Nixon’s ‘war on drugs’, racism and militarism

Posted on April 10, 2016 by petrel41

This video from the USA says about itself:

Nixon Invented War On Drugs To Attack Black People And Leftists

9 April 2016

John Ehrlichman was one of the henchmen for Richard Nixon. He was sent to prison for his role in the Watergate conspiracy. He was also part of a much broader conspiracy, which has only recently come to light. Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.

“Former aides to President Richard Nixon disavowed a recently published, provocative quote from a colleague about the racial motivation behind the war on drugs, and suggested that the colleague was being sarcastic.

The statement — attributed to Nixon’s chief domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman — alleged that the administration’s drug war was meant to cripple black communities and the “antiwar left.”

Journalist Dan Baum wrote in the April cover story for Harper’s that Ehrlichman told him in 1994 that the Nixon campaign and Nixon White House considered those two groups to be their enemies. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman reportedly said.

But three former Nixon aides say the quote just doesn’t sound like Ehrlichman, and if he did say it, he was mistaken.”

Read more here.

NIXON TRIED TO DELAY VIETNAM PEACE FOR CAMPAIGN POINTS “Richard M. Nixon told an aide that they should find a way to secretly ‘monkey wrench’ peace talks in Vietnam in the waning days of the 1968 campaign for fear that progress toward ending the war would hurt his chances for the presidency, according to newly discovered notes.” [NYT]

Richard Nixon comedy on TV

Posted on August 26, 2011 by petrel41

This video is called The Watergate Scandal: Timeline and Background

It says about itself:

This was one of the biggest political scandals in American history, and led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Britain: This Is Spinal Tap star Harry Shearer is to play disgraced US president Richard Nixon in a new show based on secret White House tapes, he revealed today.

New biography claims Richard Nixon may have had gay affair; here.

Richard Nixon Fighting a Giant Saber-Toothed Tiger (laughingsquid.com)
Harry Shearer: ‘I don’t think Obama is the genius he likes to think he is’ (telegraph.co.uk)
Will Obama Follow Richard Nixon As An Asterisk President? (pakalertpress.com)
New book alleges longtime affair between President Richard Nixon and businessman Bebe Rebozo of Key Biscayne (miamiherald.typepad.com)

US Nixon did not care about gassed Jews

Posted on December 12, 2010 by petrel41

This video from the USA is called Devasting Quotes From Nixon & Reagan.

From Haaretz daily in Israel:

Latest update 01:39 12.12.10

‘It wouldn’t be U.S. concern if U.S.S.R sent Jews to gas chambers‘, Kissinger told Nixon

Former American president can also be heard making many disparaging comments about ‘abrasive and obnoxious’ Jews on the 1973 recording, including: ‘I don’t want any Jew at that [state] dinner who didn’t support us in that campaign’.

By Haaretz Staff

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told President Richard Nixon that if the Soviet Union sent its Jews to the gas chambers, this would not be an American concern, the New York Times reported Saturday.

The 1973 conversation, recorded on a newly released batch of White House tapes from the final months before Nixon’s presidency became consumed by the Watergate affair, took place shortly after the U.S. president had met with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.

Meir had apparently raised the issue of the oppression of Soviet Jewry and the possibility that the Americans would press the Soviet Union to allow the Jews to emigrate. Kissinger, the Times reported, can be heard saying: “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Nixon, according to the report, replied: “I know. We can’t blow up the world because of it.”

The American president can also be heard making many disparaging comments about Jews on the recording, from telling his secretary “I don’t want any Jew at that dinner who didn’t support us in that campaign” – referring to the state dinner held for the Israeli prime minister – to stating that “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”

Other groups singled out by the president were the Irish, who he said “can’t drink” because they “get mean,” along with the Italians, who he said “don’t have their heads screwed on tight.”

Nixon also made disparaging remarks about African Americans, saying they would be able to strengthen the United States only after 500 years, because they would need to be “inbred.”

Nixon wanted to kill Leftist Uruguyans

Posted on August 13, 2010 by petrel41

This video says about itself:

19 February 2010

Former Uruguayan dictator Juan Maria Bordaberry has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for violating the constitution when he led a 1973 coup that began 12 years of dictatorship in Uruguay. He also faces charges for 11 homicides and forced disappearances of dissidents. The United States had been instrumental in developing and training the leadership of Uruguay’s military and police forces, the same forces who helped bring Bordaberry to power. Reports of torture had become routine. It was also during this time that death squads appeared.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Cables show Nixon urged Uruguay to kill leftist prisoners

Friday 13 August 2010

by Our Foreign Desk

Long-Secret diplomatic cables released earlier this week show that former US president Richard Nixon wanted the Uruguayan government to threaten to kill leftist prisoners to end the kidnapping of a US agent 40 years ago.

The National Security Archive, which published the papers on Wednesday, said that State Department cables suggested that the US government knew about death squads which attacked leftist insurgencies even before military dictatorships ousted democracies across much of south America.

The cables focus on the kidnapping of Dan Mitrione, an FBI agent who had been advising Uruguay on interrogation techniques.

Mitrione’s captivity and eventual murder were part of a wave of kidnappings of foreign officials by the Tupamaros who hoped to use them in a prisoner exchange and eventually topple the government.

Instead, it prompted an intense police and military response that resulted in the arrest of Tupamaro leader Raul Sendic and hundreds of other guerillas and set the stage for Uruguay’s dictatorship in 1973.

The documents show that, while publicly calling for amnesty and offering ransoms, the Nixon administration was very different behind the scenes.

“We have assumed that the government of Uruguay has considered use of threat to kill Sendic and other key MLN prisoners if Mitrione is killed.

“If this has not been considered, you should raise it with GOU at once,” former secretary of state William Rogers cabled to then US ambassador Charles Adair.

Mr Adair replied saying he had met top Uruguayan officials who intended to take “severe measures.”

But, despite US pressure, the Uruguayan government treated Tupamaro Mr Sendic in a military hospital for wounds suffered during his arrest. He, like other jailed Tupamaros, was sentenced to prison.

Another jailed Tupamaro, Jose Mujica, also served a lengthy prison term, then entered politics and became Uruguay’s president this year.

“The documents reveal the US went to the edge of ethics,” said archive director Carlos Osorio.

Leftist music about Latin America: here.

In Tapes, Nixon Rails About Jews and Blacks: here.

US General Haig dies

Posted on February 20, 2010 by petrel41

Alexander Haig was President’s Chief of Staff during the Watergate scandal. This video from the USA is called The Watergate Scandal: Timeline and Background.

From Wikipedia:

Alexander Meigs Haig, Jr. (December 2, 1924–February 20, 2010) was a retired United States Army general who served as the United States Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan and White House Chief of Staff under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. In 1973 Haig served as Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, the number-two ranking officer in the Army. Haig served as the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, commanding all U.S. and NATO forces in Europe.

Haig, a veteran of the Korean War and Vietnam War, was a recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star with oak leaf cluster, and the Purple Heart.

On February 20, 2010 news reports indicated that Haig had died from complications from an infection after being hospitalized since January 28 in critical condition at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Though, like with other people who die, this obviously is a sad day for the relatives and friends of Alexander Haig, this should not lead to any concessions to the Rightist militarist policies which Haig stood for.

On the contrary, one should hope that now when NATO‘s ex Commander has died, the aggressive and expensive NATO alliance itself will die soon.

Alexander Haig was a trailblazer for a modern reactionary type, the political general, who crosses over from the uniformed military to high political office. Haig played a central role during two critical periods for American imperialism: as Nixon’s White House chief of staff in 1973-74, and Reagan’s secretary of state in 1981-82: here.

Chomsky is trying to rescue crimes from the memory-hole, so we can remember them. In his new book, for example, he explains that Ronald Reagan — the great hero of the American right — was a champion of jihadism: here.

Watergate and COINTELPRO in Nixon’s USA

Posted on December 19, 2008 by petrel41

This video is called COINTELPRO: FBI’s War On Black America.

From the blog of Greg Mitchell in the USA:

The Other Side of ‘Deep Throat’: He Spied on My Friends

I’ll never know for sure, but it’s possible that I was once on, ahem, extremely intimate terms with W. Mark Felt, the leak artist formerly known as Deep Throat who has now passed away.

Journalists and many others lionizing the former FBI official — rightly — for his contribution in helping to bring down Richard Nixon, should not overlook the fact that Felt was one of the architects of the bureau’s notorious COINTELPRO domestic spying-and-burglary campaign. He was convicted in 1980 of authorizing nine illegal entries in New Jersey in 1972 and 1973 — the very period during which he was famously meeting Bob Woodward in a parking garage. Only a pardon, courtesy of Ronald Reagan, kept him out of jail for a long term.

So the man knew a thing or two about illegal break-ins. COINTELPRO was the Patriot Act on steroids. And that’s where I come in.

Ron Howard’s [film] Frost/Nixon: Trivializing a war criminal: here.

Nixon supported mixed race abortions: here; and anti-Semitism: here.

USA: Richard Nixon’s anti-Semitism and Senator McCain

Posted on April 6, 2007 by petrel41

McCain, cartoon

From Media Matters for America:

On April 3, Sen. John McCain‘s (R-AZ) 2008 presidential campaign announced [UPDATE August 2008: that page is no longer at the McCain site] that it had hired former Nixon staffer Fred Malek as its national finance co-chairman.

However, as David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation, noted in an April 3 entry on his Capital Games weblog, the McCain campaign’s press release “left out an interesting piece of Malek’s history: when he counted Jews for President Richard Nixon.”

As Corn reported, Nixon suspected that a “cabal” of Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics was skewing economic figures to make the administration look bad and assigned Malek to report back on how many Jews were employed at BLS.

When former President George H.W. Bush hired Malek as a top official at the Republican National Committee (RNC) in 1988, revelations in the press regarding Malek’s work for Nixon reportedly led him to resign.

McCain’s hiring of Malek would seem to warrant the same disclosures from the media, but so far, only one news outlet other than The Nation has reported it.

Moreover, as Media Matters for America senior fellow Eric Boehlert documented, Politico senior writer Ben Smith “lean[ed] on lots of innuendo” in a March 13 weblog post in order to report that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has a “Jewish Problem,” but failed to provide evidence substantiating that claim.

Now that McCain has hired Malek, who allegedly aided President Nixon’s attempts to expose the so-called “Jewish cabal” in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, will the Politico investigate “McCain’s Jewish Problem”?