred days. So did Obama. FDR realized laissez faire economics had ushered the depression. So does Obama. And the actions of both presidents were and have been met with fierce resistance and outright rebellion from the rich. The A.L.E.C. of FDR’s day was the American Liberty Lobby back then. It was a right wing consortium of America’s most trusted names: Heinz, Colgate, General Motors, DuPont, J.P. Morgan, Goodyear, and they were deadset against F.D.R.’s “socialist” policies (sound familiar?). So they hatched a plot that revolved around American veterans organizations and Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor recipient revered by America’s vets who had a reputation for quelling rebellions overseas for American business interests.

Butler was also on great terms with the “Bonus Army which was the Occupy D.C. of its day. The Bonus Army, officially the Bonus Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.), consisted of 200.000 unemployed vets with useless government-issued “bonuses” they couldn’t cash until 1945 and other “99ers” who set up camp around Washington, D.C. to force the issue. This “rogue army,” in conjunction with other veteran organizations, was the basis for “Ecomcon” in the film, the military force prepared to march on the general’s orders to install a fascist dictator. And the Bonus Army might well have marched on the White House if Butler had led the charge. He visited their encampments often and was well known to sympathize with their plight. He was the enlisted man’s friend. A guy who was very vocal when it came to protecting their interests.

But the Bonus Army would never have marched on the White House if they knew FDR was to be replaced by Douglas MacArthur. On July 28, 1932, Douglas MacArthur, then Army Chief of Staff, led a young Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton (and six tanks) in an eight-hour siege against the veterans’ encampments. Hundreds were injured. Two vets were killed. Two others were killed in neighboring camps. Two babies were asphyxiated by tear gas. A young boy’s leg was run through with a bayonet. It was police brutality on an incredible scale.

And similar to the attacks we’ve seen against Occupy encampments.

The siege, called the Battle of Anacostia Flats, was very much on the minds of the Bonus Army when they returned to their encampments. And their hatred for MacArthur and Hoover, who was the Nixon of his day (he gave the order to burn their encampments to the ground) were palpable.

So the book and screenplay deviate from the facts in small ways. The veteran’s groups, or “Ecomcon,” would never have followed the right wing general (MacArthur) but rather the outspoken friend of liberty and the enlisted man, Butler (or Jiggs).

But Butler was told he was the man to take power, and had the plot succeeded, he never would have known the truth until it was too late.

But don’t take my word for it. The House Un-American Activities Committee itself concluded after months of testimony that “there is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.”

What attempts?

In his testimony to the Committee, which by the way makes fascinating reading, Butler describes constant efforts of front men for wealthy but unnamed bankers and industrialists to recruit him to rally veteran’s organizations, ostensibly to oppose FDR’s decision to take the dollar off the gold standard.  But Butler was quite sure their “gold standard” issue was a front for a more sinister purpose.

And he was right.

At one point, exasperated by Butler’s constant refusal to play ball, he was told that the time had come for “the soldiers” to come together into an organization of “supersoldiers,” akin to the veteran’s organizations in Fascist Italy and France that had installed their respective dictators , an organization ostensibly created to “help” FDR. When Butler questioned why FDR would need such help when he had the entire American populace to help him, he was told that the president was “overworked” and might need the help of an “Assistant President”… a position Congress would quickly approve… a sort of “Supersecretary.”

Or what we might call today… a “Decider.”

Butler admitted to the committee that he was concerned for the president’s health, but he smelled a fascist rat and shot back at the front man (Jerry MacGuire): “If you get 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of fascism I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you and then we’ll have a real war at home!”

Ya gotta love this guy.

MacGuire, who was accompanied by a guy named Doyle (which is straight out of Seinfeld) went on to explain the rules of succession. “If the president resigns and the Vice President is unavailable (gotta love that), the Secretary of State becomes President and Garner (the veep at the time) doesn’t want to be president. So the new Supersecretary would take the place of the Secretary of State and become President.”

He asked Butler again to head the organization, saying that no one but him could rally the veterans, but Butler refused. Upon leaving, MacGuire predicted Butler would hear of an organization dedicated to reinstating the gold standard within the weeks.

Three weeks later the New York Times reported the founding of the American Liberty League. Their members included two former Democratic presidential nominees, John W. Davis and Al Davis, Irene DuPont (who kicked in 30% of the cash), and congressmen from both parties.

There was plenty of money and plenty of talk about fascism.

Butler’s testimony was augmented by Paul Comley French, a reporter for the New York Evening Post and Philadelphia Record, who testified under oath that he met with MacGuire in the banking offices of Grayson M-P Murphy Company (who held accounts for Goodyear and Anaconda Copper) and was told point blank by MacGuire: “We need a Fascist government in this country to save the nation from communists… the only men to do it are the veterans and Maj. Gen. Smedley is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight.”

The plan was simple: surround the White House with armed vets and present FDR with an ultimatum: either remain as a puppet or resign.

MacGuire added that he had a fabulous solution for the unemployment problem, too… one he had learned from Hitler himself: send the unemployed to forced labor camps and silence opposition by “registering” dissenters. “The country needs a dictator to come galloping in on his white horse,” he told French.

By contrast, MacGuire’s testimony was haphazard and evasive, even to the friendly House Un-American Activities Committee who reported as such in their final conclusions. He was forgetful. He couldn’t account for large sums of cash. And when forgetfulness didn’t work he simply denied everything.

Butler’s book, “War Is a Racket” (released in 1935, after the non-coup) shows him to be a man of uncommon courage and conscience. In it, he laments his role as a tool for Wall Street war profiteers:

“I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras ‘right’ for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents. Our exploits against the American Indian, the Filipinos, the Mexicans and against Spain are on a par with the campaigns of Genghis Khan, the Japanese in Manchuria and the African attack of Mussolini. No country as ever declared war on us before we first obliged them with that gesture. Our whole history shows we have never fought a defensive war.”

Admirable words that could easily have come from Howard Zinn.

This Memorial Day we should indeed honor our veterans, but we should also remember Maj. General Smedley Butler who paid for his patriotism by surrendering his career, surviving a court martial that nearly cost his freedom and refusing  an unlimited sum of money and power. Men like that are hard to find these days.

And their contributions deserve to be documented.

Andrea Hackett is a writer, political activist and founder of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance. Comments are always welcome and may also be directed to @andreafed on Twitter.

The Diety

The average person on the Left has always operated within a different time frame than the Fascist Right. Lefties are far less consumed with history than with the inequities of their times, and their resentments rarely span generations.

Not so with religious extremists, right wing political organizations and corporations on the Right. These groups have extremely long memories and can often wait centuries to achieve their goals, or settle old scores. They are, by comparison, Deities, outside the realm of our mortal timeline: like the seasons, earth or the tides; like the vampires who captivate our imaginations or the planets that circle the sun, powerful, young and immortal.

We rarely think of these entities as immortal. Nor do we perceive nations, religions and political organizations as “outside the realm of time.” Yet they have the same characteristics as gods. They’re immortal, as least to our perspective. They have infinitely more power. And they’re invisible to the naked eye, seen only through their symbols and representatives: their flags and pageantry, architecture, relics and the actions of their adherents. The deities themselves are never seen. They remain hidden, high atop Mount Olympus as the Greeks once told us euphemistically, beyond space and time, and ultimately beyond the control of mere mortals.

So it’s no surprise that many mortals worship these deities through nationalism, religiosity or fanaticism without ever mourning the loss of their self-determination. The rewards are just too tempting:

Immortality and power.

With immortality comes a memory that spans the ages. Individuals forget. Vampires and Global Fascists never do. That’s why our myths are so important. They elevate us; allow us to view our mortality within a profound and collective timeline. When passed through generations they put our lives in context, they level the playing field, they elevate our collective humanity to that of the gods and thereby remind us of our collective immortality. This connection, often confused for “God,” keeps our individualism in check and ultimately in perspective.

The Deity is the species, not its individuals. The Deity is the sea, not its waves.

It should therefore come as no surprise that Ayn Rand, matriarch of the Modern Right, argued vehemently against the notion of a collective humanity in favor of the individual’s right to a life unencumbered by collective responsibility. This myth-busting tactic effectively elevates the Individual to a deity while removing the only “immortal” ingredient we have: our collective history.

This is exactly the type of myth-busting propaganda spewed by The Right because it isolates the individual from the species. Fascists understand the power of myth. They understand that the first step toward destabilizing any country is to undermine its myths. That’s why the study of American fascism is riddled with conspiracies. The dissemination of misinformation is always their first plan of attack, to destabilize a nation’s myths, its truths, its irrevocable history, to create doubt and ultimately isolate and confuse the individual.

That’s what they do.

Once isolated, the individual, confused by conflicting myths, can easily be picked off and put to work against their own best interests. The conflicted state leaves individuals with an acute sense of powerlessness and fear. They know that something is wrong but don’t know what it is. They just don’t trust anymore and they pine for the days when “things were simpler,”  when the world “made more sense.”

That’s when the Fascists tap them on the shoulders and say, “You know whose fault this is, don’t you?”

Unfortunately, this process is well underway.

I lead with this not to belabor the obvious, but to demonstrate the importance of tracking American Fascists over time. A deposed monarch in a far off land may seem to have passed into history. But his heirs and supporters may carry the torch for centuries, and carry it right to our shores. As time proceeds and future generations forget, the fight becomes much easier. By then their only enemy is other Deities who stand against them: nations, political movements or historians whose memories are just as long. But when these Deities succumb and our myths are scrambled by secrecy, misinformation and repetitive lies, we lose our identity and all that remains is the individual.

Without our myths, our history, our collective immortality we become easy picking’s for The Right. Half the country has already been brainwashed by the Fascist Right. The astounding rate at which these individuals succumb to cults in this country is terrifying, and a fitting testament to the success of spreading doubt then offering a deity to replace the one you just lost.

Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster. Not true? So what? It will sit in the back of your brain and you’ll never quite see her the same again. And when another lie pops up about Hillary Clinton, you’ll be more apt to believe it. Until, without realizing it, you’re so far from the truth you can’t find your way back.

At that point you’ve abandoned established myth and need a replacement.

It might be Scientology or Mormonism or Catholicism or Baptism or a right wing religious cult like the Army of God or Christian Identify. It might be rabid nationalism, whereby you might start a “patriotic militia” and believe in your heart you’re another Thomas Jefferson.  It might be anti-nationalism, where you swing the other direction, or A.A. or anti-abortion politics…even dieting which holds at its core the promise (or hope) of eternal youth.

Immortality.

On the surface these substitutes seem to work, especially to the extent you trade your self identify with that of the larger group (deity).

But the only way out is with historical truth, which underlies all myth. Without a thorough examination and agreement on our history, no matter how strange, no matter how painful, we will also be at the mercy of false and dangerous gods. They’ve already confused our myths to the point that nearly half of all Americans believe the government has some involvement in covering up UFOs and that aliens probably landed in Roswell in 1947!

Aliens!!!

Small wonder FOX was the television station that aired the X-Files in the early 1990’s. What other station would benefit from distracting voters from actual cover-ups by creating an imaginary scenario of little green men? Dozens of Right Wing groups and magazines piled on, adding mountains of dubious “proof” that a cover-up was in play which demanded our immediate attention.

And it worked. For the reasons I stated above, intelligent people, normal in every respect except for the dis-ease that permeates America, bought into the ludicrous premise that the U.S. government was covering up knowledge of extraterrestrial beings. Spielberg made a killing with E.T. then followed it up with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It was an era of insanity that paralleled the Dutch Tulip Craze.

And without knowing history we’ll see more of the same.

The players you’ll meet as we explore American Fascism are nothing if not strange. Expatriates deposed by revolutions in Russia, Cuba and France. Fascists from Hungary, Italy and Spain. Nazis from Hitler’s High Command. International assassins. Masters of espionage. Terrorists. Organized crime bosses. Small and big time racketeers. Union bosses. Criminals who hide behind robes and stained glass. Intelligence operatives.  Secret Service personnel with blood on their uniforms. Presidents, politicians, witting and unwitting dupes, patsies, their handlers and the agents-at-large.

You’ll also meet everyday people who got in the way of this global menace, a network of fascists whose tentacles reach into every corner of the globe and are intertwined like a strangler’s fingers.

It’s a chess game, my friends. One that can only be seen from the cliffs of history. And to understand our history we must pierce the smokescreen contrived by these Right Wing devils. For despite their flags and American pageantry, their political goals are far different than the ones our fathers fought to preserve. We who still have our wits must fight again. And that fight begins by re-learning our history.

Andrea Hackett is the Founding Executive Director of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance. She is an editor, historian, Left Wing political activist in the truest sense and author. She is currently writing an expose of the American Right entitled “1945″ and spends much of her time researching documents for its release. Constructive comments are always welcome. Trolls will be not be tolerated. 

Twitter Blacklists Users on Mother’s Day

I’ve said a lot of nice things about Twitter in the past. I teach Twitter at local colleges. I design custom Twitter pages for my clients. I encourage people to try Twitter on almost a daily basis. I even have a Twitter event scheduled for this week to teach skeptical business owners how they can benefit from Twitter.

But this Mother’s Day changed everything.

This weekend I was blocked from following anyone on Twitter, even those who started following me, for no reason whatsoever.

Do I have thousands of followers? No. Was I abusing the system? No. Do my 650 followers, built up over months, point to a person “gaming the system”? No. Do I use third party software in some crazed effort to get followers? No. I warn everyone I know to steer clear of such promises. The fact is, I don’t even care how many followers I have. I just follow the people who seem to have similar interests and bam!

Blacklisted for hitting some magical “limit.”

I figured it must be a glitch, an overload related to Twitter’s servers. After all, why would a social networking site prevent its users from following people? It didn’t make sense. Especially those who followed them first?

Then I found my answer.

Twitter “is not a social networking website.” At least that’s what they say on their support page. “’Following’ is a one way action that means you want to receive information in the form of tweets from someone.” Period.

I almost fell out of my chair.

So in Twitter’s eyes, tweeps are just there to follow the people Twitter deems important, to hang on their every word, to listen instead of speak, to create communities around celebrities, not each other. And, judging from Twitter’s categories, the people we’re supposed to follow are rock stars, sports figures, politicians, celebrities and, of course, Twitter itself by adding such thrilling categories as Twitter Support, Top Tweets and Twitter Help.

Can you imagine how boring life would become?

Yet that’s what Twitter insists we do or suffer their wrath. The social media platform I discovered, the application I found so compelling at first is not what I thought at all. It’s a one-way communication tool for celebrities. Followers (like me) are allowed to eavesdrop politely. Get too “aggressive”? Use the platform to expand your friends? Have too many interests? And you’re blacklisted, a description that recalls the darkest and most embarrassing days of Hollywood during the 1950′s. And it’s anyone’s guess what “aggressive” means.

This aristocratic stance by a social media giant (and Twitter is arguably the most social of all the social networks), may be a vestige of their original intent, but it may also become their undoing.  For the country is no longer filled with airheads enamored of wealth and fame. Social media has taught us that @whatshername or @JoeTheClown may have far more to offer than, say, Justin Bieber. Much more. And we’ve learned this by seeking each other out on Twitter.

But that’s not the way it was supposed to be. Twitter was supposed to be an elite texting mechanism for a small, eruidite cadre of journalists, writers and newsmakers. And they’ve tried their damnedest to keep it that way for six years now. They’ve most recently cracked down on third party applications, making it nearly impossible to comply with Twitter’s standards. They’ve always resisted organic movements, like the ubiquitous hashtag, until they became overwhelmingly popular. And they’ve  made it difficult for everyone by setting ridiculous limits on following, tweeting and everything in between.

Yet the Twitteratti, like Sarah Palin or any mainstream media personality, would never encounter such problems. It’s only the little folks, down on the bottom.

Twitter is like the Titanic. It’s huge, awe-inspiring and intimidating. But it suffers from the same deplorable elitism that dotes on celebrity while casting the rest of us into steerage. And we all know what happened to the Titanic.

It sank with all its wealthy passengers.

1945

Americans have had the sense that something has changed for some time, but few can define that change and even fewer can pinpoint the people and events that led to it. Most reconcile their vague but persistent fears by blaming a litany of ethereal culprits: socialism, liberals, Democrats, the unemployed, “politicians,” “Washington,” welfare recipients, a loss of patriotism, a loss of the right kind of patriotism, a loss of “values,” the young. The American political psyche is so deeply rooted in this collective dis-ease our political discourse is shot through with it.

Yet no one can agree on what “it” is.

Few are aware of how sinister our country has become and, to be fair, most prefer ignorance. Yet our descent into fascism is well documented and, tedious though the facts may be, can be readily traced by anyone with enough interest to scry our most painful secrets. Until those secrets are acknowledged by more than handful of erudite but discredited heralds, our place within history will remain mysterious and our dilemma an increasingly bizarre political farce to all but the victims of our eventual comeuppance.

- Andrea Hackett

*    *    *    *    *

1945

At the end of World War II, as the Red Army closed on Berlin,  Allen Dulles and top U.S. Army Intelligence officers offered an incredible “treaty” to Hitler’s Nazi intelligence apparatus. This pact, formalized for Truman’s signature as Operation Paperclip months later in a de facto insult to civilian government[1], was a defining moment in U.S. history, perhaps the defining moment . For it meant that every sacrifice, every horror, every ounce of energy we expended to stop the Nazis was in vain. Nazism had prevailed.

Only their mail stop had changed.

This “treaty,” which stood in stark contrast to FDR’s vision for post-war Germany,  allowed more than 1,800 Nazi murderers and spies to “defect” to the West.  It also lent credidiblity to Stalin’s suspicions that FDR had been poisoned, though Stalin implicated “the Churchill gang.”[2] FDR died just eighteen days before the German surrender. His death couldn’t have come at a better time for the Nazi high command who faced “total anihilation” just weeks before. Indeed, FDR’s last letter to Stalin, penned on the day of his death, said, “When our armies make contact in Germany and join in a fully coordinated offensive, the Nazi armies will disinegrate.” In that light, Eleanor’s refusal to open the casket to satisfy Stalin’s suspicions seems more a euphamism for our own denial than an act of respect for Franklin. But if FDR was murdered, as I suspect, “the Churchill gang” wouldn’t top my list of suspects. I’d pin the blame on the Nazi high command and their sympathizers in the West.

The defectors covered by this seditious “treaty” included the worst of Hitler’s ghouls:

• Gen. Reinhard Gehlen: a cold-blooded, calculating, Nazi butcher who headed Hitler’s murderous Intelligence Organization for Eastern Europe and committed some of the most notorious crimes of the war. Gehlen endeared himself to the West by pledging his exaggerated assets to our anti-Soviet crusade while working to exacerbate East-West tensions and divert attention from the ODESSA Nazis.[1] He was extremely close to Allen Dulles who gifted him a Swiss chalet when the General retired.[2]

• Gehlen’s Organization: “at least 100… SD and former Gestapo officers” according to documents released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act,[3] a description which falls far short of the mark. In fact Gehlen’s organization, overseen by a myriad of U.S. intelligence agencies after the war and directed under the auspices of the CIA in 1948 (when Gehlen was code named, Dr. Schneider), numbered closer to 4,000 spies, agents and transmission specialists who extended all across Eastern Europe. Gehlen’s Organization (code named RUSTY) was our premier intelligence gathering apparatus during the Cold War and even when subsumed into the U.S.-German “7821 Composite Group,” provided the bulk of our intelligence on Soviet Russia from 1945-1953. It included the Ukranian émigré organization OUN which later became the ABN in Hungaray headed by Ferenc Nagy, former Nazi collaborator who also headed the CIA-run Permindex Corporation in Rome which, coincidentally, had among its Board of Directors one Clay Shaw (indicted for JFK’s assassination). Gehlen’s apparatus was at all times under the command of U.S. Intelligence

• George deMohrenschildt: Nazi spy who went to work for the CIA, most infamously employed as Lee Harvey Oswald’s “babysitter” in Dallas. He was the first person to greet Oswald and his wife Marina when they returned from Russia. He also “introduced” the couple to Ruth and Michael Paine who were gracious enough to procure Lee his job in the Texas Book Depository which, as Noel Twyman put it, “just happened to overlook JFK’s motorcade route in Dealey Plaza.” He was a member of the rabidly right wing Petroleum Club in Dallas, close friends with H.L. Hunt [4], Lester Logue, Howard K. Davis and General Edwin Walker (all tied to JFK’s assassination) and was seen in the company of Gerald “Gerry” Patrick Hemming, a former CIA operative on the fringe of the JFK plot with extensive involvement in CIA assassination operations and tradework. If that doesn’t suggest some involvement in JFK’s murder, deMohrenschildt committed suicide the day after his daughter was contacted by Gaeton Fonzi, investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) for an interview.[5]

• Emil Augsburg[6] an officer at the infamous Wannasee Insitute where he helped craft the Final Solution, Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews and other “undesirables”

• “At least five associates of the Adolf Eichmann”[7] the notorious leader of Hitler’s Amt/IV B4 who implemented the Holocaust through RSHA and authorized the deportation and murder of at least 4,000,000 Jews. Eichmann, arguably the most notorious mass murderer in history, claimed “6,000,000 deaths” to his superior, Heinrich Himmler, who complained that the extermination was moving at such a slow pace.

• Hans Globke: a lawyer in Hitler’s Internal Ministry and close associate of Eichmann who authored the infamous Nuremburg “race laws,”[8] the “Codex of Jewish Law” which legalized the expropriation and repression of the Jews, “The Law For Protection of German Blood and German Honour,” “Law For The Protection of Genetic Health of the German People” and other rabidly anti-Semetic legislation. Globke remained in West Germany after the war as Chancellor Konrad Adenaur’s right-hand man (his past safely guarded by the CIA) and used his position to help many former Nazi officials gain prominent posts in the government

• Kurt Blome: In 1945, Blome told Army interrogators he was ordered to perform ghastly experiments on concentration camp victims by injecting them with the Black Plague. He was acquitted at Nuremburg and subsequently offered a lucrative postion with the U.S. Army Chemical Corps in 1951 making chemical weapons

• Major General Walter Schreiber: According to Linda Hunt, prosecutors at Nuremburg presented evidence that Schreiber assigned doctors to perform hideous medical experiments on concentration camp victims during the war and made funds available for those experiments. But he was in Soviet hands at the time and unavailable to answer the charges. That was good enough for the Air Force School of Medicine at Randolph Field, Texas who offered him a job the moment as he mysteriously appeared on U.S. soil. It wasn’t until Drew Pearson exposed his gruesome past in 1952 that the JIOA stepped in and had him safely (and quietly) whisked to Argentina.

• Seigfried Ruff:  Ruff was barely acquitted at Nuremburg on charges he killed more than 80 prisoners at Dachau in a pressure chamber designed to emulate altitudes of 60,000 feet. In appreciation for his incalculable contribution to science, the U.S. Army paid him handsomely to document his shop of horrors

• Arthur Rudolph: originally classified as a “menace to the security of Allied Forces”[9]

• Hubertus Stronghold: originally classified as a “menace to the security of Allied Forces”

• Hermann Becker-Freysing and Seigfried Ruff: Becker-Freysing, Ruff and Kurt Blome were among 23 defendents at Nuremburg whose medical attrocities horrified the world. Becker-Freysing was convicted of starving Dachau prisoners to death and feeding them sea water chemically altered to make it drinkable. He was sentenced to 20 years. He, too, was paid by the Army to document the results of his experiments

• Dozens of Nazi doctors and psychiatrists whose ghastly medical experiments and attrocities were simply ignored. These so-called psychiatrists would later be used in CIA mind control experiments such as MK-ULTRA and Jonestown in Guyana as well as the agency’s attempts to create “robot assassins” to further the legacy of Der Fuhrer’s S.S.

An impressive list of ghouls even by today’s standards.

In his book, “Blowback,” Christopher Simpson describes Gehlen as the “most important of all” with an “arrogant demeanor,” “violent temper,” “extraordinary powers of concentration” and “a jeweler’s attention to detail.” And the Army clearly agreed because he was paid the amazing sum of $200,000 at the time to keep his spy network intact and focused on the Bolshevik threat.

In the “Report of Initial Contacts with General Gehlen’s Organization” by Capt. John R. Boker, Jr., released as part of 27,000 secret documents declassified by the CIA, Boker tells of his first meeting with Gehlen in “early June, 1945” at the von Bergen House on the Bodenstedstrasse in Weisbaden where Gehlen was being held for interrogation. According to Boker, Gehlen made a profound impression on him during that and subsequent meetings, and he reports that he “convinced higher-ups” to permit him to reassemble Gehlen’s entire organization from the POWs being held at allied camps.

Boker writes: “By the middle of July, 1945 we had succeeded in reconstructing General Gehlen’s key members  and staff, all his important documents and were very much aware of the gold mine we had found… The problem now was convincing higher American authority as to the value of our enterprise.”

“We” refers to General Betts and Col. W. R. Philp, Chief of the 12^th Army Group’s Interrogation Center who approved Boker’s efforts to reassemble Gehlen’s scattered organization and retrieve the intelligence Gehlen had secreted (just for us) in Southern Germany. Brigadier General Edwin L. Sibert was informed on their progress, according to a secret memorandum released by the CIA

“Higher American authority” refers to the Commander in Chief, President Truman, FDR’s milquetoast successor who was given Operation Paperclip for approval in August 1945 to provide cover for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) who had been colluding with the Nazis since before the war’s end. It certainly doesn’t refer to Gens. Bradley, Smith or Eisenhower who were staunchly opposed to any plan to employ Nazis.[10] And it certainly doesn’t refer to the Joint Chiefs of Staff or OSS, who were in no need of convincing.  The OSS, with Wild Bill Donovan and Allen Dulles at the helm, were up to their necks in Nazi intrigue. Allen Dulles was made Chief of the OSS Mission to Germany on June 8, 1945 (the exact moment Boker had his first meeting with Gehlen) and Dulles bowed to no “higher American authority.” It was Dulles, not Gen. Sibert as the CIA documents suggest, that offered asylum to Gehlen and his Nazi thugs.

And Gehlen wasn’t the only high level Nazi intelligence officer making deals. They all were. In his book, Battleground in Berlin: CIA vs KGB in the Cold War, David E. Murphy tells of SS Sturmbahnfuehrer Wilhelm Hoettl, chief of SS intelligence operations in southeastern Europe who “volunteered his efforts to the OSS, described the remnants of his networks, and led OSS to his radio communications center in Austria.”[11]  Information like this might have been made interesting reading for, say, a civilian president with the task of protecting the country from enemies within and without.

Wouldn’t you think?

But then Truman was never that kind of guy. Despite his tough talk and populist rhetoric, his purported fear that the Executive Branch had lost control of the military, and his high-profile firing of General MacArthur, Truman did more to aggregate our ascension to a military state than any other president before him. From Operation Paperclip to his creation of the CIA. From our involvement in Korea to the atomic bombs he agreed to drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Truman was always ready, pen in hand.

So Boker’s reference to “higher American authority” was a reference to Truman. Though (and Boker couldn’t know this) Truman didn’t need much convincing. He approved Operation Paperclip with a self-serving caveat (like Judas washing his hands) that anyone who had “been a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a normal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism” be excuded from the operation. Then somehow missed the fact that Gehlen was brought to the United States that very month… to Washington, D.C. no less! He also somehow missed the fact that thousands of former Nazis emigrated in the months and years that followed.

But then, that was part of the plan.

Truman wasn’t FDR’s first choice. No. Roosevelt picked Truman as his running mate only after considerable prodding by a cabal of party insiders who wanted anyone but his Vice President, Henry Wallace, to succeed him upon his death (which, though I suspect he was poisoned, was a distinct possibility). Wallace was anti-fascist to the core and was dispised by the Right for his “socialist” agricultural policies. He was also a progressive, nominated by the Progressive Party, and once equated the American and Russian revolutions as both “part of the march to freedom.”

Not the kind of guy you’d pick if you wanted a fascist regime.

So a select group of Democratic Party insiders worked on Franklin. One of them, curiously enough, was Edwin Pawley, a wealthy oilman who was Director of the Democratic National Committee at the time. Pawley had worked his way up from fundraiser to top man in the Democratic Party in just four years and become quite chummy with Truman along the way (a relationship I characterize as a double agent with a ready patsy in his crosshairs). When FDR’s fragility became an issue at the 1944 Democratic Convention, Pawley saw his opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. He gathered his cabal and promoted his ineffectual “chum” Truman like crazy.

His efforts paid off like a slot machine.

When FDR died, Truman repaid his “dear” friend by making him U.S. Representative to the Allied Reparations Committee (1945-47) where, as ambassador to the Potsdam Conference, he “renegotiated” the agreements made by Roosevelt at Yalta, effectively ending any chance for a post-war peace to the extraordinary benefit of Allen Dulles, the Nazis and the CIA. He later became financially involved with George Bush, Sr. though Bush’s Zapata Corporation (a CIA front) which, among other things, laundered money for Nixon’s Watergate plumbers. The plumbers, you may recall, included Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt who have both been inextricably linked to the JFK assassination.

So Pawley was clearly furthering a sinister agenda when he promoted the “soft spoken,” ineffectual Truman to be FDR’s running mate.

But there were bigger fish calling the shots. Fish who’d been itching for FDR’s death to align American foreign policy with the Nazis. Fish like W. Averill Harrimann who was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union by President Truman despite (or because of) the fact that he ran the notorious Union Bank in New York which funneled millions of dollars to Hitler’s coffers in direct violation of the Giving Aid and Comfort to the Enemy Act (Union Bank, in case you missed the first article I wrote in this series, was owned entirely by Fritz “I Paid Hitler” Thyssen who practically bankrolled the rise of the Third Reich single-handedly. It was also run by Prescott Bush, W’s granddaddy). [12]

Also calling the shots were fish like General John Deane who ran the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as Commanding General of the U.S. Military Mission and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.[13] and Gen. Edwin L. Seibert who was fully aware of the Gehlen operation in June 1945 and never “cleared it” with Gens. Eisenhower, Bradley or Smith.[14]

Then there was General Douglas McArthur whose intelligence apparatus in the Far East was so extensive it provided 90% of the intelligence received by the Pentagon. So he could spin the intel however he wished (a double-edged sword that contributed to his eventual dismissal). He even promoted himself to Viceroy of Japan in 1945! MacArthur’s intelligence network was run by his Chief of Intelligence, Charles Willoughby aka Adolph Tschepp-Weidenbach who MacArthur fondly referred to as “my little fascist.” Indeed, MacArthur’s intelligence organization proved to be fertile ground for burgeoning fascists. William Potter Gale, a MacArthur aide, brought the Christian Identity movement to the United States (Jews are the spawn of Satan, etc.). Willoughby himself had direct ties to the JFK assassination plot, as we’ll see in a later installment.

Much has been made of Truman firing General MacArthur. Many have held it up as proof of Truman’s staunch defense of the Republic. But Truman had little choice in the matter. He was backed into a corner and did the only thing he could do to save face.

Things were starting to get ugly for our little 200 year old experiment. Six months earlier General Patton had promoted himself in the field to a four star general, ignoring senate approval with his infamous rejoinder, “They have their schedule, I have mine.”

So the fact that Boker (an Army Captain) received the go-ahead and reassembled Gehlen’s entire Nazi intelligence organization by “early June, 1945” is not surprising. But his statement that he would need the approval of “a higher authority” is absurd.

1945 marked the birth of a shadow government within the United States, a government comprised of military intelligence offficers from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the U.S. Armed Forces combined into the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), and a subcommitee of the JIC called the Joint Intelligence Objectives Committee (JIOC), overseen by the OSS to implement Operation Paperclip. And we need to understand 1945 to understand how we got where we are today.

Now, before I continue, a word about the eight million pages of documentation declassifed by the CIA under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998. Though I draw liberally from these documents, it’s important to note that they had to be pried from CIA hands by the Nazi War Criminals Records Interagency Work Group (IWG) established by Executive Order by President Clinton in 1998. Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the IWG, echoed the frustration of the group aptly when he testified to the Subcommitte on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations Committee on Government Reform of the U.S. House of Representatives on March 2, 2005: “…depsite the fact that relevant records are in some cases more than 50 years old, the CIA balked at full compliance, causing a delay of more than a year in the IWG’s work.”

I know. A real shocker.

The point is, anything could have happened to the documentation during that period, up to and including the production of fictitous documents that cast the agency in a better light. As I’ve stated, I find it hard to believe that an Army Captain like Boker, an interrogator, had to “convince American authority” to help a man of Gehlen’s rank at a time when those same authorities were granting de facto citizenship to hundreds, if not thousands, of Nazis. Other documents in this release suffer a similar incredulity. In “Forging an Intelligence Parternship: CIA and the Origins of the BND 1945-49,” released in 2002, the CIA is described as having a “lack of enthusiasm” toward Gehlen’s organization and quotes a CIA officer updating Richard Helms as being “concerned about the political implications of sponsoring an organization that in the opinion of qualified observers constitutes a re-activation of the German Abwehr under American aegis.” [15]

Excuse me while I stop laughing.

The suggestion that a CIA officer, any CIA officer, found it necessary to “update” Richard Helms with a newsflash amounting to: “Oh, my God! We’re working with Nazis! What will people think?” is so ludicrous it’s laughable.

So though I draw from these documents to some degree, I take them, like anything the agency releases, with a large grain of salt. And the devil is in the details, like Boker’s admission that Gehlen’s organization had been completely reassembled by “…the middle of July, 1945.” That was six weeks before our elected U.S. president was advised that Nazi collusion with top U.S. intelligence officers was in the offing, much less under way. And Truman certainly wasn’t advised that Hitler’s entire intelligence apparatus in Eastern Europe had been revived intact and was being funded by taxpayer dollars!

He may have been inept, but I’m not ready to believe he knew about that one.

No. It was the JOIC. They were well aware that Truman, like FDR, would have shut the entire operation down if he had known.  So they took great pains to circumvent the letter of the law by quietly “cleansing” the dossiers of over 1,500 Nazi scientists, engineers, technicians and officers before granting them top level security clearances. Indeed, the term “paperclip” came from the paperclips used to hold their fictional backgrounds together with their actual backgrounds in JOIA personnel files.

Someone somewhere had to be smiling about that one.

Determining Who Was Who

Toward the end of the war, as the race across Germany accelerated, the race to find Hitler’s technologically advanced weapons and scientists accelerated. By 1945, more than thirty intelligence-gathering organizations, including Air Technical Intelligence (ATI), were competing for  The Reich’s hidden secrets. Among those were the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), the U.S. Army’s oldest intelligence gathering apparatus, dating to 1917 when it was known as the Corps of Intelligence Police.  The CIC had been charged with collecting intelligence on suspected Nazis, deciding their importance and detaining whomever seemed important since the invasion at Normandy.

But the job was becoming daunting.

During Patton’s famous surge to Bayonne in 1944,  Third Army was covering more than 30 miles a day and Nazis were literally everywhere.

The Toilet Papers

In March, 1945, a month before the German surrender, a Polish lab technician at Bonn University found an crumpled list stuffed into a school toilet which made the job a lot easier. That list, later named the Osenberg List for Werner Osenberg who headed Hitler’s Military Research Association, had the names of every scientist, engineer and technician recalled by The Reich to join a concentrated effort to defeat the enemy with technological weaponry. How this lab technician realized its importance is a mystery to me, but it eventually found its way into the hands of M16 [16] and one Maj. Robert B. Staver, Chief of the Jet Propulsion Section of the Research and Intelligence Branch of the U.S. Army Ordance in London.

Staver used the Osenberg List to compile his own list of Nazi rocket scientists and Werner von Braun topped the list. Von Braun had pioneered the development of Hitler’s V-1 and V-2 rockets, the first cruise missiles ever made, which reigned death and terror on London during the “Flying Bomb Blitz.” In fact, 8,000 V-1s and 1,200 V-2s were launched against London during the war, kiling nearly 8,600 civilians and military personnel. Countless others were wounded or disfigured. Another 1,200 missiles were launched against Antwerp. Even after von Braun’s escape (to preempt Soviet capture) his industrial facility at Mittlewerk in Nordhausen (always well stocked with slave labor) continued to manufacture his lethal rockets. Clearly a guy to be spared the hangman’s noose.

And he was.

Four months after his capture by U.S. Armed Forces on May 2, 1945, von Braun and seven cronies found themselves at the U.S. Army installation at Fort Bliss, Texas on an indefinite reassignment. His V-2 rockets, parts, machinery and equipment had been stealthily removed from Mittlewerk and shipped to (where else?) Texas where they were reassembled and put back into production. Less than a year later, on April 16, 1946, the first V-2 rocket was launched in the United States. That launch was followed in successive years by the Hermes, Titan, Atlas, Mercury Redstone and Jupiter programs which eventually launched Americans into space and created a nationalistic fervor so deafening it drowned out the fact that our accomplishments were entirely due to Hitler’s top scientists!

Of course, in fairness, von Braun’s dossier, like the dossiers of thousands of Nazis soon to appear at our shores, were ably “cleansed” by the JOIA. As such, von Braun was made the first Director of NASA’s initial Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Today folks have nothing but praise for the guy. And most people actually believe it was “Yankee know-how” that put a man on the moon.

All I can say is “puh-lease.”

Not surprisingly, von Braun’s wartime dossier was never included in the Name Files released by the CIA.

The Osenberg List was a gold mine. It included the names of engineers, physicists, chemists, technicians and other intellectuals who held the potential to greatly benefit the West, or offer a catastrophic setback if obtained by the Soviets. When obtained by Major Staver in London, he immediately cabled Col. Joel Holmes at the Pentagon with his plans to interrogate Hitler’s rocket scientists. Staver’s plan was greatly expanded and Operation Overcast was born.

All this makes sense from a military standpoint. And its significance is often blithely dismissed with: “If we didn’t get him the Soviets would!” But of far more importance was the diminished control of our Executive Branch.  By 1945 the Executive Branch was at best tolerated by the Pentagon. Even General Eisenhower,  the celebrated Supreme Commander who orchestrated the Allied victory in Europe and replaced Harry Truman as the first Republican president since Herbert Hoover,  was patently ignored when he insisted there be “no dealings with the Nazis.” By 1945 civilian government had become an anachronism, a quaint experiment with dubious qualifications to run an empire.

And we were clearly in the empire business.

Gen. Jack Ripper

To quote General Ripper, Stanley Kubrick’s inimitable general who laments democratically elected officials while plunging the world into nuclear destruction: “They have neither the time, the training nor the inclination for strategic thought.”

Such was the thinking at the time. And such was the thinking that led to our military dictatorship. But by the time the Executive Branch realized what had happened it was far too late. Eisenhower’s ballyhooed warning of a “military-industrial complex” was as prescient as the infamous words of the Titanic’s lookout: “Iceberg ahead!”

Overcast was the precursor to Operation Paperclip and it was initiated by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff on July 19, 1945, ostensibly to aid the war effort against the Japanese. But its main objective was to reap the intellectual spoils of Hitler’s defeat, and prevent the Soviets from gaining the advantage. Overcast relocated Nazi scientists, chemists, physicists and engineers to Bavaria where they would be safe from the Russians.

What we have at the close of World War II is the adolescence of American Nazism. Yes, Nazi operatives were rife in America from the 1930’s onward, and yes the Republican Party was heavily funded and influenced by the Nazis throughout that period. But that was just the opening act. It’s at this critical juncture that the American military melds with Hitler’s Nazi high command. And it is at this moment, a moment made imminent by the concentration of military power overseas, that a New Age for America begins, an age that reveals its darkness every day in acts that seem almost surreal to those who remember our lost republic.

(to be continued)

[1] Truman’s order expressly excluded anyone found “to have been a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism”

[2] “Who Killed Franklin D. Roosevelt?” L. Fletcher Prouty (Mr. X in Oliver Stone’s JFK)

[3] ODESSA has been highly publicized in such films as The Odessa File and Marathon Man, but suffice it to say that ODESSA was a secret Nazi organization formed toward the end of Hitler’s Reich to relocate and conceal tens of thousands of Waffen SS, Nazi war criminals and mass murderers to Argentina, Paraguay, South Africa, Madrid and Egypt using a billion dollars in gems, currencies and gold derived from the fillings of gassed Jews which was deposited into Swiss banks to fund Hitler’s vision of a global fascist empire.

[4] “Bloody Treason” Neol Twyman, pg. 569

[5] Richard Breitman, Norman Goda, Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, (Washington, DC: National Archive Trust Fund Board, 2004), 377.

[6] Hunt obtained the first copy of the Zagruder film, even before the FBI

[7] “Bloody Treason” Noel Twyman, pg 328

[8] Augsburg was described in a CIA assessment in 1952 as “honest and idealist…enjoys good food and wine…unprejudiced mind”

[9] “The CIA and Nazi War Criminals, National Security Archive Electronic Debriefing Book No. 146 Edited by Tamara Feinstein, February 4, 2005 http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB146/  b) the CIA clearly knew of Eichmann’s whereabouts before his capture in 1960 despite the agency’s purported surprise at the time and efforts to distance themselves in the released documents; a memo dated March 19, 1958 (accidentally?) included in the documents released by the CIA, written by a German secret service operative to the CIA, gives Eichmann’s exact location in Argentina and explains that he had been living there since 1952 under the pseudonym Ricardo Clement (Klement). In a memorandum documented in “Hitler’s Shadow: New Information on Major Nazi Figures” pg 13, by Chief of CIA’s Near East and Africa Division subunit-2 and cleared by the CIA’s General Counsel, Larry Houston, the agency’s position vis-à-vis Eichmann is made crystal clear: “while CIA has a continuing interest in the whereabouts and activites of individuals such as Eichmann , we are not in the business of apprehending war criminals, hence in no position to take and active role in [locating him].”

[10] The CIA took special care to protect Globke as he was closely linked to Barbie and also Undersecretary of State under West Germany’s Chancellor Adenaur after the war. Exposing the Globke-Barbie connection would expose the entire fiction of de-Nazification and the seamless bond between the CIA and Nazi criminals. When Life magazine acquired Eichmann’s memoirs they omitted all reference to Globke at Allen Dulles “request.”

[11] http://promoteliberty.wordpress.com/tag/joint-intelligence-objectives-agency/

[12] During his term in office, President Eisenhower was repeatedly attacked by the John Birch Society and other fascist organizations for being, of all things, communist. The rhetoric against Eisenhower made it clear that Nazis sympathizers within the Republican Party were looking for a very different candidate in 1960.

[13] “Chap 1, CIA’s Berlin Base, footnote 6

[14] For more on the Union Bank, W. Averill Harriman, Prescott Bush and Fritz Thyseen, see “The Ascent of American Fascism” 

[15] “The International History Review” XIV 2, May 1992 Chap: “John Deane, W. Averill Harrimann, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the ‘Reversal of Cooperation’ with the Soviet Union in 1945”

[16] According to the“Report of Intervew with General Edwin L. Sibert on the Gehlen Organization” 26 March 1970 SECRET ReiGER, Sibert was well aware of Gehlen’s “employment” from June 1945 on and never cleared it with General Eisenhower, General Bradley or General Smith.

The Bin Laden Mess

We’ve seen it for years in the movies. A guy wants to quit the mob. The Big Boys say no. Think for a minute then nod. After all, he’s a stand up guy. He’s been with the mob for years. He’s been good for business, never squealed when the going got tough.

Then they start thinking.

What if he comes out of hiding? What if the wrong people nab him? What if he starts blabbing to save his own hide? What if he does something stupid like write a book?

In the immortal words of Remo Gaggi, Scorsese’s uberlord in his classic Casino: “Why take a chance?”

Bin Laden’s assassination was a gangland hit on a potential witness. Nothing less. It was perfectly timed, just like Saddam. And just like Saddam, Osama had too many nasty secrets on the Bush family. Way too many. And just like everyone else in this global chess game, the powers that be played Bin Laden like the pawn he was. His extremism served our interests all too well in Afghanistan in 1979. So when a plot was hatched to seize dictatorial power during the 2000 coup. Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft and the whole clan drafted the Patriot Act to rip up the Bill of Rights. And once more Old Faithful Bin Laden was called to serve. Fighter jets were ordered to stand down. Commercial airliners were permitted to veer hundreds of miles off course. Field reports from honest intelligence agents were quashed. And the Trade Center, to the horror of New York citizens, lit up like the Reichstag Fire (with Bldg 7 imploding in perfect vertical formation).

None of this is new, of course. But its important to keep in context as we mull Bin Laden’s assassination and the nauseating celebration that ensued.

Osama was never missing. Once Bush was out of the White House (alibi) and the “war on terror” had been firmly established as the New Cold War, Osama had simply outlived his usefulness. And with the secrets he held, he was an ongoing threat to the Bush Dynasty.

That’s where Bush buddy, Barack Obama, whose only role has been to hold the White House until public furor over Republicans died down, came in. And with his poll ratings at an all-time low…what better time?

Killing Bin Laden was just the pick-me-up this president needed and held out the opportunity of winning back those starry-eyed groupies who’d vanished faster than the Antarctic.

Where’s the body? Who knows? They never found Jimmy Hoffa. No body means no questions. Just flag-waving, jingoist nonsense and a guaranteed second term for the Ruling Elite’s errand boy.

Just another page future generations will study as the Rise and Fall of the American Empire.

The last days are always the ugliest.