Undue Influence, Deceptions, and the Neocon Energy Agenda’ – analyze Aaron Good (and my theory about ISIS) – The Duran

9:38

Things related to Rumsfeld and in general the US orientation toward Israel. At one point, he talks about speaking to a high-level official who shared a remarkable anecdote. He says the official lowered his voice to say that he wanted to share something with him, but that he would deny it if ever quoted by name. He alleged that Donald Rumsfeld was quoted by one of his close advisers as stating during a moment of frustration that he did not run the Pentagon, but AIPAC (the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee) did.

That’s a remarkable statement. Think about that comment: the Secretary of Defense himself was stating that a powerful foreign lobby was running the Pentagon. It’s also notable that as far back as when Jack and Robert Kennedy were around Congress, a young Congressman Donald Rumsfeld wrote a letter to Robert Kennedy, as I recall, inquiring about efforts to force the Zionist Organization of America to register as a foreign agent. This was something that the Israel lobby of the day very much resisted, and Rumsfeld was basically carrying water for them.

So, if he wants to complain about how Israel took over US foreign policy and made it hard for him to run the Pentagon when he was the Secretary of Defense, maybe Rumsfeld should reflect on his own role in that incremental corruption of the US government.

12:27

Recall, George H.W. Bush had greatly upset the Israel lobby by essentially forcing Israel to enter into negotiations for a Palestinian state by threatening to withhold loan guarantees if Israel did not do so. As I’ve argued before, George H.W. Bush — CIA man, establishment man, oil man — was a very spooky character and not someone I would hold up as a good moral statesman of any kind. He’s a deep statesman, a servant of the American oligarchy and the American empire. But he recognized, along with others like Brzezinski and so on, people on the more realist side of the U.S. imperial foreign policy establishment, that full-on support of Israel as the neocons wanted was going to be dangerous to U.S. interests. The neocons were obsessed with this idea of Greater Israel and basically crushing and balkanizing the rest of the Middle East.

People recognized that this could be dangerous for U.S. interests, that it could basically unite the region — maybe even the world — against the U.S., as it was part of a really unjust situation. But the pro-Israel forces, represented by the neocons, had enormous political power in the United States, and they were able to defeat Bush. He cites the Jewish vote, 27% of the Jewish voted for him while only 13% in 1992, but I don’t see that as especially decisive. The Jewish vote in the United States is not a huge portion of the electorate, and yet, as we find out time and again in the U.S., when AIPAC wants a congressman or a senator to lose an election or a primary, they can make that happen. They have enormous resources to rally on behalf of political outcomes they want. They seem to have enormous influence in the media. Civil society is afraid to criticize Israel because of donations and so-called philanthropy, the different funders and wealthy alumni at universities, and so on.

You see this happen again and again. Why did all these university professors crack down on these protests? It was because of the influence of pro-Israel donors. This is a difficult issue in American politics, and it’s difficult to speak about because the Israel lobby has so effectively created propaganda that states if you criticize the influence of the Israel lobby, you are somehow feeding into anti-Semitic tropes, and that it’s like a form of racism to question these things. They call it anti-Semitism, which really means anti-Judaism, but they always say anti-Semitism. It’s a strange thing, the more you think about it.

This is fascinating to me that he points this out because he’s not looking at it from the perspective I was. He was only saying what the common sense was around the time, and yes, I do believe that. The other aspect of this that’s important, which will come up later, is that his defeat in 1992 was often credited to the entry of Ross Perot into the race. But I find that to be a strange as well, and it has a funny connection to this story, which we’ll get into — something that’s not in the book but I found myself thinking about.

6:46

Later on in this discussion, before the Iranian Revolution, the pipeline was a joint Israeli-Iranian enterprise, similar to how the Nord Stream pipeline was half Russian and half German. This pipeline operated until the revolution. The pipeline, owned by Iran and Israel via the joint venture Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Company, was constructed in the late 1960s to transport Iranian oil to both Europe and Israel. It’s a comparatively large pipeline with a diameter of 42 inches, capable of transporting a million barrels a day. Israel took sole control of the pipeline company in 1979 after the Shah was overthrown. A Swiss court ruled in 2016 that Israel owed Iran $1.2 billion for its share of the pipeline, a sum that Israel refuses to pay.

This is a strange and very sensitive issue, apparently because, as I mentioned, a lot of people didn’t even know that this pipeline existed. In 2017, the Israeli legislature, the Knesset, passed a law criminalizing, with up to 15 years of penalty, the leaking of any information about the pipeline. This is also very interesting, given they did this in 2017. It seems to suggest they have some designs on this area, which makes you think about Gaza, the attacks on Yemen, and the Red Sea. All of these seem to point to some kind of geopolitical grand strategy on the part of the neocons that the “axis of resistance” seeks to thwart, with oil appearing to be a big part of it.

The next section in his book, part of a chapter, is how Marc Rich got rich and then became a fugitive. The Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline was the major source of Rich’s huge fortune, which he had from 1973 to 1994.

Here’s what Daniel Ammann had to say about Rich, in a passage from The King of Oil:

“Israel’s salvation came from none other than Marc Rich, a fact that has remained largely unknown to this day. Israel owes a great debt to Marc; he provided Israel with all its energy needs in its most difficult time,” Avner Ayal told me. Ayal, a former colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces and high-ranking Mossad agent with a solid network of political contacts, today directs Rich’s philanthropic foundation.

This is quite interesting. We understand here that Marc Rich was an enormously important figure for Israel’s energy security. Of course, he was later pardoned by Bill Clinton. In the mid-1990s, Israel needed this because the partnership had ended. Rich sold his company around the same time, which became Glencore.

Marc Rich & Co. experienced booming business during the 70s and 80s. The Swiss-registered company expanded into new countries and various commodities. Rich sought opportunities in countries sanctioned by the U.S. but not by Switzerland. Iran was not the only sanctioned country where Rich did business; others included Cuba, Angola, apartheid South Africa, and Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega.

Here we see Rich as a commodities trader connected to Mossad. Despite Iran becoming bitterly anti-American after the overthrow of the Shah—and thus also anti-Israel—this Mossad-connected oil merchant was still able to work with them. The sanctions made it even more lucrative, similar to how the drug trade works; by making it illegal, you increase profit margins. In this case, the Iranians were compelled to sell oil for less than market value due to sanctions. This is reminiscent of what later happens with Iraq during the Oil-for-Food Program.

These sanctions regimes are a form of warfare and often lead to predictable, perhaps intentional, criminal racketeering operations. We know those operations are intertwined with intelligence agencies, which are frequently working with various mobs.

“These sanctions regimes are a form of warfare and often lead to predictable, perhaps intentional, criminal racketeering operations.” Not only do sanctions lead to this outcome, but so does the destabilization of regions, such as the formation of ISIS. I have argued before that ISIS was not a mistake, nor was it created because our leaders didn’t know what they were doing; it was, in fact, the goal of the entire war. It was the only way to create criminal racketeering operations, which were essential for stealing oil from Iraq, much like sanctions do.

After winning a war and occupying a country, you can’t impose sanctions on it. The only way to steal resources, like oil, is to promote and allow illegal organizations to create occupied areas with oil reserves. You then assist them in extracting the oil and purchase it at a discounted price through illegal channels.

Here is a fragment from Oglesby, Carl. The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate and Beyond. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1976, describing how the CIA (then OSS) and the U.S. government began working with organized crime.

The Yankee and Cowboy War, part 3: The Round Table, the Kennedys and Meyer Lansky

by Carl Oglesby

Meyer Lansky, the chief architect of organized crime, was troubled by the reluctance of certain Mafia families to join the larger Syndicate he had been building since Prohibition, under the leadership of Lucky Luciano. Luciano had been jailed in 1937 by New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey, and since then, Lansky had acted as Luciano’s top man among the other capos. His primary challenge was persuading the Sicilian holdouts to accept the executive leadership of a Jew—Lansky himself.

Different scholars interpret Lansky’s role in organized crime in America in various ways. Alfred McCoy, in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972), considers Luciano, not Lansky, as the first fully modern executive of crime, crediting Luciano with the insights that led to the current federation of previously autonomous criminal groups. However, Hank Messick, in a series of books on organized crime, including Lansky (1971) and John Edgar Hoover (1972), argues that Luciano’s greatest genius was his recognition of Lansky’s superior strategic mind. According to Messick, Lansky was the main strategist in rationalizing big crime along the lines of corporate monopolies, akin to the Harvard Business School’s teachings.

McCoy acknowledges that Lansky ultimately became the top boss after Luciano’s sudden death from a heart attack at a Naples airport in 1962. I tend to follow Messick’s interpretation, as Lansky was Luciano’s front man during the nearly ten years Luciano was imprisoned, carrying out the concrete tasks that brought the new supercorporate organization, “the Syndicate,” into existence.

However, this debate matters little for the current point. Whether the transformation of organized crime was Lansky’s or Luciano’s doing, or the result of broader social forces pushing towards corporate centralization in every sphere of exchange—whether in business, politics, or crime—the expansion and integration of criminal enterprises is the key fact. This movement is best associated with the long period of Lansky’s preeminence.

At the time, Roosevelt’s problem was ensuring the security of the docks against Fascist sabotage, while Lansky’s concern was completing the organization of the Syndicate. The convergence of these two problems led to a common solution.

The precise origins of “Operation: Underworld” remain unclear, though both McCoy and Messick trace its roots to a Brooklyn shipyard office of U.S. Naval Intelligence. The initiative might not have been federal or naval in origin but could have been suggested by an intermediary. In any case, it involved a straightforward proposition: Lansky approached the reluctant Mafia capos, asking, “What if I can free your leader, Luciano?” Then, he turned to Roosevelt, offering, “What if I can secure your docks against sabotage?”

Lansky’s offer to Roosevelt was to intervene in the Luciano matter. However, given the prosperity organized crime enjoyed during World War II, it is possible the deal extended further, perhaps even involving federal protection for certain Syndicate wartime activities, such as smuggling.

Luciano was swiftly transferred from the remote Dannemora Prison to the more comfortable Great Meadow Prison near Albany, improving his circumstances significantly. He spent the war years in style, befitting a prisoner who was also a benefactor of his jailers. Shortly after V-E Day, Luciano’s lawyer filed for his release, resulting in his deportation to Sicily. Luciano would soon return to his role in the exile capital Lansky had been preparing in Havana. In delivering Luciano, Lansky secured federal protection, and the Syndicate was fully formed.

This collaboration between the Syndicate and the U.S. war effort did not end there. For example, the Sicilian Mafia had been nearly wiped out by Mussolini during his rise to power, as the Mafia was seen as a rival. However, when General George Patton landed in Sicily with the Seventh Army’s Third Division in 1943, he was instructed to fly Luciano’s black-and-yellow scarf alongside the Stars and Stripes and to seek out local Mafiosi for tactical support. While the military value of this support is debated, the Kefauver Committee later suggested it was too slight to justify Luciano’s release on patriotic grounds. Nonetheless, Patton’s arrival marked the Mafia’s restoration to power in Sicily.

“Whether the transformation of organized crime was Lansky’s or Luciano’s doing, or the result of broader social forces pushing towards corporate centralization in every sphere of exchange—whether in business, politics, or crime—the expansion and integration of criminal enterprises is the key fact.”

We live in a capitalist society where profit is paramount, regardless of whether that profit is legal or illegal. Since illegal markets—or rackets—are often more profitable than legal ones, they become highly desirable. This profit-driven mentality extends so far that it leads to the creation of entities like ISIS and the collapse of Libya into a failed state with active slave markets. (I am convinced that the CIA profits from those slave markets as they are simply another form of racket.)