Gates to Obama?

[justdrew]

this visit?

Putin awards George Bush Sr. WWII victory medal
www.chinaview.cn 2005-05-24 03:23:06

MOSCOW, May 23 (Xinhuanet) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded the 60th anniversary of Victory in World War II Medal to former US President George Bush senior in the Kremlin on Monday, according to the Itar-Tass news agency.

"Before we begin our conversation I would like to award a commemorative medal to you as a veteran of World War II," Putin told visiting George Bush senior.

"I know that you took part in the war and know the tragic incident linked with your participation when your plane was shot down," Putin said.

Putin meanwhile recalled the previous meeting with George Bush Senior in Sochi, where the former US president put his signature under the Charter on Friendship and Cooperation with Russia in theearly 1990s, the report said.

George Bush Senior, for his part, thanked the Russian presidentfor the medal and Putin personally who met the US ex-president despite a tough work schedule.

The former US president meanwhile denied that some cooling off was noticeable between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin during their recent meeting in Moscow. He believes the Russian and US leaders have good relations and understand each other, the Interfax said.

Speaking at a meeting with students and faculty of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Bush Sr. approved of his son visiting Moscow on May 9 and taking part in the WWII victory commemoration ceremonies.

Talking about the war against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraqlaunched under the decision of George W. Bush, the former US president noted that when the incumbent president says something, he means it, and he is not the kind of person who waits to see which way the wind blows.

Asked to comment on the US president visiting Latvia before coming to Moscow, Bush Sr. denied this was done to offend President Putin, said the Interfax.

[Hammer of Los]

“The meeting was a courtesy call between the presidents,” said Jim Appleby, a spokesman for Mr. Bush. “President Bush is in town on personal business. There was no agenda for the visit this morning.”

No agenda at all see.

Oh to have been a fly on the wall...

You know what? The BBC told me last week or so that Obama had announced his plans to tax and otherwise recover from the banking sector all the public funds that had been used on the bailouts(s). I almost fell off my metaphorical chair. Here in Albion we hear constantly how taxes will have to be raised and essential services cut to bone (but not security and defense spending, oh no, thats ringfenced) in order to balance the books after they bankrupted Britain to save us all from economic apocalypse when banks too big to be allowed to fail, failed.

And they had Nigel Lawson on R4 tonight talking about glass steagal.. and how he couldnt have foreseen the consequences of our own financial sector deregulation, and how perhaps in retrospect it hadnt been wise.. and so on. Nigel Lawson is well connected. They insult my intelligence by expecting me to believe this rubbish.

Anyway.. I thought nice one Obama, I wasn't expecting something like that. But I hope he hasn't put his head in a noose there. Even Gordon Brown doesn't dare utter talk like that. He doesnt seem too keen on new regulation either.. unless its global of course.

[MinM]

From another site:

According to today’s New York Times, flying home on his way back from Pakistan, Secretary of “Defense” Gates “relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching Seven Days in May the cold warrior film about an attempted military coup in the United States.” Gosh, that's really relaxing! All of a sudden out of nowhere Gates resurrects this ancient film and ostentatiously lets the New York Times and the other media know that he is watching it on his Pentagon plane home.

Obviously, Gates is sending a threat to Obama and the civilian “leadership” in America: You risk a military coup if you do not do exactly what those in the Pentagon tell you to do...

His final message delivered, he relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching "Seven Days in May," the cold war-era film about an attempted military coup in the United States.

Wikipedia - The plot centers on the fictitious U.S. President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March). As the story begins, Lyman faces a wave of public dissatisfaction with his decision to sign a treaty with the Soviet Union, an agreement that will supposedly result in both nations simultaneously destroying their nuclear weapons under mutual international inspection. This is extremely unpopular with both the President's opposition and the military, who believe the Soviets cannot be trusted.

As the debate over the treaty rages on, an alert and well-positioned Pentagon insider, United States Marine Corps Colonel Martin "Jiggs" Casey (Kirk Douglas) becomes aware of a conspiracy among the Joint Chiefs of Staff led by his own superior officer, the charismatic head of the JCS, Air Force General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster). As he digs deeper, he uncovers the conspiracy's shocking goal: Scott and his cohorts, Colonel Broderick (John Larkin), Colonel Murdock (Richard Anderson), Gen. Hardesty (Tyler McVey), along with allies in the United States Congress led by Sen. Frederick Prentice (Whit Bissell) and influential members of the news media led by Harold McPherson (Hugh Marlowe), are plotting to stage a coup d'etat to remove President Lyman and his cabinet seven days hence.

The plot itself, called ECOMCON (for "Emergency Communications Control"), entails the seizure of the nation's telephone, radio and television network infrastructure by a secret United States Army combat unit created and controlled by Scott's conspiracy and based in Texas near Fort Bliss. Once this is done, General Scott and his conspirators will control the nation's communications assets; then, from their headquarters within a vast underground nuclear shelter called "Mount Thunder" (based on the actual continuity of government facility maintained by the U.S. at Mount Weather in Berryville, Virginia), they will use the power of the media and the military to prevent the implementation of the treaty. . .
1/24/2010"

Eric Massa Esquire Story - Inside Congressman Eric Massa's Esquire Interview - Esquire

• On Friday, March 5, 2010, Congressman Eric Massa, whom I had known professionally for a few years, called me and said that he was preparing to announce his resignation from the U.S. House of Representatives. He had previously announced his intention not to seek reelection this fall, citing a possible recurrence of cancer. But there were also allegations that he had sexually harassed young male staff members, at least one of whom was gay. On this same phone call, he said that he had attempted suicide two nights earlier.

• The following Tuesday, Massa traveled from his home in Corning, New York, to Manhattan, for appearances on two talk shows: Glenn Beck's, for an interview that became infamous; and Larry King's, on which he appeared via satellite. I was present in the studio during both. That night, I asked if I could join the Massas at their home in Corning to interview Eric about his ordeal. He agreed without hesitation.

• Earlier in the year, long before the allegations had been made public, Massa had called me with a potentially huge story: Four retired generals — three four-stars and one three-star — had informed him, he said, that General David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, had met twice in secret with former vice president Dick Cheney. In those meetings, the generals said, Cheney had attempted to recruit Petraeus to run for president as a Republican in 2012.

• The generals had told him, and Massa had agreed, that if someone didn't act immediately to reveal this plot, American constitutional democracy itself was at risk. Massa and I had had several conversation on the topic, each more urgent than the last. He had gone to the Pentagon, he told me, demanding answers. He knew the powerful forces that he was dealing with, he told me. They'd stop at nothing to prevent the truth from coming out, he said, including destroying him. "I told the official, 'If I have to get up at a committee hearing and go public with this, it will cause the mother of all shitstorms and your life will be hell. So I need a meeting. Now.'"

• Massa eventually came to the Esquire offices in New York to tell us the Petraeus story. He spoke with the bluster and hyperbole I had seen in him at stump speeches, but he had credibility on this matter — twenty-four years of active service in the Navy, a seat on the House Armed Services Committee, and an increasing voice in the media as a Democrat who would speak with authority about military issues. Still, when he called the possibility that Petraeus could beat Obama in an election a "coup" and "treason," the characterization seemed odd. "If what I've been told is true — and I believe it is," he told myself and two colleagues, "General David Petraeus, a commander with soldiers deployed in two theaters of war, has had multiple meetings with Dick Cheney, the former vice-president of the United States, to discuss Petraeus's candidacy for the Republican nomination for the presidency. And in fact, that's more than a constitutional crisis. That's treason."...

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/e ... z0rn8tldvw

Obama's Truman-MacArthur Moment | Consortiumnews.com

McChrystal/Obama and Kennedy/Lemnitzer - The Education Forum
What the Hell is going on here???

Fox News' James Rosen on The Moorer-Radford Affair. An earlier episode in U.S. History where Haig 'took charge'...



Jim Hougan: Strange Bedfellows: Deep Throat, Bob Woodward and the CIA

Zumwalt, Felt and McCord were by no means alone in their deep mistrust of the Nixon White House. Within the Pentagon, a military spy-ring was pillaging Kissinger's secrets on behalf of Adm. Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff since 1970.

Within the offices of the National Security Council, and on secret missions to China, Kissinger's briefcases were rifled and his burn-bags ransacked. In all, perhaps a thousand top-secret documents were stolen and transmitted to Moorer's office (if not elsewhere, as well) by Yeoman Charles Radford, a young Mormon acting on orders of Adm. Robert Welander.

Here, matters become a bit incestuous.

Admiral Welander was an aide to Moorer. But he was also a mentor of Lt. Bob Woodward, whose commander Welander had been aboard the USS Fox. Reportedly, it was at the urging of Welander---who had yet to be implicated in "the Moorer-Radford affair"---that Woodward extended his tour of duty in 1969, going to the Pentagon to serve as Communications Duty Officer to then-CNO Tom Moorer.

In that capacity, Woodward presided over the CNO's code-room, reading every communication that went in and out, while acting, also, as a briefer and a courier. This, he tells us, is how he met Deep Throat, while cooling his heels outside the Situation Room in the White House. It was 1970 and, according to Woodward, Mark Felt was sitting in the next chair.

The Moorer-Radford Affair is not usually considered a part of the Watergate story, though it deserves to be. The Nixon Administration learned of the Pentagon spy-ring in late 1971, but the affair did not become public until almost three years later. By then, the Watergate story was almost played out.

While president, Nixon was determined to keep the affair secret, telling Kissinger aide David Young, "If you love your country, you'll never mention it." But the Pentagon's chief investigator, W. Donald Stewart, was more forthcoming. Asked how seriously the affair should have been taken, Stewart replied with a rhetorical question: "Did you see that film, Seven Days in May? That's what we were dealing with...

rigorousintuition.ca - View topic - Two things about Al Haig that are not in his obituary

rigorousintuition.ca - View topic - What about Watergate?

Alexander Haig and the coup against Nixon

The weird world of Alexander Haig

And the beat goes on...

Report: Sources claim Gates backed keeping McChrystal | Raw Story

[8bitagent]

What would be wishful about it?

...the "wishful" part is just that Obama would need threatening because he's putting up even a shred of resistance to the JSOC/"Neo-con" agenda. That maybe Obama is a JFK about to bloom...instead of a Curtis LeMay

Even if true that wouldn't remove the utility from delivering the message once in a while.

Step back and view system and context. Context: Pakistan escalation likely clusterfuck, chaos and revival of calls to scale down, possibly even antiwar movement. Systemic factors: Obama as pres always in spotlight and conditional position, potentially susceptible to political pressures. Gates an old, very made man with nothing to lose at the head of the bureaucracy that oversees the empire. He may want to play, merely to keep Obama's mind focused. It likely has nothing to do with Obama per se or anyone else who'd be in WH; just good preventive statecraft.

Am confused by yr conflation of JSOC with "neocon" agenda. Pentagon mainstream clearly all about AfPak - that's where their minds and plans and resources have been for years. "Neocons" want a strike on Iran, which isn't popular at Pentagon. Their hardon for that hasn't changed in years, either. I'm not the least sentimental about any of these characters, just cognizant of differences they display and how these are rooted in genuine conflicts of interest and geostrategic understanding.

I think if McCain had been in, Iran would have been hit last year during election crisis. Can't prove it, but find it hard not to believe it. Does this make Obama the good guy? Irrelevant question!

Also confused by your statement Obama is not a "JFK about to bloom." JFK never bloomed either. He was a committed cold warrior full of the usual anti-Communist shit and got himself elected on propaganda about a bogus "missile gap." He likely did develop a mind of his own while in office and seems to have been considering a historic policy shift to leave Vietnam and end the cold war, but fact is, the JSOC and the politician-crazies thought he was a Commie fellow traveler long before there was any hint of deviance on his part. It's partly a cultural thing: only yahoo full-on fundamentalist Republicans can be fully trusted not to be weaklings and traitors. That wasn't different with Clinton despite his compliance with empire, and it won't necessarily be different with Obama.

Imagine that YOU might be able to see things they don't. From a distance, we can see the claimed conflicts between these characters and their factions are minimal or even kabuki, but that's not obvious to those actually entrenched behind given positions in the high bureaucracy. They actually believe in the reality of many of the conflicts they have amongst themselves. Fancy that! Again, even to the extent where committed hyper-patriots view a Kennedy or, laughably, a Clinton as a potential commie.

(We imagine too much guile on their part sometimes. Most people do not handle the excess in cognitive dissonance well that comes from always lying; their positions and self-images will tend to congeal into passionately held unities regardless of how logically conflicted these may be. They come to believe their own bullshit.)

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Yes...to everything. And SPOT ON with the Af-Pak vs Iran raw raw crowd

BUT...dont these guys see that ALL sides are controlled? Do they not see who is financing and manipulating the Taliban, al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Toiba, Pakistani Taliban, Beluchistan networks, etc?

See...this is why I doubt the "Pentagon was behind 9/11", these CIA/Pentagon types are very convinced that there is this "existential Islamic threat"...they want to believe it. And their puppet masters create and make the "virulent radical Islamic networks" appear real. But the Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban...its all financed and coddled deep within the bigger framework. The US is being played, as much as people thinks the US is running things