Douglas Caddy

This is no fairy tale; its the only believable possibility and it is based upon facts all the way through, as demonstrated by the 1,827 citations to other works. If you can't get past your pre-conclusions, formed before you've read it, it might be best if you not read the book because you need to have an open mind as you read it. If you should decide to plow through it anyway, you are welcome to challenge it point by point and I will respond to them. I suggest you might want to consider starting by trying to find Lyndon Johnson in the Altgens photo of the motorcade coming down Elm Street. Only two people have reacted to the first shot(s) in that photo, JFK and LBJ. The former is grasping towards his throat; the latter isn't in the photograph. Go figure. No one knows what another person is thinking. However, in LBJ’s case we may eventually know some of his thoughts – especially those stemming from his guilt complex of being aware of and involved in the planning of the assassination of JFK. Barr McClellan maintains that the key lies in obtaining the records of the psychiatrist whose professional assistance was sought by LBJ after he left the Presidency. I have always believed that LBJ might have been driven crazy by the mobs of people that gathered daily outside the White House when he was president who shouted in unison, “Hey, hey, LBJ, who you going to kill today?” Of course, these mobs were outraged about LBJ’s decisions that escalated the Vietnam War after Kennedy’s death, which ultimately resulted in over 56,000 Americans being killed in combat. Little did the mobs know that their daily screams of anger were like a thousand daggers hitting LBJ’s heart since he was only too aware that he was sitting in the Oval Office courtesy of his participation in killing the President whom he had served as Vice President. There were half a dozen major scandals – ranging from Billie Sol Estes to Bobby Baker – that were about to burst open in 1963. Witness the cover of LIFE magazine about LBJ’s criminal activities that was scheduled for publication about the time of the assassination but then suddenly withdrawn when JFK was shot. With JFK dead, LBJ was able, with the help of J. Edgar Hoover and his cronies on Capitol Hill, to derail the investigations into these scandals.

This sounds like a vitally important book. As U.S. Marshal Clint Peoples once told me about LBJ, "It is about time that the truth comes out." I certainly plan to purchase your work.

Forum member Barr McClellan is scheduled to appear on Fox Business Daytime on Monday, July 26, between 11:30 and Noon Eastern Time. He will be interviewed by Fox anchor Dagen McDowell about his new book on American business.

JFK Assassination Museum Beckons With Lattes, Wi-Fi Updated: July 22, 2010 AOL. News [click on link to view photos] http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/jfk-assassination-museum-beckons-with-lattes-wi-fi/19561631 By Linda Jones Contributor DALLAS (July 22) -- Having spent her high school years in Dallas, Nausheen Ahmed is no stranger to the city's historic landmarks, including Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. But she never had any interest in visiting that popular sightseeing stop until after she had moved away to New Jersey and returned years later with her four children to attend a relative's wedding. "I just took the place for granted when I lived here," Ahmed said recently during a break from taking her children on a tour of the Sixth Floor Museum, the repository of documents and artifacts from the Kennedy era. "Now that I'm a tourist, I'm acting like one." Ahmed's story represents a conundrum that museum officials have long faced: With 325,000 visitors annually, the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza is the most popular tourist attraction in Dallas, yet it's often overlooked by locals. Less than a third of its visitors, in fact, are from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The cafe at the Museum Store and Cafe, across the street from the Sixth Floor Museum, a repository of documents and artifacts from the Kennedy era, at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, offers coffee, snacks and Wi-Fi. Now, officials are seeking to remedy the landmark's relative obscurity among natives by luring them with a new store and coffee shop right across the street. Opened on July 1, the Museum Store and Cafe represents a "strategic opportunity" to increase the visibility of the historic site, said Liza Denton, director of public relations. "We believed this corner location, with commanding views of Dealey Plaza, would increase visitors' overall engagement to the museum and historic site," she said, "as well as attract those who live and work downtown." Kennedy was assassinated Nov. 22, 1963, as his presidential motorcade traveled past the former Texas School Book Depository Building, which is now owned and operated by the Dallas County Historical Foundation, a private nonprofit. The museum is housed on the building's two upper floors. Across the street, the new store and cafe -- outfitted with contemporary, loftlike decor -- is already receiving a steady stream of traffic and positive responses from the local community, with many residents paying return visits, Denton said. Tourists sit in front of the grassy knoll on March 13 beside the former Texas School Book Depository Building, right, at Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Like the shop inside the museum itself, the store here is stocked with 1960s-themed merchandise, such as reproductions of Jacqueline Kennedy's three-strand pearl necklaces, as well as books and souvenirs. It also has a variety of items from local artisans that make statements about Dallas today, including jewelry and handbags. Visitors can refuel with gourmet coffee, sandwiches and pastries at the cafe, which also aims to lure local workers with pre-ordered boxed lunches. Organizers hope that the cafe's free Wi-Fi will further draw in residents, and that the large wall screen showing continuous Kennedy film footage and photos will compel locals and visitors alike to settle in for a while. "We want our guests to feel inspired from the moment they walk through the door," Denton said.

http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2010/7/17_Matt_Simmons.html Interview with oil guru Matt Simmons who paints a desperate picture of the outcome of BP's disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

IS THE WASHINGTON POST ABOUT TO PUBLISH TOP SECRETS? http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2010/jul/16/put-content-here/

New Book Aims to Reveal FBI, CIA Involvement in Kennedy Assassination www.lewrockwell.com July 7, 2010 To Kill a President: Finally – an Ex-FBI Agent Rips Aside the Veil of Secrecy that Killed JFK by M. Wesley Swearingen http://www.lewrockwell.com/pr/new-book-fbi-cia-jfk-killing.html To Kill a President: Finally – an Ex-FBI Agent Rips Aside the Veil of Secrecy that Killed JFK by M. Wesley Swearingen seeks to uncover new information about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and identify the groups who conspired to kill him. According to Swearingen, Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in assassinating Kennedy as was claimed by the FBI, the Warren Commission and other investigating bodies. Instead, he argues that rogue CIA agents acting in concert with the mafia and certain Cuban exiles plotted to kill Kennedy. Swearingen contends that the conspiracy was covered up by the FBI, an effort that continues to this day through the agency's unwillingness to disclose key details about the events surrounding Kennedy's death. "I want to set the record straight," Swearingen says. "The truth is my inspiration. Upholding the Constitution and exposing government corruption is my sole purpose." A 25-year veteran of FBI field work, Swearingen was employed by the bureau in 1963 when Kennedy was shot in Dallas. Citing internal sources and information not previously released to the public, Swearingen claims that Oswald was an FBI informant who was known to government officials prior to the assassination. He argues that the statements and actions of FBI and CIA personnel indicate a cover-up, one that he believes included CIA-trained Cuban exiles and American mobsters. "Names are named, associations are made, reasonable conjectures are served and Swearingen comes across as the real deal," explains a Kirkus Discoveries review. "He virtually dares readers to prove him wrong." To Kill a President: Finally – an Ex-FBI Agent Rips Aside the Veil of Secrecy that Killed JFK is available for sale online at Amazon.com and other channels. About the Author M. Wesley Swearingen is a former FBI agent and the author of FBI Secrets: an Agent's Expose. A U.S. Navy veteran who served during World War II, Swearingen later graduated from Ohio State University and joined the FBI while it was directed by J. Edgar Hoover. Following his retirement from the FBI in 1977, Swearingen was involved in several lawsuits against the bureau related to wrongful imprisonment and civil rights violations. A licensed private investigator, Swearingen has appeared in several documentary films about the FBI and earned the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice's President's Award.

Canal exposes fabrications in official autopsy reports http://thesop.org/story/opinion/2010/07/05/jfk-assassination-news-john-canal-exposes-fabrications-in-official-autopsy-reports.php

Thanks for posting this information about Paulson. I concur with you that his case is worthy of further investigation.

A podcast with Russ Baker www.lewrockwell.com June 27, 2010 http://www.lewrockwell.com/lewrockwell-show/2010/06/27/156-the-invisible-government-3/ Lew Rockwell and investigative reporter Russ Baker discuss the permanent but invisible government: the merchants of death, the bankster-state alliance, rotten American exceptionalism, and the Bush Family as rich and dangerous agents of the Rockefeller world empire. Samuel Bush, Prescott Bush, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush–what a rogues’ gallery. BTW, was George Bush involved on the Kennedy assassination?

thepeoplesvoice.org Sirhan Sirhan: In His Own Words 06/26/10 05:11:58 am by Stephen Lendman Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot, The New York Times headlining: "Kennedy is Dead, Victim of Assassin; Suspect, Arab Immigrant, Arraigned; Johnson Appoints Panel on Violence" Sirhan Sirhan was the alleged assassin, convicted, and serving a life sentence at (no pun intended) Pleasant Valley State Prison, CA, despite convincing evidence of his innocence. In his October 17, 2008 article "The Assassinations of the 1960s as 'Deep Events,' " Peter Dale Scott discussed the killings of both Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, saying: "The more that I look at these deep events comparatively, ranging over the past five decades, the more similarities I see between them, and the more I understand them in the light of each other." With respect to both Kennedys and King, official accounts obscured the events, suppressed key facts, enough to question the guilt of the alleged suspects, concealing the real culprits and why men of this stature were assassinated - what Scott called "some continuing and hostile force within our society..." In his June 13, 2010 article titled, "JFK and RFK: The Plots that Killed Them, The Patsies that Didn't," James Fetzer debunked the official accounts, saying: "we are looking at staged events that fit into a recurrent pattern in US and world history where innocent individuals (or 'patsies') are baited and framed for cover-up purposes," RFK's killing "in part intended to prevent a reinvestigation into his brother's death....The assassinations of RFK and JFK were both conspiracies. Both involved the destruction of evidence. Both involved the fabrication of evidence. Both involved framing their patsies. Both involved complicity by local officials. Both involved planning by the CIA. Both were used to deny the American people (their) right to be governed by leaders of their own choosing." Both put a myth to the rule of law, judicial fairness, and democratic freedoms. Both crimes and MLK's assassination eliminated figures dark American forces wanted silenced, blaming innocent "patsies" for the killings, Sirhan Sirhan for RFK's. Fetzer's article explains numerous important facts: -- multiple shots targeted him, more "than could have come from Sirhan Sirhan's gun" that was also the wrong caliber; -- "RFK was shot behind the right ear from about 1.5 inches, but Sirhan was never that close and always in front of him;" -- the coroner and LAPD reports were contradictory; -- LAPD "engaged in massive destruction of evidence from the pantry of the hotel because 'it would not fit into a card file,' " as part of an official cover-up to blame Sirhan for a state-sponsored assassination, evidence suggesting CIA involvement in both Kennedy brothers and MLK killings; -- Sirhan's gun was a ".22 caliber, eight-round revolver (serial number H-53725);" -- he "emptied his weapon from a location in front of Bobby Kennedy;" -- Dr. Thomas Hoguchi's autopsy "showed RFK was hit by four bullets, all of which were fired from behind at upward angles; -- five others were wounded by separate shots;" -- as many as 13 shots were fired; -- Dr. Noguchi's autopsy "did not point to Sirhan as the killer;" -- an eyewitness, DeWayne Wofler, "testified that the bullets fired at RFK had come from an entirely different gun," not Sirhan's; -- a security guard, Eugene Cesar, standing right behind RFK, had a drawn gun of the same caliber as the murder weapon; it was never examined nor was he charged; and -- "a woman in a polka dot dress" left the scene hurriedly, "shouting, "We shot him! We shot him! We shot Kennedy!" In their book, "The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy," Jonn Christian and William Turner made a convincing case "indicting Cesar for the crime," concluding "that Sirhan may have been firing blanks." Fetzer's article has detailed information on both JFK and RFK assassinations, accessed through the following link: http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2010/06/jfk-and-rfk-plots-that-killed-them.html Below, Sirhan gives his own account of what happened that night and why he was at the Ambassador Hotel. "My Morning with Sirhan" On January 21, 2010, Academic Prison Teacher, Gerald B. Reynolds, spent time with Sirhan and wrote it up in detail. An account below follows. At the Delta Facility library, a prison guard let him in. His ID said Sirhan Sirhan. "He looked at me in a calm way with a half-smile. I looked at him....There was an eerie, prolonged silence." He's now 66 years old, 42 of them in prison for a crime he didn't commit. After another "calm silence....I swiveled in my chair to face Sirhan Sirhan and asked, 'Did you do it?' " "Did I do what," he responded. Reynolds: "You know." Sirhan: "What do you want to know?" Reynolds: "Did you kill Robert F. Kennedy?" Sirhan: "No, I did NOT kill Robert F. Kennedy!" Reynolds: "I know you didn't." Sirhan: "How do you know?" Reynolds explained that he studied the details of his case, learned that RFK was killed at point blank range by a bullet to the back of his head. "The real assassin appears to be Kennedy's 26 year old Ace Security Company bodyguard....Thane Eugene Cesar. At least one eye witness claims to have seen Cesar with a smoking gun in his hand immediately after Kennedy fell to the floor. An audio recording made during the assassination indicates that there were at least 11 shots fired (perhaps more) from possibly three different guns." "The conclusion is that Kennedy was shot three times from behind with a fourth bullet passing through his suit coat. The fact that you (Sirhan) were standing in front of Kennedy is undisputed and yet according to the coroner's report not one bullet entered Robert F. Kennedy from the front of his body." Sirhan: "Oh my! I knew this morning when I woke up that God was telling me he had something great in store for me today and this is it! God has sent you to me!....I was beginning to lose hope so you were sent to lift my spirits. Now I can be hopeful again. Thank goodness somebody else knows." Reynolds: "Have you ever talked to anybody else in prison that knows the truth of your case?" Sirhan: "Yes. One person, that's all....He was one who drives a truck around and empties the dumpsters....I had a job where I had to take the garbage out of the kitchen....to the dumpster....once in a while he would talk to me. He told me he believed I was innocent." Reynolds: "Did you talk to this guy often?" Sirhan: "Actually no. He and I only talked maybe about three times and each time it was only for about five minutes or so." He explained that he never met anyone in prison, besides him, who knows. He said friends on the outside set up a web site for him - rfkmustdie.com, with information about him, RFK, and whether CIA operatives killed him, framing Sirhan for the crime. Reynolds: "Do you have an appeal on file right now?" Sirhan: "Not now. Everything has run its course. I had a great attorney named Lawrence Teeter....He was a wonderful man and a great attorney. He tried several times to win me an appeal and even just to get a new evidentiary hearing but the courts seemed biased against me. The judges wouldn't budge....Teeter died in 2005, and I haven't really tried to work on any appeal since then." Yet he feels, one day, he can be cleared and set free. "The truth will win out," he believes. Earlier he was on San Quentin's death row for three years. "They thought they were rid of me but then something happened they didn't plan on." Led by Chief Justice Rose Bird, "the California Supreme Court intervened and ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional. The ruling was retroactive and my sentence was commuted to life in prison. They thought I was dead and yet after 41 and a half years I'm still alive!" Now it's over 42. But "they stole my life!....I've been rotting in that stinking prison for (over four decades) for nothing!....The bastards stole my life....I have been denied parole 13 times. I am scheduled for another parole hearing in 2011. (Against long odds), Maybe if there was a grassroots movement, like perhaps millions of people finding out how the authorities have buried me unjustly, and coming together in demonstrations all over the country they would have to reconsider and let me go." Saying to Reynolds, "You do it for me. Become a guest speaker at colleges and universities and speak on my behalf....I hereby give you my permission....I will notify the press of your name and mission." Reynolds: "Ah, no, not my name. My name can't be attached to this. I could get in big trouble. You know the monsters that run this place." Sirhan: "OK, I understand. We will keep you anonymous." Reynolds offered to make this conversation available to anyone "responsible enough to appreciate it." Sirhan suggested sending to magazines and newspapers. Reynolds said he'd try, sent it to one on the progressive left that wouldn't publish it, one reason for discussing it here. Sirhan also explained he's Palestinian, born in Jerusalem in 1944, "alive during the turmoil that erupted when the United Nations stole our country and gave it to the Jews." In fact, its 1947 Partition Plan (General Assembly Resolution 181) gave them 56% of historic Palestine, placing Jerusalem (declared a corpus separatum, a separate body) under UN trusteeship as an international city, binding to this day. At the time, Palestinians comprised two-thirds of the population, owning 93% of the land, most of it now stolen. All of it occupied illegally. Ever since, Israelis treated "my people....like dogs. (They) shoot rockets and tank fire into the West Bank (and Gaza) killing everyone, including women and children. They drop bombs and spray machine gun fire into crowded marketplaces. They are treating my people the same way they were treated by the Nazis....It breaks my heart to see how my people are suffering." Reynolds: "So, then, you're a Muslim?" Sirhan: "No....I am a Christian. My whole family is Christian....We have been Christians for at least 800 years. We are Palestinian Christians." He came to America at age 11, moved to Los Angeles, and settled in Pasadena, attending Altadena's Eliot Junior High School, graduating from John Muir High School, then completing two years of junior college..." Reynolds asked if he had any connections to Middle East or organized terrorists? Sirhan: "No. No way! I am alone. I am by myself. I do have a few people in the West Bank that I correspond with but they are just regular people. I have a brother in Los Angeles. But I definitely do not have any terrorist connections and I am not a member of any groups, any groups at all." Spurious prison information circulated that on 9/11, he "gleefully clapped (his) hands and (was) delighted" to see the twin towers collapse, adding that he had confidential information of the impending attack "by a Middle Eastern terrorist organization whose members revere you as an icon and a hero and do everything they can to honor you." Sirhan: "Oh my God, that's ridiculous. I've never had anything to do with any terrorist groups. Who said this about me?" Reynolds: "It was Chief Deputy Warden James Mattingly." Sirhan said he'll sue him for libel and slander, adding he wants to see his evidence. Reynolds asked what he thought of the incident, Sirhan explaining that he cried because his country was attacked and "felt sadness and anger and wanted to punish the people responsible...." Reynolds: "Sirhan, what were the events that led up to you being in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel on the night" JFK was shot there? Sirhan: "In the evening, I had something to eat at Bob's Big Boy. Then later in the evening, I decided to drive downtown....The Jews were going to be having a big party to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Israel's" Six Day War victory." Reynolds: "What did you intend to do once your got there?" Sirhan: " I don't know exactly but I wanted to protest. The Jews should not have been allowed to fill the streets in celebration of stealing more of our land. I can remember driving down Highway 5 with my 22 caliber hand gun lying next to me on the passenger seat." Reynolds: "Why did you have a gun with you in the car?" Sirhan: "I had been shooting at the range earlier that day." Reynolds: "Was the gun....out in the open?" Sirhan: "No, it was in the plastic box it came in, you know, with the cloth, the cleaning rod, and oil." Reynolds: "and what did you do when you got downtown?" Sirhan: "I realized that I was a day early and that the event was to take place the next night. So I just drove back up the freeway." Reynolds: "Why did you stop at the Ambassador Hotel?" Sirhan: "I don't know. I can't remember parking and going in there but I must have because I was there." Reynolds: "What did you do when you got there?" Sirhan: "It was hot that night and I was very thirsty. I remember that....I went to the bar and had four drinks within about 15 minutes. I couldn't seem to get enough to drink....They were Tom Collins's....(but) I wasn't drunk. I felt drugged. I think somebody slipped something into my drinks. My legs and arms became rubbery. I remember standing by my car but I couldn't drive so I went back inside and got some coffee." Reynolds: "How did you get downstairs to the pantry?" Sirhan: "Somebody guided me. I don't know who." Reynolds: "Did you have your gun with you?" Sirhan: "Yes. When I was in the pantry, the gun was in my hand." Reynolds: "Did you know Robert Kennedy was going to be walking toward you?" Sirhan: "No. I didn't know where I was and I don't know how I got there. I was in a state of blackout." Reynolds: "You were a Manchurian candidate....It's something the CIA uses. They assassinate a president, or senator, or anyone they wish, and make it look like some crazed, lone-nut assassin did it. But he has been heavily drugged, possibly with LSD, and undergone intense brainwashing followed by reprogramming. Everything you're saying about yourself follows the established pattern of the drugged, duped, CIA patsy." Sirhan: "They used me, framed me, and they set me up to die." Reynolds: "Do you remember firing the gun that was in your hand?" Sirhan: "I can't remember. I was blacked out. I remember feeling woozy and it felt like I was falling down....I don't remember the things that happened that night." Reynolds: "Do you remember being led in handcuffs out of the Ambassador Hotel and made to sit in the back seat of a police car?" Sirhan: "I remember being led away but I didn't know why they were doing this to me. Nobody told me anything." He was interrogated by the police for about 24 hours, detectives telling him he murdered JFK. "They yelled at me. They kept shoving papers at me demanding that I sign...They were documents saying I killed Kennedy. Confession. They insisted I had murdered Robert F. Kennedy and they demanded I confess and sign the papers....At first I resisted, but later I confessed and signed the papers. They broke me down and I told them I would do anything they wanted me to do. I just wanted it to stop." After he confessed, he was taken to a cell and allowed to sleep. A court trial followed where his "interrogators convinced me to plead guilty and ask for the death penalty....I told the judge I was guilty and wanted the death penalty," explaining he was ashamed. "They made me believe I had murdered Robert Kennedy in cold blood and I was remorseful and ashamed. Everyone said I was guilty. They said I would get the death penalty....no matter what I said or did. They said it was an open and shut case and that I might as well give up. I just wanted to get the whole thing over with and if it meant me being dead, so be it. I didn't have anything left to live for anyway." A trial followed, Sirhan represented by attorney Grant Cooper, a man he called "crooked. He had mafia and CIA connections," Sirhan explaining what he knew and his mob involvement. "He was (picked) to make sure I was convicted and sent to my death, and Cooper complied because they were planning to kill him" otherwise. Reynolds asked him to portray what he remembered doing at the Ambassador Hotel. Sirhan stood up, swayed, his arms gently rising, looked straight ahead, then made a gun shape with his right hand, his arm parallel to the ground pretending to shoot, saying: "At a specific moment, and I can't remember when or why, I shot my 22 caliber pistol three times. My arms were unsteady but level with the ground. Two of the shots missed. I saw them miss. One of the shots may have bounced off him like a BB. All of a sudden people were grabbing me. They were forcing me down....Did anybody say I reached around behind and shot Robert Kennedy in the back of the head?" Reynolds: "Nobody." Sirhan: "But that's what I would've had to do" to kill him....So, what do you think of me now? Do you think I am crazy like they say?" Not at all, said Reynolds, Sirhan adding "I am just a man. I am a man just like you. I am trained never to allow an inmate to touch me." In parting, he embraced Reynolds, both of them now "secret friends in a desolate place." A Final Comment Evidence strongly suggests that Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan Sirhan were patsies, blamed for state-sponsored assassinations, likely carried out by CIA operatives or hired guns they enlisted. Jack Ruby, with known mob and police connections, fatally shot Oswald on November 22, 1963. Incarcerated without trial, James Earl Ray died in prison on April 23, 1998, proclaiming his innocence. Sirhan Sirhan has been imprisoned since 1968, despite no evidence proving his guilt. In these and hundreds more cases in US courts, justice was denied, revealing the myth of the rule of law, under a system absolving high-level crime, getting patsies punished for offenses they didn't commit, the major media always going along, supporting official accounts without question. Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

THE GAME THAT GOES ON AND ON: A SWISS BANK, A PRESIDENT, AND THE PERMANENT GOVERNMENT By RUSS BAKER Published: April 21, 2010 WhoWhatWhy.Com http://www.whowhatwhy.com/the-game-that-goes-on-and-on.html Last August, the presidential press corps followed Barack Obama and his family to Martha's Vineyard for their brief vacation. The coverage focused on summery fare—a visit to an ice cream parlor, the books the president had brought along. Nearly everyone mentioned his few rounds of golf, including his swing, and the enthusiasm of onlookers. What caught my eye, though, was the makeup of his foursome. The president was joined by an old friend from Chicago; a young aide; and Robert Wolf, Chairman and CEO, UBS Group Americas. In a decidedly incurious piece, a New York Times reporter made light of Wolf's presence: "The president has told friends that to truly relax he prefers golfing with young aides...But he departed from that pattern Monday when he invited a top campaign contributor, Robert Wolf, president of UBS Investment Bank, to join him for 18 holes. Call it donor maintenance." Wolf, however, is hardly—as the Times suggested— just another donor. For one thing, he is a leading figure in an industry that almost brought down the entire financial system—and then was the recipient of astonishing government largesse. UBS, along with other banks, benefited directly from the backdoor bailout of the insurance giant AIG. But UBS stands alone in one rather formidable respect—it was the defendant in the largest offshore tax evasion case in U.S. history, accused of helping wealthy Americans hide their income in secret offshore accounts. To settle a massive investigation, UBS forked over $780 million to the US treasury. This settlement came shortly before Wolf rounded out Obama’s golfing party. Given this rather problematical situation, why then would the President choose UBS’s Wolf of all people for this honor? Wolf declined a request for an interview about his relationship with the President, so it was not possible to pose that question to him. This hardly matters, though, for the story goes far beyond Wolf and UBS. It involves Republicans as well as Democrats, the Bush Administration as well as Obama’s. More importantly, behind the trivialized golf outing on Martha’s Vineyard, lie the interests that increasingly set the course for every administration. And that now game the system so well that the rest of us—wherever we live in the world—are kept fighting for the scraps. BOTH SIDES NOW When most people criticize those aspects of government that seem most impervious to the democratic process, they cite the permanency and perceived self-interest of the mandarins of the Washington bureaucracy. But when it comes to real power, an ability to come out ahead no matter which party is in power, it’s hard to top certain financial institutions. UBS is very much a part of that permanent government. Though not a household name in the United States, UBS is a major player in the Beltway game. During the 2008 campaign, while Robert Wolf was courting Democratic hopeful Obama, his UBS cohort, former Senator Phil Gramm, was working the other side of the street. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee in the 1990s, Gramm, a corporate-friendly Texas Republican, played a key role in the deregulation of the banking industry, an act so central to the nation’s financial collapse. Since 2002, Gramm has been UBS Americas’ vice chairman. In 2008, he was the leading economics adviser for Obama’s opponent, John McCain—and even touted as a possible treasury secretary in a McCain administration. The bottom line: UBS hedged its bets, and so had an inside track no matter which party took the White House. Thus, when Obama won, it was Wolf who ascended. The new president named the banker-donor to his White House Economic Advisory Board. The important machinations behind this accrual of influence rarely get attention in the frenzied hustle of the news cycle. One reason is that they do not seem like news at all, since they are essentially woven deeply into the fabric of politics and government, thus hidden in plain sight. Another is that they are dauntingly complex. Some things are simple, though. Like the fact that a UBS executive is a dubious candidate to serve as an economic advisor to the president. For one thing, the company’s track record at the time of the election was distinctly underwhelming. UBS suffered major losses on subprime lending, and had to raise money from the Singapore government and other entities. As Slate’s money columnist Daniel Gross quipped back in 2008, “UBS used to stand for Union Bank of Switzerland. But perhaps it should stand for Untold Billions Squandered. Or Underwater Bi-Lingual Schleppers.” Furthermore, UBS’ stock lost nearly 70 percent of its value even before the recession really kicked in—making it the worst performing foreign bank operating here. Given this damning set of facts, Wolf made both an odd choice as a presidential adviser and a peculiar pick for that intimate round of golf. “HIDE FUNDS HERE” Despite being the world’s biggest manager of private assets, UBS has stayed pretty much below the domestic radar. The Alpine quiet surrounding its activities was, however, quietly shattered in mid-2007, when an IRS audit of a US citizen led to a UBS banker who then revealed certain UBS practices that encouraged wealthy Americans to hide taxable income. UBS bankers had apparently used every trick in the book—including giving customers code names and assisting them with or providing them with untraceable pay phones, encrypted computers, fake trusts, document-shredding and even counter-surveillance training. The feds did not move quickly on the revelations—but when they did, in good measure thanks to a kick from July 2008 Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearings chaired by Senator Carl Levin and the report released in conjunction with the hearings, the UBS affair grew into the largest offshore tax evasion case in US history. It is worth pointing out that one of three Senate co-sponsors of the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act of 2007, introduced even before the UBS situation was known, was none other than a then-senator named…Barack Obama. The House sponsor was Rahm Emanuel—who would go on to be President Obama’s Chief of Staff. Another, weaker bill was proffered by Sen. Max Baucus of the Finance Committee—parts of which did just quietly become law as part of an employment stimulus bill signed by Obama in March, 2010, with the goal of capturing lost tax income as a way of financing job creation. In any case, it has become increasingly clear that tax evasion is but a piece of a troubling larger picture. The states of New York, Texas and Massachusetts sued the bank in 2008, accusing it of misleading investors about risks in its auction-rate securities market. UBS executives dumped their own holdings when the supposedly safe investments took a nosedive, yet continued to recommend them to customers. In Puerto Rico, a Bloomberg News reporter found, UBS had created its own closed-loop system for generating profits —it advised the Commonwealth to issue bonds, marketed the bonds to investors through UBS mutual funds, and then loaned the mutual funds money so they could buy the bonds. As James Cox, a Duke law professor and expert on finance and law said at the time, “I’ve never seen such a blatant series of conflicts of interest.” In a filing last June, New Hampshire's securities regulator charged UBS with "dishonest and unethical" practices in selling notes from the now-defunct Lehman Brothers, causing New Hampshire investors $2.5 million in losses. Wrote one securities lawyer on Forbes’ website: “UBS is going to have to account for why it continued to aggressively market Lehman notes to retail customers as highly conservative investments at the very same time its institutional side was facilitating transactions designed to mask Lehman's financial troubles.” Further south, Brazilian police arrested officials of both UBS and the insurance giant AIG as part of a half-billion-dollar tax avoidance scheme, alleging that the companies used suspected black market money-changers to spirit the funds out of Brazil to Switzerland. At the time, the daily newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo published a picture of a man in handcuffs, identified as a UBS executive, and reported that he told one of the arresting officers: "I'm not going to stay in custody. Anyone who has money in [brazil] does not stay in custody." Things are not necessarily so different up north. The only company official sent to jail in the United States thus far in connection with the massive tax evasion case was, remarkably, the former employee who blew the whistle on the scheme in the first place. AN ATTRACTIVE FELLOW The Obama-UBS relationship began on a December day in 2006. According to his calendar, the presidential hopeful was visiting New York City to speak at a fundraising dinner for children in poverty. Beforehand, though, he attended a much more exclusive gathering—in the midtown Manhattan conference room of billionaire George Soros—for a dozen wealthy figures eager to have a closer look at the prospect. One attendee was UBS executive Robert Wolf. Then just 45, he had already been a major fundraiser for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid and for congressional Democrats in 2006. For 2008, he had initially backed a moderate, Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia. But when Warner decided not to run, Wolf turned to Obama, liked what he saw, and signed on. His motivation, Wolf told New York Magazine in 2007, was simple: “I’d like my children to soon see a president give a State of the Union address and have both parties applaud.” He praised Obama’s early opposition to the invasion of Iraq. And he told Business Week: “I found him to be unbelievably refreshing and smart and thoughtful.” Wolf soon became a top fundraiser. By the time of the New York article, he had already hosted two big cocktail parties, made a lot of calls, and brought in more than $500,000. It was through people like Wolf that Obama was able to match and then pass Hillary Clinton in fundraising for the primaries. Another person who attended that exclusive session with Obama was a financier by the name of Hassan Nemazee. Nemazee’s story circles back to UBS, through his involvement with Harken Energy, an obscure but supremely well-connected company that UBS took an unusual interest in keeping afloat. In the process, it illustrates how byzantine and pervasive the new trans-partisan money world has become. The complexity helps explain why reporters so often shrug and move on. They should pause more often; within that complexity resides an important truth about American democracy. THE CLINTONS’ HOT MONEY MAN Over the years, Hassan Nemazee had become, like Wolf, a major Democratic fundraiser and insider. More importantly, he was deep into the Clinton inner circle. So much so, that he and a partner used an investment firm they had recently acquired, Carret Asset Management, to provide a lucrative perch to Terry McAuliffe, the Clintons’ confidante and money man. (This was in the period between McAuliffe’s chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee and his chairmanship of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.) This indebted the Clintons further to Nemazee, who had been an avid supporter of Bill Clinton’s presidency and major donor to his defense fund during the Monica Lewinsky/impeachment saga. Nemazee for his part was rewarded with appointment as ambassador to Argentina—an offer that was withdrawn, however, when Forbes reported that he had improperly represented himself as a “Latino” in order to secure targeted bond business from the state of California. As with UBS’s Wolf, Nemazee’s substantial fundraising soon begot true insider status. The campaign even asked Nemazee to publicly defend Ms. Clinton when another top donor, Norman Hsu, was arrested as an alleged swindler and campaign finance fraudster (Hsu was later convicted.) Nemazee was frequently characterized as a “top foreign policy adviser” to Ms. Clinton. Probably his closest thing to real foreign policy credentials was the fact that his father was one of the richest men in Iran under the dictatorship of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, and a close ally of the deposed leader. At the time of the meeting to size up Obama in Soros’s office, Nemazee was simply window-shopping, as he remained committed to Hillary. But when Hillary dropped out of the race, Nemazee became a major Obama fundraiser. And once Hillary became Obama’s secretary of state, according to insiders, she pushed the administration to take a tougher line with Iran’s revolutionary Islamic government than Obama preferred. In so doing she renewed the appreciation of the retinue around the exiled Pahlavi faction, which still hopes to return to power one day, directly or indirectly. Notwithstanding Nemazee’s largesse, both Clinton and Obama must have had second thoughts this past September, when the financier was arrested on charges of bank fraud. Since then, Nemazee has pled guilty to defrauding several banks over the course of a decade, through the use of false collateral documentation, to the tune of $292 million. In a brief flurry of coverage, Nemazee’s downfall was smirkily dismissed as just another day in the hothouse of Democratic corruption. The media has shown little further interest in Nemazee, and in what his arc signified. This is unfortunate as it was not just a story about Democrats—or Republicans either, although they were involved. Rather it was the edge of an amoral iceberg that is essentially trans-partisan and that constantly exerts influence on presidents and would-be presidents of all stripes. The outline of that larger reality becomes apparent when one traces Nemazee’s path back more than two decades. In that earlier epoch, we find Nemazee mixed up again with Soros and UBS and a would-be president. At that point the rising star was not Barack Obama, but George W. Bush. GROWING A BUSH For many years, Hassan Nemazee has been a business partner of, and shared offices with, a man named Alan Quasha. And both of them have been involved with a company called Harken Energy, a mysterious outfit with links to some of the world’s most powerful and odiferous regimes. Harken, Nemazee, Quasha (and UBS) first came to my attention while I was researching my 2009 book, Family of Secrets, which is an investigative history of the rise of the Bush family and the special interests behind them. I was examining George W. Bush’s run of good fortune in the 1980s when his failed oil ventures repeatedly became golden as larger ventures scooped them up and increased his remuneration. Texas-based Harken Energy, the biggest of these, paid Bush more than he had ever earned, gave him a nice board position, and basically freed him up to move to Washington and work on his father’s 1988 White House race. Just as Nemazee and Quasha would later take care of Hillary Clinton’s guy—McAuliffe—so he could concentrate on preparing for her campaign, years earlier they had supported George W. Bush while he helped develop strategy for his father’s campaign. In the process Harken took Bush, a man without much to show for himself as a businessman, and gave him the credibility and financial means with which to embark upon a political career—which he did soon thereafter. Why had Harken adopted Bush? The few media organizations—Time and The Wall Street Journal among them— that looked into Harken concluded that something was fishy about the venture itself. The company’s structure and transactions were unnecessarily convoluted. It violated most of the rules of sound business practice yet somehow continued to exist despite the fact that it rarely made money for its public shareholders. It was nigh impossible to figure out where the funding for Harken originated, beyond shell companies in offshore tax havens such as the Netherlands Antilles. But what it actually did was nothing short of astonishing. In 1986, the year George W. Bush entered the picture, Harken had total revenue of four million dollars. Three years later, thanks to a flurry of acquisitions and infinitely complicated transactions, revenue would exceed a billion dollars. Notwithstanding its general precariousness and obscurity, Harken somehow managed to assemble backing from global superstars, ranging from the billionaire investor Soros (at one point the largest Harken shareholder), and Harvard University’s endowment, to interests tied to the Saudi elite, to then-Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and to the deposed Shah of Iran. In other words, this obscure company somehow was catnip to brutal and corrupt foreign leaders who had grown fabulously wealthy at the expense of their people—and who collaborated closely with the highest levels of the US military-intelligence-corporate establishment. (Soros’s role seems especially strange; he went on to become the leading single funder of efforts to deny President George W. Bush a second term.) UBS was among the banks that profited from this dubious funding. UBS had taken a position in Harken at a moment when the company was on the shoals. Coincidentally or not, this also was when George W. Bush—son of vice president George H.W. Bush—was part of the corporate board. UBS’s role struck the Wall Street Journal as odd, in part because UBS was not known for investing in small American firms like Harken. Facing regulatory difficulties over its investment in Harken, UBS ended up unloading its stock to Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, a Saudi tycoon with separate business ties to James Bath, a key Bush family operative who fronted for Saudi interests in Houston. Bakhsh was also a business partner with a Saudi royal family favorite labeled by the Federal Reserve as a “front man” for BCCI, or Bank of Credit and Commerce International. For those who have forgotten, BCCI was a criminal banking operation whose customers ranged from Western intelligence agencies to drug cartels and terrorist organizations. Shortly before UBS helped bail out Harken, it had partnered with BCCI in a Geneva-based bank. BCCI was eventually shut down in raids commenced by the British government, after intense investigations by Senator John Kerry’s Foreign Relations terrorism subcommittee and the Manhattan DA. But evidence of its ties to the highest levels of the US government under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, extensively uncovered by investigators, was repeatedly rebuffed by superiors and by regulators. It is worth noting that the Treasury Department official responsible for scrutinizing BCCI’s affairs in the Reagan-Bush administration was assistant secretary for enforcement John M. Walker Jr.—who happened to be the cousin of George H.W. Bush. (Bushes have for generations been involved both in government and banking, with another close relative serving as a top official at Lehman Brothers before it precipitously failed. More on this topic, and on George H.W. Bush’s secret past in deep covert intelligence work, can be found in my book, Family of Secrets. ) Keep in mind that such is the business milieu of Nemazee and Quasha, who jumped with apparently little effort from the Bush to Clinton camps when the moment was opportune—and one of whom ended up a player in the Obama campaign. Scenarios like this cause the mind to reel. Yet where Ferdinand Marcos, the Saudi royal family, and the Shah converge with the son of an American president, in a deal involving large amounts of money, it is not necessary to untangle all the spaghetti strands to sense that something is amiss. Why, to begin with, would a major international bank get involved with a shadowy operation such as Harken? Whatever the reasons, the bank clearly gained influence with a White House that had family connections to the company. Clues may be found in 1986, which is when George W. Bush joined the Harken board. It also is the year that Harken’s chairman, Alan Quasha, hooked up with something called Rembrandt Group Holdings, a Swiss-based company headed by a South African billionaire, Anton Rupert. Rembrandt’s vast portfolio included tobacco, financial services, wines and spirits, gold and diamond mining and luxury goods. Soon after that, Rembrandt took over a small, closely-held Denver company, Frontier Oil. Frontier then announced an $ 85-million "revolving credit facility" with….. Union Bank of Switzerland. UBS again. Few expect international bankers to be paragons of virtue, but the South African connection highlights a particularly unsavory side. This was revealed in a series of reports produced by a coalition of Swiss organizations pushing for reparations to post-apartheid South Africa and cancellation of that country’s debt to Switzerland. The group took particular interest in two South African-controlled companies that were established in Switzerland at the time of global economic sanctions against the apartheid regime – and one of these was Rembrandt. According to one of the reports from Koordination Südliches Afrika, Swiss banks had played an important role “in financing the apartheid state and its corporations from the very beginning” and that “… the two Swiss banks UBS and CS Group have played a special role.” UBS’s former chairman, Nikolaus Senn, actually had a medal bestowed on him for service to the white regime. When it became inevitable that apartheid would crumble, Senn nevertheless pronounced his doubts about giving blacks the franchise: “‘One man–one vote’ to me is not a world religion.” The connections here are worth considering. In 1988, while George W. Bush advised his father’s presidential campaign and sat on Harken’s board, Harken chairman Alan Quasha joined the board of Richemont, a new Swiss-based company controlled by the same South African Rupert family that controlled Rembrandt. UBS’s Senn became Richemont’s chairman. So George W. Bush was joining an obscure company whose constituent parts were tied to the white power structure in South Africa, and also to the evasion of sanctions against that regime via Switzerland. And UBS played a central role in the arrangement. The South African regime was not the only one that got in on this money game. Ferdinand Marcos, the late dictator of the Philippines, whose kleptocratic rule was marked by savage human rights abuses and martial law, had a seat at the table too. The father of Alan Quasha, Harken’s chairman, was an American lawyer who lived most of his adult life in the Philippines, and represented clients tied to US intelligence. He remained an advocate of Marcos to the end. Marcos also was moving billions pillaged from the Philippine and American people (via aid to that country) into Swiss accounts. In fact, Phil Kendrick, who sold Harken Energy to Alan Quasha, recalls having heard rumors back then that the money to buy him out came from Marcos himself. The Bushes and Marcos were famously friendly. As vice president, George HW Bush visited Marcos’s Philippines during its protracted martial law and declared that country, to considerable subsequent ridicule, a great and vibrant example. “We love you, sir, we love your adherence to democratic principles,” vice president Bush said on that 1981 trip. And Marcos’s widow Imelda would speak, elliptically, of how the elder Bush had given her husband advice on how to invest “his” fortune. Bush and Marcos even took lessons from the same golf instructor. *** It’s all about access—and golf has long played a crucial role. Back in the 1950s, Senator Prescott Bush, father of HW and a powerful former banker himself, used to have unique access to President Eisenhower as his regular golf partner. By the time of Barack Obama’s little-studied invitation to Robert Wolf to round out his foursome, Wolf (and UBS), too, were already on the inside. Early in the Obama administration, Wolf had quietly been appointed to Obama’s Economic Advisory Board. The fact that UBS is now playing a role in the administration of a liberal democratic “reformer” illustrates just how trans-partisan money interests can be. Though the board has engendered little media notice besides an Associated Press piece that subtly tried to spark broader curiosity, its makeup alone deserves attention—for what it tells us about the group that had the ear of the President as he embarked upon his change agenda. One of Wolf’s fellow board members is William H. Donaldson, an old friend of the Bush family who served on the board of the tobacco company Philip Morris for two decades. Donaldson headed the investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, which looked after the financial affairs of George W. Bush over the years. Donaldson was one of the directors brought into Frontier Oil when it was taken over by the Quasha-Rembrandt-Bush-UBS group. President George W. Bush named Donaldson head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), where he served from 2001-2005. During that period, he presided over changes requested by investment banks that lessened regulation; among other things, the SEC chose to rely on the banks’ own computer models for risk assessments. "If anything goes wrong," said Harvey Goldschmid, another commissioner at the time, "it's going to be an awfully big mess." And indeed it is. The staff director for Obama’s Economic Advisory Board, who also serves as a member of the president’s powerful Council of Economic Advisers, is Austan Goolsbee, who along with Donaldson and Bush shared membership in the exclusive Yale secret society, Skull and Bones. Goolsbee has pretty much stayed out of the news, except for a brief scandal during the 2008 campaign when a Canadian government internal memo characterized Goolsbee as reassuring our Northern neighbors that Obama’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric was just that, “political positioning” that did not reflect the candidate’s real position on globalization. *** People wonder why, year after year, promise after promise, so little seems to change in Washington. But it is usually left to academics and theoreticians to explain, somewhat abstractly and historically, how powerful institutions continue to influence the course of public affairs irrespective of who is in the White House and what party is in charge. Meanwhile, polls show that most Americans think that banks got a much better deal out of the Bush-Obama rescue-stimulus than the average Joe. And they’re right—but they don’t quite get the real story on how such deals come about. Supporters of Barack Obama argue that reporting on his connections to the powerful “permanent government” can only impede his sincere efforts to reform health care, the financial industry and so on. But such revelations carry an important message: that American presidents, no matter how good their intentions, are inevitably enmeshed in a self-reinforcing web of interests and influences that permits the wealthy to shape our national destiny no matter who controls the government in Washington. Shining a light on the UBS-Obama link can serve as yet another warning beacon to anyone who underestimates the nature of the challenge facing American democracy. Figuring out how our world works—actually works —requires a skeptical eye and a willingness to follow the facts wherever they lead. After all, sometimes a good golf story is just a story about some guys playing golf. And sometimes it isn’t. Research assistance: Isabel Gautschi

Posted by DougR on The Oil Drum June 13, 2010 http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6593/648967 Editors' note for first-time visitors: What follows is a comment from a The Oil Drum reader. To read what The Oil Drum staff members are saying about the Deepwater Horizon Spill, please visit the front page. (Were the US government and BP more forthcoming with information and details, the situation would not be giving rise to so much speculation about what is actually going on in the Gulf. This should be run more like Mission Control at NASA than an exclusive country club function--it is a public matter--transparency, now!) OK let's get real about the GOM oil flow. There doesn't really seem to be much info on TOD that furthers more complete understanding of what's really happening in the GOM. As you have probably seen and maybe feel yourselves, there are several things that do not appear to make sense regarding the actions of attack against the well. Don't feel bad, there is much that doesn't make sense even to professionals unless you take into account some important variables that we are not being told about. There seems to me to be a reluctance to face what cannot be termed anything less than grim circumstances in my opinion. There certainly is a reluctance to inform us regular people and all we have really gotten is a few dots here and there... First of all...set aside all your thoughts of plugging the well and stopping it from blowing out oil using any method from the top down. Plugs, big valves to just shut it off, pinching the pipe closed, installing a new bop or lmrp, shooting any epoxy in it, top kills with mud etc etc etc....forget that, it won't be happening..it's done and over. In fact actually opening up the well at the subsea source and allowing it to gush more is not only exactly what has happened, it was probably necessary, or so they think anyway. So you have to ask WHY? Why make it worse?...there really can only be one answer and that answer does not bode well for all of us. It's really an inescapable conclusion at this point, unless you want to believe that every Oil and Gas professional involved suddenly just forgot everything they know or woke up one morning and drank a few big cups of stupid and got assigned to directing the response to this catastrophe. Nothing makes sense unless you take this into account, but after you do...you will see the "sense" behind what has happened and what is happening. That conclusion is this: The well bore structure is compromised "Down hole". That is something which is a "Worst nightmare" conclusion to reach. While many have been saying this for some time as with any complex disaster of this proportion many have "said" a lot of things with no real sound reasons or evidence for jumping to such conclusions, well this time it appears that they may have jumped into the right place... TOP KILL - FAILS: This was probably our best and only chance to kill this well from the top down. This "kill mud" is a tried and true method of killing wells and usually has a very good chance of success. The depth of this well presented some logistical challenges, but it really should not of presented any functional obstructions. The pumping capacity was there and it would have worked, should have worked, but it didn't. It didn't work, but it did create evidence of what is really happening. First of all the method used in this particular top kill made no sense, did not follow the standard operating procedure used to kill many other wells and in fact for the most part was completely contrary to the procedure which would have given it any real chance of working. When a well is "Killed" using this method heavy drill fluid "Mud" is pumped at high volume and pressure into a leaking well. The leaks are "behind" the point of access where the mud is fired in, in this case the "choke and Kill lines" which are at the very bottom of the BOP (Blow Out Preventer) The heavy fluid gathers in the "behind" portion of the leaking well assembly, while some will leak out, it very quickly overtakes the flow of oil and only the heavier mud will leak out. Once that "solid" flow of mud is established at the leak "behind" the well, the mud pumps increase pressure and begin to overtake the pressure of the oil deposit. The mud is established in a solid column that is driven downward by the now stronger pumps. The heavy mud will create a solid column that is so heavy that the oil deposit can no longer push it up, shut off the pumps...the well is killed...it can no longer flow. Usually this will happen fairly quickly, in fact for it to work at all...it must happen quickly. There is no "trickle some mud in" because that is not how a top kill works. The flowing oil will just flush out the trickle and a solid column will never be established. Yet what we were told was "It will take days to know whether it worked"...."Top kill might take 48 hours to complete"...the only way it could take days is if BP intended to do some "test fires" to test integrity of the entire system. The actual "kill" can only take hours by nature because it must happen fairly rapidly. It also increases strain on the "behind" portion and in this instance we all know that what remained was fragile at best. Early that afternoon we saw a massive flow burst out of the riser "plume" area. This was the first test fire of high pressure mud injection. Later on same day we saw a greatly increased flow out of the kink leaks, this was mostly mud at that time as the kill mud is tanish color due to the high amount of Barite which is added to it to weight it and Barite is a white powder. We later learned the pumping was shut down at midnight, we weren't told about that until almost 16 hours later, but by then...I'm sure BP had learned the worst. The mud they were pumping in was not only leaking out the "behind" leaks...it was leaking out of someplace forward...and since they were not even near being able to pump mud into the deposit itself, because the well would be dead long before...and the oil was still coming up, there could only be one conclusion...the wells casings were ruptured and it was leaking "down hole" They tried the "Junk shot"...the "bridging materials" which also failed and likely made things worse in regards to the ruptured well casings. "Despite successfully pumping a total of over 30,000 barrels of heavy mud, in three attempts at rates of up to 80 barrels a minute, and deploying a wide range of different bridging materials, the operation did not overcome the flow from the well." http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=2012968&contentId=7062487 80 Barrels per minute is over 200,000 gallons per hour, over 115,000 barrels per day...did we seen an increase over and above what was already leaking out of 115k bpd?....we did not...it would have been a massive increase in order of multiples and this did not happen. "The whole purpose is to get the kill mud down,” said Wells. “We'll have 50,000 barrels of mud on hand to kill this well. It's far more than necessary, but we always like to have backup." Try finding THAT quote around...it's been scrubbed...here's a cached copy of a quote... http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WDj-HORTmIoJ:www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/deepwaterhorizon/7006870.html+%E2%809CThe+whole+purpose+is+to+get+the+kill+mud+down,%E2%80%9D+said+Wells.+%E2%80%9CWe'll+have+50,000+barrels+of+mud+on+hand+to+kill+this+well.+It's+far+more+than+necessary,+but+we+always+like+to+have+backup.%E2%80%9D&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us "The "top kill" effort, launched Wednesday afternoon by industry and government engineers, had pumped enough drilling fluid to block oil and gas spewing from the well, Allen said. The pressure from the well was very low, he said, but persisting." "Allen said one ship that was pumping fluid into the well had run out of the fluid, or "mud," and that a second ship was on the way. He said he was encouraged by the progress." http://www.houmatoday.com/article/20100527/ARTICLES/100529348 Later we found out that Allen had no idea what was really going on and had been "Unavailable all day" http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/05/27/interview_with_coas... So what we had was BP running out of 50,000 barrels of mud in a very short period of time. An amount far and above what they deemed necessary to kill the well. Shutting down pumping 16 hours before telling anyone, including the president. We were never really given a clear reason why "Top Kill" failed, just that it couldn't overcome the well. There is only one article anywhere that says anything else about it at this time of writing...and it's a relatively obscure article from the wall street journal "online" citing an unnamed source. "WASHINGTON—BP PLC has concluded that its "top-kill" attempt last week to seal its broken well in the Gulf of Mexico may have failed due to a malfunctioning disk inside the well about 1,000 feet below the ocean floor. The disk, part of the subsea safety infrastructure, may have ruptured during the surge of oil and gas up the well on April 20 that led to the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig, BP officials said. The rig sank two days later, triggering a leak that has since become the worst in U.S. history. The broken disk may have prevented the heavy drilling mud injected into the well last week from getting far enough down the well to overcome the pressure from the escaping oil and gas, people familiar with BP's findings said. They said much of the drilling mud may also have escaped from the well into the rock formation outside the wellbore. As a result, BP wasn't able to get sufficient pressure to keep the oil and gas at bay. If they had been able to build up sufficient pressure, the company had hoped to pump in cement and seal off the well. The effort was deemed a failure on Saturday. BP started the top-kill effort Wednesday afternoon, shooting heavy drilling fluids into the broken valve known as a blowout preventer. The mud was driven by a 30,000 horsepower pump installed on a ship at the surface. But it was clear from the start that a lot of the "kill mud" was leaking out instead of going down into the well." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870487560457528013357716426... There are some inconsistencies with this article. There are no "Disks" or "Subsea safety structure" 1,000 feet below the sea floor, all that is there is well bore. There is nothing that can allow the mud or oil to "escape" into the rock formation outside the well bore except the well, because it is the only thing there. All the actions and few tid bits of information all lead to one inescapable conclusion. The well pipes below the sea floor are broken and leaking. Now you have some real data of how BP's actions are evidence of that, as well as some murky statement from "BP officials" confirming the same. I took some time to go into a bit of detail concerning the failure of Top Kill because this was a significant event. To those of us outside the real inside loop, yet still fairly knowledgeable, it was a major confirmation of what many feared. That the system below the sea floor has serious failures of varying magnitude in the complicated chain, and it is breaking down and it will continue to. What does this mean? It means they will never cap the gusher after the wellhead. They cannot...the more they try and restrict the oil gushing out the bop?...the more it will transfer to the leaks below. Just like a leaky garden hose with a nozzle on it. When you open up the nozzle?...it doesn't leak so bad, you close the nozzle?...it leaks real bad, same dynamics. It is why they sawed the riser off...or tried to anyway...but they clipped it off, to relieve pressure on the leaks "down hole". I'm sure there was a bit of panic time after they crimp/pinched off the large riser pipe and the Diamond wire saw got stuck and failed...because that crimp diverted pressure and flow to the rupture down below. Contrary to what most of us would think as logical to stop the oil mess, actually opening up the gushing well and making it gush more became direction BP took after confirming that there was a leak. In fact if you note their actions, that should become clear. They have shifted from stopping or restricting the gusher to opening it up and catching it. This only makes sense if they want to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed.....and that sort of leak is one of the most dangerous and potentially damaging kind of leak there could be. It is also inaccessible which compounds our problems. There is no way to stop that leak from above, all they can do is relieve the pressure on it and the only way to do that right now is to open up the nozzle above and gush more oil into the gulf and hopefully catch it, which they have done, they just neglected to tell us why, gee thanks. A down hole leak is dangerous and damaging for several reasons. There will be erosion throughout the entire beat up, beat on and beat down remainder of the "system" including that inaccessible leak. The same erosion I spoke about in the first post is still present and has never stopped, cannot be stopped, is impossible to stop and will always be present in and acting on anything that is left which has crude oil "Product" rushing through it. There are abrasives still present, swirling flow will create hot spots of wear and this erosion is relentless and will always be present until eventually it wears away enough material to break it's way out. It will slowly eat the bop away especially at the now pinched off riser head and it will flow more and more. Perhaps BP can outrun or keep up with that out flow with various suckage methods for a period of time, but eventually the well will win that race, just how long that race will be?...no one really knows....However now?...there are other problems that a down hole leak will and must produce that will compound this already bad situation. This down hole leak will undermine the foundation of the seabed in and around the well area. It also weakens the only thing holding up the massive Blow Out Preventer's immense bulk of 450 tons. In fact?...we are beginning to the results of the well's total integrity beginning to fail due to the undermining being caused by the leaking well bore. The first layer of the sea floor in the gulf is mostly lose material of sand and silt. It doesn't hold up anything and isn't meant to, what holds the entire subsea system of the Bop in place is the well itself. The very large steel connectors of the initial well head "spud" stabbed in to the sea floor. The Bop literally sits on top of the pipe and never touches the sea bed, it wouldn't do anything in way of support if it did. After several tens of feet the seabed does begin to support the well connection laterally (side to side) you couldn't put a 450 ton piece of machinery on top of a 100' tall pipe "in the air" and subject it to the side loads caused by the ocean currents and expect it not to bend over...unless that pipe was very much larger than the machine itself, which you all can see it is not. The well's piping in comparison is actually very much smaller than the Blow Out Preventer and strong as it may be, it relies on some support from the seabed to function and not literally fall over...and it is now showing signs of doing just that....falling over. If you have been watching the live feed cams you may have noticed that some of the ROVs are using an inclinometer...and inclinometer is an instrument that measures "Incline" or tilt. The BOP is not supposed to be tilting...and after the riser clip off operation it has begun to... This is not the only problem that occurs due to erosion of the outer area of the well casings. The way a well casing assembly functions it that it is an assembly of different sized "tubes" that decrease in size as they go down. These tubes have a connection to each other that is not unlike a click or snap together locking action. After a certain length is assembled they are cemented around the ouside to the earth that the more rough drill hole is bored through in the well making process. A very well put together and simply explained process of "How to drill a deep water oil well" is available here: http://www.treesfullofmoney.com/?p=1610 The well bore casings rely on the support that is created by the cementing phase of well construction. Just like if you have many hands holding a pipe up you could put some weight on the top and the many hands could hold the pipe and the weight on top easily...but if there were no hands gripping and holding the pipe?...all the weight must be held up by the pipe alone. The series of connections between the sections of casings are not designed to hold up the immense weight of the BOP without all the "hands" that the cementing provides and they will eventually buckle and fail when stressed beyond their design limits. These are clear and present dangers to the battered subsea safety structure (bop and lmrp) which is the only loose cork on this well we have left. The immediate (first 1,000 feet) of well structure that remains is now also undoubtedly compromised. However.....as bad as that is?...it is far from the only possible problems with this very problematic well. There were ongoing troubles with the entire process during the drilling of this well. There were also many comprises made by BP IMO which may have resulted in an overall weakened structure of the entire well system all the way to the bottom plug which is over 12,000 feet deep. Problems with the cementing procedure which was done by Haliburton and was deemed as “was against our best practices.” by a Haliburton employee on April 1st weeks before the well blew out. There is much more and I won't go into detail right now concerning the lower end of the well and the troubles encountered during the whole creation of this well and earlier "Well control" situations that were revieled in various internal BP e-mails. I will add several links to those documents and quotes from them below and for now, address the issues concerning the upper portion of the well and the region of the sea floor. What is likely to happen now? Well...none of what is likely to happen is good, in fact...it's about as bad as it gets. I am convinced the erosion and compromising of the entire system is accelerating and attacking more key structural areas of the well, the blow out preventer and surrounding strata holding it all up and together. This is evidenced by the tilt of the blow out preventer and the erosion which has exposed the well head connection. What eventually will happen is that the blow out preventer will literally tip over if they do not run supports to it as the currents push on it. I suspect they will run those supports as cables tied to anchors very soon, if they don't, they are inviting disaster that much sooner. Eventually even that will be futile as the well casings cannot support the weight of the massive system above with out the cement bond to the earth and that bond is being eroded away. When enough is eroded away the casings will buckle and the BOP will collapse the well. If and when you begin to see oil and gas coming up around the well area from under the BOP? or the area around the well head connection and casing sinking more and more rapidly? ...it won't be too long after that the entire system fails. BP must be aware of this, they are mapping the sea floor sonically and that is not a mere exercise. Our Gov't must be well aware too, they just are not telling us. All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit...after that, it goes into the realm of "the worst things you can think of" The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well, that could literally come flying out...as I said...all the worst things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn't any "cap dome" or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more damage to the gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up less and less likely to work, which as it stands now?....is the only real chance we have left to stop it all. It's a race now...a race to drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and failing system gives up it's last gasp in a horrific crescendo. We are not even 2 months into it, barely half way by even optimistic estimates. The damage done by the leaked oil now is virtually immeasurable already and it will not get better, it can only get worse. No matter how much they can collect, there will still be thousands and thousands of gallons leaking out every minute, every hour of every day. We have 2 months left before the relief wells are even near in position and set up to take a kill shot and that is being optimistic as I said. Over the next 2 months the mechanical situation also cannot improve, it can only get worse, getting better is an impossibility. While they may make some gains on collecting the leaked oil, the structural situation cannot heal itself. It will continue to erode and flow out more oil and eventually the inevitable collapse which cannot be stopped will happen. It is only a simple matter of who can "get there first"...us or the well. We can only hope the race against that eventuality is one we can win, but my assessment I am sad to say is that we will not. The system will collapse or fail substantially before we reach the finish line ahead of the well and the worst is yet to come. Sorry to bring you that news, I know it is grim, but that is the way I see it....I sincerely hope I am wrong. We need to prepare for the possibility of this blow out sending more oil into the gulf per week then what we already have now, because that is what a collapse of the system will cause. All the collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even being able to halt it will go down. The magnitude and impact of this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our life times if the worst or even near worst happens... We are seeing the puny forces of man vs the awesome forces of nature. We are going to need some luck and a lot of effort to win... and if nature decides we ought to lose, we will.... Reference materials: On April 1, a job log written by a Halliburton employee, Marvin Volek, warns that BP’s use of cement “was against our best practices.” An April 18 internal Halliburton memorandum indicates that Halliburton again warned BP about its practices, this time saying that a “severe” gas flow problem would occur if the casings were not centered more carefully. Around that same time, a BP document shows, company officials chose a type of casing with a greater risk of collapsing. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/us/06rig.html?pagewanted=1&sq=at_issue... Mark Hafle, the BP drilling engineer who wrote plans for well casings and cement seals on the Deepwater Horizon's well, testified that the well had lost thousands of barrels of mud at the bottom. But he said models run onshore showed alterations to the cement program would resolve the issues, and when asked if a cement failure allowed the well to "flow" gas and oil, he wouldn't capitulate. Hafle said he made several changes to casing designs in the last few days before the well blew, including the addition of the two casing liners that weren't part of the original well design because of problems where the earthen sides of the well were "ballooning." He also worked with Halliburton engineers to design a plan for sealing the well casings with cement. http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/hearings_bp_ce... graphic of fail http://media.nola.com/news_impact/other/oil-cause-050710.pdf Casing joint http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/files/OGL00001.gif Casing http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/files/OGL00003.gif Kill may take until Christmas http://preview.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-02/bp-gulf-of-mexico-oil-leak-... BP Used Riskier Method to Seal Well Before Blast http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/us/27rig.html BP memo test results http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20100512/Internal.BP.Email.Reg... Investigation results The information from BP identifies several new warning signs of problems. According to BP there were three flow indicators from the well before the explosion. http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100525/Memo.BP.Internal.Inve... BP, what we know http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100512/BP-What.We.Know.pdf What could have happened 1. Before or during the cement job, an influx of hydrocarbon enters the wellbore. 2. Influx is circulated during cement job to wellhead and BOP. 3. 9-7/8” casing hanger packoff set and positively tested to 6500 psi. 4. After 16.5 hours waiting on cement, a negative test performed on wellbore below BOP. (~ 1400 psi differential pressure on 9-7/8” casing hanger packoff and ~ 2350 psi on double valve float collar) 5. Packoff leaks allowing hydrocarbon to enter wellbore below BOP. 1400 psi shut in pressure observed on drill pipe (no flow or pressure observed on kill line) 6. Hydrocarbon below BOP is unknowingly circulated to surface while finishing displacing the riser. 7. As hydrocarbon rises to surface, gas break out of solution further reduces hydrostatic pressure in well. Well begin to flow, BOPs and Emergency Disconnect System (EDS) activated but failed. 8. Packoff continues to leak allowing further influx from bottom. Confidential http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100512/BP-What.Could.Have.Ha... T/A daily log 4-20 http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100512/TRO-Daily.Drilling.Re... Cement plug 12,150 ft SCMT logging tool SCMT (Slim Cement Mapping Tool) Schlumberger Partial CBL done. http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100530/BP-HZN-CEC018441.pdf Schlum CBL tools http://www.slb.com/~/media/Files/production/product_sheets/well_integrit... Major concerns, well control, bop test. http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100530/BP-HZN-CEC018375.pdf Energy & commerce links to docs. http://energycommerce.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=articl... well head on sea floor http://nca-group.com/bilder//Trolla/A.%20GVI%20of%20Trolla%20prior%20to%20WHP002%20(2).jpg Well head on deck of ship http://nca-group.com/bilder//Trolla/DSC_0189.JPG BP's youtube propoganda page, a lot of rarely seen vids here....FWIW http://www.youtube.com/user/DeepwaterHorizonJIC http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1097505/pg1 -------------------------- I used to cover the energy business (oil, gas and alternative) here in Texas, and the few experts in the oil field -- including geologists, chemists, etc. -- able or willing to even speak of this BP event told me early on that it is likely the entire reserve will bleed out. Unfortunately none of them could say with any certainty just how much oil is in the reserve in question because, for one thing, the oil industry and secrecy have always been synonymous. According to BP data from about five years ago, there are four separate reservoirs containing a total of 2.5 billion barrels (barrels not gallons). One of the reservoirs has 1.5 billion barrels. I saw an earlier post here quoting an Anadarko Petroleum report which set the total amount at 2.3 billion barrels. One New York Times article put it at 2 billion barrels. If the BP data correctly or honestly identified four separate reservoirs then a bleed-out might gush less than 2 to 2.5 billion barrels unless the walls -- as it were -- fracture or partially collapse. I am hearing the same dark rumors which suggest fracturing and a complete bleed-out are already underway. Rumors also suggest a massive collapse of the Gulf floor itself is in the making. They are just rumors but it is time for geologists or related experts to end their deafening silence and speak to these possibilities. All oilmen lie about everything. The stories one hears about the extent to which they will protect themselves are all understatements. BP employees are already taking The Fifth before grand juries, and attorneys are laying a path for company executives to make a run for it.

Helen and Martha Helen Thomas' Watergate Scoop By FRED GARDNER www.counterpunch.org June 15, 2010 http://www.counterpunch.org/gardner06152010.html The alacrity —the relief— with which her fellow journalists allowed Helen Thomas to be offed is shameful but understandable. She showed them all up. She was the only one whose questions weren't mealy-mouthed, the only anti-war voice in a roomful of enablers. Polite reviews of her career credit Thomas with gender-related firsts and longevity. None acknowledge the role she played in exposing the Watergate cover-up. It was Helen Thomas who lent a sympathetic, respectful ear when Martha Mitchell claimed that the burglary of Democratic Party files had been planned at the highest levels in the White House. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear… John Mitchell, Martha's second husband, was a successful Wall St. lawyer whose firm hired Nixon after Tricky Dick lost his bid to become Governor of California in 1962. Six years later, with the U.S. military mired in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson resigned, the Democrats split into pro- and anti-war camps, and Nixon was elected president. John Mitchell moved to Washington to be attorney general. At first, Martha Mitchell, a belle from Arkansas, actually believed Nixon's lip-service about the wives of his cabinet members playing an active role in his administration. She soon became disenchanted. She hated the way, at parties, "the men went off by themselves for cordials and cigars on the sun porch and the women went to another room." She would look at the women in the living room "in their beautiful gowns, lined up like dolls in a museum and think 'We're nothing but window dressing!'" She hated Chief Justice Warren Burger because he gave her a lecture about smoking. Martha Mitchell overheard a lot of things that dismayed her. Occasionally she would place a nocturnal phone call to a reporter —Helen Thomas of United Press International was her favorite— to share observations. Nixon viewed her as a vague threat. He feared and hated women in general, according to Martha. "I didn't even exist," she told Winzola McClendon, a reporter who became her biographer; "nor in my opinion, did any woman, as far as Richard Nixon was concerned. He wanted men around him." Martha wanted John to leave the government and return to his law practice in Manhattan. According to McLendon's revealing biography, she dreamed of throwing dinner parties for his sophisticated private-sector clients, far away from Haldeman, Ehrlichman and the other low-level management types who ran the White House. John promised that they would get out of Washington after the '72 election. He resigned as Attorney General that spring so he could run the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). Mitchell's strategy called for Nixon to remain in the White House and act "presidential." He feared that if Nixon were out campaigning, the American people might pick up on just how bizarre his personality really was. By the spring of 1972, the Republicans' top drawing card at campaign events was none other than Martha Mitchell. When Henry Kissinger had to bow out of a June 16 fundraising event in Newport Beach, CREEP assigned Martha. That's where she was —partying with Charlton Heston, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and John Wayne— on the night of the Watergate break-in. The party was a drag and Pat Nixon snubbed Martha, as usual. Back at the hotel Martha wanted to discuss the snub with John, but he was huddled with his aides. They didn't tell her that five CREEP operatives had just been caught trying to steal files from Democratic Party headquarters. Keeping the about-to-break news from Martha was literally the first step of the Watergate cover-up. Next morning John flew back to D.C. to direct the disinformation campaign, after convincing Martha to stay in California because she needed rest. Martha got an LA Times and read that James McCord, a CREEP employee, had been arrested. The story contained a statement by her husband that she knew to be a lie: "A man identified as employed by our campaign committee was one of five persons arrested at the Democratic National Committee headquarters... The person involved is the proprietor of a private security agency who was employed at our committee months ago to assist with the installation of our security system... We want to emphasize that this man and the other people were not operating either in our behalf or with our consent." John Mitchell had delegated two people to stay with Martha at the Newporter Inn: his secretary, Lea Jablonsky, and a security guard named Steve King. Martha kept drinking Scotch, smoking Salems and growing more and more agitated as her husband refused to take her phone calls. On June 22 she called her Washington apartment and told John Mitchell's aide, Fred LaRue, that if her husband didn't quit politics immediately, she would leave him. She added that she was going to tell the press. She then called Helen Thomas of UPI. While Martha was on the phone with Thomas, Steve King --alerted by LaRue or Mitchell-- ran into her bedroom, threw her onto the bed and ripped the phone out of the wall. "The conversation ended abruptly when it appeared someone took away the phone from her hand," Helen Thomas reported. "She was heard to say 'You just get away.'" When Thomas called back the hotel operator told her, "Mrs. Mitchell is indisposed and cannot talk." The White House put out the story that Martha was about to be institutionalized. Back at the Newport Inn, her guards wouldn't give her food but plied her with liquor. She eventually negotiated the right to fly back east. She checked into the Westchester Country Club and called UPI to declare, "I'm leaving him until he decides to leave the campaign. It's horrible to me... I'm not going to stand for all those dirty things that go on. If you could see me you wouldn't believe it. I'm black and blue. I'm a political prisoner... They don't want me to talk." In his famous comeback interview with David Frost in September '77, Richard Nixon said, "If it hadn't been for Martha, there'd have been no Watergate, because John wasn't mindin' the store." Nixon told Frost that Martha was mentally unbalanced and that "John was practically out of his mind about Martha in the spring of 1972. He was letting Magruder and all these boys, these kids, these nuts, run this thing." It was a total lie. In the spring of 1972 Martha Mitchell was a highly active, visible and popular member of the Committee to Re-Elect the President. They turned her into a crazy drunken dame. In All The President's Men there's a turning-point scene in which Jason Robards, the editor of the Washington post (played by Ben Bradlee) tells Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford (played by Carl Bernstein and Robert Woodward) that he just can't let them make unsubstantiated allegations about the president of the United States —as if the Attorney General's wife hadn't been making the same allegations for months to Helen Thomas! Woodward and Bernstein didn't break the story, they confirmed it. Fred Gardner is editor of O'Shaughnessy's. He can be reached at: fred@plebesite.com

On May 27, 2010, TrineDay Publishers signed a contract with me, as the author, for the publication of “Watergate Exposed: A Confidential Informant Tells How the Watergate Burglars Were Set-Up and Reveals Other Government Dirty Secrets", by Robert Merritt as told to Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven. Under the contract the publisher will release bound galleys of the book for sale by July 31, 2010, and an electronic version of the book for downloading by August 31, 2010. Print bound copies will follow at a later date. The contract was devised to take advantage of the electronic downloading by Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and the devises of other electronic book distributors. Apple has sold over two million iPads since its release six weeks ago. It is deemed crucial that “Watergate Exposed” be published electronically as soon as possible. This is because Robert Merritt is in poor health and because he was visited yesterday, May 31, by a high-ranking Intelligence Officer of a major law enforcement agency who gave him a friendly warning that those who do not want the book published planned to resort to physical action against Merritt to disrupt its publication. Merritt, by the way, at the present time serves as a confidential Informant (CI) for the Intelligence Division of the New York Police Department. Douglas Caddy

Thank you, John, for this important research lead. That an answer to such a detailed query could be forthcoming so quickly proves once again how valuable the Education Forum is and how knowledgeable its members are. I also want to thank John Dolva and William Kelly for their responses. While I am not at liberty at this time to explain how the answer to the query and the other information supplied will be utilized, pleased be assured that at some time in the future you will read about the matter in a book and remember it being posted here and your cerebral contributions in helping to solve the mystery.

Can anyone verify whether C. Hamilton Moses (President of Midwest Video of Little Rock Arkansas) or G.R. Morrell (VP of Midwest Video) were in Austin or Fredericksberg between Christmas 1963 and Jan. 6, 1964?

Historian Niall Fergusson on why the West's governments will all default. He gave this speech at the Peterson Institute for International Economics on May 13, 2010. He declared that America needs a new currency based on a commodity: oil and/or gold. The video is here: http://www.piie.com/events/event_detail.cf...D=152&Media The transcript is here: http://www.petersoninstitute.org/publicati...rguson-2010.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_people Robert Merritt lived in Mole City circa 1991-92. A book was subsequently published about Mole City (see link above.) Merritt tells me that not too long ago a NYC cop who was interviewed on television about Mole City under Grand Central Station declared that the authorities had decided to leave it alone as the homeless people living there were not a public nuisance and it was crime-free. It turns out that there is another Mole City in Manhattan that is beneath Central Park. It is inhabitated by dangerous persons, such as thieves and drug users. One of the railroad tunnels connects the Mole City under Grand Central with its counterpart under Central Park. But the inhabitants of Mole City under Grand Central will have nothing to do with those living under Central Park.

Watergate Exposed and the Cure for AIDS The following is excerpted from chapter ten of the forthcoming book, Watergate Exposed: A Confidential Informant Tells How the Watergate Burglars Were Set-Up and Reveals Other Government Dirty Tricks, by Robert Merritt as told to Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven: One thing that everyone needs to know is that lose your job, lose your health and you become one steps away from being homeless. That is never more true than today. I had been on the streets for some time and was beginning to discover a brand new world – a city underneath the City of New York. Another person who had befriended me took me to Grand Central Station where we went through the main lobby and down a small staircase that appeared obsolete. We descended down as far as we could go, perhaps four to six stories underground. At the end of the staircase we came out to a train platform that was no longer in use. We walked a couple of steps and then went onto a old unused railroad track where we walked about 20 feet and came to a small sliding metal door that was under the platform. The door was approximately three by four feet. When we opened it to my surprise there were two guards on the other side who after we entered searched us for weapons, drugs and alcohol. They were polite but cautious. I found myself in a vast open area that was incredible huge. There were hundreds of people living in spaces or cubicles. The area was lighted by electricity that also powered TV sets, refrigerators and hot plates. The aroma of home cooked food was everywhere. All the persons I met were exceptionally intelligent, nice and courteous. I was in famous Mole City several stories below Manhattan. The rules for the community were strict. No drugs, weapons, fighting, alcohol or sex. Believe it or not, there were decent people with clean white sheets on their beds. They had chairs and tables that originally had been thrown away on the streets above and somehow transported to the city below. The inhabitants of Mole City used the bathroom upstairs at Grand Central Station and took their showers at public baths. Some of the persons had lived in Mole City for several years. These persons were obviously not on the census roles. However, some of them actually worked on Wall Street and left each weekday morning wearing appropriate clothing and carrying a briefcase. I was happy to live there despite the fact that we had literally hundreds of neighbors living right beside us that we had to feed to keep them away from us. Some of the rats were easily recognizable and had been given names. I stayed there for over a year and managed to stay clean from crack for the entire period. But I found myself becoming increasingly depressed, so I placed another ad in The New York Times seeking a superintendent’s job again. I always had a telephone number placed in the ad to receive my calls that was managed from a mail and answering service. One day I found a message from a woman by the name of Monica Oboleneski. I telephoned her back and learned that she was actually looking for a superintendent’s job herself in a small building. We became instant friends over the telephone and she asked me to meet her at the corner of Central Park South and 59th Street, just to talk. When we met Monica told me that she lived at the Carnegie Apartments at 57th Street and Sixth Avenue, where she was sharing an apartment with a famous fashion designer who was in her 90’s. Monica said that the fashion designer, whom she never named, was charging her little or nothing for rent. She said that she live in fear that when the lady passed away that she could not possibly afford the rent on the apartment. Monica told me that she had been a scientist in Russia and had defected to the U.S. We met at the same spot for three or four weeks to talk. I would meet her because she would bring me lunch every day and I loved her company. One day Monica brought with her a package that contained a small vial of some solution and a chemical compound that bore an inscription in the Russian language that only a scientist could read. She said that the U.S. and the United Kingdom had created the AIDS virus in a hidden and small laboratory in Africa. She maintained that the virus was created to rid the world of certain undesirables, such as homosexuals and certain ethnic groups and that those who created it believed that only people who practiced unsafe sex and especially anal intercourse would contract and activate the virus. She said, however, that the virus creators had forgotten about people who used IV drugs and that it could be transmitted that way as well. Monica said that Russian spies had discovered the plan to eradicate certain groups, which was deemed a new form of chemical warfare. She further disclosed that the Russians had stolen the formula for the AIDS virus and had developed an antidote to the virus that would kill it and rid the virus from the victim’s body. Monica made it quite clear to me that her life was in danger from the Russians, the U.S., the United Kingdom and the pharmaceutical companies. At the same time Monica disclosed that she wanted to sell the AIDS antidote to the highest bidder. She asked me to help her to do this as she knew no one else that she could trust. I then made a horrible mistake that may have cost Monica her life and cheated the world of the cure of AIDS. I told Carl Shoffler. At the time I thought that he would help Monica. To my knowledge to this day I don’t know if Carl ever contacted Monica or attempted to help her in any way. I also don’t know what happened to Monica because she suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth. One day much later I contacted the fashion designer by going to her apartment building. I spoke to her on the house phone from the lobby and she told me that Monica had been missing from over a year. She said that Monica had left expensive clothing, furs and jewelry in her room and after months had passed she arranged for these to be donated to the Good Will Industries. She told me that Monica had even left several hundred dollars on her dresser and that this sum had been donated as well. I asked her if she had found a package containing a vial and a chemical compound and she replied in the negative. I don’t know to this day what happened to Monica Oboleneski. Did Carl do something that caused her disappearance? After all I did receive two thousand dollars from Carl via Western Union for supplying him with the information. Was some government involved or some pharmaceutical company? After all Monica was holding out to get the highest bid, even while tens of thousands of people around the globe were contracting AIDS and dying from the virus. If I could have looked into the future and could have seen my destiny and how I was being exploited and used as a pawn to hurt others, I would have gladly sacrificed my life for this sake. [End of excerpt from Watergate Exposed] --------------------------------- The following is excerpted from an article titled, “The Treatment: Why is it so difficult to develop drugs for cancer?” by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker magazine of May 17, 2010 (page 72]: An early financial backer of [a cell biologist at Harvard Medical School named Lan Bo] Chen was Michael Milken, the junk- bond king of the nineteen-eighties who, after being treated for prostate cancer, became a major cancer philanthropist. “I told Milken my story,” Chen said, “and very quickly he said, ‘I am going to give you four million dollars. Do whatever you want.’ Right away, Milken thought of Russia. Someone had told him that the Russians had, for a long time, thousands of chemists in one city making compounds, and none of those compounds had been disclosed.” Chen’s first purchase was a batch of twenty-two thousand chemicals, gathered from all over Russia and the Ukraine. They cost about ten dollars each, and came in tiny glass vials. [End of excerpt from The New Yorker]

Trouble in Europe, China May 5, 2010 http://michael-hudson.com/2010/05/trouble-in-europe-china/ Based on an interview with Eric Janszen of iTulip April 10, 2010 On April 10, 2010 I caught up with Michael Hudson and he was in rare form. Readers know that my personal view is that much of the right wing of the political spectrum doesn’t know what the problem is and all of the left wing, while nailing the problem, doesn’t know how to solve it. No one is too left wing or too right wing to get an interview here. Interviewer (EJ): Thank you for your time this morning. Hudson (MH): Glad to be here. EJ: It’s been a while since I’ve interviewed you so let’s have a wide-ranging discussion today. I want to include your Thursday Financial Times article on the fate of the ex-Soviet debtor nations, the Bank of International Settlement report I sent you on New Europe and other industrialized debtors, and China, and see where it goes. Let’s start with the BIS report. MH: I skimmed through it quickly, and it’s the same class war junk economics that the Peterson Institute for International Economics (the lobbyist for international banks) and other neoliberal (that is, anti-labor and pro-financial) lobbying organizations have mounted against public obligations to any parties but the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector. The aim is to prepare the ground for President Obama’s recently appointed “bipartisan” commission to scale back Social Security and Medicare. The argument is that these two programs need to be pre-funded, with savings levied regressively in advance, to promote a balanced federal budget. The effect would be to prevent fiscal policy from providing the growth in money and credit that economies need. This would all be provided by private-sector banks – at interest. So recent focus on government “over-spending” (meaning spending on infrastructure and social betterment, as opposed to subsidies and bailouts for the financial sector and its real estate market) is a cover story intended to prepare populations for austerity plans IMF-style. If you look at the origins of the BIS, you see an irony. It was created as part of the Young Plan back in 1929 to deal in a less financially destructive way with German reparations. As a result of the arguments put forth mainly by Keynes (which I discuss in my history of international trade and financial theories, Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (new ed. 2009), the BIS aim was to see how much foreign-currency reparations debt Germany could pay without destabilizing its economy. The BIS was supposed to take a structural view of Germany’s capacity to pay, and scale back its foreign debt service to this capacity. Otherwise, demands for foreign debt would turn into asset stripping. This broader context of the “ability to pay” is what is needed today from Greece to the Baltics and Iceland. These countries are being directed to pay the financial sector first – international bankers, creditor-nation governments, the IMF and World Bank, and financial institutions – before they spend money on sustaining their own employment and economic growth. So instead of government spending being counter-cyclical as these countries are pushed into debt deflation, they are “pro-cyclical,” that is, squeezing a government budget surplus to pay creditors rather than mounting the public infrastructure and related spending programs that we are seeing in the United States and other countries that put their own populations first. The twist is that the BIS, Peterson Institute and other creditor-oriented organizations are now telling the United States as well to put creditors first, not the “real” economy. Governments are to run a “balanced budget” (which, former President Clinton told his appreciative Peterson Institute audience, his home state of Arkansas is required to do by constitutional requirement, as are many other U.S. states and cities). They then put forth a junk-economics calculation of Social Security and Medicare claiming that the money will not be there in a few decades under current arrangements. But these current arrangements insist that money to pay Social Security and Medicare are saved up in advance. This was the trick gimmicked by the Greenspan Commission in 1982-83.This policy demand is hypocritical, unless they say that military wars and bailouts to the financial sector also have to be pre-funded as user fees, levied on the military-industrial complex and Wall Street respectively. According to their reasoning, America will go bankrupt unless it levies a $30 trillion tax on wealth. Wages have to be cut by 90 percent and assets in the public domain need to be sold off, because on their logic, in order to pay for a $3 trillion war you need to have a $60 trillion savings already pre-saved at 5% interest. Let’s extend their logic to the $13 trillion bailout last year. America would need to have saved up $100 trillion or $200 trillion in order to yield that much in interest to make this payment. And inasmuch as the bailout was a vain attempt to keep the exponential growth of debt intact, there will need to be more and more bailouts. But all they’re talking about is the rise in medical insurance to the health monopoly. They’re applying an anti-labor economic logic to Social Security and Medicare, and pro-financial logic to the military and financial bailouts. In both cases it’s labor and industry that must pay. EJ: Whom does the BIS represent, in your opinion? MH: They’ve become board of directors for the international financial class, standing up for the banks against labor and now also against the “real” industrial economy. So anything they say should be looked at as class warfare and paid propaganda. If adopted, their recommendations would destroy industry and impose a neo-feudal economy run by creditors. They have no understanding of what credit is, for example. People who do understand the basic monetary principles of credit are considered unfit to work at the BIS. Junk economics likes team players. EJ: So what is your theory about the role of Simon Johnson who was Chief Economist for the IMF, now a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a member of the CBO’s Panel of Economic Advisers? He was the first of rank to note that our political system as run by a financial oligarchy. MH: He’s trying to promote monetarism with a friendly face. A lot of the things he writes are correct so he’s sort of the good cop setting things up for the bad cop. But he’s a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute, which carefully excludes economists whose idea do not make lobbying points for high finance. [To continue reading the interview with Michael Hudson, click on the link below] http://michael-hudson.com/2010/05/trouble-in-europe-china/

[Note: the statement and link below are from www.garynorth.com for May 12, 2010] This is from the Joint Operating Environment, 2010. It is an assessment of the US Joint Forces Command. http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive.../JOE_2010_o.pdf It devotes several pages to the supply of oil. For comparison, the latest Wikipedia estimate of world oil consumption is 85 million barrels per day (mbd).

US troops executing prisoners in Afghanistan, journalist says By David Edwards Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 www.rawstory.com http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0512/hersh-bat...continue-obama/ The journalist who helped break the story that detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were being tortured by their US jailers told an audience at a journalism conference last month that American soldiers are now executing prisoners in Afghanistan. New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh also revealed that the Bush Administration had developed advanced plans for a military strike on Iran. At the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva, Hersh criticized President Barack Obama, and alleged that US forces are engaged in "battlefield executions." "I'll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan," Hersh said. "They're being executed on the battlefield. It's unbelievable stuff going on there that doesn't necessarily get reported. Things don't change.: "What they've done in the field now is, they tell the troops, you have to make a determination within a day or two or so whether or not the prisoners you have, the detainees, are Taliban," Hersh added. "You must extract whatever tactical intelligence you can get, as opposed to strategic, long-range intelligence, immediately. And if you cannot conclude they're Taliban, you must turn them free. "What it means is, and I've been told this anecdotally by five or six different people, battlefield executions are taking place," he continued. "Well, if they can't prove they're Taliban, bam. If we don't do it ourselves, we turn them over to the nearby Afghan troops and by the time we walk three feet the bullets are flying. And that's going on now." The video of Hersh was uploaded to Michael Moore's YouTube account Tuesday. Hersh has a long history as an investigative journalist and worked for many years at The New York Times. In 1969, he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. This video is from YouTube, broadcast May 11, 2010.

A podcast with James W. Douglass www.lewrockwell.com May 13, 2010 http://www.lewrockwell.com/lewrockwell-sho...s-jfk-murdered/ Jim, the author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, demonstrates that John F. Kennedy was assassinated not by the usual "lone nut," himself killed by another lone nut, but because he turned towards peace. The assassination was a coup by the dark military-imperial-merchants of death cabal that has ruled America since. A follower of Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, Jim Douglass is a retired religion professor from the University of Hawaii.

DOUGLAS CADDY ATTORNEY AT LAW 7941 Katy Freeway Suite 296 Houston, Texas 77024 713-867-3476 email: douglascaddy@justice.com April 26, 2010 President Barack Obama The White House Washington, D.C. 20600 Dear President Obama: New evidence has emerged recently that the Watergate burglars were set-up by Washington, D.C. Police Detective Carl Shoffler. Robert Merritt, a Confidential Informant for the police who reported directly to Shoffler, informed him of the planned break-in on June 2, 1972, two weeks in advance of the arrests. Shoffler, a military intelligence agent assigned to the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, then used wiretap triangulation that he had been taught by the National Security Agency to set-up the burglars, whom he arrested on June 17, 1972. The unique relationship between Merritt and Shoffler was first explored by Jim Hougan in his 1984 best-seller book, Secret Agenda, on pages 320-322. The new evidence about Shoffler’s prior knowledge of the break-in is revealed in great detail in the new book, Watergate Exposed: A Confidential Informant Tells How the Burglars Were Set-up and Reveals other Government Dirty Secrets, by Robert Merritt as told to Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven. Attached is a copy of my March 20, 2010, letter to Senator Christopher Bond requesting that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigate the role of Intelligence Agencies in the origins of Watergate, as well as their domestic spying and civil liberties abuses then and today. By means of this letter I am requesting that you communicate to Senator Bond and the Senate Intelligence Committee of your desire that the committee fully investigate the matter of the Intelligence Agencies’ prior knowledge of the break-in in its entirety and let the chips fall where they may. Such a unifying gesture on your part would have the dramatic effect of building bridges to rank-and-file Republicans and other concerned citizens, especially if this were coupled with an invitation to President Nixon’s two daughters to visit the White House in the near future. Sincerely yours, Douglas Caddy [Forum Note: My March 20, 2010 letter to Senator Bond was posted previously in the Watergate topic of the Education Forum]