The Alleged Secret Plot To Sabotage Jimmy Carters Re-election By Delaying Hostage Release

[Mikeoxenormous]

True but irrelevant.

It has everything to do with relevance, because without double standards, the Demofacists would have no standards at all.

 

[PeterPilot]

It has everything to do with relevance, because without double standards, the Demofacists would have no standards at all.

It was George Bush and the Neocons that delivered the Global War Of Terror and the USA Patriot Act. Because we are ruled by a Uniparty, the Dems voted yes on everything the neocons proposed.

 

[Mikeoxenormous]

It was George Bush and the Neocons that delivered the Global War Of Terror and the USA Patriot Act. Because we are ruled by a Uniparty, the Dems voted yes on everything the neocons proposed.

George Bush like his daddy that the left now adores are the swamp creatures known as establishment Republicans.

They all teamed up to fuck US over royally and you still dont get it. That is why you are such a stupid twit.

 

[PeterPilot]

George Bush like his daddy that the left now adores are the swamp creatures known as establishment Republicans.

They all teamed up to fuck US over royally and you still dont get it. That is why you are such a stupid twit.

No, I get it Enormous Twit. I got it in 2001. Were you born yet by that date?

 

[Soupnazi630]

Isn't this part of the reason it was called the Iran-Contra Affair?

No

 

[AZrailwhale]

Isn't this part of the reason it was called the Iran-Contra Affair?

Iran contra was something different. Ollie North was selling overage TOWs to the Iranians to get money to fund the Nicaraugan Contra guerrillas that we’re fighting Daniel Ortega’s communist government. The democratically controlled congress refused to fund any anti- communist forces.

 

[Rodimus]

A “prominent Texas politician” has come forward to allege a shocking four-decade secret: that foes of President Jimmy Carter sabotaged his 1980 re-election by urging Iranians not to release 52 American hostages until after that election.

The New York Times reported yesterday that Ben Barnes, a major figure in Texas politics in the 1980s, says he now wants to set the record straight about having “unwittingly (taken) part in a 1980 tour of the Middle East with a clandestine agenda.”

In that tour, Barnes says, he traveled that summer with his mentor, former Texas Governor John Connally” to one Middle Eastern capital after another meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.”

Revealed: The alleged secret plot to sabotage Jimmy Carter's reelection by delaying hostage release

A “prominent Texas politician” has come forward to allege a shocking four-decade secret: that foes of President Jimmy Carter sabotaged his 1980 re-election by urging Iranians not to release 52 American hostages until after that election. The New York Times reported yesterday that Ben Barnes, a...

www.rawstory.com

No body gives better deals to the mullah than Republicans.

Nostradamus also said there was a secret agreement to delay the release of the hostages until after the presidential election in Conversations With Nostradamus by Dolores Cannon.

 

[Funzo Hoss]

In mid-November 1985, a hitch developed in a secret plan to ship arms to Iran: the Portuguese government was refusing to allow a plane loaded with U.S.-made Hawk antiaircraft missiles to refuel on a circuitous route from Israel to Iran via Lisbon.

Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, the National Security Council (NSC) aide later fired for his role in the Iran-contra affair, turned for help to Richard V. Secord, a retired Air Force major general with far-flung connections in the worlds of intelligence and commercial arms trading.

Secord, acting as North's emissary, instructed the top Central Intelligence Agency officer in Lisbon to try to persuade Portuguese authorities to change their minds. The Portuguese continued to resist. And North later arranged for the weapons to be carried on a plane arranged by a CIA official under the cover of a "humanitarian mission."


The incident, recounted to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, provides a glimpse of what appears to have been the extensive role played by a network of former U.S. military and intelligence operatives in the traffic of arms to Iran and the movement of millions of dollars through secret foreign bank accounts.

By drawing Secord into the clandestine arms shipments to Iran, North and his superiors on the NSC staff tapped a network of Secord associates whose bonds date in some cases from the early 1960s. Men who once served the U.S. government as experts in special warfare, clandestine operations and arms selling -- and whose friendships began at the Bay of Pigs or in the jungles of Southeast Asia -- apparently served again, this time privately and perhaps for profit.

No one disputes that this private network was enlisted to do the bidding of the highest levels of the U.S. government. But House and Senate panels investigating the Iran-contra affair plan to focus on whether, by "contracting out" crucial foreign policy initiatives, the NSC underestimated the extent to which private commercial aims rather than U.S. national interests influenced the covert programs.


Furthermore, it appears increasingly likely that some of the men tapped by the NSC staff to assist in the surreptitious arms sales to Iran also were secretly shipping arms to the Nicaraguan contras at a time when Congress prohibited most military assistance from the U.S. government.

The Senate intelligence committee has been told that Secord and his business partner, Albert Hakim, came to act as virtual agents of the U.S. government in key aspects of the Iranian arms program. Secord and Hakim had regular contact with the Iranian intermediaries and were instrumental in opening up a second channel of communication in Iran after doubts about the reliability of the first one arose in mid-1986. And Secord, investigators have learned, was part of the operational team which, along with North, attended meetings at the CIA to plan Iranian strategy and logistics.

Yet Secord and Hakim were pursuing business in the Middle East at least as early as 1984, according to independent sources. And several sources have recently asserted that well before the U.S.-Iranian arms deals began in 1985, Hakim had been seeking to reactivate business ventures in Iran which had been dormant since the ouster of the shah in 1978.


At the other end of the Iran-contra connection, Secord and North also have been linked to a Salvadoran-based contra air resupply operation that stopped when a C123K cargo plane was shot down Oct. 5. Former members of the resupply operation and internal documents indicate that Secord played a role in managing the operation. Telephone records from the operation showed several calls to phones in North's White House office.

Here again, the private actors have maintained that they were carrying out an operation intended to support White House policy. And administration officials said that there was nothing wrong with private efforts to assist the contras during the two-year period Congress cut off military aid.

But evidence recently uncovered in Portugal suggests that at least one Secord associate was involved in large arms shipments to the contras from Lisbon and that North was intimately aware of flights ferrying the weapons to Central America. Again, one of the questions congressional investigators are likely to ask in coming months is whether the profit motive -- in the form of fees paid to intermediaries -- played a role in White House foreign policy objectives.The Secord Connection


Virtually all of the private U.S. citizens known to have figured in the covert Iran arms program or the private contra resupply effort have had some connection to Secord.

In an unusually varied military career, Secord was exposed to a wide range of people and experiences: the clandestine world of unconventional warfare, covert CIA operations and, later, the Pentagon's multibillion-dollar global arms trade, especially that involving the Middle East.

In the course of his rise, Secord developed friendships with well-known intelligence operatives such as Theodore Shackley, former CIA station chief in Laos and South Vietnam; Thomas G. Clines, former CIA official; Edwin P. Wilson, a deep-cover CIA agent who was later arrested and convicted for selling explosives to Libya; Iranian generals, and arms brokers.


Typical of these enduring ties is Secord's relationship with Robert C. Dutton, who helped oversee the contra air resupply effort that was exposed after the October downing in Nicaragua.

Dutton is believed to have met Secord in the early 1960s, when both volunteered for the Air Force's elite special warfare unit known as the Air Commandos, based at Hurlburt Field in Florida.

Their paths crossed again in 1976, when Dutton worked under Secord in the Air Force Military Assistance Advisory Group in Tehran.

Both returned to the Pentagon in 1978, where Dutton worked in the office of special plans, which drew up unconventional warfare programs. Dutton was still in this office in 1980 when Secord, by then a major general, was detailed to help draft plans for a second operation to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran that never took place.


Years later, Dutton and Secord worked again, as civilians, on the Iran arms deal. Last Oct. 30, according to the Senate intelligence committee report, Dutton was in Tel Aviv helping load a plane that went to Tehran with TOW antitank missiles. Two days later, on Nov. 1, Dutton and Secord were in Beirut debriefing released hostage David Jacobsen.

Dutton had gone to work for Secord's company after retiring from the Air Force in April 1986. Soon after that he was helping manage the private contra air resupply operation, which initially began in early 1986, according to crew members and operation records.

Also involved in the contra air resupply operation were Richard B. Gadd, another former Air Force commando who shared a Pentagon special operations office with Dutton, and three Cuban-American veterans of the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. Gadd knows Secord, according to associates, but the Cuban-Americans have no known ties to him. At least two of the Cubans know former CIA official Clines, who has remained close to Secord since they met in Southeast Asia in the mid-1960s.


Some of the contra resupply flights into Nicaragua were coordinated by Rafael Quintero, who once worked under Clines in the agency and who subsequently became a business associate. Clines also knows Felix I. Rodriguez who, using the code-name "Max Gomez," was the air resupply's chief liaison with the Salvadoran air force, according to associates.

The third Cuban linked to the resupply network went by the name Ramon Medina and is believed to be Luis Posada Carriles, another Bay of Pigs veteran previously jailed in Venezuela on charges stemming from the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airliner that killed 73 people.

Some members of the network have recently cropped up in connection with what allegedly is a contra arms supply operation working through Portugal. Documents in Lisbon list a company called Energy Resources International as the agent for several arms shipments to Guatemala in 1985-86. The company listed the same Vienna, Va., address used at that time by a company partly owned by Secord.


The arms came from a Lisbon weapons dealer, Defex-Portugal, according to Portuguese records. An official of that company said Defex had done unspecified business with Clines, whom Secord has described as a "good friend."

Guatemalan officials denied last week that they ordered or received any such arms shipments from Portugal; U.S. and Portuguese sources believe the munitions went to the contras.

Clines, who once worked in Miami overseeing anti-Castro Cubans about the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, has also been identified in a Wall Street Journal report as assisting North in a May 1986 attempt to ransom U.S. hostages held in Lebanon.

Efforts to reach Clines have been unsuccessful. However, a woman companion said under oath in November 1985, in connection with a civil suit filed in Charleston, S.C., that Clines was then doing work of an undisclosed nature for the NSC.A Rapid Rise

Secord graduated 193rd of 470 in his 1955 West Point class. Once on active duty his superiors quickly began to tout him as a man of unusual potential.

Unsmiling, icy under pressure, politically savvy and totally focused on the task at hand, Secord began a rapid rise during the four years he was assigned to the Air Commandos from 1961-1965. The commandos, a flying equivalent of the Army Green Berets, was an elite force engaged in the "low and slow" operations of special warfare, skills learned in the flat, sterile wastelands of the Florida panhandle around Hurlburt Field.

Detailed to South Vietnam during this time, Secord and his fellow commandos flew missions in single-engine planes that were ostensibly for training South Vietnamese pilots but, according to veterans, carried out early U.S. combat missions there. He also did temporary duty in Iran, training Iranian air force pilots.

From 1966 to 1968, Secord was assigned to the CIA at Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base in central Thailand, operational center of the secret, U.S.-supported war against communist Pathet Lao forces in southern Laos. Secord coordinated photographic missions and performed other tasks, according to a former associate. It was during that assignment that he developed lasting relationships with CIA officials Shackley and Clines.

Shackley, who at one point before his retirement in 1979 was mentioned as possible director of the CIA, would emerge in 1984 as one of the first Americans contacted by Iranian arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar, then seeking to promote a change in U.S. policy prohibiting weapons sales to the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Shackley has said he subsequently played no role in either the secret Iranian arms sales or the private efforts to help the contras.

In 1973, Secord's career entered a new phase that would introduce him to a new circle of people who would play an even more important role in his future. He was assigned to the Defense Security Assistance Agency, overseer of the Pentagon's global arms sales. During the massive U.S. support of Israel in the Six-Day War, Secord got his first exposure to the heady and highly political world of multibillion-dollar arms shipments.

Two years later he was sent to Iran, then the fastest-growing market for U.S. arms. As chief of the Air Force mission, Secord supervised a thousand military and civilian personnel and became acquainted with dozens of influential Iranians in the military, whom he advised on procurement and use of American equipment.

In Tehran, Secord met Hakim, who represented U.S. companies. According to Secord's attorney, Thomas C. Green, Hakim came to Secord's office to complain about his failure to secure an Iranian air force contract. Later, when Secord was at the Pentagon, Hakim came to see him about a contract he was seeking, Green said. Secord has declined repeated requests for an interview and Hakim's lawyer will not comment.

Another person he saw in Tehran was Wilson, a CIA agent who operated an international consulting company and came seeking business with the SAVAK, the Iranian secret police. Secord in 1983 testified at one of Wilson's trials that Wilson sought his advice.

The assignment that is believed to have introduced Secord to North of the NSC had its origins in Secord's work at the Pentagon from 1978 until his retirement in May 1983. After taking charge of the worldwide Air Force arms sales program, Secord, by then a deputy assistant secretary of defense with two stars, assumed a leading role in persuading Congress to allow the sale of Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) radar aircraft to Saudi Arabia.

In 1981, Secord, North and Air Force Col. Robert H. Lilac worked under then national security adviser Richard V. Allen in the campaign. Future relations with Saudi Arabia -- and some $2 billion worth of follow-up sales of radars, sensors and communications -- were at stake.

After Congress narrowly approved the sale in the fall of 1981, Lilac moved to the NSC, where he specialized in security assistance until he retired at the end of 1983. He became a consultant to the Saudi Embassy in Washington and other clients. In 1984, Lilac, Secord and several others formed a company called American Marketing and Consulting Inc., which purchased a Maule, a short takeoff and landing plane. Secord has said he arranged for it to be sold later to the contras for $49,000.

Lilac has denied involvement in the Iran-contra operation.

During the windup of his military career, Secord became entangled in the controversy surrounding Wilson, who had been introduced to Secord by Clines.

In the late 1970s, Wilson became the target of federal investigations into his supplying weapons and explosives for Libyan terrorist operations. He was convicted and sent to prison for his dealings with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's government.

In the course of examining Wilson's business dealings, investigators received allegations that Secord and others secretly benefited from a freight forwarding company set up by Clines and an Egyptian to handle millions of dollars of Pentagon arms shipments to Egypt while Secord was in the office of the secretary of defense.

No charges were brought against Secord. A company in which Clines had an interest later pleaded guilty to a charge related to overbilling the Pentagon.

Secord has said that his career unfairly suffered because of the investigation. In a recent interview with the Chicago Tribune, Secord asserted that he was denied promotion to lieutenant general because of it.

"No one wanted to take a chance on someone who was under a cloud for two years," he said.

In April 1983, a month before Secord's retirement, Hakim established Stanford Technology Trading Group International Inc. in California. Hakim had set up a company with a similar name in 1974 while he was still doing business in Iran. Shackley consulted for this company in late 1980 after the Iran-Iraq war. Later Shackley explored other business opportunities with Hakim, including sale of electronic surveillance equipment to Trinidad and Tobago, sources said.

According to two former business associates, Hakim in the early 1980s looked into the possibility of selling wheat, chicken and tank engines to Iran. One of these associates said that in mid-1983, Hakim was approached by Iranians seeking to buy U.S. weapons. This source said Hakim talked of trying to sell the idea to the CIA as a way of opening up relations with the Khomeini regime.

However, he said, nothing apparently came of it then.

By 1984, Secord and Hakim were seeking Middle Eastern business. A Washington-based defense industry source recalls receiving a phone call from Secord in late 1984 or early 1985 in which Secord expressed interest in brokering the sale of munitions to countries in the Middle East. Secord said his partner, Hakim, was also interested. Hakim later called the firm's headquarters to discuss potential sales, according to the industry source.

"There was no question in my mind that he {Secord} was in the arms brokerage business," the source said.

Also in 1984, Secord and Hakim traveled to Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi on a mission to try to sell hardened shelters for aircraft. Mohamed Malik Ali, a Sudanese businessman who has dealings in Abu Dhabi and who says Stanford Technology owes him expense money, said he agreed to help Secord and Hakim sell the shelters.

Ali said that in late 1984 and early 1985 he was asked by Hakim to help Hakim meet French arms dealers "so we can buy something to sell to Iran." Ali said he declined. In November 1985, Ali said, Secord and Hakim were selling C130 spare parts in Geneva and he recalled that the shipments may have gone through Lisbon. Ali was interviewed last Nov. 29, before Portugal's role in the Iranian and contra arms shipments became widely known.

Green, Secord's lawyer, declined to comment on Ali's assertions.

Ali also said he was told that he would be paid through a Geneva financial concern; that the money would not be traced to Secord, Hakim or their company, and that he should talk to a "Madame Carolina." A person with the first name Caroline works in the Geneva office of Compagnie de Services Fiduciaires S.A., a Swiss financial institution with which Hakim regularly does business. Stanford Technology's Geneva office was housed in the same building.

Green said Secord has no business with the Geneva firm.

 

[PeterPilot]

With all those world connections, it's no wonder the CIA and its many secret figures were so deeply involved in the drug business. Can't help but think of the Nugan-Hand Bank in Australia....

 

[Funzo Hoss]

With all those world connections, it's no wonder the CIA and its many secret figures were so deeply involved in the drug business. Can't help but think of the Nugan-Hand Bank in Australia....

They just found Michael Hand hiding in plain sight

 

[Bob Blaylock]

These claims were bullshit 30 years ago and they are bullshit now.

Jimmy Carter was the guy who dragged out the Iran Hostage Crisis (which could have been ended in five minutes by returning the Shah) for over a year and then found he couldn't find a way to end it. The Iran Hostage Crisis saved him from losing the nomination to Ted Kennedy, but his indecisiveness and inaction is why he lost to Reagan, and deservedly so.

The Shah had been one of the very best allies that we ever had in that part of the world, until Carter's incompetent betrayal of him allowed him to be overthrown by the Khomeniacs.

So what you are saying is that having already betrayed him once, that Carter should have handed the Shah over to the Khomeniacs to be murdered by them?

I guess, given that this is coming from you, it is no surprise at all that you would take this position.

We had then, an still do, the military capability to completely wipe Iran off of the map. A real President would not have allowed the Khomeniacs to hold our embassy staff hostage for as much as a week without having wrought serious and devastating consequences down on that fucked-up nation.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

So your argument is we should have killed millions of people - including the hostages we were so worried about - in order to show how tough we were? Really?

Carter's spectacular failure to properly deal with the Khomeniacs is at the root of nearly all of the troubles that the world has had with radical Islamist terrorism ever since; and is responsible for all the bloodshed caused thereby. Many more lives would have been saved if we had stomped this disease into the ground, back when we had a chance, than what would have had to be sacrificed in order to do so.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

From Iran's perspective, building a bomb is the wise move, even if they risk total destruction to do it. They face certain destruction if they don't.

Total destruction of Iran would be a very good thing for the rest of the world. Alas, decades too late, now, to prevent much of the harm that has come of allowing the Khomeniacs to take it over in the first place.

 

[multivita-man]

Total destruction of Iran would be a very good thing for the rest of the world. Alas, decades too late, now, to prevent much of the harm that has come of allowing the Khomeniacs from taking it over in the first place.

Iran might be a different place if the US/UK hadn't installed a brutal dictator to make sure they didn't nationalize their oil. The Islamic Revolution was basically Iran's 1970s youth giving the finger to outside meddling.

 

[Lastamender]

A “prominent Texas politician” has come forward to allege a shocking four-decade secret: that foes of President Jimmy Carter sabotaged his 1980 re-election by urging Iranians not to release 52 American hostages until after that election.

The New York Times reported yesterday that Ben Barnes, a major figure in Texas politics in the 1980s, says he now wants to set the record straight about having “unwittingly (taken) part in a 1980 tour of the Middle East with a clandestine agenda.”

In that tour, Barnes says, he traveled that summer with his mentor, former Texas Governor John Connally” to one Middle Eastern capital after another meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.”

Revealed: The alleged secret plot to sabotage Jimmy Carter's reelection by delaying hostage release

A “prominent Texas politician” has come forward to allege a shocking four-decade secret: that foes of President Jimmy Carter sabotaged his 1980 re-election by urging Iranians not to release 52 American hostages until after that election. The New York Times reported yesterday that Ben Barnes, a...

www.rawstory.com

No body gives better deals to the mullah than Republicans.

Carter sabotaged his re-election all by himself. Thread closed.

 

[multivita-man]

Carter sabotaged his re-election all by himself. Thread closed.

Carter was a shit communicator, but he was not a bad president. I sometimes think that George H.W. Bush losing in 1992 was karma for Carter losing in 1980. Both were quiet, nose-to-the-grindstone presidents who were replaced by professional bullshitters.

 

[Lastamender]

Carter was a shit communicator, but he was not a bad president. I sometimes think that George H.W. Bush losing in 1992 was karma for Carter losing in 1980. Both were quiet, nose-to-the-grindstone presidents who were replaced by professional bullshitters.

He was a terrible president. I lived through it. Did you?

 

[multivita-man]

He was a terrible president. I lived through it. Did you?

I actually did, though I was young.

Look at his record, though. Not terrible. Much of that shit was out of his control. The changes that Reagan made fucked us over for good.

 

[Lastamender]

I actually did, though I was young.

Look at his record, though. Not terrible. Much of that shit was out of his control. The changes that Reagan made fucked us over for good.

Did you turn the heat down to 55 degrees?

 

[JoeB131]

The Shah had been one of the very best allies that we ever had in that part of the world, until Carter's incompetent betrayal of him allowed him to be overthrown by the Khomeniacs.

Um, yeah, he might have been a "good ally" (not really, because he did a lot to destabilize the region, such as arming the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq), but at the end of the day, he overthrew a democratically elected government and ruled as a despot for 26 years until his people finally got fed up and overthrew him.

So what you are saying is that having already betrayed him once, that Carter should have handed the Shah over to the Khomeniacs to be murdered by them?

Um, yeah. You can't insist on hanging Nazis and Japanese leaders and then say, "This guy is our pal, we are going to protect him."

The point is, his own people would have executed him for his many crimes against them.

Here's the biggest problem with our Cold War Policies... to fight the evil commies, we supported people like the Shah, Somoza, Marcos, Suharto, who did awful things to their own people. The USSR is gone now, but the people in these countries remember what we did.

We had then, an still do, the military capability to completely wipe Iran off of the map. A real President would not have allowed the Khomeniacs to hold our embassy staff hostage for as much as a week without having wrought serious and devastating consequences down on that fucked-up nation.

I always like when someone who never served a day in his life talks about "military capability" like he knows what he's talking about.

No, we really didn't. Nukes simply weren't an option unless you want to trigger World War III. (Or did you think we could nuke Iran, and the USSR would say, "Meh, not my problem, except for the radioactive fallout that's going to hit our country") Our Army at the time was reduced to only 16 active duty divisions in the post-Vietnam draw down. One only need look at the difficulty we had in Iraq and Afghanistan to realize what a complete fools errand trying to invade Iran would have been.

Case in point, Saddam invaded Iran in 1980 with a nudge-nudge, Wink-wink from the US. Eight years of fighting, he never got more than a few miles into Iranian territory.

Carter's spectacular failure to properly deal with the Khomeniacs is at the root of nearly all of the troubles that the world has had with radical Islamist terrorism ever since; and is responsible for all the bloodshed caused thereby. Many more lives would have been saved if we had stomped this disease into the ground, back when we had a chance, than what would have had to be sacrificed in order to do so.

Um, no, guy. I think this just shows your profound ignorance of the Middle East.

Quick lesson for you. The Iranians are Shi'ites. Most of the Islamic Terrorists such as Al=Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, are SUNNI Muslims. And for the most part, nearly every one of them were guys the CIA said, "Yeah, we can work with these boys." Particularly in Afghanistan, where we recruited Arabs from across the Middle East to fight the Soviets because the CIA didn't have anyone on staff who spoke Pushti or Urdu or any other language spoken in the region. these Arabs went to Afghanistan, and then came back like a plague. .

Iran might be a different place if the US/UK hadn't installed a brutal dictator to make sure they didn't nationalize their oil. The Islamic Revolution was basically Iran's 1970s youth giving the finger to outside meddling.

Reasoning with Mormon Bob is like reasoning with a crazy person.

But you make a good point. Before we propped up the Shah, Iran was on her way to becoming a constitutional Monarchy. Then the Shah cracked down on all political parties, particularly the Tudeh party. The reason why the Ayatollahs because the center of the opposition is they were the only institution the Shah dare not touch.