Alex Constantine - May 30, 2014
By Alex Constantine
Yesterday, The Huffington Post, a site that I've criticized for some time, published a puff piece by the sinister Graham Fuller praising Kai Bird's latest dubious best-seller, this one on the CIA's Robert Ames -- a spook with quite a checkered history, including collaboration with Middle Eastern terrorists -- given the adolescent fairy-tale headline: "Why America Needs Good Spies Like the CIA's Robert Ames."
I wrote about Ames myself at some length in "Terror on the Right," and deconstructed his mollycoddling of mass murdering Muslim terrorist cut-outs with ties to Nazi Germany who targeted Jews for assassination. But Fuller filters out the Ugly American/CIA subterfuge details and spins with Kinssingeresque disregard for the truth: "Ames was brilliantly successful in cultivating sources in the Arab world because of his exceptional empathy for the region and its people. "
This, of course, is CIA moonshine for jingoistic perception management addicts who lap up their mental programming from the corporate media (and make the rest of us miserable by pounding on their puffy chests and waving the flag with self-righteous indignation on a regular basis).
A few biographical details regarding HuffPo's latest oily CIA propagandist?:
On Graham Fuller (Wikipedia)
CIA
He served 20 years as an operations officer in the CIA. Assignments include postings in: Germany, Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, North Yemen, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong. In 1982, the CIA appointed him National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia, In 1986, the CIA appointed him vice-chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
Iran-Contra Affair
In 1987, Fuller was identified as the author of a 1985 study that according to the New York Times was "instrumental" in the decision of the Reagan Administration to secretly contact leaders in Iran and "eventually led to the covert sale of United States weapons to Tehran in what became the Iran-Contra Affair." The document suggested that the Soviet Union was in position to influence Iran and that the United States might gain influence by selling arms to the country. According to Fuller, he had revised his opinion as the situation developed, but though he had told Government officials, a written report on the change was not circulated. Fuller denied that the original "think piece" he had prepared with Howard Teicher was "tailored... to support Administration policy."
After government
Fuller left the CIA in 1988 for the RAND Corporation, remaining as a senior political scientist until 2000. At the RAND Corporation he wrote, among many publications, on political Islam in various countries, and on the geopolitics of the Muslim world.
Boston Marathon Bombing Connection
After the Boston Marathon bombings, it was revealed that Fuller's daughter Samantha Ankara Fuller (married Tsarnaev) was married in the 1990s to Ruslan Tsarni (born Tsarnaev), the terrorists' uncle.[unreliable source?] They divorced on 26 April 1999, in Orange County, North Carolina. Ruslan Tsarni worked for companies connected to Halliburton, the American multinational corporation run by Dick Cheney before he became Vice President of the United States. He was also a ″consultant″ for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. In late 2012 Russia barred USAID from its soil, alleging USAID together with CIA was attempting to influence the internal political processes in the country.
