Remembering Investigative Journalist Danny Casolaro, A Martyr For Truth

While writing the previous blogpost this morning (below) about the Obama regime's newly-declared policy of murdering/torturing/imprisoning-without-trial journalists it doesn't like, I was trying to remember the name of the journalist who was murdered by having his wrists slit in a bathtub.

So I did an Internet search (using duckduckgo.com, which claims not to record your searches, unlike Google) for "journalist slit wrists suicide," since the murder was falsely called suicide by "the authorities." Got his name- Danny Casolaro- right on the first page. Then I went to Wikipedia to refresh my memory some more, and- Damn!- Karmic coincidence. He was murdered on this date in 1991. Only a 1-in-365 chance of that.

So I guess that means it's my task to commemorate the man and remind people he lived, what he did, and why he was murdered by the regime of Bush the Elder 24 years ago today.

Danny was a genuine investigative journalist. That is, he actually investigated things that those in power wanted to keep hidden, and he was a journalist in that he thought journalism meant reporting truthfully to the public about matters that properly concerned them. Danny was sufficiently intrepid- or reckless and stupid, his murderers would say- to investigate the so-called "October Surprise." This was the secret deal Reagan's gang made with the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini (aka Evil Demon in U.S. propaganda) of Iran back in 1980 to not free the U.S. embassy "hostages" until James Earl "Jimmy" Carter was no longer president. He was also investigating a number of other secret U.S. Deep State scandals, some of which were CIA criminal operations. (These were Iran-Contra terrorist-financing scheme under Reagan featuring the fascist Colonel Oliver North, an American version of Otto Skorzeny; the BCCI CIA terrorist bank; and the Inslaw theft scandal.)

George H.W. Bush is the prime suspect in the murder conspiracy. He was president at the time, he was Reagan's Vice President for the entirety of Reagan's term (January 1981-January 1989), and he was vice presidential candidate in 1988 when the secret treasonous deal with Iran was arranged. (There's a sinister pattern in U.S. history. The Republicans always accuse the Democrats of treason, the Democrats defensively move to the right to try and prove it ain't so, and the Republicans commit treason, which the Democrats remain silent about. Just as the Republicans undercut the efforts of the Carter regime to free the "hostages," in 1968 Nixon sabotaged the Paris peace talks to end the Vietnam War by secretly instructing the "South" Vietnamese fascist regime to boycott those talks. LBJ knew this through FBI surveillance of the "South" Vietnamese embassy, and warrantless wiretaps of Nixon and others, which he was afraid would be revealed. So Nixon got away with it.)

Bush the Elder was Director of the CIA in 1976. He formed close bonds with fascist cutthroats in that agency, some of whom tried to get him elected president in 1980. (That didn't pan out, but he did get to be Reagan's vice president instead.) During his tenure as CIA boss, the CIA helped smuggle the terrorist bombmaker Michael Vernon Townley into the U.S. from Chile. Townley made and planted the bomb that was used to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington, D.C. that same year. A week after the murder, the CIA planted an attributed item in Newsweek, on their "Periscope" page, saying the CIA has determined that the Pinochet regime secret police, DINA, didn't do it. How the CIA could "know" that in just a week wasn't explained. Of course, that was a big fat evil lie, as was subsequently proven. So Bush was a conspirator in an act of international terrorism, a double homicide, and aiding and abetting after the fact. Bush has been tight with the CIA ever since.

The Bush family's ties to terrorism, fascist cutthroats, and criminals are numerous and of long standing, and are no secret except in the U.S. establishment media, which prefers to portray the Bushes in glowing terms. (So much for the "liberal" media.) But if you go to, say, foreign media, or "alternative" media, there is voluminous documentation, as well as in books. See for example "The Bush dynasty and the Cuban criminals," the Guardian, (UK), December 1, 2002. 

A classic fake-out dirty trick was run to discredit the "October Surprise" story. A fake story was generated about Bush himself flying in an SR-71 Blackbird supersonic spyplane to a secret meeting in Spain to cut the deal with the Iranians. This absurd tale was then easily refuted, thus "disproving" the October Surprise "rumor."

A similar style operation was later run on Dan Rather, on behalf of Bush the Younger, regarding that spoiled creep's being AWOL from the cushy slot in the Texas Air National Guard that was arranged by Daddy Bush to keep Bush the Younger out of harm's way during the Vietnam War, yet allowing him to pose as a "veteran" who had "served his country." The real documents were removed from the archives, and forgeries were slipped to Rather's team at CBS, who fell for the bait. When the forgeries were duly exposed, CBS threw Rather overboard. (For some odd reason, American reactionaries have always despised Dan Rather. As Rather is no more "liberal" than the other corporate media talking heads, I never got what their beef was. But highly irrational people are often hard to figure out, especially since their "explanations" for things are equal parts falsehoods and incoherencies.)

These types of covert, nasty operations are one of the hallmarks of both the CIA and the GOP. Both are fascistic, vicious, ruthless, and devious. Both also have a history of murdering people who threaten to expose their crimes. (Scores were murdered just to eliminate witnesses after the assassination of JFK.)

Danny Casolaro had to work as a freelancer. Typically, U.S. media had no use for a genuine journalist who was interested in pursuing critical stories that would shine a light on the criminal nature of the U.S. power structure and expose some of its leading personages as the thugs they are. The U.S. media likes to misappropriate the slogan "speaking truth to power," as if they are brave Davids and not oppressive Goliaths. But those who really do try to speak truth to power are subject to severe retaliation. It could be a broken arm, dislocated shoulder, and torn ligaments, as happened to Medea Benjamin for daring to confront Emperor Obama during one of his speechifyings, it could be imprisonment, or it could be death, as happened to Casolaro.

 Casolaro was only 44 when he died. The beneficiaries of his silencing, Reagan and Bush the Elder, got to live to ripe old ages. (Bush of course is still haunting the earth and arranging who knows what evil schemes with his Saudi partners.) If the U.S. had had a genuine news industry at that time, his murder would have raised an uproar, demands for a real investigation, and followups on the leads he was pursuing.

Wikipedia has some information and links that are useful, although it inexplicably avers that " no evidence of murder was ever found." I beg to differ. His DEAD BODY is rather strong evidence of murder, as well as the totality of the circumstances around his death. Give no credence to that irritating falsehood.

It shouldn't fall to me alone to remind people of this crime, its coverup, and what it reveals about the gangster nature of the U.S. system of power. Really, people who consider themselves progressive or left-wing or opponents of the system of U.S. power, should not let such martyrs- and such crimes- be forgotten. Others have far more resources and support than I do. I think it's irresponsible and even feckless to unwittingly (or wittingly in some cases!) aid and abet a gangster government and ruling class in making sure its crimes stay forgotten.

Danny Casolaro, 1947-1991.

Obama Regime Codifies Policy of Murdering Journalists U.S. Doesn't Like

Another day, another U.S. outrage. Under the Obama regime, the Pentagon has issued a manual on how the U.S. military is to deal with journalists they don't like. They are to be deemed “unprivileged belligerents,” treated as enemy spies, and subject to assassination. [1]

The “privilege” being stripped from journalists would be the Geneva Conventions, an allegedly binding treaty obligation of the U.S. But as the regime of Bush the Younger already declared  those solemn Treaties null and void, Treaties which under the U.S. Constitution carry the same status as Constitutional law, they already are dead letters. The U.S. does what it wants, whenever it wants, as long as it thinks it can get away with it. The only thing that is new here is its open declaration of the fact that journalists are targets of its lethal violence. Although the declaration was done in a smarmy, matter-of-fact way that belies its awful significance. As happens so often in the Obama Regime, they want to slip one past us, reflecting the character of the Con-Man-In-Chief.

And make no mistake- murder is the real intent here. The New York Times asked an unnamed “senior Pentagon official” for an example of  a journalist as “unprivileged belligerent” (i.e. someone it's okay to murder, torture, imprison in secret “black sites” or the Guantanamo Bay military gulag, etc., since there are no rules once you discard the Geneva Conventions) and this creature gave the example of the Al-Qaeda assassins who murdered the leader of the Northern Alliance on September 10th, 2001. Who, of course, were not journalists but assassins masquerading as journalists.[2]

In other words, if they don't like what a journalist is doing, they'll be treated as a “terrorist.” You know what that means.

In fact, we know what it means from how the U.S. conducted itself in Vietnam, especially with the CIA's mass assassination program, Operation Phoenix. Or in Latin America, where it created and directed fascist terrorist regimes to slaughter all told hundreds of thousands. Or in Indonesia, where a minimum of 800,000 people were exterminated in a U.S.-instigated and CIA-planned mass murder.

Once the U.S. labels you a terrorist, your life is in grave peril.

The targeting of journalists actually isn't new in practice, as the U.S. has been murdering journalists for years. What's new is the overtness, the declaration of this vileness as official policy. As with torture and assassination generally, the U.S. no longer feels the need to put up a false front. As with outsourcing CIA subversion to the “National Endowment for Democracy,” the U.S. now does matter-of-factly what it used to try and hide. Whereas before U.S. hypocrisy was the tribute its vice paid to virtue, now the mask is off. Increasingly the U.S. sinks lower and lower into the abyss of immorality. [3]

But typically, the Obama White House was smarmily evasive when asked by the New York Times [2] about the Pentagon's newly declared official policy of targeting journalists, as if somehow Obama wasn't Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and chief of the executive branch of the U.S. Government. He does that a lot, trying to fob off responsibility as if he's just a bystander. He's been doing it on other issues to, like “criminal justice reform,” running around saying “Hey, we lock up too many folks,” instead of ordering his Attorney General to stop seeking maximum charges against people, deprioritize “drug” offenses, and use his own powers of commutation and pardon to free Federal prisoners. He's commuted fewer than 100 sentences- and pardoned no one- in all his years in office, vs. “dictator” Vladimir Putin of Russia freeing at least 1,000. Of course, Russia is oppressive, and the U.S. is “free.” That's why the U.S. has three times the prison population as Russia, and a much higher percentage of its adult population imprisoned.

Or maybe, rather than the U.S. sinking deeper into immorality, it is merely the U.S. returning to its roots. It is, after all, an evil empire founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery. Many have struggled mightily over the centuries to make it something better, with mixed results. After a brief upsurge of resistance, protest, and rebellion lasting about a decade from the early 1960s to the early 1970s which consisted of disparate strands of black struggle, opposition to the Indochina war, and the Counterculture, the power structure has worked assiduously, using all its arms (every branch of government at every level, the media, corporations, schools, religion, and more) to beat back these movements and especially to delegitimize the ideological content of those movements and re-brainwash and re-indoctrinate the populace in the “correct” attitudes and ideas.

Another factor was the demise of the main force in the world that could check U.S. power and arrogance, the Soviet Union. This emboldened the U.S. tremendously. Bush the Elder even declared a “New World Order.” Meaning an era of unchallengeable U.S. hegemony.

It hasn't worked out that way, due to various factors, including the rise of China, and the stubborn spread of Islamofascism, a huge example of “blowback” from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan,where the U.S. allied with the most reactionary Islamic elements and with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the two crucial patrons of Islamofascism.

But the U.S. elites are still drunk on power. Unfortunately for them, this arrogance makes them behave stupidly. So instead of seriously countering the rise of the most dangerous rival that looks set to become the next world hegemon in a few decades, China, they've decide to focus on attacking Russia. The U.S. and its Eurostooges creates a crisis in Ukraine, blamed that crisis on Russia, and used that as a pretext to restart the Cold War (and claiming it was Russia restarting the Cold War, for good measure!).

Meanwhile China repeatedly rips off Western businesses in China, and massively infiltrates U.S. computer networks and steals data, including critical information on weaponry, which China has used to build its own advances jets and missiles. The latest (announced) attack was the theft of personal data on 20 million people in Federal databases. Other than scapegoating the (female) head of the agency in question by firing her (Obama is constantly throwing women overboard like that- the same thing happened with Lois Lerner of the IRS and with the first female head of the Secret Service) the U.S. has taken it lying down. It is afraid to retaliate. It is afraid of China. It is afraid to confront China. And you better believe the Chinese rulers know this.

Thus China now has the psychological upper hand. This makes China the dominant “partner” in the “relationship.”

Some reactionary American demagogues will of course blame this on Democratic “weakness” and fecklessness, a card they've been playing since 1946 or so. (Hey, it still works, so why not?) Of course Republican regimes have also practiced appeasement towards China. U.S. policy towards China should rightly be called appeasement, punctuated by occasional “stern” talk. (Shades of Neville Chamberlain!)

The underlying reasons for this effective surrender and submission to China are two-fold. First, big corporations drive U.S. policy. And those corporations are still blinded by the chimera of “a market of 1.3 billion consumers.” The Chinese have cleverly played foreign corporations like fiddles, stringing them along, forcing them into “partnerships” with Chinese businesses that take all their knowledge and technology and methods, and then grab the whole or most of the pie. But the stupid foreigners never learn. GE has handed over critical jet engine technology (nothing like a capitalist selling the hangman the rope to be used to hang the capitalist!) which the U.S. government permitted. (Can you imagine the Chinese government permitting the reverse to occur?) China is a one-party dictatorship in a society that historically is very conformist and regimented, making it far easier to set coherent policies.

The other factor is U.S. cowardice. The U.S. has been spoiled by two centuries of weak enemies and easy expansion. I think the U.S. is basically a big bully, and deep down, bullies tend to be cowards. They fear adversaries they might actually lose to. (Obviously that is not to belittle the personal bravery of the cannon-fodder who do the actual fighting and dying. Don't confuse me with Donald Trump.)

Unfortunately, a world dominated by China (assuming the current one-party dictatorship is still in power) will be no real improvement over a world dominated by the U.S. So from the human perspective, there is no side to root for in this competition for global hegemony.

But at least it won't be total hegemony. True hegemony over the entire planet is a rainbow in the eyes of imperialists. They think it is real, and they constantly chase it, but they can never attain it. Global dominance however is attainable. So unfortunately the crushing oppression they CAN inflict on humanity is very much in the realm of the possible. Indeed, it has been the actual state of (sub)humankind for millennia.

I MAKE THE CONNECTIONS YOU NEED TO KNOW.

1] “The Pentagon’s Dangerous Views on the Wartime Press,” New York Times editorial, August 10, 2015. The manual is cynically titled “Department of Defense Law of War Manual June 2015.” Obviously the actual content is “There Is No Law For US, We Do What We Want!” If you want the Pentagon to capture your computer's IP address, and maybe plant spyware on you, the manual is in .pdf form here or here, Better, just get the pdf from public intelligence. 

The Pentagon had it's very own lawyers concoct this 1,204 page pile of excrement, so it MUST be “legal.”

The manual makes a nice bookend to the U.S. Army Field Manual, which instructs soldiers on torture techniques. That's not just my opinion. These torture methods are defined as torture by the United Nations. (But the U.S. holds the UN in contempt, so who cares?)

2] Ibid.

Meet the "public servants" who legalized the murder of journalists. Thank you for your service!

3] Examples of the U.S. targeting of journalists for death include the bombing of the Belgrade TV center in Serbia (one could argue whether those were journalists or propagandists, but just as one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, one man's journalist is another man's propagandist); the attack by U.S. Army tank on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, killing a Spanish journalist (the Spanish government, a quasi-satrapy of the U.S., helped the U.S. quash legal cases in the matter); the repeatedly bombings of the Al-Jazeera offices in Kabul and Baghdad (interesting footnote that is deeply buried in the memory hole- British Prime Minister and accomplice to U.S. aggression Tony Blair had to talk Bush the Younger out of bombing Al-Jazeera in its home country, the oil sheikdom of Qatar- you'd think that was an important enough fact NOT to systematically suppress); and the murder of American journalists Danny Casolaro, and of Michael Hastings in California, using a bomb planted in his car and the remote seizure of his car's accelerator, brake, and steering via the car's computer systems. Nor is this an all-inclusive list.

Casolaro was murdered on this very date in 1991 while investigating the secret deal Ronald Reagan and his henchmen made with the Khomeini regime in Iran to delay the release of the U.S. "hostages" until Carter was no longer president. (The "hostage crisis" was the key factor in Carter's defeat in the 1990 election. ABC even started a nightly "news" program, Nightline, to harp on the "hostage crisis" every single night. It was hosted by notorious propagandist and Kissinger sycophant Ted Koppel.  It's obvious purpose was to oust Carter, which the ruling class had soured on. The New York Times also spent a year portraying Carter negatively, even running a photo of him out of breath in a marathon and describing him as "panting," i.e. weak and pathetic. Real subtle.)

We should mention in passing U.S. pals that murder journalists. Two of the U.S.' favorite Latin American nations murder scores of journalists- Colombia and Mexico. In fact it is obviously their policy to do so as they've been doing it for years.

But not to be one-sided about this, “bad guy” nations kill journalists too. Iran, for example. And Russia has killed a few- a mere handful, far fewer than those two U.S. buddy nations I mentioned have killed. Which is not to exonerate those execrable regimes. The totalitarian theocrats of Iran hate the “wrong” kind of writers so much that they tried to murder an entire busload of them whom they lured to a fake “conference.” The bus driver tried to drive the bus over a cliff (after jumping out) but flubbed the hit. So the writers all had to be arrested and charged with “crimes” instead.

That latter move is standard procedure in dealing with dissidents and “subversive elements;” paint them as criminals. To return to my own country, that Beacon of Freedom, the U.S. does it incessantly. Just two recent examples (out of innumerable thousands over U.S. history): Randy Credico, who had the temerity to run for Governor of New York State, was punished for this infraction by being arrested and charged wih a non-existent “assault” on police, and Cecily McMillan, who was grabbed by her breasts from behind and mauled by a sadistic New York City cop with a history of violence. (Grantley Bovell, who happens to be black, another example of the fallacy of thinking that the way to change this repressive system is with more black cops.) McMillan blindly swung her elbow backwards, catching her assailant in the head. The Manhattan District Attorney, one Cyrus Vance, Jr., a scion of the ruling class and made member of the U.S. nomenklatura (his daddy was  Secretary of State in the Carter regime), following standard operating procedure when the police brutalize someone, indicted Cecily for felonious assault on a police officer. A group of sheep was impaneled as a jury, and Cecily was duly convicted after a “fair” trial (all U.S. trials are “fair” by definition) and imprisoned at the notorious Rikers Island prison complex, where beatings and deaths are commonplace. Also, she was enjoined from engaging in political activity for five years, on pain of reimprisonment. Because the U.S. is a “free” country, you see. (Reminds me of the South African apartheid regime's practice of “banning” people, to politically neutralize them. Come to think of it, the U.S. was an ally and protector of that regime until almost the very end. Hmmm.)

During McMillan's trial, the female prosecutor very convincingly explained the documented bruises on Cecily's breasts by saying she deliberately created  them herself. (You detected my irony there, I presume.)

But Credico and McMillan are two of  the “lucky” ones. The “unlucky” ones get imprisoned for decades, or are beaten, tased, gassed, or are victims of arson attacks, or are assassinated. (Note to dissidents: whatever you do, don't interrupt a speech by Barack Obama!)

Of course, all the attention of the Western propaganda systems go towards the crimes of enemy nations like Russia and Iran while completely ignoring the often more numerous crimes of the U.S. and its “partners.” (The U.S. media of course is completely despicable in this regard, but the BBC is no better. I have yet to hear a mention on BBC of the murder of journalists and labor organizers, among others, in Colombia. They only “report” on Colombia to demonize FARC, the guerrilla movement there. So is the BBC journalism or propaganda?)

I MAKE THE CONNECTIONS YOU NEED TO KNOW.