Quick, someone help WPost top Russia-gate sleuths connect the dots!

They write that the DOJ’s investigation of the FBI’s role in investigating Trump, “is pursuing potential crimes, though it is not clear what those crimes might be.” Misleading the FISA Court is a felony – that clear enough?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/justice-dept-inspector-general-invites-witnesses-to-review-draft-of-russia-report-signaling-public-release-is-close/2019/11/12/0a2c246c-05a2-11ea-b17d-8b867891d39d_story.html

Our misunderstanding of the hostage crisis still poisons US-Iran relations

Want to understand Iran? Then don’t go to West Point. Alumnus Mike Pompeo is proof positive that you can get all “A”s there and never learn that in 1953 the CIA and the Brits “regime-changed” the first democratically elected government in Iran/Persia in millennia.  You see, Mohammad Mosaddegh, the newly elected Prime Minister, had the bizarre notion that Iranians should have more control over the oil there — not UK or U.S. oil companies.

The satrap/shah they installed on the “Peacock Throne,” Shah Mohammad Reza Pelavi was as cruel as they come, yet everyone, including Jimmy Carter, kowtowed to him — because of the oil.  The Iranians who, against international law, seized the U.S. embassy and took hostages in 1979 were motivated largely by (understandable) fear that the same CIA and Brits would re-install a merciless dictatorship — because of the oil.  (There are, of course, lots of things the U.S./UK couple still do — because of the oil.)

Quick, someone tell Pompeo to read this recent, fact-filled opinion piece by Stephen Kinzer in the Boston Globe:

Our misunderstanding of the hostage crisis still poisons US-Iran relations
By Stephen Kinzer, October 31, 2019

A FEW WEEKS AGO, as I was giving a speech urging better relations between the United States and Iran, a man on the edge of the crowd began shouting in protest. Slowly I was able to make out his words. He was chanting a single phrase: “Hostage crisis! Hostage crisis! Hostage crisis!”

Forty years ago this weekend, militants scaled the wall of the American Embassy compound in Tehran and seized it. They could not have imagined how decisively they would shape history. Many Iranians still wonder how the embassy takeover and subsequent “hostage crisis” ended up shaping American perceptions of them and their country so decisively and for so long. Yet for the protester who disrupted my speech, and for countless other Americans, that episode crystallized the image of a malevolent Iran.

Our other national humiliations, from the Alamo to Saigon, have faded from memory or been transformed into noble lost causes. Anger over the hostage crisis has not subsided. For four decades it has grotesquely distorted our approach to the Middle East. Although it ended peacefully with the release of American diplomats, it has had an effect on our national consciousness — and our foreign policy — comparable to the effect of the 9/11 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.

The hostage crisis is a lamentable example of how ignorance leads nations to misunderstand each other. It led many Americans to believe that Iranians act out of pure nihilism, cheerfully violating every law of God and man without any reason other than a desire to show how much they hate us. Only years later did it become clear that the opposite was true. The hostage-takers acted to achieve a specific political goal — to stave off what they suspected was an imminent effort by the Americans to reinstall a despised Iranian leader. We might have recognized their motive if we knew our own history.

Rarely has a national humiliation been played out so excruciatingly as during the crisis that began in Iran on Nov. 4, 1979. Americans were already shocked by the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, our prized ally, earlier that year. Seizure of our embassy compound turned that shock from political to emotional. On newscasts every night for 14 months, Americans watched with mounting rage as images from Iran — blindfolded hostages intercut with vituperative denunciations of the United States — flooded into our living rooms. An attempted rescue mission ended in disaster. The hostage-takers had a slogan: “America cannot do anything!” They were right. That only intensified anti-Iran passion in a nation more accustomed to inflicting humiliation than feeling it. The result has been 40 years of bitter hostility.

We now know that militants stormed our embassy in Tehran because they feared the United States was about to launch a coup and re-install the deposed shah. Diplomats posted there had reported this fear to Washington. They warned in one cable that if President Carter brought the shah to the United States, Iranians would believe the coup plot was underway and their reaction would be “immediate and violent.” When they learned that Carter had decided to bring the shah to New York despite their warning, one of them later recalled, they “felt we had been betrayed by our own people. How could they admit the Shah and leave us in Iran to face the angry wolves?”

Those diplomats knew something that few other Americans understood. A quarter-century earlier, in 1953, the CIA had directed a coup that destroyed an incipient democracy in Iran and placed the shah back on his Peacock Throne. Memory of that intervention, and the 25-year dictatorship that followed, burned in the minds of Iranian revolutionaries. They knew that Iranians had overthrown the Pahlavi shah once before, and that CIA officers working in the basement of the American Embassy had directed a coup that placed him back in power. Since it had happened once, they reasoned, it could happen again. To prevent that, they stormed the embassy.

“In the back of everybody’s mind hung the suspicion that, with the admission of the Shah to the United States, the countdown for another coup d’etat had begun,” one of the hostage-takers wrote years later. “Such was to be our fate again, we were convinced, and it would be irreversible. We now had to reverse the irreversible.”

But if Iranian militants were intent on preventing a second coup, few Americans had any idea that we had ever staged a first. That is why we misinterpreted their assault as an act of mindless savagery.

Two generations of American politicians and military officers have been obsessed with punishing Iran for the embassy takeover and hostage crisis. Their enmity has other reasons as well, including hostile Iranian actions and pressure from our regional partners, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Yet after four decades, policy makers in Washington remain fixated on the events of 1979 and convinced that we cannot rest until we have satisfaction. For many of them, it seems, true satisfaction can only come with the destruction of the Islamic Republic.

Americans see the history of US-Iran relations as beginning and ending with the hostage crisis. Iranians see that history quite differently: shaped almost entirely by the 1953 coup. Until these two countries come to a common understanding of what we have done to each other, peace will remain remote.

Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2019/10/31/our-misunderstanding-hostage-crisis-still-poisons-iran-relations/ig8yzkT1QWHaQ5xKN7LlaM/story.html

Do Pelosi & Other “Adults in the Room” Actually Want 4 More Years for Trump?

With impeachment proceedings on the way, it’s useful to remember that House Intel. Committee chair Adam Schiff has a broken rudder called credulousness, an occupational hazard in his line of work. See, for example, https://raymcgovern.com/2018/11/24/adam-schiffs-incredible-incurable-credulity/ Is it possible that Schiff actually believed Brennan & al. who used him as “useful idiot.” Result: 4 more years. Yuk

First They Came For Max

By Ray McGovern

Well, not really first.  They had already come for Chelsea Manning; for Julian Assange; for John Kiriakou; for Jeffrey Sterling — the list is longer still.  Last Friday they came SWAT-Like for the founder and editor of thegrayzone.com, journalist Max Blumenthal, whom they arrested, cuffed, jailed, and shackled, and prevented immediate access to a lawyer. Corporate media played Tar Baby —  “didn’t say nothin” about Max.

Meanwhile, former CIA Acting Director John McLaughlin — WMD slam-dunker extraordinaire and devoted fan of Iraqi bio-weapons fabricator “Curveball,” — told a captive audience, “Thank God for the Deep State.”

On RT’s CrossTalk Ray joined Garland Nixon and Dan Kovalik for a no-holds-barred discussion of what happened to Max and why.
https://youtu.be/OgSrITHdUek
Nov. 1, 2019; 37 minutes (including a commercial break from 12:15 to 14:45.) 

Also on Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/rttv/sets/crosstalk-1

Obama shied away from holding McLaughlin and his boss George Tenet accountable for fraudulent intelligence before Iraq, while Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence Carl Ford said the two of them “should be shot.”

As for the former partners-in-crime and direct descendants of Tenet/McLaughlin — Brennan et al. — Obama chickened out there too.  He could not even find the courage to rein them in from illegal activities to help Hillary, which are about to be revealed, in all their squalor, by Justice Department investigations — unless Trump, too, chickens out.

Ray’s unkempt beard is meant as a sign of solidarity with good and admired friend, Julian. See: https://raymcgovern.com/2019/05/28/the-julian-assange-beard-jab-movement-a-suggestion/

Empire Prefers Profits of War to Prophets of Peace

A Biblical “Remnant” Cries the Beloved Country

BREAKING: Kings Bay Plowshares 7 Found Guilty on All Counts 
kingsbayplowshares7.org
October 24, 2019

This is a breaking news update; more coming… 

BRUNSWICK, GA – More than 18 months after they snuck onto the site of one of the largest known collections of nuclear weaponry in the world, a jury found the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 guilty of all four of the charges brought against them.  

The defendants face more than 20 years in prison for destruction and depredation of government property in excess of $1,000, trespassing, and conspiracy.

“The Pentagon has many installations – and we just walked out of one of them,” Mark Colville said outside the courthouse. “It’s a place where they weaponize the law. And they wield it mostly against the poor, the people who have all the red lined neighborhoods in this county know that very well. ***

“And once in a while the people who are privileged like us get a taste of it. And when we do we should hear the word guilty as a blessing on us because it gives us an opportunity to stand with people who hear guilty all the time every day.”

The seven expect to be sentenced in 60 to 90 days. Until then, six of them have been released under bond conditions each had prior to trial.

Late at night on April 4, 2018 Mark Colville, Clare Grady, Martha Hennessy, Fr. Steve Kelly, S.J., Elizabeth McAlister, Patrick O’Neill, and Carmen Trotta used a bolt cutter to enter a remote gate at Naval Base Kings Bay in St. Mary’s GA. They walked two miles through swamp and brush. They then split into three groups and prayed, poured blood, spray painted messages against nuclear weapons, hammered on parts of a shrine to nuclear missiles, hung banners, and waited to be arrested.

During the course of the trial, which began Monday morning, the defendants and their supporters had expressed pleasure with the unexpected amount of information they had been able to provide to the jury about their reasons for undertaking their protest. Federal Judge Lisa Godbey Wood had issued an order late last Friday night restricting any evidence or testimony having to do with a necessity defense, international law and treaties restricting nuclear weaponry, and religious and moral reasons. 

“I really think that the verdict was, frankly, reactionary,” Trotta told supporters outside the courthouse. “They (the jurors) heard a lot. The judge allowed them to hear a lot. And it’s a little frightening that nuclear weapons could be hidden in plain sight. We have to understand that we are a remnant.… We remain a remnant of the spirit that I think was stronger in our country at other periods on time.

“But we all know which way the wind is blowing. There’s the Black Lives Matter movement. There’s the Extinction Rebellion. There’s the Me Too movement. There’s an activist community waiting just behind us.”

++++++++++++++++++++++

*** Ray has been arrested and jailed with Mark Colville in Syracuse, witnessing against the death-dealing done at the drone base there.  Mark and his wife founded the Amistad Catholic Worker community and house of hospitality in New Haven, Connecticut (amistadcw.wordpress.com), where they live with others dedicated to the daily practice of the Works of Mercy, prayer, nonviolence, environmental justice and promoting human rights and dignity for all people.

Mark has warned, “We stand poised to murder our own children, for no other reason than to preserve our nation’s dominance in the world.  This is the definition of idolatry.  This is the definition of insanity.” Mark and his Plowshare 7 companions keep reminding us of the warning that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. issued in 1968: “The ultimate logic of racism is genocide.”

It IS all connected.  Ray is reminded of the letter James Baldwin sent to Angela Davis after seeing her on the cover of Newsweek, under arrest and chained.  (See: https://raymcgovern.com/2019/01/18/james-baldwins-letter-to-angela-davis/ .)  White supremacy still plays a disguised but major role in many of the hideous crimes of Empire.

After Powerful Testimony, Kings Bay Plowshares Trial Nears End

kingsbayplowshares7.org
October 24, 2019

BRUNSWICK, GA—Both the government and the defense finished their testimony yesterday at 5 p.m. in the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 anti-nuclear weapons case. 

Defendants were able to say much more than had been expected after the wide “in limine” restrictions established late last week before trial. They spoke about their strong faith motivations and their knowledge of the horrendous effects of nuclear weapons, and read portions of documents they had carried onto the Kings Bay submarine base in their action on April 4, 2018, the fiftieth anniversary of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination. Thursday will likely see the trial end with closing statements, the charge to the jury, and jury deliberations.

In a recurring pattern, the judge would allow items the seven carried onto the sub base into evidence over frequent government objection. Martha Hennessy was even allowed to read from the indictment that nuclear weapons are always illegal. The judge did always remind the jury the items admitted were only for the fact that they were left on the base, not that they were true.

The prosecution called their final witness in the morning, base Facilities Management Specialist Juan Melgarejo, to verify the expenses of cleaning and repairs after the disarmament action, which he reported totaled $31,833.

Then two defendants, Hennessy and Patrick O’Neill, who had not previously given opening statements did so, and the defense began their case with Attorney Stephanie Amiotte examining Hennessy. After overruling an objection from the prosecution, the indictment of nuclearism the seven carried and which Hennessy had posted at the Strategic Weapons Facility Engineering office (known as SWFLANT) finally was allowed into evidence by Judge Lisa Godbey Wood.

Go Pro video footage was also admitted of Hennessy reading Bible verses from the prayer book “Give Us This Day” which she, Clare Grady, O’Neill and Mark Colville had read as they waited to be apprehended by base security personnel. Hennessy ended her testimony with, “It’s imminent (nuclear war) and it haunts me.”

Next, Attorney Fred Kopp, in examining Carmen Trotta, asked why he and his colleagues went to Kings Bay. Trotta said that the base has one quarter of the US deployed nuclear weapons, and that it cannot be legal to destroy nearly all life on Earth. He noted the “outrage of God at putting his creation in jeopardy.” Trotta was one of three who went to the so-called “Limited Area,” where deadly force is authorized and where the activists believe nuclear weapons are stored in bunkers. Kopp elicited from Trotta the extreme caution the three took to be “careful for everyone’s sake” as they entered the zone and when they were approached by Marine guards. 

Grady, in examination by Attorney Joe Cosgrove, said that the consequences of global nuclear war are so atrocious they necessitate the creation of the word “omnicide.” 

“Trident is the crime,” she said, explaining her use of crime scene tape, not caution tape, as the government kept calling it, at the SWFLANT office. Grady also noted that her colleagues used hammers to “deconstruct” or “transform” weapons to plowshares, instead of doing damage as the government claims. In cross examination, chief prosecutor Karl Knoche rapid-fired a series of accusations at Grady, claiming that she and her co-defendants believed themselves to be a law unto themselves. Grady calmly answered that the egregious use of weapons is bullying, not the painted peace messages and blood that Grady and Hennessy poured on the engineering office sidewalk.

Attorney Matt Daloisio examined Colville, who quoted his father saying, “Integrity is what you do when no one is looking, taking responsibility to what you know to be true.” Colville also explained his use of the word “idolatry” that he had written on one of the missile replicas, noting that the Bible urges us to remove, even smash, idols. Colville related that it was a long time before any authorities actually confronted him and Grady, Hennessy, and O’Neill in what the activists call the missile shrine area, even though several vehicles approached, slowed and then drove on. So after about an hour they felt they had done enough. They sat down and prayed, then carefully showed their hands when the vehicles finally approached them. In response to the repeated cross examination accusation of arrogantly choosing to run red lights, Colville said that he ran every red light when his wife Luz was in labor. “It was an emergency!”

Representing himself, O’Neill was examined by advisory attorney Keith Higgins. As a “cradle Catholic” grandchild of four immigrants from Ireland, his faith was always his guide and led him to co-found the Fr. Charlie Mulholland Catholic Worker in Garner, NC with his wife, Mary Rider. He noted that Catholic workers take nonviolent action and break the law like Rosa Parks, Susan B. Anthony, and Dr. King, to bring social change. In reviewing the items he took onto the base, O’Neill brought international law into the courtroom. He mentioned copies of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the new Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. In government’s exhibit 36-1B-6 GoPro video footage O’Neill recorded himself quoting Pope Francis saying the use and possession of nuclear weapons is to be firmly condemned.

The seven’s statement is one of love and hope, O’Neill said.

Elizabeth McAlister was questioned by her attorney Bill Quigley. After briefly describing her life growing up and her life as a nun, McAlister explained how she got involved in the peace movement. As a college professor during the Vietnam War, she said, 30 of her students’ boyfriends came home in body bags. 

“One could not be a teacher of these young women without sharing their grief. I felt that we were being called to more.”

She related the story of marrying well-known activist Philip Berrigan, who later co-founded the Plowshares movement. They established the activist community Jonah House in Baltimore. McAlister described how her continued sense of her vocation led her to this action. Prayer, she said, was integral to the action. There is a “reshaping” of conscience that happens within each of us, which mirrors the transformation we seek of weapons into tools for cultivating life. McAlister also explained her reason for using the symbol of blood. 

“War involves radical bloodshed. (Using blood as a symbol) is a way of remembering that war is bloodshed, and we long to see the end of war and the end of shedding the blood of another human being.”

Scott Bassett, the communications officer for the Kings Bay base was called as a witness by the defense. Upon prompting, he testified that he had at earlier pre-trial motions hearings given a statement to the Washington Post. His statement said that there was no threat to any assets or personnel at the base from the protestors. He said the statement meant there had been no damage to military assets such as submarines or weapons systems, not a missile display.

Apart from a few objections and brief comments to indicate his agreement with the testimony of his co-defendants, Fr. Steve Kelly, S.J., remained silent throughout the proceedings. 

After exiting the courthouse, the defendants told a gathering of supporters and media they were pleased that they were able to say so much more in court about their beliefs and motivation than they had expected because of the judge’s rulings prohibiting mention of their religious motivations, international law, or necessity.

“We are seeing what the courts protect,” said Grady. 

PLEASE DONATE
Supporting this profound sacrifice by these seven requires generosity. Your support of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 will help cover the ongoing costs surrounding this trial and social change effort. You can give at our GoFundMe site and checks can be sent to Plowshares, PO Box 3087, Washington, DC 20010. Further details check the website: kingsbayplowshares7.org. 
Thank you!