Secret HistoryS


Star of David

The goy and the golem: James Angleton and the rise of Israel

james jesus angleton
The special relationship between the United States and Israel is usually viewed as the product of great forces, the imperial interests of the United States in the cold war and the work of establishment Jewish groups after Israel's two regional wars 50 years ago. But individuals play a part too; and a new biography of the secretive CIA official James Angleton shows the power that a non-Jewish rightwing nationalist played in knitting the two countries together, and building up Israel.

"Angleton was was a leading architect of America's strategic relationship with Israel that endures and dominates the region to this day," Jefferson Morley writes in The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton. More than any other man, the longtime chief of U.S. counterintelligence made possible Israel's shift "from an embattled settler state into a strategic ally of the world's greatest superpower."

Angleton did so chiefly by burying any effort in the U.S. intelligence establishment to question Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons in the 1960s. "Angleton's loyalty to Israel betrayed U.S. policy on an epic scale," Morley writes. "Instead of supporting U.S. nuclear security policy, he ignored it."

Comment: See also: James Jesus Angleton: Inside the paranoid and pathological mind of a CIA chief


Black Cat 2

Ireland's history with witch detectives

Ireland witch
Being a witch in Ireland has always required a certain amount of versatility. You had to be good with animals as well as people, and as adept at curses as you were at cures.

And you had to be able to solve crimes.

In 1916, PJ McCorry sought the help of a witch when his local police proved incapable of providing either clues or suspects in the short time they devoted to investigating a burglary at his home.

The thief had taken £50 while the farmer laboured in the fields in Aghadalgan, near Crumlin, County Antrim. It was a significant sum, and McCorry wanted it back.

Comment: There have and probably always will be people with an understanding of folk medicine and perhaps with a certain psychic sensitivity which can be used in beneficial ways such as that mentioned above. With the advent of monotheism and the ponerization of the Christian doctrine, the idea of wise folk in the local village was turned on it's head, probably because those very same people saw through the lies being espoused by those claiming to be holy, and also because terror has always been used by a corrupt establishment to control its population.

See:


Arrow Down

Desperate Daily Mail fakes 'recent' discovery of Nan Madol and offers erroneous claims for it being Atlantis

Nan Madol
Yes, The Curse of Oak Island returned last night, but as it has dragged on, the program has become a reality show more than a documentary series, and the deaths of two cast members make it much less fun to criticize the increasingly rickety program. When and if they uncover anything worth mentioning, I might return to talking about it.​


The Daily Mail ran another of its stupid clickbait articles, and it has earned quite a bit of play across the fringe internet for reasons that baffle me. The new article implies, without bothering to explain, that the city of Nan Madol, in the South Pacific, had something to do with the lost continent of Atlantis. The news peg is that the Science Channel took some satellite images of the city, which the internet quickly misunderstood as meaning that Nan Madol had been "newly" discovered. This, in turn, prompted the Daily Mail to write about the online speculation as though it had substance. ​

Technically, the article doesn't say that Nan Madol is itself Atlantis. That would be fairly impossible since Atlantis appeared in the works of Plato nearly two millenniums before Nan Madol was built. But, the Mail writes that "New footage of an ancient city in the middle of the Pacific Ocean has sparked theories that the fictional island of Atlantis could be real." This was the article's only mention of Atlantis, despite the sensational headline; the body of the article contains claims recycled from previous articles about Nan Madol, because basically the Mail is a click farm masquerading as a newspaper.

Comment: This was one which also picked up the story: Drones capture enormous man-made structures along coastline of Pacific island of Pohnpei - Another ancient city discovered? (VIDEO)


Info

Assyrian tablet reveals details about infertility

Cuneiform tablet
© Daily SabahCuneiform tablet containing details about infertility.
The first diagnosis to determine infertility was made 4,000 years ago, an ancient Assyrian clay tablet discovered by Turkish researchers in central Kayseri province revealed Thursday.

Various researchers from different universities led by Şanlıurfa's Harran University examined a 4,000-year-old Assyrian tablet containing a prenuptial agreement and found out that the first infertility diagnosis was made in central Kayseri province's Kültepe district.

The clay tablet written in cuneiform script discusses infertility and a solution for the issue, which is the inability of a person to reproduce through natural means.

Professor Ahmet Berkız Turp from Harran University's Gynecology and Obstetrics Department told NTV that the clay prenuptial agreements addressed the issue of infertility in Assyrian families.

Blue Planet

The Son Doong Cave, 'A lost world below the surface': Russian explorers film in world's biggest cave with drone (VIDEO)

Son Doong Cave
© cameraptor
A group of Russian travelers explored one of the most spectacular yet least visited natural landmarks in the world - the Son Doong Cave located in the jungles of inland Vietnam.

The world's biggest known cave, formed as a result of a cave in caused by a mountain river at least two million years ago, was stumbled upon by a local man in 1991. At at its widest, it measures 150 by 200 meters, stretches for over 5 kilometers, and has a volume of 38,5 million cubic meters, about twice the size of the next largest underground hollow.

Archaeology

Ruins found in Turkish lake may be Iron Age fortification dating back 3,000 years

Lake Van castle turkey
© CC BY 3.0 / gozturk / Lake VanLake Van, Turkey
A team of Turkish researchers has discovered the remains of what is believed to be a 3,000-year-old Urartu castle in the country's eastern Van province, the site of Lake Van, the largest lake in Turkey and the second largest in the Middle East.

The excavations were led by Van Yüzüncü Yıl University and the governorship of Turkey's eastern Bitlis Province. The researchers who went underwater believe that the ruins are supposedly from the Iron Age Urartu civilization, also known as the Kingdom of Van, thought to date back to the eighth to seventh centuries B.C., Turkish Daily Sabah reports on Sunday.

Bad Guys

Setting the record straight on the Beirut Barracks bombing: Iran had nothing to do with it

Beirut US barracks bombing
© Gunnery Sgt. R.D. Lucas/DefenseImages.milChaplains, U.S. Marines and family members observe a moment of silence at memorial services for the 241 Marines killed during the terrorist bombing of the barracks at Beirut International Airport.
The White House wants to blame Iran, but they're wrong. I was there.

Vice President Mike Pence and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster recently marked the 34th anniversary of the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. Their remarks may have comforted the families and honored the sacrifice of the 242 American service members-222 of whom were Marines-who were killed. But both officials presented such a distorted version of the events of that horrible day that, if not corrected, they will cause more harm than good to our national security.

According to Pence and McMaster, the attack on the Marine (and French) barracks was an early version of the attacks of 9/11. In their view, terrorist bombers, aided and abetted by Iran, committed mass murder and inspired Osama bin Laden by attacking U.S. and allied military forces that were simply in Lebanon on a peacekeeping mission. Moreover, the attack demonstrates that their boss, President Trump, was right not to certify the nuclear deal with Iran.

However, close examination of the events reveals that while the U.S. and French military forces were initially engaged in a peacekeeping mission, by the time of the attack their nations were waging war against the allies of Iran in the Lebanese civil war.

Black Magic

How medieval women shrank in height because of Black Death

Mass burial trench
© Museum of LondonMass burial trench from the East Smithfield Black Death cemetery from London (MIN86).
In the middle of the 14th century, the Black Death swept Europe, killing millions of people, but archaeologists have recently discovered that its effects were far-ranging and surprising. People living after the plague were overall healthier than those who lived just before it, but a new study suggests that the Black Death may have caused Medieval women to shrink.

Writing in the American Journal of Human Biology, bioarchaeologist Sharon DeWitte from the University of South Carolina studied more than 800 skeletons from Medieval London with the goal of investigating "stress, sex, and plague." A bit less salacious than it sounds, the main topic covered in the research is the experience of physiological stress among members of two sexes -- male and female -- before and after the Black Death.

Comment: See also:


Pistol

US' deadliest attack on educational institution happened in 1920s

Enoch Monument Franklin County
© Ken Shockey/Antrim-Allison MuseumEnoch Brown and his students are memorialized at this Antrim Township site in Franklin County.
School shootings are gruesome and, unfortunately, are nothing new to America. The Enoch Brown school massacre predates the invention of the original Colt revolver by 70 years. But as far as mass-murder goes, no school attack comes close to the Bath School disaster of 1927.

Everything started when Andrew Kehoe, a Michigan school board treasurer, killed his wife and blew up his farm with dynamite, which detonated simultaneously with explosives he planted at the nearby Bath Consolidated School.

Comment: The latest in school violence in the US:


Vinyl

Another CIA horror show: Biological warfare expert Frank Olson's fatal trip

Frank Olson CIA
By the early 1950s the CIA's relationship with drugs stretched from alliances with criminal smugglers of heroin to research in, and application of, lethal or mind-altering chemical agents. On November 18, 1953, a group of seven men gathered for a meeting at the Deer Creek Lodge, in the mountains of western Maryland. Three were from the US Army's biological weapons center at Fort Detrick; the other four were CIA officers from the Agency's Technical Services Division. This encounter was one in a regular series of working sessions on Project MK-NAOMI, with MK being the prefix for work by Technical Services and NAOMI referring to a project to develop poisons for operational use by the CIA and its clients. The men at Fort Detrick had, at the CIA's request, already stockpiled a lethal arsenal of shellfish toxins, botulinum, anthrax and equine encephalitis.

A day later, during the evening of November 19, the scientists shared an after-dinner glass of Cointreau. Unknown to those round the convivial table, the CIA's Dr. Sidney Gottlieb had decided to spike the Cointreau with a heavy dose of LSD. Gottlieb didn't tell the officers they had been drugged and indeed had violated CIA rules by failing to get prior approval for the experiment. About thirty minutes after they had tossed back their liqueurs, Gottlieb asked if anyone had noticed anything unusual. The doctor found that most of men round the table experienced a little buzz, but nothing significant. Then Gottlieb fessed up and disclosed the covert LSD dosage.

Comment: For more on leading CIA psychopath Dr. Sidney Gottlieb: