Soon after legendary spymaster and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton’s intelligence career supposedly ended with his forced retirement in December 1974 due to the exposure of CIA wrongdoing, he returned to the Agency, where counterintelligence operations reportedly remained under his purview until late 1975.

Documents obtained by obtained by MIT national security researcher Ryan Shapiro and shared exclusively with MuckRock show that the Agency soon signed a Top Secret contract with Angleton after his much publicized firing. The documents also show that both Angleton and CIA Director Colby gave misleading testimony to the Church Committee about this. A previously classified internal CIA History also raises doubts about the nature of Angleton’s contract work by contradicting CIA’s public statements. Part one of this article explores his rehiring and the lies directly surrounding it, while later parts will reexamines CIA’s “war in heaven” including the possibly libelous “Monster Plot” report and the circumstances surrounding Angleton’s fall from grace.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/oct/19/angleton-return/

The federal government’s long campaign to try to choke off rampant conspiracy theories about the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy is threatening to end this month in massive confusion, if not chaos.

Within the next two weeks, the National Archives is legally obligated to release the last of thousands of secret documents from government files about the assassination, most of them from the CIA, FBI and the Justice Department.

And there is every indication that the massive document dump—especially if any of it is blocked by President Donald Trump, the only person empowered under the law to stop the release of the files—will simply help fuel a new generation of conspiracy theories.

Trump, no stranger to conspiracy theories, including totally unsubstantiated theories about a link between Ted Cruz’s father and JFK’s death, has not yet revealed his plans for the documents. His friend and political adviser Roger Stone, the Republican consultant who is the author of a book claiming that President Lyndon Johnson was the mastermind of the Kennedy assassination, said last week that he has been informed authoritatively that the CIA is urging Trump to delay the release of some of the JFK documents for another 25 years. “They must reflect badly on the CIA even though virtually everyone involved is long dead,” Stone said in a statement on his website.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/16/the-next-jfk-document-dump-could-be-a-fiasco-215716

Founded around 1118 as a monastic military order devoted to the protection of pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land following the Christian capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, the Knights Templar quickly became one of the richest and most influential groups of the Middle Ages, thanks to lavish donations from the crowned heads of Europe, eager to curry favor with the fierce Knights. By the turn of the 14th century, the Templars had established a system of castles, churches and banks throughout Western Europe. And it was this astonishing wealth that would lead to their downfall.

For the Templars, that end began in the early morning hours of Friday, October 13, 1307.

A month earlier, secret documents had been sent by couriers throughout France. The papers included lurid details and whispers of black magic and scandalous sexual rituals. They were sent by King Philip IV of France, an avaricious monarch who in the preceding years had launched attacks on the Lombards (a powerful banking group) and France’s Jews (who he had expelled so he could confiscate their property for his depleted coffers).

In the days and weeks that followed that fateful Friday, more than 600 Templars were arrested, including Grand Master Jacques de Molay, and the Order’s treasurer. But while some of the highest-ranking members were caught up in Philip’s net, so too were hundreds of non-warriors; middle-aged men who managed the day-to-day banking and farming activities that kept the organization humming. The men were charged with a wide array of offenses including heresy, devil worship and spitting on the cross, homosexuality, fraud and financial corruption.

http://www.history.com/news/why-friday-the-13th-spelled-doom-for-the-knights-templar

If journalism resigns itself to being a “first draft of history,” Ken Burns’ popular PBS documentaries, written by Lynn Novick, have increasingly aspired to—and achieved—a coveted status as popular historical canon. This has, in part, been accomplished by Burns’ choice of cozily American subject matter—jazz, baseball, the Brooklyn Bridge—as well as the calming effect that time and distance provide when it comes to more difficult, inflammatory topics like the Civil War. His success is a rare, fraught feat.

But how would Burns’ earnest, middlebrow glosses on American history, forever panning slowly across sepia-tinted photos, treat a more contemporaneous, contentious event like the Vietnam War? The answer can be found in a 10-part, 18-hour opus that for the first time ventures outside Burns’ previous editorial and narrative comfort zones. The Cold War lead-up, decade-plus of intense air and ground combat, and subsequent years of national shame/guilt over the war affected the second half of our 20th century like nothing else.

Teasing out a coherent, honest through-line of such a momentous, highly charged topic is ambitious, to say the least, and Burns rises to the challenge in many ways. Most notable among them: a dedicated effort to include the voices and experiences of the Vietnamese who suffered and/or fought Americans, to create a much more complete, insightful portrait of the war. But in the striving to present all sides and simply lay out the facts for the viewer, Burns nonetheless pulls his punches when it comes to assigning blame and culpability for the disastrous war. As a result, he has produced a sometimes daring, sometimes schmaltzy, richly detailed yet ultimately flawed film about the tragedy and horrors that the United States brought upon itself and inflicted upon Southeast Asia.

http://fair.org/home/ken-burns-vietnam-war-an-object-lesson-in-the-failures-of-the-objective-lens/

One of the most hyped “events” of American television, “The Vietnam War,” has started on the PBS network. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Acclaimed for his documentaries on the Civil War, the Great Depression and the history of jazz, Burns says of his Vietnam films, “They will inspire our country to begin to talk and think about the Vietnam War in an entirely new way.”

In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its “exceptionalism,” Burns’s “entirely new” Vietnam War is presented as an “epic, historic work.” Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in Vietnam.

Burns says he is grateful to “the entire Bank of America family” which “has long supported our country’s veterans.” Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and around the same number are estimated to have taken their own lives.

I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings.”

The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.

There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be for many Americans – it is difficult to watch the film’s jumble of “red peril” maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences. In the series’ press release in Britain — the BBC will show it — there is no mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans.

“We are all searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy,” Novick is quoted as saying. How very post-modern.

All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the Twentieth Century: from “The Green Berets” and “The Deer Hunter” to “Rambo” and, in so doing, has legitimized subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries. The invader is pitied and purged of guilt, while “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy.” Cue Bob Dylan: “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/21/the-killing-of-history/

A decade in the making, The Vietnam War, a 10-episode, 18-hour, 360-degree documentary, which premieres on September 17th, isn't just a corrective to the fact that generations have grown up being taught little more about Vietnam than "we came, we lost, now forget about it." It's also the deepest exploration yet of the origins, the fighting and the fallout of a conflict that virtually defined the Sixties, and the first to let "the enemy" speak at length alongside familiar American voices, including Pentagon policy wonks, Army privates, anti-war protesters and grieving parents.

http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/features/the-vietnam-war-inside-ken-burns-definitive-18-hour-documentary-w503401

http://www.pbs.org/show/vietnam-war-not-edited/

Here, from chapter six of None Dare Call it Conspiracy, “The Rockefellers and the Reds,” is a devastating passage commenting on the period just after the Russian Revolution of 1917:

“The Rockefellers assigned their public relations agent, Ivy Lee, to sell the American public the idea that the Bolsheviks were merely misunderstood idealists who were actually kind benefactors of mankind.”

“Professor Antony Sutton of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, notes in his highly authoritative Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development:”

“‘Quite predictably…[Ivy] Lee concludes that the communist problem is merely psychological. By this time he is talking about “Russians” (not Communists) and concludes “they are all right.” He suggests the United States should not engage in propaganda; makes a plea for peaceful coexistence; and suggests the United States would find it sound policy to recognize the USSR and advance credits [give loans].’ (Antony Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1917-1930, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, Calif., 1968, p.292)”

“After the Bolshevik Revolution, Standard of New Jersey [Rockefeller] bought 50 per cent of the Nobel’s huge Caucasus oil fields even though the property had theoretically been nationalized [by Russia]. (O’Connor, Harvey, The Empire Of Oil, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1955, p.270.)”

“In 1927, Standard Oil of New York [Rockefeller] built a refinery in Russia, thereby helping the Bolsheviks put their economy back on its feet. Professor Sutton states: ‘This was the first United States investment in Russia since the Revolution.’ (Ibid, Vol.1, p.38)”

https://geopolitics.co/2017/08/29/forgotten-history-us-bankers-financing-us-enemies-and-why-it-is-important-now/

This piece has been adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy's new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.

In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, particularly of the emerging technologies for digital surveillance, agile drones, and biometric identification. In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a "fourth branch" of the federal government -- with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year.

Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history's largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus. According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation's 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined "black budget" of $52.6 billion, the equivalent of 10% percent of the vast defense budget.

By sweeping the skies and probing the worldwide web's undersea cables, the National Security Agency (NSA) could surgically penetrate the confidential communications of just about any leader on the planet, while simultaneously sweeping up billions of ordinary messages. For its classified missions, the CIA had access to the Pentagon's Special Operations Command, with 69,000 elite troops (Rangers, SEALs, Air Commandos) and their agile arsenal. In addition to this formidable paramilitary capacity, the CIA operated 30 Predator and Reaper drones responsible for more than 3,000 deaths in Pakistan and Yemen.

While Americans practiced a collective form of duck and cover as the Department of Homeland Security's colored alerts pulsed nervously from yellow to red, few paused to ask the hard question: Was all this security really directed solely at enemies beyond our borders? After half a century of domestic security abuses -- from the "red scare" of the 1920s through the FBI's illegal harassment of antiwar protesters in the 1960s and 1970s -- could we really be confident that there wasn't a hidden cost to all these secret measures right here at home? Maybe, just maybe, all this security wasn't really so benign when it came to us.

From my own personal experience over the past half-century, and my family's history over three generations, I've found out in the most personal way possible that there's a real cost to entrusting our civil liberties to the discretion of secret agencies. Let me share just a few of my own "war" stories to explain how I've been forced to keep learning and relearning this uncomfortable lesson the hard way.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41724-exploring-the-shadows-of-the-us-security-state-how-i-learned-not-to-love-big-brother