Douglas Caddy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd3umyNpufM&feature=player_embedded

Ex-FBI agent who watched JFK autopsy reflects on death Updated 11/22/2009 8:54 AM USA TODAY By Glenn Miller, The (Fort Myers, Fla.) News-Press [Please click on the link below to read the full article] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-11-22-jfk-assassination-anniversary_N.htm Jim Sibert has answered the questions for 46 years, ever since the night he observed the autopsy of President John F. Kennedy. Over the years, the former FBI special agent has been interviewed for books and calls and questions keep coming from teachers, authors and historians. Now, as another anniversary of the assassination arrives, Sibert, 91, was asked again about that historic day, Nov. 22, 1963. "It started out like a normal day," Sibert said. At the time, Sibert was a 45-year-old FBI special agent stationed in Maryland and only a year younger than Kennedy. Late in the day, the president of the United States lay dead in front of him with a hole in his head. "It was a piece blown out of the skull," Sibert said. Sibert and another agent, Frances X. O'Neill, met the casket at Andrews Air Force Base and accompanied it to Bethesda Naval Hospital. They were assigned to watch the autopsy, stay with the body and, as Sibert and O'Neill noted in a report dictated four days after the examination, "to obtain bullets reportedly in the president's body." When Kennedy's body was removed from its casket and white sheets were unwrapped from him, Sibert recalls how the one around his head was blood soaked. "His eyes were fixed open," Sibert recalled. No clothing came with the slain president. The suit Kennedy wore in the open-topped limousine had been cut off in Dallas, where he was gunned down. More than a single bullet? What happened in Dallas that day remains contested with factions still debating whether Lee Harvey Oswald was the only shooter or if he was part of a wide-ranging conspiracy. "I don't buy the single-bullet theory," Sibert said. "I won't go as far as to say there was no conspiracy." Sibert and O'Neill's report, titled "Autopsy of Body of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy," stated that Commander James J. Humes, who conducted the autopsy, noted another wound. "During the latter stages of this autopsy, Dr. Humes located an opening which appeared to be a bullet hole which was below the shoulders and two inches to the right of the middle line of the spinal column," Sibert and O'Neill reported. Sibert won't guess on possible conspirators, on who else may have shot Kennedy other than Oswald. "I wouldn't have any way of knowing," Sibert said. "See, that's another thing. All my work was in Bethesda, Md." The FBI, Sibert said, had no jurisdiction in the investigation. The FBI website notes that "When President Kennedy was assassinated, the crime was a local homicide; no federal law addressed the murder of a president." Focused on duty During the autopsy, Sibert couldn't let the magnitude of the event overwhelm his duty. "You just kind of think this happened to the president of the United States," Sibert said. Sibert recalls the somber atmosphere during the president's autopsy. "There wasn't any joking," Sibert said. "No comic remarks made." The experience, Sibert said, didn't change him profoundly. But every now and then the former World War II bomber pilot who continued with the FBI until 1972 gets calls from people who are still curious. There are also the memories of the history he witnessed. "The other thing was the ferocity of the wounds," Sibert said. "That's tough. I never had nightmares, but it's something that flashes through my mind a lot of times." Still, he's not obsessed with what he saw or what may have been behind the assassination. "I don't think about it every day," Sibert said. "Generally when something comes up, an article in the paper, something about the assassination, somebody wants to know about it. It's just another incident in your bureau career that you handled the best you could."

New book claims Marilyn Monroe told Jackie about her affair with JFK: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2384446/JFK-book-Marilyn-Monroe-confessed-affair-Jackie-replied-great-Ill-problems.html

I watched CNN’S “Our Nixon” last night. It was a two-hour special that essentially was a long series of commercials with snippets about Nixon squeezed in-between. I have never seen so many commercials in a single television program. It had been billed as comprising home movies made primarily by John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, and Dwight Chapin. There were indeed snippets from these home movies but old TV interviews of the key White House staffers were far more dominant in the show. The only new insight came from an interview late in the program wherein Ehrlichman, years after Watergate, revealed that he come to the conclusion that he had not possessed a “full deck” in assessing Nixon’s real role in Watergate. From what he said I deduced that Nixon purposely kept from his closest aides throughout the Watergate scandal and thereafter information about his implementing a plan to kill Castro in 1960 that led to the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1962 and culminated in JFK’s assassination in 1963. Both Howard Hunt and Nixon were aware of his role and an aspect of it may have been a key purpose of the break-in of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex. But Nixon kept this information from Erhlichman, Haldeman, Chapin, John Mitchell, John Dean and others, who paid the ultimate price of disgrace by imprisonment for their roles in the Watergate cover-up. These aides were kept in the dark about Nixon’s personal stake in the cover-up and were essentially used as pawns by him to mask his role in setting into motion in 1960 a plan that ultimately led to the death of President Kennedy, although of course the latter’s assassination was never Nixon’s intent.

I watched CNN’S “Our Nixon” last night. It was a two-hour special that essentially was a long series of commercials with snippets about Nixon squeezed in-between. I have never seen so many commercials in a single television program. It had been billed as comprising home movies made primarily by John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, and Dwight Chapin. There were indeed snippets from these home movies but old TV interviews of the key White House staffers were far more dominant in the show. The only new insight came from an interview late in the program wherein Ehrlichman, years after Watergate, revealed that he come to the conclusion that he had not possessed a “full deck” in assessing Nixon’s real role in Watergate. From what he said I deduced that Nixon purposely kept from his closest aides throughout the Watergate scandal and thereafter information about his implementing a plan to kill Castro in 1960 that led to the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1962 and culminated in JFK’s assassination in 1963. Both Howard Hunt and Nixon were aware of his role and an aspect of it may have been a key purpose of the break-in of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex. But Nixon kept this information from Erhlichman, Haldeman, Chapin, John Mitchell, John Dean and others, who paid the ultimate price of disgrace by imprisonment for their roles in the Watergate cover-up. These aides were kept in the dark about Nixon’s personal stake in the cover-up and were essentially used as pawns by him to mask his role in setting into motion in 1960 a plan that ultimately led to the death of President Kennedy, although of course the latter’s assassination was never Nixon’s intent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqo2c_SxQag&feature=player_embedded

http://tv.nytimes.com/2013/08/01/arts/television/our-nixon-a-cnn-documentary-about-white-house-cameras.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-30/nixon-jokes-with-dirty-tricks-men-on-white-house-video.html

A Kennedy Baby’s Life and Death By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D. The New York Times July 29, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/health/a-kennedy-babys-life-and-death.html?pagewanted=all WASHINGTON — Fifty years ago this summer, the nation was transfixed by a medical drama that is now largely forgotten: the desperate struggle to save the life of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, the first baby born to a sitting president and first lady since the 19th century. Five and a half weeks premature, delivered by Caesarean section on Aug. 7, 1963, at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod, Patrick weighed a relatively robust 4 pounds 10 1/2 ounces. But he immediately began having trouble breathing, three of his doctors recalled in recent interviews — the first they have given publicly. His father, President John F. Kennedy, kept asking them, “Will he be retarded?,” one of the doctors said. (His younger sister Rosemary was born mentally retarded.) With the answer unknowable, a senior physician directed attention to the medical team’s immediate role — saving Patrick’s life. It was a battle that would almost certainly have a different outcome today. Patrick died just 39 hours after his birth, a victim of what was then the most common cause of death among premature infants in the United States, killing an estimated 25,000 babies each year: hyaline membrane disease, now known as respiratory distress syndrome. His story bears retelling because it highlights the enormous advances in neonatal care over the last half century, and provides a rare glimpse into how a president dealt with a major emotional event. The term hyaline refers to a glassy membrane that can form in the air sacs of premature infants, impeding their ability to extract oxygen from inhaled air. At the time, medicine had little to offer babies with the disease, other than warm incubators and good nursing care; if a baby made it through on its own for 48 hours, its chances of survival were good. (Newton, Einstein, Picasso and Churchill are cited as examples of preemies who survived.) Jacqueline Kennedy had a history of troubled pregnancies; she had already had one miscarriage and had delivered a stillborn daughter, in addition to their children, Caroline, then 5, and John Jr., then 2. In Patrick’s first hours, his mother’s obstetrician, Dr. John W. Walsh, called Boston Children’s Hospital, a Harvard affiliate. He spoke with the hospital’s chief resident in pediatrics, Dr. James Hughes. Dr. Hughes, who now lives in Vermont, says he suspected the call was a hoax. But he was able to verify it, and he called an attending pediatrician, Dr. James E. Drorbaugh, who promptly asked his patients to reschedule their appointments, left his office and jumped on a helicopter flight to the Otis hospital. Dr. Drorbaugh — now in Hawaii — remembers being greeted by the president, who asked him to examine the baby. Finding Patrick in moderate distress, “with a rapid respiratory rate and grunting, with lots of effort going into each breath,” he advised transferring the infant to Boston. The president asked if the Children’s Hospital facilities could be brought to the Cape, but Dr. Drorbaugh replied that they could not be. Before leaving Otis, Dr. Drorbaugh said President Kennedy asked him to join him in wheeling the baby into the first lady’s room. She reached into the Isolette and held Patrick’s hand for about 10 minutes — the last time she would see him alive. The baby was rushed back to Boston. In those days there were no neonatal I.C.U.’s, and ventilators, a standard therapy today, had yet to be used for premature babies. Moreover, it was August, and most of the senior physicians were on vacation, recalled a third doctor, Welton M. Gersony, then training in pediatric cardiology. “The junior doctors felt overwhelmed and were desperate to get a senior person,” said Dr. Gersony, who later became chief of pediatric cardiology at what is now Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. So the hospital called Dr. Gersony’s mentor, Dr. Alexander S. Nadas, a pioneer in pediatric cardiology, who arrived the next day, Thursday, Aug. 8, from Cape Cod. Patrick’s breathing had become even more labored and Dr. Nadas said, “Welton, we go see the president” — his Hungarian accent turning the w’s into v’s. Dr. Gersony said President Kennedy appeared “tanned, calm, cool and very polite as Dr. Nadas explained some of the things we would do.” To his insistence on knowing whether the baby would be retarded, Dr. Nadas responded, “Mr. President, we are trying to save the baby’s life.” The president dropped the subject. Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary, conveyed a message from Mrs. Kennedy’s sister, Lee Radziwill, who urged the president to send for Dr. Samuel Z. Levine, a prominent Manhattan pediatrician who had cared for her own premature baby. Secret Service agents located him strolling in Central Park and whisked the startled physician to Boston. Dr. Hughes, the chief resident in pediatrics, recalled that Dr. Levine told the president, “I am very impressed with the efficiency of government” — to which Kennedy, a veteran of political battles with the American Medical Association, replied, “It’s about time you doctors learned that.” At the time, Boston Children’s Hospital was using a pressurized device called a hyperbaric chamber to increase blood oxygen in so-called blue babies — those with congenital heart defects that deprived them of enough oxygen. The hospital had tried the procedure on preemies two or three times without success, but lacking anything else to offer Patrick, the team thought it was worth the medical equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. The doctors told the president of the risks, including blindness from excess oxygen; whether he discussed them with his wife, who remained hospitalized on Cape Cod, is unclear. Through a window in the 31-by-8-foot steel chamber, the president gazed at his son. At first he seemed to improve, but not for long. He died in the early hours of Friday, Aug. 9. During the ordeal, the president rarely showed emotions to those around him. But after retreating to his private room in the hospital, close aides have written, he wept. Patrick’s death was eclipsed a few months later by Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, and it is barely remembered today. But at the time, it sparked interest in research on prematurity. Over the next decade or so, innovations from physicians, nurses and others led to bold and successful treatments for babies of increasingly lower birth weights. In particular, scientists discovered that hyaline membrane disease resulted from a deficiency of surfactant, a substance that lines the air sacs in the lungs. Surfactant replacement shortened the length of ventilation therapy. This and other advances gave rise to a new specialty, neonatology. The risks of cognitive impairment are somewhat higher for babies like Patrick than those for a baby born at full term. But even with the advances today, many more severely affected premature babies develop devastating complications that keep them in costly neonatal units for months and affect their neurological and cognitive functions later in life. Ethical debates continue over when and how long neonatal care should be given. As physicians often do in reviewing their clinical judgment in managing a difficult case, Dr. Drorbaugh said he had often wondered whether “we did the right thing” in putting Patrick in the chamber. “Before we had any thought of the hyperbaric chamber, we watched these babies struggle and struggle and go downhill, and some of them survived,” he said, “so we can’t arbitrarily say because we thought he was going downhill, he would not have survived.” But this much is known: If Patrick were being born in August 2013, his odds of surviving would be better than 95 percent.

Bad management drives talent from CIA, internal reports suggest Frustration with poor managers is costing the CIA some of its most talented staff, internal surveys and former officers say http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cia-management-20130730,0,3286082,full.story By Ken Dilanian Los Angeles Times July 29, 2013, 7:54 p.m. WASHINGTON — For the Central Intelligence Agency, he was a catch: an American citizen who had grown up overseas, was fluent in Mandarin and had a master's degree in his field. He was working in Silicon Valley, but after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he wanted to serve his country. The analyst, who declined to be named to shield his association with the CIA, was hired in 2005 into the agency's Directorate of Intelligence, where he was assigned to dig into Chinese politics. He said he was dismayed to discover that unimpressive managers wielded incredible power and suffered no consequences for mistakes. Departments were run like fiefdoms, he said, and "very nasty internecine battles" were a fixture. By 2009, he had left the CIA. He now does a similar job for the U.S. military. CIA officials often assert that while the spy agency's failures are known, its successes are hidden. But the clandestine organization celebrated for finding Osama bin Laden has been viewed by many of its own people as a place beset by bad management, where misjudgments by senior officials go unpunished, according to internal CIA documents and interviews with more than 20 former officers. Fifty-five percent of respondents to a 2009 agency-wide survey who said they were resigning or thinking about it cited poor management as the main reason, according to a 2010 report on retention by the agency's internal watchdog that mirrored the findings of a 2005 report. Although the CIA's overall rate of employee turnover is unusually low, the report cited "challenges" in the retention of officers with unique and crucial skills, such as field operatives. The heavily redacted, unclassified report by the CIA's inspector general was turned over to the Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau recently, two years after a request was filed under the Freedom of Information Act. Retired CIA officers who talk regularly with former colleagues say little has changed. CIA employees are generally prohibited from speaking to the news media and are grilled during periodic polygraph exams about any contacts with reporters. "Perceptions of poor management, and a lack of accountability for poor management, comprised five of the top 10 reasons why people leave or consider leaving CIA and were the most frequent topic of concern among those who volunteered comments," the inspector general's report says. CIA employees complained of "poor first-line supervision, lack of communication about work-related matters and lack of support for prudent risk taking," the report says. The raw numbers in the survey were blacked out, but CIA human resources officials said in interviews that those who were considering leaving represented about 12% of the respondents. Other internal surveys suggest that most CIA employees have confidence in their managers, the officials asserted — but they declined to release the results. The officials acknowledged that the inspector general's report identified long-standing concerns about the CIA's culture. In response, they say, they have placed new emphasis on training and evaluating managers. They touted three leadership courses that are required for senior officials as a condition of promotion, all of which were started before the report. "I really think you would see a different result if the [inspector general] would come back and ask those same questions," said John Pereira, the CIA's chief of corporate learning. The inspector general's report concluded, however, that "none of these initiatives include a mechanism for improving accountability for poor management." Seven of 19 reviews of the CIA posted from 2010 to 2012 on Glassdoor, a website that allows employees to review their workplaces anonymously, cite bad management. CIA officials acknowledged they had not implemented any specific new accountability measures since the July 2010 report, which criticized a lack of progress on that front after a 2005 inspector general's report that also noted a high level of complaints about bad management. "Since the 2005 report on retention, the agency has taken no significant actions to address management accountability with regard to poor management that may lead to high rates of attrition," the 2010 report says. Complaints about management are most concentrated in the National Clandestine Service, the CIA's spying and covert action arm, where 71% of employees who had left or were considering leaving cited bad management as a reason. Such complaints are acute among newer employees, "who have exhibited high resignation rates in recent years," the report says. Although the CIA's overall annual attrition rate is low at 3.5% — compared with a government-wide rate of 6% — that figure masks the premature departure of some of the most creative people who joined after Sept. 11 attacks, former CIA employees say. "After a while you say, 'You know what? I love my country, but I can serve in other ways,'" said Aki Peritz, who tracked terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi while working as a CIA counter-terrorism analyst in Iraq but left the agency in 2009 and now works at Third Way, a Washington think tank. "The more adventurous people, the risk takers, tend to throw up their hands and leave," said a former CIA manager who did not want to call attention to his association with the agency. "You end up with the C's, the people willing to hang in and put up with it." The toll of such departures is difficult to quantify, but CIA veterans see the consequences in breakdowns such as what happened in 2011 in Lebanon, when CIA informants were arrested in part because of poor tradecraft by agency officers, current and former U.S. officials said. And they see it in the CIA's flat-footed response to the Middle East's political tumult, which led President Obama in 2011 to express his disappointment with the intelligence community. No career has suffered over either failure, U.S. officials say. In October 2010, three months after the inspector general criticized a lack of management accountability at the CIA, an independent review found "systemic failures" in the operation that allowed an Al Qaeda suicide bomber to kill seven agency personnel and injure six others in Khost, Afghanistan, in 2009. No one was fired or disciplined. No CIA officer was punished in the case of a German citizen named Khaled Masri, who in 2003 was mistakenly identified as a terrorist, kidnapped by CIA officers in Macedonia and sent to a secret prison for interrogation in Afghanistan, officials say. "We do fire people here at the agency," Pereira said, adding that the agency also has demoted, suspended or reprimanded managers. "We can't give you specific numbers, obviously." Some of the CIA's problems stem from its hidebound bureaucratic structure, said Peritz, who left the agency in part because of dissatisfaction with his supervisors. "CIA is a 1950s-style top-down organization where you come in at the bottom and move your way up the ranks," he said. Directors come and go, but "if you look at the people who actually make the decisions, they've been there for 25, 30 years. They've never actually worked in the private sector." Added the former China analyst: "People warned me about the bureaucracy, but when I think of bureaucracy, I think of things taking a long time, forms to be filled out, inefficient processes. What I wasn't prepared for was the culture. It was the most bizarre place I have ever worked." Failing managers are allowed to stay in their jobs too long and given too many chances, said Susan Hasler, who served in the Directorate of Intelligence from 1983 to 2004. "I used to call them rotating attrition specialists," she said. "I know one who cleared out two or three branches before they finally determined that he wasn't management material. In the meantime, he ruined a number of careers." Charles "Sam" Faddis, a former case officer in Iraq, wrote a book in 2009 titled "Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA" that skewered the agency's management. Faddis recalled a chat with an agency veteran in 2003 who had just spent time training new hires at the Farm, as the Virginia training center is known. "He was awed by the quality of the recruits," Faddis said, but he was concerned about "whether we will prove worthy of these people. He said they are going to go to the field and there is a chance they are going to be horribly disillusioned. And I think that has come to pass." ken.dilanian@latimes.com

The same crew of individuals was involved in both the Kennedy assassination and the Watergate break-in. Many in the media as the Watergate scandal took on ominous tones wondered aloud and in print how the burglars could have been so reckless in their undertaking. “Reckless” was a word that was tossed about frequently at the time. It is speculation on my part that those involved in the planning and execution of the Watergate break-in probably discussed what might happen if their undertaking were awry, as it ultimately did. They may have been lulled into a sense of false security by what took place in the wake of the Kennedy assassination when President Lyndon Johnson orchestrated a cover-up to make certain the truth would never emerge, thus insulating the same crew from being exposed and prosecuted. Hunt in his death bed confession placed LBJ at the top of the pyramid of assassins. The crew members may have thought that if they escaped with the connivance of the highest higher-up in 1963, why wouldn’t they escape in 1972 with Nixon as president should things go awry? After all it was Nixon in 1960 with his plan to kill Castro that set in motion the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1962 and culminated in the killing of JFK the next year, the latter’s death being a development Nixon never dreamed would be the result of his 1960 plan, whose intent was to kill Castro, certainly not the President of the U.S. There is also the lingering and unresolved question of whether Nixon ordered or had advance knowledge of the break-in. From the time the Watergate case broke on June 17, 1972, Nixon must have lived with mind-numbing fear that Hunt would talk about 1963, which would lead back inevitably to 1960. This fear showed up in Nixon’s comments in the oval office tapes where he used the Bay of Pigs invasion as a code word for the Kennedy assassination. Hunt with his demands after Watergate broke had Nixon over a barrel, which both of them realized. But 1972 turned out to be different from 1963 because there was no way that Nixon even as president could control the evolution of the criminal case and prevent the five burglars and Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt from being prosecuted. His closest ally in a cover-up cause, who was also LBJ’s closest ally in the prior cover-up cause, would have been FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who unfortunately for Nixon had died six weeks before the Watergate case broke. Had Hoover been alive when Watergate broke, he would have lived in fear also that it could lead back to 1963 when he wasted no time in pinpointing of Oswald as the lone trigger man. Watergate was a form of karma or perhaps of what goes around comes around, albeit on a mindboggling scale.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/movies/our-nixon-uses-hundreds-of-reels-shot-by-staff-members.html?_r=0

No, I did not get this information in my capacity as an attorney in the Watergate case. I received it earlier this year from an extremely reliable source with whom I do not have a legal relationship. There is a chance that the information may be authenticated in an undisputable fashion in the near future.

I think you are right, Bill, about Dallas with Frank Sturgis as a shooter and Howard Hunt as his spotter.

Sorry but this is the way the article came out when copied although in its print and online edition the type was large and easy to read. However, in the article I posted above I included a link to the article both at the beginning and end. By clicking on either link, the original comes up and can be easily read.

A President and His Men A Revealing Look at Richard Nixon Through the Private Films of His Closest Advisers The Wall Street Journal July 26, 2013 By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324110404578627964253211762.html Let there be no misconception about this playfully named film, bitter at the core, the edges and everywhere else. "Our Nixon" was put together from some 500 reels of home movies taken by Richard Nixon's chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, domestic security adviser John Ehrlichman and special assistant Dwight Chapin, all of whom would end up doing prison time in the wake of Watergate. No member of this once youthfully happy trio—men who had considered themselves fortunate beyond belief to be where they were, serving in the Nixon White House—could have guessed that anything like such a future lay ahead as they took those endless films memorializing a time when life was all promise and working endless hours was a price willingly paid. There was the fun, the camaraderie—the faith in this president, mirrored in the film of the eager crowds, young and old, roaring their enthusiasm for him wherever he went—vivid reminders of Mr. Nixon's immense popularity. Already mired in Watergate when he ran for re-election in 1972, he would beat George McGovern in a huge landslide, losing only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. The temptation to film everything came naturally enough to Messrs. Haldeman and Ehrlichman, both advertising men prior to their enlistment in the Nixon campaign.The resulting movies would be among the materials the FBI confiscated during the Watergate investigation. After moldering in the files of the National Archives for the next 40 years or so, they've now been shaped—along with audio excerpts of the Nixon tapes and archival news footage—into a small film of devastating power. Filmmakers Penny Lane and Bryan Frye have, to a degree that borders on the miraculous, avoided most of the stock dramatic images of Watergate, with the result that their film manages to bring it back afresh in all of its miserable absurdity. You won't soon forget the growing atmosphere of dread, the mix of panic and defiance that oozed from the White House as it was enveloped by the scandal. Our Nixon Thur., Aug. 1, at 9 p.m. on CNN The credit for the film's potent effects belongs almost entirely to Mr. Chapin and Messrs. Haldeman and Ehrlichman, both now deceased, or rather to their intimate view of events. In a snippet from a 1982 television interview, Mr. Ehrlichman says that the Nixon administration would not have gone under in the face of Watergate if the president had not had a compulsive need to control matters—if he'd been able to maintain his distance from the mess. He had instead involved himself obsessively and "pulled it into his office." It would take time before the president's top aides had to come to grips with their chief's flaws and predilections. The Nixon team considered itself a family, one that could chuckle at the president's foibles. "You got the idea you were in the middle of a great big badly lighted television show," observes Mr. Ehrlichman. He had never laughed as much as he did in the Nixon White House, Mr. Chapin, surviving member of the trio, recalls. They reveled in the first-term trip to Europe, a heady tour of eight countries that saw immense crowds turn out for the U.S. president, and the team's films show it. The zestful Mr. Ehrlichman shot everything—one minute the glory of the Arc de Triomphe; the next, the urinal in the hotel bathroom. Things would change at home as the antiwar demonstrations—captured in the film's dramatic archival footage—grow in size and intensity. Their upsetting effect on the president also grows apace, as the taped recordings tell, not least the complaints directed at journalists—who, the president informs his aides, never show the crude and outrageous behavior of the demonstrators. The night Mr. Nixon gives his famous 1969 speech to the constituency he named "the silent majority"—that is, those Americans not out marching in the street and denouncing their government—he waits for the response from his cabinet. Which is, for the most part, silent. He's had messages from only three, he's heard telling one of the aides in chagrined wonderment. It's only a foreshadowing of the isolation to follow, with Watergate. Still all is not gloom at the Nixon White House yet, far from it—though war protests had a way of breaking in unexpectedly, as we see in a vignette from January 1972 involving the Ray Conniff Singers, invited to perform for the president and guests. Among them would be a woman who unfurled an antiwar banner and then lectured the president on roughly the same subject while a frantic Ray Conniff tried to stop her. The president was forgiving, the audience was outraged and—too bad the film doesn't include this part—the redoubtable Martha Mitchell, wife of the attorney general, called for the woman to be torn limb from limb. The president was somewhat less forgiving closer to home, as some of these insider reflections attest. He was not happy, for instance, that Henry Kissinger involved himself in flirtations with numerous gorgeous women, and directed aides to see to it that he wasn't, at least, seated next to glamorous beauties at White House dinners. Instead, he should be put next to some "interesting and intelligent woman." Qualities that would, the president evidently reasoned, pose no danger of glamour. This highly personal view of the Nixon years is, for obvious reasons, a sad and wrenching one—a film that is nonetheless filled with spirit, humor and a bountiful sense of irony.

RFK files show missile crisis disrupted anti-Castro plots By James Rosen Published July 25, 2013 FoxNews.com http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/07/25/rfk-files-show-missile-crisis-disrupted-anti-castro-plots/?test=latestnews [Click on link to view supporting documents] An example of anti-Castro literature developed as part of Operation Mongoose and released as part of the RFK files unsealed by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on July 24, 2013. (AP) An example of correspondence released as part of the RFK files unsealed by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on July 24, 2013. An example of anti-Castro cartoons developed as part of Operation Mongoose and released as part of the RFK files unsealed by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on July, 24, 2013. In "A Strategic Concept for South Vietnam," first declassified in 2012, Roger Hilsman, then the head of the State Department's intelligence unit, emphasized that the struggle against Communism in Southeast Asia could not be won solely by military means. An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 pages of files from Robert F. Kennedy's tenure as U.S. attorney general remain classified. By the fall of 1962, President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had spent the better part of a year orchestrating a massive and multifaceted campaign aimed at toppling Cuban dictator Fidel Castro from power. The initiative, code named "Operation Mongoose," drew on the brainpower and energies of the U.S. government's most senior officials and ranged from balloon drops of anti-Castro pamphlets and cartoons to covert sabotage of Cuban industry and infrastructure. In time, it would even include active plotting to assassinate the Cuban dictator, with the Central Intelligence Agency clandestinely enlisting the aid of the era's reigning Mafia chieftains. Suddenly that autumn, however -- and only temporarily -- the Kennedy brothers were forced to back off. The intervening event, newly declassified files show, was the Cuban Missile Crisis. The new restraint was formalized at a tense gathering of the Special Group, an elite cadre of policymakers drawn from the ranks of the National Security Council, on October 26, 1962. It was the twelfth of the famous "thirteen days" that saw the world teetering on the edge of nuclear war, after the U.S., relying on state-of-the-art aerial reconnaissance photography, discovered that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. "It was agreed that all plans for dispatch [of saboteurs] should be suspended," declared a Top Secret memorandum of the session, adding that "instructions were issued during the course of the meeting designed to recall the three teams already on the way" to Cuba. "No major acts of sabotage should be undertaken at this time." To drive home the point that Operation Mongoose needed to take a back seat to the more urgent task of defusing the superpower confrontation, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara chimed in, while Attorney General Kennedy, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other Special Group members listened carefully. "Mr. McNamara," the memo recorded, "thought that MONGOOSE in the short-term should be considered in the context of (a) providing support for action designs to get rid of the missiles, and ( support for a possible invasion." * * * These deliberations were among the revelations tucked away in some 7,500 pages of files amassed by the younger Kennedy and withheld from public view until now. The unsealing of RFK's confidential files on Wednesday, a half-century after the events they chronicled, drew a handful of researchers and historians to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. While an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 pages of RFK's files remain classified -- the documents released by the library were peppered with redactions and withdrawn items -- those that were unsealed provided fresh insight into the extraordinary influence that their owner wielded in the Kennedy White House. They make clear that as the president's brother and a ruthless practitioner of realpolitik in his own right, RFK exercised power second only to that of President Kennedy himself, and shaped policy on a broad range of issues -- from counterinsurgency measures in Vietnam, Latin America and Iran to the proliferation of what were known, even then, as "weapons of mass destruction" -- in a manner that far exceeded the typical purview of the attorney general. A Top Secret memo distributed to the Special Group in May 1962, for example, appeared to show that Bobby Kennedy virtually predicted the missile crisis, seven months before aerial reconnaissance photographs first captured evidence of the Soviets' nuclear aggression. "At the 22 March meeting," the memo stated, "Mr. Robert Kennedy asked the Special Group...what would be an appropriate course of action for the United Sates to take in the event that the Soviets establish a military base in Cuba." A Pentagon official noted: "Since the Special Group...has assumed that overt U.S. military force will have to be used to end Communist control of Cuba, Mr. Kennedy's question is particularly pertinent." * * * Yellowing carbon sheets bearing the usual welter of classified markings -- as well as the rather unusual imprint of a red rubber stamp reading MONGOOSE -- show that RFK was also forced, early and often, to referee disputes among lower-level officials about how Operation Mongoose was to be prosecuted. Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, a legendary master of the dark arts of psychological warfare and covert operations, frequently dashed off memos to RFK exhibiting frustration at the slow inter-agency pace of Mongoose. On October 15, 1962 -- one day after the Kennedys learned of the Soviet missiles on Cuba -- Lansdale urged the attorney general to take a tougher line with the intelligence community. "When the President asks for something, he should get it," Lansdale wrote in a memo captioned "Sabotage Program, Mongoose." "He has asked for action [to overthrow Castro], yet CIA indicates it has these actions 'under study' or 'in preparation' despite the fact that it has claimed to be ready to go...I believe you will have to hit CIA per the head personally." The next day, Lansdale sent RFK another Top Secret memo, hoping to prod him to stern action in a Mongoose meeting scheduled for 2:30 that afternoon. "You can strike a real blow for action by looking [senior CIA officials] Dick Helms and Ed Martin in the eye and telling them you are very dissatisfied with the initiative and the results in this project," the general wrote. "Lay it directly on them..." But RFK had already received conflicting counsel from his own staff. Administrative aide James W. Symington, later a congressman, had written the attorney general earlier that year to caution him against accepting Lansdale's advice wholesale. "Lansdale's emotional focus on Castro's overthrow has obscured his peripheral vision," Symington wrote Kennedy, in a memo declassified in 2002. "[The] State [Department] will not support any action which, if leaked, would point to a U.S. policy of overthrowing the Cuban regime." Symington noted that CIA officials had found "little proof" that Castro was seeking to subvert other Latin American governments, and added: "If the genesis of Mongoose was the President's desire to knock off Castro without counting the cost...then there is no need to 'justify' the operation in those terms." * * * Students of the Vietnam War will find of interest a February 1962 briefing paper that RFK received from Roger Hilsman, then the head of the State Department's intelligence unit. In "A Strategic Concept for South Vietnam," first declassified in 2012, Hilsman emphasized that the struggle against Communism in Southeast Asia could not be won solely by military means, and lamented that, where basic counterinsurgency doctrine was concerned, "there is as yet no real understanding of these concepts at the working level" of the U.S. government. Ngo Dinh Diem, the corrupt South Vietnamese president whose regime the U.S. was backing, Hilsman described as "an old-fashioned Asian ruler" who harbored fears about his allies in Washington. "He is concerned," Hilsman wrote, "that the United States will someday decide to engineer a coup" against him. Diem was ultimately killed in a coup in Saigon in November 1963, a violent episode in which some historians have indeed suggested the Kennedy administration was complicit. * * * Within weeks of Diem's death, President Kennedy would be felled by a sniper's bullet in Dallas. On November 21, 1963 -- one day before the assassination of the president -- RFK was among a select group of senior U.S. officials to receive a memo from Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms, in which the latter, recounting a recent trip to Miami by JFK, stated: "Some were organizing hostile or rowdy shows of dissatisfaction to embarrass the President." Perhaps the most personal of the documents released in this batch was a handwritten note that then-CIA Director John McCone sent to Bobby and Ethel Kennedy two months after the assassination of President Kennedy. "Your thoughtfulness...touched me deeply," McCone wrote on December 23, 1963, "coming at a time when deep sadness so fills your own lives." "I know how difficult this season is for both of you," he continued, "and I can say almost nothing to comfort you except to tell you that the heartbreak that you are experiencing is keenly felt and shared by your many friends and admirers." Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/07/25/rfk-files-show-missile-crisis-disrupted-anti-castro-plots/?test=latestnews#ixzz2a4BpFeVP

Boarding house where Lee Harvey Oswald stayed before JFK assassination appears frozen in time as it goes on sale http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2373793/Boarding-house-Lee-Harvey-Oswald-stayed-JFK-assassination-appears-frozen-time-goes-sale.html#ixzz2ZsjjxQyd http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2373793/Boarding-house-Lee-Harvey-Oswald-stayed-JFK-assassination-appears-frozen-time-goes-sale.html

Summary of interview on show: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2013/07/21

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=20310

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2013/07/21

The betrayal of Dr David Kelly, 10 years on Andrew Gilligan, the journalist at the centre of the 'dodgy dossier’ row, reflects on the shocking facts that have emerged since Dr David Kelly’s death Dr David Kelly: it is 10 years since the death of the weapons inspector who was caught in a row about the justification for the Iraq war By Andrew Gilligan 7:00AM BST 21 Jul 2013 The Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10192271/The-betrayal-of-Dr-David-Kelly-10-years-on.html I still remember, of course, how I heard about David Kelly’s death. It started with an early-morning phone call from my friend Mick Smith, then defence correspondent of The Daily Telegraph. Dr Kelly had gone missing, and the police were looking for a body. Even then, I couldn’t really believe that he had died. Surely it was some sort of misunderstanding? Perhaps he’d just decided to go off for a few days and would turn up in some hotel, à la Stephen Fry? As soon as I got to the BBC, the director of news, Richard Sambrook, called me to his office. While I had been on the way in, he said, not sounding like he believed it himself, Dr Kelly’s body had been found, and it looked like suicide. He’d taken painkilling tablets and slashed one of his wrists. If Sambrook sounded shaken, it was nothing to how I sounded. He had to get me a glass of water to calm me down. But as well as being upset, I was very, very surprised. I hadn’t known David all that well, but he didn’t strike me as the suicidal type, if there is such a thing. He was quite used to confrontation and pressure: he’d been a weapons inspector in Iraq, for goodness’ sake. I thought his famous grilling by the Foreign Affairs Committee had been distasteful, and symptomatic of the committee’s stupidity, but it hadn’t been that bad. And the affair was tailing off. Politics was breaking for the summer, both the BBC and I had refused to confirm or deny whether David was my source, and the battle between us and Downing Street had essentially reached stalemate. What a lot I didn’t know. Even now, almost precisely 10 years since David Kelly’s last journey, we are still learning just how extraordinary and inexcusable the behaviour of our rulers was – both towards him, and in the wider cause, defending the Iraq war, for which he was outed and died. On July 18 2003, I did not consider myself a shockable person; I was an experienced, sceptical journalist with, I thought, a realistic idea of how politicians, intelligence officers and civil servants behaved. But over the months and years that followed, my views, and those of most of the country, changed. To borrow the famous words of David Astor over Suez, we had not realised that our government was capable of such folly and such crookedness. You probably remember Dr Kelly’s main contention, which became the centrepiece of my BBC story – that a government dossier making the case against Iraq had been “transformed” at the behest of Downing Street and Alastair Campbell “to make it sexier”, with the “classic example” being the insertion in the final week of a claim, based on a single source, that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction could be deployed within 45 minutes. The intelligence services were unhappy about the 45-minute claim, David said. They believed it was unreliable. In the first of my 18 broadcasts on the story, I added a claim, mistakenly attributing it to David, that the Government probably knew the 45-minute claim was wrong. What we now know is that at precisely the same moment as the Government was launching hysterical attacks on the BBC and on me for reporting this, Whitehall had quietly conceded that it was true. In July 2003, literally as David Kelly was outed, MI6 secretly withdrew the 45-minute intelligence as unreliable and badly-sourced. What we now know is that according to Major General Michael Laurie, the head of the Defence Intelligence Staff at the time of the dossier, “we could find no evidence of planes, missiles or equipment that related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It was clear to me that pressure was being applied to the Joint Intelligence Committee and its drafters. Every fact was managed to make the dossier as strong as possible. The final statements in the dossier reached beyond the conclusions intelligence assessments would normally draw from such facts.” What we now know is that, according to an MI6 officer working on the dossier, the 45-minute claim was “based in part on wishful thinking” and was not “fully validated”. Another MI6 officer said that “there were from the outset concerns” in the intelligence services about “the extent to which the intelligence could support some of the judgments that were being made”. What we now know is that on September 17 and 18 2002, a week before the dossier was published, Alastair Campbell sent memos to its author, Sir John Scarlett, saying that he and Tony Blair were “worried” that on Saddam’s nuclear capability the dossier gave the (accurate) impression that “there’s nothing much to worry about”. On September 19, Campbell emailed Scarlett again, suggesting the insertion of a totally false claim that, in certain circumstances, Saddam could produce nuclear weapons in as little as a year. This fabrication duly appeared in the dossier. What we now know is that in his September 17 memo, Campbell suggested 15 other changes to the text of the dossier. Most were accepted; their effect was to harden the document’s language from possibility to probability, or probability to certainty. Campbell lied to Parliament about the content of this memo, giving the Foreign Affairs Committee an altered copy which omitted his comments on the 45-minute claim and played down his interventions on most of the other issues. And what we now know is that, contrary to his campaigning certainty at the time, Blair admits in his memoirs that he privately saw the case for war against Iraq as “finely balanced”. No wonder a little tipping of the scales was needed – or, as Blair also put it in his book, “politicians are obliged from time to time to conceal the full truth, to bend it and even distort it, where the interests of the bigger strategic goal demand that it be done”. We knew nothing of this then. Indeed, in his evidence to the Hutton inquiry, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, described the 45-minute claim, straight-faced, as “a piece of well-sourced intelligence”, two months after his own service had discredited it. Despite his key role as Dearlove’s military counterpart, General Laurie was never called to Hutton at all; his explosive statement, and that of the two MI6 people, emerged only in 2011, at the Chilcot inquiry. I don’t blame you if you knew nothing of all this until now; most of it, by happy coincidence, came out only long after public attention had moved on, and the government could no longer be damaged. But the government knew – and this is what makes its behaviour towards the BBC and David Kelly so incredible. He came forward to his bosses as my source under a promise that his identity would be kept secret, but was effectively given up to the world after Campbell, in his words, decided to “open a flank on the BBC” to distract attention from his difficulties over the dossier. Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, the FAC, was inquiring into the dossier. After it failed to denounce me to Campbell’s satisfaction, he confided to his diary that “the biggest thing needed was the source out”. That afternoon, on Downing Street’s orders, Ministry of Defence press officers announced that a source had come forward, handed out clues allowing anyone with Google to guess who he was, then kindly confirmed it to any reporter who guessed right. One newspaper was allowed to put more than 20 names to the MoD before it got to Dr Kelly’s. Once outed, Dr Kelly was openly belittled by the foreign secretary, Jack Straw. The FAC, by the way, didn’t want to question him – its inquiry had finished and its report had already been published – but Downing Street forced it to hold a special hearing anyway. The day before, for several hours, he was intensively coached in the need to “f---” me. Under great pressure, he blurted an untruth in the glare of the TV lights; an untruth which, on the morning of his death, his bosses told him they would investigate. Dr Kelly defined himself by his work and his reputation for integrity. The fear of losing it must have been terrifying, even if it was almost certainly unfounded. Understanding that is one reason why I am certain that he did indeed kill himself, for all some people’s obsession to the contrary. They’ll hate this comparison, but there’s an odd symmetry between the Kelly conspiracy theorists and Mr Blair. In both cases, their convictions seem to require them to fit the facts into unusual shapes. For Dr Kelly to have been murdered, as the pathologist’s report makes clear, it would have needed someone to force 29 pills down his throat, making him swallow them without protest. Then they would have had to get him to sit on the ground without any restraint, making no attempt to defend himself, while they had sawn away at his wrist with a knife. That knife, by the way, came from the desk drawer in Dr Kelly’s study, so they’d also have had to burgle his house to get it. The even more telling question, though, is what motive anyone could have had for murder. Even if you believe the British government goes round bumping off its employees in cold blood, killing David Kelly would simply not have been in its interest. It was guaranteed to create a scandal and a crisis, as anyone with an iota of sense would have known. There’s no need to claim that David Kelly was murdered; his suicide is scandal enough. Ten years on, there are some Groundhog Day elements. Over successive crises, the BBC’s management has been as incompetent as ever. Politicians still appear to think that set-piece inquiries are worth the paper they’re written on – despite the evidence from Lord Hutton’s and Sir John Chilcot’s efforts on Iraq, the latter entering its fifth year with few signs of a report. Whatever Chilcot may eventually say, the debate on the war appears to have been decided. Few would now dispute the dossier was sexed up. But there is still a fascinating degree of dispute about David Kelly. I have sometimes asked myself why the self-inflicted death of one scientist should matter to us as much as, if not more than, the violent deaths of perhaps 120,000 Iraqis (535 of them this month alone, by the way – so much for making Iraq safe for democracy). I think it’s partly because there may still be some excuses for what the Government did in Iraq. They expected it to be like Kosovo: the operation would succeed, the troops be welcomed and the predictions of doom confounded. They expected, too, that a few barrels of WMD would probably be found that could have been cast as a threat. Even the charge of “lying” about those weapons is not quite cast-iron: I prefer the charge I made, of sexing-up, or exaggeration. I and most others always thought Iraq had something in the WMD line; the exaggeration lay in the fact that it was nowhere near threatening enough to justify a war. But there are no excuses for what the government did to the BBC and to Dr Kelly. He was outed to further a series of denials which we can, quite plainly, call lies. An explanation, if not an excuse, may rest in Campbell’s mental state: even Blair, in his memoirs, called him a “crazy person” who by that stage “had probably gone over the edge”. But that doesn’t explain the really scary part: how the machinery of government, in a mature democracy such as Britain’s, allowed itself to be captured by someone in that state. Sir Richard Dearlove, the former MI6 chief responsible for the dossier, was once asked what he thought of me. Flatteringly, he said: “I wouldn’t want you to print my views on Andrew Gilligan.” My own views on Sir Richard, Sir John Scarlett and the other distinguished knights of Iraq who got too close to New Labour are perfectly printable: they failed catastrophically in their duty, bringing their professions, their services – and their country – into deep, possibly permanent, disrepute

LBJ and JFK: The Night Before the Assassination Gary North - July 16, 2013 www.garynorth.com This video is remarkable. It has two interviews. The first is with a woman who says LBJ whispered something in her ear at a party the night before the assassination. This is not what I would call reliable stand-alone evidence. The confirming interview impresses me. The woman confirms the existence of the party. That is important. But more important is her reference to J. Edgar Hoover. She said that she had been told that someone important was scheduled to attend. She said he was code-named "bulldog." I grew up in an FBI agent's household. There is no doubt that this was how Hoover was referred to among insiders. My father often spoke of Hoover as "the bulldog." This is not surprising, given the shape of his face. The woman said that she did not attend. She had never heard of Hoover. This adds credibility to her story. She got feedback from the black chauffeur who drove him to the airport: no tip. There is a site devoted to proving that LBJ was behind the assassination, along with other murders. it is comprehensive -- fixated. But some of these stories were known 40 years ago. They made sense then. They still do. http://lyndonjohnsonmurderedjfk.blogspot.com

Rupert Murdoch admits error in criticism of police investigations Media mogul writes to MP Keith Vaz to retract 'incompetence' remark but says inquiries have taken too long Read the full text of Murdoch's letter to Vaz http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jul/18/rupert-murdoch-admits-error-keith-vaz By Sandra Laville, crime correspondent The Guardian, Thursday 18 July 2013 18.43 EDT Rupert Murdoch has admitted he was wrong to describe phone-hacking and corrupt-payments investigations by police into his company and its journalists as "incompetent", in a letter sent to the chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee. But writing to Keith Vaz, he has also questioned the proportionality of the investigations, which will have cost £40m by 2015 and have involved dawn raids involving up to 14 officers, and the arrest of scores of his journalists. The letter marks the first time that the media chief has spoken about what he has termed a "highly emotional" meeting that occurred in March with journalists at the Sun who had been arrested and who face trial for allegedly paying public officials for information. The meeting was secretly recorded and subsequently leaked. In his letter, which has been published by Vaz, Murdoch said: "I accept that I used the wrong adjectives to voice my frustration over the course of the police investigation. But I have been hearing for months about pre-dawn raids undertaken by as many as 14 police officers, and that some employees and their families were left in limbo for as much as a year and a half between arrest and charging decisions." He said of the meeting on 14 March, requested by his staff: "I was reminded of the impact on families, including suicide attempts and medical conditions arising from the significant stress." Recordings of the secretly recorded meeting were subsequently broadcast on the Exaro website. Speaking to staff who were working for the Sun, Murdoch had said in the meeting: "Still, I mean, it's a disgrace. Here we are, two years later, and the cops are totally incompetent. So, I'll just ask you a question, I don't want to interrupt you – are you happy with the lawyers that have been provided?" But there was a clear limit to his apology in the letter to Vaz. "I have no basis to question the competence of the police … but I do question whether, over the last two years, the police have approached these matters with an appropriate sense of proportion with regard for the human cost of delay. "Whilst I regret my choice of words in that highly emotional meeting, I care deeply about our employees and I was and am troubled by the effect of these events on them." The assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Cressida Dick, revealed to Vaz's committee last week that detectives were seeking a copy of the tape whether anything Murdoch said at the meeting amounted to alleged conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office – an allegation not addressed by him. But when he was asked to comment on Dick's claims that the police investigation was very competent and progressing well, Murdoch said: "I cannot endorse the judgment that the investigation has 'progressed' very well, not when some of our employees were arrested early in the investigation in 2012 and they and their families are still in limbo awaiting charging decisions … My personal view is that this has gone on too long." Those comments were endorsed by Vaz. "Mr Murdoch's letter does raise the issue of the length of time these investigations have taken which the home affairs committee has raise and which have so far cost the taxpayer £20.3m," he said. The tape recording also heard Murdoch indicating that News UK – owner of the Sun, and the former News of the World – was no longer co-operating fully with the investigations. Police said they were having to seek court orders for some information. said in the letter that he made the decision in 2011 to co-operate fully with the police because "we thought it was the right thing to do". He said that after volunteering a mountain of evidence, including 500,000 documents, a further 1,900 requests for information had been made by the police. "Over 98% of these requests have already been resolved to everyone's satisfaction," he added. Vaz said: "I am pleased to hear News UK are co-operating with the Metropolitan police, and hope they continue to do so. It is in everyone's interests for them to redouble their efforts to co-operate which will speed up the investigation process and bring it to a conclusion." In a separate letter to John Whittingdale, chairman of the Commons culture and media select committee, Murdoch rejected claims he was aware of his journalists paying police for information. "The 'reports' that I knew about, let alone tolerated payments to police, are completely false," he wrote. He said he accepted that his journalists should face the consequences of violating the law but insisted his staff had "been singled out for the harshest treatment". Murdoch offered to appear before Whittingdale's committee on 29 July to be interrogated over the tape, but it is understood he was told the MPs on the committee would be on holiday and not able to accommodate him.

Watergate Bugging-again Newly released wiretap list raises questions on '72 break-in http://www.andmagazine.com/content/phoenix/13124.html