Douglas Caddy

Eladio del Valle http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKeladio.htm http://cuban-exile.com/doc_051-075/doc0069a.html

More on this subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePKz-4ZKeag

From the article: “There is, too, the strange behavior of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, that I and other JFK assassination researchers have recounted(I did so in LBJ and the Conspiracy to Kill Kennedy). Ruby, for those not aware of it, acted strangely during the murder of Oswald. Police officers who wrestled him away from Oswald recount that Ruby’s hand was tightly clenched on his pistol, repeatedly attempting to pull the trigger long after his gun was no longer pointed at Oswald. Once in his cell, Ruby acted agitated and anxious, almost manic, until he learned Oswald had died, at which his behavior changed dramatically: he calmed completely down, as if a burden had been lifted. Strange behavior for a man who faced the electric chair. Some suggest that Ruby, too, was a candidate for mind manipulation.” http://gizadeathstar.com/2013/12/tamerlan-tsarnayev-implications/

[This was posted on Facebook today] COMING SEPT 2014 Nixon's Secret Watergate, the Ford Pardon, the 18 1/2 minute gap By Roger Stone with Mike Colapietro He was the youngest Vice President in history but a disastrous debate with the dashing JFK caused him to lose the presidency by a whisker. After a humiliating loss in run for Governor of his home state Richard Nixon said he through with politics. Then he would rise from the ashes in the greatest comeback in political history only to be brought low by a terrible, terrible secret, a secret the Watergate break -in was trying to find proof of. Yet the very secret that caused his downfall would also guarantee his pardon. Now, finally the inside story on Watergate Nixon's pardon and what was erased in the 18 1/2 minute gap. Using Gen Al Haig as his agent Nixon let Ford know Nixon would expose the CIA's involvement in the JFK assassination and Ford's role in altering autopsy records for the Warren Commission if he went to trial in the Watergate scandal. "Tell them if Dick Nixon's going down I'm taking everyone down with me, that xxxxx (CIA Director Richard) Helms, Lyndon and Jerry Ford are going down with me." was the way Haig phrased it. Nixon's Secret charts Nixon's spectacular rise to the pinnacle of power as Vice President, his agonizingly close loss to John Kennedy, his humiliating defeat for Governor or California and his wilderness years, which would take him to Dallas on November 22, 1963. Stone outlines Nixon's stunning comeback in which Roger Ailes (later the President of FOX news) repackaged Nixon for the television age. Stone says Nixon followed the path created by the murders of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King as well the folly of the Vietnam War to the greatest comeback in American Political history. Yet Nixon's paranoia would drive him to break in the Democratic National Committee and rifle committee files to see if his Cuban arch-nemesis Fidel Castro had filled the Democrats in on his terrible secret- it was Vice President Richard Nixon who approved the CIA contracting of the mob to kill Castro - a plot that failed. Nixon also knew the failed Bay of Pigs invasion has spawned the JFK assassination and that President Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, the Mob and big Texas Oil has staged Kennedy's removal. Stone examines the bungled Watergate Break-in to determine what exactly Nixon's agents were looking for and how the CIA infiltrated the burglar team and sabotaged the break-in to gain leverage over Nixon who was demanding the CIA turn over the records of the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy Assassination. Stone presents stunning evidence proving Democrats and the DC Metropolitan Police had been tipped off the break-in in advance. Nixon also knew Warren Commission member Gerald Ford has altered Kennedy's Autopsy record to change the description of the location of a wound from the upper back to the lower neck to accommodate the Warren Commission's single bullet theory- a fact unknown to the American public until records were declassified exposing Ford's duplicity in 1996. Nixon had learned of Ford role in the Warren Commission cover-up because the #3 man at the FBI Cartha "Deke" DeLoach , who actually gave Ford his instructions told John Mitchell Nixon's Attorney General who briefed the President. Thus Nixon would use this information to avoid prosecution and jail to blackmail Gerald Ford for a full, free and unconditional pardon. Nixon's secret would not only destroy his presidency it would save him from prison. Nixon threaten to take them all down if he went to trial. Gen. Alexander Haig , who would broker Nixon's pardon confirmed Nixon ploy to a wealthy Republican crony the year he died. Nixon blurting out this threat is why Nixon erased 18 1/2 minutes of the famous White House Tapes only to let longtime personal secretary Rose Mary Woods take the rap. Stone also reveals other gaps in the White Tapes where Nixon deleted rants about the CIA. JFK and the Bay of Pigs. Nixon didn't need to worry as, as Stone tells us, even today the government has redacted all references to the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy Assaonationan and the CIA from the publicly released Nixon tapes and the Obama Administration's fighting in Federal Court to keep the CIA's Bay of Pigs records sealed. Stone's book is certainly not a partisan apologia for Nixon as much as a warts-and-all assessment of the 37th President who dominated American politics for forty years, was on five national GOP tickets and who's record in office, quirky personality and idiosyncrasies still fascinate the public today. Stone offers similarly colorful and nuanced portraits of Pat Nixon, John and Robert Kennedy, J.Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Hoffa, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Gerald Ford, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and others in this vivid drama. Nixon, the Bay of Pigs, the 1960 cliff hanger, the JFK Assassination, the Watergate break-in, Al Haig , Gerald Ford, the Pardon, the 18 1/2 minute gap, political Insider Roger Stone explains it all. Stone is the author of the New York Times Bestseller The Man Who Killed Kennedy- the Case Against LBJ ( Skyhorse)

Conversation with Peter Dale Scott Conversations with History, University of California http://conversations.berkeley.edu/content/peter-dale-scott

Morley Safer of CBS tells how the government lies with intent http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003698.html

There always remains the possibility of the public disclosure of Frank Sturgis's confession to Cardinal Cooke in 1971 in which he named the person who allegedly shot Tippit. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=19994

Whodunit: SFSU Professor Joseph McBride Finds a New Angle on the JFK Assassination By Casey Burchby Wednesday, Aug 28 2013 SFweekly.com http://www.sfweekly.com/2013-08-28/culture/joseph-mcbride-into-the-nightmare-jd-tippitt/full/ Noted film historian, critic, and journalist Joseph McBride has quietly maintained a parallel career for decades. While he was writing acclaimed biographies of Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg, John Ford, and Frank Capra, while he worked as a columnist and critic for Daily Variety, and while he taught in the Department of Cinema at San Francisco State University, McBride dedicated a separate track of his life to researching the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Last month, McBride released the product of his decades-long effort, Into the Nightmare. The book documents his investigation and focuses on a little-understood piece of the assassination's puzzle: the murder of Dallas police Officer J. D. Tippit, who was purportedly (according to the Warren Commission) killed by Lee Harvey Oswald 46 minutes after Oswald shot the president. McBride's research has led him to believe that Oswald could not have shot Tippit, which by extension would tend to cast doubt upon the validity of the Warren Report's other conclusions. "To confront the truth is very disturbing because that means you have to do something about it," McBride says. And, in writing the book, "I confronted the truth. It wasn't easy for me, because I lost my faith in the American system. But I felt that I've made a contribution as an individual by shedding light on parts of the story." McBride frames the book as a memoir, recounting his experience working for and meeting Kennedy during the 1960 Wisconsin primary (McBride is a Milwaukee-area native). He also recalls the sense of promise Kennedy embodied as president, and the jarring trauma of his assassination. In the book, McBride discusses the development of his early suspicions, which he traces to the day of the assassination. These were primarily incited by Oswald's calm, rational denials in his brief television appearances after his arrest, and by Oswald's live, televised murder by Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters two days later. McBride is equally frank about the temporary satisfaction of his suspicions by the Warren Commission, which released its findings in September 1964. But shortly after the release of that report, McBride became aware of independent assassination researchers such as Sylvia Meagher (author of Accessories After the Fact) and Mark Lane (author of Rush to Judgment), whose books identify crucial errors and omissions in the Warren Report and examine the likelihood of a conspiracy behind the assassination. They, and others, inspired McBride to revisit the creeping doubts he felt the day Kennedy was killed. McBride describes his approach to writing Into the Nightmare by quoting the influential assassination researcher Penn Jones, former editor of the small-town Texas paper the Midlothian Mirror, who advised others to "take one area of the case that has been neglected and research the hell out of it." The idea being that, whereas no one person could tell the entire story of a case so expansive, a person who focuses on one area may uncover something significant.. McBride began to research the assassination in earnest in the late 1970s, after the Church Committee (the nickname of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church) "revealed that our government had been involved in attempts to assassinate foreign leaders," he says. "This possibly validated criticisms of the Warren Report." In 1982, McBride began to focus on the murder of Officer Tippit — per Jones's suggestion, an area of the case that had been neglected. "Oddly," says McBride, "there was very little in the Warren Report on [Tippit]. The report relied entirely on ballistics evidence to say that Oswald killed Tippit, because their main witness, Helen Markham, was very unreliable. If you study the bullets and cartridges [that were entered into evidence], they don't link to Oswald's gun. An FBI expert testified that he could not link the cartridges to Oswald's pistol." In addition, Dallas policemen in the vicinity testified that the killer used an automatic weapon, whereas the Warren Commission said it was a revolver. (When Oswald was arrested at the Texas Theatre 40 minutes after Tippit's shooting, he was carrying a revolver.) Beyond the ballistics evidence is a suspicious timeline. Oswald was seen at his rooming house at 1:04, and that was nearly a mile away from the site of Tippit's shooting. McBride places the time of the shooting at 1:09; his basis for this includes a wide range of references, including the testimony of T.F. Bowley, an eyewitness who arrived on the scene at 1:10. "There's no way Oswald could have walked that distance in five minutes," says McBride. "It takes anywhere from 12 to 15 minutes." In his research, McBride examined witness testimony, Tippit's background, and the officer's other activities that day, and found that the "official" circumstances of his murder are misleading. One of the most significant interviews McBride conducted was with Tippit's father, Edgar Lee, who had never been interviewed before. The elder Tippit provided McBride with one of the book's biggest revelations. "Mr. Tippit told me that a Dallas police officer had gone to J. D.'s widow, Marie, and said J. D. and he had been sent to hunt down Oswald in the aftermath of the assassination — but that this second officer had not made it because he was in a traffic accident," McBride says. "I found evidence there was indeed a traffic accident nearby around the time of the shooting. The significance of this is manifold, because at the time, Oswald's identity, officially, was not known to the Dallas Police Department, which indicates that Tippit was part of a plot to frame or perhaps murder Oswald." McBride acknowledges the fact that Americans seem to be of two minds about the Kennedy assassination. On one hand, polls routinely show that a majority of the nation believes there is more to the story than what the Warren Report has to say. But, on the other hand, there is a stigma attached to assassination researchers, who are often referred to as paranoid, obsessed, or "conspiracy buffs." "The public, as Noam Chomsky likes to say, is smarter than the politicians and the media," he says. "Most of the people who are wedded to the lone gunman theory are government and media people. They can get very vicious and dismissive. I describe in the book that there was a CIA memo issued in the '60s about how to deal with skeptics — how to imply that they're crazy and they're in it for the money. All these tropes they've put out have been very effective. You keep hearing them all the time, and they do filter down to ordinary people." As with any investigation, McBride encountered his fair share of blind alleys, red herrings, and frustrating gaps in available documentation. "It was a difficult book to write, because you'd like it to be less time-consuming," McBride wryly notes. "This is a 50-year-old cold case. They say in criminology that most murders are solved within a few weeks or a month. After that, it's hard to prove things because witnesses scatter and die; evidence and leads get lost. There are some things we will never know, as much as we might try."

Ken: In framing the title so that it would fit in the limited space provided on the Forum's page, I found it necessary to reword the lengthy title as it appeared in the original article. Click on the link to see the original title and article. Your observation is correct as to the article's content but this explains how the posting of the title came about. Doug

JFK Assassination: Jacqueline Kennedy, RFK Did Not Believe Only One Person Assassinated President John F. Kennedy Analysis International Business Times By Joseph Lazzaro on December 20 2013 1:44 PM Share this article http://www.ibtimes.com/jfk-assassination-jacqueline-kennedy-rfk-did-not-believe-only-one-person-assassinated-president-john One week after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy privately communicated to the leadership of the Soviet Union that they did not believe accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Jacqueline Kennedy and RFK wanted the Soviet leadership to know that “despite Oswald’s connections to the communist world, the Kennedys believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents.” Publicly, Jacqueline Kennedy endorsed the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone, and it was not until 1999 that her and RFK’s private views were made known, when they were revealed by historians Aleksandr Fusenko and Timothy Naftali in their book on the Cuban Missile Crisis, “One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964.” In the book, the historians reported that when Jacqueline Kennedy’s artist friend William Walton traveled to Moscow on a previously scheduled trip a week after President Kennedy’s assassination, Walton carried the above “felled by domestic opponents” message from Jacqueline Kennedy and RFK to another friend of the Kennedy administration, Georgi Bolshakov, a Russian diplomat. Bolshakov served as a back-channel link between the White House and the Kremlin during the October 1962 missile crisis. Jacqueline Kennedy’s Analysis: Little Media Coverage At the time of the book’s publication in 1999, Jacqueline Kennedy and RFK’s private views received very little attention from U.S. media outlets. Further, in 2013, despite the enormous amount of media coverage of the recent 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, when hundreds of media outlets sent reporters and TV crews to Dallas, there was relatively little coverage of what Jacqueline Kennedy, RFK or other public officials in office in 1963 thought occurred on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, even though many public officials have made their opinions and analyses known publicly since then. Here are a few of note: “I think the [Warren Commission] report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards ... the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up." -- U.S. Sen. Richard Schweiker, R-Penn., and former member of the Church Committee, which investigated U.S. intelligence community activities, including illegal operations (1976) "I told the FBI what I had heard [two shots from behind the grassy knoll fence], but they said it couldn't have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn't want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family." -- Ken O’Donnell, former Special Assistant to President Kennedy (1987) “Hoover lied his eyes out to the [Warren] Commission -- on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the guns, you name it …” -- Hall Boggs, Majority Leader and Former Warren Commission member “Were they aiming at the president?” President Lyndon B. Johnson said. "They were aiming directly at the president. There’s no question about that," Director Hoover said. "This telescopic lens brings close to you like they were sitting right beside you." -- Lyndon Johnson, president of the United States, to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, on Nov. 29, 1963 “I never heard the shot that hit me.” -- Texas Gov. John Connally, who had been seated in front of President Kennedy in the presidential limousine in Dallas At The Center Of The Nightmare Of course, in the years following the nation’s dark and ignominious day in 1963, many talented assassination researchers have offered rigorous, systematic analyses of what happened in Dealey Plaza, but the observations and thoughts of Jacqueline Kennedy, though often overlooked, are extremely pertinent: She was the closest witness to the crime and its intended victim, the president. She was, more than anyone else, at the center of the nightmare. Moreover, the observations of the aforementioned and other public officials are data points of consequence and therefore relevant. These are not the observations of ill-informed adults or mere conjecture. To public investigators, these witnesses represent adults who had access to at least some of the hard evidence available, and, in regard to the Dealey Plaza witnesses, they comprise only those with first-hand evidence or observations. A Preponderance Of Evidence Further, if the above observations and thoughts had occurred in isolation, they would still be significant in the investigation of the president’s murder. However, when combined with the suspicious activity, anomalies and commonality of interests among key parties in the case, they form a preponderance of evidence that, at minimum, begs additional questions. Those suspicious activities/anomalies/commonalities include: • Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t fire when the presidential motorcade was close. • Gov. John Connally never heard the shot that injured him. • Aristocrat George de Mohrenschildt befriended working-class Lee Harvey Oswald. • Authorities arrested Oswald in about 90 minutes. • Oswald’s paraffin test was negative: The test determined that he may have fired a revolver that day, but not a rifle. • After an earlier arrest, in August 1963 in New Orleans, Oswald called a specific person at the FBI. • Two days after President Kennedy was murdered, Jack Ruby murdered Oswald. • Most Parkland Hospital emergency room physicians said President Kennedy had an exit wound, indicative of a gunshot from the front, but the Bethesda, Maryland, autopsy that followed did not describe the back-of-the-head wound as an exit wound. • At least 21 law enforcement personnel in Dealey Plaza thought a gunshot came from the front of the presidential motorcade. • The presidential limousine was washed before it was inspected for blood, bone and tissue evidence. • No one physically saw Oswald at the TSBD’s sixth floor window at 12:30 p.m. Central Time, the time of the assassination. • At three committee investigations, the Central Intelligence Agency either hid evidence or obstructed the committee from obtaining it. • Despite threatening to disclose “classified things” to the Soviet Union after defecting, Oswald was never punished by the U.S. government for doing so. Then, when Oswald said he wanted to return, despite saying he was a communist, and it being the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government let him return. • Despite being interrogated for 10-12 hours after being arrested on Nov. 22, 1963, crime investigators did not make a legal, stenographic or audio recording of the interrogation. • After Oswald was allowed to return to the United States, he was surrounded by talented, accomplished middle/upper class citizens at nearly every key point in his life through Nov. 24, 1963, even though Oswald held largely blue collar, low-pay jobs. Making Public JFK Assassination Files Held By CIA Would Clarify Much Further, the U.S. intelligence community in general, and the Central Intelligence Agency specifically, could resolve many of the questions/anomalies above by making public more than 1,100 classified files related to the JFK assassination. In particular, when made public, the classified files of CIA Officer George Joannides; CIA Officer David Atlee Philips, who was involved in pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald; Birch D O’Neal, who as counter-intelligence head of the CIA, opened a file on defector Oswald; CIA Officers Howard Hunt; William King Harvey; Anne Goodpasture; and David Sanchez Morales -- when made public, these files will help the nation determine what really happened in Dallas, who Oswald was and how the CIA handled Oswald’s file. However, the CIA says the Joannides’ files and the files of the CIA officers -- which the Agency said are “not believed relevant” to the JFK assassination -- must remain classified until at least 2017, and perhaps longer, due to U.S. national security. But the CIA’s national security claim has never been independently verified, according to JFKFacts.org Moderator Jefferson Morley. Morley is the plaintiff in the ongoing Morley v. CIA suit, which seeks to make public Joannides’ classified files. In Morley’s suit, his attorney has responded to the CIA’s latest brief, on the issue of court fees. Having won on appeal twice, Morley argues that the standard practice of the U.S government paying court fees for a successful appeal should apply. The CIA counters that the litigation has not generated any significant new information, and therefore the government should not have to pay the court fees. The issue is now in the hands of U.S. Judge Richard Leon. It must be underscored that, to date, there is no smoking gun or incontrovertible evidence of a plot or conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, but there is a pattern of suspicious activity, along with a series of anomalies and a commonality of interests among key parties, that compel additional research and the release of non-public documents. Further, the CIA probably is not covering up some tectonic, systemic crisis-triggering secret about the assassination of President Kennedy, or even evidence of a colossal Agency operational failure that would prompt the American people to call for a dismantling of the national security state apparatus. However, until all of the JFK assassination files are made public, the pattern of suspicious activity, anomalies, commonality of interests, along with the observations of the investigators and public officials, form a preponderance of evidence that strongly suggest that -- at minimum -- the American people do not know the full truth regarding the assassination of President Kennedy, and that the Agency is hiding something. -- See Also: 4 JFK Assassination Files The CIA Must Make Public In Dealey Plaza, It Is Always November 22, 1963 The CIA And Lee Harvey Oswald - Questions Remain Just Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? First JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theory Was Paid For By The CIA Joseph Lazzaro Joseph Lazzaro, U.S. Editor, served as Managing Editor of New York-based financial news web sites WallStreetEurope.com/WallStreetItalia.com, 1999-2004, and as Economics... Continue Reading

Was this whitewash not to be expected? -------------------------------- Report finds no evidence of widespread sexual misconduct in Secret Service http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/long-awaited-report-finds-no-evidence-of-widespread-misconduct-in-secret-service/2013/12/20/5e8b7f7a-693c-11e3-8b5b-a77187b716a3_story.html?wpisrc=al_national

November 13, 2013 50 years after JFK, family of Jack Ruby feels the pain by Steve North JEWISHJOURNAL.COM http://www.jewishjournal.com/nation/article/me_and_the_family_of_lee_harvey_oswalds_jewish_killer We were sharing a pastrami sandwich and pickles at a Los Angeles landmark: Canter’s Deli on Fairfax. I was 24; she was nearly 50 years older, with a piercing voice as loud as her flaming red wig. Her name was Eva Rubenstein Grant, and she was a little-known nightclub manager the morning of Nov. 24, 1963, when her brother Jack Ruby left the apartment they shared in Dallas and blasted his way into infamy by fatally shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. It was history’s first live televised murder. Eva worked and lived with her younger brother and spent the rest of her life defending him against various allegations. “I swear on my life, my brother was not three things,” Eva told me, her voice rising. “He was not a homosexual; he was not with the communists; and certainly not with the underworld!” I listened with fascination to Eva on that day in 1977. (Years later, she was perfectly portrayed in a TV movie by Doris Roberts, the high-decibel mom on “Everybody Loves Raymond.”) “But Mrs. Grant,” I said, “Jack had ties to the ‘syndicate,’ as you call it, as far back as your childhood in Chicago.” “Look,” she replied in exasperation. “We would see these people in the neighborhood, and we’d ask, ‘How’s your mother? How’s your sister?’ But that doesn’t mean Jack was connected with them! I grew up with a bunch of boys who turned out to be no good. Who knew!?” It was a quintessentially Jewish response, albeit delivered in Eva’s hybrid Chicago-Dallas accent. And the Rubensteins were a staunchly Jewish family, a fact that may have played a role in Ruby’s killing of President John F. Kennedy’s alleged assassin. Ruby was born Jacob Rubenstein in 1911 to Polish-Jewish immigrants Joseph and Fannie. They were a volatile couple; Joseph was a mean and abusive drunk, while Fannie suffered from mental illness and was committed to an Illinois state hospital at one point. Their eight children had their fair share of tzuris, both before and after the parents separated. Jack and three siblings were made wards of Chicago’s Jewish Home Finding Society and placed in foster homes for various periods of time during the 1920s. Despite the dysfunctional world of the Rubensteins, the parents kept a kosher home, holidays were observed, the boys received some Hebrew school training and went with their father to synagogue. Jack idolized Jewish boxing champion Barney Ross, who later described him as a “well-behaved” youth. But others recall his hair-trigger temper and street brawls, especially when taunted by the non-Jews in his mixed Jewish-Italian neighborhood. Ruby biographer Seth Kantor writes, “In his mid-20s, he was part of a Jewish pool-hall crowd that attacked the … pro-Hitler German-American Bundist meetings. In his mid-30s, as an Air Force private, he beat up a sergeant who had called him a Jew bastard.” At the end of World War II, Eva moved to Dallas and began managing nightclubs and restaurants. Jack got an honorable discharge from the Air Force in 1946, then joined Eva in Texas in 1947, the year he and brothers Earl and Sam all legally changed their last name to Ruby. As a young man in Chicago, Ruby reportedly ran errands for Al Capone’s cousin and henchman Frank Nitti. A former Dallas sheriff once testified that Chicago Mafia figures told him Ruby was sent to Texas to run nightclubs that were fronts for illegal gambling operations. According to evidence uncovered by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s, Ruby was later linked to mobsters Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante, who the panel considered prime suspects in a possible mob conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. Whatever he was doing behind the scenes, Ruby became known as a nightclub owner, and at some point he began attending services at Congregation Shearith Israel. Rabbi Hillel Silverman, who was the synagogue’s spiritual leader from 1954 to 1964, says, “He didn’t come regularly, but he came to say Kaddish for his father. He came to minyan one day with a cast on his arm. I said, ‘Jack, what happened?’ He said, ‘In my club, somebody was very raucous, and I was the bouncer.’ ” Silverman (whose father, Morris, edited the Conservative movement’s siddur, and whose son Jonathan is an actor known for “Weekend at Bernie’s”) is now 89 and still leading High Holy Days services every year in the San Diego County community of Vista. His memories of Ruby remain precise. Sometimes he was peaceful and calm, but he was unpredictable,” Silverman told me recently. “He could be very volatile and belligerent at times.” “He came to my home once with a bunch of puppies and said, ‘Take one.’ I didn’t really want a dog, but one of my kids did, so we ended up with a puppy. Then we went to Israel one summer, and I had no place to put the dog. I went to Jack’s nightclub, and the dog stayed there for a month. So Jack Ruby was my dog sitter,” the rabbi recalled, laughing. But there was no laughter in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. “The day of the assassination, we had our regular Friday night service, which became a memorial service for the president. Jack was there. People were either irate or in tears, and Jack was neither. He came over and said, ‘Good Shabbos, Rabbi. Thank you for visiting my sister Eva in the hospital last week.’ I thought that was rather peculiar.” Two days later, Silverman spoke to his Sunday morning confirmation class, expressing relief to the students that Lee Harvey Oswald was not Jewish, or else “there might have been a pogrom Friday night here in Dallas.” He then switched on the radio and heard that a “Jack Rubenstein” had killed the alleged assassin. “I was shocked,” Silverman said. “I visited him the next day in jail, and I said, ‘Why, Jack, why?’ He said, ‘I did it for the American people.’ ” I interrupted Silverman, pointing out that other reports had Ruby saying he did it “to show that Jews had guts.” The elderly rabbi sighed. “Yes, he mentioned that. But I don’t like to mention it. I think he said, ‘I did it for the Jewish people.’ But I’ve tried to wipe that statement from my mind.” Another one of those close to Ruby who has tried, unsuccessfully, to block out most of the past is his nephew “Craig” Ruby. (He asked that I not give his real first name). His early memories are pleasant. “Uncle Jack would come to the house two or three times a year for Jewish holidays. He’d have a shot of whiskey with my dad, and most of the time, he’d give us each a silver dollar.” More impressive to Craig was Ruby’s flashy wheels. “He got a new car every other year, and he always had a nice two-door sports coupe.”Craig enjoyed going with his father to visit Ruby at his nightclub in the afternoon, before the doors would open. Like millions of Americans, Craig watched the stunning murder of Oswald live on television, and soon afterward, he and his mother heard the name of the gunman. “Did you ever hear the expression ‘the color drained from her face’? I literally saw my mother’s face go from flesh to green,” he recalled. At age 12, that was a little freaky to watch.” The FBI arrived that evening to interview Ruby’s brother and sister-in-law, and later stationed agents outside the house after a bomb threat was called in. Half a century after the fact, Craig is still bitter over the dramatic effect his childless uncle’s act had on the extended family. “My dad sold off his business in order to pay for Uncle Jack’s lawyers, leaving us nearly destitute.” Given his last name, Craig was an easy target for bullies during his junior high school years in Dallas, although he remembers one gym coach who’d known Jack telling the students to leave Craig alone. Worst of all, though, was facing Uncle Jack himself. “One Sunday, my dad insisted we go to see Jack in jail. Outside, a police car’s siren started up, and my uncle was standing there with this incredibly intense, wild-eyed look on his face, and he yelled, ‘You hear that? You hear that? They’re torturing Jews in the basement!’ That particular experience was traumatic enough to where talking about it right now, 50 years later, is turning my gut into a knot.” Rabbi Silverman, who later testified before the Warren Commission, also vividly remembers his jailhouse visits. “In prison, he deteriorated psychologically. One time I walked in, and he said, ‘Come on, Rabbi, duck underneath the table. They’re pouring oil on the Jews and setting it on fire.’ He was quite psychotic.” As a broadcast journalist, my initial connection to Jack Ruby’s eccentric family was through his sister Eva, who I convinced to appear on ABC’s “Good Night America” program in 1976. (The previous year, the show had made headlines by airing the Abraham Zapruder film of the JFK assassination on TV for the first time). I visited Eva several times at her Beverly Boulevard apartment in Los Angeles, where she once gave me the last piece of stationery from Jack’s Carousel Club. She introduced me to her brothers Earl, who owned a dry cleaning store in Detroit, and Sam, who lived in the L.A. suburb of Sylmar. Sam showed me the one picture he had of their immigrant parents, as well as the rusting car Jack drove to the Dallas police station the morning he shot Oswald. In 1991, Earl allowed me to rendezvous with him in Dallas on the day he retrieved Jack’s gun, which he won after a decades-long legal battle. I later exclusively showed the weapon on television for the first time since 1963, shortly before it was auctioned off for $220,000. The brothers also downplayed Jack’s ties to the mob. Sam leaned in close and lowered his voice, confiding, “These guys would come into Jack’s club, and you had to be nice to them, ya know.” Ironically, however, when Earl chose a place for us to meet in Dallas the day he was given Jack’s gun, he picked an Italian restaurant better known for its links to the Mafia than for its lasagna. Some conspiracy theorists believe Ruby was ordered to silence Oswald by his organized-crime contacts. Others, who think the murder was an impulsive act, point to Ruby’s fury over an anti-Kennedy advertisement in a Dallas newspaper the morning of the president’s visit. It was paid for by a right-wing Jewish activist named Bernard Weissman, which Ruby thought put Jews in a bad light. We will never know for sure. What Craig Ruby knows for certain is that he did not mourn his uncle’s death from cancer in 1967. His family had moved to Chicago by then. “I remember getting off the school bus on a cold January day, and saw a headline on the newsstand — ‘Jack Ruby Dead In Jail.’ I literally felt a weight lift from my shoulders. And I thought, ’Thank God it’s finally over.’ I was 15.” As for having a connection to one of the darkest moments in American history, Ruby’s view has not changed in 50 years. “I wish to God it hadn’t happened to us.” Steve North is a broadcast journalist with CBS News who’s been reporting on the Kennedy assassination since 1976.

Woodward, Bernstein to speak at Florida Atlantic University http://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/news/2013/11/05/woodward-bernstein-to-speak-at-fau.html?page=all

Prosecutor Says Kate Middleton’s Phone Was Hacked By ALAN COWELL The New York Times December 19, 2013 LONDON — A prosecutor in a high-profile trial accused Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid on Thursday of hacking into the voice mail of the Duchess of Cambridge when she was known as Kate Middleton before her marriage to Prince William, second in line to the throne. Transcripts read in court by the prosecutor, Andrew Edis, quoted the prince as saying “Hi, baby, it’s me” in one voice mail and referring to her as “babykins.” The transcripts were discovered during a police investigation into the phone hacking that convulsed Mr. Murdoch’s British tabloid newspaper empire after disclosures about its scope in 2011. The News of the World closed that year after the scandal erupted. The recordings were said to have been found in the belongings of Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator employed by The News of the World who served a jail term in 2007 for hacking royal phones. While there had been earlier accusations that phones used by members of the royal family had been hacked, the latest disclosure is certain to be seen as a bombshell as prosecutors press an array of charges against two former top Murdoch executives, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, and five other people. The messages were said by the prosecution to have been intercepted in 2006 while William was attending the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, five years before the couple married in 2011. Mr. Edis said messages left for Prince Harry, William’s younger brother, had also been intercepted.

The CIA and the Washington Post by NORMAN SOLOMON counterpunch.org December 18, 2013 http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/18/the-cia-and-the-washington-post/ News media should illuminate conflicts of interest, not embody them. But the owner of the Washington Post is now doing big business with the Central Intelligence Agency, while readers of the newspaper’s CIA coverage are left in the dark. The Post’s new owner, Jeff Bezos, is the founder and CEO of Amazon — which recently landed a $600 million contract with the CIA. But the Post’s articles about the CIA are not disclosing that the newspaper’s sole owner is the main owner of CIA business partner Amazon. Even for a multi-billionaire like Bezos, a $600 million contract is a big deal. That’s more than twice as much as Bezos paid to buy the Post four months ago. And there’s likely to be plenty more where that CIA largesse came from. Amazon’s offer wasn’t the low bid, but it won the CIA contract anyway by offering advanced high-tech “cloud” infrastructure. Bezos personally and publicly touts Amazon Web Services, and it’s evident that Amazon will be seeking more CIA contracts. Last month, Amazon issued a statement saying, “We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA.” As Amazon’s majority owner and the Post’s only owner, Bezos stands to gain a lot more if his newspaper does less ruffling and more soothing of CIA feathers. Amazon has a bad history of currying favor with the U.S. government’s “national security” establishment. The media watch group FAIR pointed out what happened after WikiLeaks published State Department cables: “WikiLeaks was booted from Amazon’s webhosting service AWS. So at the height of public interest in what WikiLeaks was publishing, readers were unable to access the WikiLeaks website.” How’s that for a commitment to the public’s right to know? Days ago, my colleagues at RootsAction.org launched a petition that says: “The Washington Post’s coverage of the CIA should include full disclosure that the sole owner of the Post is also the main owner of Amazon — and Amazon is now gaining huge profits directly from the CIA.” More than 15,000 people have signed the petition so far this week, with many posting comments that underscore widespread belief in journalistic principles. While the Post functions as a powerhouse media outlet in the Nation’s Capital, it’s also a national and global entity — read every day by millions of people who never hold its newsprint edition in their hands. Hundreds of daily papers reprint the Post’s news articles and opinion pieces, while online readership spans the world. Propaganda largely depends on patterns of omission and repetition. If, in its coverage of the CIA, the Washington Post were willing to fully disclose the financial ties that bind its owner to the CIA, such candor would shed some light on how top-down power actually works in our society. “The Post is unquestionably the political paper of record in the United States, and how it covers governance sets the agenda for the balance of the news media,” journalism scholar Robert W. McChesney points out. “Citizens need to know about this conflict of interest in the columns of the Post itself.” In a statement just released by the Institute for Public Accuracy, McChesney added: “If some official enemy of the United States had a comparable situation — say the owner of the dominant newspaper in Caracas was getting $600 million in secretive contracts from the Maduro government — the Post itself would lead the howling chorus impaling that newspaper and that government for making a mockery of a free press. It is time for the Post to take a dose of its own medicine.” From the Institute, we also contacted other media and intelligence analysts to ask for assessments; their comments are unlikely to ever appear in the Washington Post. “What emerges now is what, in intelligence parlance, is called an ‘agent of influence’ owning the Post – with a huge financial interest in playing nice with the CIA,” said former CIA official Ray McGovern. “In other words, two main players nourishing the national security state in undisguised collaboration.” A former reporter for the Washington Post and many other news organizations, John Hanrahan, said: “It’s all so basic. Readers of the Washington Post, which reports frequently on the CIA, are entitled to know — and to be reminded on a regular basis in stories and editorials in the newspaper and online — that the Post‘s new owner Jeff Bezos stands to benefit substantially from Amazon’s $600 million contract with the CIA. Even with such disclosure, the public should not feel assured they are getting tough-minded reporting on the CIA. One thing is certain: Post reporters and editors are aware that Bezos, as majority owner of Amazon, has a financial stake in maintaining good relations with the CIA — and this sends a clear message to even the hardest-nosed journalist that making the CIA look bad might not be a good career move.” The rich and powerful blow hard against the flame of truly independent journalism. If we want the lantern carried high, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” Information about the documentary based on the book is at www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.

This has nothing to do with Oswald or Levinson, which in both cases involved CIA controversies, but it does show the mindset of the CIA even today: ------------------------------------------------ Senators clash with Justice Department lawyer over CIA intelligence memos CIA nominee Caroline Krass angers intelligence committee by claiming legal opinions on torture are beyond its scope Share 32 · By Spencer Ackerman · theguardian.com, Tuesday 17 December 2013 19.52 EST · ) · Dianne Feinstein suggested Caroline Krass had placed her nomination as CIA general counsel in jeopardy. An argument about a secret congressional committee's ability to review the US intelligence agencies exploded into rare public view on Tuesday as angry senators demanded legal memos from a nominee to run the CIA's legal office. Caroline Krass, a top justice department lawyer, sparked the ire of several Senate intelligence committee members by claiming that crucial legal opinions about intelligence matters were beyond the scope of the committee. Asked directly and repeatedly if the Senate panel was entitled to the memos, which several senators claimed were crucial for performing their oversight functions, Krass replied: "I do not think so, as a general matter." Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the committee, suggested that Krass placed her nomination as CIA general counsel in jeopardy. "You are going to encounter some heat in that regard," Feinstein said. The Senate intelligence committee, whose public hearings are increasingly rare, is usually a bastion of support for the CIA and its sister intelligence agencies. The exception is the committee's prolonged fight with the CIA over a 6,300-page report on the agency's torture of terrorism detainees in its custody since 9/11. The committee has prepared its report for years; the former chairman, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, said the classified version contains 50,000 footnotes. For a year, the panel has sought to release a public version that multiple members of the panel say documents both the brutality of CIA torture and what they have called "lies" told by the CIA to the oversight committees in Congress and the rest of the executive branch concerning its torture practices. CIA director John Brennan, who was a senior CIA official during the years scrutinised by the committee, is resisting release of the report. The CIA has told reporters that the report contains numerous factual errors, which Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat on the panel, said on Tuesday was a "misleading" and self-serving description of differences of "interpretation" between the agency and the committee. "I'm more confident than ever in the factual accuracy" of the torture report, Udall said. The panel said at the hearing that the CIA is stalling on the provision of documents to the committee that will help it complete its work. Krass, a former White House official who worked alongside Brennan there, did not assure the committee she would help provide them. Krass said the general counsel of the CIA had a "duty and obligation to make sure the committee understands the legal basis" for CIA activities. She worried that disclosure of the legal memos themselves would inhibit the executive branch from candidly discussing policy proposals for fear of embarrassing public disclosure. Several senators found Krass's statement insufficient. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who has investigated torture while serving on the Armed Services Committee as well, asked if the committee was "entitled" to the opinions as a matter of oversight. Krass said her "caveated answer" was, "I do not think so, as a general matter." It is unclear if the committee will reject Krass's nomination. But the two-hour exchange highlighted the difficulties the intelligence committees can face in getting basic factual information from the intelligence agencies they are tasked with overseeing. Those difficulties carry over to the ongoing controversy about the NSA's bulk surveillance activities, Udall and his colleague Ron Wyden of Oregon have charged. But they are the only dissenters on a committee that has been stalwart in favour of the NSA, even as the committee is feuding with the CIA. Feinstein got Krass to say she disagreed with a federal judge's opinion on Monday that the NSA's bulk surveillance of US phone data was likely unconstitutional. Krass, who would have a limited ability to oversee that program at CIA but likely has insight into it through her Justice Department role, disputed Judge Richard Leon's assessment that such constitutional protections surround that data. "I have a different view about the Fourth Amendment," Krass said. Feinstein said she agreed with Krass, but said no one on the committee wished to contravene the constitution, urging the Supreme Court to settle the issue.

Inside the Saudi 9/11 coverup By Paul Sperry New York Post December 15, 2013 | 5:13am http://nypost.com/2013/12/15/inside-the-saudi-911-coverup/ After the 9/11 attacks, the public was told al Qaeda acted alone, with no state sponsors. But the White House never let it see an entire section of Congress’ investigative report on 9/11 dealing with “specific sources of foreign support” for the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals. It was kept secret and remains so today. President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report. Text isn’t just blacked-out here and there in this critical-yet-missing middle section. The pages are completely blank, except for dotted lines where an estimated 7,200 words once stood (this story by comparison is about 1,000 words). A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks. Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) can’t reveal the nation identified by it without violating federal law. So they’ve proposed Congress pass a resolution asking President Obama to declassify the entire 2002 report, “Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.” Some information already has leaked from the classified section, which is based on both CIA and FBI documents, and it points back to Saudi Arabia, a presumed ally. The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found “incontrovertible evidence” that Saudi government officials — not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom — helped the hijackers both financially and logistically. The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war. The findings, if confirmed, would back up open-source reporting showing the hijackers had, at a minimum, ties to several Saudi officials and agents while they were preparing for their attacks inside the United States. In fact, they got help from Saudi VIPs from coast to coast: LOS ANGELES: Saudi consulate official Fahad al-Thumairy allegedly arranged for an advance team to receive two of the Saudi hijackers — Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi — as they arrived at LAX in 2000. One of the advance men, Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi intelligence agent, left the LA consulate and met the hijackers at a local restaurant. (Bayoumi left the United States two months before the attacks, while Thumairy was deported back to Saudi Arabia after 9/11.) SAN DIEGO: Bayoumi and another suspected Saudi agent, Osama Bassnan, set up essentially a forward operating base in San Diego for the hijackers after leaving LA. They were provided rooms, rent and phones, as well as private meetings with an American al Qaeda cleric who would later become notorious, Anwar al-Awlaki, at a Saudi-funded mosque he ran in a nearby suburb. They were also feted at a welcoming party. (Bassnan also fled the United States just before the attacks.) WASHINGTON: Then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar and his wife sent checks totaling some $130,000 to Bassnan while he was handling the hijackers. Though the Bandars claim the checks were “welfare” for Bassnan’s supposedly ill wife, the money nonetheless made its way into the hijackers’ hands. Other al Qaeda funding was traced back to Bandar and his embassy — so much so that by 2004 Riggs Bank of Washington had dropped the Saudis as a client. The next year, as a number of embassy employees popped up in terror probes, Riyadh recalled Bandar. “Our investigations contributed to the ambassador’s departure,” an investigator who worked with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington told me, though Bandar says he left for “personal reasons.” FALLS CHURCH, VA.: In 2001, Awlaki and the San Diego hijackers turned up together again — this time at the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, a Pentagon-area mosque built with funds from the Saudi Embassy. Awlaki was recruited 3,000 miles away to head the mosque. As its imam, Awlaki helped the hijackers, who showed up at his doorstep as if on cue. He tasked a handler to help them acquire apartments and IDs before they attacked the Pentagon. Awlaki worked closely with the Saudi Embassy. He lectured at a Saudi Islamic think tank in Merrifield, Va., chaired by Bandar. Saudi travel itinerary documents I’ve obtained show he also served as the ­official imam on Saudi Embassy-sponsored trips to Mecca and tours of Saudi holy sites. Most suspiciously, though, Awlaki fled the United States on a Saudi jet about a year after 9/11. As I first reported in my book, “Infiltration,” quoting from classified US documents, the Saudi-sponsored cleric was briefly detained at JFK before being released into the custody of a “Saudi representative.” A federal warrant for Awlaki’s arrest had mysteriously been withdrawn the previous day. A US drone killed Awlaki in Yemen in 2011. HERNDON, VA.: On the eve of the attacks, top Saudi government official Saleh Hussayen checked into the same Marriott Residence Inn near Dulles Airport as three of the Saudi hijackers who targeted the Pentagon. Hussayen had left a nearby hotel to move into the hijackers’ hotel. Did he meet with them? The FBI never found out. They let him go after he “feigned a seizure,” one agent recalled. (Hussayen’s name doesn’t appear in the separate 9/11 Commission Report, which clears the Saudis.) SARASOTA, FLA.: 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and other hijackers visited a home owned by Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of King Fahd. FBI agents investigating the connection in 2002 found that visitor logs for the gated community and photos of license tags matched vehicles driven by the hijackers. Just two weeks before the 9/11 attacks, the Saudi luxury home was abandoned. Three cars, including a new Chrysler PT Cruiser, were left in the driveway. Inside, opulent furniture was untouched. Democrat Bob Graham, the former Florida senator who chaired the Joint Inquiry, has asked the FBI for the Sarasota case files, but can’t get a single, even heavily redacted, page released. He says it’s a “coverup.” Is the federal government protecting the Saudis? Case agents tell me they were repeatedly called off pursuing 9/11 leads back to the Saudi Embassy, which had curious sway over White House and FBI responses to the attacks. Just days after Bush met with the Saudi ambassador in the White House, the FBI evacuated from the United States dozens of Saudi officials, as well as Osama bin Laden family members. Bandar made the request for escorts directly to FBI headquarters on Sept. 13, 2001 — just hours after he met with the president. The two old family friends shared cigars on the Truman Balcony while discussing the attacks. Bill Doyle, who lost his son in the World Trade Center attacks and heads the Coalition of 9/11 Families, calls the suppression of Saudi evidence a “coverup beyond belief.” Last week, he sent out an e-mail to relatives urging them to phone their representatives in Congress to support the resolution and read for themselves the censored 28 pages. Astonishing as that sounds, few lawmakers in fact have bothered to read the classified section of arguably the most important investigation in US history. Granted, it’s not easy to do. It took a monthlong letter-writing campaign by Jones and Lynch to convince the House intelligence panel to give them access to the material. But it’s critical they take the time to read it and pressure the White House to let all Americans read it. This isn’t water under the bridge. The information is still relevant ­today. Pursuing leads further, getting to the bottom of the foreign support, could help head off another 9/11. As the frustrated Joint Inquiry authors warned, in an overlooked addendum to their heavily redacted 2002 report, “State-sponsored terrorism substantially increases the likelihood of successful and more ­lethal attacks within the United States.” Their findings must be released, even if they forever change US-Saudi relations. If an oil-rich foreign power was capable of orchestrating simultaneous bulls-eye hits on our centers of commerce and defense a dozen years ago, it may be able to pull off similarly devastating attacks today. Members of Congress reluctant to read the full report ought to remember that the 9/11 assault missed its fourth target: them. Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration” and “Muslim Mafia.”

Bill Moyers in the past decade has been terrific in attempting to expose publicly how America has gotten off on the wrong track. However, as Roger Stone points out he has studiously avoided talking about the role of LBJ in JFK's assassination, which was the principal starting point when America got off on the wrong track.

50 Reasons For 50 Years - Episode 50 Black Op Radio Published December 3, 2013

Amazon Wins Ruling for $600 Million CIA Cloud Contract By Edvard Pettersson Oct 7, 2013 11:01 PM CT http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-07/amazon-wins-ruling-for-600-million-cia-cloud-contract.html ------------------------------------ Authors and prospective authors should be aware of Amazon's relationship to the CIA. Did the CIA advise Bezos to purchase the Washington Post?

American Spy in Iran: TIME Talks to the Assassin at the Center of the Robert Levinson Saga In 2007, CIA contractor Robert Levinson met American exile Dawud Salahuddin on an Iranian resort island. Levinson was arrested and remains in Iranian detention. Salahuddin speaks out on the affair. By Karl Vick @karl_vickDec. 16, 20134 Comments TIME http://world.time.com/2013/12/16/american-born-assassin-in-iran-robert-levinson-never-said-he-was-working-for-the-cia/?iid=gs-main-lead Dawud Salahuddin, who was named David Belfield when he was growing up on Long Island, says he’s never regretted serving as an assassin for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Salahuddin converted to Islam as a young man and in July 1980, disguised as a mailman, he shot and killed the spokesman for the exiled Shah of Iran in the foyer of the man’s home in Bethesda, Md. Salahuddin then fled to Iran, where he has lived ever since. But something else has been a burden on the conscience of the American fugitive for more than six years: the fate of Robert Levinson, the retired FBI agent who was arrested by security officials while visiting Salahuddin in Iran in March 2007 and has not been seen since. “Not any more,” Salahuddin tells TIME. The revelation in several American news outlets over the weekend that Levinson was a CIA contractor aiming to turn Salahuddin into an agency “asset” leaves Salahuddin feeling only irritation and disappointment, he says. (The leaked news has also riled the CIA and politicians in Washington.) Salahuddin may have secrets worth knowing but no desire to work for a U.S. government he says he despises as deeply as Iran’s. “I’m not ready to trade on that kind of stuff,” Salahuddin says, speaking by telephone from his home in Karaj, a suburb of Tehran. “I consider that to be less than honorable. That’s all I’ll say about that. I might know some of those things, yeah, but I’m not a snitch, man.” The obvious question, then, is why did Salahuddin travel from suburban Tehran to the Persian Gulf island to meet a stranger? “Pure curiosity,” says Salahuddin. “I had nothing in it. No financial incentives, nada. I was just curious.” According to Salahuddin, Levinson was up-front about his history with the FBI, where he specialized in tracking money laundering. But Levinson indicated he was working for private clients, not any government, Salahuddin says. “He told me he was there on behalf of British American Tobacco, and he wanted to talk to some Iranian officials about cigarette smuggling in the Persian Gulf,” Salahuddin says. “We talked. Very nice man, very personable, anybody would feel comfortable with him. “Of course I had no idea that he was misrepresenting himself. And what has come out in the last few days, about him trying to cultivate me as a source, came as a surprise to me, a very unpleasant surprise. I never had any desire to work for the American government in any way, surreptitiously or otherwise. I never intimated that.” Nor did Levinson broach the topic in some six hours of conversation, which continued over dinner, Salahuddin says. Salahuddin recalls the visiting American “regaled me with past cases” and made allusions to the wealth of former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, “but as the hamburger commercial used to phrase it, ‘where’s the beef?’ He said we would get down to brass tacks the next day but that day never came.” Salahuddin is a well-known figure in expatriate circles in Tehran, the city where he has been marooned for more than half of his 63 years, waylaid on what he said was a promise by Iranian officials that he could continue on to China after fleeing the United States. He has worked as a journalist for state news outlets, traveled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet army, and parried overtures from Iranian security services to take on new assignments, including, he says, one request to hijack a Kuwaiti airliner and another to assassinate Saddam Hussein. Articulate, insightful – he was mentored by Said Ramadan, longtime aide to the Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Banna – and perhaps a bit lonely, Salahuddin meets with reporters who seek him out, and has been profiled in documentaries, books and magazines. In 2001, he showed up in the role a doctor in Kandahar, an Oscar-nominated feature film. He confirms he met Levinson through the author of a story for The New Yorker magazine, longtime NBC producer Ira Silverman, who had known Levinson as a source. Salahuddin and Levinson spoke two or three times by phone before Levinson proposed meeting in person on Kish, a resort island in the Persian Gulf foreigners can enter without a visa. The timing was less than auspicious, Salahuddin recalls pointing out. Just three months earlier, U.S. forces had detained five Iranians in northern Iraq, setting the stage for Iranian reprisals. “But he decided not to [postpone], and I figured that he might know something that I didn’t know,” Salahuddin says. “But he didn’t.” They met at the Maryam Hotel, where Levinson had booked them into the same room – a fatal error, Salahuddin came to realize. The presence of two Americans drew the attention of the Interior Ministry, whose officials routinely check hotel registrations. Both men were detained by ministry officials; Salahuddin spent the night in jail, and never saw Levinson again. “The notion that it was some kind of brilliant move on the part of Iranian intelligence is bullxxxx,” Salahuddin says. “It was dumb luck. I’ve been around these guys long enough to know when they’re on to something and when they get lucky. And those guys were lucky. If they were so damn efficient, they’d be able to keep their nuclear scientists alive.” Upon his release the next day, Salahuddin made inquiries, first at the hotel, and later with contacts in the security services, who signaled that Levinson was in their custody but would be released soon. When he wasn’t, Salahuddin took his story to the Financial Times, hoping to create pressure. He also met with Levinson’s wife when she traveled to Tehran, on a visit arranged by the Swiss embassy, which represents U.S. interests in Iran. Salahuddin said Levinson had talked at length about his her, and their seven children. “High school sweethearts,” Salahuddin says. “Deeply attached to each other.” Levinson’s whereabouts remain unknown. Iranian officials claim ignorance of the case, and there has been no sign of him since a “proof of life” video sent to his family in late 2010, followed by still photos early in 2011, in which Levinson looked gaunt and wore an orange jumpsuit. Salahuddin faced consequences as well. He brushes off the “veiled threats” from Iran’s security apparatus that followed, but laments the loss of his passport, and with it the ability to pursue overseas business opportunities. In 2009, he was fired from his job as a digital journalist for the state news service Press TV after walking out on election night rather than report the rigged re-election of then-President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, he says. “Long story short, over the years I have lost a lot of respect for the Iranian system,” Salahuddin says. “It relies on blunt force. Iranians are afraid of their government. The basis of their rule is not love and respect for their rulers, it’s fear. It has nothing to do with religion and, everything to do with power, corruption and enrichment.” Which does not mean he’s keen to return to America. “What is in the States for me, man? Jail.” He does, however, expect Levinson to surface, if he’s still alive. It’s the most plausible explanation, he says, for the news of Levinson’s ties finally surfacing, after years of news organizations voluntarily holding information back. “What I suppose is once [new President Hassan] Rouhani got into place they began to talk about this behind the scenes, and they figured out a way to get this guy released – I have no inside knowledge on this, it ‘s just the only thing that makes sense – allow both sides to save face and remove a potential impediment from the nuclear talks,” Saladdin says. “So I expect that the guy will show up in a place like Muscat, clean-shaven, new suit, pair of Gucci loafers and that’ll be the end of the story and both sides will save face.… For the first time, the Americans and the Iranians actually need each other, in a very real way. The Iranians because they need to get out from under these sanctions. And for the Americans, Mr. Obama needs a legacy. These separate sets of interests may allow this man to surface Read more: Robert Levinson Saga: U.S. Exile CIA Contractor Met in Iran Talks to TIME | TIME.com http://world.time.com/2013/12/16/american-born-assassin-in-iran-robert-levinson-never-said-he-was-working-for-the-cia/#ixzz2ngLvc15n

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=px-7IRJpMZE Preview of Mark Lane's Film.

The Dirty Secret of the Secret Service Published on Sunday, 15 December 2013 Florida Courant http://floridacourant.com/index.php/politics/political-news/u-s-politics/766-the-dirty-secret-of-the-secret-service The Dirty Secret of the Secret Service: President Kennedy Should Have Lived. “There wasn’t a thing we could have done to stop it” – so said former Kennedy Secret Service agent Gerald Blaine on his prosperous book tour and media blitz of 2010-2011 for his 2010 work titled The Kennedy Detail, an (extended list) NY Times best-seller which was also made into an Emmy-nominated Discovery Channel documentary and, rumor has it, will be made into a full length movie in 2014. The “it” Blaine is talking about is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, when the Secret Service lost a president for the first and only time in their officially-sanctioned watch (the other three presidents to die by the hand of assassins-Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley-did not have a White House Detail watching over them). “All the advantages went to the shooter that day- we didn’t have a chance to do anything to prevent it”- so said fellow former Kennedy Secret Service agent Clint Hill during several even more prosperous book tours and multiple media blitzes for The Kennedy Detail (Hill wrote the Foreword and contributed), his own 2012 work Mrs. Kennedy and Me, a #1 NY Times best-seller, and yet another NY Times best-seller, 2013’s Five Days In November. All three books were co-written by Lisa McCubbin, a 48 year old journalist close to Gerald Blaine (she had once dated his son) and is now in a romantic relationship with the 81 year old Hill. We will leave it at that. Those statements by Blaine and Hill are compelling. They are thought-provoking. They appear authoritative. And they are dead wrong. Let me back up a bit. I am not a conspiracy theorist. This past 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, while interesting on certain levels, bordered on overkill with the never ending barrage of internet articles, newspaper columns, television programs, and even movies in the theater. I would just as soon give it all a much needed rest. For the record, I join the majority of Americans in their disbelief that Lee Harvey Oswald (and, for that matter, his murderer Jack Ruby) acted totally alone with no assistance whatsoever. In fact, I even harbor much suspicion towards Kennedy’s successor, “Landslide” Lyndon Johnson (Roger Stone’s brilliant book The Man Who Killed Kennedy crystalized my thinking on the matter greatly). That said, all things being equal, I would just as soon see the country move on. Alas, it is time. Well, that was the way I felt until very recently. Quite by accident (aren’t all good revelations born of these random acts and occurrences?), I came across the work of a gentleman by the name of Vincent Palamara, the author of Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect President Kennedy. If that title is daunting to you, as well, then you know how I initially felt, as well. Mr. Palamara’s book was incongruously placed in the Travel Section of my local bookstore (by accident or by design, we will never truly know, I suppose). The title and the design of the book seemed to call out to me; a true square peg in round hole, so to speak. Once I began reading, I could not put the book down. In fact, I had to sit down to finish reading several chapters before I purchased the book, took it home, and finished it in a couple days. The verdict? Blaine and Hill have some serious explaining to do. Simply put, President Kennedy could have and should have survived Dallas, either unscathed or, at the very least, only the victim of an assassination attempt a la President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. The country would have been spared Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam, Richard Nixon and Watergate, and decades of doubt and Lord knows how many other crises, foibles and theories. Pretty bold conclusion, you say? Read the book. To summarize a bit: Contrary to popular mythology, it is the Secret Service, NOT the president, who is in charge of security. JFK’s two Secret Service Chiefs, U.E. Baughman and James Rowley (spanning careers in the Service from the 1920’s to the 1970’s between them), confirm this little known fact. Baughman conveyed this in his 1962 book Secret Service Chief, while Rowley testified under oath to the Warren Commission that “No President will tell the Secret Service what they can or cannot do”. Presidents Truman and (ironically) Johnson both said “The Secret Service was the only boss the President of the United States really had.” Indeed, an Associated Press story from November 15, 1963- a week before Kennedy’s death- stated: “The (Secret) Service can overrule even the President where his personal security is involved.” Evidently with an eye toward distant history and posterity, none other than Clint Hill himself told the Sixth Floor Museum in a 2010 oral history: “He can tell you what he wants done and he can tell you certain things but that doesn’t mean you have to do it. What we used to do was always agree with the President and then we’d do what we felt was best anyway.” (During another Sixth Floor Museum televised appearance with both Hill and Blaine, co-author Lisa McCubbin mentioned that, during the writing of The Kennedy Detail, she would find things that contradicted what Blaine was telling her [no doubt Palamara’s prolific online writings]. Ultimately, she copped out, stating “he was there”…no, he wasn’t there in Dallas and what about these contradictions? Luckily for history (and honesty), Mr. Palamara documents the contradictions in spades) So, the onus is truly on the Secret Service agents themselves, NOT the dead president who cannot defend himself, for what transpired, security-wise, in Dallas that dreadful November day. As Truman would say, the buck truly does stop with the Secret Service. This point becomes very important for one major reason: The Secret Service falsely blamed JFK for his own death after the assassination! No, he did not kill himself (surprised I never read that one before), but the president was not reckless with his own security to the level alleged in both Blaine and Hill’s works- the glad-handing JFK was fond of was no different than the kind that many other presidents have enjoyed thru the decades (and, notably, President Kennedy was NOT killed during at a crowded rope line but in his special limousine driven by a Secret Service agent on a motorcade route designed by Secret Service agents…and with security invoked by Secret Service agents). You see, Blaine, Hill, and their brethren have adopted the blame-the-victim mantra for quite some time, even before their books were even passing thoughts in their long-retired brains. As Mr. Palamara deftly details in his book, this was an institutional cover-up of agency malfeasance and gross negligence (or perhaps worse) that actually has its genesis through the direct actions of one specific agent: Floyd Boring, second in command of the White House Detail and the planner of the Texas trip (from the agency’s perspective, at least). There is no doubt that Mr. Boring told Clint Hill (later LBJ’s #1 agent) and others not to ride on the rear of the presidential limousine right before the start of JFK’s ill-fated Texas tour…and there is also no doubt that the substance of these remarks was, at best, an exaggerated relay of presidential kindness (what Boring conveyed to the ARRB in 1996), or, at worst, a total fabrication with sinister connotations (what Palamara greatly alludes to in his book from many documented sources and former agent statements. Ironically, included in that mountain of evidence are the statements of Mr. Boring himself, who categorically denied that there was ANY truth to the allegation that JFK ever ordered the agents off his limousine!). If that wasn’t enough, President Kennedy was also blamed for the depletion of the motorcycle formation in Dallas (quantity and quality of outriders) that the HSCA deemed was “uniquely insecure”. Again, through scrupulous documentation and testimony, Palamara has discovered that these were Secret Service decisions falsely blamed on the dead president. In addition, a Secret Service agent who drove the follow-up car that day in Dallas (and who believed there was a conspiracy, mind you), Sam Kinney, was adamant to Palamara that HE was solely responsible for the bubbletop’s removal from the presidential limousine and that JFK had nothing to do with this at all. I went to Palamara’s You Tube channel and the ghosts from the dead- deceased agents Kinney, Behn, Boring, and Lawton- confirm this and more. Chilling…and disturbing. But it gets even worse. Mr. Blaine writes, on page 74 of his book: "... the only way to have a chance at protecting the president against a shooter from a tall building would be to have agents posted on the back of the car." Blaine later writes, on page 184: “None of the agents understood why he [JFK] was willing to be so reckless [by allegedly ordering the agents off his limousine].” Both statements are false. In what can only be termed a major discovery of epic proportions, Palamara discovered that multi-story buildings were guarded countless times before Dallas (but not, unfortunately, during the Dallas trip)! Yes, you read that correctly: during many prior motorcades during the life of President Kennedy, not just as an after-the-fact reaction to his murder, agents and/ or police and/ or the military manned and guarded multi-story buildings. Obviously, the implications are disturbing: why was this NOT done in Dallas? Even if one chooses to believe that Oswald was a lone-nut assassin acting alone, he would have been spotted and neutralized long before a shot was fired. Ironically, it was Mr. Blaine himself who was the lead advance agent for the President’s trip to Tampa, Florida, the major trip before Dallas. Want to know what kind of security JFK received (as compared to Dallas)? Here you go: As confirmed by Tampa motorcycle police officer Russell Groover and the Final Survey Report of Mr. Blaine himself (yep, it’s in writing), multi-story buildings were guarded during the motorcade. And, get this: this was the longest motorcade JFK ever was involved in…ever! Far longer and more involved than the one in Dallas. So, they found the manpower and wherewithal to protect President Kennedy in this fashion, yet, during a far shorter route that, obviously, required much less manpower in comparison, NO BUILDINGS WERE GUARDED! Does that make sense…at all? To add insult to injury, Chief Inspector Michael Torina-who wrote the Secret Service’s own manual, for God’s sake- confirmed to both Palamara and in an obscure 1962 book that guarding buildings was a matter of routine protocol, as also confirmed by Chief U.E. Baughman and in several contemporary newspaper articles from 1961-1963 that Palamara, once again on his own, uncovered. Amazing. The implications are, once again, mind-boggling: President Kennedy was not guarded as he should have been. What else happened in Tampa that did not happen (as it should have) in Dallas: -agents on the rear of the limo (other than Clint Hill, briefly, 4 times before they got to Dealey Plaza. And, by Hill’s brief presence on the limousine, this further demonstrates that there was NO order from JFK not to be there); -military aide in front seat between driver and agent in charge (McHugh was asked, for the first time in Dallas, not to ride there!); -press photographers flatbed truck in front of limo (canceled at last minute at Love Field); -fast speed of cars (slow in Dallas); -ASAIC Boring on trip (SAIC Gerald Behn and his immediate assistant Boring always accompanied JFK in motorcades. A third-stringer, Kellerman, goes in their place); -multiple motorcycles running next to JFK in a wedge formation (they did 11/18-11/22/63 [morning in Fort Worth]...until Dallas); -White House Press Photographer Cecil Stoughton riding in follow-up car taking photos (he did 11/18-11/21/63...until they got to Dallas); -Pierre Salinger on trip (Assistant Malcolm Kilduff makes his first trip on his own to Texas; Salinger said he missed only "one or two trips" with JFK...Texas was one of them!); -Dr Burkley close to JFK (Burkley protested being placed far away from JFK in Dallas, for this was the only time, save in Rome, this ever happened to him); -military and/or police lining the streets and overpasses and facing the crowd. If the agents were closer to JFK, the assassination either does not happen or is prevented; if the military aide was present, he would have been yet another important eye and ear witness (and in the line of fire, as well); if the press- and still and motion photographers- would have been there, we would not need Abraham Zapruder’s grainy, inconclusive, amateur footage to tell us what happened (and they would have been professional eye and ear witnesses themselves); if the cars were going faster, the shots were much less likely to have found their mark (or even to have been fired in the first place); if the #1 or #2 agent would have been on the scene in Dallas, it would have been far less likely that some of the insubordination that occurred would have stood a chance of happening (such as when a shift leader who later became very close to LBJ, Emory Roberts, ordered a couple agents away from the limousine at Love Field and during the assassination itself [it was Palamara who discovered/ popularized the video of the agent’s perplexed reaction at the Dallas airport]); if there would have been more motorcycles next to JFK in their standard wedge formation, not only would there (again) have been more professional eye and ear witnesses, more importantly, JFK would have been more covered from an assassin or assassins; if the White House photographer would have been where he was allowed to be beforehand (in the follow-up car behind JFK’s limousine and, intermittently, on the rear of the limousine[JFK didn’t seem to mind that, either]), as with his cohorts in the flatbed truck, he would have been yet another professional eye and ear witness with a camera; if Salinger would have been on the trip, it would have been far less likely that the printing of the exact motorcade route- and the changes made to it-would have escaped his experienced notice; if Dr. Burkley would have been allowed to be closer to JFK as he wanted to be (and normally was), not only would we have had yet another experienced eye and ear witness, the doctor would have been able to provide quality care to a wounded president; and if the military and police would have been lining the streets and facing the crowd, no organized plot or lone nut would have stood a chance. “There wasn’t a thing we could have done to stop it” - are you kidding me? “All the advantages went to the shooter that day- we didn’t have a chance to do anything to prevent it”- unbelievable. Indeed, the buck stops with the Secret Service. Blaine and Hill are peddling prevarications for profit. Kudos to Vincent Palamara for exposing them for what they are, what they did, and what they should have done and did not do. President Kennedy deserved much better than he received from his “Kennedy Detail”…and so do we. By Mike Picetti

McCain: CIA 'did not tell truth to Congress' in Robert Levinson case • Senator says Iran knows fate of former FBI agent • Foreign minister: Iran has 'no traces' of American Associated Press in Washington · · theguardian.com, Sunday 15 December 2013 14.08 EST · http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/robert-levinson-cia-iran-john-mccain Senator John McCain suggested on Sunday that the CIA has not been forthcoming with Congress regarding details about an American who disappeared while on a secret intelligence mission to Iran. Iran's foreign minister, meanwhile, asserted that Robert Levinson was "not incarcerated by the government and I believe the government runs, pretty much, good control of the country". An Associated Press investigation, published on Thursday, found that Levinson was working for the CIA, investigating the Iranian government, when he went missing in 2007. The US long has publicly described Levinson as a private citizen who traveled to an Iranian island on private business. McCain told CNN "the CIA did not tell the truth to the Congress" about the case. He added that he is confident the US is doing all it can to learn what has happened to Levinson, but he said he is disturbed that the Obama administration has not been more forthcoming with information. McCain said he doesn't "think there's any doubt" about whether Iran knows Levinson's fate. But the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, asked on CBS' Face the Nation where Levinson is, replied: "I have no idea." "If we can trace him and find him, we will certainly discuss" returning him to the United States, Zarif added, though he made clear that "we have no traces of him in Iran". Secretary of State John Kerry dismissed a suggestion by Levinson's family that the US government was not doing enough to find out what happened to Levinson. "There hasn't been progress in the sense that we don't have him back. But to suggest that we have abandoned him or anybody has abandoned him is simply incorrect … and not helpful," he told ABC's This Week. "The fact is I have personally raised the issue not only at the highest level … but also through other intermediaries. So we don't have any meeting with anybody who has something to do with Iran or an approach to Iran where we don't talk to them about how we might be able to find not just Levinson, but we have two other Americans that we're deeply concerned about." Right now, Kerry said, "we're looking for proof of life". Iran's press counselor at the United Nations called on Washington to explain Levinson's mission in Iranian territory, after the AP investigation revealed that the former FBI agent had been on an unauthorized assignment for the CIA when he vanished on Iran's Kish Island in March 2007. US officials have raised the Levinson case with Iran repeatedly over the years. But until the AP investigation was published, it was not known that Levinson was hoping to gather information in his role as an independent contract investigator who expected to be compensated by a group of analysts at the CIA. After he vanished, the CIA at first told lawmakers he had previously done contract work for the agency, but that he had no current relationship with the agency and there was no connection to Iran. However, in October 2007, Levinson's lawyer discovered emails in which Levinson told a CIA friend that he was working to develop a source with access to the Iranian government. The emails were turned over to the Senate intelligence committee, which touched off an internal CIA investigation. Three veteran analysts were forced out of the CIA and seven others were disciplined as a result of a breach of agency rules. The last photos and video of a bearded, emaciated Levinson were released anonymously to his family in 2010 and early 2011. Investigators say his trail has grown cold since.

Paul: "There may be incremental improvements in our understanding of Intelligence ties to Oswald, and that's good." This is a great phrase to use in what we do here on the forum in regard to JFK's assassination. Brick by brick we are building a more complete and accurate picture of what occurred and the subsequent impact it has had on the world.