Christopher T. George

Hello Stephen I think the account attributed to City policeman Sergeant Stephen White is highly questionable partly because it appeared so many years later, in People's Journal after White's death in 1919. As you say, it is written in "in very florid prose" and while the account is usually taken to apply to the Mitre Square murder of Catherine Eddowes the details do not exactly fit the circumstances of that murder, and we don't know if White was in fact on duty at Mitre Square at the time of the crime. The article giving the White account appeared, as discussed on the Casebook message boards, supposedly written by "a Scotland Yard man." I should think therefore that there is a good possibility that the article was either a journalist's invention or an embroidered version of White's story that could have easily have been about one of the other Whitechapel murders if in fact he was on duty in the East End during the murder series. A number of people, as you know, feel that the suspect described fits the description of William Holt, a doctor at St Georges hospital, an amateur detective, who donned various disguises and went patrolling the East End hoping to capture Jack the Ripper. I believe that Packer's testimony is at least worthy of more scrutiny because it is known that he was tending his fruit stall in Berner Street about the time Elizabeth Stride was murdered. But it also appears that he embroidered on his statements for the newspapers. Thus his testimony is questionable too for that reason. Dave Yost wrote an excellent discussion of Packer's testimony for Ripperologist some years back and it can be found on Casebook at "Matthew Packer - Final Thoughts." All my best Chris

Hi all I am not sure whether Frank Zappa ever referenced the Kennedy assassination in any lyrics, but on the inside cover of the 1968 Mothers of Invention album, "We're Only In It for the Money," -- a parody of the famous cover of the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" released the year before -- the photograph of Oswald groaning as he is shot by Jack Ruby appears at upper right in the collage of photographs. Chris

Chris, Was it just that woman or did others join her? This story in a way is worse I would have expected that Brits were less racist than Americans Len Hi Len It was my mother who experienced the incident. I will ask if she recalls whether others joined in. My mother was taken aback by that reaction to the slaying of MLK and I suspect others at the meeting were as well. On the other hand politics can drive people to extremes. One of my other interests is the War of 1812. An early "hero" of mine was Levi Hollingsworth, a Baltimore manufacturer who owned a copper rolling mill on the Gunpowder river that supplied the copper for the Bulfinch dome of the Capitol prior to the present dome. He was wounded in the arm at the Battle of North Point September 12, 1814, and it was a letter of his about the battle that I found in my early research that made him a figure of interest to me. However, I felt less well about him when I found out that he was one of the witnesses to the vicious anti-Federalist riot in July 1812 that led to the death of one Federalist, a Revolutionary War hero named General James Lingan, and the torture of a number of other Federalists who opposed the war. Hollingsworth made the remark that the all of the Federalists deserved killing. There were some 20-30 of the Federalists in Baltimore in a house on South Charles Stret to put out a Federalist newspaper whose newspaper office was wrecked by the anti-war mob a month earlier. They included Revolutionary War hero General Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, Robert E. Lee's father, who was tortured but survived the abuse of the mob. All my best Chris

Hi Len I heard a similar report about a women's organization meeting in Baltimore in regard to the assassination of Martin Luther King in March 1968. It was actually an ex-pat group of British women and the woman who led the applaud was a British woman married to a retired U.S. armed forces officer who presumably had right wing views and believed the stories that King was a Communist, etc., or else the reaction was just plain racist. Chris

Published on The Progressive (http://progressive.org) America’s Blinders By Howard Zinn April 2006 Issue Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled? The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans—members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen—rushed to declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway around the world to Iraq. A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell’s presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his “evidence”: satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled “Irrefutable” and declared that after Powell’s talk “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.” It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived. One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior. If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don’t know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him. But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials. We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn’t that Mexico “shed American blood upon the American soil,” but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico. We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to “civilize” the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that. President Woodrow Wilson—so often characterized in our history books as an “idealist”—lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers. Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was “a military target.” Everyone lied about Vietnam—Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent. Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States. The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country. And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991—hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken over Iraq’s taking of Kuwait?), rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East. Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the reasons for invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against the sacrifice of lives for oil? A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against being deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States. This thought startles most people, because it goes against everything we have been taught. We have been led to believe that, from the beginning, as our Founding Fathers put it in the Preamble to the Constitution, it was “we the people” who established the new government after the Revolution. When the eminent historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred years ago, that the Constitution represented not the working people, not the slaves, but the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders, he became the object of an indignant editorial in The New York Times. Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn’t talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, “Father of the Constitution,” said, thirty years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not. Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like “national interest,” “national security,” and “national defense” as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war. Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that—not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor—is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power. If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there—the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be “checks and balances”—do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth. Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars. The deeply ingrained belief—no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general—that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to “pledge allegiance” (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with “liberty and justice for all.” And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” announcing that we are “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” There is also the unofficial national anthem “God Bless America,” and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation—just 5 percent of the world’s population—for his or her blessing. If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then you are not likely to question the President when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values—democracy, liberty, and let’s not forget free enterprise—to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world. It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and our fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for other people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation. These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest. We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud. Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in the minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, with an arrogance appropriate to the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, pronounced this “the American century,” saying that victory in the war gave the United States the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.” Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this notion. George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, said that spreading liberty around the world was “the calling of our time.” Years before that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a West Point commencement, declared: “The values you learned here . . . will be able to spread throughout this country and throughout the world and give other people the opportunity to live as you have lived, to fulfill your God-given capacities.” What is the idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on our behavior toward people in other parts of the world. Is it based on how well people in the United States live? The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked countries in terms of overall health performance, and the United States was thirty-seventh on the list, though it spends more per capita for health care than any other nation. One of five children in this, the richest country in the world, is born in poverty. There are more than forty countries that have better records on infant mortality. Cuba does better. And there is a sure sign of sickness in society when we lead the world in the number of people in prison—more than two million. A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world. It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars and killers who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join the rest of the human race in the common cause of peace and justice. Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.”

Thanks for the reference, Ron. I will check it out. Chris

Hopefully such luck will continue on Friday and we might draw the other mediocre premiership team left in the tournament Semi-final draw: Chelsea v Liverpool Charlton Athletic or Middlesbrough v West Ham Games to be played on Saturday 22 April/Sunday 23 April. It was West Ham who got the luck. Does anyone know that if it is a West Ham v Chelsea final, will West Ham be in Europe even if they lose? Then I definitely want to hear Mourinho moaning on the weekend of 22/23 April, "The Best Team Lost. . ." Benitez and Mourinho A study in contrasts: the Portuguese firecracker, the loud bang and fizz in the night, all show, and the steady Spanish Catherine wheel, showering sparks in a streaming rain. So Mourinho bragged and mugged how his Champion team would sweep the series -- before Stevie and boys won the toothsome tie at Stamford Bridge -- then his team would win at Anfield, for sure, the Reds think they've won, but my team will show them. And now? Ungracious in defeat: "The best team lost." Chelsea falls at the hurdle again; the Reds go to Istanbul. Christopher T. George -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- © Christopher T. George 2005 Liverpool 1-0 Chelsea http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/europe/4501277.stm BBC Sports, May 3, 2005 Liverpool appear to have been "lucky"again Ah, Andy, Andy, I suppose we were lucky to knock out Manchester United too? Chelsea's next for the drop. They've already got their trophy in the bag. Now's the time for us at Liverpool to secure ours. Chris

Hi Ron Okay I have it now. I misread what you said at the top of the page and was looking for a cable "in all caps" and maybe a photograph of the original document. Presumably the "Dr. Ward case" referred to is the supposed suicide of osteopath Dr. Stephen Ward, of the Profumo affair, who took a fatal dose of sleeping pills on July 31, 1963, the last day of his trial at the Old Bailey for living on immoral earnings, dying three days later on August 3. Conspiracists say he was murdered and may have been a Russian spy. Thanks Chris

Hi Ron For some reason when I call up the URL that you cite, I don't see the text of the cable. Can you help? I am also wondering if possibly the mystery of the prescient phone call might be explained by someone making a mistake in the time difference between Cambridge, UK, and Texas. Just a thought. We tend to forget that communications were more primitive back then and instant satellite communication etc was just starting to come in (Telstar able to beam the first transatlantic images was launched the prior year, 1962, a sensation at the time). Chris

Hopefully such luck will continue on Friday and we might draw the other mediocre premiership team left in the tournament Yep Liverpool were lucky to score seven times against Brum on Tuesday. I can't wait to hear Morinho moaning once again, "The best team lost!" Chris

Hi John, Francesca, and John I am delighted to hear that the weekend went so well. I hope to make a JFK assassination conference sooner or later, either here in the U.S. or your U.K. counterpart. Following on from John Geraghty's remarks -- that "It was well worth the few quid I spent to attend" -- let me inject a bit of black humor. John, lad, I am glad to know you got a "Bang for your Buck." Aye, and it was so in regard to the U.S. Presidency and Vice-Presidency in 1963, just as it is now. . . Chris

Hi John Interesting information. I have a question for you, out of general interest and I hope I don't come off sounding smart-alecky in asking it. Are you against Blair more for his betrayal of the Socialist principles of the Labour Party (as with your illustration of Ramsay MacDonald) or for his business contacts? Or both? All my best Chris

Hi John A worthwhile article and a significant warning from recently retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor about political trends impacting the independence of the U.S. judiciary and as a consequence the freedoms of all Americans. In some respects, and I don't think I am being hyperbolic here, I think the speech bears comparison with retiring President Dwight Eisenhower's warning about the growing power of the U.S. military-industrial complex when he stepped down as U.S. executive and handed over the reigns of power to John F. Kennedy. There is no doubt that the right wing do threaten many of the freedoms presently enjoyed by Americans. One of the most important and debated of course being the right of women to have control over their own bodies. Republicans have talked about overturning Roe versus Wade which guarantees the right of the woman to choose. In South Dakota, on March 6 South Dakota governor Mike Rounds signed into law an act that essentially prohibits women from seeking abortions in the state], a clear case of South Dakotan legislators challenging the Supreme Court on Roe versus Wade. Thus, South Dakota, already the state with the strictest abortion regulations, has passed a controversial law that prevents doctors from performing an abortion except in cases where the mother's life is in danger. All the best Chris George

FWIW, the people at Mesa Verde lived on top of the Mesa for almost their entire time there. They only moved into the cliff dwellings for the last 100-200 years. Most of the dwellings were fairly inaccessible. They believe people climbed to the top from Spruce House on a large tree. Similarly, Balcony House had a narrow trail from the top, culminating in a very narrow entrance into the house. This entrance was made progressively smaller, to the point that today you have to crawl on your belly for 10 feet or so just to get into the house. The thinking ten years ago was that the various dwellings were in conflict with one another. The thinking today is that there wasn't war between the people as much as there was a concern for theft. As their soil became depleted, food was harder to come by and the ab ility to protect what food they had became more and more important to the various communities. At least that's what Ranger Duff said. As far as the different tribes claiming their heritage... As I remember the Zunis have always insisted they were the descendants, and the Navajo have never claimed they were the descendants. Apparently, the word Anasazi in Navajo means "ancient ones" or "enemies of my ancestors." The Navajo have never claimed the Anasazi were their ancestors, even though several Navajo communities were built on the ruins of the "ancient ones". Hi Pat Many thanks for that additional fascinating information about Mesa Verde. I would think it is natural for local indigenous people to believe their ancestors created the cliff dwellings, which is what you say the Zunis claim though the Navajos do not. It would be interesting to know for sure. I wonder if there is any way DNA could help to determine that, if, for example, DNA could be obtained from any bones at Mesa Verde? Chris

Hi Pat In terms of the changing story in regard to who was responsible for the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, with you hearing two different stories from the National Park Rangers, the older story of ten years ago being that the Anasazi were responsible and the new story that you heard from a ranger in November "that the people who lived there were the fore-runners of today's Zuni tribe (and not Anasazi--a Navajo word)," also the older idea that the cliff dwellers lived there for defensive reasons, and the new story that they created the structures to shelter from the elements, I would suggest that there is not as you put it, "A huge difference" between the stories. The reason I don't think there is that "big difference" between the stories is that we are dealing with the realm of theories and not facts. Either idea might be true. I wasn't aware though that Mesa Verde was built like a defensive fort-like structure. I have long wanted to go there, and hope to still do so, so you may know more than I do about that possibility. I would also suggest though that, knowing the National Park Service as I do, the "new" NPS ranger story (assuming other rangers are giving out the same "revised" story) might show a bending to political correctness and even to the trend in which current tribes have claimed ownership of artifacts, or making a local tribe feel as if it has an interest in these ancient structures. Since the study of pre-Columbian peoples is done without any written history, it largely depends on archeology. A lot of theory on pre-Columbian peoples is dependent on current trends in thinking. I took a course in pre-Columbian history in the MLA program at Hopkins and the instructor made the point that there was for a long time a tendency to view many artifacts as being religious... effigies of the gods, etc. The truth is though that we just don't know the function of everything that is discovered. He made the point that a later civilization coming along after ours might, if they found an effigy of Mickey Mouse, assume that Mickey Mouse was a god that we worshipped. In regard to the possible poisoning of Napoleon, authors Ben Weider and Sten Forshufvud have made a strong case that Napoleon was poisoned by one of the former Emperor's most trusted French aides on St. Helena, Count Charles-Tristan de Montholon. They assert that Montholon was acting under the direction of Louis XVIII's brother, the Count d'Artois (later Charles X), who wanted to make sure that Napoleon would never be able to return to reclaim his throne. At the time of the exiled monarch's death in 1821, the British doctors in attendance claimed that Napoleon died of cancer. It is also clear that it was in the interests of the British to dispose of "Bony" so that he could not effect another escape and return in triumph as he had after his escape from Elba in 1815. It is evident from the toxicology results that strands of Napoleon's hair, given to Betsy Balcombe in 1818, contained an inordinate amount of arsenic. The hairs were tested by the FBI and showed levels of arsenic that were, in the words of the FBI, "consistent with arsenic poisoning." Another theory is that Napoleon got arsenic in his system from arsenic-containing wallpaper in the house where he lived on St. Helena. However, it would seem to me that the measurable arsenic discovered in his hair would have been more than the former emperor could have taken in through his pores from just being around arsenic-containing wallpaper. Chris

Hi John Many thanks for posting this. The ending of the piece is-- "Could it happen today? No, I am afraid not. The political landscape has changed beyond recognition. Cruise missiles are long gone. MI5 has been cleared of dead wood such as Peter Wright and his friends. A Labour government is in power - and on excellent terms with Washington." Is that last paragraph not a bit naive? Say, for whatever, reason the British take a sudden lurch to the Left and the neo-Cons or even more Right wing people are in power in Washington, and they don't feel Britain is friendly to them, maybe too soft on Islamic radicals in Britain or so on. Game on? Chris

There was a short film on New Orleans on BBC news the other night. I was amazed by the state of New Orleans. It seemed there had been no attempt to clear up the mess. They spoke to one woman who was trying to continue to live in this completely destroyed neighbourhood. As she was being interviewed a coach arrived full of holidaymakers who had paid to be taken on a tour of the devastation. The woman clearly became distressed and said that she felt totally humiliated by these constant coach tours. Are people in America seeing film on your news about the state of New Orleans? If so, what are they saying about it? Hi John Yes the dire state of New Orleans is being covered here in the media. The plain fact is that the Bush Administration is not prepared to deal with the problem of Third World America, and the poverty in the South and elsewhere. I can say all this now that Mr. Gratz has left the room. What is really needed is a new War on Poverty to deal with the problems of the poor but the Bush administration has been more intent in giving tax cuts to the rich than in addressing the problems of the poorer classes. All my best Chris

Hi everyone Good posts here. I think many of us have doubted that the U.S. mission to Iraq could succeed in the way Bush and his friends thought it would. Their thinking about Iraq and how it could be set up as a trouble-free democracy was highly simplistic, and it was on the cards that Iraq would break up much in the same way that post-Tito Yugoslavia broke up and fell into civil war, with one faction against another. Bush has said time and again that Iraq's quest for democracy can be likened to the growing pains of the young United States, but the parallels just aren't there, and that type of notion totally ignores the realities of the Middle East and Iraq specifically. As for Bush and Katrina, the new revelations are hardly surprising, given that because Bush and his administration were distracted by Iraq and the so-called war on terror, they were ill prepared to act effectively as Katrina bore down on New Orleans. His promises to rebuild New Orleans have proved as empty as many of his other promises about Iraq, saving Social Security, etc. The man probably won't be impeached, but history will record him as one of the most ineffective and destructive presidents the United States has known given that not only are lives being thrown away in Iraq... American, British and other allied lives, as well as foreign journalists, and untold numbers of innocent Iraqis... but that billions of dollars are being poured away into the desert sand. Those are U.S. taxpayer dollars that could be used to rebuilt New Orleans and for anti-poverty programs, investment in U.S. industry instead of allowing outsourcing, and so on. Best regards Chris George

Hi Graham The best of luck to you with your surgery. I actually had heard this anecdote, from my English uncle who lived in Germany for a number of years. A humorous sidelight on a famous moment in history. Thanks for sharing it. Chris

Hi Marcel and Jim Unless I am missing something, Marcel, I don't see in the picture you posted anyone corresponding to Jim's description of the man with Oswald in New Orleans -- a tall slim Cuban (what's a DCM?) wearing a cap and accepting a Fair Play for Cuba handill from Oswald. As I understand it, this is from a film of Oswald handing out handbills, so could it be another frame that shows the man? Also I would like to be able to compare with the shot of Dealey Plaza that Jim interprets as being the same the dark complected man wearing a cap. Any further help would be most appreciated. I am curious. Chris

Hello Nancy et al. Nancy, are you correct that the accident was reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife, as you say, "right away"? If you look on the "Smoking Gun" website, the copy of the official accident report states that the accident took place at 5:30 pm on February 11 BUT another page of the same report shows that the accident report was filed by the game warden two days later, on February 13. A third page shows that the Kenedy County Sheriff's Office press release, surprisingly appears to be undated. This press release, written somewhat confusedly, tells us a sheriff's officer arrived at the ranch and that people on the gate had no information on the incident "due to a lack of communication" but that "Sheriff Salinas was informed shortly after the incident by Secret Service Agents by phone" (presumably despatching the Kenedy County Officer to the ranch). The sheriff's department, we learn, "is fully satisfied that this was no more than a hunting accident." Perhaps there had to be a wait to speak to Mr. Whittington to get his version of the event, as the press release appears to imply when it says, "Mr. Whittington's interview collaborated Vice President Cheney's statement." Even so, if as the sheriff's office press release states, the sheriff did know of the accident "shortly after the incident" why was the accident report by the game warden signed two days after the accident and not the same day, or the next day (February 12). Anybody else have an idea if that is regular procedure, for such a delay to occur in filing a report on a hunting accident? Does the local police authority have to sign off on the incident and satisfy themselves that it indeed was an accident before the game warden gets involved? Best regards Chris George

Hi again Tim To be crass about it: if a man is judged by the voting public to be incompetent to be Vice President because he has had wires attached to his head, what about a man who shoots another man in the face with birdshot, causing the man to subsequently have a heart attack, and uses, as everyone admits, poor judgement in being slow at reporting the incident? Chris

Hi again Tim You say, "And I still do not understand what you think Cheney did wrong other than mistaking his friend for a quail." Well, that's an amusing statement. But. . . Should Cheney have had a gun in his hands at all? Here is a guy who himself has a well-established history of heart problems. What if he had a heart attack and gun went off in his hands as he collapsed? Was he drunk when this happened? He said he had only had one beer. But had he in fact drunk much more? That should be investigated. He shot somebody who was correctly dressed in orange while looking into the sun? That sounds like negligence to me, at the very least. The 18-hour delay in reporting the incident is highly suspicious. The public has a right to know anything that has a bearing on the health and well-being of its top public officials. The fact that Cheney was remiss in not even informing the President of the incident until some time after it occurred is alarming and wrong. The whole episode raises a boatload of character questions about Richard B. Cheney quite apart from politics. Chris

Hi Tim I agree that Chappaquidick raises serious questions about Ted Kennedy. I do think Kennedy and Bush-Cheney arrogance is akin. I am serious in saying that I don't think that this Cheney incident and its aftermath is too dissimilar to Ted and Chappaquidick and its aftermath in casting doubt on the man. After all, Senator Thomas F. Eagleton (D, Missouri) lost credibility in 1972 as a Vice Presidential candidate with McGovern when he admitted that he had been three times hospitalized for depression and had received electric shock therapy. Chris

Well, Tim, let's try to leave politics to one side for a minute. Let's even leave aside whatever one may think about hunting. Try to be nonpartial. Not easy I know. What say the same circumstances occurred and the shooter was, say, John Kerry or Ted Kennedy. I am a registered Democrat, and I have to say that if either of those two individuals comported themselves in the manner Cheney has, their ability to hold high office would be seriously in question for me. Your opinion? Over to you, Tim. Chris