OpEdNews.com September 11, 2016

By Paul Fitzgerald Elizabeth Gould

America’s coordinated use of psychological warfare began in earnest during World War II and has grown and expanded into public relations, advertising, cinema, radio and television, electronic video games and now social media. Its pro-war boosterism extends over sports, religion, education, news and entertainment to form a seamless electronic cocoon-like web.

Five Part Series: 15th anniversary of 9/11, 2016

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Building the Afghan Narrative with Black Propaganda; the People, the Process & the Product

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

By definition, America’s use of Psychological Warfare is described as the “The planned use of propaganda and other psychological actions having the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of hostile foreign groups in such a way as to support the achievement of national objectives.” Of course this very definition is itself propaganda, a black lie which omits the fact that America’s domestic population is just as often the target of psychological warfare as any “hostile foreign groups.”

The state’s use of psychological warfare to bend the population to war is as old, if not older than the existence of states themselves. But it was perhaps Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goeringwhose statement while on trial at Nuremberg best summed up the cynical simplicity of the logic.

“Of course people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders, that is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.”

Psychological warfare in the form of propaganda comes in all shapes and sizes as well as shades of black, grey or white. America’s coordinated use of psychological warfare began in earnest during World War II and ever since has grown and expanded into public relations, advertising, cinema, radio and television, electronic video games and now social media. Its pro-war boosterism extends over sports, religion, education, news and entertainment to form a seamless electronic cocoon-like web. It is employed on an ever growing list of those deemed as enemies of America as well as on a confused and agitated American public — whose corporate news networks frame and manage an increasingly false narrative while engaging in a kind of Orwellian Kabuki Theatre of fairness and balance.

Americans were heavily propagandized to support a U.S. entry into World War II and again to accept the morality of deploying the atomic bomb to end it. Even Mickey Mouse was conscripted for America’s total war effort along with the minds of America’s youth. Following the war Americans were heavily propagandizedto accept the Cold War, the need for maintaining a permanent army, navy and air force as well as the buildup of a nuclear weapons arsenal.

Since 9/11 Americans have been bathed in psychological warfare on Islamic terrorism, but so much evidence has emerged linking that terrorism to covert U.S. policy goals, tha the propaganda value has backfired.

The Bush administration can take credit for breaking the system in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, by using fraudulent claims as a pretext for the invasion. But for reasons that defy logic, the U.S. government continues to employ these methods despite them having been shown time and again to be fraudulent.

One has only to look to the U.S. role in Afghanistan in the 1970s to understand the background of the current crisis in American thinking; but without reexamining the real purpose behind America’s long term involvement, today’s disinformation wars will remain imponderable.

The origins of Washington’s war in Afghanistan have always been strategic, long term and particularly black, obscured throughout the Cold War by a narrative adapted from Britain’s 19^thcentury colonial expansion in India.

After a fruitless effort in Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s, America’s psychological warfare campaign shifted its attention to Central Asia in 1973, when Afghanistan’s king was overthrown by his brother in law and cousin, Mohammed Daoud. Aided by the Parcham faction of the Marxist/Leninist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), Daoud’s takeover fit neatly into Washington’s anti-communist manifesto, despite his overwhelmingly nationalist credentials. The role of the Communist party meant so little to the U.S. media at the time that it remained invisible in both Time and Newsweek’s published reports of the coup. But to U.S. ambassador Robert G. Neumann, the presence of the PDPA meant that a “limited Great Game” with the Soviet Union was now back in play.

A coordinated campaign of pressure from U.S.-backed Pakistan and Iran soon ousted Daoud’s Marxist partner, while the Shah’s dreaded spy agency SAVAK moved in to help Daoud clean house of leftists. The Shah even readied a military force to invade, should Daoud waver in his newfound anti-Communist zeal. But by 1978 a new day for Iran and Afghanistan was about to dawn.

Enter Hafizullah Amin. Before, during and after World War II, the U.S. had created a number of psychological warfare organizations designed to compete with the political propaganda of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Integrated closely into the CIA’s intelligence and psychological warfare units after the war, organizations like Leo Cherne’s International Rescue Committee (IRC) and according to the CIA’s own website, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, helped to solidify CIA’s emerging strategy of promoting the non-Communist left–the strategy that would soon become the theoretical foundation of the agency’s political operations against Communism over the next two decades.”

In constant competition with the Soviet KGB, the CIA was also known to target foreign students destined to hold high rank in their home countries. Handpicked by U.S. administrators to participate in a UNESCO/Columbia University program, Amin was sent to New York in 1957. He later completed a master’s degree at Columbia–coincidentally, at a time when future National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was gaining prominence there as a professor.

Amin claimed to have become radicalized at the University of Wisconsin in 1958. He also claimed to have become a Marxist that summer, but would conceal his emergence as a leader in the Kalq faction of the PDPA until much later. Despite being a Marxist, Amin was again chosen in 1962 by the Americans to attend Columbia, this time as a doctoral candidate, rising quickly to become the president of the Afghan Student Association. A disclosure in Ramparts magazine in April1967 would reveal the CIA’s sponsorship of that same Afghan Student Association during that time. Following his return, Amin rose rapidly in Afghan politics and by 1978 was positioned to play a pivotal role in another Palace coup, this time of Prince Mohammed Daoud himself.

1978 was a pivotal year in the foreign policy of the United States as President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski made steady inroads into Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s power. By that year, he had persuaded Carter to transfer jurisdiction over the CIA from the Inter-Agency Policy Review Committee, (headed by the Secretary of State), to the National Security Council’s Special Coordinating Committee, which he chaired. This shift gave Brzezinski control over covert operations in Afghanistan. It also gave him control of the psychological warfare campaign necessary to make those operations work both at home and abroad.

Hafizullah Amin played the perfect foil to Brzezinski’s propaganda war which, regardless of the lack of evidence, painted the PDPA takeover in Kabul as a clear example of the growing dangers of Soviet expansionism and their pursuit of dominance in the Persian Gulf. Throughout 1978 and into 1979, Amin’s actions dovetailed perfectly into the expanding psychological warfare campaign against detente and the Soviet Union, with Brzezinski blaming Amin’s February 1979 assassination of American Ambassador Adolph Dubs on the Soviets.

Transcripts from Politburo meetingsin Moscow from March 1979 show a Soviet leadership confounded as the events unfolded, referring to a conversation with Amin as seeming “like a detective novel.” Had the operation been scripted in advance by the CIA to confuse Moscow, it could not have worked more brilliantly.

The subsequent, December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ended detente, renewed the Cold War and opened a U.S. military relationship with Communist China that could not have been imagined up to that time. It established a new narrative of an expanding Soviet Evil Empire threatening America’s vital interests in the Persian Gulf, while shifting U.S. foreign policy permanently into the neoconservative’s hands. This policy shift was laid out within days of the Soviet invasion by former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Theodore Eliot and Harvard Professor Richard Pipes in a MacNeil Lehrer broadcast on January 2, 1980.

But it wasn’t until we probed this new narrative by going to Afghanistan ourselves in 1981 and were challenged personally in a public forum for doing so by Ambassador Eliot, that we realized there was much more to Ambassador Eliot and his narrative than met the eye. Join us for Part III as we explain how President Jimmy Carter’s reelection, as well as American diplomacy, suffered a stealth attack from his own national security advisor in the next installment of Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.

Copyright 2016 Gould & Fitzgerald All rights reserved

Part I–Psychological Warfare and the American Mind

By Paul Fitzgerald Elizabeth Gould

Looking back on the carnage of the last 15 years it’s easy to see the psychological changes in America. What’s not easy to see is how a longstanding campaign of covert psychological warfare built up since the early days of World War II had made the slow destruction of American democracy and the ascension of rule by secrecy inevitable, long before the planes ever left the runway on 9/11.

Five-Part Series: 15th anniversary of 9/11

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9/11/2001. The date still echoes in the mind with outrage, anger, and utter disbelief. Through the clarity of hindsight it now seems more than ever like a Madison Avenue commercial intended to sell the American population on another war they didn’t need or want. But that’s what we got. Fifteen years of it so far and no end in sight. Believing in the official narrative of 9/11 requires what’s referred to in drama as a willful suspension of disbelief. How could this happen? How did a band of ragged terrorists plotting from a cave in faraway Afghanistan accomplish such a feat given the pervasiveness of the most expensive military/intelligence apparatus in the history of the world? How did three skyscrapers defy the laws of physics and manage to collapse as if brought down by a controlled demolition? And even more curiously, why would Islamic radicals provide the neoconservative administration of George W. Bush with exactly the pretext they needed to launch a bloody invasion of Afghanistan and further occupation of the Middle East?

Who among America’s national-security mandarins at the CIA or FBI or Department of Defense would be held accountable? No one would. Instead America’s national-security apparatchiks would be rewarded with expanded powers to eavesdrop and torture; powers that were supposed to be anathema to the American way of doing things. Like Kafkaesque characters who’d suddenly found themselves on the other side of the Cold War mirror, Americans would now have to “watch what they say and watch what they do” as a preexisting “Patriot Act” would be signed into law to clamp down on dissent and real or imagined domestic terrorism.

Some careful observers like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times had already noticed the bizarre coup-like changes coming over Washington in the months leading up to the attack as the George W. Bush administration inaugurated radical shifts in domestic and foreign policy that seemed un-American and alien to anything that had gone before. But those concerns would soon be forgotten in the race for revenge.

9/11 would ultimately give President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisors all the public approval they needed to transform America and invade Afghanistan and Iraq to cleanse the world of evil. In the end it would turn the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and America’s reputation on its head.

Looking back on the carnage of the last 15 years it’s easy to see the psychological changes in America. What’s not easy to see is how a longstanding campaign of covert psychological warfare built up since the early days of World War II had made the slow destruction of American democracy and the ascension of rule by secrecy inevitable, long before the planes ever left the runway on 9/11:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” –Dr. Joseph Goebbels

As chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, Joseph Goebbels’ system of black propaganda not only helped Hitler’s rise to power but kept him there by utilizing near-hypnotic powers over the German people even after the consequences of his disastrous failures had become obvious.

To counter Goebbels’ propaganda theatre emanating from Nazi party headquarters at Munich’s Braunhaus (Brown House), an organization named Freedom House was founded in New York City in 1941. Fronted by American celebrities and public luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt, the wizard behind the outfit was Leo Cherne, psychological warfare specialist/co-founder of the Research Institute of America (RIA), which would later be labeled the “CIA for businessmen.”

If anyone could match Goebbels’ black arts of psychological warfare it was Cherne. In 1939 Cherne published a guide to industrial mobilization in Adjusting Your Business to War, prophetically forecasting the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 and on September 1^st of that year completed a 3000-page report titled, Industrial Mobilization Plans for World War II, the very day that German troops crossed into Poland.

That same year Cherne asked an ambitious young prote’ge’ named William J. Casey, the future director of the CIA, “How do you take a country like ours, stuck in depression, and convert it into an arsenal?” The answer was a highly profitable loose-leaf book called The War Coordinator. Operating through Freedom House and a second entity known as the International Rescue Committee, (IRC) Cherne and Casey’s psychological-warfare campaign would ultimately transform universally held concepts like Freedom, Justice and Truth into exclusive American brands, which over decades of repetition and reinforcement would grow into the now sacred axioms of American exceptionalism.

Over the decades following World War II Cherne would attract the most powerful and influential figures in American business and politics to his causes. A listing of Freedom House trustees on its 50^th anniversary in 1991 includes people as diverse as Andrew Young, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Albert Shanker, Donald Rumsfeld and James Woolsey. It has since become an exclusive clearinghouse for the neoconservative’s international agenda.

Freedom House’s narrative is no less than the narrative of the American century where, “It has fought on the side of freedom and against aggressors in struggles that can be evoked by simple words and phrases: the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, NATO, Hungarian Freedom Fighters, the Berlin Wall, the Prague Spring…” and of course Afghanistan.

We experienced Freedom House’s profound influence on the major media in the spring of 1983 in a televised Nightline program following a trip to Afghanistan with Harvard Negotiation Project Director Roger Fisher. We had brought Fisher to Afghanistan to explore the possibilities of a Soviet withdrawal of forces and discovered the Soviets were desperate to get out. But instead of expanding on Fisher’s expert opinions about Soviet intentions, host Ted Koppel steered the discussion toward the CIA-backed Mujahideen by introducing a political officer of the Jamaat-i Islami, which Koppel described as “an anti-communist resistance group based in Pakistan… here in the United States under the auspices of two American organizations, concerned with democracy in Afghanistan, the Afghan Relief Committee and Freedom House.”

Had Koppel and Freedom House really been concerned about democracy in Afghanistan, they would never have chosen the Jamaat-i Islami. Originally founded by the Pakistani theologian Abul Ala Maudidi in 1941, the Jamaat-i Islami’s primary concern was not about democracy but replacing western-style democracy with an extremist Islamic Society.

According to testimony of Freedom House’s Rosanne Klass at a congressional hearing in February 1988, Freedom House’s real concern wasn’t about ending the conflict in Afghanistan at all but about keeping the Soviet Union tied down indefinitely. So, Nightline’s challenge to Roger Fisher’s evidence of a Soviet willingness to leave Afghanistan in 1983 and its choice of the Jamaat-i Islami could only have been intended to discredit Soviet intentions and the potential for peace in Afghanistan.

In 1939 Leo Cherne and William Casey set out to wage a war of disinformation on Germany and Japan. When that war was over they turned their campaign onto the Soviet Union. Then in 1981 – after they’d helped to stoke up a disinformation campaign surrounding events in Afghanistan – CIA Director William Casey told the President of the United States, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

Fifteen years ago on 9/11, the product of Leo Cherne and William Casey’s disinformation war came home to America. Americans couldn’t know what had just happened and still can’t know because everything they’d been hearing for decades about the Soviet Union, about Afghanistan and Ronald Reagan’s fiercely religious freedom fighters was admittedly false. By September of 2001 both men had passed on, but the false narrative where the lie became the truth and the truth became the enemy of the state lives on today. It comes as a steady flow of false information about America’s latest enemies floods American minds as never before.

How did the American political system and foreign-policy apparatus become enslaved by a demented political class whose only recourse is to prepare for a third World War that can never be won? How can the American people defend themselves against a lie they would rather accept than face the stark truth that lives within our society like a cancer? Join us, as we explain how this dilemma came to be, who the players are and what they really want in the next installment of Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.

Copyright 2016 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

Opinion 00:01 21.07.2016 Get short URL 04600  sputniknews.com

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Iraq war criminals deserve to be prosecuted. Britain’s Chilcot report is only the most recent example of a worthy cause needing to be addressed. But in 1979, long before false intelligence was used to justify the Iraq war, a heinous war crime was committed against Afghanistan by President’s Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. It’s not just Brzezinski who is culpable. It was the Washington bureaucracy that enabled Brzezinski to activate his Machiavellian plot of intentionally drawing the Soviets into his “Afghan Trap.”

How the Washington bureaucracy enabled Brzezinski’s scheme and why it’s still important today

Once the Soviets took Brzezinski’s bait and crossed the border into Afghanistan on December 27, 1979 the fates of both countries were doomed. As if in a trance, a complacent bureaucracy turned a blind eye to the lack of proof of the American claims that the Soviet invasion was a step towards world domination. Within days the beltway became a cheering squad, enabling Brzezinski to fulfill his imperial dream of giving the Soviets their own “Vietnam.” The bureaucracy’s motivation was simple. Brzezinski was winning the only game in town, the Cold War against the “Evil Empire.” The fact that Brzezinski’s deceitful plot could lead to the death of Afghanistan as a sovereign state did not concern Washington’s elites, either from the right or the left. Predictably, Afghans’ lives have been turned into an endless nightmare that festers to this day.  Not only is Brzezinski’s scheme continuing to undermine Afghanistan’s sovereignty, his Russophobia also drives NATO’s unjustified aggression towards Russia today!

How Brzezinski activated his Russophobic Imperial Dream that now dominates Washington

In 1977 when Brzezinski stepped into the Oval office as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, his Russophobia was a well-known fact from Washington to Moscow. It was no surprise that he was not content with the American moderates’ pragmatic Cold War acceptance of coexistence with the Soviet state. The Polish born Brzezinski represented the ascendency of a radical new breed of compulsive xenophobic Eastern European intellectual bent on holding Soviet/American policy hostage to their pre-World War II world view. According to Brzezinski biographer Patrick Vaughan, Brzezinski rejected the very legitimacy of the Soviet Union itself, calling it “a cauldron of conquered nationalities brutally consolidated over centuries of Russian expansion.”

Brzezinski Vision to Lure Soviets into ‘Afghan Trap’ Now Orlando’s Nightmare
Racism is not a basis for a rational foreign policy
A phobia is defined as an extreme or irrational fear. Therefore it is reasonable to define a Russophobe as one who has an irrational fear of Russians. Simply put, a Russophobe hates Russians for being Russian! That’s called racism, pure and simple, not the basis of creating rational foreign policy. The Beltway should have demanded that a well-known Russophobe like Brzezinski back his claims with proof that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the first step to taking over the world. Instead, the Washington Bureaucracy dined out on his fantasy and we have been living with the consequences ever since.

The Bureaucracy knows Brzezinski has always been a Russophobe

Paul Warnke, President Carter’s SALT II negotiator put Brzezinski’s racial bias this way in an interview we conducted with him in 1993. “It was almost an ethnic thing with Zbig, basically that inbred Polish attitude toward the Russians. And that of course that was what frustrated the Carter Administration. [Secretary of State] Vance felt very much the way that I did. Brzezinski felt the opposite. And Carter couldn’t decide which one of them he was going to follow. So it adds up to a recipe for indecision.” Warnke went on to say that he believed the Soviets would never have invaded Afghanistan in the first place if Carter had not fallen victim to Brzezinski’s irrational attitude toward détente and his undermining of SALT II. In our own research into the causes of the Soviet invasion we did prove Warnke’s assumption that there would have been no invasion without Brzezinski’s willful use of entrapment.

At a conference conducted by the Nobel Institute in 1995, a high-level group of former US and Soviet officials faced off over the question: Why did the Soviets invade Afghanistan? Former National Security Council staff member Dr. Gary Sick established that the US had assigned Afghanistan to the Soviet sphere of influence years before the invasion. So why did the US choose an ideologically-biased position when there were any number of verifiable fact-based explanations for why the Soviets invaded? To former CIA Director Stansfield Turner, responsibility could only be located in the personality of one specific individual. “Brzezinski’s name comes up here every five minutes; but nobody has as yet mentioned that he is a Pole.” Turner said. “[T]he fact that Brzezinski is a Pole, it seems to me was terribly important.” What Turner was suggesting in 1995 was that Brzezinski’s well-known Russophobia led him to take unjustifiable advantage of a Soviet miscalculation.

The conference revealed that “self-fulfilling prophecies,” “a dubious deductive apparatus,” and “decisions that provoked as often as they deterred” provided the operating system for more than a decade of Cold War policy under Presidents Carter and Reagan. Numerous scholars pondered Brzezinski’s decision-making process before, during and after the Soviet invasion. Dr. Carol Saivetz of Harvard University testified, “Whether or not Zbig was from Poland or from someplace else, he had a world view, and he tended to interpret events as they unfolded in light of it. To some extent, his fears became self-fulfilling prophecies… Nobody looked at Afghanistan and what was happening there all by itself.”

But it wasn’t until the 1998 Nouvel Observateur interview that Brzezinski boasted that he had provoked the invasion, by getting Carter to authorize a presidential finding to intentionally suck the Soviets in, six months before Moscow considered invading. Yet, despite Brzezinski’s admission, Washington’s entire political spectrum continued to embrace his original false narrative, that the Soviets were embarked on world conquest.

Brzezinski’s Russophobia is still the basis of U.S. foreign policy towards Russia

For Brzezinski, getting the Soviets to invade Afghanistan was an opportunity to shift Washington toward an unrelenting hard line against the Soviet Union. By using deceit combined with covert action, he created the conditions needed to provoke a Soviet defensive response, which he then used as evidence of Soviet expansion. However, after Brzezinski’s exaggerations and outright lies about Soviet intentions became accepted, they found a home in America’s imagination and never left. US foreign policy, since that time, has operated in a delusion of triumphalism, provoking international incidents and then capitalizing on the chaos.

US, NATO Spreading ‘Russophobia’ Out of Fear of Losing Political Ground

Brzezinski’s current status as the almost mystical “wise elder” of American foreign policy should be viewed with extreme caution given the means by which he achieved it. Today, the legacy of Brzezinski’s Russophobic ideological agenda continues through many acolytes including his two sons, as they carry on the Brzezinski lineage by aggressively pushing beltway polices towards dangerous confrontations with Russia. Tragically, Brzezinski’s legacy also lives on in the failed state of Afghanistan as the hated Taliban are poised to take over again. While all this horror is happening to the Afghan people, NATO forces are using Brzezinski’s homeland of Poland to push provocatively against Russia’s border.

The role that Brzezinski played, as well as those officials who enabled him to cause the death of Afghanistan while intentionally triggering the rise of Islamic extremism, must be examined. Building to a trial, even in absentia, will begin the desperately needed process of breaking the trance-like hold Brzezinski’s Russophobia still has on Washington’s foreign policy that is denying its core role in creating Islamic extremism and driving America to the brink of nuclear war with Russia.

No matter whom the next president is, if we are to save America, this forty year old crime against Afghanistan must first be made right.

Copyright © 2016 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

SPUTNIK NEWS SERVICE

Today, 12 july 2016, 19:51

ANALYSIS: Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Russophobia Drives NATO Aggression in Poland, Baltics

* US * NATO * BRZEZINSKI * POLAND *

WASHINGTON, July 12 (Sputnik) – The Russophobic racist ideology of US geo-strategist and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski is shaping NATO’s agenda in Poland and the Baltic states in an attempt to provoke a war with Russia just like the United States did 40 years ago in Afghanistan, experts told Sputnik.

On Tuesday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the Alliance’s military buildup in Eastern Europe will dominate tomorrow’s NATO-Russia Council (NCR) meeting.

The European Parliament is supposed to adopt a resolution this week to establish an anti-Russian information warfare center based on NATO’s Brzezinski-designed model, according to Voltaire Network, a French news site.

“Brzezinski’s agenda continues to undermine Afghanistan’s sovereignty while NATO forces push aggressively to the Russian border in Brzezinski’s homeland of Poland,” authors of highly-acclaimed books on US foreign policy Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald told Sputnik.

As former President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Brzezinski’s ideological war against the Soviet Union culminated in 1979 with the success of his plot to draw the Soviets into the “Afghan Trap,” and now NATO is trying to provoke a war with Russia because of the mastermind’s racist influence, Gould and Fitzgerald noted.

In 1995, the authors explained, CIA Director Stansfield Turner admitted that “the fact Brzezinski is a Pole” was terribly important to what drove US policy in the Cold War, meaning that his irrational hatred for Russia is what left Afghanistan in ruins.

Moreover, Gould and Fitzgerald continued, Brzezinski openly bragged in a 1998 interview with a French news weekly about how he inveigled the Soviets into Afghanistan to give them “their own Vietnam,” by convincing Carter to authorize support for the country’s mujahideen six months before the Soviet Unions considered invading.

Brzezinski’s simple exaggerations and outright lies about Soviet intentions grounded in a blind hatred for Russia found a home in America’s imagination, and is influencing NATO’s military buildup in Eastern Europe, Gould and Fitzgerald maintained.

“US foreign policy, since that time, has operated in a delusion of triumphalism, provoking international incidents and then capitalizing on the chaos,” Gould and Fitzgerald observed.

Peace activists should focus on Brzezinski’s war crimes in Afghanistan rather than hyper-focus on crimes committed by US and UK officials in Iraq, because US policy will never change until his influence is stopped, the authors stated.

Unfortunately, Gould and Fitzgerald lamented, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton clearly intends to carry on Brzezinski’s legacy if she is elected to become the next US president.

Radio show host and political activist Steve Lendman told Sputnik that he is worried about NATO’s saber-rattling, and fears that if Clinton wins the US presidential election, a confrontation with Russia is a “coin flip.”

“The possibility of World War III is greater than any time in my lifetime… [and] I will be 82 [years old] next month,” Lendman said. “I hope [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has some magic up his sleeves to prevent the unthinkable.”

On Monday, Russia’s envoy to NATO Alexander Grushko said the alliance’s plans to deploy four multinational battalions of about 1,000 troops each in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland, undermine security in the region and threaten Russia.

Listen as they explore the deep ties between imperial wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, Islamic extremists, terrorist attacks, the Brexit referendum vote, and the future of the West. BROADCAST DATE: Monday, June 27, 2016. Listen to the broadcast here.

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould     01:16 16.06.2016   Sputnik International   Huffpost.com

In 1977 Afghanistan had no refugees.

Omar Mateen, the man believed to be solely responsible for the June 14 Orlando shooting massacre, was born in the United States 29 years ago, to Afghan parents who fled to the US as refugees, following the fulfillment of  a scheme by President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski to inveigle the Soviets into Afghanistan to saddle Moscow with its own Vietnam. In 1977 Afghanistan had no refugees and Brzezinski, at the time, set in motion events that have come full circle, to this tragedy, leaving Afghanistan today with the second-largest refugee population in the world.

In 1977 Afghanistan was transforming itself into an enlightened, modern and democratic society. Eyewitness accounts from the 1960s and 1970s document rapid changes embraced by Afghan men and women, across a broad spectrum of society. Despite its poverty, Afghanistan had been independent in its foreign policy and self-sufficient in many areas, including food production, in a vivid illustration of what life is like when Afghans control their own state. It was also the year that Zbigniew Brzezinski stepped into the role as National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter. Brzezinski quickly inaugurated a plan to lure the Soviet Union into an invasion of Afghanistan, a plan that was fulfilled on December 27, 1979. The blowback from Brzezinski’s scheme, even after almost 40 years, has delivered another dagger into the heart of America’s soul as well as the LGBT and Muslim global community.

How Zbigniew Brzezinski did it.

Upon entering the White House in 1977, Brzezinski formed the Nationalities Working Group (NWG), dedicated to weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming ethnic tensions, especially among the Islamic populations of the region. While Brzezinski activated his scheme, former CIA operative Graham Fuller was station chief (1975-1978) in Kabul. Conveniently for Brzezinski, Fuller’s focus was on how to politicize the Islamic world on behalf of American interests. As Fuller explained his thesis: “In the West the words Islamic fundamentalism conjure up images of bearded men with turbans and women covered in black shrouds. And some Islamist movements do indeed contain reactionary and violent elements. But we should not let stereotypes blind us to the fact that there are also powerful modernising forces at work within these movements. Political Islam is about change. In this sense, modern Islamist movements may be the main vehicle for bringing about change in the Muslim world and the break-up of the old “dinosaur” regimes.”
In 1977 Fuller was in a position to activate Brzezinski’s scheme. As CIA station chief in Kabul he was perfectly positioned to provide Brzezinski with the intelligence necessary to build a case for President Carter to sign a directive allowing him to lure the Soviets into invading Afghanistan.
As the first American TV crew, in 1981, to gain access to Kabul after the Soviet invasion, we got a close-up look at the narrative supporting President Carter’s “greatest threat to peace since the second world war” and it didn’t hold up. What had been presented to the public as an open-and-shut case of Soviet expansion by Harvard Professor Richard Pipes on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour could just as easily be defined as a defensive action within the Soviets’ legitimate sphere of influence. Three years earlier, Pipes’ Team B Strategic Objectives Panel had been accused of subverting the process of estimating national security threats by inventing threats where none existed, and intentionally skewing findings along ideological lines. In the early 1980’s that ideology was being presented as fact by America’s Public Broadcasting System.

In 1983 our press team returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation Project Director Roger Fisher, for ABC’s Nightline. Our aim was to establish the credibility of American claims. We discovered, from high-level Soviet officials, that the Kremlin wanted desperately to abandon the war, but the Reagan administration was dragging its feet. From the moment he entered office, Reagan and his administration demanded that the Soviets withdraw their forces, at the same time keeping them pinned down through covert actions that prevented them from leaving. Though lacking in facts and dripping in right wing ideology, this hypocritical foreign-policy campaign was embraced by the entire American political spectrum and continues to be willfully-unexamined by America’s mainstream media.

At a conference conducted by the Nobel Institute in 1995, a high-level group of former US and Soviet officials faced off over the question: Why did the Soviets invade Afghanistan? Former National Security Council staff member Dr. Gary Sick established that the US had assigned Afghanistan to the Soviet sphere of influence years before the invasion. So why did the US choose an ideologically-biased position when there were any number of verifiable fact-based explanations for why the Soviets invaded? To former CIA Director Stansfield Turner, responsibility could only be located in the personality of one specific individual. “Brzezinski’s name comes up here every five minutes; but nobody has as yet mentioned that he is a Pole.” Turner said. “[T]he fact that Brzezinski is a Pole, it seems to me was terribly important.”

What Turner was suggesting in 1995 was that Brzezinski’s well-known Russophobia led him to take advantage of a Soviet miscalculation. But it wasn’t until the 1998 Nouvel Observateur interview that Brzezinski boasted that he had provoked the invasion, by getting Carter to authorize a presidential finding to intentionally suck the Soviets in, six months before Moscow considered invading. Yet, despite Brzezinski’s admission, Washington’s entire political spectrum continued to embrace his original false narrative, that the Soviets were embarked on world conquest.
For Brzezinski, getting the Soviets to invade Afghanistan was an opportunity to shift Washington toward an unrelenting hard line against the Soviet Union. By using covert action, he created the conditions needed to provoke a Soviet defensive response, which he then used as evidence of Soviet expansion. However, after Brzezinski’s simple exaggerations and outright lies about Soviet intentions became accepted, they found a home in America’s imagination and never left. US foreign policy, since that time, has operated in a delusion of triumphalism, provoking international incidents and then capitalizing on the chaos.

From its origins in 1977 as a covert program to destabilize the Soviet Union, through ethnic violence and radical Islam in Afghanistan, Soviet Georgia, Azerbaijan and Chechnya, a line can be drawn to the Orlando massacre shooter. The theories, practices and policies implemented by Brzezinski, prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, have found their logical evolutionary step, and the violence continues.

If it hadn’t been for Brzezinski’s scheme, Omar Mateen, the man believed to be solely responsible for the June 14 massacre, most likely would have been born in Afghanistan 29 years ago, instead of the United States. We will never know what kind of man Mateen might have become had he been born and raised in the home of his ancestors. One thing is sure; the time has come for Americans to question whether the legacy of Brzezinski’s obsession with conquering the world at any cost should continue to be an American dream as well.

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