Guest David Guyatt Posted April 18, 2008 Share Posted April 18, 2008 Again, Mae Brussell noted this nexus long ago. Ah, the inexhaustable Mae Brussells - dead but never forgotten (except from time to time by an old codger like me ) . She was a remarkable woman. A dying breed it seems. Thanks Peter. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted May 22, 2008 Author Share Posted May 22, 2008 I would also like to know if Jan knows the identity of "Dr. Jensen," the CIA psych who programed Jessica Wilcox (Cand Jones). Bill - I've just found another claimed identification of "Marshall Burger", who was Gilbert Jensen's boss. It is made by researcher Martin Cannon in his manuscript "The Controllers", and his source appears to be files of Manchurian Candidate researcher, John Marks. The final confirmation of Candy's tale requires a revelation -- one which I make with some trepidation, even though the individual named is dead. "Marshall Burger" was really Dr. William Kroger[123]. Kroger, long associated with the espionage establishment, had written the following in 1963: ...a good subject can be hypnotized to deliver secret information. The memory of this message could be covered by an artificially-induced amnesia. In the event that he should be captured, he naturally could not remember that he had ever been given the message...however, since he had been given a post-hypnotic suggestion, the message would be subject to recall through a specific cue.[124] ........................ 123. Marks files. 124. William Kroger, CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL HYPNOSIS (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963), 299. And more from Cannon: After L'AFFAIR JONES, Kroger transferred his base of operations to UCLA -- specifically, to the Neuropsychiatric Institute run by Dr. Louis Jolyon West, an MKULTRA veteran. There he wrote HYPNOSIS AND BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION[126], with a preface by Martin Orne (another MKULTRA veteran) and H.J. Eysenck (still another MKULTRA veteran). The finale of this opus contains chilling hints of the possibilities inherent in combining hypnosis with ESB, implants, and conditioning - - though Kroger is careful to point out that "we are not concerned that man might be conditioned by rewards and punishments through electronic brain stimulation to be controlled like robots."[127] HE may not be concerned -- but perhaps WE ought to be. ......................................... 126. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1976. 127. Ibid., 415. Thanks for that Jan, So if Dr. William Kroger was "Marshall Burger," aka Dr. Gilbert Jensen's boss, who was "Dr. Gilbert Jensen"? Also, Dr. Robert B. Livingston, a JFK assassination conspiracy theorists, and hiking partner with Robert MacNamara, was a neuro surgeon who worked out of San Diego, and should have known Lt. Commander Narut, also of San Diego. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKlivingston.htm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted June 18, 2009 Author Share Posted June 18, 2009 http://www.thestar.com/article/651713 Jun 16, 2009 06:23 PM Nedra Pickler WASHINGTON - John Hinckley, who tried to kill President Ronald Reagan nearly three decades ago, can spend more time away from his psychiatric hospital and apply for a driver's license, a federal judge ruled today. U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman found that Hinckley's health probably will improve with more freedom, and he would not be a danger to himself or others. Hinckley has been committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington since he shot and wounded Reagan, press secretary James Brady, a Secret Service agent and a policeman on March 30, 1981, as Reagan left a downtown hotel. Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He said he shot Reagan to impress actress Jodie Foster. Friedman ruled that Hinckley can increase the length of his visits to his mother's hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia, from six nights at a time to nine; Williamsburg is 185 kilometres south of Washington. Hinckley also will be allowed to do volunteer work during the visits and take driver's education. Federal prosecutors had opposed the request by the hospital and Hinckley to increase his visits, saying the hospital underestimated the risk that Hinckley could be violent again and that the support structure in Williamsburg was inadequate. Prosecutors said Hinckley's relationships with women were worrisome, pointing out that he was seeing at least two, maybe more, women at the same time and that he might act out again to demonstrate his love. Friedman granted prosecutors' request that Hinckley be required to carry a GPS-enabled cellphone to track his whereabouts. And he agreed with prosecutors that Hinckley should not be allowed to perform volunteer work in Washington unaccompanied for up to four hours, twice a week, as Hinckley and the hospital had requested. Friedman said Hinckley never has tried to escape from the hospital or while on unsupervised release for visits with his parents. He also said indications were that Hinckley has faithfully taken his medications daily. In a 43-page ruling, Friedman found that Hinckley's psychotic disorder and major depression have been in remission and that long ago he stopped exhibiting violent behaviour and evidence of delusional thinking and obsessive conduct. Friedman said a relapse is not likely to occur suddenly but could be detected over weeks or months by family and mental health professionals who will be monitoring him. Friedman said Hinckley still suffers from narcissistic personality disorder, exhibiting signs of grandiosity and self-importance, but not the same intense self-absorption that was present during the 1980s. He also can be deceptive, guarded, defensive and sometimes secretive, Friedman found.thestar.com/article/651713 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted July 4, 2009 Author Share Posted July 4, 2009 This is great stuff. It was apparently released - leaked, in an attempt to defend Alex Haig from the impression portrayed on Oliver Stone's HBO TV special "The Day Reagan Was Shot," which was the raving maniac he was, saying the Secretary of State was next in line for the presidency after the Vice President (G.H.W. Bush I). Here's a guy who was in the Situation Room when JFK was killed and when Reagan was shot. What are the odds? In 1963 Haig was part of the Army's DOD covert ops team at the Pentagon - along with Joe Califano, Gen. Krulack, Col. Higgens, et al., who were running the "Contingency Plans for a Coup in Cuba," that was adapting the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler to use against Castro. They ran the Task Force with the CIA that conducted all of the covert ops against Cuba, including the maritime ops from JMWAVE that became entangled with the Dealey Plaza operation. So they released THIS transcript to support Haig? As John Judge says, it's a transcript of "a coup in progress." It's a shame that Ollie Stone didn't have this when they made the movie, or they could have just used it as the dialog, something out of Marx Brothers movie. Who's in charge here, anyway? Who'se got the football? (You have to imagine Groucho asking this - puff puff). Who'se on alert? Who's on first? It's a real scarry Rod Serling script ripe for the Twilight Zone. I hope somebody else enjoys this as much as I did. BK http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articl...26/202623.shtml Excerpts From the White House Situation Room on the Day Reagan Was Shot NewsMax.com Tuesday, March 27, 2001 Transcript of recordings made by National Security Adviser Richard Allen on the day Ronald Reagan was shot, March 30, 1981. COLSON: Someone out there wants to know if you want the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. ALLEN: I don't think we need him here ... Cap is the – Cap is here. HAIG: Cap is the – and the football is near the Vice President – so that's fine. ALLEN: We should get one over here. We have a duplicate one here. HAIG: Get the football over here. ALLEN: There is one at the military aide's office. The football is in the closet ... I don't think we need the Chair of the Joint Chiefs over here, do you? Let's leave him over at the NMCC [National Military Command Center, at the Pentagon]. This is a draft statement, but I want to put something else in it. FIELDING: Do you want any other Cabinet members? ALLEN: No, they should all be told to stand by. Here's the copy of that draft statement [on the President's condition]. You don't want the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs over here? WEINBERGER: Well, I want ... not over here, I want him ... ALLEN: At the NMCC. WEINBERGER: Yeah, and they should go on alert or be ready to go on alert. SAC [the Strategic Air Command] went on alert with Kennedy's assassination. *** HAIG: We'll be on a straight line from the hospital. So anything that is said, before it's said, we'll discuss at this table ... and any telephone calls that anybody is getting with instructions from the hospital come to this table first [raising voice] ... RIGHT HERE! And we discuss it and know what's going on. WEINBERGER: I have the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs coming on, Jones, in just a second. We're going to tell him to get alerts to the Strategic Air Command and such other units that seem to him to be desirable at this point. HAIG: What kind of alert, Cap? WEINBERGER: It's a standby alert ... just a standby alert. HAIG: You're not raising readiness? WEINBERGER: No, but the main thing is that he should stay there in the Command Center. Not here. HAIG: Right. DARMAN: Is that information not to be released up till ... ALLEN: It'll leak ... WEINBERGER: Well, until we know more about it. The alert, they'll probably put themselves on alert, but I just want to be sure. HAIG: Do we have a football here? Do we? ALLEN: Right there. REGAN: Al! Don't elevate it! Be careful! HAIG: Absolutely! Absolutely! That's why I toned down the message that was going out ... there's no reason for that. WEINBERGER: Yeah, I don't think anything that talks about continuity of government or anything ... that sounds like we know a lot more than we do. REGAN: This is apt to turn out to be a loner. WEINBERGER: I think it was! MURPHY: Cap, what do they mean by "alert"? WEINBERGER: Well, an alert is ... MURPHY: We've been down this path once before with Henry [Kissinger]. WEINBERGER: That's right. The alert simply is that there are conditions which may require very quick actions. MURPHY: Are you sure that doesn't mean Defcon Three ... or Four? WEINBERGER: No, no ... I'll fill in ... It's a matter of being ready for some later call ... HAIG: Yeah, I think the important thing, fellows, is that these things always generate a lot of dope stories, and everybody is running around telling everybody everything that they can get out of their gut ... and I think it's goddamn important that none of that happens. The President, uh, as long as he is conscious and can function ... WEINBERGER: Well, that's right ... the Vice President's in an Air Force plane. ALLEN: Well, just let me point out to you that the President is not now conscious. HAIG: No, of course not. *** FIELDING: A rather technical thing is that the President can pass the baton temporarily under the law, and we're preparing that right now ... toward the eventuality ... HAIG: That's what I was going to ask next. What are the legal ... FIELDING: It's being prepared right now. HAIG: That's the pass the baton to the Vice President ... FIELDING: On a temporary basis. It passes to him in writing from the President until the President rescinds it. HAIG: Has somebody gone into the Eisenhower precedent on this? I think we need that from a public-relations point of view. FIELDING: Well, we may not want to put it out. HAIG: No, the things you want to make note of are first, precisely what happened, notification of the Vice President, assembly of the key crisis Cabinet, preservation of continuity of command, and that it was handled. WEINBERGER (on the telephone to the Pentagon): No, I think what we want to do is increase the degree of alertness so that in the event there should be anything required shortly, that could be done within a minimum amount of time ... Gergen interrupted to ask a question, and Haig declared that he himself was constitutionally the person in charge. GERGEN: Al, a quick question. We need some sense, more better sense of where the President is. Is he under sedation now? HAIG: He's not on the operating table. GERGEN: He is on the operating table! HAIG: So the ... the helm is right here. And that means right in this chair for now, constitutionally, until the Vice President gets here. GERGEN: I understand that. I understand that. HAIG: Yeah. *** WEINBERGER: We've got the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Joint Chiefs in the Military Command Center. The alert has been raised from a normal condition to a standby condition under which they can move to a much higher degree very quickly. There is no, there will be no publicity about it. And the degree of alertness at the moment is going to commanders only, so that there would not be a lot of leaks right away from the men. All of that on the basis that at this point it looks like an isolated incident, but there isn't enough information and we want to remain alert. So that's where the armed forces stand. *** HAIG: Why don't you come with me? Allen (to staff): Okay, I'll be back later ... HAIG: How do you get to the press room? ALLEN: Up here. HAIG: Yeah ... he's just turning this into a goddamned disaster! ALLEN: Who has? HAIG: How can he walk into the press room ... Speakes ... ALLEN: Did he walk in up here? HAIG: He's up there now. ALLEN: Christ almighty, why's he doing that? PRESS STAFFER: They want to know who's running the government. ALLEN: Oh, well, just a minute ... HAIG: We'll assemble them ... we'll ... STAFFER: You're coming back? [shouting] They're coming back again ... The Secretary of State! The Secretary of State! *** PRESS REPRESENTATIVE: Who is making the decisions for the government right now? Who is making the decisions? HAIG: Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State, in that order, and should the President decide he wants to transfer the helm to the Vice President, he will do so. As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending the return of the Vice President and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course. *** REGAN: Preliminary investigation by the FBI and the Secret Service, no plot, no reason why the suspect shouldn't be in the area. They're conducting a background investigation in Lubbock, Texas. He stayed at the Park Central Hotel here, which is one block from the Executive Office Building. WEINBERGER: We have the SAC bases ... we have the crews who are normally on alert twenty-four hours a day move from the base to their planes. The nearest submarine is [redacted] minutes, forty-seven seconds off, which is about two minutes closer than normal. ALLEN: Nearest Soviet sub. Al, are you listening? [Redacted] minutes, forty-seven seconds – the nearest Soviet sub. WEINBERGER: Yeah. Not enough to worry about. They're in and out there all the time, but it is a close approach. And the bomber crews of the Strategic Air Command, they are always on the alert, certain numbers, and those that are on alert now are moving from alert in their quarters and on the post to their planes. Simply stated, that's all ... HAIG: That's based on the Soviet situation and not on anything here? WEINBERGER: Well, that's based on the idea that until we know a little bit more about it, it is better to be in the plane which saves three and a half to four minutes than it is to stay in their quarters. HAIG: I said up there, Cap ... I'm not a xxxx. I said there had been no increased alert. WEINBERGER: Well, I didn't know you were going up, Al. I think if ... HAIG: I had to, because we had the question already started and we were going to be in a big flap. WEINBERGER: Well, I think we could have done a little better if we had concerted on a specific statement to be handed out. When you're up there with questions, why then it's not anything you can control, and ... HAIG: Well, we had just discussed that here at the table, and we said we were not going to increase alert. WEINBERGER: It may not be increasing the alert from a technical point of view, but once you get the additional information which I got about the one sub being closer than they've been before, then it seemed prudent to me to save three or four minutes. HAIG: Yeah, but I think we could have discussed it. WEINBERGER: Yeah, well, you were not here. I didn't know that you were going to make any statement, and I don't think it was a good idea to make a statement when you are with a question period. I think the best thing ... HAIG: Well, you have the right to say that when we discuss it, and we did talk about it and everyone agreed there wouldn't be an increased alert. WEINBERGER: I didn't know you were going up. I didn't have the information about the sub at that time. The stuff is coming in every three or four minutes. HAIG: Well, you're not telling me we're on increased alert. WEINBERGER: We have changed the condition to the extent I indicated. HAIG: Is that a Defcon increase? WEINBERGER: No, I don't think it is formally classified as such. ALLEN: It's a change of degree, is it not? It's a change ... WEINBERGER: It's an increased degree of alertness, yes. ALLEN: Within Defcon Five, I presume. WEINBERGER: Yes. *** HAIG: Let me ask you a question, Cap. Is this submarine approach, is that what's doing this, or is it the fact that the President's under surgery? WEINBERGER: What's doing what, Al? HAIG: That we are discussing whether or not to put the NEACP bird up in the air. WEINBERGER: Well, I'm discussing it from the point of view that at the moment, until the Vice President actually arrives here, the command authority is what I have ... and I have to make sure that it is essential that we do everything that seems proper. HAIG: You'd better read the Constitution. WEINBERGER: What? HAIG (laughing): You'd better read the Constitution. We can get the Vice President any time we want. WEINBERGER: Well, one way or another, the initial steps, because he's not in a position there to take all of them without consultation, one way or another we ought to prepare at least enough so that we can move more rapidly than we could otherwise. HAIG: Is it because of the submarine or because of the incident, that's the question I'm asking. WEINBERGER: The reason that I asked to have them move to the planes is because of the incident, and I would continue to take that position until I know absolutely definitely that it's an isolated incident, which I think it is. But I don't know that yet, and I don't want to take any kinds of risk. The risk of some newspaper story or some rumor is a hell of a lot less than not having things in place. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Len Colby Posted July 4, 2009 Share Posted July 4, 2009 Bill - I don't see what the big deal is everyone has known since that day that Haig claimed to be "in charge". Though in case of permenant removal of the POTUS the Speaker of the House would be third in line it would make sense in a temporary sistuation for the role to remain "in house" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted July 4, 2009 Author Share Posted July 4, 2009 Bill - I don't see what the big deal is everyone has known since that day that Haig claimed to be "in charge". Though in case of permenant removal of the POTUS the Speaker of the House would be third in line it would make sense in a temporary sistuation for the role to remain "in house" The Big Deal is that the Sec State didn't know the line of succession or his role in it, that he claimed to be in charge, that he was ordering the alert status of the military when it wasn't his call, that they didn't know where the football was, that the VP was Bush and his son was meeting with the brother of the assassin, and that this transcript confirms that the Situation Room was in chaos. This transcript was released years ago. I just found it and thought it funny. I'm sorry you don't share my sense of humor. BK Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted December 9, 2009 Author Share Posted December 9, 2009 (edited) Haw did I miss this? Has anybody seen this before? BK http://codxxxx.blogspot.com/2004/02/why-jo...-jr-almost.html Why John Hinckley, Jr. Almost Assassinated Reagan by Towbridge H. Ford 16 February 2004 The contrast behind the myth and reality regarding the health of American democracy when President Jimmy Carter sought re-election in 1980 could not have been greater. While liberals, and responsible conservatives, especially those who had brought about the resignation of the rampaging Nixon, thought that constitutional government had been restored, or at least secret government had been significantly reined in, actually conditions, despite appearances, had become worse, thanks to leaders of covert rule finding new ways to perform old operations. The slimming down of CIA, particularly the Operations Directorate, the adoption of more technical means for the collection of intelligence, and the retirement and death for some of the worst offenders - especially former DCI Richard Helms, CI chief James Angleton, and "Executive Action's" William King Harvey - had been more than compensated by old troublemakers finding new homes in other agencies, current ones finding ways to operate behind the backs of their nominal superiors, and old agent capability, especially in the production of mind-control, obtaining new technology and candidates for covert operations. The Secret Team's, to use Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty's terminology, hopes that Theodore Kaczynski (aka the Unabomber) had the makings of a perfect Manchurian Candidate for killing President Carter's re-election chances, despite promising testing, proved unfounded. Kaczynski, though connected to all the right people while at Berkeley at the end of the 1960s through Colston Westbrook's Black Cultural Association, was not politically motivated enough to become a predictable robot. The loner mathematician, while he was finally recruited from Montana where no sceptics would suspect CIA involvement, was not willing to go after targets it had in mind, no matter how hard his co-conspirator brother David drove him, or how much drugs he was given. Ted Kaczynski had it in for unversity colleagues, especially those who supported the build-up of technology the Agency was interested in, and air lines which permitted them to experiment all around the world, as his FBI code name prefix indicated. The Unabomber showed his unreliable character in the wake of the failed hostage rescue mission in Iran (Operation Eagle Claw) by following up his attack on an American Airline flight to Washington with a crude bomb sent to United Air Line president Percy Wood on June 9, 1980. Kaczynski set Wood up by writing first in the name of Enoch W. Fischer, recommending that he, and other leaders of the capitalist world read Sloan Wilson's new book, Ice Brothers, which would be arriving in a separate wrapper. This nostalgic account by Wilson - the author also of best-selling The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit - of his service during WWII in the Greenland Patrol was a telling reminder of just how far the author and Kaczynski had fallen out with their wartime buddies, especially Ted's most ambitious brother David, in the post-war grab for personal glory. (For those interested in pursuing red-herrings on the internet about the book, see Ross Getman's website where he claims that Kaczynski, a neo-Nazi, found inspiration for his anti-Semitism in its pages.) Characteristically, the Bureau questioned Sloan rather than David Kaczynski about the book's significance, once the Unabomber was finally caught. Ronald Reagan's biggest contribution to the covert campaign against Carter's re-election then became the expertise that Dr. Earl Brian, his former Secretary of Health, supplied for mind-control operations, now that the CIA, especially Dr. George White, had been obliged officially to close down experiments in California, and former head of the Technical Services Staff Dr. Sidney Gottlieb was driven to convenient suicide because of legal questions arising in 1979 about painter Stanley Milton Glickman's incapacity, another unwitting CIA guinea pig from a quarter century before in Paris. While Brian, like George Bush, Theodore Shackley, and William Casey, would ultimately be linked to the "October Surprise", and the Reagan Justice Department's theft of PROMIS software from Bill Hamilton's INSLAW company to keep track of foreign counterintelligence (Jonathan Vankin and John Whelan, The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, p. 119ff.), actually Dr. Brian, like White and Gottlieb, was most closely connected to "LSD surprises", what had led to tennis professional Harold Blauer's death from forced injections, and Olson's suicide in 1953. Brian even tried to establish in 1975, with Governor Reagan's support, a center for the study of violent behavior in the Santa Monica Mountains, what would permit all kinds of mind-control operations with complete secrecy under UCLA professor Dr. Louis "Jolly" West's leadership, but the fallout from Watergate prevented the California legislature from authorizing such a reckless initiative. West, as Henry Martin and David Caul indicated in a long 1991 series about the state's continuing mind-control program for the Napa Sentinel, was a product of the University of Minnesota's Morse Allen, the leading expert on making Manchurian Candidates, and had worked at Oklahoma for 15 years with John Gittinger, the developer of the crucial Personal Assessment System for finding potential ones. ( For more, see obituary, "Louis Jolyon 'Jolly' West," The Los Angeles Times, Jan. 7, 1999.) At Oklahoma, West, as John Marks indicated in The Search for the 'Manchurian Candidate', became the leading recipient of secret funding for LSD experimentation (p. 63), what ultimately led to certain people being programmed with sufficient doses of the drug not only to betray their countries but also their families, even their spouses. LSD, in an operational setting, could make the patient into a paranoid madman, set on destroying his marriage and memory. Coming to UCLA in 1968, just after the assassinations of MLK and RFK, West was so successful in securing grants, over $5 million for himself from the National Institutes of Mental Health, and as much as $14 million in a single year for his Neuropsychiatric Institute from a wide range of sources for conducting experiments on controlling allegedly violent individuals, what gave all kinds of opportunities for creating them through the assistance of cooperating, professional informants. Though West feigned to be a great civil libertarian, and made a point of providing free expert opinion in public interest cases (See his letter in the June 24, 1976 issue of The New York Review of Books about Patty Hearst's unsuccessful defense.), he, and side kick Dr. "Oz" Janiger, were such pavlovians when it came to drugs that Aldous Huxley, the greatest proponent of LSD's liberating qualities, could not abide their obsessions. (See Huxley's June 6, 1961 letter to Timothy Leary.) In 1966, LSD was prohibited by the Drug Abuse Control Amendment from being used in experiments, causing the FDA to raid Janiger's office in Beverly Hills, and to confiscate all his drugs, and records of clinical research. "When the panic subsided, only five government-approved scientists were allowed to continue LSD resarch...," Todd Brendan Fahey wrote in the Las Vegas Weekly, the leading one being West. Until then, Janiger had gotten LSD from people like the CIA's Captain Al Hubbard for his experiments on those who wanted to improve their performance, especially among Hollywood's actors, notably Cary Grant. Now Janiger would get it from West, and, in return, he would be given access to his most promising subjects. This came in most handy in 1977 when The Washington Post reported that the scientific assistant to Carter's Navy Secretary, Dr. Sam Koslov, had ended the program that West was running out of Stanford's Research Institute at Fort Meade to create Manchurian Candiates by electronic means ("The Constantine Report No1,"), leaving apparently only the old means of deprivation, drugs, psychic driving, and hypnosis for making people with multiple personalities. West's greatest asset was that he was now interested in cults, the ideal cover for anyone who wanted to continue practicing "brain-washing" by CIA's more traditional methods. In the wake of Charles Manson's murders, Patty Hearst's kidnapping and brain-washing by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the massacre/suicide of 913 cultists at Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, the public was prepared to believe that such brain-washing was only the result of thought reform, what CIA had apparently helped sponsor with drugs in order to make sure that student radicalism spun out of control in utter confusion. To legitimize the idea of coercive persuasion, West's associate Dr. Margaret Singer wrote a ground-breaking paper the following year on the new phenomenon ("Dr. Margaret Singer's 6 Conditions for Thought Reform," csj.org/studyindex), and she and Yale's Dr. Robert Jay Lifton started propagating the claims as advisory board psychologists to the new American Family Foundation. Singer and Lifton had studied the brain-washing techniques on Amercian POWs by the North Koreans for Washington back in the 'fifties, ruling out wrongly their drug, and hypnosis-based techniques - what West used heavy doses of LSD-25, and hypnotism to replicate. (Jeffrey Steinberg, "Who Are the American Family Foundation Mind-Controllers Targeting LaRouche?," Executive Intelligence Review, April 19, 2002, and larouche pub.com/other/2002) During August 1980, Reagan's campaign managers, especially pollster Richard Werthlin, Georgetown professor Richard Allen, and former CIA agent Richard Beal, organized a special operations group to counter any Carter "October Surprise" - the only thing they thought would secure his re-election. At the same time, John Hinckley, Jr. was programmed to assassinate President Carter just in case he was able to secure the release of the hostages by negotiation - what these people, along with Marine Captain Oliver North and Colonel Robert MacFarlane - had been able to prevent by force. The operation's attraction lay in the fact that despite the publication of John Marks's book on Manchurian Candidates the previous year, only Milton Kline, onetime President of the American Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, and sometime CIA consultant in actual operations, believed that patsies and assassins could be, and had been created on occasion. (p. 199ff., esp. 204, note.) Hinckley, one of the Beat Generation, was the offspring of an upward-mobile, disassociated family, growing up in Dallas during the years before the JFK assassination and during its aftermath. While his older brother Scott was following in his father's footsteps at the Agency-connected Vanderbilt Energy Corporation, John was having trouble even getting started, spending seven years, on and off, at Texas Tech but without success. About the only thing he picked up was how to play the guitar, and an inclination for acting. During a trip to Hollywood in 1976, he came across Dr. Janiger, it seems, and was soon taking LSD again, and watching incessantly Martin Scorsese's film Taxi Driver, based on the life of George Wallace assassin Arthur Bremer, in the hope of becoming a successful actor. Before it was over, he imagined that he had become Robert Di Niro's alter ego. ("John W. Hinckley, Jr.: A Biography," law.unkc.edu/faculty/proje...) Hinckley was so convinced that he was a carbon copy of the alienated, drugged cabbie that he even fantasized, it seems, that he too had a girl friend, like Betsy in the film, working in a campaign for a politician he ultimately plotted to kill in order to impress her, calling her Lynn Collins. The only trouble with this propensity was that there was no need for it now in Agency operations as critics like Church were finished off early by the electorate because of their attacks on America's covert government. Hardly had the unknown Carter gotten established in the White House than Hinckley was back in Hollywood a year later for more. The trouble with Hinckley's potential was that the new President was proving much more supportive of the plans by secret government than any one had imagined (See, e. g., Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man's Bluff, p. 294ff.), and making Walter Mondale, the most experienced politician in keeping the intelligence community in check, President would only compound problems with its critics. Consequently, Hinckley's handler, and it seems to have been either Dr. Singer or one of her female associates, directed him towards more beneficial activity, leading apparently to his gaining a role in a play, and becoming romantically attached to an actress, a daughter of the mother of all conspiracy theorists, Mae Brussell, of all people. "Brussell," Vankin and Whelan have written, thought that this well-heeled individual without any visible means of support "...might be an 'agent provocateur' directed against her by the FBI via her daughter." (p. 66) Then, as when Jules Ricco Kimble aka Raoul thought that Harvey was pursuing him in New Orleans in 1967, and called the Domestic Contact agent to protest, she called the Bureau's Monterey Resident Agent to complain, making herself likewise a possible suspect in future developments. Ms. Brusell, thanks to financial support from the John Lennons, and publication support from The Realist's Paul Krassner, was becoming increasingly convinced that Governor Reagan was to be the beneficiary of all the ongoing 'dirty tricks'. (Paul Krassner, Confessions of a raving, unconformed nut, pp. 213-5) Once the summer season was over, Hinckley returned to Texas Tech with a new lease on life for the stage, changing his major from business administration to English to suit his new career goals, only to see his relationship with Mae's daughter ended, apparently because the mother opposed it, possibly resulting in the daughter's death in an automobile accident. In a tailspin, Hinckley helped young George W. Bush in his unsuccessful 1978 run, directed by brother Neil, for the House seat in Lubbock, a campaign which Hinckley's parents contributed money to. When it too proved unsuccessful, Hinckley went completely off the rails. He played Russian roulette with a .38 pistol he bought in August 1979, as he began to experience all kinds of aliments, requiring him to seek professional help, and to take both anti-depressants and tranquilizers, talltail signs of a manic depressive in a stretched out state. Hinckley even anticipated his role as Carter's assassin in March 1980, before his handlers had even decided upon it, by stalking him on his own during his early campaigning. Once the Reagan campaign against Carter moved into gear, and his assassintation was now a distinct possibility, Hinckley spent three weeks during September enrolled at Yale, stalking actress Jodi Foster who played the teenage prostitute, Iris, in the movie. It was a classic case of negative psychic driving where the candidate would have experiences, and emotional reactions which would spur him on to more threatening actions - what James Earl Ray experienced after he attended dancing classes, graduated from bartending school, underwent a nose job, joined a Swinger's Club, and advertized his sexual prowess in the Los Angeles Free Press but to no avail. (Gerald Posner, Killing the Dream, p. 208ff., though n.b. that he did not see hypnosis as the cause.) As Hinckley wrote Foster, perhaps a bit too self-consciously, just before he set off on his final mission to shoot Reagan: "And by hanging around your dormitory, I've come to realize that I'm the topic of more than a little conversation, however full of ridicule it may be." (evidence in U.S. v. John W. Hinckley, Jr.) "In a three-day period, Hinckley visited three cities where Carter rallies were held: Washington, D. C., Columbus, and Dayton." (Doug Linders, "The Trial of John W. Hinckley, Jr.") Though he once got within 20 feet of the President, he wasn't able to draw his pistol, and shoot, claiming cryptically that he wasn't in the proper frame of mind. Actually, the President hadn't made a surprise annoucement about the hostages which would have triggered the shooting, like what RFK's announcement caused when he won the California primary. Then trips by Hinckley to Lincoln, Nashville, Dallas, Washington, and Denver proved no more effacacious, thanks to the apparent failure of a leading Nazi to stiffen his nerve, to a tipoff to airport authorities about a pistol in his luggage, and the like. Hinckley's defense, if he had been pushed to shoot Carter, would have been that he was such a rabid supporter of the Reagan-Bush ticket, thanks particularly to all his connections with the Vice President's family, that he could not restrain himself when the President stole the election by completely underhanded means because of Mae Brussell's hatred of Reagan and his supporters. Just when all Hinckley's stalking had apparently proven unnecessary - Reagan's campaign officials having concluded that Teheran's consultations with Carter's Iranian Core Group had ended in failure - Bush received a report from former Texas Governor John Connally, now Reagan's campaign finance director who had helped box the President in the White House during the crisis, that Carter had worked out a "October Surprise" with Teheran afterall, causing him to activate Allen. Robert Parry has explained in "The Consortium: Bush & a CIA Power Play": 'George Bush,' Allen's notes began, 'JBC (Connally) - already made deal. Israelis delivered last wk. spare pts. via Amsterdam. Hostages out this wk. Moderate Arabs upset. French have given spares to Iraq and know of J. C. (Carter) deal w/Iran. JBC (Connally) unsure what to do. RVA (Allen) to act if true or not.' (consortiumnews.com) In another column, Parry added about Bush's role: "Whenever Allen knew more, he was to relay information to 'Shacklee (sic) via Jennifer' (Fitzgerald, Bush's infamous secretary)." ("Clouds over George Bush," Dec. 29, 1998, ibid.) When Allen's queries failed to resolve the confusion, he activated Shackley. The Agency's former DDO was just the man to activate a programmed assassination at the drop of a hat - what the emergency required as there was no time to indoctrinate another Candidate. Shackley's successor, John McMahon, supervised the work of the Stanford Research Institute which was still developing "remote viewing" - the projection of words and images right into patient's brains by machines and psychics - despite Koslov's attempts to kill it off. In 1995, McMahon admitted that the Agency had spent $20,000,000 on remote viewing research. "McMahon has, according to Philip Agee, the whistle-blowing exile, an affinity for 'technological exotics' for CIA covert operations," Alex Constantine wrote in Virtual Government. Most of the program's "empaths" - victims - came from Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientolgy, and Dr. West provided medical oversight for the psi experiments. West conducted his own on the "phenomenology of disassociate states" - the creation of people with multiple personalities. Thanks to research by Yale's Jose Delgado, California's Dr. Ross Adey, Walter Reed Hospital's Joseph Sharp, and DOD-funded J. F. Scapita, Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher, of San Leandro's Technic Research Laboratory in the Bay area, was prepared to produce any kind of human behavior by directing extremely low frequency (ELF), electromagnetic waves of words and images into victim's brains. This technique permitted handlers to quickly create robot killers, provided they had willing victims, and were able to move them around at will. Ideally, they would want to find someone who had a love-hate relationship with the proposed target. One just had to find a candidate who could be easily persuaded to do the evil deed with the appropriate psychic driving without any calculation or reservation. Then It was just a question of getting the controlled killer into position for killing the target on cue - what could be managed nearby with the proper electronic equipment. It was like having a home-deliverty assassination service. The same day, October 27th, that Shackley was alerted to take action, Mark David Chapman, a Hinckley lookalike - who had quit his job when Hinckley's mission had ended, and signed out in Lennon's name as if he were the target, only to cross it out before adding his own - started preparing to assassinate the famous Beatle, buying a .38-caliber Charter Arms Special in a Honolulu gun shop. (Fred McGunagle, Mark David Chapman, Chapter Six - "To the Brink and Back," p. 2) Hinckley was no longer available to go after anyone, back in Denver under the care his parents had arranged with psychologist Dr. John Hopper after he had taken an overdose of antidepressants. Chapman, who long had been of two minds about the former Beatle, had been ready for a similar assignment for a month, having been put through the psychological wringer the previous two months. Chapman, the same age as Hinckley, and born in nearby Fort Worth, was another product of a disfunctional family, though it took longer for him to descend to Hinckley's state. Then, just when he had miraculously gotten married, and worked himself out of debt, Chapman fell into a similar mental frenzy, believing increasingly that he was becoming Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, even writing Hawaii's Attorney General about the necessary procedure for changing his name. (McGunagle, p. 1) At the time, Chapman was working as a maintenance man at the Castle Memorial Hospital, under the supervision of psychologist Leilani Siegfried, after its therapists had nursed him back to health from a suicide attempt. While Chapman, a Hinckley copycat, could have been positioned to shoot Carter too, it would have been extremely difficult, and the shooting of Lennon would be more efficacious at the polls. (Chapman indicated that he had a few other high profile targets, one added as recently as October 1980 when Carter captured the public's fancy, on his assassination list when he went before the NY State parole board after 20 years incarceration, the names of whom were so sensitive that it redacted them from the published report.) Lennon's murder, it was assumed, would send liberal elements and the beat generation in the American electorate into a tailspin, and any violence, like burning down Harlem, would rally conservative American voters flocking to the voting booth for Reagan, as had happened for Nixon after the MLK and RFK shootings. While Lennon had drawn the ire and interest of MI5, and the FBI because of his songs of peace, and support of radical causes, especially the IRA's, while taking drugs since the Nixon years (Fenton Bressler, Who Killed John Lennon?, excerpts, Part 2, pp. 2-3, www. shout.net/-bigred/lennon), John and Yoko unwisely considered themselves like comedians Laurel and Hardy when it came to serious political business until it was far too late. Lennon discounted the idea that CIA could have gotten rid of artists like Jimmi Hendrix, and James Morrison to quell radical ardor until his last days, only to concede to Krassner: "Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and me, it was not an accident. (Krassner, p. 215, emphasis Lennon's) The Agency had far more reason for wanting to fix the unexpected permanent residents in America for underestimating the consequences of taking drugs, especially LSD, and of MK-ULTRA operations than the British and American security services, and few would suspect it having done so. While the surprisingly well-heeled Chapman, whose source has never been adequately identified, set off for New York, like Holden Caulfield in the Salinger novel, on October 30th, splurging like Arthur Bremer at the Waldorf while stalking Nixon and Wallace, he allegedly failed to procure ammunition for his revolver when he bought it, requiring a trip to Atlanta to make up for the deficiency. Actually, it would have been most easy for anyone to purchase ammunition in New York. In the meantine, Carter's last-minute effort to free the hostages through negotiation had been trumped by Bush and Allen bribing the Iranian Hostage Policy Committee's Mohammad Behesti, thanks to a tipoff by the NSC's Donald Gregg, who accompanied them, about the state of the President's efforts. This was apparently the cause of the delay, and by the time Chapman returned, shooting Lennon had become meaningless with Reagan's election, his handler persuading him to return to his wife Gloria in Hawaii in the hope of regaining a normal life. There were the strongest operational reasons, though, for this not being allowed to continue. A cured Chapman, his CIA handlers in the "remote viewing" program soon feared, might well recall how he had been maneuvered to kill Lennon, eager to tell all about the regime the Agency had put him through. More sinister elements in the program rued the loss of an actual operation which would determine if a patient could really be driven directly to shoot a target wherever it appeared. As typical scientists, they were obsessed with seeing if their push button approach to assassination really worked. Most important, Reagan's people wanted a diversion to direct the people's attention away from his "October Surprise," the return of all the hostages being postponed until after his inauguration to prevent further speculation. No sooner, though, did Reagan hint that he might have pulled off an "October Surprise" of his own than Chapman's Castle Memorial therapist started winding him up again, resulting in his having such a shouting match with supervisor Siegfried that he was obliged to resign, resulting in threatening phone calls, and bomb threats to various parties - reminiscent of when Kaczyinski went off the rails. The apparent loner "... spent his days harrassing a group of Hare Krishnas who dailly appeared in downtown Honolulu." (McGunagle, "Is That All You Want?," p. 1) Arriving back in New York on December 6th, Chapman planned to kill Lennon the next day, the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a fitting reminder to Yoko Ono of the betrayals. After a spate of psychic driving during which Chapman acted as if he were a close associate of Lennon's while living as if he were a nobody without a friend in the world, he bought a poster intended to screw up his courage, spotted a photograph of the former Beatle on a newsstand advertising an interview with the Lennons to focus his attention, purchased a copy of Lennon's latest albumn to remind himself of his words, and finally bought a new copy of The Catctcher in the Rye to renew his hatred of the world's biggest phony - the image, sound, and words which were to trigger the shooting by impulses into his brain when he was in position. In doing this programming, though, Chapman was so engrossed that he missed a few opportunities to kill Lennon. When Lennon finally came into the picture, Chapman couldn't bring himself to shoot him because he was so friendly, open, and generous. Instead of allowing Chapman to go back to Hawaii with the signed Lennon albumn, and possibly a photograph of the friendly Beatle handing over the prized possession to this apparent nobody, his handler so bombarded him with negative impulses during the night at the Sheraton that he was back the next night at the Lennons' Dakota residence to finish the job. There was no way that Chapman could escape now, as any remission from what he had been through would be more dangerous than ever, given the ever increasing conspiratorial activities by Reagan's people. The negative driving finally won, as Chapman later explained: "He walked past me, and then a voice in my head said, 'Do it, do it, do.' over and over again, saying 'Do it, do it, do it, do,' like that." (McGunagle, ch. 8, p. 1) And Chapman, after getting Lennon to turn, and show his face, did it, and then, after preparing himself for the arrival of the police, resumed reading Salinger's novel. While Lennon's assasination had the expected effect upon the American electorate, it served no useful purpose. In fact, it brought Hinckley out of his drug-related fantasies with a vengeance. He was so upset by Lennon's assassination, the Beatle being the one person he truly loved, that he went to New York, and attended a service in Central Park to honor his contributions to music and art. As the debate about who was behind it, and the release of the prisoners in Iran grew, Hinckley increasingly sided with, of all people, Mae Brussell who explained Lennon's assassintion thus: "It was a conspiracy. Reagan had just won the election. They knew what kind of president he was going to be. There was only one man who could bring out a million people on demonstration in protest at his policies -- and that was Lennon." (Bresler, p. 1) Under the circumstances, questions about Hinckley's stability, and allegiances started growing in official circles. On January 13, 1981, Mae Brussell noticed a white sedan, with a man and woman sitting inside, parked across the street from her house. The conspiracy theorist, as she explained in a 14-page letter to FBI Director Clarence Kelly, thought that the pair were conducting a surveillance on her, and she characteristically confronted them about it. While the woman in the car explained that they weren't, the man hardly said anything. "When Reagan was shot, Mae recognized photographs of the accused assailant as the same quiet young man she had seen parked in front of her home." (Vankin and Whlean, p. 64) After the Bureau checked out this claim, and others by the noted conspiracy theorist, it concluded conveniently in a memo that she was "mentally unstable", whose theories were not to be taken seriously. Of course, the FBI might have concluded differently if it had realized that the person, probably his former handler, in the while sedan with Hinckley was trying to rekindle his hatred of Brussell for having stopped his romance with her daughter a few years before rather than conducting a surveillance on her. Obviously, it didn't work as Hinckley increasingly had the President or the Vice President in his sights. Then there were stories in the Washington press that someone was stalking the Vice President, causing the city's police and the Secret Service all kinds of concerns which Bush was denying as quietly but as angrily as he could. Then there was the dinner date that his son Neil had scheduled with Hinckley's older brother Scott on the night after John's assassination attempt on Reagan. (ibid., pp. 332-3) People in the know about John's state of mind, and intentions were obviously most concerned about what he was up to. Despite further attempts by John's handler to prevent him from doing anything drastic, though she did not report the risk to law-enforcement officials for fear of disclosing the whole covert operation, he was among the small group awaiting Reagan's exit from Washington's Hilton early on the afternoon of March 30, 1981, and then started firing his .22 caliber pistol, armed with "devastator" bullets, at the rather loosely protected President, the last of which ricocheted off the limosine's fender, and deeply penetrated the President's thorax, narrowly missing his aorta. The Secret Service had apparently not followed its usual formation in protecting Reagan, apparently not to highlight its increased concerns about his safety in apparently such a risk-free area, and was slow to react to his wound, thinking it still impossible for any assassin to actually have hit him. These miscalculations almost cost Reagan his life, and a new batch of data for conspiracy theorists to work with. The Agency, though, did not need any new revelations to mend its ways somewhat. Its trials and tribulations with Hinckley taught it to avoid the use of any kind of Manchurian Candidate in future, though it was willing to lend out its expertise to allied services, particularly Israel's Mossad, if necessary, as we shall see. Edited December 9, 2009 by William Kelly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted February 26, 2010 Author Share Posted February 26, 2010 (edited) Two things about Al Haig that are not in his obit By Wayne Madsen http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:DBwmlz5GmQMJ:arthurzbygniew.blogspot.com/2010/02/rip-alexander-haig-protector-of-us.html+Alexander+haig+JFK+Assassination&cd=12&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/articles/20100221 February 22, 2010 There are two things that the corporate media wil not report about former Secretary of State and consummate Washington insider Al Haig, who died on February 20 at age 86. In 1974, Haig, who was President Richard Nixon's chief of staff. sent a classified message to the Secretary of Defense and all top echelon U.S. military commanders that any orders sent from the Commander-in-Chief without Haig's authorization were to be ignored. In the weeks leading up to the Nixon resignation over the Watergate scandal, this editor was a 20-year old Navy midshipman who happened to be staying with a Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel who was assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. The Marine officer related to me a chilling event that day at the Pentagon. The Haig co-authorization order resulted from a fear that Nixon, in an effort to remain in office, might have ordered troop movements and Army Reserve and National Guard call-ups from surrounding bases in the Washington area, particularly from Fort A. P. Hill in Virginia and Fort George Meade in Maryland, to enter Washington and seize control of Congress. The reason would be the preservation of "national security." Defense Secretary James Schlesinger sent Haig's directive as a flash presedence, Top Secret, "'PERSONAL FOR" message to all top military commanders. Orders from Nixon, including that for a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, that did not go through the Pentagon were to be ignored. Apparently, Haig did not trust Nixon or the Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to not try to stage a military occupation of Washington in order to remain in power. In a dramatic move, the Joint Chiefs agreed with Haig and took steps to counteract any orders from Nixon to military commanders. Alexander Haig 1924 On March 30, 1981, the son of John W. Hinckley, Sr. a close family friend and Midland, Texas oil industry associate of Vice President George H W Bush, John W. Hinckley, Jr., shot and seriously wounded President Ronald Reagan as he left the Washington Hilton hotel. Bush was sitting in Air Force Two in Austin, Texas with Texas Republican Governor Bill Clements, a close Bush ally. Furthermore, Hinckley Jr.'s brother Scott Hinckley was to have dinner with Bush's son Neil Bush the day after the assassination. Neil was living at the time in Denver, where the Hinckleys had moved from Texas, and was working for AMOCO. Scott Hinckley was a Vice President for his father's Vanderbilt Energy. The friendship mirrored that between John Hinckley, Sr. and George H. W. Bush. Bush's Zapata Oil reportedly bailed out Vanderbilt Energy when it fell on hard times in the 1960s. Hinckley Sr. also served as president of the Christian evangelist organization World Vision, believed to be a major CIA conduit for operations in Third World countries. A colleague of mine who knew Haig, related a story that when Haig first heard about a family connection between the Hinckley and Bush families, the veteran of the Nixon-Kissinger Watergate intrigue immediately conducted a virtual "lock down" of the White House as Reagan was being rushed to the hospital. Haig quickly left his office at Foggy Bottom and sped the few blocks to the White House Situation Room. Haig may not be my or anyone else's "cup of tea" but in the aftermath of the Reagan shooting when he let the world know that he was "in control" at the White House, he was sending a message to America's friends and enemies, and particularly Vice President Bush, that nothing would happen that would upset the normal succession. If it turned out that Hinckley's attempt on Reagan's life was connected to a plot by the Vice President, Haig would ensure Bush got no where near the White House. Haig, as third in succession for the presidency after ordering the arrest of Bush, would transfer presidential power to Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill of Massachusetts. There is also the curious nature of Bush's actions on the morning of March 30. Bush was flying on the Boeing 707 Air Force Two from Fort Worth to Austin while Hinckley was stalking the side entrance to the Washington Hilton, waiting for Reagan to depart after his address to an AFL-CIO meeting. Earlier in the morning, Bush had dedicated a historical plaque at the Fort Worth Hyatt Regency, the old Texas Hotel, the very same hotel wjere President Kennedy stayed on November 21, 1963, the night before his fateful trip to Dallas where he was assassinated. Bush was, like Hinckley, stalking the entrance to the Texas School Book Depository Building at the time of Kennedy's assassination. When his plane arrived in Austin, Bush remained on board with Texas Governor Clements. With Reagan laying gravely wounded and undergoing surgery at George Washington University Hospital, Bush decided to stay put. Was the reason for Bush to have easy access to a judge in order to be sworn into office upon learning of Reagab's death. If Bush were to have taken off for Washington without knowing about Reagan's status, Bush would be in the air without the ability to be sworn into office. By remaining on the tarmac at Austin, Bush would not only be able to be sworn in but he would be able to give his presidency legitimacy by flying back to Andrews Air Force Base with the governor of Texas at his side. If Bush had risked having a judge on an airborne Air Force Two before knowing that Reagan had died, the entire conspiracy would have been exposed. Therefore, Bush and Clements remained on the tarmac in Austin waiting to hear about Reagan's prognosis. Haig was also undoubtedly aware that on March 31, 1981, the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) had been ordered to conduct and exercise simulating a Soviet ICBM missile attack on the United States. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman David Jones immediately ordered the exercise canceled after they became suspicious of the timing. Weinberger, who was close to Haig, was also suspicious about Reagan chief of staff James Baker, an old political crony of Bush, informing the White House Situation Room officials, including Haig, that the following day -- the same day of the pre-planned NORAD missile attack simulation -- the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), scheduled OPERATION NINE LIVES, an exercise on presidential succession. That exercise also was immediately canceled. Bush did not arrive at the White House Situation Room until 7:00 pm and he appeared, according to Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, surprisingly calm in the face of the day's events. It was also clear that Bush's cabal at the White House included Baker and Ed Meese, the Counselor to the President for Policy. Curiously, Bush had stopped by the Vice President's residence at the Naval Observatory instead of proceedinh directly to the White House. When it appeared that Reagan would survive the assassination attempt, even after he was administered an "cold transfusion" of blood that could have also killed kim and may have brought about his Alzheimer's condition, Bush and his media pals immediately began the disinformation campaign about the would-be assassin. Bush's Press Secretary, Pete Teeley, caustically told inquiring reporters that he knew nothing about any Bush-Hinckley family connection. Attorney General William French Smith, with Bush chairing the emergency Cabinet meeting, quickly ruled out any conspiracy with the attempt of Reagan's life. As far as the FBI was concerned, Hinckley was a troubled lone assassin in the mold of Arthur Herman Bremer, the attempted assassin of Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace, and Mark David Chapman, the assassin of John Lennon. Never mind the fact that Chapman had worked for the senior Hinckley's World Vision. And then the press was treated to the zinger concerning Hinckley Jr. He shot Reagan to impress actress Jodie Foster. The following note was allegedly found in Hinckley's Washington hotel room: "Dear Jodie, There is a definite possibility that I will be killed in my attempt to get Reagan. It is for this reason that I am writing you this letter now. As you well know by now, I love you very much. The past seven months I have left you dozens of poems, letters, and messages in the faint hope you would develop an interest in me. . . . Jodie, I'm asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance with this historical deed to gain your respect and love. I love you forever. /s/ John Hinckley" For the seasoned military leader Haig, the Hinckley-Foster connection must have seemed like a bad dream and a definite indication that a massive "psy-op" campaign was being initiated after Reagan did not die. Those suspecting Bush of involvement in the attempt on Reagan, who Bush personally abhorred over Reagan's outspoken criticisms of Bush's favorite groups -- the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission -- included, first and foremost, Haig, but also Weinberger and Regan. Bush's core team included Baker and Meese. One Washington journalist who was not buying into the "lone gunman" theory was NBC News anchorman John Chancellor. Chancellor believed the relationship between the would-be assassin's family and Bush was more than coincidental. NBC News reporter Judy Woodruff reported that at least one shot that was fired at the Hilton came from "above." Chancellor died from stomach cancer in 1996 at the age of 68. Years ago, this editor spoke to Reagan's personal Secret Service agent who quickly pushed Reagan into the presidential limousine when the shots rang out from Hinckley's weapon. The standing Secret Service orders were for the limousine to proceed directly to the White House. When Parr noticed that Reagan was bleeding he wisely countermanded the standing order and re-directed the limousine to George Washington University Hospital. The decision most likely saved Reagan's life and spared the nation from Bush assuming the presidency on March 30, 1981 instead of January 20, 1989. Anecdotally, when Parr covered the seriously wounded Reagan with his full body weight, Reagan in pain, yelled out: "Are you trying to xxxxing kill me?" The answer to that question that someone was trying to kill Reagan, not his Secret Service agent who saved his life, but his Vice President, George H. W. Bush. And for ensuring that George H. W. Bush did not darken the Oval Office as early as March 30, 1981, we have Al Haig largely to thank for that. RIP, General Haig. Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. He has written for The Village Voice, The Progressive, Counterpunch, Online Journal, CorpWatch, Multinational Monitor, News Insider, In These Times, and The American Conservative. His columns have appeared in The Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Columbus Dispatch, Sacramento Bee, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among others. ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE OF HAIG http://firedoglake.com/2010/02/21/sunday-l...] In our televised American culture, Alexander Haig is likely now best-remembered for his moment in the White House briefing room only hours after President Ronald Reagan was shot at the Washington Hilton on March 31, 1981. After racing up the stairs from the Situation Room, he muttered shakily on live television, to a nation unclear about what had just happened, "I am in control here in the White House…." In the absence of Vice President GHWBush, who was flying back to Washington, and due to rumors that had gone out on the air that 'no one was in charge in the White House' the new Secretary of State felt America needed reassurance — and our enemies needed reminding — that the machinery of American government was still operational despite the shooting. Alexander Haig was unsuccessful in that moment. Once the shock of the assassination attempt wore off, and our President recovered and America focused on Reagan's horrible economy, we needed laughs. Haig's shaky, sweaty statement became one source of those laughs. He left the State department the following year, believing he'd lost the President's confidence in a battle with Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and a National Security Council that was to become infamous later in Reagan's presidency. But it was actually one thing Alexander Haig did more than half a decade before this television moment that shaped our current American political landscape and made our country what it is today. Perhaps more than any other American of the twentieth century who was not President, Alexander Haig forged our political culture and set American history on our current, sorry path. Hephaestus was the Greek smith-god who forged all the thrones in the Palace of Olympus. Al Haig, American Hephaestus, forged the current view of our American president as invulnerable to accountability for any actions while in office. (Indulge me the alliteration, please; the god is more well-known nowadays as the Roman deity, Vulcan.) Alexander Haig shaped the way we view the Presidency today, and changed the course of history with stern advice he gave a new president just finding his way in the Oval Office after an earlier American tragedy. How? In 1973, merely one year after his landslide re-election, Richard Nixon lost his impeachment insurance when Spiro Agnew was forced to resign the Vice Presidency in a plea deal to avoid prison for bribery. Busy covering up Watergate and embroiling America in foreign policy machinations to distract from his and his aides' malfeasance, Nixon settled on the House Minority Leader to be America's first appointed Vice President: Michigan's Gerald Ford. The process of selecting a Vice President was new; previously, vacancies went unfilled. After John Kennedy's assassination and LBJ's ascension, Congress wondered whether it was wise to leave the in-waiting Vice slot unfilled. This problem was especially well illustrated in 1963 by LBJ's health and that of the 71-year-old Speaker of the House, John McCormack and the 85-year-old president pro tempore of the Senate, Carl Hayden. So a constitutional solution was proposed and, only seven years after its ratification, America was now using our brand new XXVth Amendment. During his Congressional confirmation hearings, the first ever for a Vice President, Gerald Ford was asked about pardoning his predecessor, should it come to that. Widely interpreted as a promise not to were these words, "I don't think the American people would stand for it." In retrospect, you can see the wiggle room. As Bob Woodward reported in "Shadow," Alexander Haig sought out Vice President Ford in the chaotic first week of August, 1974, and proposed a Nixon pardon, full and complete, for any and all crimes committed. Ford said the deal wasn't "consummated" then but shocked the nation five weeks later on a lovely fall Sunday by granting the disgraced ex-President just such a pardon. In truth, he had been right almost a year before: America didn't stand for it, and his trust with the slowly healing American people was irretrievably broken. Jerry Ford, an otherwise decent man who had already told America that "our long national nightmare is over" when he assumed the Presidency, undertook his Nixon pardon path aided by Alexander Haig, who thus forged modern American political culture. America was denied a healing process begun when Ford became President. We will never likely know the extent of Nixon's involvement in Watergate and 'other high crimes' because the pardon ended his accountability. Thus began the corruption of America as a nation that can withstand great harm and still survive: we are instead a vulnerable people to be protected from the spectacle of accountability for our leaders' wrongs. It's a twisted notion of American exceptionalism: the Executive Exemption from Accountability. It saved Ronald Reagan and GHWBush from impeachment and prosecution for their Iran/Contra high crimes and saved GWBush and Dick Cheney from impeachment and prosecution for their 9/11 negligence and subsequently lying America into war. America never trusted Jerry Ford again. He flailed about on economic matters, wrestling alternately with inflation and recession. A gifted athlete, his public stumbles boosted the successful career of comedian Chevy Chase and embarrassed us. A plain mid-Western speaker, Ford's sometimes garbled syntax opened him up to gaffes that made it appear he didn't understand foreign policy. All this, but first of all his unexpected, sudden reversal on a Nixon pardon (and lack of press preparation and Congressional consultation) made possible the unlikely presidential candidacy of a Georgian peanut farmer who carried his own suitcase. Jimmy Carter engaged the nation with the simple promise that he would always tell America the truth. Carter might not have been elected had Ford not broken trust with the American people so early in his presidency, at Haig's urging. Follow me a few more steps into this political fantasy of Jerry Ford elected to his own presidential term in 1976: recall that he had barely vanquished Ronald Reagan that summer for the GOP nomination, leaving the defeated Reagan a strong candidate for the subsequent 1980 nomination. Elected to his own term, though, a full Ford presidency probably would have resulted in a Democratic win in 1980. Twelve years of the Presidency in one party's hands usually results in a turnover to the other party, in this case the Democrats. Would America have seen President Edward Kennedy take the oath in January 1981? Possibly; but regardless of either nominee we certainly would have been spared a President Ronald Reagan. The outgoing President Ford likely could have controlled the levers of his own party to prevent the 1980 Reagan nomination from ever happening. And an America without a Reagan Presidency would be a vastly different America today, wouldn't it? I submit: a much better one. No Reagan Presidency means no Bush Vice Presidency, which means no GHWB Presidency. Which means no Fortunate Son, beholden to and manipulated by Nixon leftovers Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. So raise a glass to the shade of Al Haig, wherever he resides: forger of America's destiny with one swift strike of his smith's hammer against the iron will of Jerry Ford's promise to his country, on the anvil of executive integrity. For better or for worse, no one not elected President did more with a single act to create the circumstances we find ourselves mired in today. The legacy of America's Hephaestus, Alexander Haig: an unaccountable Executive; Ronald Reagan's presidency; and the disastrous reach into the twenty-first century of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, returned from the never-extinguished wreckage of the Nixon years to shape America's destiny as their own. Thanks, Al. Edited February 26, 2010 by William Kelly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted March 27, 2011 Author Share Posted March 27, 2011 Did anyone see the TV documentary on the Hinkley/Reagan Assassination attempt at the DC Hilton? I'd like a report on it if anybody saw it. Thanks, Bill Kelly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Hogan Posted March 27, 2011 Share Posted March 27, 2011 Did anyone see the TV documentary on the Hinkley/Reagan Assassination attempt at the DC Hilton? I'd like a report on it if anybody saw it. Thanks, Bill Kelly CBS ran a short piece this morning: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/27/sunday/main20047616.shtml There's some interesting information here: http://rawhidedown.com/ I didn't see the documentary you are referring to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted April 1, 2011 Author Share Posted April 1, 2011 Did anyone see the TV documentary on the Hinkley/Reagan Assassination attempt at the DC Hilton? I'd like a report on it if anybody saw it. Thanks, Bill Kelly CBS ran a short piece this morning: http://www.cbsnews.c...n20047616.shtml There's some interesting information here: http://rawhidedown.com/ I didn't see the documentary you are referring to. Hi Michael, Thanks for the response, The show I am referring to is The Stalker: The Reagan Shooting Stalker: The Reagan Shooting (2011) | LocateTV Reagan assassination attempt documentary on CNN this Sunday - UZI Talk Forums Here's an article in USA Today that extensively quotes the late Phil Melanson, a former COPA board member. Effects of assassination attempt on Reagan echo today - USATODAY.com By William M. Welch, USA TODAYThe attempt on Ronald Reagan's life in 1981 failed to cut short his presidency but led to lasting changes in the way the Secret Service protects presidents, prompted changes in laws on insanity as a criminal defense and advanced the national debate over gun control. Reagan was shot in the chest as he was leaving a Washington hotel and getting into his presidential limo after delivering a speech on March 30, 1981, a little more than two months into his first term. Reagan survived and even was able to joke with doctors at George Washington University Hospital who saved his life, but his injury was grave and life-threatening. A deflected bullet entered his chest below his left arm and lodged close to his heart. John W. Hinckley Jr., a young Texas Tech University dropout from a wealthy oil-business family, fired six shots from a revolver after drawing within 15 to 20 feet of the president and blending in with photographers and reporters. After a trial in June 1982, Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined to a mental institution in Washington, D.C., where he remains a resident. He is periodically released for family visits. MENTAL INSTITUTION: Hinckley granted more freedoms Besides the president, Hinckley's bullets wounded three others — a Secret Service agent, a police officer and presidential press secretary James Brady, who suffered a grievous head wound that left him paralyzed. The shooting left its mark on the legal and political battle over controlling guns. Brady became a leader in the push for stricter gun laws, along with his wife, Sarah. In 1993, President Clinton signed into law the "Brady Bill" named in his honor. It required a waiting period and background check on handgun purchases through licensed dealers. The shooting prompted an examination of security procedures by the Secret Service, says Edwin Donovan, special agent and spokesman for the agency. The Secret Service does not discuss specific tactics it employs in the protection of the president, Donovan says, but it made some significant changes in light of the attempt on Reagan's life. The main one, he says, is that arrivals and departures of the president at event sites are now closed to the public and press. "Quite obviously, they weren't at that time," Donovan says. In the Reagan case, the shooting took place as he moved from a side doorway of the Washington Hilton along a sidewalk flanked by a stone wall. Reporters and photographers had gathered behind a rope line behind his limo and were shouting "Mr. President" as he moved from building to car. Members of the public, including the would-be assassin, had been able to enter the area without being screened, although they were under visual scrutiny by agents and police. In a second major change, the Secret Service began regularly using metal detectors, called magnetometers, to screen the public and search for weapons at presidential appearances, Donovan says. "They weren't used as extensively at that time as they are today," he says. "Nowadays we secure thousands of sites for the president and vice president each year. We put millions of people through magnetometers at the White House and every venue the president and vice president travel to." The attempt on Reagan's life also contributed to a major upgrade and expansion of the Secret Service. Technology has advanced greatly since that attempt almost 30 years ago, and Donovan says the agency incorporates far more technology today as part of its countermeasures for protecting the president against threats. The Secret Service has more than twice as many agents. In 1981, the Secret Service had 1,550 special agents, as they're known. Today there are 3,500. "We spend more money and devote more assets to our protective mission than ever before in our history," Donovan says. In a 2002 book, Secret Service: The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency, author Philip Melanson recounts how internal reviews uncovered shortcomings in agency procedures that were brought to light by the assassination attempt. "John W. Hinckley, the man who had nearly killed the president and whose actions set off a firestorm of questions about the service's protective performance, turned out to be a deeply disturbed young man with fantasies of a love affair with actress Jodie Foster," Melanson wrote. "The third unsuccessful presidential assassination attempt in six years, Hinckley's attempt compelled the Secret Service to examine every aspect of its March 30, 1981, performance. The agency had constantly implored the genial Reagan not to pause and chat with the press during his exits. 'Wave and move, Mr. President,' agents had urged. … "In the aftermath of the shooting, agents tightened security. The president exited events through parking garages instead of out on the street, and the press was kept at much greater distance, which meant fewer opportunities to ask questions of him. Decoy limousines were used on subsequent trips to the Hilton to confuse bystanders as to where the president would exit," he wrote. Among other changes, the book noted, Reagan began wearing a bulletproof overcoat, and details of the president's daily itinerary were no longer made public. Still, the book said, agency review showed that the agents who were protecting the president "performed flawlessly" in removing him from the scene within 10 seconds of the shooting. The jury's verdict for Hinckley brought public outcry over the insanity defense and prompted hearings in Congress that led to a 1984 law limiting use of the defense in federal cases. Many states adopted similar changes, according to a report by the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. "During the three years following the Hinckley acquittal," the report said, "Congress and half of the states enacted changes in the insanity defense, all limiting use of the defense." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted April 1, 2011 Author Share Posted April 1, 2011 (edited) Did anyone see the TV documentary on the Hinkley/Reagan Assassination attempt at the DC Hilton? I'd like a report on it if anybody saw it. Thanks, Bill Kelly CBS ran a short piece this morning: http://www.cbsnews.c...n20047616.shtml There's some interesting information here: http://rawhidedown.com/ I didn't see the documentary you are referring to. Hi Michael, Thanks for the response, The show I am referring to is The Stalker: The Reagan Shooting Stalker: The Reagan Shooting (2011) | LocateTV Reagan assassination attempt documentary on CNN this Sunday - UZI Talk Forums Here's an article in USA Today that extensively quotes the late Phil Melanson, a former COPA board member. Effects of assassination attempt on Reagan echo today - USATODAY.com By William M. Welch, USA TODAY The attempt on Ronald Reagan's life in 1981 failed to cut short his presidency but led to lasting changes in the way the Secret Service protects presidents, prompted changes in laws on insanity as a criminal defense and advanced the national debate over gun control.Reagan was shot in the chest as he was leaving a Washington hotel and getting into his presidential limo after delivering a speech on March 30, 1981, a little more than two months into his first term. Reagan survived and even was able to joke with doctors at George Washington University Hospital who saved his life, but his injury was grave and life-threatening. A deflected bullet entered his chest below his left arm and lodged close to his heart. John W. Hinckley Jr., a young Texas Tech University dropout from a wealthy oil-business family, fired six shots from a revolver after drawing within 15 to 20 feet of the president and blending in with photographers and reporters. After a trial in June 1982, Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined to a mental institution in Washington, D.C., where he remains a resident. He is periodically released for family visits. MENTAL INSTITUTION: Hinckley granted more freedoms Besides the president, Hinckley's bullets wounded three others — a Secret Service agent, a police officer and presidential press secretary James Brady, who suffered a grievous head wound that left him paralyzed. The shooting left its mark on the legal and political battle over controlling guns. Brady became a leader in the push for stricter gun laws, along with his wife, Sarah. In 1993, President Clinton signed into law the "Brady Bill" named in his honor. It required a waiting period and background check on handgun purchases through licensed dealers. The shooting prompted an examination of security procedures by the Secret Service, says Edwin Donovan, special agent and spokesman for the agency. The Secret Service does not discuss specific tactics it employs in the protection of the president, Donovan says, but it made some significant changes in light of the attempt on Reagan's life. The main one, he says, is that arrivals and departures of the president at event sites are now closed to the public and press. "Quite obviously, they weren't at that time," Donovan says. In the Reagan case, the shooting took place as he moved from a side doorway of the Washington Hilton along a sidewalk flanked by a stone wall. Reporters and photographers had gathered behind a rope line behind his limo and were shouting "Mr. President" as he moved from building to car. Members of the public, including the would-be assassin, had been able to enter the area without being screened, although they were under visual scrutiny by agents and police. In a second major change, the Secret Service began regularly using metal detectors, called magnetometers, to screen the public and search for weapons at presidential appearances, Donovan says. "They weren't used as extensively at that time as they are today," he says. "Nowadays we secure thousands of sites for the president and vice president each year. We put millions of people through magnetometers at the White House and every venue the president and vice president travel to." The attempt on Reagan's life also contributed to a major upgrade and expansion of the Secret Service. Technology has advanced greatly since that attempt almost 30 years ago, and Donovan says the agency incorporates far more technology today as part of its countermeasures for protecting the president against threats. The Secret Service has more than twice as many agents. In 1981, the Secret Service had 1,550 special agents, as they're known. Today there are 3,500. "We spend more money and devote more assets to our protective mission than ever before in our history," Donovan says. In a 2002 book, Secret Service: The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency, author Philip Melanson recounts how internal reviews uncovered shortcomings in agency procedures that were brought to light by the assassination attempt. "John W. Hinckley, the man who had nearly killed the president and whose actions set off a firestorm of questions about the service's protective performance, turned out to be a deeply disturbed young man with fantasies of a love affair with actress Jodie Foster," Melanson wrote. "The third unsuccessful presidential assassination attempt in six years, Hinckley's attempt compelled the Secret Service to examine every aspect of its March 30, 1981, performance. The agency had constantly implored the genial Reagan not to pause and chat with the press during his exits. 'Wave and move, Mr. President,' agents had urged. … "In the aftermath of the shooting, agents tightened security. The president exited events through parking garages instead of out on the street, and the press was kept at much greater distance, which meant fewer opportunities to ask questions of him. Decoy limousines were used on subsequent trips to the Hilton to confuse bystanders as to where the president would exit," he wrote. Among other changes, the book noted, Reagan began wearing a bulletproof overcoat, and details of the president's daily itinerary were no longer made public. Still, the book said, agency review showed that the agents who were protecting the president "performed flawlessly" in removing him from the scene within 10 seconds of the shooting. The jury's verdict for Hinckley brought public outcry over the insanity defense and prompted hearings in Congress that led to a 1984 law limiting use of the defense in federal cases. Many states adopted similar changes, according to a report by the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. "During the three years following the Hinckley acquittal," the report said, "Congress and half of the states enacted changes in the insanity defense, all limiting use of the defense." Edited April 1, 2011 by William Kelly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ron Ecker Posted April 3, 2011 Share Posted April 3, 2011 The Stalker is airing again tonight (Sunday, April 3) on CNN at 11 pm EST (8 pm PST). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted April 3, 2011 Author Share Posted April 3, 2011 The Stalker is airing again tonight (Sunday, April 3) on CNN at 11 pm EST (8 pm PST). Thanks Ron, I'll try to catch it. BK Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted April 4, 2011 Author Share Posted April 4, 2011 The Stalker is airing again tonight (Sunday, April 3) on CNN at 11 pm EST (8 pm PST). Thanks Ron, I'll try to catch it. BK Oh, but then I'll have to miss The Kennedys on Reelz. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Please sign in to comment
You will be able to leave a comment after signing in
Sign In Now