Chris Christie Owes His Victory To . . . The Dulles Brothers' Secret Policy Of Flooding New Jersey With Eastern European Nazi War Criminals!

On Christmas Eve I was living in a riad in Marrakech's ancient medina, reading a new book by former U.S. government prosecutor and Army intelligence officer John Loftus, America's Nazi Secret. The book, which systematically reveals-- in great detail-- a conspiracy to import Nazi war criminals (and not atomic scientists, just murderous thugs) into the United States, is shocking. Because of the current repression crisis in Belarus, the country that is a focus of Loftus' book, it seemed like a good topic to write about, and when I got home I called Loftus to follow up on a few topics he had raised but hadn't gone into in depth.

Before I get into my conversation with Loftus, let me quote from the epilogue of America's Nazi Secret. Keep in mind that he's referring to New Jersey here, not some faraway, quaint banana republic in Eastern Europe.

March 25 is the traditional National Day of the Byelorussians of South River.

On the Sunday closest to that date-- which marks the anniversary of the proclamation of the Byelorussian National Republic in 1918-- they gather at the Byelorussian-America Club on Whitehead Avenue to celebrate. Some of the girls and women wear brightly colored national costumes, and there is dancing, drinking and feasting.

On most days the club is almost empty except for a few old men drinking in the bar, but there are some interesting customers. One of them had thrown small children into a well and dropped hand grenades on them. A frequent visitor to the club has been an executioner at the death camp at Koldichevo. Another club patron teased a visitor known to be squeamish about the Holocaust by picking up a cleaver and hacking at some lunch meats. "I wish these were Jews," he declared.

The old men of South River have achieved a certain respectability. In 1978, the New Jersey American Revolution Bicentennial Celebration Commission published an Ethnic Directory of New Jersey. Heading the five pages of Byelorussian organizations were the American Friends of Byelorussia Central Council. It's president was listed as Emanuel Jasiuk [a notorious Nazi war criminal].

Radoslaw Ostrowsky [an even more notorious Nazi war criminal] had finally emigrated to America too. There is no controversy concerning his entry, but his file shows that at the time he applied for citizenship in 1972, the INS was notified of Ostrowsky's complete Nazi background. After considerable consultation among the various intelligence services, the INS noted in his file that he "appears to have been involved in some sort of espionage activity." A reporter for a New Jersey newspaper who learned that Ostrowsky was living in the United States asked the Immigration Service if the rumors were true. The INS noted on the letter that it had no record of any such individual, but filed it in Ostrowsky's folder. When the reporter came back in 1975 with several variants of the spelling of Ostrowsky's name [like Radaslau Astrouski, though none of which were Mendoza, Gomez, Valdez, Perez, Garcia, Martinez, Hernandez, Ruiz, Lopez, Ramirez, Espinoza, or Gonzalez] the INS put that in the folder too, along with the note that the reporter had been advised by telephone that the INS had concluded a full investigation which cleared Ostrowsky completely. And so one of the highest-ranking Nazi war criminals to enter this country lived on undisturbed until his death in 1979.

The old men of South River might have been more circumspect if they had realized that despite the clean bill of health reluctantly given them by the General Accounting Office, another investigation was closing in on them.

Or might they not have been? After all, the Whitehead Avenue hall that the CIA [OPC] built for the Byelorussian Nazi war criminals now also serves as a Republican Party headquarters and when the Nazis and their spawn helped propel ideological brother Chris Christie into the governor's office-- along with a GOP takeover of the local government-- the Byelorussian-America Club on Whitehead Avenue is where Republicans and Nazis gathered to celebrate last year.

Loftus' entire book is fascinating, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. There are a few parts, though, that are particularly relevant for the DWT community.



The Dulles Brothers, at the nexus of Wall Street, the intelligence community, the Republican Party and dangerously inept Cold War jingoism, overrode President Truman's and Congress' ban on allowing Nazi war criminals into the country, let alone employing them-- purging their records and getting them U.S. citizenship. John Foster Dulles, who now shamefully has an airport named after him near our nation's capital, was complicit steeped in Wall Street backing for prewar Hitler and was at all times looking out for the interests of the wealthy Republican investors who invested in him, particularly the Rockefellers and the Bushes. They had decided to bring their Nazi cronies to the U.S. once Truman was defeated by Dewey.

When Truman didn't play his assigned role, they did it anyway, and then when the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket was elected, the floodgates opened, and New Jersey, among a few other states, became a sanctuary for Nazi collaborators and war criminals from Eastern Europe. Nixon saw them as a counterbalance to the hated Jews, who always voted for the Democrats, and Eisenhower gave him supervisory powers over the operations to bring them to America. Ironically, many of them had been infiltrated by the Russian Communists and the entire program was an absolute disaster, bringing the U.S. no Cold War benefits whatsoever and costing the country hundreds of millions of dollars, but, eventually, helping elect Republican rightists from Nixon to Christie. These are the topics I talked with Loftus a few days ago.

For one thing, I wanted to know how much of the motivation for flooding New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, etc. with anti-Semitic Nazi war criminals, many of whom had personally taken part in the Holocaust, from Byelorussia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, etc. had to do with Wall Street greed and how much had to do with the ideological kinship between Germany's and America's right-wing parties, the Nazis and the Republicans. Loftus told me:

My guess is it was 90 percent greed, as they funded the infant Bolshevik and Nazi parties simultaneously. In fact, Hitler knew the robber barons preferred the conservative and Catholic parties over the Nazis, so that is why he banned foreign ownership of German companies, which forced the robber barons to enact the Swiss Bank Secrecy Act of 1933. In the upcoming film American Secrets we document how the Auschwitz industrial park was originally a Russian-German partnership funded by the robber barons of Wall Street.

But what about Nixon?

Nixon always blamed the Jews for his narrow loss to JFK, and tasked George H.W. Bush as co-director of the RNC to recruit the Eastern European groups... [T]he GOP still uses the old Arab Nazi network, the Muslim Brotherhood. That is why we are the only Western nation not to list the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group. The second-generation Muslim Brotherhood members [Al Arian, Alamoudi, etc.] delivered Florida for Bush II against Gore. Nixon's Nazi dream come true.

Especially interesting coming from the past president of the Florida Holocaust Museum. But it's funny how when things like these are covered up and we "move on," they just repeat themselves over and over.

UPDATE: Times Didn't Quite Get The Story Right

In mid-December the NY Times ran a piece by Sam Roberts, Declassified Papers Show U.S. Recruited Ex-Nazis. It was a baby step in the right direction, but it didn't go all the way to exposing the conspiracy or the on-going coverup.

After World War II, American counterintelligence recruited former Gestapo officers, SS veterans and Nazi collaborators to an even greater extent than had been previously disclosed and helped many of them avoid prosecution or looked the other way when they escaped, according to thousands of newly declassified documents.

...The report, “Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence and the Cold War,” grew out of an interagency group created by Congress to identify, declassify and release federal records on Nazi war crimes and on Allied efforts to hold war criminals accountable. It is drawn from a sampling of 1,100 C.I.A files and 1.2 million Army counterintelligence files that were not declassified until after the group issued its final report in 2007.

“Hitler’s Shadow” adds a further dimension to a separate Justice Department history of American Nazi-hunting operations, which the government has refused to release since 2006 and which concluded that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for certain other former Nazis.

Like earlier reports generated by the group, this one paints a grim portrait of bureaucracy, turf wars and communication gaps among intelligence agencies. It also details blatantly cynical self-interested tactical decisions by Allied governments and a general predisposition that some war crimes by former Nazis and their collaborators should be overlooked because the suspects could be transformed into valuable assets in the more urgent undercover campaigns against Soviet aggression.

The American intelligence effort to infiltrate the East German Communist Party was dubbed “Project Happiness.”

“Tracking and punishing war criminals were not high among the Army’s priorities in late 1946,” the report says. Instead, it concludes that the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps spied on suspect groups ranging from German Communists to politically active Jewish refugees in camps for displaced people and also “went to some lengths to protect certain persons from justice.”

DWT has obtained a copy of a letter Loftus wrote to the Times after publication of the misleading, half-baked Justice Department report and just before the Times published it's own latest, uncritical coverage.

I am a former Justice Department Attorney with code word Top Secret clearances. The recent Nazi report which you published was written by DOJ to discredit my 1985 congressional testimony (see chapter 5) accusing the Justice Department itself of sponsoring the immigration of Nazi war criminals. I was threatened with imprisonment by Mark Richards and others if I ever revealed the names of living Nazis like Mykola Lebed. Lebed has since died and the CIA had declassified his files. I am ready to talk.

Lebed was the head of the Ukrainian version of the Gestapo, the Sluzhpa Beshpa or SB, wich recruited Nazi collabroators for the OUN/Bandera movement and the SS. He was arguably the highest ranking Nazi war criminal ever to enter the United States. His troops murdered Simon Wiesenthal's mother.

Lebed was personaly sponsored for immigration under an intelligence stautute by the Attorney General of the United States, without President Truman's knowledge.

His SB members were also allowed into the country by Justice on the grounds they were running an asssinaton program inside the Soviet Union that had killed 35,000 communists.

In 1985, the Justice Department falsely told the CIA, GAO, and Congress that Lebed was a leader of the Anti-Nazi resistance. Mark Richards knew that eventually I would write a book exposing him as a fraud, and that is why he prepared the report whch you published recently. Coincidentally, my new book, America's Nazi Secret, was just published on Veterans Day, just as the Justice Department released a copy of their report. This is the first time in thirty years I have been able to tell the whole story without government censorship. I would like to speak with you. State and Justice have committed a major fraud on the public.

Who Are America's Old Friends The Muslim Brotherhood?

A natural fit for Fox in the making

About a month ago, we looked at the stunning revelations about the GOP bringing thousands of Eastern European Nazi war criminals illegally into the United States, exposed on John Loftus' latest book, America's Nazi Secret. As I was reading it, I was also struck by Loftus' explanation of the decades-long cozy relationship between right-wing elements of the American foreign policy establishment-- going back to the Dulles Brothers-- and the Nazi-oriented Muslim Brotherhood. In the context of the freedom fighters in Egypt a skeptical Fox News may be demonizing them today but Fox and the Muslim Brotherhood are both extreme right-wing organizations with a great many shared values.

Loftus, who first betrayed the right-wing connections to the Muslim Brotherhood in his book The Secret War Against The Jews, wrote a column this week for Ami Magazine, "Who will be the next Pharaoh?" putting the relationship into the context of what has been playing out nightly on our TVs in Egypt and the Middle East. The column isn't available online but I'll quote a few passages of interest.

On December 30, 2008, The American Ambassador to Cairo transmitted a classified cable describing a meeting with an anonymous Egyptian youth leader. He had been trained in activist techniques by the US Government, and made the startling prediction that Mubarak would be overthrown in 2011. He claimed that “several opposition forces” had formed an alliance against President Mubarak and had “agreed to support an unwritten plan for a transition to a parliamentary democracy, involving a weakened presidency and an empowered prime minister and parliament, before the scheduled 2011 presidential elections.” The embassy’s source said the informant’s plan was “so sensitive it cannot be written down.”

It did not stay secret for long. The low-level State Department code was broken almost immediately by the Chinese. For the next three years, the crypto intelligence division of the People’s Liberation Army tracked the youth leader, and studied his conversations with other Egyptian activists.

...Only a few weeks earlier, China had listened from the shadows as the Tunisian dictatorship tracked the “secret” Facebook plotting of the naïve revolutionaries. Like a false front glued over an ATM cash machine, the Tunisian government created a “false flag” website to steal the Facebook passwords of an entire nation. But the Tunisian dictatorship waited too long. The government was overthrown just before the Facebook conspirators could be arrested. The Egyptian dictator was making the same mistake.

...Like China, Russian intelligence believed that President Mubarak’s days were numbered. The old man‘s health was deteriorating rapidly. After three decades of rule, he no longer had the iron fist needed to maintain his dictatorship. His vain plans to name his western-oriented son Gamal ( “Jimmy” to his western friends) as his successor was so obviously a non-starter. Jimmy would not last a week after his father’s death with all the wolves that were gathering. Russia knew a lot about wolves, and they knew a lot about Egypt.

In fact in a moment of weakness, Jimmy Mubarak had blurted out to the Americans that he feared that two of his father’s confidants would oust him for the Presidency. He had begged his father to get rid of Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of the Armed Forces and General Omar Suleiman, the head of Egyptian intelligence.

To the horror of both father and son, the family plot was about to revealed. Wikileaks, desperate not to be ignored, released an American secret cable reporting Jimmy’s futile plot to have Daddy fire the two most powerful generals in Egypt. In order to protect his son, Mubarak immediately ordered that the internet be closed.

But as the day wore on, it was clear to President Mubarak that he could not protect his weak son forever. The next morning he told General Tantawi to stay on in close control of the Army, and he promoted General Suleiman to Vice President.

The Russians smiled. It was all working out as they planned. Their man now was the lawful successor to President Mubarak.

General Suleiman had received his military training in Moscow. He had been one of the rising red stars in the Egyptian officer corps during the heady days of Nasser’s rule, when Egypt was Russia’s ally against the west. Two disastrous defeats at the hands of the Israeli army had caused some officers like Anwar Sadat to dump the Russians and make peace with Israel and the west, a peace that had endured for thirty five years. Peace was not what Russia wanted. War along the Suez would keep oil
prices (and Russian profits) high.

With secret Russian help, Suleiman had not only endured over the years since Nasser, but had risen to become head of Egyptian intelligence. He bided his time until he could become the new Nasser, and restore Egypt to the glory days of the Russian alliance.

The Russians had a long history of patient meddling in Egypt. In 1928, an Egyptian ultra-rightist named Hassan Al Banna created the Muslim Brotherhood as the umbrella for a pan-Arab Nazi movement. The Brotherhood eventually grew to three quarters of a million members who believed “in heaven Allah, on earth Hitler.”

Hitler returned the adulation, and personally briefed the Brotherhood’s ambassador to Berlin on Nazi plans for the Holocaust, first killing all the Jews in Eastern Europe, then on to North Africa and Palestine. Hitler planned to use the Muslim Brotherhood to recruit several Muslim SS divisions, which Hitler would send to start a Nazi Jihad, an uprising in the soft southern underbelly of the Islamic states of the U.S.S.R.

Russian intelligence knew all along of the Brotherhood’s anti-Russian strategy. For years the COMINTERN had been telling young Egyptians not to support communism in public, but rather pretend to be fanatical Nazis and join the Muslim Brotherhood. All through World War II, Stalin used the Muslim Brotherhood to penetrate and deceive the intelligence service of the Third Reich. Al Banna’s right hand man was an Egyptian communist agent, but he did not know it.

Neither did the British. Kim Philby, a closet communist upper class Englishman posing as a fascist, convinced the British Secret Service to recruit the Muslim Brotherhood as a post war proxy army to crush the infant state of Israel. When Nasser ordered the Muslim Brotherhood into exile, Philby (and his father) convinced the Americans and the Saudis to take them in.

During the cold war, the Eisenhower administration used the Muslim Brotherhood as a proxy army against the Arab communists. During the Reagan administration, Vice President Bush used the aging Arab Nazi movement to recruit a new generation of Mujahedeen in Afghanistan.

Despite the fact that the Brotherhood was the parent organization of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Al Qaeda, America remains the only western power to refuse to declare it a terrorist organization. The gullible Americans even prevailed upon the Egyptians to let the Brotherhood back in. It was a fatal mistake.

The Russians knew that Field Marshall Tantawi was the Pentagon’s choice to replace the Mubarak dynasty. As soon as the revolution erupted, Tantawi had flown to Washington for secret meetings at the White House.

According to the Israelis, Field Marshall Tantawi “warned them that by advocating a soft hand with the demonstrators and responsiveness to their demands, American officials were doing more harm than good. Without a crackdown, he said, the regime was doomed.”

The Obama administration would not back a crackdown to keep Mubarak on the throne. Tantawi was told to keep his army neutral, and let the people vent their wrath on Mubarak (and later against his new protégé, Vice President Suleimani.)

...For the moment, the Americans have decided that non-intervention is best. Let the Egyptian
people decide the future for themselves. Let the Army stay on the sidelines and wait to move against the Muslim Brotherhood when they show their hand. Democracy will triumph in the end.

Yes, the Israelis say. Just like in Gaza, where an election brought the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas faction to power.

“Maj.-Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser, and a senior research fellow at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), said, "There's a reasonable chance that if a revolution takes place in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood would rise to power. That would be bad not just for Israel but for all democracies." The true struggle in Egypt was not between "Mubarak and pro-democracy elements, but between Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood," Eiland said. Shlomo Brom, director of the program on Israel-Palestinian relations at the INSS, said, "We can't forget that in Iran, at the end of the 1970s, the uprising against the shah was led by [pro-democracy] youths who took to the streets-- but this was taken over by Islamists in the end." (Jerusalem Post)

For the time being, Israelis politicians are biting their tongues and praying that this time, the Americans are right.

And Loftus isn't alone among historians, as opposed to cable news anchors, who knows something about the Muslim Brotherhood. In his feature, The Arab World Is on Fire, at In These Times this week, Noam Chomsky puts Mubarak in the context of tyrants and kleptocrats like Ferdinand Marcos, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Chun Doo Hwan, Zia ul-Haq, Suharto and many other of Ameroca's once useful gangsters.

A common refrain among pundits is that fear of radical Islam requires (reluctant) opposition to democracy on pragmatic grounds. While not without some merit, the formulation is misleading. The general threat has always been independence. In the Arab world, the United States and its allies have regularly supported radical Islamists, sometimes to prevent the threat of secular nationalism.

...“The traditional argument put forward in and out of the Arab world is that there is nothing wrong, everything is under control,” says Marwan Muasher, former Jordanian official and now director of Middle East research for the Carnegie Endowment. “With this line of thinking, entrenched forces argue that opponents and outsiders calling for reform are exaggerating the conditions on the ground.”

Therefore the public can be dismissed. The doctrine traces far back and generalizes worldwide, to U.S. home territory as well. In the event of unrest, tactical shifts may be necessary, but always with an eye to reasserting control.

Obama And Egypt

The month I spent in Egypt was wonderful-- but it doesn't make me an Egypt expert like all the imbecile babbling away this week on cable TV. I don't speak Arabic; I wasn't tuning into the Arab street. I was on a boat floating in a leisurely fashion up the Nile visiting ancient sites like the crocodile god's Temple of Kom Ombo in what was once the ancient city of Nubt. Not a whisper of Nubt, Kom Ombo, Sobek or even the falcon god Horus (who shared the temple with Sobek, the crocodile god) or Ptolemy VI, who started building the temple, or Jacques de Morgan who cleaned and restored it in 1893. Actually, a Canadian oil explorer, Sea Dragon Energy, whose stock price has tumbled precipitously, reported that they're having trouble getting supplies to their operation in Kom Ombo but that production is humming along uninterrupted.

"Street demonstrations are restricted to major cities and therefore have little or no impact on the company's field operations in Kom Ombo and NW Gemsa," the company, whose activities are concentrated in Egypt, said in a statement.

Sea Dragon said it is experiencing some shortages in supplies in Kom Ombo because of the remoteness of the area, and that drilling and service rigs have temporarily been placed on stand-by until regular transportation of goods and services resumes.

We were lucky in our trip in 1997. Egypt had emptied out of tourists because of a massacre at the temple of Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh, at Deir el-Bahri across the Nile from Luxor the day before we arrived. 62 people were massacred, mostly tourists from Switzerland and Japan, and everyone in Egypt's hotels just packed up and went home. There were basically no tourists in the country; we had it all to ourselves. You know the guy who always see on TV whenever they talk about pyramids or mummies or excavations-- Dr. Zahi Hawass? He took us for a tour of the Pyramids that he said was the kind of trip usually reserved for heads of state like Charles DeGaulle (Americans heads of state being too busy for the tour).

Anyway, I'm no expert on Egyptian politics. I think I follow it more than most Americans without Egyptian heritage or who don't work for the State Department. But not enough to pump myself up as some kind of an expert the way all these clowns on CNN are doing. Friday we tried putting the Muslim Brotherhood into a little historical context with an article by a real expert, John Loftus. And a week before that I pointed out that Egyptians Hakin and Cleopatra do a really spectacular cover version of the Bangles' "Walk Like An Egyptian."

One thing I do know, though, is that... I don't really know squat about what's actually going on there, especially behind the scenes. Neither do the talking heads on cable, especially not the ideologically-motivated sociopaths at Fox. Although I tried to make it clear that so-called VP Omar Suleiman (who "someone" seems to have maybe/maybe not already tried to assassinate) is Russia's man on the scene and that America's guy is Field Marshall Tantawi, head of the military, here's a passage from what Loftus sent me that I didn't use-- explaining who China seems to be betting on:

For nearly two decades, the PLA [China's People's Liberation Army] leadership had been selling components of the atomic bomb to Arab leaders’ in return for influence and oil. Chinese nuclear weapon technology had been delivered to North Korea, Libya, and Pakistan. The entrepreneurial Pakistanis re-sold the Chinese nuclear secrets to Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and, of course, Egypt. China’s contact in the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency had played a vital role in squelching any mention of the PLA’s role in nuclear proliferation. With his help, the Chinese had managed to keep their secret, secret. It was time to repay the favor.

The elegantly dressed Egyptian switched off his encrypted email and frowned in thought for a moment as he stared out the window at the falling snow. Life was comfortable here among the wealth Swiss. The risks of returning to Egypt were enormous. Too soon, and he might spend his life in a prison cell. Too late and he would miss his date with history. Ego triumphed over discretion. He turned to his secretary and ordered “Book me on the next flight to Cairo.” With that command, the die was cast and the war for Pharaoh’s succession began in earnest.

The secretary in Switzerland used a computer to make an online reservation for the Cairo flight. It was a common mistake. All over the world, electronic robots wait to vacuum up every signal coming down the wires. The passenger’s first name, Mohammed, was so ubiquitous in the Arab world as to be almost untraceable. His last name, ElBaradei, was still fairly common, and even the data from the office credit card
was ignored by the targeting computers, but just for the first few seconds. As soon as the secretary keyed in the passenger’s frequent flyer number, the unique digital sequence was intercepted.

Before the electronic request had even been processed by the airline booking computer,
intelligence computers of several nations had matched the passenger’s frequent flyer number to the target list, and automatically red flagged his airline ticket for immediate attention. The advent of supercomputers enabled intelligence services to vacuum the world for electronic patterns. Every day, every email you send, every telephone call you make, every fax, every online transaction is recorded. Collecting billions of bytes of data is easy. Targeting is hard.

...In Washington, the response to the flight booking was predictable; a snort of disgust, a sigh of regret, and then grudging acceptance of a duty to an old ally. “We probably should let Mubarak know before he arrives.”

Mohammed ElBaradei was flying back home to join the Egyptian revolution, if not as its leader, then to establish himself in the Egyptian press as the best alternative to President Mubarak’s thirty year old dictatorship. The conventional wisdom in Washington was that ElBaradei would do anything for Egypt, as long as he did not actually have to live there. The fact that he was coming home probably meant that
ElBaradei believed that the rioting in the streets was more than just a temporary phenomenon; it was the harbinger of a Tunisian-style instant revolution.

In the Moscow, the news of ElBaradei’s return was handled differently. “We had better tell our man to get ready. We may have to plan for an accelerated takeover.”

Like China, Russian intelligence believed that President Mubarak’s days were numbered...

Thrilling, isn't it? Loftus writes a column, SPYGLASS, for Ami Magazine. This one, on the stands now, is called "Who Will Be The Next Pharaoh?" It helped inform me, of course; but it also made me certain that I can't put myself in Obama's shoes. He's getting shit from all sides-- from the hard realities of soaring worldwide food prices to an understandably freaked out Israel and other panicky U.S. allies in the region-- and this isn't like a bunch of Glenn Beck's racist zombies marching around yelling about his birth certificate. This is the real thing with a lot of moving parts on a lot of levels. I wish him the best. And I wish the spite, bigotry and hatefulness of the "loyal opposition" would, for once, put America first, even over their personal ambitions and social psychosis.

It's also worth reading George Soros' OpEd in Friday's Washington Post. He's not a hippie and he's more aware than most of us of what realpolitik actually means and that there are times when liberation trumps dysfunctional and crumbling strategic relationships.

Revolutions usually start with enthusiasm and end in tears. In the case of the Middle East, the tears could be avoided if President Obama stands firmly by the values that got him elected. Although American power and influence in the world have declined, our allies and their armies look to us for direction. These armies are strong enough to maintain law and order as long as they stay out of politics; thus the revolutions can remain peaceful. That is what the United States should insist on while encouraging corrupt and repressive rulers who are no longer tolerated by their people to step aside and allow new leaders to be elected in free and fair elections.

That is the course that the revolution in Tunisia is taking. Tunisia has a relatively well-developed middle class, women there enjoy greater rights and opportunities than in most Muslim countries, and the failed regime was secular in character. The prospects for democratic change are favorable.

Egypt is more complex and, ultimately, more influential, which is why it is so important to get it right. The protesters are very diverse, including highly educated and common people, young and old, well-to-do and desperately poor. While the slogans and crowds in Tahrir Square are not advancing a theocratic agenda at all, the best-organized political opposition that managed to survive in that country's repressive environment is the Muslim Brotherhood. In free elections, the Brotherhood is bound to emerge as a major political force, though it is far from assured of a majority.

Some have articulated fears of adverse consequences of free elections, suggesting that the Egyptian military may seek to falsify the results; that Israel may be adamantly opposed to a regime change; that the domino effect of extremist politics spreading to other countries must be avoided; and that the supply of oil from the region could be disrupted. These notions constitute the old conventional wisdom about the Middle East - and need to be changed, lest Washington incorrectly put up resistance to or hesitate in supporting transition in Egypt.

That would be regrettable. President Obama personally and the United States as a country have much to gain by moving out in front and siding with the public demand for dignity and democracy. This would help rebuild America's leadership and remove a lingering structural weakness in our alliances that comes from being associated with unpopular and repressive regimes. Most important, doing so would open the way to peaceful progress in the region. The Muslim Brotherhood's cooperation with Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate who is seeking to run for president, is a hopeful sign that it intends to play a constructive role in a democratic political system. As regards contagion, it is more likely to endanger the enemies of the United States-- Syria and Iran-- than our allies, provided that they are willing to move out ahead of the avalanche.

The main stumbling block is Israel. In reality, Israel has as much to gain from the spread of democracy in the Middle East as the United States has. But Israel is unlikely to recognize its own best interests because the change is too sudden and carries too many risks. And some U.S. supporters of Israel are more rigid and ideological than Israelis themselves. Fortunately, Obama is not beholden to the religious right, which has carried on a veritable vendetta against him. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is no longer monolithic or the sole representative of the Jewish community. The main danger is that the Obama administration will not adjust its policies quickly enough to the suddenly changed reality.

I am, as a general rule, wary of revolutions. But in the case of Egypt, I see a good chance of success. As a committed advocate of democracy and open society, I cannot help but share in the enthusiasm that is sweeping across the Middle East. I hope President Obama will expeditiously support the people of Egypt. My foundations are prepared to contribute what they can. In practice, that means establishing resource centers for supporting the rule of law, constitutional reform, fighting corruption and strengthening democratic institutions in those countries that request help in establishing them, while staying out of those countries where such efforts are not welcome.

Republican Immigration Policy: Flood America With Eastern European Neo-Nazis

The Dulles Brothers' policies enabled the rise of Trumpism in America

After World War II, Republicans encouraged an influx of Nazi and pro-Nazi immigrants from Europe. The Dulles brothers were at the nexus of an immigration policy that brought hundreds of thousands of Nazis into America-- not atomic scientists, most just Nazi thugs from all over eastern Europe-- like from Belarusia, which saw New Jersey, for example, become a major center of a Belarusian diaspora. Their communities--in places like South River (Middlesex County)-- are far more anti-Semitic than anything in the modern day South. In South River the Belarusian community center on Whitehead Ave., built for Nazi war criminals by the CIA, is also the local Republican Party headquarters.

The Dulles brothers were the embodiment of where Wall Street, and the intelligence community blended seamlessly into the far right, pro-Nazi Republican Party and the inept Cold War jingoism. They overrode President Truman's and Congress' ban on allowing Nazi war criminals into the country-- let alone employing them-- purging their records and getting them U.S. citizenship. John Foster Dulles, who now shamefully has an airport named after him near our nation's capital, was complicit steeped in Wall Street backing for prewar Hitler and was at all times looking out for the interests of the wealthy Republican investors who invested in the Nazi take-over, particularly the Rockefellers and the Bushes. They had decided to open the floodgates to Nazi collaborators throughout Eastern Europe once Truman was defeated by Dewey.

New Jersey, among a few other states, became a sanctuary for Nazi collaborators and war criminals from Eastern Europe. Nixon saw them as a counterbalance to the hated Jews, who always voted for the Democrats, and Eisenhower gave him supervisory powers over the operations to bring them to America. Ironically, many of them had been infiltrated by the Russian Communists and the entire program was an absolute disaster, bringing the U.S. no Cold War benefits whatsoever and costing the country hundreds of millions of dollars, but, eventually, helping elect Republican rightists from Nixon ando Christie to, obviously, Trump.

A few years ago I spoke with John Loftus, author of America's Nazi Secret, interested nine what he thought about the motivations for flooding New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, etc. with anti-Semitic Nazi war criminals, many of whom had personally taken part in the Holocaust, in Belorusia, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. This is what Loftus told me:

My guess is it was 90 percent greed, as they funded the infant Bolshevik and Nazi parties simultaneously. In fact, Hitler knew the robber barons preferred the conservative and Catholic parties over the Nazis, so that is why he banned foreign ownership of German companies, which forced the robber barons to enact the Swiss Bank Secrecy Act of 1933. In the upcoming film American Secrets we document how the Auschwitz industrial park was originally a Russian-German partnership funded by the robber barons of Wall Street.

...Nixon always blamed the Jews for his narrow loss to JFK, and tasked George H.W. Bush as co-director of the RNC to recruit the Eastern European groups.

Sad how when things like these are covered up and we "move on," they just repeat themselves over and over. In 1967 I was walking along with 2 friends, Sandy Pearlman and Joan Shapiro, in the East Village, a gentrifying piece of the Lower East Side. We all had long hair and looked like hippies, which, basically, we were. We passed the Ukrainian community center and were immediately attacked by a large gang of Ukrainian neo-Nazis. Joan and I made it safely to the Psychedelicatessen but poor Sandy got caught by the Ukrainians who beat him up and stuffed him into a trash can, which they rolled down Avenue A. Gee, that's 50 years ago! Let's bring this forward a little to-- this past weekend. Here we are, back on the Lower East Side with the NY Post reporting that a gang of neo-Nazis (who they don't identify by ethnicity) beat up two twin brothers and menaced them with a knife in front of a Lower East Side bar Saturday morning when they took offense to an 'anti-fascist' sticker on one of the men’s cell phone cases, police said."

The beat down happened when the brothers, both 27-year-old Columbia graduate students noticed the large group of “skinheads” hanging inside one of their usual haunts called Clockwork on Essex Street and decided to head for the exits around 12:30 a.m.

On the way out the door, they ran into a group of smokers outside who noticed the sticker on one of their phones reading “New York City Anti-Fascists.”

“One of the guys … sees [my brother’s] phone, grabs it and starts screaming, ‘I know what the fuck that means, I know what the fuck that sticker is, you need to get the fuck out of here,” said one of the victims, who asked to remain anonymous.

“He throws the phone on the ground and they just start jumping us right in front of the bar.”

The brothers were pummeled by about six or seven men-- some who were using brass knuckles-- and dressed in matching vests with “211 Crew” patches, a white supremacy gang, police said. The brothers tried to run away from their attackers but were chased down Essex Street and then Hester Street before the group caught up to them and continued the beating, cops said.

“One of the guys pulled a knife on my brother first and starts slashing at him. Then the guy with the knife starts coming over to me… His buddy grabs him and I guess at that point they all decide to run off.”

Officers in an undercover police car that happened to be driving by spotted the two bloodied men standing on the sidewalk while trying to call 911 and asked them what was going on.

They were able to point out one of the suspects lingering around the scene and police quickly grabbed him.

He was identified as 29-year-old John Young and was charged with assault, grand larceny, menacing, criminal mischief, and possession of a weapon, cops said.

“I didn’t think something like this could happen. This is crazy,” one of the victims said. “I didn’t think they would be so brazen as to patronize a bar in Manhattan like that. I go there all the time and never felt a bad feeling.”

The men suffered cuts and bruises to their faces and bodies. One brother required five staples to close a wound on his head while the other received two staples for a head wound at a nearby hospital.

I don't know how well Trump did in the communities the Nazi immigrants settled in after World War II, although my guess is that Trump did extremely well in them. South River, NJ, for example, is in a Democratic County that Clinton won handily but it has a Republican mayor, John Krenzel, and the borough council is Republican-majority. In 2013 Christie won 63.8% of South River's votes in his gubernatorial reelection bid, up from the 53.2% he had won in 2009.

Streams Of Consciousness, Christmas Eve Edition: Korea, Belarus, Jim Messina, et al.

Despite a disastrous meeting between White House political hack Jim Messina-- a kind of dense and clueless Rahm Emanuel sleazebag-- and the Democracy Alliance, a group of top progressive heavy donors (many vowing to never give another dime after hearing the White House's tone-deaf look forward, which apparently didn't include anything about job creation and didn't even mention the word "jobs"), the White House did lay out what many will consider a Christmas present for the nation yesterday, even before a major staff reshuffle. Not as likely to generate headlines as the success they had in repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, getting a reasonable healthcare package passed for the 9-11 first responders, and getting the START Treaty ratified-- none of which impinged on the core demands of government by the Conservative Consensus ruling elite-- the White House reversed Bush's anti-environmental wilderness policy, restoring federal land managers' powers to curb development on vast tracts of America's back country, undoing what conservation groups called a "no more wilderness" policy put in place under Bush.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced on Thursday that the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will again have the authority to set aside large areas of federally owned territory in the West that it deems as deserving of wilderness protection.

It would still be up to Congress to decide whether to grant those areas formal wilderness status, thus putting them off-limits to energy development and other commercial uses on a permanent basis.

An official wilderness designation by law prohibits the building of roads or other structures, or any human activities that would alter the natural landscape, such as farming, logging, mining, or oil and gas drilling.

Hard to imagine either house of Congress getting behind this, though, financially controlled as each is by the extraction and development industries. It'll give us something to write about going forward, though. Already one of the worst special-interest whores in this area, Utah Republican crook-Senator Orrin Hatch denounced the policy shift as a "brazen" attempt by the Obama to usurp congressionalcontrol of wilderness designations. Hard to imagine Salazar fighting hard enough for the change to see it through to the end.

Bye-bye, Lynn Woolsey?

Lynn Woolsey has done more to retard the effective development of the Congressional Progressive Caucus than anyone else in Congress. As the caucus's co-chair, she sowed the kind of dissension and discord that have marked her entire political career. Long before she made herself famous by undermining the efforts of Raúl Grijalva to forge the CPC into an effective fighting force and long before she backed backed Blue Dog and warmonger Jane Harman against progressive acivist Marcy Winograd-- and long before becoming addled by her addiction to painkillers-- Woolsey had become such a divisive figure in Sonoma County politics that the Petaluma City Council did everything it could to "kick her upstairs" into an open congressional seat and get her out of their hair. It looks like she may actually retire now and get out of the way of real progressive change at a time it is most needed. It won't happen fast enough! (Imagine Norman Solomon replacing her!)

Plenty of Crime On Wall Street... And Punishment?

You're more likely to find a reasonable look at that by reading Rolling Stone than the Wall Street Journal, and Matt Taibbi reports on some real movement in bringing the evildoers to justice.

It took more than two years, but there might finally be some capital sentences handed out for crimes committed during the financial crisis. That’s metaphorically speaking, of course. Like the accounting firm Arthur Anderson, whose head was sacrificed during the Enron debacle, the once-proud financial auditing firm Ernst and Young now looks poised to take a spin down the toilet of history thanks to its role in the Lehman Brothers debacle.

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is about to file civil fraud charges against E&Y for the work it did helping Lehman cook its books during 2007 and 2008.

Taibbi speculates that this suit is curtains for Ernst and Young and "may be the beginning of a series of investigations that ultimately take down the auditors and ratings agencies that made the financial crisis possible. Without accountants and raters signing off on all the bogus derivative math and bad bookkeeping, a lot of this mess would never have happened."

Belarus, A Nazi Hellhole That Never Dealt With Its Dark Past, In The News Again

I'm guessing most Americans couldn't tell you what or where Belarus is if their lives depended on it. The Republicans made the same bet right after World War II when they sponsored the illegal immigration of hundreds of Belarus Nazis to America, most of whom had been involved in extermination of that country's entire Jewish population. They moved to South River, New Jersey, and, contrary to federal law barring Nazis from immigrating, became citizens and staunch Republicans. Their resettlement was a pilot project for the GOP takeover of Florida with fascist Cuban refugees.

Former U.S. government prosecutor and Army intelligence officer John Loftus has a new book exposing the entire project, America's Nazi Secret. Right-wing elements in the State Department, led by the Dulles brothers, with powerful financial and ideological ties to the Nazis were able to subvert President Truman's policies and, once Eisenhower became president, move into high gear in bringing thousands of genocidal war criminals and Nazis from Belarus and Ukraine to America.

Today, never having dealt effectively with its past, Belarus is one of the world's worst authoritarian hellholes, and today the U.S. human rights organization Freedom House called on the European Union and our own country to renew full sanctions against Belarus.

More than 600 people were detained [including five presidential candidates] in the Belarusian capital [Minsk] during a police crackdown on demonstrators after the presidential vote that the opposition said had been rigged.

"The current situation is much worse than that in 2006, when the EU and U.S. together imposed sanctions against the regime," [Freedom House director David] Kramer added.

Western nations, including the United States, called the 2006 presidential elections in Belarus fraudulent and introduced sanctions against the country and travel bans on some Belarusian officials.

[Alexander] Lukashenko, 56, who has ruled Belarus with an iron rod since 1994 and has been dubbed by the United States "Europe's last dictator" for a clampdown on opposition and dissent, won 79.67% of the vote on Sunday. International monitors said the election was "flawed."

The United States and the European Union have called on Belarusian authorities to immediately release opposition activists who were arrested during the protests.

Wiping North Korea Off The Map Would Probably Guarantee Obama A Second Term-- A Popular Idea In Certain Circles

The U.S. won't be distracted by Belarus's fascism when it's busy provoking North Korea into a suicidal attack on South Korea so it can end the Communist regime there once and for all. Watch the video below explaining what's really happening in Korea and then read the U.S. propaganda version in the Washington Post, which is pushing a right-wing American line that South Korea's puppet-president, Lee Myung-bak, "looks weak" by not acting after all his bellicose statements attacking the North and his election promises to reunite the two countries.