Douglas Caddy

William Kelly wrote on Facebook today: "Subject to further information" - the still withheld secret JFK Assassination Records will be released to the public tomorrow, Thursday, October 26, 2017, 25 years after George H. W. Bush singed the JFK Act of 1992 that was unanimously passed by Congress. When was the last time Congress did anything unanimously?

Will the JFK files tell us more about Lee Oswald’s call to Raleigh? http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article180610706.html#storylink=cpy

JFK assassination documents could tell us a lot about Miami http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article180717251.html

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2017/10/22/jfk-documents-release-fbi-cia/

J. Edgar Hoover murdered JFK http://www.nationalenquirer.com/photos/j-edgar-hoover-fbi-jfk-murder/ [Posted here for informational purposes only] Edgar Hoover Murdered JFKr Hoover Murdered Edgar Hoover Murdered JFKr Hoover Murdered

Joseph McBride wrote on Facebook today: Now we learn from David Lifton that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was the one who gave the order to alter the Zapruder film, which was done by the CIA during the weekend of the JFK assassination in their classified photo laboratory at the Kodak main industrial facility in Rochester, New York. The alteration was done to try to conceal the nature of Kennedy's head wounds, the direction of shots and the involvement of more than one shooter, and the criminally lax behavior... of the Secret Service. McNamara, one of the few cabinet members who remained in DC at that time, gave conflicting accounts of where he was and what he was doing at the time of the shooting and in the immediate aftermath. And there is this from Jim Bishop’s 1968 book THE DAY THE PRESIDENT WAS SHOT: Officials at the Pentagon were calling the White House switchboard at the Dallas-Sheraton Hotel [in the immediate aftermath of the assassination] asking who was now in command. An officer grabbed the phone and assured the Pentagon that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff "are now the President."

CIA’s former senior officer for Congressional affairs was convicted of lying to Congress Clair George’s eight month tenure effectively killed the Agency’s communications to Congress Written by Emma Best https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/jul/05/cia-clair-george/?utm_content=bufferac97e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Mort Sahl on JFK https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBINnEpNu5u7tdX0bXFBCzKFSL_ehDaWQ

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-says-hell-allow-kennedy-assassination-files-to-be-released/ar-AAtNJa8?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=UE07DHP

No, I do not know enough about its details to have formed an opinion.

I am pleased to report that Facebook today restored my ability to post on my home page. I attribute the restoration, which I trust is not just temporary, to my posting here yesterday in the forum of FB"s decision to deny my posting of this particular thread. Google and Bing regularly read what has been posted in the Education Forum and as a result my protest here yesterday likely quickly caught FB's attention. This leads me to wonder if we as forum members fully appreciate the exterior power of the forum that stems from what is posted in it..

About James Angleton and the author of the Monster Plot Report https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/oct/20/angleton-monster-plot/

I attempted today to post this topic and the link to it on Facebook but Facebook refused to allow me to do so. My attempt was at 7:-04 pm (central time) on Thursday, Oct. 19, 2017. I am officially recording what happened on Facebook here in the forum because the information in this topic that I have provided Special Counsel Mueller may appear subsequently in the criminal indictments that the Special Counsel will hand down in the not too distant future. As you may be aware Facebook is being investigated by the proper authorities for permitting Russia to post on Facebook fake ads and fake news that attacked Hillary and favored Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. For months Facebook denied it allowed this to happen. But recently it was forced to admit publicly that it did allow Russia to place ads on Facebook and was paid in Russian rubles to do so. This aspect may be a factor in Facebook refusing today to allow me to post my link to this topic. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/us/politics/facebook-google-russia-meddling-disclosure.html

In the near future new registration rates for attending the mock trial and/or Baldwin dinner may be posted. As soon as these are formally posted I shall inform the forum.

The mystery of disgraced CIA spymaster James Angleton’s “retirement” After being publicly ousted as counterintelligence chief, Agency wasted little time in signing a contract with Angleton at his old salary Written by Emma Best https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/oct/19/angleton-return/

http://history-world.org/vietnam_war_statistics.htm

http://www.bizneworleans.com/October-2017/NOLA-Lee-Calls-On-The-Feds-To-Expose-Americas-Most-Controversial-Secret-On-JFKs-Assassination/

Jefferson Morley wrote on Facebook today: I will soon go on my first book tour. It promises to be fun, if grueling. I will visit six cities in 21 days to talk about, sell, and sign THE GHOST, my compulsively readable story of James Angleton, one of the most brilliant and damaged spymasters to ever walk the corridors of the CIA. Angleton died 30 years ago but his story is more relevant than ever. If you want to know what people mean when talk about "the Deep State" (is it real? is it just a conspiracy theory?), you need to know Angleton's story. If I'm in your city, come on by, I tell you why, and I'll sign your book. Check out my Amazon page for dates and times.

Judge Tunheim: “It’s time to release everything.” http://kfgo.com/news/articles/2017/oct/12/judge-who-chaired-jfk-records-review-board-says-its-time-to-release-everything/

From the October 2017 issue of Harper's Magazine https://harpers.org/archive/2017/10/crime-and-punishment-4/

https://www.voicesfromtheshadows.com/

David Talbot wrote on Facebook today: Thanks to Steve Wasserman and Judy Gumbo for this article by Christopher Koch, the first American reporter to visit North Vietnam during the war. The best article I've read on the PBS "Vietnam" series. The author nails it -- Burns & Novick demean the antiwar movement, thereby removing any moral center from the series, and they establish false equivalencies between the U.S. invaders and the Vietnamese who resisted them. No, the American and Vietnamese were NOT equally culpable. This kind of fuzzy narrative-- in which the United States is once again let off the hook and portrayed as a country whose good intentions simply took a tragic turn -- dooms us to keep repeating our horrific history. Steve Wasserman October 7 at 8:12am · Albany · My thanks to my longtime friend and comrade, Judy Gumbo, an original member of the Yippies, for alerting me to the following critique of the Burns-Novick Vietnam War series. Written by Christopher Koch who in 1965 became the first American reporter to visit North Vietnam, it is the most cogently argued and compelling of any of the criticisms made so far. The Tragic Failure of Ken Burns' Vietnam by Christopher Koch There is so much to love about this series. The uncompromising scenes of combat, the voices of both Americans and Vietnamese, the historical context, the exposure of the utter incompetence of our military leaders, the terrific music that is frequently exactly where it should be, the slowly revealed powerful still images and Peter Coyotes’ wonderful narrative voice. Its tragic failure is its inability to hold anyone responsible for their actions. Burns and Novick tell us that the war was begun “in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and …” whatever the current threat. That’s probably true of most wars. However, as we used to teach our children, you have to be accountable for your actions. If you kill someone speeding the wrong way down a one way street you’ll get charged with manslaughter even if you’re rushing someone to the hospital. It’s the lack of accountability, the failure to prosecute those who lied to get us into the war, who encouraged battlefield tactics that resulted in the massacre of women and children, who authorized the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets, who drenched Vietnam in chemical poisons that will cause birth defects and death for generation. In order to maintain this central lie, Burns and Novick must establish a false balance between good and evil on both sides. Every time the United States is shown doing something bad, Burns and Novick show us how the Vietnamese also did bad things. In one absurd example, Coyote intones something like, “we called them ‘Dinks,’ ‘Gooks,’ ‘Mamasans;’ they called us ‘invaders’ and ‘imperialists.’” The GI terms are dehumanizing, but the Vietnamese terms are accurate. People who cross 3,000 miles of ocean to attack a country that has done them no harm, are accurately called ‘invaders.’ I suppose you could argue about the ‘imperialist’ charge. Vietnamese soldiers killed some 58,000 Americans and wounded a couple of hundred thousand more. Buns and Novick put the number of Vietnamese we killed at 3 million, but most experts say it was more like 4 million and Vietnam says it’s 6 million, with more people continuing to die from unexploded ordinance and Agent Orange. We destroyed 60% of their villages, sprayed 21 million gallons of lethal poisons, imposed free fire zones (a euphemism for genocide) on 75% of South Vietnam. They attacked US military bases in their country and never killed an American on American soil. There are no equivalences here. Burns and Novick do a good job of explaining that the United States worked with Ho Chi Minh during World War II and that Ho hoped to get our support after the war. They do not mention that having friendly relations with Communist countries was a successful strategy we used with Yugoslavia, because although it was Communist, Yugoslavia was also independent and a thorn in the Soviet Union’s side. Any minimal understanding of Vietnam’s history would have identified Vietnam’s fiercely independent streak. Intelligent leaders (anyone with half a brain) would have adopted the Yugoslav strategy in Vietnam. This brings us to another central problem of the Burns and Novick series, Leslie Gelb’s smiling recollection (he looks so smug) that nobody knew anything about Vietnam and didn’t for several years. In fact, throughout the series, many people say “we should have known better.” Is ignorance really a good excuse for launching a brutal war and the war crimes that followed? Unmentioned is how easy it was to gather information on Vietnam. French historians and journalists had studied every aspect of the country and its culture during and after their defeat in the French Indo China war. Much of this material had been translated into English. That’s how I figured out in 1965 that we were going to lose the war in Vietnam. Burns and Novick fail to mention my trip to North Vietnam in 1965 nor any of the other trips to North Vietnam by members of the American peace movement such as Tom Hayden, Staughton Lynd and Herbert Aptheker who went in January 1966 and members of Women’s Strike for Peace who went later. They only show us Jane Fonda’s trip in 1972, when she broadcast to US troops asking them to stop the bombing and was photographed sitting in an anti-aircraft gun. No one else who went to North Vietnam did either of these things. Our earlier trips to North Vietnam were important, because we were the only Americans to witness the destruction being rained down on North Vietnam. Burns’ documentary shows lots of aerial shots of bombs and napalm going off (Mussolini’s son called them rosebuds blooming in the desert when he attacked Ethiopia) but very few shots of the bomb’s effects on the ground in North Vietnam. We hear talk of precision bombing, but those of us who traveled to North Vietnam observed hospitals, schools, churches, markets, and working class neighborhoods utterly destroyed. And this was ten years before the war ended! The Burns’ documentary doesn’t show us the makeshift hospitals with children and old people without arms and legs or suffering from horrendous burns, all victims of American bombing attacks. The documentary focuses our compassion on the American pilots who dropped the bombs. In fact, the only heroes in Ken Burns’ Vietnam are American GI’s. Almost everyone else is their enemy: the Vietnamese they fought, the officers whose absurd strategy sent them to their deaths, and the American peace movement that struggled to end the war and bring them home. Burns and Novick portray the peace movement in the worst possible terms. In at least three places, they have moving sound bites about how returning soldiers were spit on or in other ways disrespected. It’s a false memory, at least in any general sense. They couldn’t find any visual support, no signs about baby killers, because it didn’t happen, or happened extremely rarely. To me, this is the central flaw of Burns and Novick’s film, their failure to deal truthfully and equally with the peace movement. Six million Americans took part in the anti-war effort (only 2.7 million Americans served as soldiers). Everyone I knew in the peace movement honored the veterans and wanted justice for them. They studied books, took part in teach-ins, and watched newsreels. But Burns and Novick, with a couple of notable exceptions, characterize the peace movement as uninformed, chaotic, disrespectful, self absorbed and violent. At one point, they intercut 1969 pictures of kids at Woodstock wallowing in great music with soldiers fighting in Vietnam. What was that supposed to mean? The kids who refused to go (many out of righteous opposition), who fled into exile in Canada or Sweden, or who, like boxer Muhammad Ali lost his right to fight for three years, or the Fort Hood 3 who went to prison, or the professors and journalists who lost their jobs, the protestors beaten by riled up construction workers, Martin Luther King who went public with his opposition in 1967, the priests who raided draft offices and burned their records, Alice Hertz and two other Americans who burned themselves to death in honor of the Buddhist monks who did the same in South Vietnam protesting our puppet regime — these are not worth profiling, all tinged by the same brush, they are the bad guys who disrespected our troops and went violent. What a wonderful authoritarian message that gives to viewers. Don’t protest an evil war or your country’s war crimes. The only heroes in Burns and Novick’s Vietnam are American servicemen and I am thrilled to see them finally recognized for what they went through. We have moving back stories of their homes, their motives for joining, their families waiting for them. None of the six million participants in the American peace movement gets similar treatment. The same is true, incidentally, of the Vietnamese. While the sound bites are great, there are no Vietnamese back stories either. Without the peace movement, there is no moral center to this series. The lack of accountability is fatal. That an American general can watch from a helicopter the massacre at Mai Lai (as the films tells us) and suffer no consequences is sickening. If military courts had aggressively prosecuted violators of human rights, or even if we only had held detailed and accurate reconciliations where the truth came out, there would have been a chance that our reckless invasions of Iraq with its policy of torture and the invasion of Afghanistan would not have followed so easily. When people are held accountable for their actions, perpetrators of questionable violent acts think twice. Last week on NPR an American general in Afghanistan announced that we are not trying to occupy territory in Afghanistan, we are simply trying to kill terrorists. Here, again, is the same rationale of the body count that led to disaster in Vietnam. We are reliving the Vietnam War because no one was ever really held responsible for its horrors. The moral center of the Vietnam War was held by those who opposed it. Several people I’ve talked to say the series is depressing. I had the same feeling of despair at the end. Burns and Novick suggest Vietnam’s a tragedy. It’s not. In tragedy a powerful human makes a terrible mistake and suffers the consequences. No one suffered any consequences for Vietnam. Burns and Novick assure us that even if people did wrong, they didn’t mean to. America is still the shining city on the hill and we can do no wrong.

In 1967, the CIA Created the Label "Conspiracy Theorists" ... to Attack Anyone Who Challenges the "Official" Narrative http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-23/1967-he-cia-created-phrase-conspiracy-theorists-and-ways-attack-anyone-who-challenge

The announcement was a disappointment to say the least. Here is one viewpoint on it: http://www.theangryufologist.us/tom-delonges-ufo-announcement-wasnt/

You can view the formal announcement tomorrow. From the article: On Wednesday October 11, at 9:00 AM PT and 12:00 PM EST, the team will launch the new initiative at an event to be live-streamed from Seattle. Tom will introduce his colleagues and explain the intentions and purpose of the new company, and its need for public support. To tune in, or to watch it aftewards, click here.