Tag: CIA

08SEP1780: In Only Two Weeks of Irregular Warfare, Marion’s 150 Men are Targeted by the British

The last we heard of Marion, he had split his militia force in the face of larger British/Tory numbers into three units. Maj. James had some intel that indicated on the evening of 07SEP1780 that 400 Redcoats/Tories under Wemyss were in Kingstree only 20 miles west of Marion with orders to finish Marion off. Marion was also made aware of 200 more Redcoats coming north out of the port of George Town heading his way as well.

With the news of overwhelming forces headed their way, Marion took counsel with the militia leadership and decided to move back east and north away from this pressure. Many of the men we audibly anxious about this news as they knew their homes in the Williamsburg area would be subjected to the pillaging efforts of the British as they gave chase to the fox (Marion).

The morning of 08SEP1780, Marion had more intel about the same force he had dispersed at Blue Savannah, Gainey and his Tory militia was headed toward Marion from the east. It is at this point that Marion makes the call to release those under his command to go and give aid and comfort to their own families as well as other patriotic families in the region and left with the balance, 60 men in all, to move north. Maj. James with a small band of men were to move directly in the path of Wemyss in the Williamsburg area to do what they can to counter act the wrath of the British.

By this time, from the west, the British force under Wemyss was only two miles away and so Marion decided to address the items he had that slowed him down, two old iron artillery pieces, probably six-pounders, and dumped them in the swamp just before crossing the North Carolina border.

By 15SEP1780, Marion and his men would be safely in Great White Marsh which is in eastern North Carolina, 30 miles past the border. Francis Marion, like a fox, sensed eminent danger and pressure from all sides and safely withdrew into a swamp area that offer protection and rest for the remainder of his men. Without a direct conflict in a week, Marion reflects on his efforts in late August / early September 1780.

With two weeks of irregular warfare with NO support from the Continentals prompted Francis Marion to use this time in relative safety to write Gen. Gates and explain that he and his men would remain in North Carolina until he heard from Gates or had another opportunity.

In Marion’s absence, the British left an indelible impression on the region:

Upon his arrival in Indiantown around September 7 Wemyss burned the Presbyterian church there, calling it a “sedition shop.” (Ironically, Wemyss was himself a Presbyterian.) Over the next few days he put the torch to several more homes, including that of Major James, allegedly because James’s wife refused to provide information as to her husband’s whereabouts.

He also hanged Adam Cusack, a local ferryman, in front of his wife and children as they pleaded for his life. According to American accounts, Cusack was executed either for refusing to ferry Wemyss’s officers across a creek or because he fired a shot across the creek at a slave of Tory militia captain John Brockinton. When Dr. James Wilson tried to intercede on Cusack’s behalf, Wemyss burned his house too. …

On his march north from Kingstree to the town of Cheraw, Wemyss cut a path of destruction seventy miles long and five miles wide on both sides of the Pee Dee River, burning fifty houses and plantations along the way. He claimed that these “mostly” belonged to people who had broken their paroles or oaths of allegiance and were now in arms against the British. (He offered no justification for burning the others.) Wemyss also ordered his men to destroy blacksmith shops, looms, and mills and to shoot or bayonet any milk cows and sheep not taken by the British for themselves. The residents thus lost not only their shelter but also their means of livelihood, food, and clothing. Wemyss’s scorched-earth policy would have echoes in Sherman’s famous march through the South in the Civil War.

Oller, John. The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution (Kindle Locations 1093-1106). Da Capo Press. Kindle Edition.

There is a term that is used in the 21st century to describe the unintentional consequences of this kind of warfare on the civilian population, BLOWBACK. The US Empire’s CIA is well aware of what happens when these kind of tactics are used in that a majority of the population is so incensed that freedom fighters/insurgents are “birthed” at incredible rates. This is what would be the case in 18th century South Carolina, where any gains the British had after practically overrunning the whole state by the end of May 1780 would be erased by the conduct of British officers and Tory/Loyalists.

While it was tempting for the patriotic forces to mimic the British in a “tit-for-tat” move, for the most part Marion was able to control those under his command. While some junior officers did go rogue and follow the British “total war” strategy, Marion sought to distance himself from this and communicated with Gen. Gates specifically which officers had crossed that line. Unfortunately, there were few if any British officers that reined in their men like Marion did, and the civilian population in South Carolina took the brunt of this immoral use of military troops directly on families, their livelihood and their property.

-SF1

Iran: Misunderstood If One Only Listens to US Government/US Media

USS Kidd (DDG-993), the never-delivered IIS Kouroush, to be part of the Shah’s upgraded Iranian Navy

Reflecting back on the late 1970s when I was an instructor in the US Navy’s Naval Training Center, it was apparent that I was more than just a little intrigued by some of the nationalities represented. I taught Aussies (quite the drinkers) and Germans (2nd place drinkers) as well as Saudis, Iraqis and Iranians. It was the Iranians I was the most curious about especially when it seemed at one moment Iran was the US’s closest ally and then during the “Hostage Crisis” broke out in November 1979, they were becoming our worst enemy.

In hindsight, with a little research and education it is apparent that the Shah’s policies did little to advance the Iranian people as the Iranian military was not ready to use these advanced US built navy warships without outside technical help. The situation was not helped by the woeful state of Iranian society which in the 1970s it was still 40%+ illiterate and it had an acute shortage of engineers and electronics technicians, let alone ones who wanted to join the navy. I had seen this first hand in teaching Iranians about radar systems.

Most people who remember 1979 saw what those in power wanted us to see. Few people at that time understood the path the Iranian people had up to that point. As David Swanson points out in this Lew Rockwell article back in 2013 about what the US public was fed:

[Myth follows]

U.S.-Iranian relations began around November 1979 when a crowd of irrational religious nutcases violently seized the U.S. embassy in Iran, took the employees hostage, tortured them, and held them until scared into freeing them by the arrival of a new sheriff in Washington, a man named Ronald Reagan.

From that day to this, according to this popular theory, Iran has been run by a bunch of subhuman lunatics with whom rational people couldn’t really talk if they wanted to. These monsters only understand force. And they have been moments away from developing and using nuclear weapons against us for decades now.

However, if the truth be told (just know that it was in 2013 when the CIA finally admitted to this):

[Truth follows]

… the CIA, operating out of that U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1953, maliciously and illegally overthrew a relatively democratic and liberal parliamentary government, and with it the 1951 Time magazine man of the year Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, because Mossadegh insisted that Iran’s oil wealth enrich Iranians rather than foreign corporations.

The CIA installed a dictatorship run by the Shah of Iran who quickly became a major source of profits for U.S. weapons makers, and his nation a testing ground for surveillance techniques and human rights abuses. The U.S. government encouraged the Shah’s development of a nuclear energy program. But the Shah impoverished and alienated the people of Iran, including hundreds of thousands educated abroad.

We are talking about a beta test of the NSA called SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, back in the 1970s. So embedded was this surveillance network, that the CIA was able to transition Iran from the Shah’s regime to an equally abusive on based on a theocracy without hardly anyone in media seeing anything strange at all.

A secular pro-democracy revolution nonviolently overthrew the Shah in January 1979, but it was a revolution without a leader or a plan for governing. It was co-opted by rightwing religious forces led by a man who pretended briefly to favor democratic reform. The U.S. government, operating out of the same embassy despised by many in Iran since 1953, explored possible means of keeping the Shah in power, but some in the CIA worked to facilitate what they saw as the second best option: a theocracy that would substitute religious fanaticism and oppression for populist and nationalist demands.

When the U.S. embassy was taken over by an unarmed crowd the next November, immediately following the public announcement of the Shah’s arrival in the United States, and with fears of another U.S.-led coup widespread in Tehran, a sit-in planned for two or three days was co-opted, as the whole revolution had been, by mullahs with connections to the CIA and an extremely anti-democratic agenda.

They later made a deal with U.S. Republicans, as Robert Parry and others have well documented, to keep the hostage crisis going until Carter lost the 1980 presidential election to Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s government secretly renewed weapons sales to the new Iranian dictatorship despite its public anti-American stance and with no more concern for its religious fervor than for that of future al Qaeda leaders who would spend the 1980s fighting the Soviets with U.S. weapons in Afghanistan. At the same time, the Reagan administration made similarly profitable deals with Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq, which had launched a war on Iran and continued it with U.S. support through the length of the Reagan presidency…

So you see, Iran was once again used and abused by a super power like it had been before by the British and BP which profited from the immense oil discoveries from 1908 through 1953 when it enlisted the CIA to get the Shah of Iran back in power. Back in the 1800s it was Iran’s weak and greedy monarchs who where all too ready to hand over their country’s riches to the country, usually Britain or Russia, that had the deepest pockets with little regard for the well being of their subjects. These corrupt rulers, more than any other internal factor, set the stage for the violent struggle the Iranians waged for freedom, democracy, and national sovereignty throughout the first half of the 20th century.

You see, there are bits of truth out there but you will not see it in the best sellers sections of bookstores or in your history books. One recommended read is the yet to be published “Waking Up in Tehran: Love and Intrigue in Revolutionary Iran“, which is the memoir of Margot White, an American human rights activist who became an ally of pro-democracy Iranian student groups in 1977, traveled to Iran, supported the revolution, met with the hostage-takers in the embassy .. which in fact was an early version of WikiLeaks. They “continued to publish reconstructed US Embassy documents, eventually producing 54 volumes of evidence of CIA operatives … manipulating, threatening and bribing world leaders, rigging foreign elections, hijacking local political systems, shuffling foreign governments like decks of cards, sabotaging economic competitors, assassinating regional, national and tribal leaders at will, choreographing state-to-state diplomacy like cheap theater.” [ Facebook page link to this book here ]

This book, promised for the past five years, could unlock even more information about the Deep State. Maybe this is why this book has yet to be published?

In the meantime I encourage you to check out The Corbett Report article back in June 2016 which states:

It’s been an open secret that the US organized and enabled two of the three major events in modern Iranian history: the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and the Shah’s subsequent reign of terror (and eventual exile)…. newly-released documents confirm that the US had a larger role than previously admitted in the third: the Islamic Revolution of 1979

-SF1

 

More On US Sanctions – Will This Knee-Jerk Reaction Lead toward USD/Empire Demise?

From Iceland (where it is much safer to say the truth), The Saker article “Sanctions, Sanctions, Sanctions – the Final Demise of the Dollar Hegemony?” by Peter Koenig takes on this trend from all angles and states the obvious:

They [sanctions] are made to punish countries, nations, that refuse to bend to a world dictatorship.

Even ZeroHedge said back ten days ago:

… the relative surge in China’s ‘petroyuan’ futures contract overnight could suggest a shift away from the petrodollar to avoid US sanctions on Iranian oil..

A picture of USD hegemony:

.. and a picture of a significant shift:

So what is Peter Koenig saying? Here are a few interesting clips:

… Looks like everybody accepts this new economic warfare as the new normal. Nobody objects. And the United Nations, the body created to maintain Peace, to protect our globe from other wars, to uphold human rights – this very body is silent – out of fear? Out of fear that it might be ‘sanctioned’ into oblivion by the dying empire? – Why cannot the vast majority of countries – often it is a ratio of 191 to 2 (Israel and the US) – reign-in the criminals?  ..

You see, sanctions ARE effectively the first strike in most every war, from Gulf War I and II back to WWII with both Germany and Japan. It is rare when sanctions do not result in war because of the stress it brings on a nation’s people that causes politicians to panic into “doing something”.

Now doing something might not mean specific military actions, but maybe just imprisoning some criminals (US’s CIA) that are in various countries:

What if Iran, Venezuela, Russia, China – and many more countries not ready to bow to the empire, would jail all those spies embedded in the US Embassies or camouflaged in these countries’ national (financial) institutions, acting as Fifth Columns, undermining their host countries’ national and economic policies? – Entire cities of new jails would have to be built to accommodate the empire’s army of criminals.

Interesting times ahead for sure. But when a bully empire operates on lies, the patience of these nations will be tested. What of the American people? Well, the last line of this paragraph shows what we have become:

Imagine Russia – more sanctions were just imposed for alleged and totally unproven (to the contrary: disproven) Russian poisoning of four UK citizens with the deadly nerve agent, Novichok – and for not admitting it. This is a total farce, a flagrant lie, that has become so ridiculous, most thinking people, even in the UK, just laugh about it. Yet, Trump and his minions in Europe and many parts of the world succumb to this lie – and out of fear of being sanctions, they also sanction Russia. What has the world become? – Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, would be proud for having taught the important lesson to the liars of the universe: “Let me control the media, and I will turn any nation into a herd of Pigs”. That’s what we have become – a herd of pigs.

Actually, I have known pigs, and they are even smarter than dogs. Suffice it to say, the American people in general are sheep .. stupid and aimless, scared to be without someone telling them what to do every day or every hour (daddy / mommy government and its media).

So if the American people are dumb, what about its leaders? Well, there is a history there .. and if you knew it all you would NEVER trust the US government again. Consider just one parallel, Venezuela = Chile:

… Venezuela is struggling to get out of this dilemma which has people suffering, by de-dollarizing her economy, partly through a newly created cryptocurrency, the Petro, based on Venezuela’s huge oil reserves and also through a new Bolivar – in the hope of putting the breaks on the spiraling bursts of inflation. This scenario reminds so much of Chile in 1973, when Henry Kissinger was Foreign Secretary (1973-1977), and inspired the CIA coup, by “disappearing” food and other goods from Chilean markets, killing legitimately elected President Allende, bringing Augusto Pinochet, a horrendous murderer and despot to power. The military dictatorship regime brought the death and disappearance of tens of thousands of people and lasted until 1990…

I think the CIA would love to get back into South America this way .. as they are getting back into Africa after too much attention has been drawn to its Middle East collusion with Israel, Saudi Arabia and UK with ISIS. Peter Koenig goes on to state the facts about Iran, North Korea and China and the inability for the US to ever abide by treaties it is involved with for any real length of time .. just ask the American Indians:

The bottom line is a rot that is the swamp:

… What is really transpiring is that Washington is isolating itself, that the one-polar world is moving towards a multipolar world, one that increasingly disregards and disrespects the United States, despises her bullying and warmongering – killing and shedding misery over hundreds of millions of people, most of them defenseless children, women and elderly, by direct military force or by proxy-led conflicts – Yemen is just one recent examples, causing endless human suffering to people who have never done any harm to their neighbors, let alone to Americans. Who could have any respect left for such a nation, called the United States of America, for the people behind such lying monsters? ..

Our national character is mud. Our legacy means once the empire starts dying there will be a piling on of other countries demanding revenge on this nation who by then will be led by our kids and grand-kids. We will not have followed Thomas Paine’s advice:

SF1

 

 

Is Israel 2.0 Anything Like Israel 1.0 was Supposed to Be?

From The Electronic Intifada

No surprise .. from supporting ISIS to supporting neo-Nazis .. they ain’t anything like Israel 1.0 .. or at least what God intended for Israel 1.0.

Azov Battalion online propaganda shows Israeli-licensed Tavor rifles in the fascist group’s hands

Neo-Nazis supported by Israel 2.0? No, get out, I thought they only supported ISIS …

The rifles are produced under licence from Israel Weapon Industries, and as such would have been authorized by the Israeli government.

OK, so what would be the motive?

When the civil war began in eastern Ukraine against Russian-backed separatists, the new western-backed government began to arm Azov. The militia soon fell under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian interior ministry, and saw some of the most intense frontline combat against the separatists.

The group stands accused in United Nations and Human Rights Watch reports of committing war crimes against pro-Russian separatists during the ongoing civil war in the eastern Donbass region, including torture, sexual violence and targeting of civilian homes.

Today, Azov is run by Arsen Avakov, Ukraine’s interior minister. According to the BBC, he pays its fighters, and has appointed one of its military commanders, Vadym Troyan, as his deputy – with control over the police.

Avakov last year met with the Israeli interior minister Aryeh Deri to discuss “fruitful cooperation.”

Azov’s young founder and first military commander Andriy Biletsky is today a lawmaker in the Ukrainian parliament.

As journalist Max Blumenthal explained on The Real News in February, Biletsky has “pledged to restore the honor of the white race” and has advanced laws forbidding “race mixing.”

There it is … Israel HEARTS this …

Israel’s military aid to Ukraine and its neo-Nazis emulates similar programs by the United States and other NATO countries including the UK and Canada.

So obsessed are they with defeating a perceived threat from Russia that they seem happy to aid even openly Nazi militias – as long as they fight on their side.

This is also a throwback to the early Cold War, when the CIA supported fascists and Hitlerites to infiltrate from Austria into Hungary in 1956, where they began slaughtering Hungarian communist Jews and Hungarian Jews as “communists.”

.. and when the US supported Bin Laden as a freedom fighter in the late 1970s .. what can go wrong when you chose sides like your “enemy’s enemy is your friend” mantra.

Israel has historically acted as a useful route through which US presidents and the CIA can circumvent congressional restrictions on aid to various unsavory groups and governments around the world.

In 1980s Latin America, these included the Contras, who were fighting a war against the left-wing revolutionary government of Nicaragua, as well as a host of other Latin American fascist death squads and military dictatorships.

The US and Israel, a couple that overtly or covertly bring their violence to the world at large .. while all the time claiming to either being the world’s policeman or the nation that God favors yet again.

 

When the CIA’s Color Revolutions Just Keep Coming

Signature of the CIA:
2014 Version (under Obama):
“Accompanying the demonstrations and illegal occupations of government buildings are in both cases brutal, criminal attacks on the police and other government forces. In Syria the violence “muscle” part was done by foreign financed Jihadists while neo-nazi gangs are used in the Ukraine. The demonstrations and the attacks on the state are planned and go together…”

From Moon of Alabama

So I hear so many in the US talk that anything “Nazi” is a bad thing, but our tax dollars funded Nazi groups in Ukraine to over-through the government there (CIA has been doing this dozens of times since 1953 in Iran) ..

2018 Version (under Trump)
CIA operations in Venezuela and now most recently in Nicaragua. The same concept is used to attack Iran like in December 2017 peaceful economic protests were hijacked by violent elements and now just last night a similar attempt occurred.

The US Two Party Political System stinks .. both parties are rotten to the core and have been for decades.

These efforts in Iran are likely to fail. Since its Islamic revolution in 1979 every U.S. attempt to damage Iran (or Russia, or China) or its allies has led to the opposite effect. Every time Iran emerged stronger than before. It is likely that the current attempt will have a similar result.

The American Empire is waning .. and not a moment too soon. We should go the way of the USSR, divide up into republics!!!