Douglas Caddy

http://www.lewrockwell.com/podcast/pat-buchanan-remembers-richard-nixon/

James Forrestal and John Kennedy by DC Dave August 7, 2014 http://buelahman.wordpress.com/2014/08/07/james-forrestal-and-john-kennedy/ Note: Ted Rubinstein originally posted this article on Facebook with an advisory "treat with caution."

Iraq Policy: Washington’s Puzzle Palace Keeps Getting Curiouser By David Stockman From David Stockman’s article: “The more interesting mystery is how the ISIS fighters learned how to use Uncle Sam’s advanced weaponry so quickly. Perhaps the CIA knows. It did train several thousand anti-Assad fighters in its secret camps in Jordan in preparation for Washington’s “regime change” campaign in Syria. Undoubtedly, in the fog of war—-especially the sectarian wars in the Islamic heartland that have been raging for 13 centuries—it is difficult to have friend and foe vetted effectively.” http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/iraq-policy-washingtons-puzzle-palace-keeps-getting-curiouser/

Notes on a Scandal ‘Hack Attack,’ About a Rupert Murdoch Paper’s Trials, by Nick Davies By DAVID CARR AUG. 14, 2014 The New York Times Book Rewiew In the United States, most of us fall for the movie version of Britain — horsy, obsessed with propriety and full of hard stares of unfulfilled longing between the genders. And then there is the Britain of Nick Davies’s “Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch.” This version is less Jolly Olde England than a country gone mad, drunk on prerogative, a tiny treehouse of a place where people lie just for practice and trash the law for sport and gain. There is so much excess and human pathology on display here, it makes “Bonfire of the Vanities” seem restrained. The book traces Davies’s three-year campaign to bring to account News Corporation and its British subsidiary News International, along with its owners, the Murdochs, and various enablers in Britain. It is a travelogue of a relentless pursuit, detailing how Davies, an investigative journalist, refused to accept the common wisdom of the political, media and law-enforcement establishment that hacking at the Murdoch-owned News of the World — breaking into the voice mail messages of public and private figures — was an isolated instance of tabloid excess. As it turned out, the practice was exceedingly common and casually deployed to create villains in order to sell papers and, when it was useful, to persecute enemies of the Murdoch empire. The Britain that emerges in “Hack Attack” is a festering petri dish where, as Davies puts it, “everything is for sale. Nobody is exempt.” While Davies is a populist and a partisan who loves catching out the rich and punishing elites, he clearly believes that the common folk of Britain have gotten exactly the government and media they deserve. Not only are they willing to lay down a hard-earned quid for one of the tatty papers Murdoch and much of the rest of Fleet Street sell, but the voice mail and email boxes of those newspapers are always jammed with proffers from waiters, hotel clerks and trainers who are more than eager to spill dirt for a few pounds. If, as Janet Malcolm has said, journalists are always selling someone out, the public in Britain seems happy to serve as their wingmen. In that cultural context, the hacking of phones on an enormous scale by The News of the World, Britain’s most popular newspaper, seems like just one more part of how business gets done in a country where the cruelty of the press is chronic and callous. There’s a long, florid history of tabloid excess in Britain, hardly restricted to the Murdoch-owned papers. This part of the tale began in 2006, when Clive Goodman, the royals editor at The News of the World, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator the newspaper had hired, were arrested and charged with hacking the phones of the British royal family. The pair eventually pleaded guilty and went to prison, and Andy Coulson, the editor of The News of the World at the time, resigned. News Corporation officials insisted it was an isolated incident spawned by a rogue reporter, an assertion that turned Davies into something of a rogue himself because he knew better. On July 8, 2009, Davies published the first of what would be many articles in The Guardian about the extent of hacking at The News of the World, writing that News Corporation had paid out more than £1 million to settle hacking cases that would have led to embarrassing exposures, and pointedly noting that Coulson, by then the Conservative leader David Cameron’s communications director, had served as deputy editor and then editor of The News of the World while much of the hacking had gone on. There were many attempts to knock down and minimize the story, but working in concert with the attorneys of several victims, Davies published a series of reports over the next few years suggesting that hacking was rife and that knowledge of the practice went right to the top of the newspapers and the political establishment. As an old hand in journalism, Davies knew the dimensions of the cesspool and was more than willing to stand in the muck for years to figure out what was at the bottom. He is, as it turns out, just the kind of person you don’t want to have on your tail. It’s less about his strategic brilliance and more about an innate refusal to give up — ever. That which cannot be known is precisely what Davies wants to know, over and over again. He wages a ground war to get at the truth, which comes less in one single “aha” moment than as a slow drip of facts penetrating a tissue of lies. Evidence is destroyed just before he gets his hands on it, the police redact documents so as to denude them of value. Then, just in the nick of time, a confidential source or secret document arrives. In that sense, the book moves right along, from cliffhanger to cliffhanger. Davies is, as these things often go, the lonely hero of his own telling, though Alan Rusbridger, the bespectacled editor of The Guardian, is given credit for backing him when others thought he was a bit off his rocker. But as is frequently the case in books by investigative reporters, everything the editor made him leave out of his coverage for the sake of clarity and narrative momentum now becomes string for the book. And since every misdemeanor is a potential felony to Davies, he chases them all down. However, those exhausting tendencies are really not a deal breaker for the reader, given how good a story Davies uncovered and now is in a position to tell. For a time that story seemed stuck, but then in September 2010, The New York Times Magazine published an article that included on-the-record confirmation, by former News of the World reporters, of widespread hacking. Much of the British press were bystanders to a huge story that took place right in their midst. Davies’s depiction of Fleet Street, and in particular the thuggish deputies who ran The News of the World, is great industry portraiture. It was a hellish place, where editors waved magic wands until reporters made stories come true. The fairness of that reporting was so much beside the point that the question barely arose. British journalism is a ferociously competitive industry where success is measured on the newsstand and in getting consumers to part with their money. As such, it is a place of campaigns, with targets caricatured to the point that much of any given newspaper seems like a comics page. The brutal pressure to win in the British press, to get the story no matter what, has curdled the civic impulse of journalism into something far more bloody and less enlightening. Or as Davies pithily explains it, “In the newsroom without boundaries, there was one thing which was not tolerated: failure.” Hypocrisy is a frequent star of this book. The popular press was going after all manner of public peccadilloes even as journalists spent their own nights drinking, drugging and sleeping with one another. Police officers buried evidence because they were either on the take or had cozy relationships with News International that led to their own columns in the newspapers after they retired. “Hack Attack” is a very British book, to the good, I think. It teaches the reader a whole new lexicon of skulduggery. Politicians who fail to support the editorial line of the Murdoch newspapers are “monstered,” their personal lives taken apart with an amalgam of facts, lies and trumped-up scandal. The toolbox of the sleazy reporter includes “blagging,” “muppeting” and “double whacking.” Without getting bogged down in the tawdry details, all involved various degrees of false identities and impersonation. The cloak-and-dagger activities of the lawyers and journalists pursuing the Murdoch empire make for delicious reading, as when the attorneys routinely pull the batteries out of their phones when they meet to discuss strategy. This unseemly state of affairs might have continued to this day were it not for Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old schoolgirl who had gone missing and was found dead. The voice message case had been motoring along under the radar as various sports and entertainment celebrities sued, and were sometimes paid off, for instances of hacking. But all that changed in July 2011 when it came out in The Guardian that The News of the World had hired investigators to hack Milly Dowler’s voice mail messages. (At the time, Davies got a significant fact wrong, which he acknowledges in the book, by reporting that agents of The News of the World, while hacking, had erased a voice mail message.) Whereas hacking royals and various celebrities may have been a bit of good old-fashioned fun, there was a huge public outcry over the news that a murdered child and a bereaved family were targeted. The uproar engaged heretofore indifferent public officials and compromised police officers sitting on a huge mound of hacking evidence. Other newspapers jumped in, and News International found itself in the middle of a scandal that could no longer be contained. The News of the World was shuttered, a hugely important bid for the satellite broadcaster BSkyB was scuttled and eventually Rupert Murdoch was forced to spin off his beloved newspapers to contain that damage. Coulson ended up paying dearly for encouraging and tolerating hacking with a guilty finding, but his predecessor at The News of the World, Rebekah Brooks, who went on to edit another Murdoch publication, The Sun, and to run his British newspaper operation, was acquitted on all charges. She is, in Davies’s account, the white whale, always just out of reach and eluding the various harpoons he lobs at her. Perhaps it is a quirk of British justice, and great lawyering, that she got away. In the book, she comes off as a particularly ambitious, particularly British version of the professional social climber. She is an extremely cinematic character, menacing various politicians about their extramarital affairs even as she has her own with Coulson. As an editor, Brooks went on various campaigns — Britain must build prison ships! — less as a matter of civic conviction than because the campaigns moved copies at the newsstand. She shared drinks and horses with police officers, and her newspapers’ ability to make and end the careers of prime ministers meant that they frequently courted her, instead of the other way around. Despite the book’s subtitle, the truth never catches up with Murdoch. True enough, he loves newspapering and has been known to become deeply involved in editorial matters, but no real case is made that he knew the specifics of how his papers were coming up with very private facts about public figures. His son James — the pair are frequently depicted at odds — was closer to the action, and was called to account both in Parliament and in the book. But one need only note his subsequent ascent to understand that the dents have been hammered out and he continues to roll along. It is, in the best way, an old story. A lone gunslinger takes on a dishonest town, and in the end the bad guys flee. It is both more complicated and a bit less satisfying in reality, but that would be another book, and probably a less enjoyable one. HACK ATTACK The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch By Nick Davies Illustrated. 430 pp. Faber & Faber. $27. David Carr writes the Media Equation column for the business section of The Times and is the Lack professor of media at Boston University.

I regret the sources cited do not meet your subjective criteria.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/08/12/Study-You-Have-Near-Zero-Impact-on-U-S-Policy

CBS insulted the intelligence of its viewers last night when it introduced on its Evening News its new national security consultant, Mike Morell, who used to be the no. 2 man at the CIA. Former CIA Deputy Director Morell declared the rise of ISIS was due to the mal administration of outgoing Iraq Prime Minister Malaki. Morell failed to disclose that ISIS was trained by the CIA and the Mossad in Jordan and entered Iraq via Syria from Turkey. The CIA's goal in using ISIS is to split Iraq into different nations and break its bond with Iran. If a million people are killed in the process, the U.S. and CIA could care less. The CIA used to control the American media from behind the scenes. Now it puts its agent upfront in the media. http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/how-will-iraqs-change-of-leadership-affect-the-civil-war/ http://www.globalresearch.ca/isis-leader-abu-bakr-al-baghdadi-trained-by-israeli-mossad-nsa-documents-reveal/5391593

Nixon’s Bay of Pigs Secrets Posted on April 23, 2012 by Brittany Leddy — No Comments ↓ By Don Fulsom www.thehistoryreader.com http://www.thehistor...y-pigs-secrets/

Nixon’s Bay of Pigs Secrets Posted on April 23, 2012 by Brittany Leddy — No Comments ↓ By Don Fulsom www.thehistoryreader.com http://www.thehistoryreader.com/contemporary-history/nixons-bay-pigs-secrets/

The Power Hour radio show has invited me for another guest interview on March 20. I hope at that time to provide additional information about Watergate and its relationship to the JFK assassination. I also plan to discuss events that happened after I moved from Washington, D.C. back to Texas in 1979, including the Billie Sol Estes - LBJ saga.

The Power Hour radio show has invited me for another guest interview on March 20. I hope at that time to provide additional information about Watergate and its relationship to the JFK assassination. I also plan to discuss events that happened after I moved from Washington, D.C. back to Texas in 1979, including the Billie Sol Estes - LBJ saga.

It's time for John Dean to tell the truth about Watergate By Roger Stone Published August 06, 2014 FoxNews.com http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/08/06/it-time-for-john-dean-to-tell-truth-about-watergate/ Saturday, August 9 marks the fortieth anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s resignation over the scandal known as Watergate. It’s hard to believe but 40 years after Nixon’s resignation the American public still does not know who ordered the Watergate break-in, what the burglars were looking for and why they did it. The mainstream media narrative about Watergate is a grotesque and fantastic distortion of historical fact. No one has sought to control this narrative more than former White House Counsel John Dean. Through his books, interviews, paid speeches, lawsuits and litigation Dean has spun the myth that he was a naïve and ambitious young man sucked into the Watergate cover-up by the evil Nixon and his men. Only Dean can supply the full story of the Watergate break-in and cover up now by releasing the transcripts of all of his conversations with Nixon on March 13,16, 17, 20 and 21. Now Dean is back with a brand new book "Nixon's Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It" in which he seeks to write the "authoritative" narrative of Nixon and Watergate. Dean claims his book is based on 1,000 hours of tapes that only he has had transcribed. Missing from the July 27 New York Times review of the book by presidential historian Robert Dallek is the fact that Dean refuses to submit these transcripts for independent review. Although Dean says his goal to "reconstruct the full history of the scandal" his book is anything but the full or complete story. Truncated or entirely missing are recordings of Dean and Nixon discussing the cover-up on March 13, 16, 17, 20 and 21, 1973. The full audio and transcripts for these tapes can be found at http://www.nixontapes.org/watergate.html "In assembling this story," Dean writes in "Nixon's Defense," "I have not, except in a few instances, recounted my own involvement." Indeed, Dean has air-brushed himself out of the picture although these tapes clearly show Dean coaxing Nixon into the cover-up and coaching him on the talking points for their planned lies. What kind of lawyer urges his client to commit crimes? What did Dean mean when he closes the conversation with Nixon of March 16, 1973 by saying "we will win"? By omitting any information about tape recordings on these dates, Dean has actually obscured what the president knew and when he knew it rather than revealing it. The one-week gap in the tapes has the effect of hiding Dean's true role and omitting a number of statements Nixon made which he could have used in the president's defense. On the tapes that Dean mischaracterizes or completely ignores, the former White House counsel tells Nixon for the first time on March 13 that the Watergate break-in is connected to the White House through Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman's aide Gordon Strachan -- who is receiving transcripts of the Watergate bugs. It's clear that Dean has lied to Nixon for nine months about what he knows about White House involvement in Watergate. During hearings of the Senate committee investigating Watergate in the months to come, Mr. Dean would falsely testify that there had been no prior White House knowledge of the break-in. On March 16, Dean and Nixon discuss putting out a false statement in "The Dean Report" to cover up White House involvement in the burgeoning scandal. On March 17, Dean explains his discovery that Nixon aide John Ehrlichman had used CREEP (Committee to Reelect the President) lawyer Gordon Liddy for the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist and that the arrest of Liddy would eventually lead the investigation to Ehrlichman. Dean also tells Nixon that beyond Strachan more people in the White House are "vulnerable" including Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Colson and even himself ("since I have been all over this thing like a blanket") long before his "Cancer on the Presidency" speech (more on that in a moment) mentioned on the March 21 tape. On the March 20 tape, Dean and White House aide Richard Moore are heard in a meeting with Nixon in the oval office to discuss composing that phony statement. But wait, there's still more. In Dean's meeting with the president on March 21, in which he informs Nixon that there is "a cancer on the presidency," the president concludes a discussion about granting clemency to the burglars by saying: "No, it's wrong, that's for sure." Dean excises this quote from his latest book. Why should we believe Dean now? When confronted, under oath in litigation, with discrepancies between his sworn testimony and the facts alleged in his book "Blind Ambition" Dean claimed that his ghost writer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch, "made up out of whole cloth" key parts of his book. He later blamed his editor the well-respected Alice Mayhew. Yet Mayhew said "I never told John Dean what to put in his book, that's a lie, L-I-E. I, would never have been party to, and if John Dean wants to say that Alice Mayhew and Taylor Branch, ah, are parties to such dishonest behavior ... He's got serious problems, period." In fact we now know that it was Dean who ordered Liddy to produce the Gemstone plan that included the break in at the Watergate hotel. It was Dean who ordered the Watergate cased six weeks before the first break-in, and it was Dean who was the self-described "case officer for the cover up," who pressured the CIA to post bail for the Watergate burglars, and arranged for and ordered the payment of hush money for the Watergate burglars. Dean began the cover-up shortly after the 1972 election by telling Nixon he had concluded that the White House had nothing to do with the break-in. Nixon would announce this in a press conference. Dean, in his own words, admitted to the president that he was involved in "an obstruction of justice." Only Dean can supply the full story of the Watergate break-in and cover up now by releasing the transcripts of all of his conversations with Nixon on March 13,16, 17, 20 and 21. I challenge him to do so. These transcripts will prove that Dean was a progenitor of the Watergate cover-up who sought immunity and a plea bargain with Watergate prosecutors only when he saw the cover-up he was running would not hold. Roger Stone is author of “Nixon's Secrets: The Rise, Fall and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate, and the Pardon” (Skyhorse Publishing) which will be released on August 11.

I was interviewed on The Power Hour radio show on August 5, 2014, about the key to understanding Watergate is the JFK assassination. I advise skipping the first 8 minutes that are part of an interview of a prior guest. http://archives2014.gcnlive.com/Archives2014/aug14/PowerHour/0805143.mp3

Andy Coulson, Former Murdoch Editor, Accused of Perjury By ALAN COWELL AUG. 6, 2014 The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/07/world/europe/coulson-former-murdoch-editor-is-indicted-again.html?_r=0

Nixon reframes Watergate scandal in rereleased 1983 interviews The Los Angeles Times August 6, 2014 http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-nixon-watergate-20140806-story.html

http://archives2014.gcnlive.com/Archives2014/aug14/PowerHour/0805143.mp3

Bob Woodward reviews ‘The Nixon Defense,’ by John W. Dean By Bob Woodward July 31, 2014 The Washington Post Bob Woodward is an associate editor of The Washington Post, where he has worked for nearly 43 years. He is the author or co-author of 17 books. Four are about Watergate, including “All the President’s Men” and “The Final Days,” both co-authored with Carl Bernstein. Evelyn Duffy contributed to this review. President Richard Nixon’s decision to install a secret recording system — and then to retain the tapes — perhaps ranks as the most consequential self-inflicted political wound of 20th-century America. The criminality, abuse of power, obsession with real and perceived enemies, rage, self-focus, and small-mindedness revealed on those tapes left him abandoned by his own party and forced him to resign 40 years ago. To date, the dissemination of some 250 White House conversations has defined his presidency and its corruption. Now comes John W. Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel and later his chief accuser, to transcribe and analyze at least 600 new conversations in his book “The Nixon Defense.” The title is misleading, because it suggests there is a case for Nixon’s innocence. Dean quickly clears that up when he writes in the preface, “Fortunately for everyone, his defense failed.” The new material reveals further examples of the administration’s contempt for the law. It provides a detailed narrative of precisely what happened inside the Nixon White House beginning three days after the June 17, 1972, burglary when five men were arrested in the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate, and continuing until the taping system was shut down after aide Alexander Butterfield revealed it 13 months later. I never doubted that Nixon was the ringleader and driving force behind the Watergate crimes and mind-set. The evidence on previous tapes, the testimony at hearings and trials, and the memoirs of his closest aides made that clear. But Dean’s book seals that conclusion, perhaps forever. He brings the microscope as close to the Nixon of Watergate as anyone has, and he has done so in a generally dispassionate presentation of hundreds of pages of content from the tapes, plus quotations and scenes from previously released recordings, including conversations in which he participated. “Watergate,” Dean concludes, “as the overwhelming evidence revealed, was merely one particularly egregious expression of Nixon’s often ruthless abuses of power. Had Richard Nixon not encouraged his aides to collect political intelligence by any means fair or foul, or insisted from the moment of the [Watergate] arrests that there must be no coverup, neither would have taken place. Nixon was not only responsible for all that went amiss during his presidency, he was in almost every instance the catalyst, when not the instigator.” The new tapes depict a White House full of lies, chaos, distrust, speculation, self-protection, maneuver and counter-maneuver, with a crookedness that makes Netflix’s “House of Cards” look unsophisticated. Dean himself was eventually charged with obstruction of justice and served four months in prison. Describing himself and Nixon’s other top aides in the spring of 1973, he writes: “We had become something of a criminal cabal, weighing the risks of further criminal action to prevent the worst while hoping something might unexpectedly occur that would resolve the problems. Watergate conversations had become like the devil’s merry-go-round with the same basic tune played over and over while various people climbed on and off.” The book contains no new blockbusters, but the new tapes suggest that the full story of the Nixon administration’s secret operations may forever remain buried along with their now-deceased perpetrators. For example, on Oct. 10, 1972, Carl Bernstein and I wrote in The Washington Post that Watergate was not an isolated operation but only part of a massive campaign of political espionage and sabotage run by the Nixon reelection committee and the White House. Dean writes that the story “reframed Watergate as more than a mere bungled burglary at the DNC.” The broad extent of the malfeasance was evident in a conversation that Charles W. Colson had with the president the same day, according to the book. Colson, Nixon’s shadowy operative and special counsel, told him almost gleefully that “nothing in that article this morning has anything to do with my office. The things that I have done that could be explosive in the newspaper will never come out, because nobody knows about them. I don’t trust anybody in my office.” Nixon did not ask what these might be. Three months later, after the president won reelection, Colson bragged to his boss: “I did a hell of a lot of things on the outside, and you never read about it. The things you read about were the things I didn’t do, Watergate” and the sabotage and espionage operations against the Democrats run by California lawyer Donald Segretti. “But you see, I did things out of Boston,” Colson said, referring to his home town. “We did some blackmail and — ” “My God,” Nixon interrupted. Even he was apparently surprised. “I’ll go to my grave before I ever disclose it,” Colson continued. “But we did a hell of a lot of things and never got caught. Things that — ” Colson abruptly stopped, and Nixon inquired no further. In a footnote, Dean writes that he had a similar conversation with Colson, who said that his “secret activities” could send him to jail if they were ever revealed. Colson died in 2012. Dean shows White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and the top domestic adviser, John D. Ehrlichman, at one moment denying to the president any role in clandestine, criminal activities, then acknowledging it. The tapes also capture Nixon shading the truth after admitting knowledge of the activities. On April 14, 1973, Ehrlichman told the president that, based on his own investigation of the Watergate cover-up, “there were eight or 10 people around [the White House] who knew about this, knew it was going on.” He told Nixon that “Bob [Haldeman] knew, I knew, all kinds of people knew.” “Well, I knew it, I knew it,” Nixon replied. But then he quickly tried to backtrack. Dean writes: “Realizing what he had just confessed, and possibly realizing that it had been recorded, the president immediately tried, rather awkwardly to retract it.” Nixon is then heard on the tape saying, “I knew, I must say though, I didn’t know it.” This type of classic doubletalk appears time and again on the new tapes. “The Nixon Defense” offers tantalizing hints that White House aides were gleaning information from the telephone wiretap that had been secretly placed in the DNC’s Watergate headquarters. On March 16, 1973, Ehrlichman told the president that it was his “hunch” that key campaign and White House aides, including former attorney general John Mitchell, were receiving reports from the wiretap. “And there’s some pretty juicy stuff in there,” Ehrlichman said. The fruits of the bug have not been made public. Dean notes that the National Archives is holding back some material, citing privacy and because it was obtained using an illegal wiretap. On April 9, 1973, three months before the secret White House recording system was revealed publicly, Nixon instructed Haldeman to get rid of all the tapes. “I think we should take all that we’ve got and destroy them,” the president is heard saying on tape. “I don’t want to have in the record the discussions we’ve had in this room about Watergate.” As Dean writes, “Had he destroyed the tapes he would have survived, tarnished but intact.” But the order was not carried out. Nine days later, Nixon repeated his request. “I would like you to take all these tapes, if you wouldn’t mind,” he said, as if he were asking Haldeman to perform a routine task. He wanted Haldeman to destroy most of the tapes. “Would you do that?” “Sure,” Haldeman said. But Nixon did not pursue the matter. The White House was chronically prone to insufficient follow-through, and Nixon was often indecisive as he tried to untangle himself from the Watergate crimes. Not only did the tapes escape the trash bin, but the president kept the secret recording system going through the spring of 1973 while he directed the cover-up. During those months he developed another, deeper illegal obstruction of justice — the cover-up of the cover-up. After White House aide Butterfield publicly disclosed the existence of the secret recordings to the Senate Watergate committee on July 16, 1973, Nixon told his new chief of staff, Alexander Haig: “Al, I’ve thought about this all night. Maybe Alex Butterfield has done us a favor. These tapes will be exculpatory. I know I never said anything to anybody that could be interpreted as encouragement to cover things up. Just the opposite.” This is preposterous and indicative of Nixon’s state of denial. Although an abundance of tape material now exists, it is likely that still more evidence is on the horizon. Some tapes or key sections are inaudible and defy reliable transcription. Improved technology could someday retrieve additional content. In addition the National Archives, which houses the tapes, may eventually release more of them. Dean, as always the model of precision and doggedness, has performed yeoman service in this more-than-700-page monster of a book. Even for someone who has covered Watergate for 42 years, from the morning of the burglary through the investigations, confessions, denials, hearings, trials, books and attempts at historical revisionism, Dean’s book has an authoritative ring. Page after page of taped dialogue reveals the rambling, ugly fog of scandal as Nixon and his top aides scramble to deceive one another and save themselves. The new tapes provide even more incontrovertible evidence of the administration’s illegal conduct. Look no further than a May 23, 1973, tape in which Nixon addressed his initial authorization of Tom Charles Huston’s top-secret 1970 plan to expand break-ins, wiretapping and mail openings. “I ordered that they use any means necessary, including illegal means, to accomplish this goal,” Nixon told Haig. “The president of the United States can never admit that.” He just had, of course, and the new tapes show him making admissions of criminality again and again. Bob Woodward is an associate editor of The Washington Post, where he has worked for nearly 43 years. He is the author or co-author of 17 books. Four are about Watergate, including “All the President’s Men” and “The Final Days,” both co-authored with Carl Bernstein. Evelyn Duffy contributed to this review.

Two Former Senior Murdoch Editors Charged Over UK Phone-Hacking By REUTERS JULY 30, 2014, 8:57 A.M. E.D.T. LONDON — Two more senior journalists from Rupert Murdoch's defunct British tabloid the News of the World have been charged with phone-hacking, prosecutors said on Wednesday, weeks after the paper's former editor was jailed for the crime. Neil Wallis, the paper's former deputy editor, and former features editor Jules Stenson, have been charged with conspiracy to intercept voicemails on mobile phones of well-known figures or people close to them, the Crown Prosecution Service said. Andy Coulson, who edited the paper from 2003 until 2007 before working as Prime Minister David Cameron's media chief, was jailed on July 4 for 18 months for encouraging staff to hack phones in a bid to get exclusive stories. His trial, one of the most expensive of its kind in British legal history, heard that thousands of victims from celebrities to politicians and victims of crime were targeted by the paper. Minutes after he was convicted, Cameron apologised for employing him. Outrage at the paper's activities forced Murdoch to close the paper in 2011 when the scale of the crimes came to light, since when dozens of reporters from his British tabloids have been arrested over allegations of criminal activity. Four other former journalists and a private detective have also admitted phone-hacking while working for the News of the World. A week ago, the CPS decided not to take action against six other staff. Prosecutors are still considering whether corporate charges should be brought against News Corp.'s British arm, formerly known as News International (NI). "I'm devastated that more than three years after my initial arrest, this swingeing indiscriminate charge had been brought against me," Wallis said on Twitter. "Perhaps it is inevitable that after being such an outspoken critic of the collateral damage and pain caused by this needlessly vindictive and enormously costly investigation, the ire has been turned on me for something that occurred at NI of which I knew nothing and which I have always said was wrong." News UK, as Murdoch's British paper business is now known, said it had no comment on the charges while Stenson could not be reached for comment. Wallis and Stenson are due to appear at London's Westminster Magistrates' court on Aug. 21.

If you want to understand what is happening in the world today, you must view this video. Russia recognizes that the U.S. is aiming for a World War, one that will be fought with nuclear weapons. From what Putin’s Economic Adviser says, it is almost inescapable but to conclude that this may occur before year’s end. Putin’s Economic Advisor Warns WW3 Has Begun, States Russia Must Defeat US Nazism to Solve Ukranian Crisis!

THE NIXON DEFENSE What He Knew and When He Knew It By John W. Dean 746 pages. Viking. $35. Review by Robert Dallek The New York Times July 27, 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/books/in-the-nixon-defense-john-w-dean-returns-to-watergate.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

Andy Coulson faces questions over 'hidden assets' as court seeks to recoup phone hacking trial costs Former News of the World editor is being asked to pay back a proportion of the cost of his trial but prosecutors want to investigate whether he has hidden any assets Telegraph July 26, 2014 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/10991099/Andy-Coulson-faces-questions-over-hidden-assets-as-court-seeks-to-recoup-phone-hacking-trial-costs.html

Book Review: 'The Nixon Tapes' by Douglas Brinkley and Luke A. Nichter The Wall Street Journal By John Lewis Gaddis July 25, 2014 http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-nixon-tapes-by-douglas-brinkley-and-luke-a-nichter-1406322741

Unclassified JFK Assassination Database Still Stored In Top Secret Vault -- for Convenience By Aliya Sternstein July 23, 2014 www.nextgov.com The master database cataloging material related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has always been housed in a Top Secret vault, much of the time on a personal computer, according to National Archives and Records Administration officials. The index -- which does not hold physical artifacts -- was set up in a stand-alone computer in the early 1990s in response to the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. The law does not require Fort Knox-like protection. It's just handy for the Archives personnel who use the system to have the JFK database close to other caseloads that include classified records http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2014/07/unclassified-jfk-assassination-database-still-stored-top-secret-vault-convenience/89435/

Google must not be left to 'censor history', Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales warns Jimmy Wales says that "right to be forgotten laws" must not mean that a private company such as Google is in charge of deciding what parts of history are recorded and which are erased http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/10990414/Google-must-not-be-left-to-censor-history-Wikipedia-founder-Jimmy-Wales-warns.html

BEBE THE BAGMAN Secret Manipulations of President's Crony Still Pose Question Mark http://quixoticjoust.blogspot.com/2014/07/bebe-rebozo-and-his-pan-american.html