Secret HistoryS


Bad Guys

The complete guide to the NY Times' support for US-backed coups in Latin America

nyt new york times
On Friday, The New York Times continued its long, predictable tradition of backing U.S. coups in Latin America by publishing an editorial praising Donald Trump's attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. This will be the 10th such coup the paper has backed since the creation of the CIA over 70 years ago.

A survey of The New York Times archives shows the Times editorial board has supported 10 out of 12 American-backed coups in Latin America, with two editorials-those involving the 1983 Grenada invasion and the 2009 Honduras coup-ranging from ambiguous to reluctant opposition. The survey can be viewed here.

Star of David

Former Carter aide: Barbara Walters boasted of love affairs with Israeli ministers while covering Camp David

Moshe Dayan Barbara Walters
A new book says that Barbara Walters boasted of love affairs with Israel's foreign and defense ministers, Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman, in 1978-1979 while she was covering Camp David negotiations for ABC news.

In "Jimmy Carter: The White House Years", Carter's former domestic policy adviser, Stuart Eizenstat, quotes Gerald Rafshoon, Carter's former communications director, as saying that Walters- who was 49 and divorced at the time -bragged to him of having affairs with the ministers, both of them Israeli generals.

Eizenstat reports that on day 3 of the heated negotiations at Camp David in September 1978, a busload of reporters were granted access to the retreat for just 45 minutes, and Walters went missing, hiding in the ladies' room in order to "hang back to interview Dayan and Weizman."

Dig

Siberia's Denisova cave continues to shed light on enigmatic extinct human species

denisova cave
The entrance to Denisova Cave, which contains evidence of previous habitation by extinct human species, in the Anui River valley in the Altai mountains of Siberia, Russia
Scientists using sophisticated techniques to determine the age of bone fragments, teeth and artifacts unearthed in a Siberian cave have provided new insight into a mysterious extinct human species that may have been more advanced than previously known.

Research published on Wednesday shed light on the species called Denisovans, known only from scrappy remains from Denisova Cave in the foothills of the Altai Mountains in Russia.

While still enigmatic, they left a genetic mark on our species, Homo sapiens, particularly among indigenous populations in Papua New Guinea and Australia that retain a small but significant percentage of Denisovan DNA, evidence of past interbreeding between the species.

Comment: In light of numerous studies and discoveries from the archaeological and genetic record, a great many theories about the history of humanity don't stand up to scrutiny: The 'Out of Africa' theory for all human species has been debunked; neanderthals and denisovans were much more sophisticated than presumed; there is burgeoning evidence for multiple episodes of interbreeding between our early human ancestors; and the dating for for all of this is being pushed much further back with each new discovery.

See also:


Info

German archaeologist on the latest research at Gobekli Tepe

Archaeologist Dr. Lee Clare says; As mentioned previously, our scientific research is currently in what I would refer to as a "transitional phase". Freed of its old paradigm, I believe that we will see Göbeklitepe in a completely different light.
Gobekli Tepe_1
© Arkeolojik Haber
Coordinator of research and fieldwork at Göbeklitepe from the German Archaeological Institute, Dr. Lee Clare answered Arkeofili's questions.

Attention

Amnesty International's problematic collaboration with UK and US intelligence

Benenson/Smith
© Uppsala-Bild/Creative CommonsPeter Benenson, left, with George Ivan Smith at a 1966 Nordic Africa Institute Seminar.
Amnesty International, the eminent human-rights non-governmental organization, is widely known for its advocacy in that realm. It produces reports critical of the Israeli occupation in Palestine and the Saudi-led war on Yemen. But it also publishes a steady flow of indictments against countries that don't play ball with Washington - countries like Iran, China, Venezuela, Nicaragua, North Korea and more. Those reports amplify the drumbeat for a "humanitarian" intervention in those nations.

Amnesty's stellar image as a global defender of human rights runs counter to its early days when the British Foreign Office was believed to be censoring reports critical of the British empire. Peter Benenson, the co-founder of Amnesty, had deep ties to the British Foreign Office and Colonial Office while another co-founder, Luis Kutner, informed the FBI of a gun cache at Black Panther leader Fred Hampton's home weeks before he was killed by the Bureau in a gun raid.

These troubling connections contradict Amnesty's image as a benevolent defender of human rights and reveal key figures at the organization during its early years to be less concerned with human dignity and more concerned with the dignity of the United States and United Kingdom's image in the world.

Blackbox

Forgotten history: New documentary explores the Finders conspiracy

finders cult
The Conscious Resistance Network presents:

Who Will Find What The Finders Hide? Pt 1

Researched, Written & Narrated by Derrick Broze
Produced and Edited by Jeremy Martin
Funded by our Patreon supporters

In our last documentary we talked about powerful billionaire and registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and showed how Epstein and his co-conspirators, were able to escape punishment for their role in abusing over 40 young girls. We noted that Epstein and people like him do not act alone in their efforts to feed their depraved desires. In Epstein's case, he had an inner circle of people who helped him acquire young girls. In other cases there exist networks of individuals helping to pressure or even kidnap young children and force them into sexual bondage.

This time, we are going to explore the story of a cult that was suspected of international human trafficking in 1987. The Finders cult was a young group of men, women, and children who claimed to be nothing more than former hippies living an alternative lifestyle and practicing alternative parenting. The Finders were founded by a mysterious man with military connections nicknamed "The Game Caller" who believed in turning his life, and the lives of those around him, into a constant game or experiment.


Attention

New documentary accuses Belgian mercenary of killing Dag Hammarskjold

Jan van Risseghem
Jan van Risseghem at the controls of an Avikat Fouga jet.
Jan van Risseghem was only a teenager when his mother ordered him to flee Nazi-occupied Belgium for her native England with his brother Maurice. After hiding in a convent, and an epic journey across the war-torn continent, they reached safety in Portugal, then took a ship north.

Once in England, the pair signed up with the Belgian resistance, and with the help of an uncle enrolled for flight training with the RAF, a decision that shaped not just their war, but the rest of their lives.

Half a century later, flying skills he learned in Britain would also make the younger van Risseghem internationally notorious, when he was publicly linked to the plane crash that killed Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN secretary general, in 1961.

His plane, the Albertina, came down in forest just outside the town of Ndola in present-day Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia, just after midnight on 18 September, as it approached the town's airport.

Fifteen people on board died immediately, and the only survivor in hospital a few days later. The same day, a US ambassador sent a secret cable - one that stayed buried in files for decades - speculating about possible sabotage and apparently naming Van Risseghem as a suspect.

But his name would not be connected with Hammarskjöld's in public until many years later, after the Belgian pilot had returned to his quiet hometown of Lint with his British wife, raised two sons and mourned the death of one, retired, and then died a war hero himself.

Comment: See also: Inquiry: Who or what brought down Dag Hammarskjöld


USA

Washington's long and bloody history of violent intervention in Latin America

US war with Mexico 1846
© U.S. Army Signal Corps / APThis file photo of a painting depicts street fighting during the siege of Monterey, Mexico in Sept. 1846 during the U.S. War with Mexico. The United States invaded Mexico in 1846 and captured Mexico City in 1847. A peace treaty the following year gave the U.S. more than half of Mexico's territory, what is now most of the western United States.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro accuses the United States of trying to orchestrate a coup against him. While the U.S. says it's trying to rescue Venezuela's democracy, Washington has a long history of interventions - military and otherwise - in Latin American politics.

Since the advent of the Monroe Doctrine in the early 19th century, the United States has involved itself in the daily affairs of nations across the hemisphere, often on behalf of North American commercial interests or to support right-leaning forces against leftist leaders.

That military involvement petered out after the end of the Cold War, although the U.S. has been accused of granting at least tacit backing to coups in Venezuela in 2002 and Honduras in 2009.

The Trump's administration leading role in recognizing Juan Guaido as the interim president of Venezuela returns the U.S. to a more assertive role in Latin America than it has had for years.

Comment: More on US regime change operations in Latin America and other countries:


Archaeology

The Jeddas: Algeria's ancient pyramid tombs still shrouded in mystery

Algerian pyramids
Archaeology students and their teachers are trying to shed more light on the history of Algeria's ancient pyramid tombs, known as the Jeddars
Dating back centuries, Algeria's pyramid tombs are unique relics of an ancient era but a dearth of research has left the Jeddars shrouded in mystery.

The 13 monuments, whose square stone bases are topped with angular mounds, are perched on a pair of hills near the city of Tiaret, some 250 kilometres (155 miles) southwest of the capital Algiers.

Constructed between the fourth and seventh centuries, the tombs are believed by some scholars to have been built as final resting places for Berber royalty-although nobody knows who truly laid within.

But Algerian authorities and archaeologists are now pushing to get the Jeddars listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, in the hope of assuring their preservation and study.

Airplane

Inquiry: Who or what brought down Dag Hammarskjöld

Dag Hammarskjöld
© blog427NYTimesDag Hammarskjöld
Background to the Crash

A plane carrying the Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, crashed while approaching the Ndola (Zambia) airport on September 18, 1961. The exact time of the crash is unknown, although it was around midnight. The DC-6, named Albertina, had flown a circuitous route from Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo, to Ndola, a large town in what was then Northern Rhodesia. The purpose of the flight was to bring Secretary Hammarskjöld to a meeting with Moise Tshombe, the president of the breakaway republic of Katanga, in which many western (British, French, Belgian and American) investors had large stakes in various mineral deposits.

Those corporate interests had supported independence for Katanga after the Congolese leadership, notably Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, had advocated closer relations with the Communist bloc. (Lumumba, himself, was assassinated in January 1961, in what some researchers now believe was part of a Central Intelligence Agency plot to get rid of him.)

For his part, Hammarskjöld believed that the Congo ought to remain one country, and toward that end he was flying to Ndola (just over the border of Northern Rhodesia from Katanga) to have ceasefire talks with Tshombe, in the hope of mediating a settlement to the conflict. Instead, his plane crashed in the darkness, killing fifteen of the sixteen passengers and crew aboard the DC-6. One security officer for Hammarskjöld survived for about eight days.

Ndola, Zambia Dag Hammarskjöld’s crash site
© UnknownNdola, Zambia, showing the roof of the memorial museum and Dag Hammarskjöld’s DC-6 as it would have appeared coming through the trees onto the crash site.
Since the fatal crash, various investigative instruments, including UN committees and independent aviation groups in the United Kingdom and Sweden, have looked into the cause of the crash. The initial investigation, conducted by colonial authorities in 1961, concluded that the pilots of the DC-6 (an experienced Swedish crew) had misjudged the night landing on an unfamiliar approach and flew the plane into the ground. A UN inquiry at the same time, however, failed to reach the same conclusion, although it was at a loss to explain the crash.