You're right to observe the chasm between Burns' candor and the double speak routinely practiced by officials, and I appreciate your closing sentence indicating continuing worthy skepticism of the CIA (as well as your recognition of Burns' tragic selectiveness when admitting that military force can't destroy an ideology). That said, I wonder to what extent Burns' interview reflected a public relations strategy to promote precisely the understanding that the Agency is more forthright than officials.
That strategy could be motivated by at least two possibilities. First, Burns might aim to cultivate background interviews (mis?)informing future journalism. That would be consistent with the Agency's contrivance of public opinion during the Operation Mockingbird era, which may have been resuscitated or rebranded with less transparency than Burns appeared to show here.
Burns might instead aim to support the Agency's reputation in the face of its politicization by figures including Trump, as well as human rights advocates sincerely concerned about the Agency's legacy of ashes. Folks curious to learn more can explore Tim Wiener's book by that title. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/970488.Legacy_of_Ashes
I wrote about the bipartisan nature of the Agency's crimes—for which no one has ever been held accountable—a few months ago and continue to work on a related electronic dance track that has taken me entirely too long to finish. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/fears-of-a-fascist-future-overlook
" It's also a movement and an idea. and in my experience the only way you kill an idea," I noticed that there is no mention of what this idea actually is. Might it be a return to their homes and live free? Nah, must be something, and they're not telling. Here's a group who might have some ideas:
Join bereaved Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers in NYC and Boston, September 15-26!
Ramping up for another cold war as the globe literally heats? All countries need to be concerned to minimize this heating in particular the US and China as they are the main generators of CO2 and the US through it's profligate use of fossil fuels over the 20th century bears the greatest responsibility for landing us in the fix we are in from past emissions. Even the Pentagon has said climate change is a threat to national security. Nobody is talking about this in our political system, as if the problem didn't exist and we can go right on as always. More growth, a bigger economy is all we hear.
Your comment about words carefully designed to say nothing is exactly right. John Kirby is a master of it and adds with his very flexible face and gestures an emotional emphasis that also says nothing. We all laughed at Sean Spicer because he was so inept an actor, saying nothing without being able to disguise it, but the whole corps of professional liars including KJP and Jen Psaki are equally to be distrusted at all times.
HAMAS is a horror? A group dedicated to violent opposition to a country that has been ethnically cleansing for its entire history since the first wave that created the state of Israel is a horror? Why is Zionism not a horror? My courageous Jewish friends in Jewish Voice for Peace are not afraid to say so, what makes non-Jewish Americans so timid to join them? Native-Americans who fought the white man without mercy were certainly considered a horror at the time by the white man. Native Americans are today proud of that history of resistance and don't most white Americans look back in admiration for the decision by the fighting Indians to die for one's people?
We have simply got to get rid of Zionist financial influence on the corrupt US political system. In that is a very big reason why US politicians are terrified to speak the truth.
A bit more on St. Obama and his CIA, FBI and NSA executives:
Barack Obama was/is a spook (i.e., CIA operative/spy ), from a spook family, and his political campaigns were financed by spooks… ). Snowden disclosed the all-encompassing surveillance of US population under St. Obama after Clapper directly lied about it in Senate and to all of us.
In 1965 CIA organized a coup against Indonesia founding president Sukarno by CIA-trained generals. The US considered Sukarno too progressive (he implemented land-reform – same reason for CIA coup in Guatemala which resulted with a genocide of high-land Mayas). CIA installed one of the most murderous military regime (under Suharto dictatorship) on Earth which killed more than two million ( 2M !!) civilians – the massacres are known as “The Jakarta Method” (see book by Vincent Bevins) used subsequently in Africa (Angola, Mozambique) and throughout Latin and Central America.
What is important here is that Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, worked for U.S. government agencies and allied NGOs—the Ford Foundation, Asia Foundation, Development Alternatives Inc., and United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—in Indonesia in the 1960s and 1970s as well as later in Ghana, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Thailand.
Obama’s mother married Indonesian Lt. Col. Lolo Soetoro; they had a daughter Maya Soetoro when Barack Obama was four. The colonel was from an aristocratic family which lost out in Sukarno’s land reform; the marriage was likely arranged, Obama’s mother may have acted as a female “honeypot” for the CIA whose job was to recruit assets
Obama always lied and claimed that his mother did not know about the countless atrocities that were committed by the Suharto government, which is implausible given her CIA background and the fact that they were much reported on by mainstream newspapers at the time (although mostly favorably by right-wing media). Of significance, Obama underplayed his stepfather Lolo’s army rank in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope.
Soetoro went on to become an executive at Mobil Oil and its liaison to Suharto, whose policies Obama’s mother praised. And – Obama became a labor and community “organizer” – while he actually worked for a large corporate foundation.
A Company Family: The Untold History of Obama and the CIA
Jeremy Kuzmarov - October 1, 2021 ( Note: Photos themselves are truly fascinating )
A Company Family: The Untold History of Obama and the CIA - CovertAction Magazine
Obama as a “community organizer”. He actually worked for a large corporate foundation.
Obama embraces Tony Rezko, one of his earliest and top fundraisers who was sentenced to ten years in federal prison in 2011 for participating in political kickback schemes. Obama helped Rezko secure more than $14 million in taxpayer subsidies to build low-income housing facilities of poor quality after promoting the privatization of public housing.
Barak Obama's alleged biological father is who I was thinking of when I wrote "asset, not agent". As far as his mother, she might be a more likely choice, but I'm not privy to intelligence agency personnel files- Ditto regarding the adoptive parent Sottero, of course.
Barack himself was so obviously a synthetic candidate, made to order for the time, I looked at the publicly available back story when he was first put forward as a presidential candidate with great wonder. This background qualifies him for THAT?
When the whole Hawaiian birth certificate thing blew up, with the state electronic birth certificate image (never the paper original) being put out to "prove" he was born in USA, my sig. other downloaded the file and did forensics on it (computer science degrees, worked primarily in optical imaging and related software her whole career, scanned/generated/stored/matched images and algorithms were HER DAY JOB, working for corporations that nade both the hardware and the software. Also, she was then working for a security company, mainly fingerprint scanning and biometric ID).
She yelled several profanities and just stared at her monitor for a while, going through the data in that image file. When she finally stopped looking and swearing and could talk to me, she said: It's BEEN ALTERED. And whoever did it HAD NOT CARED IF THE FORGERY WAS OBVIOUS TO PEOPLE WITH HER SKILL SET. I asked what she would do about that (she was then more or less a Republican). She said NOTHING. "If this thing was put out like it was, the fix is in and nothing "little people" like us can do matters".
And here we all are.
I've had kind of a strange life. Didn't really seem that way while it was happening but looking back?
Burns was the top diplomat when he retired from the State Department in 2015 and should have been Biden's pick for Secretary of State ... but instead Biden went with the uber Zionist who moonlights as an Arms salesman, Antony "I come here a Jew" Blinken. Biden's donors considered Burns too soft on Israel.
Thank you for this, Ken.
Enjoy being your guys eyes and ears on this stuff!
Yeah, the MIC needs China as a “threat” to justify the umpteen billion dollars to be sucked up by the national security state.
Just infuriating that our govt. does these things and will apparently continue in perpetuity.
You're right to observe the chasm between Burns' candor and the double speak routinely practiced by officials, and I appreciate your closing sentence indicating continuing worthy skepticism of the CIA (as well as your recognition of Burns' tragic selectiveness when admitting that military force can't destroy an ideology). That said, I wonder to what extent Burns' interview reflected a public relations strategy to promote precisely the understanding that the Agency is more forthright than officials.
That strategy could be motivated by at least two possibilities. First, Burns might aim to cultivate background interviews (mis?)informing future journalism. That would be consistent with the Agency's contrivance of public opinion during the Operation Mockingbird era, which may have been resuscitated or rebranded with less transparency than Burns appeared to show here.
Burns might instead aim to support the Agency's reputation in the face of its politicization by figures including Trump, as well as human rights advocates sincerely concerned about the Agency's legacy of ashes. Folks curious to learn more can explore Tim Wiener's book by that title. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/970488.Legacy_of_Ashes
I wrote about the bipartisan nature of the Agency's crimes—for which no one has ever been held accountable—a few months ago and continue to work on a related electronic dance track that has taken me entirely too long to finish. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/fears-of-a-fascist-future-overlook
" It's also a movement and an idea. and in my experience the only way you kill an idea," I noticed that there is no mention of what this idea actually is. Might it be a return to their homes and live free? Nah, must be something, and they're not telling. Here's a group who might have some ideas:
Join bereaved Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers in NYC and Boston, September 15-26!
www.parentscirclefriends.org/september2024
This tour will be the launch of our new peace education program, Listening from the Heart:
www.parentscirclefriends.org/listening
Highly recommend you check out his memoir "The Back Channel". This is how he operates. And it's a breath of fresh air.
My editor does too! Have yet to read it
Ramping up for another cold war as the globe literally heats? All countries need to be concerned to minimize this heating in particular the US and China as they are the main generators of CO2 and the US through it's profligate use of fossil fuels over the 20th century bears the greatest responsibility for landing us in the fix we are in from past emissions. Even the Pentagon has said climate change is a threat to national security. Nobody is talking about this in our political system, as if the problem didn't exist and we can go right on as always. More growth, a bigger economy is all we hear.
Your comment about words carefully designed to say nothing is exactly right. John Kirby is a master of it and adds with his very flexible face and gestures an emotional emphasis that also says nothing. We all laughed at Sean Spicer because he was so inept an actor, saying nothing without being able to disguise it, but the whole corps of professional liars including KJP and Jen Psaki are equally to be distrusted at all times.
HAMAS is a horror? A group dedicated to violent opposition to a country that has been ethnically cleansing for its entire history since the first wave that created the state of Israel is a horror? Why is Zionism not a horror? My courageous Jewish friends in Jewish Voice for Peace are not afraid to say so, what makes non-Jewish Americans so timid to join them? Native-Americans who fought the white man without mercy were certainly considered a horror at the time by the white man. Native Americans are today proud of that history of resistance and don't most white Americans look back in admiration for the decision by the fighting Indians to die for one's people?
We have simply got to get rid of Zionist financial influence on the corrupt US political system. In that is a very big reason why US politicians are terrified to speak the truth.
CIA has been a real “presidency of the US” for quite some time ;-)).
Perhaps since assassinations of both Kennedys.
St Obama was selected and nominated by CIA - Obama family (including his mother were CIA operatives)
Assets, not operatives.
How much do you really know about Obama?
A bit more on St. Obama and his CIA, FBI and NSA executives:
Barack Obama was/is a spook (i.e., CIA operative/spy ), from a spook family, and his political campaigns were financed by spooks… ). Snowden disclosed the all-encompassing surveillance of US population under St. Obama after Clapper directly lied about it in Senate and to all of us.
In 1965 CIA organized a coup against Indonesia founding president Sukarno by CIA-trained generals. The US considered Sukarno too progressive (he implemented land-reform – same reason for CIA coup in Guatemala which resulted with a genocide of high-land Mayas). CIA installed one of the most murderous military regime (under Suharto dictatorship) on Earth which killed more than two million ( 2M !!) civilians – the massacres are known as “The Jakarta Method” (see book by Vincent Bevins) used subsequently in Africa (Angola, Mozambique) and throughout Latin and Central America.
What is important here is that Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, worked for U.S. government agencies and allied NGOs—the Ford Foundation, Asia Foundation, Development Alternatives Inc., and United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—in Indonesia in the 1960s and 1970s as well as later in Ghana, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Thailand.
Obama’s mother married Indonesian Lt. Col. Lolo Soetoro; they had a daughter Maya Soetoro when Barack Obama was four. The colonel was from an aristocratic family which lost out in Sukarno’s land reform; the marriage was likely arranged, Obama’s mother may have acted as a female “honeypot” for the CIA whose job was to recruit assets
Obama always lied and claimed that his mother did not know about the countless atrocities that were committed by the Suharto government, which is implausible given her CIA background and the fact that they were much reported on by mainstream newspapers at the time (although mostly favorably by right-wing media). Of significance, Obama underplayed his stepfather Lolo’s army rank in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope.
Soetoro went on to become an executive at Mobil Oil and its liaison to Suharto, whose policies Obama’s mother praised. And – Obama became a labor and community “organizer” – while he actually worked for a large corporate foundation.
A Company Family: The Untold History of Obama and the CIA
Jeremy Kuzmarov - October 1, 2021 ( Note: Photos themselves are truly fascinating )
A Company Family: The Untold History of Obama and the CIA - CovertAction Magazine
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/10/01/a-company-family-the-untold-history-of-obama-and-the-cia/
-------------------------------------------
Barack Obama’s Father Identified as CIA Asset in U.S. Drive to “Recolonize” Africa During Early Days of the Cold War
By Gerald Horne - February 7, 2022
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/02/07/barack-obamas-father-identified-as-cia-asset-in-u-s-drive-to-recolonize-africa-during-early-days-of-the-cold-war/
-----------------------------------------------------
Obama as a “community organizer”. He actually worked for a large corporate foundation.
Obama embraces Tony Rezko, one of his earliest and top fundraisers who was sentenced to ten years in federal prison in 2011 for participating in political kickback schemes. Obama helped Rezko secure more than $14 million in taxpayer subsidies to build low-income housing facilities of poor quality after promoting the privatization of public housing.
@Boris Petrov
Barak Obama's alleged biological father is who I was thinking of when I wrote "asset, not agent". As far as his mother, she might be a more likely choice, but I'm not privy to intelligence agency personnel files- Ditto regarding the adoptive parent Sottero, of course.
Barack himself was so obviously a synthetic candidate, made to order for the time, I looked at the publicly available back story when he was first put forward as a presidential candidate with great wonder. This background qualifies him for THAT?
When the whole Hawaiian birth certificate thing blew up, with the state electronic birth certificate image (never the paper original) being put out to "prove" he was born in USA, my sig. other downloaded the file and did forensics on it (computer science degrees, worked primarily in optical imaging and related software her whole career, scanned/generated/stored/matched images and algorithms were HER DAY JOB, working for corporations that nade both the hardware and the software. Also, she was then working for a security company, mainly fingerprint scanning and biometric ID).
She yelled several profanities and just stared at her monitor for a while, going through the data in that image file. When she finally stopped looking and swearing and could talk to me, she said: It's BEEN ALTERED. And whoever did it HAD NOT CARED IF THE FORGERY WAS OBVIOUS TO PEOPLE WITH HER SKILL SET. I asked what she would do about that (she was then more or less a Republican). She said NOTHING. "If this thing was put out like it was, the fix is in and nothing "little people" like us can do matters".
And here we all are.
I've had kind of a strange life. Didn't really seem that way while it was happening but looking back?
Burns was the top diplomat when he retired from the State Department in 2015 and should have been Biden's pick for Secretary of State ... but instead Biden went with the uber Zionist who moonlights as an Arms salesman, Antony "I come here a Jew" Blinken. Biden's donors considered Burns too soft on Israel.