| “This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote: Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.” |
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Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church 4 April 1967, New York City Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it's always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit. Concience leaves me no other choice I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. |
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Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen
Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one.
Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war.
Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world.
Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty.
But we must move on.
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.
We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.
And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history.
Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us.
If it is, let us trace its movement, and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance.
For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
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Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen
Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people?" they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church — the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate — leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight. I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans. Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings.
Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war.
Demonic, destructive suction tube.
And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.
So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home.
It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.
We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.
So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.
So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago.
I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers.
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems.
I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.
But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?"
They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted.
The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government
Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.
For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. |
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For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer.
To save the soul of America
In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America."
We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear.
In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath — America will be!
Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war.
If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam."
It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.
So it is that those of us who are yet determined that "America will be" are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954.* [Probably mispoke, meaning 1964 when Dr King won the Nobel Peace Prize]
And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man.
This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.
To the ministry of Jesus Christ
But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ.
To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war.
Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men — for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative?
Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them?
What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one?
Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
Finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God.
Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood.
Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions.
We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula.
I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now.
I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries. |
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Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen
Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church
Strange liberators
They must see Americans as strange liberators.
The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954 — in 1945 rather — after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China.
They were led by Ho Chi Minh.
Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them.
Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.
Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long.
With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China — for whom the Vietnamese have no great love — but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists.
For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence.
For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.
Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs.
Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not.
We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will.
Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.
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After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement.
But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem.
The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North.
The peasants watched as all of this was presided over by United States influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused.
When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support.
All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform.
Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy.
They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met.
They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.
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So they go, primarily women and children and the aged.
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops.
They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees.
They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury.
So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children.
They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals.
They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food.
They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform?
What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?
Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building?
Is it among these voiceless ones?
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We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village.
We have destroyed their land and their crops.
We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church.
We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon.
We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.
Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness.
Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets."
The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these.
Could we blame them for such thoughts?
We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise.
These, too, are our brothers. |
Monday, August 27, 2007
I Am Alden Pyle
President Bush's Vietnam Fantasy
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Actually, the president had advanced this line of reasoning last November during the APEC summit in Vietnam.
My comment at the time is still, I think, on the mark:
President Bush recently attracted considerable attention and criticism by stating before the Veterans of Foreign Wars that the takeaway from Vietnam was that we cut and ran too soon, and we should not duplicate that mistake in Iraq.
Asked if the experience in Vietnam offered lessons for Iraq, Bush said Friday, "We tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take awhile."
He said "it's just going to take a long period of time" for "an ideology of freedom to overcome an ideology of hate. Yet, the world that we live in today is one where they want things to happen immediately."
We'll succeed unless we quit," the president said.
It seems to me that the lesson of the Vietnam War is we screwed up, we got beat, tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese died but, hey, the sun still rises in the East, things got better, and thirty years later our President is shaking hands with the political heir of the guys who kicked our ass.
In other words, the emergence of a prosperous, peaceful Vietnam is a pretty strong argument for acknowledging the mistake we made in Iraq and, bluntly, succeeding by quitting. |
“In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called ‘The Quiet American.’ It was set in Saigon and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle.
He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism and dangerous naivete.
Another character describes Alden this way: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.’
“After America entered the Vietnam War, Graham Greene — the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam.
Matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out, there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people.
In 1972, one anti-war senator put it this way: ‘What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?'"
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Hmmm.
Contrary to the president’s assertion, the central lesson of Greene’s book is not that Pyle’s (read Bush’s) courage, energy, and idealism were betrayed by the lazy, ignoble disdain of lesser men (read Democrats) for a multi-decade crusade on behalf of Vietnamese (read Iraqi) freedom.
Greene’s powerfully-argued theme is that Pyle sacrificed the moral high ground, doomed his venture at its inception, and sowed the seeds of his own destruction by orchestrating a terrorist bombing in a profoundly misguided and indecent attempt to advance a foolish, unrealistic, and catastrophic political agenda.
Greene got it right in Vietnam and, I would say, in Iraq.
President Bush gets it wrong.
The thought that President Bush is perhaps relying on this fictional portrayal of a deluded naif to stoke personal fantasies of omniscience, moral clarity, and perhaps even (political) martyrdom in the face of widespread repudiation of his policies is, to say the least, disturbing.
Who was Alden Pyle supposed to be?
Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the brilliant, driven general who was High Commissioner to Indo-China and the last, best hope of France’s desperate counterinsurgency effort against Ho Chi Minh, had this to say about Robert Blum, head of the US Economic Aid Mission to Indochina (Blum is sometimes cited as Greene’s model for Pyle):
You are the most dangerous man in Indochina.
And was the United States — represented in Greene’s fiction by Alden Pyle — dangerous enough to connive with a Vietnamese warlord in a terrorist attack in Saigon in 1951?
That was the explosive allegation at the heart of The Quiet American.
The Quiet American culminates with a bloody bombing in a square off the rue Catinat in central Saigon, precipitated by the naïve, bookish Pyle’s disastrous attempt to end-around the French and package a thuggish warlord, General The, as the leader of a nationalistic and democratic “Third Force”.
In real life, as in the book, the blast was set off by a “General” The, a renegade officer who had left the private army of the Caodai sect to set up business for himself near Saigon. He had apparently attracted the interest of American, keen for a nationalist third force that would supplant both Communism and the French-backed Bao Dai regime.
To make a splashy arrival on the political scene, The executed two bloody bombings in Saigon. Not only that, he took credit for them in a radio broadcast, despite initial attempts by the US to blame the Vietminh for the atrocities.
The later on became a fixture in the US-backed Diem government.
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The Quiet American infuriated Americans when it came out. New Yorker writer A.J. Leibling, fresh from liberating the wine cellars of Paris and flush with the self-regard born of the good war, excoriated Greene in a famous review.
Not surprisingly, the current Vietnamese government loves the book for its depiction of a US intervention morally and strategically doomed from its inception.
The Quiet American is apparently available all over Vietnam and the government gave full support to the filming of Philip Noyce’s excellent adaptation, which was finally released in 2002 after much 9/11-related anguish.
But the interesting and unanswered question is, what exactly did The get from the United States in 1950 and 1951?
Most American histories of the Vietnam mess give relatively short shrift to the period before 1954. That was the year of Dienbienphu, Geneva, Diem, and all that, and Vietnam officially became America’s exclusive tar baby.
That’s why Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and volume two of Norman Sherry’s authorized biography of Greene The Life of Graham Greene (Penguin, 2004) are such fascinating and important additions to the history of the period.
Greene worked as a correspondent in Vietnam in the early 50s, and many of the characters and incidents are direct distillations of his experiences. He wrote “Perhaps there is more direct rapportage in The Quiet American than in any other novel I have written”. Sherry's diligence in retracing Greene's steps and providing context for his work and life have become legendary.
It appears highly likely that in 1950-51 the US aid mission, actually a hive of CIA spooks, was chafing at the limited role and information the French were willing to grant them in the effort against the Vietminh.
The survival of the French presence in Vietnam and its Bao Dai regime was clearly a matter of no more than a year or two. The US had no qualms about pursuing Third Force options independently and displayed little sympathy for French objections or the destabilizing and demoralizing effects that their actions had on the desperate French effort to stabilize Vietnam.
Greene, himself a MI6 officer in the Second World War and sympathetic to the French view, undoubtedly learned of America’s playing footsie with people like The from indignant sources in the French Surete.
Did The, as Greene alleges in his book, get explosives, know-how, and direction from the CIA? And did the US have prior knowledge of the attacks and, instead of stopping them, encouraged them and planned around them and exploited them for propaganda purposes?
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Norman Sherry is extremely cautious and circumspect in weighing the evidence for the more sensational allegations.
Greene was clearly hearing Gallic tittle-tattle as suspicious French intelligence, military, and diplomatic personnel monitored the growing and increasingly assertive U.S. presence in Saigon.
The most damning was information from the French No. 1 in Vietnam, General Salan, that he had arrested an American consular officer on the Dakow Bridge (where Alden Pyle meets his end in the book) with plastic explosives in the trunk of his car.
However, Mr. Sherry did not uncover any whistleblowers within the ranks of Americans stationed in Saigon in ‘50/’51 who supported Greene’s story that the Catinat bombing was carried out by The with guilty American foreknowledge, assistance, and approval — or even that the US had any serious contacts with The prior to 1954.
Case not proven to legal standards is the conclusion I extracted from Chapter 29, which discusses the era and the events of the bombings in great detail.
However, on artistic grounds the situation in Vietnam provided a suitable basis for Greene to depict the deaths in rue Catinat as the direct consequence of callous and overconfident American adventurism.
Examining the historical context of The Quiet American provides an illuminating picture of the creeping American intervention and sidelining of the French, which came into the open only in 1955, when the US sided with Ngo Van Diem — and General The — and closed the books on the French experience in Vietnam.
The French struggle to regain control of Vietnam after World War II was a political, human, and financial catastrophe for the French homeland.
No question that the French needed American help, which Truman and Eisenhower provided. By the time the French packed it in after Dien Bien Phu, America had underwritten 80% the cost of the failed French effort.
Nevertheless, the United States was an unenthusiastic and suspicious partner. Truman’s anti-communism had replaced Roosevelt’s support for self-determination in the liberated countries of Southeast Asia as America’s guiding ideology, but the US was never able to look upon French aims, methods, or capabilities in Vietnam with any enthusiasm.
The corrosive distrust and dislike between the French and the Americans is fully documented in Greene’s book.
The takeaway from Greene’s book is not that he was wrong about the nature of US engagement in the brief period when Vietnam was slipping from French control. It was that he was profoundly right about the twenty-year nightmare that the US and Vietnam were embarking on together.
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Greene’s life and art were nourished by a stew of self-loathing and self-knowledge. France’s doomed, disgusted struggle for Vietnam resonated with Greene’s sense of sin and cynical despondency.
On the other hand, he took the blithe, assertive ignorance of the Americans — symbolized by Alden Pyle — as a personal affront.
In 1951, to indicate the disastrous consequences of virtue blindly asserted without awareness of personal sin and weakness, Greene makes the naïve Pyle knowingly complicit in a horrific crime: the terror bombing of a square filled with innocent civilians in the center of Saigon.
Later on, American errors in Vietnam would be characterized more by sins of omission by the intentionally blind and willfully ignorant, and all-too-knowing sins of commission by people who harbored no illusions about the decency of their own methods.
People like Edward Lansdale.
Thankfully, Sherry’s book lays to rest the canard, repeated in Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam and countless other works — and promoted by Landsdale himself — that Edward Lansdale was the model for Alden Pyle.
Lansdale was the antithesis of Pyle: an egomaniacal blowhard, grandstander, and loose cannon whose eccentricity bordered on the pathological.
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When the movie appeared, Alden Pyle — played by Audie Murphy — was the hero; and Greene’s alter-ego — the jaded English journalist Fowler — is the dangerous naïf who precipitates the carnage in the square.
In explaining why his version would prevail, Lansdale wrote to Manckiewicz:
" [no] more than one or two Vietnamese now alive know the real truth of the matter, and they certainly aren't going to tell it to anyone."
Landsdale did not officially enter the Vietnam arena until 1954, when he appeared as Diem’s minder. Greene wrote his book in 1952.
But that doesn’t mean that Lansdale’s shadow isn’t over the events in rue Catinat.
Before Lansdale gained notoriety as John Kennedy’s go-to guy for spectacular failures, first in Vietnam and then Operation Mongoose — the increasingly harebrained strategies for destabilizing Cuba and assassinating Castro that attracted the attention of the Church Committee — he presided over one of the greatest successes in post-world war II US foreign policy — the crushing of the Philippine insurrection.
He did it in alliance with an energetic, talented, and compliant military office, Ramon Magsaysay.
Tactics included enlarging and upgrading the army, limiting abuses against the population by state military forces, aggressive irregular counterinsurgency operations, lots of psyops, and some land reform. Also highly trained hunter-killer squads and unreliable paramilitaries.
Amazingly, everything worked, at least against the isolated Huk movement, which at its height claimed 15,000 troops and only drew on the population of Luzon — 1.5 million — for support.
The Philippines is still the acme of American counterinsurgency, and one thinks it would be cited in the same breath with British suppression of the Malay Uprising, which seems to get all the positive ink as the only truly successful counterinsurgency operation in the modern period.
According to Lansdale, in 1954 he was ordered to Vietnam "to do there what you did in the Philippines."
An academic at the University of the Philippines, Roland Simbulan, stated:
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So successful was the CIA in pulling the strings thru Lansdale that in 1954, a high-level US committee reported that, "American policy in Southeast Asia was most effectively represented in the Philippines, where any expanded program of Western influence may best be launched."
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The CIA's success in crushing the peasant-based Huk rebellion in the 1950s made this operation the model for future counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam and Latin America.
Colonel Lansdale and his Filipino sidekick, Col. Napoleon Valeriano were later to use their counterguerrilla experience in the Philippines for training covert operatives in Vietnam and in the US-administered School of the Americas, which trained counterguerrilla assassins for Latin America.
Thus, the Philippines had become the CIA's prototype in successful covert operations and psychological warfare.
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After his stint in the Philippines using propaganda, psywar and deception against the Huk movement, Lansdale was then assigned in Vietnam to wage military, political and psychological warfare.
When the Americans looked at Vietnam, they believed the French had a formula for failure, and America had the recipe for success.
During World War II, Roosevelt had already touted America’s policy supporting Philippine independence as a template for Vietnam.
The Pentagon Papers record that President Roosevelt offered the De Gaulle Filipino advisors to help them out in Vietnam.
De Gaulle’s response to the astounding suggestion that the banner of European civilization and French honor could best be shouldered with the help of brown folks from the Philippines was “pensive silence”.
The Americans — like Alden Pyle — were too impatient of success and confident in their methods to work with the French.
Once the French were left, the American magic would work in Vietnam as it had in the Philippines. All it required was U.S. prestige and aid, an innovative and ruthless cadre of advisors, and a seamless coordination between the American patron and the Vietnamese client, all constellated around a charismatic, competent leader.
But the differences turned out to be more important than the similarities.
Instead of Magsaysay, a dynamic man on horseback, we put our money on Diem, a (literally) cloistered Catholic and out of touch egoist.
Instead of the hapless, isolated Huks, we got iron-hard NVA soldiers with an impregnable base in North Vietnam, safe-haven borders, and Russian and Chinese assistance.
We got a counterinsurgency operation fatally compromised from its outset by excessive American reliance on political and military violence.
And of course, we got defeat instead of victory.
That’s the tragedy Graham Greene foresaw in the rue Catinat.
I think I’ll let Philip Noyce, director of the 2002 film adaptation of The Quiet American, have the last word. From a Salon interview in early 2003, as America teetered on the brink of the Iraq invasion:
Alden Pyle is alive and well today. And that's either a mark of Greene's brilliance, or the fact that some things just never change... In theory, you've got a White House full of Alden Pyles.
[Laughter] And that's scary... ...Well, George Bush is the ultimate Alden Pyle! He's hardly been out of the country, he's steeped in good intentions, believes he has the answer, is very naive, ultimately not that bright, and extremely dangerous. |
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| Vietnam 1969 |
| Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts. |
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Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen
Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name?
What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part?
They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta.
And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants.
They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded.
Their questions are frighteningly relevant.
Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of a new violence?
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves.
For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi.
In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust.
To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now.
In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies.
It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva.
After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.
When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.
Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops.
They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made.
Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North.
He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy.
Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores. |
Page 13, CIA Sabotage Manual — Nicaragua |
| Guatemala 1966-67 Command operation — Green Berets intervene against rebels. Chile 1973 Command operation — CIA-backed coup ousts democratically elected Marxist president. El Salvador 1981-92 Command operation, troops — advisors, overflights aid anti-rebel war, soldiers briefly involved in hostage clash; long-term result: at least 75,000 murdered and destruction of popular movement. Nicaragua 1981-90 Command operation, naval — CIA directs exile (Contra) invasions, plants harbor mines against revolution; result: at least 50,000 murdered. Honduras 1982-90 Troops — maneuvers help build bases near borders. Grenada 1983-84 Troops, bombing - war crime at destruction of hospital. Invasion four years after. revolution. Bolivia 1987 Troops — army assists raids on cocaine region. Panama 1989 Troops, bombing — Nationalist government ousted by 27,000 soldiers, leaders arrested, 2000+ killed Haiti 1994-95 Troops, naval — Blockade against military government; troops restore President Aristide to office three years after coup. Venezuela 2002 Command operation — failed coup attempt to remove left-populist president Hugo Chavez. Haiti 2004- Troops — removal of democratically elected President Aristide; troops occupy country. |
Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.Unquote. |
Vietnam
A street vendor walks past a souvenir shop in downtown Hanoi.
The question of whether John Kerry was a coward or a leader during the Vietnam War might be raging in the US, but in Hanoi people hope for just one result from the American election — the exit of George W. Bush.
AFP — August 2004 |
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The wife of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. who carried out his legacy after his death in 1968 Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr, died in her sleep early Tuesday morning at the age of 78. She had worked tirelessly after her husband’s death in 1968 to carry on his legacy and only recently began to slow down her efforts. Having suffered a stroke in August, 2005, King made a surprising appearance at a children's program in mid January during events surrounding the annual commemoration of King's birthday. Passive and regal in a wheelchair, King did not speak but welcomed a line of children to her side. She leaves four children, Yolanda, Martin III, Dexter and Bernice. Flags in Atlanta began flying at half-mast shortly after the news was circulated of her passing. "We appreciate the prayers and condolences from people across the country," her children noted Tuesday morning in a statement. After her husband's slaying in 1968, King worked to establish the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, which opened as it stands today in 1982, a complex that includes King's tomb, his boyhood home and the historical Ebenezer Baptist Church, part of which is a federal historic park project. The roots of the center started a year after her husband's assassination, begun in the basement of Dr. King's home. She also successfully fought for a national holiday positioned to King's birthday, which was established in 1985, and was observed this year on Jan. 16. A monument to her husband is also being pursued in Washington, DC on the national mall. "My husband, Martin Luther King, Jr, was a man who had hoped to be a Baptist preacher to a large, Southern, urban congregation," she wrote in the introduction to her 1983 book, 'The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr,' "Instead, by the time he died in 1968, he had led millions of people into shattering forever the Southern system of segregation of the races. . . Above all, he brought a new and higher dimension of human dignity to black people's lives." Coretta and King met in 1952 in Boston where she was studying music at the New England Conservatory, having already studied at Antioch College in Ohio. King Jr. had been pursuing a doctor of philosophy at Boston University. But both of them were originally from the South. She grew up in Alabama, he in Atlanta, and they married just the next year in 1953. They moved together to Montgomery, Alabama where King Jr began his as a pastor for the Dexter Avenue Church. Both were struck by the specific injustice of the segregation of the Montgomery City Bus Lines, which became a national issue when Rosa Parks made her stand in that city in 1955. After that incident, the Dexter Avenue church became a growing meeting place for civil rights activists. Soon, King's life and legacy began to take shape in a public sphere, while at home four children would soon enter the their household. "We began getting death threats and abusive phone calls. One night, while Martin was at a mass rally, I was at home with a friend and our first child, two-month-old Yolanda, when a bomb hit our front porch and exploded,” Coretta recalled. Later in the book she wrote, "Martin was now a hero to America's black people. Shortly after the (Montgomery bus boycott), Time magazine ran a cover story on Martin, calling him 'the scholarly Negro Baptist minister who in little more than a year has risen from nowhere to become one of the nation's remarkable leaders of men." Coretta summed up she and her husband's struggle, "By reaching into and beyond ourselves and tapping the transcendent ethic of love, she shall overcome these evils. Love, truth, and the courage to do what is right should be our own guideposts on this lifelong journey." TIME Jan. 31, 2006 Greg Fulton |
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Published on Wednesday, April 4, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV
by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
It’s become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King’s death, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.”
The remarkable thing about these reviews of King’s life is that several years — his last years — are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.
What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).
An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968.
Yet King didn’t take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.
Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped.
But they’re not shown today on TV.
Why?
It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.
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In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies.
Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.
But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities.
He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” — including economic rights.
For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.
Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective.
An edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring
He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power.
“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic.
In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
(Full text/audio here. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm) |
From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.”
King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.
In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”
You haven’t heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 — and loudly denounced it.
Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection”
Time magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.”
The Washington Post patronized that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”
In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign.
He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington — engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be — until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights.
Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.”
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Congress hostility to the poor
King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America’s cities.
He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor” — appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.”
How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King’s efforts on behalf of the poor people’s mobilization were cut short by an assassin’s bullet.
In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty.
They fund foreign wars with “alacrity and generosity,” while being miserly in dispensing funds for education and healthcare and environmental cleanup.
And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media.
No surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther King’s life. |
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Ishaqi first massacre Soldiers against the war |
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Combat Medic Vietnam 1970More than 2 million Vietnamese people diedEstimates of deaths are between 2 million and 4 million |
| New World Order Statistics of Human Misery of Soldiers and Military that fight for the 'Order' ('The West' and their lackey's Warfare) Excluding Somalia and various other secret engagements | |
| icasualties.org Of the 3,305 coalition deaths in Afghanistan: One Albania 39 Australia One Belgium 158 Canada Five Czech 43 Denmark Nine Estonia Two Finland 86 France 17 Georgia 54 Germany Seven Hungary 47 Italy Two Jordan Three Latvia One Lithuania 9 Unidentified as to country NATO 25 Netherlands 11 New Zealand 10 Norway 36 Poland Two Portugal 19 Romania One South Korea 34 Spain Five Sweden 14 Turkey 444 UK 2,220 US | To May 8, 2013 These figures are 'Battle deaths' and do not include deaths that take place as early as two or three weeks outside the Afghanistan war zones when seriously injured troops are shipped to their home country, or in the situation with the US military to some hospital on a military base in another country. These figures do not include suicide of soldiers who have returned home, or the killing and injuring of loved ones and others outside the family, by soldiers with mental impairment who have returned home. At least 17,674 US personnel have been wounded in action, according to the Pentagon. |
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U.S. & Coalition/Casualties in Afghanistan occupation | |
| Of the 4,804 coalition deaths in Iraq: 4,486 have been Americans Two Australia One Azerbaijan Thirteen Bulgaria One Czech Republic Seven Denmark 5 El Salvador Two Estonia One Fiji Five Georgia One Hungary 33 Italy One Kazakhstan Three Latvia Two Netherlands 23 Poland Three Romania Four Slovakia One South Korea 11 Spain Two Thailand Eighteen Ukraine 179 UK | To May 8, 2013 These figures are 'Battle deaths' and do not include deaths that take place outside Iraq war zones, as early as two or three weeks, after seriously injured troops are shipped to their home country, or in the situation with the US military to some hospital on a military base in another country. — other coalition deaths are estimated at up to 10,000 deaths including contract people brought into Iraq by coalition forces. These figures do not include suicide of soldiers who have returned home, or the killing and injuring of loved ones and others outside the family, by soldiers with mental impairment who have returned home. At least 32,223 U.S. troops have been wounded in action, according to the Pentagon. |
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U.S. & Coalition/Casualties in Iraq occupation | |
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Shoe Thrower — the Story of My Shoe Mass death returns to Ishaqi THE SCIENCE OF EVIL
ITS USE FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES |
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Vietnam Veterans Memorial The Wall in Washington, D.C. The stated purpose of killing 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 plus US young men was 'the domino theory' — to prevent all of South Asia from becoming communistThe US withdrew from Vietnam after 9 years allowing the North Vietnamese government, who the US had been fighting, to take control of the whole countrySouth East Asia should now be one communist enclave3 million Vietnamese killed in that war58,000+ young males reared in America, only to be sent to dieUncounted Vietnamese people injured and maimedAgent Orange continues to cause deformities |
Agent Orange Dioxin — Vietnam Cleft palate, Canoe footed, Clawed fingers continue in births I didn't know what it was then, but it was white |
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ESTIMATED NUCLEAR WARHEADS, STRATEGIC AND TACTICAL The United States has conducted 1,127 nuclear and thermonuclear tests — 217 in the atmosphere.
The Soviet Union/ Russia conducted 969 tests — 219 in the atmosphere.
France, 210 tests, 50 in the atmosphere.
The United Kingdom, 45 tests — 21 in the atmosphere.
China, 45 tests — 23 in the atmosphere.
India and Pakistan — 13 tests underground.
Israel — possible 1 test atmosphere South Africa 1979.
North Korea — 1 test underground, October 2006.
“The United states had drawn up a battle plan for the potential use of nuclear weapons in Iraq and the United States has been involved in planning potential nuclear use scenarios for Iran.”“The United States is now involved in a massive program to overhaul its nuclear arsenal. In fact they're working to replace every nuclear warhead and all of the existing delivery systems in the arsenal to ensure prompt precision global strike capabilities.”Jackie Cabasso — Western States Legal Foundation |
Western Elite militarismWestern Elite Terror StatesWestern Elite War Crimes
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'Oh! You don't believe the 9-11 official version,' they say.
'You mean where they want you to accept the buildings were not blown up from below.
'Plane fuel! Substance never burns higher then a gas stove! That it caused the inner core steel to melt!
'Steel melting!
'Concrete vaporizing!
'
'No! I don't believe that conspiracy theory.
'Cheney! Bush! Rudy Giuliani! HA! HA!
'Tower 7 that never had a plane hit — just came tumbling down!
'You believe that, eh!
'Ever think it had to be blown up because the plane scheduled to fly into it was off getting shot down.
'Thermite in Tower 7's walls, you see — incriminating evidence — impossible to get out without people watching!
Had to be blown up!
'Next you'll be saying Obama is not a Wall Street Illuminati banker stooge?
'Take your pick: The partner in a comedy team who feeds lines to the other comedians.
'Him who allows himself to be used.
'Oh! I can't really blame you, Television it turns minds to pulp.
'Turn off the television. It's the only way.'
'Turn off the television?'
'Get rid of it really. I mean what else is there to do!'
'Get rid of the television?'
'Don't forget all radio garbage is propaganda, even the songs.
'Then those five minute propaganda hits they send you every hour!
'The ones they refer to as News
'Get rid of all the propaganda from your brain, the only way to do it.'
'Stop being hooked on those Hollywood movies — even those that make you think they are making you think'
'All paid performers to make your brain dead.
'You turn the brainwashing off, you'll begin to become yourself.
'It really is the only way!'
'Oh!'
Kewe — TheWE.name
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We are change 9/11 lies have sustained the ruling terrorism-threat paradigm The “why” is obvious: To justify an unjust war to serve corporate interests and greed |
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9.11 Truth New York City Decades long history of political disruption the US has been responsible for 9/11 is part of a long series of criminal, imperialist conquests Another major highlight was surprise appearance of Cynthia McKinney |
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Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth A solid convincing case which architects & engineers will readily see: that the 3 WTC high-rise buildings were destroyed by both classic and novel forms of controlled demolition These buildings were professionally demolished with explosives |
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Transcript of interview with Niels Harrit on Danish TV2 News 6th April 2009.
Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe
Danish TV2 International researchers have found traces of explosives among the World Trade Center rubble.
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A new scientific article concludes that impacts from the two hijacked aircraft did not cause the collapses in 2001.
We turn our attention to 9/11 — the major attack in New York.
Apparently the two airplane-impacts did not cause the towers to collapse, according to a newly published scientific article.
Researchers found nano-thermite explosive in the rubble, that cannot have come from the planes.
They believe several tonnes of explosives were placed in the buildings in advance.
Niels Harrit, you and eight other researchers conclude in this article, that it was nano-thermite that caused these buildings to collapse. What is nano-thermite?
Niels Harrit We found nano-thermite in the rubble.
We are not saying only nano-thermite was used.
Thermite itself dates back to 1893.
It is a mixture of aluminum and rust-powder, which react to create intense heat.
The reaction produces iron, heated to 2500 °C.
This can be used to do welding. It can also be used to melt other iron.
Nanotechnology makes things smaller. So in nano-thermite, this powder from 1893 is reduced to tiny particles, perfectly mixed.
When these react, the intense heat develops much more quickly.
Nano-thermite can be mixed with additives to give off intense heat, or serve as a very effective explosive.
It contains more energy than dynamite, and can be used as rocket fuel.
Danish TV2
I Googled nano-thermite, and not much has been written about it. Is it a widely known scientific substance? Or is it so new that other scientists are hardly aware of it?
Niels Harrit It is a collective name for substances with high levels of energy.
If civilian researchers (like myself) are not familiar with it, it is probably because they do not do much work with explosives.
As for military scientists, you would have to ask them.
I do not know how familiar they are with nanotechnology.
Danish TV2 So you found this substance in the WTC, why do you think it caused the collapses?
Niels Harrit
Well, it's an explosive. Why else would it be there?
Danish TV2 You believe the intense heat melted the building?s steel support structure, and caused the building to collapse like a house of cards?
Niels Harrit I cannot say precisely, as this substance can serve both purposes.
It can explode and break things apart, and it can melt things.
Both effects were probably used, as I see it.
Molten metal pours out of the South Tower several minutes before the collapse.
This indicates the whole structure was being weakened in advance.
Then the regular explosives come into play.
The actual collapse sequence had to be perfectly timed, all the way down.
Danish TV2 What quantities are we talking about?
Niels Harrit A lot. There were only two planes, but three skyscrapers collapsed.
We know roughly how much dust was created.
The pictures show huge quantities, everything but the steel was pulverised.
And we know roughly how much unreacted thermite we have found.
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This is the “loaded gun”, material that did not ignite for some reason.
We are talking about tonnes. Over 10 tonnes, possibly 100 tonnes.
Danish TV2
Ten tonnes, possibly 100 tonnes, in three buildings? And these substances are not normally found in such buildings?
Niels Harrit No. These materials are extremely advanced.
Danish TV2 How do you place such material in a skyscraper, on all the floors?
Niels Harrit How you would get it in?
Danish TV2 Yes.
Niels Harrit If I had to transport it in those quantities I would use pallets. Get a truck and move it in on pallets.
Danish TV2 Why hasn't this been discovered earlier?
Niels Harrit By whom?
Danish TV2 The caretakers, for example. If you are moving 10 to 100 tonnes of nano-thermite around, and placing it on all the floors. I am just surprised no-one noticed.
Niels Harrit As a journalist, you should address that question to the company responsible for security at the WTC.
Danish TV2 So you are in no doubt the material was present?
Niels Harrit You cannot fudge this kind of science.
We have found it. Unreacted thermite.
Danish TV2 What responses has your article received around the world?
Niels Harrit It is completely new knowledge for me.
It was only published last Friday. So it is too early to say.
But the article may not be as groundbreaking as you think.
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world, have long known that the three buildings were demolished.
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This has been crystal clear.
Our research is just the last nail in the coffin.
This is not the 'smoking gun', it is the 'loaded gun'.
Each day, thousands of people realise that the WTC was demolished.
That is something unstoppable.
Danish TV2 Why has no-one discovered earlier that there was nano-thermite in the buildings? Almost ten years have passed.
Niels Harrit You mean in the dust?
Danish TV2 Yes.
Niels Harrit It was by chance that someone looked at the dust with a microscope.
They are tiny red chips.
The biggest are 1 mm in size, and can be seen with the naked eye.
But you need a microscope to see the vast majority.
It was by chance that someone discovered them two years ago.
Danish TV2 It has taken 18 months to prepare the scientific article you refer to.
Niels Harrit It is a very comprehensive article based on thorough research.
Danish TV2
You have been working on this for several years, because it didn't make sense to you.
Niels Harrit
Yes, over two years actually.
It all started when I saw the collapse of Building 7, the third skyscraper.
It collapsed seven hours after the twin towers.
And there were only two airplanes.
When you see a 47-storey building, 186m tall, collapse in 6.5 seconds, and you are a scientist, you think “what?”.
I had to watch it again… and again.
I hit the button 10 times, and my jaw dropped lower and lower.
Firstly, I had never heard of that building before.
And there was no visible reason why it should collapse in that way, straight down, in 6.5 seconds.
I have had no rest since that day.
Danish TV2
Ever since 9/11 there has been speculation, and conspiracy theories. What do you say to viewers who hear about your research and say, “we?ve heard it all before, there are lots of conspiracy theories”. What would you say to convince them that this is different?
Niels Harrit I think there is only one conspiracy theory worth mentioning, the one involving 19 hijackers.
I think viewers should ask themselves what evidence they have seen to support the official conspiracy theory.
If anyone has seen evidence, I would like to hear about it
No-one has been formally charged. No-one is 'wanted'.
Our work should lead to demands for a proper criminal investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attack.
Because it never happened. We are still waiting for it.
We hope our results will be used as technical evidence when that day comes.
Danish TV2
Niels Harrit, fascinating, thanks for coming in.
Niels Harrit
My pleasure |
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ITALIAN SAYS 9-11 SOLVED
It’s common knowledge, he reveals
CIA — Mossad behind terror attacks By the Staff of American Free Press
Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga, who revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, has told Italy’s oldest and most widely read newspaper that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were run by the CIA and Mossad, and that this was common knowledge among global intelligence agencies.
In what translates awkwardly into English, Cossiga told the newspaper Corriere della Sera:
“All the [intelligence services] of America and Europe… know well that the disastrous attack has been planned and realized from the Mossad, with the aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arabic countries and in order to induce the western powers to take part … in Iraq [and] Afghanistan.”
Cossiga was elected president of the Italian Senate in July 1983 before winning a landslide election to become president of the country in 1985, and he remained until 1992.
Cossiga’s tendency to be outspoken upset the Italian political establishment, and he was forced to resign after revealing the existence of, and his part in setting up, Operation Gladio.
This was a rogue intelligence network under NATO auspices that carried out bombings across Europe in the 1960s, 1970s and ’80s.
Gladio’s specialty was to carry out what they termed 'false flag' operations — terror attacks that were blamed on their domestic and geopolitical opposition.
In March 2001, Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated, in sworn testimony:
“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game.
The reason was quite simple: to force … the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”
Cossiga first expressed his doubts about 9-11 in 2001, and is quoted by 9-11 researcher Webster Tarpley saying:
“The mastermind of the attack must have been a sophisticated mind, provided with ample means not only to recruit fanatic kamikazes, but also highly specialized personnel.
I add one thing: it could not be accomplished without infiltrations in the radar and flight security personnel.”
Coming from a widely respected former head of state, Cossiga’s assertion that the 9-11 attacks were an inside job and that this is common knowledge among global intelligence agencies is illuminating.
It is one more eye-opening confirmation that has not been mentioned by America’s propaganda machine in print or on TV.
Nevertheless, because of his experience and status in the world, Cossiga cannot be discounted as a crackpot.
Free to redistribute as long as credit given to American Free Press |
Photo: Bentham-Open.org |
Bentham-Open.org Download pdf — 10mg document including images — Right click Save As |
The secret story of Mossad and the World Trade Center attack The Odigo Warning: Israeli employees get e-mail warnings of 9-11 SEC Secret Probe Of Stock Dealings Before 9/11 |
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Truth Action LA Branch We are in the midst of a mass awakening 9/11 is the foundational myth upon which the entire agenda has been triggered for our generation |
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Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice High Velocity Bursts of Debris From Point-Like Sources in the WTC Towers Why Did the World’s Most Advanced Electronics Warfare Plane Circle Over The White House on 9/11? |
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Your life, your children's lives — Will you live or die?Decided by small group of elite.Pure evil It doesn't get any clearer than this
Published on Friday, March 2, 2007 by the Los Angeles Times
US to Develop New Hydrogen Bomb
by Ralph Vartabedian
The Energy Department will announce today a contract to develop the nation's first new hydrogen bomb in two decades, involving a collaboration between three national weapons laboratories, The Times has learned.
The new bomb will include design features from all three labs, though Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Bay Area appears to have taken the lead position in the project. The Los Alamos and Sandia labs in New Mexico will also be part of the project.
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Hiroshima, Nagasaki — George Weller report |
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Why are the West's elites trying to start a nuclear war?
Because you pay for it |
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BBC — Thursday, 6 September 2007
UK jets 'chase Russian bombers'
The UK's Royal Air Force has launched fighter jets to intercept eight Russian military planes flying in airspace patrolled by Nato, UK officials say.
Four RAF F3 Tornado aircraft were scrambled in response to the Russian action, the UK's defence ministry said.
The Russian planes - said to be long-range bombers - had earlier been followed by Norwegian F16 jets.
Russia recently revived a Cold War-era practice of flying bombers on long-range patrols.
A Norwegian officer, Lt Col John Inge Oegland, told the BBC the Russian Tupolev Tu-95 Bear bombers flew in international airspace from the Barents Sea to the Atlantic, before turning back.
Two Norwegian F-16s shadowed them on Thursday morning and another two went up later, he said.
There have been several similar incidents in recent months, Lt-Col Oegland added.
"Norway is following the increased Russian activity in the far north with interest," he told the BBC News website.
He said the Russian flights were not causing alarm in Norway. "Our systems are adequate," he said, when asked whether Norway was bolstering its security in the area. |
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Why are the West's elites trying to start a nuclear war?
Because you pay for it |
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BBC — Thursday, 6 September 2007
UK jets 'chase Russian bombers'
The UK's Royal Air Force has launched fighter jets to intercept eight Russian military planes flying in airspace patrolled by Nato, UK officials say.
Four RAF F3 Tornado aircraft were scrambled in response to the Russian action, the UK's defence ministry said.
The Russian planes - said to be long-range bombers - had earlier been followed by Norwegian F16 jets.
Russia recently revived a Cold War-era practice of flying bombers on long-range patrols.
A Norwegian officer, Lt Col John Inge Oegland, told the BBC the Russian Tupolev Tu-95 Bear bombers flew in international airspace from the Barents Sea to the Atlantic, before turning back.
Two Norwegian F-16s shadowed them on Thursday morning and another two went up later, he said.
There have been several similar incidents in recent months, Lt-Col Oegland added.
"Norway is following the increased Russian activity in the far north with interest," he told the BBC News website.
He said the Russian flights were not causing alarm in Norway. "Our systems are adequate," he said, when asked whether Norway was bolstering its security in the area. |
| It's kind of a fun gameYou see the aim of those inner forces who guide the Elite —
For them the real agenda is to kill you your children your grandchildren It is to have fun watching your stupidity as you destroy your planet But most haven't figured it out yet! If you stop them with the nuclear weapons — then it's the 400+ MPH, KPH wind, the UVB, UVC, UVA rays due to loss of stratospheric ozone. It's the climate! Your Elite — tools and servants of Lucifer |
Gustave Doré's illustration for Paradise Lost by John Milton |
The Dark Side Initiates — Click here Dark path initiates depend on the denial The five-percent manipulator class is composed of those on the dark path |
UVC in the 10 to 290 nanometer band UVB, 290 to 320 nanometers UVA, 320 to 400 nanometers |
Soot's effect on ice melt and glaciers Washington State's Glaciers are Melting |
Remnants of knowledge would be retained with those on higher ground. A few people here, a few there. Translations of discussions with The WE |
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EndGame — Alex Jones, you have done the world a great favor
It has taken me until now to view this great masterpiece that chronicles the planet's true history
But I am glad for this delay as my awareness of reality, and the events that seemingly must unfold to educate humankind, have come from sentience off planet — now with this movie the circles merge
A movie par excellence, it will likely be considered the most significant in the downfall of the rich and powerful who control the world and rising politicians already in their pocket — the imprisonment of all those who seek to bring forth this horror, this enslavement of 'New World Order'
Kewe
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Depleted Uranium — its use in Afghanistan, Iraq, Balkans Photos of Iraq children being born deformed
Afghanistan — Western Terror States: Canada, US, UK, France, Germany, Italy Photos of Afghanistan people being killed and injured by NATO
Foreign Ministry officials stated they will do everything possible to renew diplomatic ties, expressing sorrow over the "unfortunate incident". Darfur pictures and arial views of destruction — 2003 — 2005 October 2004 photos Suicide now top killer of Israeli soldiers Atrocities files — graphic images 'Suicide bombings,' the angel said, 'and beheadings.''And the others that have all the power — they fly missiles in the sky.They don't even look at the people they kill.' The real Ronald Reagan — Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, South Africa Photos September 2004 Follow the torture trail... Photos August 2004 Should the dam break, as attempts are being made in Saudi Arabia Photos July 2004 US Debt Photos June 2004 Lest we forget — Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying When you talk with God were you also spending your time, money and energy, killing people? Are they now alive or dead? American military: Abu Gharib (Ghraib) prison photos, humiliation and torture — London Daily Mirror article: non-sexually explicit pictures Photos April 2004 The celebration of Jerusalem day, the US missiles that rained onto children in Gaza, and, a gathering of top articles over the past nine months Photos March 2004 The Iraq War — complete listing of articles, includes images Photos February 2004 US missiles — US money — and Palestine Photos January 2004 Ethnic cleansing in the Beduin desert Photos December 2003 Shirin Ebadi Nobel Peace Prize winner 2003 Photos November 2003 Atrocities — graphic images... Photos October 2003 Aljazeerah.info Photos September 2003 |
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Listen to the speech
