Prav, that very same afternoon, by chance, without seeing your post, in fact I went to a library to take a look, as I didn't want my computer to be polluted by this gross stuff collected by what must be fanatics - themselves. I gamely looked at one story but couldn't stand to look any more.
The mentality of those who "track" this type of thing and sensationalize it is so repellent. Most looked invented. I did not see actual citings of news agencies, though I may have missed those.
As if stepping in to get me out of there, the computer shut down by itself before I could investigate further!
Even so, I was glad I had waited and even braved a Saturday afternoon at a noisy library rather than view this type of propaganda on my screen. This shows you that I did take your mentions seriously. I only looked at the latest link.
By the way, Muslims don't have "ChristianWatch". They dignifiedly stick to real casualties caused by "Christian" nations - such as lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. at the hands of the U.S. and its [ostensible] allies.
Going back to that earlier discussion about WWII and the performance of Americans, I want to give two different aspects.
This below is the negative side that came out over the weekend. Here is a big goof-up which I maintain was caused by the fact that America has no "religion" in any public place. [Unlike many parts of the Muslim world - and other religions too - such as the Tibetans before they were stamped out by these same unfortunately alert Chinese Communists].
This was back in the 50s, though. What about today, when the CIA has been heavily pressed into service to kill opponents of the American disastrous invasion of Afghanistan, through drones and other means?
This is shocking to me that though the objective was a good one, a certain hubris dictated how such an operation was conceived and conducted.
NEVER did anyone apparently PRAY and ask : "What is the Will of God here? Is this the right way? Should these kids be sent out or should their risky mission be scrapped due to the uncertainties?".
American officialdom there and everywhere relied on HUMAN reasoning, NEVER ASKING GOD or His Angels for ASSISTANCE in getting out of a bad flop.
See what I mean? Then of course, NEVER ONCE ABLE TO APOLOGIZE TO THE AMERICAN OR OTHER PEOPLES!
No, everything they did was perfect - which is how a Narcissist is, by the way. It's NOT good that our country has become so self-centred, and irresponsible.
That was THEN, the early 50s.
What about today?? How many more horrible blunders take place regularly>and are even more glibly lied about -- as the American govt. did back then ? How much are we all being deceived ?! [These jihadwatch sites aide and abet the govt streamlined package: Muslims are your enemies. Look what they do.]
How can we then trust Obama or Bush to dictate to us, the American people, who is the 'foe du jour' ? For starters. Then why should they define for us what are the country's priorities: fighting "terrorists"? Or cleaning up our own back yard and tackling the walloping national debt?
Did anyone - or LOTS of people - beseech God to obtain HIS opinion about this or any other important topic ? Of course not.
These govt officials believe they are omnipotent gods - especially clearly seen in the neo-cons. But the Obama team is probably a hair WORSE!
You should hear how bitterly Pakistanis complained about Hillary Clinton's lecturing them as though she were their dictator and they her bad children. Of course you will NEVER hear it unless you read their local media like I do. Such hostile reactions on the part of foreign countries to US policies are conveniently sanitized out of American news.
In fact what really is happening is that the U.S., lacking a mature and/or spiritual outlook, immediately blames any old scapegoat for its own failures. Like a teenager who hasn't grown up!
Eric Margolis, the sharp conservative Canadian columnist, wrote about this in a great article back in 2008, when this knee-jerk reaction was not near as apparent: "Can't Win in Afghanistan? Blame Pakistan!" Of course, his incredibly insightful column was published nowhere in the mainstream US media; only on a few blogs but barely that. People here don't want the Truth. If you do, here is the article:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis118.html
In my opinion, God may let disasters like The Manchurian Episode below occur so that Americans will wake up and ask for HIS direction and intercession. But so far Americans fail to get the point. This egomania of telling the rest of the world = ESPECIALLY Muslim nations - what to do has spiraled downwards into the current messes, needlessly costing so many lives! FOR NO GAIN and MUCH loss!
Prav you may be interested where the guy went after his release...
What can we do to help this situation? Not swallow the Bush-Obama bait and get more angry than ever at Muslims.
But: PRAY that God will direct completely this country and the entire world, and take control out of the hands of the devils and their agents: Bilderbergers, Zionist lobbies, etc. Probably your sites are all funded by either the latter OR both those! So much for objectivity.
"By ROBERT BURNS, AP National Security Writer
Sun Jun 20
WASHINGTON – Detail by painful detail, the CIA is coming to grips with one of the most devastating episodes in its history, a botched cloak-and-dagger flight into China that stole two decades of freedom from a pair of fresh-faced American operatives and cost the lives of their two pilots.
In opening up about the 1952 debacle, the CIA is finding ways to use it as a teaching tool. Mistakes of the past can serve as cautionary tales for today's spies and paramilitary officers taking on al-Qaida and other terrorist targets.<<<
At the center of the story are two eager CIA paramilitary officers on their first overseas assignment, John T. Downey of New Britain, Conn., and Richard G. Fecteau, of Lynn, Mass., whose plane was shot from the night sky in a Chinese ambush.
The mission was quickly smothered in U.S. government denials, sealed in official secrecy and consigned to the darkest corner of the spy agency's vault of unpleasant affairs.
Downey was the youngest of the four. At 22, with one year of CIA service, he was destined to spend the next 20 years, three months and 14 days in Chinese prisons. His CIA partner, Fecteau, was 25. He was behind bars for 19 years and 14 days.
Both survived. Their pilots, Robert C. Snoddy, 31, a native of Roseburg, Ore., and 29-year-old Norman A. Schwartz of Louisville, Ky., did not.
Bits and pieces of the story surfaced over the years. But the lid was largely intact until a series of disclosures — some required of the CIA, some not — revealed a tale of tragedy, miscalculation, misery and personal triumph, as well as the agency's misplaced confidence it could manipulate events in China.
Three years ago, the CIA declassified an internal history of the affair. Now it's hired a filmmaker to produce an hourlong documentary. The CIA does not plan to release the film publicly. But the agency premiered it for employees on Tuesday at its Langley, Va., headquarters, and an AP reporter attended.
Downey and Fecteau declined through CIA officials to be interviewed for this story.
Their tale forms part of the backdrop to today's uneasy U.S.-China relationship, especially Beijing's anger over American military support for China's anti-communist rivals on Taiwan.
In the early years of the Cold War, the CIA had a rudimentary paramilitary force — those with specialized skills to conduct high-risk, behind-the-lines operations.
Downey and Fecteau were assigned to a covert program called "Third Force," intended to create a resistance network. Small teams of noncommunist Chinese exiles were airdropped into the Manchuria area of China to link up with disaffected communist generals.
The goal was to destabilize Mao Zedong's new government and distract it from the Korean War, which Chinese forces had entered two years earlier.
The plan failed — badly.
"The CIA had been `had,'" the late James Lilley, who helped train agent teams for insertion into China, wrote in his 2004 memoir, "China Hands." There were no dissident communist Chinese generals to be found, and the Chinese on Taiwan and Hong Kong who sold the idea turned out to be swindlers, Lilley wrote.
"The whole program smacked of amateurism," CIA historian Nicholas Dujmovic says.
Donald Gregg, who came into the CIA with Downey in 1951 and had dinner with him the night before his ill-fated flight, faults those in the CIA who oversold the program.
"That was a wild and woolly, swashbuckling time in the agency's history," Gregg said in an interview. "There was pressure from presidents for regime change here and there, and it was a very damaging time."
On Nov. 29, 1952, above the foothills of the Changbai mountains, Downey and Fecteau flew into Chinese air space in an unarmed C-47 Skytrain. They planned to swoop low over a rendezvous point marked with three small bonfires and use a tail hook to pick up a Chinese agent off the ground without landing. Downey was to reel in the agent with a winch aboard the plane.
As they descended, the sky suddenly exploded in bursts of gunfire. It was a Chinese ambush. The agent had betrayed the Americans, luring them by promising to provide important documents from a dissident leader.
After the C-47 slammed through a grove of trees, the cockpit burst into flames and skidded to a halt near the village of Sandao.
Downey and Fecteau, stunned and bruised but alive, were captured on the spot. They were hauled off to prison — first in the city of Mukden, then in Beijing — interrogated and isolated in separate cells. Each spent long stretches in solitary confinement, alone with their fears.
It was an intelligence bonanza for the Chinese. Both Americans, after a psychological battering, spilled the beans, to varying degrees.
Here lay one of the lessons: Agency officers with close links to a covert action program should not fly on such missions.
Another blunder: At a CIA base on the Pacific island of Saipan, the Chinese agent teams lived and trained together, inevitably learning of each other's missions. So the capture of one team risked compromising the rest.
Also, Downey was well known to the Chinese operatives because he trained them. When Downey was captured, a Chinese security officer pointed at him and said in English, "You are Jack. Your future is very dark." [C5: Imagine how your heart would sink if you were he and heard that statement.]
For two years, until China announced that Downey and Fecteau had been convicted of espionage and sentenced — Fecteau for 20 years, Downey for life — neither the CIA nor the men's families knew their fate. The families received letters in December 1953 saying the two men were "presumed dead."
The CIA concocted a cover story, telling the families that the four had gone missing on a routine commercial flight from Korea to Japan on Dec. 3, four days after the shootdown.
After China announced that Downey and Fecteau were being held as spies, Washington publicly denied it, claiming they were civilian employees of the Army.
Fecteau was released by China in December 1971 and Downey in March 1973, shortly after President Richard Nixon publicly acknowledged Downey's CIA connection.
Both said after their return that to cope with their confinement they stuck strictly to a daily schedule.
Downey, for example, said he would rise each morning and begin a series of activities in his cell: calisthenics, cleaning, eating, reading, listening to the radio and reviewing an occasional package of letters, books and magazines. Fecteau had a similar approach but varied his routine by the day of the week.
Remarkably, once home they resumed normal lives. Downey earned a law degree from Harvard and became a judge. Fecteau returned to his alma mater, Boston University, as assistant athletic director.
Dujmovic wrote that the CIA unit chief who approved the mission apparently made crucial misjudgments for which he was never held to account. For starters, the unit chief ignored a warning that the Chinese agent team — codenamed STAROMA — had been compromised shortly after it arrived in Manchuria."
[C5: Just think, then-Archimandrite Philaret was right in the area at the time and praying fervently every day. If he had known about this operation, maybe HIS prayers could have averted the problem.]