Douglas Caddy

I am not certain if Brent Bozell ever ghost wrote for Joe McCarthy. He and Buckley worked closely together and Buckley authored, "McCarthy and his Enemies." Bozell was close to Senator Goldwater and had a hand in the writing of Goldwater's book "Consience of a Conservative," which launched the Senator into the political stratosphere. Goldwater's book, National Review, and Young Americans for Freedom together formed the bedrock upon which the conservative movement was erected. Bozell's son, Brent II, for years has headed a conservative organization that monitors the mass media.

Were you ever given any information that suggested he had or was still working for the CIA? Do you remember how he reacted to the news that JFK had been assassinated? No, I had no information that William F. Buckley was involved with the CIA during the period that Young Americans for Freedom was founded and launched in the early 1960's. To be best of my recollection, I first learned that Buckley had worked for the CIA after being so informed by Howard Hunt soon after I met him following my being assigned in 1969 by General Foods Corporation in New York to work out of the Mullen Company offices in Washington, D.C. I was quite surprised to learn of Buckley’s past association with the CIA. While Hunt was a close friend of Buckley, he was quite upset with Brent Bozell, a brother-in-law of Buckley. One of Hunt’s sons was seriously injured in an automobile accident when Bozell foolishly allowed a Mexican gardener whom he employed to drive Hunt’s young son home after the latter had spent the weekend as a guest with the Bozell family. Hunt told me the gardener didn’t even have a driver’s license. I have often wondered if the fact that both Hunt and James McCord were burdened with heavy medical bills for their children did not lead them to take the gamble of engaging in the Watergate break-in as a mean of securing additional income to pay for the medical expenses. Hunt told me that he and his wife incurred heavy medical bills as a result of the vehicle accident that injured their son. The McCords had an autistic child to whom they were devoted but also burdened them with medical bills. When JFK was assassinated in 1963, I was employed in the New York City office of Governor Nelson Rockefeller located at 22 West 55th Street, on the staff of Lt.-Gov. Malcolm Wilson, who was as conservative and Rockefeller was liberal. I juggled my work load with also attending New York University Law School. As such, I was “out of the loop” as to Buckley’s activities in the years following 1962.

I thought you worked with him in setting up the Young Americans for Freedom in 1960? You posed your original question as follows: "Were you still working for William Buckley during this period?' Now you ask, "I thought you worked with him in setting up the Young Americans for Freedom in 1960?" There is a vast difference between working for someone and working with someone. I did work with William Buckley in setting up Young Americans for Freedom in 1960. I was never paid any compensation for serving as its first national director. But I never worked for William Buckley. I work with you in attempting to make the Forum a credible research tool to expose the the hidden history behind major developments in the world since the beginning of World War II. However, I do not work for you in this joint endeavor. My only desire is that the Forum becomes recognized and utilized for the vast treasure trove of information that it is. I once took a course in Hollywood on how to write a movie script. In my opinion there is enough information stored in the Forum's postings by its members for a thousand award-winning movie scripts to be written.

James: When General Foods Corporation moved me from its corporate headquarters in White Plains, New York in 1969 to work for a period of a year or so in the Mullen Company offices in Washington, I found Robert Mullen to be a man of about 62 years of age. About a year after my transfer Robert Mullen approached Howard Hunt and myself regarding taking over ownership of his company as he wanted to retire. So I would hazard to guess that if he were about 62 in 1969, he was about 56 in 1963. I remember reading the obituary of Robert Mullen when he passed on while residing in a retirement home in Maryland about 10 years ago, or so my memory leads me. If that obituary could be located you could probably pinpoint his exact age in 1963. You seem to have incredible access to even the most obscure news clippings going back many years (how you do so is a mystery). So maybe you can locate his printed obituary. Doug

I thought you worked with him in setting up the Young Americans for Freedom in 1960? You posed your original question as follows: "Were you still working for William Buckley during this period?' Now you ask, "I thought you worked with him in setting up the Young Americans for Freedom in 1960?" There is a vast difference between working for someone and working with someone. I did work with William Buckley in setting up Young Americans for Freedom in 1960. I was never paid any compensation for serving as its first national director. But I never worked for William Buckley. I work with you in attempting to make the Forum a credible research tool to expose the the hidden history behind major developments in the world since the beginning of World War II. However, I do not work for you in this joint endeavor. My only desire is that the Forum becomes recognized and utilized for the vast treasure trove of information that it is. I once took a course in Hollywood on how to write a movie script. In my opinion there is enough information stored in the Forum's postings by its members for a thousand award-winning movie scripts to be written.

SPIEGEL ONLINE - March 22, 2007, 06:21 PM http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiege...,473166,00.html COLLAPSING COLONIES Are GM Crops Killing Bees? By Gunther Latsch A mysterious decimation of bee populations has German beekeepers worried, while a similar phenomenon in the United States is gradually assuming catastrophic proportions. The consequences for agriculture and the economy could be enormous. Is the mysterous decimation of bee populations in the US and Germany a result of GM crops? Walter Haefeker is a man who is used to painting grim scenarios. He sits on the board of directors of the German Beekeepers Association (DBIB) and is vice president of the European Professional Beekeepers Association. And because griping is part of a lobbyist's trade, it is practically his professional duty to warn that "the very existence of beekeeping is at stake." The problem, says Haefeker, has a number of causes, one being the varroa mite, introduced from Asia, and another is the widespread practice in agriculture of spraying wildflowers with herbicides and practicing monoculture. Another possible cause, according to Haefeker, is the controversial and growing use of genetic engineering in agriculture. As far back as 2005, Haefeker ended an article he contributed to the journal Der Kritischer Agrarbericht (Critical Agricultural Report) with an Albert Einstein quote: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." Mysterious events in recent months have suddenly made Einstein's apocalyptic vision seem all the more topical. For unknown reasons, bee populations throughout Germany are disappearing -- something that is so far only harming beekeepers. But the situation is different in the United States, where bees are dying in such dramatic numbers that the economic consequences could soon be dire. No one knows what is causing the bees to perish, but some experts believe that the large-scale use of genetically modified plants in the US could be a factor. Felix Kriechbaum, an official with a regional beekeepers' association in Bavaria, recently reported a decline of almost 12 percent in local bee populations. When "bee populations disappear without a trace," says Kriechbaum, it is difficult to investigate the causes, because "most bees don't die in the beehive." There are many diseases that can cause bees to lose their sense of orientation so they can no longer find their way back to their hives. Manfred Hederer, the president of the German Beekeepers Association, almost simultaneously reported a 25 percent drop in bee populations throughout Germany. In isolated cases, says Hederer, declines of up to 80 percent have been reported. He speculates that "a particular toxin, some agent with which we are not familiar," is killing the bees. Politicians, until now, have shown little concern for such warnings or the woes of beekeepers. Although apiarists have been given a chance to make their case -- for example in the run-up to the German cabinet's approval of a genetic engineering policy document by Minister of Agriculture Horst Seehofer in February -- their complaints are still largely ignored. Even when beekeepers actually go to court, as they recently did in a joint effort with the German chapter of the organic farming organization Demeter International and other groups to oppose the use of genetically modified corn plants, they can only dream of the sort of media attention environmental organizations like Greenpeace attract with their protests at test sites. But that could soon change. Since last November, the US has seen a decline in bee populations so dramatic that it eclipses all previous incidences of mass mortality. Beekeepers on the east coast of the United States complain that they have lost more than 70 percent of their stock since late last year, while the west coast has seen a decline of up to 60 percent. In an article in its business section in late February, the New York Times calculated the damage US agriculture would suffer if bees died out. Experts at Cornell University in upstate New York have estimated the value bees generate -- by pollinating fruit and vegetable plants, almond trees and animal feed like clover -- at more than $14 billion. Scientists call the mysterious phenomenon "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD), and it is fast turning into a national catastrophe of sorts. A number of universities and government agencies have formed a "CCD Working Group" to search for the causes of the calamity, but have so far come up empty-handed. But, like Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an apiarist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, they are already referring to the problem as a potential "AIDS for the bee industry." One thing is certain: Millions of bees have simply vanished. In most cases, all that's left in the hives are the doomed offspring. But dead bees are nowhere to be found -- neither in nor anywhere close to the hives. Diana Cox-Foster, a member of the CCD Working Group, told The Independent that researchers were "extremely alarmed," adding that the crisis "has the potential to devastate the US beekeeping industry." It is particularly worrisome, she said, that the bees' death is accompanied by a set of symptoms "which does not seem to match anything in the literature." In many cases, scientists have found evidence of almost all known bee viruses in the few surviving bees found in the hives after most have disappeared. Some had five or six infections at the same time and were infested with fungi -- a sign, experts say, that the insects' immune system may have collapsed. The scientists are also surprised that bees and other insects usually leave the abandoned hives untouched. Nearby bee populations or parasites would normally raid the honey and pollen stores of colonies that have died for other reasons, such as excessive winter cold. "This suggests that there is something toxic in the colony itself which is repelling them," says Cox-Foster. Walter Haefeker, the German beekeeping official, speculates that "besides a number of other factors," the fact that genetically modified, insect-resistant plants are now used in 40 percent of cornfields in the United States could be playing a role. The figure is much lower in Germany -- only 0.06 percent -- and most of that occurs in the eastern states of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Brandenburg. Haefeker recently sent a researcher at the CCD Working Group some data from a bee study that he has long felt shows a possible connection between genetic engineering and diseases in bees. The study in question is a small research project conducted at the University of Jena from 2001 to 2004. The researchers examined the effects of pollen from a genetically modified maize variant called "Bt corn" on bees. A gene from a soil bacterium had been inserted into the corn that enabled the plant to produce an agent that is toxic to insect pests. The study concluded that there was no evidence of a "toxic effect of Bt corn on healthy honeybee populations." But when, by sheer chance, the bees used in the experiments were infested with a parasite, something eerie happened. According to the Jena study, a "significantly stronger decline in the number of bees" occurred among the insects that had been fed a highly concentrated Bt poison feed. According to Hans-Hinrich Kaatz, a professor at the University of Halle in eastern Germany and the director of the study, the bacterial toxin in the genetically modified corn may have "altered the surface of the bee's intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry -- or perhaps it was the other way around. We don't know." Of course, the concentration of the toxin was ten times higher in the experiments than in normal Bt corn pollen. In addition, the bee feed was administered over a relatively lengthy six-week period. Kaatz would have preferred to continue studying the phenomenon but lacked the necessary funding. "Those who have the money are not interested in this sort of research," says the professor, "and those who are interested don't have the money." Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

I am sorry I missed your earlier comments. At least this thread has given you the opportunity to put the record straight. Whether you were or were not officially employed by the Mullen Company is fairly irrelevant. The important point is whether you knew it was a CIA front organization. Were you involved in running the Free Cuba Committee. Were you still working for William Buckley during this period? Forum reply (1) No, I did not know definitively that the Mullen Company was a CIA front until Senator Howard Baker disclosed this fact in his memographed special report released at the same time that the Senate Watergate Committee issued its final report. However, I admit that I was puzzled by some things that I observed in the Mullen office, and by Robert Mullen's phone call to me from Chile when he informed that he was there to orchestrate the media in a project to overthrow President Allende. So when I was asked a question about the CIA and the Mullen Company when I was before the Watergate grand jury in July 1972, I responded that I had "intimations" that something was not quite kosher about the whole Mullen setup. The Washington Post published this remark by me a few days later. (2) I have never heard of the Free Cuba Committee until reading about it recently in the Forum. I certainly never heard it discussed in the Mullen office, where I was assigned to work by General Food Corporation for approximately 18 months. (3) The underlying premise of your final question is false. I never worked for William Buckley. I did have an article published in National Review in 1959 when I was in the junior class at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. But I was never employed by National Review or receive employment compensation from it or from William F. Buckley.

I am sorry I missed your earlier comments. At least this thread has given you the opportunity to put the record straight. Whether you were or were not officially employed by the Mullen Company is fairly irrelevant. The important point is whether you knew it was a CIA front organization. Were you involved in running the Free Cuba Committee. Were you still working for William Buckley during this period? (1) No, I did not know definitively that the Mullen Company was a CIA front until Senator Howard Baker disclosed this fact in his memographed special report released at the same time that the Senate Watergate Committee issued its final report. However, I admit that I was puzzled by some things that I observed in the Mullen office, and by Robert Mullen's phone call to me from Chile when he informed that he was there to orchestrate the media in a project to overthrow President Allende. So when I was asked a question about the CIA and the Mullen Company when I was before the Watergate grand jury in July 1972, I responded that I had "intimations" that something was not quite kosher about the whole Mullen setup. The Washington Post published this remark by me a few days later. (2) I have never heard of the Free Cuba Committee until reading about it recently in the Forum. I certainly never heard it discussed in the Mullen office, where I was assigned to work for 18 months by General Food Corporation. (3) The underlying premise of your final question is false. I never worked for William Buckley. I did have an article published in National Review in 1959 when I was in the junior class at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. But I was never employed by National Review or receive employment compensation from it or from William F. Buckley.

On Feb. 24, 2007, almost a month ago, I posted my comments on Hunt’s book in a new topic titled “My Overview of Howard Hunt’s new book, Highlights gleaned from reading it first half.” In my posting I noted that the book has several factual errors, one of them being Hunt’s statement (or that of his co-author) that I had been an employee of the Mullen Company. I was never an employee of the Mullen Company but instead was employed solely by General Foods Corporation, which assigned me to work out of the Mullen Company. John Simkin has seen fit to ignore this correction that I made in the Forum almost a month ago and instead has now quoted from Hunt’s book the inaccurate sentence that I was an employee of the Mullen Company. Why John Simkin has chosen to do this, without calling the attention of the Forum’s members to my posting on the matter of almost a month prior, raises doubts in my mind as to his good faith intentions. Reproduced below is the original posting that I made: My overview of Howard Hunt’s new book, Highlights gleaned from reading its first half Feb 24 2007, 10:36 PM I purchased a copy of the book, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, at Barnes&Noble yesterday and am half-way through reading its 340 pages. This brief overview is of the first half. I hope to finish reading the second half in the next day or so. Based on what I have read so far, I would say that the volume is most-worthwhile. Its contents bring new revelations about Hunt’s unusual life as well as reinforcing impressions of the man previously gained from the mass media. Members of the forum who are adamantly critical of Hunt will find that Watergate aside, he was a patriot who had an extremely fascinating career as an international spy, always intent on advancing America’s national interests. There are some errors in the book. One that jumps out on page one is the author uses the name Howard Felt instead of Mark Felt in discussing Deep Throat. Hunt died in January, so he may not have had the opportunity to proof-read the book's galleys before publication. Here are a few brief highlights gleaned from the book’s first half: (1) Hunt in his early years was awarded simultaneously both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rhodes Scholarship. He chose the former. (2) He joined the OSS under the sponsorship of Wild Bill Donovan, a family friend. (3) After the ousting of Leftist Jacob Arbenz as president of Guatemala, “thousand of files were confiscated (but) no direct link between Arbenz and the Soviets ever emerged...Most important, the fallout resulted in a lasting legacy of anti-American bias throughout Latin America, most significantly in Cuba, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela.” Furthermore, this led to “decades of iron-fisted military rule, under which one hundred thousand mostly impoverished Guatemalans died.” (4) “So there are now three CIA agents who have been named in connection with Oswald – David Phillips, Cord Meyer and Bill Harvey – all with the means, motive, opportunity and some connection to kill Kennedy.” (5) “If LBJ had anything to do with the [Kennedy assassination] operation, he would have used Bill Harvey, because he was available and corrupt.” (6) Much of what Hunt worked on for a number of years for the CIA “was exposed in revelations about Operation Mockingbird...” (7) Hunt was not an admirer of Angleton. “Some people have suggested that maybe Angleton was a double agent like Philby [who trained him], but I don’t think so.” (8) LBJ ordered the CIA, who in turn ordered Hunt, to infiltrate the Goldwater campaign to gather information that could be used by LBJ against his opponent in the 1964 presidential campaign. (9) Hunt incorrectly asserts that I was an employee of the Robert Mullen Company, handling the General Foods Corporation account. In fact, however, I was never an employee of the Mullen Company but instead of General Food Corporation, which had assigned me to work out of the Mullen Company. He writes that I “resigned [from the Mullen Company] to take up law (remember his name as it will come up later), whereupon Mullen announced that he was selling the company to Robert Bennett, son of the Republican senator from Utah.” The second half of the book, which I shall briefly review soon, is devoted to chapters concerning activities leading up to Watergate, Watergate itself, and post-Watergate events.

On Feb. 24, 2007, almost a month ago, I posted my comments on Hunt’s book in a new topic titled “My Overview of Howard Hunt’s new book, Highlights gleaned from reading it first half.” In my posting I noted that the book has several factual errors, one of them being Hunt’s statement (or that of his co-author) that I had been an employee of the Mullen Company. I was never an employee of the Mullen Company but instead was employed solely by General Foods Corporation, which assigned me to work out of the Mullen Company. John Simkin has seen fit to ignore this correction that I made in the Forum almost a month ago and instead has now quoted from Hunt’s book the inaccurate sentence that I was an employee of the Mullen Company. Why John Simkin has chosen to do this, without calling the attention of the Forum’s members to my posting on the matter of almost a month prior, raises doubts in my mind as to his good faith intentions. For the record reproduced below is the original posting that I made: My overview of Howard Hunt’s new book, Highlights gleaned from reading its first half Feb 24 2007, 10:36 PM I purchased a copy of the book, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, at Barnes&Noble yesterday and am half-way through reading its 340 pages. This brief overview is of the first half. I hope to finish reading the second half in the next day or so. Based on what I have read so far, I would say that the volume is most-worthwhile. Its contents bring new revelations about Hunt’s unusual life as well as reinforcing impressions of the man previously gained from the mass media. Members of the forum who are adamantly critical of Hunt will find that Watergate aside, he was a patriot who had an extremely fascinating career as an international spy, always intent on advancing America’s national interests. There are some errors in the book. One that jumps out on page one is the author uses the name Howard Felt instead of Mark Felt in discussing Deep Throat. Hunt died in January, so he may not have had the opportunity to proof-read the book's galleys before publication. Here are a few brief highlights gleaned from the book’s first half: (1) Hunt in his early years was awarded simultaneously both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rhodes Scholarship. He chose the former. (2) He joined the OSS under the sponsorship of Wild Bill Donovan, a family friend. (3) After the ousting of Leftist Jacob Arbenz as president of Guatemala, “thousand of files were confiscated (but) no direct link between Arbenz and the Soviets ever emerged...Most important, the fallout resulted in a lasting legacy of anti-American bias throughout Latin America, most significantly in Cuba, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela.” Furthermore, this led to “decades of iron-fisted military rule, under which one hundred thousand mostly impoverished Guatemalans died.” (4) “So there are now three CIA agents who have been named in connection with Oswald – David Phillips, Cord Meyer and Bill Harvey – all with the means, motive, opportunity and some connection to kill Kennedy.” (5) “If LBJ had anything to do with the [Kennedy assassination] operation, he would have used Bill Harvey, because he was available and corrupt.” (6) Much of what Hunt worked on for a number of years for the CIA “was exposed in revelations about Operation Mockingbird...” (7) Hunt was not an admirer of Angleton. “Some people have suggested that maybe Angleton was a double agent like Philby [who trained him], but I don’t think so.” (8) LBJ ordered the CIA, who in turn ordered Hunt, to infiltrate the Goldwater campaign to gather information that could be used by LBJ against his opponent in the 1964 presidential campaign. (9) Hunt incorrectly asserts that I was an employee of the Robert Mullen Company, handling the General Foods Corporation account. In fact, however, I was never an employee of the Mullen Company but instead of General Food Corporation, which had assigned me to work out of the Mullen Company. He writes that I “resigned [from the Mullen Company] to take up law (remember his name as it will come up later), whereupon Mullen announced that he was selling the company to Robert Bennett, son of the Republican senator from Utah.” The second half of the book, which I shall briefly review soon, is devoted to chapters concerning activities leading up to Watergate, Watergate itself, and post-Watergate events.

Watergate plotter may have a last tale Two of E. Howard Hunt's sons say he knew of rogue CIA agents' plan to kill President Kennedy in 1963. Los Angeles Times By Carol J. Williams Times Staff Writer March 20, 2007 http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...=la-home-nation EUREKA, CALIF. — Howard St. John Hunt remembers the night of the Watergate break-in as a bonding experience with his father. A sweating and disheveled E. Howard Hunt roused his 19-year-old son from a dead sleep to help him wipe fingerprints from the burglars' radios and pack the surveillance equipment into a suitcase. Then, father and son raced to a remote Maryland bridge, where they heaved the evidence into the Potomac River just before dawn on June 17, 1972. "From that point on I felt relevant in his life, that I was the one he could count on," said Howard St. John Hunt, now 52, who is called St. John. It also was a turning point for St. John's brother and two sisters. They learned that their father wasn't just a Washington advertising executive and former diplomat. He was an ex-CIA agent and veteran of the ill-fated Cuban Bay of Pigs operation who worked for the Nixon White House as part of a secret team of "plumbers" that fixed information leaks. The unmasking of Hunt, who was convicted in 1973, sent his family into a tailspin: His first wife, Dorothy, was killed in a plane crash in 1972 while carrying $10,000 in hush money from the White House to the burglars' families; son David was sent to live with his militant Cuban godfather in Miami; St. John later became a drug addict and daughters Kevan and Lisa became estranged from their father. But before his death at age 88 in January, E. Howard Hunt had reconciled with his children and left the sons one last tantalizing story, they say. The story, which he planned to detail in a memoir and could be worth big money — was that rogue CIA agents plotted to kill President Kennedy in 1963, and that they approached Hunt to join the plot but he declined. Unfortunately, when the old spy's memoir appeared this month, there was something missing. * Before Watergate Before the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office complex, the Hunt family of Potomac, Md., was, to outward appearances, fairly typical for a beltway power player. Their father was in advertising; the mother worked at the Spanish embassy; and the four children, ages 8 to 23, attended private schools. Watergate was a bomb that detonated under the family. "Our life as we knew it came to an explosive end," recalls daughter Kevan Hunt Spence, now 54, of Pioneer, 50 miles east of Sacramento. "Our home was lost. Our financial security was lost. Our mother was dead. Our father was in prison.'' Kevan, who was 20 at the time, and her sister Lisa, then 23, distanced themselves from a father they blamed for their mother's death and took refuge with friends, away from the besieged family home. Kevan played her own role in the Watergate fallout. Instead of burning records of White House payoffs as her father had asked, she hid them in her Smith College dorm room for a nearly a year, when her father's lawyer needed them to prove White House complicity to get her father a reduced sentence. David, the youngest of Hunt's children with Dorothy and 8 at the time of the break-in, was effectively orphaned when Hunt went to prison in 1973. At his father's request, lifelong friend William F. Buckley Jr. spirited David from the house to get him away from Lisa and St. John, who, Hunt notes in a posthumous memoir, were furious with their father. David left his privileged life to spend three years at the crowded Miami home of his Cuban exile godfather. A Bay of Pigs veteran and anti-communist militant, Manuel Artime would take David on gun-running missions to Central America, letting the boy fire pistols with the bodyguards of right-wing dictators the exile visited. Hunt's daughters headed west to create new lives. Kevan came to California, where she has practiced law for 25 years. Lisa became a fundamentalist Christian and runs an insurance firm in Las Vegas. St. John was estranged from his father from the late 1970s to the start of this decade. He was convicted twice on felony drug charges in the Bay Area but served no prison time. When he became homeless, he renounced his drug habit, renewed ties with his father and siblings and moved to this Pacific Coast timber and fishing town. He now works assisting elderly patients in their homes and is a student at College of the Redwoods. David, now 43, also abused drugs after his mother's death and the years he spent in the violent milieu of Cuban exile politics. He now sells Jacuzzis at a West L.A. spa shop. The sisters remain estranged from the brothers but all were on good terms with Hunt and his widow Laura and their children, Austin and Hollis, when the veteran CIA operative and spy novelist died. Hunt had been preparing for publication of "American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond," released this month. St. John says it was he who suggested the idea of a memoir when he convinced his father that it was time to reveal anything he knew about the Kennedy assassination. It had always been suspected that Hunt shared his Cuban exile friends' hatred of Kennedy, who refused to provide air cover to rescue the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion that Hunt helped organize. "He told me in no uncertain terms about a plot originating in Miami, to take place in Miami," said St. John. He said his father identified key players and speculated that then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was responsible for moving the venue to Dallas, where the Texan could control the security scene. But the memoir's published passages about the assassination have an equivocal tone. Hunt provides only a hypothetical scenario of how events in Dallas might have unfolded, with Johnson atop a pyramid of rogue CIA plotters. The brothers insist their father related to them a detailed plot to assassinate Kennedy. Hunt told them he was approached by the conspirators to join them but declined, they say. That information was cut from the memoir, the brothers say, because Hunt's attorney warned he could face perjury charges if he recanted sworn testimony. Hunt also had assured Laura before they married in 1977 that he had nothing to do with the assassination. St. John said he respected his father's wishes while he was alive but felt no obligation now. He is writing a script about his father, and David is shopping for a publisher for their father's account of CIA involvement in the Kennedy shooting. Despite the brothers' efforts, their father's role will probably never be known. The materials they offer to substantiate their story, examined by the Los Angeles Times, are inconclusive. Hunt answers questions on a videotape using speculative phrases, observing that various named figures were "possibly" involved. A chart Hunt sketched during one conversation with St. John shows the same rogue CIA operation he describes in the memoir. None of the accounts provides evidence to convincingly validate that their father disclosed anything revelatory. Hunt's widow and her two children, 27-year-old Austin and 23-year-old Hollis, dismiss the brothers' story, saying it is the result of coaching an old man whose lucidity waxed and waned in his final months. Kevan bitterly accuses her brothers of "elder abuse," saying they pressured their father for dramatic scenarios for their own financial gain. Hunt's longtime lawyer, Bill Snyder, says: "Howard was just speculating. He had no hard evidence." St. John, who sports a mustache and longish graying coif combed back from a receding hairline, has a more personal reason to believe in his father's disclosures. He said he was instructed by Hunt in 1974 to back up an alibi for his whereabouts on the day Kennedy died, 11 years earlier. "I did a lot of lying for my father in those days," St. John said. The brothers, who both possess Hunt's piercing pale-blue eyes, concede they would like to profit from their father's story but insist he meant them to. "My father died utterly unapologetic about anything he did," David said. "People do that kind of thing all the time," St. John said of the prospect of making money from his father's deeds. Nor does he think the story will reflect badly on their father. "I don't think it was terrible that he was approached [with the assassination plot] and turned them down." That Hunt, a skilled obfuscator, might have left contradictory accounts of the Kennedy plot to protect friends and preserve the mystery is not lost on his sons. "That's the way spies are," David says with a wry smile, remembering a father he never really knew. "They lead double lives and maintain cover." carol.williams@latimes.com

Watergate plotter may have a last tale Two of E. Howard Hunt's sons say he knew of rogue CIA agents' plan to kill President Kennedy in 1963. Los Angeles Times By Carol J. Williams Times Staff Writer March 20, 2007 http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...=la-home-nation EUREKA, CALIF. — Howard St. John Hunt remembers the night of the Watergate break-in as a bonding experience with his father. A sweating and disheveled E. Howard Hunt roused his 19-year-old son from a dead sleep to help him wipe fingerprints from the burglars' radios and pack the surveillance equipment into a suitcase. Then, father and son raced to a remote Maryland bridge, where they heaved the evidence into the Potomac River just before dawn on June 17, 1972. "From that point on I felt relevant in his life, that I was the one he could count on," said Howard St. John Hunt, now 52, who is called St. John. It also was a turning point for St. John's brother and two sisters. They learned that their father wasn't just a Washington advertising executive and former diplomat. He was an ex-CIA agent and veteran of the ill-fated Cuban Bay of Pigs operation who worked for the Nixon White House as part of a secret team of "plumbers" that fixed information leaks. The unmasking of Hunt, who was convicted in 1973, sent his family into a tailspin: His first wife, Dorothy, was killed in a plane crash in 1972 while carrying $10,000 in hush money from the White House to the burglars' families; son David was sent to live with his militant Cuban godfather in Miami; St. John later became a drug addict and daughters Kevan and Lisa became estranged from their father. But before his death at age 88 in January, E. Howard Hunt had reconciled with his children and left the sons one last tantalizing story, they say. The story, which he planned to detail in a memoir and could be worth big money — was that rogue CIA agents plotted to kill President Kennedy in 1963, and that they approached Hunt to join the plot but he declined. Unfortunately, when the old spy's memoir appeared this month, there was something missing. * Before Watergate Before the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office complex, the Hunt family of Potomac, Md., was, to outward appearances, fairly typical for a beltway power player. Their father was in advertising; the mother worked at the Spanish embassy; and the four children, ages 8 to 23, attended private schools. Watergate was a bomb that detonated under the family. "Our life as we knew it came to an explosive end," recalls daughter Kevan Hunt Spence, now 54, of Pioneer, 50 miles east of Sacramento. "Our home was lost. Our financial security was lost. Our mother was dead. Our father was in prison.'' Kevan, who was 20 at the time, and her sister Lisa, then 23, distanced themselves from a father they blamed for their mother's death and took refuge with friends, away from the besieged family home. Kevan played her own role in the Watergate fallout. Instead of burning records of White House payoffs as her father had asked, she hid them in her Smith College dorm room for a nearly a year, when her father's lawyer needed them to prove White House complicity to get her father a reduced sentence. David, the youngest of Hunt's children with Dorothy and 8 at the time of the break-in, was effectively orphaned when Hunt went to prison in 1973. At his father's request, lifelong friend William F. Buckley Jr. spirited David from the house to get him away from Lisa and St. John, who, Hunt notes in a posthumous memoir, were furious with their father. David left his privileged life to spend three years at the crowded Miami home of his Cuban exile godfather. A Bay of Pigs veteran and anti-communist militant, Manuel Artime would take David on gun-running missions to Central America, letting the boy fire pistols with the bodyguards of right-wing dictators the exile visited. Hunt's daughters headed west to create new lives. Kevan came to California, where she has practiced law for 25 years. Lisa became a fundamentalist Christian and runs an insurance firm in Las Vegas. St. John was estranged from his father from the late 1970s to the start of this decade. He was convicted twice on felony drug charges in the Bay Area but served no prison time. When he became homeless, he renounced his drug habit, renewed ties with his father and siblings and moved to this Pacific Coast timber and fishing town. He now works assisting elderly patients in their homes and is a student at College of the Redwoods. David, now 43, also abused drugs after his mother's death and the years he spent in the violent milieu of Cuban exile politics. He now sells Jacuzzis at a West L.A. spa shop. The sisters remain estranged from the brothers but all were on good terms with Hunt and his widow Laura and their children, Austin and Hollis, when the veteran CIA operative and spy novelist died. Hunt had been preparing for publication of "American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond," released this month. St. John says it was he who suggested the idea of a memoir when he convinced his father that it was time to reveal anything he knew about the Kennedy assassination. It had always been suspected that Hunt shared his Cuban exile friends' hatred of Kennedy, who refused to provide air cover to rescue the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion that Hunt helped organize. "He told me in no uncertain terms about a plot originating in Miami, to take place in Miami," said St. John. He said his father identified key players and speculated that then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was responsible for moving the venue to Dallas, where the Texan could control the security scene. But the memoir's published passages about the assassination have an equivocal tone. Hunt provides only a hypothetical scenario of how events in Dallas might have unfolded, with Johnson atop a pyramid of rogue CIA plotters. The brothers insist their father related to them a detailed plot to assassinate Kennedy. Hunt told them he was approached by the conspirators to join them but declined, they say. That information was cut from the memoir, the brothers say, because Hunt's attorney warned he could face perjury charges if he recanted sworn testimony. Hunt also had assured Laura before they married in 1977 that he had nothing to do with the assassination. St. John said he respected his father's wishes while he was alive but felt no obligation now. He is writing a script about his father, and David is shopping for a publisher for their father's account of CIA involvement in the Kennedy shooting. Despite the brothers' efforts, their father's role will probably never be known. The materials they offer to substantiate their story, examined by the Los Angeles Times, are inconclusive. Hunt answers questions on a videotape using speculative phrases, observing that various named figures were "possibly" involved. A chart Hunt sketched during one conversation with St. John shows the same rogue CIA operation he describes in the memoir. None of the accounts provides evidence to convincingly validate that their father disclosed anything revelatory. Hunt's widow and her two children, 27-year-old Austin and 23-year-old Hollis, dismiss the brothers' story, saying it is the result of coaching an old man whose lucidity waxed and waned in his final months. Kevan bitterly accuses her brothers of "elder abuse," saying they pressured their father for dramatic scenarios for their own financial gain. Hunt's longtime lawyer, Bill Snyder, says: "Howard was just speculating. He had no hard evidence." St. John, who sports a mustache and longish graying coif combed back from a receding hairline, has a more personal reason to believe in his father's disclosures. He said he was instructed by Hunt in 1974 to back up an alibi for his whereabouts on the day Kennedy died, 11 years earlier. "I did a lot of lying for my father in those days," St. John said. The brothers, who both possess Hunt's piercing pale-blue eyes, concede they would like to profit from their father's story but insist he meant them to. "My father died utterly unapologetic about anything he did," David said. "People do that kind of thing all the time," St. John said of the prospect of making money from his father's deeds. Nor does he think the story will reflect badly on their father. "I don't think it was terrible that he was approached [with the assassination plot] and turned them down." That Hunt, a skilled obfuscator, might have left contradictory accounts of the Kennedy plot to protect friends and preserve the mystery is not lost on his sons. "That's the way spies are," David says with a wry smile, remembering a father he never really knew. "They lead double lives and maintain cover." carol.williams@latimes.com

The Sunday Times (U.K.) March 18, 2007 Iran to hit back at US ‘kidnaps’ Uzi Mahnaimi, Tel Aviv IRAN is threatening to retaliate in Europe for what it claims is a daring undercover operation by western intelligence services to kidnap senior officers in its Revolutionary Guard. According to Iranian sources, several officers have been abducted in the past three months and the United States has drawn up a list of other targets to be seized with the aim of destabilising Tehran’s military command. In an article in Subhi Sadek, the Revolutionary Guard’s weekly paper, Reza Faker, a writer believed to have close links to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, warned that Iran would strike back. “We’ve got the ability to capture a nice bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers and feed them to our fighting cocks,” he said. “Iran has enough people who can reach the heart of Europe and kidnap Americans and Israelis.” The first sign of a possible campaign against high-ranking Iranian officers emerged earlier this month with the discovery that Ali Reza Asgari, former commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force in Lebanon and deputy defence minister, had vanished, apparently during a trip to Istanbul. Asgari’s disappearance shocked the Iranian regime as he is believed to possess some of its most closely guarded secrets. The Quds Force is responsible for operations outside Iran. Last week it was revealed that Colonel Amir Muhammed Shirazi, another high-ranking Revolutionary Guard officer, had disappeared, probably in Iraq. A third Iranian general is also understood to be missing — the head of the Revolutionary Guard in the Persian Gulf. Sources named him as Brigadier General Muhammed Soltani, but his identity could not be confirmed. “This is no longer a coincidence, but rather an orchestrated operation to shake the higher echelons of the Revolutionary Guard,” said an Israeli source. Other members of the Quds Force are said to have been seized in Irbil, in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, by US special forces. “The capture of Quds members in Irbil was essential for our understanding of Iranian activity in Iraq,” said an American official with knowledge of the operation. One theory circulating in Israel is that a US taskforce known as the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group (ISOG) is coordinating the campaign to take Revolutionary Guard commanders. The Iranians have also accused the United States of being behind an attack on Revolutionary Guards in Iran last month in which at least 17 were killed. Military analysts believe that Iranian threats of retaliation are credible. Tehran is notorious for settling scores. When the Israelis killed Abbas Mussawi, Hezbollah’s general secretary, in 1992 the Quds Force blew up the Israeli embassy in Argentina in revenge. Despite the Iranian threat to retaliate in Europe, Iraq is seen by some analysts as a more likely place in which to attempt abductions. “In Iraq, the Quds Force can easily get hold of American — and British — officers,” said a Jordanian intelligence source.

In the mid-1980's I organized a seminar on terrorism under a grant from the Moody Foundation of Galveston, Texas. Among those that I worked with on the seminar was Edward Miller, a former Assistant Director of the FBI. It was Ed who introduced me to Mark Felt. Both Ed and Mark were convicted for 'black bag" jobs that they undertook at the direction of J. Edgar Hoover. President Reagan later pardoned them. In the course of my working with Ed, he told me that immediately after Marilyn Monroe's death Hoover dispatched him to go to the telephone company, whose office was located in Santa Monica, to retrieve Marilyn Monroe's long-distance telephone records. In those days, he said, the records were maintained by hand by telephone company personnel. I wonder what the telephone records revealed?

The Confession Backfired by Paul Craig Roberts 3/17/2007 The first confession released by the Bush regime’s Military Tribunals – that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – has discredited the entire process. Writing in Jurist, Northwestern University law professor Anthony D’Amato likens Mohammed’s confession to those that emerged in Stalin’s show trials of Bolshevik leaders in the 1930s. That was my own immediate thought. I remember speaking years ago with Soviet dissident Valdimir Bukovsky about the behavior of Soviet dissidents under torture. He replied that people pressed for names under torture would try to remember the names of war dead and people who had passed away. Those who retained enough of their wits under torture would confess to an unbelievable array of crimes in an effort to alert the public to the falsity of the entire process. That is what Mohammed did. We know he was tortured, because his response to the obligatory question about his treatment during his years of detention is redacted. We also know that he was tortured, because otherwise there is no point for the US Justice (sic) Dept. memos giving the green light to torture or for the Military Commissions Act, which permits torture and death sentence based on confession extracted by torture. Mohammed’s confession of crimes and plots is so vast that Katherine Shrader of the Associated Press reports that the Americans who extracted Mohammed’s confession do not believe it either. It is exaggerated, say Mohammed’s tormentors, and must be taken with a grain of salt. In other words, the US torture crew, reveling in their success, played into Mohammed’s hands. Pride goes before a fall, as the saying goes. Mohammed’s confession admits to 31 planned and actual attacks all over the world, including blowing up the Panama Canal and assassinating presidents Carter and Clinton and the Pope. Having taken responsibility for the whole ball of wax along with everything else that he could imagine, he was the entire show. No other terrorists needed. Reading responses of BBC listeners to Mohammed’s confession reveals that the rest of the world is either laughing at the US government for being so stupid as to think that anyone anywhere would believe the confession or damning the Bush regime for being like the Gestapo and KGB. Humorists are having a field day with the confession: "’I’m a very dangerous mastermind,’ said Mohammed, who confessed to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the Brink’s robbery, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the Lincoln and McKinley assassinations. Mohammed also accepted responsibility for spreading hay fever and cold sores around the world and for rained out picnics." If there was anything remaining of the Bush regime not already discredited, Mohammed’s confession removed any reputation left. The most important part of the Mohammed story is yet to make the headlines. Despite having held and tortured hundreds of detainees for years in Gitmo, and we don’t know how many more in secret prisons around the world, the US government has come up with only 14 "high value detainees." In other words, the government has nothing on 99 percent of the detainees who allegedly are so dangerous and wicked that they must be kept in detention without charges, access to attorneys and contact with families. And little wonder. The vast majority of detainees, alleged "enemy combatants," are not terrorists captured by the CIA and brave US troops. They are hapless persons who happened to be outside their tribal or home territories and were kidnapped by criminal gangs or war lords who profited greatly at the expense of the naive Americans who offered bounties for "terrorists." The US government does not care that innocent people have been ensnared, because the US government desperately needs both to prove that there are vast numbers of terrorists and to demonstrate its proficiency in protecting Americans by capturing terrorists. Moreover, the US government needs "dangerous suspects" that it can use to keep Americans in a state of supine fearfulness and as a front behind which to undermine constitutional protections and the Bill of Rights. The Bush-Cheney Regime succeeded in its evil plot, only to throw it all away by releasing the ridiculous confession by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Will Bush’s totalitarian Military Tribunal now execute Mohammed on the basis of his confession extracted by torture, or would this be seen everywhere on earth as nothing but an act of murder? If Bush can’t have Mohammed murdered, the US government will have to shut Mohammed away where he cannot talk and tell his tale. The US government will have to replicate Orwell’s memory hole by destroying Mohammed’s mind with mind-altering drugs and abuse. It is to such depths that George Bush and Dick Cheney have lowered America. March 17, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail] wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is author or coauthor of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholar journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He is also coauthor with Karen Araujo of Chile: Dos Visiones – La Era Allende-Pinochet (Santiago: Universidad Andres Bello, 2000). Copyright © 2007 Creators Syndicate Paul Craig Roberts Archives Find this article at: http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts201.html

FBI file links Kennedy to Monroe's death March 17, 2007 Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/kennedy-l...722744304.html# For four decades there have been rumours that Marilyn Monroe's death was not a simple suicide. Now a Los Angeles-based Australian writer and director, Philippe Mora, has uncovered an FBI document that throws up a chilling new scenario. The screen legend Marilyn Monroe...the FBI report says she "expected to have her stomach pumped out and get sympathy for her suicide attempt", but it suggests she was left to die. Latest related coverage How Bobby betrayed Marilyn Web links Documents: Read the FBI papers BOBBY KENNEDY'S affair with the screen idol Marilyn Monroe has been documented, but a secret FBI file suggests the late US attorney-general was aware of - and perhaps even a participant in - a plan "to induce" her suicide. The detailed three-page report implicates the Hollywood actor Peter Lawford, Monroe's psychiatrist, staff and her publicist in the plot. The allegations suggest the 36-year-old actress, who had a history of staging attention-seeking suicide attempts, was deliberately given the means to fake another suicide on August 4, 1962. But this time, it is suggested, she was allowed to die as she sought help. The document, hidden among thousands of pages released under freedom-of-information laws last October, was received by the FBI on October 19, 1964 - two years after her death - and titled simply "ROBERT F KENNEDY". It was compiled by an unnamed former special agent working for the then Democrat governor of California, Pat Brown, and forwarded to Washington by Curtis Lynum, then head of the San Francisco FBI. Despite a disclaimer that it could not be sourced or authenticated, it was considered important enough to immediately circulate to the FBI's five most senior officers, including director J. Edgar Hoover's right-hand man, Clyde Tolson. The report was in effect buried for decades as a classified document, and even the released version contains censored sections. Never before mentioned despite thousands of articles, books and documentaries about her death, it details aspects of Kennedy's on-and-off affair with the movie star, including sex parties and a lesbian dalliance, as well as her emotional departure from 20th Century Fox and descent into depression. Critically, it raises an alleged conspiracy, apparently overseen by Lawford, for Monroe to unwittingly commit suicide with the drug Seconal, a barbiturate used to treat insomnia and relieve anxiety. The document gives no precise reason why she would be killed but hints it may be linked to her threats to make public her affair with Kennedy, as other conspiracy theories have previously claimed. It states in part: "Peter Lawford, [censored words blacked out] knew from Marilyn's friends that she often made suicide attempts and that she was inclined to fake a suicide attempt in order to arouse sympathy. "Lawford is reported as having made 'special arrangements' with Marilyn's psychiatrist, Dr Ralph Greenson, from Beverley Hills. The psychiatrist was treating Marilyn for emotional problems and getting her off the use of barbiturates. On her last visit to him he prescribed Seconal tablets and gave her a prescription for 60 of them, which was unusual in quantity especially since he saw her frequently. On the date of her death … her housekeeper put the bottle of pills on the night table. It is reported that the housekeeper and Marilyn's personal secretary and press agent, Pat Newcomb, were co-operating in the plan to induce suicide." It goes on to say that on the same day, Kennedy had booked out of the Beverley Hills Hotel and flown to San Francisco where he booked into the St Charles Hotel, owned by a friend. "Robert Kennedy made a telephone call from St Charles Hotel, San Francisco, to Peter Lawford to find out if Marilyn was dead yet." Lawford called and spoke to Monroe "then checked again later to make sure she did not answer". The document claims the housekeeper, Eunice Murray, who had been hired by the actress on the advice of Dr Greenson, then called the psychiatrist. "Marilyn expected to have her stomach pumped out and get sympathy for her suicide attempt. The psychiatrist left word for Marilyn to take a drive in the fresh air but did not come to see her until after she was known to be dead." Officially, the actress was found by Murray in the early hours of August 5, naked on her bed lying on top of her telephone. The others are now dead, too. The FBI report says Kennedy had promised Monroe he would divorce his wife and marry her, but the actress eventually realised he had no intention of doing so. About this time, he had told her not to worry about 20th Century Fox cancelling her contract - "he would take care of everything". When nothing happened, she called him at work and they had "unpleasant words. She was reported to have threatened to make public their affair." Hoover, keeper of America's secrets, was obsessed with the private life of celebrities, particularly those with leftist leanings. The files show the FBI tracked Monroe from the Cold War mid-1950s to her death in 1962, but particularly after she met and married the playwright Arthur Miller, who was being watched as a possible communist. http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/kennedy-l...722744304.html#

After False Claim, Wikipedia to Check Degrees By NOAM COHEN New York Times March 12, 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/technolo...?ref=technology After an influential contributor and administrator at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia was found last week to have invented a history of academic credentials, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder and globetrotting advocate, called for a voluntary system for accrediting contributors who say they have advanced degrees, like a Ph.D or M.D. The details of how Mr. Wales’s system would work are still being bandied about, and include the idea of having users fax copies of their diplomas to Wikipedia’s offices, or relying on a “circle of trust,” whereby a trusted individual would be in charge of verification. Mr. Wales said he thought that some version of his proposal would begin on the site “in a week.” But reaction within the fiercely egalitarian Wikipedia world has not been universally favorable. Many writing on Mr. Wales’s user page seemed dumbstruck at the idea of Wikipedia spending its time to verify academic authority when the site’s motto is “the encyclopedia anyone can edit.” Florence Devouard, Mr. Wales’s successor as the head of Wikimedia Foundation board, the parent of the many Wikipedias in scores of languages, said she was “not supportive” of the proposal. “I think what matters is the quality of the content, which we can improve by enforcing policies such as ‘cite your source,’ not the quality of credentials showed by an editor,” she added. Mr. Wales was reacting to the public fallout from the revelation that a contributor and Wikipedia administrator named Essjay who claimed to be a tenured professor in Catholic law was in fact Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old from Louisville, Ky. Mr. Wales said that the Essjay controversy was evidence of “growing pains” for the site, a worldwide phenomenon that has become a default research tool for nearly everyone who uses the Internet. And while he said “the moral of the story is what makes for a good Wikipedian is not a good credential,” he added that it was important that the general public not think that Wikipedia is “written by a bunch of 12-year-olds.”

Michael Horn was the guest on March 7, 2007 on coasttocoastam, the international night-time radio program that has the world’s largest listening audience. Among his provocative comments were assertions that Microsoft’s new Windows Vista was designed with the aid of the National Security Agency so that NSA can monitor the computers of individuals. Mr. Horn also claimed that America On Line – AOL – has an on-going relationship with the CIA. Does any Forum member know of evidence that would support the assertions of Mr. Horn?

CounterPunch Special Investigation Coming in From the Cold Ketcham's Story CounterPunch Special Investigation High-Fivers and Art Student Spies What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks? By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM http://www.counterpunch.org/ CounterPunch Special Investigation Coming in From the Cold Ketcham's Story By ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR May 7, 2007 http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn03072007.html In this special report we print a carefully reported narrative by Christopher Ketcham. He's a journalist whom publications such as Harper's and Salon.com have been happy to publish. Indeed, it was in May of 2002 that Salon featured on its site a 9,000-word story by Ketcham on the so-called Israeli "art students" whose curious activities before 9/11/2001 around U.S. government offices and in locations in many cases identical to those frequented by the 9/11 hijackers had been the subject of much speculation. In the fall of 2005 Ketcham ran across a short report in the Philadelphia Times-Herald about a 166-page memorandum written by a retired corporate lawyer named Gerald Shea. The memo, which Shea sent to the 9/11 Commission and the relevant Senate and House intelligence committees, reviewed all publicly known information about the activities of possible Israeli intelligence operatives working in New Jersey, Florida and elsewhere, and posed the questions: how much had the Mossad learned about the hijackers' plans; what had they divulged to the agencies of the U.S. government? These are not questions likely to receive an enthusiastic reception in the U.S. press or in Congress. Shea's memo, which he sent to many major news outlets, received almost no coverage aside from that tiny story in the Philadelphia Times-Herald (written, it should be noted, by Keith Phucas, who broke the Able Danger story). After reading Shea's full memo, Ketcham went back to the leads and sources he'd developed for the earlier piece for Salon. By May 2006 he'd completed an 11,000-word report for Salon. One hour before it was due to go up on Salon's site, the story was killed. The word from inside Salon is that the top editors suddenly decided that there was nothing newsworthy about Ketcham's report. Anyone familiar with the verbal smokescreens sent up by a publication killing a story knows well two standard ploys: one is the last-minute assertion, often after weeks of enthusiastic editorial preparation, that "there's really nothing new here", that "it's an old story". The other is that the facts are so explosive, so fresh, that unusually explicit corroboration is required, demanding the reporter get multiple named sources and so forth. Salon's editors obviously decided that an exposé with words like "Israeli spies" and "9/11" in the same headline was just too hot to handle. But in that case why wait to the last minute, after long hours of editorial work preparing the story for publication? They probably didn't like to admit to themselves that were just not prepared to take heat for the story and that they simply got cold feet. Ketcham took the story to a number of other magazines and got nowhere. Then, in the late summer of 2006 he took it to the Nation, whose editors said that yes, they wanted the story, but wouldn't schedule it till after the crush of political coverage in the run-up to the November elections. The target publication date was December 8. At the last minute, the Nation pulled the piece. When we first read it, we felt--and still feel--somewhat baffled at the difficulty this piece had in getting published. It's a report that deals with substantiated events that demand explanation, starting with the van on the New Jersey shore and the Israelis who were seen cheering as the planes crashed into the towers, and who on the afternoon of 9/11 were arrested following an FBI alert. It is not as though Ketcham is alone in probing the background and activities of the celebrating Israelis. Justin Raimondo, of Antiwar.com has been a pioneer in exploring this same series of events and questions and he deserves great credit for his spirited stories on the matter, which can be found on his site and in his concise and powerful book, The Terror Enigma. The Israeli connection has also been the topic of a fine piece of investigation published in The Forward in 2002. The Forward's sensational discoveries were studiously ignored by the press. ("Old story.", "unsubstantiated") Similarly, the saga of the "art students" has been the object of careful investigation and broadcast pieces by Fox News' Carl Cameron. Yes, when it comes to Israel and the U.S. press we are familiar with obstructions to raising edgy topics. That's why we're glad we have CounterPunch, to welcome good reporters like Ketcham in from the cold. [click on link below to read the Ketchum investigative story] http://www.counterpunch.org/

Chalmers Johnson: "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" Democracy Now Tuesday 27 February 2007 In his new book, CIA analyst, distinguished scholar, and best-selling author Chalmers Johnson argues that US military and economic overreach may actually lead to the nation's collapse as a constitutional republic. It's the last volume in his Blowback trilogy, following the best-selling "Blowback" and "The Sorrows of Empire." In those two, Johnson argued American clandestine and military activity has led to un-intended, but direct disaster here in the United States. Chalmers Johnson is a retired professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego. He is also President of the Japan Policy Research Institute. Johnson has written for several publications including Los Angeles Times, the London Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, and The Nation. In 2005, he was featured prominently in the award-winning documentary film, "Why We Fight." Chalmers Johnson joined me yesterday from San Diego. I began by asking him about the title of his book, "Nemesis." Amy Goodman: Today, we spend the hour with the former CIA consultant, distinguished scholar, best-selling author, Chalmers Johnson. He's just published a new book. It's called Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. It's the last volume in his trilogy, which began with Blowback, went onto The Sorrows of Empire. In those two, Johnson argued American clandestine and military activity has led to unintended but direct disaster here in the United States. In his new book, Johnson argues that US military and economic overreach may actually lead to the nation's collapse as a constitutional republic. Chalmers Johnson: Nemesis was the ancient Greek goddess of revenge, the punisher of hubris and arrogance in human beings. You may recall she is the one that led Narcissus to the pond and showed him his reflection, and he dove in and drowned. I chose the title, because it seems to me that she's present in our country right now, just waiting to make her - to carry out her divine mission. By the subtitle, I really do mean it. This is not just hype to sell books - "The Last Days of the American Republic." I'm here concerned with a very real, concrete problem in political analysis, namely that the political system of the United States today, history tells us, is one of the most unstable combinations there is - that is, domestic democracy and foreign empire - that the choices are stark. A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship. I've spent some time in the book talking about an alternative, namely that of the British Empire after World War II, in which it made the decision, not perfectly executed by any manner of means, but nonetheless made the decision to give up its empire in order to keep its democracy. It became apparent to the British quite late in the game that they could keep the jewel in their crown, India, only at the expense of administrative massacres, of which they had carried them out often in India. In the wake of the war against Nazism, which had just ended, it became, I think, obvious to the British that in order to retain their empire, they would have to become a tyranny, and they, therefore, I believe, properly chose, admirably chose to give up their empire. As I say, they didn't do it perfectly. There were tremendous atavistic fallbacks in the 1950s in the Anglo, French, Israeli attack on Egypt; in the repression of the Kikuyu - savage repression, really - in Kenya; and then, of course, the most obvious and weird atavism of them all, Tony Blair and his enthusiasm for renewed British imperialism in Iraq. But nonetheless, it seems to me that the history of Britain is clear that it gave up its empire in order to remain a democracy. I believe this is something we should be discussing very hard in the United States. Amy Goodman: Chalmers Johnson, you connect the breakdown of constitutional government with militarism. Chalmers Johnson: Yes. Amy Goodman: Can you talk about the signs of the breakdown of constitutional government and how it links? Chalmers Johnson: Well, yes. Militarism is the - what the social side has called the "intervening variable," the causative connection. That is to say, to maintain an empire requires a very large standing army, huge expenditures on arms that leads to a military-industrial complex, and generally speaking, a vicious cycle sets up of interests that lead to perpetual series of wars. It goes back to probably the earliest warning ever delivered to us by our first president, George Washington, in his famous farewell address. It's read at the opening of every new session of Congress. Washington said that the great enemy of the republic is standing armies; it is a particular enemy of republican liberty. What he meant by it is that it breaks down the separation of powers into an executive, legislative, and judicial branches that are intended to check each other - this is our most fundamental bulwark against dictatorship and tyranny - it causes it to break down, because standing armies, militarism, military establishment, military-industrial complex all draw power away from the rest of the country to Washington, including taxes, that within Washington they draw it to the presidency, and they begin to create an imperial presidency, who then implements the military's desire for secrecy, making oversight of the government almost impossible for a member of Congress, even, much less for a citizen. It seems to me that this is also the same warning that Dwight Eisenhower gave in his famous farewell address of 1961, in which he, in quite vituperative language, quite undiplomatic language - one ought to go back and read Eisenhower. He was truly alarmed when he spoke of the rise of a large arms industry that was beyond supervision, that was not under effective control of the interests of the military-industrial complex, a phrase that he coined. We know from his writings that he intended to say a military-industrial-congressional complex. He was warned off from going that far. But it's in that sense that I believe the nexus - or, that is, the incompatibility between domestic democracy and foreign imperialism comes into being. Amy Goodman: Who was he warned by? Chalmers Johnson: Members of Congress. Republican memb- Amy Goodman: And why were they opposed? Chalmers Johnson: Well, they did not want to have their oversight abilities impugned. They weren't carrying them out very well. You must also say that Eisenhower was - I think he's been overly praised for this. It was a heroic statement, but at the same time, he was the butcher of Guatemala, the person who authorized our first clandestine operation and one of the most tragic that we ever did: the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 for the sake of the British Petroleum Company. And he also presided over the fantastic growth of the military-industrial complex, of the lunatic oversupply of nuclear weapons, of the empowering of the Air Force, and things of this sort. It seems to be only at the end that he realized what a monster he had created. Amy Goodman: Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. We'll come back to him in a minute. Amy Goodman: As we return to my interview with Chalmers Johnson - his new book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic - I asked him to talk about the expansion of US military bases around the globe. Chalmers Johnson: According to the official count right now - it's something called the Base Structure Report, which is an unclassified Pentagon inventory of real property owned around the world and the cost it would take to replace it - there are right now 737 American military bases on every continent, in well over 130 countries. Some apologists from the Pentagon like to say, well, this is false, that we're counting Marine guards at embassies. I guarantee you that it's simply stupid. We don't have anything like 737 American embassies abroad, and all of these are genuine military bases with all of the problems that that involves. In the southernmost prefecture of Japan, Okinawa, site of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, there's a small island, smaller than Kawaii in the Hawaiian islands, with 1,300,000 Okinawans. There's thirty-seven American military bases there. The revolt against them has been endemic for fifty years. The governor is always saying to the local military commander, "You're living on the side of a volcano that could explode at any time." It has exploded in the past. What this means is just an endless, nonstop series of sexually violent crimes, drunken brawls, hit-and-run accidents, environmental pollution, noise pollution, helicopters falling out of the air from Futenma Marine Corps Air Base and falling onto the campus of Okinawa International University. One thing after another. Back in 1995, we had one of the most serious incidents, when two Marines and a sailor abducted, beat and raped a twelve-year-old girl. This led to the largest demonstrations against the United States since we signed the security treaty with Japan decades ago. It's this kind of thing. I first went to Okinawa in 1996. I was invited by then-Governor Ota in the wake of the rape incident. I've devoted my life to the study of Japan, but like many Japanese, many Japanese specialists, I had never been in Okinawa. I was shocked by what I saw. It was the British Raj. It was like Soviet troops living in East Germany, more comfortable than they would be back at, say, Oceanside, California, next door to Camp Pendleton. And it was a scandal in every sense. My first reaction - I've not made a secret of it - that I was, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, certainly a Cold Warrior. My first explanation was that this is simply off the beaten track, that people don't come down here and report it. As I began to study the network of bases around the world and the incidents that have gone with them and the military coups that have brought about regime change and governments that we approve of, I began to realize that Okinawa was not unusual; it was, unfortunately, typical. These bases, as I say, are spread everywhere. The most recent manifestation of the American military empire is the decision by the Pentagon now, with presidential approval, of course, to create another regional command in Africa. This may either be at the base that we have in Djibouti at the Horn of Africa. It may well be in the Gulf of Guinea, where we are prospecting for oil, and the Navy would very much like to put ourselves there. It is not at all clear that we should have any form of American military presence in Africa, but we're going to have an enlarged one. Invariably, remember what this means. Imperialism is a form of tyranny. It never rules through consent of the governed. It doesn't ask for the consent of the governed. We talk about the spread of democracy, but we're talking about the spread of democracy at the point of an assault rifle. That's a contradiction in terms. It doesn't work. Any self-respecting person being democratized in this manner starts thinking of retaliation. Nemesis becomes appropriate. Amy Goodman: Chalmers Johnson, there have been major protests against US military bases. Recently in Vicenza in Italy, about 100,000 people protested. Ecuador announced that it would close the Manta Air Base, the military base there. What about the response, the resistance to this web of bases around the world? Chalmers Johnson: Well, there is a genuine resistance and has been for a long time. As I say, in the case of Okinawa, there's been at least three different historical revolts against the American presence. There's collaboration between the Japanese government and the Pentagon to use this island, which is a Japanese version of Puerto Rico. It's a place that's always been discriminated against. It's the Japanese way of having their cake and eating it, too. They like the alliance with America, but they do not want American soldiers based anywhere near the citizens of mainland Japan. So they essentially dump them or quarantine them off into this island, where the population pays the cost. This is true, what's going on in Italy right now, where there is tremendous resistance to the CIA rendition cases. That is, kidnapping people that we've identified and flying them secretly to countries where we know they will be tortured. There's right now something like twenty-five CIA officers by name who are under indictment by the Italian government for felonies committed by agents of the United States in Italy. And, indeed, we just did have these major demonstrations in Vicenza. The people there believe that with the enlargement of the base that is already there - I mean, this is, after all, the old Palladian city, a city of great and famous architecture, that they would become a target of terrorism, of numerous other things. We see the resistance in the form of Prime Minister Zapatero in Spain, that he promised the people that after he came to power, he would get out of Iraq, and he was one of the few who did deliver, who does remember that if democracy means anything, it means that public opinion matters, though in an awful lot of countries, it doesn't actually seem to be the case. But he has reduced radically the American military presence in Spain. And it continues around the world. There is a growing irritation at the American colossus athwart the world, using its military muscle to do as it pleases. We see it right now, that people of the Persian Gulf are not being asked whether or not they want anywhere between two and four huge carrier task forces in the fifth fleet in CENTCOM's navy in the Persian Gulf, and all of which looks like preparation for an assault on Iran. We don't know that for certain by any manner of means, but there's plenty enough to make us suspicious. Then you look back historically, probably there is no more anti-American democracy on earth than Greece. They will never forgive us for bringing to power the Greek colonels the in the late '60s and early '70s, and, of course, also establishing then numerous American military enclaves in Greece until the colonels themselves finally self-destructed by simply going too far. And the cases are ubiquitous in Latin America, in Africa today. Probably still the most important area, of course, of military imperialism is the opening up of southern Eurasia, after it became available to foreign imperialistic pressure with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many important observers who have resigned their commissions from the Pentagon have made the case that the fundamental explanation for the war in Iraq was precisely to make it the new - to replace the two old pillars of American foreign policy in the Middle East. The first pillar, Iran, collapsed, of course, with the revolution in 1979 against the Shah, who we had installed in power. The second pillar, Saudi Arabia, had become less and less useful to us, because of our own bungling. We put forces, military forces, ground forces, an air force, in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War in 1991. This was unnecessary, it was stupid, it was arrogant. It caused antagonism among numerous patriotic Saudis, not least of whom, one was our former asset and colleague, Osama bin Laden - that Saudi Arabia is charged with the defense of the two most sacred sites in Islam: Mecca and Medina. We ought to be able to do this ourselves without using infidel troops that know absolutely nothing about our religion, our country, our lifestyle, or anything else. Over time, the Saudis began to restrict the use of Prince Sultan Air Base outside Riyadh. We actually closed down our major operations headquarters there just before the invasion of Iraq and moved it to Qatar. And then we chose Iraq as the second most oil-rich country on earth, and as a place perfectly suited for our presence. I think many people have commented on it, Seymour Hersh notably, but I think, importantly, one of the reasons we had no exit plan from Iraq is that we didn't intend to leave. And certainly the evidence of it is the now series of at least five very, very large, heavily reinforced, long double runways, five air bases in Iraq, strategically located all over the country. You can never get our ambassador, the Department of Defense, the President, or anybody to say unequivocally we don't intend to have bases there. It's a subject on which Congress never, ever opens its mouth. Occasionally, military officers - the commander of Air Force in CENTCOM has repeatedly, in his sort of off-hand way, when asked, "How long do you think we'll be here?" and he usually says, "Oh, at least a decade in these bases." And then, we continue to reinforce them. Now, then, we've tried to build bases in Central Asia in the Caspian Basin oil-rich countries that were made independent - not in any sense democracies - made independent by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. We have now been thrown out of one of them for too much heavy-handed interference. And the price of our stay in Kyrgyzstan has quadrupled, much more than that actually. It's gone from a few million dollars to well over $100 million. But we continue to play these games, and they are games, and the game is property called imperialism. Amy Goodman: We're talking to Chalmers Johnson. Now, Chalmers Johnson, you were a consultant for the CIA for a period through Richard Nixon, starting with Johnson in 1967, right through 1973. And I'm wondering how you see its use has changed. You talk about, and you write in your book about the Central Intelligence Agency, the president's private army. Chalmers Johnson: say, at one point, we will never know peace until we abolish it, or, at any rate, restrict what is the monster that it's grown into. The National Security Act of 1947 lists five functions. It creates the Central Intelligence Agency. It lists five functions for it. The purpose, above all, was to prevent surprise attack, to prevent a recurrence of the attack, such as the one at Pearl Harbor. Of these five functions, four are various forms of information-gathering through open sources, espionage, signals intelligence, things of this sort. The fifth is simply a catchall, that the CIA will do anything that the National Security Council, namely the foreign affairs bureaucracy in the White House attached directly to the president orders it to do. That's turned out to be the tail that wags the dog. Intelligence is not taken all that seriously. It's not that good. My function inside the agency in the late '60s, early '70s was in the Office of National Estimates. My wife used to ask me at times, "Why are they so highly classified?" And I said, "Well, probably and mostly, simply because they're the very best we can do, and they read like a sort of lowbrow foreign affairs article." They're not full of great technical detail and certainty nothing on sources of intelligence. But as the agency developed over time, and as it was made clear to the president, every president since Truman, made clear to them shortly after they were inaugurated, you have at your disposal a private army. It is totally secret. There is no form of oversight. There was no form of congressional oversight until the late 1970s, and it proved to be incompetent in the face of Iran-Contra and things like that. He can do anything you want to with it. You could order assassinations. You could order governments overthrown. You could order economies subverted that seemed to get in our way. You could instruct Latin American military officers in state terrorism. You can carry out extraordinary renditions and order the torture of people, despite the fact that it is a clear violation of American law and carries the death penalty if the torture victim should die, and they commonly do in the case of renditions to places like Egypt. No president since Truman, once told that he has this power, has ever failed to use it. That became the route of rapid advancement within the CIA, dirty tricks, clandestine activities, the carrying out of the president's orders to overthrow somebody, starting - the first one was the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. It's from that, the After Action Report, which has only recently been declassified, that the word "blowback" that I used in the first of my three books on American foreign policy, that's where the word "blowback" comes from. It means retaliation for clandestine activities carried out abroad. But these clandestine activities also have one other caveat on them: they are kept totally secret from the American public, so that when the retaliation does come, they're unable ever to put it in context, to see it in cause-and-effect terms. They usually lash out against the alleged perpetrators, usually simply inaugurating another cycle of blowback. The best example is easily 9/11 in 2001, which was clearly blowback for the largest clandestine operation we ever carried out, namely the recruiting, arming and sending into battle of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. But this is the way the CIA has evolved. It's been responsible for the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and bringing to power probably the most odious dictator on either side in the Cold War, namely General Augusto Pinochet; the installation of the Greek colonels in the late '60s and early '70s in Greece; the coups, one after another, in numerous Latin American countries, all under the cover of avoiding Soviet imperialism carried out by Fidel Castro, when the real purpose was to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company, and continued to exploit the extremely poor and essentially defenseless people of Central America. The list is endless. The overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia, the bringing to power of General Suharto, then the elimination of General Suharto when he got on our nerves. It has a distinctly Roman quality to it. And this is why I - moreover, there is no effective oversight. There are a few, often crooked congressmen, like Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who are charged with oversight. When Charlie Wilson, the congressman, long-sitting congressman from the Second District of Texas, was named chairman of the House Intelligence Oversight Committee during the Afghan period, he wrote at once to his pals in the CIA, "The fox is in the henhouse. Gentlemen, do anything you want to." Amy Goodman: Chalmers Johnson has just finished his trilogy. The first was Blowback, then Sorrows of Empire, now Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. We'll be back with the conclusion of the interview in a minute. Amy Goodman: We return to the conclusion of my interview with Chalmers Johnson. Professor Johnson is a noted expert on Asia politics. He has authored a number of books on the Chinese revolution, on Japanese economic development. In his thirty years in the University of California system, Johnson served as chair of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. I asked him to talk about China's role as a growing world power. Chalmers Johnson: I'm optimistic about China. I think that they have shown a remarkable movement toward moderation. I believe that the public supports them, because they've done something that the public wanted done and was extremely fearful about, namely the dismantling of a Leninist economy without reducing the conditions that occurred in Yeltsin's Russia, that China has - it's unleashed its fantastic growth potential and is moving ahead with great power and insight. There are many things that we do not like in the way this is developing, particularly the fear of China by the American neoconservatives. They have no alternative but to adjust to this. It's the same kind of adjustment that should have been made in the 20th century to the rise of new sources of power in Germany, in Russia, in Japan. The failure by the sated English-speaking powers - above all, England and the United States - to adjust led to savage and essentially worthless wars. But the Americans are again continuing to harp on China's growth, where, in fact, I've been impressed with the ease with which China has adjusted to the interests of countries that do not necessarily like China at all - Indonesia, for example, Vietnam. They are contiguously egging on the Japanese to be antagonistic toward China, which was the scene of their greatest war crimes during World War II, for which they have never adequately either responded or paid compensation. I wonder what foolishness is this. A war with China would have the same - it would have the same configuration as the Vietnam War. We would certainly lose it. The glue, the political glue of China today, the source of its legitimacy, is increasingly Chinese nationalism, which is passionately held. As the Hong Kong joke has it, China just had a couple of bad centuries, and it's back. We have not been watching it with quite the hawk eyes we were during the first months of the Bush administration, when, after a spy incident in which the Chinese forced down one of our reconnaissance planes that was penetrating their coastal areas in an extremely aggressive manner - if it had been a Chinese plane off of our coast, we would have shot it down; they simply forced it down, it was a loss of an airplane and one of their own pilots - that, you'll recall, George Bush said on television that he would, if the Chinese ever menaced the island of Taiwan, he would use the full weight and force of the American military against China. This is insanity, genuine insanity. There's no way that - I mean, if the Chinese defeated every single American, they'd still have 800 million of them left, and you simply have to adjust to that, not antagonize it, and I believe there's plenty of ample evidence that you can adjust to the Chinese. Amy Goodman: Chalmers Johnson, in January, the Chinese launched their first anti-satellite test, and I wanted to segue into that to the militarization of space. Chalmers Johnson: Well, precisely, I have a chapter in Nemesis that I'm extremely proud of called "The Ultimate Imperialist Project: Outer Space." It's about the congressional missile lobby, the fantastic waste of funds on things that we know don't work. But they're not intended to work. They're part of military Keynesianism, of maintaining our economy through military expenditures. They provide jobs in as many different constituencies as the military-industrial complex can place them. We have arrogantly talked about full-spectrum dominance of control of the globe from outer space, the domination of the low and high orbits that are so necessary. We've all become so dependent upon them today for global positioning devices, telecommunications, mapping, weather forecasting, one thing after another. In fact, the Chinese, the Russians, the Europeans have been asking us repeatedly for decent international measures, international treaties, to prevent the weaponization of space, to prevent the growing catastrophe of orbiting debris that are extremely lethal to satellites, to - as Sally Ride, one of the commanders of our space shuttle, she was in an incident in which a piece of paint, or in orbit - that's at 17,000 miles an hour in low-earth orbit - hit the windshield of the challenger and put a bad dent in it. Now, if a piece of paint can do that, I hate to tell you what a lens cap or an old wrench or something like that - so there's a whole bunch of them out there. At the Johnson Space Center, they keep a regular growing inventory of these old pieces of, some case, weaponry, some case, launch vehicles for satellites, things of this sort. They publish a very lovely little newsletter that talks about how a piece of an American space capsule from twenty years ago rear-ended a shot Chinese-launched vehicle and produced a few more debris. It's a catastrophe. But instead, we've got - there's no other word for it - an arrogant, almost Roman, out-of-control Air Force that continues to serve the interests of the military-industrial complex, the space lobby, to build things that they know won't work. Amy Goodman: What is a space Pearl Harbor? Chalmers Johnson: A space Pearl Harbor would mean, they believe, what the Chinese did in January, when they tested an anti-satellite weapon against one of their old and redundant satellites. Satellites do burn out. There's no way to repair them, so they simply shot it down with a rocket. This explosion produces massive amounts of debris, whizzing around the earth in low-earth orbit. If you put it higher into orbit, you would start killing off the main satellites on which, well, probably this television broadcast is going to depend on, too. And there's no way to ever get rid of things that are orbiting in high-earth orbit. Low-earth orbit, some of them will descend into the atmosphere and burn up. But the Air Force has continuously used this so-called threat of our being blinded by - because we have become so reliant on global positioning systems. Our so-called "smart bombs" depend on them, that we've - they're not very smart, and it's not as good a global positioning system as the peaceful one the Europeans are building called Galileo. They use it to say we must arm space, we must have anti-satellite weapons in space, we have rebuffed every effort to control this, and finding out the Chinese have called our bluff. Amy Goodman: Where does Fort Greely, Alaska, fit into this, the silos? Chalmers Johnson: Well, that is, there's three ways to shoot down an alleged incoming missile. This is the whole farce of whether there is a defense against a missile. I guarantee you there is no defense at all against the Topol-M, the Russian missile that goes into orbit extremely rapidly - it goes into its arch extremely rapidly. It has a maneuvering ability that means that it's undetectable. We're basically looking at very low-brow weapons that would be coming from a country like North Korea, in which we have three different ways of trying to intercept them. We used to only try to do with one under the Clinton administration. Under the enthusiasm of the current neoconservatives, we have three ways. One, on blastoff, this is extremely difficult to do, but we're trying to create a laser, carried in a Boeing 747, that would hit one. You've got to be virtually on top of the launch site in order to do so. It's never worked. It probably doesn't work, and it's just expensive. The much more common one would be to down the hostile missile, while it is in outer space, from having given up its launch vehicle and is now heading at very high speed toward the United States. This is what the interceptors that have been put in the ground at Fort Greely, Alaska, and a couple of them at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, are supposed to do. They have never once yet had a successful intercept. The radar is not there to actually track the allegedly hostile vehicle. As one senior Pentagon scientist said the other day, these are really essentially scarecrows, hoping that they would scare off the North Koreans. This is a catastrophic misuse of resources against a small and failed communist state, North Korea. There is no easier thing on earth to detect than a hostile missile launch, and the proper approach to preventing that is deterrence. We have thought about it, worked on it, practiced it, studied it now for decades. The North Koreans have an excellent reputation for rationality. They know if they did launch such a vehicle at Japan or at the United States, they would disappear the next day in a retaliatory strike, and they don't do it. It's why, in the case of Iran, the only logical thing to do is to learn to live with a nuclear-armed Iran. It's inevitable for a country now surrounded by nuclear powers - the United States in the Persian Gulf, the Soviet Union, Israel, Pakistan and India. The Iranians are rationalists and recognize the only way you're ever going to dissuade people from using their nuclear power to intimidate us is a threat of retaliation. So we are developing our minimal deterrent, and we should learn to live with it. Amy Goodman: Finally, Chalmers Johnson, you have just completed your trilogy. Your first book, Blowback, then Sorrows of Empire, and now finally Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. What is your prediction? Chalmers Johnson: Well, I don't see any way out of it. I think it's gone too far. I think we are domestically too dependent on the military-industrial complex, that every time - I mean, it's perfectly logical for any Secretary of Defense to try and close military bases that are redundant, that are useless, that are worn out, that go back to the Civil War. Any time he tries to do it, you produce an uproar in the surrounding community from newspapers, television, priests, local politicians: save our base. The two mother hens of the Defense Facilities Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the people committed to taking care of our bases are easily Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Dianne Feinstein of California, the two states with the largest number of military bases, and those two senators would do anything in their power to keep them open. This is the insidious way in which the military-industrial complex has penetrated into our democracy and gravely weakened it, produced vested interests in what I call military Keynesianism, the use and manipulation of what is now three-quarters of a trillion dollars of the Defense budget, once you include all the other things that aren't included in just the single appropriation for the Department of Defense. This is a - it's out of control. We depend upon it, we like it, we live off of it. I cannot imagine any President of any party putting together the coalition of forces that could begin to break into these vested interests, any more than a Gorbachev was able to do it in his attempted reforms of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Amy Goodman: Is there anything, Chalmers, that gives you hope? Chalmers Johnson: Well, that's exactly what we're doing this morning. That is, the only way - you've got to reconstitute the constitutional system in America, or it is over. That is that empires - once you go in the direction of empire, you ultimately lead to overstretch, bankruptcy, coalitions of nations hostile to your imperialism. We're well on that route. The way that it might be stopped is by a mobilization of inattentive citizens. I don't know that that's going to happen. I'm extremely dubious, given the nature of conglomerate control of, say, the television networks in America for the sake of advertising revenue. We see Rupert Murdoch talking about buying a third of the Los Angeles Times. But, nonetheless, there is the internet, there is Amy Goodman, there are - there's a lot more information than there was. One of the things I have experienced in these three books is a much more receptive audience of alarmed Americans to Nemesis than to the previous two books, where there was considerable skepticism, so that one - if we do see a renaissance of citizenship in America, then I believe we could recapture our government. If we continue politics as in the past, then I think there is no alternative but to say Nemesis is in the country, she's on the premises, and she is waiting to carry out her divine mission. Amy Goodman: Chalmers Johnson, his new book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. It's the last volume in his Blowback trilogy, following the best-selling Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire. -------- Chalmers Johnson, author, scholar and leading critic of US foreign policy. Retired professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego. He is also President of the Japan Policy Research Institute. His new book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.

Fake professor in Wikipedia storm BBC News 3/6/2007 Internet site Wikipedia has been hit by controversy after the disclosure that a prominent editor had assumed a false identity complete with fake PhD. The editor, known as Essjay, had described himself as a professor of religion at a private university. But he was in fact Ryan Jordan, 24, a college student from Kentucky who used texts such as Catholicism for Dummies to help him work. He has retired from the site and his authority to edit has been cancelled. Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopaedia open to all, written by volunteers from around the world. 'Trust and tolerance' Under the name Essjay, Mr Jordan edited articles and also had the authority to arbitrate disputes between authors and remove site vandalism. In his user profile, he said he taught both undergraduate and graduate theology, and in an interview with the New Yorker in July 2006, was described as a "tenured professor of religion". His real identity came to light last week when the magazine added an editorial note to the piece highlighting the deception. "At the time of publication, neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay's real name," the note said. Essjay told them he hid his identity because "he feared personal retribution from those he had ruled against online", the newspaper's note said. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, writing on the site on 3 March, said that Mr Jordan was apologetic, but that Wikipedia was "based on twin pillars of trust and tolerance". "Despite my personal forgiveness, I hope that he will accept my resignation request, because forgiveness or not, these positions are not appropriate for him now," he wrote. And in a post the next day, Mr Jordan announced his retirement from the site. "I hope others will refocus the energy they have spent the past few days in defending and denouncing me to make something here at Wikipedia better," he said. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/6423659.stm Published: 2007/03/06 14:39:15 GMT ------------ Wikipedia founder takes on Google By Matt Wells BBC News, New York 3/7/2006 Online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has helped transform the way people use the net to seek out information and now the founder Jimmy Wales is hoping to do the same in the search field. The bearded and softly-spoken founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, describes himself as "pathologically optimistic". Bearing in mind that he recently revealed the development of a new "open source" search engine to compete for eyeballs with the mighty Google, he is going to need every ounce of optimism he can get. " Search has become a fundamental part of the infrastructure of society," said the 40-year-old, talking to a group of mainly media professionals at a recent event in downtown Manhattan, organised by The Glasshouse, a trans-Atlantic entrepreneurs' support group. "The way that things are sorted and ranked and presented to us, really does shape our view of the world. "I think it is important that we say, there really should be an alternative that is completely open and transparent," he added, before going on to criticise the culture of secrecy surrounding the cloistered algorithms of the leading search empires. There is a paradox surrounding Wales's position in the first-rank of internet movers and shakers, which he freely acknowledges. The Wiki boss has often said that his free, not-for-profit online encyclopaedia - that now gets seven billion page views each month with in-excess of five million multiple-language entries - was either the "smartest thing, or the dumbest thing that I ever did". Extraordinary statistic The total number of Wikipedia employees is five; an extraordinary statistic when you consider that it is the 10th most visited site in the world. He told a wry anecdote about being offered a recent ride in the Google jet as the online superstars converged on the World Economic Forum in Davos - since at this point, there is no Wiki-jet. But his cultural-hero status as the man who aims to bundle all the world's knowledge together and give it away free, is formidable. The new "transparent" search venture is in its early infancy, and also a project that is being shepherded by the very much for-profit sister company of Wikipedia, Wikia. His idea is to Wiki-fy the process of internet search, so that human beings decide openly how to rank and organise information, not the huge private servers of Google and Yahoo. In an online message at the end of the year, Wales labelled the project "Search Wikia" and referred to it as an attempt to create "the search engine that changes everything". 'People powered' He went on to ask for volunteers to step forward in the name of "people-powered" search, to help move the project forward. There was no mention of any possible profit-sharing. Far from seeking to confront Google in conventional business terms, Wales - ever the optimist - believes that there may be ways of working with what he calls the "second tier search players" on the web. "(Google) have hired all the geniuses... they're saying, 'gee, if this alternative could succeed, and make good quality search results a commodity, then we can compete on other things... on vertical search, on brand, on user-interface'." His philosophical approach to challenging Google, has drawn some criticism inside the blogosphere. The web veteran Dave Taylor, who writes The Intuitive Life Business Blog, wrote a sceptical post, questioning Wales's ability to influence the search market on any level. "My belief - based on talking to thousands of internet users - is that the only time someone switches search engines is when their current system begins to fail them," he wrote. "Far from being able to steal market-share from Google, the reality will be that it will be only if Google fails to produce good search results that another firm will even have a ghost of a chance of succeeding." Wales describes his politics as "libertarian with a small l" and having become used to travelling the world to meet Wikipedia's amateur army of administrators and contributors, he says he no longer cares who wins the next presidential election in the US. 'Open societies' "Within the broad framework of open societies, of liberal democracies, things aren't so horrible, right?" He added: "There are horrible places in the world - these are much more important - corruption in Africa, and things like that." Wikipedia's idealism, that some would argue is essentially flawed in that verifiability and not "objective" truthfulness is the standard by which entries are judged, has been heavily lampooned on American television in the last few months, by the satirist Stephen Colbert. In his persona as a polemical and bombastic news anchorman, Colbert lampooned the idea of allowing enthusiasts to form a consensus amongst themselves on what is fact, or not, coining the word "Wikiality". It has become a running joke, and the site's administrators have intervened to stop some of the show's fans from altering entries. Unphased Wales himself is unfazed by how easy it is for unregistered readers to make instant changes on Wikipedia - sometimes for the good, but often out of mischief. Constant upheaval and occasional "vandalism" of the site, is a price worth paying, he believes. "If you have a web environment where the software assumes everyone's going to do something bad, and where the community isn't given the tools to make corrections... you actually encourage hostile behaviours." He is convinced that Wikipedia's success is down to simple software and mutual respect, combined with the minimum amount of censorship and policing possible. Ultimately however, some wonder whether the collectivist world of Wiki, might not become more and more untrustworthy and cultish as the web expands. It is a danger that Wales himself seems to be aware of. Speaking at the University of Pennsylvania in June last year, he reportedly said that Wikipedia should not be used by college students to conduct serious research, and if students continue to believe in the objectivity of Wikipedia, they only have themselves to blame. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/6335793.stm Published: 2007/02/07 02:38:42 GMT

As an attorney, I am outraged at what is reported in the following article: March 5, 2007 Terror Case Prosecutor Assails Defense Lawyer By RAYMOND BONNER The New York Times SYDNEY, Australia, March 4 — The chief prosecutor for the American military commissions that will try suspected terrorists being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has lashed out at the military lawyer for one of the detainees, a newspaper here reported in its weekend edition. The prosecutor, Col. Morris D. Davis, said that the lawyer, Maj. Michael Mori of the United States Marine Corps, should not be making public appearances in Australia in uniform on behalf of his client, David Hicks, and that he faced possible prosecution for some of his remarks. “I don’t know what Major Mori’s plans are right now but if he wants to come back home and represent his client, that would be helpful,” Colonel Davis was quoted as saying by The Australian. “Certainly in the U.S. it would not be tolerated having a U.S. marine in uniform actively inserting himself into the political process. It is very disappointing to see that happening in Australia, and if that was any of my prosecutors, they would be held accountable.” Colonel Davis, who is an Air Force lawyer, added that it would be up to the Marine Corps whether to charge Major Mori with violation of Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which makes it a crime for a military officer to use “contemptuous words” about the president, vice president, secretary of defense and other high public officials. Major Mori, who was in Australia this past week, for the seventh time in three years, reacted with anger. “Are they trying to intimidate me?” he said in a telephone interview on Sunday. He compared Colonel Davis’s statements with remarks made last year by a senior Pentagon official, Charles D. Stimson, who was then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, who said that corporations should consider not using law firms that represented Guantánamo detainees pro bono. His remarks brought a torrent of objections, and he was forced to resign. Col. Dwight Sullivan, the chief defense counsel in the military commissions procedure, said in an interview on Sunday night in Washington that Major Mori’s behavior was “absolutely proper.” Colonel Sullivan, a Marine lawyer, said that under military ethics rules, “a military defense lawyer is supposed to provide the same level of representation as a civilian lawyer.” He said that in pressing Mr. Hicks’s case in Australia, “Major Mori is fulfilling his duty as an officer and as an attorney.” Colonel Davis, reached by e-mail Sunday night, said his comments reflected his view that Major Mori’s remarks in Australia had crossed the threshold of what was proper for a military defense lawyer. He said his remarks did not mean he was pressing for any action to be taken against Major Mori, only that he believed that the major had gone too far. “Most of the defense counsel say the commissions are unfair and criticize the process as they are entitled to do,” Colonel Davis wrote in response to a request for comment. But he said that Major Mori “goes further than any defense counsel I’ve ever known.” Colonel Davis said that it was improper for Major Mori to have made statements alleging that the president, the secretary of defense and Congress “intentionally created a rigged system that guarantees convictions in order to cover up wrongdoing” and that “everyone involved is potentially guilty of war crimes greater than the charge against” Mr. Hicks. Colonel Davis said he would not permit the prosecutors on his team to make equivalent comments or “inject themselves into the political picture in an allied country.” Major Mori has been strikingly blunt in his comments about the military commissions, on at least one occasion calling them kangaroo courts. Major Mori has been a “very effective” advocate for his client, said a senior member of the government of the Australian prime minister, John Howard, on the condition that he not be identified because he was expressing a view that the government would not state publicly. Last week, the United States military announced that it was filing only one charge against Mr. Hicks, for “material support for terrorism,” a major reduction from the initial charges, which had included conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder and aiding the enemy.

So much had been said and written about Hunt that I doubt he gave a hoot about your theories. His last memoir was written over 30 years ago. Might not something have happened in those 30 years that he felt like writing about? (A clue: think Weberman. Think the Rockefeller Commission. Think the HSCA investigation of Phillips. Think Hunt vs. Marchetti. Think Liddy vs. Dean. Think Felt.) Much has been declassified since Hunt's last jaunt. I suspect some of his CIA yarns will be revealing. My friend, the Watergate conspirator A personal account of Richard Nixon aide E. Howard Hunt. By William F. Buckley Jr. Columnist, author and TV host WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. is the founder of National Review. This is adapted from his forward to "American Spy," a new memoir by E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA operative. March 4, 2007 Los Angeles Times I MET E. HOWARD HUNT soon after arriving in Mexico City in 1951. I was a deep-cover agent for the CIA — deep-cover describing, I was given to understand, a category whose members were told to take extreme care not to permit any grounds for suspicion that one was in service to the CIA. The rule was (perhaps it is different now) that on arriving at one's targeted post, one was informed which single human being in the city knew that you were in the CIA. That person would tell you what to do for the duration of your service in that city; he would answer such questions as you wished to put to him and would concern himself with all aspects of your duty life. The man I was told to report to (by someone whose real name I did not know) was E. Howard Hunt. He ostensibly was working in the U.S. Embassy as a cultural affairs advisor, if I remember correctly. In any event, I met him in his office and found him greatly agreeable but also sternly concerned with duty. He would here and there give me special minor assignments, but I soon learned that my principal job was to translate from Spanish a huge and important book by defector Eudocio Ravines. Ravines had been an important member of the Peruvian Communist Party in the '40s. He had brought forth a book called "The Road From Yenan," an autobiographical account of his exciting life in the service of the communist revolution and an extended account of the reasons for his defection. It was a lazy assignment, in that we were not given a deadline, so the work slogged on during and after visits, averaging one every week, by Ravines to the house that I and my wife had occupied that used to be called San Angel Inn — post-revolution, Villa Obregon. (We lived and worked at Calero No. 91.) It is a part of Mexico City on the southern slopes, leading now to the university (which back then was in central Mexico City). It was only a couple of weeks after our meeting that Howard introduced me to his wife, Dorothy, and their first-born child, Lisa. I learned that Howard had graduated from Brown University and was exercised by left-wing activity there, by the faculty, the administration and students. This made him especially interested in what I had to say about my alma mater. My book, "God and Man at Yale," was published in mid-October 1951, and I shook free for one week's leave to travel to New York to figure in the promotion. I persevered in my friendship with the Hunt family. But in early spring of 1952, when the project with Ravines was pretty well completed, I called on Howard to tell him I had decided to quit the agency. I had yielded to the temptation to go into journalism. Our friendship was firm, and Howard came several times to Stamford, Conn., where my wife and I camped down, and visited. I never knew — he was very discreet — what he was up to, but assumed, correctly, that he was continuing his work for the CIA. I was greatly moved by Dorothy's message to me that she and Howard were joining the Catholic communion, and they asked me to serve as godfather for their children. Years passed without my seeing Howard. But then came the Watergate scandal — in which Howard was accused of masterminding the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters, among other things, and was ultimately convicted of burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping — and the dreadful accident over Midway Airport in Chicago that killed Dorothy in December 1972. I learned of this while watching television with my wife, and it was through television that I also learned that she had named me as personal representative of her estate in the event of her demise. That terrible event came at a high point in the Watergate affair. Then I had a phone call from Howard, with whom I hadn't been in touch for several years. He asked to see me. He startled me by telling me that he intended to disclose to me everything he knew about the Watergate affair, including much that (he said) had not yet been revealed to congressional investigators. What especially arrested me was his saying that his dedication to the project had included a hypothetical agreement to contrive the assassination of syndicated muckraker Jack Anderson, if the high command at the Nixon White House thought this necessary. I also remember his keen surprise that the White House hadn't exercised itself to protect and free him and his collaborators arrested in connection with the Watergate enterprise. He simply could not understand this moral default. It was left that I would take an interest, however remote, in his household of children, now that he was headed for jail. (Neither he nor Dorothy had any brothers or sisters.) Howard served 33 months. I visited him once. I thought back on the sad contrast between Hunt, E.H., federal prisoner, and Hunt, E.H., special assistant to the U.S. ambassador in Mexico, and his going on to a number of glittering assignments but ultimately making that fateful wrong turn in the service of President Nixon, for which his suffering was prolonged and wretchedly protracted. I prefer to remember him back in his days as a happy warrior, a productive novelist, an efficient administrator and a wonderful companion. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-...oll=la-opinion-

Au contraire, Myra. Hunt was true blue CIA. He went to court to deny his involvement in the Kennedy assassination. For him to belatedly acknowledge that other CIA officers may have been involved, and for him to acknowledge that one of his and the agency's biggest "succcesses", Operation Success in Guatemala, was in the long run a disaster, is quite a confession. As a result, I suspect future historians will put quite a bit of weight on Hunt's final words. My friend, the Watergate conspirator A personal account of Richard Nixon aide E. Howard Hunt. By William F. Buckley Jr. Columnist, author and TV host WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. is the founder of National Review. This is adapted from his forward to "American Spy," a new memoir by E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA operative. March 4, 2007 Los Angeles Times I MET E. HOWARD HUNT soon after arriving in Mexico City in 1951. I was a deep-cover agent for the CIA — deep-cover describing, I was given to understand, a category whose members were told to take extreme care not to permit any grounds for suspicion that one was in service to the CIA. The rule was (perhaps it is different now) that on arriving at one's targeted post, one was informed which single human being in the city knew that you were in the CIA. That person would tell you what to do for the duration of your service in that city; he would answer such questions as you wished to put to him and would concern himself with all aspects of your duty life. The man I was told to report to (by someone whose real name I did not know) was E. Howard Hunt. He ostensibly was working in the U.S. Embassy as a cultural affairs advisor, if I remember correctly. In any event, I met him in his office and found him greatly agreeable but also sternly concerned with duty. He would here and there give me special minor assignments, but I soon learned that my principal job was to translate from Spanish a huge and important book by defector Eudocio Ravines. Ravines had been an important member of the Peruvian Communist Party in the '40s. He had brought forth a book called "The Road From Yenan," an autobiographical account of his exciting life in the service of the communist revolution and an extended account of the reasons for his defection. It was a lazy assignment, in that we were not given a deadline, so the work slogged on during and after visits, averaging one every week, by Ravines to the house that I and my wife had occupied that used to be called San Angel Inn — post-revolution, Villa Obregon. (We lived and worked at Calero No. 91.) It is a part of Mexico City on the southern slopes, leading now to the university (which back then was in central Mexico City). It was only a couple of weeks after our meeting that Howard introduced me to his wife, Dorothy, and their first-born child, Lisa. I learned that Howard had graduated from Brown University and was exercised by left-wing activity there, by the faculty, the administration and students. This made him especially interested in what I had to say about my alma mater. My book, "God and Man at Yale," was published in mid-October 1951, and I shook free for one week's leave to travel to New York to figure in the promotion. I persevered in my friendship with the Hunt family. But in early spring of 1952, when the project with Ravines was pretty well completed, I called on Howard to tell him I had decided to quit the agency. I had yielded to the temptation to go into journalism. Our friendship was firm, and Howard came several times to Stamford, Conn., where my wife and I camped down, and visited. I never knew — he was very discreet — what he was up to, but assumed, correctly, that he was continuing his work for the CIA. I was greatly moved by Dorothy's message to me that she and Howard were joining the Catholic communion, and they asked me to serve as godfather for their children. Years passed without my seeing Howard. But then came the Watergate scandal — in which Howard was accused of masterminding the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters, among other things, and was ultimately convicted of burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping — and the dreadful accident over Midway Airport in Chicago that killed Dorothy in December 1972. I learned of this while watching television with my wife, and it was through television that I also learned that she had named me as personal representative of her estate in the event of her demise. That terrible event came at a high point in the Watergate affair. Then I had a phone call from Howard, with whom I hadn't been in touch for several years. He asked to see me. He startled me by telling me that he intended to disclose to me everything he knew about the Watergate affair, including much that (he said) had not yet been revealed to congressional investigators. What especially arrested me was his saying that his dedication to the project had included a hypothetical agreement to contrive the assassination of syndicated muckraker Jack Anderson, if the high command at the Nixon White House thought this necessary. I also remember his keen surprise that the White House hadn't exercised itself to protect and free him and his collaborators arrested in connection with the Watergate enterprise. He simply could not understand this moral default. It was left that I would take an interest, however remote, in his household of children, now that he was headed for jail. (Neither he nor Dorothy had any brothers or sisters.) Howard served 33 months. I visited him once. I thought back on the sad contrast between Hunt, E.H., federal prisoner, and Hunt, E.H., special assistant to the U.S. ambassador in Mexico, and his going on to a number of glittering assignments but ultimately making that fateful wrong turn in the service of President Nixon, for which his suffering was prolonged and wretchedly protracted. I prefer to remember him back in his days as a happy warrior, a productive novelist, an efficient administrator and a wonderful companion. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-...oll=la-opinion-

The 911 Script and the Age of Terror Wednesday February 28th, 2007 By Whitley Strieber www.unknowncountry.com I must admit that I have been deeply shocked by a story that appeared today on my website, to the effect that the BBC reported the collapse of WTC Building 7 23 minutes before it actually took place. Previously, the BBC claimed that it had lost all of its 9/11 coverage, but this video has now surfaced. I watched it myself, and sat there with my blood literally running cold as I saw their reporter saying that Building 7 had collapsed while it was still visible behind her, perfectly intact. Now, why wasn't this just a simple mistake? CNN was reporting rumors that Building 7 might be about to collapse an hour before it happened. But the BBC reporter is clearly seen reading from a teleprompter. Obviously, she was reading something written on it, and not making up what would have then seemed to be a wild tale. In other words, she was reading a script, and that script had been put up on her teleprompter early. Not only that, she was sitting in front of a live image of the still-intact Building 7. Somebody wrote that script and did so while Building 7 was still standing. How could they know that it would collapse, even if it was unstable, even if there was a fire in the cellars? No, the author of the script did not think the building had collapsed. He knew that it would, and the statement was read early as a miscue. If the BBC had not lost the video of that entire day, it would be easier to believe that this was some sort of a mistake. But the idea that an organization like the BBC, which prides itself on the record it keeps, would lose an entire day of some of the most historic footage it has ever shot is just very difficult to believe. It seems more likely that there was something on that footage that they wanted to bury. As, indeed, there was. I have long since abandoned the US media as a lost cause. Thank God we have the internet, because the American press are just a bunch of whores, frankly. I spent 45 minutes yesterday with CNN Headline News today, looking for news of Iran. 31 of those minutes were spent on Anna Nicole Smith, and the rest was fluff. Pravda did better during the height of the Soviet Union. At least it didn’t insult the intelligence of its readers, but only bored them with its obvious lies. The American media goes it one better, by ignoring the real news and running the silly stuff. And the papers that should be doing better, such as the New York Times, have been singing the "no conspiracy here" song since the days of the Kennedy assassination. Because of what appears to be an almost surrealistic belief that people cannot do bad things in concert, they missed Watergate. And they are missing 9/11 as well. They all are, and, in the end, they will be abandoned by the public because their silence and refusal to investigate are, in effect, lies spoken without words on behalf of what is coming to seem a devastating and widespread conspiracy against the lives of thousands of people, against western civilization and against human freedom at the deepest level. At present, virtually every street in Britain is watched by video, and there is a bill on its way into parliament that will ban public photography. Can you imagine, not being able to take a picture outdoors? What madness is this, what evil insanity? But it's real, and it doesn't end in Britain. Last October, without debate and in the dead of the night, the president was given the power by language buried in the budget bill to use the military as a police force within the United States, and to nationalize the National Guard without consulting governors. In other words, the Posse Cometatus Act of 1878 and the Insurrection Act of 1807 were usurped without a single word of debate and without the least whisper from the American press. To its credit, the New York Times did pick up on this story recently, reporting the event on February 19, many months after it happened. But why wait? These two acts are cornerstones of American freedom, but they have gone the way of habeas corpus, sacrificed to what now appears to be a self-generated war on terror, the purpose of which could not be more clear: it is not to protect us, it is to take away our freedom and turn this country into a dictatorship, and its little sisters the United Kingdom and Australia into the bargain. And the scale of the thing is terrifying. If the BBC was reading a script, as it must have been, then they were all reading scripts, and not one reporter has come forward, not one editor, and there is not a breath of suggestion in the 9/11 Commission report that any such thing might have been happening. And yet, one cannot forget that there was substantial trading in puts on the stock of insurance companies and airlines prior to 9/11, and that some of this trading was traced to individuals who had been associated with the CIA, as Jim Marrs reports in the Terror Conspiracy. One also cannot forget that Condoleezza Rice testified before the 9/11 Commission that the National Security Council was blindsided by the attack, even as the 11 memos warning of it that the FAA sent to her while she was its chairman were classified until after the last presidential election. How long can this go on? How much more can we stand? I find it utterly fantastic that conservatives are not outraged about the usurpation of Posse Cometatus and the Insurrection Act, and the attack on habeas corpus, not to mention the wholesale use of torture and atrocity as a matter of national policy. The Bush presidency is a burnt-out rump, it would seem, reduced to this odd recent practice of sending its officials into harm’s way in the apparent hope that any misfortune befalling them will gain it some sympathy, even as the president prepares for the future by buying a large estate in Paraguay. (However, he might have done a little more research about that country before he bought, given that the Colorado Party, which has been in power since it was set up by Nazi sympathizers and German immigrants in 1947, is now facing a serious threat from Msgr. Fernando Lugo Méndez, a populist bishop who is likely to win the next general election.) And then there is the terrifying prospect that another 9/11 will take place, but this time one so terrible that we will all desperately cleave to authority in the hope of preserving our lives, no matter who we think might be responsible. Anything less than a nuclear attack on one or more American cities would drive Bush from office, because it would reveal his entire anti-terrorism apparatus for the gimcrack sham that it is. And when I say sham, I mean sham. Right now, they are just getting around to installing equipment that would detect nuclear weapons being brought, for example, into the Port of Los Angeles—equipment that should and could have been in place every American port six months after 9/11. So it's perfectly possible that nuclear weapons are already in our cities, and have been there for years. As the Bush presidency winds down, the only real question is, will they be used to bring the American people to heel, or will he choose the Paraguay option? I used to believe that the Administration let 9/11 happen so that it could have an excuse to attack Iraq and destroy our freedoms. Condoleeza Rice ignored the FAA warnings because she knew that an attack would transform an unpopular president into a beloved leader—which it did...for a time. Given this latest piece of news, I think that anybody who seriously thinks that the whole event wasn't carefully planned and fed to us as a scripted "news event" needs to have their head examined. It was planned, period. Otherwise this reporter wouldn’t have been announcing one of the disasters before it happened. It's inescapable. This gets me to a subject I have been visiting for years, the Valerie Plame affair. As I write this, a Washington jury is deciding the fate of Administration scapegoat Lewis Libby. If he is convicted, it will be for lying to a grand jury and to the FBI, not for the real crime, which was revealing the agent in the first place. And, presumably, that will be an end to the matter. But, hold on, it might be something similar to Condi Rice’s ignoring those FAA memos. How, you may ask? This is how: Valerie Plame was a non-official cover, which is a CIA officer working abroad outside of the diplomatic context. She was an "energy consultant" for a front company called Brewster Jennings & Associates, which was allegedly involved in, among other places, Iran. Shortly after she was 'outed,' there were brief stories here and there in the media to the effect that US intelligence in Iran had been compromised. Of course, the moment the Iranians discovered that the Brewster Jennings employees in that country were actually US agents, they would all have been rounded up. Given the extraordinary fact that 9/11 now appears almost certainly to have been pre-scripted and therefore planned, dare we ask the question: was Valerie Plame's name revealed IN ORDER TO destroy our intelligence apparatus in Iran? This would put out our intelligence eyes in a very crucial respect. It would make it impossible for us to find the vents and air intakes of buried Iranian nuclear facilities, meaning that we cannot send conventional bunker buster bombs down those points of access. As Iran has buried and hardened its crucial facilities against any conventional attack except one that uses those weak points, we have been left helpless. There is only one type of weapon available to us that will certainly disrupt the centrifuges crucial to the manufacture of U-235. They must be shaken so hard that they break, and right now the only weapon in any western arsenal that will guarantee this without causing massive collateral damage is a neutron bomb. So, if somebody has been spoiling for a nuclear war--dare I say in hopes of inducing the Rapture--then the destruction of US intelligence capabilities in Iran would be the best possible way to gain that result. And the leaking of Valerie Plame's name might have been what would get that job done. Too conspiratorial, Mr. Reporter? Time to snort derision at the internet nut? YOU do your homework--but of course you won't, because you report to an editor who is telling you to turn up your nose, and if you fight back, you'll lose your job. And as for that editor--who calls the shots in his life? Well, that's easy, because we're now down to about twenty high-level managers across the whole American press! The outrageous flaunting of the Sherman Anti-Trust act over the past few years has enabled this situation to be engineered. So, do we have a free media? Of course not. And will they continue to march to the tune of higher powers? Certainly they will. And the situation is dangerous right now. It is very dangerous. A few days ago the president of Iran announced that his country would not stop its nuclear weapons program. Middle Eastern elements threatened devastating retaliation if Iran is attacked. If it is attacked, and the attack is nuclear, then I fear that we can expect a nuclear attack in the United States, from a bomb or bombs that have been put in place, or allowed to be put in place, by our nation's enemies, who, I believe, are shockingly close to home. If you want to know what will happen after that—well, I suggest you read the script.