Douglas Caddy

Nixon has won Watergate By Jonathan Turley 2:50p.m. EDT March 26, 2013 USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/03/25/nixon-has-won-watergate/2019443/ Barack Obama's imperial presidency is just what his controversial predecessor wanted. In 2013, Obama wields those very same powers openly and without serious opposition. Long after Watergate, not only has the presidency changed. We have changed. This month, I spoke at an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal with some of its survivors at the National Press Club. While much of the discussion looked back at the historic clash with President Nixon, I was struck by a different question: Who actually won? From unilateral military actions to warrantless surveillance that were key parts of the basis for Nixon's impending impeachment, the painful fact is that Barack Obama is the president that Nixon always wanted to be. Four decades ago, Nixon was halted in his determined effort to create an "imperial presidency" with unilateral powers and privileges. In 2013, Obama wields those very same powers openly and without serious opposition. The success of Obama in acquiring the long-denied powers of Nixon is one of his most remarkable, if ignoble, accomplishments. Consider a few examples: Warrantless surveillance Nixon's use of warrantless surveillance led to the creation of a special court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). But the reform turned out to be more form than substance. The secret court turned "probable cause" into a meaningless standard, virtually guaranteeing any surveillance the government wanted. After hundreds of thousands of applications over decades, only a couple have ever been denied. Last month, the Supreme Court crushed any remaining illusions regarding FISA when it sided with the Obama administration in ruling that potential targets of such spying had to have proof they were spied upon before filing lawsuits, even if the government has declared such evidence to be secret. That's only the latest among dozens of lawsuits the administration has blocked while surveillance expands exponentially. Unilateral military action Nixon's impeachment included the charge that he evaded Congress' sole authority to declare war by invading Cambodia. In the Libyan "mission," Obama announced that only he had the inherent authority to decide what is a "war" and that so long as he called it something different, no congressional approval or even consultation was necessary. He proceeded to bomb a nation's capital, destroy military units and spend more than a billion dollars in support of one side in a civil war. Kill lists Nixon ordered a burglary to find evidence to use against Daniel Ellsberg, who gave the famed Pentagon Papers to the press, and later tried to imprison him. Ellsberg was later told of a secret plot by the White House "plumbers" to "incapacitate" him in a physical attack. It was a shocking revelation. That's nothing compared with Obama's assertion of the right to kill any U.S. citizen without a charge, let alone conviction, based on his sole authority. A recently leaked memo argues that the president has a right to kill a citizen even when he lacks "clear evidence (of) a specific attack" being planned. Attacking whistle-blowers Nixon was known for his attacks on whistle-blowers. He used the Espionage Act of 1917 to bring a rare criminal case against Ellsberg. Nixon was vilified for the abuse of the law. Obama has brought twice as many such prosecutions as all prior presidents combined. While refusing to prosecute anyone for actual torture, the Obama administration has prosecuted former CIA employee John Kiriakou for disclosing the torture program. Other Nixonesque areas include Obama's overuse of classification laws and withholding material from Congress. There are even missing tapes. In the torture scandal, CIA officials admitted to destroying tapes that they feared could be used against them in criminal cases. Of course, Nixon had missing tapes, but Rose Mary Woods claimed to have erased them by mistake, as opposed to current officials who openly admit to intentional destruction. Obama has not only openly asserted powers that were the grounds for Nixon's impeachment, but he has made many love him for it. More than any figure in history, Obama has been a disaster for the U.S. civil liberties movement. By coming out of the Democratic Party and assuming an iconic position, Obama has ripped the movement in half. Many Democrats and progressive activists find themselves unable to oppose Obama for the authoritarian powers he has assumed. It is not simply a case of personality trumping principle; it is a cult of personality. Long after Watergate, not only has the presidency changed. We have changed. We have become accustomed to elements of a security state such as massive surveillance and executive authority without judicial oversight. We have finally answered a question left by Benjamin Franklin in 1787, when a Mrs. Powel confronted him after the Constitutional Convention and asked, "Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?" His chilling response: "A republic, if you can keep it." We appear to have grown weary of the republic and traded it for promises of security from a shining political personality. Somewhere, Nixon must be wondering how it could have been this easy. Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University.

Prime suspect in Georgi Markov 'umbrella poison' murder tracked down to Austria Thirty four years on, the murder of Georgi Markov - the Bulgarian dissident poisoned by the tip of an umbrella in central London - remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Cold War. By Nick Holdsworth, in Moscow, and Robert Mendick, Chief Reporter The Telegraph 2:00PM GMT 23 Mar 2013 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9949856/Prime-suspect-in-Georgi-Markov-umbrella-poison-murder-tracked-down-to-Austria.html#mm_hash The writer, who was living in the capital, was assassinated on the orders of the Bulgarian secret service as he waited for a bus on Waterloo Bridge in September 1978. While his killers have never been found, a suspect in the case has emerged: a spy known in Bulgarian files as Agent Piccadilly. He was named in Bulgaria eight years ago as Francesco Gullino, a Danish national of Italian origin, who worked for the then Communist regime using his business as an antiques dealer as a cover. Mr Gullino’s whereabouts have remained unknown. But finally he has been tracked down to an obscure Austrian town where he has admitted working for the Bulgarian secret service, Darzhavna Sigurnost (DS), but denied any involvement in Mr Markov’s murder. Now that he has been located, Scotland Yard, whose file on the Markov murder remains open, are likely to want to question Mr Gullino. Now in his 60s, he was traced to his home by a film-maker for a new documentary, entitled: Silenced: Georgi Markov and The Umbrella Murder. In it, Mr Gullino, asked if he was still in touch with his old Bulgarian secret service handler, replied: “Yes I know him, but this is an intimate question because I was really in that [secret service] branch.” He was then challenged about his role in the assassination, to which Mr Gullino responded: “I have got nothing to do with this story. "I’m sorry, I wish I could give you a straight answer but… but think for a moment: If I was, if I were the murderer, you think I should, I just say it? You know my theory about the truth.” Mr Gullino earns his money as an antiques dealer with a supplementary income from the Danish state pension. But around 1978, he was paid thousands of pounds by the Bulgarian secret service. Between then and the collapse of Communism in 1990, he received a total of £30,000 from the DS, according to official files. It is alleged that Mr Gullino was ordered by the DS to live in Copenhagen in 1978 - the year Mr Markov was murdered - and set up an antiques business as a cover. The assassination of Mr Markov, a constant thorn in the side of Bulgaria’s Communist regime, was one of the most chilling episodes of the Cold War. He had lived in political exile in London since the late 1960s and was married to Annabel Markova, a novelist who writes under the name Annabel Dilke. The couple had a daughter Alexandra, who was just two when her father, then aged 49, was killed. Mrs Markova,70, said in the documentary: “I wish, that, when people talk about it in the west, they wouldn't say ‘Oh the guy, that got stuck by an umbrella’, they'd say ‘oh the great writer’, you know. The writer was so brave, that he risked his life to tell the truth, this would be fantastic.” Mr Markov, who worked for the BBC, was standing on Waterloo Bridge when he felt a sharp pain in thigh. He thought little of it but three days later he was dead. The killer had stabbed him with an umbrella, which had injected under his skin a pellet containing the poison ricin. Mr Gullino was outed as a suspect by a Bulgarian journalist who had spent six years combing the archives of Bulgaria’s secret service. It was claimed in 2005 that Mr Gullino had entered Britain, driving an Austrian-registered caravan, having been sent to London to 'neutralise’ Mr Markov on the direct orders of the country’s then hardline ruler Todor Zhikov. Working under the codename Agent Piccadilly, it is alleged that Mr Gullino helped to arrange the assassination before leaving London the day after to travel to Rome, where he met his handler. In 1993, Mr Gullino was detained in Denmark after a tip off by MI6 and held for questioning for 11 hours by Danish intelligence services before being released due to a lack of evidence. Klaus Dexel, the investigative journalist who tracked down the suspect, said: “Gullino received £30,000 from the DS between 1978 and 1990 and was frequently invited to security service events in Bulgaria. I think that means he had an important role in this murder but there is no evidence he was trained to be a killer, trained in the 'wet arts’. He is, however, a very well trained xxxx and able to cover his trail.” Mr Dexel believes another Bulgarian agent, nicknamed The Woodpecker, flew into London the day before the killing and flew out the day after. “This Woodpecker could have been the murderer, or been used to carry the murder weapon in, or indeed Gullino may have played that role,” Mr Dexel said. The documentary-makers traced Mr Gullino after months of research in Sofia, Copenhagen, and Budapest – another city with which Mr Gullino has long been associated. He was eventually tracked down to Wels, a town in northern Austria about a two-hour drive from Vienna. City records show that Gullino has a tenancy on a shabby apartment block there. The two-storey building, situated in a part of the small Austrian town that houses antique yards and warehouses, is a warren of small apartments and corridors. Mr Markov’s friend and colleague Dimitar Botchev, 68, told The Sunday Telegraph that to see the key suspect in the murder living happily on an Danish state pension in a pretty little town in Austria left him feeling sickened and angry. He said: “There is plenty of evidence against Gullino; it is clear that his hands are not clean. There is sufficient evidence that he was involved in some way in the murder of Markov. But not a finger has been raised against him. “Georgi Markov was my best friend. It is very painful that all these years after his death, with all the facts and evidence, we are no closer to solving his murder.” Sources at Scotland Yard said it was aware of Mr Gullino. A spokeswoman said: “We can confirm that the inquiry remains open and has been a particularly complex investigation. “We continue to work with the appropriate international authorities to investigate any new information that is passed or made available to police.” It is thought UK detectives last travelled to Bulgaria about 12 months ago in the hunt for Mr Markov’s killer. Files from the time were largely destroyed making the search more difficult. Mr Gullino’s role as a DS agent was revealed after the collapse of the Bulgarian communist regime in 1989, when a file was found containing false passports in his name, his agreement work under the codename Piccadilly, as well as receipts for thousands of pounds in cash, dating to the period around September 1978. The file was one of few to have escaped destruction when the DS incinerated nearly all its files as the Communist regime fell apart. The film suggests the assassination involved a team of up to five agents, including the driver of a London cab that Scotland Yard was never able to trace. It also suggests that the KGB were involved in supplying the poison and draws parallels between Mr Markov’s murder and that of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London in November 2006 after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium-210.

Mark It was never my intention that your poll would take the detour as it has. I guess the lesson for all of us is the same one that is faced by professional pollsters, which is that the poll question must be cafefully crafted so as not to be open to interpretation. This is a difficult task. I have attempted to frame below the initial questions that I would ask about Watergate and even I am not certain that these meet the criterion of being carefully crafted so as not be open to interpretation. But for what it is worth, here they are: The Watergate break-in was a CIA plot to depose Nixon. The Watergate scandal was a Military Intelligence plot to depose Nixon. The Watergate break-in was ordered by Nixon. The Watergate break-in was ordered by officials in the White House but Nixon did not have advance knowledge of it. The real story of the Watergate break-in will never be known just as it has been said that the real story of the JFK assassination will never been known.

CIA’s big data mission: ‘Collect everything and hang onto it forever’ By Stephen C. Webster Thursday, March 21, 2013 9:26 EDT Rawstory.com http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/21/cias-big-data-mission-collect-everything-and-hang-onto-it-forever/ Speaking to a crowd of technology professionals Wednesday at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conferencein New York City, the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief technology officer explained that the CIA is so infatuated with big data that it tries “to collect everything and hang onto it forever.” During his nearly half-hour talk, CIA CTO Ira Hunt said that the agency is interested in “really big data,” or storage capacity on a scale unlike anything currently existing on the planet, so they can “connect the dots” with what’s happening in real time. “The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time,” Hunt told GigaOM’s crowd, in a quote first pulled by The Huffington Post’s Matt Sledge. “Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.” A failure in data analysis led to the so-called “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab being allowed onto an airplane, he explained, and the agency is eager to ensure another attack does not get through when there’s enough data available to know what’s going on and stop it. “It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information,” he added, explaining that nearly all mobile phones now contain a camera, a microphone, a light sensor, an accelerometer and GPS, among other sensors. The prevalence of sensors has led to a whole new world of biometric information, Hunt said, listing off a variety of ways the sensors in a mobile device can be used to identify the person carrying it. He pinpointed the most effective method as gait analysis, or watching the way a person walks and creating a complex data profile based upon their movements — something that can be accomplished with a camera and software alone. This sort of technology is “moving faster, I would argue, than you can keep up,” he said. “You should be asking the question of, what are your rights and who owns your data.” This video is frhttp://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/21/cias-big-data-mission-collect-everything-and-hang-onto-it-forever/om the GigaOM Data:Structure conference, aired Wednesday, March 20, 2013. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/21/cias-big-data-mission-collect-everything-and-hang-onto-it-forever/

One highly disturbing case of human trafficking and being compromised that Rothstein and Rosenthal investigated involved an agency in the Intelligence Community that operated a child prostitution ring in New York City that lured targeted customers who wanted to engage in pedophilia. In 1971 the two NYPD cops received word that the Intelligence Agent in charge of the ring had killed three young boys after they had been forced to engage in acts of pedophilia with the targeted customers. The two cops even had a possible lead as to where the bodies of the three children had been buried. They arranged for a subpoena to be served on the Intelligence Agent in Locust Valley, New York. However, the subpoena was quashed on the basis that the national security was involved. The question has to be asked as to what part of the national security laws allows the killing of children.

Deputy editor of Murdoch UK tabloid charged over payments 11:30am EDT * Sun's deputy editor accused over cash to public officials * Latest Murdoch executive to be charged By Michael Holden LONDON, March 20 (Reuters) - British police, investigating allegations of phone-hacking centred on Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, charged the deputy editor of his top-selling Sun tabloid on Wednesday with making illegal payments to public officials. Geoff Webster is the latest senior figure from News International, the British newspaper arm of Murdoch's News Corp , to be accused of criminal offences in a scandal which has rocked the media mogul's empire and escalated into a crisis embroiling the entire industry and the political establishment. Dozens of current and former staff from Murdoch's Sun and News of the World newspapers have been arrested by police since early 2011 when detectives re-launched an inquiry into allegations journalists had repeatedly hacked into voicemails of mobile phones to find exclusive stories. Inquiries later were extended to cover allegations journalists paid cash to public officials in return for information. Police and prosecutors said Webster, 53, would face two charges of conspiring to commit misconduct in public office, which related to payments of 6,500 pounds ($9,800) and 1,500 pounds made to two officials between July 2010 and August 2011. Webster will appear at London's Westminster Magistrates' court on March 26. In an email to staff, News International's chief executive Mike Darcey said they would be supporting their "long-standing and valued colleague", during the legal process. Revelations that phone-hacking extended from celebrities and politicians to crime victims, including murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, caused public outrage and led to Murdoch closing down the News of the World. Prime Minister David Cameron's former media chief Andy Coulson, who was editor of the News of the World between 2003 and 2007, and Rebekah Brooks, the former boss of News International and a confidante of Murdoch, are among those charged with criminal offences. News International has already paid out millions in compensation to victims, but in recent weeks the scandal has again risen to prominence. Last month, detectives arrested six people as part of an investigation into a second hacking conspiracy at the News of the World, which lawyers said could result in hundreds of new compensation claims. Earlier this week, News International also paid substantial damages and apologised after admitting journalists from the Sun had accessed private information from the mobile phone stolen from an opposition lawmaker. That came on the day Britain's main political parties agreed to set up a new press regulator with the power to levy fines of up to 1 million pounds ($1.5 million) and oblige papers to print prominent apologies, after a public inquiry said a new system was needed in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.

Elsewhere in JFK topic in the forum I have cited some material given me by retired NYPD detective Jim Rothstein with whom I am now engaged in a project to expose human trafficking. It is Rothstein’s belief, which I have come to embrace, is that it is impossible to understand most of what is happening in government and in both the public and private sectors without applying the test of whether the key person involved has been compromised. By compromised is meant whether the person has engaged in illicit sex or other criminal acts that are known to others who use this information to blackmail and extort. J. Edgar Hoover and Cartha “Deke” DeLoach were masters of blackmailing and getting what they desired through extortion. In the case of these two FBI officials it was a form of extortion to get monies appropriated by Congress for projects they wanted funded. They used information gathered by FBI agents from both public and private sources as blackmail to compromise a person. In turn, Hoover himself was a compromised person because of his fondness for young boys and the Mafia held this over him. Other government agencies regularly have used blackmail and extortion and some have set up traps to ensnare those they want to compromise. Among those compromised are two men who have held the post of U.S. Secretary of Defense. When Rothstein and Rosenthal, his NYPD cop partner, confronted a U.S. Senator in a gay bar in New York City with information that he had been compromised through pedophilia, he immediately reached for the establishment’s phone and called a famous lawyer. When the lawyer learned the cops were Rothstein and Rosenthal, he told the Senator that there was nothing he could do. What Rothstein and his partner learned soon after they began investigating human trafficking was that the information they gathered of names of customers in big operations could not be placed in the general files of the NYPD because anyone having access to the files could use them for extortion. As a result separate, special files had to be set up to safeguard the acquired information. How many of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives have been compromised by their illicit sex activities and are subject to blackmail and extortion today? How many of 100 Senators? How many who hold cabinet posts or high governmental offices? Catherine Austin Fitts, who was undersecretary of HUD in the George H.W. Bush Administration, has told in radio interviews that I have heard how HUD Secretary Jack Kemp would say to her, “Catherine, what do they have on you?” to which she would truthfully respond, “Nothing, absolutely nothing” and to which he would reply, “That’s impossible. They have something on everyone.” How Kemp was compromised is widely known. Here are some infamous if somewhat dated examples of how compromise situations are set up: 'CALL-BOY' SERVICE PROSPERS USING HIGH FINANCE, HIGH TECH," Paul M. Rodriguez and George Archibald , The Washington Times, June 20, 1989 In which we see Henry Vinson's name first surface, along with Robert Chambers, a funeral director, who operated a call boy network that laundered money through umbrella organizations in the District of Columbia area, Florida, Kentucky and West Virginia. "POWER BROKER SERVED DRUGS, SEX AT PARTIES BUGGED FOR BLACKMAIL," Michael Hedges and Jerry Seper, The Washington Times, June 30, 1989 In which we learn of Craig J. Spence, who arranged midnight tours of the White House, threw lavish parties for the famous and powerful where cocaine was generously served, spent $20,000 a month on male prostitutes from a D.C. prostitution ring, and bragged of connections to the CIA, whom he worried might kill him and then make it look like a suicide. "RNC CALLS SCANDAL A 'TRAGIC SITUATION,'" George Archibald and Paul M. Rodriguez, The Washington Times, Friday, June 30, 1989 In which we learn of the resignation of an aide to Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole, and of the reaction of Rep. Barney Frank, who is "not surprised" by the revelations. "White House mute on 'call boy' probe," Frank J. Murray, The Washington Times, July 7, 1989 In which we learn that President Bush followed the story, and that a Uniformed Division officer of the Special Service, Reginald deGueldre, arranged the midnight White House tours for Craig Spence and two male prostitutes, and was moonlighting as Spence's bodyguard. "Spence was target before raid on ring," Jerry Seper, and Michael Hedges The Washington Times, July 10, 1989 In which we learn that Craig Spence brought a 15-year old boy on at least one of his midnight tours of the White House, that Spence asked detailed questions about the Delta Force operations, that he partied with a former U.S. Attorney and his wife, and that he bragged of having blackmailed a high-ranking Japanese politician, Motoo Shiina. "Spence ma[y] be Shiina's downfall," Edward Neilan, The Washington Times, July 18, 1989 In which we hear of the connections between Motoo Shiina, groomed to be a future prime minister of Japan, and Craig Spence: how Spence had made more than $700,000 from Shiina's Policy Study Group, and how Spence had refused to pay back a loan made by Shiina for the purchase of Spence's house. "First lady not worried about hookers' tour of White House," Paul Bedard, The Washington Times, July 10, 1989 In which we learn that First Lady Barbara Bush was not concerned about the security questions raised by midnight White House tours, but did think it good that the Washington Post had not followed the Times' story. "IN DEATH, SPENCE STAYED TRUE TO FORM," Michael Hedges, and Jerry Seper, The Washington Times, Monday, November 13, 1989. Craig Spence is found dead in a Boston hotel room. Near his body is a newspaper clipping that details legislative efforts to protect CIA agents called to testify before government bodies. Friends of Spence reported that he had claimed the CIA used the call boy service to compromise other federal intelligence officials and foreign diplomats. One friend quoted Spence as saying, "Casey's boys are out to get me,"

As I wrote earlier, I do not believe that those involved directly in executing the Watergate break-in (Liddy, Hunt, McCord and the four Cuban-Americans) had as their goal the deposing of Nixon, although the hierarchy of the CIA was well aware at the time of Hunt's activities leading up to the break-in and of those of other members on the break-in team who had close ties to the CIA. So in my opinion one has to separate the plot to break-in at Watergate from the plot of expose the planned break-in at Watergate that culminated with the arrests of the five burglars. The plot to expose the planned break-in at Watergate, which culminated with the arrests of the five burglars, was devised and orchestrated by Military Intelligence whose intent was to depose Nixon. Washington, D.C. police officer, Carl Shoffler, who arrested the burglars, had obtained advance knowledge of the break-in. He was a Military Intelligence agent assigned to the Washington, D.C. police who prior to the break-in had as his primary task the monitoring of anti-Vietnam War protesters. It might be validly asserted that the successful plot to remove JFK from the presidency through assassination was a CIA executed plot while the successful plot to remove Nixon from the presidency through the Watergate scandal was a Military Intelligence executed plot. Pertinent to all this is a prescient column that Arthur Krock wrote in The New York Times six weeks before the assassination of Kennedy: The New York Times, October 3, 1963 "The Intra-Administration War in Vietnam" by Arthur Krock WASHINGTON, Oct 2 The Central Intelligence Agency is getting a very bad press in dispatches from Vietnam to American newspapers and in articles originating in Washington. Like the Supreme Court when under fire, the CIA cannot defend itself in public retorts to criticisms of its activities as they occur. But, unlike the Supreme Court, the CIA has no open record of its activities on which the public can base a judgment of the validity of the criticisms. Also, the agency is precluded from using the indirect defensive tactic which is constantly employed by all other Government units under critical fire. This tactic is to give information to the press, under a seal of confidence, that challenges or rebuts the critics. But the CIA cannot father such inspired articles, because to do so would require some disclosure of its activities. And not only does the effectiveness of the agency depend on the secrecy of its operations. Every President since the C. I. A. was created has protected this secrecy from claimants Congress or the public through the press, for examples of the right to share any part of it. With High Frequency This Presidential policy has not, however, always restrained other executive units from going confidentially to the press with attacks on CIA operations in their common field of responsibility. And usually it has been possible to deduce these operational details from the nature of the attacks. But the peak of the practice has recently been reached in Vietnam and in Washington. This is revealed almost every day now in dispatches from reporters in close touch with intra-Administration critics of the CIA with excellent reputations for reliability. One reporter in this category is Richard Starnes of the Scripps-Howard newspapers. Today, under a Saigon dateline, he related that, "according to a high United States source here, twice the CIA flatly refused to carry out instructions from Ambassador Herny Cabot Lodge [and] in one instance frustrated a plan of action Mr. Lodge brought from Washington because the agency disagreed with it." Among the views attributed to United States officials on the scene, including one described as a "very high American official who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy" are the following: The CIA's growth was "LIKENED TO A MALIGNANCY" which the very high official was not sure even the White House could control "ANY LONGER." "If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the Government, it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon". The Agency "represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone". Disorderly Government Whatever else these passages disclose, they most certainly establish that representatives of other executive branches have expanded their war against the CIA from the inner government councils to the American people via the press. And published simultaneously are details of the agency's operations in Vietnam that can come only from the same critical official sources. This is disorderly government. And the longer the President tolerates it the period already is considerable the greater will grow its potential of hampering the real war against the Vietcong and the impression of a very indecisive Administration in Washington. The CIA may be guilty as charged. Since it cannot, or at any rate will not, openly defend its record in Vietnam, or defend it by the same confidential press "briefings" employed by its critics, the public is not in a position to judge. Nor is this department, which sought and failed to get even the outlines of the agency's case in rebuttal. But Mr. Kennedy will have to make judgment if the spectacle of war within the Executive branch is to be ended and the effective functioning of the CIA preserved. And when he makes this judgment, hopefully he also will make it public, as the appraisal of fault on which it is based. Doubtless recommendations as to what his judgment should be were made to him today by Secretary of Defense McNamara and General Taylor on their return from their fact-finding expedition into the embattled official jungle in Saigon.

US secrecy policy run as though formed by Orwell and Kafka – top official William Leonard, who oversaw state secrecy under George W Bush, says successive US presidents have abused system by By Ed Pilkington in New York guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 March 2013 13.26 EDT http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/15/us-secrecy-policy-orwell-kafka-security-official Successive US presidents, including Barack Obama, have abused the system for handling classified information to expand their executive powers, the former senior official who oversaw state secrecy under George W Bush has claimed. William Leonard, who was entrusted with ensuring proper treatment of state secrets by government agencies in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, said that over the past decade both the Obama and the previous Bush administrations had manipulated their classification authority to create new executive powers without congressional oversight or judicial review. Leonard, the former head of the Information Security Oversight Office from 2002 to 2007, said that what was at stake was "the abuse of the very form of government we are operating under, as unilateral executive powers go unchallenged." He said: "Governments have decided under the cloak of secrecy to unleash the brutality of violence in our name and that of our fellow citizens. So extra judicial kidnapping becomes 'rendition', torture becomes 'enhanced interrogation', detainees are held on information that barely qualifies as hearsay, and assassination becomes 'targeted killing'." Leonard told a high-level discussion group on secrecy and security convened by the Brennan Center for Justice in Washington that even language had suffered in this scramble for new powers. "It is as if Lewis Carroll, George Orwell and Franz Kafka were jointly conspiring to form official US policy." The issue of how the US government treats state secrets has risen towards the top of the political agenda in recent days as the White House has come under intense pressure to make public the legal advice for the targeted killing program – the use of unmanned drones to assassinate terror suspects in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. The subject was given additional publicity last week during the course of a 13-hour filibuster by the Republican senator, Rand Paul, who demanded an assurance that Obama would not authorise drones to kill American citizens on domestic soil. The issue of classification of sensitive intelligence material has also been central in the prosecution of Bradley Manning, the source of the massive WikiLeaks publication of US state secrets. The US soldier had asked for permission to present evidence at his upcoming trial that he said would show the classification system was broken, and that a large portion of the hundreds of thousands of documents he transferred to WikiLeaks were ranked "secret" when they were, in fact, anodyne. The judge in the Manning case, Colonel Denise Lind, ruled the over-classification argument to be inadmissible at trial. Excessive secrecy in government has now been recognised at all levels, from Obama down. In 2009 he effected an executive order that provided for information to be released to the public as soon as possible, and the following year he signed HR 553, the "reducing over-classification act". Yet, at the same time as Obama has talked about enhancing transparency, he has also presided over one of the toughest administrations in terms of policing state secrets. There have been six prosecutions under the 1917 Espionage Act under his watch – more than under all previous presidents combined. An investigation by the Associated Press recently revealed that the Pentagon, CIA and other government agencies are rebuffing public requests for information at a greater rate than at any time since Obama took office, all in the name of national security. The endemic tendency towards secrecy was underlined at the Brennan Center event by two currently serving senior administration figures. Nancy Soderberg, a former US ambassador to the UN who now advises Obama on classification of national security information, said the system for handling official documents was not functioning. "We are withholding documents we should not be withholding. The current classification system is outmoded and outdated, and entirely unsuited for the modern digital age." Soderberg chairs the Public Interest Declassification Board, an advisory committee set up by Congress to tackle the crisis of spiraling official secrets. In December the board produced a devastating report that said the present situation was unsustainable. "It is a basic right," Soderberg told the meeting. "The government must be accountable to the public, and the public has to know what is being done in its name. But the system cannot keep pace with the number of digitised documents being created." She said that between 2001 and 2011 the cost of administering the classification of official material had more than doubled, from $4.7bn to $11.4bn. Robert Litt, the most senior legal advisor to the Director of National Intelligence who is at the coal face of classification issues in the current administration, agreed that too much information was being held secret for too long. But he ascribed it not to "evil or venality" but to a combination of a culture of secrecy among executive branches and "bureaucratic inertia". "Nobody wants to be responsible for being the person who blows the cover of an [intelligence] asset that may lead to them being killed. Nobody wants to be the person who results in the loss of an important security capability that protects the public," he said. He added: "In my view, it's fundamentally a cultural problem. We need more training of classifiers, and management buy-in, to move people away from the tendency to lean towards classification and get them to see the very real benefits of greater public information."

When I first joined the forum years ago, I wrote about residing in the Manhattan residence of newspaper columnist Alice Widener while being employed by New York Lt.-Gov. Malcolm Wilson in the NYC office of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in the early 1960s. I worked in daytime and attended New York University Law School at night. I knew Alice because I had written an article in 1958 about George Kennan for her bi-weekly newsletter, USA, while still a sophomore at Georgetown University . She also knew of my role in founding Young Americans for Freedom in 1960 with the assistance of William F. Buckley and Gov. Charles Edison. Both Alice and I considered ourselves to be Conservatives, although not of the extremist kind common today in public affairs. Alice Widener's first husband was Nicholas Sergei Berezowsky, who fled Russia when the Bolsheviks took over. He did so playing the piano in whore houses as he worked his way clandestinely to the border. He was an accomplished musician and during the Great Depression was the conductor of the NBC radio orchestra. Alice would tell me about their living comfortably on Park Avenue during the hard times while their formerly affluent friends would come each night for dinner. When Berezowsky died, Alice remarried a Widener. Apparently after some years this led to a divorce. Afterwards Alice kept the name Widener as her last name. However, as Alice Berezowsky, widow of Nicholas Sergei Berezowksy, at the urging of the FBI she became a regular financial contributor to the U.S. Communist Party and attended some of its more important meetings. Her most regular FBI contact for years was with Cartha "Deke" DeLoach. She would pass information along to him about the Party's activities and he would sometimes call her and ask that she mention something in one of her newspaper columns that the FBI wanted leaked publicly. About one month or so she would receive a telephone call from J. Edgar Hoover who valued her opinion on the communist movement. She was a frequent contributor to Barron's Financial Weekly and its editor, Robert Bleiberg, would come to dinner at Alice's residence on East 72nd St. once a week or so. Her coop was on the 21st floor on East 72nd St. at the East River, and had a spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline, the East River and Roosevelt Island. Lt.-Gov. Wilson once visited and told her that if he lived there he would have a hard time ever leaving the building to go to the office as the views from it was something one would see in a movie. In fact, the penthouse right above her floor was owned by Frank Sinatra. She never received or desired any compensation for her undercover FBI work. Her role was never disclosed publicly until I wrote about it here years ago. She was a true patriot. She thought the world of Cartha "Deke" Deloach and Hoover and of the Bureau generally.

Bribery Allegations Surfaced Against WSJ in China by DEVLIN BARRETT And EVAN PEREZ The Wall Street Journal March 17, 2013 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324532004578365064172055862.html The Justice Department last year opened an investigation into allegations that employees at The Wall Street Journal's China news bureau bribed Chinese officials for information for news articles. A search by the Journal's parent company found no evidence to support the claim, according to government and corporate officials familiar with the case. The U.S. government, meanwhile, is nearing the end of a broader investigation of the Journal's owner News Corp NWSA -0.95%. stemming from allegations of phone hacking and bribery at U.K. tabloids, among other issues, according to people familiar with the case. During the course of that broader probe, the Justice Department approached News Corp.'s outside counsel in early 2012 and said it had received information from a person it described as a whistleblower who claimed one or more Journal employees had provided gifts to Chinese government officials in exchange for information, according to people familiar with the case. News Corp. and the Journal don't know the identity of the informant, company officials say, and government officials wouldn't discuss such details. It isn't clear whether the person worked inside the Journal and whether the informant provided names of alleged bribers. According to U.S. and corporate officials, News Corp. has told the Justice Department that some company officials suspect the informant was an agent of the Chinese government, seeking to disrupt and possibly retaliate against the Journal for its reporting on China's leadership. The company officials came to that view after finding no evidence of the alleged bribery and because of the timing and nature of the accusations, company officials say. It isn't clear what, if any, evidence the company officials have for that claim, which reporters for this article couldn't independently verify. A spokesman at the Chinese embassy in Washington didn't respond to messages seeking comment. Government officials familiar with the probe declined to say what they made of the company's claim. A person close to the company said the alleged China matter hasn't been raised by U.S. investigators in some time, but wasn't more specific. It isn't clear if the Justice Department considers the matter resolved or still open. Paula Keve, a spokeswoman for News Corp.'s Dow Jones unit, which publishes the Journal, said in a written statement: "After a thorough review of our operations in China conducted by outside lawyers and auditors, we have not found any evidence of impropriety at Dow Jones." The informant's accusations about the Journal related to reporting activity in Chongqing, the power base of disgraced Chinese official Bo Xilai, and covered previous Journal reporting in China, according to government and corporate officials. To check the claims, investigators examined activity reaching back at least five years, they said. Mr. Bo, from his seat in Chongqing, was a powerful and rising figure in China until a scandal involving the poisoning death of a British associate led to his downfall and the criminal prosecution of his wife. In March 2012, the Journal published an article detailing the questions surrounding the British man's death, and how the scandal was fueling a power struggle within China's political leadership. Other articles followed about the wealth and corruption behind the private lives of some Chinese leaders. The Chinese bribery allegations against the Journal arose around the time that U.S. and Dow Jones officials believed Chinese hackers were targeting Dow Jones's computer systems, according to people familiar with the matter. That is one reason company officials say they suspected the informant's actions were part of a broader attack on the paper. Federal investigators probing the Dow Jones computer hacking concluded it was carried out by people with links to China's government, apparently to snoop on articles the paper was writing about its political leadership, according to government and company officials. An array of Western companies has been targeted by Chinese hackers in recent years, including recently some U.S. media firms such as New York Times Co. NYT -0.60%The Obama administration has stepped up its calls on China to curtail such activity. In a statement, Dow Jones Editor in Chief and Journal Managing Editor Gerard Baker called the newspaper's China reporting "exemplary and unrivaled" and added: "Our journalists, often working in the most difficult circumstances, will never be deterred from shining light on the darker recesses of Chinese society and politics." If the Chinese bribery allegations were true, such behavior would be a potential violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. That law, commonly referred to as FCPA, was the principal basis for the U.S. opening its initial investigation of News Corp.'s activities in the U.K. and elsewhere. The law makes it illegal for companies with sizable American operations to offer money or gifts to foreign-government officials to gain a business advantage. The allegations of gifts in China went beyond the typical meals or drinks shared by reporters and officials and included lavish entertainment and travel, according to people familiar with the matter. Over the past decade, the Justice Department has more aggressively pursued companies with U.S. operations suspected of bribing foreign officials. In 2012, the Justice Department announced 13 FCPA-related settlements or court charges. A decade earlier, there were four. In FCPA cases, unlike almost any other criminal probe, companies under investigation are required to do the bulk of the detective work themselves, typically by hiring an outside law firm. In the Journal case, after the Justice Department presented the informant's allegations, the company and outside investigators began going through its own accounts seeking evidence to corroborate the informant's claims, according to government and company officials. Finding none, the company notified the government it couldn't confirm the claims, the people said. The investigation comprised audits and records searches. According to officials, the informant then gave the Justice Department a similar set of allegations about a different set of company expenses in China. News Corp. looked into this second set of claims, and again found nothing, those people said. Since 2011, the Justice Department has been overseeing a criminal investigation of News Corp. relating to revelations that its British papers hacked phones and bribed public officials to get information for articles. Almost two years later, that probe is nearing completion, government and company officials said, setting the stage for settlement negotiations between the U.S. and News Corp. News Corp., which has hired law firm Williams & Connolly to oversee the FCPA case, is expected to make its final presentation detailing the company's global bribery investigation to the Justice Department next month, according to people familiar with the matter. It will be then up to the Justice Department to spell out what punishment or sanctions, if any, the agency wants, and at that point negotiations will likely begin. The Justice Department doesn't publicly discuss cases that close without charges filed. Both sides expect an agreement would include a monetary settlement of some kind, based on the alleged violations in the U.K. The government has also investigated potential misconduct in the company's former Russian outdoor billboard subsidiary, according to people familiar with the case, specifically whether it paid bribes to local officials to approve sign placements in that country. News Corp. said Thursday: "In regards to U.K. matters, we've delivered on our commitment to uncover wrongdoing and feel confident about the work we've done to put us on the right path, including sweeping changes to our global internal controls, compliance programs and ethics requirements." The company hasn't in the past commented on the Russia allegations. The Russian company, which has been sold by News Corp., has denied wrongdoing. Several U.S. officials said senior Justice Department lawyers are increasingly skeptical any criminal charges would be filed against individuals at the company, although the investigation continues. An investigation by British police has already led to criminal charges against reporters and editors, alleging that people working for News of the World and another News Corp. paper, the Sun, paid bribes to public officials for information. Many of those cases are still pending. Write to Devlin Barrett at devlin.barrett@wsj.com and Evan Perez at evan.perez@wsj.com

From the article: Mr. DeLoach had met and worked with Johnson in the 1950s, when Johnson was the Senate majority leader; he and Johnson helped push through legislation guaranteeing Hoover a salary for life. In 1963, shortly after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson called Hoover — Mr. DeLoach said it was the day after Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One — and requested that Mr. DeLoach be assigned to the White House. “There was political distrust between the two of them, but they both needed each other,” Mr. DeLoach said in a 1991 oral history interview for the Johnson library at the University of Texas. “Mr. Hoover was anxious to retain his job and to stay on as director. He knew that the best way for the F.B.I. to operate fully and to get some cooperation of the White House was for him to be cooperative with President Johnson.” “President Johnson, on the other hand,” Mr. DeLoach continued, “knew of Mr. Hoover’s image in the United States, particularly among the middle-of-the-road conservative elements, and knew it was vast. He knew of the potential strength of the F.B.I. — insofar as being of assistance to the government and the White House is concerned. As a result it was a marriage, not altogether of necessity, but it was a definite friendship caused by necessity.” Cartha D. DeLoach, No. 3 in the F.B.I., Is Dead at 92 By BRUCE WEBER The New York Times March 15, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/us/cartha-d-deloach-no-3-in-fbi-is-dead-at-92.html?ref=obituaries Cartha D. DeLoach, who as a top aide and confidant to J. Edgar Hoover was the F.B.I.’s liaison to the White House and a powerful intermediary between Hoover and President Lyndon B. Johnson during an especially tense political era, died on Wednesday on Hilton Head Island, S.C. He was 92. The death was confirmed by his son Tom. Mr. DeLoach, who was known as Deke, spent more than 25 years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, rising to deputy associate director, the No. 3 position, behind only Mr. Hoover and the associate director, Clyde Tolson. Mr. DeLoach had met and worked with Johnson in the 1950s, when Johnson was the Senate majority leader; he and Johnson helped push through legislation guaranteeing Hoover a salary for life. In 1963, shortly after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson called Hoover — Mr. DeLoach said it was the day after Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One — and requested that Mr. DeLoach be assigned to the White House. “There was political distrust between the two of them, but they both needed each other,” Mr. DeLoach said in a 1991 oral history interview for the Johnson library at the University of Texas. “Mr. Hoover was anxious to retain his job and to stay on as director. He knew that the best way for the F.B.I. to operate fully and to get some cooperation of the White House was for him to be cooperative with President Johnson.” “President Johnson, on the other hand,” Mr. DeLoach continued, “knew of Mr. Hoover’s image in the United States, particularly among the middle-of-the-road conservative elements, and knew it was vast. He knew of the potential strength of the F.B.I. — insofar as being of assistance to the government and the White House is concerned. As a result it was a marriage, not altogether of necessity, but it was a definite friendship caused by necessity.” At the time, Mr. DeLoach headed the bureau’s crime records division, which was also in charge of public affairs. He was a principal spokesman for the bureau in the investigation of the murders of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights workers who were killed by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in the early summer of 1964. Their bodies were not discovered until August; it was Mr. DeLoach who called the president to deliver the news. Johnson called on the bureau to perform tasks that caused friction with other agencies. Fearful of assassination, he added F.B.I. agents to his security detail, infringing on the territory of the Secret Service. And he drew the bureau into the political arena, requesting investigations into political opponents and reporters. Mr. DeLoach was the main conduit between Johnson and Hoover, and though he acknowledged that he knew the president occasionally asked the F.B.I. to overstep its authority, he said that other presidents had done the same, and that when the president of the United States asks for something, it is difficult to say no. “DeLoach was always at L.B.J.’s beck and call, night and day,” said Tim Weiner, a former New York Times reporter and the author of “Enemies: A History of the F.B.I.,” published last year. “He was a talented political hatchet man, a trusted deputy to Hoover. He was also crucial to intelligence investigations conducted during the Johnson presidency.” Mr. DeLoach became head of F.B.I. investigations in 1965, leading the bureau’s assault on the Klan after the 1964 killings in Mississippi. He supervised the investigation of the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. But he had also been part of the bureau’s scrutiny of the civil rights movement and was aware of the bureau’s secret surveillance of Dr. King in his private life. In Mr. Weiner’s book, Nicholas Katzenbach, an attorney general under Johnson, said he believed that Mr. DeLoach had offered reporters the chance to listen to tapes of Dr. King having sex with a woman who was not his wife. Mr. DeLoach denied that accusation. Cartha Dekle DeLoach was born on July 20, 1920, in Claxton, Ga., about 50 miles west of Savannah. His father, Cartha Calhoun DeLoach, was a “merchant of some kind,” Tom DeLoach said. The father died when Cartha, his only child, was 10 and “left the family in a whole lot of debt,” Tom DeLoach said. Young Cartha worked in cotton fields to help pay the bills, and his mother, the former Eula Dekle, took in boarders. He played football at Claxton High School and on a football scholarship went to Stetson University in Florida, where he played quarterback. Mr. DeLoach joined the F.B.I. in August 1942 as a clerk and became a special agent that December. He worked in field offices in Norfolk, Va., and Cleveland before going on military leave. He served in the Navy from 1944 to 1946. During his tenure at the bureau under Hoover, its priorities shifted from ferreting out spies during and after World War II, to combating communist ideologues during the early years of the cold war, to pursuing perceived threats to the country in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. “Deke’s commitment to the F.B.I. and to the American people at large was a hallmark of his life,” Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, said in a statement. In addition to his son Tom, Mr. DeLoach is survived by his wife of 68 years, the former Barbara Owens; three other sons, Cartha Jr., who is also known as Deke, Gregory and Mark; three daughters, Barbara Lancaster, Theresa DeLoach and Sharon Bleifeld; and “countless grandchildren and great-grandchildren,” Tom DeLoach said. After retiring in 1970, Mr. DeLoach worked as a corporate affairs executive for Pepsico until 1985 and later in banking in South Carolina. When Hoover died in 1972, Mr. DeLoach was considered a possible replacement. In 1995, he published a memoir, “Hoover’s F. B. I.: The Inside Story by Hoover’s Trusted Lieutenant,” in which he defended the F.B.I. against its many critics. In a 2007 oral history interview with the Society of Former Special Agents of the F.B.I., he said: “In my humble opinion, despite the good job the F.B.I. has done, it has not received anywhere near sufficient credit for doing all the tremendous investigative work, all the sacrifice, the labor, the blood, the sweat, the tears, to put it proverbially, that we have done. We have not been given credit.”

Phone hacking: Rupert Murdoch hit by 600 fresh claims Suspect turned informant gives new evidence to Met before parliament vote on newspaper By Lisa O'Carroll, Patrick Wintour, Josh Halliday The Guardian, Friday 15 March 2013 17.36 EDT Detectives are examining an estimated 600 fresh allegations of phone-hacking incidents at Rupert Murdoch's now closed News of the World on the back of fresh evidence obtained by the Metropolitan police from a suspect turned supergrass. Further details are expected to emerge on Monday morning at the high court during a hearing relating to the existing litigation by hacking victims against Murdoch's News International (NI) – hours before MPs are due to vote on joint Labour and Liberal Democrat amendments that would introduce a backstop law to stiffen regulation of the press. Sources say Scotland Yard detectives believe they can identify as many as 600 new incidents after obtaining the phone records of an insider who is now being lined up as a crown witness. As a result of the new information, the force's Operation Weeting is revisitng the timetable for concluding its investigation, which had been due to be completed with the conclusion of trials this year. Police now expect their work to continue into 2015. The 600 new potential litigants fall into three groups: new victims; others who sued over hacking but signed agreements with NI allowing them to sue the company again; and a third group who signed agreements potentially barring them from suing again. The indications are that there may be "some hundreds of new legal actions" from the first two groups. On Monday the high court will hear formally of at least a dozen settlements out of the 167 civil claims filed last autumn from individuals including Cherie Blair and David Beckham's father, Ted. Blair was one of 170 victims who chose to sue in the high court instead of going through the NI private scheme, which has so far accepted 254 compensation claims. More than 250 people have sued NI including Jude Law, Sienna Miller and Charlotte Church after they were told by police they were targeted by the paper but the opening of a second line of inquiry into activities at the paper will be a fresh nightmare for Murdoch and NI executives who are busy trying to rebuild the reputation of the company before a demerger of the parent company, News Corp, in June. Last month there was a fresh wave of arrests of former NoW executives, believed to have been prompted by the new evidence. Three men and three women were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to intercept telephone communications between 2005 and 2006. Information from the same supergrass also led to the arrests on Thursday of the former editor of the Sunday Mirror, Tina Weaver, and three other former colleagues who were arrested on suspicion of conspiring to hack phones. On Friday, Richard Wallace, former editor of the Daily Mirror and Weaver's partner, was interviewed by police under caution as the crisis at the Mirror Group spread. Scotland Yard said Wallace was not arrested. So far eight former NoW staff, including former editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, face charges in relation to allegations of conspiring to hack phones. The revelations come at the worst possible time for David Cameron as he prepares to battle in parliament to protect the newspaper industry from what he fears is excessive state-backed regulation. MPs and peers are due on Monday to debate legal changes designed to tighten media self-regulation and ensure it is placed on a permanent basis. Labour and the Lib Dems are hoping to defeat the Conservatives with their proposals to introduce a law to strengthen the power of a watchdog to audit the work of a reformed Press Complaints Commission. Cameron is not currently due to speak in the Commons debate, since the reforms come in the shape of amendments to the crime and courts bill. But the prime minister will face Ed Miliband across the dispatch box during a statement after the conclusion of the European council summit of EU leaders, and may yet be asked by the Speaker to make a Commons statement on why on Thursday he decided to pull the plug on all-party talks to introduce a new system of press regulation. Cameron is likely to lose, raising questions about his authority and judgment. There were still hopes that he would seek a last-minute deal. Harriet Harman, shadow culture secretary, said: "I hope that even before we get to Monday we will get that cross-party agreement." Aides to Nick Clegg said he was not planning to talk to Cameron before Monday about press regulation, saying his efforts were focused on securing as large a vote as possible amongMPs for a tough system of regulation. Clegg insisted the issue should be seen as above party politics. Miliband said: "The royal charter we propose would create a new independent voluntary system of self-regulation for the press. It has a code setting out the high ethical standards of the best in British journalism, a complaints procedure which is easily accessible and fair, and real teeth to ensure protection and redress for citizens." Earlier, Cameron welcomed the move by the other parties towards accepting a royal charter, rather than passing legislation to create a new regulator. He said it was now essential that the matter was brought to a head and could no longer be allowed to "hijack" the rest of the Government's legislative programme. News International had no comment on allegations of a second hacking operation at the NoW. It said it still planned to close its compensation scheme, but would continue to consider "meritorious claims".

Watergate: The long shadow of a scandal By Marc Fisher, Published: June 14, 2012 Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/latest-headlines/2010/08/25/gJQAKVYcdV_story.html Forty years after Watergate, a central question about the scarring chapter in U.S. history lingers: Did Richard M. Nixon’s misdeeds and downfall strip the nation of its innocence or affirm the resilience of the American system? ¶ In one vision, Watergate turned Americans into cynical people, mistrustful of government, ready to believe the worst of their leaders. Forty years after the botched burglary on Virginia Avenue NW, the squalor of Nixon’s presidency remains visible in our paralyzed, polarized politics, our alienation, our insistent disunity. ¶ Alternatively, Watergate shines as proof that the system works, that law and the Constitution prevail over the excesses of craven politicians. The details of the scandal, which resulted in the only resignation of a president in U.S. history, may fade with time, but Watergate lives on in the idealism of those who hold government to account — through grass-roots movements such as the tea party and Occupy Wall Street, investigative reporting, and public and private watchdog groups. ¶ The principal figures in the Nixon presidency and the two-year drive to reveal its misdeeds are mostly elderly men now, and the scandal that riveted the nation like no other is barely mentioned in most high school American history courses. But in politics, popular culture, the news media and the perception of the United States at home and abroad, Watergate was a watershed, the beginning of an era of inspection, the end of a more deferential culture, a turning point with as powerful an impact as the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement. “Our long national nightmare is over,” the new president, Gerald R. Ford, told the American people in his first address after Nixon resigned in August 1974. “Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.” That notion of Watergate governed for many years; in 1974, Americans elected to Congress a huge class of idealists bent on reforming the nation’s institutions and wresting power from the few. Reporters became unlikely heroes, portrayed by Hollywood and best-selling books as so many Davids taking on dubious Goliaths of politics and business. Whistleblowers — once derided as disloyal snitches — became a protected class, celebrated in pop culture and defended by new laws. As the years slip by, the Watergate story — the complicated but dramatic tale of a criminal conspiracy to cover up misdeeds by a president and his top advisers — drifts toward myth, losing some of its nuance. Fact and fiction blur. Hollywood’s rendition takes up more bandwidth than the original investigative journalism. The 1976 movie version of “All the President’s Men” — the film about Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that inspired a generation of journalism school students — made it into the American Film Institute’s list of 100 best movies of all time and remains a well-rented classic. Only a couple of decades after the scandal, an academic study on Americans’ collective memory concluded that “the only vivid personal memory of Watergate was the feature film ‘All the President’s Men.’ ” Yet in subjects as disparate as campaign financing, media responsibility and corporate ethics, Watergate is still regularly summoned as an explanation for today’s troubles. “Watergate was the onset of the change in relationships between Republicans and Democrats,” says Tom Railsback, 80, a Republican congressman from Illinois from 1967 to 1983 and a member of the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach Nixon. “It made the American people very cynical about government and created a real mistrust between the parties. Before Watergate, Republicans and Democrats traveled together, our families were friends, and we would seldom report out legislation that didn’t have support from members in both parties.” Balderdash, says Elizabeth Holtzman, a Democrat from New York who served on Judiciary with Railsback and was in the House from 1973 to 1981. “I know it sounds corny,” she says, “but the members of the Judiciary Committee put country above party and above their personal reelection chances to act together against criminal acts by the president. It’s ludicrous to argue that the ability of Republicans and Democrats to act together then created a schism between the parties.” Watergate, according to Holtzman, 70, was ultimately a triumph for American voters, who realized their error in reelecting Nixon in a landslide victory in 1972 and just a year later supported Congress, the courts and the press in “an affirmation of our system of checks and balances, working together in a historic high point in our relationship with our government.” Watergate, like so many signal moments in history, morphs over time, its meaning evolving with shifting ideologies, emerging technologies and new waves of scandal. A tough sell From the movies to novels, children’s books to , Watergate is ever with us, a wound that leaves a tender scar.Watergate is Sheryl Longin’s first political memory. She remembers her family watching the hearings on TV, “seeing my parents so upset and shocked that the president lied,” she says. “It was the first thing I learned about the president, that he lies. It stuck with me. For my generation, it wasn’t like we were disillusioned — we just assumed a certain level of sleaziness.” By the mid-1990s, Longin was a screenwriter in Hollywood with an idea about a Watergate spoof in which The Post’s inside source on the scandal, code-named Deep Throat, turns out to be two teenage girls. When Longin and director Andrew Fleming pitched their concept to studio executives, the suits worried that the public’s knowledge of Watergate had grown so thin that the movie — 1999’s “Dick” — would flop. “Does it have to be about Nixon?” they asked. It did, the writers insisted. And the movie worked: Even those who didn’t get its inside jokes identified with its core cynicism. Today, “Dick” would be a total nonstarter, Longin says — public knowledge of Watergate is so marginal that no one would take a risk on such a movie. John Simmons, creator of the Washington Scandal Tour for the comedy troupe Gross National Product, is trying to keep the memory alive. “Even though Watergate is fading as history, it’s the most important scandal because it’s about real issues of power, not silly sex stuff like Eliot Spitzer or Anthony Weiner or Gary Hart,” said Simmons, who leads bus trips through the District showing tourists sites made prominent by public wrongdoing. Truth be told, his customers want the recent stuff — they want to see where Monica Lewinsky lived, where the Secret Service agents party. “We get birthers who want to hear about the Obama scandals,” the tour guide said. Simmons, 56, keeps Watergate at the core of the tour. “I still make everyone do the Nixon victory salute, and we still think of Nixon as comedy gold,” he says. “But really, he’s more popular than Congress is today. To us, he was super right wing and a little strange, but to young people, he’s the guy who created the EPA and went to China.” The primacy of pop culture has nudged Watergate’s meaning in a less serious direction, historians say, even in how the scandal’s name is used. The word sleuths at the Oxford English Dictionary found other scandals adopting the “-gate” suffix just two months after the burglary, setting a pattern that has lasted from Billygate, the 1980 brouhaha over the behavior of President Jimmy Carter’s untamed brother, to Climategate, the 2009 controversy over whether British climate scientists had cooked the books in a study on global warming. By the time Nipplegate — Janet Jackson’s infamous wardrobe malfunction during the halftime show at the Super Bowl in 2004 — came along, the “-gate” moniker had become an ironic touch, a way to indicate that a controversy was not exactly weighty. Watergate remains a serious academic topic; many state curricula require social studies teachers to present the scandal as a lesson on the division of powers among the three branches of government. But what the curricula say isn’t always what happens in class. “On a practical level, Watergate has really receded as a topic that people teach,” says Steve Armstrong, vice president of the National Council for the Social Studies and supervisor of social studies for the West Hartford, Conn., school system. “I’m 59, so Watergate is huge to me, but anything that old is ancient history for young people. For many young teachers, Watergate is just one event among many of this nature.” Young teachers also present students with a more charitable view of Nixon, he says, giving Nixon’s overtures to communist China and the Soviet Union at least equal time against Watergate. The Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky sex scandal get more classroom time than Nixon. “They go with the stuff they know they can get the kids interested in,” Armstrong says. “The attitude is, ‘Yeah, yeah, Nixon got caught, but what president doesn’t do something like that?’ ” At 38, Stephen Masyada didn’t live through the scandal, but he thinks it contains essential lessons. So Masyada, who has taught social studies in Florida and North Carolina, tries to squeeze in at least some discussion of Watergate in the final two weeks of a U.S. history course. He challenges students to discuss whether Nixon, whose positions on affirmative action and the environment would put him on the left side of the political ledger today, could be elected as a Republican now. But Watergate is a tough sell, Masyada says. “It’s disappointing, but the kids just aren’t shocked by Watergate. They expect the president to do something wrong.” Culture change Whether the news media merely reflected that dark view of politicians or encouraged its spread, Watergate dramatically altered the relationship between those in power and those who report on them. As the congressional investigation into impeaching Nixon gathered steam in 1973, Railsback, the Illinois congressman, headed home for Christmas recess. He was startled to find he was not alone. Everywhere he went — his daughter’s elementary school, a high school basketball game — there were his new shadows, Sam Donaldson of ABC News and Ike Pappas of CBS. “It was a startling new experience,” Railsback says. “Members of the House were not subject to much media scrutiny back then. All of a sudden, we were center stage.” Four decades later, Washington’s self-image as a place where voters send representatives to work in relative obscurity, devising federal policy, is shattered. Some politicians say the paralysis that infects the capital stems from forces unleashed by the scandal — interest groups intent on countering government power, as well as a press that discovered reader interest and profit in more aggressive coverage. “The culture of Washington changed in response to Watergate, with a huge shift in journalism toward questioning authority,” says David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers University, a former research assistant to Woodward and author of “Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image.” “That led to the investigative work of the new muckrakers, but also to a gotcha journalism, with a lot of noise and heat over unimportant stories, and both forms changed the political culture.” Almost immediately after Watergate, young people, inspired by the central role that Woodward and Bernstein played in unraveling the Watergate conspiracy, flocked to journalism schools. And despite recent waves of cost-cutting in print and broadcast news organizations, enrollment in undergraduate journalism programs nationwide has jumped by 35 percent over the past decade. Watergate remains a touchstone for budding journalists eager to demonstrate that right can tame might. “It’s definitely still part of the lore and a serious driving force,” says Mark Horvit, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a nonprofit organization created in the aftermath of Watergate to support the expensive work of keeping government accountable. (Watergate made accountability reporting both easier and harder — easier because sunshine and freedom of information laws were passed, opening up government records, and harder because people in power grew more wary and savvy about record-keeping. No president since Nixon has made systematic voice recordings of White House meetings, and even note-taking is more circumscribed, although the rise of e-mail and social media are changing the nature of record-keeping.) Despite decades of decreasing respect for journalists in public opinion polling and popular culture — reporters have morphed from hunky heroes to scurrilous saps in most movie and TV depictions — Horvit sees some news organizations reinvesting in investigative work to regain relevance in an era of cuts, closings and collapsing business models. “People say they don’t trust the media, but when a big investigative project gets done, everybody wants to read it and things happen — people get fired, change happens and people eat it up,” he says. Solidifying the narrative Even now, the flow of books and papers about Watergate continues unabated, as historians, partisans and novelists try to make sense of what happened. But as Thomas Mallon, a Washington author who has written novels about the John F. Kennedy assassination and Watergate, notes, the Kennedy story has always centered on what happened — did the assassin act alone? — whereas most Watergate revisionism focuses more on why: Why did the president and his staff, coasting toward easy reelection, commence a campaign of dirty tricks? “Woodward always says that the essential story of Watergate is the one we know and believe, and he is right,” says Mallon, who teaches creative writing at George Washington University and lives across from the iconic complex (he always knew he’d eventually write a Watergate book). Mallon contends that Watergate was really about Vietnam — the deeply unpopular living-room war that turned the White House into a fortress, arming itself against a public that increasingly rejected the president as arbiter of whether the conflict in Southeast Asia was justifiable. If Watergate has been diminished by time, that’s just how history works, often becoming kinder to bad guys as years go by. In Mallon’s “Watergate,” Nixon emerges as a more nuanced figure than the easily-spoofed figure of most early books about the era. “The Nixon in my book is still guilty of many things,” says Mallon, who was in college during Watergate. “But he’s in over his head. He’s confused.” The abundant White House tapes have so solidified the Watergate narrative that those writing about the era sometimes struggle to find something new. In a biography of former Post editor Ben Bradlee, “Yours in Truth,” published this spring, Jeff Himmelman, a former research assistant to Woodward, quotes from an unpublished interview in which Bradlee said he had “a residual fear” about a few details Woodward and Bernstein included in “All the President’s Men,” such as the flag Woodward used on his balcony to signal Deep Throat, his FBI source. When New York magazine published an excerpt from the book focusing on Bradlee’s doubts, Himmelman got a shot of publicity. Was there a hole in the received version of Watergate? No, says Himmelman. “None of this upsets the narrative of Watergate,” he says in a long interview in which he tears up three times over the prospect that he may have permanently damaged his relationships with Bradlee and Woodward. He says Bradlee never questioned The Post’s reporting but rather was “just being skeptical, like any editor should be.” Then what is the meaning of the passage about Bradlee’s doubts? “I thought it was interesting,” Himmelman says. “I didn’t think it was a big deal.” The author says the stir over the “residual doubts” line is a result of the magazine’s excerpting: “The dangerous thing about an excerpt is they take the gossipiest, sexiest part of your book. I did not intend any implication that it’s about anything larger. It’s hard for me to imagine the legacy of Watergate changing much.” Books such as Himmelman’s attract buzz because of the dramatic power of story of Watergate, says Alicia Shepard, former ombudsman of National Public Radio and author of a book about Woodward and Bernstein. But she is certain that “Nothing is going to tarnish Ben Bradlee’s legacy. Nothing that’s come out in the last 40 years has dramatically altered the story of Watergate.” With the anniversary this week, Woodward, whose reporting has focused mainly on presidential power and warfare in recent years, has been listening again to the Nixon tapes. “Revisionism is inevitable,” Woodward says, “and it should be part of the process. However, every season, there’s a new batch of Nixon tapes that once again establishes his criminality, his regular abuse of power and the nature of his personality.” Anniversary to remember The 40th anniversary is likely the last important one in Watergate’s history, Mallon says. By the 50th, fewer important figures from the scandal will be around to debate the meaning of the events or to recall with vivid detail the sense in 1973 that the country was in danger of collapsing under the scandal. Mallon remembers that burden of living every day with a slow-moving but devastating crisis. And he recalls the invigorating end to the scandal: “People talk of Watergate as a moment when America lost its innocence, and there’s probably something to that. But the entire thing happened without a soldier in the street, without a gun being fired. It showed the sophistication of American law and life.”

This is a complex issue. Both the CIA and Military Intelligence had separate secret operations inside the White House that essentially monitored everything Nixon said or did. The Watergate break-in was a CIA operation. However, Military Intelligence possessed prior knowledge of the planned break-in. This was because Carl Shoffler, the D.C. detective who arrested the burglars at Watergate, was a Military Intelligence agent assigned to the D.C. police. He had learned of the planned break-in weeks before it took place. The CIA had its own file on the role of Military Intelligence inside the White House and in Watergate. Military Intelligence undertook an operation to steal this key CIA file that was successful. This prevented the real role of Military Intelligence in Nixon being deposed from ever becoming part of the public record. Some of this is explained in the link below: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=17579

Since he moved up the chain of command I doubt he supports it, the clergy men and women who did were excommunicated, defrocked or otherwise punished. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/13/pope-francis-kidnapping_n_2870251.html?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl2%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D283692

With the election of a new Pope, the question arises again whether the Catholic Church will take action to end the documented pedophilia practiced by some members of its clergy and also clean up the financial scandals involving the Vatican Bank? In 1972 Father Bruce Ritter opened Covenant House at Eighth Avenue and 43rd Street in New York City. Its purpose was to serve as a sanctuary for the victims of human trafficking and pedophilia and to help those victims to become productive members of society. Two years earlier detective James Rothstein had been assigned by NYPD to monitor Father Ritter’s activities. He found that there were no illegalities and that Ritter’s work was exceptionally effective in helping the victims of pedophilia. On or about September 19, 1978, detective Rothstein and his partner, detective Rosenthal, met with Father Ritter at the Covenant House. Their meeting was interrupted by Father Ritter receiving a phone call from the new elected Pope John Paul I. The Pope gave Father Ritter a special dispensation to clean the pedophiles out of the Church and to clean up the Vatican Bank. Father Ritter asked the two detectives to assist him in this effort and they agreed. He stated that the odds of the detectives being successful were probably one million to one and that he, who worked for a Higher Power, would likely be stopped. Ten days after the call to Father Ritter, Pope John Paul I was murdered. He had been Pope for only 33 days. Undeterred Father Ritter decided to move ahead on the assignment he had received from the late pope. Father Ritter introduced the two detectives to a young man, Dale S., who had been a victim of pedophilia and who later became actively involved in the pedophile underground. When he was a young boy, Dale S.’s father, a wealthy Canadian, had decided that his son should become a priest. As a result Dale S. was sent to the Vatican to study to be a priest. When Dale S. returned home to Canada, he told his father, “Papa, you didn’t tell me that I had to do this (be molested) to become a priest.” He has been molested by members of the Legion of Christ headed by Marcial Marciel in the Vatican. His father took him to the FBI in Detroit. The FBI agents there knew they would not be allowed to investigate the case (perhaps because it was Canadian based) and so they introduced Dale S. to Father Ritter. Ritter at the time was working with the New York Senate Select Committee on Crime and with detectives Rothstein and Rosenthal. With the assistance of Dale S. the two detectives were able to identify a key pedophile when he was present in the Hotel Waldorf Astoria bar. The pedophile was a high level executive in a major corporation that dealt with pharmaceuticals. The company had been infiltrated by pedophiles. A procurer and extortionist, W.D., was one of many who extorted money from the corporation by using the threat of exposure of the pedophilia. After the death of Pope John Paul I, those within the Church engaged in pedophilia started a campaign to destroy Father Ritter. They knew that Ritter kept a file of information that included the names of powerful persons who engaged in pedophilia provided to him by the victims. Exposure of this information would shock the faithful of the Church and the public. In I990 Rothstein received word that Ritter had been falsely accused of misconduct. Rothstein met with Cardinal O’Connor who said his hands were tied in the matter but referred Rothstein to a famous Catholic layman. The layman asked Rothstein to back off because an investigation would destroy the Catholic Church. In the end Father Ritter was sacrificed so that the cover-up could continue. Father Ritter in 1991 told Rothstein, “Many times God did not comfort me. He let me find that comfort in you.” Ritter died in 1999. Rothstein over the years never found any credible or questionable misconduct by Father Ritter. Will new Pope Francis take up the causes championed by Pope John Paul I who paid the price with his life in so doing? Or will he, at age 76, be merely a care-taker while the rot within the Church grows until its foundations are threatened? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1383867/Was-Pope-John-Paul-I-murdered-John-Julius-Norwichs-burning-question-.html http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/pope-francis-i-has-a-clear-priority-stop-and-prevent-the-sexual-abuse-of-young-boys-8533256.html

The reason I voted the way I did is that I think Military Intelligence played a greater role in deposing Nixon than did the CIA. Washington, D.C. police detective Carl Shoffler who arrested the burglars was a Military Intelligence agent assigned to the D.C. police department. He had prior knowledge of the planned break-in at Watergate on June 17, 1972. Howard Hunt was a CIA agent and at least two of the arrested burglars had long-standing connections to the CIA. The CIA hierarchy was well aware of Hunt's activities prior to the arrests at Watergate. The CIA was drastically and negatively affected by the fallout of the Watergate scandal while the Military escaped basically unscathed. The dictionary defines "depose" as: to remove from high office." I believe the Watergate break-in operation was primarily a CIA operation. I do not believe its intent was to remove President Nixon from the presidency. I do believe Shoffler's intent was to remove Nixon from office and that he had shared his prior knowledge of the planned break-in with his superiors in the Military and that a decision adverse to Nixon had been reached.

Ted Kennedy Jr. Is (Finally) Ready for the Family Business By MARK LEIBOVICH New York Times Magazine Published March 13, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/magazine/ted-kennedy-jr-is-finally-ready-for-the-family-business.html?hp&_r=0 In early December, Washington’s political class was in one of its episodic ventilations over who would fill the latest round of job openings. The intrigue of the moment involved Hillary Clinton’s replacement as secretary of state. Susan Rice, the U. S. ambassador to the United Nations and onetime front-runner, was taking a public battering, and the fallback candidate, Senator John Kerry, was looking more likely to get the job. This would in turn mean that another Massachusetts Senate seat would be up for grabs — the third election since the death of Ted Kennedy in 2009. In the midst of all that, I was eating lunch at a private club near the White House at the invitation of Ted Kennedy Jr. As the namesake of the late senator, he was of course entitled under Massachusetts law to slide happily into any available political seat without so much as leaving the compound to drop off a ballot petition. There was only one slight problem with this: he lived in Connecticut, not Massachusetts. But Kennedys have a way of surmounting pesky barriers like these, and conjecture about Kerry’s seat, if it were to become open (which it has), was on the table. Ted Jr., as he is known, has eager blue eyes and windswept Kennedy hair. He is friendly and solicitous, but his efforts at ingratiating himself come off more self-taught than natural, a bit too eager, as when, weeks earlier, he marveled at how really great it was to see me. At one point he asked if I had ever been to the family home on Cape Cod. When I said no, he insisted, “Oh, you have to come down sometime.” We had never met before. He speaks in the patrician New England accent and nasal-honking intonations that conjure his father. He kept saying things like “I am entering a new phase of my life” and “I come from a family of public servants,” and it was perfectly clear what Ted Jr. had called me here to discuss. After a lifetime of entreaties, many from his father, the oldest son of Edward M. Kennedy was now, at 51, prepared to join the family business. In the musty parlance of his heritage, he was being “called to service.” For someone so incubated in the heat of public life, Kennedy betrayed a surprising transparency, or maybe naïveté, in explaining to me how he had been preparing for this next phase. “I’ve been cultivating all sorts of friendships and relationships with people who can be helpful,” he said. And then he made clear how I came in. He also kept mentioning to me that “my father and brother had always spoken highly of you,” which carried a whiff of declaring me “reliable” within the family. (Was I, too, being called to service?) What he envisioned, Ted Jr. said, was “a foundational story” being written about him. “What’s this guy like?” he asked. “What’s he thinking?” This was somewhat unusual. When someone decides to “come out” as a politician, it is typically in connection with a specific job — as in, “I will be running for such-and-such.” They don’t generally say, “I’m being called to service, please write a foundational story about me.” My immediate question involved exactly what service Ted Jr. was being called to. And where? Would it be in Massachusetts, where he purchased the former home of his Uncle Jack, behind the main family compound in Hyannis Port? Or in Connecticut, where he lives in the New Haven suburb of Branford with his wife, Kiki, a Yale psychiatrist, and teenage son and daughter (their oldest daughter is a freshman at Wesleyan)? There was also the possibility of an executive appointment from a president who regarded his father as a crucial Senate mentor and kingmaker. Ted Jr. wanted me to know that he was open to that. Whatever the case, there was some urgency that the foundational story be done soon, presumably to help get his name “in play” for the imminent job openings. We were joined at the table by Dick Keil, a former White House reporter for Bloomberg News who now works for a media consulting company called Purple Strategies, which was co-founded by Steve McMahon, a Democratic strategist/TV pundit/friend of Ted Jr.’s from the old days, when he worked on Ted Sr.’s 1980 presidential campaign. Keil, McMahon and Ben Binswanger, another friend, who attended Wesleyan with Ted Jr. and later worked for Senator Kennedy, were all helping guide the soon-to-be-candidate-for-something through the delicate paces of his “rollout.” Ted Jr.’s brother, Patrick, a former congressman from Rhode Island who now lives in New Jersey, was also part of the small advisory team, as was Kiki. In addition to the whats, whens and wheres, there was also the matter of who — as in: Who did Ted Jr. think he was? As we talked over lunch about the rollout, wherever it may be rolling, I thought of a famous line inflicted on Ted Sr. during his 1962 Senate campaign by his Democratic primary challenger, Edward J. McCormack Jr. McCormack told his 30-year-old opponent — the brother of the sitting president — that he would have no chance in that race if his name were Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy. When I started to recall that line, Ted Jr. interjected with the exact quote: “If it was Edward Moore,” he said, “your candidacy would be a joke.” In fairness, Ted Jr. is more than two decades older and far more experienced than his father was in 1962. He has been a longtime advocate for the disabled — having lost part of his right leg to bone cancer at age 12 — and his Manhattan-based management-consulting firm, the Marwood Group, employs 130 people. But the Edward Moore line resonates within the family. Patrick Kennedy — who was elected to the Rhode Island Legislature at 21 and the U.S. House of Representatives at 27, and who himself once dismissed the U.S. Senate campaign of Scott Brown in Massachusetts as “a joke” — told me that he entered politics “as a Kennedy” but was “still looking for my identity.” His brother, on the other hand, “knows where his true compass is,” Patrick assured me, deploying another pet family term — “true compass” — that happened to be the title of their father’s memoir. Entire touch-football rosters could be filled with Kennedys who could never have been elected at their tender ages without their last names. In November, Ted’s 32-year-old cousin, Joseph Kennedy III — the son of a former U.S. representative, Joseph Kennedy II — became the latest pledge when he won the congressional seat left by Barney Frank, who retired. Even Ted Jr.’s son, Edward Kennedy III, has announced his intention to run for U.S. senator from Massachusetts someday. He was, at the time of his announcement, 11. “There is this question with every member of my family,” Patrick Kennedy said. “How do we fit into this amazing legacy that we have been given by dint of our birth?” That is not a sentence most people utter. But his point was that simply running for an office because it is available is the family default option, and it’s not necessarily the best one. Patrick did not seek re-election in 2010 and now devotes much of his life to promoting treatment and research for his twin causes, mental illness and brain injuries. He married, moved to New Jersey and has two children. He has sad green eyes, a big pillow of red hair and the gawky bearing of an overgrown boy. But he also has the weary voice of someone who could be 65. Patrick told me he has no regrets about his career choices, but his own life proves his original point: that the family reflex to run early is not for everyone. He has battled depression and alcohol and drug addictions for years, and he admits that the United States Congress was not the best place to wrestle these goblins. “When you grow up in my family, being somebody meant having power, having status,” Patrick told me back in 2006, when I was reporting an article for The Times not long after police found him disoriented, having crashed his car into a barrier near the Capitol at 2:45 a.m. “The compensations you got were all material and superficial,” he said. “I’ve come to realize, in the last few months, that that life made me feel all alone.” After the article ran, Patrick told me his father was furious at him for unburdening himself publicly. “Save that stuff for your shrink, not a reporter,” Senator Kennedy said to him. Ted Jr. is less the unburdening type. He has granted few interviews and he seemed nervous when we talked, or perhaps a bit suffocated by Keil, who was always with us. Keil, whom I first met back in his journalism days, is a friendly and earnest operator who, like many in Washington, is always working. (I ran into him once at the supermarket and teased him about the work Purple Strategies was doing to help BP “reposition” its image after the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Without missing a beat, Keil unleashed his own gusher, calling BP the “the greatest corporate turnaround story in history” before moving onto the deli counter.) He sat in on all three of my meetings with Ted Jr., monitored a subsequent phone call and also stayed close by during my meeting with Patrick. He made backup recordings of all of our conversations, which is not unusual for public-relations people to do, but typically happens with high-level subjects, not with someone who has never run for office and wasn’t really running for anything now. The aggressive “management” of the story conveyed an impression of both loftiness and hand-holding — or, at worst, of a Not Ready for Prime Time Kennedy being propped up by consultants. All of that said, there’s something innately likable about Ted Jr. People who have known him over the years generally describe a solid, down-to-earth guy who is quite normal, given his royal lineage. And his instinct to become a fully formed human being before answering the “call to service” was admirable. His priority, by all accounts, has always been to raise a family and nurture them as unassumingly as possible (again, for a Kennedy). As he put it, “I pretty much spent half my life trying to resist other people’s timetables.” Later, when I asked him to elaborate on this, he added: “My father was the single most important person in my life. But in some ways, we all live our lives resisting what our parents want us to become.” In early 1985 Ted Jr. was 23 and living in Somerville, Mass., outside Boston. Tip O’Neill, the district’s longtime representative, had announced he would retire at the end of his term. This seemed an obvious starter gig, but Ted Jr. was not interested. His 34-year-old cousin, Joe — Robert F. Kennedy’s son — ran and won instead. “I never seriously considered that race,” Ted Jr. told me. “My father was strongly considering me.” Ted Sr. commissioned a poll that came back “a slam dunk for Ted,” said Steve McMahon, who was one of the people then running Senator Kennedy’s political operation. Ted Jr.’s decision not to run, McMahon said, “was against the advice and counsel of pretty much everyone around him.” Senator Kennedy was disappointed, Ted Jr. told me. “He couldn’t understand why someone with all the built-in advantages would not take advantage of the opportunity.” Instead, Ted Jr. enrolled in Yale’s graduate school of forestry. Beyond setting a course away from politics, Ted Jr. told me that he was also trying to escape a one-dimensional identity as an amputee and advocate. “I did not want to be seen as a professional disabled person,” he said. He gained weight, grew a beard, drank heavily and invited concern that he was priming himself for another, more darkly familiar Kennedy fate. He indulged in what The Boston Globe described as “a playboy-style high life” and “careless social habits.” At about the same time, his cousin, William Kennedy Smith, was charged with rape and faced a subsequent trial that showcased the family’s history of boozy carousing — with the patriarchal senator in a leadership role. At 29, Ted Jr. enrolled himself in a drug-and-alcohol-treatment program in Hartford. He was always reticent and closed off, he said, which he attributed to being a Kennedy. “It was never very easy for me to express my feelings,” Kennedy told The Globe in 1993, on the eve of his marriage to Kiki. “I think it’s a consequence of growing up in my family and having people prying and feeling like somebody’s always trying to get something from you,” he said. “Then I realized this is no real way to live a life.” His priority, he said, was to start a family and be present as a father. “I realized if I messed that up, it would be the most serious mistake of my life,” he told me. He has not touched alcohol in more than 20 years, he said, because “it just didn’t take much imagination to see the impact that alcohol had on many different people in my family.” Ted’s mother, Joan Kennedy, has also faced many public struggles with alcoholism over the years. As other Kennedys passed in and out of office (and rehab), the great mentioners and orchestrators consigned Ted Jr. to the terminal-ambivalence compound. His father encouraged him to open a Boston office of Marwood, his consulting firm, to establish more of a presence in Massachusetts, but Ted Jr. resisted. Then in August 2009, Senator Kennedy died of brain cancer, and Ted Jr. delivered a powerful and much-discussed eulogy. “My name is Ted Kennedy Jr.,” he told the mourners assembled at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Boston. “Although it hasn’t been easy at times to live with this name, I’ve never been more proud of it than I am today.” The speech’s emotional climax was a story of his father’s taking him sledding at age 12. He was trying to adapt to his artificial limb, and the hill was slick and hard to climb. He kept slipping and started to cry. “And he lifted me up in his strong, gentle arms and said something I will never forget,” Ted Jr. said. “He said: ‘I know you can do it. There is nothing that you can’t do. We’re going to climb that hill together, even if it takes us all day.’ ” The eulogy drew a standing ovation and, almost immediately, renewed talk of Ted Jr.’s political future. “A lot of people were asking, ‘Where have you been?’ ” Ted told me. Over lunch at the University Club in Washington, I asked Ted Jr. if he had spoken to anyone in the Obama administration about a job. “I can’t talk about that,” he said, wincing a little. Then he laughed. “Have you talked to the president?” I asked. “I can’t talk about that,” he repeated. His face turned red, which I found refreshing, given how comfortable most politicians are with stonewalling. Ted Jr. then turned to Keil. “I need to think of a way to respond to this question that is respectful,” he said. “No, you just did respond,” I interrupted. “It’s O.K.” “But I don’t want the quote to be ‘I can’t talk about it.’ ” He was slightly plaintive at this point. “But that’s what you said,” I noted. Kennedy laughed again. Later, when I returned from the men’s room, he said he regretted that he didn’t answer that question differently. He wished he could change the quote. To what? “What I should have said,” he told me, “was ‘I would be honored to serve.’ ” Obama’s re-election created a few possibilities for Ted Jr. There were potential jobs in the administration or seats in Congress being vacated by members who would become cabinet officials. The most titillating prospect involved Kerry’s seat. “I haven’t thought seriously about that possibility,” he said. Except he and Keil and Binswanger met on Nov. 13 to discuss the matter at a tavern in Georgetown, then held subsequent sessions with McMahon and Patrick and Kiki. Team Ted told him that changing his official residence from Connecticut to Hyannis Port would be no problem. They all said he could win, and the time was now. “Political consultants want everyone to run for office,” Ted Jr. said. A former Connecticut senator, Christopher Dodd, a close friend of the family, seconded that notion, saying, “They’re either telling you, ‘You can never win, and you need me,’ or ‘You can’t lose, and you need me.’ ” Dodd cautioned Kennedy against the Massachusetts race. If Kennedy lost, Dodd told me, it could preclude future runs in Connecticut. “It could look like he’s on a shopping spree.” Once again, to the disappointment of others, Ted Jr. decided not to run. Ted Kennedy Jr. running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts in 2013 was “as close to a slam dunk as you’re going to get in politics,” McMahon told me. I wasn’t buying this. When I mentioned to Ted Jr. that he would have faced charges of carpetbagging if he ran for Kerry’s seat, he took issue. “Yes, I’ve lived in Connecticut for 25 years,” he said. “But the idea of calling a Kennedy a carpetbagger in Massachusetts is like. . . .” He did not finish the thought. There were other issues at play, too, among them Vicki Kennedy, Ted Kennedy’s widow. Strains between Vicki and her late husband’s sons were no secret. According to a Boston Globe article last July, Ted Jr. and Patrick Kennedy were convinced that their stepmother was mismanaging their father’s legacy, in particular the construction in Boston of the $71 million Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. Vicki Kennedy declined to comment for The Globe article (as well as for this one), and when I raised the subject of her with Ted Jr., he looked as if he would rather be cleaning an oven. “I never spoke to her about it,” he said of his decision not to run in Massachusetts. On the subject of Vicki generally, he said in a separate e-mail: “Vicki was a great source of love and support for my father, and she is working hard to ensure that my father’s memory and legacy are properly honored.” Another argument against the “slam dunk” theory: while Ted Jr. was likable and had a good story to tell, he did not strike me as a candidate who would be ready from Day 1, given the scrutiny he would endure. He could be stumbling and tentative. My mind jumped to Caroline Kennedy and her ill-fated effort to take over Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat in New York. Other than Ted Sr., no member of the Kennedy family has been on the ballot for statewide office in Massachusetts since John F. Kennedy in 1958. Kennedys are always mentioned as potential 800-pound gorillas in statewide campaigns, but none ever jump. It’s safer that way, not to risk being the one who loses and messes up the mystique of invincibility, such as it is. “The Kennedy mystique is more of a hologram at this point,” said Jon Keller, a longtime political analyst in Massachusetts. “You can see it sometimes, but it’s not really there in any meaningful way.” Ted Jr. told me that turning away from the Massachusetts option allowed him to “mentally cross a bridge.” “I think for me to go into politics with the name Ted Kennedy Jr. was going to be difficult enough,” he said. To do it in the state his father represented for nearly 47 years would possibly be too much. In our last discussion, I asked Ted Jr. if he had ever been in therapy. “I think it’s very healthy,” he said, and then he added an endearing nonanswer that I took to be a yes: “I’ve done a lot of thinking, O.K.?” It was early March, and we were on the phone. He seemed more animated and relaxed than when we last met. “I’ve had a lot to think about in my life,” he said. “I’ve been through a lot.” No doubt it all had to be a handful. From what I could tell, he had managed it admirably, raised a nice family, avoided scandal and embarrassment and seemed genuinely committed now to “making a contribution.” I had been pressing Ted on his timing, trying to get an answer to whether this “coming out” was part of some grand plan. He said he had a “general plan, and I kind of stuck to it.” I relayed to him something Steve McMahon told me earlier — that he, McMahon, found it poignant that Ted never responded to his father’s wish that he run for office when he was still alive. “But now that Senator Kennedy’s gone,” McMahon said, “it’s almost like Ted’s responding to his father’s call from above.” I asked Ted if he agreed with this, the overly poetic construction aside. He did, he said, and took it further. “All children want to please their parents,” Ted said. “I know it would have pleased my father for me to have had political success when he was still alive. But I think in many ways, now that he is no longer alive, that’s really freed me up.” That, as much as anything, would seem like the foundational story. Mark Leibovich is the magazine’s chief national correspondent. His book, “This Town,” about contemporary Washington, will be published this summer. Editor: Joel Lovell

Here are two books that cover detective Rothstein's NYPD activities: Times Square by William Sherman http://www.amazon.com/Times-Square-William-Sherman/dp/0553131168/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362952380&sr=1-1&keywords=Times+Square+by+William+Sherman The Last Investigation by Gaeton Fonzi http://www.amazon.com/Last-Investigation-Gaeton-Fonzi/dp/0980121353/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362952447&sr=1-1&keywords=gaeton+fonzi+the+last+investigation See also the Village Voice article of November 21, 1977, on the arrest of Frank Sturgis by NYPD detectives James Rothstein and his partner, Matthew Rosenthal [start in first column on the left in the article]: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1299&dat=19771121&id=_ABOAAAAIBAJ&sjid=94sDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6366,3812556 From the Village Voice article: “Late on Monday evening, Paul Meskill introduced Marita [Lorenz] to a couple of detectives from police intelligence, James Rothstein and Matthew Rosenthal. The four of them had some drinks at a bar on 43rd Street. Since May, Rothstein and Rosenthal had been assigned to the New York Senate Select Committee on Crime, which was conducting a massive investigation in to pornography. Marita was supposed to give the detectives information concerning child prostitution; she also told them that Frank Sturgis had threatened to kill her. They accompanied her back to 88th street and arrested Frank Sturgis when he turned up at her apartment around 11 o’clock.”

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=20008

This reads like bad pulp spy fiction, I've never heard of the Stasi, KGB or any other intel service selling the freedom of a captured foreign spy and why would they accept such a measly sum for two Americans? Why negotiate down the price when Rothstein et. al. had so much more in their possession? You write that "I have never heard....", which is the problem as this is the way of the "world of shadows" that those who are not in the intelligence business lack experience to understand. Money, as Howard Hunt once told me, is the easiest commodity in the spook trade. You also state that the $7500 payment for the release was a "measly sum." This took place in 1961. I would hazard to guess that $7500 in 1961 dollars would be $20,000 or more in 2013 dollars. Rothstein, a 20 year old sailor, was suffering from a hangover from partying too much the night before and was not in the mood to pay $10,000. I need to correct a sentence in my entry, which was a mistake on my part and not in the document Rothstein supplied me. Rothstein was not assigned two bodyguards who were sailors from the ship. He instead was assigned two bodyguards who were the biggest and toughest cops who worked on the Reeperbahn. Their names were Manfred Hansen and Hans Mueller. Their office was in the main police station, Davidwache. They accompanied him to secure the release of the two Americans in East Berlin.

I am starting a new topic on retired New York Police Department detective James Rothstein and in doing so am incorporating into it information about him that can be found in the prior topic in this forum titled “Human Compromise and the Protection Racket” at this link: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=19973 I am doing this for two reasons: (1) I shall be posting from time to time in the new topic information given to me by detective Rothstein and (2) with his name in the title it will facilitate being found by anyone using Google or another search engine. If his information were posted under the older topic of “Human Compromise and the Protection Racket,” then the new information might be more difficult to find using a search engine. Rothstein has supplied me with a number of documents. I have his permission to use information in some of the documents but in doing so at his request I must summarize them in my own words for the time being. I thought for my first entry I would use information about how he got started in the “world of shadows” known as the intelligence field. After being involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 while on the ship Essex, which is covered in the link above, Rothstein was still aboard the Essex in December 1961 when it made a scheduled docking in Hamburg, Germany on a goodwill visit. Because he was the only German-speaking sailor on the ship he was assigned as the official interpreter and liaison person. The Navy gave him $20,000 and 90,000 German marks to pay off any problems that might come up. He was also assigned two bodyguards who were big, strong and tough sailors. One morning while the ship was still docked in Hamburg, Rothstein heard a knock on his hotel door. A man in a suit told him he wanted assistance in helping to free an American military man and his wife who had been caught in East Berlin smuggling cigarettes. The man told Rothstein that he and his money were needed to buy the freedom of the two Americans. Rothstein agreed to accept the assignment. The Berlin Wall had just been erected but Rothstein and his two bodyguards managed to enter East Berlin. When they arrived at the address given to them earlier by the man at the hotel, they were taken by the Stasi and KGB to the basement where a man and a woman were lying on the floor being hog-tied. After a short but vigorous negotiation the ransom demand was dropped from $10,000 to $7500. The man and the woman were untied and placed in Rothstein’s car. Upon their return to West Berlin, Rothstein learned that the two were not smugglers but American spies. The day before the Essex was set to sail, the man in the suit returned to the hotel to visit Rothstein. He thanked Rothstein for a job well done and asked he would like to remain in Europe and continue his fine work while still being officially assigned to the Essex. Rothstein responded, “I may be 20 years old…but I am not stupid. I will end up in the Russian Gulag and my parents will be told I am missing at sea and presumed dead. They will be given a flag.” The man in the suit departed. Nothing was the same after that for Rothstein. He had entered another world, one that would follow him forever. In March 1962 the Gorch Foch, a German sailing ship arrived in New York City and docked at pier 86 as a return courtesy call for the Essex having visited Hamburg. The Germans on the Gorch Foch requested specifically that Rothstein be assigned as liaison and good will representative to their vessel. Their request was granted.

Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination [Hardcover] By Richard Belzer and David Wayne http://www.amazon.com/Hit-List-Investigation-Mysterious-Assassination/dp/1620878070

The Myth of Bob Woodward: Why Is This Man an American Icon? by Max Holland Mar 12, 2013 1:00 AM EDT http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/03/11/the-myth-of-bob-woodward-why-is-this-man-an-american-icon.html