Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 46, Number 50, December 20, 2019

- Cover

- Masthead

- EDITORIAL Taking the Empire Down from the Top by Barbara Boyd

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 46, Number 50, December 20, 2019

- I. For a Patriotic Intelligence Service

- Creating an American Intelligence Academy: An Important Lesson from the Past by Dean Andromidas

- A NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ACADEMY How Can Intelligence Break the Fishbowl? by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (2004)

- II. For Cooperation with China

- SCHILLER INSTITUTE WEBCAST Pelosi’s Lies Expose Criminal Intent Behind Coup Plot Against Trump

- Zepp-LaRouche Interview on China-U.S. Relationship

- SWEDISH BELT AND ROAD SEMINAR A New Africa is Emerging with the Belt and Road

- III. For Physical Economy

- Indispensable National Banking by Robert Ingraham

- EDITORIAL Pelosi Confesses: The Issue in Impeachment is War or Peace by Robert Ingraham

Calling All Patriots

Founder: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922–2019)

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Co-Editors: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher, Robert Ingraham, Tony Papert

Managing Editor: Stephanie Ezrol

Editorial Staff: David Cherry, Charles Notley

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Asia: Michael Billington

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

Berlin: Rainer Apel

Copenhagen: Tom Gillesberg

Lima: Sara Madueño

Melbourne: Robert Barwick

Mexico City: Gerardo Castilleja Chávez

New Delhi: Ramtanu Maitra

Paris: Christine Bierre

Stockholm: Ulf Sandmark

United Nations, N.Y.C.: Richard Black, Leni Rubinstein

Washington, D.C.: William Jones

Wiesbaden: Göran Haglund

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EDITORIAL

Taking the Empire Down

from the Top

by Barbara Boyd

The following is based on Mrs. Boyd’s notes for her presentation on the LaRouche PAC Fireside Chat on December 12, 2019. She was joined on the program by William Binney, former technical director at the National Security Agency, and Larry C. Johnson, former analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. Both Binney and Johnson are members of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). The full discussion, lasting more than two hours, with a live question and answer session, is available here.

Dec. 12—Wednesday, December 11, saw a truly historic Senate hearing in which DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz answered questions about his report on gross misconduct by the FBI and DOJ (Department of Justice) in the international campaign to prevent the election of Donald Trump and then to remove him from the Presidency, a coup which has been ongoing in the United States since the November 2016 election.

Today, we have a Democratic Party in the House of Representatives continuing the coup with Articles of Impeachment, articles which, if accepted and voted up by the Senate, would turn our Constitutional republic into a British parliamentary system with the President becoming a figurehead, serving at the pleasure of the Senate, a President who can be removed over style or policy disputes. We would be formally controlled, as the British and European parliaments are controlled, by a financial oligarchy centered in the central banks and the City of London, a modern imperial entity administered by academics, technocrats, and professional mandarins, like all empires in history.

The tool for such control is—as in George Orwell’s novel, 1984, and in the former East Germany—mass surveillance, outright control of popular opinion, and the inducement of cult-like ignorance and political divides based essentially on identity politics. On August 23 of this year, Mark Carney, the darling central banker now for the British Empire, called for precisely this form of fascism to be implemented immediately here in the U.S. and worldwide, using the Green New Deal as the mechanism to achieve it, a call otherwise represented in person now by the presidential candidacy of billionaire Michael Bloomberg and the millions he will spend in attempting to buy the Presidency.

The Inspector General’s Report

Despite a massive media campaign of lies, both preceding the release of the Horowitz report and following its release—and Horowitz’s choice of language to describe his results—the report is a devastating revelation of a massive abuse of power by the Department of Justice and the FBI. If you haven’t yet, please go to the LaRouche PAC website and watch Lindsey Graham deliver his 40-minute opening remarks before Horowitz’s testimony, and watch the second set of video clips we posted of Senators John Cornyn, Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, and Chuck Grassley questioning Horowitz. Hopefully you will get a sense of the magnitude of all of this, which can only be described as an historic game-changer.

Horowitz found that the DOJ and FBI procured Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants on Carter Page by committing multiple frauds against the FISA Court and, most significantly, against the American public.

I am going to focus on the two main frauds found by Horowitz. The first is that the FBI knew that the Christopher Steele dossier—the MI6-crafted dirty dossier about Donald Trump, which was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, and which was almost the sole source from which all of the allegations originated about Trump being an agent of Putin and a traitor—was a complete fraud as of January of 2017. The FBI interviewed the guy who Christopher Steele said was his main source for this crap, a Russian, who gathered all the rest of the sourcing for the dirty dossier, and this guy told the FBI that Steele’s dossier consisted entirely of unverified barroom gossip, rumor, and bullshit.

The FBI wanted to spy on Trump’s campaign, so they needed a warrant to spy on one of the campaign volunteers. Bill Binney can tell you about how one FISA warrant can get you through the door to the entire campaign. The FBI chose Carter Page for the FISA warrant, after Christopher Steele had lied that Page was the gopher for Paul Manafort, in dealings between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign.

CC BY 3.0

Carter Page, a foreign policy advisor to the Trump Presidential Campaign in 2016.

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The Carter Page Problem

The only problem with this scheme was that Carter Page was not a pawn of the Russians, as Steele reported; he was actually an operational source for the CIA and was reporting his contacts with the Russians to the Agency. When the FBI, the Justice Department, and Christopher Steele all leaked Carter Page’s name to the media and accused him essentially of being a Russian spy, he said, wait a second, I am reporting my Russian contacts to both the FBI and the CIA. The CIA sent an email to the FBI saying, hey, this guy is an operational source of ours, and an FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, changed that email to say that Carter Page was not a CIA source, before giving it to the FISA court.

Now, obviously, Page being a CIA source, undermines the claim being made for the spy warrant, painting him as a Russian agent.

So, the FBI and Justice Department, based on the Horowitz report, can now definitively and provably be said to have known that as of January 2017, when they interviewed Christopher Steele’s main source for his dirty dossier, that there was no collusion between the Russians and Donald Trump, no matter how hard British intelligence, the Obama White House, and John Brennan’s CIA pushed that lie. End of story. There was nothing further to investigate, except, of course, how in hell all this began in the first place.

Yet, at the same time, in January 2017, the U.S. Intelligence Community issued its assessment that Russia intervened in the election to elect Donald Trump, and we now know that the completely bogus Steele dossier played a significant role in that assessment, despite numerous previous denials under oath by Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, claiming it did not. The very same Steele dossier was used by Comey in an attempt to entrap and blackmail the President in a briefing in January 2017, and then to smear him as compromised by Putin because of tapes Steele claimed Putin had of perverse sexual activities on the part of Trump. It was all fake, a huge and outrageous lie, for which there are few parallels in history and none involving our nation.

US Marshals/Shane T. McCoy

U.S. Attorney General William Barr.

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Attorney General William Barr commented on this in two interviews this week. He said the country has been turned inside out for three years, based, essentially, on information which all those involved knew was bullshit (although he used much gentler terms), assisted by a lying and complicit media. They knew at least in January 2017, if you accept the proposition that the FBI did not know from the beginning. Yet, they proceeded with the entire effort to set the President up on obstruction and other crimes, out of which came the brutal and ridiculous Mueller witch-hunt, and now the equally insane Ukrainegate impeachment proceedings. As Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Sean Hannity’s TV show last night, the door Horowitz opened will be gone through: “Rod Rosenstein, get ready to testify.”

Now, there is a whole lot more revealed by the Horowitz Report, mostly by what is not there. That is why Attorney General Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham are contesting Horowitz’s conclusions, and much of that goes to what Bill Binney, Larry Johnson and other members of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have proved. The premise of the Horowitz Report is acceptance of a big lie—the big lie that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters and John Podesta, and turned the results over to WikiLeaks. That is a provable lie and Bill Binney and his associates have proved it.

Christopher Steele

The Horowitz Report also fills out and confirms much of what we have published about Christopher Steele and the circles he runs in. We said from the beginning that if you followed the Steele thread in the coup against Trump, you would be opening doors to truly evil and international operations, and that trail would lead you to the heart of the enemy. This is the Sir Richard Dearlove intelligence circle in London. Christopher Steele is Dearlove’s protégé from MI6. This is the circle which sold the Iraq War to the George W. Bush administration.

Steele has a history of conducting information-warfare operations, black propaganda, which our intelligence agencies surely knew, even if the FBI claims it didn’t know. His bogus Trump reports followed services performed for the State Department’s Victoria Nuland, her boss, Secretary of State John Kerry, and the British government in fomenting the Nazi coup in Ukraine, where Vice President Joe Biden acted as a modern-day viceroy.

Steele’s business, Orbis Business Intelligence, is a fairly obvious intelligence front. Its clients are rival Russian oligarchs whom Steele assists in their various litigation wars against each other, wars premised on their parking their ill-gotten gains in the City of London. His play is to use the profiles and information he gathers from the oligarchs to undermine Putin. According to Horowitz’s report, Steele even tried to turn some of these oligarchs into FBI informants—a very interesting tale yet to be publicly told.

Steele was the handler for the person who was, at one time, the most famous anti-Putin oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, before he ended up dead, and the case agent in the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, which kicked off London’s current war drive against Russia. Pablo Miller, associated with Steele’s Orbis firm, was the handler for Sergei Skripal, the most recent victim of British intelligence hoaxes involving Russia. You might recall that Skripal was poisoned on March 4, 2018, in a hoax attributed to the Russians. Just prior to undertaking his assignment against Trump, Steele prepared bogus reports claiming that the Brexit vote was manipulated by the Russians and that the Russians were intervening in all elections in Europe.

Don’t take seriously the after-the-fact claims by British intelligence that they found Steele lacked judgment or was untrustworthy. Their operation was blowing up and has just been incinerated by the implications of the Horowitz Report. In fact, Christopher Steele himself has taken great issue with the FBI calling him an informant who violated FBI media protocols, because, he says, he made perfectly clear he was in the black propaganda business, and the FBI accepted a contract with his firm for that purpose. Horowitz confirms that that was the understanding. So, this is all really quite stunning. It is a trail, which if properly handled can expose most of the intelligence crimes of the past four decades.

The Forced Destruction of Our Republic

Bill Binney has painted the present situation internationally as a war between a defined enemy, which is fighting to preserve its empire, internationally, at all costs, and those who are breaking free from that empire and its oligarchical axioms about the nature of human beings. Since Franklin Roosevelt’s death, the United States has gradually corrupted and degraded itself in the direction of oligarchical rule: A smug elite sits at the top and dictates rules of behavior by both law and custom which result in large swaths of the population being treated as no better than human cattle.

The sharp turn for the worse began with the Kennedy and King assassinations and the Vietnam War, and really got rolling when Nixon finally killed the Bretton Woods system in 1971, opening the door to the twin evils of globalization and massive financial speculation under the rubric of free trade.

If you want some insight into what an oligarchy is, read Friedrich Schiller’s essay, “The Legislation of Lycurgus and Solon,” available from the Schiller Institute and oft-cited and fully developed by Lyndon LaRouche in his 2004 essay, “Toward A Second Treaty of Westphalia: The Coming Eurasian World.”

The most recent nodal points in this descent of our nation were the terror attacks of 9/11 and the Iraq War. Lyndon LaRouche cites the British services, and Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington as the intellectual authors of the modern permanent warfare regime, and of the unaccountable administrative-bureaucratic apparatus warring against the President, now. Bill Binney and Larry Johnson were shouting from the rooftops shortly after 9/11 about the surveillance state which was being implemented then and its consequences, consequences which we now see playing out in the attempted coup against a sitting President, and the intended wholesale transformation of the nature of our Constitutional Republic led by crazy Jacobins with little idea of what they are doing.

The Horowitz Report is a first step in changing all of that—really all of it. The surveillance state is now under widespread attack. The Guardians of the Empire, the news media and Hollywood’s degenerate glitterati culture, have lost credibility as the result of their campaign of lies against Trump. They have been desperate and reckless and now stand fully exposed as liars and crooks. Most important, we have a President who is willing to fight, and to disrupt.

In his book, Earth’s Next Fifty Years, Lyndon LaRouche wrote about the causes of and solutions to political crises:

Usually, unfortunately, the mistaken assumption has been made that the previous crisis was the result of the violation of some traditional set of values, when, in fact, it was caused by a failure to carry out a needed violation of that set of values. The false assumption is, therefore, that the solution exists within that set of assumptions which has generated the crisis in the first place.

This, at heart, is the deadly and popular malady which this President abrasively disrupts on behalf of those forgotten Americans our elites call “deplorables.” If we join him in that endeavor, with LaRouche’s bold view of the future, the coup can clearly now be stopped.

EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 46, Number 50, December 20, 2019

Cover This Week

White House/Shealah Craighead

President Donald Trump acknowledging the crowd on the flight line after disembarking Air Force One at the Louisville International Airport on August 21, 2019.

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CALLING ALL PATRIOTS

2 EDITORIAL

Taking the Empire Down from the Top

by Barbara Boyd

I. FOR A PATRIOTIC INTELLIGENCE SERVICE

7 Creating an American Intelligence Academy: An Important Lesson from the Past

by Dean Andromidas

24 A NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ACADEMY

How Can Intelligence Break the Fishbowl?

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

September 7, 2004

II. FOR COOPERATION WITH CHINA

39 SCHILLER INSTITUTE WEBCAST

Pelosi’s Lies Expose Criminal Intent Behind Coup Plot Against Trump

Featuring Helga Zepp-LaRouche

47 Zepp-LaRouche Interview on China-U.S. Relationship

50 SWEDISH BELT AND ROAD SEMINAR

A New Africa Is Emerging with the Belt and Road

III. FOR PHYSICAL ECONOMY

53 Indispensable National Banking

by Robert Ingraham

66 EDITORIAL

Pelosi Confesses: The Issue in Impeachment is War or Peace

by Robert Ingraham

NOTE: EIR will skip the issue which would be dated Friday, Dec. 27, 2019. Subscriptions will not be affected.

The Jan. 27, 1989 Jailing of Lyndon LaRouche

Defined an Era, Which Now Must End

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I. For a Patriotic Intelligence Service

Creating an American

Intelligence Academy:

An Important Lesson from the Past

by Dean Andromidas

Dec. 13, 2019—Lyndon H. LaRouche’s 2004 article, published under the title, “How Can Intelligence Serve an Un-Intelligible President?” calls for a reform of the American Intelligence Community, with the founding of an Intelligence Academy as its central focus. Any reform must follow the principles laid out, but ignored, in LaRouche’s proposal. In an effort to make that possible, an identification of past and successful reorganizations will aid in guiding reforms as well as the establishment of an Intelligence Academy called for by LaRouche.

This article will provide the background for motivating LaRouche’s proposal. It will tell the story of a very important office of the Central Intelligence Agency, one which neither planned the overthrow of governments nor the assassination of leaders. It neither carried out secret operations nor spied on Americans. There are few books and articles written about it, and there are no biographies of its principal leaders. None of its principal leaders wrote a tell-all memoir or was the subject of lurid fiction.

I refer to the Office of National Estimates (ONE), founded in 1951, which would come to perform the central and most important function of a then crippled Central Intelligence Agency. Overseen by a Board of Estimates (BOE), from 1951 until it was dismantled in 1973 under orders of James Schlesinger and Henry Kissinger, it sought to provide the American Presidency strategic intelligence estimates free from the prejudices of a policy establishment increasingly being taken over by a doctrine more suitable for the likes of the British Empire than our republic. Its creation was part of an effort by key patriotic individuals to block what had become a preventive (later called pre-emptive) war doctrine under President Truman.

The individuals involved include names all but forgotten in popular history: General Walter Bedell Smith, who served as Chief of Staff to General Dwight D. Eisenhower in World War II; William J. Donovan, founder of this country’s first strategic intelligence service, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS); and historians William Langer and Sherman Kent, who were the fathers of American strategic intelligence analysis; and others. All served in World War II and all possessed a high degree of professionalism and integrity.

Our story begins with the outbreak of the Korean War. Truman called it an intelligence failure, the failure to forecast an act of aggression by the Communist bloc; others, including many of the protagonists in this report, saw it as a failure of the policy of the Truman Administration. That policy began in 1946, only a few months after the close of World War II, when Truman invited Winston Churchill to Fulton, Missouri to deliver his infamous Iron Curtain speech calling for the control of nuclear weapons by the “English-speaking peoples” as the only defense against the Soviet Union. Churchill thus foreshadowed what would soon emerge as a call for preventive war against the Soviet Union, which was followed by a systematic march to a “Cold War,” that by June 1950 threatened to escalate into a devastating nuclear war.

When war on the Korean Peninsula broke out, our protagonists saw that if a catastrophic miscalculation were to be avoided, the nation would need a strategic intelligence capability, one which could not only forecast the intentions of the adversary, but evaluate the validity of the proposed policies drafted by policy makers whose capacities, if not intentions, were a danger to the country.

LoC

President Harry Truman and UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill arriving in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, where Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech.

White House

Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

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Truman’s Preventive War Doctrine

and the CIA

In August, 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, several years before the 1953 date forecast by the CIA. The hardliners in the Truman administrations, led by Paul Nitze, Dean Acheson (Secretary of State) and George Kennan as well as others, sought an “appropriate response.”

Shortly after the Soviet nuclear test, at the request of George Kennan, director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, the Defense Department’s Joint Intelligence Committee submitted an estimate of the nature of the nuclear threat at the point that the Soviets would have 10, 50, 100, and 200 nuclear bombs, taking as given that the Soviets could launch war once in possession of a deliverable stockpile of bombs.

That estimate, designated JIC-502, was not a truthful estimate, but an apocalyptic sales pitch for a massive military buildup that could easily be interpreted as preparation for pre-emptive war. It claimed that once the Soviets had 200 atomic bombs, they could launch a surprise attack and defeat the U.S.

It claimed that by mid-1951, the Soviet Union would have 50 atomic bombs, which could destroy the command and control establishment of the U.S. military as well as several cities. By 1952, the Soviet Union would have 100 atomic bombs, which would cause such damage that it would remove the U.S. capability to oppose the Soviet expansion of power in Europe and Asia, and by 1954, the “year of maximum danger,” the Soviet Union would have 200 bombs that could “delay indefinitely the industrial and military mobilization of the U.S., Canada, and the UK.”

The Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949.

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These assertions were made without any analysis of Soviet capabilities to actually deliver the weapons, let alone produce them at that rate. At the time, the only operational Soviet bomber was the Tupolev Tu-4, a copy of the U.S. World War II era B-29 bomber that dropped the A-bombs on Japan. The Tu-4 could by no means reach the U.S. Nor did the estimate even attempt to analyze Soviet strategic intentions.

JIC-502 claimed that a nuclear-armed Soviet Union had introduced the notion that “a tremendous military advantage would be gained by the power that struck first and succeeded in carrying through an effective surprise attack.” Thus victory was assured for the nation that struck first—justifying preventive first strike. The estimate asserted that the Soviets required only enough bombs to destroy specific targets that would prevent the U.S. from striking back.

While the estimate was fully accepted by the Army, Air Force and State Department, as well as the National Security Council, it was totally rejected by the Navy, which had no problem seeing through the sophistry of its reasoning.

In February 1950, the CIA’s Office of Research and Estimates drafted a rebuttal of the apocalyptic JIC-502, with its “Estimate of the effects of the Soviet possession of the atomic bomb upon the security of the United States and upon the probabilities of direct Soviet military action.” Dubbed ORE 91-49, the CIA’s rebuttal warned:

It is always possible, therefore, that the U.S.S.R. would initiate a war if it should estimate that a Western attack was impending. [Nonetheless,] It is not yet possible to estimate with any precision the effects of Soviet possession of the Atomic Bomb upon the probability of war. The implications of atomic warfare, either military or psychological, have not yet been fully appraised. In particular, we have as yet no clear indications concerning the place of atomic warfare in Soviet military concepts or concerning the effect of U.S. retaliatory capabilities upon any Soviet consideration of a deliberate and unprovoked atomic attack on the U.S.

The State Department, Army and Air Force totally rejected the CIA’s rebuttal. The Air Force called the estimate “dangerous as an intelligence basis for national policy,” and charged that it failed to—

recognize that we are at war right now, and that an all-out national effort designed to maintain permanent military and political superiority over the Soviet Union is required.

Rejecting the CIA estimate, the Truman administration proceeded to draft its “appropriate response” in what became a National Security Council policy paper, designated NSC-68. Declaring that the United States was already in the moral equivalent of war with the Soviet Union, it called for a massive military buildup, both conventional and nuclear, not seen since World War II, to be completed by 1954, dubbed the “year of maximum danger,” when JIC-502 claimed the Soviets would achieve military superiority and be able to launch war against the U.S. It went on to assert that a policy of mere defense was not sufficient, but—

must envisage the political and economic measures with which the military shield behind which the free world can work to frustrate the Kremlin design by the strategy of the cold war. . . . The whole success of the proposed program hangs ultimately on recognition by this Government, the American people, and all free peoples, that the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake. . . .

This proposed military buildup would increase the defense budget from 10 billion to 40 billion dollars. In 1953, it was planned to further increase military spending to 65 billion, but was cut back to 40 billion by the incoming Eisenhower administration.

While NSC-68 was being drafted, another NSC policy paper was also being drafted that would in effect integrate the implementation of NSC-68 with the British Empire. Titled “A Report to the National Security Council by the Executive Secretary on British Military Commitments” (NSC-75) and completed on July 10, 1950, it was an audit of the British Empire’s military capability.

Requested after the Soviet A-bomb test and drafted with the involvement of Paul Nitze, the report revealed that the British had more than 700,000 men under arms and deployed throughout the empire. The report concluded that if the Empire collapsed, and Britain could no longer carry out these deployments, it would be impossible for the U.S. to fill the vacuum while carrying out current U.S. policy, especially NSC-68. It concluded that it would be more cost effective to aid Britain in saving its Empire!

Competent military commanders, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower and General Douglas MacArthur, understood that deterrence does not require absolute military superiority, especially in the age of nuclear warfare; it requires military capabilities that clearly demonstrate the futility of military aggression by any potential enemy.

Moreover, they knew the impossibility of carrying out a nuclear war. As President, Eisenhower often said, “The only thing worse than losing a nuclear war is winning a nuclear war.” Eisenhower understood the necessity for military doctrine to be complemented by a policy where statecraft, armed with the tools of diplomacy, could reach out to a potential enemy, seeking agreements that put into motion policies and processes that serve to eliminate the potential causes for war. To do otherwise merely reinforces your potential enemy’s determination to counter force with force.

Upon becoming President, Eisenhower was determined to end the fatuous reasoning of the hardliners and to implement a new defense policy with his so-called “New Look,” based on classical deterrent doctrine and technological attrition. Eisenhower saw the idea of a “year of maximum danger” as “pure rot”:

I have always fought the idea of x units by y date. I am not going to be stampeded by someone coming along with some trick formula of “so much by this date.” I’m damn tired of the Air Force sales programs. I will not have anyone in Defense who wants to sell the idea of a larger and larger force. . . .

Vice Admiral Arthur Struble, General Douglas MacArthur, and Major General Oliver P. Smith (l. to r.) inspect port facilities during the invasion of Inchon in the Korean War on Sept. 15, 1950.

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Korean War

On June 35, 1950, the North Korean army launched its attack across the 38th Parallel. The Truman administration immediately claimed it was a move by the Soviet Union to launch a global war, labeling it a sneak attack and a new Pearl Harbor. Led by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in a meeting with the President and his security chiefs, there was a call for immediate U.S. military response. A conveniently forgotten point in that meeting was the fact that the year before, Acheson himself had ordered the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea and had put the Korean Peninsula outside the U.S. strategic perimeter.

By contrast, the invasion was no surprise to General Douglas MacArthur, whose own assessment from as early as 1945 was that the removal of U.S. troops would lead to an invasion. For MacArthur, the entire region of China and the Koreas had been completely militarized as a result of the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, and the Chinese civil war that came an end in 1949. In such an environment, the impetus for “military solutions” was there.

The invasion was also no surprise to the CIA. On February 28, 1949 the CIA’s Office of Research and Estimates produced the estimate, ORE3-49, “Consequences of U.S. Troop Withdrawal from Korea in Spring 1949,” which stated in its summary:

Withdrawal of U.S. Forces from Korea in the spring of 1949 would probably in time be followed by an invasion, timed to coincide with Communist-led South Korean revolts by the North Korea’s People’s Army, possibly assisted by small battle trained units from Communist Manchuria. . . . U.S. troop withdrawal would probably result in a collapse of the U.S.-supported Republic of Korea, an event which would seriously diminish U.S. prestige and adversely affect U.S. security interest in the Far East.

The Korean War should be understood within the context of the Truman administration’s preventive war doctrine and the decision to launch a huge military buildup, as explicitly stated in the Paul Nitze-authored NSC-68. This was a reckless, provocative policy that the Soviet Union viewed as an intention to launch preemptive war.

As the war proceeded, a catastrophe was in the making. On January 11, 1951, the National Security Council passed NSC-100, “Recommended Policies and Actions in Light of the Grave World Situation.” Classified as Top Secret, it was drafted by the NSC’s National Security Resources Board, under the direction of its chairman Stuart Symington. NSC-100 called for nothing less than World War III. The document states:

On the political front, the free nations are on the defensive everywhere. This is primarily because during an era in which the naked power of aggression heeds only naked power, the free nations do not in political discussion bring up their prime power advantage, the atomic bomb and the capacity to deliver it. That advantage now gives possible superiority of power to the free world, but it is a power which every week from here on will steadily decline.

NSC-100 called for a declaration of China as the military aggressor and then called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Korea. This would be followed by a massive air campaign against China’s lines of communications and its munitions industry. Among it aims was to “Establish a United States position of strength in the Far East, thus obtaining an active strategic base against Russia in the event of war with the Soviets.” If the UN would not approve such action, the “United States should proceed unilaterally.” It went on:

On the political front, the United States could make its greatest contribution to the defense of Western Europe and other areas of interest to the free nations by announcing, preferably through NATO, that any further Soviet aggression in areas to be spelled out, would result in the atomic bombardment of Soviet Russia itself.

Among the goals was to:

Establish the moral justification for use of United States’ atom bombs in retaliation against Soviet aggression. . . . And thus afford the United States a measure of freedom it does not now have to use the atom bomb under circumstances other than retaliation out of what devastation might be left of this country after an initial atomic attack.

Truman referred this call for World War III to the Departments of State and Defense for consideration. Fortunately this policy was never fully carried out. This might have had to do with the development that I will now discuss.

A New CIA Is Created

Within days of the end of World War II, President Truman infamously ordered the complete shutdown of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), calling it a potential Gestapo—a potential secret police. This left the United States without a national intelligence service. Yet, less than a year later, Truman issued executive orders to create a Central Intelligence Group, which in 1947 was superseded by the Central Intelligence Agency under the 1947 National Security Act. Under this Act, the Director of the CIA served as the President’s chief intelligence authority with the title, Director of Intelligence, and sat as Chairman of the Intelligence Advisory Board, comprising the intelligence directors of the Army, Navy, Air Force and State Department.

Following a short directorship under Lt. General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, the directorship fell to Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter. Unable to attain a high level of authority, Hillenkoetter was unable to bring the CIA’s far more truthful estimates to bear on White House policy.

Before the Korean War broke out, a report calling for the reorganization of the CIA—the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report—was issued. The primary authors were OSS veteran Allen Dulles, who had returned to practicing law at that time; Mathias F. Correa, another veteran of the OSS and a member of the staff of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal; and William Harding Jackson, a New York lawyer and investment banker with J.C. Whitney, who had served in military intelligence and the OSS during World War II.

The report called for a strong CIA director. In June 1950, after the outbreak of the war, General Walter Bedell Smith accepted the appointment under an order by Truman. Why Truman made such an astute decision is one of the great paradoxes often seen in history. With the U.S. engaged in a ground war in Asia, Bedell Smith saw the necessity for the CIA to be capable of providing the president with truthful intelligence, while countering insane policy initiatives, like the above-mentioned NSC-100.

Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith.

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Who was Walter Bedell Smith?

Bedell Smith served as Eisenhower’s chief of staff for the Allied General Staff in Europe during World War II. A World War I veteran, he was arguably the most accomplished staff officer in the history of the American Army. His views of the Russians and his strategic outlook paralleled those of Eisenhower. He strongly disagreed with Churchill’s 1946 Iron Curtain Speech and strongly opposed a preventive war doctrine.

Smith had fought in World War I and seen how the British and French could not and would not end it, and when the war did end, how they laid the basis for a new war. He was among those officers,—which included Douglas MacArthur, George C. Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower—who were committed to building an army that would ensure an early victory, in order to create the basis for a lasting peace.

Committed as they were to building a war-winning military and industrial capability, these individuals understood, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did, that the threat to peace came not only from Nazism and fascism but from the 19th century methods of the British, French and other imperial powers. They agreed with FDR’s intention to build a war-time alliance with the Soviet Union, one that hopefully would create the necessary trust to continue after the victory, to carry out the work of dismantling the European empires.

In 1941, Bedell Smith held the important position of Secretary of the General Staff, making him the executive officer of Chief of Staff George Marshall, and in 1942 he became the Secretary to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. In this capacity he took part in war planning at the highest level, and in this capacity he often briefed Roosevelt directly on strategic matters.

British General Sir Kenneth Strong, who served under General Eisenhower and Bedell Smith in the Allied and then the Supreme Command headquarters in World War II, was a close admirer as well as friend to both Eisenhower and Bedell Smith. At the close of the War in Europe, Strong recalled:

I had come to regard myself as one of Bedell Smith’s closest friends, but toward the end of the war he made a kind of solemn declaration to me. We had, he said, been close personal and official friends, but after 14 July, things would have to change. Though he would always remain my personal friend, I should bear in mind that the United States regarded Russia as the country of the Future and his official co-operation would be with them. Britain was old-fashioned and out of date. The war had finished her, and the Americans must ally themselves with the nations of the future. I was a little surprised to hear this from Bedell Smith, but I am afraid that he was only repeating what many Americans were thinking at the time.

Roosevelt’s death brought a much smaller man into the presidency, and over the next four years Bedell Smith, like many Americans, saw that trust between America and the Soviet Union disappear, and saw the relationship turning into a very dangerous rivalry that could ignite a far more catastrophic war.

Faced with an intellectually and morally challenged President, one increasingly captured by a security team pursuing a provocative policy toward the Soviet Union, Bedell Smith, as the President’s chief intelligence adviser, saw his most powerful weapon as the truth—that is, truthful and compelling strategic intelligence that would counter adventurous policies as represented by the NSC-68 and NSC-100 mentioned above.

Bedell Smith’s Solution Paralleled LaRouche

Bedell Smith’s solution for re-orienting the CIA shared two fundamental characteristics later defined in LaRouche’s “How Can Intelligence Serve an Un-Intelligible President?” These fundamental features are the following:

1. The institution would be independent of the politically controlled policy establishment while possessing a high degree of patriotism and integrity. LaRouche defined its mission:

We require an institution which has no principal mission but the discovery of the truth about the current and prospective future developments affecting the security of the U.S.A. in the performance of its continuing mission, from administration to administration. It must, first of all, provide forewarning, and otherwise advise the instruments of the Federal government, respecting the developing shape of world history. . . .

2. The institution would also have to overcome what LaRouche identified as a fallacy of composition. As LaRouche wrote:

Competent intelligence practice at the higher level of national estimates and policy formation, must not degrade itself to mere Sherlock Holmes-like farce of interpreting facts in an empiricist’s way. We must always focus upon the sets of variously real and merely fictitious notions of controlling principles, which define a kind of physical geometry, a physical geometry, false or true, but nonetheless believed, which controls human mass behavior to the effect of defining the likely, characteristic form of action governing responses within that social system, either within, or among nations.

It is decisions, on estimates and proposed policies of practice, made at that indicated higher level of intelligence functions, which must subsume decisions on interpretation of developments, such as the case of 9/11, and proposed strategic and comparable actions. This requires a cadre of professional intelligence specialists who operate competently at that level of overview of the processes considered. . . .

These conceptions define an intelligence methodology that represents a “species difference” from that of the British. The British like to think they are the great masters of the “craft of intelligence.” Nothing could be further from the truth. While General William Donovan welcomed British assistance in certain technicalities of the so-called craft of intelligence, he understood that “species difference” in terms similar to those stated by LaRouche.

The British system is the ultimate “fishbowl.” Its principles are oligarchical. It is in fact a monarchy that rests on a Venetian-like system of oligarchical vested interests that dominate subject nations in a far-flung empire. This domination extends to the vast majority of its own “subjects” in a strictly “class” social system. Warfare takes the form of “cabinet warfare,” since the vested interests of the opposing oligarchy cannot not be completely ignored, lest a republican political revolution be unleashed. The role of “leadership” is strictly confined to that which serves the interests of this Venetian-like system. Since it is a system of vested interests and not one of overarching principle, as it should be in a true republic, in such a system, “decisions by committee,” where compromises are reached among vested interests, are the order of the day.

These vested interests determine the role for British intelligence in their policy of “balance of power” or “geopolitics.” Such a system may serve the interest of the East India Company, or the City of London, but such a system, when modern warfare is employed, has proved to be disastrous, as witnessed in Britain’s performance in two World Wars.

The British managed and still manage their intelligence organization on the basis of this “committee” approach. They love to tout their “Joint Intelligence Committee” as the supreme pinnacle of their self-proclaimed brilliant intelligence system, where all the individual intelligence services are represented, supposedly allowing them to come up with the best intelligence “assessment” or “appreciation” as they call it.

In his report on the British intelligence services in 1945, William Jackson wrote, in a letter to Donovan:

[A Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC)] appreciation is important, then, because it expresses an agreed view of the most responsible intelligence experts based on all available information. Against this obvious advantage, there may be a lesser disadvantage. . . . The result sometimes appears to be a compromise which represents no one’s view, least of all that of the intelligence agency which should know most about the subject. . . .

Totally rejecting this committee approach, both Donovan and Bedell Smith understood the crucial role of individual leadership. Smith had no stomach whatsoever for “joint committees” as were always being proposed by the British. This was a view strongly shared by Donovan himself and was a cardinal principle held by Eisenhower, because it was the basic leadership principle of U.S. military doctrine. Furthermore, the very idea of a joint committee actually taking responsibility for any decision was anathema, because when everyone takes responsibility, in reality, no one takes responsibility.

U.S. Army

British Brigadier General Sir Kenneth Strong.

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When Eisenhower’s intelligence G2, the British Brigadier Kenneth Strong, inquired whether Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, General Bedell Smith, would like to hear the views of the local Joint Intelligence Committee, Smith snapped back, “We’ve hired you for your knowledge and advice. If you are wrong too often, we’ll fire you and hire someone else to take your place.” From that moment, Strong reportedly forgot his British upbringing and took full responsibility for the estimates he presented to Smith and Eisenhower.

Militarily, this leadership principle is embodied in the conception of a General Staff, which must never be merely an efficient bureaucracy to carry out functional tasks, but a system whereby the creativity of leadership is exercised at all levels. Where there is leadership there is both responsibility and authority. The qualities of leadership are not confined to the commander, although he holds ultimate authority and responsibility, but must be exercised at all levels. It is in that context that Bedell Smith saw the mission of the intelligence officer.

In an address at the Army War College, on February 19, 1952, Rear Admiral Felix L. Johnson, Director of Naval Intelligence, described Bedell Smith’s personal view of the intelligence officer by quoting by Smith himself from 1951, where Smith posits the notion of the “inspired class”:

You can never really become an Intelligence Officer of the inspired class unless you happen to be born with that delicate touch which produces a reasonable and measurable evaluation without full knowledge of all the facts . . . but there are characteristics which you can develop even if they do not come as part of your standard equipment at birth. The first is an attitude of constant suspicion—an unwillingness to take anything for granted; the second is a form of scientific mindedness—the ability to approach all things with a sense of analytical inquiry; and finally, perhaps more important than anything else, a restraint which enables one to remain silent.

Bedell Smith Calls Donovan

Bedell Smith’s first move on becoming Director of Central Intelligence was to contact General William Donovan. Their relationship went back to World War I, when Donovan served under MacArthur in the famous Rainbow Division, as battalion commander.

Prior to U.S. entry into World War II, Donovan had succeeded in creating the civilian Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), as an organization independent of all other departments, whose mission was to provide intelligence directly to the President. In developing the COI, Donovan “invented” what is known as “All Source Intelligence,” drawn from all the departments of government—not only the Army, Navy, State Department and FBI, but also other departments such as Commerce, Agriculture and especially the Library of Congress. The idea was to create a unique intelligence product, drawing on all of these sources, that would serve the requirements of the Presidency.

With the U.S. entry into the war, Donovan proposed to transform the COI into the OSS, with a broader mandate to conduct special operations. In the face of opposition by all government departments, Bedell Smith, then serving as Secretary to the Army General Staff, and later of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, intervened with the idea of attaching the OSS directly to the General Staff. Donovan fully agreed with the proposal.

William J. Donovan

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In 1943, during the Italian campaign, while Smith was Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff in the Supreme Allied Command in Europe, he asked Donovan to draft a proposal for a post-war centralized and professional intelligence service. Donovan responded in a long letter under the title, “The Need in the United States on a Permanent Basis as an Integral Part of our Military Establishment of a Long-Range Strategic Intelligence Organization with attendant ‘Subversion’ and ‘Deception of the Enemy’ Functions.”

While accepting the structure of the CIA as defined by the National Security Act of 1947, Smith—in cooperation with Donovan—worked to re-orient the CIA to create a truth-seeking organization and not a “fishbowl.” The mission of the CIA, for Smith, was the creation of what are called “estimates,” i.e., Strategic Intelligence Estimates that expand to the level of entire nations the military estimate a commander makes of the enemy he is facing. The commander takes into account the strength, disposition, morale, and all related intelligence available to him through his General Staff and makes a determination of what he believes are the intentions of the enemy. It has to be both truthful and precise, while looking into the future.

The Strategic Estimate goes one step further than the evaluations of field commanders, in that it is an estimate of the intentions and capabilities of an entire nation or group of nations. It must take into account not only that nation’s political leadership, but its economic, scientific, and social conditions.

For Bedell Smith, the production of these estimates was the principal mission of the CIA. All of its intelligence-gathering capabilities, including the clandestine services, were to be focused on the production of these estimates, which would be presented to the President.

Bedell Smith’s mandate as CIA Director not only designated him as director of the CIA itself, but as Chairman of the Intelligence Advisory Committee (IAC), which included the directors of military intelligence (Army, Navy and Air Force), State Department, and the FBI. Unlike the British Joint Intelligence Committee, the CIA Director, as Director of Intelligence for the President, had the final responsibility in the decisions of this board. The drafting of the estimates was the responsibility of the CIA, done in cooperation with other agencies and departments, which made their contributions. The IAC, in a sense, oversaw that process.

He also worked to ensure that the CIA was an institution of the Presidency, not of any single administration, and that it maintained a strict separation from the making of policy, the latter being the responsibility of the National Security Council.

His second challenge was to create an institution that could overcome the fishbowl problem inherent in the drafting of intelligence product. He overcame this problem with the crucial advice of William Donovan. At Smith’s request, on October 13, 1950, Donovan drafted a proposal on how such a board should be organized. Donovan wrote:

[An] Evaluation Group, [composed of] men of experience and imagination and constructive intellects [was required. Such a group might] include a scholar, a strategist familiar with the uses and capabilities of the different services, a scientist with knowledge and experience in current inventions, and two to three broad-gauged men of affairs. A working committee familiar with the skills of research and analysis could collate the information for submission to the Board itself. Final evaluation should be the responsibility of the Board. To impose that duty on the analysts is like a cashier being his own auditor.

Such a board would be similar to the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS. Donovan asserted:

[It] should be the intellectual base of the organization. Such a concept, together with the putting under one tent the various essential functions of Secret Intelligence and Operations, placed intelligence on a different plane. . . . [Staffing of this new Branch would involve] certain outstanding older and representative economists, scientists and linguistic and other specialists on a consultative basis, [while the] day to day working echelon could well be organized and run by the younger groups in the 40-year bracket. The interplay of the older with the fresher minds should help you a lot in your day to day operations as well as in your evaluation and other studies.

Bedell Smith took Donovan’s fundamental idea and proceeded to re-orient the entire CIA. He transformed what was then the CIA’s Office of Estimates and Analysis into the Office of National Estimates (ONE), to be overseen by an “evaluation group” dubbed the Board of Estimates. While Estimates would be formulated by a team of ONE staffers that would often include experts, including Army, Navy or Air Force intelligence officers, and representatives from the Departments of State and Defense, the work was overseen and evaluated by the BOE. The ONE and its Board of Estimates would become the pinnacle of the CIA structure.

Smith sought potential candidates for this new branch from those who had been thrown out of the intelligence community when Truman disbanded the OSS. He especially brought back many people who had served in the OSS’s original Research and Analysis Branch. First among those contacted was William Langer, an expert in diplomatic history and Chairman of the History Department at Harvard University, who had headed the R&A branch in OSS and who had returned to Harvard after the war. Langer agreed to head ONE for a year.

Another veteran of the R&A branch contacted was Sherman Kent, who was a professor of history at Yale. Kent was an expert in 19th century French history and, at Langer’s departure, would head up the BOE until his retirement in 1967. Kent would play a crucial role as head of ONE and the BOE as we will see below.

As competent historians, Langer and Kent applied their theoretical expertise, bringing an understanding of the relationship between the past, present, and future to the task of intelligence analysis and estimating. Many more historians would join their team.

The choice of other board members closely reflected Donovan’s advice. The group grew to include Maxwell Forster, a Boston lawyer who was known for his linguistic skills and had served on the General Staff under Bedell Smith during World War II; two OSS veterans; Raymond Sontag, a diplomatic historian; Calvin P. Hoover, a professor of economics; Deforest Van Slyck, and Ludwell Montague, two trained historians who had served in military intelligence during World War II and had joined the CIA at its formation; Vice Admiral Bernhard H. Bieri, Sr.; and General Clarence R. Huebner.

The Board of Estimates had at most 26 members and a staff of about 40. The staff was organized according to regional and sectional specializations, while the members of the board were all “generalists,” an arrangement designed to counter the fishbowl syndrome.

The heavy hand of McCarthyism was not welcome. Commenting on the issue of the agency’s security screening, Sherman Kent said, “When an intelligence staff has been screened through [too fine a mesh], its members will be as alike as tiles on a bathroom floor—and about as capable of meaningful and original thought.”

Sherman Kent’s Key Role in Shaping ONE

We know little about Sherman Kent, because, unlike former CIA director Allen Dulles, and James Angleton, the longtime head of the CIA’s counterintelligence, Kent never gave interviews to the press. Even after retirement, he maintained a discretion far stronger than many of those who claimed to have served in the most secret parts of the CIA.

Yet, Sherman Kent played a seminal role in developing not only ONE and the BOE, but also in the profession of “intelligence analyst,” a vocation that hardly existed at the time. We are not talking about the “intelligence agent,” or “spook,” which the layman equates with the CIA, or the “James Bond” fantasy figure popularized by Ian Fleming, himself a member of British intelligence.

While Kent had wanted to stay in intelligence after World War II, the dismantling of the OSS led to the dismissal of many in the OSS R&A branch staff and the transfer of the rest to the State Department, which eventually sent the personnel to various branches of the government. Kent and many others soon left government service. He then spent a year writing his landmark book, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, the first study to define the meaning, collection, and evaluation of Strategic Intelligence.

Left:William L. Langer; right: Sherman Kent

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Kent was adamant about the need for the separation of intelligence and policy within government. In his book, he warned that an intelligence analysis once “captured” by the policy makers will end up “swinging behind the ‘policy’ of the operating unit” and thus “prostituting itself in the production of what the Nazis would call Kämpfende Wissenschaft.” The latter can be translated as “combat science” and was coined by Nazi historian Walter Frank, who rewrote history to suit Nazi policy. Frank was infamous for writing “histories” to justify the extermination of the Jews. He committed suicide in 1945 just before the allies could arrest him. For Kent, those in the CIA who crossed that line were “seeking power through sacrificing the truth.” These are strong words reflecting strong convictions and a high degree of integrity.

Kent was also a key intellectual force. He founded Studies in Intelligence, the official internal journal of the CIA. The purpose of that publication, in his mind, was not to write about topical issues such as the order of battle of the Soviet Army, but to write about what he saw as the new discipline of Intelligence Analysis. He also wanted to create an Intelligence Academy, not entirely unlike what Lyndon LaRouche later proposed. But such an academy, as he conceived it, was never formed, nor did his Studies in Intelligence fully live up to Kent’s intentions.

For Kent, an Estimate was not produced to flatter the presidential administration’s policy. He warned that the role of the intelligence officer is to maintain a rigorous, “disinterested objectivity.” He cautioned:

[T]o wish simply for influence can, and upon occasion does, get intelligence to the place where it can have no influence, whatever. By striving too hard in this direction intelligence may come to seem just another policy voice, and an unwanted one at that.

Kent also warned the policy maker:

Let things be such that if our policy-making master is to disregard our knowledge and wisdom, he will never do so because our work was inaccurate, incomplete, or patently biased. Let him disregard us only when he must pay greater heed to someone else. And let him be uncomfortable—thoroughly uncomfortable—about his decision to heed this other. And if the policymakers ignored the considered judgments of their intelligence arm, in favor of their own “intuition,” they would be turning their back on the two instruments by which Western man has since Aristotle steadily enlarged his horizon of Knowledge—the instruments of reason and the scientific method.

It goes without saying that the intelligence officer had to demonstrate a high degree of rigor as well as integrity, with a commitment to the national interest. However, the Estimate or other serious intelligence product, which often must analyze fast-moving strategic and complex developments, could never be the work of a single analyst, although a single analyst often is responsible for a “breakthrough.” It also has to be the work of a process of deliberation, a view often cited by LaRouche in dealing with his own intelligence staff.

Kent was very aware of this need for deliberation—but deliberation which would always struggle to maintain “disinterested objectivity,” and require intelligence officers to be constantly self-conscious of their mental processes to a very high degree. He encouraged the testing of hypothesis, and he was especially on guard against groupthink, when an entire group of analysts immediately come to an interpretation or forecast of events. Working assumptions, for Kent, were always to be vigorously challenged to determine their validity.

As the head of the BOE, his specific task was to ensure the necessary “disinterested objectivity” and the analytical rigor that would hopefully ensure a high degree of truthfulness. BOE member Ludwell Montague described their task as not “administrative” but “wholly substantive,” explaining:

Their days were spent in individual and more often collective efforts on every aspect of the estimates. They met first thing in the morning to hear the day’s news and perhaps discuss it in terms of NIEs [National Intelligence Estimates] in the works to come; they met again often with the ONE staff, often with representatives of the IAC [Intelligence Advisory Committee] agencies to talk about the schedule, to produce terms of reference, to review drafts, and to arrive at duly coordinated texts suitable to present to the Director and the IAC. They invited and listened to ambassadors, officers of the foreign aid program, attachés, members of the numerous military assistance groups (MAG, later MAAG), CIA officers in from the field, and many others. Above all they studied the new intelligence. Each day their reading room received a wide spectrum of the daily take which ranged from routine items like the FBIS [Foreign Broadcast Information Service] reports, [and] CIA, attaché, and State Department cables, to the most sensitive materials that lay in the arcane code word areas on the far side of Top Secret. This was the daily grist for thought and discussion.

Indeed, almost as much as the labor on the draft estimates, the reading of the highly privileged news made its contribution to the collegial nature of the Board. And it was this very group effort that so often resulted in the posing of the right questions and the struggling for the best answers. As one Board member has pointed out, the collegial spirit also made its contribution to a finished product of high quality. There were always, he remarks, one or two colleagues who had not been so immersed in a paper as to be bored with it and willing to let it go forward irrespective of flaws. Seemingly there was almost always one of these fresh brethren who stepped in as a potent “no” man.

This article cannot detail the numerous estimates ONE delivered and their effect on policy; nonetheless many were clearly at odds with those produced by the cold warriors. While they would accept that the Soviet Union, as a communist state, desired to convert the entire world to communism, they knew the leaders of the U.S.S.R. realized that world domination would not come within their lifetime. More importantly, these estimates made clear that the Soviet Union was not considering launching war for world domination.

The ONE estimating on the Soviet Union is described by Harold P. Ford, a former Chairman of the Board of Estimates:

Not least, the estimative batting average of NIEs proved fairly good on a number of key issues. These included: The basic character of the U.S.S.R. and its likely conduct in the world. Here the service that the NIEs performed was to narrow the field of estimative debate and raise the quality of inquiry. In time, the prevailing view of the Intelligence Community came to be that Moscow did intend to expand its influence everywhere it could on every opportunity, skillfully exerting such pressures as the traffic would bear in each instance, but that in so doing the U.S.S.R. would exercise care to avoid what it believed to be serious risks of provoking general war or of permitting local crises to escalate too far. Here the significance for U.S. intelligence became just what risks the Soviet Union was likely to run in each particular instance; the significance for U.S. policy making: keep your guard up and your powder dry, but the sky is not about to fall. Through a sometimes maze of wishful thinking on the one hand and “worst case” over-insuring on the other, and in a setting of intense fears of domestic Communism here at home, the NIEs brought American policymakers a concerned and alert but sane, and what proved to be generally accurate picture of what to expect in the way of Soviet world behavior.

Bedell Smith’s reorganization immensely improved the estimative process, and its impact on Truman did, without doubt, help temper the most extreme policy initiatives of the likes of Paul Nitze, Dean Acheson, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Omar Bradley, and others. Still, the Korean War dragged on—serving in effect as a cover for the continuing, massive military buildup.

It required the election of Dwight Eisenhower, who came to office in January 1953, on a commitment to end the war, to roll back the military buildup and bring it within the bounds of deterrence, not preemptive war. Above all, Eisenhower sought a policy of “constructive engagement” with the Soviet Union and announced his intention to hold a summit conference with Josef Stalin, which only failed due to the latter’s death in March 1953.

Through his National Security Council, Eisenhower worked closely with CIA’s estimative machinery, not only to identify potential dangers facing the country, but as a review of the effectiveness of the administration’s policy initiatives.

White House

President John Kennedy speaking with John McCone at his swearing-in ceremony as CIA Director on Nov. 29, 1961.

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Assassination of Kennedy and the

Attack on ONE/BOE

When John Kennedy came into the White House in 1961, many of the most problematic security advisers re-entered the presidential administration, including Paul Nitze, Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow, and Robert McNamara—some of whom were determined to replace Eisenhower’s deterrence and engagement policy with so-called “flexible response,” which was as dangerous as Truman’s “preventive war” doctrine. This was a policy Kennedy would more and more distance himself from, opting instead for his own policy of engagement and deterrence.

When Kennedy replaced Allen Dulles as CIA Director with John McCone, a close friend of Eisenhower whom McCone had served as head of the Atomic Energy Agency, Kennedy found a strong ally. McCone was an extremely able administrator, was well respected by Sherman Kent and others in the CIA, and is still considered second only to Bedell Smith in terms of his leadership of the organization. Moreover, McCone served as a liaison between Kennedy and Eisenhower. In fact, McCone met with Eisenhower, who was then living in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, every four to six weeks, after which he would brief President Kennedy.

For his Indochina policy, Kennedy found a strong ally in the CIA estimative machinery. In 1963, Kennedy had begun to shift his Indochina policy, under the advice of MacArthur and Eisenhower, both of whom cautioned against American involvement in a war in Asia that the Asians themselves were not willing to fight. This was a view strongly held by the Board of Estimates, not simply by conviction, but by a truthful analysis that clearly demonstrated that the Saigon government was unable to mobilize the necessary popular support to carry out a war against the Viet Cong.

When Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson reversed Kennedy’s Vietnam policy, the ONE began to be targeted for destruction. ONE’s opposition to escalating the war was well known, and it delivered estimates that demonstrated that the interventionist policy would fail. Unable to convince the Johnson administration of the danger of military intervention in Indochina, McCone resigned in 1965.

Harold P. Ford summarized that BOE/ONE view of Indochina:

With some exceptions, ONE and the NIEs made a remarkably good record over the years in accurately estimating the outlook in Indochina. This record is all the more notable because much of the time the message which the NIEs presented was not congenial to policy making consumers—who not only usually took a much more optimistic view of prospects, but at times put pressure on intelligence officers to shape up and get on the team. The admirable batting average of the ONE and the NIEs has been widely acknowledged. Two such examples:

(1) General Bruce Palmer, Jr., formerly General Westmoreland’s MACV [U.S. Military Assistance Command in Vietnam] Deputy in Vietnam and later Army Vice Chief of Staff:

“On balance the Agency [CIA] did a good job in assessing the situation in Southeast Asia. Its overall intelligence judgments were generally sound, and its estimates were mostly on the mark. . . . Our Vietnam experience should tell us that when the views of the Central Intelligence Agency—the preeminent national intelligence organization—are not given adequate consideration in the policy counsels of the government, flawed policy judgments are more likely to result and the chances of policy failure are raised accordingly.”

(2) The Pentagon Papers: “. . . [T]he American intelligence community repeatedly provided the policymakers with what proved to be accurate warnings that desired goals were either unattainable or likely to provoke costly reactions from the enemy.”

On the other hand, there were others at CIA who were willing to get involved in what became fruitless counter-insurgency operations.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Henry Kissinger

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The wholesale attack to eliminate ONE was launched under President Richard Nixon, by James Schlesinger, Henry Kissinger, and Andrew Marshall.

When Nixon dumped Richard Helms because he refused to cooperate on the Watergate cover-up, he nominated James Schlesinger, who came in as CIA Director and immediately put into effect the process that led to the disbanding of the ONE. Henry Kissinger was the driving force behind this. The reason was the ongoing, strong impulse within the ONE and BOE to stay away from falling into line under the pressure of policy implementation. When Nixon came into office in 1969, he also gave Kissinger and his NSC staff added influence over the Intelligence Community at the expense of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI).

Kissinger’s key hatchet man was Andy Marshall, his chief adviser on the NSC staff. According to the official CIA biography of DCI William Colby, written by Harold P. Ford, Marshall wrote a memorandum to Colby in which he complained that “many, if not most, intelligence officers in State and CIA did not share the world view of top U.S. military leaders,” by which he meant those driving the Vietnam War. These differences in fundamental assumptions, Marshall explained, might be one of the “most important barriers preventing U.S. intelligence from adequately supporting top-level decision making.”

From the very beginning of the Nixon administration, Kissinger, through Marshall, insisted that intelligence must do far more in assisting policy makers to exert pressure on foreign governments: The administration wanted the CIA to give it new insights into the specific weaknesses of given countries—that is, knowledge of their internal politics, perceptions, and policymaking styles—so that the White House could then “enhance the threats we make, to practice effective deception and other psychological operations against them.”

Parallel to this direct attack were the exposés of the wrongdoings of the CIA, including those of the Church Committee and other congressional investigations. While it should have been clear that whatever wrongdoing the CIA had engaged in was under the orders of the administration in power, the scandals greatly affected the prestige of the CIA as a whole, and in fact served to reduce its ability to stick to the truth and the most truthful estimates.

In 1973, under pressure from Kissinger et al., ONE/BOE was disbanded and replaced with a system of national intelligence officers, all of whom would be trapped in a series of fishbowls. The estimates were in the hands of area officers who in effect had no staff and had to seek officers from within the agency staff willing or able to join a particular project. Even more important, there were no high-level review processes as under the Board of Estimates.

CIA deliberation was fully wrecked when George W. Bush became DCI and introduced his Team A and Team B, in which Team B was the neocons—who did nothing more that criticize Team A as part of the process of destroying a professional intelligence capability.

In an appeal to revive the ONE/BOE, the late Harold P. Ford, one of the first generation of BOE estimators, wrote in 1993 that such a revived process must be based on the principles of the original Board of Estimates. In his short book, Estimative Intelligence, Ford wrote:

Hence the principal offices of the CIA, Defense, and State that engage in national estimating must be manned by the finest experts available, on the model of the R&A officers of the OSS. These offices must never be manned by just available “warm bodies.” These standards must apply not only to government experts, but to the quality and effectiveness of (and needed larger number of) those officers brought into national estimating from the outside. For in the end, it will basically be the quality of the people involved—the experts and their managers—that will or will not bring us the quality national estimating of which we are capable.

All in all, national intelligence estimating will continue to fall short of its potential until and unless it gains and maintains the deserved quality/status that DCI Walter Bedell Smith foresaw for this enterprise when, in establishing the NIEs and ONE in 1950, he told his Intelligence Community colleagues that national estimating should become “the heart” of the intelligence process.

Postscript: LaRouche and a New Model Board of Estimates

Dismantling the Board of Estimates brought U.S. strategic policy full circle back to the preemptive war doctrine of the Truman era. The new doctrine was called “Flexible Response.” Cooked up by the RAND Corporation and other hand-maidens of the Military-Industrial Complex, it became American strategic doctrine through the work of James Schlesinger and Henry Kissinger.

Just like the Truman policy of seeking absolute military superiority over the Soviet Union across the military spectrum, from conventional to nuclear, Flexible Response was implemented under the fatuous claim that having absolute military superiority would allow America to counter any level of Soviet military attack, with the second fatuous claim that this would keep the conflict under the nuclear threshold.

Nonetheless, that policy envisioned the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons under the even more fatuous claim that the use of tactical nuclear weapons would keep the conflict under the strategic nuclear threshold!

Neither Kissinger nor Schlesinger had any interest in determining the validity of their insane doctrine. Yet in the same year that the ONE was dismantled, Lyndon LaRouche took up, as a private initiative, an effort not only to blow the whistle on this dangerous policy, but to pose the alternative.

In January 1974, LaRouche launched the New Solidarity International Press Service which, in 1977, became the weekly Executive Intelligence Review. To support such a publication, LaRouche designed and established an intelligence staff structured to provide in-depth coverage of all geographical areas, international economics, and scientific and technological developments. It was structured to provide him with daily “estimates” of strategic developments (although they were not referred to as estimates). In support of LaRouche’s role as executive of an international political and philosophical association, the International Caucus of Labor Committees, the staff also provided him the required intelligence for the formulation of policies.

While LaRouche acknowledged only a modest involvement in the formal intelligence agencies of the United States during World War II, his own “intelligence agency,” in principle, paralleled in many respects the conceptions of Donovan and Bedell Smith. From the standpoint of “estimates,” LaRouche continued where ONE left off, but went one step further. As early as 1977, he published a series of strategic estimates warning of the possibility of an early nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, driven by powerful London and Wall Street financial circles committed to handling the ongoing financial crisis by imposing brutal austerity and anti-industrial, anti-growth environmentalist policies. Their insane Flexible Response policy was aimed at forcing the Soviet Union to submit to this new global policy.

LaRouche’s evaluation of the Soviet side was somewhat similar to the estimates of the Bedell Smith era. He concluded that while the Soviets aspired to world hegemony at some point in the future, they nonetheless adhered to a war avoidance policy. But LaRouche assessed that the Soviet failure to understand the role of Wall Street and the City of London could lead to dangerous miscalculation and general war.

In 1977, LaRouche wrote:

The central, continuing problem of the Soviet leadership is that heavily underlined by V.I. Lenin, who called it “Oblomovism.” The heritage of rural backwardness permeating Russian culture to the present day, mediated significantly through the old Soviet Ukrainian party apparatus—from which N.S. Khrushchev and L.I. Brezhnev came up—has been re-enforced by the garrison-economy experience of 60 years of invasion, containment and Cold War. The majority of even the Soviet Central Committee has no sensuous comprehension of the “outside world.” They lack, in particular, the intellectual powers of a V.I. Lenin or Rosa Luxemburg. They are unable to throw aside inherited errors in face of contrary scientific evidence, unable to project a self-consciousness of the world as seen through non-Soviet eyes. . . .

Despite this, the Soviets overall have a war-avoidance posture because they have no driving force for war beyond narrow considerations of strategic defense capabilities and deployments of Warsaw Pact forces. On the contrary, Chase Manhattan, Lehman Brothers and certain forces in London are seized presently by a driving force for war-by-miscalculation, not because they are anti-Communist, but because their political-economic strategic interests compel them to bring the Warsaw Pact into a position of subordination. At best, the Soviet long-term political strategy is a crude parody of Lenin’s anti-imperialist perspective of world socialist transformation. Their policy is one of waiting out the internal process in the capitalist sector which leads eventually to the “final triumph of socialism,” and correlates this with a policy of developing and maintaining a sufficient margin of war-fighting capability to win a total war if that can not be avoided. Their perception of peaceful relations with capitalist states is essentially one of a long-term delaying tactic against nations which they regard as intrinsically absolute adversaries.

That same year, LaRouche wrote on the danger of the Kissinger-Schlesinger Flexible Response doctrine:

The possibility of winning a war by limiting initial objectives to first-line military targets is an illusion, comparable to the would-be professional boxer who enters the ring believing that if he is sufficiently clever he will never be hit a painful blow. One must in fighting a war, start by acknowledging that the adversary’s deployed military capabilities will effect that damage of which they are capable, a damage which can be only partially deflected. The idea of some “Superman” from the American comic strips arriving to destroy an adversary’s first-line weapons before they are fired is just that—an infantile fantasy, like Goebbels’ “miracle weapons.”

On the other hand, if one can eliminate an adversary’s war-fighting capabilities in depth, and is prepared to survive his initial force capabilities, then the basis for winning the continuing war is firmly grounded. It is after the maximum possible destruction of in-depth logistical and related capabilities of the principal adversary that the continuation of the war by ground-fighting in an ABC-shaped [atomic, biological, chemical] geometry of aerial-and-ground artillery and infantry begins.

World War III does not begin with ground-fighting on a theater-limited scale between principal adversary forces. Once the war between principal adversary forces is initiated, the war begins with total, simultaneous use of the so-called “maximum deterrence,” and then the ground-fighting begins amid the ABC-saturated rubblepiles.

Ronald Reagan Library

President Ronald Reagan addressing the nation on National Security (the Strategic Defense Initiative speech) on March 23, 1983.

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There is no other way to order the fighting of a thermonuclear war, unless one is determined to lose that war.

This is the situation the lunatics of the Carter Administration are gambling with.

LaRouche did not stop there. He put forward political and economic alternatives, including reforming the global financial system, to bring it back to the standards of the Bretton Woods system as intended by President Franklin Roosevelt; reinvigorating the space program as the science and technology driver that would put the economy back on the path of progress; and having the military engaged in creating a defense against nuclear missiles through technologies based on new physical principles. He called for a debt moratorium for underdeveloped countries and the creation of an International Development Bank for financing infrastructure-driven development programs for these countries.

It was in this period that LaRouche opened contact with elements of the U.S. Intelligence Community in the Reagan Administration, leading to the announcement by President Ronald Reagan of the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Selected Bibliography

Books

Harold P. Ford. CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes 1962-1968, CIA, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2007.

Harold P. Ford. William Colby as Director of Central Intelligence, 1973-1976, CIA, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1993.

Harold P. Ford. Estimative Intelligence, The Intelligence Profession Series, No. 10, Association of Former Intelligence Officers, McLean, Virginia, 1993.

Sherman Kent. Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, Princeton University Press, 1951.

Willard C. Matthias. America’s Strategic Blunders, Intelligence Analysis and National Security Policy, 1936-1991, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.

Ludwell L. Montague. General Walter Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence, October 1950-February 1953, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1st Edition, February 15, 2007. The original CIA edition is here.

David Robarge. John McCone as Director of Central Intelligence, 1961-1965, CIA, Center for the Study in Intelligence, 2005.

Kermit Roosevelt. War Report of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), United States War Department, Strategic Services Unit History Project, July 1, 1976.

Major-General Sir Kenneth Strong. Intelligence at the Top, Recollections of an Intelligence Officer, Cassell & Co., London, England, 1968.

Articles, Papers, Monographs

Dean Andromidas. “How Eisenhower Stopped Truman’s March to Nuclear Armageddon,” EIR Vol. 42, No. 31, Aug. 7, 2015. Pages 9-21.

Dean Andromidas. “Eisenhower’s Fight Against the British Empire’s ‘Cold War’,” EIR Vol. 37, No. 7, Sept. 24, 2010. Pages 14-21.

Donald Phau and Dean Andromidas. “MacArthur’s Victory at Inchon: Defeating the British Empire,” EIR Vol. 40, No. 15, April 12, 2013. Pages 34-44.

Jack Davis. “Sherman Kent’s Final Thoughts on Analyst-Policymaker Relations,” Sherman Kent Center for Intelligence Analysis. Occasional Papers: Vol. 2, No. 3, June 2003.

“Sherman Kent and the Board of National Estimates: Collected Essays,” CIA, 2007.

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September 7, 2004

A NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ACADEMY

How Can Intelligence

Break the Fishbowl?

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

If you chose to vacation in the Sahara Desert, do not blame the weatherman for the lack of rain.

—Lyndon LaRouche

It’s the economy, stupid!

—James Carville, 1992

Editor’s Note: This is a reprint of Lyndon LaRouche’s article first published under the title, “Intelligence Organization: How Can Intelligence Serve An Un-Intelligible President?” in EIR Vol. 31, No. 36, September 17, 2004. Embedded links have been added.

I watch the discussions among those members of the Senate and others, who are currently rushing in panic to so-called intelligence reforms. Yet, I see, on the positive side, that a number of them do present, nonetheless, a certain level of relevant expertise, and also, often, not only show good sense, but sometimes surprise me pleasantly with their insights on some matters, if only respecting relevant matters of detail. Yet, those happier aspects of the current proceedings acknowledged, all so far, including the representatives of the spokesmen for the “9/11” commission, have missed the crucial point at issue. As it used to be said, so far, the best among them have missed the forest for the trees.

My qualifications in this matter, include my long record as the most successful long-range economic forecaster over four continuing decades. I have not only a matchlessly impeccable public record in that field; but the uniqueness of the method underlying my achievement in this area of specialization, has spilled over naturally into other matters of strategic assessment and foresight.

The relevance of these overlapping areas of long-range intelligence work, is typified by my forecast, first publicized in 1983, of an approximately five-year outlook for an economic collapse of the Soviet system, a forecast which I restated in my Columbus Day Berlin address of 1988, when I warned of the general collapse probably leading to the reunification of Germany, with Berlin as the future capital, beginning, probably, in Poland, in Eastern Europe, and spreading back into the Soviet Union itself. Every relevant government in Western Europe and the U.S.A. itself, missed the boat on that—until after it had already happened. They are all now missing the boat on both the global economic and general strategic crises already building up around the world today. On those and many similar issues of long-term strategic importance, nearly all of my putative rivals in forecasting have failed to grasp the essentials of the reality now before us all.

At this moment, the same types of official and other experts rushing into reckless innovations in intelligence reforms, have ignored the elephant standing in the middle of their conversation. The world as a whole has already entered a period of fundamental phase-shift, a period of a fast-approaching great storm, which will soon, and suddenly, collapse the entirety of the world’s present monetary-financial system.

A non-linear phase-shift of this type, invalidates all precedents and assumed trend-lines premised on the kind of environment which existed, even during a relatively long time before that phase-shift began. While the keepers of a mentally defective U.S. President George Bush[fn_1] continue to insist on their pathetically deluded dream of an approaching economic recovery, all too many Democrats refuse, similarly, to take up the fact of an already onrushing build-up toward early general collapse of the entire world monetary-financial system.

On this matter of forecasting, the current Bush Administration has sought to trap the Democratic Party into a pathetic debate over who will share the benefit of the promised riches of the on-rushing recovery which would, in fact, never come under the present policies of the U.S.A. as long as the nation’s and world’s present economic policies were in effect.

FEMA News/Andrea Booher

The World Trade Center. “Unfortunately, there is no competent definition of the concept of strategic long-range mission in the general discussion of the matter of intelligence reform among official circles, and national press, today. That is the source of the intelligence failure which underlies both the lack of preparedness prior to Sept. 11, 2001, and the apparent inability to comprehend the motive forces behind, and global historical implications of that calamity.”

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Meanwhile, the real question to be faced is: How could any of the presently leading proposals for sudden revision in the organization of the security institutions of the U.S.A., protect our presently self-endangered republic from those forces of inevitable self-destruction which would be surely unleashed by the mere act of re-electing President George W. Bush, Jr.? Isn’t there something very sadly wrong about the current obsession with rushing to jam through half-baked remedies of intelligence reform, remedies which are already worse than what is proposed to be the disease?

This pattern of wishful nit-picking among governments and our own national intelligence services, is the ignored “trumpeting elephant standing in the middle of the couple’s honeymoon bed,” the strategic implications of the onrushing general collapse of the world’s present monetary-financial system. This is the “elephant” which all of the visible proponents of reforms of U.S. intelligence insist on pretending isn’t there. Similarly, the recent, hysterical efforts to deny the deadly global implications of U.S., British, and other meddling in Transcaucasia, is, like the Congress’s consent to the ongoing new war in Iraq, typical of the frequent causes for catastrophic breakdown of the U.S. strategic and related intelligence functions.[fn_2] That is the elephant defecating in the middle of the bed, which the parties have habitually avoided seeing or smelling, thus far, in their proposals for intelligence reforms.

What they ignore, in fact, is the historical mission whose adoption by Benjamin Franklin’s circles produced the conspiracy which created this nation, and which has been often indispensable for our continued survival, until now. Unfortunately, there is no competent definition of the concept of strategic long-range mission in the general discussion of the matter of intelligence reform among official circles, and national press, today. That is the source of the intelligence failure which underlies both the lack of preparedness prior to September 11, 2001, and the apparent inability to comprehend the motive forces behind, and global historical implications of that calamity. This same disoriented state of the collective U.S. official mind is now being repeated in the discussion of the implications of the Beslan atrocity in leading press and related sources in the U.S. today.

As the late historian H. Graham Lowry documented this in his 1988 book, How the Nation Was Won, the building of what became that U.S. republic which emerged from World War II as the greatest producer economy on this planet, began in such locations as the Massachusetts Bay Colony under the Winthrops and Mathers, where the thrust was to develop a great new nation, across the continent of North America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It was to be a refuge from the oligarchical systems which reigned over Europe in that time, a new republic, cast in reflections on the memories of Solon of Athens and Plato, a bastion of freedom and hope among all mankind.

Our victory over Lord Shelburne’s predatory British East India Company, then, and our continuing, hard-fought survival against such powerful foes aiming to destroy us, such as that British and Prince Metternich’s Holy Roman Empire, defines that endless national mission which is the prime directive under which all competent national intelligence functions must be subsumed today.

We Were Not Always So Stupid

Our republic’s intelligence services once had a brilliantly appropriate definition of the sense of mission which must govern all of our republic’s policymaking, including the implicit counterintelligence functions of our diplomatic, military, and intelligence services.

That was the original conception of the mission of the U.S. intelligence services during the time, after 1815, when the Marquis de Lafayette lived as the reactivated leader of our original foreign and domestic intelligence and counter-intelligence service. This was a time which featured such figures as James Fenimore Cooper and counter-intelligence specialist Edgar Allan Poe in that role. That was the conception of national mission articulated by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, and by Adams’ one-time protégé and U.S. Representative, Abraham Lincoln. That was the mission pursued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt until the moment of his most untimely death, a death which allowed certain sudden bad changes in national mission, changes toward a Hobbesian world-outlook which have been the principal root of all of our nation’s major intelligence failures to the present time.

That original national mission of our republic, as selected under the body of international law founded by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, remains the proper principled guide to a national intelligence service of the U.S.A. today. It was, and remains a mission diametrically opposed to those doctrines of the Bush-Cheney Administration, which have reigned since January 2001 to the present day. It is to the degree that the currently assigned mission of national intelligence functions fails to proceed from, and be ruled by that original, specific conception of national mission, that all of the structural and principled errors made by our national intelligence and military institutions have been derived, since the birth of our republic to the present day.

Such a stated, but often overlooked, overriding principle of mission-orientation, must be, without exception, the ruling conception of design of any revision in our intelligence services and its functions today. None of the leading current proposals for legislated reform of the services has taken this most essential feature of the problem properly into account. For that reason, the one proposal is, in each case, only more foolish than the other.

That side of current official behavior can not be considered as intelligent. Forgive them, for they know not what they do!

I have been complaining, initially modestly, but more loudly and insistently since the middle to late 1960s, against systemic weaknesses in our national policy-making structures, as since my late 1956, privately circulated business forecast of a deep recession to begin during Spring 1957. That forecast had been based on studies of the way in which the influence of figures such as Arthur Burns had misled the changes in U.S. financial policy under an otherwise necessary, anti-utopian military traditionalist, President Eisenhower. It was a forecast which has been the springboard of all my outlooks on our republic’s foreign and domestic strategic policy since the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Reflection on my dedication, to that effect, over the recent forty years, has now more than fully validated that continuing concern of mine.

1. The Fallacy of Method

The most important fallacy of method in the practiced policy of our domestic and foreign intelligence services, is that they are often heirs of the sheer silliness which has been adopted as the incompetent investigative methods of some of our relevant institutions from the hands and mouth of the author of the childish Sherlock Holmes propaganda pieces, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. That imported, nit-picking method of investigation promoted by Doyle’s propagandistic campaign, the elementary-school sort of Hobbesian method of Sherlock Holmes’ purely fictitious successes, typifies the most common root of the failures of relevant investigations of matters of national security interest today. The incompetent handling of the crafting of the report issued by the “9/11” Commission, is typical of the way in which popularized gumshoe methods of investigation in the small, have, unfortunately, set the pattern for strategically calamitous incompetence in matters in the large.

That fallacious method of formal inquiry is typified by an axiomatic incompetence, a formal fallacy of composition, in defining the subject of that investigation. Thus, where the report of the “9/11” commission is at its relative best, is in its emphasis on the lack of precautions which should have been in place, and which were, generally, assumed to have been in place: a massive negligence failure, as by the President and Vice-President themselves, which made possible the relative ease with which an enormously complex plan of action was executed in such a successfully, precisely coordinated way on that fateful day. For example, the Commission’s de facto toleration of the off-hand assumption that no one had considered the use of a heavily fueled aircraft in that way, was, and remains, in effect, simply an outright lie; such a risk had been inherent in the ordinary business of the trade. The military, or quasi-military use of that capability, should not have come as a surprise to any relevant institution after the preceding Genoa threat to President George W. Bush’s life, and the threat of an augmented Genoa-style, riotous incident being prepared in the Washington, D.C. area during August and early September of that year.

The more serious failing of the “9/11” Commission’s report is what it, at leisure, had intentionally refused to moot before the republic, until some time after the coming election of the next President: Who actually organized what had been clearly the finely coordinated attack of 9/11, and for what purpose? Rage, or some specific, calculated strategic effect independent of the use of terrorist methods as means? What was the tell-tale intention expressed in the characteristic features of the event itself? To what variety of beast did that horrible footprint belong?

The arbitrary assumption used to evade that more crucial part of the investigation, is the presumption that “Osama bin Laden” did it, he and his al-Qaeda, all by their lonesome. Since Osama bin Laden had been drawn into the al-Qaeda business by circles of Vice-President George H.W. Bush and Britain’s Jimmy Goldsmith, together with such wild-eyed neo-conservatives of the Iran-Contra antics as Oliver North, et al., as part of the asymmetric warfare launched by National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, we can not assume that Osama bin Laden’s guilty role was not something like that of poor van der Lubbe in Nazi boss Hermann Göring’s setting fire to the German Reichstag, especially since I had warned, and that famously at the time, against precisely such a type of incident on the eve of President George W. Bush’s installation as President.

When I warned of a threatened impending event like Göring’s orchestration of the Reichstag Fire of February 1933, a fire set to motivate the immediate adoption of the fascist law doctrine of one-time Leo Strauss patron Carl Schmitt, I had no crystal ball, nor wild impulse. Anyone who knew modern history should have recognized the manner of placing George W. Bush into the Presidency as the preparation for a certain type of legalized coup d’état against our Constitution. As I emphasized at that time, before President Bush had been installed, it was the economic conditions into which the U.S. and the world had already entered, which made some attempt with the effect of what became 9/11 virtually inevitable for some time during the months then ahead.

My warning of the likelihood of such a plot, had been premised upon my studies of the way in which that dark cartel, the financier-oligarchy-controlled Synarchist International of the 1919-1945 interval, had orchestrated the wave of fascist takeovers of the nations of Western and Central continental Europe during the 1922-1945 interval: beginning with the action of the former British intelligence asset of the “Young Turk” plot, banker Volpi di Misurata’s placing of his puppet, sometime Winston Churchill protégé Benito Mussolini into power. My studies had included the precedent of the 1934 plotted, fortunately aborted military coup against the U.S. government by financier interests of a kindred spirit from inside the U.S.A. itself. My January 2001 warnings had also taken into account my early 1980s studies, from once secret U.S. intelligence files, of the way in which Adolf Hitler, and certain complicit U.S. circles, had put Hitler’s Synarchist organization into existence in Mexico, with the intention of using that Synarchist organization, which still exists as a force there today, as part of the Nazi plot for a joint Nazi-Japan attack on the U.S. from across the Mexico border, a plot aborted then, by the U.S. victory at Midway.

Senators Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), at a Sept. 7, 2004 press conference in Washington, announcing legislation to implement recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. Writes LaRouche: “Isn’ t there something very sadly wrong about the current obsession with rushing to jam through half-baked remedies of intelligence reform, remedies which are already worse than what is proposed to be the disease?”

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My warning took into account, most emphatically, the rumblings among the heirs of the pre-1945 Synarchist International, inside the U.S. and elsewhere today. If one knows the nature and habits of a man-eating tiger, one must expect the obvious, as I did in my warning of January 2001. I had no foresight into the mode in which the attack would come, but I had a clear, and well-grounded knowledge that an attack to that effect were, as I said, virtually inevitable soon under the new Bush Administration, unless action to prevent an attack of that nature were taken.

With my explicit warning to that effect in the public domain, the intelligence services of our republic should have been alarmed to the effect of putting all relevant resources on alert for the likelihood of a kind of action against which I had warned publicly. Those services did not make those preparations. That, much more than the details of the 9/11 attack itself, should have been the starting point of the 9/11 Commission’s investigation. That should have been the subsuming premise of the recommendations to be made for reform of our intelligence services.

As I have variously authored and co-authored reports on the role of the Synarchist International cabal of global financial-oligarchical interests which were behind both the spread of fascist regimes throughout Western and Central continental Europe during the 1922-1945 interval, and as behind the neo-conservative assets of Vice-President Cheney’s circles today, no investigation of the “9/11” incidents could be considered competent, if it failed to consider the intent of a terrorist action which was clearly intended to change the global strategic situation in the direction into which Vice-President Cheney and his chickenhawk cronies had already pre-shaped U.S. intelligence, military, and security policy since long prior to events of September 2001. The characteristic intention expressed by the “9/11” atrocity was not primarily an attack on the U.S.A.; it was shown by the characteristic features of that operation itself, to be a device for panicking the U.S. population and institutions into the kind of global, “preventive nuclear warfare” which draft-dodger Dick Cheney and his chickenhawks have intended to conduct against the world since Cheney was the freakish, but officially frustrated Secretary of Defense under Bush 41.

The “9/11” report said nothing about that elephant standing, glowering, in the middle of the hearing room where the public events of the Commission were conducted.

Certain features of the 9/11 incident were unique among peace-time terrorist acts in recent history; but the existence of a global strategic intention, one inherent in the implications of the act of “9/11” itself, was, as I had detailed this in January of that year, an already undeniable fact even long before midday of that September 11, 2001.

Enter Beslan

Those implications of my forecast of something whose effect would be, and did actually become, an echo of Göring’s orchestration of the February 1933 Reichstag arson, are key to the principal danger of new coups and related wars threatening the world today.

Now, the nightmare of [September 1, 2004] mass-slaughter of children in Beslan, North Ossetia, has become a second “9/11,” this time against Russia, and with far more ominous implications than the attack on the U.S.A. in September 11, 2001; this time, a potential clash of major thermonuclear powers, and much more than that besides, is on the table. Now, unless the U.S.A. abandons its terrorist protégés in Transcaucasia, such as those associated with the Jamestown Foundation, the George Bush Administration has now put the world as a whole on a hair-trigger potential for global, thermonuclear-armed, increasingly global asymmetric warfare, a greater potential threat to the planet than at the time of the Ogarkov Plan and the asymmetric warfare which the Anglo-Americans and their puppets, such as Osama bin Laden, ran in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

That implication of Beslan is the most telling indictment of the proposal to reform U.S. intelligence functions along the lines of some parody of the report of the “9/11” Commission.

Admittedly, the fable told about “9/11” is widely accepted, chiefly because the developments of the recent thirty-odd years, or more, have transformed most of our people from citizens in the true sense of the word, into underlings, people who no longer think of this government as ours, but someone else’s government, to which the mass of our own citizen-underlings must adapt themselves, still today. If that were not so, a cringing Senate would not have unleashed an unconstitutional pathway to war in Iraq, and would have shown Vice-President Cheney the door, in one way or the other, more than a year ago.

When both the mass of the citizenry, and the majority of top-ranking members of the Congress behave like fearfully credulous chickens, as we have seen in the cases of so many crucial developments of late, it is all the more the duty of leading patriotic institutions to show courage precisely where the citizens lack the inclination to defend either their nation or themselves. A true leader, in a time of great troubles, is willing to put not only his career, but his life on the line, for the defense of the nation and its people. That was once largely the case, when Franklin Roosevelt was still President, and even later. Over the past forty years, that required quality of our leading institutions has withered away, leaving only a relative handful of senior active and retired officials and others, to carry the great tradition of our nation’s nobler years.

It is the duty of our government, especially its combined military, diplomatic, and intelligence services, to fight against such suicidal predilections of the majority of popular opinion. The relevant institutions of government must act to impel the nation, and its government, to save our citizenry even from the consequences of follies of popular opinion. The abused name of “democracy” is no excuse for the follies of official behavior. A crime is a crime, and a grievous folly a shame, especially when it is done in support of widely popularized gossip.

The problem is not merely that the citizenry no longer knows what to think; the problem is that, as a result of the build-up of a now prevalent custom of sophistry, most in our leading responsible institutions no longer know how to think about issues of strategic intelligence. They think, at best, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s cocaine-sniffing, all-too-elementary charlatan, Sherlock Holmes. They sniff out, and interpret isolated facts, and use that pretext of factualness to fabricate and adopt even wildly atrocious, implicitly lying fallacies of composition, all in the name of estimates of current popular opinion.

We must end a false tradition, under which influential institutions indoctrinate government and the governed in “what to think,” to the degree that, often, none of these seem to know “how to think.”

2. The ’Fishbowl Principle’

The foundations of competent strategic intelligence in European culture still today, have been the adoption of those foundations of such needed wisdom in the studies of ancient Greece, from Homer to the Athens of Solon, Socrates, and Plato, of what we know today as ancient Greece’s persistent, inbred tragedy, from the Trojan Wars which preceded ancient Greece’s ensuing dark age, through the self-doom of Greece’s independence wrought by the folly of the Peloponnesian War. All great European tragedians, from Aeschylus and Plato, through Shakespeare and Friedrich Schiller, have presented us the essence of actual history as historically grounded Classical drama on the stage.

That Classical tragedy always deals with the matter of the role of leading figures of entire societies in shaping the tragic destiny of nations and even entire cultures. The intended function of those tragedies, is to compel the little citizen of today to take the tragedies of actual history as a lesson in the way the minds of the most powerful figures of a society bring about the tragic calamities of entire nations and cultures. In this way, the passion of the ordinary member of the theater’s audience is impelled to wish that the tragic error of the powerful leaders of that historical case had not occurred. Thus, as the ordinary member of the audience’s society is impelled to adopt a passionate concern for the qualities of a society’s ruling leaders, the ordinary person is transformed into a true citizen, rather than a greedy, grubbing underling of his nation, rather than the poor, often self-doomed fool, who despises the big issues which determine the fate of the nation, in favor of considering nothing so much as “my neighborhood,” “my little personal gripe,” “my money.”

Therefore, Classical Greek tragedies, and the introduction of the Sublime to tragedy, by Plato’s repertoire of Socratic dialogues, typifies the absolutely mandatory foundation of all modern strategic intelligence functions. Thus, the primary work of the truly qualified statesman, and the military, diplomatic, and intelligence functions which assist him in this mission, is twofold. First, to be aware of the contemporary expressions of that principle of tragedy to which I have referred here. Second, to impart that knowledge to the mind of the citizen in the way in which the Classical tragedian uses the stage to elevate the habituated underlings into the state of mind of true citizens.

As the argument for the existence of the Noösphere by the scientist Vladimir I. Vernadsky has presented the Classical conception of science of ancient Greece in modern terms, there is the absolute distinction of the human mind from that of lower forms of life, such as apes.

Vernadsky’s concepts of Biosphere and Noösphere, for example, restated the ancient Classical Greek concept of the Pythagoreans and Plato, of the distinction among non-living, living, and human noëtic principles. Vernadsky’s treatment of a geobiochemical notion of “fossils” points to a great demonstration of the absolute distinction of the human mind from the lower forms of life, and thus provides a uniquely interesting proof that the noëtic functions of the human mind reflect a higher quality in the person than possessed by mortal life itself. This reflected what was already emphasized by Plato in such locations as his Timaeus. It was a notion already implicit in the work of the founders of ancient scientific thinking, the Pythagoreans.

In my own program for self-education of a youth movement of, predominantly, the 18-25 age-interval, I presented two cornerstones of the building-up of a body of knowledge. The first was Carl Gauss’s attack on the intrinsic fallacies of the form of reductionism known as empiricism, as typified by the systemic fallacies of Euler, Lagrange, et al., as Gauss did this in his first, 1799 exposition of the “Fundamental Theorem of Algebra.” The second was training in the methods of counterpoint of J.S. Bach. The latter program combined the essential prerequisite of a Florentine bel canto program of training of the singing voice, without which Bach’s works such as his set of motets, for example, would be botched in performance. I proposed the adopted program of development of the choral performance of Bach’s Jesu, meine Freude, as the acid test of the music program, one both challenging enough, and yet within practical reach, for this purpose.

LaRouche Youth Movement organizers on the Boston subway during the Democratic Convention at the end of July 2004. At LaRouche’ s suggestion, the youth developed a choral performance of Bach’ s motet, “Jesu, meine Freude,” as the core of a music program that would be a primary focus of the political organizing drive. The effect was to transform both the city of Boston, and convention delegates.

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My intention in defining a program of educational development for a youth movement in this way, was to afford those young adults of voting age a practicable means for understanding, and resisting those commonplace ideologies that I have often identified as expressing “a fishbowl syndrome.”

The relevance of this same approach to intelligence work is the aspect of that educational program being emphasized here, a program which should be mandatory for training and qualification of all future supervisory staff occupied with intelligence functions.

I explain.

Fallacy of Composition

After we take into account the most common source of faulty intelligence, pure and simple lying about matters of fact, the chief remaining source of incompetence, such as that which I have complained against in respect to the flaws of omission in the 9/11 Commission’s report, is what is termed, in technical language, as “fallacy of composition.”

Fallacy of composition is usually expressed in two categorically distinct ways: (a) Fallacy of composition of selection of category of facts. This includes both the omission of essential categories of facts, and the addition of irrelevant categories of facts. (b) Fallacy of composition of category of principles which define the functional relationship among facts: both exclusion of relevant true principles, or concealment of those principles’ employment, or, also, the active or covert addition of false categories of principles into the “equation.” It is the second category of fallacy of composition which defines what I have commonly termed “the fishbowl syndrome.”

In teaching the relevant matters of principle, I usually begin with the subject of Cartesian geometry as a model for defining the rudiments of a “fishbowl syndrome.” In making that point sufficiently clear at this juncture for the purposes of the subject of intelligence policy at hand in this location, I am obliged to explain, in summary, what will be regarded as a contentious point, but nonetheless a point which my experience in studying intelligence work has shown me to be the most important category of failure of well-meaning intelligence assessments adopted by our government or relevant comparable institutions.

The Classical Root of Our Constitution

The origin of systematic intelligence in the known history of now globally extended European culture, is located in pre-Aristotle Greece, especially in Athens and Magna Graecia of that time. The key points of known or estimable, datable reference include the Ionian Thales (ca. 624-547 B.C.) and, later, Heraclitus (ca. 540-480 B.C.); Solon of Athens (ca. 630-590 B.C.); Pythagoras (born ca. 529 B.C.) and his followers; and Plato (ca. 428-348 B.C.). The characteristic distinction of these founders of European scientific and other Classical culture, is their included emphasis on a pre-Sophist, pre-Aristotelean scientific method known as Sphaerics, a method adopted from the astronomy of Egypt, which had been the world’s most advanced known scientific culture of the time of Classical Greece’s emergence from a preceding dark age. Plato’s Socratic dialogues and his Laws, are the benchmark of reference for defining a well-ordered historian’s approach to competent modern intelligence practice.

The implicit distinction adducible from close examination of the scientific method of these ancient Classical Greeks, is their emphasis on a notion of physical geometry which depended upon an experimental approach to all things from the standpoint of reference provided by the view of the astronomical universe, later resurrected from the decadent science of Rome by the followers of Nicholas of Cusa such as Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, and the founder of modern systematic mathematical physics, Johannes Kepler. [fn_3] Instead of the reductionist fallacy of “action at a distance,” as introduced by founder of empiricism Paolo Sarpi’s house-lackey Galileo Galilei, the Classical Greek practice of Sphaerics[fn_4] located the elementary form of human physical-scientific knowledge in those singularities which arise as the characteristic forms of action of change (e.g., Heraclitus, Archytas, Plato). Implicitly, this view by those relevant ancients already anticipated both Gottfried Leibniz’s uniquely original discovery (ca. 1676, in Paris) of an infinitesimal calculus, and Leibniz’s later refinement of that discovery, in collaboration with Jean Bernouilli, as a catenary-cued universal principle of physical least action. The latter discovery was the first systematic modern mathematical definition of the principle expressed by that physical-geometric concept of the complex domain developed through the contributions of Gauss, Abel, Dirichlet, and Riemann, most notably.

The modern significance of this development is found within European culture, from the practice of Sphaerics (e.g., spherical harmonics, such as the proof, by construction of the five Platonic Solids), whose work bridges the development of this traditional mathematical physics, from the Pythagoreans through Plato, by the modern developments of anti-reductionist science associated with the work of Leibniz, Gauss, Riemann, et al. on the subject of the functions of the complex domain.

The physical significance of the complex domain is that it represents the mathematical-functional expression of the bridging of the efficient power of unseen universal physical principles upon the domain of sense-perceptual experience. This conception is of crucial importance for all serious intelligence work, not only in the domain of mathematical physics, but respecting the ordering of human behavior in general. It is from this vantage-point, alone, that a clear understanding of the implications of the “fishbowl” syndrome can be efficiently understood.

The crucial point for all more serious tasks of intelligence work, is, that what we perceive with our verifiable sense-experience, is not the real universe, but a shadow which the real, unseen universe casts upon what the human mind comprehends as our sense-experience. This demands a rigorous, experimental verification of what we are to recognize rightfully as universal physical and related principles of action.

These universal principles, as associated with both physical experience as such, and also with those higher order of experience of human social interactions we should associate with principles of truly Classical forms of artistic composition, are defined as definite objects of thought by the same principled notion of experimental proof required for what are considered universal physical principles per se. This notion of principles, as applicable to both so-called physical and social interactions, is known from the Pythagoreans et al. as powers (Gr. dynamis), rather than a cause of ostensibly percussive actions in naive notions of sense-experience (e.g., “action at a distance”). This notion of powers corresponds to Heraclitus’ famous aphorism, that nothing exists as constant (e.g., “permanent”) except change per se. This is a notion of a universal principle, as the English translation of Kepler defines the function of intention underlying the efficiency of universal gravitation. E.g., it is the efficient intention expressed in such forms as the pre-determined shape of the planetary orbit is continuously determined by the efficiently active principle of the Solar System as a whole, rather than a reductionist’s notion of a percussive, implicitly linear impulse associated with a resulting trajectory.

From the standpoint of Sphaerics as developed by the Pythagoreans on the foundations of Egyptian astronomy, this acceptance of the efficient universe as the basis for the notion of universal physical laws, it is those principles adduced thus as universal, through proof by appropriate experimental methods, which define the proper intention of the term universal physical laws, and also discoverable universal laws of social processes.

By “mechanisms” analogous to those which Gestalt psychologists after Wolfgang Köhler attributed to the formation of object-like mental perceptions of higher apes, the individual human mind is capable of expressing the experience of a discovery of a universal physical principle as a mental object. In terms of the Gauss-Riemann complex domain, the existence of a universal physical principle is an object in the domain of analysis situs, rather than a mere string of calculations associated with the name of a putative discoverer. This notion of such higher forms of mental objects is the characteristic feature of the theses presented in, most notably, Riemann’s 1854 habilitation dissertation, “On the Hypotheses which Lie at the Foundations of Geometry,” and his 1857 Theory of Abelian Functions.

The same restrictions of meaning must be applied to the definition of actual principles of Classical artistic composition, as distinct from all other forms of composition. Leibniz’s principle of “the pursuit of happiness,” as this appears in the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the same notion of the superior authority of natural law embodied in the Preamble of the Federal Constitution, are examples of the imprint of universal principles of Classical artistic composition upon the domain of social relations.

In physical science, especially since the noted work of Riemann, the standpoint of work is the return to the ancient notion of Sphaerics as employed by the Pythagoreans and Plato, but from a higher modern standpoint in detailed expressions of practical knowledge. In this approach, the treatment of all notions of physical principle conforms to notions of physical geometry, rather than a reductionist standpoint for an arithmetic. By means of the complex domain, so situated conceptually, the human mind is greatly aided in taking into account the efficient nature of the connection between the unseen mental objects represented by universal physical principles, and the action of those principles upon the shadow-world of the adumbrated, ordinary sense-perceptual domain.

From this standpoint, the significance of the “Fishbowl” syndrome can be more clearly seen by the superior intelligence specialist. The best service of our republic demands the training and development of such specialists for the appreciation of the higher practical implications for national policy-making of relevant products of investigations.

The Pathological Euclid

To understand the degeneration in ancient Greek science from the level typified by the work of the Pythagoreans and Plato, toward relevant decadent levels of Latin-speaking culture, we must take into account the close relationship of the essentially exoteric, doctrinaire tradition of Aristotle; we must also take into account the influence of the Egyptian Euclid of the late Hellenistic period of Archimedes and Eratosthenes upon the famous neo-Aristotelean hoaxster Claudius Ptolemy. This intrinsically pathological, reductionist method, of Aristotle, Euclid, and Claudius Ptolemy, is expressed in modern times by such followers of the founder of modern empiricism Paolo Sarpi, as the British and French Eighteenth-century “Enlightenment,” as best typified by the principal targets of Gauss’s 1799 attack, the Voltaire crony D’Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, and empiricist turned quasi-neo-Aristotelean, Immanuel Kant (aka, “I Can’t!”). The Cartesian approach to matters of physical science, is the typification of the course taken by the most notable among our republic’s earliest philosophical enemies of the existence of our United States, the Eighteenth-Century British and French “Enlightenment.”

Most notable, for the epistemological standpoint of the higher quality of contemporary intelligence specialist, is the social origins of the shift from the ancient standpoint of Sphaerics to the relatively decadent standpoint of the reductionism expressed, already in ancient times, in various forms and degrees by the Eleatics, Sophists, and Aristoteleans. The surviving second part of Aeschylus’ Prometheus trilogy, Prometheus Bound, gives the show away.

Throughout the known history and pre-history of mankind, society in general has been characterized by the rule of a minority over a majority of mankind composed chiefly of herded or hunted human cattle. As the putative original “greenie,” the Olympian Zeus of the trilogy attests, what Zeus alleged to be the crime of Prometheus, was to share knowledge of the existence of universal physical principles of progress of the human condition with the underling humans. The transition from the Pythagoreans and Plato to the reductionists such as the Eleatics, Sophists, and Aristotle, represents, as does the later “code” specified by the Roman Emperor Diocletian, a condemnation of ordinary folk to live as mere animals, condemned to do nothing to improve their customary practice above the fixed set of behaviorisms practiced by their ancestors.

The establishment of our constitutional republic represents the only clearly principled break with the rubble of that oppressive and inherently tragic tradition associated with ancient Greece’s mythological Olympus cult. This tradition of our republic defines the principle which must be proffered by us to our descendants here, and to those hungry for freedom in their own sovereign states, in other parts of the human family as a whole.

The functional distinction between the truly sovereign individual citizen and a mass of people, such as our own lower eighty percentile of family-income brackets today, is the opportunity to practice the kind of progress for all mankind which the tradition of the Olympian Zeus prohibits still today. To substitute the name of “democracy” for this is a travesty, an acceptance of the equality of free man and the man shackled with the burdens of being, by his own definition of the limits of his vision and behavior, a specimen of a mass of human cattle.

The quality of true freedom, which surpasses the condition of so-called democracy, is, as Frederick Douglass posed this for the American in and emerging from slavery, the development of the creative powers of the individual mind, which, unleashed, will soon bring about the true freedom of the slave or ex-slave in the living flesh. It is that freedom which we must assure to all of our people. It is the freedom to be something absolutely above and beyond the quality of mere sense-perceptual knowledge of the beast, or self-inflicted philosophical reductionist.

This desired quality of true individual freedom of the mind, is located essentially in the transfer of the sense of personal identity of the individual from locating himself or herself in the beast-like sense-certainties of the mere living flesh, to the immortality of the individual mind linked in perpetuity to the struggles for progress of mankind of past and future generations alike. The object must be to discover an individual sense of identity located in the permanence of a process of discovery of universal principles, rather than the beast-like form of existence in the bounds of a perception of only one’s flesh.

This problem is associated famously, with the case of the figure of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the brave and efficient fighter who trembles in a disgusting exhibition, as in that Third Act soliloquy, out of fearful impotence which suddenly strikes him at the thought of what might await him after death. He lacks a sense of an efficiently immortal existence, and immortal action which lives within the fleshly bounds of the souls which come after him, as Jeanne d’Arc and the Reverend Martin Luther King dedicated their imperilled mortal existence to the permanence of what they contributed to the cause of the future nation, and also civilization more generally. The life of the happy human individual is confidence in one’s own efficient commitment to the discovery and perpetuation of true universal principles, thus honoring the past and enriching the future of mankind as a whole.

It is the individual who can locate his or her identity within the complex domain of science and Classical artistic principles of composition, who is the true citizen. It is our essential national mission, embedded in the passions and circumstances of our nation’s birth, to be that kind of nation among nations, for the advantage of humanity as a whole. With that power of justified self-confidence, we can make miracles for the benefit of our future generations, and for humanity as a whole. To do this, we must see ourselves as the common principles of the Pythagoreans, Plato, and the modern science of Cusa, Leonardo, Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann typify our powers, and our true identity. We must become a happy, and therefore powerful people, a people of great power to do good for others, not to conquer them.

The source of needed strength for our republic, in this most perilous moment of modern history of the planet as a whole, is to discover that nobler identity in ourselves. It is what many mistakenly regard as the merely intangible aspect of the higher reaches of intelligence practice, which must be the guide for shaping the policies of practice to our institutions of government.

Life in a Fishbowl

The state of mind induced by submission to the false axioms suited to the role of human cattle, is typified as to form by the case of the Cartesian model. Whereas Riemann expunges all so-called a priori assumptions respecting geometry and physical science from science, and replaces these only with experimentally validated discoveries of universal physical principle, the slave-mentality sees physical reality only in terms of the delusory, a priori form of assumptions typified by the work of Aristotle, Euclid, and the modern empiricists. Thus, the victim of such a set of delusions, may be physically able to react appropriately to the real universe, but his mind will, ordinarily, not permit him to wander beyond the electric-fence-like boundaries defined by his adopted a priori assumptions.

That is what I mean by a “fishbowl syndrome”: a condition in which the human mind behaves like that of a (mythical) goldfish habituated to the boundaries represented by a glass container within which waters he swims.

The pathological (i.e., a priori) set of definitions of a Euclidean or Cartesian geometry of space and time, are merely typical of a much broader array of conditioned mental behavior, more or less a priori conditions which act like an array of electrical cattle-prods and fences to regulate the rather typical behavior of the majority of U.S. citizens, in particular, today.

Typical is the doctrine known variously as laissez-faire, or “free trade.” In fact, those doctrines are not merely absurd scientifically, but maliciously so, as shown by the post-1964 degeneration of the U.S. from the world’s leading producer society, to the mass of “post-industrial” bread and circuses dump of today. These malignant, but widespread articles of ignorant blind faith in a-prioristic assumptions, imply a set of little green men operating from under the floorboards of reality, maliciously casting crooked dice to determine the fate of real, living human individuals dwelling above those floorboards.

Thus, the successive applications of those arbitrarily embedded false doctrines have prompted a nation seeking goods at the lowest price, to drive prices below the level at which productive households can exist, and at which the essential capital of production of goods by our consuming nations could avoid being scrapped. As we have witnessed, this systemic destruction of the economy, and conditions of life, during the sweep of the recent forty years of “floating exchange-rate” systems, of the lunacy of post-industrial utopianism, and Paul Volcker-led collapse of our economic system, have degraded a once-great nation to a degenerate, suppurating role as a “mass entertainment society.”

We have a people hedged in, as by electric fences, by habituated delusions of popularized kinds of definitions, axioms, and postulates of human individual and social behavior. Unless we seize quickly the opportunity presented by the now onrushing early expectation of a general collapse of the present ideological system, to reinstall true, positive values, including those which made us the world’s most productive power, the likelihood of the survival of our constitutional republic is virtually zero.

The same kind of problem confronts us in other nations, and in the cultural integument of the interplay among social systems of various nations and cultures.

Competent intelligence practice at the higher level of national estimates and policy formation, must not degrade itself to the mere Sherlock Holmes-like farce of interpreting facts in an empiricist’s way. We must always focus upon the sets of variously real and merely fictitious notions of controlling principles, which define a kind of physical geometry, a physical geometry, false or true, but nonetheless believed, which controls human mass-behavior to the effect of defining the likely, characteristic form of action governing responses within that social system, either within, or among nations.

It is decisions, on estimates and proposed policies of practice, made at that indicated higher level of intelligence functions, which must subsume decisions on interpretation of developments, such as the case of 9/11, and proposed strategic and comparable actions. This requires a cadre of professional intelligence specialists who operate competently at that level of overview of the processes considered.

The world has lately entered a period of increasing turbulence, an increasingly stormy interaction between old habits of institutional belief and practice, and emergence of increasingly urgent demand for a revolutionary replacement of much of the old, by newly adopted guidelines of national practice. These kinds of problems can not be mastered by an ordinary sort of practical approach; safe transit requires higher skills among the leading cadres of our national intelligence function, as I have outlined the nature of that challenge in the foregoing portions of this section of my report.

Hence the pressing need for a national intelligence institution, to afford the rigorous form of higher education which meets the requirements of a national intelligence service, as I have just indicated the principled characteristics of the challenge, above.

3. The Needed Remedy

The long-ranging objective which underlay the creation of our still wonderfully unique system of Federal Constitutional Republic, was that implicit in the adoption of the central principle of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, that peace among peoples is dependent upon commitment to a principle of “the advantage of the other,” the benefit of the other. This affirmation of the same principle of the sovereign nation-state, as opposed to all forms of empire, and to those “Towers of Babel” known as schemes for dissolving nations into a kind of common, “globalized” minestrone, was the laid cornerstone of all modern international law, as opposed to Hobbesian and kindred forms of global bestiality.

That was the commitment of the founders of the U.S. republic from the beginning, the precept expressed by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’ crafting of what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, and of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s explicitly prescribed intention, contrary to that of his successor, Harry Truman, for the reconstruction of the post-war world freed of colonialism, empire, and their vestiges: a global community of respectively perfectly sovereign nation-states under a body of international law echoing the intention of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.

The most essential features of our constitutional republic demand, that we pursue that course as expressing our most vital self-interest as a nation and its posterity. That is the argument of natural law, including the absolute rejection of John Locke’s doctrine, in favor of Leibniz’s explicit “the pursuit of happiness,” upon which the creation of our nation was premised. That is the subsuming statement of governing principle, expressed as the Preamble of our Federal Constitution. That is the basis on which the principle of our Presidential republic is premised, in rejection of the characteristically tragic failures lurking, embedded in the design of states based on Parliamentary government.

It was these distinctions of our constitutional republic which enabled us to avoid the spread of fascist tyrannies which the financier-oligarchy of the 1922-1945 interval imposed upon the states of Western and Central continental Europe. It was the summoning of that deep-rooted national character of our republic’s creation, in the form of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Presidency, which enabled us to escape going under the imposition of fascist rule by our financier oligarchy, and which enabled us to provide the decisive margin of victory for freeing the world from the threat of a Hitler-regime-led, intended fascist world empire, saving us from the intended universal fascist tyranny of an Allgemeine-SS state.

Our national enemies are not other nations as such, but rather those attempts which threaten the establishment and security of a system of respectively absolutely sovereign nation-states under a natural form of international law traced to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. It is that principle which we must be prepared to defend, and to act to defend, as necessary. That pertains to the properly assigned mission of our military, diplomatic, and national intelligence functions.

Therefore, it became my concern, born of experience with the post-war world, that certain reforms of our national intelligence institutions must occur. I proposed the establishment of a national intelligence academy, paralleling the original intents of the establishment and development of the West Point and Annapolis academies. The intent of such a new institution must be, both to inculcate a historically informed sense of the mission-orientation of our republic’s existence, and to equip the matriculants in that knowledge and use of those skills appropriate for the long-ranging historically determined essential interests of our nation’s republic, interests coincident with the conception of an international law premised upon the principle of the benefit of the other.

The proper mission of our republic, to that end, must be rooted in an appreciation of those principles which set the individual person absolutely above all other forms of life. We must know that the possibility of durable peace among peoples will be secured only to the degree that the individual is freed from the still prevalent condition of being virtual human cattle, until the emergence of a still distant state of world affairs, in which there comes the prevalence of the true citizen, freed of those shackles on the mind which the “fishbowl” syndrome expresses.

Until that happy state of the individual can be made prevalent, a danger remains. However, we must combat that danger within and among nations, by choices of means which are consistent in intent of application with the promotion of that principle itself. Despite undeniable abuses, during and following World War II, that was the attitude expressed widely by the Roosevelt Administration and by most of the ordinary soldiers during and immediately following that war. The ugliness came back in the Truman Administration’s rejection of President Roosevelt’s policy, by such means as backing of the British imperial efforts to re-enforce colonialism in places such as Indo-China and Indonesia, and the imposition of a witch-hunt atmosphere here at home.

Therein lie the pluses and minuses of our appropriate national-security, military, and diplomatic policy. That must be the efficient mission-orientation of the career of the individual intelligence officer graduated from our national intelligence academy.

The axis of the functioning of a reformed intelligence system, LaRouche writes, must be a newly established national intelligence institute, comparable to the original intention of the West Point (shown here) and Annapolis academies.

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The Organization of Intelligence

There is probably little disagreement among our intelligence professionals, in particular, that the practice of combining a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and a Director of Intelligence (DI) in the same person, has been a mistake. What must be made clearly understood, is that many of the proposals for dividing the present, nominal or practised functions represent cures which are worse than the disease. None of those heard recent proposals would be relevant to having prevented the grave lapse of intelligence performance preceding the events of 9/11. Perhaps we might not have prevented the attack itself, but we should have prevented those attested lapses, noticed in the report, which were willfully perpetrated by both the President and Vice-President, which assuredly aided in the adversary’s ability to bring about that horrible result.

We do not need a potential Heinrich Himmler for the United States. The proposals generally heard so far, do nothing to prevent the virtual inevitability of such an effect were the proposed “czar” functioning under a re-elected Bush-Cheney government.

We require an institution which has no principal mission but the discovery of the truth about the current and prospective future developments affecting the security of the U.S.A. in the performance of its continuing mission, from administration to administration. It must, first of all, provide forewarning, and otherwise advise the instruments of the Federal government, respecting the developing shape of world history. As an extension of that, it must assist appropriate functions of government in the missions of investigation which are either inherent in its primary function, or are assigned, as standing or ad hoc duties consistent with the intelligence function, by relevant other institutions of government.

I point to work I have studied, of the functioning of U.S. military and other intelligence in the matter of the operations against the U.S.A. and Mexico, by the Nazi and related operations of Synarchist International during the interval between 1935 and the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, especially those conducted against operations in progress under Hitler, his flunky Francisco Franco, and Japan, prior to the U.S. military victory at Midway. These and related precedents, as determinants for rules of undercover engagement, for the special roles of intelligence functions, are still relevant for today. That is, provided those actions do not violate the constitutional intention of the U.S.A. and its partnership in those principles of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which might be administered among nations through the appropriately defined duties of cooperation among perfectly sovereign nation-states assigned to a UNO.

The organization of our national intelligence function for this mission must reflect the interchangeable aspects of national command requirements for the alternate conditions of general warfare or peace. This must be pivoted in the form of a direct accountability for, and also by, the President as war-time commander-in-chief. This pivot on which those alternating roles of the national-intelligence swings, serves primarily as the arm of the President, but also as the role of the Presidency as a whole in checking as well as, otherwise, strengthening the President as a whole.

Suppose, for example, a President were discovered to be insane. Obviously, the power to impeach such a President lies with the Congress; but, the first step for such a case must be the influence of the leading elements of the Presidency upon the President himself, and by such means to avoid impeachment except as a last resort.

For that and comparable reasons, there must be the least-action shift from a DI and DCI in the same person, to a DI as the coordinating official bringing together the sundry functions of the military, diplomatic establishment, and intelligence functions in a coordinated way. This function of the DI ought to be situated as the function associated with direct access to the President, but also regular access to the proceedings of the Cabinet. The other divisions of the intelligence establishment as a whole (military, diplomatic, DCI-directed intelligence, national law enforcement’s intelligence functions), report in an ordinary way to the DI, but are not denied written or oral forms of direct access to the President when this is requested. An easily defined reporting to the Congress, is also needed. Thus, there must be checks-and-balances in the intelligence system as a whole, for both positive and negative reasons.

The axis of the functioning of this intelligence system as a whole, must be the location of a newly established national intelligence institute, comparable to the original intention of West Point and Annapolis Academies, which must be the shaping of the conscience and associated skills of the core of the cadres who join the regular ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency, or may be seconded for special educational programs of this type among military and diplomatic cadres.

Beyond such reforms, there is an additional requirement. For such a form of intelligence organization to function effectively, the nation must adopt a reformed affirmation of the sense of national, multi-generational mission to which I have referred earlier here.

In life, there is truly no set of permanently established sets of rules which might properly govern decision-making over successive generations. That function must be assigned to a higher level of policy-shaping, to the intent of a process of change through self-development of national practice, as changes in conditions and new opportunities for progress suggest such change. One of the appropriate institutions for coordinating studies of such processes would be the faculty of a national intelligence academy, which can serve as a rallying-point for the promotion and digestion of this advisory function.

It is also important to stress the need to establish the concept of a general staff function, a function of officers assigned to reach beyond the envelope of ordinary command, to explore new dimensions not adequately addressed by the regular order of command. This is especially required for all those intelligence functions whose authorities and duties bear on discovery of principles and special situations which arise beyond the ordinary line of command, the function of well-trained officials acting for a time as the mavericks who reach beyond the envelope of ordinary practice, to places from which the effective flanking of otherwise stubborn problems of function may be effected.

[fn_1]. Cf. Dr. Justin Frank, Bush on the Couch, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, N.Y., 2004. [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2]2. As Russian President Vladimir Putin has emphasized, in condemning the blunders of the Boris Yeltsin government in Chechnya, it is absurd to regard U.S.- and some western European-backed support for anti-Russia terrorist operations in Transcaucasia as a whole, as the issue of the bestial attack on Beslan. This is, as I warned in my 1999 Storm over Asia video. Beslan is the outgrowth of a long ongoing strategic attempt to destroy Russia itself; only a virtually rabid incompetent would overlook those implications. [back to text for fn_2]

[fn_3]. As typified by Kepler’s 1609 The New Astronomy. The central axis of development of modern mathematical physics after Kepler, was the work of Gottfried Leibniz and others, such as Gauss, Jacobi, Abel, Dirichlet, and Riemann, in carrying forth the work assigned to “future mathematicians” by Kepler, assignments, to develop a true infinitesimal calculus, and the generalization of elliptical functions, adduced from what Kepler recognized as the unsolved principled implications of his own discovery of a universal gravitation, as typified by his The New Astronomy.

I.e., the fact that a.) the planet’s orbit is elliptical, that b.) the rate of change of the planet’s vectored motion is never constant over even the smallest of infinitesimal intervals, but that c.) the vectored motion is determined empirically as equal time, equal Solar area subtended, defines that motion as governed by universal principle of constant change, which is the elementary notion of physical principle of the infinitesimal calculus. The ordered, harmonic configuration of the orbital system within the physical space of the observed Solar System as a whole, that in a way related to the Florentine bel canto determination of musical harmonics, posed the same issue of elliptical functions so remarkably addressed, later, by J.S. Bach’s system of well-tempered counterpoint.

See the presentation by the youth chorus at the Sunday evening, session (Panel 5) of the Schiller Institute’s Labor Day Weekend conference in Reston Virginia on September 4-5, 2004 for an example of the implications of this. [back to text for fn_3]

[fn_4]. Sphaerics signifies viewing the astronomical universe as a great spheroid of vast dimension, and, thus, measuring continuous action and also singularities of motion in the visible universe in terms of measurement of a universe of spherical harmonics rather than the arbitrary, false standpoint of the a priori, linear assumptions of an Euclidean or Cartesian geometry. [back to text for fn_4]

II. For Cooperation with China

SCHILLER INSTITUTE WEBCAST

Pelosi’s Lies Expose Criminal Intent Behind Coup Plot Against Trump

Left: EIRNS/Stuart Lewis; right: LPACtv

Left: William Binney; right: Larry C. Johnson

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This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s December 15, 2019 interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, by Harley Schlanger. A video of the webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger with the Schiller Institute. Welcome to our webcast with our founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche. It’s Dec. 15, 2019.

Events over the last weeks concerning impeachment of President Trump, and other things, have made very clear that the real issue we’re dealing with is war and peace. We had the vote of two articles of impeachment voted up by the House Judiciary Committee; the release of Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report, Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation, and commentary on it; and then also, some very revealing comments from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Why don’t we start, Helga, with the recent developments around the Horowitz Report and especially the comments from former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson, and former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I think most noteworthy are the signs that the impeachment coup—and Trump has called it a coup, and it is a coup—may actually backfire, bigtime. Now, I’m not normally advertising Der Spiegel, but the cover story of its upcoming print copy [Dec. 14, 2019, #51], has another one of those unspeakable Trump cartoons, but in the text announcing the coming issue, it basically says that he may “get away with it.” In other words, the impeachment may fail. I think that that is an interesting sign that Der Spiegel probably smells a change in the wind.

Most interesting for our viewers—that is, you—is the “Fireside Chat” our colleagues at LaRouche PAC posted last Thursday, featuring Bill Binney, who has the absolute, forensic proof that there was no Russian hack in the computers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) server. Binney has provided, many times, details proving that the whole story that depends upon the claim that Russia hacked he DNC is a lie, because the speed with which the files were transferred speaks to a local download and not to a hack via the internet. That evidence has never been published; it was introduced into the trial of Roger Stone, but the judge, Amy Berman Jackson, did not accept it. But this fraud actually underpins the entire Russiagate narrative.

Bill Binney is therefore, a very important witness in this whole affair, because he used to be the technical director of the NSA. As I mentioned, he was just on LaRouche PAC’s “Fireside Chat” program, together with Barbara Boyd, Larry Johnson, and also Sean Stone, the son of filmmaker Oliver Stone.

This program is a must see for anybody who wants to get to the bottom of the coup d’état being attempted against the United States. It establishes that there is now a growing number of whistleblowers in the United States, around the VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity), who are saying that the impeachment, and before that, Ukrainegate, and before that, Russiagate, cannot be maintained.

In this particular Fireside Chat, the guests levied some very important criticisms of the Horowitz Report, saying it does a pretty good job of establishing the remarkable criminality of the FBI. That has been documented very well in the report and reflects a lot of investigation.

Larry Johnson then also made the point that the Horowitz Report has a very strange, almost cover-up quality to it, as concerns the origins of the anti-Trump campaign. I think that is very, very interesting.

First, Joseph Mifsud fed George Papadopoulos hearsay that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulos repeated it to Alexander Downer, Australia’s High Commissioner (Ambassador) to the U.K. Above, Popadopoulos is second from left.

CC-BY 2.0/Richter Frank-Jurgen

Alexander Downer

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The Horowitz Report

The Horowitz Report put together the documentation that this was a conscious setup, in which a relatively unimportant person, George Papadopoulos, an early member of the Trump Campaign, who was consciously targetted by Joseph Mifsud, who, in the report, is still being portrayed as somehow having links to Russia, or being a Russian agent, while in reality, the only connection which does exist is that he worked very closely with MI6, with the CIA, with the FBI, and in all likelihood, is rather an agent of these forces; that Mifsud consciously sought out Papadopoulos, and planted the information that the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

Neither in this report, nor anywhere else, did anyone ever asked, what kind of “dirt” the Russians had on Hillary Clinton. Nevertheless, this hearsay was provided by Papadopoulos to Alexander Downer, Australia’s High Commissioner (Ambassador) to the U.K., and that hearsay was then was passed on, and was then the basis for the so-called Russiagate.

Another key element in this is the role of Gen. Michael Flynn, who used to be the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the Obama Administration, and according to all reports and information, was a very honest person, because he did not go along with the wars of aggression by Obama against Syria, for example; he made himself very much disliked by Obama in 2012 when he went to the White House to brief Obama that the weapons which were supposedly given by the United States to the “moderates” in the Middle East, actually landed in the hands of the terrorists; Obama didn’t like to hear that. Flynn was fired. And when Flynn attended a dinner with Putin in 2015, the intelligence services took that as the way to target not only Flynn, but to then pin the Russia connection to Trump as being via Flynn.

Now, what Larry Johnson has also established is that General Flynn went to the officials of the United States before he participated in this dinner with Putin, which is the common rule for all people working in the security field; he asked them for permission, he got the permission, he briefed them afterwards about the dinner. And the funny thing is that this guy Mifsud also participated in that dinner with Putin and General Flynn, and also Sean Stone, who was also on the “Fireside Chat” show reporting about all of this.

If you listen only to the mainstream media in Europe or in the United States, for that matter, you will never have an inkling of what is going on—that this so-called Russiagate, and the entire coup, have been an intelligence operation targetting Trump from the very beginning of his Presidency, and Flynn even before that. I think this discussion sheds a completely different light on what’s going on with the whole affair. I think, therefore, it’s a must-see for anybody who wants to have a competent judgment on the present strategic situation.

Schlanger: I think it’s crucial to note also that Attorney General Barr and his chief prosecutor, U.S. Attorney John Durham, commented on the Horowitz Report, disagreeing with his conclusion that there was no malign intent, and stating that they’re continuing to work on their investigation.

Another comment that was very significant was that of civil liberties attorney Alan Dershowitz. Helga, what do you think of his comment, that the whole impeachment is an attempt to destroy the office of the American Presidency, and turn us into a parliamentary system?

The Drive to Replace the Presidential System with a Parliamentary One

Zepp-LaRouche: If the impeachment of the President, in a Presidential system can be done on the grounds of partisan opposition,— because at this point it’s just the Democrats who want to “weaponize” the impeachment in order to get rid of Trump. They fear, correctly, that in the 2020 election, they cannot win an honest election campaign. Dershowitz makes the point that if this goes through, a very dangerous precedent will have been created, thus destroying the American republic and its Presidential system, and replacing it with a British parliamentary system, whereby a prime minister can be gotten rid of just with a majority vote in the parliament.

Now, I think this is, indeed, very important, because we can see not only in Great Britain, with the Brexit, but also all over Europe, that the parliamentary system is not functioning anywhere to protect the common good—or democracy, for that matter.

I think there is an effort to weaponize the impeachment process, and that must not be tolerated. Raising the issue of the American republic and Presidential system is very, very, important.

Schlanger: It’s worth noting that your late husband Lyndon LaRouche, many years ago, particularly zeroed in on this danger of America being turned into a parliamentary system by taking away the power of the President.

Gage Skidmore

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

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Pelosi Tells the Truth About Lying, and Lies About the Truth

Speaking of which, we have some very interesting comments coming from Nancy Pelosi, perhaps inadvertently, about why she didn’t support impeachment of Bush, which you probably want to discuss with our listeners. She said, what this is really about is not Ukraine, but that “All roads lead to Putin.” What do you make of Pelosi’s comments?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, I don’t know—Mrs. Pelosi has a real inability to even stick to her lies, and that’s not a good thing for somebody in her position. First of all, she admitted, in a comment to a student questioner at a town hall at Johns Hopkins University that she knew in 2003 that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that she was told that in her capacity as ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, even before she was Speaker of the House, and that she knew it was conscious lying to the public to say that Iraq had such weapons.

For her to admit that now is quite incredible, because the Iraq War—which was based on lies, there were no weapons of mass destruction—as people well remember, led to millions of people losing their lives, I think around a million Iraqis in the war, and then many more millions after the war because of the sanctions, and because of the devastation from the war. And it naturally also led to the loss of life of, I think, 4,400 American soldiers, and it naturally contributed to the refugee crisis, which has torn Europe apart, and created an incredible suffering for many millions of people.

So for her to basically say, “Yeah, yeah, I knew all of that,” and then not to have acted then to try to stop it—that destroys her entire credibility! Everybody who is concerned about these wars, should demand investigations. To their credit German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the French President Giscard d’Estaing opposed the war, and did not participate in it. Nevertheless war crimes were committed, and I think it is owed to the victims of this lie, or this war based on lies, that justice be reestablished. So I really call on all those who are concerned about justice, international law, human rights, and democracy, for that matter, to demand that this be taken up, and not just pass.

Pelosi also lied on another matter: On one occasion, said the impeachment was a very recent thing, and then in another comment she said, Oh, we were at it for two and a half years—which is true.

Now, Trump tweeted on that, pointing to the fact that Pelosi was called a liar on that point, too.

So, I think Pelosi is completely discredited, and the way she has been talking has caused many people to ask if she was sober when she made these statements. I think she is really totally discredited in every respect.

Schlanger: Speaking of lies and wars, we have a report that we’ve been repeatedly lied to about the war in Afghanistan. This is also something which should be investigated, shouldn’t it?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yeah, this is incredible. Of all places, the Washington Post revealed that the American administration, over years—after all this war has been going on for 19 years—lied about supposed progress being made, while in reality the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is absolutely horrendous. So I think this is also one of the lies which should be investigated. Democratic Party Presidential pre-candidate Tulsi Gabbard announced that she will start a congressional hearing about that, and I think that is just one more of the failures of the neo-liberal/neo-con establishments of the West, confronted with the utter failure of their policies in every respect. I think this is another thing which is worth thinking about.

Gage Skidmore

Democratic Party Presidential pre-candidate, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, announced she wants to hold a hearing about the 19-year war in Afghanistan.

CC BY-SA 4.0/Shahen books

Street protest in Beirut, Lebanon on October 18, 2019.

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After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history,” that democracy and the Western neo-liberal model would spread around the world. Well, if you look at the present situation, you can see that that neo-liberal model is completely, utterly failing. We have mass demonstrations of literally millions of people in the streets. In Chile, two million people are out in the street almost every day and every night; mass demonstrations in many countries around the globe—Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Algeria; the French general strike is continuing, probably throughout Christmas; the German farmers are out with convoys of tractors every weekend now in different cities.

So, I think the point for us to reflect about here is the absolute inability of the Western establishment to comprehend why their policies are leading to such disasters. They are definitely resistant against any kind of advice and are unable to correct their policies, and I think that that has a big implication as well.

New Security Architecture Must Supersede NATO

Schlanger: We saw that in two other conferences recently: the NATO conference, where, again, it’s a Cold War scenario, even as there are very interesting developments with the Trump-Lavrov meeting; and the Normandy Four meeting [Ukraine, Russia, France, Germany]. What do you make of the NATO conference?

Zepp-LaRouche: French President Emmanuel Macron recently said that NATO was “brain-dead.” Trump had already said NATO was obsolete. I think that is absolutely the case. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 and the Warsaw Pact dissolved, NATO lost its raison d’être. All the confrontation today against Russia and China is just being built up to justify making big salaries for the bureaucrats in the NATO apparatus and also for the military-industrial complex. So I think it is much time lost, but not too late to replace NATO with a completely different system, a security architecture which includes Russia and China, because the present confrontation policy is really implying the danger of a big war.

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Many people around the world are now reflecting, who may not like Trump at all, but who realize that Trump is trying to have a decent relationship with Russia and China; while, if Hillary Clinton had become President, we could have had World War III already.

So, I think it’s time for NATO to fold up. I think we need a new approach, an approach which guarantees the long-term survivability of the planet and humanity, and I think people should also reflect that NATO should be a relegated to the status of an institution of the past.

Schlanger: It seems that a new security architecture was part of what was discussed by President Trump and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in their meeting December 10 at the White House.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. I think it’s important that Trump, when he was in France at the beginning of December, had mentioned several times that an arms agreement on nuclear weapons is the number one question on the strategic agenda. Trump even talked about the need to stop the production of nuclear weapons and get rid of them completely, but that has not been noted by the mass mainstream media. I think that Trump’s bring that up reflects the fact that he, indeed, wants to have peace with Russia and China, and all the Trump-haters should really become objective about this point.

Changes in the Climate Change Arena

Schlanger: Talk about the failure of these trans-Atlantic institutions—at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) in Madrid, Spain we saw that the attempt to impose a global austerity shutdown of energy production ran into some fairly serious problems.

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, that is good thing. They could not agree to a final communiqué, and there was a great lack of unity, the United States was not the only nation unwilling to go along. I think China also did not sign, despite the fact that they say they are doing a lot on climate protection. Saudi Arabia; but also many of the developing countries, took the position that since changes in the climate were not been caused by them, because they have no industrial development, therefore the industrial countries should compensate them.

Now, that may not be the answer, but they just chose that argument to say that they are not willing to sign an agreement they perfectly well know would mean the end of their dreams to overcome poverty and underdevelopment. Remember that already in 2009, at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen, the G77 countries gave a press conference where they said they would never sign such a suicide pact. I think it’s very good that this monstrosity did not achieve the result desired by the climate freaks.

Schlanger: As we look at these institutions, we would be remiss if we didn’t bring up the problems in the European Union, typified on the one hand by Ursula von der Leyen, the new President of the European Commission, going ahead with a radical austerity “Green New Deal,” and at the same time, Christine Lagarde, who’s now the new President of the European Central Bank, talking about continuing a policy which has been threatening to collapse the whole European economy. What can you say about these policies?

European Council

Ursula von der Leyen

2019 UN Climate Change Conference, COP 25, Madrid, Spain.

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Zepp-LaRouche: Well, Ursula von der Leyen has a completely wrong position. If she is not stopped, this woman’s policies will mean the end of Europe as an industrial continent. What she announced with the European Green Deal is an absolute monstrosity, which aims to direct all financial streams into so-called “green” technologies and investments, which is being completely destructive of the real, physical economy. The idea of “decarbonizing” the economy would leave only low energy-flux dense power sources, and that would be completely insufficient for industrial countries. My Germany and all the other European countries would be completely destroyed. Of course, she’s against nuclear energy. Not coincidentally, this is, is exactly the “great transformation” of the economy Hans Joachim Schellnhuber has been pushing since 2004!

I just looked back in my files and discovered that I had written articles about that many years ago, saying that the whole thing was really escalated in 2004 with the German-British climate conference in the British Embassy in Berlin, which was opened by Her Majesty the Queen, Elizabeth, herself. At that time, she made Schellnhuber a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and he’s been calling himself CBE ever since.

And at that conference in 2004, it was decided among German and British financial circles that green financing would be the big business of the future. And that naturally led to the report which the Schellnhuber people gave the WBGU (German Advisory Council on Global Change), put out after the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan in 2011. The idea was to have a complete “transformation” of the world economy, decarbonize every economy by 2050. Some even crazier radicals are now talking about 2030: Doing this would mean total population reduction, simply because it would destroy entire branches of industry.

Volkmar Denner, the CEO of Bosch, issued a strong criticism of von der Leyen’s program, saying this would constitute a dire threat to the auto industry, and that if this policy got through, the auto sector would need structural support.

In an article I wrote yesterday, I pointed out that Denner’s sentiment is understandable, but still reflects the usual kind of mistake in thinking that if your field of endeavor is attacked, that you need structural reforms and support for your sector; but if you look around the globe, the people in Chile, in Iraq, in France, in Germany, the farmers, they all are demonstrating because their area is threatened, but if all of them fail to understand that their individual problems are derivative of the neo-liberal system, then none will find a solution. They may protest a little bit, maybe get some compensation, but then go out of business, and the larger process of destruction continues.

Global Solutions Exist

That is why I’m saying that everybody who is now suffering from the consequences of these neo-liberal policies must take up the solution for the whole picture, and that is: a global Glass-Steagall. We need to put an end to the casino economy. By the way, since you mentioned Lagarde, she wants to continue the policies of her predecessor Mario Draghi; she even said the sentence which made Draghi infamous, that he would do whatever it takes to save the euro, which means opening the money sluices, going for complete “quantitative easing,” leading eventually to a hyperinflation like in 1923. We are very close to that. So if these policies continue, then economic chaos, social chaos, and also security consequences of unpredictable dimensions will result.

So we need a global Glass-Steagall separation of the banks; we need a national bank in every country. During the postwar period, for example, the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau financed the German economic miracle. These national banks in all countries must cooperate in a new Bretton Woods system, acting on a global scale to finance reconstruct the real, physical economy, including a crash program for higher technologies like fusion power and propulsion; and facilitating international cooperation in space research and travel.

It is all actually very easy, because the framework for this already exists, in the form of the Belt and Road Initiative (the New Silk Road). I think everything will depend on our ability to get the European countries and the United States into a mode of cooperation with Russia and China on these policies and not go to war confrontation.

I think this is the key to whether we have peace or war in this time, and the entire impeachment process against Trump is only designed to prevent such a potentiality. I think there is a chance that we can turn it around, but it requires that you, our viewers, get active with us. You should help to spread what I said in the beginning of this interview about the Trump impeachment. You should subscribe to this channel, we should get many more people to be aware of it, and help us to mobilize for the solutions, which only the Schiller Institute and the LaRouche movement in general is promoting.

Mine is an urgent appeal to you, to not sit on the fence of history. In this very crucial moment, where the chance to get a different system is absolutely present, it does require the activation of people on the highest levels: So, join us in this effort!

China

Schlanger: One additional point on that, Helga. The same people who are running the impeachment coup against Trump are also running the vicious attacks against China. There was a very significant report that came out this last week, about what the Chinese are doing that we should be copying in terms of education. What your response to that report?

Zepp-LaRouche: Many viewers are commenting that we in the Schiller Institute are “too pro-China.” They are repeating the lying line that the Chinese communist system is a dictatorship. I think probably we should have, sometime in the near future an entire program devoted to discussing China directly. But I really want to tell people, now: If you have not been to China yet, plan your next vacation there. Just go and see China for yourself, take in the incredible development that is taking place there. EIR has just released a new pamphlet, “End the McCarthyite Witch Hunt Against China & President Trump,” saying that the McCarthy-like targetting of Trump and China, which comes from the same circles must be stopped. So, if you don’t already have a copy, get one and help us distribute it.

Left: Courtesy of Helga Zepp-LaRouche; right: CC/MINXANL

The contrast couldn’t be greater: On the left, a man pulling a rickshaw in 1971 near Shanghai. On the right, an ultra-modern Fuxing high-speed train, arriving at the Shanghai Railway Station.

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In this pamphlet is a photograph that I, myself, took in 1971, in the countryside near Shanghai, China, which shows how extremely underdeveloped China was at that time; and just beside my photo is a photo of an ultra-modern, fast train system. The transformation of transport in China in only 40 years, should give you an insight into the very rapid economic development direction this country is taking.

None of this has anything to do with the kind of communism which existed in the Soviet Union—or East Germany (G.D.R.) for that matter—but it is what the Chinese themselves call “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” meaning it’s absolutely created by Confucian principles, which have been, sort of, in the genes of the Chinese population for 2,500 years.

Now, I want to say something about the most recent PISA [Program for International Student Assessment] study, which is made every three years, testing 15-year-olds in terms of three important fields: reading ability, mathematics, and science. In all three categories this year, Chinese pupils ranked at the top, while Germany and the United States, for example, ranked in the middle—falling actually, in terms of their ratings. An article in the Chinese media commented that maybe the West should reflect that the excellent education result from China has something to do with the policies of China and the success of the Chinese model.

I’ll leave that as food for thought, to start you on your way to ridding yourself of your prejudices, and informing yourself about what is really going on, especially why it is that the Chinese model is so attractive for so many developing countries—because it opens up a perspective for them to overcome their own poverty and underdevelopment. This is the reason we put out this pamphlet. You can get it by downloading it from our website https://larouchepub.com/special_report/2019/20191123-EndChinaWitchhunt.pdf or you can get a print copy by writing to us. Whichever method you choose, help us distribute it; encourage others to engage in serious discussions, rather than sterile, prejudicial party-line chatter, because that is very much in need.

We really must have a debate about the future of humanity, about what the right policies are: how to get back to the idea that the future is something we can shape, and create, and make positive for all of humanity, rather than just trotting our usual ways and being unconscious of what history is really all about at this incredibly exciting moment.

So, get active with us. And otherwise, I wish you a Merry Christmas!

Schlanger: And for those of you who want to go deeper into China and its programs, we have the World Land-Bridge report, a thorough study by the Schiller Institute. With that, Helga, thank you very much, and we’ll see you again next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, next week.

Zepp-LaRouche Interview on

China-U.S. Relationship

Schiller Institute

Helga Zepp-LaRouche at the founding of the CGTN Think Tank in Beijing, China on December 4, 2019.

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Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and President of the Schiller Institute, was interviewed by Zhao Yang for China Plus, the official English website of China Radio International, on December 5. This is the edited transcript. Subheads have been added.

The interview was occasioned by Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche’s presence in Beijing to participate in the China Global Television Network’s Third Annual CGTN Global Media Summit on December 4, 2019, as a founding member of the network’s new CGTN Think Tank.

The think tank will function as a platform for exchanges and cooperation among global think tanks, with a goal of offering insights on world developments while promoting inter-cultural dialogue. Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche addressed one of the panels, where she focussed on the rapidly unravelling Western financial system and the urgency to adopt a new Bretton Woods agreement to establish a new system coherent with the spirit of the New Silk Road.

China Plus: You’re listening to “World Today.” I’m Zhao Yang.

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich said some of the greatest failures and weaknesses in the U.S. cannot be blamed on China. Gingrich made the comment in his new book, Trump vs. China: Facing America’s Great Threat. As one example, Gingrich wrote, “It is not China’s fault that old, bureaucratic, entrenched American telecommunications companies failed to develop a global strategy for 5G over the 11 years that the Chinese company Huawei has been working to become a world leader.” Overall, however, the book argues that China poses a real threat to the United States.

Are America’s Failures China’s Fault?

For more on this, I earlier had a talk with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, a political and economic think tank based in Germany.

Do you think he has a point when he says that some of America’s failures and weaknesses are not China’s fault?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I agree, one time, with Newt Gingrich—probably the first time, ever. But I think that the United States has simply not paid attention to it, and China has set its emphasis on innovation in many fields, so I think that his point is absolutely correct.

China Plus: And despite that particular comment—and the book is overwhelmingly about how China poses a threat to American values, and this seems to reflect a growing bipartisan conclusion among America’s political elite, that the U.S. needs to take a harder line against China—do you think U.S.-China relations are moving on a dangerous trajectory?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. But I think the bipartisan consensus only exists in the party leadership, the DNC [Democratic National Committee] and the Republican Party, but not for President Trump and not for the American people. I know that China is very disappointed about President Trump and the trade war, because in the beginning, he said he wanted to have a very good relationship with China, and he talks about his friendship with President Xi Jinping, but I think it has a lot to do with the pressure on Trump, who is confronted with, actually, a regime-change effort by the Democrats. The Attorney General, [William] Barr, has even talked about a seditious attempt to overthrow the U.S. government being behind the impeachment.

So a lot of things that Trump is saying, do not, in my view, really reflect his intention, because he has, in his rallies all the time, told his supporters that China is a great country, that it has a great culture. And I think if there is a defeat of this present coup attempt, I see the chances as actually quite good that the pendulum can swing back, because the people of America don’t hate the Chinese people, and President Trump wants to have a good relationship with Russia and China, but it is the neo-cons in both parties, who are trying to prevent that.

U.S. Pressure on China

China Plus: But we see that the U.S. has been increasing pressure on China, on a number of fronts, like a trade war, the tech embargo, and the legislation on Hong Kong and on Xinjiang. How do you think China could respond to those matters?

Zepp-LaRouche: On the one side, it’s the United States, but in the case of Hong Kong, you see very clearly the role of the British. I think there were some articles in the Chinese media that correctly traced this policy back to the British role in the Opium Wars. And it is actually the forces of the British Empire, and their associates in the United States, who want to suppress the rise of China by focussing on making a “color revolution” in Hong Kong, which is heavily financed by forces abroad: The National Endowment for Democracy, for example, has been bragging that it is spending millions of dollars on financing the so-called “democracy” movement in Hong Kong.

I think the same thing goes for Xinjiang, with the passing of the recent Act, when there was a move to force Trump to sign it, because of the overwhelming [majority for it] in the Congress, [it is being said that] there is no point in him vetoing it [because Congress would override his veto]. He’s in the middle of an election campaign, which makes it very difficult for him.

China’s Win-Win Success

But I think what China should just do, is invite more diplomats, more journalists, to Xinjiang. We had two members of our organization [who traveled] to Xinjiang and they spent a week there. And they came back and completely confirmed what China is saying, namely, that this is the way to fight against terrorism through economic development. Xinjiang used to be one of the poorest areas of China, which made it easy for the terrorists to recruit.

Now people have a good economic future. So, I think it’s absolutely on the right path. And for the last three years there has been no terrorism. I think China should just invite more people—diplomats, journalists—and also, be very self-assured. Because I think if you contrast what China is doing in Xinjiang with the absolute catastrophe that was caused by so-called “humanitarian” interventionist wars in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, in Afghanistan, I think China actually looks like a shining model of good human rights, as compared to what happened in these places.

China Plus: OK, but when we talk about competition between the U.S. and China—they’re the largest economy and the second largest—do you think there is really such a thing as a “Thucydides Trap”?

Chinese Model Similar to U.S. Founding Principles

Zepp-LaRouche: I think if one looks at the substance of the matter, the Chinese model is an incredible example of poverty alleviation. I was in China in 1971, and I have seen with my own eyes the incredible transformation. I can see that the Chinese people for the most part are happy, they’re optimistic. If you compare that, for example, with the poverty in the European Union, or in the United States, where you have for the third year in a row a reduction in the life-expectancy, as a result of drugs and alcoholism and suicides; the infrastructure in the United States is in a terrible condition, so I think that anybody who is objective sees that the Chinese model is actually more successful, from the standpoint of the well-being of the people.

If you really look at it, what China is doing today is much more in line with the intention in the beginning of the American Revolution of the Founding Fathers, of Alexander Hamilton. The principles of the American Revolution were very similar to those of China today. It’s just that the present policy of the United States, at least for the administrations before Trump, were very much taken over by the neo-liberal model, which emphasizes the profit maximization of the speculators.

As a result, the gap between the rich and the poor has become wider throughout the entire trans-Atlantic world. But also, look at the present mass demonstrations—in Chile, in Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, the whole Arab world. Today we have a general strike in France; even the German farmers are having long tractor motorcade protests, because they feel their existence is threatened. You can actually see that the neo-liberal model is completely failing.

And the Chinese model is prospering, and that is why the Belt and Road Initiative has been so attractive to many countries in the world—because they see that their benefit is [an integral part] of working with China.

So, there is a certain challenge, but I think the Western elite would be wise to reflect on why the Chinese model is more successful, and why their model is not. But they’re not willing to do that.

The Future Determines the Present

China Plus: But amid this worsening relationship with the U.S., what do you think China should do to develop its ties with other major powers, like the European Union and Russia?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think we are at the end of an epoch. I think this entire period of history is coming to end, and China has been building a new paradigm, of new relations among nations. But I think it will be very important to include Russia, India, and European nations, but I don’t think that the world crisis can be solved without including the United States. I think the two most important economies are the U.S. and China, and I’m convinced that there is a way of finding common interests: For example, we have incredible needs for the industrialization of Africa. This is a gigantic challenge: There will be 2.5 billion people [in Africa] by 2050. If we really want to solve this challenge, without having the worst migration crisis ever, all the countries must work together to help to industrialize Africa.

Also the reconstruction of Southwest Asia requires the cooperation of all big neighbors, and hopefully including the United States. So, my organization, the Schiller Institute, is working very hard, to try and convince the Americans and the Europeans that it is in their best interest to work to realize a new paradigm of civilizational cooperation—what Xi Jinping calls the shared community for the future of mankind. I think that is a concept which is the first time, the idea of overcoming geopolitics, of defining a solution to the present problems from the standpoint of the future.

We should think of how mankind should look 100 years from now: We will have, hopefully, thermonuclear fusion power, which means you will have limitless energy and raw materials resources, so that a reason for war will no longer exist. We will hopefully have villages on the Moon; we will be looking forward to soon having towns and cities on Mars, and that kind of international space cooperation will be the model for the future cooperation of mankind.

So I think if we elevate our view to that level, we can solve the problems of the present. If we don’t do that, we may destroy each other as a civilization. So, since I’m an optimist, I think we can get the reasonable people in all countries to cooperate for this higher goal.

China Plus: That’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of Schiller Institute, a Germany-based political and economic think tank.

SWEDISH BELT AND ROAD SEMINAR

A New Africa is Emerging with the Belt and Road

BRIX

Belt and Road Institute’s (BRIX) seminar in Stockholm, Sweden, December 5, 2019.

BRIX

H.E. Alaa Hegazy, Ambassador of Egypt to Sweden.

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Dec. 8—Egypt’s Ambassador to Sweden, representing the African Union—which Egypt heads this year—greeted the 60 guests at the December 5 special seminar in Stockholm, which included nineteen diplomats from fifteen countries, most of them from Africa. Hussein Askary, one of two BRIX Board members, was a speaker, along with a former Norwegian parliamentarian. Both of them emphasized that BRIX does not exist to cheer on China or Africa, but rather the goal sought by BRIX is to bring Sweden into this process of cooperation. Askary made a point that should not be missed by Europe and United States: Those nations would be wise to not “miss the train towards economic prosperity and stability in the world.”

The seminar outlined the great progress being achieved in realizing Africa’s development goals in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and explored the massive potential imbedded in making Africa the greatest economic powerhouse on the planet in the coming decades. Europe, as well as the rest of the West, can and should cooperate with the African nations and China to accelerate and benefit from this promising perspective in this kind of win-win economic approach.

Stephen Brawer, Vice-President of BRIX, who had organized the event, welcomed everyone and gave a brief history of how BRIX came into being, and about its work so far. The BRIX, which is only one year old, emerged out of a high-level seminar on the strategic and economic impact of the BRI held in May 2018 and organized jointly by the Schiller Institute and the China-Sweden Business Council (CSBC). He emphasized that BRIX is committed to disseminating knowledge of BRI as a global development process, and to presenting a deeper reflection on that process, to overcome opinion based on prejudice and geopolitical agendas.

Egypt’s Ambassador, Mr. Alaa Hegazy, emphasized the importance of the Belt and Road Initiative for the implementation of Africa’s development plans that are only now beginning to take off. He presented the African Union’s (AU) Agenda 2063 plan for a continental rail and road network, electrification, and industrialization. The Ambassador outlined the AU cooperation mechanisms with the EU, UN, Japan, and other nations, underscoring that cooperation with the BRI has been the most dynamic and effective of these mechanisms.

All 3 photos: BRIX

Left: H.E. Gui Congyou, Ambassador of China to Sweden; right: H.E. Diriba Kuma, Ambassador of Ethiopia to Sweden.

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The View from China

The Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to Sweden, Mr. Gui Congyou, in his keynote speech, detailed the extensive cooperation established between China and Africa in the context of the BRI, including the September 2018 Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Beijing and the results of that summit. He said:

China-Africa joint construction of the Belt and Road initiative has accelerated, and 40 African countries and the AU Commission have signed cooperation documents with China on the Belt and Road initiative. We have formulated a country plan based on the actual needs of Africa. We will implement a total of more than 880 China-Africa cooperation projects in the next three years.

Concerning Chinese-Swedish perspectives, Ambassador Gui stated that the Swedish government has many aid and cooperation projects for Africa, and many large Swedish companies such as Volvo, Scania, and ABB have extensive operations in Africa. China, he said, is willing to work with other countries in the world, including Sweden, to complement each other’s strengths and make positive contributions to peace, stability and development in Africa.

Ethiopia’s Ambassador, Diriba Kuma, reviewed some of the plans for modernization and industrialization now underway. Ethiopia, where the AU is headquartered, is well on its way to realizing its plans to become a middle-income country by 2025, transitioning from an agriculture-based society to an industry-based one. Ethiopia is a major beneficiary in the Belt and Road Initiative, he said—

since the country has embarked on expanding its infrastructure network across the nation—like roads, railways, telecom and airports—the technical as well as financial support from the Government of China side has helped a lot.

Ambassador Diriba explained that Ethiopia, in its program to become a middle-income country by 2025, has launched an ambitious plan of constructing 12 industrial parks across the nation. Major Chinese companies have participated in the construction of these industrial parks. Some Chinese companies are constructing their own industrial parks in Ethiopia. He emphasized that Ethiopia has a plan to have 30 industrial parks by the year 2025, saying that his nation is interested in working with “all competent companies to actively engage in this endeavor.”

Ambassador Diriba also reminded the audience that his country’s Prime Minister, Dr. Abiy Ahmed, would be receiving the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10. This is an appropriate recognition of the path Ethiopia has taken towards social, political and economic reform.

BRIX

Duncan Sebefelo, Chargé d’Affaires at the South African Embassy in Stockholm.

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South Africa’s Chargé d’Affaires, Duncan Sebefelo, discussed his country’s economic visions and plans, and the challenges and opportunities that exist today. He spoke about the major investments China has made in key projects in South Africa and explained how important the BRI is for the development goals of the African continent.

Hussein Askary, gave a thorough presentation on retooling for Africa’s rise. With the help of charts, photographs and maps, he showed how BRI is helping in realizing Africa’s goals. Western attitudes towards Africa must change, he said. China considers Africa an opportunity, and said that “the aid mentality” is a major part of the problem. The Chinese approach of empowering, rather than merely helping, means supplying Africa with the tools for development—infrastructure, industrialization, and technology transfer. That works. The highest priority goals to be addressed, he said, are ending hunger and poverty; providing electricity and water; building healthcare and education; and undertaking industrialization. With the help of China and the BRI, Africa is well on the way to realizing its Agenda 2063. But, he asked, how much faster could this agenda be realized if Sweden and the EU were to contribute to it?

BRIX

Thore Vestby, former member of the Norwegian parliament.

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The Industrial Win-Win Potential

The Norwegian former member of parliament, Mr. Thore Vestby, who is also the co-founder of the Ichi Foundation (a Norwegian cultural and educational organization that promotes cooperation between China and Europe, as well as along the Belt and Road), spoke about Norwegian cooperation with Africa, which has been largely limited to aid through the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation. But a new focus on cooperation was established in 2012 by leading Norwegian companies through the Norwegian African Business Association. Norway also needs to establish cooperation with BRI, Vestby emphasized, and a shift in Norway’s attitude towards China and the BRI is necessary. He congratulated the Swedish BRIX for its successful work and announced that a BRIX Norway will be started in the new year.

BRIX member and private consultant Mr. Lars Aspling was happy to report that now 16 of 28 EU countries have already signed agreements (MOUs) with China to cooperate with the BRI. More such agreements, let alone more positive attitudes toward BRI, as recently expressed by France and Finland, will not necessarily divide the EU. There are no legal issues that hinder Sweden from joining the BRI; only a lack of political will stands in the way, he stated. He outlined the necessary investments that need to be made in Scandinavia and northern Europe to increase the levels of productivity necessary in the new BRI era.

All of the speakers took questions from the audience in the closing panel. BRIX Chairman Ulf Sandmark commented on a question about corruption in Africa by pointing out that the BRI has a focus on real investments, not the handing out of large sums of money, as has so often been done by Western nations. The BRI investments are delivered as cement, steel, machinery and other inputs for the projects. Cement is difficult to put into a bank account, which means that BRI has an intrinsic mechanism to prevent corruption, he said.

Brawer closed the seminar by emphasizing the need to present reliable information and knowledge about the BRI. He thanked TV100 for its important work in reporting the proceedings of the seminar. All of the speeches and discussion panels are posted, in Swedish, on the BRIX website (www.brixsweden.org) and social media outlets.

III. For Physical Economy

Indispensable National Banking

by Robert Ingraham

UN/Cia Pak

President Donald Trump addressing the UN General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2019.

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Dec. 10—On September 24, 2019, President Donald Trump delivered a speech before the United Nations General Assembly, in which he stated:

The future does not belong to globalists; the future belongs to patriots. The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations who protect their citizens, respect their neighbors and honor the differences that make each country special and unique. . . . If you want freedom, take pride in your country. If you want democracy, hold on to your sovereignty, and if you want peace, love your nation.

National sovereignty is not optional or conditional. It is a scientific principle that emerged from the 15th century Renaissance and was established by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia as the basis for relations among nations. It is the foundation for world peace and human advancement. Today, the reassertion of this principle is an absolute pre-requisite for successfully overcoming our current world crisis. The greatest urgency, however, is that the principle and power of national sovereignty be applied to all matters of finance and banking. This is of paramount importance.

Painting by Gerard Terborch

The Swearing of the Oath of Ratification of the Treaty of Münster (Peace of Westphalia), in 1648.

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We find ourselves today in the midst of danger and growing chaos. What is driving this situation toward global explosion is the bankruptcy and breakdown of the Anglo-Dutch system of imperial finance. Everything else we are witnessing,—from the attempted coup d’état in the United States, to the targeting of Russia and China, and the turmoil and war in many other nations—is being propelled by the threat of systemic global financial disintegration.

Even with the beneficial impact of projects such as the Belt and Road, many nations are going backwards, under the financial and economic diktats of the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and other organs of the British financial empire. Under the brutal and regressive mandates that are being imposed on them, more and more nations are becoming ungovernable and threatened with complete breakdown.

The solution to this crisis lies in national sovereignty and national banking. The method of accomplishing this has already been illuminated in the writings and actions of Alexander Hamilton. The actions that need to be taken, and the moral and philosophical imperatives to guide us, have already been articulated by the greatest economic genius of the last 100 years, Lyndon LaRouche.

What is required is action, now.

Think Like LaRouche

As Lyndon LaRouche always, forcefully, insisted, the crisis we face today is not a cyclical banking or economic crisis;—not even one of great severity—it is a systemic crisis. It is the end of a system. We are in the terminal phase of the Anglo-Dutch banking and financial system that has run the world since 1763, and has exercised an almost complete dictatorship since 1971. That financial system is now hopelessly bankrupt, crushed under the weight of quadrillions of dollars of speculative debt.

Our current political problem is that the actual nature of this crisis is never openly discussed. Not one among the declared U.S. Presidential candidates has mentioned it. Nor have world leaders. It is for all practical purposes a taboo subject. A handful of more insightful individuals have pointed to the growing danger signs, but none have grasped the systemic nature of the crisis, nor offered legitimate solutions.

The oligarchs, the speculators, the central bankers march to the tune of their own delusional melody, one which whispers in their ears that just one more bailout, one more round of murderous austerity, or one more speculative scheme will save them yet. Thus we see the current Malthusian gibberish that is dished out by Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, among others. Hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, will die if Carney and his ilk get their way.

Only Lyndon LaRouche has provided us with a roadmap. At the end of this paper you will find a list of articles authored by LaRouche. Why would anyone listen to—let alone heed the advice of—so-called economic experts who have demonstrated their incompetence over and over again, when you have the genius of LaRouche to guide you? To be an effective leader—a world-historical leader—it is necessary to study and master at least the key concepts contained in those articles.

In 2001, in a discussion with associates, Lyndon LaRouche defined precisely the type of thinking required today:

I don’t make predictions. I make forecasts, which are based on the systemic characteristics and the boundary conditions within which the system operates. That’s why I have always been right, and every one of my critics—whether inside the organization or outside—has always been wrong!

The only useful consideration before us right now is to pose the questions, “What is the systemic character of the crisis we face today?” and, “What is the boundary condition which will determine the intervention which needs to be made?”

A Necessary Preface

Much of a technical nature will be discussed below. For that reason, it is necessary first to put a human face on the crisis as it exists today. The real crisis is not about banks, or currency or interest rates. It is about people. Think of the farmers who have lost their farms; think of the skilled workers who have lost their jobs. Consider the millions of homeless; consider the tens of millions now addicted to drugs. Look at the horrific picture which Sam Quinones paints of the American “rust belt” in his book Dreamland; look at the rise in suicides and the drop in the birth rate.

The American population is being destroyed. The youth of America are being destroyed. Their right to a productive future is being denied them. And the productive power of the American industrial economy is disappearing.

But look, also, beyond America. The same destruction is taking place in Europe; and in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere hundreds of millions of people face poverty and disease. This “no future” reality has led to wars and the refugee crisis. In entire regions people live without hope.

All of this suffering is the result of the policies of the current British imperial monetary and financial system—the system which runs the world. That system is now bankrupt, and it must be replaced.

I. The Principle of Credit

A word of warning to the reader: to properly grasp the implications of what is presented in this article, you must be willing to challenge what you think you know about economics, money and banking. The commonplace understanding of these matters, or even what passes for discussion of economic policy in Congress, is horribly flawed.

Statue of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Leipzig, Germany.

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Lyndon LaRouche situates the origin of modern economics with Gottfried Leibniz’ discussion of the implications of heat-powered machines. This stands in direct contrast to all of the flavors of modern monetarist theories and their obsession with money and markets, as currently taught in most universities.

Some might ask, “What do heat-powered machines have to do with economics?” The answer is, “Everything.”

For LaRouche, the key issue is human productivity. It is solely in the advances in human productivity, as that has been reflected in scientific and industrial progress, that the upward emergence of the human species has been realized over the last ten millennia. This advancement of productive power is the only legitimate approach to the science of economics.

All such increases in productivity are the product of individual discoveries of principle, discoveries which then lead to revolutionary advances in science and technology—and the non-linear advancement to new “platforms” of human mastery over nature. This is how the human species has advanced over thousands of years. Human creativity and the advancement of new technologies in industry, agriculture, energy production and related initiatives are the motor for all human progress.

Individual discoveries are only achieved through initiatives by individual human beings, as for example Johann Sebastian Bach’s discovery of the well-tempered musical system. The first requirement of a rational banking and credit system is that it act to encourage and foster human creativity. Continued human progress depends on this. Such a commitment to creative intervention and the application of new discoveries is not possible under the paradigm of a money system which is oriented to usury and short-term financial profits.

What approach, then, should be taken to ensure continued human advancement? What principles of banking, money, and credit are required to rescue us from our current desperate circumstances?

The answer is to be found in Alexander Hamilton. Go to Hamilton’s own writings, his actions and his life-mission, to discover the principles which created the most successful economy in human history.

The first requirement is to comprehend the difference between the oligarchical notion of “money” and the Hamiltonian concept of “Public Credit.” Under Hamilton’s policy, money has no independent, self-evident legitimacy, except as issued in the form of credit by a sovereign nation-state. In effect, money, as a thing-in-itself, does not exist, except as it is deployed to foster human progress. And since sovereign government has the sole right of issuance of currency, it axiomatically retains the right to determine the means and methods by which its currency may be circulated. Thus, Public Credit and the circulation of sovereign currency becomes a catalytic action (action on the universe), through which beneficial physical economic development may be accomplished.

The Outline of a Proper Approach

Technological progress is mandatory, not optional. Non-linear increases in human productivity are mandatory, not optional. A legitimate banking and credit system must serve those ends. Ultimately, the goal is to increase human happiness.

As Lyndon LaRouche often stated, the only sensible approach to national economics is to view a national economy as a giant “agro-industrial firm.” Continued upward progress depends entirely on increasing the productive power of that “firm.” This is accomplished through the application of new scientific and technological advances which produce both a growing surplus, i.e. Net Physical Operating Profit, as well as an increase in the productive power of the individual worker.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Lyndon LaRouche discussing his “typical collapse function” (“triple curve”).

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Any economic approach, including its subsumed banking, monetary, trade and taxation policies, which has the effect of reducing the productive power of society, is suicidal, and will lead to financial collapse, as well as to human suffering and death. All such failed approaches are characteristic of monetarist imperial financial methods, and the effect of such foolishness is explicit in LaRouche’s original presentation of the “Triple Curve,” as well as its subsequent revision. Prosperity and upward growth depend, not on monetary profits, but on an increase in the productive power of the economy.

The measuring rods for judging such an increase in human productive power were promulgated by Lyndon LaRouche in two related economic discoveries: (1) an increase in per-square kilometer potential relative population density—i.e., the increasing power of the economy to support a growing population; and, (2) an increase in energy flux-density, i.e., the power of the unit of energy (wood, coal, oil, nuclear) being employed within the current economic platform. The vitality and productive power of an economy is measured by non-linear (i.e., geometric) upward progress as defined by these two physical criteria.

American Precedents

It was in America that an alternative to oligarchical finance was born. Alexander Hamilton created the system of sovereign Public Credit. In his famous Reports, as well as in other writings, Hamilton defined not merely a series of policies and practices, but the principle as to how a sovereign nation must conduct its economic affairs and how human progress and happiness might be guaranteed. It was Alexander Hamilton, not Karl Marx, who first examined the question of “labor power,” i.e., the productive power of the individual worker, as well as the productive power of the economy as a whole, and it was Hamilton who insisted that a healthy economy must be characterized by a growth in such productive power, an approach identical to what LaRouche calls for today.

Hamilton’s national banking policy was designed to facilitate exactly such an increase in the nation’s productive power. All one has to do is to read through Hamilton’s Report on the Subject of Manufactures to obtain a precise comprehension of his intention. In his Report on a National Bank, Hamilton formulates a system of sovereign credit which is intended to keep speculative and other oligarchical practices in check, or outlaw them entirely, while centrally deploying the credit of the nation to improvements and productive advances in the real economy, to the benefit of the people and future generations.

Statue of Alexander Hamilton in Paterson, New Jersey.

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With Hamilton’s principles always in the forefront of our mind, it will also be necessary today to borrow from the initiatives of two other American Presidents. Abraham Lincoln’s Greenback policy took Hamilton’s intention and added to it the issuance of sovereign U.S. Treasury Notes, which served as a form of sovereign credit to, among other uses, capitalize a tightly regulated national banking system. In 1944-1945, Franklin Roosevelt instructed his representatives to the Bretton Woods Conference to negotiate a set of economic agreements that would be based around a fixed-exchange-rate gold-reserve monetary system, one which would be under the complete control of sovereign nations.

Hamilton’s intention and principles of national banking, Lincoln’s Greenback policy and Roosevelt’s gold-reserve monetary system provide the foundation for what must be done today.

II. Outgrowing Feudal Practices

The only way out of our current crisis is to replace all practices associated with private central banking with modern Hamiltonian methods. The private central banking system, as it has been deployed by the British Empire over the last two centuries, is based entirely on practices inherited from feudalism and has no place in the modern world. What has characterized the feudal financial paradigm are the twin pillars of usury and ground rent, and these—actually superstitious—feudal practices were themselves derived from the earlier legacy of the tax-farming and related pagan economic methods of the Roman Empire.

Beginning almost a millennium ago, with the Champagne Fairs and similar initiatives elsewhere in Europe, a system of private usurious finance emerged. Much of this was tied to trade, and as the new financial system developed over several centuries, the accumulation of monetary wealth became increasingly concentrated in mercantile port cities, such as Venice, Genoa and later in Amsterdam. In addition to the ever-present usury, other speculative practices were also introduced very early in this process. All of this was designed to serve a ruling oligarchy. Human progress was incremental or even non-existent, and the vast majority of the people were exploited and kept poor and backwards.

The Parasitical Lombard System

By the 13th century, these primitive beginnings had evolved into the notorious parasitical Lombard System of Banking, associated with the Bardi, Peruzzi, Frescobaldi and Acciaiuoli families, which became hegemonic in Europe. In the 16th century the principles of Lombard Banking were revived and refined by the Banco della Piazza di Rialto in Venice and the Casa di San Giorgio in Genoa. With the creation of the Bank of Amsterdam (Wisselbank) in 1609 and the Bank of England in 1694, both based, in toto, on the axioms of Lombard Banking,—as those axioms had been further refined in Venice—the structure of modern private central-banking began to take shape.

From the beginning, this central-banking financial paradigm was hybrid in its nature. On the one hand, the centralization of finance, the issuance and management of a national currency, and other innovations, such as the creation of a “sinking fund” to manage national debt, were positive steps, and recognized as such by Hamilton who adopted some of these practices in his banking proposals. However, both in London and Amsterdam, this was an oligarchical system, and the axiomatic principles which guided the new financial institutions were identical in principle to the practices and outlook of the 13th century Lombard Banking System.

Usury and financial speculation dominated day-to-day financial activity in London and Amsterdam, thus leading into the invention of purely speculative practices, such as options trading. Short term gains in monetary wealth were the sine qua non of the entire operation. Ground Rent, i.e., wealth derived from the ownership of property, and Monetary Wealth, i.e., wealth derived from the possession of money, were the twin engines for the entire operation. Nowhere was there an operating intention to foster the future productive power of the physical economy. Nowhere was there an effort to develop the cognitive and productive potentials of the people, or even to defend their well-being. This was an anti-human banking/financial paradigm.

The oligarchical financial system, as it developed into modern times, has always been one in which the requirements for human advancement—including industry, agriculture, technology and science—have been subordinate to this feudalist form of rentier-financier domination. This was the species-character of the 19th century British imperial financial system, and it continues to this day in the hegemonic practices of the supra-national trans-Atlantic financial institutions.

The American Solution

What emerged from this modern form of Lombard banking was an oligarchical notion not only of wealth but of the human personality, one which conformed to the oligarchical outlook. From Bernard Mandeville’s 1714 Fable of the Bees, through Jeremy Bentham’s hedonistic calculus and into Adam Smith’s “pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain,” a philosophy of economics was created that asserted that all economic activity is driven by bestial appetites and greed. This monstrous assertion stands in direct violent opposition to the principles enunciated in the American Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution.

Fundamentally, the American Revolution was fought for the Right to Develop—the right to improve one’s condition and to advance the productive powers of society to benefit future generations. It was anti-oligarchical in its essence. It was future-oriented in its intention. It was pro-human.

It is far past time to throw off the feudal chains of the past. Nicholas of Cusa, Johannes Kepler and others accomplished revolutions in science which freed mankind from the superstitious beliefs of the middle ages. Yet, in the arena of economics, we still suffer under feudal oligarchical notions of wealth and banking, where the accumulation of “objects” or “money” define what wealth is.

Henry C. Carey

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This is an oligarchical system, and as the 19th century American economist Henry Carey demonstrated, such a rentier-financier financial system can not sustain itself without looting the population. Carey proved that the entire British Empire, including its financial hub in the City of London, would have long ago collapsed but for the continued looting of the colonies, particularly India, through the extraction of labor, raw materials, and onerous taxation.

III. National Banking

The establishment of a National Bank, together with the creation of a new Bretton Woods agreement among sovereign nations, will break the power of the global cancerous monetarist dictatorship and usher in an era of global economic development in which no nation will be excluded. We provide here not a detailed blueprint for a constitution of a National Bank, but merely the guidelines by which such an institution must operate.

First, it must be understood that a National Bank, in conjunction with a New Bretton Woods agreement, will operate as part of an international gold reserve system in which the price of gold is fixed for purposes of international trade and monetary relations among nations. This is not to be confused with the old British gold standard. The U.S. Treasury will not be restricted in its issuance of currency to the amount of gold held by the Treasury, nor shall Treasury Notes be redeemable in gold.

The establishment of national banking systems must be enacted with all deliberate speed. In the United States a situation already exists where productive enterprises—manufacturing, farms, etc.—are being starved for credit as the Federal Reserve’s monetary inflation spews money into speculative investment. The commercial banks themselves are in an increasingly precarious situation, and any interruption in the speculation chain-letter will result in defaults and failures. A National Bank must act swiftly to re-capitalize these banks, and that in such a way that investment capital begins to flow into the nation’s businesses.

Following appropriate national legislation, the Federal Reserve, as an independent entity, will cease to exist, and the necessary parts of its functioning will be absorbed under the directorship of a National Bank. That Bank, operating under the supervision of the U.S. Treasury, shall serve as the depository for new issuances of gold-backed U.S. Treasury Notes, the which shall replace (over time) all Federal Reserve Notes in circulation. The philosophical model for this will be the method whereby legal tender was printed and circulated under Abraham Lincoln’s Greenback policy.

The National Bank will be empowered to loan U.S. Treasury Notes (the new currency), at low interest, to all of the nation’s private commercial banking institutions,—not limited to the major super-banks—and these issuances of notes will re-capitalize these individual banks, allowing them to resume lending to private enterprise and individuals. This, however, will be done under strict national banking regulation of a “two-tier” approach, with a low rate of interest for investment into productive enterprises—e.g., industry, construction, infrastructure, agriculture, energy, aeronautics and water management; as well as into advanced areas of research and development, space science and Fusion Energy—and a considerably higher rate of interest for loans to non-productive activity.

The National Bank will also be empowered to engage in “participating loans” with individual private banks, on a 1:1 “matching fund” basis for loans into major productive projects, and the Bank will be authorized to invest directly in selective major government projects—including infrastructure projects—which are beyond the scope of the private banking institutions.

It shall be the policy of the National Bank to eliminate all generation of fiat credit, except through issues of U.S. Treasury Notes, as those notes are then lawfully deployed, by the National Bank, through the private banking system. Privately-owned banks will be prohibited from loaning out more than their individual capital and reserves. This prudent restriction will not have the effect, however, of tightening credit, because the issuance of new “Greenback” U.S. Treasury Notes and their circulation through the banking system will provide an ample source for new loans and investments.[fn_1]

Similar measures will be enacted to rescue the nation’s savings banks and credit unions.

President Franklin Roosevelt signing the Banking Act of 1933. To his immediate right and left are Sen. Carter Glass and Rep. Henry Steagall.

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Franklin Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall policy, in its original form, must be reenacted. With this, the commercial banks will be shorn of all of their speculative debt obligations, and prohibited from engaging in financial speculation. This will allow them to relearn the principles of sound banking and concentrate on the business of building-up a healthy productive economy.

As to the current speculative debt bubble, the National Bank, under the supervision of the U.S. Treasury and in cooperation with America’s partners in a New Bretton Woods institution, will be authorized to examine the books and write off the vast bulk of this debt in a manner of bankruptcy liquidation. Furthermore, subsequent Congressional repeal of all legislation which legalized “financial derivatives,” “options trading” and other funny-money schemes will severely limit the future speculative practices of “investment banks” and “hedge funds” and place them under strict government regulations. The National Bank will be prohibited from making loans to private investment banks.

The establishment of a national credit policy, despite the issuance of massive amounts of credit, will be decidedly deflationary in its monetary effect. The consequences of such a policy will be to stimulate not simply an increase in physical production, but to spur new innovations and revolutionary technologies, all of which will create new physical wealth. Monetary inflation is entirely the product of Keynesian and other feudalist monetarist methods.

Public Credit

The question arises as to the permissible limit of the issuance of new “Greenback” U.S. Treasury Notes. In 1980 Lyndon LaRouche proposed that such a new Credit System would generate $400 billion dollars annually in hard-commodity credit. Today, 39 years later, that figure could be revised substantially upward. However, it would be a grievous error to calculate such a figure merely on the basis of the feudal practice of double-entry bookkeeping methods. Rather, LaRouche’s “Riemannian” approach to physical economics provides the proper orientation.

As LaRouche discusses in a number of the articles listed in the bibliography to this paper, the only limiting factor to new investment—and thus the issuance of new currency—is the ability of the current economic platform to absorb new productive investment, based on the productive surplus which is currently generated. Since the intention is to catalyze continual revolutions in science and applied technology, this implies a non-linear rate of growth in the net productive rate of surplus (i.e., rate of net profit), as well as a non-linear increase in the ratio of this productive surplus to the non-productive sector of the economy, thus increasing the potential for new and larger investments, and the need for additional public credit. As long as the vast bulk of new investment is channeled into such technologically-intensive new initiatives, the effect must be deflationary for costs and prices across the board.

EIRNS/Sylvia Spaniolo

LaRouche PAC organizing for LaRouche’s Four Laws on the streets of New York City, April 10, 2018.

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In essence, there is no linear mathematical limit to the issuance of sovereign fiat currency. It is limited only by the increase in human creative output, as this is reflected in the net physical profit of society. It is only essential and mandatory that such new credit be limited to the margin of this net profit and that new investment be directed to the requirements of capital improvements and productive investments.

It is time to get off of the inflationary merry-go-round of financial speculation and fictitious wealth. The sovereign circulation of currency is intended to service the physical economy and enhance human productivity. It has no other legitimate purpose.

The intention is to encourage the adoption of national banking methods world-wide. As to how this would evolve, those precise details must be left up to the individual member nations of a New Bretton Woods agreement, as their separate needs dictate. As long as the principle of sovereign control of credit and currency is agreed to, nations are best left to their own methods.

For the United States, the precise structure and make-up of the National Bank will not be discussed here. All that will be said is that the U.S. National Bank will be established as an independent corporation, as Hamilton intended, capitalized largely through private investment. The U.S. Treasury will be a significant minority stock-holder in the National Bank, have representation on the Board of Directors, and be granted oversight to regularly examine the books and actions of the Bank. The Treasury, however, shall have no power to interfere with the day-to-day decisions of the Bank.

What is mandatory, however, is that the intention to promote the upward development of the productive economy be clearly enunciated, as a matter of principle, in the founding constitution of the Bank. This declaration of principle shall guide the actions of the Bank, in a manner similar to the role of the Preamble with the body of the U.S. Constitution. That intention, together with the necessary U.S. Treasury oversight, should suffice to guarantee the proper functioning of the Bank.

Other Tasks

The encouragement of productive investment will also be aided by changes in the U.S. tax code. This will include a Kennedy-style investment tax credit program for useful investment, and will include tax exemptions or write-downs for depreciation, amortization, and depletion allowances, as well as for investments in fixed-capital improvements in agricultural and industrial production. American farmers, in particular, will benefit from these changes. In principle, all tax policy will be made coherent with the new national orientation toward a productive credit policy. The intention is to put people back to work and to shift the ratio of employment increasingly into productive activity.

The financial bubble in real estate holdings (ground rent) must be brought down. This can not be done all at once, due to the catastrophic effect it would create for tens of millions of homeowners and businesses. Nevertheless, as the current casino economy is replaced by sound banking policies, including anti-speculation Glass-Steagall measures, the frenzy in real estate speculation can be halted and real estate valuation slowly returned to some semblance of sanity.

Similarly, a Bretton Woods agreement and concurrent adoption of sovereign national banking will be key to solving the problem of the current pernicious nature of many of the so-called multi-national corporations. Many of these super-rich mega-companies are now characterized, as to both their behavior and outlook, with the same fatal sickness which infects the mega-banks: speculative profit, non-productive investment, and monopolistic practices. The measures already detailed in this article will solve many of these problems, and the re-institution of all of the powers of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which have been eroded and stripped away over the recent decades, will go a long way to solving the remaining problems.

Essentially, what we are discussing here is the end of the era of “shareholder values.” Real wealth must be produced, not illusory speculative profits. The now pervasive phenomenon of corporations asset-stripping their own productive potential in order to pump monetary profits into financial speculation and shareholder dividends will be terminated by means of the measures detailed above.

IV. The Larger Picture

To return to the critical issue raised at the beginning of this paper, let us first situate the proper approach with another contribution from Lyndon LaRouche:

There’s no possible way that the present international monetary, financial system could be continued without collapsing civilization into a generalized and prolonged New Dark Age, out of which most nations will disappear, and the human population will drop rapidly during the course of this century to below 1 billion . . . We are in a situation in which anybody who doesn’t support my proposals, on bankruptcy reorganization of the international monetary and financial system, does not support the measures which I’ve proposed as required for this purpose, has to be an idiot. Why do we not say that? Why do we not make that case clearly, and say: “Now, sit down and listen. Here’s what the situation is. Now, listen. Don’t block, don’t scream, don’t yell, listen, and think.” We’re now in a situation where you can’t survive under this system.

Mr. LaRouche identified the advent of this crisis more than 50 years ago. No “reforms,” even well-meaning, will work. Re-enactment of Glass-Steagall, by itself, will not work. An Infrastructure Bank, by itself or in combination with Glass-Steagall, will not work. The entire system is hopelessly bankrupt, and any attempt to “save it” will result in precisely the catastrophic consequences cited by LaRouche in the above quotation. It is possible, as the Anglo-Dutch financial system heads over the cliff, that some nations might respond by turning inward and attempt a defensive autarchical policy of self-sufficiency, but such actions can not possibly succeed in the long term. We are all bound together, as Lyndon LaRouche once demonstrated with his illustration of the “world-wide cup of coffee.” No nation can “go it alone.”

Only the liquidation and orderly bankruptcy reorganization of the current hegemonic global financial system, to be enacted concurrently with the erection of a new credit system, will provide a pathway through this crisis.

This is not an “anti-banker” approach. The goal is to rescue the private banking institutions from the foolishness of their recent actions and to create a credit system which will benefit human beings. Glass-Steagall will allow the viable commercial banks to shed the bulk of their speculative obligations. A re-capitalization of these same banks through “Greenback” national banking methods, combined with a reorientation of credit into productive investment will put them back on a sound footing.

A New Bretton Woods

A New Bretton Woods agreement must be negotiated among sovereign nations;—but this must not be the Delphic “New Bretton Woods” of Yanis Varoufakis, Bernie Sanders or London’s Chatham House. A New Bretton Woods System must be premised on mutually beneficial agreements among perfectly sovereign nations-states. No supra-national authority is to be recognized.

The new system must be premised on a singular intention and two subsumed economic principles. The overriding moral and philosophical intention is Upward Human Development. The two subsumed principles: first, that a New Bretton Woods must be based on fixed-exchange-rate gold-reserve agreements among sovereign nations, as Franklin Roosevelt insisted; second, that such agreements must be negotiated by nations who have themselves adopted the principle of sovereign control of currency and credit. A New Bretton Woods shall be a treaty agreement established and directed by sovereign nations, not an arrangement among private central banks. It shall operate, constitutionally, based on a shared commitment to upward human development.

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney (left) and Michael Bloomberg at the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris.

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The slavish devotion of the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization to serving the interest of imperial monetary profit means that those organizations, in their present form, must be abolished. The Malthusian green dictatorship of the Paris Agreement reached at the COP21 conference and its fraudulent demands to limit human industrial and technological development must also be rejected in their entirety.

The establishment of a fixed-exchange rate system will provide enormous benefits for world trade and production, and eliminate the inflationary effects now created by middle-men speculators. As LaRouche prescribes, for international trade and monetary relations among nations the price of gold shall be fixed at a rate marginally above the cost of extraction and processing. Such price shall be maintained by treaty agreement, regardless of the price paid for gold by private individuals and institutions. As Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated in 1933, the most effective approach would be for member nations to purchase all domestic supplies of gold from within their respective nations.

For those developing and poorer nations which lack adequate gold reserves, this will be taken into account, and credit policies adjusted to facilitate aid in the capital-intensive development of those nations.

Given the entrenched position of the British imperial financial institutions, for a New Bretton Woods initiative to succeed, sufficient strategic and economic power must exist among the founding member nations. For this reason, Lyndon LaRouche has always pointed to the four great strategic powers—China, India, Russia and the United States—as indispensable participants for such an initiative to be accomplished. Whatever current friction exists among these four nations; it is in their self-interest to follow LaRouche’s advice in these matters.

The intention is to replace entirely the current bankrupt monetarist system with a Hamiltonian-style new monetary order, under which sovereign governments exercise a monopoly in utterance of credit, replacing all central banking systems. This should be complemented by new tax and trade agreements negotiated among the participating sovereign nations.

Under the new system, it becomes axiomatic that all financial debt which is attributable to financial speculation, i.e., gambling debt, must be either summarily nullified, or reorganized in a way which is suited to bring about a beneficial result. This can be accomplished through domestic Glass-Steagall-related legislation in the participating nations, as well as through stipulations established in the charter of a New Bretton Woods agreement. A certain amount of care, e.g., in the United States, will have to be taken during this bankruptcy reorganization to protect the well-being of the population, in areas such as pension funds, health care and the like.

Related to these powers, a New Bretton Woods agreement, together with the establishment of national banking methods will result in the complete regulation or abolition of all private and “crypto” currencies, ending their usage for various illegal activities, including the drug trade.

Sovereign Foreign Relations

As to foreign private banks and financial institutions, the rule of thumb will be that no demands for payment on purely speculative financial debt by those entities will be given legal standing by the National Bank. Concurrently, any foreign financial institution which desires to do business in the United States will be required to operate according to U.S. law, including strict adherence to the restrictions of Glass-Steagall, banking policy as set by the National Bank, and the revised U.S. tax code.

Demands for payment on trade obligations will only be honored by the National Bank if those institutions are themselves operating transparently according to national banking guidelines within their own respective countries. Redemption of Treasury Notes in gold by private individuals and institutions will not be allowed, and any necessary transference of gold between nations will be conducted according to rules established in the New Bretton Woods agreement. It is the right of the United States, as well as the other member states of the New Bretton Woods, to defend the value of their own currencies.

As to relations among nation-states, the framework of the New Bretton Woods agreement provides the venue for beneficial global development. The current World Bank could be reorganized or replaced with a new institution, which would be generously capitalized by the member nations, with a mandate for investing in those major capital-intensive projects which will have the greatest impact on increasing the industrial/agricultural/scientific productivity of the recipient nations. These investments will obey the guiding principle of upward human progress. These, as well as any complementary initiatives, should be carried out so as to be in harmony with other development projects, such as the Belt and Road or projects financed by regional development banks.

Additionally, the U.S. National Bank, as well as a revived and enlarged Export-Import Bank and any other institution established by law for this purpose, will be allowed to make foreign loans, with the only restriction that these be coherent with U.S. law and follow the intention of aiding the physical economic development of the recipient nations and institutions. Such loans will also greatly benefit U.S. industry, particularly in the area of capital goods exports.

Human Economics

To further elucidate the fundamental issue before us, we conclude here with comments delivered by Lyndon LaRouche in an April 11, 2009 international webcast.

Value does not lie in money! Money is simply a vehicle to organize exchange: investment, and goods, and exchange. It has no intrinsic value. Statistical measures of money flow, do not really tell you anything about how an economy works.

Left: USDA/Jeff Vanuga; right: CC/Zgyricky

LLNL

Technologies to increase productive power: irrigation; use of lasers in manufacturing; science-driver research for inertial confinement fusion energy.

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Everyone who has opposed me has been wrong: They use statistical methods, which are intrinsically incompetent. They measure in terms of money statistics. It’s an incompetent measurement. The important thing is what you do, to invest in the physical productive powers of labor. And also to invest in the development of the minds and social relations of people, which are essential for that increase in productivity. The physical productive powers of labor, made possible by inventions. No animal can make an invention; no animal ever discovered a principle.

So therefore, only man and only man’s creativity, the creativity which is potential in man as in no other species, is capable of creating a modern human economy. No money system defines a human economy, except as rot in the economy. We need money, in a sense. Money as a deal of trade. But the productivity is the increase of the productive powers of labor, per capita and per square kilometer of this planet. And that comes from two things: the development of the physical power to produce, which is a reflection of physical science, including biological science. And the other thing, is the development of the ability to communicate ideas of that type, which has to do with the culture, a literate culture of a people, and the development of that literacy, and the development of the use of that culture. So, that’s what economy is. . . .

It is not money, it is not statistics, it is not monetary theory, that determines the way an economy works: It is physical! But physical includes the fact of the human brain, which is not like any animal brain, no animal can make an invention; only human beings can. And it’s the kind of way in which we organize our social system, by adopting social conventions, as to how we behave, and the physical effect of these conventions. Therefore, if we have defective conventions, which are not functioning properly, we’re going to have problems! And these problems are foreseeable in physical terms! Not in money terms, in physical terms. . . .

Therefore, profit really means, that mankind, through the mental powers of mankind, in developing not only physical-scientific discoveries, but in terms of increasing capital-intensive investment in mankind, we increase mankind’s ability to outrun what would have appeared earlier, as the limits on population. And this is real profit. Profit comes from the mind of man, who is able to make inventions and realize them to increase the productive potential of mankind to live, even while apparently otherwise depleting the Biosphere environment.

Now, creativity: This is the most important question, in economics. The human being, the human mind is capable of discovering laws of the universe which are not mathematical laws as such. They may have a mathematical reflection, as a shadow; that is the footprint of discovery. But it is not the content of discovery. The content of discovery is the act of discovery, not the content of it, not its energy footprint. And therefore, what you want is a culture which has a higher degree of creativity in the culture.

Coda

On June 8, 2014, Lyndon LaRouche issued his “Four New Laws to Save the U.S.A. Now!” These Four Laws are: (1) Immediate re-enactment of the Glass-Steagall law instituted by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, without modification, as to principle of action; (2) A return to a system of top-down, and thoroughly defined as, National Banking (3) The purpose of the use of a Federal Credit-system, is to generate high-productivity trends in improvements of employment, with the accompanying intention, to increase the physical-economic productivity, and the standard of living of the persons and households of the United States; (4) “Adopt a Fusion-Driver ‘Crash Program’.”

These Four Laws are not simply a “good” economic program. In its original publication, LaRouche’s “Four Laws” were subtitled (by the author) “Not an Option: An Immediate Necessity.” That is the reality. The Anglo-Dutch financial/monetary empire is at its end. Every action now being taken by the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Federal Reserve is producing only more human suffering and bringing us closer to total ruin. This system, in its entirety, must be replaced.

Banks and financial systems do not exist to serve themselves. They are allowed to exist, by sovereign government, only if they serve the public’s interest. Human beings—and a commitment to the posterity of existing human beings—are the only allowable yardstick for economic policy-making. This is what the fight is about today.

It is now a necessity that LaRouche’s economic breakthroughs must become the basis for policy-making, world-wide. Economic value lies not in things, nor statistical monetary value, but in the process of improving our productive powers. By doing so, we improve our humanity. We create a future. This is accomplished through economic measures which foster human invention, creativity, discovery and scientific and technological advancement.

In closing, it must be stated that the material contained in this article, as well as the writings of Lyndon LaRouche listed below, are not intended primarily for policy-makers or government leaders. What is required in our current crisis is the willful emergence of organic leaders—ordinary citizens who will take responsibility for the future of the nation and human civilization. The question of National Banking is a matter which every citizen must understand.

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Suggested Readings from Lyndon LaRouche

“The LaRouche Gold Proposal,” EIR October 13, 1981 (reprinted in the October 25, 2019 EIR).

“Time to Nationalize the Federal Reserve,” EIR January 3, 1992 (reprinted in the September 13, 2019 EIR).

“LaRouche’s Proposals,” EIR March 28, 2008 (reprinted in the September 27, 2019 EIR).

“A Four-Power Agreement for a New Monetary System” (in the book, The State of Our Union: The End of Our Delusion! September 2007).

“How to Regulate Credit-Expansion,” in A Gaullist Solution for Italy, Oct. 8, 1980 (reprinted in the October 4, 2019 EIR).

“A Conceptual Outline of Modern Economic Science,” 1982 EIR Special Report (republished in book format in 2019).

“Why Credit Can Be Greatly Expanded Without Adding to Inflation,” 1980, published by the National Democratic Policy Committee.

“New Accounting Standards are Imperative: The Becoming Death of Systems Analysis,” March 21, 2000 EIR.

[fn_1]. There is an argument that banks should be allowed to engage in conservative fractional lending, say on a 3:1 ratio against deposits. Lyndon LaRouche has stated that the large-scale issuance of U.S. Treasury Notes alone should be more than adequate for lending needs. [back to text for fn_1]

EDITORIAL

Pelosi Confesses:

The Issue in Impeachment is

War or Peace

by Robert Ingraham

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House.

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Dec. 13—At a CNN Town Hall meeting late Thursday evening, December 5, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, perhaps involuntarily, suffered an “Ibykus Moment,” echoing the guilty cry of murder in Friedrich Schiller’s poem, “The Cranes of Ibykus,” while revealing her actual criteria for the impeachment of President Donald Trump. Possibly, the mental and moral strain is getting too much for Ms. Pelosi. Whatever the reason, such a “truth will out” revelation, from an inside-the-beltway D.C. operative is very rare indeed.

Speaker Pelosi was asked by a member of the audience to justify her support for impeachment against President Trump. Inexplicably, she then proceeded to discuss why she had not supported impeachment against George W. Bush at the time of the invasion of Iraq, despite calls by many individuals and elected leaders to do so. Pelosi stated:

I was Ranking Member of the Intelligence Committee even before I became part of the leadership of [the] Gang of Four. So, I knew there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq. It just wasn’t there. They had to show us now—to show the Gang of Four all the intelligence they had. The intelligence did not show that—that was the case. So, I knew it was a—a misrepresentation to the public. But having said that, it was, in my view, not a ground for impeachment.

So, in Pelosi’s view, a President of the United States who lies to the American people (and the world) in order to justify a full-scale war has not committed an impeachable offense. Bear in mind that the Iraq War resulted in 275,000 dead Iraqis, another 1 million who subsequently died from starvation and disease, 8,000 dead young American soldiers, hundreds of thousands of American war veterans suffering from PTSD, and despondent war veterans who continue to commit suicide at the rate of 22 per day.

All of this was made possible by a monstrous lie, concerning “weapons of mass destruction,” declared by President Bush and his advisors. Pelosi states that she knew it was a lie by 2003, yet did not think it warranted impeachment!

During the regime of Barack Obama, the lies and military interventions continued. Britain and America joined to overthrow the legally elected government of Ukraine, utilizing outright Nazis to accomplish that goal. Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was overthrown and murdered in cold blood, with U.S. military forces deployed by the Obama White House to effect that result. Regime-change warfare became the modus operandi of the Obama years. The net effect of all of this was to drastically worsen relations with both Russia and China, while U.S. interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria produced a deluge of recruits to ISIS and other terrorist groups.

Where was the “Trump must be impeached!” Pelosi during all of this? Silent as a church-mouse—as the bodies piled up.

DoD:Edward Martens

U.S. Army soldiers conducting a raid on the Hateen Weapons Complex in Babil, Iraq, on March 26, 2005.

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End the Endless Wars

Fast forward to the 2016 election. Candidate Trump publicly called the Iraq war the biggest mistake in U.S. history. He pledged he would end the Bush/Obama “endless wars,” and would work to establish cooperative relationships with Russia and China. As President, he has maintained his view of the Iraq War and fought to keep his promise of a better relationship with Russia and China, despite the continuing vicious attacks accusing him of being a puppet of Putin. If there remain any honest, i.e., not bought-and-paid-for, individuals among what are sometimes called “progressives,” honesty and integrity now demand that they recognize that Trump has been a Peace President and has fought, against great opposition, to reverse the war policies of his two predecessors.

Two articles of impeachment have now been drafted against President Trump. The first charges that Trump abused the power of his office by withholding funds allocated by Congress to purchase lethal weapons for Ukraine, until an investigation were launched by the Zelensky government into charges of corruption by former Vice President Joe Biden. The second charges Trump with obstruction of Congress, by withholding documents related to the case, and refusing to allow key administration personnel to be called before the Intelligence Committee to testify.

Consider first, that Republicans on the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees completely destroyed the basis for these charges during the Committee hearings. Second, recognize that charges by the opposition political party of Abuse of Power, and Obstruction—not allowing White House personnel to testify before rigged hearings, are not impeachable offenses. The U.S. Constitution sets a very high bar for impeachment, to prevent exactly the type of shenanigans we are now witnessing.

In a press statement on December 12, when she announced that the full House will vote on articles of impeachment next week, Pelosi intoned, “The facts are clear—irrefutable.” Truly, she is the “woman that was used up.” Whatever morality that might have inhabited her soul at one time is long gone. Yet, like Lady Macbeth, the blood will not wash off her hands, and in moments of extreme agitation we see her compelled to confess to her own past crimes.