Dave Emory’s entire lifetime of work is available on a flash drive that can be obtained here. (The flash drive includes the anti-fascist books available on this site.)
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Introduction: As our title indicates, this program brings a number of paths of inquiry up to date, as well as highlighting some new points of interest.
Recent months have seen ISIS–The Islamic State of Syria and Iraq–blitzkrieg across much of Iraq, even taking a city in Lebanon. This has occasioned much criticism of Obama, including from within the ranks of the General Staff, as well as the predictable cries of outrage from the GOP.
Receiving less coverage is the apparent role of Saudi Arabia and the Saudi chief of intelligence Prince Bandar in the ISIS onslaught. Nicknamed “Bandar Bush” for his long-standing intimacy with the Bush clan, Bandar appears to have backed ISIS in an anti-Shiite campaign with genocidal overtones. His backing of the Syrian jihadist effort is well known.
” . . . Prince Bandar told him [MI6 chief Richard Dearlove]: “The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally ‘God help the Shia’. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.”
Bandar resigned his position as head of Saudi intelligence in April. Might that have been as a result of Saudi support for ISIS jihadists?
For years, we have discussed The Turner Diaries, which discusses a Nazi takeover of the U.S. by armed militias. After conducting a campaign of assassination, sabotage and terrorism with WMD’s they take over the U.S.
The Turner Diaries and Hunter, published by Greenwald’s client, the National Alliance
Next, we turn to the subject of the recent stand-off at the Bundy ranch, in which armed militiamen successfully defied agents of the Bureau of Land Management. Far from operating in a vacuum, they may well be a vanguard of larger, more sinister things to come, with support from elements of the GOP and that party’s extreme right-wing echo chamber.
Turning from clandestine military activities in the U.S. to Nazi military units in post-war Germany, we examine a fascinating article from declassified BND files. After World War II, former Wehrmacht and Waffen SS personnel coalesced into a fighting force, supposedly for the purpose of combating a “Soviet invasion.”
Assembled in cooperation with SS commando officer and ODESSA functionary Otto Skorzeny, the unit appears to have actually been part of the “Operations Stay Behind/Gladio” formations assembled by NATO at the end of the war.
One of the most interesting features of the story lies in the advisory given by a BND official queried about the units. He ” . . . suggested consulting “the SS”, adding, the SS “is a factor and we should sound out opinions in detail there before making a decision.” Apparently networks of old and former Nazis still exercised considerable influence during the 1950s. . . .” The use of present tense to discuss the SS in a 1950’s memorandum is noteworthy.
Next, the program highlights the “suicide” of former Florida GOP official Katherine Harris, who helped swing the 2000 election for George W. Bush. Anders Ebbeson was a wealthy Swede, who worked for Electrolux, the vacuum cleaner company formed by Nazi-linked money man Axel Wenner-Gren.
Like his wife, Ebbeson was part of an Underground Reich Florida political milieu linked both to drug-trafficking and to the Florida connections to the 9/11 attacks. After his work for Electrolux, he founded a company that made appliances for luxury yachts–an ideal vehicle for the clandestine smuggling of contraband, as well as espionage activity.
Concluding with a story about the U.S. Army’s European command, we note that a German general will be chief of staff for the U.S. Army Europe. Why?!
Program Highlights Include: Analysis of the probable Bormann capital network links of Axel Wenner-Gren and the Swedish industrial and financial elite of which he was part; review of the profound role of Wehrmacht and Waffen SS generals in the postwar Bundeswehr; reviww of the links between the milieu of William Potter Gale and the paramilitary milieu operating out of Guy Banister’s office in New Orleans; review of Prince Bandar’s many political connections, including those to the Bush family.
1. Recent months have seen ISIS–The Islamic State of Syria and Iraq–blitzkrieg across much of Iraq, even taking a city in Lebanon. This has occasioned much criticism of Obama, including from within the ranks of the General Staff, as well as the predictable cries of outrage from the GOP.
Receiving less coverage is the role of Saudi Arabia and the Saudi chief of intelligence Prince Bandar in the ISIS onslaught. Nicknamed “Bandar Bush” for his long-standing intimacy with the Bush clan, Bandar appears to have backed ISIS in an anti-Shiite campaign with genocidal overtones.
” . . . Prince Bandar told him [MI6 chief Richard Dearlove]: “The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally ‘God help the Shia’. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.”
A speech by an ex-MI6 boss hints at a plan going back over a decade
How far is Saudi Arabia complicit in the Isis takeover of much of northern Iraq, and is it stoking an escalating Sunni-Shia conflict across the Islamic world? Some time before 9/11, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, once the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington and head of Saudi intelligence until a few months ago, had a revealing and ominous conversation with the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Prince Bandar told him: “The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally ‘God help the Shia’. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.”
The fatal moment predicted by Prince Bandar may now have come for many Shia, with Saudi Arabia playing an important role in bringing it about by supporting the anti-Shia jihad in Iraq and Syria. Since the capture of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) on 10 June, Shia women and children have been killed in villages south of Kirkuk, and Shia air force cadets machine-gunned and buried in mass graves near Tikrit.
In Mosul, Shia shrines and mosques have been blown up, and in the nearby Shia Turkoman city of Tal Afar 4,000 houses have been taken over by Isis fighters as “spoils of war”. Simply to be identified as Shia or a related sect, such as the Alawites, in Sunni rebel-held parts of Iraq and Syria today, has become as dangerous as being a Jew was in Nazi-controlled parts of Europe in 1940.
There is no doubt about the accuracy of the quote by Prince Bandar, secretary-general of the Saudi National Security Council from 2005 and head of General Intelligence between 2012 and 2014, the crucial two years when al-Qa’ida-type jihadis took over the Sunni-armed opposition in Iraq and Syria. Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute last week, Dearlove, who headed MI6 from 1999 to 2004, emphasised the significance of Prince Bandar’s words, saying that they constituted “a chilling comment that I remember very well indeed”.
He does not doubt that substantial and sustained funding from private donors in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to which the authorities may have turned a blind eye, has played a central role in the Isis surge into Sunni areas of Iraq. He said: “Such things simply do not happen spontaneously.” This sounds realistic since the tribal and communal leadership in Sunni majority provinces is much beholden to Saudi and Gulf paymasters, and would be unlikely to cooperate with Isis without their consent.
Dearlove’s explosive revelation about the prediction of a day of reckoning for the Shia by Prince Bandar, and the former head of MI6’s view that Saudi Arabia is involved in the Isis-led Sunni rebellion, has attracted surprisingly little attention. Coverage of Dearlove’s speech focused instead on his main theme that the threat from Isis to the West is being exaggerated because, unlike Bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida, it is absorbed in a new conflict that “is essentially Muslim on Muslim”. Unfortunately, Christians in areas captured by Isis are finding this is not true, as their churches are desecrated and they are forced to flee. A difference between al-Qa’ida and Isis is that the latter is much better organised; if it does attack Western targets the results are likely to be devastating.
The forecast by Prince Bandar, who was at the heart of Saudi security policy for more than three decades, that the 100 million Shia in the Middle East face disaster at the hands of the Sunni majority, will convince many Shia that they are the victims of a Saudi-led campaign to crush them. “The Shia in general are getting very frightened after what happened in northern Iraq,” said an Iraqi commentator, who did not want his name published. Shia see the threat as not only military but stemming from the expanded influence over mainstream Sunni Islam of Wahhabism, the puritanical and intolerant version of Islam espoused by Saudi Arabia that condemns Shia and other Islamic sects as non-Muslim apostates and polytheists.
Dearlove says that he has no inside knowledge obtained since he retired as head of MI6 10 years ago to become Master of Pembroke College in Cambridge. But, drawing on past experience, he sees Saudi strategic thinking as being shaped by two deep-seated beliefs or attitudes. First, they are convinced that there “can be no legitimate or admissible challenge to the Islamic purity of their Wahhabi credentials as guardians of Islam’s holiest shrines”. But, perhaps more significantly given the deepening Sunni-Shia confrontation, the Saudi belief that they possess a monopoly of Islamic truth leads them to be “deeply attracted towards any militancy which can effectively challenge Shia-dom”.
Western governments traditionally play down the connection between Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabist faith, on the one hand, and jihadism, whether of the variety espoused by Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’ida or by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Isis. There is nothing conspiratorial or secret about these links: 15 out of 19 of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, as was Bin Laden and most of the private donors who funded the operation.
The difference between al-Qa’ida and Isis can be overstated: when Bin Laden was killed by United States forces in 2011, al-Baghdadi released a statement eulogising him, and Isis pledged to launch 100 attacks in revenge for his death.
But there has always been a second theme to Saudi policy towards al-Qa’ida type jihadis, contradicting Prince Bandar’s approach and seeing jihadis as a mortal threat to the Kingdom. Dearlove illustrates this attitude by relating how, soon after 9/11, he visited the Saudi capital Riyadh with Tony Blair.
He remembers the then head of Saudi General Intelligence “literally shouting at me across his office: ‘9/11 is a mere pinprick on the West. In the medium term, it is nothing more than a series of personal tragedies. What these terrorists want is to destroy the House of Saud and remake the Middle East.’” In the event, Saudi Arabia adopted both policies, encouraging the jihadis as a useful tool of Saudi anti-Shia influence abroad but suppressing them at home as a threat to the status quo. It is this dual policy that has fallen apart over the last year.
Saudi sympathy for anti-Shia “militancy” is identified in leaked US official documents. The then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in December 2009 in a cable released by Wikileaks that “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan] and other terrorist groups.” She said that, in so far as Saudi Arabia did act against al-Qa’ida, it was as a domestic threat and not because of its activities abroad. This policy may now be changing with the dismissal of Prince Bandar as head of intelligence this year. But the change is very recent, still ambivalent and may be too late: it was only last week that a Saudi prince said he would no longer fund a satellite television station notorious for its anti-Shia bias based in Egypt.
The problem for the Saudis is that their attempts since Bandar lost his job to create an anti-Maliki and anti-Assad Sunni constituency which is simultaneously against al-Qa’ida and its clones have failed.
By seeking to weaken Maliki and Assad in the interest of a more moderate Sunni faction, Saudi Arabia and its allies are in practice playing into the hands of Isis which is swiftly gaining full control of the Sunni opposition in Syria and Iraq. In Mosul, as happened previously in its Syrian capital Raqqa, potential critics and opponents are disarmed, forced to swear allegiance to the new caliphate and killed if they resist.
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2. Bandar resigned his position as head of Saudi intelligence in April. Might that have been as a result of Saudi support for ISIS jihadists?
The sudden shakeup at the top of the kingdom’s intelligence service will likely have implications for Saudi policy on Iran and Syria.
Earlier today, Saudi Arabia announced that controversial prince Bandar bin Sultan had resigned as intelligence chief. According to the official Saudi Press Agency story, the unexpected royal decree stated that Bandar had been “relieved...from his post at his request” and replaced by Gen. Youssef bin Ali al-Idrisi, his deputy at the General Intelligence Presidency (GIP), the Saudi equivalent of the CIA. No mention was made of Bandar’s other official position as secretary-general of the Saudi National Security Council.
The news comes less than three weeks after Bandar was reported to be returning from Morocco, where he had been convalescing for several weeks following shoulder surgery. Significantly, the spin on his absence was that he had still been running Saudi intelligence from his hospital bed despite reportedly bequeathing at least the Syria portfolio to his cousin, Interior Minister Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, in January. And last October, Bandar ruffled Washington policymakers by briefing foreign journalists on Saudi exasperation regarding the Obama administration’s Middle East policies. . . . .
. . . . Bandar’s 2012 appointment as intelligence chief was seen as a reflection of King Abdullah’s policy on two key issues at the time: his hardline stance against the Assad regime in Damascus, and his determination to thwart Iran’s emergence as a nuclear-armed regional rival to Saudi Arabia. Today’s leadership switch allows for the possibility that these policies may be changing, as suggested by recent Saudi restrictions on supporting jihadists in Syria. But whether General Idrisi, a nonroyal, has the political weight to implement policy is questionable. Recent intelligence chiefs have all been princes; Bandar himself took over from Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, who was named deputy crown prince last month.
If Bandar retains his National Security Council role, he will continue to wield influence in Riyadh. But given his antipathy toward Washington in recent months, the change may suggest an opportunity to further close the rift between the United States and the kingdom following last month’s meeting between President Obama and King Abdullah outside Riyadh. That assessment depends on which officials are promoted to fill the gaps that Bandar’s resignation will leave.
3. Turning to the subject of armed insurrection in the U.S. (albeit on a smaller scale than the ISIS campaign in Iraq and Syria), we note the Cliven Bundy stand-off and the fact that the forces that produced it are more powerful and well-connected than our media will acknowledge.
The armed insurrectionists that precipitated the Bundy siege was led by a veteran of the Iraq war and backed by both elements of the GOP and its right-wing media echo chamber. Indeed, the ideological foundation of the Bundy siege was set by domestic fascist elements such as the John Birch Society.
We would also note the Bundy siege, in which armed insurrectionists successfully defied federal authority and the law, fits neatly into the scenario set forth in The Turner Diaries.
It is also important to know that the milieu of the Bundyites is that of the Snowdenistas.
This is not mentioned by SPLC, nor do they discuss the wider context of the history of fascism–support for fascism by financial and industrial elites, the Gehlen organization, the Crusade for Freedom, the Nazi element of the GOP, nor this country’s political assassinations.
Cliven Bundy wasn’t a one-off. New report shows far-right militias are growing, and more fear of home-grown terror
Three months after the standoff at the Cliven Bundy ranch, the Southern Poverty Law Center has issued a report—”War in the West: The Bundy Ranch Standoff and the American Radical Right“—stating what should have been obvious at the time, but which most media coverage utterly obscured: The standoff was not some quirky, standalone event that spontaneously just happened out of the blue. Rather, it was a highly coordinated event reflecting the threat of a larger militia movement, which in turn has drawn together multiple threads of far-right ideology over the course of the last 40 years.
On the purely tactical level, the report notes that Bundy’s armed supporters had “overwhelming tactical superiority” due to their pre-positioning on the high ground above the confrontation—under the direction of a Montana militia member and Iraq War veteran—which is a primary reason why the Bureau of Land Management wisely withdrew. On a somewhat broader level, the report warns of the events’ ripple effect. “Just in the months since the Bundy ‘victory,’ tense standoffs between the BLM and antigovernment activists have taken place across the West — in Idaho, New Mexico, Texas and Utah.”
That’s in addition to the violent Las Vegas rampage of Bundy supporters Jerad and Amanda Miller, which left three innocents dead along with the two shooters. And it places these events in a larger context. First in the Obama era—“Since 2009, there have been 17 shooting incidents between antigovernment extremists and law enforcement”—but also beyond. It stretches as far back as the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s, but gaining much more organizational coherence with the confluence of the racist, anti-Semitic Posse Comitatus, starting in the 1970s, and two more mainstream movements, “the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s and the Wise Use movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s.”
“The Bundy ranch standoff wasn’t a spontaneous response to Cliven Bundy’s predicament but rather a well-organized, military-type action that reflects the potential for violence from a much larger and more dangerous movement,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow in the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, and lead author of the report, in a statement accompanying the report. “This incident may have faded from public view, but if our government doesn’t pay attention, we will be caught off guard as much as the Bureau of Land Management was that day.”
“SPLC’s piece is focused on the need for law enforcement to be ready in light of the apparent military-style planning of the Bundy protest. They are arguing that the Bundy ranch was a trap, and that it worked,” said veteran researcher Frederick Clarkson, author of ””Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy,” co-founder of the group researchers blog Talk To Action, and a senior fellow at Political Research Associates. “Indeed, given the involvement of former military and police officers in the Oath Keepers, one of the groups involved in the stand off, that far right figures would apply their knowledge to such situations is to be expected.”
“Mark Potok observes that the episode suggests that there is potential for ‘violence from a much larger and more dangerous movement.’ It’s a good point and one all sectors of society need to take seriously,” Clarkson said.
Speaking to Salon, Potok himself made it clear it was the government as a whole, rather than BLM specifically, that bore the brunt of the blame. “The BLM certainly could have gone in in a better way. the optics were obviously terrible…. It was not the best approach,” Potok said. “On the other hand, at the end of the day, they did the right thing. They didn’t try to tough it out…. As for the BLM itself, I actually feel sorry for them. This is not a law enforcement agency. Mostly, people who work for BLM go to college and study land-use issues.”
The problem is much more one of inter-agency coordination, leadership and simple recognition of the widespread threat of right-wing violence—a failure epitomized by the Obama administration’s knee-jerk disavowal of a Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism, leaked to right-wing media in April 2009. As Potok noted, this disavowal came despite two basic facts: first, that a similar report on the virtually nonexistent radical left had been issued six months earlier, and second, the fact the report itself was “a fair, sober and prescient analysis of what was going on.” In fact “virtually everything that was written in that report came to pass in one way or another.”
But it’s not just the government that’s been caught flat-footed. The media’s sensationalist approach obscured as much or more than it revealed, “aided” as it were by its slavish devotion to “balanced coverage.” And the conservative establishment that first embraced, then fled from Bundy has long had a symbiotic partnership with the farthest fringes whose bottomless paranoia it regards as a natural resource without end. Neither the corporate media nor the establishment right shows any signs of having learned anything lasting from the Bundy ranch standoff. Some future sequel, spinoff or copycat seems virtually inevitable, above and beyond what we’ve already seen.
The Bundy ranch standoff may have been unique in one respect, the report admits, “in terms of its utter brazenness”:
Rarely have even the most militant of members of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement been photographed aiming sniper rifles at the heads of law enforcement officials. Almost never has a group of heavily armed right-wing radicals, facing large numbers of equally heavily armed law enforcement, forced the government to back down.
But it belongs on a spectrum of similar confrontations over the decades, and was clearly less lethal than many of them, including, of course the Oklahoma City bombing, which left 168 people dead, including 19 babies and children.
Part of what distinguished the Bundy ranch confrontation, the report suggests, was the role of Ryan Payne, a 30-year-old militia man from Anaconda, Montana, who had deployed twice to Iraq, and who played a key role in recruiting hundreds of other militia members to support Bundy, and in positioning the snipers, leading the BLM to withdraw. Payne is a member of small local militia group, the West Mountain Rangers, but he also “sits atop a little-known militia organization called Operation Mutual Aid, a group that he hoped could coordinate militias across the country to respond to federal aggressions,” according to the report. SPLC interviewed Payne weeks after the confrontation.
After a Bundy family video of their initial confrontations went viral, Payne jumped into action, first talking with Bundy, then driving through the night with another member of his militia, Jim Lardy, “a few sleeping bags in tow, burning up cell phones hoping to bring every militia member they could. On April 9, he sent out an urgent call for the militias to mobilize,” saying that 150 members had already responded, “but that number is growing by the hour.” Once he arrived, he took on the role of a battlefield planner—a role that payed off, big time, when the BLM decided to retreat, rather than precipitate a bloody confrontation:
Recounting the day several weeks later from the Bundy compound, Payne smiled. In the days before the standoff, he and Cliven Bundy had toured the public lands Bundy was using, looking for ways to defend them if necessary. He knew the battlefield, planned the response by Bundy supporters, and made sure snipers were in position. In his telling, his planning could not have gone more perfectly.
“Not only did they take up the very best position to overwatch everything, they also had the high ground, they were fortified with concrete and pavement barriers,” Payne said. “They had great lines of fire and then, when I sent in that other team, for counter sniper positions, [the BLM agents] were completely locked down. They had no choice but to retreat.”
The reason, he boasted, was “overwhelming tactical superiority.”
But a good case can be made that the real reason was strategic and political, not tactical. Contrary to all the right-wing paranoia, the American government has never seriously focused on the militia movement, its antecedents and allies in a sustained manner commensurate with the threats that it poses, although it has handled some specific incidents in an exemplary manner. (Ironically, in contrast, Potok told Salon that local, on-the-ground law enforcement has been keenly aware of the right-wing militia threat ever since the Oklahoma City bombing—though, tellingly, not before it.) The fact that Bundy was decades in arrears in the money he owed for grazing his cattle on public lands was just one more piece of evidence of how the government’s lax attitude toward conservative lawbreakers breeds a sense of impunity and entitlement, which is also strongly supported by mainstream conservative voices, as well as media figures who straddle the ever-shrinking divide between mainstream conservatism and the lawless, violence-prone fringe.
The report not only provides a broad overview of how violence-prone right-wing anti-government conspiracism and broader land use grievances have interacted since the 1970s, it also provides direct evidence of how Bundy himself has espoused such fringe views throughout his decades-long period of refusing to pay the minimal grazing fees he owes.
But as far-reaching as it is, it is still remarkably focused, Clarkson points out. “The issue in the case of the Bundy grazing fees, is a long standing issue of federal lands in the West. But there are many such potential rallying points for the Patriot movement and its prospective allies, informed by a volatile range of beliefs, many of them religious.”
While the report does mention religion in passing, as Clarkson suggests, there’s a great deal more out there that lies beyond its scope. “In 2001, for example, there was an analogous situation when the Indianapolis Baptist Temple, which had refused to withhold taxes from their employee paychecks, faced the seizure of their assets. Militia groups also turned out to defend the church,” Clarkson said. In a post-Hobby Lobby world, who’s to say what would happen with similar situation today? In that case, however, “law enforcement simply waited until almost everyone had gone home and three months later seized the church without violence,” Clarkson noted. “Not every such standoff need end in violence. But ideological shifts in elements of the Christian Right in recent years, also point to a growing potential if not actual preparation for violence.”
With this broader range of threats in mind, let’s refocus on what “The War in the West” does tell us. Most broadly, it takes up the modern history of the militia movement and its kin with William Potter Gale’s creation of the Posse Comitatus:
[H]istoric resistance to federal authority grew far sharper and more ideologically refined with the emergence of the modern radical right in the 1970s and 1980s, in particular the racist and anti-Semitic Posse Comitatus. The Posse, whose name is Latin for “power of the county,” pushed an especially radical localism, originating the doctrine of “county supremacy” even as it married elements of the tax protest movement to Christian Identity—a heretical reading of the Bible that depicts Jews as biologically satanic and people of color as subhuman.
In common law, posse comitatus means “the authority of a law officer to conscript any able-bodied males to assist him.” In American history it refers to the the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law prohibiting the military from policing non-federal property, which was intended specifically to cripple enforcement of the Civil War Amendments, which granted full citizenship and legal protections to former slaves and their descendants. At its core, Gale’s Posse Comitatus seeks to elevate a mere statute to the level of a core constitutional principle—and not just any law, but a law passed specifically for the purpose of effectively nullifying three separate constitutional amendments, and reducing African-Americans back to the de facto level of slaves.
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Bundy’s connection is not an accidental one. Although his father was a scofflaw before him, Bundy had the good fortune of a growing movement around him, whose language and postures he readily adopted as his own. Concerning the family’s history of delinquency, the report notes:
The Bundy family had been at odds with the BLM for almost half of the 20th century, dating back to 1953, when Cliven Bundy’s father, David Bundy, applied for his first permit to graze 95 cattle on the BLM’s Gold Butte allotment, about 600,000 acres of low-lying desert.
According to a detailed timeline prepared by High Country News, David Bundy immediately went into arrears on payments for his permit.
By the time Bundy took over his father’s claim, there was a pre-fab language of BS tailor-made for him to use:
In 1994, the BLM took Bundy to federal court in order to force him to pay what then amounted to about $25,000 in grazing fees. Even then, Bundy disavowed the federal government. He attempted to pay his fees to Clark County, a government body he recognized, but was turned away. On his own accord, as he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, he “fired the BLM.”
“[T]hey’ve never proven to me they own that land, and I’m willing to do whatever’s necessary to defend my land,” Bundy told the Rocky Mountain News.
Over the next four years, “Bundy began filing sovereign citizen-like filings with the court, acknowledging only a ‘sovereign state of Nevada,’ not the federal government,” the report notes. One example suffices to reveal his state of mind:
In one letter to the authorities, dated Nov. 27, 1998, Bundy lectured state and federal officials about how they had no authority to restrict these lands. “Nevada officials are hereby given constructive notice that an unconstitutional jurisdiction without limitations is being imposed upon me and my family’s life, liberty and property. … I have been a rancher and steward of the range in this area for many more years than there has been a BLM…. I hereby give notice to all above named persons and entities that this order is coming from a foreign court,” he wrote.
There’s so much BS in this letter, one hardly knows where to begin. So keeping it ultra-simple is perhaps the best tactic: In fact, Bundy’s father purchased their ranch in 1948, two years after the BLM was formed in 1946, from a merger of the U.S. Grazing Service (established 1934) and the General Land Office (established 1812). Thus it is simply a bald-faced lie when Bundy claims “I have been a rancher and steward of the range in this area for many more years than there has been a BLM.” The land itself has been continuously owned by the U.S. government since its purchase from Mexico in 1848, as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Virtually all of the far right’s conspiracist beliefs are equally transparent lies, if you can trace them back far enough. But that assumes a truth-seeking function on somebody’s part—an assumption that’s clearly unwarranted. In our age of savagely decimated newsrooms, fact-free “he said/she said” journalism appears to be the only kind that most organizations can manage—a style that naturally gives the advantage to those like Bundy who just make things up, carefully tailored to bolster their arguments.
“The vast majority of reporters have little or no background in covering movements,” Potok told Salon.
This is not a criticism of individual reports, but a reflection on “what has happened over 20 years collapse of the news media and the rise of opinion journalism.” With the collapse of newspapers, there are “very few people who are really knowledgeable about the far right,” he said. The Southern Poverty Law Center saw this trend coming 17 years ago, when Potok first joined the organization. “We realized this movement was being covered more and more by people who didn’t know much about it. That’s in part why we’re organized the way we are…. There’s a lack of that knowledge in the world, and we’re trying to fill in the gap…. The bottom line is the radical right is very complicated, with multiple facets and multiple layers,” which make it quite difficult for reporters not familiar with it to make sense of things on the fly.
But the problem isn’t simply lack of information—it’s the presence of disinformation as well, which was on full display with the widespread embrace of Bundy as a folk hero, until he started spewing unvarnished racist hate speech.
“I think that the right wing of the Republican Party and figures on talk radio acted despicably during the standoff. And I think that has been true for large sections of the Republican Party for many years now,” Potok said. “Sean Hannity and others lionized Cliven Bundy as some kind of great hero, standing up for the Constitution. He was no hero, he was a thief, a man who stole over $1 million from you and I, his fellow Americans. And yet these people who supposedly represent law and order were out there cheering him on, until he made his unfortunate remarks about ‘the negro’, and then they ran—out of pure political cowardice.”
But this was hardly an isolated example, Potok noted. “The right wing of the Republican party has done a hell of a lot to help move completely fringe conspiracy theories and propaganda from far right of our society into the political mainstream.” He cited as an example an entry from the report’s Timeline section, primarily focused on land use and the militia movement, but with some telling entries documenting their wider influence, and related conspiracist tendencies. Here’s the example:
January 2012: The Republican National Committee passes a resolution denouncing Agenda 21 as a “destructive and insidious scheme” to impose a “socialist/communist redistribution of wealth” on America, a completely unfounded view of the voluntary UN sustainability plan. The resolution reflects how deeply Patriot conspiracy theories about environmentalism have penetrated the political mainstream.
In the real world, Agenda 21 is a non-binding plan to guide sustainable development—economic development along the lines pre-supposed by Lockean theory, in which the development of some land leaves as much opportunity for future developers and future generations. But in the eyes of right-wing extremists, there’s no difference at all between John Locke and Vladimir Lenin. Also in the real world, George H.W. Bush was an original signatory of Agenda 21 at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, along with 186 other heads of state.
“It is a completely innocent, feel-good document that cannot force anyone to do anything,” Potok remarked. “And yet the RNC denounced it as a ‘destructive and insidious scheme’ and goes on to say it’s an attempt to destroy all property rights in the U.S. These things are completely and utterly false.”
But what’s even more astonishing is how this came about, Potok explained. “The John Birch Society, which infamously attacked President Eisenhower as a communist agent has been running around the country for years telling this lie,” Potok said. “Ten years ago, nobody on the right or the left gave a damn what the John Birch Society said. But now we have the RNC signing on to their conspiracy theory.”
Indeed, when William F. Buckley was struggling to make the conservative movement respectable, he officially condemned the John Birch Society, with a show of support from other conservative leaders as they rallied around the cause of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Of course Bircher-style conspiracism never went away—conspiracist tracts such as “None Dare Call It Treason” and “A Choice, Not An Echo”—both wildly popular during Goldwater’s campaign and beyond—sold far more copies than Buckley ever dreamed of. But at least there was a conservative establishment that officially disowned that sort of thinking. Today, Buckley is dead—and so is that establishment ethos.
Of course, it’s not just the conservative establishment that’s now legitimized the Birchers. The Southern Poverty Law Center is perhaps best known for its annual report “The Year in Hate and Extremism” which reports on the number of active hate groups and other extremists. The report is, as Potok suggested above, a form of journalistic endeavor. But in reporting on SPLC’s 2013 report, some confusion slipped in at USA Today, which treated it almost as a matter of opinion, “balanced” by none other than the John Birch Society!
At least the BLM can see when it’s made a mistake. But USA Today? I wouldn’t bet on it. “Balance” is such an unquestionable virtue, you see. And that’s arguably the biggest reason why we can expect future Bundy ranch incidents, with even bloodier outcomes ahead.
4. A recent piece in Der Spiegel discusses what we are told was an “underground army” composed of Third Reich Wehrmacht and SS veterans. This comes as no surprise and is–in all probability–part of the NATO operation known as “Stay Behind.”
A contingency plan to wage guerrilla warfare against either a communist takeover in a Western European country and/or a “Soviet invasion,” the operation enlisted fascist combatants in order to staff the ranks.
Many of these fascists found other, useful roles, such as the Italian fascists who executed the “Strategy of Tension” during the “Years of Lead.”
The Gehlen “Org” was deeply involved in the execution of Stay Behind.
The underground force discussed by Spiegel worked with the Gehlen Org/BND, and operated with the approval of then Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, after he was informed of its existence.
As indicated in the title of this post, a noteworthy aspect of this disclosure concerns the fact that the BND–in assessing the course of action to pursue with regard to the Schnez underground army–noted that the SS should be consulted in conjunction with the operation.
The fact that the SS was discussed as a noteworthy factor in the Federal Republic’s activities and referred to in the present tense is more than a little significant.
Other important aspects of the analysis include:
- The fact that Schnez was close to Defense Minister Franz Joseph Strauss and served both Chancellor Willy Brandt and (later chancellor) Helmut Schmidt.
- Schnez’s underground army was approved by “ex” Nazi generals Hans Speidel (later a key NATO general) and Adolf Heusinger (who became the equivalent of our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff).
- Schnez’s operation was executed in conjunction with ODESSA kingpin Otto Skorzeny.
- The historian who uncovered and handled the BND document about the Schnez operation was the grandson of key Nazi general Albert Kesselring.
- Schnez’s network operated in conjunction with the officially “banned” League of German Youth and its “Technical Service”–both secretly funded by the United States.
“Nazi Veterans Created Illegal Army” by Klaus Wiegrefe; Der Spiegel; 5/14/2014.
For nearly six decades, the 321-page file lay unnoticed in the archives of the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency — but now its contents have revealed a new chapter of German postwar history that is as spectacular as it is mysterious.
The previously secret documents reveal the existence of a coalition of approximately 2,000 former officers — veterans of the Nazi-era Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS — who decided to put together an army in postwar Germany in 1949. They made their preparations without a mandate from the German government, without the knowledge of the parliament and, the documents show, by circumventing Allied occupation forces. . . .
. . . . The new discovery was brought about by a coincidence. Historian Agilolf Kesselring found the documents — which belonged to the Gehlen Organization, the predecessor to the current foreign intelligence agency — while working for an Independent Historical Commission hired by the BND to investigate its early history. Similar commissions have been hired by a number of German authorities in recent years, including the Finance and Foreign Ministries to create an accurate record of once hushed-up legacies. . . .
. . . . According to the papers, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer didn’t find out about the existence of the paramilitary group until 1951, at which point he evidently did not decide to break it up. . . . .
. . . . Among its most important actors was Albert Schnez. Schnez was born in 1911 and served as a colonel in World War II before ascending the ranks of the Bundeswehr, which was founded in 1955. By the end of the 1950s he was part of the entourage of then Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss (CDU) and later served the German army chief under Chancellor Willy Brandt and Defense Minister Helmut Schmidt (both of the SPD). . . .
. . . . Statements by Schnez quoted in the documents suggest that the project to build a clandestine army was also supported by Hans Speidel — who would become the NATO Supreme Commander of the Allied Army in Central Europe in 1957 — and Adolf Heusinger, the first inspector general of the Bundeswehr.
Kesselring, the historian, has a special connection to military history: His grandfather Albert was a general field marshal and southern supreme commander in the Third Reich, with Schnez as his subordinate “general of transportation” in Italy. Both men tried to prevent Germany’s partial surrender in Italy. . . .
. . . . Contemporaries described Schnez as an energetic organizer, but also self-confident and aloof. He maintained contacts with the League of German Youth and its specialized organization, the Technischer Dienst (Technical Service), which were preparing themselves for a partisan war against the Soviets. The two groups, secretly funded by the United States, included former Nazi officers as members, and were both banned by the West German federal government in 1953 as extreme-right organizations. Schnez, it seems, had no qualms whatsoever associating himself with former Nazis.
Schnez also maintained a self-described intelligence apparatus that evaluated candidates for the “Insurance Company,” as he referred to the project, and determined if they had suspicious qualities. . . .
. . . . US documents viewed by SPIEGEL indicate that Schnez negotiated with former SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny. The SS officer became a Nazi hero during World War II after he carried out a successful mission to free deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who had been arrested by the Italian king. The former SS man had pursued plans similar to those of Schnez. In February 1951, the two agreed to “cooperate immediately in the Swabia region.” It is still unknown today what precisely became of that deal. . . .
. . . . A notation in papers from the Gehlen Organization states that there had “long been relations of a friendly nature” between Schnez and Reinhard Gehlen. The documents also indicate that the secret service first became aware of the clandestine force during the spring of 1951. . . .
. . . . Still, Adenauer decided not to take action against Schnez’s organization — which raises several questions: Was he shying away from a conflict with veterans of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS?
There were misgivings within the Gehlen Organization, particularly surrounding Skorzeny. According to another BND document seen by SPIEGEL, a division head raised the question of whether it was possible for the organization to take an aggressive stance against Skorzeny. The Gehlen Organization man suggested consulting “the SS”, adding, the SS “is a factor and we should sound out opinions in detail there before making a decision.” Apparently networks of old and former Nazis still exercised considerable influence during the 1950s. . . .
. . . . From that point on, Gehlen’s staff had frequent contact with Shnez. Gehlen and Schnez also reached an agreement to share intelligence derived from spying efforts. Schnez boasted of having a “particularly well-organized” intelligence apparatus. . . .
5a. We note the recent alleged suicide of former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris’ husband, a Swede named Anders Ebbeson. (Harris was the Jeb Bush functionary who was instrumental in stealing the Florida vote for Dubya in the 2000 election.)
We are told that he had health problems, the supposed reason he decided to check out. He was also very wealthy and certainly could afford excellent health care.
We note a number of considerations in conjunction with this case:
- Katherine Harris was involved with the intelligence and drug smuggling network of airlines linked to the milieu of Rudi Dekkers, Wally Hilliard, Huffman Aviation et al. This milieu links, in turn, to what we call the Underground Reich.
- Harris has also networked with Underground Reich elements linked to Argentina.
- Ebbeson’s company–InterCon–specialized in making appliances for yachts and RV’s. That would dovetail very well with drug smuggling and other contraband trafficking activities. (See text excerpt below.)
- Wolfgang Bohringer, another of Dekkers’ associates linked to drug trafficking, also was an accomplished yachtsman.
- Ebbeson started a company that was bought out by Electrolux, the Swedish manufacturing giant. Ebbeson continued to work for Electrolux until he started InterCon. (See text excerpt below.)
- Electrolux was the creation of Axel Wenner-Gren, a prominent Swedish industrialist who was a Third Reich ally. (See text excerpt below.)
- Wenner-Gren was deeply involved with masking German industrial assets after World War I and through the World War II period. (See text excerpt below.) Might he have done the same after World War II?
- Sweden is a prominent focal point for the Bormann capital network. (See text excerpt below.)
- Carl Lundstrom (financier of the PRQ server that hosted WikiLeaks) and Ingvar Kamprad (of IKEA fame) are other prominent Swedish industrial luminaries with fascist pedigrees.
- We wonder if the Axel Wenner-Gren estate is part of the Bormann network. Wenner-Gren had significant capital participation in the Swedish munitions manufacturer Bofors.
- Might Ebbeson’s “suicide” actually have been linked to one or more ongoing investigations?
- Might Ebbeson’s exit have been linked to Rudi Dekkers’ recent indictment for drug smuggling activities?
- Might Ebbeson’s exit have been linked to the recent judicial decision to permit a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia to proceed?
- Might Ebbeson’s exit have been linked to a recent investigation of financial giant HSBC for laundering drug money?
- We also readily admit that sharing a bed with Katherine Harris for any length of time might be enough to drive someone to suicide.
“Police: Katherine Harris’ Husband Commits Suicide” [WTSP.com]; USA Today; 11/19/2013.
The husband of former Congresswoman and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris has reportedly killed himself, WTSP.com reports.
Sarasota Police say they were called out to the home of Harris and her husband, 68-year-old Anders Ebbeson on Tuesday morning. Upon arrival, investigators found Ebbeson dead from an apparent suicide. . . .
5b. We note Ebbeson’s work for Electrolux, a firm founded by Swedish industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren. Wenner-Gren was on excellent terms with the Third Reich.
“Katherine Harris’ Most Steadfast Supporter” by Anita Kumar; The Tampa Bay Times; 10/20/2006.
. . . .Ebbeson and his first wife, also Swedish, moved to Sarasota while he worked for his father’s company, Origoverken, a manufacturer of everything from stoves to seatbelts, according to his brother, Bengt Ebbeson.
Anders and Bengt Ebbeson eventually took over the company, which according to newspaper reports at the time had 45 employees. In 1986, the brothers sold it to Electrolux, a massive global company best known in the United States for vacuum cleaners.
Ebbeson continued to work for Electrolux in Sarasota for a while until he opened his own company, Bengt Ebbeson said.
InterCon Marketing touts itself on its Web site as a distributor of appliances including microwaves, refrigerators, dishwashers, TVs and lighting for yachts, RVs, hotels, government housing and assisted living facilities.
Ebbeson travels the world, flying to Sweden for work at least half a dozen times a year, Bengt Ebbeson said. . . .
6. Wenner-Gren was not only an intimate of Nazi luminaries such as Hermann Goering but was suspected of intrigue on behalf of the Nazi U‑Boat campaign in the Atlantic.
“Fortune’s End: The Mysterious Murder of Sir Harry Oakes” by Rachael Bell; trutv.com.
Wenner-Gren was also known to have developed a close friendship with one of Nazi Germany’s key figures, Hermann Goering. In fact, it was believed that his friendship with Goering facilitated Sweden’s good standing with Germany, which allowed the country to maintain its neutrality during the war. Wenner-Gren would often brag about having friendships with other unsavory political figures, such as Mussolini and Mexico’s pro-Fascist General Maximino Camacho.
It was not long before Wenner-Gren showed up on the “radar screens” of the U.S. and British governments. Wilson reports that the two countries monitored Wenner-Gren’s movements closely, believing him to be a spy. Wenner-Gren had established a bank in Mexico, which allied intelligence believed was being used for Nazi petroleum and arms deals. Intelligence sources also believed Wenner-Gren was accumulating large sums of money in order to control the Mexican economy. . . .
7. Axel Wennner-Gren served as something of a Nazi cat’s paw as a major investor in Bofors, the Swedish armaments firm that assisted the Third Reich.
“3‑Way Nassau” by Peter Swanson; Yachting Magazine; 11/6/2010.
Allied intelligence agencies mistrusted Axel Wenner-Gren immensely. The Swede made his fortune as founder of the Electrolux vacuum cleaner company, but he was also a major owner of Bofors, the Swedish armaments manufacturer that had covertly assisted in Germany’s rearmament under the Nazi regime.
Wenner-Gren was heard to boast about his friendly connections to Hitler’s inner circle, and his crew was formerly of the Swedish Navy, considered a pro-German organization within neutral Sweden. Southern Cross herself had immense fuel capacity and bristled with antennas connected to its state-of-the- art radio room. Wenner-Gren had purchased Southern Cross from American tycoon Howard Hughes for $1 million. “The Aviator” was courting the women of Hollywood in the 1930s and had entertained them aboard the palatial vessel.
Events of September 1939 went a long way to fuel Allied suspicions about the Swede. This was before Wenner-Gren’s arrival in the Bahamas and happened while Southern Cross was on a pleasure cruise in the North Atlantic. In the first sinking of the submarine war, German sub U‑30 torpedoed the liner Athenia with 1,450 Canadian and American passengers on board. Along came Southern Cross, which happened to be nearby. She picked up 200 survivors and delivered them to Ireland.
Move forward to 1942. Allied intelligence suspected that even if Wenner-Gren hadn’t come to the Bahamas on a secret mission to refuel German submarines, Southern Cross may have very well been serving as a scout ship, helping U‑boats find targets such as Athenia.
Despite official paranoia, Wenner-Gren was able to take up residence in the Bahamas. He became friendly with the Duke of Windsor, who had come to Nassau to serve as wartime governor of the Bahamas, then a British possession. The duke used to be Edward VIII, King of England. In a spectacular 1936 news event, he had abdicated the throne of England to marry the “woman I love,” an American divorcée named Wallis Simpson. The abdication twosome were frequent guests aboard Southern Cross, and Wenner-Gren once loaned the use of his yacht to run Simpson over to Florida to have a tooth pulled.
Before the war, the duke and his wife had met Hitler and expressed their admiration for the Nazi regime. It is widely suspected that Windsor later engaged in treasonous wartime communications with the Nazis, any evidence of which will remain under the seal of British government secrecy until 2046. He was believed to be Hitler’s first choice to be puppet ruler of Britain after the planned German invasion. Churchill, in effect, had exiled the duke to Nassau to get this troublesome royal out of the way. . . .
8. As noted above, Wenner-Gren helped mask German assets during World War I and during the Second World War. He was one of a wealthy international elite circle that were supportive of fascism during World War II. The Wallenbergs were part of that circle. Was Wenner-Gren part of the post-war Bormann network?
All Honorable Men by James Stewart Martin; Little Brown [HC]; pp. 252–253.
. . . .One of the mysteries of World War II has been the unexplained international relations of the Swedish industrial organization, A.B. Svenska Kullager- Fabriken, known as SKF, Sweden’s largest industrial concern and the world’s largest manufacturer of ball and roller bearings. The principal Swedish interest in SKF is held by the Wallenbergs through their Enskilda Bank and its investment subsidiary, A.B. Investor. The actual extent of German or other foreign control, either directly or through the Wallenbergs, has not been disclosed.
For many years the active management of SKF was in the hands of Sven Wingquist, the founder of the firm. In 1941, he gave up the day-to-day management but remained as chairman of the board. From time to time, beginning in 1933 and 1934, Sven Wingquist came into the world spotlight as one of a colorful clique of international adventurers, who gained special notoriety by their buzzing around Edward VIII at the time of his abdication in 1936. They included Axel Wenner-Gren, the yachtsman; Charles Bedaux, inventor of a labor speed-up system; and Jacques Lernaigre-Dubrenil, French banker and vegetable-oil man of West Africa.
Axel Wenner-Gren will he remembered as a yachtsman with a remarkable record of coincidences. He cruised the seas throughout much of the war in his yacht, the Southern Cross, and turned up to rescue survivors of German submarine attacks, beginning with the German sinking of the British ship Athenia in 1939 and continuing through the Caribbean submarine campaign of 1942. At the time, some people speculated about how one yacht could happen along so often when a submarine spotted a vessel; but the coincidences were never explained. . . .
. . . . Sven Wingquist and Axel Wenner-Gren had taken an active part after World War I in the German plans to mask the ownership of subsidiaries abroad. To get around the Versailles Treaty, firms like Carl Zeiss, manufacturers of military optical equipment, set up branches such as the “Nedinsco” firm at Venlo in the Netherlands and carried on as before. The Krupp firm did the same in Spain, Sweden, and other countries.
In 1934 the Swedish government discovered that Krupp controlled a block of shares in the Bofors steel and munitions works through a Swedish dummy holding company called “Boforsinteressenten.” Sven Wingquist, who was chairman of the board of the Bofors steel and munitions works, was one of the two Swedish citizens who had been voting this stock for Krupp at stockholders’ meetings.
The Krupp concern controlled approximately one third of Swedish Bofors in this manner and had maintained enough additional voting strength through Axel Wenner-Gren to control the affairs of Bofors. . . . .
9. In the context of Swedish industrialists’ participation in the Bormann capital network, we take note of the important role in that organization played by the Wallenberg industrial and financial empire.
. . . . An interesting sidelight to this struggle between the Allies and Germany for influence on Sweden is the peculiar role played by Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg, members of Sweden’s most important banking family. Marcus headed a government commission which negotiated with Britain and the United States throughout the war. At the same time, his brother Jacob was the chief negotiator for the Swedish government with Nazi Germany. Thus were both sides covered for Swedish business, including the family’s very own substantial economic interests. Following World War II, this family empire was to achieve its most spectacular prosperity, as German investments under the Bormann program matured in their Swedish safe-havens.
In this way, impressive wealth accrued to the Wallenbergs, as well as to the other Swedish and German investment groups controlling large holdings in the many Swedish companies under German dominance in 1944. . . . [This would certainly have included the Wenner-Gren assets. Note that James Stewart Martin discusses the Wallenberg connection at great length in All Honorable Men.–D.E.]
10. We learn that a German general will be the new chief of staff for U.S. Army Europe. We wonder why?
This certainly fits in the context of the Underground Reich that we have been developing and presenting for years. Precisely why an American officer would not have fit the bill remains a matter of speculation.
This occurs against the background of U.S. and European intervention in Ukraine, an “op” that has brought back to power the successor elements to the World War II Nazi collaborationist forces of the OUN/B.
As we noted in our series on Ukraine, the U.S. is basically engaging on behalf of the EU and Germany–the EU and EMU being the enactment of a German political and economic plan for European and, eventually, world domination. (For more on this, see–among other programs–FTR #788.)
The United States has no dog in that fight. We are basically playing enforcer for Germany and the EU, this at the same time that Germany expelled the CIA Station Chief in Berlin!
“German Officer to Serve as U.S. Army Europe’s Chief of Staff” by Jim Tice; Army Times; 7/31/2014.
Gen. Markus Laubenthal is the first German officer to be assigned to U.S. Army Europe. He is the command’s new chief of staff. (U.S. Army Europe)
A German Army brigadier general who recently served with NATO forces in Afghanistan is assuming duties as the chief of staff of U. S. Army Europe, the first time a non-American officer has held that position.
Brig. Gen. Markus Laubenthal, most recently the commander of Germany’s 12th Panzer Brigade in Amberg, and chief of staff of Regional Command North, International Security Assistance Force Afghanistan, will be stationed at USAREUR headquarters, Wiesbaden, Germany. He could report to duty as early as Monday.
Laubenthal also has served as military assistant to the deputy commander of operations and assistant chief of staff of operations for NATO forces in Kosovo.
As the major staff assistant to USAREUR commander Lt. Gen. Donald Campbell, Laubenthal will synchronize the command’s staff activities much as American predecessors have in the past.
“This is a bold and major step forward in USAREUR’s commitment to operating in a multinational environment with our German allies,” said Campbell.
“U. S. and German senior military leaders have been serving together in NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan for years. Sustaining the shared capability from this experience will benefit both the U. S. and German armies,” said Campbell who has headed the Army’s largest and oldest overseas command since 2012.
One of the trick things about solutions is that they often come with their own sets of problems. That’s something to keep in mind when masked, armed far right anti-government vigilante groups with a recent history of trying to spark a civil war are now roaming the borders searching for child refugees:
Yep, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott refuses to denounce the presence of armed gangs roaming the boarder in ski masks and view criticism of the groups as just a partisan stunt (because partisans oppose armed masked vigilantes roaming remote areas of the nation). And, of course, he’s not the only state official to boldly support far right armed masked militias trying provoke an armed conflict between the states and the federal government:
Well, at least Abbott and Heller are boldly consistent. Sort of.
Relating to the surge in right-wing militias and the growing embrace of such groups by mainstream politicians, Digby has a piece in Salon that highlights one of the more important potential consequences relating to the GOP’s inevitable shift towards the libertarian Paul-ite wing of the party: The “I don’t want government to do anything”-ideology of libertarianism can be interpreted in a way that’s awfully close to the “I don’t want the government to do anything, except that which is necessary to preserve our traditional values. Specifically, 18th century values. It’s God ordained.”-ideology of the theocratic “constitutional conservatives”. And since the Tea Party has basically forced the entire GOP to embrace a confused blend of libertarianism and far right “traditional values”, the “God ordained small government” theocratic worldview of the “constitutional conservative” movement is getting increasingly mainstreamed:
The fever swamps are beckoning...
Here’s quite the ‘whodunnit’ with an additional ‘whogotitdunntothem’ twist:
Note that a lack of clarity over Saudi involvement in the financing of ISIS should probably be expected by now.
A lot of weapons. Not a single refugee:
Otto Skorzeny was one of the (at least) 14 famous Nazi and SS members that died peacefuly in Spain, most of them by the South and East Coast as well the ‘Baleares’ islands; they not only had the support of Franco’s regime, they also had mentions and recognition of the AP party which later on became the actual PP party, the goverment right now. The PP refused four times to make a ‘symbolic’ vote on the congress condemning the Franco’s regime. Various of their members have been seen waving or showing the regime’s flags, there’s a record too of a business man that were told by the treasurer of the PP (actualy in jail, for illegal funding of the party among to have been found having up to 40.000.000€ “hidden” in Switzerland) that he could bring his own franquist flag to a meeting/dinner comemorating the death of the dictator, 20th of November; there’s a mayor in Galicia, on the Spain’s NW, that uses the Franco regime’s flag and his photo on his office instead use the current flag (called: constitutional) and the king’s photo, which is mandatory by law; but nothing happens, the top PP leaders call this acts and reffer to this people as ‘anecdotal’, ‘nostalgics’ or ‘kinds things’.