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USS Liberty Massacre: A Pivotal Moment in the Hostile Takeover of America

By Kevin Barrett | Crescent | Dhu al-Qa’dah 24, 1445

In corporate America, hostile takeovers are commonplace. They occur when an aggressor—a larger corporation or rich individuals—seizes control of a smaller corporation without asking permission.

What few recognize is that the United States itself has been subjected to a hostile takeover. Since the aggressor, the illegitimate settler colony known as “Israel,” is much smaller than the US, the takeover has necessarily been surreptitious.

As of June, 2024, Israel’s gradual takeover of the US has become obvious and undeniable—a proverbial “elephant in the living room.” In this election year, all three major presidential candidates compete for Israel’s favor, even as the whole world recoils from the zionist genocide of Gaza. The Democratic incumbent, Joe Biden, supplies the butcher Netanyahu with all the weapons he needs to massacre tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children, uttering only occasional peeps of pro forma protest in a lame attempt to mollify his base.

Biden’s Republican challenger, Donald Trump, openly supports the genocide and calls on Israel to “finish the job” (of massacring Palestinians). Most bizarrely of all, the independent challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who offers a refreshing alternative to mainstream approaches on other issues, has staked out the most pro-genocide position of the three.

Kennedy’s position is puzzling for many reasons. As the “alternative” candidate, he might be expected to take an alternative position on Palestine, especially since it would markedly enhance his slim chances of becoming president. Young Americans oppose genocide and side with Palestine, as the ongoing campus protests demonstrate. If RFK Jr. harnessed that youthful energy by reversing course and announcing his support for Palestine, he would immediately gain tens or even hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic youthful volunteers who would start ringing doorbells and promoting his candidacy, just as anti-Vietnam-war students did for his father in 1968.

Since polls show that most Democratic voters oppose Biden’s pro-Israel stance, and that American public opinion overall is following world public opinion in the direction of ever-stronger support for Palestine, RFK Jr. could conceivably win a plurality of votes, and the presidency, by leading that shift. Instead, he has chosen to doom his candidacy by echoing the ultra-genocidal ravings of his handler, Rabbi Schmuley Boteach.

Though Kennedy decries the corrupt forces that have taken over America, and denounces the coups d’état that killed his father (1968) and uncle (1963), he seemingly fails to recognize who was behind the takeover and the killings. Kennedy knows and openly states that his father was not killed by the hypnotized Palestinian patsy Sirhan Sirhan. He acknowledges Sirhan’s innocence and has worked to free him from prison. But the significance of the fact that the perpetrators chose a Palestinian to falsely take the blame apparently escapes him.

In his blockbuster book, Brothers, David Talbot presents convincing evidence that Robert F. Kennedy was murdered because he was about to become president—and use the power of his office to bring to justice the killers of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. So, who were those killers? Michael Collins Piper’s Final Judgment makes a strong case that David Ben Gurion, the Israeli Prime Minister who resigned under pressure from JFK, and Israel’s CIA mole James Jesus Angleton, were the ringleaders. The motive: Prevent JFK from shutting down Israel’s nuclear program, and insert Israel’s asset Lyndon B. Johnson into office to oversee the 1967 land-grab war.

Anyone who doubts that Johnson was an Israeli asset needs to read Peter Hounam’s Operation Cyanide: How the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III. Hounem discovered evidence that then-President Johnson scrambled US nuclear bombers on highest-level alert more than one hour before the USS Liberty was attacked by Israel on June 8, 1967. Then when the ship miraculously stayed afloat, radioed for help, and identified its attackers as Israelis, the President of the United States issued a treasonous order: “I want that goddamn ship going to the bottom. No help. Recall the wings.”

Most Americans have no idea that Israel attempted to sink the unarmed US spy ship USS Liberty and murder its crew of 293 sailors so the attack could be falsely blamed on Egypt. Nor do they realize that the zionists succeeded in killing 34 sailors and wounding 171. Even less do they know that the sitting US president was complicit and yearned for the death of every one of those 293 American servicemen.

Why don’t more Americans know about the USS Liberty massacre? A draconian cover-up, in which surviving sailors were told to keep quiet or bad things would happen to their families, persisted for decades. Simultaneously the mainstream media published a smattering of ludicrous assertions that the Israelis had attacked the ship by accident. Those were rare exceptions to a general blackout on the topic.

Why would the media cover up such a sensational story? That question raises an even more basic one: Who controls the media? The president who followed Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, knew, but was afraid to talk about it in public. Privately, he discussed the matter with friends and advisors like the Rev. Billy Graham, who told Nixon that powerful Jews “are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country.” “You must not let them know,” Nixon replied.

“This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain” Graham continued. Nixon: “Do you believe that?” Graham: “Yes, sir.” Nixon: “Oh boy. So do I. I can’t ever say that, but I believe it.”

Today, as we approach the 57th anniversary of Israel’s massacre of American sailors aboard the USS Liberty, the United States of America has gone even further down the drain than it was in 1972, when Nixon’s conversation with Graham took place. Today, anyone who mentions the extraordinary power of America’s 2% Jewish minority, specifically its organized lobby groups and sway over media, finance, politics and organized crime (which are not mutually exclusive categories) will be viciously smeared, their careers and reputations ruined by a group so powerful that it has prohibited any mention of its power.

Some try to avoid the smears by speaking of the “zionist lobby” rather than the “Jewish lobby.” But the distinction is largely semantic. Virtually all of the power of organized Jewry supports zionism, including every one of the 50 groups represented at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Since the zionist entity defines itself as the “Jewish state” and its presumptive citizens as all Jews on Earth, regardless of where they live, calling its American contingent “the Jewish lobby” is reasonable and accurate—just as Irish-Americans who lobby for Ireland, albeit without the power of their Jewish counterparts, are an “Irish lobby.”

Others prefer the term “zionist” because it includes so-called Christian zionists like Billy Graham. But as the tapes of his conversations with Nixon show, Graham’s professed zionism was insincere. The only reason Graham pretended to support Israel was the same reason Nixon pretended to support Israel: Both men were terrified by the power of the Jews. And while there are, no doubt, some sincere Christian zionists, they are mere useful idiots in the quintessentially Jewish project of building an ever-expanding, ever-more-powerful Jewish state representing not just Israel’s Jewish citizens, but all the Jews of the world.

Looking back on the 1967 war and its context, including the USS Liberty massacre, one is struck by the Jewish state’s willingness to engage in risky and reckless behavior. Normally, if a small nation of just a few million people murdered a sitting US president, as Israel did in 1963, it might expect to be scrubbed from the face of the Earth. “Oy vey, if we get caught!” Israeli leader Golda Meir was reported to have said shortly after the JFK assassination. Meir also said, on two occasions, that Israel would destroy the world with nuclear weapons rather than accept military defeat. (The source for both statements was Meir’s personal friend, former lead Mideast BBC correspondent Alan Hart.)

Today, the zionist entity is still taking enormous risks—and pushing the world toward nuclear Armageddon. Its genocide of Gaza has cast it as the enemy of all humanity. Its repeated attacks on regional countries, and its assassinations of Iran’s top generals and suspected assassination of the Iranian president and foreign minister, have brought the Muslim East, and the world, to the proverbial precipice. And its complete death grip on power in America has destroyed the American republic and is driving the now-fascist US empire to destruction.

Like the brave soldiers on the wounded USS Liberty, who cobbled together makeshift communications equipment after the zionists had bombed their antenna, and managed to broadcast a message revealing the identity of their attackers, we need to piece together what is left of our Enlightenment-era free communications network and use it to inform the world who the enemy really is.

June 6, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | 2 Comments

Paul Manafort and LBJ, Influence Peddlers

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | September 18, 2018

The mainstream press and the progressive movement are shocked — shocked! — over Paul Manafort’s influence peddling and political corruption schemes. Their reaction to Manafort’s conviction and guilty plea remind me of the scene in the movie Casablanca, where the police chief is “shocked” to learn that there is gambling in Rick’s establishment, followed by someone bringing the police chief his gambling winnings.

The fact is that influence peddling, political corruption, and being on the take have always been an inherent part of the welfare-warfare state way of life. With trillions of taxpayer dollars flooding into the federal government’s coffers, there will always be people who are doing their best to get their sticky little fingers on a part of all that welfare-warfare largess. Why do you think the Pentagon has long refused to permit a financial audit of its operations? It’s because lots of people are on the warfare-state take in one way or another.

Paul Manafort brings to mind Lyndon Johnson, another influence peddler par excellence. The only reason Johnson is hailed as a hero by the mainstream press while Manafort is condemned as a crook is because Johnson had the good fortune of becoming president, which, in the eyes of the mainstream press and the Washington establishment, put a halo around his head.

Despite the fact that he became president, Johnson was one of the most crooked politicians in U.S. history. If Kennedy had not been assassinated, there is little doubt that Johnson would not have been his running mate in the 1964 presidential election, not only because JFK had expressed to close friends his intention to dump Johnson from the ticket but, more important, because of the strong likelihood that Johnson was going to be indicted for influence peddling and corruption, just like Paul Manafort.

In 1948, Johnson was running for U.S. Senate against Coke Stevenson, the governor of Texas, who was one of the most admired and respected governors in the history of the state. Johnson knew that he stood a good chance of losing the race. He instructed a powerful political crony in South Texas named George Parr, who ran his county like a personal fiefdom, to keep his ballot station open until all the others statewide had closed.

As detailed in a New York Times review of Robert Caro’s biography of Johnson, after all the other ballot stations had closed, Johnson had lost the election. His South Texas crony Parr proceeded to manufacture thousands of bogus votes, which put Johnson over the top by 87 votes statewide. When Stevenson sent the Texas Rangers to seize the voting signatures sheets, which were all in the same ink and same handwriting, the courthouse mysteriously burned down, along with all the fraudulent voting records.

Johnson also became a multimillionaire while in public office. How did he do that? By having his wife purchase a television station in Austin, which had a monopoly on broadcasting in that area because Johnson used political influence to ensure that television broadcasting licenses weren’t given to competitors. The resulting monopoly poured millions of dollars in advertising money into the pockets of Johnson and his wife Lady Bird. Caro stated, “It was a case study of political influence.”

At the time of the assassination of President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson was in grave danger of being removed from office and being sent to the penitentiary. It was only because of the assassination that he was spared such ignominy.

One scandal in which LBJ was embroiled involved a man named Billie Sol Estes, a fellow Texan who was ultimately sent to jail for agricultural fraud. When a federal agent went down to Texas to investigate Estes’s agriculture schemes, he was found dead on a Texas ranch, his body riddled with several bullets. The local authorities ruled it a suicide.

Another scandal involved Bobby Baker, who had been LBJ’s right-hand man when Johnson was Senate Majority Leader. Baker had been caught in an influence-peddling, corruption scheme involving vending machines on military bases. As the noose was being tightened around Baker’s neck, it was also indirectly being tightened around Johnson’s neck, owing to the strong suspicion that Baker would, under pressure, disclose Johnson’s role in the fraudulent scheme.

In fact, there was a congressional hearing on the Baker scandal that was very likely to implicate Johnson going on at the very moment of the JFK assassination. The assassination caused the hearing to be shut down immediately and, once Johnson became president, it was never resumed.

Moreover, Life magazine had planned a big expose of Johnson’s corruption for an issue in late November. It got replaced by coverage of the Kennedy assassination and was never published after Johnson became president.

As Caro details in his most recent volume on Johnson, there were two newspapers in Texas where investigative reporters were delving into Johnson’s role in these scandals. After he became president, Johnson telephoned the principals at both papers and threatened them with IRS or regulatory retaliation if they didn’t shut down their investigations into his corruption. Both papers shut down their investigations and never resumed them.

Paul Manafort’s mistake was obviously not being elected president. If he had been, he would be hailed as a giant hero, just as Lyndon Johnson is, rather than labeled as a run-of-the mill, corrupt white-collar criminal.

September 18, 2018 Posted by | Corruption | , | Leave a comment

The “Progessive” (aka, Liberal) Antiwar Movement: RIP?

By John V. Walsh | CounterPunch | June 16, 2014

Ralph Nader wrote a very perceptive essay in the wake of the edifying defeat of the despicable arch-imperialist, Israel Firster and reliable servant of Wall St. Banksters, Eric Cantor, at the capable hands of the libertarian leaning Professor David Brat. It was titled “Can Progressives Learn From Eric Cantor’s Defeat”? Can they? Yes. Will they? It is highly doubtful. It is difficult to learn anything if you think you have nothing more to learn.

But here we are interested only in the lessons of Cantor’s electoral humiliation at the hands of Brat for the progressive antiwar, anti-Empire movement.  (For the significance of the Brat victory beyond the matter of war, see this.) And by “progressive” we do not mean “Left.” “Progressive” for some is merely a brand change adopted by long ago to escape the abuse poured on “liberalism.”  One looks in vain for a self-described liberal these days only because they have donned a new costume which they have already badly soiled.

Here are two relevant quotes from Nader’s essay:

“(The Brat victory) has several takeaways for progressives besides envy and shame over why they do not directly take on the corporate Democrats.”

“Unfortunately the driving energy of progressives, including the dissipating Occupy Wall Street effort, is not showing up in the electoral arena. The political energy, the policy disputes and the competitive contests are among the Republicans, not the Democrats…”

In summary, why are the progressives not taking on the corporate (and hawkish) Democrats in the electoral arena? And what does that mean for the next presidential year, 2016?  Certainly it is desirable to have antiwar candidates in primaries of both major parties – and even better to have them win the nomination. Thus, there are two electoral tasks for the broad antiwar movement in the rapidly approaching election year of 2016:

1. On the Democratic Side. The progressives must field a candidate to take on the bloodthirsty Hillery to make good on Nader’s challenge. Otherwise, she could well be “the first woman” – to start a world war. So far there is no one – and the undependable Bernie Sanders is not that person, as even a cursory reading of the late Alexander Cockburn’s denunciations of Sanders over the years makes clear. Nor is that great American Indian, my Senator, Elizabeth Warren who ran for Senate as a hawk on Iran, a credible peace candidate.

2. On the Republican Side. Antiwarriors here must make sure that there is an antiwar Republican running in the primaries and hopefully winning the nomination.  That person is Rand Paul.  And Brat’s victory over the establishment’s candidate bodes well for Paul’s success.  So the forces of peace are making headway in the GOP even though they face an uphill battle.

That leaves the Democrats without any anti-Empire voice. Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) will not do the job of challenging Hillary. From Norman Solomon to Medea Benjamin they are notorious by now for putting Party over principle. Other progressives operating outside the Dem Party, and few in number, are well defended, claiming that elections are for naught. But history argues against this. Truman, the architect of the unpopular Korean War was defeated in the New Hampshire primary, paving the way for an Eisenhower victory due in part to a pledge to end the war, a pledge he kept promptly. Lyndon Baynes Johnson, the inheritor of a very unpopular war from JFK was also undone in New Hampshire, by the principled Eugene McCarthy, not the most “liberal” Democrat and a bit of a libertarian. From that point on despite the best efforts of both Humphrey and Nixon to prolong it, the Vietnam War was over. Primary challenges have an effect. Ron Paul built a very powerful movement, especially among the young, with his 2008 and 2012 runs.

Other progressives will tell you that street actions like Occupy are the way forward despite the inability of Occupy to so much as articulate a platform, program or strategy. And they are bereft of even a shadow of ideology and consistency having long ago abandoned the more traditional left precepts. Most notably the decade of wars went largely unmentioned in their gatherings, in great part because they are now Obama’s wars. Nader kindly describes Occupy as “dissipating.” Strangely, some of these Occupiers find refuge in the Green Party, which is dedicated to electoral action. The Green Party itself is a resounding failure. Its perennial presidential candidate is a very pleasant, organized and well meaning person but is entirely too solicitous of “progressive” Dems to make an impact. And she has not been able to win even a State House seat in very progressive Massachusetts, although she has tried.

Picasso said he became a Communist, because the Communists were for the peasants and he was for the peasants. Often it is as simple as that. What are people to do if they are for peace and the only viable force for peace is the libertarians, as was true in 2012? Then they will become libertarian Republicans. And we see that happening with many young people. If “progressives” cannot accomplish a challenge to Hillary, they will be finished for the foreseeable future, probably a generation at least. And that seems to be the way things are headed.

John V. Walsh can be reached at [email protected]

June 16, 2014 Posted by | Militarism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , | 1 Comment