Douglas Caddy

JFK secretly freed rapists, drug dealers and Mafia hitmen to kill Castro and curb threat of Communism, claims explosive new book Revelations made by journalist Bill Deane in new book 'Smooth Criminal' It tells story of alleged CIA spy and 'one-man crime wave' Dave Riley Claims criminals allowed on 'crime sprees' in US when not working for CIA Deane: 'Riley was typical recruit: Intelligent, ambitious and without morals' While JFK did not order the programme, Deane says he was 'aware' of it By Matt Blake Daily Mail (U.K.) PUBLISHED: 07:25 EST, 15 February 2013 | UPDATED: 09:04 EST, 15 February 2013 Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2279155/JFK-secretly-freed-rapists-drug-dealers-Mafia-hitmen-kill-Castro-curb-Communist-threat-claims-explosive-new-book.html#ixzz2L4sIJSkQ

Bill Clinton Consulted Richard Nixon On Foreign Policy:Documents By MICHAEL R. BLOOD 02/14/13 04:34 AM ET EST Associated Press YORBA LINDA, Calif. -- In the final months of his life, Richard Nixon quietly advised President Bill Clinton on navigating the post-Cold War world, even offering to serve as a conduit for messages to Russian President Boris Yeltsin and other government officials, newly declassified documents show. Memos and other records show Nixon's behind-the-scenes relations with the Clinton White House. The documents are part of an exhibit opening Friday at the Nixon Presidential Library, marking the centennial of his birth. Clinton has talked often of his gratitude to Nixon for his advice on foreign affairs, particularly Russia. In a video that will be part of the exhibit, Clinton recalls receiving a letter from the 37th president shortly before his death on April 22, 1994, at a time when Clinton was assessing U.S. relations "in a world growing ever more interdependent and yet ungovernable." "I sought guidance in the example of President Nixon, who came to the presidency at a time in our history when Americans were tempted to say, `We've had enough of the world,'" Clinton says in the video. "But President Nixon knew we had to continue to reach out to old friends and to old enemies alike. He knew America could not quit the world." The documents from late February and early March 1994 show Nixon, then 81, in his role of elder statesman. It was two decades after he left the White House in disgrace during Watergate. The exhibit is an attempt to present a fuller picture of Nixon. It includes the wooden bench he often warmed as a second-rate football player in college, and illustrates events often eclipsed by the scandal that drove him from office. Media reports from the time discussed interaction between Nixon and Clinton before his trip, including a phone call. The records, provided to The Associated Press by the library, fill in the backstory, detailing Nixon's advice as well as his willingness to assist U.S. interests abroad. They include a confidential National Security Council memo from a senior Clinton aide who spent three hours with Nixon, shortly before the former president would make his 10th, and final, trip to Russia that year. The aide, R. Nicholas Burns, writes that Nixon is generally supportive of White House policy on Russia but thinks the administration has not been tough enough when it comes to Russia's dealings with its neighbors. Nixon also advises that U.S. aid to Russia should be linked to U.S. security aims, such as nuclear balance and a reduced threat from the Russian military, rather than emphasizing the value of domestic reforms there. Nixon also offered to carry messages to Yeltsin and others as his own, the memo says. The documents, released through Clinton's presidential library for the exhibit, also include talking points Clinton apparently used in his call with Nixon. Nixon's trip to Russia was followed closely in the media, in part because Yeltsin froze the former president out of the Kremlin and took away bodyguards and a limousine the government had provided for him after Nixon held meetings with Yeltsin adversaries. Yeltsin later backed off and urged Russian officials and parliament members to meet with Nixon. In another glimpse into their relationship, a handwritten note will be on display from Nixon to Clinton that praises the former Arkansas governor's 1992 presidential campaign that helped put him in the White House. Nixon said the campaign was one of the best he had ever witnessed. "The strongest steel must pass through the hottest fire. In enduring that ordeal you have demonstrated that you have the character to lead not just America but the forces of peace and freedom in the world," Nixon wrote. Clinton in his younger days was no fan of Nixon – as a college student in the 1960s, he opposed escalation of the Vietnam War. And his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, was a young lawyer advising a House committee when she helped draw up impeachment papers against Nixon. But Clinton's views changed. He led the nation in paying tribute to Nixon at his funeral in California in April 1994, declaring, "May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close." He later told interviewer Larry King that he was deeply grateful for Nixon's counsel since he took office and wished he could call the former president for advice. Clinton echoed that statement in the video tribute. "After he died, I found myself wishing I could pick up the phone and ask President Nixon what he thought about this issue or that problem, particularly if it involved Russia. I appreciated his insight and advice and I'm glad he chose, at the end of his life, to share it with me," Clinton says

Statistical information relevant as to how Marilyn Monroe died: From the article: “Guns are particularly lethal. Suicidal acts with guns are fatal in 85 percent of cases, while those with pills are fatal in just 2 percent of cases, according to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.” “Overdoses, which account for about 80 percent of suicide attempts, are responsible for just 14 percent of fatalities.” --------------------------------------------------- To Reduce Suicide Rates, New Focus Turns to Guns By SABRINA TAVERNISE The New York Times February 13, 2013 http://www.nytimes.c...to-guns.html?hp DAYTON, Wyo. — Craig Reichert found his son’s body on a winter morning, lying on the floor as if he were napping with his great-uncle’s pistol under his knee. The 911 dispatcher told him to administer CPR, but Mr. Reichert, who has had emergency training, told her it was too late. His son, Kameron, 17, was already cold to the touch. Guns are like a grandmother’s diamonds in the Reichert family, heirlooms that carry memory and tradition. They are used on the occasional hunting trip, but most days they are stored, forgotten, under a bed. So when Kameron used one on himself, his parents were as shocked as they were heartbroken. “I beat myself up quite a bit over not having a gun safe or something to put them in,” Mr. Reichert said. But he said even if he had had one, “There would have been two people in the house with the combination, him and me.” The gun debate has focused on mass shootings and assault weapons since the schoolhouse massacre in Newtown, Conn., but far more Americans die by turning guns on themselves. Nearly 20,000 of the 30,000 deaths from guns in the United States in 2010 were suicides, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national suicide rate has climbed by 12 percent since 2003, and suicide is the third-leading cause of death for teenagers. Guns are particularly lethal. Suicidal acts with guns are fatal in 85 percent of cases, while those with pills are fatal in just 2 percent of cases, according to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. The national map of suicide lights up in states with the highest gun ownership rates. Wyoming, Montana and Alaska, the states with the three highest suicide rates, are also the top gun-owning states, according to the Harvard center. The state-level data are too broad to tell whether the deaths were in homes with guns, but a series of individual-level studies since the early 1990s found a direct link. Most researchers say the weight of evidence from multiple studies is that guns in the home increase the risk of suicide. “The literature suggests that having a gun in your home to protect your family is like bringing a time bomb into your house,” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, an epidemiologist who helped establish the C.D.C.’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. “Instead of protecting you, it’s more likely to blow up.” Still, some dispute the link, saying that it does not prove cause and effect, and that other factors, like alcoholism and drug abuse, may be driving the association. Gary Kleck, a professor of criminology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, contends that gun owners may have qualities that make them more susceptible to suicide. They may be more likely to see the world as a hostile place, or to blame themselves when things go wrong, a dark side of self-reliance. Health officials in a number of states are trying to persuade families to keep guns away from troubled relatives or to lock the weapons up so teenagers cannot get them. Some of those same officials say the inflamed national gun control debate is actually making progress harder because the politics put gun owners on the defensive. “You just bump up against that glass wall, and barriers go up and the conversations break down,” said B. J. Ayers, a suicide prevention specialist in southeast Wyoming. Seeking to lower death rates, health departments in Missouri, Wyoming and North Carolina are giving out gunlocks. In New Hampshire, about half the gun shops put up posters and give out fliers alerting gun owners to the warning signs for suicide and suggesting ways to keep guns from loved ones at risk of harming themselves. A coalition of firearm dealers in Maryland is now planning a similar program. “This is an issue whose time has come,” said Keith Hotle, state suicide prevention team leader for Wyoming, the state with the highest suicide rate. A state advisory council recently bumped firearms safety to the top priority in a new report to the governor on suicide prevention. But Mr. Hotle cautioned that in Wyoming, where guns are like cars — just about everybody has one — direct arguments against them simply will not work. “The framing is important,” he said. “It’s not about taking away people’s guns. It’s about how to deal with folks in a temporary crisis.” Kameron’s crisis was, by all accounts, temporary. He was a popular football player with adoring parents and no history of depression. He worked after school at the only corner grocery store in Dayton, a tiny town in northeastern Wyoming with tidy, tree-lined streets and a park at the base of Bighorn National Forest. He liked to drive students around in his Pontiac Grand Prix, and he always bought multipacks of gum at Costco so he could give out sticks in pretty blue wrappers to girls at school. “If someone had a hankering for a hamburger, he’d be off,” said his mother, Cara Reichert, an administrator in the local school system. The event that preceded his death in 2008 seems like the mischievous scrape of a teenage boy. Out one night in the town park, he was caught with a package of cigars by local police officers. His parents are still tormented over the bad luck that followed. The officers searched him because they were training a new colleague. Then a clerk at the local court told him — incorrectly — that his parents had to be present to pay the fine. His parents punished him by taking away his cellphone, though they left him his car. “If just one little piece of this story would not have fallen into place,” Mr. Reichert said, his voice breaking. Suicidal acts are often prompted by a temporary surge of rage or despair, and most people who attempt them do not die. In a 2001 study of 13- to 34-year-olds in Houston who had attempted suicide but were saved by medical intervention, researchers from the C.D.C. found that, for more than two-thirds of them, the time that elapsed between deciding to act and taking action was an hour or less. The key to reducing fatalities, experts say, is to block access to lethal means when the suicidal feeling spikes. The chances of dying rise drastically when a gun is present, because guns are so much more likely to be lethal, said Dr. Matthew Miller, associate director of the Harvard center. Guns are used in more than half of all suicide fatalities, but account for just 1 percent of all self-harm injuries treated in hospital emergency rooms, a rough proxy for suicide attempts, Dr. Miller said. Overdoses, which account for about 80 percent of suicide attempts, are responsible for just 14 percent of fatalities. “If you use a gun,” Dr. Miller said, “you usually don’t get a second chance.” One common argument is that the suicidal person would have found some other way to kill himself, even if no gun was available. That is the belief of Sharon Wells, the adoptive grandmother of Kyle Wells, a 16-year-old in Cody, Wyo., who shot himself with her pistol in October. “It’s not the guns, it’s the person,” Ms. Wells said. Kyle was born into a world of problems that began with fetal alcohol syndrome, and continued throughout school, where he was bullied relentlessly for his small stature, she said. If he had not used a gun, she said, he would have used something else. “Yes, many may find another method,” said Catherine Barber, director of the Harvard center’s Means Matter public health education campaign, “but will it kill them?” Citing statistics from emergency rooms and death certificates, she said, “Nearly everything they substitute will have lower odds of killing them, sometimes dramatically so.” Reducing access to lethal means has worked in other countries. An intervention in Israel preventing soldiers from taking their guns home on weekend leave, a time when many soldiers’ suicides occurred, helped reduce the suicide rate among them by 40 percent. Michael Richins, a coroner in Lincoln County in southwest Wyoming who lectures on suicide prevention, contends that it is gun owners, not the government, who will bring down suicide rates. Gun control, which is about restrictions imposed by government, will only turn them off, he said. “You have to use an approach that’s palatable to people,” he said. “You’re not victimizing, you’re empowering.” After Kameron’s death, his father could no longer stand to have the gun his son used in the house, so he gave it to his brother. Still, he cherishes his gun collection, and strongly opposes talk of gun control in Washington. “I will always believe in guns,” he said. He has sought solace in comforting others, reaching out to other families in the area who were going through a similar trauma. His life is still a fog of unanswerable questions: What if he had not punished Kameron by taking away his cellphone? What if he had locked up the family guns? His daughter, Kassidy, a high school senior, tries not to ask such questions. Sometimes she feels angry at her brother, but mostly she misses him. “It hurts even more to think what could have happened,” she said, “because it’s not going to change anything.”

From the article: “Guns are particularly lethal. Suicidal acts with guns are fatal in 85 percent of cases, while those with pills are fatal in just 2 percent of cases, according to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.” “Overdoses, which account for about 80 percent of suicide attempts, are responsible for just 14 percent of fatalities.” --------------------------------------------------- To Reduce Suicide Rates, New Focus Turns to Guns By SABRINA TAVERNISE The New York Times February 13, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/us/to-lower-suicide-rates-new-focus-turns-to-guns.html?hp DAYTON, Wyo. — Craig Reichert found his son’s body on a winter morning, lying on the floor as if he were napping with his great-uncle’s pistol under his knee. The 911 dispatcher told him to administer CPR, but Mr. Reichert, who has had emergency training, told her it was too late. His son, Kameron, 17, was already cold to the touch. Guns are like a grandmother’s diamonds in the Reichert family, heirlooms that carry memory and tradition. They are used on the occasional hunting trip, but most days they are stored, forgotten, under a bed. So when Kameron used one on himself, his parents were as shocked as they were heartbroken. “I beat myself up quite a bit over not having a gun safe or something to put them in,” Mr. Reichert said. But he said even if he had had one, “There would have been two people in the house with the combination, him and me.” The gun debate has focused on mass shootings and assault weapons since the schoolhouse massacre in Newtown, Conn., but far more Americans die by turning guns on themselves. Nearly 20,000 of the 30,000 deaths from guns in the United States in 2010 were suicides, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national suicide rate has climbed by 12 percent since 2003, and suicide is the third-leading cause of death for teenagers. Guns are particularly lethal. Suicidal acts with guns are fatal in 85 percent of cases, while those with pills are fatal in just 2 percent of cases, according to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. The national map of suicide lights up in states with the highest gun ownership rates. Wyoming, Montana and Alaska, the states with the three highest suicide rates, are also the top gun-owning states, according to the Harvard center. The state-level data are too broad to tell whether the deaths were in homes with guns, but a series of individual-level studies since the early 1990s found a direct link. Most researchers say the weight of evidence from multiple studies is that guns in the home increase the risk of suicide. “The literature suggests that having a gun in your home to protect your family is like bringing a time bomb into your house,” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, an epidemiologist who helped establish the C.D.C.’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. “Instead of protecting you, it’s more likely to blow up.” Still, some dispute the link, saying that it does not prove cause and effect, and that other factors, like alcoholism and drug abuse, may be driving the association. Gary Kleck, a professor of criminology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, contends that gun owners may have qualities that make them more susceptible to suicide. They may be more likely to see the world as a hostile place, or to blame themselves when things go wrong, a dark side of self-reliance. Health officials in a number of states are trying to persuade families to keep guns away from troubled relatives or to lock the weapons up so teenagers cannot get them. Some of those same officials say the inflamed national gun control debate is actually making progress harder because the politics put gun owners on the defensive. “You just bump up against that glass wall, and barriers go up and the conversations break down,” said B. J. Ayers, a suicide prevention specialist in southeast Wyoming. Seeking to lower death rates, health departments in Missouri, Wyoming and North Carolina are giving out gunlocks. In New Hampshire, about half the gun shops put up posters and give out fliers alerting gun owners to the warning signs for suicide and suggesting ways to keep guns from loved ones at risk of harming themselves. A coalition of firearm dealers in Maryland is now planning a similar program. “This is an issue whose time has come,” said Keith Hotle, state suicide prevention team leader for Wyoming, the state with the highest suicide rate. A state advisory council recently bumped firearms safety to the top priority in a new report to the governor on suicide prevention. But Mr. Hotle cautioned that in Wyoming, where guns are like cars — just about everybody has one — direct arguments against them simply will not work. “The framing is important,” he said. “It’s not about taking away people’s guns. It’s about how to deal with folks in a temporary crisis.” Kameron’s crisis was, by all accounts, temporary. He was a popular football player with adoring parents and no history of depression. He worked after school at the only corner grocery store in Dayton, a tiny town in northeastern Wyoming with tidy, tree-lined streets and a park at the base of Bighorn National Forest. He liked to drive students around in his Pontiac Grand Prix, and he always bought multipacks of gum at Costco so he could give out sticks in pretty blue wrappers to girls at school. “If someone had a hankering for a hamburger, he’d be off,” said his mother, Cara Reichert, an administrator in the local school system. The event that preceded his death in 2008 seems like the mischievous scrape of a teenage boy. Out one night in the town park, he was caught with a package of cigars by local police officers. His parents are still tormented over the bad luck that followed. The officers searched him because they were training a new colleague. Then a clerk at the local court told him — incorrectly — that his parents had to be present to pay the fine. His parents punished him by taking away his cellphone, though they left him his car. “If just one little piece of this story would not have fallen into place,” Mr. Reichert said, his voice breaking. Suicidal acts are often prompted by a temporary surge of rage or despair, and most people who attempt them do not die. In a 2001 study of 13- to 34-year-olds in Houston who had attempted suicide but were saved by medical intervention, researchers from the C.D.C. found that, for more than two-thirds of them, the time that elapsed between deciding to act and taking action was an hour or less. The key to reducing fatalities, experts say, is to block access to lethal means when the suicidal feeling spikes. The chances of dying rise drastically when a gun is present, because guns are so much more likely to be lethal, said Dr. Matthew Miller, associate director of the Harvard center. Guns are used in more than half of all suicide fatalities, but account for just 1 percent of all self-harm injuries treated in hospital emergency rooms, a rough proxy for suicide attempts, Dr. Miller said. Overdoses, which account for about 80 percent of suicide attempts, are responsible for just 14 percent of fatalities. “If you use a gun,” Dr. Miller said, “you usually don’t get a second chance.” One common argument is that the suicidal person would have found some other way to kill himself, even if no gun was available. That is the belief of Sharon Wells, the adoptive grandmother of Kyle Wells, a 16-year-old in Cody, Wyo., who shot himself with her pistol in October. “It’s not the guns, it’s the person,” Ms. Wells said. Kyle was born into a world of problems that began with fetal alcohol syndrome, and continued throughout school, where he was bullied relentlessly for his small stature, she said. If he had not used a gun, she said, he would have used something else. “Yes, many may find another method,” said Catherine Barber, director of the Harvard center’s Means Matter public health education campaign, “but will it kill them?” Citing statistics from emergency rooms and death certificates, she said, “Nearly everything they substitute will have lower odds of killing them, sometimes dramatically so.” Reducing access to lethal means has worked in other countries. An intervention in Israel preventing soldiers from taking their guns home on weekend leave, a time when many soldiers’ suicides occurred, helped reduce the suicide rate among them by 40 percent. Michael Richins, a coroner in Lincoln County in southwest Wyoming who lectures on suicide prevention, contends that it is gun owners, not the government, who will bring down suicide rates. Gun control, which is about restrictions imposed by government, will only turn them off, he said. “You have to use an approach that’s palatable to people,” he said. “You’re not victimizing, you’re empowering.” After Kameron’s death, his father could no longer stand to have the gun his son used in the house, so he gave it to his brother. Still, he cherishes his gun collection, and strongly opposes talk of gun control in Washington. “I will always believe in guns,” he said. He has sought solace in comforting others, reaching out to other families in the area who were going through a similar trauma. His life is still a fog of unanswerable questions: What if he had not punished Kameron by taking away his cellphone? What if he had locked up the family guns? His daughter, Kassidy, a high school senior, tries not to ask such questions. Sometimes she feels angry at her brother, but mostly she misses him. “It hurts even more to think what could have happened,” she said, “because it’s not going to change anything.”

Republican Leaders Worry Their Party Could Divide in Two As Rand Paul mulls a presidential campaign, GOP frets over impact of disaffected voters and shifting coalitions. Democrats should worry, too. By Ron Fournier National Journal Updated: February 14, 2013 | 6:41 a.m. February 14, 2013 | 5:00 a.m. http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/republican-leaders-worry-their-party-could-divide-in-two-20130214 [Photo caption: Republicans worry that Rand Paul or a candidate like him will mount a third-party presidential campaign that divides the GOP. At least one leading Democrat says his party should also worry about disaffected voters and the rise of third and even fourth parties.] Inside the cozy enclaves of GOP bonhomie—hunkered at the tables of see-and-be-seen Washington restaurants—Republican leaders are sourly predicting a party-busting independent presidential bid by a tea-party challenger, like Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., in 2016. To them, the GOP apocalypse looms larger than most realize. Dueling State of the Union rebuttals and Karl Rove’s assault on right-wing candidates are mere symptoms of an existential crisis that is giving the sturdiest Republicans heartburn. And yet, the heart of the matter extends beyond the GOP. My conversations this week with two Republican officials, along with a Democratic strategist's timely memo, reflect a growing school of thought in Washington that social change and a disillusioned electorate threaten the entire two-party system. Seem like a lot to swallow? Allow me to describe my last few days at work. Between bites of an $18.95 SteakBurger at the Palm, one of Washington’s premier expense-account restaurants, Republican consultant Scott Reed summed up the state of politics and his beloved GOP. “The party,” he told me, “is irrelevant.” He cited the familiar litany of problems: demographic change, poor candidates, ideological rigidity, deplorable approval ratings, and a rift between social and economic conservatives. “It’s leading to some type of crash and reassessment and change,” said Reed, who ran Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign and remains an influential lobbyist and operative. “It can’t continue on this path.” Reed sketched a hypothetical scenario under which Paul runs for the Republican nomination in 2016, loses after solid showings in Iowa and other states run by supporters of his father (former GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul), bolts the GOP, and mounts a third-party bid that undercuts the Republican nominee. Paul, a tea-party favorite who was elected to the Senate in 2010, told USA Today on Wednesday that he was interested in running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. "I do want to be part of the national debate," he said. What are the odds of Paul or another GOP defector splitting the party? Reed asked me to repeat the question—and then grimaced. “There’s a real chance,” he replied. The next morning, Rep. Reid Ribble of Wisconsin dipped his spoon into a bowl of strawberries, sugar, and pink milk—and declared the era of two major parties just about over. “I think we’re at the precipice of a breakdown of the two-party system,” said the Wisconsin Republican. Voters are tired of partisan rancor and institutional incompetence, Ribble said, pointing to polls that suggest the number of independent voters is rising. “Ross Perot was a goofy guy,” he said of the deficit hawk who mounted two independent presidential bids in the 1990s. “If he was packaged as a different guy and had the Internet, he would have emerged [as president]. The warning bell he was sounded then is getting louder today.” Ribble represents one of the few House districts still divided almost equally between Republican and Democratic voters. Many of the rest are gerrymandered, drawn to easily elect a conservative Republican or liberal Democrat. It's one cause of gridlock, what voters loathe about Washington. “I think over a period of time we could watch third and even fourth parties emerging,” Ribble said. A third voice joined the conversation when Democratic consultant Doug Sosnik released his State of the Union memo, a remarkable document warning both Democrats and Republicans about the increasing likelihood of a third-party presidential bid. “And even though the Republican Party is in free fall, the Democratic Party’s position among the electorate has only marginally benefited from its misfortune,” Sosnik wrote. “The broad sense of alienation leaves a very wide door open for a third party presidential candidate in the future.” (Disclosure: I coauthored a book with Sosnik and GOP consultant Matthew Dowd about the effect that social change has on politics.) Sosnik noted “the staggering pace of economic, demographic, and technological change,” a period of social tumult that rivals the first years of the industrial revolution. “All the upheaval and uncertainty have taken a toll on Americans’ confidence in their government and institutions to solve the nation’s problems,” Sosnik wrote, touching on a topic I explored in a 2012 National Journal magazine feature, “In Nothing We Trust.” “This disaffection shows no signs of dissipating any time soon,” Sosnik continued. “There’s little doubt that it will continue to be a major challenge for both political parties and future presidential aspirants as the clock continues to tick on President Obama’s presidency.” In a telephone interview last week, Sosnik said voters are wary of the leadership pool in U.S. politics. Business or even religious leaders could find traction in future presidential races. “I think we will have a great debate with third and even fourth parties” vying for traditional GOP voters as well as Democrats now aligned with Obama, he said. The Democratic Party will have trouble transferring Obama’s popularity to its next presidential nominee unless Hillary Rodham Clinton runs, Sosnik told me. “I’m not surprised Republicans in this town are telling you they’re worried about the declining influence of their party and the potential for a third-party bid,” Sosnik said, adding with a chuckle: “Democrats should worry, too.” He wasn't joking. Want to stay ahead of the curve? Sign up for National Journal’s AM & PM Must Reads. News and analysis to ensure you don’t miss a thing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/14/christopher-dorner-fire-police

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This is not connected directly to the topic here but is informative of the whole subject in a general way. _________________________________________ Body language experts say Obama exuded dominance and empathy By Brigid Schulte, Published: February 12, 2013 | Updated: Wednesday, February 13, 5:55 AM Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/body-language-experts-say-obama-exuded-dominance-and-empathy/2013/02/13/7755207e-7590-11e2-95e4-6148e45d7adb_print.html President Obama swallowed hard after he averred that protections for consumers, health-care patients and homeowners are stronger than ever before. A sure sign, body language expert Tonya Reiman said, that he wasn’t sure he believed what he was saying. But when the president urged Republicans and Democrats to work together to reduce the deficit, he gesticulated emphatically with both hands directly in front of him, progressively moving them closer to his center. Reiman said that meant he really did believe. “If the hands go outward,” she said, “it’s a sign that people are lying.” His eyes flashed anger when he spoke of guns and the children of Newtown. The tightness of his jaw registered frustration when he spoke of AIDS. His eyes widened, a sign of intensity, when talking about people learning English. His eyes blinked faster as he spoke of terrorism, a sign he was touching a raw nerve. And he smirked, one side of his mouth drawing up as he spoke of CEO salaries never being higher as wages for the poor and middle income have remained stagnant. “That was a flash of contempt,” she said. Reiman is one of a rarified group of psychologists and anthropologists, like those at the Center for Nonverbal Studies in Spokane, Wash., who carefully track political leaders, not so much for what they say, but for what their body language conveys about what they believe. They analyze the 46 facial muscles capable of making 10,000 facial expressions, the twitch of the eyebrow, the sincerity of the smile, the jut of the chin and the hand gestures to determine when someone is telling the truth, fibbing or just saying things that they think people want to hear. These are the experts who track sighs, eye rolling and eye blinks during campaign speeches and presidential debates to determine who is lying and who is anxious. (Typical human blinks per minute: 20. GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole in the 1996 presidential debates: 147. Former president Richard M. Nixon giving his resignation speech: “an eye blink storm” on a par with schizophrenics, according to Boston College psychology professor Joe Tecce.) And what body language experts say Obama needed to do during his State of the Union address Tuesday night was not just to reach across the aisle and appeal to a divided Congress and country split along ideological lines to find a way forward together. He also needed to convince them — and television viewers — that he was not just a calm, cool, collected and cerebral thinker, but a warm, empathetic and, yes, even charismatic leader worthy of rallying behind. “His job was to convince Congress that, in coming together, everybody wins,” Reiman said. “And he did. He came across as warm and convincing. He needed to be dominant and forceful without being aggressive.” So how to do that, in body, not just in words? Watch Obama talk about immigration reform, she said. He used what body language experts call “the politician’s point.” His thumb touched his index finger. His hand was closed in a soft fist and he waved it in short bursts. “That’s a great way to make your point, to show dominance without being overly aggressive,” she said. But when the cameras cut to Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), Obama’s opponent in 2008 whom he had just praised for working in a bipartisan manner to find market-based solutions to climate change, Reiman sucked in a deep breath. “Oh, look, McCain is really agitated. He did not like being mentioned.” But wasn’t McCain smiling? “Yes, but you had to watch his eyebrows,” she said. “The eyebrows went down first, which is annoyance. Our immediate facial expressions usually show our real emotions. But then, when we realize it, we often cover up that emotion quickly. And we usually cover it up with a smile. The first expression is real. The second is the coverup.” Reiman watched carefully and noted that, on every point — from bringing troops home from Afghanistan to gun control to admonishing lawmakers to stop the brinksmanship with sequestration — Obama kept his palms parallel or down. And that’s critical. For a country that tends to elect its leaders because they are tall, or because they look good, keeping the palms down shows you mean business and you are not someone to be messed with. “When the palms are up, that’s a sign of weakness,” she said. Obama jutted his chin up and out, she said, usually a sign of arrogance. “But that’s just the way Obama carries himself. That’s his baseline,” she said. And within the space of the first 15 minutes of the speech, he began to thrust his left elbow out repeatedly. “Flaring your elbow is a power move. You’re trying to take up more space so you’ll come across as powerful. It’s like puffing out your chest. It tells people, ‘Hey, I’m bigger than you think I am,’ ” she said. “He does it so often, that when you watch his speeches in fast-forward, it looks really bizarre, like he’s doing the funky chicken.” And what of Vice President Biden’s squinty eyes? And House Speaker John A. Boehner’s sour expression. And wait, was he sucking his teeth? “Well, Biden was rubbing his eyes, so that may not mean anything other than he had something in his eyes. It looked like he had double pink eye,” Reiman said. “But Boehner’s facial expressions and smirks registered disgust and contempt. It was just the worst. You could see Obama try to counteract that at the end with a kind of tug-of-war handshake.” A sign, perhaps, she said, of things to come.

Why Police Lie Under Oath By MICHELLE ALEXANDER The New York Times February 3, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/why-police-officers-lie-under-oath.html THOUSANDS of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury’s believing their word over a police officer’s are slim to none. As a juror, whom are you likely to believe: the alleged criminal in an orange jumpsuit or two well-groomed police officers in uniforms who just swore to God they’re telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? As one of my colleagues recently put it, “Everyone knows you have to be crazy to accuse the police of lying.” But are police officers necessarily more trustworthy than alleged criminals? I think not. Not just because the police have a special inclination toward confabulation, but because, disturbingly, they have an incentive to lie. In this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn’t be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so. That may sound harsh, but numerous law enforcement officials have put the matter more bluntly. Peter Keane, a former San Francisco Police commissioner, wrote an article in The San Francisco Chronicle decrying a police culture that treats lying as the norm: “Police officer perjury in court to justify illegal dope searches is commonplace. One of the dirty little not-so-secret secrets of the criminal justice system is undercover narcotics officers intentionally lying under oath. It is a perversion of the American justice system that strikes directly at the rule of law. Yet it is the routine way of doing business in courtrooms everywhere in America.” The New York City Police Department is not exempt from this critique. In 2011, hundreds of drug cases were dismissed after several police officers were accused of mishandling evidence. That year, Justice Gustin L. Reichbach of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn condemned a widespread culture of lying and corruption in the department’s drug enforcement units. “I thought I was not naïve,” he said when announcing a guilty verdict involving a police detective who had planted crack cocaine on a pair of suspects. “But even this court was shocked, not only by the seeming pervasive scope of misconduct but even more distressingly by the seeming casualness by which such conduct is employed.” Remarkably, New York City officers have been found to engage in patterns of deceit in cases involving charges as minor as trespass. In September it was reported that the Bronx district attorney’s office was so alarmed by police lying that it decided to stop prosecuting people who were stopped and arrested for trespassing at public housing projects, unless prosecutors first interviewed the arresting officer to ensure the arrest was actually warranted. Jeannette Rucker, the chief of arraignments for the Bronx district attorney, explained in a letter that it had become apparent that the police were arresting people even when there was convincing evidence that they were innocent. To justify the arrests, Ms. Rucker claimed, police officers provided false written statements, and in depositions, the arresting officers gave false testimony. Mr. Keane, in his Chronicle article, offered two major reasons the police lie so much. First, because they can. Police officers “know that in a swearing match between a drug defendant and a police officer, the judge always rules in favor of the officer.” At worst, the case will be dismissed, but the officer is free to continue business as usual. Second, criminal defendants are typically poor and uneducated, often belong to a racial minority, and often have a criminal record. “Police know that no one cares about these people,” Mr. Keane explained. All true, but there is more to the story than that. Police departments have been rewarded in recent years for the sheer numbers of stops, searches and arrests. In the war on drugs, federal grant programs like the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program have encouraged state and local law enforcement agencies to boost drug arrests in order to compete for millions of dollars in funding. Agencies receive cash rewards for arresting high numbers of people for drug offenses, no matter how minor the offenses or how weak the evidence. Law enforcement has increasingly become a numbers game. And as it has, police officers’ tendency to regard procedural rules as optional and to lie and distort the facts has grown as well. Numerous scandals involving police officers lying or planting drugs — in Tulia, Tex. and Oakland, Calif., for example — have been linked to federally funded drug task forces eager to keep the cash rolling in. THE pressure to boost arrest numbers is not limited to drug law enforcement. Even where no clear financial incentives exist, the “get tough” movement has warped police culture to such a degree that police chiefs and individual officers feel pressured to meet stop-and-frisk or arrest quotas in order to prove their “productivity.” For the record, the New York City police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, denies that his department has arrest quotas. Such denials are mandatory, given that quotas are illegal under state law. But as the Urban Justice Center’s Police Reform Organizing Project has documented, numerous officers have contradicted Mr. Kelly. In 2010, a New York City police officer named Adil Polanco told a local ABC News reporter that “our primary job is not to help anybody, our primary job is not to assist anybody, our primary job is to get those numbers and come back with them.” He continued: “At the end of the night you have to come back with something. You have to write somebody, you have to arrest somebody, even if the crime is not committed, the number’s there. So our choice is to come up with the number.” Exposing police lying is difficult largely because it is rare for the police to admit their own lies or to acknowledge the lies of other officers. This reluctance derives partly from the code of silence that governs police practice and from the ways in which the system of mass incarceration is structured to reward dishonesty. But it’s also because police officers are human. Research shows that ordinary human beings lie a lot — multiple times a day — even when there’s no clear benefit to lying. Generally, humans lie about relatively minor things like “I lost your phone number; that’s why I didn’t call” or “No, really, you don’t look fat.” But humans can also be persuaded to lie about far more important matters, especially if the lie will enhance or protect their reputation or standing in a group. The natural tendency to lie makes quota systems and financial incentives that reward the police for the sheer numbers of people stopped, frisked or arrested especially dangerous. One lie can destroy a life, resulting in the loss of employment, a prison term and relegation to permanent second-class status. The fact that our legal system has become so tolerant of police lying indicates how corrupted our criminal justice system has become by declarations of war, “get tough” mantras, and a seemingly insatiable appetite for locking up and locking out the poorest and darkest among us. And, no, I’m not crazy for thinking so. Michelle Alexander is the author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” ______________________________________________________________________ http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/02/police-discuss-setting-dorner-cabin-on-fire-on-scanners-scanner-traffic-silenced-says-listeners-2563502.html

Phone hacking: two current Sun staff among six new arrests Officers from Metropolitan police's Operation Weeting detain former News of the World journalists in new line of inquiry By Lisa O'Carroll and Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 February 2013 05.34 EST Six former News of the World journalists, two of whom now work for the Sun, have been arrested by Scotland Yard officers investigating a new line of inquiry in relation to phone hacking. In a dramatic new twist to the phone-hacking scandal on Wednesday morning, the Metropolitan police said in a statement that it had identified a further suspected conspiracy to intercept voicemail messages by three men and three women that is alleged to have taken place between 2005 and 2006. All of them are journalists or former journalists, the Met said, and all but one of them were detained in London. Those arrested were a 46-year-old man in Wandsworth, a 45-year-old man in Wandsworth, a 39-year-old man in Greenwich, a 39-year-old woman in Cheshire, a 33-year-old woman in Islington and a 40-year-old woman in Lambeth. They are being interviewed at police stations in London and Cheshire and their homes are being searched. "Detectives on Operation Weeting have identified a further suspected conspiracy to intercept telephone voicemails by a number of employees who worked for the now defunct News of the World newspaper," the Met said. The Met added that the alleged victims of the hacking were not previously notified, confirming that it was "part of the new lines of inquiry". "In due course officers will be making contact with people they believe have been victims of the suspected voicemail interceptions," the Met said. None of those arrested have been arrested before. Mike Darcey, chief executive of Sun publisher News International, emailed staff to confirm the arrests. He told colleagues: "As always, I share your concerns about these arrests and recognise the huge burden it places on our journalists in the daily challenge of producing Britain's most popular newspaper. I am extremely grateful to all of you who succeed in that mission despite these very challenging circumstances." More details soon ....

Sarah Ferguson's phone was hacked for six years by News of the World, court hears. The Duchess of York's mobile phone was hacked for six years by the News of the World, a court was told today, as she and 143 other hacking victims accepted damages from News International. By Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter The Telegraph 11:46AM GMT 08 Feb 2013 The Doctor Who actor Christopher Eccleston, spoon-bender Uri Geller, actor Hugh Grant and Colin Stagg, who was wrongly accused of the murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common, have also settled their claims. It means that 450 people have now settled claims through the High Court, with more than 250 others being given payouts via a compensation scheme set up by NI. Mr Justice Vos was told that the 144 victims who have settled in recent months include the singers James Blunt and Kerry Katona and the former paymaster-general, Geoffrey Robinson. Statements on behalf of 17 of the victims were read out to the High Court in London, but no details of the size of most of the compensation payments were given. The rest of the claimants did not want statements read out in open court. The Duchess of York's barrister David Sherborne told Mr Justice Vos: "During the period from 2000 until 2006 the claimant experienced unusual activity on her mobile phone. "The claimant also noticed that journalists and/or photographers appeared to know her location in advance, meaning that when she arrived at functions or planned events, it was often the case that journalists or photographers were already present." She commenced proceedings last year for "misuse of private information, breach of confidence and harassment in respect of the interception of her telephone messages". Mr Sherbourne told the court that the Duchess was "targeted" and voicemail messages on her mobile phone "were intercepted for the News of the World over a considerable period of time". He added: "I am here today to announce that News Group Newspapers [the division of NI that published the News of the World] has accepted liability and agreed to pay damages to the claimant plus her legal costs." Paul Tweed, the Duchess's solicitor, said she had been given "a significant payment" in damages and costs, but added: "Notwithstanding this successful outcome, my client remains extremely concerned that questions beyond the scope of these legal proceedings still need to be answered in relation to other instances of inappropriate and extreme intrusion into her private life." Anthony Hudson, for NGN, told the judge: "NGN is here today through me to offer its sincere apologies to the claimant for the damage and the distress caused to her by the accessing of her voicemail messages and obtaining confidential information. "NGN acknowledges that the information should never have been obtained unlawfully in the manner in which it was, and that NGN is liable for misuse of private information and breach of confidence." Jeff Brazier, who fathered two children during his relationship with the reality TV star Jade Goody, who died of cancer in 2009, had argued with her over material they thought had been leaked to the News of the World when in fact it had been obtained through hacking. The court was told that he was "very distressed that he can now never apologise to Ms Goody for the times that he did not believe her despite her denials that she was the source of particular private information in the public domain". Also among the 144 victims who settled today are Cherie Blair, the actor James Nesbitt and David Beckham's father. Others who settled were one or two steps removed from celebrities in which the News of the World was interested, such as Charlotte Church's priest and Edwina Pitt, who worked in a Mayfair gallery whose clients included Jeffrey Archer. Hugh Grant's advocate Mark Thomson said the actor had been "distressed to learn that he had wrongly mistrusted and avoided certain friends and acquaintances in the past", suspecting them of leaking information to the News of the World, "and would never find out the full extent of the defendant's misuse of his private information". He will make a donation to Hacked Off, the non-profit organisation campaigning to clean up the media, from his settlement. Eccleston's voicemail was hacked 16 times in 2005 and 2006 and was "deeply angry and upset" that the News of the World had destroyed documents that would have revealed the full extent of the intrusion. James Blunt, a former soldier, was "shocked" to discover his phone had been hacked while he was in contact with serving members of the armed forces on duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Colin Stagg received £15,500 damages plus costs after his voicemails were intercepted and his medical records obtained through "blagging". A further 25 cases, some of which were only launched in recent weeks, remain outstanding, including seven cases that will go to trial if the complainants do not reach agreements with NI. All of the victims had voicemails intercepted by journalists or private detectives working for the News of the World, which closed in 2011 as a result of the scandal. NI is desperate to draw a line under the affair, but fresh claims are still being launched by victims who have only recently been told by police that their phones were hacked. Among the most recently-launched claims are law suits launched by Nigel Lythgoe, the TV producer, and Simon Jordan, the former owner of Crystal Palace FC. NI also faces the prospect of a costly and drawn-out trial if it cannot reach an agreement with the seven victims who have so far refused to settle. Tony Woodley, the former joint general secretary of the Unite union, is one of the seven.

News International rushes to settle phone-hacking claims ahead of hearing Publisher of now-defunct News of the World attempts to close down scandal before court hearing as new claims are launched By Lisa O'Carroll Guardian (U.K.) Wednesday 6 February 2013 12.21 EST Rupert Murdoch's News International is making a concerted effort to close down the News of the World phone-hacking saga, agreeing out-of-court settlements on 143 of 165 outstanding civil damages cases it is facing in the high court ahead of a key hearing before a judge on Friday. However, lawyers acting for alleged phone-hacking victims say News International will be unable to finally draw a line under the scandal, as police are still in the process of informing victims. At least eight new claims are being prepared for Mr Justice Vos's court hearing on Friday, including cases brought by former Crystal Palace owner Simon Jordan, the mobile-phone millionaire who bought the club in 2000 and remained chairman until it went into administration in 2010. Jordan's action has just been lodged in the high court along with a case brought by Nigel Lythgoe, the British TV producer behind American Idol, and former assistant chief constable at South Yorkshire police Steve Chamberlain. One lawyer working on behalf of victims said News International was "throwing money" at claimants in a hope of persuading victims to drop their lawsuits ahead of Friday's case management conference before Vos and clean the slate for the company. News International is understood to have been notified in total of 701 claims since the first action was launched by Sienna Miller back in 2010, but not all victims are going through the high court. More than 250 have opted to enter into an alternative £20m compensation scheme set up by News International, but earlier this week the publisher of the now-defunct News of the World informed lawyers it was closing this down in April. The decision to close the compensation scheme, which was launched in 2011, has raised concerns with lawyers who are acting for victims who have just been told by police their phones have been hacked. Steven Heffer, solicitor at Collyer Bristow, who is acting for 80 individuals seeking damages through the News International compensation scheme, said: "It is a very strong signal that News International are trying to close this down very swiftly. This will cause a big problem because there are more claims around from people who have just been told by police their phones had been hacked. They are trying to put a lid on something that is still popping out of the box." He said that News International has also changed the rules on the scheme and is even challenging those who have been informed by the Metropolitan police that their voicemails were hacked by the News of the World. "People who would have expected they had a prima facie case are now finding their cases contested on the grounds of lack of evidence, but that's because they haven't had disclosure from the police yet and they may not get it before the April deadline. That means their only option is to go to the high court which is more expensive," said Heffer. Heffer, who acted for Meg Matthews in the first batch of civil phone-hacking damages claims settled in the high court in early 2012, said he has at least another 20 claims heading for the compensation scheme. Vos has already said he does not want to see a third tranche of claims and is expected to seek an update from News International at the hearing on Friday. A spokesman for News International said: "We have been keen from the beginning to settle these cases with minimum delay and minimum stress for all involved." MediaGuardian reported that News International had agreed to settle 130 of the high court claims in early January, including cases brought by Cherie Blair, David Beckham's father and James Nesbitt. But now it has made 13 more settlements, including deals struck with actor Christopher Eccleston and Uri Geller, who suspects he was hacked because of his friendship with pop star Michael Jackson. One source said that at least seven of the high court claimants, including Tony Woodley, the former joint general secretary of the Unite union, are adamant that they want their case to go to trial. And at least one claim, that brought by Mary Ellen Field, the former adviser to model Elle Macpherson, is being contested by News International, which has made an application to have her case struck out. Statements from at least 15 claimants are expected to be read out in the high court on Friday, but the exact size of the settlements are not expected to be revealed. This will be unlike the scenes of pandemonium in the high court last January when dozens of solicitors, claimants and journalist piled into court to hear News International lawyers make 37 humiliating apologies to individuals including Jude Law, who received a £130,000 settlement, former Labour deputy leader Lord Prescott (£40,000), Labour MPs Chris Bryant (£30,000) and Denis MacShane (£32,500), Welsh rugby union international Gavin Henson (£40,000), designer Sadie Frost (£50,000) and Prince Harry's friend Guy Pelly (£40,000). The majority of claimants in the second tranche of actions being managed by Vos have opted for privacy and do not want statements in open court. Among those who do want the settlement and apology on the public record are actor Hugh Grant, Geller and Eccleston.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2274316/Detectives-investigating-VIP-paedophile-ring-1980s-guest-house-make-arrests.html#axzz2K2KRaPIm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/cycling/lancearmstrong/9852015/Lance-Armstrong-facing-criminal-investigation.html

http://vimeo.com/6686193

The question raised by John is a legitimate one and for that reason is timely to discuss now or at any time in the future until absolutely credible evidence is forthcoming that provides the answer.

Jim Marrs does a superb job in pulling all the loose ends together. He describes the key roles played LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover.

Phone hacking investigation: Senior Met officer April Casburn jailed for bid to sell data to New of the World By Margaret Davis The Independent Friday, 1 February 2013 A senior counter-terrorism detective who is the first person to be convicted under the fresh investigations into corruption and phone hacking has been jailed for 15 months. Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn was sentenced at the Old Bailey today for misconduct in public office for offering to sell information to the News of the World (NoTW). Mr Justice Fulford told her it was "a corrupt attempt to make money out of sensitive and potentially very damaging information". Casburn, 53, is currently in the process of adopting a child, and the judge said had that not been the case he would have sentenced her to three years. He said her offence could not be described as whistleblowing, and went on: "If the News of the World had accepted her offer, it's clear, in my view, that Ms Casburn would have taken the money and, as a result, she posed a significant threat to the integrity of this important police investigation." The judge went on: "Activity of this kind is deeply damaging to the administration of criminal justice in this country. It corrodes the public's faith in the police force, it can lead to the acquittal or the failure by the authorities to prosecute individuals who have committed offences whether they are serious or otherwise. "We are entitled to expect the very highest standards of probity from our police officers, particularly those at a senior level. "It is, in my judgment, a very serious matter indeed when men or women who have all the benefits, privileges and responsibilities of public office use their position for corrupt purposes." He said he was particularly concerned about Casburn's child, and admitted that her absence while she is in prison could be damaging. But he said that, had she not been arrested, the detective would have returned to work by now, and therefore the child would be cared for by others anyway. Casburn, from Hatfield Peverel in Essex, called the NotW news desk on September 11 2010, and spoke to journalist Tim Wood about the fresh investigation into phone hacking. She claimed she contacted the tabloid because she was concerned about counter-terror resources being wasted on the phone-hacking inquiry, which her colleagues saw as "a bit of a jolly". The detective denied asking for money, but Mr Wood had made a note that she "wanted to sell inside information". Today Mr Justice Fulford said: "It seems to me Mr Wood was a reliable, honest and disinterested witness. "He took time and trouble during the defendant's call to find out exactly what Miss Casburn was saying, questioning the defendant in detail on her account in order to make an accurate note for his superiors at the News of the World which he wrote up in detail immediately afterwards. "He had absolutely no reason to lie and every cause to be cautious given the risk that the newspaper was to be the victim of a sting, as he suspected." During her trial at Southwark Crown Court last month, Casburn likened the male-dominated counter-terrorism unit to the TV series Life On Mars. She was not given a desk for several months, despite more junior colleagues having them, jurors were told. But the judge rejected this as an explanation for her behaviour. He said: "It seems to me this is a straightforward but troubling case of corruption. "I decline to accept that she had significant difficulties working with her male colleagues in the senior ranks of the counter-terrorism unit, which in part she said led her to act as she did. "The most that could be said is that she was a relative newcomer to this area of police work. As a result she may have felt something of an outsider." But he said this "could not begin to explain the actions of a detective chief inspector who offers to the very newspaper which is the subject of a sensitive and confidential investigation by other officers to sell details of the progress of the inquiry and the strategy that officers were intending to follow".

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-27/nazi-goebbels-step-grandchildren-are-hidden-billionaires.html

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/watch-rachel-maddow-and-bill-moyers-take-rupert-murdochs-media-empire#.UQK6QYtC2iQ.facebook

It was my privilege to meet Jay in Austin not long after I had met Barr McClellan, who lived in Houston at that time. This was over 15 years ago. Barr asked me to visit with Jay about JFK's assassination and I found him to be a prodigious investigator. At the time he had a young man who was assisting him but whose name I have forgotten. The latter was also extremely knowledgeable.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2267291/JFKs-personal-items-reveal-inside-look-private-lives-Kennedy-family.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhLDGXRc9zs

http://www.dailymail...uest-house.html This story is similar to the Franklin Scandal in the U.S. that involved high level politicians in Washington, allegedly including one that later became president. http://trineday.com/paypal_store/product_pages/Franklin.html

Weekend Edition January 18-20, 2013 www.counterpunch.org Rupert's Misdeeds American Media Ignore Major Murdoch News Corp Scandal by LINN WASHINGTON JR. America’s corporate news media love highlighting David-besting-Goliath stories…except apparently, when the fallen Goliath is major media mogul Rupert Murdoch – the billionaire owner of America’s caustic FOX News and other entities. Arguably the biggest Goliath slaying story in the world during the past two years involved the unraveling of Murdoch’s news empire in England, where he exerted extraordinary influence over top British governmental officials from police to Parliament and even into that nation’s Prime Minister’s Office. But disturbing documentation of wrongdoing by Murdoch minions, such as illegal hacking into telephones, arrests of top Murdoch executives and a scathing report from Parliament, elicited little sustained interest from America’s mainstream media into what is known variously as the ‘Murdoch Scandal’ and ‘England’s Watergate.” This despite the fact that Murdoch’s News Corp is also a huge enterprise in the US. Even when one of the journalists who exposed America’s 1970s-era Watergate Scandal – Bob Woodward – broke a story in early December 2012 about a scheme by Murdoch to seize control of the US presidency, America’s news media continued focusing on celebrity fluff and the looming ‘Fiscal Cliff.’ Woodward exposed a covert effort by Murdoch and his FOX News head, Roger Ailes, to recruit General David Petraeus as a 2012 presidential candidate complete with pledges to bankroll a Petraeus campaign, plus providing on-air support from FOX News – an offer Petraeus declined. “The Murdoch story – his corruption of essential democratic institutions on both sides of the Atlantic – is one of the most important and far reaching political/cultural stories of the past 30-years,” wrote Woodward’s Watergate reporting partner Carl Bernstein in a December commentary published in London’s Guardian newspaper. Bernstein blasted the U.S. media for ignoring Woodward’s exposé. Although still reeling from scandals in England, Murdoch continues his efforts in the U.S. to win rule changes from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that would permit him to expand his News Corp media empire here through increased monopoly ownership. Given the criminality explicit in the British Murdoch scandal and 24/7 FOX News savaging of U.S. President Barack Obama, why would the Obama Administration consider relaxing longstanding ownership rules to permit Murdoch to buy the top newspapers in Chicago and Los Angeles as he is attempting to do? The London Guardian’s dogged go-it-alone coverage of phone hacking and other misdeeds within Murdoch’s English media empire led to that scandal’s unraveling, inclusive of Murdoch’s July 2011 closure of his beloved News of the World newspaper (then England’s largest newspaper). The May 2012 report from a British Parliament investigative committee declared Murdoch “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international corporation.” That report blasted the Australian Media baron (he later bought a US citizenship so he could get around the rule barring foreign ownership of TV stations in the US) for “willful blindness” to the misdeeds of his underlings, whom he kept closely under his thumb until he disavowed knowledge of their misdeeds in an effort to evade accountability. Murdoch denies knowing about the misdeeds of his News of the World employees. One of the arrested Murdoch employees, former newspaper executive Andy Coulson, served as the press spokesman for Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron until January 2011, when he resigned due to mounting pressure from the evolving phone hacking scandal. Police arrested Coulson in July 2011. Cameron hired Coulson in 2007 after Coulson left a Murdoch newspaper under a cloud of impropriety from an earlier phone hacking debacle. Coulson nonetheless reportedly secured Murdoch’s personal backing for Cameron’s successful bid for the PM position – the British equivalent of the U.S. presidency. A key player in this epic mangling of Goliath Murdoch is a classic David figure – British lawyer Mark Lewis – whose representation of clients victimized by phone hacking and other illegal conduct within Murdoch’s English empire contributed to erection of scaffolding that eventually reached Murdoch’s corporate suite. Lewis’ clients included the family of Milly Dowler, a teen murder victim. Revelations that News of the World’s scandal-mongering reporters had hacked into the voicemail of the then missing Dowler – deleting voicemails so as to continue giving Dowler’s distraught parents the false impression that she was still alive – galvanized public opinion against that newspaper and eventually against Murdoch himself. “Only twice in the past 70-years have political parties in Britain had a consensus: World War II and Milly Dowler,” asserted Lewis during a panel discussion on the Murdoch Scandal last spring at the Logan Investigative Reporting Symposium held at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. That Symposium featured a screening of the insightful “Frontline” documentary “Murdoch’s Scandal.” Lowell Bergman, the lead correspondent for that documentary, is an investigative reporting professor at Berkeley’s J-School. “The thing that surprised me the most in doing this story is the amount of control Murdoch and his News Corporation had over police and politicians,” said Neil Docherty, director/producer of that “Scandal” documentary. “One police official who said there was nothing to investigate regarding phone hacking was later forced to resign. Then he became a columnist for a Murdoch newspaper,” said Docherty. That collusion between Murdoch employees and top officials of London’s Metropolitan Police represents one of the seamier undersides of this serial misconduct, said lawyer Mark Lewis during a TCBH interview. “Murdoch bought police with wine and football [soccer in England] tickets,” said Lewis. “The big issue is that corruption in the Met came from top to bottom not bottom to top. Police corruption is a huge program in England.” The cozy relationship between Murdoch’s media empire and the Metropolitan Police dates from a major mid-1980s labor dispute between newspaper unions and Murdoch, where strikers contend police brutalized them. Collusive behaviors, according to a special union report published in the fall of 2011, included News of the World reporters setting up people to commit crimes and then police “would arrive to nab the culprits, usually on a Saturday afternoon, giving the paper its Sunday scoop and the police their arrest.” John Pilger, a journalist who, like Murdoch, hails from Australia, contends phone hacking and influence peddling are not Murdoch’s most atrocious misdeeds. “The most enduring and insidious Murdoch campaign has been against the Aboriginal people,” Pilger wrote a few years ago. FOX News in America is often lambasted for race-baiting against blacks and Hispanics. Thinking that the British Murdoch scandal in particular or media ownership in general is no big deal as long as the media provides weather, traffic, some headline news and/or favored songs/shows ignores the reality that what people hear and see in the media all too often becomes what they believe. The FOX News Channel – the preeminent purveyors of malicious right-wing partisanship (a/k/a propaganda) and utter misinformation in America – is a prime example. A survey released in November 2012 by researchers at New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University documented that people who only watch FOX News are less informed about facts than all other news consumers — and that’s starting from an pretty low bar. The findings of this survey mirror previous findings about ill-informed FOX News viewers. If there is any consolation to the timid treatment of Murdoch’s misdeeds by U.S. mainstream media it is that they are following in the footsteps of British media. “The press in England was afraid of the phone hacking scandal because they were scared of Murdoch’s power to attack them,” said lawyer Mark Lewis, who was himself the target of threats and dirty-tricks by Murdoch corporate operatives. “Murdoch’s attacks on politicians through his newspapers pushed whole areas of policy off of public discussions.” LINN WASHINGTON, JR. is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, DAVE LINDORFF, LORI SPENCER and CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net