In this classic speech from the year 2000, author and researcher John Loftus talks about the shocking discoveries he found in top secret CIA files about collaboration w/ #Nazis.
This led to Congress passing the #Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998.
At 20 minutes, 45 seconds Loftus explains how the “Bush family fortune came from the Third Reich.”
Prescott Bush’s grandson, George W. Bush was running for president at the time.
Loftus’ book made the Bush campaign very uncomfortable 🥵 for a while… 📕
Loftus’ search into documents showing Nazi officers and sympathizers smuggled to the West as anti-communist informants led to his resignation from a federal Nazi-prosecution unit in 1981. That’s when he began his one-man probe into the government’s secret work w/ fugitive Nazis.
Loftus estimated that nearly 10,000 Nazi officers and sympathizers were brought into the United States through intelligence networks using the Displaced Person’s Act at the height of McCarthyism. Many were given citizenship and lived openly without recrimination until they died.
People see the Holocaust as a Jewish issue,” Loftus told the LA Times in 1988.
“I’m not a Nazi hunter now. I’m not a Simon Wiesenthal. I’m hunting those Western bureaucrats that recruited them, that handful of the ‘40s and ‘50s who made Nuremberg meaningless.”
In 1987, Loftus began a crusade of lobbying for a House resolution calling for full disclosure of postwar intelligence operations.
This eventually materialized as the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act — which took a decade to pass. It became law in 1998.
Read the 1988 L.A. Times interview with John Loftus about his thankless job of trying to find and prosecute Nazis for the US government:
Just think: had John Loftus simply walked out of that secret file storage room and kept his mouth shut about what he saw, we never would have had the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act now — and never would have known about any of this!
This CIA Draft Working Paper is 14 pages, all about John Loftus’ exposure of the Agency’s Nazi secrets after Loftus’ first book was published in 1982.
Ironically this document on Loftus was declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 2004!
As you can imagine, the charges John Loftus made created quite a public relations nightmare for the CIA in 1982.
Members of Congress were now talking about a full investigation and hearings into this, but the #ColdWar was still on — postponing any action for another decade.
Here it is, the full 60 Minutes investigation that started it all:
John Loftus with Mike Wallace, 1982’s “The Nazi Connection.”
This is why we have a Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. 👇🏽
It’s important that John Loftus gets due credit for his 40 years of tireless work, bringing these secrets to light — because unscrupulous fame-seekers are always trying to take credit that rightfully belongs to him:
None of this has been easy for Loftus, and he deserves our respect.
He has been jumping hurdles with almost superhuman resolve ever since he started down this path more than 4 decades ago.
For example, “the Justice Department had directly threatened me with disbarment if I disclosed what I knew about any living Nazi working for US or British intelligence,” Loftus told journalist Russ Baker in 2011.
On February 22, 1972 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked Lufthansa flight 649, demanding a $5 million ransom for the release of 192 onboard.
The skyjackers also had a celebrity hostage: 19 year-old Joseph Kennedy, son of #RFK — their human bargaining chip.
Young Kennedy had been touring India with his uncle and aunt, Senator and Mrs. Edward M. Kennedy.
The Senator's wife, Joan, had accompanied Joseph to New Delhi while her husband returned to the United States, but left India ahead of her nephew.
Joe boarded the plane alone.
The PFLP hijackers seized the plane about an hour after it took off from New Delhi, around 1 a.m.
Bombay air control authorities said they received this message from the plane: “Call us victorious Jidda. If you call us Lufthansa, we won't answer you.” ✈️
When he was arrested after the #RFK assassination, one of Sirhan’s appellate lawyers says there was a newspaper clipping in Sirhan’s pocket that discussed the incongruity of Kennedy’s advocacy for the oppressed while also supporting Israel over Palestine. bentley.umich.edu/news-events/ma…
Sirhan’s friend and appellate attorney says he cannot be certain there was not some sort of conspiracy, but has little doubt Sirhan shot Kennedy. “Sirhan never said there was somebody else,” Jabara insists.
The official motive for Sirhan’s murder of #RFK was “anti-#Zionism.”
Sirhan blamed his murderous rage on trauma he had suffered as a child in Palestine.
At age 4 he witnessed the bombing of Damascus Gate, the death of his older brother, a man disemboweled by a bomb and the family was forced to relocate after Israel was created in 1948.
Nazi Germany waged an extensive propaganda campaign to spread Nazi ideology in the Arab world.
University of Maryland Prof. Jeffrey Herf and American University Prof. Richard Breitman discuss how Nazi ideology still lingers in the 21st Century.
Prof. Breitman served as director of historical research for the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group, which helped to bring about declassification of more than eight million pages of U.S. government records under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.
If some of these talking points sound familiar today, now you know where they originated…
According to an April 25, 1966 Tom Wicker article in the New York Times (“CIA: Maker of Policy, or Tool?), President #Kennedy vowed privately to an aide after the Bay of Pigs incident in Cuba, that he would “splinter the CIA in 1000 pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
#JFK didn’t complete his mission to fully destroy the CIA (some believe the Agency got him first) — but here’s what he DID do.
In June 1961, two months after the Bay of Pigs — he issued National Security Action Memos (NSAM) 55 and 57.
NSAM 55 called for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the CIA, to be his primary military advisors.
NSAM 57 declared “any large paramilitary operation wholly or partly covert… is properly the primary responsibility of the Department of Defense with the CIA in a supporting role.”
#RFKJr grew up in a family that strongly supported #Israel. He says he was “shocked” when his kids came home from college with views of Israel as an evil, apartheid state.
No matter what side you take, I hope you’ll listen to RFK argue his position.
It is important to understand the history of why generations of Democrats (and Republicans) have supported Israel.
It all started in 1944, when both parties adopted planks in their platforms advocating for a Jewish state in Palestine.
A fascinating story that Benjamin Netanyahu’s father played a key role in. Read this thread 🧵…