Eugene McCarthy Revisited

We have dis­cussed the dubi­ous con­nec­tions of the late Sen­a­tor Eugene McCarthy of Min­neso­ta, the “Peace Can­di­date” who upend­ed the 1968 Pres­i­den­tial race. We note his remark­able, reveal­ing 1980 endorse­ment of “Peace Can­di­date” Ronald Rea­gan: ” . . . . Mr. McCarthy said he had come to the con­clu­sion that Mr. Rea­gan’s posi­tions on nuclear dis­ar­ma­ment and tax­es were bet­ter than Pres­i­dent Carter’s . . . .” Ukrain­ian tele­vi­sion anchor quotes Adolf Eich­mann ver­ba­tim in this video from UKRAINE 24. WFMU-FM is pod­cast­ing For The Record–You can sub­scribe to the pod­cast HERE. Mr. Emory emphat­i­cal­ly rec­om­mends that listeners/readers get the 32GB flash dri­ve con­tain­ing all of Mr. Emory’s 43 years on the air, plus a library of old anti-fas­cist books on easy-to-down­load PDF files.

Patreon Update: Latest Talks Plus First Zoom Q & A Scheduled for June 5

The Patre­on site con­tin­ues to devel­op and take form: The first Zoom Q & A Ses­sion is sched­uled for 6/5 in the late afternoon/early evening. In addi­tion, the lat­est talks devel­op both recent polit­i­cal events and his­tor­i­cal trends. Top­ics of dis­cus­sion include: the mass shoot­ings in Uvalde Texas and Buf­fa­lo, NY; Don­ald Trump’s suc­cess­ful use of polit­i­cal mythol­o­gy to devel­op his cam­paign and Pres­i­den­cy; the unsa­vory polit­i­cal con­nec­tions of Bernie Sanders and Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez; the late Sen­a­tor Eugene McCarthy’s so-called “Peace Can­di­da­cy” in 1968; Mr. Emory’s own expe­ri­ence com­ing of age dur­ing the Viet­nam War. Ukrain­ian tele­vi­sion anchor quotes Adolf Eich­mann ver­ba­tim in this video from UKRAINE 24. This video of Ukraine’s top mil­i­tary med­ical offi­cer dis­cussing an order to cas­trate Russ­ian males is an eye-open­er. WFMU-FM is pod­cast­ing For The Record–You can sub­scribe to the pod­cast HERE. Mr. Emory emphat­i­cal­ly rec­om­mends that listeners/readers get the 32GB flash dri­ve con­tain­ing all of Mr. Emory’s 43 years on the air, plus a library of old anti-fas­cist books on easy-to-down­load PDF files.

Memorial Day Weekend Special on KFJC-FM

On Sun­day, 5/29, from 7 until 10pm and Mon­day, 5/30, from 6 until 7pm, KFJC-FM observes Memo­r­i­al Day Week­end by fea­tur­ing Dave Emory’s research on the fun­da­men­tal inter­re­la­tion­ship of fas­cism, mon­ey, war and mur­der. Ukrain­ian tele­vi­sion anchor quotes Adolf Eich­mann ver­ba­tim in this video from UKRAINE 24. WFMU-FM is pod­cast­ing For The Record–You can sub­scribe to the pod­cast HERE. Mr. Emory emphat­i­cal­ly rec­om­mends that listeners/readers get the 32GB flash dri­ve con­tain­ing all of Mr. Emory’s 43 years on the air, plus a library of old anti-fas­cist books on easy-to-down­load PDF files.

Latest Patreon Talk: The OUN/B, the ABN and the Assassination of JFK

In the lat­est Patre­on talk, Mr. Emory delves into man­i­fes­ta­tions of polit­i­cal lying, with the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy as foundation/centerpiece of dis­cus­sion. The role of the Ukrain­ian fas­cist OUN/B and over­lap­ping Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations in the JFK assas­si­na­tion com­prise the bulk of the pre­sen­ta­tion. Ukrain­ian tele­vi­sion anchor quotes Adolf Eich­mann ver­ba­tim in this video from UKRAINE 24. WFMU-FM is pod­cast­ing For The Record–You can sub­scribe to the pod­cast HERE. Mr. Emory emphat­i­cal­ly rec­om­mends that listeners/readers get the 32GB flash dri­ve con­tain­ing all of Mr. Emory’s 43 years on the air, plus a library of old anti-fas­cist books on easy-to-down­load PDF files.

Project Paperclip and Agent Orange

The rav­ages of the Agent Orange defo­liant used in South­east Asia are well known. What has not received as much pub­lic­i­ty is the doc­u­ment­ed fact that the poi­son was devel­oped by Friedrich “Fritz” Hoff­man, one of the Third Reich alum­ni brought to the U.S. under Project [or “Oper­a­tion”] Paper­clip. “. . . . Under the umbrel­la of the CIA’s Secu­ri­ty Research Ser­vices, [CIA orga­ni­za­tion] Mor­wede was among the front orga­ni­za­tions pro­tect­ing Nazi chemists trans­port­ed to the US, includ­ing Dr. Friedrich “Fritz” Hoff­man, a major ben­e­fi­cia­ry of the largesse of the Paper­clip pipeline. In the late ‘50s, Hoffmann’s work for the CIA and Fort Det­rick includ­ed devel­op­ment of lethal chem­i­cal agents to be used as weapons in Viet­nam, proof that the dis­hon­or­able was just over the hori­zon when John Kennedy took office. One of these weapons, the hor­rif­ic and now-infa­mous Agent Orange, was autho­rized for use in Viet­nam in Novem­ber 1961 . . . .” WFMU-FM is pod­cast­ing For The Record–You can sub­scribe to the pod­cast HERE. Mr. Emory emphat­i­cal­ly rec­om­mends that listeners/readers get the 32GB flash dri­ve con­tain­ing all of Mr. Emory’s 43 years on the air, plus a library of old anti-fas­cist books on easy-to-down­load PDF files.

FTR#1221 War Games, Part 3 (Rittenhouse Nation)

In these pro­grams, we con­tin­ue our dis­cus­sion of Nick Turse’s 2008 tome The Com­plex: How the Mil­i­tary Invades Our Every­day Lives.

Writ­ing in his nov­el Trop­ic of Can­cer, Hen­ry Miller wrote: ” . . . . Amer­i­ca is the very incar­na­tion of Doom. And she will lead the rest of the world into the Bot­tom­less Pit. . . .”  (The quote was includ­ed in his For­give My Grief  books by pio­neer­ing JFK assas­si­na­tion researcher Penn Jones.

Epit­o­miz­ing Miller’s obser­va­tion is what Mr. Emory terms the res­o­nant syn­the­sis of video games and mil­i­tary train­ing and train­ing tech­nol­o­gy:

“. . . . Cer­tain­ly, the day is not far off when most poten­tial U.S. troops will have grown up play­ing com­mer­cial video games that were cre­at­ed by the mil­i­tary as train­ing sim­u­la­tors; will be recruit­ed, at least in part, through video games; will be test­ed, post-enlist­ment, on advanced video game sys­tems; will be trained using sim­u­la­tors, which will lat­er be turned into video games, or on recon­fig­ured ver­sions of the very same games used to recruit them or that they played kids; will be taught to pilot vehi­cles using devices resem­bling com­mer­cial video game con­trollers; and then, after a long day of real-life war-gam­ing head back to their quar­ters to kick back and play the lat­est PlaySta­tion or Xbox games cre­at­ed with or spon­sored by their own, or anoth­er, branch of the armed forces.

More and more toys are now poised to become clan­des­tine com­bat teach­ing tools, and more and more sim­u­la­tors are des­tined to be tomorrow’s toys. And what of America’s chil­dren and young adults in all this? How will they be affect­ed by the daz­zling set of mil­i­tary train­ing devices now land­ing in their liv­ing rooms and on their PCs, pro­duced by video game giants under the  watch­ful eyes of the Pen­ta­gon? After all, what these games offer is less a mat­ter of sim­ple mil­i­tary indoc­tri­na­tion and more like a near immer­sion in a vir­tu­al world of war, where armed con­flict is not the last, but the first—and indeed the only—resort. . . .”

A con­crete exam­ple of that “res­o­nant syn­the­sis” is the bat­tle of 73 East­ing:

“. . . . Just days into the ground com­bat por­tion of the Gulf War, the Bat­tle of 73 East­ing pit­ted Amer­i­can armored vehi­cles against a much larg­er Iraqi tank force. The U.S. troops, who had trained using the SIMNET sys­tem, rout­ed the Iraqis. With­in days, the mil­i­tary began turn­ing the actu­al bat­tle into a dig­i­tal sim­u­la­tion for use with SIMNET. Inten­sive debrief­ing ses­sions with 150 vet­er­ans of the bat­tle were under­tak­en. Then DARPA per­son­nel went out onto the bat­tle­field with the vet­er­ans, sur­vey­ing tank tracks and burned-out Iraqi vehi­cles, as the vet­er­ans walked them through each indi­vid­ual seg­ment of the clash. Addi­tion­al­ly, radio com­mu­ni­ca­tions, satel­lite pho­tos, and ‘black box­es’ from U.S. tanks were used to gath­er even more details. Nine months after the actu­al com­bat took place, a dig­i­tal recre­ation of the Bat­tle of 73 East­ing was pre­miered for high-rank­ing mil­i­tary per­son­nel. Here was the cul­mi­na­tion of Thorpe’s efforts to cre­ate a net­worked sys­tem that would allow troops to train for future wars using the new tech­nol­o­gy com­bined with accu­rate his­tor­i­cal data. . . .”

Plac­ing Hen­ry Miller’s quote into an iron­i­cal­ly-rel­e­vant con­text, a pop­u­lar video game “Doom” quick­ly was adapt­ed to Mar­tine Corps train­ing pur­pos­es:

“. . . . In late 1993, with the green glow of Gulf War vic­to­ry already fad­ing, id Soft­ware intro­duced the video game Doom. Gamers soon began mod­i­fy­ing share­ware copies of this ultra­vi­o­lent, ultra­pop­u­lar first per­son shoot­er, prompt­ing id to release edit­ing soft­ware the next year. The abil­i­ty to cus­tomize Doom caught the atten­tion of mem­bers of the Marine Corps Mod­el­ing and Sim­u­la­tion Man­age­ment Office who had been tasked by the corps’ Com­man­dant Charles Kru­lak with uti­liz­ing “‘com­put­er (PC)-based war games”‘to help the marines ‘devel­op deci­sion mak­ing skills, par­tic­u­lar­ly when live train­ing time and oppor­tu­ni­ties are lim­it­ed.’

“Act­ing on Krulak’s direc­tive, the marines’ mod­el­ing crew nixed Doom’s fan­ta­sy weapons and labyrinthine locale and, in three months’ time, devel­oped Marine Doom, a game that includ­ed only actu­al Marine Corps weapon­ry and real­is­tic envi­ron­ments. Kru­lak liked what he saw and, in 1997, approved the game. . . .”

Next, Turse dis­cuss­es Pen­ta­gon plans to oper­ate in urban slums in the Third World. Mr. Emory notes that many com­bat vet­er­ans of this coun­try’s long counter-insur­gency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are join­ing the increas­ing­ly mil­i­ta­rized police forces in this coun­try.

Pen­ta­gon strat­e­gy as dis­cussed here by Turse may, even­tu­al­ly be real­ized, to an extent, in the U.S., par­tic­u­lar­ly in the event of an eco­nom­ic col­lapse.

More about Pen­ta­gon plans for urban war­fare in slums, osten­si­bly in the devel­op­ing world:

” . . . . As both the high-tech pro­grams and the pro­lif­er­at­ing train­ing facil­i­ties sug­gest, the for­eign slum city is slat­ed to become the bloody bat­tle­space of the future. . . . For exam­ple, the U.S. Navy/Marine Corps launched a pro­gram seek­ing to devel­op algo­rithms to pre­dict the crim­i­nal­i­ty of a giv­en build­ing or neigh­bor­hood. The project titled Find­ing Repet­i­tive Crime Sup­port­ing Struc­tures, defines cities as noth­ing more than a col­lec­tion of ‘urban clut­ter [that] affords con­sid­er­able con­ceal­ment for the actors that we must cap­ture.’ The ‘hos­tile behav­ior bad actors,’ as the pro­gram terms them, are defined not just as ‘ter­ror­ists,’ today’s favorite catch-all bogey­men, but as a panoply of night­mare arche­types: ‘insur­gents, ser­i­al killers, drug deal­ers, etc.’. . .”

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Dis­cus­sion of Colonel Dave Gross­man­’s book On Killing against the back­ground of the res­o­nant syn­the­sis of video games and mil­i­tary train­ing; analy­sis of the use of gam­ing apps by Nazi ele­ments to cel­e­brate school shoot­ings and encour­age them; dis­cus­sion of school shoot­er Niko­las Cruz of Park­land high and his Nazi, white suprema­cist and Trumpian influ­ence; dis­cus­sion of alt-right use of web­sites cater­ing to peo­ple suf­fer­ing from depres­sion for recruit­ing pur­pos­es.

FTR#1219 and FTR#1220 War Games, Part 1 and War Games, Part 2

In these pro­grams, we con­tin­ue our dis­cus­sion of Nick Turse’s 2008 tome The Com­plex: How the Mil­i­tary Invades Our Every­day Lives.

In this pro­gram, we exam­ine how the mil­i­tary exerts dom­i­nant influ­ence over our enter­tain­ment activ­i­ties and how that, in turn, both affects and bol­sters the Pen­ta­gon.

We begin by “going to the movies.”

The syn­the­sis of Hol­ly­wood and “The Com­plex” is sum­ma­rized by Nick Turse in the pas­sage below. It should be not­ed that the meld­ing of Hol­ly­wood and the mil­i­tary is a foun­da­tion of the deriv­a­tive syn­the­sis of the mil­i­tary and the video-gam­ing industry–the focus of the bulk of these pro­grams.

“. . . . As David Robb, the author of Oper­a­tion Hol­ly­wood: How the Pen­ta­gon Shapes and Cen­sors the Movies, observed: ‘Hol­ly­wood and the Pen­ta­gon have a col­lab­o­ra­tion that works well for both sides. Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­ers get what they want—access to bil­lions of dol­lars’ worth of mil­i­tary hard­ware and equipment—tanks, jet fight­ers, nuclear sub­marines and air­craft carriers—and the mil­i­tary gets what it wants—films that por­tray the mil­i­tary in a pos­i­tive light; films that help the ser­vices in their recruit­ing efforts.’. . .”

Indeed, the very gen­e­sis of video games in deriv­a­tive of the defense indus­try: ” . . . . In 1951, Ralph Baer, an engi­neer work­ing for defense con­trac­tor Loral Elec­tron­ics (today part of Lock­heed Mar­tin) on ‘com­put­er com­po­nents for Navy RADAR sys­tems,’ dreamed up the idea of home video games, which he termed ‘inter­ac­tive TV-based enter­tain­ment.’. . . .”

The Hollywood/Pentagon/gaming indus­try syn­the­sis is epit­o­mized by the Insti­tute of Cre­ative Tech­nolo­gies:

” . . . . The answer lies in Mari­na Del Rey, Cal­i­for­nia, at the Insti­tute for Cre­ative Tech­nolo­gies (ICT), a cen­ter with­in the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia (USC) sys­tem. There, in 1999, the military’s grow­ing obses­sion with video games moved to a new lev­el when Sec­re­tary of the Army Louis Caldera signed a five-year, $45-mil­lion con­tract with USC to cre­ate ICT, says the center’s Web site, ‘to build a part­ner­ship among the enter­tain­ment indus­try, army and acad­e­mia with the goal of cre­at­ing syn­thet­ic expe­ri­ences so com­pelling that par­tic­i­pants react as if they are real.’. . .”

The video game/Pentagon rela­tion­ship has evolved into a fusion of the two: “. . . . The rest fol­lowed, lead­ing to the cur­rent con­tin­u­ous mil­i­tary gaming/simulation loop where com­mer­cial video games are adopt­ed as mil­i­tary train­ing aids and mil­i­tary sim­u­la­tors are reengi­neered into civil­ian gam­ing mon­ey mak­ers in all sorts of strange and con­fus­ing ways. . . .”

Author Turse looked ahead (in 2008) and fore­saw a future that, to a dis­turb­ing extent, has become real­i­ty: ” . . . . Cer­tain­ly, the day is not far off when most poten­tial U.S. troops will have grown up play­ing com­mer­cial video games that were cre­at­ed by the mil­i­tary as train­ing sim­u­la­tors; will be recruit­ed, at least in part, through video games; will be test­ed, post-enlist­ment, on advanced video game sys­tems; will be trained using sim­u­la­tors, which will lat­er be turned into video games, or on recon­fig­ured ver­sions of the very same games used to recruit them or that they played kids; will be taught to pilot vehi­cles using devices resem­bling com­mer­cial video game con­trollers; and then, after a long day of real-life war-gam­ing head back to their quar­ters to kick back and play the lat­est PlaySta­tion or Xbox games cre­at­ed with or spon­sored by their own, or anoth­er, branch of the armed forces. . . .”

FTR#1211 The Narco-Fascism of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, Part 18

Intro­duc­ing the expan­sion of Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence with Chi­ang and his Kuom­intang fas­cists into U.S. Cold War pol­i­cy in Asia, we present Ster­ling Seagrave’s rumi­na­tion about Stan­ley Horn­beck, a State Depart­ment flack who became: “. . . . the doyen of State’s Far East­ern Divi­sion. . . .”

Horn­beck “ . . . . had only the most abbre­vi­at­ed and stilt­ed knowl­edge of Chi­na, and had been out of touch per­son­al­ly for many years. . . . He with­held cables from the Sec­re­tary of State that were crit­i­cal of Chi­ang, and once stat­ed that ‘the Unit­ed States Far East­ern pol­i­cy is like a train run­ning on a rail­road track.  It has been clear­ly laid out and where it is going is plain to all.’ It was in fact bound for Saigon in 1975, with whis­tle stops along the way at Peking, Que­moy, Mat­su, and the Yalu Riv­er. . . .”

Next, we vis­it one of the stops on Horn­beck­’s straight rail­way line:

A con­sum­mate­ly impor­tant study of Viet­nam War crimes was authored by Nick Turse. A review by the U.S. Naval Insti­tute can be tak­en as an advi­so­ry in this regard.

Mr. Turse per­forms the remark­able feat of unspar­ing­ly sear­ing pre­sen­ta­tion of the war crimes that were stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dure for much of the Amer­i­can (and allied) forces in Viet­nam by trac­ing the foun­da­tion of those crimes from the tech­no­crat­ic approach to mil­i­tary strat­e­gy pur­sued by the Pen­ta­gon and Robert McNa­ma­ra, through the re-social­iza­tion and re-pro­gram­ming of young, often teen-aged, recruits to turn them into reflex­ive killers, chron­i­cling the mas­sive fire­pow­er avail­able to U.S. forces, and doc­u­ment­ing the recal­ci­trant atti­tude of the offi­cer corps and Gen­er­al Staff, who were unwill­ing to coun­te­nance the pro­fes­sion­al and ide­o­log­i­cal dam­age that would result from pre­sen­ta­tion and adju­di­ca­tion of the truth.

In addi­tion, Mr. Turse–while avoid­ing self-right­eous posturing–highlights the doc­tri­naire racism of many U.S. com­bat­ants, who com­mit­ted war crimes behind the “MGR”–the “Mere Gook Rule.”

“ ‘An impor­tant addi­tion to Viet­nam war stud­ies . . . . Turse’s study is not anti-vet­er­an, anti-mil­i­tary, or anti-Amer­i­can. It does not allege that the major­i­ty of U.S. mil­i­tary per­son­nel in South Viet­nam com­mit­ted crimes. . . .” Pro­ceed­ings (U.S. Naval Insti­tute).

Nick Turse traces the strate­gic use of over­whelm­ing fire­pow­er and de fac­to coun­te­nanc­ing of civil­ian casu­al­ties owes much to the tac­ti­cal approach of Japan­ese forces dur­ing World War II in Chi­na: “ . . . . These efforts were com­mon­ly known as ‘paci­fi­ca­tion,’ but their true aim was to depop­u­late the con­test­ed coun­try­side. ‘The peo­ple are like water and the army is like fish.’ Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist rev­o­lu­tion, had famous­ly writ­ten. Amer­i­can plan­ners grasped his dic­tum, and also stud­ied the ‘kill-all, burn-all, loot-all’ scorched earth cam­paigns that the Japan­ese army launched in rur­al Chi­na dur­ing the 1930s and ear­ly 1940s for lessons on how to drain the ‘sea.’ Not sur­pris­ing­ly the idea of forc­ing peas­ants out of their vil­lages was embraced by civil­ian paci­fi­ca­tion offi­cials and mil­i­tary offi­cers alike. . . .”

The accounts of many G.I.’s about war crimes appear to be large­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the con­duct of U.S. forces: “ . . . . While we have only frag­men­tary evi­dence about the full extent of civil­ian suf­fer­ing in South Viet­nam, enough sim­i­lar accounts exist so that rough­ly the same sto­ry could have been told in a chap­ter about Binh Dinh Province in the mid-1960’s, or Quang Tri Province in the ear­ly 1970s, among oth­ers. The inci­dents in this chap­ter were unbear­ably com­mon­place through­out the con­flict and are unusu­al only in that they were report­ed in some form or recount­ed by wit­ness­es instead of van­ish­ing entire­ly from the his­tor­i­cal record.” 

Turse notes that racism–embodied in the “MGR” (Mere Gook Rule)—contributed fun­da­men­tal­ly to the slaugh­ter per­pe­trat­ed by the U.S. in Viet­nam. “ . . . . In 1971, Major Gor­don Liv­ingston, a West Point grad­u­ate who served as reg­i­men­tal sur­geon with the 11th Armored Cav­al­ry Reg­i­ment, tes­ti­fied before mem­bers of Con­gress about the ease with which Amer­i­cans killed Viet­namese. ‘Above 90 per­cent of the Amer­i­cans with whom I had con­tact in Viet­nam,’ said Dr. Liv­ingston, treat­ed the Viet­namese as sub­hu­man snd with ‘near­ly uni­ver­sal con­tempt.’ . . . .”

Turse’s very impor­tant and pro­found­ly dis­turb­ing book encap­su­lates the Amer­i­can pol­i­cy in Viet­nam. Speak­ing of the Phoenix assas­si­na­tion pro­gram: “ . . . . Phoenix was a pro­gram run amok, but it was also the log­i­cal result of a mil­i­tary cam­paign dri­ven by the body count and run under the pre­cept of the mere-gook rule. For the Viet­namese the Amer­i­can war was an end­less gaunt­let of poten­tial calami­ties . . . . the range of dis­as­ters was near­ly end­less.

While no exact fig­ures are avail­able, there can be lit­tle ques­tion that such events occurred in shock­ing num­bers. They were the very essence of the war: crimes that went on all the time, all over South Viet­nam, for years and years. When you con­sid­er this along with the tal­lies of dead, wound­ed, and dis­placed, the scale of the suf­fer­ing becomes almost unimaginable—almost as unimag­in­able as the fact that some­how, in the Unit­ed States all that suf­fer­ing was more or less ignored as it hap­pened and then writ­ten out of his­to­ry even more thor­ough­ly in the decades since. . . .”

Stan­ley Horn­beck referred to U.S. Far East­ern pol­i­cy as a rail­road track, pro­ceed­ing on a straight line. Ster­ling Sea­grave not­ed that ” . . . . It was in fact bound for Saigon in 1975, with whis­tle stops along the way at Peking, Que­moy, Mat­su, and the Yalu Riv­er. . . .”

The ref­er­ence to the Yalu Riv­er is in con­sid­er­a­tion of a key inci­dent in the Kore­an War. Gen­er­al Dou­glas MacArthur was warned by mil­i­tary intel­li­gence pro­fes­sion­als not to approach the Yalu Riv­er dur­ing his advance through North Korea, lest the Chi­nese enter the con­flict.

MacArthur ignored the warn­ing of the mil­i­tary intel­li­gence pro­fes­sion­als with the ulti­mate result that they fore­cast: Chi­nese forces entered the con­flict and rout­ed the forces under MacArthur’s com­mand.

Dur­ing the pre­cip­i­tous retreat of the Amer­i­can and U.N. forces, it appears that the U.S. used bio­log­i­cal war­fare against the Chi­nese and North Korea.

In numer­ous pro­grams and lec­tures, we have dis­cussed the impor­tant, dev­as­tat­ing­ly suc­ces­sive­ly mind con­trol pro­grams engaged in by the mil­i­tary and CIA. Those pro­grams were devel­oped in reac­tion to downed Amer­i­can air­men who–after captivity–gave tes­ti­mo­ny that they had been involved in bio­log­i­cal war­fare attacks against Chi­na and North Korea dur­ing the war.

A superb book about Unit 731–the Japan­ese bio­log­i­cal war­fare unit dur­ing World War II–had a chap­ter in the British edi­tion that was omit­ted in the Amer­i­can edi­tion. (Sad­ly, the books are out of print, although both the British and Amer­i­can edi­tions are avail­able through used-book ser­vices. Mr. Emory hearti­ly encour­ages lis­ten­ers to obtain the book. Even the Amer­i­can edition–missing this key chapter–is worth­while. Hope­ful­ly, a pub­lish­er will obtain the rights to the book and re-issue it. If so, we will enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly pro­mote the work.)

The chap­ter in the UK edi­tion chron­i­cles the inves­ti­ga­tion into the alle­ga­tions of Amer­i­can BW use dur­ing the Kore­an War, includ­ing cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence that Unit 731 vet­er­ans and method­ol­o­gy may well have been used in the alleged cam­paign. That chap­ter is alto­geth­er objec­tive, avoid­ing ide­o­log­i­cal bias toward either side in the con­flict.

Because of that, we found the omis­sion of this chap­ter from the U.S. edi­tion to be sig­nif­i­cant. As the bril­liant Peter Dale Scott not­ed: “The cov­er-up obvi­ates the con­spir­a­cy.” It is a mat­ter of pub­lic record that Unit 731’s files were incor­po­rat­ed into the U.S. bio­log­i­cal war­fare pro­gram, and vet­er­ans of the Unit bequeathed their exper­tise to the Amer­i­cans in exchange from immu­ni­ty from pros­e­cu­tion for war crimes.

It is a mat­ter of pub­lic record that Unit 731’s files were incor­po­rat­ed into the U.S. bio­log­i­cal war­fare pro­gram, and vet­er­ans of the Unit bequeathed their exper­tise to the Amer­i­cans in exchange from immu­ni­ty from pros­e­cu­tion for war crimes.

FTR#1172 presents the sci­en­tif­ic cre­den­tials of the Inter­na­tion­al Sci­en­tif­ic Com­mis­sion inves­ti­gat­ing the alle­ga­tions of bio­log­i­cal war­fare, which are impres­sive and their con­clu­sions are cred­i­ble.

The intro­duc­tion of FTR#1173 con­sists of read­ing and analy­sis of Tom O’Neil­l’s pre­sen­ta­tion of the career of one of the CIA’s most impor­tant MK-Ultra mind con­trol oper­a­tives, which occurred in the imme­di­ate after­math of the Kore­an War–1954.

Note that Jim­mie Shaver was serv­ing in the Air Force. Per­son­nel from that branch were involved in the alle­ga­tions of BW waged by the U.S. Those alle­ga­tions were the ratio­nale for the U.S. mind con­trol pro­grams, devel­oped to com­bat Chi­nese “brain­wash­ing” which was alleged to have pre­cip­i­tat­ed the basis for the tes­ti­mo­ny by USAF.

Louis Joly­on West was Jack Ruby’s psy­chi­a­trist, and pre­sent­ed the unten­able hypoth­e­sis that Ruby killed Oswald because he had a brief psy­chomo­tor epilep­tic event in the base­ment of the Dal­las jail. In fact, the evi­dence sug­gests strong­ly that West had helped to erase Ruby’s mem­o­ry of hav­ing killed Oswald.

West­’s work with Ruby helped to keep the train of U.S. Far East­ern pol­i­cy run­ning on track.

The broad­cast sets forth the mur­der of Chere Jo Hor­ton, a three-year-old girl whose muti­la­tion, rape and mur­der were pinned on 29-year-old Jim­mie Shaver.

An obvi­ous vic­tim of mind con­trol, appar­ent­ly imple­ment­ed in con­sid­er­able mea­sure by Louis Joly­on West, Shaver was pro­grammed to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for the killing, despite enor­mous con­tra­dic­tions in the evi­dence.

O’Neil­l’s dis­cus­sion of West, Shaver, the mind con­trol pro­grams and the Man­son Fam­i­ly “op” is part of what appears to be a domes­tic Phoenix Pro­gram, designed to win “hearts and minds” in the U.S. dur­ing the Viet­nam War.

Key Points of Dis­cus­sion and analy­sis include:

1.–Shaver’s unusu­al behav­ior and demeanor at the ini­tial scene of the crime: ” . . . . He was shirt­less, cov­ered in blood and scratch­es. Mak­ing no attempt to escape, he let the search par­ty walk him to the edge of the high­way. Bystanders described him as ‘dazed’ and ‘trance-like’ . . . .”
2.–Shaver’s appar­ent lack of aware­ness of the imme­di­ate cir­cum­stances of the crime: ” ‘What’s going on here?’ he asked. He did­n’t seem drunk, but he could­n’t say where he was, how he’d got­ten there, or whose blood was all over him. Mean­while, the search par­ty found Hor­ton’s body in the grav­el pit. Her neck was bro­ken, her legs had been torn open, and she’s been raped. . . .”
3.–” . . . . Around four that morn­ing, an Air Force mar­shal ques­tioned Shaver and two doc­tors exam­ined him, agree­ing he was­n’t drunk. One lat­er tes­ti­fied that he ‘was not nor­mal . . . . he was very com­posed out­side, which I did not expect him to be under these cir­cum­stances.’ . . .”
4.–Shaver did­n’t rec­og­nize his own wife when she came to vis­it him. ” . . . . When his wife came to vis­it, he did­n’t rec­og­nize her. . . .”
5.–Initially, he believed some­one else com­mit­ted the crime. ” . . . . He gave his first state­ment at 10:30 a.m., adamant that anoth­er man was respon­si­ble: he could sum­mon an image of a stranger with blond hair and tat­toos. . . .”
6.–Eventually, he signed a state­ment tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty: ” . . . . After the Air Force mar­shal returned to the jail­house, how­ev­er, Shaver signed a sec­ond state­ment tak­ing full respon­si­bil­i­ty. Though he still did­n’t remem­ber any­thing, he rea­soned that he must have done it. . . .”
7.–Enter Jol­ly West: ” . . . . Two months lat­er, in Sep­tem­ber, Shaver’s mem­o­ries still had­n’t returned. The base hos­pi­tal com­man­der told Jol­ly West to per­form an eval­u­a­tion: was he legal­ly sane at the time of the mur­der? Shaver spent the next two weeks under West­’s super­vi­sion . . . While Shaver was under–with West inject­ing more truth serum to ‘deep­en the trance’–Shaver recalled the events of that night. He con­fessed to killing Hor­ton. . . .”
8.–West was a defense wit­ness who, instead, appears to have aid­ed the pros­e­cu­tion: ” . . . . At the tri­al, West argued that Shaver’s truth-serum con­fes­sion was more valid than any oth­er. And West was tes­ti­fy­ing for the defense . . . .”
9.–Shaver’s behav­ior at the tri­al is fur­ther sug­ges­tive of mind con­trol: ” . . . . One news­pa­per account said he ‘sat through the stren­u­ous ses­sions like a man in a trance,’ say­ing noth­ing, nev­er ris­ing to stretch or smoke, though he was a known chain-smok­er. ‘Some believe it’s an act,’ the paper said, ‘oth­ers believe his demeanor is real. . . .”
10.–Shaver’s med­ical records at Lack­land Air Force base had van­ished. ” . . . . But, curi­ous­ly, all the records for patients in 1954 had been main­tained, with one excep­tion: the file for last names begin­ning with ‘Sa’ through ‘St’ had van­ished. . . .”
11.–West posed lead­ing ques­tions to Shaver, who denied hav­ing ever tak­en the vic­tim’s clothes off. ” . . . . West had used lead­ing ques­tions to walk the entranced Shaver through the crime. ‘Tell me about when you took your clothes off, Jim­my,’ he said. And try­ing to prove that Shaver had repressed mem­o­ries: ‘Jim­my, do you remem­ber when some­thing like this hap­pened before?’ Or: ‘After you took her clothes off, what did you do?’ ‘I nev­er did take her clothes off,’ Shaver said. . . .”
12.–The inter­view was divid­ed into thirds, the mid­dle third of which was not record­ed! ” . . . . The inter­view [with Shaver] was divid­ed into thirds. The mid­dle third, for some rea­son, was­n’t record­ed. When the record picked up, the man­u­script said, ‘Shaver is cry­ing. He has been con­front­ed with all the facts repeat­ed­ly.’ . . .”

Next, we review Luce’s beat­i­fi­ca­tion of Chi­ang Kai-shek in Life mag­a­zine, por­tray­ing the Gen­er­alis­si­mo as a Chris­t­ian mar­tyr: “ . . . . Chi­ang Kai-shek has hereto­fore shown him­self a man of remark­able courage and res­o­lu­tion. . . . He is a con­vert­ed Methodist who has now for solace the exam­ples of tribu­la­tion in the Chris­t­ian bible. . . .”

Adding fur­ther depth to the Luce/Time Inc. meme of Chi­ang Kai-shek as an icon­ic Chris­t­ian is his “broth­el-hop­ping” behav­ior with his fel­low Chris­t­ian con­vert, Tu Yueh-sheng.

“ . . . . At the oppo­site end of the Shang­hai social scale, Big-eared Tu enjoyed vis­it­ing the famous Blue Vil­la and cruis­ing the oth­er Green Gang broth­els in the Blue Cham­ber Dis­trict with a young, ill-tem­pered bra­vo by the name of Chi­ang Kai-shek. . . .”

he pros­ti­tutes in the broth­els were sub­jects of the bru­tal prac­tice of foot­bind­ing;

“ . . . . Since this nether­world con­sumed so much of Chiang’s and Tu’s atten­tion, it requires a clos­er look. The Chi­nese broth­els, almost with­out excep­tion, were staffed by girls with bound feet—the ide­al being less than three inch­es long. These were objects of extra­or­di­nary sex­u­al excite­ment, and enjoyed a cen­tral role in any noisy evening. . . .”

More about the prac­tice of foot­bind­ing, long-since for­bid­den in Chi­na.

“ . . . . Foot­bind­ing usu­al­ly began at age four. A ten-foot long two-inch ban­dage was wrapped around the toes to force them in against the sole. Each day the ban­dage was tight­ened until the foot was fold­ed under with only the big toe stick­ing out, a shape called the ‘Gold­en Lotus’ because it resem­bled a lotus pod with the petals removed. Flesh rot­ted and fell off, some­times a toe or two, and the foot oozed pus, until the process of defor­ma­tion was com­plete after two years, at which point the feet were prac­ti­cal­ly dead. . . .”

FTR#1210 The Narco-Fascism of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, Part 17

Intro­duc­ing the expan­sion of Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence with Chi­ang and his Kuom­intang fas­cists into U.S. Cold War pol­i­cy in Asia, we present Ster­ling Seagrave’s rumi­na­tion about Stan­ley Horn­beck, a State Depart­ment flack who became: “. . . . the doyen of State’s Far East­ern Divi­sion. . . .”

Horn­beck “ . . . . had only the most abbre­vi­at­ed and stilt­ed knowl­edge of Chi­na, and had been out of touch per­son­al­ly for many years. . . . He with­held cables from the Sec­re­tary of State that were crit­i­cal of Chi­ang, and once stat­ed that ‘the Unit­ed States Far East­ern  pol­i­cy is like a train run­ning on a rail­road track.  It has been clear­ly laid out and where it is going is plain to all.’ It was in fact bound for Saigon in 1975, with whis­tle stops along the way at Peking, Que­moy, Mat­su, and the Yalu Riv­er. . . .”

In numer­ous pro­grams over the decades, we have doc­u­ment­ed the fact that Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion was a deci­sive event in the U.S. involve­ment in the Viet­nam War.

As laid out in NSAM #263 (craft­ed in Octo­ber of 1963), JFK had decid­ed to pull all U.S. forces out of Viet­nam by Christ­mas of 1965. Two days after his assas­si­na­tion, the Sun­day on which Ruby slew Oswald, Kennedy’s with­draw­al pro­gram was can­celed and the esca­la­tion pol­i­cy that became man­i­fest was put into effect, cod­i­fied in NSAM 273.

This is dis­cussed, in–among oth­er programs–FTR#978, as well as numer­ous pro­grams in our land­mark series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio.

The Zaprud­er Film, which dis­proves the Oswald cov­er sto­ry, was pur­chased by Time Inc. and han­dled by Life Mag­a­zine, plac­ing this cru­cial bit of evi­dence in the domain of Hen­ry Luce, a pri­ma­ry pro­mot­er of Chi­ang Kai-shek and Mme. Chi­ang, aka Mae-ling Soong.

Thus,  Amer­i­ca’s eyes and ears on Chi­ang Kai-shek  were the same as Amer­i­ca’s eyes and ears on the assas­si­na­tion of JFK, which threat­ened to change the direc­tion on which the rail­way line described by Stan­ley Horn­beck was head­ed.

The Assas­si­na­tion Records Review Board accessed the per­spec­tive of a CIA pho­to­graph­ic expert, who opined that the Zaprud­er Film had been tam­pered with.

He viewed the film and saw what he believed was JFK react­ing to between six and eight dif­fer­ent shots, from at least three direc­tions.

Life’s pub­lish­er was C.D. Jack­son, a long­time intel­li­gence and psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare asset. He large­ly over­saw the Luce pub­lish­ing out­let’s han­dling of the film.

Dur­ing the course of the Cold War, Hen­ry Luce had become “ . . . . a key CIA media asset.”

C.D. Jack­son “ . . . . who had been in charge of Life since 1960 . . . . was no ordi­nary pub­lish­er. . . . Jack­son had been a spe­cial­ist in psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare for the gov­ern­ment . . . and was an expert in Cold War pro­pa­gan­da . . . .”

The mag­a­zine delib­er­ate­ly struc­tured its pub­lish­ing of still frames from the film to mis­lead a naive observ­er about the infor­ma­tion con­tained in the film.

Life also pub­lished a cov­er pho­to­graph of Lee Har­vey Oswald that had obvi­ous­ly been doc­tored, with the shad­ows in the pho­to­graph going in dif­fer­ent direc­tions!

Numer­ous eye­wit­ness­es to the killing gave tes­ti­mo­ny to the effect that, at one point, the motor­cade actu­al­ly came to a com­plete halt, giv­ing the snipers a sta­tion­ary tar­get at which to fire.

Among those who tes­ti­fied to that effect were Dearie Cabell, the wife of Ear­le Cabell, the may­or of Dal­las. Cabel­l’s broth­er, Gen­er­al C.P. Cabell, had been a Deputy Direc­tor of the CIA, and was fired by JFK for lying to him about the Bay of Pigs inva­sion. 

(Anoth­er of those fired was Allen Dulles, who served on the War­ren Com­mis­sion.)

Pres­i­dent Biden con­tin­ued the sus­pi­cious han­dling of JFK evi­dence by fur­ther delay­ing release of infor­ma­tion about the mur­der.

The notion that the doc­u­ments could com­pro­mise mil­i­tary, intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty or law enforce­ment method­ol­o­gy at this stage of the inves­ti­ga­tion strains cred­i­bil­i­ty.

The JFK assassination–the key event to keep­ing Amer­i­can Far East­ern Pol­i­cy trav­el­ing the straight rail­road line described by Stan­ley Hornbeck–was also a cen­tral event in the career of Mort Sahl, the bril­liant stand-up come­di­an and one of the inspi­ra­tions for Mr. Emory’s life’s work.

“. . . . Mr. Sahl worked on radio and on local tele­vi­sion in Los Ange­les, but he didn’t help his cause with what some felt was on obses­sion with the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion. His per­for­mances began to include read­ing scorn­ful­ly from the War­ren Com­mis­sion report [pub­lished by The New York Times—D.E.]. And he worked as an unpaid inves­ti­ga­tor for Jim Gar­ri­son, the New Orleans dis­trict attor­ney, who claimed to have uncov­ered secret evi­dence that Lee Har­vey Oswald was not the assas­sin, and who accused a New Orleans busi­ness­man, Clay Shaw, of con­spir­ing to mur­der the pres­i­dent. No con­vinc­ing evi­dence secret or oth­er­wise, was pro­duced at Mr. Shaw’s tri­al, and the jury acquit­ted him in less than an hour.

‘I spent years talk­ing with peo­ple, Gar­ri­son notably, about the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion,’ Mr. Sahl wrote in ‘Heart­land,’ a score-set­tling, dys­pep­tic mem­oir pub­lished in 1976, ‘and I was said to have hurt my career by being in bad com­pa­ny. . . . I don’t think that Jack Kennedy is bad com­pa­ny. I don’t think that Gar­ri­son is bad com­pa­ny. I learned some­thing, though. The peo­ple that I went to Hol­ly­wood par­ties with are not my com­rades The men I was in the trench­es with in New Orleans are my com­rades.’ He con­clud­ed, ‘I think Jack Kennedy cries from the grave for jus­tice.’ . . . .”

A con­sum­mate­ly impor­tant study of Viet­nam War crimes was authored by Nick Turse. A review by the U.S. Naval Insti­tute can be tak­en as an advi­so­ry in this regard.

Mr. Turse per­forms the remark­able feat of unspar­ing­ly sear­ing pre­sen­ta­tion of the war crimes that were stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dure for much of the Amer­i­can (and allied) forces in Viet­nam by trac­ing the foun­da­tion of those crimes from the tech­no­crat­ic approach to mil­i­tary strat­e­gy pur­sued by the Pen­ta­gon and Robert McNa­ma­ra, through the re-social­iza­tion and re-pro­gram­ming of young, often teen-aged, recruits to turn them into reflex­ive killers, chron­i­cling the mas­sive fire­pow­er avail­able to U.S. forces, and doc­u­ment­ing the recal­ci­trant atti­tude of the offi­cer corps and Gen­er­al Staff, who were unwill­ing to coun­te­nance the pro­fes­sion­al and ide­o­log­i­cal dam­age that would result from pre­sen­ta­tion and adju­di­ca­tion of the truth.

In addi­tion, Mr. Turse–while avoid­ing self-right­eous posturing–highlights the doc­tri­naire racism of many U.S. com­bat­ants, who com­mit­ted war crimes behind the “MGR”–the “Mere Gook Rule.”

“ ‘An impor­tant addi­tion to Viet­nam war stud­ies . . . . Turse’s study is not anti-vet­er­an, anti-mil­i­tary, or anti-Amer­i­can. It does not allege that the major­i­ty of U.S. mil­i­tary per­son­nel in South Viet­nam com­mit­ted crimes. . . .” Pro­ceed­ings (U.S. Naval Insti­tute).

Nick Turse traces the strate­gic use of over­whelm­ing fire­pow­er and de fac­to coun­te­nanc­ing of civil­ian casu­al­ties owes much to the tac­ti­cal approach of Japan­ese forces dur­ing World War II in Chi­na: “ . . . . These efforts were com­mon­ly known as ‘paci­fi­ca­tion,’ but their true aim was to depop­u­late the con­test­ed coun­try­side. ‘The peo­ple are like water and the army is like fish.’ Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist rev­o­lu­tion, had famous­ly writ­ten. Amer­i­can plan­ners grasped his dic­tum, and also stud­ied the ‘kill-all, burn-all, loot-all’ scorched earth cam­paigns that the Japan­ese army launched in rur­al Chi­na dur­ing the 1930s and ear­ly 1940s for lessons on how to drain the ‘sea.’ Not sur­pris­ing­ly the idea of forc­ing peas­ants out of their vil­lages was embraced by civil­ian paci­fi­ca­tion offi­cials and mil­i­tary offi­cers alike. . . .”

Exem­pli­fy­ing the bru­tal real­i­ty of the crimes com­mit­ted by G.I.‘s in Viet­nam is the “dou­ble vet­er­an” man­i­fes­ta­tion. Before killing them and adding them to the body count of “ene­mies” killed, GI’s raped female “gueril­las.”

September 2, 1945: The American Deep State Rolls the Dice

In FTR#1142, we detailed the lit­tle-known involve­ment of Chi­ang Kai-shek and Mme. Chi­ang Kai-shek in the 1943 con­fer­ences at Cairo and Teheran. (Mme. Chi­ang Kai-shek was the sis­ter of T.V. Soong, one of Chi­ang’s finance min­is­ters and the rich­est man in the world at one time.) This low-pro­file involve­ment appar­ent­ly gave them con­sid­er­able grav­i­tas in help­ing to shape the post­war geopo­lit­i­cal agen­da. While in Oki­nawa dur­ing Japan’s sur­ren­der in World War II, Colonel L. Fletch­er Prouty was wit­ness to the ear­ly com­mit­ment of deci­sive mil­i­tary resources to the wars that were to take place in Korea and Indochina/Vietnam. ” . . . . I was on Oki­nawa at that time, and dur­ing some busi­ness in the har­bor area I asked the har­bor­mas­ter if all that new mate­r­i­al was being returned to the States. His response was direct and sur­pris­ing: ‘Hell, no! They ain’t nev­er goin’ to see it again. One-half of this stuff, enough to equip and sup­ply at least a hun­dred and fifty thou­sand men, is going to Korea, and the oth­er half is going to Indochi­na.’ In 1945, none of us had any idea that the first bat­tles of the Cold War were going to be fought by U.S. mil­i­tary units in those two regions begin­ning in 1950 and 1965–yet that is pre­cise­ly what had been planned, and it is pre­cise­ly what hap­pened. Who made that deci­sion back in 1943–45? . . . .” WFMU-FM is pod­cast­ing For The Record–You can sub­scribe to the pod­cast HERE.