Trump and the Unspeakable? Part II

[Paz Marverde]

On 5/16/2018 at 11:26 AM, Robert Harper said:

But it was unarmed civilian protesters, not militants, who Israeli soldiers targeted on Monday

Absolutely

[Robert Harper]

On 5/16/2018 at 12:55 AM, David Josephs said:

A nicely worded piece Robert... till I hit the nuke issue and that tired old cliche of the rift between these men...

.....

I was leaving some time for David Josephs to re-comment on my comment to his post,  since I respect him and his work on this Forum. I was unsuccessful in trying to message him before I comment again.

 

This thread is meant to reflect upon - and memorialize - some aspects of James Douglas's "unspeakable"that might apply to the Trump years. His current envoys to the Middle East, Jared and Ivanka are -  in Norman Finklestein's quip - the Ken and Barbie of American diplomacy. Dolls generally don't speak, and those that do, have a string that's pulled enabling them to do so.

 

Mordecai Vanunu was the original whistleblower. In 1986 he told the world that Israel had nuclear weapons and published photos of the secret Dimona works in the British press. He said Prime Minister Ben Gurion ordered the assassination of JFK because the President opposed Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Ben Gurion resigned in protest over JFK’s Israeli policies. Vanunu also wrote a letter in 1997 saying that there was even a link between the assassination of Kennedy and Israel’s launching of the 1967 war.Vanunu was kidnapped through a ruse by Mossad, and spent 11 years in solitary confinement for his speaking of the unspeakable. To this day he is not allowed to meet with foreign visitors, nor to speak publically.

 

Along these lines it is pertinent to recall Congressman's Paul Findlay's comment from 25 years ago: "in all the words written about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, has never been mentioned, despite the obvious fact Mossad complicity is as plausible as any of the other theories." It shouldn't surprise anyone that he was attacked feroushly by the  Lobby and did not return to Congress. The other 534 members got the message and pretty much have kept to it since (with one or two exceptions). 

 

Journalist Andrew Cockburn has stated: “There has been since almost the earliest days of the Israeli state and the earliest days of the CIA a secret bond, basically by which Israeli intelligence did jobs for the CIA and the rest of the American intelligence. You can’t understand what’s been going on with American covert operations and the Israeli covert operations unless you understand that.

 

(Dr. Syed Mujahid Kamran 2017): "The conflict between JFK and Israel was simple, even though the JFK-Ben-Gurion correspondence, that contained evidence of this conflict, was not declassified for at least three decades after JFK’s assassination. Parts of it were kept classified even after a lapse of over four decades. There is nothing in this correspondence that should have been kept secret for so long. The correspondence reveals very clearly that JFK wanted to find out about the activities that were going on at the nuclear reactor that had been secretly built at Dimona. JFK wanted to ensure that Israel would not become a nuclear power. Perhaps the real reason for the concealment of this correspondence was to prevent the American people from becoming cognizant of Israel’s secret nuclear program. Such an awareness on the part of the American people would certainly have, at that time, led to cutting off of much needed American aid to Israel. The real beneficiary of this delayed declassification was only Israel. A deeper reason could be that had the public known of this correspondence, Mossad would have been, along with the CIA, a real suspect in the JFK assassination."

 

Avner Cohen and William Burr have written on this topic and Jim DiEugenio has referenced them. A review of the film JFK, referred to it as "the Kosher Version" which 10 years ago or 30 years ago, I would have thought absurd. Oliver Stone was a truth-seeker, and to me, has always had a halo affixed to him for his work on that film alone. How many works of art have had a political punch like that one? Lincoln thought that  Uncle Tom's Cabin had. Thomas Paine maybe with Common Sense? To Kill a Mockingbird? Catch-22? Grapes of Wrath? The list isn't that long.

 

But since the premiere of JFK,  I've read books on Angleton and on counterintelligence; we've had the disclosures of JFK and Ben-Gurion letters; we've had historians reviewing JFK's actions against colonialisms of all kinds. We now have information that Angleton - who was in charge of the the Israeli division of the CIA also had organized crime attachments (John Whitten testimony to both House and Senate) that ran deep. We learned in Jefferson Morley's book,  that Israel has two monuments to Angleton; and we have learned drip-by-drip of the connections Angleton had with the fascist Gladio and P-2 in Italy. It was Angleton, who took over from Whitten, the CIA "investigation" of Lee Harvey Oswald. We have since learned that the producer of the film, Arnon Milchan, was a long time Mossad asset who has recently boasted of his friendship with the guiding light of the Dimona project Shimon Peres, as well as his own  participation in the acquisition of the nuclear material. Indeed after reading The Zhivago Affair (2014) subtitled:  The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle over a Forbidden Book and Who Paid the Piper (1999) subtitled:  The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, I no longer approach works from any studio or publishing house,  without wondering if - and to what extent - the CIA as America''s propaganda tool, is involved. False flags can be placed in artworks as well as in newspapers or on ships.

 

This speculation doesn't demean Stone, nor diminish his accomplishment; rather it is meant to illustrate how writers on the NY Times,  Washington Post or The Nation magazine likely didn't know of the absence of an impartial spectator in their exchange with their employer.

 

It certainly was an  "invisible hand" that moved the market of ideas post WW II, but it was a greedy and slippery and tax deductable hand as well. 

 

 

     -

 

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Edited May 25, 2018 by Robert Harper

[Robert Harper]

Most recently , as Joan Mellen discovered, Clay Shaw was a "highly paid"CIA assest. Helms and Shaw lied under oath about this. Shaw was on the Board of Permindex. Permindex was owned by CMC of Rome, which was founded by a Hungarian Jew named George Mandel who had deep connections with Israel and the Mossad. The Stern family funded Clay Shaw’s defense.  The Stern family owned WDSU radio and TV stations in New Orleans (which broadcast Oswald's "interview") and prior to JFK’s assassination, they ran stories on Lee Harvey Oswald denouncing him as a member the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. They did not tell the people of New Orleans that this was an FBI front group. This gave Oswald the cover of being a Leftist while spying on American liberals. The Stern family was heavily invested in the NUMEC nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, which was the source of Israel’s first nuclear bomb.

 

The London Jewish Chronicle denounced President Kennedy’s UN delegation position that displaced Palestinians had the right to return to the land that Israel had illegally taken from them during the 1948 war. The Jewish Chronicle published this in London on November 22, 1963.

 

So, as a response to David Joseph's objection, I don't think anything has been shown to "debunk" these queries about Israel's possible participation in any US government intelligence operation. Information was withheld; the "unspeakable" was not mentioned. I also draw attention to recent comments by Noam Chomsky who reminds us that sometimes it can appear to be the tail wagging the dog, but  such can be another form of a false flag. It is the dog that gets the money and gives the money. Who benefits, Chomsky asks, from this unspeakable exchange about Israel? The 10 million a day for "defensive use weapons"and other needs, go to the people making the planes and tanks and missles and bullets. There is a LOT of money in that business. Tha'st why there are so many middle men involved in arms transfers; that's why the scheme in Iran Contra used the US intelligence apparatus  which used the Israeli apparatus, to give arms to the Iranians, and then bill the US again. No wonder there was 2 trillion "lost"at he Pentagon on 9/11.

 

Nothing should be off limits when searching for truth.

 

My reference earlier in this thread to the Nazi influence in America's ruling class is not incidental to the concept of the unspeakable.

 

Operation Paperclip (2014) relates how certain Americans - including John McCloy and Allen Dulles of the Warren Commission, brought Nazi scientists to America along with Nazi intelligence officers, so that America could make use of their "ability" to make rockets and  their"insights" into the communists. Not much attention was paid to their morality or their decision making process regarding moral judgment. It was "economic" self-interest of the half-baked variety -- concern for the economic gains guided by the "invisible hand" of the marketplace, yet devoid of any concerns for the underlying principle of exchange - the moral evaluation by the "impartial spectator" of any action.

 

 When people think of economic security or econmic upheavals, it is not unwise to think of Adam Smith's two imaginary friends from the 18th century: the behind-the-curtain-hand and the sitting-out-front-neutral-spectator.

 

 Is it any surprise that Eichmann's division was called "The Economic Department of the SS?"

Edited May 26, 2018 by Robert Harper

[Paul Brancato]

Robert - I’ve bumped my thread ‘interesting CIA interview’ for you, in case you hadn’t seen it.

i don’t view any one named agency as responsible for the death of JFK. Whenever someone suggests the Mossad did it, or the Nazis did it, or the CIA did it, or the US military did it, or the Dallas Police , or Edwin Walker and the Minutemen, or Rockefeller and Wall Street, we get lost in the weeds, and in the Unspeakable.

lets review some links between all of the above, because they are all linked by individuals. You named Angleton as a link from CIA to Mossad, and I would add to Israel’s nuclear program. Mossad hired Otto Skorzeny in 1961-62 to destroy Egypt’s nuclear program. Skorzeny claimed (in the YouTube clip I posted on my thread) to have worked for several governments including the US, and indirectly to Castro, and ‘for the enemies of Castro’. Other CIA men closely connected to Nazis include Dulles, and those who were stationed in Berlin, including Theodore Shackley, originally Gehlen’s interpretor who stayed in Berlin until his post to head JMWAVE in Miami, and William Harvey, who eventually found himself in Rome after running Staff D and ZRRIFLE. There were many other CIA agents who were stationed in Berlin in the 1950’s. Angleton and Skorzeny both link to Italian fascists. 

General Edwin Walker lived with American Nazi Robert Alan Surrey. Walker called the National Zeitung (or perhaps they called him) on Nov 23 1963. The editor of that Nazi publication was reportedly on the board of CMC, as was the brother of Shimon Perez, and Major Mortimer Bloomfield, whose private papers from 1961-63 are still being held by the Canadian Government. Bloomfield ties to Israel, to Permindex/CMC, to David Rockefeller. (Mae Brussell mentions other connections harder to prove, such as his ties to British Intelligence and to Division 5 of the FBI). He was Edgar Bronfman’s lawyer. Garrison chose to prosecute Clay Shaw, CMC board member and unknown to Garrison a well paid CIA asset. 

JFK fire or reposted several key figures - Walker, who chose to resign rather than be sent to Hawaii, Dulles, General Cabell, and Lyman Lemnitzer, who became head of NATO. The last might be important, because that should have put Lemnitzer, the author of Operation Northwoods, into direct contact with Operation Gladio, the granddaddy of false flag. Other military connections worth looking at include what Steve Thomas likes to call ‘ the Colonels’, such as Jack Crichton and Frank Brandstetter, founder and member of the Dallas based 488th Military Intelligence Detachment. According to Crichton in an oral history, there were many members of his Detachment that were also Dallas Police and detectives (Police intel), including some key figures like Westbrook, Lumpkin, and Gannaway, well positioned to control and even plant evidence. Brandstetter’s ties include his close friend Gordon McLendon (who Ruby names as one of his closest friends, and who co-founded the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers with his life long friend David Atlee Phillips), and Phillippe De Vosjoli. Brandstetter was a life long Intelligence Officer who reported directly to the Assistant Chief of Staff Intelligence (Army) for 20 years. That’s a story in itself.

When I post these links I’m usually met with little commentary, especially by the better known authors who post here. I’m not sure why. 

[Robert Harper]

10 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

ts review some links between all of the above, because they are all linked by individuals.

Thanks Paul for this.  Much of this post reminded me of the artwork by Mark Lombardi, described in a book Interlock (2014) subtitled: Art, Conspiracy and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi. He started making a beautiful series of interweaving circles connecting names associated with the S&L Scandal of the 1980's; many of them intersected with George W.Bush. His purpose was to illustrate connections so that  one can proceed studying the ramifications.

I have long been interested in the Crichton-McLendon and the 488th in Dallas. I am not as familiar with De Vosjoli, Brandtetter or Skorzeny, though I intend to spend some time this weekend on them. The Angleton/Gladio/Rome nexus has always been disturbing, and Lemnitzer at NATO is an addendum of that  which is not insignificant.

The message you send is an important one - that things connect and that none should be ignored. A fellow member here, Doug Caddy, wrote me when I first joined, not to be discouraged by few or no comments; that the important  thing was getting down the thoughts for others to read (or not to read) and that is sufficient. Keep truckin'.

[Robert Harper]

As discussed in this thread earlier, there are ways an Executive can be entangled with intelligence agencies of one's own or another government, which can be lethal. There are also ways the Executive can be entangled with one of the other two branches of  government, which can can be equally fatal, if not to life, at least to power.

 

Earlier this month, I posted two comments in the Wall Street Journal: (May3- 4, 2018) 

• Posted In Judge Questions Mueller’s Authority to Prosecute Manafort

• I think the whole special prosecutor is an employment scheme developed by lawyers and politicos to milk money from the public til in search of a crime. If a massive Dept of Justice can't handle proper investigations, the country is getting bilked. Whether you love or hate Trump, I think all lovers of the Constitution should  be against all these make-work-for-us-needs in Washington.

 Trump Gambit Stuns Staff

• I think the whole "special prosecutor" is a farce and against the tenets of the Constitution. Millions have been spent on an office full of lawyers looking for a crime. If the Dept of Justice cannot prosecute a case, then there should be no case. Conflict of interest in the DOJ? Then go down the list until you find someone who doesn't have a conflict.Sam Dash stayed on as the "ethics adviser" during the Clinton probe until the last weeks when he THEN said, well, it's gone too far. Lots of money - tax money- for these "feel good" searches. May 3, 2018
•  

While reading up on this, I found that it had been found "constitutional" 30 years ago.

 

The following is a dissent by Justice Scalia in a case involving the constitutionality of the law creating an Independent Prosecutor. The law was passed in 1978. This case (Morrison v. Olson, No. 87-1279)) was argued  in April of 1988 and decided in June, 1988.This is before Walsh, Starr or Mueller. Scalia's reasoning was also upheld by the Court of Appeals and supported  (in an amicus curie)  by three ex-Attorneys General from each of the last three administrations.To call it prescient is an understatement. (bold emphasis is mine)

 

 

 

"Federal Constitution similarly viewed the principle of separation of powers as the absolutely central guarantee of a just government. In No. 47 of The Federalist, Madison wrote that "[n]o political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty. 

 

T]he great security," wrote Madison "against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack."

That is what this suit is about. Power. The allocation of power among Congress, the President, and the courts in such fashion as to preserve the equilibrium the Constitution sought to establish -- so that "a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department," Federalist No. 51, p. 321 (J. Madison)".

 

"Although the Court's opinion asserts that the Attorney General had "no duty to comply with the [congressional] request," ante at 487 U. S. 694, that is not entirely accurate. He had a duty to comply unless he could conclude that there were "no reasonable grounds to believe," not that prosecution was warranted, but merely that "further investigation" was warranted, 28 U.S.C. § 592(b)(1) (1982 ed., Supp.

 

 ...the context of this statute is acrid with the smell of threatened impeachment. Where, as here, a request for appointment of an independent counsel has come from the Judiciary Committee of either House of Congress, the Attorney General must, if he decides not to seek appointment, explain to that Committee why.

 

"The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States."

As I described at the outset of this opinion, this does not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power. It seems to me, therefore, that the decision of the Court of Appeals invalidating the present statute must be upheld on fundamental separation of powers principles if the following two questions are answered affirmatively:

 

  (1) Is the conduct of a criminal prosecution (and of an investigation to decide whether to prosecute) the exercise of purely executive power?

 

(2) Does the statute deprive the President of the United States of exclusive control over the exercise of that power? 

 

The Court concedes that "[t]here is no real dispute that the functions performed by the independent counsel are executive'," though it qualifies that concession by adding "in the sense that they are `law enforcement' functions that typically have been undertaken by officials within the Executive Branch." 

 

In what other sense can one identify "the executive Power" that is supposed to be vested in the President (unless it includes everything the Executive Branch is given to do) except by reference to what has always and everywhere -- if conducted by government at all -- been conducted never by the legislature, never by the courts, and always by the executive. 

 

The utter incompatibility of the Court's approach with our constitutional traditions can be made more clear, perhaps, by applying it to the powers of the other two Branches. Is it conceivable that, if Congress passed a statute depriving itself of less than full and entire control over some insignificant area of legislation, we would inquire whether the matter was "so central to the functioning of the Legislative Branch" as really to require complete control, or whether the statute gives Congress "sufficient control over the surrogate legislator to ensure that Congress is able to perform its constitutionally assigned duties"? Of course we would have none of that

 

We should say here that the President's constitutionally assigned duties include complete control over investigation and prosecution of violations of the law, and that the inexorable command of Article II is clear and definite: the executive power must be vested in the President of the United States.

 

 A system of separate and coordinate powers necessarily involves an acceptance of exclusive power that can theoretically be abused. As we reiterate this very day, "t is a truism that constitutional protections have costs." Coy v. Iowa, post at 487 U. S. 1020. While the separation of powers may prevent us from righting every wrong, it does so in order to ensure that we do not lose liberty.

 

Political pressures produced special prosecutors -- for Teapot Dome and for Watergate, for example -- long before this statute created the independent counsel. See Act of Feb. 8, 1924, ch. 16, 43 Stat. 5-6; 38 Fed.Reg. 30738 (1973).

The Court has, nonetheless, replaced the clear constitutional prescription that the executive power belongs to the President with a "balancing test." What are the standards to determine how the balance is to be struck, that is, how much removal of Presidential power is too much?

The most amazing feature of the Court's opinion is that it does not even purport to give an answer. It simply announces, with no analysis, that the ability to control the decision whether to investigate and prosecute the President's closest advisers, and indeed the President himself, is not "so central to the functioning of the Executive Branch" as to be constitutionally required to be within the President's control. Apparently that is so because we say it 

 

-- insofar as the decision whether to conduct a criminal investigation and to prosecute is concerned -- in the Executive Branch, that is, in a forum attuned to the interests and the policies of the Presidency. That was one of the natural advantages the Constitution gave to the Presidency, just as it gave Members of Congress (and their staffs) the advantage of not being prosecutable for anything said or done in their legislative capacities.

 

(How much easier it is for Congress, instead of accepting the political damage attendant to the commencement of impeachment proceedings against the President on trivial grounds -- or, for that matter, how easy it is for one of the President's political foes outside of Congress -- simply to trigger a debilitating criminal investigation of the Chief Executive under this law.)

 

Besides weakening the Presidency by reducing the zeal of his staff, it must also be obvious that the institution of the independent counsel enfeebles him more directly in his constant confrontations with Congress, by eroding his public support. Nothing is so politically effective as the ability to charge that one's opponent and his associates are not merely wrongheaded, naive, ineffective, but, in all probability, "crooks." 

 

As far as I can discern from the Court's opinion it is open season upon the President's removal power for all executive officers, with not even the superficially principled restriction of Humphrey's Executor as cover. The Court essentially says to the President: "Trust us. We will make sure that you are able to accomplish your constitutional role." I think the Constitution gives the President -- and the people -- more protection.

 

 Robert Jackson,(who became lead Prosecutor at Nuremberg as well as a Supreme Court Justice), The Federal Prosecutor, Address Delivered at the Second Annual Conference of United States Attorneys, April 1, 1940: 

 

"There is a most important reason why the prosecutor should have, as nearly as possible, a detached and impartial view of all groups in his community. Law enforcement is not automatic. It isn't blind. One of the greatest difficulties of the position of prosecutor is that he must pick his cases, because no prosecutor can even investigate all of the cases in which he receives complaints. If the Department of Justice were to make even a pretense of reaching every probable violation of federal law, ten times its present staff will be inadequate. We know that no local police force can strictly enforce the traffic laws, or it would arrest half the drivin any given morning. What every prosecutor is practically required to do is to select the cases for prosecution and to select those in which the offense is the most flagrant, the public harm the greatest, and the proof the most certain."

 

"If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his case, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. "

"In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm -- in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. (bold emphasis my own)

 

It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself."

 

Under our system of government, the primary check against prosecutorial abuse is a political one. The prosecutors who exercise this awesome discretion are selected, and can be removed, by a President whom the people have trusted enough to elect. Moreover, when crimes are not investigated and prosecuted fairly, nonselectively, with a reasonable sense of proportion, the President pays the cost in political damage to his administration. If federal prosecutors "pick people that [they] thin[k] [they] should get, rather than cases that need to be prosecuted," if they amass many more resources against a particular prominent individual, or against a particular class of political protesters, or against members of a particular political party, than the gravity of the alleged offenses or the record of successful prosecutions seems to warrant, the unfairness will come home to roost in the Oval Office. 

What if they are politically partisan, as judges have been known to be, and select a prosecutor antagonistic to the administration, or even to the particular individual who has been selected for this special treatment? There is no remedy for that, not even a political one. Judges, after all, have life tenure, and appointing a sure-fire enthusiastic prosecutor could hardly be considered an impeachable offense. So if there is anything wrong with the selection, there is effectively no one to blame. 

 

It seems to me not conducive to fairness. But even if it were entirely evident that unfairness was in fact the result -- the judges hostile to the administration, the independent counsel an old foe of the President, the staff refugees from the recently defeated administration -- there would be no one accountable to the public to whom the blame could be assigned.

 

 

 But the difference is the difference that the Founders envisioned when they established a single Chief Executive accountable to the people: the blame can be assigned to someone who can be punished

 

 "... in the brief filed on behalf of the three ex-Attorney Generals ( Ed Levi, Griffin B. Bell, and William French Smith):

"The problem is less spectacular, but much more worrisome. It is that the institutional environment of the Independent Counsel -- specifically, her isolation from the Executive Branch and the internal checks and balances it supplies -- is designed to heighten, not to check, all of the occupational hazards of the dedicated prosecutor; the danger of too narrow a focus, of the loss of perspective, of preoccupation with the pursuit of one alleged suspect to the exclusion of other interests."

 The mini-Executive that is the independent counsel, however, operating in an area where so little is law and so much is discretion, is intentionally cut off from the unifying influence of the Justice Department, and from the perspective that multiple responsibilities provid

 

But it is difficult to vote not to enact, and even more difficult to vote to repeal, a statute called, appropriately enough, the Ethics in Government Act. If Congress is controlled by the party other than the one to which the President belongs, it has little incentive to repeal it; if it is controlled by the same party, it dare not. By its shortsighted action today, I fear the Court has permanently encumbered the Republic with an institution that will do it great harm.

 

 

.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 28, 2018 by Robert Harper
spelling

[Cliff Varnell]

 

[David Andrews]

So, nu?  Create a narcostate from La Paz to Tegucigalpa to Ciudad Juarez, and then put Mr. Populist Trump in to seal up the border and send the innocent back, Like St. Michael at the threshold of Hell in Paradise Lost.

So, nu? we used to say in Manhattan, before gentrification, when soup was cheap or reasonably priced on Second Ave.

Edited June 19, 2018 by David Andrews

[Paul Brancato]

On 5/26/2018 at 2:32 AM, Robert Harper said:

Thanks Paul for this.  Much of this post reminded me of the artwork by Mark Lombardi, described in a book Interlock (2014) subtitled: Art, Conspiracy and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi. He started making a beautiful series of interweaving circles connecting names associated with the S&L Scandal of the 1980's; many of them intersected with George W.Bush. His purpose was to illustrate connections so that  one can proceed studying the ramifications.

I have long been interested in the Crichton-McLendon and the 488th in Dallas. I am not as familiar with De Vosjoli, Brandtetter or Skorzeny, though I intend to spend some time this weekend on them. The Angleton/Gladio/Rome nexus has always been disturbing, and Lemnitzer at NATO is an addendum of that  which is not insignificant.

The message you send is an important one - that things connect and that none should be ignored. A fellow member here, Doug Caddy, wrote me when I first joined, not to be discouraged by few or no comments; that the important  thing was getting down the thoughts for others to read (or not to read) and that is sufficient. Keep truckin'.

Robert - I missed the reference to Lombardi the first time and his finding that George W. Bush shows up in his concentric circles of connections. One of my reading card sets as on the Savings and Loans scandal. After it was written but before the cards were printed, the publisher Eclipse Comics took out an ad in a comic book trade mag to see what advance orders might be before they ran the presses. I received a phone call from the editor and publisher saying we had a problem. A Bush family lawyer had called them and demanded to see the text of the Neil Bush card (Silverado S&L) under threat of lawsuit, and the publisher felt they had no choice but to either show him the text or cancel the printing. Long story short we (the actual writers and myself) decided to show it to them. They said ok, and we went to print.

Two things I would point out. First, my writers and I must have missed something that the Bush Family was worried about. Second, how closely do they monitor the press to have noticed an obscure ad in a comic book trade magazine? 

 

[Paul Brancato]

1 hour ago, David Andrews said:

So, nu?  Create a narcostate from La Paz to Tegucigalpa to Ciudad Juarez, and then put Mr. Populist Trump in to seal up the border and send the innocent back, Like St. Michael at the threshold of Hell in Paradise Lost.

So, nu? we used to say in Manhattan, before gentrification, when soup was cheap or reasonably priced on Second Ave.

What a great post. 

[Ron Bulman]

18 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

Robert - I missed the reference to Lombardi the first time and his finding that George W. Bush shows up in his concentric circles of connections. One of my reading card sets as on the Savings and Loans scandal. After it was written but before the cards were printed, the publisher Eclipse Comics took out an ad in a comic book trade mag to see what advance orders might be before they ran the presses. I received a phone call from the editor and publisher saying we had a problem. A Bush family lawyer had called them and demanded to see the text of the Neil Bush card (Silverado S&L) under threat of lawsuit, and the publisher felt they had no choice but to either show him the text or cancel the printing. Long story short we (the actual writers and myself) decided to show it to them. They said ok, and we went to print.

Two things I would point out. First, my writers and I must have missed something that the Bush Family was worried about. Second, how closely do they monitor the press to have noticed an obscure ad in a comic book trade magazine? 

 

The all seeing eye of the mockingbird?

[Robert Harper]

10 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

demanded to see the text of the Neil Bush card (Silverado S&L)

I spent much of yesterday reading the FBI reports that were kept - on Prescott Bush.

A few of his "grandchildren" visited the FBI got VIP treatment but their names were blacked out. I think George W had his first fling with a firing range and liked it. Half of Prescott's letters are suck ups or long winded  requests or unending gratitude for this meeting or that lunch. The Bush dynasty started with Prescott in 1952; his son George was in Congress the next decade and the White House 3 decades later; while the grandson - who J Edgar had treated well - took over the White House almost 50 years later. I still find it amazing that I hadn't even given them (Bush clan) a thought till 25 years after JFK's killing, and now I see them as a lot closer to the center of all that has been corrupted since Dallas, 1963.

I happen to think it likely that Lombardi -like Philip Marshall--was suicided. I just can't accept his wanting to exit just when on the verge of attaining widespread appreciation after decades of hard work. It's also very hard to get copies of Lombardi's drawings; the book mentioned earlier in the thread, shows sections of some, but I have been unable to secure a set. He echoes Eugene Dinkin for me--he observed patterns and saw connections and did something about it.

[Cliff Varnell]

15 hours ago, David Andrews said:

So, nu?  Create a narcostate from La Paz to Tegucigalpa to Ciudad Juarez, and then put Mr. Populist Trump in to seal up the border and send the innocent back, Like St. Michael at the threshold of Hell in Paradise Lost.

So, nu? we used to say in Manhattan, before gentrification, when soup was cheap or reasonably priced on Second Ave.

Indeed.

American prohibitions and American appetites created the Latin American cartels.

We owe these asylum seekers.

[Cliff Varnell]

1 hour ago, Robert Harper said:

I spent much of yesterday reading the FBI reports that were kept - on Prescott Bush.

...Half of Prescott's letters are suck ups or long winded  requests or unending gratitude for this meeting or that lunch.

Robert, how many letters involved W. Averell Harriman or Robert Lovett?

[Ron Bulman]

On ‎6‎/‎18‎/‎2018 at 5:41 PM, Cliff Varnell said:

 

They are screwing up so bad.  Kids in basically prisons crying for mom and dad, not knowing when, if, ever they will see them again.  Terrible.  Then today they attack social security.  Ted Cruz ain't waffling, he's a pancake flip flopping.  The frying pan's getting too hot too handle.  Sorry, off the soap box.