JFK Was Right: The CIA Should Have Been Splintered Into A Thousand Pieces And Scattered To The Winds

After Kennedy took office, he was unaware that the CIA, in accord with an OK from President Eisenhower and working with the Belgians, had overseen the gruesome torture and brutal murder of the Congo's popular first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. With Lumumba already dead a month and his body dissolved in sulphuric acid, Kennedy called for him to be reintegrated into the new nation's government. The CIA-- Allen Dulles, who JFK foolishly kept on as director-- hadn't told him that they had carried out Eisenhower 's orders to have him murdered as a commie dupe. According to Stephen Kinzer's book about Allen and John Foster Dulles, The Brothers, "Less than two years later, Allen casually admitted that he might have exaggerated the danger Lumumba posed to the West. A television interviewer, Eric Severeid, asked him if he had come to believe that any of his covert operations were unnecessary. He named just one. 'I think that we overrated the danger in, let's say, the Congo,' Allen said. 'It looked as though they were going to make a serious attempt at takeover in the Belgian Congo. Well, it didn't work out that way at all. Now maybe they intended to do it, but they didn't find the situation ripe and they beat a pretty hasty retreat.'" There was worse to come.

Eisenhower had also authorized the assassination of Fidel Castro. When that didn't work out, he authorized a half-assed invasion of Cuban that came to fruition right after Kennedy became president, the Bay of Pigs. As the clownish plot fell apart in the first minutes of the "invasion," the CIA and some elements of the military tried to get Kennedy to U.S. commit Air Force, Naval and Army resources. He thought they were all out of their minds and realized he had made a terrible mistake by keeping Dulles-- who was completely senile by then-- in office. Again, from The Brothers:

At White House meetings the next day, Kennedy fended off more pleas that he send U.S. forces to support the Bay of Pigs invaders. The strongest came from his chief of naval operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, who came into the Oval Office late in the evening with an equally agited [CIA official Richard] Bissell.

"Let me take two jets and shoot down this enemy aircraft," Burke pleaded.

"No," Kennedy replied. "I don't want to get the United States involved with this."

"Can I not send in an airstrike?"

"No."

"Can we send in a few planes?"

"No, because they could be identified as United States."

"Can we paint out their numbers?"

"No."

Grasping for options, Burke asked if Kennedy would authorize artillery attacks on Cuban forces from American destroyers. The answer was the same: "No."

Later that day Kennedy told an aide, "I probably made a mistake keeping Allen Dulles."

…More than one hundred of the invaders had died. Most of the rest were rounded up and imprisoned. For Castro it was a supreme, ecstatic triumph. Kennedy was staggered.

"How can I have been so stupid?" he wondered aloud.

Others were equally stunned. Criticism of the CIA, in both the press and Congress, rose to unprecedented intensity. Allen was not spared. The cover story in Time, headlined "The Cuba Disaster," questioned his very concept of intelligence.

…If Allen had not yet confronted the implications of the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy had. In private he cursed "CIA bastards" for luring him into it, and wished he could "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds."

He should have. America would have been much better off. But all he did was fire Dulles, too late to prevent the horrors the Dulles brothers committed in our names in Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam, not to mention the Congo and Cuba. Yesterday another CIA chief-- and another failed Republican scumbag who was foolishly held over by a Democratic president-- released his memoir.

President Obama eventually lost faith in the troop increase he ordered in Afghanistan, his doubts fed by top White House civilian advisers opposed to the strategy, who continually brought him negative news reports suggesting it was failing, according to his former defense secretary, Robert M. Gates.

In a new memoir, Mr. Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration who served for two years under Mr. Obama, praises the president as a rigorous thinker who frequently made decisions “opposed by his political advisers or that would be unpopular with his fellow Democrats.” But Mr. Gates says that by 2011, Mr. Obama began expressing his own criticism of the way his strategy in Afghanistan was playing out.

At a pivotal meeting in the situation room in March 2011, Mr. Gates said, Mr. Obama opened with a blast of frustration over his Afghan policy-- expressing doubts about Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander he had chosen, and questioning whether he could do business with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.

“As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Mr. Gates writes. “For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War is the first book describing those years written from inside the cabinet. Mr. Gates offers more than 600 pages of detailed history of his personal wars with Congress, the Pentagon bureaucracy and, in particular, Mr. Obama’s White House staff over the four and a half years he sought to salvage victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The “controlling nature” of the Obama White House and the national security staff “took micromanagement and operational meddling to a new level,” Mr. Gates writes.

Digby's look at the release, Once a Bush loyalist always a Bush loyalist, makes more sense that Gates' self-serving critique and helps make the point that it is incumbent on a president to be highly skeptical on the CIA and the Military Industrial Complex-- unlike Eisenhower until his farewell address, the high-point of his 8 presidential years. Especially interesting is Digby's update from Max Fisher in the Washington Post:

... if Gates is going to take shots at Biden on this scale, it's worth asking how Gates would fare under similar scrutiny. I am not appropriately positioned to evaluate Gates's positions on "every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." But I can tell you how he performed on the single most important one he ever confronted: ending the Cold War. He was, quite simply, dead wrong.

Back in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev took over as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the United States faced a really big dilemma. Gorbachev professed to be a reformer. Should the United States work with him to reduce nuclear weapons, ease the U.S.-Soviet proxy battles that were at that point directly responsible for a number of deadly conflicts around the world and, just maybe, try to end the Cold War? This wasn't just a major, difficult question: It would turn out to be one of the most important U.S. foreign policy decisions in decades.

President Ronald Reagan eventually came around to the idea that, yes, he could and should work with Gorbachev. He was persuaded by, among others, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who famously said that Gorbachev was a man the West could do business with.

But Reagan had to overcome the fierce opposition of a top CIA Kremlinologist and eventual CIA director named Robert M. Gates, who maintained for years that Gorbachev was no reformer, that he was not to be trusted and that Reagan would be walking into a Soviet ploy.

Quite simply, Gates was wrong, overruled by Reagan, and the world was better off for it.

Historically, the United States would have been better off to use CIA Directors as negative indicators of action. They are always wrong, always wrong about everything. From day one, they missed everything important and disastrously misinterpreted everything they touched. The U.S. and the whole world would have been a lot better off had Kennedy-- or Truman, who had similar ideas-- splintered them into a thousand pieces and scattered them into the winds.

This Isn't About The Tom Dooley Who Hung Down His Head-- This Is The Other Tom Dooley

Growing up, CBS' weekly game show What's My Line? was one of the most popular shows on the relatively new television machine. It ran from 1950 to 1967 and won a bunch of Emmys and Golden Globes. By the time the above episode ran in 1959, the guest, Tom Dooley, had already had his major impact on the word stage, although in a role that certainly never came up on the show. To John Daley, Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf, Dorothy Kilgallen-- and their audience-- young Dr. Dooley was a crusading physician running hospitals in the war-torn Laotian jungle.

When I was very young, Dooley had had a slightly earlier brush with fame-- as a tool of the CIA in the lead up to the American invasion of Vietnam. By the time the French were ready to admit they could no longer hold back Vietnamese nationalism and were ready to surrender the country to the victorious Ho Chi Minh, fully delusional right-wing American extremists, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA head Allen Dulles, NY Cardinal Francis Spellman were determined-- with President Eisenhower's backing-- to destroy Vietnam rather than see it fall to "the Communists." But Americans were sick of war-- World War II was still fresh in everyone's mind and the very unpopular Korean War was still smoldering. In his stupendous new book, The Brothers, Stephen Kinzer explains Tom Dooley's entry onto the world stage. The Dulles' man on the ground in Vietnam in the early '50s was Madison Avenue ad man turned CIA operative Ed Lansdale. The U.S. had embarked on a policy of undermining the Geneva Agreements that had guaranteed a free election in Vietnam once they realized Ho Chi Minh would win, according to Eisenhower's own estimates, by over 80%. The Dulles brothers, Lansdale and their teams got busy with a disinformation campaign meant to stir up religious, ethnic and regional strife that would undermine civil society entirely and create despair and panic throughout the country.

Lansdale, steeped in the principles of advertising and "pay-war<' occluded that the story of Operation Passage to Freedom would resonate more deeply if he could find a single figure to personify it. Americans associated the anti-Communist crusade with dour scolds like Foster, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and Cardinal Spellman. Lansdale wished to give it a brighter face.

The face he chose belonged to a young man named Tom Dooley, a handsome young Notre Dame graduate [at least everyone thought he was a Notre Dame graduate] who had become a doctor, enlisted in the Navy, and thrown himself into the nobel mission of rescuing Christians from Ho. Within months of his arrival, Lansdale began steering journalists to him. They pounced on the human aspect f his story, and he quickly became a popular hero in the United States.

Americans admired Tom Dooley because he reflected them as they believed themselves to be. He was an idealist… In his best-selling book, Deliver Us From Evil, Dooley described Ho as "a Moscow puppet" who had launched his revolution "by disemboweling more than 1,000 native women in Hanoi." Fortunately for the Vietnamese, "our love and help were available, just because we were in the uniforms of the U.S. Navy." Dooley provided a narrative calculated to move the American soul: Christians in a foreign land were being brutalized by Communists; these Communists also wished harm to Americans; therefore, the United States must act.

"The American press reported on the million-person migration as if it were a spontaneous rejection of communism and the manifestation of a natural yearning of people for freedom," according to one study. "The media ported the typical refugee as a devout Catholic who wished to practice his or her religion freely. Newsreels depicted U.S. naval vessels crammed with hungry and huddled masses being transported to freedom by kindhearted and white-uniformed sailors of the U.S. Navy. Photographs showed the small, stooped, frightened, and bedraggled Vietnamese peasants finding safety in the arms of their big, clean, strong American protectors… What the American public was not told, however, is that much of what they were seeing and hearing was the result of a CIA-instigated propaganda campaign designed to frighten Catholics in North Vietnam and ti elicit sympathy for them in the United States."

The Tom Dooley story was a masterstroke for Allen, Lansdale, and the CIA. It might have been tarnished when Dooley was forced out of the Navy for homosexuality, but the facts were hushed up. A poll in the late 1950s found him to be one of the ten most admired people in the United States. For a time after his death in 1961, the Catholic Church considered canonizing him.

"As a key agent in the first disinformation campaign of the Vietnam War," one scholar wrote of Dooley, "he performed the crucial propaganda function of making the American people knowledgeable of and willing to fight Communism in Southeast Asia."

Over the weekend, when Itay Hod exposed anti-gay hypocrite Aaron Schock (R-IL) as flamboyantly gay himself, on twitter follower of his asked if the media doesn't "have an OBLIGATION to expose his hypocrisy?" It certainly never dawned on anyone to bring it up publicly in regard to Tom Dooley when he was raising buckets of money for his various crusades in Southeast Asia while living high on the hog and seducing any young men he could get his hands on. (It wasn't that much later that the U.S. Army covered up Mitch McConnell's homosexual advances towards a young enlisted man when he was an officer at Ft Knox.) Much later, the NY Times published the first chapter of Dr. America-- The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-1961 by James Fischer. By that time, Dooley was no longer on the track towards Roman Catholic sainthood but his real story never really become as well known as the one the CIA pushed on the AMerican people while they were preparing the country for their war against the Vietnamese people. Dooley was as mentally ill as any garden variety closet case and an inveterate liar, hypocrite and self-promoter.

Between late December 1955 and the first week of 1956, Dr. Thomas A. Dooley III signed publishing agreements with Reader's Digest and the prestigious New York firm of Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. To support the massive publicity campaign for his first book, Deliver Us from Evil, Dooley supplied "biographical" materials to his sponsors. His invention as a public figure was launched in these sketchy documents that, among other fictions, reported that he "completed his undergraduate work at the Sorbonne in Paris." For the remainder of his life Dooley revised and rewrote his life story with brazen disregard for consistency, as though his experience was meaningful only as it could be invoked to serve the demands of the moment. Given license to continually reinvent himself, he simply intensified patterns that had marked his earlier years. Between 1946 and 1958, for instance--in completing a series of passport applications--Dooley alternately listed his father's birthplace as Hannibal, Joplin, Springfield, or St. Louis, Missouri (Thomas A. Dooley Jr. was born in Moberly, Missouri, in 1885).

Between Dooley hagiography, timeless and eternal (a cover story in the Liguorian, a Catholic magazine, from June 1991 is virtually identical to devotional works written during his lifetime), and the resentful exposes that emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War, one might hope to discover the "historical" Tom Dooley. But the precelebrity, presainthood version is only faintly accessible to us, due in part to the influence Dooley's public image inevitably exerted on the memory of his friends and acquaintances.

Notre Dame students were not permitted to leave the campus overnight without letters of permission from their parents, yet Dooley frequently spent weekends with his sophisticated friends along the midwestern horse show and fox hunt circuit. He also spent a great deal of time at neighboring Saint Mary's College, a women's school where he played the piano and became a favorite of the college's poet-president, Sister M. Madeleva Wolff. He even made an appearance during 1944 in the chorus line at the fabled Empire Room of Chicago's Palmer House Hotel, where impresario Merriel Abbott booked the nation's most glamorous entertainers. The enormously popular chanteuse Hildegarde was rehearsing one afternoon for a performance when she saw a young man wheeling a piano across the stage of the Empire Room, histrionically wiping feigned perspiration from his brow. She introduced herself to the young collegian and on learning he was a Notre Dame student invited him to accompany her to the 2:00 A.M. "swinger's Mass" at St. Mary's Church in Chicago.

Dooley was able to appear in Hildegarde's chorus line because, while still in his teens, he had become a highly spirited participant in the homosexual subcultures of the American armed forces, the Catholic Church, the hunt circuit, and various urban centers including New York and Chicago. Hildegarde was herself a devout Catholic with a large gay following: her campy nightclub act was rife with allusions to "Kinsey's whimseys" (after 1948) and other euphemisms for homosexuals in currency among entertainers of the period. Allan Berube, the chronicler of gay life in World War II, noted that "although nightclub entertainment was never publicly identified as gay, such performers as Hildegarde and Tallulah Bankhead attracted a devoted gay following, sometimes dropping veiled hints or singing lyrics with double meanings directed at their admirers."

From the time that Dooley's homosexuality was first discussed publicly in 1989, it has been widely assumed that he must have suffered terribly for his sexuality. This view is not wholly unfounded, but it is equally true that from his adolescence onward, Tom Dooley made little effort to conceal his sexuality. He made frequent passes at male acquaintances; according to his classmate Michael Harrington, Tom had a sexual relationship with a young cleric that was anything but secretive, at least so far as Harrington was concerned. A gay friend who served with Dooley as a marine corpsman recalled that far from being confused or tormented by his sexuality, Tom confidently exploited his appeal to gay officers in order to receive choice assignments.

In fact Dooley's precocious talent for trumping military authority and protocol--often a function of his gay connections--may have caused him later to overestimate dangerously his own prowess. In Promises to Keep, Agnes Dooley proudly described Tom's coup in arranging for an impromptu visit by Hildegarde to the U.S. Navy Hospital at St. Alban's, where he was stationed in 1945: "Hildegarde had arrived on schedule, all right, but she refused to budge unless Corpsman Dooley personally escorted her through the hospital. Followed by all the Navy brass--`It was the first time in my life I preceded anyone of rank,' Tom wrote--Hildegarde took Tom's arm, went into Tom's ward, entertained Tom's patients, and then toured the entire hospital."

In 1991, the L.A. Times outed him, posthumously, with a long piece by Diana Shaw, "The Temptation Of Tom Dooley: He Was The Heroic Jungle Doctor Of Indochina In The 1950s. But He Had A Secret, And To Protect It, He Helped Launch The First Disinformation Campaign Of The Vietnam War."

Several months after he had arrived in Laos, Dooley's mother wrote him that Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper and others were making snide allusions regarding Dooley's departure from the Navy. His mother offered to do anything she could to stop the rumors-- including calling the FBI to investigate their origin and arrest the instigators. He fired off a telegram to her, ordering her to do nothing. "This would be gravest error," he wrote. Surely it would; she would learn the truth.

Dooley followed up the telegram with a rambling letter saying he had known all along that his abrupt resignation would start rumors. But, he went on, no one who had read his book or heard him speak would believe such nonsense, implying that everyone knew that to be homosexual was blatantly at odds with being the man of action he was. The "slur on his family name" came with being a public figure; the fact that anyone should even bother to malign him was a measure of how big he had become. "I can take it, mother," he wrote, "and you should buck up and take it, too."

The rumors died before most people heard them, killed off by those who had invested in his image. The Navy issued denials-- restating that Dooley had resigned from the Navy only to continue his humanitarian work in Indochina. And Life ran a three-page spread, replete with photographs of the good doctor at work and at play. Churches, schools, and corporations went on with fund drives for Dooley, while Reader's Digest bid with other publications for exclusive rights to his next piece.

Within a year, Dooley came home, swinging through the country to solicit support. He had it in mind to franchise himself, to set up a foundation called MEDICO (Medical International Cooperation) to sustain a network of clinics throughout the developing world. He also intended to move farther north in Laos, near the Chinese border, so that he would be close to the action-- if any developed.

But during his move north, Dooley fell, knocking his shoulder and raising a lump that wouldn't recede. A few weeks later, he asked a visitor, the late William Van Valin, then a surgical resident, to remove the lump. Van Valin, jittery about operating on the famous doctor, performed the procedure nevertheless. "I did it under local," he said, "and Tom was wide awake and alert when I pulled the thing out of his chest." The "thing" was a wad the size of a golf ball, and pitch black. "Tom knew it was cancer, and that it was malignant."

Dooley dawdled before going home for more extensive surgery, and there are many who interpret the delay as a death wish. After all, Tom Dooley was fundamentally at odds with the very institutions and individuals sustaining him-- the church and the U.S. government. He knew he could count on them only as long as he was useful to them. Dr. Vincent J. Fontana, medical director of the New York Foundlings Hospital, remembers having dinner with Dooley when he came to New York for treatment. "We were sitting in a restaurant, and Dooley said, 'Nobody loves me,' " Fontana recalls.

He reacted with astonishment. "You get letters every day, from all over the world," he says he told Dooley. "Everyone loves you." But Dooley shook his head. Nobody could possibly love him, he thought, because nobody knew him. If they knew him, they would find him loathsome.

"Tom Dooley was never able to integrate his sexuality into his life in the way that many gay men in the professions were able to do back then," Fontana observes. "He gave in to the stigma and isolated himself."

Dooley parlayed his cancer treatment into a public-relations event. He invited CBS News to film his operation at New York's Sloan Kettering Medical Center, and the network dispatched cameras. On film, in contrast to the grave, stentorian CBS commentator Howard K. Smith, Dooley, painfully thin and wearing a bathrobe, was calm and straightforward. He has agreed to have his surgery broadcast, he said, to comfort other cancer victims and to promote MEDICO. The resulting footage, titled Biography of a Cancer, was broadcast nationally on April 21, 1960, and ended on a sanguine note. On television, Dooley's doctor told him he would survive for years. In fact, Dooley knew that he had a year, at most, to live.

In December, 1961, Dooley, emaciated, bent and insensible with pain, checked back into Sloan Kettering, where he celebrated his 34th birthday. According to Fontana, who was Spellman's physician at the time, Spellman went to see Dooley despite warnings from his advisers, who worried that it might lend credence to rumors about the cardinal's sexual orientation. Navy Surgeon General Bartholomew Hogan went to see Dooley as well, bringing with him a copy of Dooley's new discharge. The record would show, he told Dooley, that he had resigned with a grade of "honorable," not his original "less than honorable." And so it does.

On the day Tom Dooley died, his clinic in Laos was overrun by the Pathet Lao.

Thousands turned out for Dooley's funeral, in the snow, in St. Louis. President John F. Kennedy awarded him a posthumous Medal of Freedom. But given the demands of U.S. policy objectives and events in Vietnam and Laos, Dooley's message, that we need "works of peace," would have to be abandoned. The United States was preparing for war. And so he-- or who he was meant to be-- had to make way. He had served his purpose; the public now cared about a part of the world it had known nothing about before Dooley started pleading on its behalf.

Few doubted Dooley's motives as they were presented by him and the press-- the selflessness that made him remain a bachelor so that he could dedicate himself entirely to this cause. It seemed to them it must be a worthy cause indeed that would inspire him to sacrifice a promising career in the military so that he might devote himself to it. "He was a national hero and a national hazard," Lederer says. "It was his mammoth ego, his need for recognition, that helped get us into that mess over there."

Has The American Mass Media Turned Itself Into An Arm Of A Government Propaganda Machine?

One month ago, to the day, we looked at a fascinating bit of interaction, billed as a HARDtalk interview, between Glenn Greenwald and a British government stooge who broadcasts propaganda on the BBC, Stephen Sackur, the voice of Establishment Group Think. You can hit that link above and watch the interview if you'd like because Greenwald refrerred to it Friday in a German computer conference, Hamburg's 30th annual Chaos Communication Congress on Friday. Greenwald's keynote address accused the media establishment of being "guilty of failing significantly with respect to accomplishing its most crucial role: keeping governments in check." Obviously Greenwald and the other journalists who took part in the Ed Snowden whistleblower episode strayed far from the propaganda role the mainstream media has been drifting into.

“It really is the case that the United States and British governments are not only willing but able to engage in any conduct no matter how grotesque,” Greenwald said. Nevertheless, he added, journalists tasked with reporting on those issues have all too often been compliant with the blatant lies made by officials from those governments.

...“[A]t one point I made what I thought was the very unremarkable and uncontroversial observation that the reason why we have a free press is because national security officials routinely lie to the population in order to shield their power and get their agenda advanced,” recalled Greenwald, who said it is both the “the goal and duty of a journalist is to be adversarial to those people in power.”

[Sackur:] “I just cannot believe that you would suggest that senior officials, generals in the US and the British government, are actually making false claims to the public,” he remembered being told on-air.

“It really is the central view of certainly American and British media stars, that when-- especially people with medals on their chest who are called generals, but also high officials in the government-- make claims that those claims are presumptively treated as true without evidence. And that it’s almost immoral to call them into question or to question their voracity,” he said.

“Obviously we went through the Iraq War, in which those very two same governments specifically and deliberately lied repeatedly to the government, to their people, over the course of two years to justify an aggressive war that destroyed a country of 26 million people. But we’ve seen it continuously over the last six months as well.”

From there, he went on to cite the example of US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who earlier this year made remarks to Congress that were quickly proved false by documents leaked to Greenwald by Mr. Snowden. The very first National Security Agency document he was shown, Greenwald said, “revealed that the Obama administration had succeeded in convincing court, a secret court, to compel phone companies to turn over to the NSA every single phone record of every single telephone call.”

Clapper “went to the Senate and lied to their faces...which is at least as serious of a crime as anything Edward Snowden is accused of," Greenwald added.

But DNI Clapper aside, Greenwald said that the established media continues to reject the notion that government officials spew lies. Snowden’s NSA documents have exposed those fibs on more than one occasion, he noted, yet reporters around the world continue to take the word of officials as fact rather than dig from the truth.

“Their role is not to be adversarial. Their role is to be loyal spokespeople to those powerful factions that they pretend to exercise oversight,” Greenwald said.

But as the US, UK and other governments continue to feed the media lies, Greenwald said their operations are far from being single-pronged. The US “knows that its only hope for continuing to maintain its regiment of secrecy behind which it engages with radical and corrupt acts is to intimidate and deter and threaten people who are would-be whistleblowers and transparency activists from coming forward and doing what it is that they do by showing them that they’ll be subjected to even the most extreme punishments and there’s nothing that they can do about it,” he said. “And it’s an effective tactic.”

...The NSA’s goal, Greenwald said, is to “ensure that all forms of human communication... are collected, monitored, stored and analyzed by that agency and by their allies.”

I just happen to be reading Stephen Kinzer's great new book on John Foster and Allen Dulles, The Brothers and Kinzer provides ample examples throughout the chapters dealing with Allen Dulles' role as CIA director of how he inaugurated the policies of subverting and coopting the media. Thursday we saw how he was able to get a NY Times reporter fired for reporting the inconvenient truth about Guatemala, just as the CIA was about the launch a covert war against that country and replace the democratically-elected president with a brutal fascist dictator more in line with CIA ideals. As Kinzer explained, the Dulles brothers, under the protection of President Eisenhower, were able to create "a nexus of power unmatched in American history."

Law prohibited the CIA from operating within the United States, but Allen interpreted it loosely. He sought to shape coverage of world events in the American press through calls to editors and publishers... Perhaps the most imaginative media operation was taking control of the animated film version of George Orwell's anti-totalitarian classic Animal Farm. The book's ending, in which animals realize that both ruling groups in the barnyard are equally corrupt, is a trenchant rejection of the binary worldview. Allen realized that this message implicitly contradicted much of what the United States was saying about the Cold War. By investing in the film and influencing its content through a team of operatives who included E. Howard Hunt... he arranged for the film version to end quite differenty. Only the pigs are corrupt, and ultimately patriotic rebels overthrow them. Orwell's widow was disgusted, but the film reached a wide audience. The United States Information Agency distributed it around the world.

Republicans always seek to fight totalitarianism-- or at least the kind that endangers American corporate profits-- with... what elese? totalitarianism. The Dulles brothers may have made it standard operating procedure for the American government, but Obama sure isn't doing anything to ameliorate a problem that got very much out of control under the Cheney-Bush administration.

Is Enough Ever Enough For The Deluded American Voter?

You may have noticed that the latest polls show have completely turned around from October when voters were furious at Republicans for shutting down the government and were reporting 50-42% that they planned to back Democrats in 2014. Republicans have now opened a 49-44% lead over Democrats in this generic polling. (Due to gerrymandering, for Democrats to actually win back the House, they would have to be leading the GOP by a minimum of 10 points in the national poll. Being down by 5% is potentially catastrophic.) As expected, Democrats are far less enthusiastic about voting next year-- which is precisely what led to the midterm electoral disaster in 2010.

If you follow this blog at all, you know I will be the last person to defend the revolting DC Democratic Establishment who can only ever be considered even relatively acceptable as a product of how terrible the GOP is. Outside of their progressive caucus, the DC Democrats are only marginally better than the Republicans, at best a C-minus compared to an F. Corrupt slime like Steve Israel, Steny Hoyer, Joe Crowley, Debbie Wasserman Schultz deserve the worst. But do the rest of us?

There are barely words to describe the sheer putridness of the Republican Party. They exist, like most conservative parties, to counter democracy and impose the will of an overwhelmingly criminal, self-entitled plutocracy on society. They'd all deserve to be guillotined... if we still sought to solve problems that violently.

The other day a Twitter wag asked who would be heading up the investigation of the serial lies crooked Orange County/San Diego multimillionaire Darrell Issa fed the media and the American public about Benghazi in the pursuit of partisan gain and American disunity. (The answer is no one... there will be no investigation-- other than the exhaustive one David Kirkpatrick wrote up for the NY Times Saturday.) It's long and you can click that link and read the whole thing. A few excerpts, that should be entered as evidence in the rial of Darrell Issa and the whole Republican DC Establishment:

Months of investigation by the New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

A fuller accounting of the attacks suggests lessons for the United States that go well beyond Libya. It shows the risks of expecting American aid in a time of desperation to buy durable loyalty, and the difficulty of discerning friends from allies of convenience in a culture shaped by decades of anti-Western sentiment. Both are challenges now hanging over the American involvement in Syria’s civil conflict.

The attack also suggests that, as the threats from local militants around the region have multiplied, an intensive focus on combating Al Qaeda may distract from safeguarding American interests.

...Members of the local militia groups that the Americans called on for help proved unreliable, even hostile. The fixation on Al Qaeda might have distracted experts from more imminent threats. Those now look like intelligence failures.

More broadly, Mr. Stevens, like his bosses in Washington, believed that the United States could turn a critical mass of the fighters it helped oust Colonel Qaddafi into reliable friends. He died trying.

Of course, some people always think they know better than people who do careful investigations because they feel it in their gut or because it fits their worldview-- be it Republican or Zionist. On Meet the Press today, David Kirkpatrick stated flatly, "There's just no chance that this was an al Qaeda attack. It was an armed terrorist attack motivated in large part by the video." No one should have been surprised that Darrell Issa, who has lied about everything in his life since he was a youngster and was arrested several times for car theft, arson-for-hire, fraud and various other felonies before being drafted by the Republican Party to run for for Congress, disputed Kirkpatrick's thorough investigation. And it was certainly no surprise when the warmonger head of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers (R-MI), disputed the investigation on Fox News Sunday. What may have astounded some viewers-- viewers who haven't followed the bug-eyed little worm's career-- is that Adam Schiff (D-West Hollywood, Burbank, Silverlake, Los Feliz, Hollywood, Glendale), one of Congress' most pathetic agents of the Israeli government, also disputed the Times investigation. Worm: "I don't think it's complete... I don't think either paradigm is really accurate here. Intelligence indicates al Qaeda was involved."

When will the United States ever learn that you can't buy "friends" with bribes? I doubt Allen Dulles, Eisenhower's CIA chief, later fired by JFK when it was no longer possible to persuade anyone he was anything but severely senile, was the first policy maker to employ bribery of foreign leaders and groups as a key component of American "diplomacy." Throughout Stephen Kinzer's book on the Dulles brothers, The Brothers, there are reports of Allen Dulles wasting tens of millions of dollars without compunction trying to bribe everyone from members of the French Cabinet, to the Italian Mafia, gangs in Tehran and Saigon, Christian leaders willing to help him with his extremist plots, members of every fascist junta that managed to overthrown a democracy during the '50s to the king of Saudi Arabia, the mother of the king of Jordan, the members of an international tribune in Geneva and the Pakistani military. He was so breathtakingly incompetent that nothing ever worked for him except bribery-- and the bribery, of course, only worked in the short term. One of Kinzer's many descriptions of him that peppers the book:

Allen was a poor administrator. Many around him also noted a lack of intellectual engagement. He often turned aside probing discussion by telling a story, or musing about his favorite baseball team, the Washington Senators. His mind was undisciplined. By one accounted he "seemed almost scatterbrained. A senior British agent who worked with him for years recalled being "seldom able to penetrate beyond his laugh, or to conduct any serious professional conversation with him for more than a few sentences."

Bribery was all Dulles, an inbred, self-entitled Republican, ever knew how to do. And it's a policy the U.S. still practices to this day, rarely with any kind of lasting impact for the good of anyone concerned. And, of course, there was this:



It's not unrelated to point out Joseph Stiglitz's OpEd in today's NY Times, bemoaning a society where elites behave as though everyone else is a commodity to buy and sell. He could be well describing a domestic version of he Allen Dulles mentality-- and his strategy that everything boils down to the brutal power of cash without honor or dignity.

Economic inequality, political inequality, and an inequality-promoting legal system all mutually reinforce one another. We get a legal system that provides privileges to the rich and powerful. Occasionally, individual egregious behavior is punished (Bernard L. Madoff comes to mind); but none of those who headed our mighty banks are held accountable.

As always, it is the poor and the unconnected who suffer most from this, and who are the most repeatedly deceived. Nowhere was this more evident than in the foreclosure crisis. The subprime mortgage hawkers, putting themselves forward as experts in finance, assured unqualified borrowers that repayment would be no problem. Later millions would lose their homes. The banks figured out how to get court affidavits signed by the thousands (in what came to be called robo-signing), certifying that they had examined their records and that these particular individuals owed money-- and so should be booted out of their homes. The banks were lying on a grand scale, but they knew that if they didn’t get caught, they would walk off with huge profits, their officials’ pockets stuffed with bonuses. And if they did get caught, their shareholders would be left paying the tab. The ordinary homeowner simply didn’t have the resources to fight them. It was just one example among many in the wake of the crisis where banks were seemingly immune to the rule of law.

I’ve written about many dimensions of inequality in our society-- inequality of wealth, of income, of access to education and health, of opportunity. But perhaps even more than opportunity, Americans cherish equality before the law. Here, inequality has infected the heart of our ideals.

I suspect there is only one way to really get trust back. We need to pass strong regulations, embodying norms of good behavior, and appoint bold regulators to enforce them. We did just that after the roaring ’20s crashed; our efforts since 2007 have been sputtering and incomplete. Firms also need to do better than skirt the edges of regulations. We need higher norms for what constitutes acceptable behavior, like those embodied in the United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. But we also need regulations to enforce these norms-- a new version of trust but verify. No rules will be strong enough to prevent every abuse, yet good, strong regulations can stop the worst of it.

Strong values enable us to live in harmony with one another. Without trust, there can be no harmony, nor can there be a strong economy. Inequality in America is degrading our trust. For our own sake, and for the sake of future generations, it’s time to start rebuilding it. That this even requires pointing out shows how far we have to go.

File Under: What If...

If you're following the narrative on the blog with any regularity over the week, you probably noticed we've been taking a close look at Stephen Kinzer's brilliant new book, The Brothers, an intense look at the two worst and most destructive arch-villains in 20th Century American history. Having a major international airport named after John Foster Dulles is a slap in the face to all Americans who revere democracy and detest the aggressive fascism he espoused his entire miserable life.

The Dulles brothers had just finished deposing the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mosadegh, and we getting ready to do the same to the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, when the 13th Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Fred Vinson had a heart attack and died. Eisenhower immediately offered his Secretary of State, former sleazy Wall Street lawyer, Foster Dulles, the position. Dulles immediately turned him down. He had monsters to slay all over the world and had no time for Justice, not even a chance to pervert it. Kinzer speculates that "Foster's decision to remain as secretary of state opened the way for the appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice. If he had decided otherwise and left the State Department, Allen would undoubtably have continued to press the anti-Arbenz project. Whether another secretary of state would have shared his passion for it is an intriguing question for which there can be no answer." And that's true. But, had he been interested in domestic matters rather than international affairs, Kinzer could have taken the other fork for speculation, one for which there are plenty of answers: what if John Foster Dulles, a dull-minded bigot and fascist operative, had become the Chief Justice instead of Earl Warren? America would be a very different place today, a far worse one.

Warren, who had served 3 terms as the Republican governor of California (although he was also nominated by the Democrats for reelection), served as Chief Justice from 1953 until 1969. He was one of the three or four most impactful Chief Justices in American History and there isn't a single decision he is best known for-- from Brown v Board of Education in 1954 to Miranda v Arizona in 1966-- that Foster Dulles would have agreed with. Both men were Republicans and elitists but Dulles was the preeminent American reactionary of his time and Warren was a lifelong idealist and progressive.

In fact, Warren turned out to be so unabashedly progressive on the Court-- and so persuasive in terms of forging a liberal activist majority on the Court-- that Eisenhower came to rue the day he ever appointed him. Eisenhower is said to have remarked that appointing him was "the biggest fool mistake I ever made," although this may be a right-wing myth.

Dulles would have never voted to desegregate American schools, the decision Warren is probably most well-known for. And Dulles, a dedicated anti-democracy fanatic certainly would never have championed the two big "one man, one vote" cases by which Warren ended the dominance of rural areas in state legislatures. Although conservatives in Congress frantically tried to pass a Constitutional Amendment to overrule Warren, they failed. "To the extent that a citizen's right to vote is debased, he is that much less a citizen," explained Warren defiantly. "The weight of a citizen's vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives. This is the clear and strong command of our Constitution's Equal Protection Clause." Had he been in a position to, John Foster Dulles would have ended universal suffrage entirely and gone back to a system in which only wealthy, white, male, property owners could vote.

In 1963, Warren's progressivism helped shaped the Gideon v Wainwright decision that requires that indigent defendants are entitled to legal counsel paid for by the government. Other Warren Court decisions that Dulles would have never allowed to slip through outlawed mandatory school prayer and enshrined a doctrine of privacy that led to abortion rights (Griswold v Connecticut).

Will Obama's Covert Actions In Egypt Haunt America In Future Decades The Way Eisenhower's Covert Actions In Iran Haunt Us Today?

Everyone blames Nazi-sympathizer John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State, and his bumbling and incompetent brother, Allen, head of the CIA, for the unintended consequences brought on by the violent CIA overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh. History blames them-- and history was meant to blame them. Eisenhower's fingers are nowhere near any of that stuff-- only on his revered speech warning Americans about the Military-Industrial Complex. Eisenhower, who desperately wanted a cheap "victory" against communism, is more to blame than the venal Dulles brothers. He bought in to the fabrication-- a direct precursor of the Big Lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction-- that the anti-Communist Mosaddegh was a Soviet puppet or, when that became too implausible even for the most simpleminded of foreign policy observers, that he was so weak that the Soviets could and soon would overthrow him... and the next step would be landings in Omaha and Salt Lake City.

Eisenhower cut taxes on the rich and paid for that, in part, with slashing the Pentagon budget, primarily shrinking the size of the military. But he decided it would be cheaper and more effective to use covert wars against fifth-rate powers to project a sense of supposed American omnipotence around the world. The effects of the policy were an unmitigated disaster that is still playing out in Iran, the Congo, Cuba and several other countries. It was such an unmitigated disaster that Obama seems to have embraced an updated version of the dreadful strategy in, among other places, Egypt. We'll get back to Egypt in a moment. This is from Stephen Kinzer's fantastic new book about the Dulles brothers, The Brothers.

"Moscow's involvement with Iran was negligible," the historian Richard Immerman later concluded, but [Foster] Dulles could not distinguish between indigenous nationalism and imported communism."

..."Eisenhower participated in none of the meetings that set up Ajax [the overthrow of Mosaddegh's popular government and the installation of a repressive fascist dictatorship]; he received only oral reports on the plan; and he did not discuss it with his cabinet or the NSA," Stephen Ambrose wrote in his biography of Eisenhower. "Establishing a pattern he would hold to throughout his presidency, he kept his distance and left no documents behind that could implicate the President in any proposed coup. But in the privacy of the Oval Office, over cocktails, he was kept informed by Foster Dulles, and he maintained a tight control over the activities of the CIA."

Wednesday, the NY Times reported that the Obama-backed repressive military junta that overthrew Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has now outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a very big deal and it is bound to play out over decades.

Egypt’s military-backed leaders on Wednesday designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, outlawing the country’s most successful political movement and vowing to treat anyone who belongs to it, or even takes part in its activities, as a terrorist.

Egypt’s leaders have been in conflict with the movement since July, when the military deposed Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president and a former Brotherhood leader. State forces have killed hundreds of the group’s supporters during protests against Mr. Morsi’s removal. Most of its leaders and thousands of its members have been imprisoned.

Now, with Wednesday’s decision, the government signaled its determination to cut off any air to the more than 80-year-old Islamist organization.

Analysts said the designation opened the door to the most severe crackdown on the movement in decades, requiring hundreds of thousands of Brotherhood members to abandon the group or face prison, and granting the military and the police new authority to suppress protests. The decision makes it a crime to promote the Brotherhood and could also outlaw hundreds of welfare and charitable organizations affiliated with the movement that help Egyptians with little access to government services.

The move came a day after officials blamed the Brotherhood for a suicide bombing at a police headquarters north of Cairo that killed 16 people, though on Wednesday a separate group-- Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, which has derided the Brotherhood for its lack of militancy-- claimed responsibility for that bombing.

The government was not swayed. In announcing the designation, it again blamed the Brotherhood for bombing the police headquarters, without supplying evidence that the Brotherhood was responsible.

Officials framed their decision as part of a long struggle between the state and a militant movement, making no mention of the Brotherhood’s more recent emergence as the most successful force in democratic elections after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. “The Muslim Brotherhood remains as it has been,” the cabinet said in a statement. “It only knows violence as a tool.”

The designation represented a victory for government hard-liners who have sought to eradicate the Brotherhood since the military’s ouster of Mr. Morsi in July and who cast doubt on the repeated promises by officials of an inclusive, democratic transition. It appeared to set Egypt, which has been in crisis since the military takeover, on an even more precarious course.

Khalil al-Anani, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington who studies the Brotherhood, called the designation “a turning point” and said it could lead Egypt to a civil conflict like the one in Algeria in the 1990s.

“This is a big miscalculation from the government,” he said. “It is a massive social movement, whose supporters might retaliate or fight back.”

With most of the Brotherhood’s senior leaders already imprisoned, he said, “there is a lack of communication between the leadership and young Brotherhood members. And these people can be dragged to the violent path.”

With the decision on Wednesday, the current government moved against the group even more aggressively than had been the case under Mr. Mubarak, who ruled for three decades before being deposed by the uprising in 2011. In the Mubarak era, the Brotherhood was banned and its leaders were imprisoned, but some members could participate in politics, and the group’s social organizations and charities were permitted to operate.

Mr. Anani said that the cabinet decision would not have been announced without the blessing of the military and the powerful defense chief, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi. The military was giving the police “carte blanche,” he said. “They don’t have a political solution,” he said.

In a statement, the cabinet said that the authorities would punish anyone who joined the Brotherhood or remained a member, as well as “those who take part in the activity” of the group or “promotes it by speech, writing or any other means and all those who fund its activities.” The law mandates a maximum five-year sentence for joining a banned group, but allows judges to impose lengthier sentences if terrorism is involved.

The Times dug deeper Thursday as the junta went on the offensive against Brotherhood members, announcing "dozens of arrests across the country, and the seizure of land, stocks and vehicles belonging to the Islamist movement’s members."

Social and charitable groups even loosely associated with the group struggled after their funds were frozen by the state. It was a new level of disruption to a society already riven by violence and suspicion in the months since the military ousted Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president and a Brotherhood leader.

Egypt’s new leaders clearly signaled that they had opened a wide-ranging and possibly protracted war on every facet of the Brotherhood’s activities, with the terrorism designation giving the security forces greater latitude to stamp out a group deeply rooted in Egyptian social and civic life. The government had also sought to deny the group foreign help or shelter, urging other Arab governments to honor an antiterrorism agreement and shun the organization.

...The defense minister, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, set the official tone, vowing to eradicate those who try to harm Egypt from “the face of the Earth,” according to a statement released by the military.

“Don’t let these treacherous terrorist incidents affect you or your spirits,” he said, speaking of recent bombings by militants for which the government has blamed the Brotherhood. “We’re on the side of pronounced righteousness.”

The police announced the first arrests under the terror designation, charging 16 Brotherhood supporters in Sharqiya Province with belonging to a terrorist group. That charge carries a five-year prison sentence, the Interior Ministry said, but leaders of the Brotherhood potentially face execution.

Now let's skip back to an interview Terry Gross of NPR did with Kinzer in October. "The way you describe it, John Foster Dulles, as secretary of state, plotted a new kind of war; and then Allen Dulles, as head of the CIA, waged those wars covertly. So describe what their working relationship was when plotting to overthrow leaders they thought opposed what was in America's best interest," asked Gross.

KINZER: We have very little written record of the relationship between the two of them. And the reason is, they would speak on the phone several times a day; they would meet after work sometimes or on weekends; and it just took a wink or a nod, sometimes literally, for these huge operations to be carried out. They had the full blessing of President Eisenhower, and they didn't do anything behind his back. But he gave them, more or less, free rein, and they functioned as kind of two jaws of a serpent that are kind of not connected but working towards the same goal. Foster Dulles would provide the diplomatic backdrop and the political motivation that American citizens would hear, and then Allen would carry out the operation secretly.

GROSS: What were the major coups or overthrows they engineered?

KINZER: I think the main theme of this book that is new is that during the 1950s - which according to most histories, was a period of peace in the world - actually, we were involved in a continual secret war. Nobody noticed it because it was covert. I use this phrase monsters to describe the enemies that the Dulles brothers struck out against. That's a word that John Quincy Adams used in a famous speech, when he said America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. But the Dulles brothers did.

They saw enemies everywhere, and they waged one war after another, in a sense merging these into one single conflict. The first two monsters they struck out against were people against whom they had grudges from their days as corporate lawyers. Their job was to protect the interests of big American corporations in foreign countries, and in 1951they failed twice.

Two of their major clients were attacked by foreign leaders, and they couldn't do anything to protect their clients. In Guatemala, the United Fruit Company, which was a longtime client of the Dulles brothers, was affected by a land reform law. And around the same time, the government of Iran nationalized its oil industry, and the oil company that they nationalized had used as its financial agent a bank that the Dulles brothers represented and on whose board Allen Dulles sat.

So this represented an unaccustomed failure for the Dulles brothers. They developed deep grudges against President Arbenz of Guatemala and Prime Minister Mosaddegh of Iran. They carried those grudges into office, and within the first 18 months of their terms in office, they had disposed of both of those leaders. So those were the first two.

Then they began developing new ideas of who the real monsters in the world were. In my book I talk about their efforts to foment civil war in Indonesia; their terribly tragic decision to get involved in Vietnam, which led to the entire American war there; and their actions against Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in The Congo and Fidel Castro in Cuba.

There were some others that they were interested in trying to topple, like Nassir in Egypt and Nehru in India, all of them believers in neutralism, which was a horrible concept to the Dulles brothers, but those operations didn't succeed, and we are now living with the legacies of both their failed operations and their successful ones.

GROSS: Yeah, we'll get to some of the legacies a little bit later. When you say neutralism, they saw the world as divided between communism and the free world, and if a country was neutral, why was that a bad thing?

KINZER: Actually, President Sukarno asked that question to Foster Dulles, and Dulles told him our policy is global. He even used the word immoral to describe the concept of neutralism. He believed that everything that happened in the world during the 1950s was part of the Cold War.

For example, it wasn't conceivable to him that land reform in Guatemala could be a project that Guatemalans had designed to deal with a Guatemalan situation. He just assumed that it had been ordered by the Kremlin. They had this view of the world, which I think was implanted in them from a very young age, that there's good and evil, and it's the obligation of the good people to go out into the world and destroy the evil ones.

...They had no concept of what we now call blowback. They had no idea that operations that seemed successful at first might have terrible long-term effects that wouldn't even be visible for decades, or even generations.

...The prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and the parliament of Iran decided in the early 1950s to nationalize their oil industry. That was a challenge not only to the oil industry worldwide but to the entire economic system by which the world was ruled. That system was based on the idea that corporations in rich countries had the right to extract resources from poor countries and find markets in poor countries.

And it also assumed that those companies should have the right to operate in those countries under rules that they themselves set. So Mosaddegh's nationalization of the oil industry was profound. In addition, it directly affected a key Dulles brothers client, that was the Schroder Bank, which was a bank on which Allen Dulles served as a board member, and both of the brothers represented it.

So that bank lost a huge client in Iran when Mosaddegh nationalized his oil industry. As a result, they saw Mosaddegh as a challenge to the stability of the world. Why? Because he didn't allow large international companies, in this case Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, to operate freely in Iran. The Dulles brothers were terribly afraid of the precedent this might set.

They could not let anyone get away with tinkering with the system that allowed large corporations to operate freely in weak countries. They saw Mosaddegh as a challenge, and they felt that if they let him get away with it, the entire edifice of the way the world economy was run might crumble.

...What would happen, and this happened in Iran and almost simultaneously in Guatemala, Is that John Foster Dulles would make speeches to the American people explaining that dangerous forces were at work in Country X. He wouldn't say what we were going to do about it. In fact he always denied that we had done anything about it.

But while he was creating the public climate in which Americans would come to sense Country X as an enemy, his brother would be actively working to bring down that government. Foster Dulles' role was to tell Americans that huge numbers of people in Iran opposed Mosaddegh, or huge numbers of people in Guatemala opposed Arbenz. That wasn't true in either case.

However, when Allen Dulles and the CIA brought those governments down, Foster Dulles was then able to complete the circle by going on television and saying the people of Country X have done just what we thought they might do. They've risen up to overthrow their tyrant. So he was certainly not above distorting what had really happened, and in fact he specifically said in his television address after the overthrow of the Guatemalan government the problem was solved by the people of Guatemala themselves.

This was completely untrue; he knew that. The problem had been solved by Allen Dulles. But Americans didn't know that and didn't realize it for decades.

Ironic that Obama is working to clean up the mess Eisenhower (and the Dulles brothers) left us in Iran 60 years ago, even while he is making a mess in Egypt for a future president to clean up.

Painted in 1954 by Diego Rivera, Glorious Victory has as its subject the infamous CIA coup in Guatemala of the same year. At the center of the mural, CIA Director John Foster Dulles is shaking hands with the newly installed U.S. puppet, Colonel Castillo Armas. Resting at their feet is an anthropomorphized bomb bearing the smile of President Eisenhower. Allen Dulles and the U.S. Ambassador are handing out money to members of the fascist junta as Mayan workers salve away loading bananas onto a United Fruit Company ship.

Republican War On Christmas Might Be Over For The Year, But Their War Against Women Never Ends

Sometimes we cover the Republican War on Women, and invariably some pompous Republican asshat denies that there's any such thing. But it's very real and very serious and profoundly undemocratic. And it's got to stop. I've been reading The Brothers, Stephen Kinzer's much-acclaimed book about the two most venal Republicans who lived in any of our lifetimes, John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, two deeply corrupt men-- in terms of using government office for self-enrichment-- the former the most destructive Secretary of State in American history and the latter, the bumbling head of the CIA. They founded the Council on Foreign Relations and refused to admit any women. In fact, no woman was ever admitted until a year after both were in their graves (1970).

It wasn't a whim; it's how they were raised and it's part of what made them Republicans-- and two of the most influential Republicans of the Twentieth Century. Even before Foster became the prototype for the modern-day lobbyist, the young men were completely disdainful of women. Using family connections, both weaseled their way into the Peace Conference in Paris that ended World War I. Their uncle, Robert Lansing, was Wilson's mediocre Secretary of State. That turned out to be fortuitous for them-- though not for their sister Eleanor. She was eager to get in on the action in Paris as well.

She had asked "Uncle Bert" to find her a useful position in the post-war relief effort, but he dismissed her, saying that the only way a woman could contribute would be by knitting socks. Infuriated, she paid her own way to Europe and went to work for a Quaker reilef group that was building homes for refugees along the Marne River.

Lansing was a conservative, but a conservative Democrat. It was his two nephews who joined the GOP and who brought their inbred misogyny to its upper reaches. Neither Dulles brother had close relationships with any of their children, but a story Kinzer relates early in the book will give you more of an idea about the formative state of the Republican war on women.

Foster's middle child, Lillias, offended her father's sense of order by announcing that she wished to attend college and, like her aunt Eleanor, make a career for herself. Foster believed education spoiled women and disapproved. "He didn't want her to learn anything, except maybe the feminine charms, which he thought she lacked," Eleanor later wrote. Finally Lillias persuaded her father to allow her to attend Bennington College, which he mistakenly believed to be a finishing school... "His work [overthrowing governments around the world and making millions along the way] was very important to him, and he felt a real sense of obligation toward colleagues and subordinates," Eleanor wrote of her elder brother. "He couldn't neglect them for his children."

His attitude of disdain for women and his embrace of a narrow, air-less and tightly ordered world, ultimately lend him to embrace fascism. His firm did more business with Nazi Germany than any other firm in America. He was a staunch admirer, like so many from his class and upbringing, of Hitler. Starting in 1933, all letters from the German offices of Cromwell & Sullivan the biggest law firm in America, over which he presided, were signed with the salutation "Heil Hitler."

The firm brokered a trillion dollars (in 2013 dollars) in loans to the Hitler regime-- most of which had to be written off by his clients. Kinzer called him "the preeminent salesman of German bonds in the United States, probably the world. He sharply rejected critics who argued that American banks should invest more inside the United States, and protested when the State Department sought to restrict loans to Germany... 'Without Dulles,' according to a study of Sullivan & Cromwell, 'Germany would have lacked any negotiating strength with [the International Nickel cartel], which controlled the world's supply of nickel, a crucial ingredient in stainless steel and armor plate.' [He and the Nazi Finance Minister Hjalmar Schacht, were extremely close.] Like Dulles, he projected an air of brisk authority. He was tall, gaunt, and always erect, with close-cropped hair and high, tight collars. Both men had considered entering the clergy before turning their powerful minds toward more remunerative pursuits. [Foster] fought successfully to block Canada's effort to restrict the eexport of steel to German arms makers."

Foster had clear financial reasons to collaborate with the Nazi regime, and his ideological reason-- Hitler was fiercely anti-Bolshevik-- was equally compelling. In later years scholars would ask about his actions in the world. Did he do it out of a desire to protect economic privilege, or out of an anti-Communist fervor? The best answer might be that to him there was no difference. In his mind defending multinational business and fighting Bolshevism were the same thing.

...This put Foster at odds not only with Allen but also with their sister Eleanor, who had traveled to Nazi Germany and was horrified by what she saw. She appealed to Foster to change his mind, but he never took her seriously and told her she was "working herself up" over nothing.

She was right, of course, and he was tragically, horrifyingly wrong. But the Republican Party missed that lesson and that message and they just stuck with the age-old conservative values that demean and denigrate women as little more than property for the pleasure and convenience of men. And like most misogynists, Foster Dulles was also homophobic. He helped establish the Republican Party as a bastion of hatred and bigotry against gay people. Partially the placate a deranged and alcoholic Senator McCarthy-- his day's Ted Cruz-- Dulles moved against gay people working in the State Department.

During his first weeks in office, Foster dismissed twenty-three diplomats as security risks, apparently after being told that they might be homosexual.