2016 Postmortem

[font color="green"]By providing a much higher rate of return, privatization would raise the incomes of those elderly retirees who are most in need. [/font color]

Cato Institute: http://www.cato.org/publications/social-security-choice-paper/privatizing-social-security-big-boost-poor

Allen Dulles, the NAZIs, and the CIA

By Cory Panshin
March 2005

Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg once stated that "The Dulles brothers were traitors." Some historians believe that Allen Dulles became head of the newly formed CIA in large part to cover up his treasonous behavior and that of his clients.

-- Christian Dewar, Making a Killing

Just before his death, James Jesus Angleton, the legendary chief of counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency, was a bitter man. He felt betrayed by the people he had worked for all his life. In the end, he had come to realize that they were never really interested in American ideals of "freedom" and "democracy." They really only wanted "absolute power."

Angleton told author Joseph Trento that the reason he had gotten the counterintelligence job in the first place was by agreeing not to submit "sixty of Allen Dulles' closest friends" to a polygraph test concerning their business deals with the Nazis. In his end-of-life despair, Angleton assumed that he would see all his old companions again "in hell."

-- Michael Hasty, Paranoid Shift

EXCERPT…

Allen Welsh Dulles was born to privilege and a tradition of public service. He was the grandson of one secretary of state and the nephew of another. But by the time he graduated from Princeton in 1914, the robber baron era of American history was coming to an an end, ushered out by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act -- which had been used in 1911 to break up Standard Oil -- and by the institution of the progressive income tax in 1913. The ruling elite was starting to view government less as their own private preserve and more as an unwanted intrusion on their ability to conduct business as usual. That shift of loyalties in itself may account for many of the paradoxical aspects of Dulles's career.

Dulles entered the diplomatic service after college and served as a State Department delegate to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which brought a formal end to World War I. The Versailles Treaty which came out of this conference included a provision making it illegal to sell arms to Germany. This displeased the powerful DuPont family, and they put pressure on the delegates to allow them to opt out. It was Allen Dulles who finally gave them the assurances they wanted that their transactions with Germany would be "winked at."

Dulles remained a diplomat through the early 1920's, spending part of that time in Berlin. However, he left government service in 1926 for the greener pastures of private business, becoming a Wall Street lawyer with the same firm as his older brother, John Foster Dulles.

By the middle 20's, Germany had started recovering from the effects of the war and its postwar economic collapse, and the great German industrial firms were looking like attractive investment opportunities for wealthy Americans. W.A. Harriman & Co., formed in 1919 by Averell Harriman (son of railroad baron E.H. Hariman) and George Herbert Walker, had led the way in directing American money to German companies and had opened a Berlin branch as early as 1922, when Germany was still in chaos. At that time, Averell Harriman traveled to Europe and made contact with the powerful Thyssen family of steel magnates. It was to be a long-lasting and fateful partnership.

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http://www.enter.net/~torve/trogholm/secret/rightroots/...

The CIA and Nazi War Criminals

National Security Archive Posts Secret CIA History
Released Under Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 146

Edited by Tamara Feinstein

February 4, 2005

Washington D.C., February 4, 2005 - Today the National Security Archive posted the CIA's secret documentary history of the U.S government's relationship with General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army's intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II. At the end of the war, Gehlen established a close relationship with the U.S. and successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals. The use of Gehlen's group, according to the CIA history, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, was a "double edged sword" that "boosted the Warsaw Pact's propaganda efforts" and "suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB."

The declassified "SECRET RelGER" two-volume history was compiled by CIA historian Kevin Ruffner and presented in 1999 by CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jack Downing to the German intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) in remembrance of "the new and close ties" formed during post-war Germany to mark the fiftieth year of CIA-West German cooperation. This history was declassified in 2002 as a result of the work of The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) and contains 97 key documents from various agencies.

This posting comes in the wake of public grievances lodged by members of the IWG that the CIA has not fully complied with the mandate of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and is continuing to withhold hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation related to their work. (Note 1) In interviews with the New York Times, three public members of the IWG said:

• "I think that the CIA has defied the law, and in so doing has also trivialized the Holocaust, thumbed its nose at the survivors of the Holocaust and also at the Americans who gave their lives in the effort to defeat the Nazis in World War II." - Former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman

• "I can only say that the posture the CIA has taken differs from all the other agencies that have been involved, and that's not a position we can accept." - Washington lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste

• "Too much has been secret for too long. The CIA has not complied with the statute." - Former federal prosecutor Thomas H. Baer


The IWG was established in January 11, 1999 and has overseen the declassification of about eight million pages of documents from multiple government agencies. Its mandate expires at the end of March 2005.

CONTINUED w LINKS…

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB146/index.htm

Nazis and Bush family history:

Government investigated Bush family's financing of Hitler

By Carla Binion
December 21, 2000

This article on Nazis in the Republican party was originally published in Online Journal on 1/28/00. However, the following includes additional information regarding George H. W. Bush's father, Prescott, and his maternal grandfather, George Herbert (Bert) Walker, and the fact that the U. S. government investigated their financing of Adolf Hitler.

One book referenced here, Christopher Simpson's "Blowback," was praised by journalist Seymour Hersh as "the ultimate book about the worst kind of cold war thinking." Nora Levin, Director, Holocaust Archive, Gratz College, said "The full story of this country's shameful, cynical collaboration with Nazi criminals has not been told until now with the publication of Simpson's book." Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman said, 'Blowback' is a must read for anyone who wants to understand postwar policy on Nazi war criminals and the cold war."

In another Simpson book, "The Splendid Blonde Beast," the author wrote about George H. W. Bush's father, Prescott, and his maternal grandfather, George Herbert Walker. Both Bert Walker and Prescott Bush were powerful financial supporters of Adolf Hitler.

Walker was president of Union Banking Corporation, a firm that traded with Germany and helped German industrialists consolidate Hitler's political power. Simpson says Union Banking became a Nazi money-laundering machine.

Walker helped take over North American operations of Hamburg-Amerika Line, a shipping line and cover for I. G. Farben's Nazi espionage unit in the U. S. Hamburg-Amerika smuggled in German agents, and brought in money for bribing American politicians to support Hitler. A 1934 congressional investigation showed Hamburg-Amerika subsidized Nazi propaganda efforts in the U. S.

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http://www.govsux.com/nazisandbushfamilyhistory.html

Q: A lot of our allies in Europe do a lot of business with Iran. So I wonder what your thoughts are about how you further tighten the financial pressure on Iran, in particular, if it also means economic pain for a lot of our allies.

BUSH: It's an interesting question. One of the problems, not specifically on this issue, just in general, that - let's put it this way: Money trumps peace, sometimes.

In other words, commercial interests are very powerful interests throughout the world. And part of the issue in convincing people to put sanctions on a specific country is to convince them that it's in the world's interest that they forego their own financial interest.

And that's why sometimes it's tough to get tough economic sanctions on countries, and I'm not making any comment about any particular country, but you touched on a very interesting point.

You know - so, therefore, we're constantly working with nations to convince them that what really matters in the long run is to have the environment so peace can flourish.

In the Iranian case, I firmly believe that, if they were to have a weapon, it would make it difficult for peace to flourish, and therefore I am working with people to make sure that that concern trumps whatever commercial interests may be preventing governments from acting.

I make no specific accusation with that statement. It's a broad statement. But it's an accurate assessment of what sometimes can halt multilateral diplomacy from working.

SOURCE: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=24507