It seems that Maddow is observant and inquisative when it comes to the media (at times) but not so much when she can get the official word from a Government organization... is she a secret CIA agent?
History at it's superficial worst; Sept. 6, 2016. Rachel Maddow suggests US bombed Laos for more than a decade for no apparent reason
Extract from here:
MADDOW: I once worked for a radio network called Air America, liberal radio network, it no longer exists. That Air America, not to be mistaken for the 1990 comedy, "Air America," starring Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. Honestly, not that great a movie. That was a movie that got basically every single fact wrong, but it was loosely based on a true story.
There was an airline called Air America that was secretly owned by the CIA. It was a passenger and cargo airline that moved troops and refugees and goods to and from the country of Laos. It was part of the largest paramilitary operation the CIA has ever taken on. The US secretly directed local forces in Laos and secretly had our own troops in Laos and Air America -- the airline, not the stupid movie or the radio network -- Air America was a front for that big, paramilitary operation, and that lasted forever. That paramilitary operation went on for 13 years and during those years the US dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos. That's more than what US planes dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II. Per capita, Laos is the most heavily bombed country ever.
And that's why it was such a big deal that President Obama went to Laos today, he's the first sitting president to set foot in that country. And that was supposed to be the big headline thing about President Obama's big trip to Asia, right? China was supposed to be the G20 (summit) cakewalk and then Laos was supposed to be the really big news because of our incredible history in that country.
What Maddow is saying is 'a fact beyong any doubt' is basically the official CIA line;
CIA's official line: CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955-1974 Supporting the "Secret War"
I thought I would do a little google journalism to put in a little doubt into this sudden belief in an organisations words that is not required to show anyone what it does or tell anyone why it is doing something. Destabilizing a country with decades of repercussions is too much power for a shadowy organization in a democracy. i.e. I think there is enough proof to cast doubt on the CIA's innocnece in all matters that are not transparent (as I explained on my .org);
NY Times: The CIA Drug Connection Is as Old as the Agency
From The National Security Archive;
| Washington, D.C., August 26, 2009 - The Central Intelligence Agency participated in every aspect of the wars in Indochina, political and military, according to newly declassified CIA histories. The six volumes of formerly secret histories (the Agency's belated response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by National Security Archive senior fellow John Prados) document CIA activities in South and North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in unprecedented detail. The histories contain a great deal of new material and shed light on aspects of the CIA's work that were not well known or were poorly understood. The new revelations include: |
- The CIA was aware from the very early 1960s of the problems posed by Laotian drug trafficking to its Laos campaign, but not only took no action, it did not even make drug trafficking a reporting requirement until the Nixon administration declared war on drugs [Document 5, p. 535].
Huffington Post: Ron Paul Had Accurate Conspiracy Theory: CIA Was Tied To Drug Traffickers
Are you saying soldiers can do it but individuals in the CIA can't? Do they not employ humans
Is Heroin being Smuggled in Dead Soldiers Body Bags from Afghanistan & Iraq ?
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Note: The blogger I got this video from from seems angry because he thinks there was a good reason for the massive Vietnamese bombing campaign. I thought I should clear up that misunderstanding if I use the link, so here it is;
l its viewers why the US dropped those bombs on Laos --
BRENNAN: During the war in neighboring Vietnam, US warplanes dropped 270 million cluster bombs on Laos to cut off enemy supply lines. Eighty million of those bombs did not explode and there have been more than 20,000 casualties since the war ended.
IN reality the bombs were dropped for scaring people (irrelevant of innocents killed) and for "prestige". But what this highlights is the divide between republican vs the liberal view of war. One thing they agree on is that alot of bombs were dropped.
In Henry Kissinger's words;
3. Bombing Vietnam: "It's wave after wave of planes. You see, they can't see the B-52 and they dropped a million pounds of bombs ... I bet you we will have had more planes over there in one day than Johnson had in a month ... each plane can carry about 10 times the load of World War II plane could carry." (link)
A more detailed look;
In 1971, a returning veteran named John Kerry testified powerfully before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He indicted the war as “the biggest nothing in history” and posed a powerful question: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
Kissinger’s best answer to Kerry’s question was “for the sake of credibility.” The national security adviser understood that the United States could not “win” the Vietnam War and largely agreed with Kerry that the Americanization of the conflict had been a mistake. But he was adamant that the nation could not be seen to “lose” it either. In a widely noted essay in Foreign Affairs in January 1969 titled “The Viet Nam Negotiations,” Kissinger placed greatest emphasis not on the tangible ramifications of withdrawal but on the amorphous psychological ones:
The commitment of 500,000 Americans has settled the issue of the importance of Viet Nam. What is involved now is confidence in American promises. However fashionable it is to ridicule the terms “credibility” or “prestige,” they are not empty phrases; other nations can gear their actions to ours only if they can count on our steadiness . . . In many parts of the world—the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, even Japan— stability depends on confidence in American promises.
Henry Kissinger’s plan for a staged withdrawal from Vietnam was thus sustained by the logic of keeping up appearances. “We could not simply walk away from an enterprise involving two administrations, five allied countries, and thirty-one thousand dead,” Kissinger observed in his memoir, “as if we were switching a television channel.” More would die to display America’s continued potency to friends and enemies. The nation would not slink away under cover of darkness but depart with all guns blazing.
Credibility was important to nineteenth-century diplomats like Metternich and Bismarck. (The latter established extensive German colonies in Africa primarily for reasons of credibility, not because he believed that an African empire added much to Berlin’s strategic or economic strength.) But its logic was harder to sell in twentieth-century America, where battlefield deaths born of prestige-driven actions were tolerated less well by political elites beholden to mass democracy and subject to media scrutiny. In Paris in March 1969, President Charles de Gaulle asked Kissinger, “Why don’t you get out of Vietnam?” Surprised by de Gaulle’s bluntness, Kissinger answered, “Because a sudden withdrawal might give us a credibility problem.” “Where?” demanded de Gaulle. Kissinger specified the Middle East. “How very odd,” said de Gaulle. “It is precisely in the Middle East that I thought your enemies had a credibility problem.” De Gaulle understood something that Kissinger did not: America’s allies—even ambivalent ones like France—believed Washington’s credibility would be enhanced, not diminished, by casting aside fictions, cutting its losses, and pursuing an expedited withdrawal.
Kissinger’s ostensible peace goals were twofold: that North Vietnamese troops leave South Vietnam at the point of armistice, and that North Vietnam respect South Vietnam’s independence after America’s withdrawal. Kissinger was not so naïve that he believed either goal was realistically attainable. Rather, as he observed to Hans Morgenthau in 1968, he would “drag on the process” of withdrawal “for a while because of the international repercussions.”
This dragging effect would be achieved with multiple weights and pulleys. First, the withdrawal of American troops would commence at a steady rate—twenty-five thousand American troops left Vietnam in 1969 and hundreds of thousands soon followed. Second, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), whom the Americans would train and equip to the highest standards, would fill the gap left by the departing American troops—a strategy described as “Vietnamization.” Third, the United States would escalate the war in the most efficient (read destructive) manner possible. As the ground war was being deescalated, the U.S. bombing campaign increased sharply in intensity—and secretly, for such actions were always likely to create a firestorm of protest. Nixon and Kissinger expanded the U.S. bombing campaign in the spring of 1969 to include targets in Cambodia. This action caused two of Kissinger’s assistants, Anthony Lake and Roger Morris, to resign in protest. A year later, American troops began their “incursion” (read: invasion) of Cambodia in the hope—forlorn, as it turned out—of destroying North Vietnamese command facilities.
The bombing of Cambodia encapsulated all of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s failings regarding transparency, strategy, and morality. The bombings were conducted in total secrecy and were falsely designated as attacks on North Vietnam. Congress and the public were not informed. As per usual, many within the administration knew as little as Congress: the State Department, inevitably, and even the secretary of the Air Force. Yet keeping a large-scale bombing campaign under wraps was impossible. On May 9, 1969, The New York Times ran a front-page story publicizing this expansion of the war into Cambodia. Nixon was furious, exclaiming to Kissinger, “What is this cock-sucking story? Find out who leaked it, and fire him.” Without foundation, Kissinger pinned the blame on Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and confronted him directly: “You son of a bitch. I know you leaked that story, and you’re going to have to explain it to the president.” Laird simply hung up. Kissinger subsequently conceded that he had accused the wrong man. To identify the real culprit, he and Nixon requested the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, to install a series of wiretaps on three of Kissinger’s NSC staff: Daniel Davidson, Morton Halperin, and Hal Sonnenfeldt, as well as one of Melvin Laird’s assistants at the Pentagon, Colonel Robert Pursley. The number of wiretaps Nixon and Kissinger authorized on administration staff eventually totaled seventeen, but none captured anything incriminating. Nixon lamented that the wiretaps “never helped us,” they merely comprised “gobs and gobs of material. Gossip and bullshitting.” Only one recording device captured a detail that led to a high-level resignation. It was voice-activated and whirred into action whenever the president opened his mouth.
The bombing of Cambodia killed thousands of people and destabilized a sovereign nation to little if any discernible effect. The secret bombing raids—for the administration persisted in denying their existence in spite of compelling evidence to the contrary—continued for fourteen months, during which U.S. B-52s flew 3,875 sorties and dropped 108,823 tons of bombs. The objective of the raids was to destroy North Vietnam’s political and military headquarters—the Central Office for South Vietnam—and in this it failed. Kissinger felt no moral qualms about escalating the war in this fashion. The fact that the primary strategic objective had not been met seemed not to faze him. This was because the bombing had a negligible impact on the United States beyond the cost of the tonnage—and the lives of the airmen who died delivering their payloads.
Confession: I don't think Maddow is a CIA agent. I think she's afraid of the CIA and will take them at thier word because of that. What I want to show here is that for a conspiracy theory to work you need a link with no apparent evidence. If you have evidence (government memos OR science) ... then it's not a conspiracy, it's a fact. Calling it a conspiracy just sounds dumber and dumber over time. EVEN if the CIA really is out there spreading disinformation to hide their illegal activities...Article: How the CIA Invented and Promoted 'Conspiracy Theories' to Discredit Controversial ViewsConspiracy theories fill the news, labeled or not.
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