Nixon, Anna Chennault, and Kissinger, 1972
Richard Millhouse Nixon, the most loathed and tragic figure of the Republican Party until George W. Bush, has yet another nail in his coffin.
The Atlantic Wire has a great article about some newly released tapes from the Johnson Presidency:
“Rumors and whispers of Richard Nixon’s ‘treason’ — sabotaging Vietnam peace talks to help his Presidential campaign — have floated around for years, but newly released tapes from Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency confirm that LBJ knew about Nixon’s behaviour and didn’t bother to report it.
In previously released tapes from Johnson’s Presidency, we had heard about Johnson having a substantial body of evidence showing Nixon schemed to keep the South Vietnamese away from the negotiating table at the 1968 Paris peace talks. Johnson recorded all of his conversations held inside the White House while he was President. (Where do you think Nixon got the idea?) Nixon was accused or dispatching Anna Chennault, a senior advisor, to convince the South Vietnamese they would get a better deal if they didn’t agree to peace, effectively ending the Vietnam war, until after the U.S. Presidential election. Chennault confirmed she spoke with the Vietnamese in her autobiography, The Education of Anna, but nothing more than that. If true, the charge would likely amount to treason.
Which brings us to today. The BBC’s David Taylor reports newly unclassified Johnson tapes, combined with unreleased interviews carried out by the BBC’s former Washington correspondent Charles Wheeler with senior Johnson administration officials (before Wheeler’s death), reveals new, amazing information about the scandal. In October 1968, there was a breakthrough in the Paris peace talks that would end the Vietname war. At the same time, Nixon’s campaign was relying heavily on the war continuing. If a deal was reached, Johnson would halt the bombing of North Vietnam. But Nixon had Chennault convince South Vietnam that they “should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal,” Taylor writes. They did on the day before Johnson was going to announce the end of the Vietnam war.”
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First, you might ask, “Who is Anna Chennault?”
Chennault was the wife of General Claire Chennault, leader of the legendary “Flying Tigers”.
The Tigers were U.S. “private contractors” that fought a guerrilla air war for Chiang Kai-shek against mainland Communist China. The American General Stilwell claimed that Chiang Kai-shek’s forces behaved much like the Nazis, and no small wonder the Chennaults were instrumental in the Development of “The China Lobby”. The China Lobby was in support of Chiang’s Koumintang, elements of which fled into the “Golden Triangle” area around Burma and Laos, becoming instrumental in the Heroin trade. U.S. representatives of The China Lobby spawned the ill-fated John Birch Society and The World Anti-Communist League, both serious hotbeds of American Fascism.
Fast forward to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980:
Alternet has a lengthy article by Robert Parry linking the tactics of Nixon to those of the Reagan election team and the Iran “October Surprise”:
“A favorite saying of Official Washington is that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” But that presupposes you accurately understand what the crime was. And, in the case of the two major U.S. government scandals of the last third of the Twentieth Century – Watergate and Iran-Contra – that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Indeed, newly disclosed documents have put old evidence into a sharply different light and suggest that history has substantially miswritten the two scandals by failing to understand that they actually were sequels to earlier scandals that were far worse. Watergate and Iran-Contra were, in part at least, extensions of the original crimes, which involved dirty dealings to secure the immense power of the presidency.
(snip)
Official Washington and many mainstream historians have tended to dismiss Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal as another case of some overzealous subordinates intuiting what the President wanted and getting everybody into trouble.
The “Big Question” that insiders were asking after the scandal broke in November 1986 was whether President Reagan knew about the decision by White House aide Oliver North and his boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter, to divert some profits from secret arms sales to Iran to secretly buy weapons for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
(snip)
At the start of the Iran-Contra investigation, Attorney General Edwin Meese had set the time parameters from 1984 to 1986, thus keeping outside of the frame the possibility of a much more serious scandal originating during Campaign 1980, i.e., whether Reagan’s campaign undermined President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 American hostages in Iran and then paid off the Iranians by allowing Israel to ship weapons to Iran for the Iran-Iraq War.
So, while congressional and federal investigators looked only at how the specific 1985-86 arms sales to Iran got started, there was no timely attention paid to evidence that the Reagan administration had quietly approved Israeli arms sales to Iran in 1981 and that those contacts went back to the days before Election 1980 when the hostage crisis destroyed Carter’s reelection hopes and ensured Reagan’s victory.
The 52 hostages were not released until Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.”
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This is absolutely the definition of Treason.
Think about this: there is an unbroken lineage of right-wing operatives that have manipulated events since World War 2-
*The secret Wall Street funding of the Nazi war machine
*The recruitment of Nazis into the U.S. intelligence agencies
*The Bay of Pigs failed attack on Cuba
*The Kennedy and King Assassinations.
*Watergate
*The October Surprise
*The Iran-Contra affair
*The 2000 Bush-Gore election coup
*The Iraq war and the lies that led us there
*The crash of the U.S. economy, bank failures and bailouts (2008)
What do all these things have in common?
The Bush family.
Much more later…
Yeah, I read about that. It’s events like this that makes me wonder how many times crooked politicians never got caught!