Skip to content

Crossing the Rubicon

Metadata

Highlights

George Orwell once said that omission is the greatest form of lie. That’s the best description I know of corporate media today. — location: 246 ^ref-14976

From the Manhattan Project to the Stealth fighter, the US government has successfully kept secrets involving thousands of people. — location: 410 ^ref-10239

The success of the US in maintaining the secrecy around the atom bomb and the Stealth fighter, or in any classified operation, lies in compartmentalization. — location: 412 ^ref-12506

Bill Casey and the CIA’s general counsel Stanley Sporkin put extreme pressure on both the network and anchor Peter Jennings to stop their coverage. During the semi-public battle, ABC’s stock dropped from $67 to $59 a share, and by December, the firm Capital Cities was trying to buy the network. Capital Cities successfully completed the buyout of ABC in March of 1985, after which the CIA conveniently dropped a suit against the network.7 Bill Casey had helped to found Capital Cities and had served both as its lawyer and as a member of its board of directors in the years between his service as SEC chairman for Nixon and as director of Central Intelligence for Reagan. ABC became known thereafter as “the CIA network.” — location: 1517 ^ref-35472

In 1997 the United Nations estimated that, as of 1996, the drug trade represented 8 percent of all world trading activity as measured in dollars. — location: 1611 ^ref-56174

(An excellent discussion of how illegal money moves according to a separate set of laws — having nothing to do with what we tend to think of as the law — is contained in Hot Money by R.T. Naylor — location: 1627 ^ref-30011

The Taliban banned opium production in the late summer of 2000 and destroyed almost all the opium that still remained planted; this was completed and confirmed in January of 2001. — location: 1645 ^ref-22655

You might do it by selling your products “off the books” and accepting cash for them. Then you would just inflate your net profits without any increased costs. — location: 1666 ^ref-40043

When Enron went bankrupt, the US government allowed Enron to sell Enron Online to the Union Bank of Switzerland.36 That meant that all of the evidence of money laundering by Enron is now owned by a Swiss bank and out of reach for federal prosecutors. — location: 1681 ^ref-6332

The competitive edge provided by handling drug money is an instrumental factor in who can compete in a globalized, new-world, corporate order. — location: 1702 ^ref-32931

The use of the drug trade to secure economic advantage for an imperialist nation is at least as old as the British East India Company’s first smuggling of opium from India into China in the late 1600s (the defense of that British practice, Scott points out, was John Stuart Mill’s motivation for writing the tract “On Liberty”). They did that for 300 years. When something works that well, the ruling elites rarely let go of it. — location: 1804 ^ref-20152

One of the other great contributors to America’s economic growth has been its willingness to profit from the destruction of the life, health, safety, and happiness of its population. — location: 1989 ^ref-20056

a brilliant two-part series by Le Monde Diplomatique in the spring of 2000. — location: 2013 ^ref-19906

in 1975 none of the heroin entering the US came from Pakistan. By 1980 some 40 percent of the heroin in the US came from Pakistan, which had virtually become a CIA protectorate by that time. — location: 2136 ^ref-36798

the CIA created powerful local warlords who were very well armed and who effectively prevented any national government from restoring stability. In both cases, the warlords derived their power from their direct involvement in the drug trade. — location: 2138 ^ref-15248

agitation believed to be backed by the regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran soon led to an uprising that prompted the first official request for limited Soviet military assistance to — location: 2143 ^ref-57455

maintain control of key facilities in Herat. — location: 2144 ^ref-5494

five months before the Russian invasion, President Carter, at the urging of Brzezinski, signed a secret directive for clandestine assistance to enemies of the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan (i.e., agents of our allegedly sworn enemy in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini). — location: 2145 ^ref-37553

What in the world could the Russians possibly want with Afghanistan? There were very few good answers. Afghanistan wasn’t producing much opium in those days. — location: 2150 ^ref-27010

“What is more important to the history of the world ... the Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central — location: 2154 ^ref-49030

In 2002, the US has started making less violent versions of the same books, which Bush touts will have ‘respect for human dignity, instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry.’ Bush fails to mention who created those earlier books. — location: 2202 ^ref-26950

A task force headed by Vice President Al Gore, Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot19 and involving exclusive US Treasury contracts with Goldman Sachs, the Harvard Institute for International Development, the IMF, and the World Bank worked in partnership with the government of Boris Yeltsin to remake the Russian economy. What happened was that Russia, in the words of Yeltsin himself, became a “mafiocracy” and was looted of more than $500 billion in assets; its economy was ruined, its currency destroyed, its population rendered desperate, and its ability to support a world-class military establishment smashed. — location: 2228 ^ref-14655

The Empire loved the oligarchs because they were simple and could be easily controlled with money. — location: 2249 ^ref-37517

Millions of senior citizens, whose meager pension income had been suspended for months, were cut off completely. When the dust finally settled in March 1999, the ruble — and — location: 2315 ^ref-59000

with it, every Russian’s life savings — had lost fully 75 percent of its value. — location: 2316 ^ref-52923

The devastation of Russia’s economy was worse than what America experienced in the Great Depression. By 1932, the US gross national product had been cut by almost one-third. But within just six months of the 1998 crash, Russia’s economy, measured in dollars, had fallen by more than two-thirds. — location: 2317 ^ref-9690

“The Soviet Union was economically self-sufficient except for bananas, coffee, and coconuts.”34 By the dawning of the new century, except for small parts of Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and other cities where the oligarchs spent their money, it was as badly ruined as it had been at the worst part of World War II. — location: 2340 ^ref-13974

Indeed, in Russia in 2001, the year of the World Trade Center attacks, if you were an American with hundred-dollar bills, you were God. And that is just the way the Empire wanted it. — location: 2359 ^ref-32355

by verbal agreement each new head of the ISI had to receive the personal blessing of the director of Central Intelligence in Langley, Virginia. — location: 2581 ^ref-41075

India, Russia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan had been part of the preparations for what was reportedly joint US-Russian military action against Afghanistan scheduled for October 2001. — location: 2637 ^ref-9303

If you hear somebody say, and I have, the CIA abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviets left and that we never paid any attention to that place until September 11th, I would implore you to ask those people how we were able to accomplish all we did since the Soviets departed. How we knew who [sic] to approach on the ground, which operations, which warlord to support, what information to collect. Quite simply, we were there well before the 11th of September — location: 2662 ^ref-56386

Al Qaeda is infiltrated by the CIA. In other words, there were no “intelligence failures”! In the nature of a well-led intelligence operation, the “intelligence asset” operates (wittingly or unwittingly) with some degree of autonomy, in relation to its US government sponsors, but ultimately it acts consistently, in the interests of Uncle Sam. — location: 2855 ^ref-47375

al Qaeda is supported by Pakistan’s military intelligence, the Inter-services Intelligence (ISI). Amply documented, the ISI owes its existence to the CIA: “With CIA backing and the funnelling of massive amounts of US military aid, the ISI developed [since the early 1980s] into a parallel structure wielding enormous power over all aspects of government .… The ISI had a staff composed of military and intelligence officers, bureaucrats, undercover agents, and informers estimated at 150,000.” — location: 2871 ^ref-2491

With so much damning evidence stacking up to suggest that the CIA had actually helped to finance the 9/11 attacks, there was nothing left for the mainstream press to do but engage in a game of confusion. — location: 2971 ^ref-45637

“Oh, there’s no doubt about it. It was common knowledge on the streets. Pearl was investigating the ISI.” — location: 2988 ^ref-49736

Antisemitismus was — location: 5723 ^ref-47985

invented as part of an effort by German racist authors to replace the religion-based Jew-hatred (Judenhass) of the past with a more modern, ethnicity-driven contempt. — location: 5723 ^ref-59683

Those who believed the rumor think they needn’t look further, and those who rejected it think the same, for opposite reasons. — location: 5775 ^ref-21219

The same cold, administrative approach to life that built the vast economies of the modern world is also preparing a terrible solution to the collapse of those economies. In the Empire’s vision, love and art and religion and community are invisible; they count for nothing. It is as if the human race existed only in a statistical dimension; a calculus equation in need of a solution. — location: 12838 ^ref-59611

“Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the ClintonAdministration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise and Failed the Russian People.” — location: 13249 ^ref-64704