“I had a lot of my American identity beaten out of me”: Tom Hayden on Chicago 7 Trial (2008)

Apr 18 2022

Thomas Emmet Hayden (December 11, 1939 – October 23, 2016) was an American social and political activist, author, and politician. Hayden was best known for his role as an anti-war, civil rights, and intellectual activist in the 1960s, authoring the Port Huron Statement and standing trial in the Chicago Seven case.

In later years, he ran for political office numerous times, winning seats in both the California Assembly and California Senate. At the end of his life he was the director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Los Angeles County. He was married to Jane Fonda for 17 years, and is the father of actor Troy Garity.

In 1965, while still committed in Newark, Hayden, along with Communist Party USA member Herbert Aptheker and Quaker peace activist Staughton Lynd, undertook a controversial visit to North Vietnam. The three toured villages and factories and met with an American POW[who?] whose plane had been shot down. The result of this tour of North Vietnam, at a high point in the war, was a book titled The Other Side.[18][19] Staughton Lynd later wrote that the New Left disavowed “the Anti-Communism of the previous generation”, and that Lynd and Hayden had written, in Studies on the Left: “We refuse to be anti-Communist. We insist the term has lost all the specific content it once had.”[20]

In 1968, Hayden joined the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (“the Mobe”), and played a major role in the protests outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. The demonstrations were broken up by what the U.S. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence later described as a police riot.[21] Six months after the convention, he and seven other protesters including Rennie Davis, Dave Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin were indicted on federal charges of conspiracy and incitement to riot as part of the “Chicago Eight”, a.k.a. the “Chicago Seven” after Bobby Seale’s case was separated from the others. Hayden and four others were convicted of crossing state lines to incite a riot, but the charges were later reversed and remanded on appeal. The government did not re-try the case, and thereafter elected to dismiss the substantive charges.[22]

Hayden made several subsequent well-publicized visits to North Vietnam as well as Cambodia during America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, which had expanded under President Richard M. Nixon to include the adjoining nations of Laos and Cambodia, although he did not accompany his future wife, actress Jane Fonda, on her especially controversial trip to Hanoi in the spring of 1972.[23] The next year he married Fonda and they had one child, Troy Garity, born on July 7, 1973. In 1974, he appeared in a brief scene as an ER doctor in the film Death Wish. In the same year, while the Vietnam War was still ongoing, the documentary film Introduction to the Enemy, a collaboration by Fonda, Hayden, Haskell Wexler and others, was released. It depicts their travels through North and South Vietnam in spring 1974.[24]

Hayden also founded the Indochina Peace Campaign (IPC), which operated from 1972 to 1975. The IPC, operating in Boston, New York, Detroit and Santa Clara, mobilized dissent against the Vietnam War and demanded unconditional amnesty for U.S. draft evaders, among other aims. Jane Fonda, a supporter of the IPC, later turned this moniker into a name for her film production firm, IPC Films, which produced in whole or in part, movies and documentaries such as F.T.A. (1972), Introduction to the Enemy (1974), The China Syndrome (1979), Nine to Five (1980) and On Golden Pond (1981).[25][26] Hayden and Fonda divorced in 1990.

Writing about Hayden’s role in the 1960s New Left, Nicholas Lemann, national correspondent for The Atlantic, said that “Tom Hayden changed America”, calling him “father to the largest mass protests in American history”, and Richard N. Goodwin, who was a speechwriter for presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy, said that Hayden, “without even knowing it, inspired the Great Society.”[27] Staughton Lynd, though, was critical of the Port Huron and New Left concept of “participatory democracy”, stating: “We must recognize that when an organization grows to a certain size, consensus decision-making is no longer possible, and some form of representative government becomes necessary.”[28]

Brian Benben portrayed Hayden in the 1987 film Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8. Troy Garity, Hayden’s son, portrayed his father in the 2000 film Steal This Movie!. Hayden was voiced by Reg Rogers in the 2007 animated documentary Chicago 10. David Julian Hirsh played Hayden in the 2010 film The Chicago 8. Hayden was portrayed by Eddie Redmayne in the 2020 drama film The Trial of the Chicago 7.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hayden

Image: William S. Murphy, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons

The Head of CIA Counterintelligence Was “Certifiably Insane”: Covert Operations (1991)

Apr 18 2022

David MacMichael is a former contract employee of the CIA who served two years as an analyst. A ten-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, he was a counter-insurgency expert in South-East Asia for four years. He also served as an analyst for the National Intelligence Council from 1981-1983. MacMichael graduated with an MA and Ph.D. in History from the University of Oregon.

MacMichael reportedly resigned from the CIA in July 1983 because he felt the Agency was misrepresenting intelligence for political reasons. His public resignation from the Agency gave credence and notability to his vocal indictment of the Reagan Administration’s policy toward Central America. He was considered the “key witness” in Nicaragua v. United States. The case was heard in 1986 before the International Court of Justice, which ruled that the United States had violated international law by supporting the Contras in their war against the Nicaraguan government and by mining Nicaragua’s harbors. MacMichael also testified in front of Congress on this matter.

A former investigator for the Christic Institute, he was an outspoken critic of the Institute’s reliance on conspiracy theory, arguing that the Institute “was eager, perhaps overeager, to demonstrate that this enterprise was responsible for everything since Cain slaying Abel.” In July 2005, he testified at a special joint hearing of Congressional and Senate Democrats about the consequences of the Plame affair.

MacMichael is a founding member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), as well as its predecessor Association of National Security Alumni and the Association for Responsible Dissent, and an outspoken critic of the Iraq War and the Bush Administration. He has participated in six documentary films from 1988-2003. Journalist John Pilger has described him as a “CIA renegade.”

In August 2014 he was among the signatories of an open letter by the group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity to German chancellor Angela Merkel in which they urged the Chancellor to be suspicious of U.S. intelligence regarding the alleged invasion of Russia in Eastern Ukraine.

In September 2015 MacMichael and 27 other members of VIPS steering group wrote a letter to the President challenging a recently published book, that claimed to rebut the report of the United States Senate Intelligence Committee on the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of torture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M…

In 1954 Allen Dulles, who had recently become Director of Central Intelligence, named Angleton chief of the Counterintelligence Staff, a position that Angleton retained for the rest of his CIA career.

Under the heading of foreign intelligence, there was the Israeli desk, the “Lovestone Empire” and a variety of smaller operations. The Israeli connection was at first of interest to Angleton, for the information that could be obtained about the Soviet Union and aligned countries, from émigrés to Israel from those countries and for the utility of the Israeli foreign intelligence units, for proxy operations in third countries. Angleton’s connections with the Israeli secret intelligence services were useful, for example, in obtaining from the Israeli Shin Bet a transcript of Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Congress denouncing Joseph Stalin. The Lovestone Empire is a term for the network run for the CIA by Jay Lovestone, once head of the Communist Party of the United States, later a trade union leader, who worked with foreign unions, using covert funds to construct a worldwide system of anti-communist unions. Finally, there were individual agents, especially in Italy, who reported to Angleton. It is quite possible that there were other foreign intelligence activities for which Angleton was responsible, for example, in Southeast Asia and in the Caribbean.

Angleton’s primary responsibilities as chief of the counterintelligence staff of the CIA have given rise to a considerable literature focused on his efforts to identify any Soviet or Eastern Bloc agents, working in American secret intelligence agencies. As such agents have come to be called “moles”, operations intended to find them have come to be called “Molehunts”.

Three books dealing with Angleton take these matters as their central theme: Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter, David C. Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War’s Most Important Agents and David Wise’s Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA. Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA paints Angleton as an incompetent alcoholic. These views have been challenged by Mark Riebling in Wedge: The Secret War between the FBI and CIA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J…

Image: Matankic, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons

How the Media Manufactures Consent: U.S. Population as Enemy Territory – Propaganda Model (1988)

Apr 18 2022

Read the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=U…

The propaganda model is a conceptual model in political economy advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky to explain how propaganda and systemic biases function in corporate mass media. The model seeks to explain how populations are manipulated and how consent for economic, social, and political policies, both foreign and domestic, is “manufactured” in the public mind due to this propaganda. The theory posits that the way in which corporate media is structured (e.g. through advertising, concentration of media ownership or government sourcing) creates an inherent conflict of interest and therefore acts as propaganda for anti-democratic elements.

First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the propaganda model views corporate media as businesses interested in the sale of a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers) rather than the pursuit of quality journalism in service of the public. Describing the media’s “societal purpose”, Chomsky writes, “… the study of institutions and how they function must be scrupulously ignored, apart from fringe elements or a relatively obscure scholarly literature”. The theory postulates five general classes of “filters” that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five classes are: ownership of the medium, the medium’s funding sources, sourcing, flak, and anti-communism or “fear ideology”.

The first three are generally regarded by the authors as being the most important. In versions published after the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001, Chomsky and Herman updated the fifth prong to instead refer to the “War on Terror” and “counter-terrorism”, which they state operates in much the same manner.

Although the model was based mainly on the media of the United States, Chomsky and Herman believe the theory is equally applicable to any country that shares the basic economic structure and organizing principles that the model postulates as the cause of media biases. Their assessment has been confirmed by a number of scholars and the propaganda role of the media has since been empirically assessed in Western Europe and Latin America.

The fifth and final news filter that Herman and Chomsky identified was ‘anti-communism’. Manufacturing Consent was written during the Cold War. Chomsky updated the model as “fear”, often as ‘the enemy’ or an ‘evil dictator’ such as Colonel Gaddafi, Paul Biya, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, or Vladimir Putin. This is exemplified in British tabloid headlines of ‘Smash Saddam!’ and ‘Clobba Slobba!’. The same is said to extend to mainstream reporting of environmentalists as ‘eco-terrorists’. The Sunday Times ran a series of articles in 1999 accusing activists from the non-violent direct action group Reclaim The Streets of stocking up on CS gas and stun guns.

Anti-ideologies exploit public fear and hatred of groups that pose a potential threat, either real, exaggerated or imagined. Communism once posed the primary threat according to the model. Communism and socialism were portrayed by their detractors as endangering freedoms of speech, movement, the press and so forth. They argue that such a portrayal was often used as a means to silence voices critical of elite interests. Chomsky argues that since the end of the Cold War (1991), anticommunism was replaced by the “War on Terror”, as the major social control mechanism: “Anti-communism has receded as an ideological factor in the Western media, but it is not dead… The ‘war on terror’ has provided a useful substitute for the Soviet Menace.” Following the events of September 11, 2001, some scholars agree that Islamophobia is replacing anti-communism as a new source of public fear. Herman and Chomsky themselves conceded, in an interview given in 2009, that the popularity of ‘anti-communism’ as a news filter is slowly decreasing in favor of other more contemporary ideologies such as ‘anti-terrorism’.

The authors point to biases that are based on only reporting scandals which benefit a section of power, while ignoring scandals that hurt the powerless. The biggest example of this was how the US media greatly covered the Watergate Scandal but ignored the COINTELPRO exposures. While the Watergate break-in was a political threat to powerful people (Democrats), COINTELPRO harmed average citizens and went as far as political assassination. Other examples include coverage of the Iran–Contra affair by only focusing on people in power such as Oliver North but omitting coverage of the civilians killed in Nicaragua as the result of aid to the contras.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaga…

“Colonial Violence Is the Norm”: Israel Raids Al-Aqsa Mosque, Injuring 160+, Arresting Hundr eds

Apr 18 2022

At least 19 were injured around occupied Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque on Sunday after a violent crackdown by Israeli police cleared out worshipers from the compound. It was the second raid since Friday, when Israeli police used rubber bullets, stun grenades and tear gas on unarmed Palestinians, resulting in the arrest of more than 300 and at least 158 injuries. This latest violence in Jerusalem comes as the holy days of Ramadan and Passover overlap. Meanwhile, Western media has been describing the attacks as “clashes” and using other obfuscatory language “as if there is no imbalance of power here, as if there is no nuclear state using its rubber-coated bullets and tear gas against worshipers at a mosque,” says Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd.

Biden administration restarts oil, gas leases on federal lands – Marketplace

In the latest attempt to get a hold on rising oil and natural gas prices, the Biden administration announced over the weekend it would open up some federal land for drilling leases.

Symbolically, this move is polarizing. On one hand, it’s the administration showing voters that it’s willing to do something to help bring down prices. On the other, environmentalists are upset that the president is apparently going back on his word to try to curb oil and gas production in the United States.

Clark Williams-Derry, an energy analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said he gets why the administration made this move.

“There’s probably a real political need to be seen as doing something about high oil prices, high gasoline prices. But this is not going to have much of an effect,” Williams-Derry said.

That’s because it would take six months to a year before any oil could be produced there, he said. Plus, less than 10% of all of the oil and gas that’s being produced in the U.S. comes from federal land. Not only that, but energy companies aren’t even drilling on the federal land they’ve already got access to.

…(read more).

Treason by the Book: A Fascinating Study of the Intrigues & Politics in 18th-Century China (2001)

Apr 18
2022

Read the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=U…

Treason by the Book, by Jonathan Spence, is a historical account of the Zeng Jing (曾靜) case which took place during the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor of Qing China around 1730. Zeng Jing, a failed degree candidate heavily influenced by the seventeenth-century scholar Lü Liuliang, in October 1728 attempted to incite the descendant of Yue Fei, Yue Zhongqi (岳仲琪), Governor-general of Shaanxi-Sichuan, to rebellion. He gave a long list of accusations against Yongzheng, including the murder of the Kangxi Emperor and the killing of his brothers. This triggered a series of investigations which captured the attention of Yongzheng, who was eager to make his ascent to the throne seem legitimate. Highly concerned with the implications of the case, Yongzheng had Zeng Jing brought to Beijing for trial. But instead of imposing an immediate death sentence, the emperor began an intensive, written conversation with Zeng Jing. Zeng Jing eventually wrote a confession of error and received pardon for his crimes. The emperor then decided to circulate the relevant documents, including the original note, nationwide as a civics lesson for his subjects.

However, Yongzheng’s sudden death in 1735 caused a turn of events as the Qianlong Emperor, Yongzheng’s successor, sensitive to the potentially defamatory material that was making its rounds across the country, went against his father’s wishes in recalling and destroying his father’s response, the Dayi Juemi Lu (大義覺迷錄; literally: “Records of great righteousness resolving confusion”), as well as executing Zeng. Lü Liuliang’s coffin was ordered to be opened, and his corpse was mutilated in public.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason…

Zeng Jing (Chinese: 曾靜, 1679 – 1735) was a minor Chinese official in Hunan who attempted to instigate a rebellion against the Qing government in the 18th century. Inspired by the poet and influential Confucian scholar Lü Liuliang’s anti-Manchu writings, Zeng conspired to overthrow the Yongzheng Emperor. However, Yue Zhongqi, governor-general of Sichuan and Shaanxi, uncovered Zeng’s plans. Imprisoned in Beijing, Zeng eventually recanted his views and received the Yongzheng emperor’s pardon. However, the Qianlong Emperor, immediately upon his succession, arrested and executed Zeng Jing.

Interpreting floods as signs of dynastic mismanagement of the land, Zeng Jing attempted to organize a plot to overthrow the Manchu-led Qing dynasty in 1728.[1] He approached Yue Zhongqi for aid, but Yue, already under suspicion by the Qing, exposed Zeng Jing’s plot. Zeng Jing and his few conspirators were easily caught and transported to Beijing. Zeng also published a tract attacking the Yongzheng Emperor, accusing him of disrespecting his father the Kangxi Emperor and of licentiousness.[2]

On learning of Zeng Jing’s treasonous texts, the Yongzheng Emperor did not immediately execute Zeng Jing. In fact, Yongzheng was grateful for Zeng’s tract because it provided Yongzheng an opportunity to clarify some of his own positions.[3] Instead of punishment, Yongzheng carried out a correspondence with Zeng Jing while the latter was imprisoned.[4] Yongzheng eventually convinced Zeng Jing to renounce his anti-Manchu views and pardoned Zeng. It had been the case that Lü Liuliang (1629-1683) had deeply influenced Zeng Jing’s thought. Closer examination of Lü’s texts revealed that Lü harbored deeply anti-Manchu beliefs and that he considered the Manchus barbarians. Yongzheng exhumed Lü’s remains and pulverized them. Yongzheng also issued and distributed a response throughout the empire, the Dayi Juemi Lu (大義覺迷錄: “A Record of Righteous Principles to Awaken the Deluded”) in which he argued against the principles that gave rise to Zeng Jing’s plot in the first place and stated that there are really no differences between the ethnicities.[1] Yongzheng later allowed Zeng Jing to return to Henan and even gave him some gifts on his departure from Beijing.[5]

The Qianlong Emperor, immediately upon his succession to the throne, arrested and executed Zeng Jing in 1736 in direct opposition to Yongzheng’s directive that none of his descendants reopen the case.[6] Qianlong explained that Yongzheng had punished Lü Liuliang because Lü had offended Yongzheng’s imperial ancestors, but had treated Zeng Jing with clemency because Zeng attacked only Yongzheng. Now that Yongzheng had passed, Qianlong desired to punish Zeng Jing for offending his imperial ancestor.[7] He also recalled all copies of the Dayi Juemi Lu and destroyed them.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeng_Ji…)

Africans Say No to US Neo-Colonial Laws, Nigeria Train Attack, Zimbabwean City to be Named Kenyatta

2nacheki– Apr 12, 2022

Here is your latest #AfricanNews:
African Diaspora Join #BreakTheSilence Rally to Protest US Neo-Colonialism in Africa
President Ramphosa Says current Anti-foreigner acts echo apartheid past.
Nigeria train attack: Kidnappers release new video of more hostages
Migration Museum dedicated to migrant entrepreneurs opens in London.
Mnangagwa orders a Zimbabwean city to name a street after Kenyan President.

Ghana President Reveal Gaddafi was Assassinated Because of Challenging NATO

2nacheki – Apr 17, 2022
Ghana’s late President Jerry Rawling Reveal #Gaddafi was Assassinated Because of Challenging #NATO https://youtu.be/wIpnejIwe9M #Africaspeech

994K subscribers

Ghana’s late President Jerry Rawling Reveal #Gaddafi was Assassinated Because of Challenging #NATO https://youtu.be/wIpnejIwe9M #Africaspeech