worst u.s. governmet coverups?

  On 1/3/2014 at 1:30 AM, John Ehrlichman said:

also the WMD 'scandal' was used to misdirect the public from the fact that Anthrax was sent out from a US government lab to 3 senators, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather, killing 5 postal workers and a NY post employee in it's wake. Saddam Hussein was blamed for the attacks via a whisper campaign put out by the Bush administration. This is essentially how we got into Iraq, without using the anthrax scare as fuel, it's doubtful the public would have gone along with it so easily when it was first pushed.

 

WWII history beyond the propaganda is also very fascinating, specifically the Smedley Butler WWII attempted coup to turn the United States into a fascist state. Check that out if you haven't heard about it. Also Smedley wrote a book called 'war is a racket' after WWII ended basically laying out how the US used WWII as an excuse to be a tool used by powerful corporations to protect trading routes and open up new industry in 3rd world countries. He was a highly decorated general and his statements are almost completely ignored by most WWII historians.

 

I lived in Okinawa as a kid and Butler's name is used for the collective USMC bases there. He was no mere officer either, had the highest ranking and was the most highly decorated Marine during his life. I had no idea of his fascinating career until years later. The Bonus_Army protest and it's violent conclusion is greatly overshadowed.

There's subtle trend sincere military leaders being subverted by elected officials, quietly ousted, or major parts of their career downplayed in history as needed. WWII allied commander Eisenhower's farewell_address and it's prophetic "military-industrial complex" warning. Robert_McNamara was asked to resign by LBJ when he began advocating for withdrawal from Vietnam. Hap_Arnold, who revolutionized air warfare, experienced numerous backlash during his career for his outspoken criticism of FDR's appointees and associates. General_Douglas_MacArthur was removed and relieved from command by Truman when he couldn't restrain his criticism of Truman's orders in the Korean war. Desert Storm commander Norman_Schwarzkopf,_Jr. was critical of the War In Iraq throughout it's operation but nonetheless supported Bush. There's more but their names escape me. The great irony is that loyalty prevents most military leaders from dissidence. I've noticed it's reflected in some films and books too, like in Akira, the character of Colonel Shikishima is highlighted as honorable and sincere compared to his corrupt bureaucratic superiors.

In the present day there's still a divide between the "Pentagon" generals and veteran officers and senior enlisted soldiers. Major weapon assets or combat needs of the military are perpetually de-funded or delayed because of Defense Industry lobbying. For example, despite no air-to-air combat fighting for decades, there has been efforts to cut A-10 CAS planes from the inventory for more the expensive and less-suited JSF, despite the fact that it performs flawlessly and is highly demanded by infantry in the field. I have two siblings and a brother-in-law in the USAF, and they mention a lot of behind-the-scenes information that contradicts what the leadership touts in their official assessments to the public. Primarily, the fact that many pilots and commanders rather build new and cheap existing aircraft (F-15, F-16) rather than invest more into the JSF.

i dunno if it actually counts as a coverup, but the CIA operation PBSSuccess, which almost bloodlessly overthrew a legitimate reformist government in Guatemala. The story of how the CIA pulled it off is amazing.

Just about everything regarding the 2012_Benghazi_attack has been pretty disgusting. The whole matter has become a political football and both the liberal and conservative establishments have taken advantage of it. At first I was in line with the Daily Show's "criticism of the criticism," because the GOP has been pretty hypocritical in their highlighting of this incident, but their fundamental questions are sound. Even Maddow has agreed that Obama and Clinton's vague blame on it being protesters was wrong (remember all of the Innocence_of_Muslims blame and spin early on too - the media perpetuated it from the beginning and that's half the battle in convincing the masses), and it's fact that it was a coordinated attack. I am miffed that the NYT essentially endorsed the State Departments reports.

It's clear that the issue has had a lot of mishandling and misinformation espoused by the Obama administration. It was a Intel and military deployment failure and they've successfully staved off any serious and productive assessment of what actually occurred. The fact that most critics are of the misinformed "it was Al-Qaeda" camp has greatly benefited the administration in washing it's hands of the incident. And the right-wing? The GOP has reaped the benefits of framing this as a cover-up with no real solutions. Nothing is going to change, unlike say, the huge extent of changes and re-structuring that occurred after the Iran Hostage rescue operation debacle: Operation_Eagle_Claw

  On 1/2/2014 at 9:14 PM, SR4 said:

COINTELPRO and the assassination of civil rights leaders. white people have an incredibly hard time believing it hapened.

cointelpro is horrendous, found out about it from andrew marr interviewing noam chomsky and chomsky's reaction to marr not knowing what cointelpro is quite funny:

http://youtu.be/SnjYVmHbB-4?t=2m55s

yeah, glad to know more people are becoming aware of it.

People like to talk about surveillance today, but COINTELPRO is where they got their chops, and yet STILL today people deny it ever existed. It also makes me almost laugh when people denounce the horrors of the East German Stasti; short of prison camps, our system was just as, if not more efficient.

There was one particularly insane day in one of my classes where I talked about COINTELPRO and a student believed I was making it up. Only after I showed him the FBI's admission of the program on their own website did he calm down.

Link if you are interested about their operations: http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro

Note the statement: "COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons."

Always thought that was amazing that the FBI themselves admitted they had way overstepped their authority.

Theres a lot of a crazy stuff thats really interesting (and also disturbing) to history buffs about the Cold War era, I'm sure everyone here is familiar with MKULTRA, but there was even another program where the CIA would hire prostitutes to take their johns into a room where they would then be given LSD or blackmailed, all to test the effects of the situations on their unwilling participants. I always forget the name of the program, but it was some crazy ass shit.

Im still not sure where I stand on the Benghazi issue, but I was always under the impression that if a sovereign nation kills another nation's diplomat, it's casus belli for war. I suppose the issue was that the actors were not directly in association with the Libyan state, and they issued a declaration condemning the attack.

But yeah, I always withheld judgement on that issue because everything now seems like political disinformation within the left/right talking point paradigm. And yet probably another reason to despise our current administration. At the very least we need to start rethinking our diplomatic strategy. Wars make enemies and disgruntled populations, who then exercise their frustrations in either protests or in extremist groups. It seems rather counter-intuitive to counter the negative push back from fighting wars by fighting yet another war. But Im sure we've discussed this on here already.

  On 1/2/2014 at 9:14 PM, SR4 said:

COINTELPRO and the assassination of civil rights leaders. white people have an incredibly hard time believing it hapened.

who did they assassinate ?

  On 1/3/2014 at 8:17 PM, eugene said:

 

  On 1/2/2014 at 9:14 PM, SR4 said:

COINTELPRO and the assassination of civil rights leaders. white people have an incredibly hard time believing it hapened.

who did they assassinate ?

 

Murder of Fred Hampton, a member of the Black Panthers. Official admission is still denied, but there was plenty of evidence found that implicated COINTELPRO and the Chicago police. A couple of FBI agents later went on the record and admitted they had been involved in his killing.

heres the wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton though I'd hesitate to say how much of it is true. A better resource would be the testimony/interviews of the FBI agents that participated.

i was always weirded out by this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

the us goverment pardoned japanese war crimes because they might be useful in future biological weapons development. the whole thing is horrendous. i'm sure this kind of plea bargain was fairly commonplace, but it bothers me. not really a coverup, just kind of gross.

That is beyond fucked up. The rape of Nanking was beyond horrific. But this shows US military as cowardly and devious beyond belief. Sick fucks.

just like the Nazis in operation paperclip we worked with japanese war criminals and the military in general to fight off the Chinese for almost 15 years post WWII, many of the people stationed in japan stayed there because of this and ended up starting new lives. A lot of the interested post WWII history is covered in William Blum's excellent book 'killing hope' which is the best historical overview on all US military interventions i've seen.

  On 1/3/2014 at 4:00 PM, LimpyLoo said:

in before tenuous dot-conneting...

 

 

 

oops nevermind imo

it is pretty easy to write all the horrible side of american history off by using an alternate pejorative phrase to 'conspiracy theorist'. good job

seriously a very tragic thing that any critically thinking american would still hold onto the Bush narrative of 9/11 even after more and more crazy shit just keeps piling up. You saw that the CIA knew of Saudi Arabian government involvement before and after the attacks but then covered it up right? It's making all the major newspapers right now. Good thing we went into Afghanistan and Iraq when 14 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi right?

http://www.ibtimes.com/911-link-saudi-arabia-topic-28-redacted-pages-government-report-congressmen-push-release-1501202

  On 1/3/2014 at 7:55 PM, SR4 said:

yeah, glad to know more people are becoming aware of it.

 

People like to talk about surveillance today, but COINTELPRO is where they got their chops, and yet STILL today people deny it ever existed. It also makes me almost laugh when people denounce the horrors of the East German Stasti; short of prison camps, our system was just as, if not more efficient.

 

There was one particularly insane day in one of my classes where I talked about COINTELPRO and a student believed I was making it up. Only after I showed him the FBI's admission of the program on their own website did he calm down.

 

Link if you are interested about their operations: http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro

 

Note the statement: "COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons."

 

Always thought that was amazing that the FBI themselves admitted they had way overstepped their authority.

 

Theres a lot of a crazy stuff thats really interesting (and also disturbing) to history buffs about the Cold War era, I'm sure everyone here is familiar with MKULTRA, but there was even another program where the CIA would hire prostitutes to take their johns into a room where they would then be given LSD or blackmailed, all to test the effects of the situations on their unwilling participants. I always forget the name of the program, but it was some crazy ass shit.

 

 

Im still not sure where I stand on the Benghazi issue, but I was always under the impression that if a sovereign nation kills another nation's diplomat, it's casus belli for war. I suppose the issue was that the actors were not directly in association with the Libyan state, and they issued a declaration condemning the attack.

 

But yeah, I always withheld judgement on that issue because everything now seems like political disinformation within the left/right talking point paradigm. And yet probably another reason to despise our current administration. At the very least we need to start rethinking our diplomatic strategy. Wars make enemies and disgruntled populations, who then exercise their frustrations in either protests or in extremist groups. It seems rather counter-intuitive to counter the negative push back from fighting wars by fighting yet another war. But Im sure we've discussed this on here already.

i have a book called SPOOKS written in 1975 that details how many corporations used ex-intelligence agency employees to perform covert actions, cointlepro and basically corporate black ops all over the world. The cointelpro part is especially interesting, since corporations have been using forms of that for years but to the degree in which they do and probably do even worse now is pretty hard for even me to believe.

Someone recently catalogued a bunch of outed 'agents' in all types of activism, unions, human rights groups and derived an alarming statistic, that 1 in 5 people in these organizations could very likely be a paid spy or disruptor. I'm not sure if i can get on bored with that because I'm already pretty paranoid.