#321
speaking of the pike committee i've spent the last decade trying to find audio/video of it somewhere. if anybody knows of any, holla
#322

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

the unwillingness to listen to mccoy seems bizarre now....


it's one thing to state that there's a problem and a nebulous indistinct complicity by unnamed parts of the establishment, it's another to name names and reveal the structure and planned, deliberate nature of the "problem" so that it could actually be solved.

bourgeois politics is all about paying lip service to remedying something while knowing on some level that it is a part of the way the machine functions and should never truly be addressed. using factual information to force the political class into cognitive dissonance about this is a major faux pas!

#323

gyrofry posted:

speaking of the pike committee i've spent the last decade trying to find audio/video of it somewhere. if anybody knows of any, holla



it's likely it doesn't exist anywhere anymore, even in the hands of the u.s. government. the material we have was leaked and that was a while ago.

#324

shriekingviolet posted:

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

the unwillingness to listen to mccoy seems bizarre now....

it's one thing to state that there's a problem and a nebulous indistinct complicity by unnamed parts of the establishment, it's another to name names and reveal the structure and planned, deliberate nature of the "problem" so that it could actually be solved.

bourgeois politics is all about paying lip service to remedying something while knowing on some level that it is a part of the way the machine functions and should never truly be addressed. using factual information to force the political class into cognitive dissonance about this is a major faux pas!

i agree with you, but when i post these newspaper articles i think you'll be surprised how much of the details (including naming names) are there. im still going through these archives and i'll post the best shit soon. obviously it can't compete with a 400 page book, but its not like these details werent out there in one of the biggest papers in the nation. maybe i should try to check NYT or wall street journal or w/e to see if they printed stories also.

#325
haha



from jack anderson's may 10 1971 column
#326
The Times (London) 9 July 1971, p6:

Interesting that here we have a CIA-agent-cum-Republican-senator making allegations against South Vietnamese and Laos officials. Like this was just a matter of oriental bastards preying on are boys
#327
http://youtu.be/BQpPxXKG_lE?t=1h9m47s

how do u embed particular times? im not gonna watch the whole thing but the "our politicians wont let us win" myth is in full swing here...

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()

#328

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

http://youtu.be/BQpPxXKG_lE?t=1h9m47show do u embed particular times? im not gonna watch the whole thing but the "our politicians wont let us win" myth is in full swing here...


BQpPxXKG_lE&start;=4187
edit: idk why but for me even tho the embed code looks okay it keeps starting at 1h9m29s. ymmv

#329

Petrol posted:

The Times (London) 9 July 1971, p6:

Interesting that here we have a CIA-agent-cum-Republican-senator making allegations against South Vietnamese and Laos officials. Like this was just a matter of oriental bastards preying on are boys

it'd be interesting to get this steele guys report/testimonial or w/e. jack anderson's already printed the cia connection by may 5 1971, although the claim is that they're now cracking down on it. appears he's getting it from steele but its hard to be sure without going to the source i guess:



looks more like an omission on the london times' behalf. interested to read the proper mccoy stuff to see how well things line up.

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()

#330
ill post more stuff later when i get back... some good things in here. enjoy ur saturday afternoon petrol.

#331
cheers mate.
#332
^ pooftas

#333

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

apparently on June 2 1972 there was a senate committee hearing where alfred mccoy talked about the cia & opium. anyone know where i could get a transcript (or recording) of this online? or is that the kinda stuff they bury deep in some library archive in washington dc?

i spent like 20 minutes digging thru this site to find this, enjoy:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015019201766;view=1up;seq=709

hathi trust needs better search algorithm or something.

EDIT: better URLs too:

http://tinyurl.com/h37cawc

added to imgur:
http://imgur.com/a/S9egw/

Edited by HenryKrinkle ()

#334
[account deactivated]
#335

HenryKrinkle posted:

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

apparently on June 2 1972 there was a senate committee hearing where alfred mccoy talked about the cia & opium. anyone know where i could get a transcript (or recording) of this online? or is that the kinda stuff they bury deep in some library archive in washington dc?

i spent like 20 minutes digging thru this site to find this, enjoy:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015019201766;view=1up;seq=709

hathi trust needs better search algorithm or something.

EDIT: better URLs too:

http://tinyurl.com/h37cawc

added to imgur:
http://imgur.com/a/S9egw/

Lmao. Nice find krikle. Reading what Senator McGee has to say from page 710 onward... how he starts in with "Oh, I appreciate that you're struggling to get your PhD right now so it makes sense you would accuse the CIA of not being entirely ethical at every moment because uh... um, sorry, this isn't for your dissertation?"

#336

HenryKrinkle posted:

added to imgur:
http://imgur.com/a/S9egw/

thanks krinkle. that Trần Văn Khiêm guy who writes in the last letter is an interesting character (look him up on wiki)

#337
im browsing through the steele/murphy report. can't see any references to the CIA but they do implicate the laotian military at least. mostly generic charges of "corruption" rather than a systemic problem. i'll give it a closer read later.

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()

#338

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

HenryKrinkle posted:

added to imgur:
http://imgur.com/a/S9egw/

thanks krinkle. that Trần Văn Khiêm guy who writes in the last letter is an interesting character (look him up on wiki)





from letters to the editor in the washington post 6th of April 1972. i was reading up on his murder trial 14 years later and he believed in a conspiracy theory that involved his parents, the death of ngo dinh diem and jfk. weird. seems like a self-serving guy (mostly the "why don't you come back to lead us" line)

#339
check this out. washington post editorial 26th of july 1972



but what's real interesting is that its accompanied by a cartoon that is very similar to the famous nazi "stabbed in the back" cartoon.



#340
just gonna dump some other articles.

13th november 1969:


28th october 1970:


20th march 1971


21st march 1971:


11th may 1971:


18th may 1971


23rd may 1971:

#341
~2 months later... hmm maybe not such a success after all.....

13th july 1971:


...article continued....
#342
lots of articles on ngo dzu:

12 july 1971:


15 july 1971:


28 july 1971:


9 september 1971:


2 june 1972:


2 july 1972:
#343

Makeshift_Swahili posted:


Fuck

#344
holy moly
#345
love it when US gets all racist against its own proxies. oy.
#346
the right wing variation of "bumbling CIA" being "bumbling colonial proxies"?
#347

c_man posted:

the right wing variation of "bumbling CIA" being "bumbling colonial proxies"?

people were looking for reasons to minimse the failures of the us military. drugs (pushed onto our troops by nefarious asians) served as a handy excuse. thomas j dodd was speculating if marijuana was to blame for my lai, for example.



from Washington Post 25th march 1970.

#348

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

people were looking for reasons to minimse the failures of the us military. drugs (pushed onto our troops by nefarious asians) served as a handy excuse. thomas j dodd was speculating if marijuana was to blame for my lai, for example.



from Washington Post 25th march 1970.


wow. its a good thing all those hippie college students back home didnt have guns or kent state could have turned out a lot differently

#349
was searching for one of mccoy's old articles but found this instead. recent article on the afghan opium trade and its relation to the war.
#350

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

was searching for one of mccoy's old articles but found this instead. recent article on the afghan opium trade and its relation to the war.


pWa0dZMHYeE

#351
Incidentally I have taken to streaming Terrible TV News Channels Of The World lately in the background while I do housework or study and had a good chuckle at this story on CNN

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/27/asia/kabul-drug-rehab-npw/ posted:

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) The sound of a bare razor, scraping hair off an unwashed scalp. The shuddering foot of someone struggling with the agony of withdrawal. The endless racks of expensive internet cables that once connected the building to satellites in space but now gather dust.

Months ago, this was Camp Phoenix.

A large and tidy NATO military base, it was home to hundreds of British soldiers and their support staff, and some Americans too.

CNN used to visit for often highly organized media events that NATO laid on in a bid to show the war in Afghanistan was being won, and they could go home. But now victories here are a little more palpable, and something that everyone inside the base's walls can only win over themselves.

Camp Phoenix has been turned into a large and heavily fortified drug rehabilitation center. Walls that once kept the Taliban's bombs out, now keep those struggling with heroin addiction in.


#352
I've started reading "Politics Of Heroin" by McCoy. This is the updated/revised version from 1991 which apparently adds in a lot of info about Afghanistan and other case studies of CIA drug involvement. In my chapter summaries I'll probably try to cover the Southeast Asia parts in the most detail and skim over other things (although I'm gonna read the whole book obviously). Has anyone else read this?
#353
i started Kill Anything That Movies and it's making me real depressed
#354
Preface

McCoy talks about his experiences researching and writing the original edition of the book in the early 1970. Some good anecdotes:

Over a dinner of pig fat and sticky rice, Ger Su Yang asked Everingham, through our interpreter, what we were doing in his village. Knowing the Hmong leader from previous visits, Everyingham was frank and told him that I was writing a book on opium. For a man who did not read a daily newspaper, Ger Su Yang proposed a bargain that showed a keen sense of media management. He would provide armed men to escort us anywhere in his district and would allow us to ask anything we wanted about the opium. If he did that, could I get an article in a Washington newspaper reporting that the CIA had broken its promise? For ten years, he explained, the men of his village had died fighting in the CIA's army until only the fourteen-year-old boys were left. When he refused to send these boys to die, the CIA had stopped the rice airdrops that fed his village of women and children. After six months the children were visibly weak from hunger. Once the Americans in Washington knew about his situation, surely, said Ger Su Yang, they would send the rice. I promised.


(page xii)

McCoy speaks about his interview technique, which was to ask questions about the historical opium trade (colonial opium monopolies had been operating legally until fairly recently in many countries in the region) before moving closer to current times in an attempt to get them to slip up.

For an hour, he chatted about his family and the career path he had followed in his rise to command. General, I said, that was fine but what about the allegations by your enemies that you stole money when managing the opium syndicate just a few years ago. "Merde! That bastard Phoumi is gossiping again. I am going to stop these rumors for good," muttered General Ouane, referring to his old rival General Phoumi Nosavan, then exiled in Bangkok. Suddenly, that elephantine figure leapt up the stairs with a catlike grace and returned a few minutes later with a heavy, leather-bound ledger. On the cover was the title "Opium Régie Du Laos" (Laotian Opium Monopoly). The general took me through every page, showing what he had paid the tribes for opium in the 1960s, how many kilograms he exported to Vietnam, and the profits he had deposited in the syndicate's bank accounts. I was impressed, particularly since all the transactions took place after 1961 when Laos had abolished its official opium monopoly and made drug dealing illegal. With the general's encouragement, I copied down sample transactions, which appear in the footnotes of this book


(pages xiv-xv)

On page xvii McCoy mentions that Seymour Hersh wrote an article about CIA reaction to McCoy's book... let's read.




(apearing in the New York Times July 22 1972)

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()

#355
lol that last section. smuggling and "looking the other way" was common in the 1960s says 1972-CIA-man. we've put that far behind us. ancient history. why even bring it up?
#356
*bump* As u can see this thread was on the backburner for a long time as I read about Australia and write MIM-style reviews of NWOBHM albums. However, I have recently come into possession of a number of collections of speeches, interviews, letters etc by various Vietnamese leaders which do not appear to be in english anywhere on the internet (as far as i can tell from rudimentary googling). These are from books from the "Foreign Languages Publishing House" in Hanoi and were all printed in the 1960s and 1970s. I will try to transcribe the contents of these for the pleasure of the rhizzone, but there is 100s of pages of this stuff so ill probably continue with Politics of Heroin in parallel. Should I start with Ho or Vo?

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()

#357

Petrol posted:

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

http://youtu.be/BQpPxXKG_lE?t=1h9m47show do u embed particular times? im not gonna watch the whole thing but the "our politicians wont let us win" myth is in full swing here...

BQpPxXKG_lE&start;=4187
edit: idk why but for me even tho the embed code looks okay it keeps starting at 1h9m29s. ymmv

this particular link to "No Substitute For Victory" is down for copyright infringement but the whole thing is still on youtube elsewhere, hosted by the Troma youtube account (lol). i guess they own the rights now if you ever wanna see bircher propaganda.

#358
start with whichever one you like best, but imo go vo
#359
ok maybe i should have been looking harder, because i found at least one of the books online eventually. here's a "revised and enlarged" version of Vo's "Dien Bien Phu", all the other versions I'd seen on the internet were older shorter versions. this also has a lot of appendix material that I was gonna type out. saves me some typing.

http://michaelharrison.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Dien-Bien-Phu-Vo-Nguyen-Giap.pdf

there's also a couple congratulatory letters from Ho at the start.

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()

#360
really a lot of this stuff is probably of minimal interest and are fairly simple letters/speeches, this is more of an archival impulse of mine - there's very little works of Vietnamese leaders in english on marxists.org for example.