Today in Labor History June 19, 1985: Gunmen opened fire on an outdoor restaurant in San Salvador’s upscale Zona Rosa, killing 13, including four U.S. Marines and two U.S. businessmen. A broadcast by Radio Venceremos, the FMLN’s pirate radio station, said: "If U.S. Army members and CIA agents died in San Salvador, it was because they came to attack our people. No one had summoned them; they died as a result of the interventionist policy carried out by President Reagan, whose intervention grows day by day. Reagan will have to assume full responsibility for his deeds." I was in El Salvador in 1993 and some of the bullet holes were still visible from the Zona Rosa attack. And, even though peace had been officially declared at this point, there were still sporadic death squad murder occurring, even while I was there. I remember going to a peace march in San Salvador that was patrolled by armed United Nations monitors. Buses had driven in from every corner of the country, displaying banners of the department or town from where they came, as well as others demanding an end to governmental impunity and assassinations.
Mark Danner wrote a really horrifying, but excellent article in the New Yorker, 1993, about the dirty war the Salvadoran government had waged against its own people. It includes the story of how guerillas pretended to allow the Radio Venceremos transmitter to get captured by the ruthless Colonel Monterosa, when in reality they had packed it full of explosive to destroy the colonel. You can read it here: http://markdanner.com/1993/12/06/the-truth-of-el-mozote/
*Police murders of striking United Fruit workers at New Orleans port June 11, 1913
*CIA orchestrated coup in Guatemala, 1954, leading to decades of Genocide against Mayan people, all on behalf of United Fruit
*Death squad murders in Columbia, on behalf of Chiquita (which used to be called United Fruit)
Today in Labor History June 10, 1971: Mexican police, and paramilitary death squads known as Los Halcones, killed 120 student protesters, including a 14-year-old boy, in the Corpus Christi Massacre, also known as El Halconazo. In 1968, the government had massacred up to 500 of students and bystanders in the Tlatelolco massacre. The Halconazo started with protests at the University of Nuevo Leon, for joint leadership that included students and teachers. When the university implemented the new government, the state government slashed their budget and abolished their autonomy. This led to a strike that spread to the National Autonomous University of Mexico and National Polytechnic Institute. To suppress the strike, the authorities used tankettes, police, riot police, and the death squad, known as Los Halcones, who had been trained by the CIA. Los Halcones first attacked with sticks, but the student fended them off. Then they resorted to high caliber rifles. Police had been ordered to do nothing. When the injured were taken to the hospital, Los Halcones followed and shot them dead in the hospital. Silvia Moreno-Garcia writes about these events in her 2021 novel “Velvet Was the Night.” It is also depicted in the 2018 film Roma.”
In this “superb” new history of American intelligence, a celebrated historian uncovers how the CIA became the foremost defender of America’s covert global empire.
> On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple - the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat.
@appassionato@palestine Of course, #Indonesia is always targeted by the #CIA but notice how every large #Muslim nation was compromised immediately before the fake Hamas "attack" that took months to debunk, especially after the #NYTimes restated their lies by using an unknown with no journalistic qualification to create the lies on their front page.
The US took complete control of Pakistan, and had Imran Khan jailed for revealing the truth, using #Pakistan to enforce US law against him.
Max Bergmann, a former State Department official and now program director with the Center for Strategic International Studies, predicts Russian-fueled turbulence at the Democratic national convention in August. He foresees attempts of Russian operatives to infiltrate groups of protestors and attempt to turn protests violent.
He also notes that social media has “become way more of a cesspool than it was in 2016.”
Today in Writing History May 22, 1927: Author Peter Matthiessen was born. Matthiessen was an environmental activist and a CIA officer who wrote short stories, novels and nonfiction. He’s the only writer to have won the National Book award in both nonfiction, for The Snow Leopard (1979), and in fiction, for Shadow Country (2008). His story Travelin’ Man was made into the film The Young One (1960) by Luis Bunuel. Perhaps his most famous book was, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983), which tells the story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s war on the American Indian Movement. Peltier is still in prison (over 43 years so far) for a crime he most likely did not commit. The former governor of South Dakota, Bill Janklow, and David Price, an FBI agent who was at the Wounded Knee assault, both sued Viking Press for libel because of statements in the book. Both lawsuits threatened to undermine free speech and further stifle indigenous rights activism. Fortunately, both lawsuits were dismissed.
Bove asks #Pecker about how #Comey & Trump later had a contentious relationship. Prosecutors object, & Bove asks for a sidebar. Justice #Merchan sustains the objection.
Everything you need to know about so-called 'Swiss Privacy' we learned decades ago from Operation Thesaurus, AKA, Operation Rubicon. We learned that CIA operations and black budget banking are actually headquartered in the Swiss underground.
If you trust any third-party server to protect your privacy, you're a rube. If you trust Proton Mail to protect your privacy, you're a rube getting 'crossed' by the Swiss Rubi-con. Either you own your keys and your data on your computer or else you have no privacy. Someone else's promise that your data will be 'encrypted' so they can't decipher it is a hollow pledge. If you send any form of plaintext to a remote server, no matter how much they claim to encrypt it, you have zero assurance of data privacy.
Today in Labor History Today in Labor History April 15, 1943: Albert Hoffman, inventor of LSD, tested his first dose and went for a bike ride. This day is now celebrated as Bicycle Day. “... Little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux ...” And from that date forward, working class people could finally afford to go on a trip.
Sandoz originally marketed the drug as Delysid and sold it in 100 microgram doses. From the late 1940s, through the early 1960s, the drug was legal and numerous psychologists and researchers began experimenting with it as a form of therapy. Many were willing participants in the CIA’s UKUltra mind control experiments, in which LSD was given to people without their consent or knowledge. Cary Grant was a frequent and enthusiastic user. As early as the late 1940s, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson became enthusiastic about its potential to unleash a new era of peace and expanded consciousness. The founder of Alcoholic Anonymous was also an early user and said that it was far more effective at treating alcoholism than any other treatment he knew of. Research John Lily, along with Gregory Bateson, began dosing dolphins in the early 1960s, in experiments connected with the U.S. military, in an attempt to learn to communicate with the animals and deploy them as weapons in the cold war.
Hoffman later went on to isolate psilicyben, the active hallucinogenic ingredient in mushrooms, which he also enjoyed experimenting with.
The Israeli military has conducted missile strikes against Iran, a snr #UnitedStates#military ofcl told NPR Thurs. There are also reports of explosions in #Iraq & #Syria.
Iran's Fars News Agency says explosions were heard in the central city of #Isfahan, according to the Reuters News Agency.
The extent of Israel's strikes & the weapons used weren't clear.
Alex Finley looks at the revelation that the Russians have been paying a wide network of European politicians to spout pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine rhetoric and asks if this can be happening in the US, too. He concludes:
"It is naïve to think the same pattern does not exist in the United States, given the ample evidence of coordinated pro-Russian talking points from several Republican politicians."
Today in Labor History March 16, 1978: The far-left terrorist group Red Brigades (BR) kidnapped Former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. They murdered him 55 days later. There are lots of hypotheses about their motivations, many of which are considered fringe. One hypothesis claims they did it to stop Moro’s mediation between the Communist Party and the Christian Democrats in order to halt the CP’s rise to power so as to increase the BR’s influence within the Left. Other hypotheses include the idea that BR had been infiltrated and manipulated by the CIA or by Gladio, a clandestine paramilitary associated with NATO.
The top U.S. #intelligence ofcl on Mon warned that the #war in #Gaza could embolden #terrorist groups, which are aligned in their opposition to the #UnitedStates for its support of #Israel.
“The crisis has galvanized #violence by a range of actors around the world. And while it is too early to tell, it is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on #terrorism,” #ODNI#AvrilHaines, told an annual hearing on #GlobalSecurity#threats.
…#Republican Sen #TomCotton, a stalwart backer of #Israel, prodded #CIA Dir Burns & #ODNI Haines to refute allegations that Israel is “exterminating the #Palestinian people” w/its military campaign.
The officials declined to do so. Burns said that while the #Biden admin understands “Israel’s need” to respond to the brutal attack it suffered on Oct7, “I think we all also have to be mindful of the enormous toll that this has taken on innocent #civilians in #Gaza.”
Billion Dollar Spy · A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal by David E. Hoffman
From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history The Dead Hand comes the riveting story of a spy who cracked open the Soviet military research establishment and a penetrating portrait of the CIA’s Moscow station, an outpost of daring espionage in the last years of the Cold War.
My respect for #Lowkey (aka Kareem Dennis) for the highly informed acuteness of his geopolitical insights - especially in relation to #Israel and #Zionism - grows deeper every time I watch/ hear him speak!
Here he is talking, at some length in conversation on Al Hiwar TV English via YouTube, about “The Tangled Web of #Zionist Interests”! His detailed knowledge on this topic is astonishing and what he reveals is, imo, deeply worrying!
Swiss authorities intervene, Proton Mail not blocked in India ( www.moneycontrol.com )