When “Would” Became “Wouldn’t”: Who Made Trump Buckle?
It seemed like an ominous warning when the lights started to dim and went off as soon as President Trump began his backtrack to assure the intelligence agencies, and everyone else screaming ‘treason’, that he really meant ‘wouldn’t’ when he clearly said ‘would.’
“Who made Trump buckle?” Tucker Carlson asked, after President Trump appeared before a meeting with Republican members of Congress to ‘correct’ himself.
Perhaps Trump took to heart Newt Gingrich’s rebuke in a tweet on 17 July:
“President Trump must clarify his statements in Helsinki on our intelligence system and Putin. It is the most serious mistake of his presidency and must be corrected—-immediately.”
But why is this his “most serious mistake”?
Given the level of vitriol in the media, perhaps there is something more sinister hidden behind the scenes, like this ominous warning from Tim Weiner’s article: Trump has attacked U.S. intel agencies. Expect them to strike back.
“The foundations of American national security are under assault. The battle lines are drawn. On one side stand the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency. On the other: the commander-in-chief of the United States.”
At the centre of this battle is the word PEACE. Trump has stated emphatically many times that he wants peace, which he reiterated at the beginning of the video that records his backtrack: “We’re gonna have peace, that’s what we want, that’s what we’re gonna have. I say peace through strength.” But PEACE means détente with Russia, America’s number one enemy since the end of the Second World War and George Kennan’s Russian policy of “containment” – seemingly no matter the cost.
In the above video President Trump was referring to the presence of a Russian naval ship, the Viktor Leonov, in international waters off the East Coast of the United States, which was making the US media apprehensive at the time.
“The best way to revitalize the economy is war…the United States has grown stronger with war,” President G.W. Bush told then president of Argentina, Néstor Kirchner, who wanted to implement a Marshall Plan to improve his country’s economy. [1] To wage war, an enemy is needed. Without an enemy such as Russia, the American economy would implode with the loss of arms sales. Check out the mind-boggling sale of US arms around the world in Will Geary’s video of arms sales from 1950-2017 in the video below.
The United States of Arms from Will Geary on Vimeo.
Pausing to reflect on this and the assassination of President Kennedy who wanted peace, détente with Russia, and who threw the CIA ‘under the bus’ when he said he wished he could “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds” after their Bay of Pigs fiasco, I recall the scene comedian Bill Hicks described after each new president is inaugurated on the White House lawn: he is led into the basement and shown the film, the real film, of what happened that day in Dealey Plaza.
In my mind I imagine an ominous silence afterwards as everyone leaves to allow the shock of what the film exposes to burn deeply into the new president’s brain so its message is never forgotten. But maybe a second showing of the film is mandatory for presidents who speak about peace, or anything that differs from the American foreign policy outlined at the end of the Second World War in The Truman Doctrine that George Kennan drafted, in which he stated:
“…we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.
It is understandable, therefore, that to those who jealously guarded US foreign policy to maintain this disparity of wealth in the world, Kennedy was crossing too many red lines. To them, Soviet Russia had to remain enemy number one to feed the by now very lucrative arms industry of the Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhower warned the American people about on the day he left office.
As for Kennedy withdrawing troops from Vietnam, Wade Frazier wrote in his long essay, The American Empire:
“When the Pentagon Papers were leaked, the government’s internal documents revealed that the main theme of the war planners was not freedom, democratic rule or any of those lofty ideas, but tin, rubber and oil. As with all those slave-owning Founding Fathers, when the political rhetoric is stripped away, the economic motivation behind the institutions and actions is clear.
“WAR is a racket,” declared Major General Smedley Butler after reflecting on his long military career, adding, “It always has been.” At the beginning of his short book, War is a Racket, he wrote of war:
“It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
“A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
This is why the political stakes are so high and presidents who want peace or try to ‘drain the swamp’ have to be reined in – or shown the unedited version of the Zapruder film a second time.
But exactly what does the uncut version of the Zapruder film show?
During my many hours of research into the Kennedy assassination, I have only discovered two people who said they have seen the original version of the Zapruder film, that is, the one that didn’t have frames removed or doctored. Investigative journalist Cherie Seymour was one person who saw what was on the film. In the condensed version of her non-fiction book, The Last Circle, which she presented to a secret Investigative Committee comprised of Congress people, lawyers and former POW’s at their request in October 1996, she wrote:
At one point during our conversation, and completely out of context with what we were discussing, Nichols played a video tape of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The southern wall of Nichols’ apartment contained a six-foot-wide screen on which I watched a blownup (enlarged), slow motion “uncut” version of the famous Zapruder film.
I watched what appeared to be the standard media version of the film, seen so many times in film clips over the years, but then Nichols slowed the camera even more, and on the sixfoot screen, I observed the driver of the limousine turn to his right, first looking at Connolly, then at Kennedy. The driver’s left hand came over his right shoulder, and he was holding a long barreled gun. Smoke and a bullet emerged from the gun, traveling ever so slowly across the screen into Kennedy’s head, blowing brain tissue into the air as he fell back against the seat.
Stunned, I watched Jacqueline Kennedy open her mouth in horror as she glanced at the driver, then try to climb over the back seat of the car.
Littman and Zokosky and I stared at the scene in silence, unable to believe what we were seeing. Nichols then changed the tape and showed what he described as the “media” version of the Zapruder tape. In the media version, the driver continued to drive, unflinching, as the shots rang out. Then the scene switched to the back part of the limousine.
At this point, Nichols stopped the frame and pointed with a stick at a tree in the background behind the limousine. From the middle of the tree to the ground, there was no trunk, just air. The top part of the tree was growing in air!
I demanded that my husband be allowed to see the film. I felt I must have been hypnotized. When he arrived, he viewed both films up close, in slow motion, and saw the same thing. Nichols played both tapes backwards and forwards as often as we demanded, until the memory of it was burned forever into our minds.
I wondered if the video had been tampered with. I asked Nichols where he had obtained the original “uncut” version? He would not say. I had no idea at that time that his F.I.D.C.O. partner, Clint Murchison, Jr.’s father had had instant access to the Zapruder film immediately after the assassination in Dallas, Texas.
Nichols studied me for the longest time, then walked over to the window and lit a cigarette. He finally commented that the CIA can cover up anything it wants, even a president’s murder. He wanted to show me the power of the Octopus. “Nothing is as it appears to be,” he said.
As chilling as this is, perhaps it explains why President Trump would go through the motions to ‘correct’ what he said at the press conference in Helsinki with President Putin, when “would” became “wouldn’t.”
As a president who wants peace and to “drain the swamp” Donald Trump has every reason to distrust the intelligence agencies, and the FBI and CIA especially. Peter Janney brings to light in his book, Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy To Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, And Their Vision For World Peace (Third Edition), one of the most important documents ever revealed by the CIA, signed by his own father who “chaired a meeting that took place at the highest levels in the CIA on September 20, 1967.” It reveals very clearly why Jim Garrison failed to get a conviction against Clay Shaw for the role he played in the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.
Janney wrote:
“Present at this meeting was the CIA’s Executive Director, General Counsel, Inspector General, and others, including Raymond Rocca who was James Jesus Angleton’s chief lieutenant in the office of Counterintelligence…
Rocca was quoted as stating in the meeting that he felt that “Garrison would indeed obtain a conviction of [Clay] Shaw for conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy.”
“That statement was nothing less than prima facie evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the assassination of a sitting U.S. President, which amounted to an open, documented admission by a high level CIA officer – during an internal CIA meeting – that Clay Shaw (as well as the CIA itself) was “indeed” part of the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. Since its release in 1998, few JFK assassination researchers have even mentioned this document, much less understood its true significance. Ultimately, the memorandum is a complete vindication of Jim Garrison’s steadfast, undaunted effort to bring the real truth of President Kennedy’s assassination into the light of day.” (pp. 447-448)
While some might like to believe that the CIA works to keep America safe, it is chillingly clear that the CIA works not in the interests of democracy, but in the interests of the few to maintain either their profits and/or their position of power in the world, and perhaps many hidden agendas besides – especially in foreign policy.
War is far too profitable for peace to ever be allowed to prevail in the world. This unfortunately, is the current reality, and the underlying agenda to the interminable “witch hunt” as Trump calls it, trying to ‘prove’ that Russia meddled in the 2016 US presidential elections.
In order to pay for never-ending war or the threat of war, it is we the people who suffer when money is slashed for infrastructure, social welfare programs, health, and education. These wars, as we have seen, destroy the lives of civilians in many other countries, including their infrastructure, hospitals, schools, factories, food storage silos and much more with bombs, the planes that carry those bombs, the aircraft carriers from which they take off, the pilots who fly those planes, and the bases of armies of men and women needed to provide back-up for this ongoing and wholesale slaughter fuelled by greed.
Before we completely lose what is left of our democracies in the western world, we the people had better wake as to what is going on behind the lies we are told to maintain our silent and obedient acquiescence to the status quo.
Let the words sink in that Paul Craig Roberts (former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan presidency) wrote after the Helsinki meeting between Trump and Putin:
“The hatred of Russia that is being generated in America is extraordinary. It can only lead to war. [2]
Let Smedley Butler remind you:
“War is a racket”!
And may I remind you that any president who stands in the way of a war the deep state wants to wage through a barrage of lies to fool we the people, will have his power revoked one way or another – even by assassination.
According to Professor Stephen Cohen, it is the job of the President of the United States to talk with the head of a nuclear power in order to “keep us safe.” With the uproar this has created, he considers that America has now entered a time more dangerous than the Cuban missile crisis.
References
[1] Oliver Stone, South of the Border
[2] Paul Craig Roberts, America Overrules Trump: No Peace With Russia: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/07/18/america-overrules-trump-no-peace-with-russia/
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