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Former CIA operative exposes secrets about JFK, Che, and Castro

Jefferson Morley
Newsweek
Fri, 02 Jun 2017 11:16 UTC
© ROBERT W. KELLEY/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY
Antonio Veciana stands in a meeting with members of the anti-Castro action group Alpha 66, on October 1, 1962.
In the early 1960s, Antonio Veciana was the CIA's man in Havana. With a senior position in the Cuban government, he wreaked havoc on Fidel Castro's Communist regime, firebombing the capital's largest department store and plotting to kill Castro with a bazooka. When the Cuban strongman's security forces forced him into exile, Veciana didn't quit. From 1960 to the early 1970s, he funneled CIA funds to a network of Miami-based counter-revolutionaries who carried out an armed revolt against the Cuban government.

Veciana has long since retired from his covert war against Castro, who died peacefully in his own bed last year. Now, the ex-Cuban operative is telling his story in a memoir, Trained to Kill: The Inside Story of CIA Plots Against Castro, Kennedy, and Che, which weighs the cost of the anti-Castro crusade, both for himself and the United States. Veciana writes to justify and to apologize, to express pride and regret. He doesn't regret fighting Castro, but he does regret that his fight led him to miss so many events with his family and children.

Most of all, he wants to share what he knows about one of the most enduring traumas in American history: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Comment: This is yet another example of how the psychopathic deep state operates: in the shadows, with the aim of disrupting peace and causing chaos wherever possible with no concern for the ramifications of such actions on people. For more information see SOTT's series on the JFK assassination and the book JFK: The Assassination of America.

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Dig

Lithuanian mummies reveal medical mysteries

Nicholas St. Fleur
New York Times
Fri, 02 Jun 2017 13:46 UTC
© Kiril Cachovski of the Lithuanian Mummy Project, 2015
One of 23 mummies found in a crypt under a church in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Hundreds of skeletons have lain scattered around a crypt beneath a church in Vilnius, Lithuania, for centuries. But 23 of these remains are unlike the rest: Flesh wraps their bones, clothes cover their skin, and organs still fill their insides.

They are mummies, and since they were recovered about five years ago, scientists have investigated their secrets, seeking insights into the lives of people in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and the diseases they suffered.

"They are so well preserved that they almost look alive," said Dario Piombino-Mascali, an anthropologist from Italy who has studied the mummies since 2011.

Recently, Dr. Piombino-Mascali and his colleagues have uncovered remnants of the smallpox virus in one of the mummies, gaining new insights into the origins of a deadly scourge that killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone.

The work follows on their earlier discoveries: signs of rickets, osteoarthritis and intestinal parasites in the mummies. And they are not the only researchers unearthing new findings from the bodies of the long dead but well preserved.
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No Entry

June 6, 1939: St. Louis refugee ship forced to return to Europe after being refused safe haven in Cuba, US

Trevor Hammond
Newspapers.com
Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
On June 6, 1939, the St. Louis, a German transatlantic liner, was forced to sail back to Europe after more than 900 of its passengers primarily German-Jewish refugees) were refused entry by Cuba; over 200 of these refugees would later die in the Holocaust.

The St. Louis departed Germany for Cuba on May 13. The majority of the 937 passengers were German Jews fleeing the increasing discrimination and violence against Jews under Hitler, and many planned to stay in Cuba only until they received U.S. visas. However, unbeknownst to most of the passengers, a week before the ship sailed, the Cuban government invalidated one of the types of travel documents held by the refugees.

Comment: If Newspapers.com and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are unable to apply this lesson in history to the plight of other groups today - and connect what we're seeing now to the events of the past - then calling attention to stories like these will only have the further effect of politicizing people's worldviews in the most limiting and subjective ways. 'Never again' should mean never again for everyone. Not just Jewish people.

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Chess

Myths and truths about Zbigniew Brzezinski

Paul Craig Roberts
IPE
Fri, 02 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
© The Hindu
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Brzezinski's death at 89 years of age has generated a load of propaganda and disinformation, all of which serves one interest group or another or the myths that people find satisfying. I am not an expert on Brzezinski, and this is not an apology for him. He was a Cold Warrior, as essentially was everyone in Washington during the Soviet era.

For 12 years Brzezinski was my colleague at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where I occupied the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy. When I was elected to that chair, CSIS was a part of Georgetown University. However, the president of Georgetown University was one of those liberals who hated Henry Kissinger, who was also our colleague, and the university president also hated Ronald Reagan for his rhetoric, not for his deeds about which the Georgetown president was uninformed. So I also was unwelcome. Whatever I was worth to CSIS, Kissinger was worth more, and CSIS was not going to give up Henry Kissinger. Therefore the strategic research institute split from Georgetown university. Brzezinski stayed with CSIS.

Comment: That there are myths and truths of differing degrees and perspectives regarding Brzezinsky speaks to the mystery surrounding this iconic personage. Whatever the outcomes he intended, and whatever the worth of the man, he played the global chessboard as the pro he was reputed to be.

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Star of David

Land without a people? Tracing the "transfer" policy for Palestine's indigenous population dispels the lie

Neil Godfrey
Vridar
Sat, 03 Jun 2017 15:25 UTC
© palestineremembered.com/Flickr
A Palestinian man sits in a refugee camp following the displacement in Nakba.
Dear Reader,

This post is for anyone who loathes racism, both anti-Jewish and anti-Arab, and who feels they have not heard details of the Palestinian side of the history of the establishment of Israel in 1948. It continues a series of posts I have been doing on a book by Palestinian historian Nur Masalha titled Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. As the title indicates, the research Masalha addresses is the extent to which the Jewish Zionist movement was seriously preparing to transfer the Arabs out of Palestine prior to 1948. The significance of the research is that it indicates that the popular notion that the Palestinians virtually voluntarily left Palestine at the establishment of the state of Israel and the first war with the neighbouring Arab states is a myth.

So if you are someone who cannot tolerate any suggestion that there could possibly be two sides to the situation besetting Palestine today then don't read any further. If you are obsessed with a one-sided narrative that Israelis are saintly innocent victims and Palestinian Arabs are devilish bloodthirsty monsters, go away.

Thank you.
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Star of David

50th anniversary of Israel's infamous attack on the USS Liberty

Stephen Lendman
Global Research
Sat, 03 Jun 2017 14:06 UTC
On June 8, during Israel's preemptive Six-Day War, an act of aggression, not self-defense against regional Arab states, the IDF did the unthinkable.

It provocatively attacked its main ally, striking the USS Liberty intelligence gathering ship, in international waters about 25.5 nautical miles northwest of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula in international waters.

The incident took 34 US lives, another 171 wounded, the vessel severely damaged, lucky to stay afloat.

It was deployed to monitor belligerents' communications in response to Israeli aggression on Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq - not the other way around.
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Info

15th century ovarian tumor with teeth discovered in Portugal church graveyard

Megan Gannon
Live Science
Tue, 30 May 2017 06:58 UTC
© Sofia N. Wasterlain et al./International Journal of Paleopathology
Archaeologists discovered this ovarian teratoma, or a tumor that had started sprouting teeth, in a burial outside the Church and Convent of Carmo in Lisbon.
Archaeologists excavating a gothic church graveyard in Lisbon, Portugal, made a discovery for the annals of medical history: an ovarian tumor that had started forming teeth.

Today, doctors know that this type of cyst, called a teratoma, is the most common tumor that occurs in the ovaries. But scientists are just starting to learn about past teratoma cases thanks to new evidence from the archaeological record.

A teratoma, which essentially translates as "monstrous swelling" from Greek, can occur when cells that should become eggs start multiplying abnormally and form mature tissues like hair, teeth and bones.

These cysts account for up to 20 percent of all ovarian tumors, and most develop in women of reproductive age, according to past studies. These masses are usually benign and go unnoticed, without causing any symptoms. But some can be cancerous, and some can grow so large that they cause severe pain, or twisting in the ovaries. The largest reported teratoma was 18 inches by 10 inches (45 by 25 centimeters), removed from a 74-year-old woman, according to one review.
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Gold Coins

The after costs of war: America is STILL paying for the Civil War

Mike Baker
Associated Press
Tue, 19 Mar 2013 09:55 UTC
If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.

An Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.

At the 10 year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, more than $40 billion a year are going to compensate veterans and survivors from the Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Iraq campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And those costs are rising rapidly.

If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.

An Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.

At the 10 year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, more than $40 billion a year are going to compensate veterans and survivors from the Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Iraq campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And those costs are rising rapidly.


Comment: Imagine if America also had to pay war reparations to all those countries that it has invaded. That would completely cripple the US. Germany was forced to pay after both WWI and WWII.


Comment: Let that sink in: 40 billion dollars a year and that is not even considering war reparations which should by right also be paid by the US for all the wars it has fought against other sovereign countries in order to further American imperial designs.

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Magnify

President Carter's inferiority complex? Zbigniew Brzezinski's Russia-hating obsession dominated U.S. foreign policy

John Helmer
Dances with Bears
Fri, 02 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
© Unknown
The widow of Cyrus Vance, the only US Secretary of State to resign in protest against his president's actions in a hundred years, called Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor and Vance's rival, "that awful man". Not a single official of the State Department under Vance during the Carter Administration of 1977 to 1981, thought differently. Most of them had monosyllabic terms for Brzezinski. Since Brzezinski died last Friday, not a single member of his own White House staff has made a public statement in his honour, memory or defence. The mute ones include Madeleine Albright, who owed to Brzezinski her career promotion as an academic, then White House staffer, then Secretary of State herself.

Despite the disloyalty of those closest to him, and the detestation for Bzezinski of those further away, he was, and remained, Carter's favourite. Between 1977 and 1981, Brzezinski's time with Carter, according to the White House logs, amounted to more than 20% of the president's working time. That's 12 minutes of every hour — no other official came close. On Friday, shortly after Brzezinski's death was announced by his family, Carter issued a statement extolling him as "a superb public servant...inquisitive, innovative, and a natural choice as my national security advisor ...brilliant, dedicated, and loyal. I will miss him."
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Book 2

'Beren and Lúthien': JRR Tolkien book released a century after he wrote it


RT
Fri, 02 Jun 2017 00:45 UTC
© Reuters
A new book by famed Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit author J.R.R Tolkien was released Thursday - a century after the literary genius first penned the story.

Beren and Lúthien brings readers back to the mythical realm of Middle Earth, a land occupied by humans, elves, dwarves, wizards (both good and evil) and, of course, bloodthirsty orcs.
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