Dawn Meredith

So...out of curiosity...what happened to the complaint thread? Dawn

Because exactly the same situation occurred not long ago, where Jan believed Len compared him to a holocaust denier, and I failed to act. Does Len not deserve the same treatment as anyone else? The compromise offer would have made clear what he meant without the possibility of it being interpreted as being directed at Len. At least two moderators read the comment as being directed at Len. The thread about psyops has been deleted; if you care to repost it - ensuring it conforms to the standards expected - then there will be no problems. Evan, I am going to speak openly and I hope this does not cause this post to be peremptorily deleted. If one cannot air one's complaints in the complaints thread, where else can one do it.... As you already know because I have already made this clear, I can't repost that thread as it has been lost to history due to your biased and hasty decision to delete it. Until this weekend I felt not the need in these fora to copy my posts and threads as I had not hitherto seen or expected to see the wholesale murder of them by one Moderator (you) for the poorest of poor reasons. I would be grateful if you would post a link to that exact charge about Jan and holocaust denial and any subsequent moderation decisions made about it, so that I can review the accuracy of the charge you now make. Thank you. I do remember that you recently took action on another post Jan made, that Jan appealed to John of unfair treatment at your hands, and that John upheld Jan's apology and asked you to issue and apology, which you did and which Jan accepted. I do know that you have reacted badly to Jan's presence here in recent times (prompting an outrageous outburst of spleen) - to the extent that it was clear there was a personal issue involved and that has grown out of all proportion. This, in my view, has entirely clouded your judgements. And this is why I have expressed my formal opinion to John Simkin that you are no longer fit to Moderate these fora. As I anticipated John has not responded. Nor did he respond to Jan's appeal against your latest decision. But it is not relevant anyway, because it is against the natural order of justice to carry over resentment (and/or harbour a vendetta against a member for being forced to apologize - assuming that was the case) from an earlier post (unresolved or not) to current times. If that were the case then every poster on this forum from their accumulated past posts - especially the debunking crowd whom you appear to heavily favour and protect (imo), would have every post excised. After all, the debunking crowd specialize in attacking other members motives, ridiculing, and baiting them and engaging in inflammatory statements and so forth. But I haven't yet seen you censure any of them to any marked extent for any of that. What's good for the Goose Evan, is also good for the Gander. Favouring one camp because they are the natural allies of your own positions, while punishing others who hold opposing views, is a terrible abuse of power. If you have any self respect left, you'd resign and allow other moderators to step into the breach. I am quite certain none will voluntarily step forward in opposition to your wishes otherwise - or that John Simkin will replace you no matter how badly you damage the forum by running amok (and believe me this place HAS been badly damaged after these recent happenings). I think you are also wily enough to know that this is the case and that this knowledge invigorates your decisions. Just my opinion, though. Meanwhile many regular members here have now signed up for a new forum as they are sick and tired of the Colby debunking crowd and your protection of them. The view is that this place no longer warrants the effort to try to salvage it because the patients have taken over the asylum and that there is no courage in the leadership to take tough decisions. How this will play out only time will tell. But as I have indicated earlier, Jan has left, I will be leaving shortly, as will others. The upshot will be that this place will not have the clash of opposing views and will be quieter. This may be a good thing... I don't know. I'll be interested to see if the debunking crowd end up debunking each other or just fall silent -- mission achieved as one member here recently observed? Who knows what the future holds. But the word is now out that this is no longer the place for objectivity, balance or fairness or for knowledgeable members, researchers, writers, journalists and others who have an interest in those subject this forum has been a safe harbour to until recent times. I have no way of knowing if the two moderators you mention have reviewed their decisions in the light of Jan's entirely credible follow-on explanation (once he actually received an explanation from you why you deleted his post - although he still hasn't receive the fabled PM you say you sent him - the fact that Antti has a copy does not prove you sent Jan a PM does it), because every other Moderator here, including John Simkin appears to have donned flak-vests, tin helmets and legged it to the bunkers, leaving you to run the place on your lonesome, taking whatever decisions to delete or locks thread/posts your spleen and bias sees fit to take (again in my opinion). David Guyatt (my real name) PS, you will note that I have changed my avatar, in view of the nonsense that has surrounded this subject in recent days. The fact is that when I began posting on this forum, John asked me to post an avatar. I declined and explained my reasons for doing so, namely security following two very unpleasant death threats that included the delivery to my home of a firebomb and other items on other another occasion. There is no publicly available picture of me anywhere and never will be. John offered ideas of a compromise and I therefore used, with his tacit understanding, a picture that is similar to me in some respects (lifted from the internet) but is not me. This has amounted to an intelligent compromise hitherto. The recent nonsense you have engaged in with Maggie has highlighted the ridiculousness we now see being enacted. I have therefore chosen another picture that might be me, but might not. If you have a problem with this, please contact John and ask him to PM me to discuss this. I have kept the original exchange of emails discussing this topic with John btw. I see this issue as the forum having a mod who in essence is anti conspiracy, whose political philosophy is similar to that of the attack dogs, so he naturally is more defensive of their positions than those of Jan, Jack, David, Charlie etc. This is NOT what the forum used to be like. While anti- CT posts were not banned, they were also not lauded. When someone says the least little thing about "Len" it's deleted but CTers can be called names, mocked, and worse yet this is tolerated. If people say they are not receiviing PM's I believe them. John's silence speaks volumes. Dawn I also long ago noted that the pic of "Len" resembled DW. I chalked it up to coincidence or good genes.

It is with great sadness I read this post. I do not understand why John has allowed this situation to reach this point. Exceptionally good researchers and lovely people have been leaving this forum in droves the last two years over the non- stop harrassment and insults by the Colby/Lamson group. Yet they are continually protected. I am in complete agreement with Charlie Drago's assessment of these posters. I very much miss his presence on this forum. And Jan's work has been so very significant. I remember when John started this forum and the hopes he had of researchers all over the world joining forces for the common good: truth and justice. Jack White wrote an important post yesterday: Beginning with how CT's were handled in the old days- harrassed, phones tapped, mail opened, even beat up. And now on the net we know that the gov is all over this stuff and their lackys are sent in to cause as much dissention as possible. Anything to derail a thread, to get the focus off the search for the truth. That IS their MO. And I have seen this occur repeatedly on this forum. A a result a pattern emerged long ago: the true researchers finally gave up and left. Now yet another. I do hope that there is some resolution to this whereby Jan stays. We can count the number of mainstream journalists on one hand who have come over to our side. And it's been an honor to have Jan and his fine mind on these pages. But it certainly appears that the powers that be here favor the presence of those whose sole purpose here (imho) is to attack the truth and its presenters. And that's a damn shame. Dawn

And we- the CTers- are just paranoid nuts! This is beyond disturbing. Dawn Thoughts On the Harassment of Tom Feeley Kurt Nimmo Infowars August 7, 2008 Reading Mike Whitney’s account of the harassment of Tom Feeley, the editor and publisher of the Information Clearing House website, I am once again reminded that it is a few minutes before midnight (see Paul Joseph Watson’s account as well). As the clock strikes midnight, our brownshirts will rush in like a plague of locusts, or more accurately an invasion of cockroaches. America will become Nazi Germany, it will become Chile under Pinochet, it will be transformed into a fascist dictatorship. Most of us, distracted by bread and circuses, numbed by incessant propaganda, don’t realize how close at hand this reality is. It is now emerging from the shadows, as Mr. Feeley no doubt understands. George Grosz: A Writer, Is He? 1934-35. Nazi Germany, of course, is not an exact parallel. In 1921 Adolf Hitler formed his own private army called Sturm Abteilung, German for Storm Section, and the SA was instructed to disrupt the meetings of political opponents. In large part the SA was comprised of former members of the Freikorps, reactionary thugs organized into gangs after the First World War. As Spartacus Educational explains, Freikorps thugs “had considerable experience in using violence against their rivals” and were inspired after Hitler’s speeches to hunt down, brutalize, and even murder their opponents. Later, select members of the SA would be organized into the Gestapo SS. Bush’s neocons are nowhere nearly as organized and vicious as the SA brownshirts, although the demented passion and violence is there, the desire to deal with opponents severely is thinly masked, ready to emerge given the right situation. Bush, however, is not Hitler, although his grand daddy helped facilitate Hitler’s crimes. Unlike Hitler, Bush’s neocons do not have at their disposal a mass fascist organization and cannot dispatch paramilitary goon squads and knuckle draggers to deal with opponents. In America, circa 2008, we have yet to experience organized gangs of neocon thugs attacking antiwar activists and truth movement patriots. In America, circa 2008, the intimidation and violence operates in the shadows… for the moment. It is not clear who exactly threatened and intimidated Tom Feeley and his wife, although a few educated guesses come to mind. It is a matter of documented history that the FBI and recruited local police, under COINTELPRO, used “extralegal” force and violence against opponents of government policies. Such tactics included break-ins, vandalism, assaults, beatings, and — in the case of the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement — murder. “Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that,” reported the Church Committee back in the mid-1970s, “the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.” In essence, the FBI served as America’s secret police then and continue to do so now. It also on occasion served as an assassination team assigned with taking out leaders like Martin Luther King. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, there was no such thing as the Patriot Act, nothing approaching the Military Commissions Act, and certainly nothing of the draconian character of PDD51, basically a plan to declare martial law and implement a dictatorship, provided the right situation or, as in the case of 9/11, the right “terrorist event.” Nixon’s declared “silent majority” pales when compared to Bush’s neocon minority, a gaggle of reactionaries hysterically calling not only for nuking Iran but also rounding up the growing opposition, tasering and beating them, and marching them off to freshly constructed concentration camps built under government contract by Halliburton. But maybe I am biased, as I have personally experienced the insane wrath of these people. Compared to Mr. Feeley, however, I am fortunate — no thugs showed up uninvited in my kitchen. Instead, they repeatedly emailed and blogged death threats and made harassing telephone calls to my place of employment. Unlike Alex Jones, I was not physically attacked, or did a thug block in my car and demand I forget about the First Amendment. I am fortunate to have only experienced minor harassment. If you can tell which way the wind is blowing, though, you will realize time is short. It is eleven fifty eight and twenty seconds. It is no mistake that candidate Obama calls for a “National Security Force” as large and well-funded as the U.S. military, and candidate McCain calls for troops to lock down cities and conduct raids to “fight crime.” REX-84 was no mistake and the long-standing plans for FEMA detention camps are not happenstance. Operation Cable Splicer and Garden Plot are not the idle meanderings of pencil-necked geeks at the Pentagon. Former Gen. Tommy Franks was serious when he said the Constitution will be jettisoned after the next false flag terror attack. Exercise Vigilant Shield and dozens of other “exercises” conducted by U.S. Northcom, the DHS, and local, state and other federal “responders” has less to do with natural disasters than gearing up for martial law. It’s no mistake the local cops, the National Guard, and Blackwater — under the aegis of FEMA — confiscated firearms in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Likewise, it was no mistake local cops, the Kansas Highway Patrol, ATF, FEMA, and the National Guard confiscated firearms in the aftermath of a tornado in Greensburg, Kansas. Both were incubator studies in tyranny. No, the Nazi SA comparison does not work — not in America, circa 2008. Tom Feeley and Alex Jones were not kidnapped in the dead of night and found the next morning executed in typical death squad fashion. But after martial law is declared — after the next attack, an attack repeatedly promised by no shortage of government officials and experts — the machinery is firmly in place to turn America into a fascist dictatorship that will make the Nazi corollary pale by way of comparison with its scientific precision. In the meantime, keep your eye on the clock. 9/11 Chronicles Part One: Truth Rising Get the DVD and make copies or watch the high quality streaming and download version online at Prison Planet.tv. Click here to read more about the film and view sample trailers.

Nothing going on here but a bunch of paranoid old CT fools going off on nothing in a childish attempt at...well lets just say its childish. Don't let the the screen door slap you in the azz on your way out to greener pastures. (Craig Lamson) But Craig, That's exactly what your little gang desires. That the CTs all leave. Sorry- Mission Accomplished-not!

Jan, Please check your PMs again. I have a copy of the PM sent to you, so it can be confirmed that it was at least sent. Edited to add: it was sent at 9.54PM my time, 32 mins before this post. It was also sent to Antti at the same time, so he can confirm if it was received by him or not. A couple of months ago, Evan Burton deleted (he preferred to refer to it as made invisible) an exchange between Len Colby and me. There were no Forum rules broken on my part. I received no PM. When I asked why the exchange was deleted, all I got from Evan was a nondescript and patronizing sentence about bickering. Since then, I've made several references to his biases. His lack of consistency in his moderating efforts have been apparent to me for a long time. [/color] Mike You are not alone in noting that for some ODD reason those who appear to be here merely to debunk all conspiracy truth have their rights overly protected, imho. Downright coddled. Colby has called me names and it's been left up. The worst I said of his group is call them "attack dogs". Of course he responded with an innane comment about me not understanding "irony". I have not ever attacked onyone on this forum. A few days back I sugested just ignoring their comments and posting as if the offending comments are not even there. About two years ago we had a character who went by the name of "Lynn Foster". I found that the best way to deal with her outrageous comments was to utilize the "ignore" feature on the forum. It worked wonders. She eventually disappeared. Members may remember she was fond of posting links that when opened messed up your computer. Aside from that and her nonstop detestation for Jim Garrison she had virtually nothing to say. Justa a suggestion... Dawn

Again???? Evan, John this is so unfaiar. CD does serious rersearch. Len merely attacks. Check out his bio folks,: "GG Allin" concerts, then google GG Allin. A most fitting and admirable way to earn a living. Dawn

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: Having only just discovered it, I see you've been a frequent visitor to my Profile Page. Have you been spending all your time neg-repping me just so you could post the above? Puerile puerile puerile..... Seeing as how Len is so into visiting bios, I urge forum member to look carefully at his: one of the activities he claims he did was book shows and videos for one GG Allin. Check out this act. There is a utube online but I am not sure I can post it here, it may violate rules. GG Allin is on an old Jerry Springer show and bragging about in his rock shows he gets a woman out of the audience and RAPES her. Also assaults people. Now we've all gotta make a living but, geez. I sure would not list this on my bio. But it does provide insights. Dawn

:lol: :lol: :lol: Having only just discovered it, I see you've been a frequent visitor to my Profile Page. Have you been spending all your time neg-repping me just so you could post the above? Puerile puerile puerile..... Why are these attack dogs permitted to just insult our best members? Don't the mods ever wonder why these characters are really here? Disgusted. Dawn

Thanks for that one John, JWD has a very powerful message that just might get through. BK This is one of the most profoundly spiritual talks I have ever seen. And so relevent to today. Thanks John for posting this. (And of course Douglas' book is a must!) Dawn

The first I heard about this last year is when Chauncey Holt's daughter Karen emailed me and told me "Hey did you know Wim Dankbaar is in jail?" I said it didn't surprise me. She said he was caught stealing information off journalists Peter DeVries computer. Among other things, she also told me how Dankbaar harrassed her and her husband in California. Pamela Ray I'm confused. Sounds like you are miffed at Wim. Since he is/was File's biggest advocate, does this mean there is something amiss now? Dawn

How could the world's great democracy elect George W Bush twice? Because the system is corrupt. It doesn't work anymore. America will have another revolution, imo. [/color] Mark: Americqans are way too dummed down to ever pull off another revolution. As to the election of W? Stolen, both times. The evidence for '04 was overwhelming. And Kerry -(Sull and Bones)- said not a word. Recall what happened to a person who dared to ask Kerry if there was a Skull and Bones deal: he got hit with a taser. I saw Kerry speak a few years ago here in Austin. I had him sign a book just so I could mention the election. All I said was "you won the election you know". The look of startle that came over his face was amazing. "That's what I hear" was his response. I came close to asking him the Skull and Bones question myself. Wonder what would have happened if I had. Dawn

One might wonder "why is this news?" An article about a book in progress. They must be getting desperate. For Holland this is just one more career move. Did the Post cover John Kelin's book or Jim Douglas' ? No, those were important books, to be ignored. Dawn

It appears that more and more "untruthers" are piling on here. Peter, thanks for that excellent article. Very impressive group of people, hard to dismiss these folks as "conspiracy waccos", but the supporters of the official conspiracy theory will just ignore them. Dawn

Suggestion: Ignore Colby/Lamson. Just carry on as if they are not even here. To get into it with them just brings the fourm down to the level of __________________ (you decide). Dawn

I am on record as saying that many good people have left this forum due to the admins always taking the side of the Colby crew. This is most unfortunate. I do not know what CD wrote but I was in agreement with what Jack was posting. When I saw that CD had posted I was really glad, alas....he is silenced again. The forum is the loser imho. Dawn

Thank you so much B.! And yes, thanks to Gil for putting this togehter. Let's all fight those who would have it removed by disseminating this information widly. Dawn

David Guyatt and I have both worked - separately - with Harlan Girard for more than a decade. We mentioned his case in this recent thread. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=12949 There is additional information about the potential state of electronic mind control technology in the overview piece linked below. I was working with another claimed victim, Blanche Chavoustie, when she was presenting her (and other's) evidence to Admiral Boorda, who very soon after decided to commit suicide. Many of us doubt the official story. http://www.tetrahedron.org/articles/health...rime.html#N_31_ I have shared this information with other members whom I regard as genuine researchers. I now share the tip of the iceberg with the Education Forum. I do so in the hope that any discussion will be constructive. Jan: Thank you for posting this deeply disturbing article. If this is merely "the tip of the iceberg" one shudders to think just what else our evil government is capable of. No wonder the net is not "controlled" , if too many people become overly aware that can be easily taken care of. Dawn

Agreed. But wonder if any of the men who worked on refurbishing it are still alive to bear witness to what they saw and had to 'repair'?! I'd almost be willing to bet they had to take secrecy oaths or have been just plain threatened to keep their mouths shut....but one never knows...after all this time.... for more info concerning the Limo see: Murder in Dealey Plaza, Part II, The Kennedy Limousine pgs. 120-159, by Douglas Weldon, J.S. ************** Doug Weldon : TMWKK The Final Chapter, ep.1.The Smoking Gun, seg 2 Limo information begins with Dr.2 minutes ..Dr.Galanges......54 seconds into the video.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAW-bxxZfcM The Limo Windshield, Bullet from Front Limo to Detroit, Part I TMWKK, The Final Chapter, ep.1 The Smoking Gun, seg.3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmMXfBgjsh0...feature=related JFK Assassination, Presidential limo SS-100-X, part 5 B....... Thanks Bernice for posting TMWKK segments. I recall that someone posted all these utube showings of the three censored hours. Could someone please repost them. I am recently in contact with the son of an old friend who is very interested in all things conspiracy and I would like to email them to him. Many thanks, Dawn

I do not have this book and would not read anything by the intellectualy dishonest Dale Meyers but have a question: In this book does Meyers ever admit to believing, in the 80's, that LHO was framed? Merci, Dawn

Yea, thank's for Jim's review, Ron, and I concur with most of what Jimmy D says. But, I don't think Michael Paine and Volkmar Schmidt ever lived together. At the time Oswald met Michael Paine, they were attending a party at the home of Everett Glover, who lived with two other Magnolia Oil Company employees, Richard Pierce and possibly Volkmar Schmidet. There is also a reference, I think wrong, that Norman Fredrickson, whose father worked for Radio Free Europe, lived there, but he was married at the time, and attended the party. Also in attendance were the DeMohrenschildts, who brought the Oswalds, the Paines, and Betty McDonald, not the stripper, but another employee of Magnolia Labs. Paine and Schmidt however, did not live together, as far as I can tell from the record, so its not such a coincidence after all. BK The quote below is from Jim DiEugenio, who asked me to post this response: "The information about Schmidt living with Michael Paine is listed in Evica's book on page 237. Evica sources it to authors Edward Epstein and Priscilla Johnson. If there is a question it should be checked against those books."

[quote name='William Kelly' date='Jun 16 2008, 07:54 AM' post='147780'] The Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law and Duquesne University School of Law present Making Sense of the Sixties A National Symposium on the Assassinations and Political Legacies of Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Oct. 3-5, 2008 Power Center Ballroom Duquesne University Pittsburgh, PA Forty years after the brutal and untimely deaths of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, and 45 years after the relatively better known assassination of President John F. Kennedy, questions still abound about the circumstances of their murders. Furthermore, amidst the current climate of political cynicism and apathy, historians and voters alike ponder what these men might have become, and what their political legacies are even today, on the cusp of another historic presidential election. From matters of ballistics and trajectories to questions of conspiracy and cover-up, these three cases present fascinating and important topics for students of all ages. Following up on their historic 2003 conference on the JFK assassination, The Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law and Duquesne University School of Law are convening many of the top experts on these men and their murders for three days of presentations and panel discussions. Among the confirmed speakers to date are: Michael M. Baden, M.D. Chairman, Forensic Pathology Panel, U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) James DiEugenio Author, Destiny Betrayed; co-author, The Assassinations Isaac Ferris, Jr. CEO, The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change Robert J. Joling, J.D. Attorney and co-author, An Open & Shut Case Robert Blair Kaiser Author, R.F.K. Must Die! Chasing the Mystery of the Robert Kennedy Assassination Dan E. Moldea Author, The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy Lisa Pease Chief Archivist, Real History Archives; co-editor, Probe Magazine; co-author, The Assassinations William Pepper Sirhan Sirhan attorney, former James Earl Ray attorney, and author, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King David Talbot Author, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years Robert K. Tanenbaum Author, attorney and Deputy Chief Counsel, HSCA For more information, or to join our mailing list, please visit us at www.forensics.duq.edu Od choices:Michael Baden and Dan Moldea. To present the other, anti- CT side? Dawn

What is worse - a man who abandons his political friend, or the man who abandons his wife. When McCain got back from Vietnam he discovered that his wife at the time, Carol, a former beauty queen, had been disabled in a car accident. He abandoned her for Cindy Hensley, an heiress whose wealth is estimated at $100m in 1979. Hensley has helped to bankroll her husband's political career. And this is a distortion of what occurred in 1972. Yes McGovern did say he was behind Eagleton 1,000%. Then the entire press corps began demanding that Eagleton be dropped. It did not let up. No one in the press supported Eagleton remaining on the ticket. Then McGovern caved. And it is rather strange that every ugly rumor about Michelle Obama is all over Fox news but McSame is gettin a pass regarding Carol and their children. Dawn

There was no better loved journalist than Russert. Much of TV lat night was devoted to him. I just cannot imagine the debates and electin coverage without him. He will be greatly missed. Dawn

Gaeton Fonzi's Review of JFK and The Unspeakable: JFK and the Unspeakable Posted on Apr 29, 2008 10:23am CST. Print Friendly Version On the Road to Peace by John Dear S.J. Tuesday, April 29, 2008 Vol. 2, No. 34 This week, Orbis Books publishes one of its most significant books in years, a labor of some 15 years work by Jim Douglass. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters tells the painful, hopeful story of John F. Kennedy's efforts to save us from nuclear war, his decision to pull out troops from Vietnam, and his call for nuclear disarmament, a vision that animated shadowy forces in the U.S. government to do away with him and his vision. We need your help. John Dear's column, On the Road to Peace, is made available to you -- at no charge -- by the National Catholic Reporter. We ask that you consider supporting NCR in this endeavor. Donate Online Print a Form Contributions are tax-deductible. We appreciate your help. I consider Jim one of the world's leading theologians of Christian nonviolence. His brilliance is reflected in his powerful books, The Nonviolent Cross, Lightning East to West, Resistance and Contemplation and The Nonviolent Coming of God (all recently republished by Wipf and Stock). JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass Orbis Books, 544 pages, $30 JFK and the Unspeakable is the first of three volumes (the other two, on the assassinations of Malcolm X and Dr. King, and then Robert F. Kennedy.) It reads like a Robert Ludlum political thriller, only the stakes are much higher, all too real, and all too current. It is the ultimate American story, for it sheds light not only on our history, but on the predicament we face today. It traces the life of John F. Kennedy into the presidency, through the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile crisis, right through the weeks before his death. With every turned page, we observe him transform from a conventional Cold Warrior to someone determined to pull the world back from the edge of a nuclear apocalypse. His change is evident in his secret back-channel dialogue with Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschchev and his historic American University peace speech a few months before he was killed. He said: "I have ... chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived. And that is the most important topic on earth: peace ... not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time. I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war ... " A Quaker friend, David Hartsough, told me some years ago that when he was 22, in 1962, he spent time with Kennedy in the White House. He was vigiling for total nuclear disarmament with more than a thousand Friends outside the White House and the State Department. Turns out, JFK welcomed in David and five others to discuss the issue. They gave the president a statement urging a change in direction "from headlong preparation for nuclear war" to "general and complete disarmament." The group was surprised by how open and friendly JFK was, and surprised in particular by how seriously he listened. But then, as Jim Douglass records, JFK offered a sober word to them: "The military-industrial complex is very strong. If you folks are serious about trying to get our government to take these kinds of steps, you've got to get much more organized, to put pressure on the government to move in this direction." Such a trend in JFK's thinking, later made evident in his speech, alarmed members of his own U.S. military-intelligence establishment, and finally they regarded him as a dangerous traitor who had to be eliminated. Douglass tells the story as no mere reporter. He keeps an eye on the mystical veins of history, relying at times on the prophetic voice of his friend Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, a reliable and prophetic commentator on world events in his day. It was Merton who first wrote about the "unspeakable" in his classic collection of essays, Raids on the Unspeakable (a favorite of mine). "I have little confidence in Kennedy," Merton wrote a friend in January 1962 "What is needed is not shrewdness or craft, but what the politicians don't have: depth, humanity, and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals, but for humanity as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe Kennedy will break through into that some day by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination." What the visionary Merton foretold, the chronicler Douglass charts in detail. JFK, along with Khrushchev and Pope John XXIII, had brought the world back a step from nuclear war. Kennedy planned to remove all U.S. troops from Vietnam. His heart was coming into its own. He embraced global peace; he broke through toward compassion for all of humanity under nuclear siege. And among obstinate powers, his compassion marked him as a candidate for the anonymous bullet. The implications are staggering. Who can face them? The truth shatters the American myths that lull us asleep, and our hearts lurch in fear. But at some level we know the truth already; American myths have recently grown patently threadbare. One thinks of the Bush administration's disregard of the economy, the children of Iraq, the world's poor, the planet itself -- all in the name of some interest most Americans cannot name or relate to. American myths no longer add up. The mind protests, nevertheless. Could they go so far as to assassinate a president? Certainly national institutions aren't as insane as all that? The thought sets us reeling. But take a moment to ponder and the dissonance eases. If officials can institute policies that kill three million people in Southeast Asia, a million and a half in Iraq, half a million people in Central America and Colombia, if they shrug at global warming, if they institute a vast, secretive industry for building a nuclear arsenal, controlling outer space, stealing the world's natural resources -- surely they can dispatch a prominent leader who tries to reverse direction, and dispatch him without compunction. I've pestered Jim for years about the nonviolence of Jesus and Gandhi. And I've found him all too happy to talk. Gandhi, he said, was not only committed to nonviolence, he was committed to truth. He insisted that his people seek it; he insisted they pursue it, experiment in truth by organizing campaigns of nonviolent love. For Jim, writing the book, he said, was his own Gandhian experiment in truth. It was his effort to face the truth of our country, our government, and our predicament today. The truth, Jim says, is humanity's only hope. Only truth can wake us to reality and inspire our work for transformation. Jim, though, weaves no hovering dream. While his sober eye searches out the moral and spiritual dimensions, he's an assiduous journalist as well. Here is a story told with immense skill. He lays out the fine details (his endnotes run a hundred pages). He chronicles the details of Lee Harvey Oswald, how CIA and Mafia operatives framed him, how the assassination was set for Chicago, how the plan was foiled, how they had a contingency, and how the deed was done in Dallas. He chronicles the spate of witnesses that died or disappeared during the few years following -- details to make us recoil and blanch. In our hands lies an account of spirituality wed to the gritty details of history. JFK himself began to see the two as one. He began to hold a view of history in loftier terms than mere national security. And some resolved to put it to an end. They had more in mind than to eliminate one man. They conspired to eliminate a vision. And to this extent they succeeded. Since his death, the NSA-Pentagon military complex, the secret government within the government, has wreaked unprecedented havoc on our nation and the world, reaching unprecedented heights of violence with the imperial Bush-Cheney administration. Dare we admit we suffered a kind of coup-d'etat? That we've transmogrified toward NSA dictatorship? That we have on our hands a species of national security state? That our lust for war and money and domination has risen to unprecedented heights? Our knees tremble to think on it. But Jim's book persuades us. And ultimately it frees us because it wakes us up to the mordant reality of our warmaking government. The book shakes us awake to truth. It may be helpful to read it as we watch Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama battle for the Democratic nomination, as we hear John McCain talk of "a 100 years of war." There we can here the old assumptions staking our future on a perpetual war-economy. The nation still plunges headlong toward the Unspeakable. The Unspeakable. Merton was trying to name that ineffable systemic evil that dominates us and beggars our powers to define them. St. Paul tried his hand at it; he gave it a sweeping name, "the principalities and the powers" Other names have emerged over two millennia: Eisenhower's "the military-industrial complex," Walter Wink's "the domination system," "Babylon," according to John of Patmos, or in Dorothy Day's idiom, "the filthy rotten system." However we name it, Jim urges us to face it and expose it. We expose it by proclaiming the truth about it. To be sure, we'll bring upon ourselves its malign gaze. But at the same time we'll find ourselves liberated and healed. We'll find ourselves able to turn from our love of death toward new life and a sharp vision of equality for all humanity. It was a bad time in the American 1960s. But Jim's account breaks barriers of time and space. The story is timeless, universal. I believe it points us back to another moment when myth and history converged. A time when the world gasped at the possibility of redemption, even of resurrection. Jim's story points us back to the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth -- he who exposed the system of his day and by example showed succeeding generations how. "I speak of peace because of the new face of war," JFK said at American University on June 10, 1963. (The entire speech is included at the end of the book.) Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces. It makes not sense in an age where a single nuclear weapons contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. What kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables people and nations to grow, to hope, and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time. Gaeton Fonzi, staff investigator for the U.S. House Select committee on Assassinations, calls Jim's book "by far the most important book yet written on the subject." Many other experts agree that Jim's work is an "exceptional achievement," the best yet. Read it, and get a big dose of truth. Archives