Tag Archives: agora

The Ronald Reagan of Colombia?

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At The Daily Bell, Ron Holland describes Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe as a Latin “Ronald Reagan.”

Unlike knee-jerk leftists, I recognize that Reagan started out with some genuine free-market leanings. Contrary to the mythology, he was well-informed about economics. And he was a realist dove, not a neo-con hawk:

Mehdi Hasan at the Guardian:

“As the liberal US writer Peter Beinart argues in his book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris: “On the ultimate test of hawkdom – the willingness to send US troops into harm’s way – Reagan was no bird of prey. He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totalled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war – the 1986 bombing of Libya – was even briefer.”

In contrast, consider the blood-spattered record of his successors. George Bush launched Gulf war I and sent troops into Panama and Somalia; Bill Clinton bombed Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia; George W Bush invaded Afghanistan and gave us Gulf war II and the war on terror. And the Nobel peace prize winner Obama had troops surging in Afghanistan, launched a war on Libya and sent drones into Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

Lest we forget, after America’s first encounter with jihadist violence in 1983 – when 241 US military personnel were killed – Reagan, to use the disparaging lingo of the neocons, chose to “cut and run”. Every single soldier was pulled out of Lebanon within four months. “Perhaps we didn’t appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle,” Reagan later wrote in his memoir, adding: “The irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there … If that policy had changed towards more of a neutral position … those 241 marines would be alive today.”

These are the words not of a hawk but of a dove; of a leader who did not share the neocons’ blind faith in the use of military force to spread freedom.

The truth is that Reagan wasn’t a Reaganite; he ended the cold war through negotiation and with far fewer military interventions than his successors have managed so far in the war on terror. His actions, rather than his occasionally bombastic words, reveal a president more interested in jaw-jaw than war-war.”

But, by the second half of his presidency, the shadow state had taken over. Neocons had infiltrated the offices of the executive, were conducting espionage, pulling strings to overcome  security blocks, and pushing agendas developed in their think-tanks.

Stephen Green at Counterpunch describes the decades-long take-over that started in the 1970s, accelerated in the second half of the Reagan administration, and came to full flower with Bush junior. The main figures are people like Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, Paul Wolfowitz  and Douglas Feith, with supporters like Norman Podhoretz, Midge Dector, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

Ledeen especially was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra affair and with Colonel Oliver North, a key figure in the drug-arms-money-laundering  that was the principal source of funding of the Shadow State.

This network has been called the Octopus by Danny Casolaro (who was murdered because of his investigations of it).

Other related or overlapping networks/operations include the Enterprise and Pegasus.

All of them are tied in different ways to prominent, seemingly disparate scandals of the period –  Operation Red Rock in Vietnam, the CIA-related Australian Nugan-Hand bank, the CIA-related BCCI bank, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the deaths of drug barons like Pablo Escobar and political bosses like Manuel Noriega.

To sum that up as briefly as possible, the New World Order was put in place through covert operations by a secretive element in government that is now so extensive as to control the entire government. That shadow government relies on the drug/arms trade for its funding and espionage and blackmail for its enforcement.

Uribe is an integral part of that story.

Mr. Holland is maybe naive.

But the Bell?

From the Guardian, some information tying Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe to Pablo Escobar:

“My brother Jaime died in 2001, married to Astrid Velez, they had two children … Any other romantic relationship that my brother may have had was part of his personal life and is unknown to me,” Álvaro Uribe tweeted on Sunday. He denied Jaime was ever linked to the drug lord Pablo Escobar.

According to the Nuevo Arco Iris investigation, Jaime Uribe was arrested and interrogated by the army in 1986 after detectives discovered calls had been made from his carphone to Escobar, leader of the Medellín cartel.

Álvaro Uribe acknowledged that his brother had been arrested but said he had been released and charges were dropped, claiming Jaime was recovering from throat surgery in a local hospital at the time the calls were made. “His car phone was cloned by criminals,” Alvaro Uribe tweeted.

The Uribe family has long faced accusations of ties to drug trafficking. A US intelligence report from 1991, declassified in 2004, identified Álvaro Uribe as a “close friend” of Escobar, who was “dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín cartel”. It also says Uribe’s father was murdered “for his connection with the narcotic (sic) traffickers”. Officially Uribe’s father died while trying to resist being kidnapped by leftist guerrillas in 1983.

The US state department disavowed the intelligence report when it was published, during Uribe’s second year in office, saying it had “no credible information” to substantiate the information.

Another Uribe brother, Santiago, isbeing investigated over the alleged founding and leadership of a rightwing paramilitary group, while Uribe’s cousin Mario lost his seat in the senate and was jailed for seven and a half years over ties to paramilitaries, main players in Colombia’s drug trade.“

Colombia Reports has more on Uribe’s ties to narco-trafficking:

“Uribe’s early political career has been the subject of much speculation, rumors and accusations over his alleged links to Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel. He began his political career in the late 70s, holding the posts of Chief of Assets for the Public Enterprises of Medellin (EPM) in 1976 and serving as Secretary General of the Ministry of Labor from 1977 to 1978. However it was after he was appointed as Director of Civil Aviation in 1980 that the rumors began.

Uribe’s appointment coincided with the rise of Escobar as an international trafficker and Uribe has had to answer allegations that the unusually high number of pilot’s licenses and airstrip construction permits issued on his watch were a major contributing factor to Escobar’s success. According to Escobar’s former lover Virginia Vallejo, the drug lord held Uribe in high regard for establishing the infrastructure to transport cocaine to the U.S.

Accusations that Uribe was an ally of Escobar were to follow him into his first major political role. In 1982, Uribe became mayor of Medellin, a post he was to hold for less than half a year. His reasons for leaving remain unclear but several journalists and writers have alleged his mafia ties became an embarrassment to more senior political figures. In his short term, Uribe publicly supported two public works projects financed by Escobar; construction of new housing for the poor and a city-wide tree planting scheme. Further controversy followed after the death of his father when it was reported that Uribe flew to his father’s ranch in a helicopter belonging to Pablo Escobar.

In 2004, during Uribe’s presidential term, the U.S. National Security Archive (NSA) published a declassified 1991 intelligence report from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that listed Uribe on a list of prominent Colombians involved in the drug trade. The report described Uribe as a “close personal friend of Pablo Escobar” and “dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin cartel at high government levels.”

From Counterpunch, analysis of Uribe’s US-backed policy of fomenting divisions in Latin American solidarity (written in 2010, when Uribe was stepping down):

“A U.S.-Colombian offensive against Venezuela at the moment of political transition presents a huge threat to regional stability. Uribe has consistently relied on the visceral response of the international right, forces within the U.S. government and nationalist anti-Venezuela sentiment in Colombia to build a fear of Chavez that is based more on created perception than on cool-headed analysis. Obviously, the vast majority of FARC, ELN and rightwing paramilitary forces declared “terrorist”, operate within Colombia.”

Stephen Lendman cites the valiant James Petras on Uribe’s narco-state:

“Thanks to Plan Colombia and other support, the state is heavily militarized, more than ever now serving as Washington’s land-based aircraft carrier against regional targets, including neighboring Venezuela.

The Pentagon got expanded access, former President Alvaro Uribe agreeing to US forces on seven more military bases (three airfields, two naval installations, and two army facilities), as well as unrestricted use of the entire country as-needed for internal and external belligerency, including out-of-control violence and human rights abuses, the region’s most extreme to keep two-thirds of Colombians impoverished, millions displaced, corruption endemic, wealth concentration growing, and corporate predators freed to exploit and plunder.

Also to facilitate record amounts of Colombian cocaine from government-controlled areas reaching US and world markets, new President Juan Manuel Santos embracing the “Uribe Doctrine,” now his. It’s extremist, hard right, corrupt, brutal, corporate-friendly, and militarized in lockstep with Washington.

As Uribe’s Defense Minister, James Petras explained that Santos was an assassin, deploying military forces and paramilitary death squads “to kill and terrorize entire population centers, (murdering) over 20,000 people….falsely labeled ‘guerrillas.’

Was Pegasus behind the murder of Bill Colby?

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Links added on May 15, 2013

[I think I originally had links, but they seem to have vanished so I’m adding them back.]

Update:

Journalist Christopher Ruddy has also written about the death of Bill Colby while he (Colby) was employed at “Strategic Investment” a newsletter edited at the time by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg and thus affiliated to Agora Inc.

[Note: the passage “edited…..and thus” was added on May 15, 2013].

Ruddy, an investigative journalist, was originally hired by SI’s James Dale Davidson to investigate the Vince Foster murder death [corrected, May 15, 2013], which Davidson believed was linked to Bill Clinton.

[May 15, 2013 Clarification: Ruddy was funded by right-leaning financier Andrew Mellon Scaife, who later backed NewsMax, the publishing company, of which Ruddy later became the CEO. He was also backed by Joseph Farah, founder of the  conservative Western Journalism Center. But it was Davidson who funded and circulated Ruddy’s influential video of the Foster death, Unanswered: The Death of Vincent Foster.”]

In writing about Colby’s death, Ruddy implies that there is significance in Colby joining SI. He believed SI gained a high profile by carrying the DCI’s name and gave Colby’s name greater recognition. Colby had already annoyed Agency staff by his revelations about past CIA misdeeds. Ruddy seems to imply that Colby’s death had something to do with this.

What Ruddy doesn’t mention is that there is equal evidence that others in government had as much motive to silence Colby as Clinton did, for example, figures like Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig.

Haig was on the board of News Max, of which Ruddy was at one time is [May 15 – correction] the chief editor and CEO.

Whether Colby’s arrival at SI lent it credibility and thus lent credibility to Davidson’s and Ruddy’s accusations against Clinton, who then had Colby terminated; or whether Colby was killed because of Operation Red Rock, by those who ordered that operation (Nixon, Kissinger, Haig); or whether the reason lies elsewhere,  Colby was evidently murdered, and did not commit suicide, as a son of his, Carl Colby [added, May 15, 2013], now conveniently claims.

Yet another theory is that the Agency itself assassinated Colby to prevent further disclosures about certain illegal CIA operations around the time of Watergate.

Then there is the theory that Colby was taking an interest in the bizarre pedophile ring that John De Camp has written about. (See also this summary of the Franklin investigation). I admit to having a liking for this one.

Finally, some people theorize that Colby’s killing arose from the Aldrich Ames spy case.

Colby, it is claimed,  was himself spying for the Soviets and it was the FBI that disposed of him to spare themselves the embarrassment of a trial.

That would make FBI director Louis Freeh the culprit.

Not being an expert in CIA history, I am hardly qualified to judge the probability of any of these no doubt entertaining tales.

It’s not the villainy that appalls me, really.

Villains one comes across everywhere.

It’s the complete pointlessness of it all. What exactly was accomplished by espionage besides provoking more conflict and retaliation from other countries?

Nothing that couldn’t have been learned by good analysis.

Further comment:

I should state, off the bat, that I am thoroughly unsympathetic to Bill Colby, beyond the sympathy one feels toward anyone who is assassinated.

The man supervised and put through the most horrendous operations (Gladio, Phoenix, MKUltra) all in the name of the government.

He was, at very best, a deluded fool.

Given his position at the top of the intelligence services, he was much more likely to have been fully immersed in evil actions as a high-functioning sociopath, despite his religious leanings.

So, as is usually the case in politics,  both sides (the top brass who likely hunted him down and he himself),  are equally repugnant to normal human beings.

ORIGINAL POST

In “Deep Black Lies” David Guyatt describes the formation of the secretive “Pegasus” group, a cover for a deep intelligence group (Operations Sub Group) emerging out of President’s Reagan’s National Security Defense Directive No. 138 (NDSS-138) in Feb 1986.

The OSG had 3 parts: OSG 1 (anti-narcotics, headed by Ted Shackley); OSG 2 (anti-terrorism, headed by Colonel Oliver North, and, after North’s exposure in Contra-gate, by Richard Secord); OSG 3 (“alignment” – i.e.  assassinations to take care of potential problems, by Richard Secord and then Tatum).

The groups reported to the CIA, the FBI, the NSC, the DoD, MI6, Israeli intelligence, George Bush, and a British peer with expertise in Middle Eastern affairs, Lord Chalfont.

Pegasus was responsible for multiple covert operations, including the Superbills Sting, a deal between Iranian leadership, VP George Bush (a former CIA director), and Panama’s Manuel Noriega. The sting involved depositing $8 billion from the Iranians in drug-lord Pablo Escobar’s bank; then, exchanged half of that sum for twice the number of counterfeit bills from the Iranians (courtesy of a printing press and bank quality paper  gifted to the Shah years earlier).

At the end of some clever machinations, the Iranians were supplied with arms by Colonel Oliver North, the counterfeits were left safely in Escobar’s account, and Bush got a real loan on the back of the counterfeit deposit. That money he laundered through a series of banks, including the Vatican bank, to pay off various covert operations around the world.

That left President Bush finally with $3.8 billion, which went to fund the espionage, surveillance, and research apparatus of the coming New World Order.

Central to the new order would be the global drug trade, which would be in the hands of senior people in 11 different countries. In the US, the names included Bill Casey, Bill Colby, Bush, Kissinger, Haig, Secord, Gregg, North, Clinton, and others.

The most fascinating part of the story for me, however, was Tatum’s interactions with Bill Colby, the former CIA director, turned Agora Inc.  newsletter publisher, who had brought Tatum in as a deep cover agent decades earlier.

Before Tatum’s induction into the agency, Colby was CIA Saigon station chief and was organizing a highly confidential operation at the direction of the White House.

Nixon planned to withdraw from SE Asia, because of the unpopularity of the war domestically.

Afraid that the withdrawal would leave a power vacuum into which the North Vietnamese would rush (those were the days of the “domino” theory), he hoped to strengthen the resolve of local Cambodian forces under Lon Nol, against the N. Vietnamese forces, by staging a false-flag attack on military, air and civil installations in Phnom Penh, leaving behind as decoy the bodies of some North Vietnamese “Sappers.”

They would be brought in there and sacrificed by a super secret agency group, Team Red Rock.

What Red Rock members, including Tatum, were not told, was that they too were to be sacrificed. No word was to ever go back home about such a radioactive operation.

But the Red Rock team managed to spot the treachery in advance and escaped, hoping to get back to the Vietnamese border. It wasn’t to be. Their numbers thinning, they ran into the North Vietnamese and ended up tortured by Chinese and Russian interrogators.

Tatum was one of only two who survived. He was debriefed by Bill Colby, who then inducted him into the CIA, to protect him from what he claimed were powerful enemies in DC, i.e., Nixon, Kissinger and the rest of the top brass, from whom the whole criminal adventure had originated.

For the next ten years, Tatum was stationed all over the country at bases like Fort Bragg (Green Berets) and others, safe under the mentoring of Colby.

Then, when Colby retired, he called Tatum and told him to deactivate, claiming he would be in danger without his old boss to look out for him.

Tatum left and was involved in civilian life for a while, until reactivated on orders from above into the US army and from there to Special Forces aviation, through which he became involved in confidential business in the Grenada invasion.

Tatum was contacted again by Colby in 1983 and assigned a role in flying for Oliver North’s “Enterprise” – the whole-sale shipment of cocaine from Latin America (from the Colombian cartels), in return for gun-running to the Nicaraguan Contras.  The Mena airforce shipments during the Clinton era were part of this. Tatum was apparently ignorant of the actual nature of what he was shuttling back and forth. He claims he was also used by another covert group, Pegasus, at the same time.

But soon he realized the dangers and to safeguard himself started keeping records of his activities. Around the same time, he was given a list of the important figures in the global drug-trade by Barry Seal, a pilot from “Enterprise,” based in Mena airport in Arkansas. Seal later turned DEA informant and was killed, allegedly by the Colombian mafia, as retaliation for exposing it.

Before Clinton’s inauguration, Bush pardoned many of those in his circle who were likely to face prosecution imminently.

“In a very real sense, Chip Tatum’s story has now gone full circle. In March 1996, Tatum wrote to former Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby. Readers will recall that it was Colby who originally recruited Tatum into the CIA in 1971 and set him on his career as a covert intelligence operator. Since that time, Tatum developed a fondness for the super-spook, and Colby, in turn, played the role of mentor. In his letter, Tatum asked Colby to write a foreword for his book, Operation Red Rock, which he had completed just two months earlier. But there was another purpose in writing to the former DCI.

Four years earlier, when Tatum resigned his OSG command, he had volunteered to plead guilty on a felony charge in order to discredit himself. This was part of Tatum’s strategy of survival, as he was aware that one didn’t resign this particular team and remain alive for long. The fact that he had collected a body of evidence (including video and audio tapes and other related documentation) as ‘life insurance’, gave muscle to his negotiation. At that time he had not planned to reveal any of the details that he has now provided. In the event, his offer was taken up and he served a prison sentence of just over one year. That is where matters should have ended.

However, having served his sentence-thus complying with his part of the agreement-both Tatum and his wife, Nancy, were subsequently arrested and charged with another misdemeanour [sic]. Tatum got angry. His letter to Colby stated: “I have always kept my word with you. I told you that I would discredit myself. I don’t need your help to accomplish this. But to charge Nancy with a crime, and expect me to allow this, is beyond my comprehension.” He angrily continued: “I know that North and Rodríguez are the fuel for this, but haven’t you warned them that I wouldn’t sit still for this?” He then added: “I do not blame you for this; I am disappointed that you have allowed the ‘Pond Scum’ to control you!”

There then followed a warning: “The second book that I have already started will contain my movements from 1980 through today. I will not only write about the missions but about the NWO [New World Order] timetable and planned events including a chronology.” Ominously he added: “And I will name names. You must detach yourself from these people!”

Tatum then continued by outlining how he would enter evidence for his forthcoming trial and warning that if disallowed for reasons of classification, then “a Special Prosecutor will be required to investigate the information, and the videotape tells no lies.” He added: “I also had stills and an audio clip of a meeting added to the video. Out of respect for you I have kept your name out to this point, but if you don’t separate yourself from these terrorists I will have no choice but to reveal your involvement also. Either way, the group will be exposed-by the media or by the investigating committee. Either way, they’re out of gas!” Tatum closed the letter by saying: “Mr Colby-you’ve done too much for your country to be disgraced in the manner that these men will be.”

Less than two months later, the former DCI was reported missing. By Monday 6 May 1996, Colby’s body was found. It was later reported that Colby died following a “canoeing” accident on the Wicomico River, Maryland. Tatum and many others (including this writer) doubt this. Throughout his life, Colby had an all-abiding fear of water. It would have been entirely out of character for him to step voluntarily into a boat, let alone a canoe.

Despite this, Colby’s death officially remains an accident. This has come as no special surprise to Tatum, who recently stated to this writer: “I knew the OSG were bulletproof when one of our targets, a 25-year-old, was reported to have died of a heart attack. His name was Al-Jarrah.” That, however, is another story.

POSTSCRIPT

At 3 pm on Friday 4 April 1997-shortly after publication of Part 1 of this article-Chip Tatum was roused from a mid-afternoon snooze and told to report to the warden of his prison. He was informed that he was being released-less than midway through his 27-month sentence-with immediate effect, following an appellate court decision that found his conviction by Judge Adams to be illegal.”

Paul-Lehrman Connection Meaningless, Says Daily Bell (Corrections Added)

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Update: Subsequent to my posting this, the Agora disinfo agent/troll/paid basher Ryals reposts Amberger’s comments to him (rather than Amberger’s blog posts about Agora), simultaneously discrediting and neutralizing Amberger by an unsubstantiated smear (Nazi Stasi), just as he posts any substantial criticism of Agora, ALWAYS with slurs about the critics and always with OLD NEWS about Agora, usually attributing criminal behavior to the critics, for which he gives not a shred of proof.

His response fails to mention the people who really are responsible for Agora’s marketing and selling today – Myles Norin (CEO), Matthew Turner (counsel), Addison Wiggin (chief of Agora Financial, its flagship subsidiary, and also heavily involved in Oxford Group, Michael Masterson (Mark Ford), Byron King, Alexander Greene, Mike Ward, Julia Guth, and many others, whose border-line promotions were all deconstructed by Christoph Amberger. Instead, Ryals tries to discredit Amberger’s whistle-blowing. No question Ryals has some kind of tie to Agora.

To make things clearer, Agora is not solely Bonner’s company but owned by several people, some of whom no doubt have axes to grind with others. Bonner himself might have enemies within the company, for partisan, financial or personal reasons.

Notice how Ryals only focuses on the Republicans in the group, like Bonner, presumably Casey, and Robert Bauman, who specializes in the admirable field of asset protection. Now, unlike the state-worshipping fraud Ryals,  I would love to believe Bob Bauman is a really good asset protector (aka money-launderer), but, alas, if he is not what he seems (and I haven’t seen anything concrete to suggest that), he is much more likely to be an IRS/DOJ honey-pot, if I know how these things work.

That’s what I believe large parts of the  asset-protection racket really is about, when it’s not about espionage and government-related money-laundering.

That might include the over-hyped Simon Black, who also seems to be a part of the LRC-Agora crew and constantly tells people that Singapore is a great place for financial security, when anyone who even researches the matter in a skimpy way will figure out that Singapore is crawling with Mossad and CIA.

NWO resistance indeed.

Anyone boosting simplistic asset protection, or simplistic encryption like Tor (heavens!) is simply pushing people into US govt supervised encryption. But, then, maybe that’s the idea.

ORIGINAL POST

The Daily Bell argues that the Ron Paul-Lewis Lehrman connection is meaningless (links to follow):

“Worse, in our humble opinion, whenever such issues arise these days, the dissemblers come out in force to attack the world’s only apparently honest politician, US Congressman Ron Paul, for working with Lewis Lehrman.

It is true that when Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman served (with many others) on a US Gold Commission during the Reagan years they wrote a minority report recommending a return to some sort of gold standard.

But Ron Paul certainly didn’t seek Lehrman out to write the report. He wrote it with Lehrman because Lehrman was on the committee. Ron Paul, of course, went on to call for a regime of competing currencies, which is something we’re partial to.”

Comment:

This would be a whole lot more credible if  The Daily Bell itself didn’t call out people on just as tenuous evidence, in much more black and white terms than I have ever done.

It also doesn’t help that the Bell dismisses critics of Paul as dissemblers.

Why?

What’s wrong with criticizing a politician who’s set up as the sole spokesman for libertarian issues?

Why would anti-state capitalists focus on a politician as their spokesman, in the first place?

What sense does that make?

Especially, when just a few days ago, the Bell raised no objection at all, when, in an interview on their site, Gerald Celente claimed Paul was “not a fighter” and had failed because he was not a fighter.

If that is the opinion of Paul’s friends, isn’t it natural that people on the paper-money team or outside the binary altogether (like me) would reach even more devastating conclusions?

I don’t believe most Paul critics are dissembling. I think they are genuinely disappointed and suspicious. I am too.

Three. The Bell loses credibility when it claims Paul is the “only honest politician in the world.”

That’s pure hyperbole.

I’m sure the Daily Bell doesn’t know “all the politicians in the world.” And Paul isn’t perfectly clean. There was rampant nepotism during his campaign. There was the alleged double-billing. There were other mis-steps.

They might all be minor. And the Lehrman connection might be innocuous too, but it’s not the only troubling thing that comes to mind.

Which brings me to my fourth point.

Paul has a long-standing relationship via Murray Rothbard with Agora Inc. and its founder, James Dale Davidson, about which I blogged in July (the first person to pull that little nugget up, I do believe….although, as soon as I say that, I’m sure a dozen quicky sites will pop up with the same information on them).

This is a very troubling connection, in my opinion.

The Agora Inc. network has  ties to Rockefeller-related groups, like the Peterson Institute. I blogged about that in 2009, January.

Now, I myself have once cited research produced by the Peterson.

[It’s in my piece on Krugman, at LRC, and the researcher was Anders Aslund, who was one of the advocates of privatization in the Soviet Union. Aslund was wrong about that,  although not the only one wrong, and certainly not the main one.]

But I post research from all over the place, and that is not an endorsement of the authors’ other works or of the websites carrying the research.

Agora’s ties to the Peterson Institute, however, are a bit more relevant and important than my posting or quoting someone once, casually.

The I.O.U.S.A film (a spin-off from Agora’ “Empire of Debt,” Wiley, 2005) was promoted nationally by the Peterson Institute. Some of the positions Agora supports are consonant with Pete Peterson’s interests, although I do believe most people at Agora are anti-state libertarians, whereas Peterson is no more than a  crony capitalist.

This is what I wrote in my 2009 blog post  about the Peterson connection:

“Assembling this bipartisan group of prominent enablers/theorists of empire over the last twenty years lets IOUSA claim it goes beyond partisanship. In reality it does no such thing. Omitting a context for its arguments, the film actually lends itself to being interpreted in ways quite contradictory to the tenor of the original work. At times it even subverts the book thoroughly.

IOUSA lends itself to a very anti-libertarian, statist moralizing of the debt issue: thus, spendthrift population needs to be forced to save by government. Now that really alarms me. Watch out – forced savings accounts ahead!”

Agora also promotes things like “peak oil,” which I don’t find persuasive, being a long-time believer in the abiotic origin of oil.

These positions are  accompanied by promotions throughout its marketing network from which it stands to gain financially, either directly or indirectly.

That surely calls into question the credibility of the positions of anyone deeply connected to them.

Is Paul connected to them in a serious way?

{Added, August 25: Obviously, Agora has also supported anti-war positions that have not won it popularity, so I should give them credit for that and I do.

But I also recognize that the “anti-war” position has a place in the permissible range of public opinion, as long as on crucial issues and events  antiwar advocates develop laryngitis. This strategy, devised by the intelligence services, ensures that there is “cognitive diversity” among critics of war and the police state that gives the appearance of a “liberal” political culture, while actually permitting them little impact.  It siphons off the energy, time, money, and ambition of perhaps 95% of activists and effectively marginalizes the rest. Zahir Ebrahim has written extensively about this at his depressing but honest website, Project HumanBeingsFirst.]

Besides the tie-in to the establishment via Peterson/Rockefeller and besides the commercial imperative which undermines the sincerity of its positions, there are also Rothschild connections to Agora.

First, Rothschild interests are now directly connected to Rockefeller interests, by a recent merger (which I’ve blogged a couple of times).

Second, there are also direct connections between the Rothschilds and Agora.

I wasn’t sure about some of those, a couple of years ago.

In fact, I thought the allegation that Agora was a Rothschild front was only innuendo concocted at Executive Intelligence Review by ex-Larouchite, Bill Engdahl, who often doesn’t cite his sources and has once picked up leads from me without acknowledgement, likely because I come from the right

That’s why, even though I was disillusioned with Ron Paul by then, I didn’t place much stock in the Engdahl charge, especially when it was picked up on Jennifer Lake’s blog (see this blog post of March 10 2010) and then embellished with a lot of strange errors.  I felt the whole thing had to be some kind of disinformation. I certainly didn’t make any connection to Paul.  I thought it was a ploy to muddy more concrete legal issues. One can’t be prosecuted for being a Rothschild front, after all, but one can discredit one’s detractors by posing as one, since the whole Rothschild conspiracy is beyond the pale for mainstream analysts and writers. In fact, Lake’s silly comments, which I was forced to address because they libeled me, actually damaged the very thing she –  with typical arrogance – thought she was assisting – the public interest. In short, she forced me to state things that tipped off the very people she claimed I was covering for.

That’s why I even thought Agora itself was encouraging the story, a view shared by at least one other credible journalist. For the same reason, I suspect that Tony Ryals, the cyberbully behind all the negative postings about me, isn’t half as insane as he pretends to be. In fact, I think he has indirect ties to Agora himself, since he never mentions the people there who have actual legal responsibility there, like CEO Myles Norin, or their attorney, Matt Turner, or Agora Financial chief, Addison Wiggin, or some of their star traders, like Alan Knuckman.

[Sept 6 – this morning, I checked to find that Ryals’ posts referencing these comments of mine and thus referencing these individuals had been deleted or “disappeared.” Of course, just to make me a liar,  they might pop back. But it’s interesting that it’s impossible to stop Ryals’s libels, when it’s someone like me (or others, who aren’t in charge at Agora or whose crimes, if they committed any, are beyond the statute of limitations, but it’s easy enough to get him to remove comments about the people still there.]

Funnier still, Ryals never mentions a former senior employee, Christoph Amberger, whose blog about the company’s shenanigans (cons would be a better word from what I read) was shut down in 2011. Reportedly, this was after he was paid to keep his silence, that is, hold to a non-disclosure agreement under threat of litigation. All traces of his blog about the company’s marketing deceptions (GreenLaserReviews) were wiped off the net in a matter of days.

Instead of mentioning all this, Ryals, who even corresponded with Amberger (who smacked him down for the troll he is) waffles on about Davidson, who is safely beyond reach of prosecution, and, in any case, seems to have more than paid for any sins by his investigations into the Clinton mafia and his insights into the manipulation of the stock markets; Bonner, who probably has no legal liability, as he’s not an officer of the company, and is too wealthy, too cautious, too smart, and too well-connected to get into trouble anyway; and Stansberry, who is already damaged goods and unlikely to get hurt any worse by innuendo.

But leaving aside intriguing theories about the cyber-underworld in which Ryals and his rants reside, I’m still not sure what the Rothschild connections to Agora really amount to.  The best I can say is I’m much more willing to believe some people there profit from them.

Why did it take me so long to get to that point?

Because it’s only recently (over the last year) that I’ve had the time to dig around and find any kind of credible accounting of how the Rothschild family might be the financial juggernaut they are said to be on conspiracy sites.

[I got there by adding material posted at Project Humanbeingsfirst  to my own research into BCCI (via Engdahl, Skolnik, DeepBlackLies, Yamaguchi.com, Forbes.com, LBMA website and other material.]

Now that I’ve come to think the whole “Rothschild” conspiracy  is something more than fiction, I’ve also begun to look at Ron Paul with a more critical eye.

So that’s where I come from on that.

Now, for my own credibility on the subject, given that I too have a connection to Agora.

This is what I have to say.

Except for the attacks following my pieces on Assange (by an attention-seeking Assange groupie, Tom Usher at RealLiberalChristian) and a legal threat at DailyBell by another fanboy and blatant troll, calling himself Al Kyder, and a couple of other things), one hundred percent of  the negative posts about me on the net stem from this one supposedly crazy person, who seems to have an indirect connection to Agora.

And all the rest of the monitoring/hacking I’ve experienced stem from my fall-out with Agora too.

What was the monitoring/hacking about? Simple.

In 2008, I gave whatever information I had  about certain sensitive issues to responsible journalists and investigators.

There you have it. That’s why their campaign against me didn’t end with the resolution of my IP issues with the company.  In fact,  it’s the reason why the IP issue keeps festering.

Who likes to be joined at the hip to someone who’s outed them? Who likes to know that someone knows what they are capable of?

That is why they are so bent on isolating me, stirring up third parties against me, and minimizing my influence in every way possible.

Since then, I’ve been warned by good people to “leave it alone” or possibly become even more of a target.  And that’s what I’ve tried to do, but it’s not because I’m interested in covering up anything for anyone.

It’s because I see no reason to second-guess the integrity, good faith, and sound judgment of what I’ve been told but take it as solid advice from people who know better than me. And  it’s because I believe more evil than good will come from ignoring that advice.

Especially as there’s another layer of complexity to this story.

Agora Inc. was also the last business association of former CIA director, William Colby, who  seemingly committed suicide some twenty years ago.

I say seemingly, because the suicide theory has been peddled only recently, and only by one of Colby’s sons. No one else believes it and there’s not much evidence for it.

Thus far, the official story has been  that it was an accident.

That sounds just as unlikely to me, as I blogged earlier.

Note: Ryals not only filched the Davidson-Chomsky-Rothbard connection from my blog (posted on July 20), as well as the information about Rees-Mogg’s and Colby’s Le Cercle and Pilgrim connections (which I got by discovering and researching the ISGP.EU site in detail),** he failed to link the post and then tried to pretend that I was covering up something about the Colby killing, when I’d  blogged about it as a murder, long ago, in 2010, and before that, in 2009. In fact, I’d been researching Mockingbird, MKUltra, mind-control, and sex-trauma as early as 2004, for my first book, where I have a couple of chapters on the material.

In 2005 I wrote a piece about former CIA director Stansfield Turner and Operation Gladio. It was around then that I also first heard about about Colby.

The fact that I ended up in the company where Colby once worked is one of those strange coincidences that “intention” pulls out of the universe.

And, far from covering up any of this, I’ve blogged repeatedly about it.

For instance, here’s my comment on an interview of Rees-Mogg there:

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 06/05/10 11:59 AM

Sorry. Colby was Cercle and apparently also Opus Dei …

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 06/05/10 11:55 AM

Rees-Mogg is reportedly a member of Le Cercle and the Pilgrim’s Society, as well as the exclusive Roxburghe club – supposedly a very influential part of the Anglo-American establishment. He was backed by speculator and corporate raider, James Goldsmith, relative and close associate of the Rothschilds.

Allegations are made on the left that Rees-Mogg is closely associated with Richard Mellon Scaife. Rees-Mogg is also closely tied to James Davidson, Bill Bonner, and Agora, through the Strategic Investment newsletter and other publications.

Through SI, he’s also linked to William Colby, ex CIA chief, also a Pilgrim Society member, if I’m not mistaken.

By link, I just mean there exists a relationship. It’s by no means clear how that actually plays out, if at all.

Colby was murdered (?) early 1990s. My best guess is it was related to the opening of CIA files with the Church Committee (much earlier)….and inter departmental fighting that resulted; there’s also a connection to a White House- related paedophilia scandal in Nebraska that got hushed up in a hurry. Some have linked that scandal to CIA mind-control operations but I haven’t seen anything conclusive about it. “

It always seemed plausible to me that Colby’s death was a political assassination, given his involvement in Operation Phoenix and Project Mockingbird, his testimony at the Church Committee hearings, his interest in the Nebraska pedophile ring, and his work for the intelligence-affiliated Nugan Hand bank (which had ties to BCCI).

I learned about Le Cercle and the Pilgrim’s Circle from ISGP.eu, and passed that onto the Bell, as well.

I posted the link to ISGP.eu at the Bell below a July 8, 2010 article

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 07/09/10 12:28 PM
Sorry. Two careless mistakes.

@John Treichler (not Treicher, as posted before).

The site is the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics (ISGP.eu not ISGPU, as I wrote in a hurry). Written from a very left-wing perspective. Meticulously compiled.

[Note: ISGP eu was up when I posted the link, but googling for it today, I find that the domain is for sale and I find a post at Cryptogon, dating back to January of the same year (2010), saying that the site had disappeared, but that the writer at Cryptogon had saved the information from the google cache in the form of a zip file. However the link he had posted didn’t open to the ISGP.eu file at all. He claimed he had given it to Wikileaks for safe-keeping. I later found it at wikispooks.]

So, that’s my explanation of why the Bell’s dismissal of the Lehrman link isn’t quite enough; why there are other reasons to worry about Paul, such as his connections to Agora; why I was slow to start looking at Paul critically; what Agora’s ties to the Rothschilds might be; and what my connection to the whole business amounts to.

There’s one other thing. The Bell is also a part of the same Agora network to which Paul seems to have ties.

You won’t hear that from them, though.  It’s one of those little omissions that are troubling,  like the repositioning and revisionism that goes on on the site, at times.

For instance, in the same piece on the Lehrman tie, Wile writes that he knew Assange was disinformation right away.

Not so. He got that from me (see these comments below a piece at Infowars.com

as well as these comments below another piece there.

I was perhaps the only rightist anti-neocon to criticize Assange.

Other debunkers were Wayne Madsen (the first on the case) and Bill Engdahl, both on the left.

Neither of those two, by the way, assembled nearly as comprehensive a critique of Wikileaks as I did.

And I know that research had an impact, because  the Guardian ran a piece derived from it shortly after (picking up on the John Shipton lead) and an Australian academic wrote a paper repositioning the cypherpunk association (deconstructed in my pieces) into a narrative more favorable to their man.

Wile relied on that research, as well as material on Gordon Duff’s site, in changing his opinion. Then he exaggerated and ended up with a kind of parody of my criticism of Assange.

This he tends to do, which allows an opening to people like Fed regulator, William Black, whom Wile once made the mistake of criticizing. Black reacted with a petty and surprisingly  personal attack, but, when you distort people’s positions, you have to expect vehement reactions.

Wile’s subtle perception management has even caught the attention of many contributors to the Bell, including pro-Paulian goldbugs like Bionic Mosquito and Leonardo Pisano, as well as paper-money anti-Paulians like FauxCapitalist and Memehunter.

Why does he do it? Most likely as a way for the site to stay viable on the net, while conspiracy mongering, or perhaps, as a way to manage the reactions of readers and associates. Nothing wrong with that, but, still, it’s unsettling and tends to make people suspicious.

It’s why I stopped posting on their forum, despite my gratitude to them. for providing a useful and unusual venue for discussions.

I also do respect Wile’s courage in tackling material people usually avoid for fear of losing their credibility.

So the Bell does get a lot of props from me for bravery and unique content, yes, but I also see them as compromised by their financial ties. The same goes for some other libertarian sites I still read.

Other pluses: Wile is almost always polite and he is not as Eurocentric in his thinking as some others.

I should add that I’m not one of those who think he’s running a limited hang-out himself.  Or, at least, he is doing it less than most.

Some final thoughts:

First, about Colby and Agora.

Colby had so many enemies that it would be hard to narrow down who murdered him, if he was murdered, without a lot more evidence being uncovered. But no one in officialdom or intelligence is likely to want to do that. And only a fool or a martyr would venture into that territory alone.

About the Agora connection (and, through them, to Paul):

Colby’s name appeared on Agora’s long-running Strategic Investments newsletter, with which the Rothschild-related Rees Mogg is/was affiliated, along with long-time anti-tax advocate, electronic counterfeiting (anti-Naked Short Selling) critic, and Forbes/Scaife protege, James Dale Davidson.

Davidson, Rothbard, and Chomsky all worked together in the 1970s, in antiwar activism, which by itself means little or nothing. Many ideological foes make common cause on single issues.

But, it was not “by itself,” as the evidence shows.

At least one of Paul’s writers (the guy who wrote the race realist pamphlets) is directly tied to Agora.

Paul himself has been incessantly promoted by Agora, until very recently, when affiliates and associates began promoting a few anti-Paul libertarians, like Wendy McElroy, N. Stephen Kinsella, and even Stephan Molyneux, who appeared briefly on the Doug Casey website, and then was pushed out.

It was also from Agora Inc. that I first heard of Ron Paul.

Casey, like Jeff Berwick and what looks like a majority of the hard-money community, is himself closely tied to the Agora network by business affiliation.

So also, as I said earlier,  the Daily Bell, with its multiple banking and gold community associations.

These ties may or may not mean anything nefarious, but they would certainly limit what the Bell, or any other libertarian writer in this circle, would be willing or able to say publicly.

Which means I really can’t trust someone in that circle to be too forthcoming about Paul, since they all share business networks.

That is simply common-sense.

Even I have had a hard time writing about Agora’s network, even though all I did was write and do some research there, and the only person I really worked with was Bill Bonner.

To put it as simply as possible for all the trolls who still can’t read my actual words, let alone between my words:

It is difficult to write critically about people with whom you have had personal and professional relationships; who have accessed your personal and business records (illegally).

It is even more difficult when their employees work and live close to where you work and live and they are native-born, while you are an immigrant.

It becomes impossible when the political and economic context is a multi-front global military and economic war, in which your motherland is also involved, and not always as an ally; when the legal and media environment of your adopted country is totalitarian; when your family lives abroad and you are self-employed and modestly well-off, while they have tens of millions of dollars behind them, are connected to intelligence and financial elites, have thousands, if not millions, of subscribers and friends to whom they can outsource their efforts, and when they are marketing, financial, and political players on a global scale.

If that is true of me, how much more is it true of the hard-money community, which is completely encompassed by the Agora network?

I don’t expect any of them to pipe up with anything but support for Ron Paul. They will alienate their business associates, otherwise.

I hope that explains why I don’t think the Bell’s dismissal of the Lehrman tie is sufficient by itself.

I say this as someone who took a long time to open their eyes about Paul.

Which person likes to think they’ve been had? Or, that establishment critics mightn’t be entirely off-base in their criticism of Paul?

As far back as 2008, I heard some mutterings from loyal fans of Paul but said nothing, hoping it was all minor or a mistake.

I even took the part of the LRC crowd against the WSJ in a lengthy blog post.

[As far as that WSJ incident goes, I still stand by the piece ]

In 2010 I spoke up about my dissatisfaction with Paul’s positions at the Daily Bell forum.

I didn’t want to, because I knew Paul supporters would get annoyed by it, but credibility is very important to anyone writing about politics. It should be more important than pleasing the team.

Then, a few people who’ve wanted to discredit me for supporting libertarian positions(albeit nuanced and rather more conservative ones than that of the anarcho-caps), or for criticizing Assange (albeit in a most circumspect and balanced way than his other detractors), or for deconstructing Ron Paul and his libertarian promoters (albeit factually and with respect), have tried to claim that I’m covering up for this or that person.

The truth is exactly the opposite. I’ve been libeled, monitored, and undermined covertly, almost continuously since 2007.  I’ve also been plagiarized repeatedly and marginalized.

I don’t really believe the government was behind any of that, except maybe at a very low level, in so far as some petty operatives might have been employed by my enemies to do the dirty work.

So, there is no cover up on my part. Or paranoia.  What I say is not a lie. It’s not propaganda. It’s not a smear or anything but the most truth it is possible, helpful, and advisable for anyone in my position to speak.

For the umpteenth time, I’m not RAW, nor CIA, nor Jihadi, nor Hindu fascist. I’m just a writer, with a lot of interests, an eclectic background, and too much curiosity and impetuosity for her own good.

It was a meaningful synchronicity that I got involved in the whole business. I don’t say that to promote myself,  create a mystery, or confuse the situation. I say it because that is really how it happened.

There are mysteries of “intention,” “attraction,” and the cycles of time.  And they have nothing to do with “dissembling”, “disinformation,” or “RAW”.

The innuendos by Jennifer Lake, Tony Ryals, and Tom Usher are simply smears, even if they are understandable smears.

There really are more things in earth and heaven, Horatio…

Is Tolstoyan Anarchism The Same As Rothbardian Anarcho-Capitalism?

Posted on by

I smell more smoke…and mirrors..

Agora-affiliated  Jeff Berwick

[in an interview today with Agora-affiliated Daily Bell]:

“Tolstoy was an anarchist.”

Agora-afflicted Lila Rajiva

[in a monologue with herself over coffee as she looks over Tolstoy’s astrological chart – just kidding! – and recalls the millions of words of  Lev she actually read decades ago, if only in translation]:

Yes, Tolstoy was an anarchist.

He was also anti-capitalist and anti-property, and, by the end of his life,  he was also anti-sex, anti-church, anti-religion, anti-mysticism, anti-technology, anti-capital punishment, and anti-art.

He worshiped the Russian peasant.

He excoriated himself for having written “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”.  He wanted to give away everything he owned, even though his children and his poor wife (who had slaved over his manuscripts for years) opposed him.

And most of this extremism came out of his own psychodrama (as Gandhi’s “issues” came out of Gandhi’s psychodrama).

Tolstoy killed a man in a duel in his youth, fought in wars in which he killed his enemies, and contracted an STD from an early experience of sex (perhaps his earliest).

He had such an enormous sexual appetite that he was always taking up with underclass women and then suffering bouts of self-loathing and revulsion toward them.

He often threatened his wife with a gun, while cussing her out.

Then he had a “dark night of the soul” and became a different man.

You know what happens. An alcoholic swears off drink. Then he becomes even more of a nuisance than he was before. He follows you around, a thermos of coffee clutched to his heart, the lingo of AA on his lips. You feel sorry for him. He’s off liquor. But he’s not cured.

Same thing with Tolstoy.

For the Mises-Agora-hard-money (gold-bug) libertarian circle of co-investors and co-thinkers (to which Jeff Berwick belongs) to pretend that Tolstoy’s anarchism is equivalent to the anarcho-capitalism of the gold-bug, secessionist, philo-Semitic-yet-Dixiecrat, finance-capital-friendly, anti-democratic, Rothbardian  wing of American political and economic thought is, frankly, nonsense.

But it’s terrific marketing if you want to neutralize the anger of a  whole bunch of  anarchist youngsters, oldsters, and hipsters,  by channeling it into anti-nation state ideology in the service of the new KKK – Korporatist-Krisismongering-Kleptocrats.

And make a few bucks doing it too.

Wink.