Douglas Caddy

Could the U.S. be brought to its knees overnight? Well, maybe not overnight but perhaps in a matter of weeks? I have never considered myself attracted to a “survival” mode of living, that is preparing for a disaster by stockpiling food and supplies and whatever it takes to survive a local or national calamity.....until now. However, for the first time in memory I sense an unease among the American population that an international event of disastrous proportions for the whole planet may be just around the corner. While the possibility of such an event has been building up steam for the past 50 years, it has drastically accelerated under the present administration of President George W. Bush whose reckless foreign policy and war initiatives have kept the world living on the edge for the past six years. His invasion of Iraq, sold by a cascade of lies, has opened up a Pandora’s Box that may not be closed within the lifetimes of those living today. One military historian has said that Bush’s Iraq initiative was the greatest strategic mistake in 2000 years. An attack in the near future upon Iran by the U.S., carried out with the Israelis and the Saudis acting in unison, may be the final spark that ignites a worldwide conflagration, one threatening the very survival of Western Civilization. Two recent events have brought home the fragility of society and how easily it might be for life in the United States to be ground to a halt within a short time span with the possibility of utter chaos ensuing. The first event was a major earthquake in the U.S. state of Hawaii, which resulted in a shutdown of electrical current for hours. Nothing that functioned by electricity worked. Many citizens found that they only had a few dollars in their pocket with no access to a working ATM. The lack of electricity brought modern society in Hawaii to a virtual standstill. Had the shutdown lasted much longer panic might have ensued. The second event was the Chinese military’s shooting down of a Chinese satellite high above the earth by means of a single missile. This is being interpreted as showing that all American satellites are equally vulnerable to such an attack. The destruction of even a small number of American satellites that perform crucial functions could cripple the U.S. economy overnight. There can be no doubt but that “sleeper” terrorist cells exist within the continental U.S., which will become activated if America and its allies in the Mid East overreach themselves by expanding the war beyond Iraq. These cells have well-thought out plans that might bring the U.S. to its knees within a short time span by sabotaging electrical facilities and major modes of transportation. Even travel by car would become impossible as there would be no way to obtain fuel as the pumps of gas stations themselves operate using electricity. So I have decided to take my own steps toward preparing for personal survival for at least a six-weeks period in the event catastrophe occurs. The Internet has a number of web sites that offer practical advice about doing so. My own plans do not include relocation but merely stockpiling of essentials. Does anyone else in the forum share the same feeling of a possible impending calamity as do I?

John is on the right track in banning forum members who continually show abusive behavior. Ashton Gray's arrival in the Watergate section, with his instanteous personal attacks on other members, had the effect of ending that particular forum as a source of new information and valuable research concerning this history-changing scandal. If abusive behavior is the standard by which a member should be banned, Ashton Gray easy meets and exceeds this criterion.

Jan. 30, 2007 17:39 US strike group transits Suez Canal By ASSOCIATED PRESS ISMAILIYA, Egypt A US Navy strike group led by the assault ship USS Bataan steamed through the Suez Canal on Tuesday on its way to join the buildup of American forces in the Middle East. The Bataan, which entered Egyptian waters Monday, spent the night at the Mediterranean harbor of Port Said and was expected to leave the Egyptian part of the Red Sea later Tuesday, a Suez Canal official said, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to the press. The seven-vessel Bataan group includes 2,200 US Marines and sailors, helicopters and Harrier fighter jets, the Navy said in Bahrain. The US Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain, will be overseeing around 50 warships in the Mideast after the arrival of the Bataan and an American aircraft carrier group in February, said US Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Brown. The Fifth Fleet normally commands a fleet of about 45 ships, about a third of them from US-allied navies, Brown said. The Navy is in the midst of a regional buildup, with the group of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis on its way as well as 21,500 US soldiers being sent to Iraq. The carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower is already in the region. The United States has not had two carriers in the Mideast since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Bataan will join a second amphibious assault ship, the USS Boxer, which was on port visit in Dubai on Tuesday. Brown said the Pentagon recently extended the tour of duty of the Boxer's US Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is in Iraq. The Bataan is on a routine six-month deployment to the region to conduct "maritime security operations" which includes boarding and searching ships suspected of carrying terrorists or nuclear components to Iran, the Navy said.

SPIEGEL ONLINE - January 29, 2007 http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiege...,462782,00.html SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH CIA'S FORMER EUROPE DIRECTOR "We Probably Gave Powell the Wrong Speech" The former chief of the CIA's Europe division, Tyler Drumheller, discusses the United States foreign intelligence service's cooperation with Germany, the covert kidnapping of suspected terrorists and a Bush adminstration that ignored CIA advice and used whatever information it could find to justify an invasion of Iraq. The US attack on Baghdad (2003): "No President on my watch has had a spotless record when it comes to the CIA." SPIEGEL: Mr. Drumheller, do you still dare to travel to Europe? Drumheller: Yes, absolutely. I was a great friend of the Europeans. I grew up in Wiesbaden. I love Germany very much. SPIEGEL: Arrest warrants have been issued in Europe for a number of your former colleagues. They are suspected of involvement in the illegal kidnappings of suspected terrorists as part of the so-called "renditions" program. Doesn't this worry you? Drumheller: No. I'm not worried, but I am not allowed to discuss the issue. SPIEGEL: One of the cases is the now famous kidnapping of Khalid el-Masri, a German-Lebanese who was taken into custody at the end of 2003 in Macedonia and later flown to Afghanistan. How could the CIA allow an innocent person to be arrested? Drumheller: I'm not allowed by the agency to comment on any of those cases or the so-called "secret prisons." I would love to, but I can't. We have a life-long secrecy agreement and they are very, very strict about what you can say. SPIEGEL: The renditions program saw the kidnapping of suspected Islamist extremists to third countries. Were you involved in the program? Drumheller: I would be lying if I said no. I have very complicated feelings about the whole issue. I do see the purpose of renditions, if they are carried out properly. Guys sitting around talking about carrying out attacks as they smoke their pipes in the comfort of a European capital tend to get put off the idea if they learn that a like-minded individual has been plucked out of safety and sent elsewhere to pay for his crimes. SPIEGEL: We disagree. At the very least, you need to be certain that the targets of those renditions aren't innocent people. Drumheller: It was Vice President Dick Cheney who talked about the "dark side" we have to turn on. When he spoke those words, he was articulating a policy that amounted to "go out and get them." His remarks were evidence of the underlying approach of the administration, which was basically to turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurences. SPIEGEL: So there was no clear guidance of what is allowed in the so called "war on terrorism"? Martin H. SimonTyler Drumheller, 54, had a 25- year career working for the CIA. In 2001, he was promoted to become the American intelligence agency's chief of European operations. The spectacular kidnappings of suspected al- Qaida terrorists -- including the German- Syrian Mohammed Haydar Zammar and the German- Syrian Khaled el- Masri -- by CIA commandos happened under his watch. Drumheller, who retired in 2005, recently published his memoir, "On the Brink," in the United States. Drumheller: Every responsible chief in the CIA knows that the more covert the action, the greater the need for a clear policy and a defined target. I once had to brief Condoleezza Rice on a rendition operation, and her chief concern was not whether it was the right thing to do, but what the president would think about it. I would have expected a big meeting, a debate about whether to proceed with the plan, a couple of hours of consideration of the pros and cons. We should have been talking about the value of the target, whether the threat he presented warranted such a potentially controversial intervention. This is no way to run a covert policy. If the White House wants to take extraordinary measures to win, it can't just let things go through without any discussion about their value and morality. SPIEGEL: Perhaps the White House wanted to gloss over its own responsibility. Drumheller: Let me give you a general thought: From the perspective of the White House, it was smart to blur the lines about what was acceptable and what was not in the war on terrorism. It meant that whenever someone was overzealous in some dark interrogation cell, President (George W.) Bush and his entourage could blame someone else. The rendition teams are drawn from paramilitary officers who are brave and colorful. They are the men who went into Baghdad before the bombs and into Afghanistan before the army. If they didn't do paramilitary actions for a living, they would probably be robbing banks. Perhaps the Bush Administration deliberately created a gray area on renditions. SPIEGEL: Investigations in the European Parliament and the German parliament, the Bundestag, are trying to ascertain the extent to which European governments cooperated with the CIA after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. How close is the relationship? Drumheller: On terrorist issues very closely -- we did some very good things with the Europeans. Two weeks after Sept. 11, August Hanning (the head of the German foreign intelligence service, the BND) came with a delegation to discuss how we can make cooperation better. Elements of the Bush administration developed the view that European personal privacy laws were somehow to blame, that the Europeans are too slow. We can be very frustrating to work with. I always said, 'Stop preaching to them.' The Europeans have been dealing with terrorism for years, we can learn from their successes and failures. Its not a good spy story, but it's actually how you do this. SPIEGEL: How important is Europe to the CIA? Drumheller: The only way we will ever be able to protect ourselves properly is if we can get a handle on the threat in Europe, since that is the continent where fanatics can best learn their most crucial lesson: How to disappear in a Western crowd. Europe has become the first line of defense for the United States. It has become a training ground for terrorists, especially since the war in Iraq has heralded an underground railroad for militants to go and fight there. It is being used for young fanatics in Europe to be smuggled into Iraq to fight Americans and, assuming they survive, to return home, where they present a more potent threat than they did before they left. Since the odds against penetrating the top of al-Qaida are phenomenally high, we must pursue the foot soldiers. SPIEGEL: But given the uproar in Germany and all over Europe, it looks highly unlikely that they will cooperate fully with the CIA. Drumheller: The guys who attacked the World Trade Center didn't fly from Kabul to New York. They came from Hamburg. So the value in befriending the local intelligence services in Europe instead of alienating them is clear: We need to ensure that they are telling us everything they know. SPIEGEL: But it was your agency that was coming up with all the wrong information concerning Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. To what degree is the intelligence community responsible for the disaster? Drumheller: The agency is not blameless and no president on my watch has had a spotless record when it comes to the CIA. But never before have I seen the manipulation of intelligence that has played out since Bush took office. As chief of Europe I had a front-row seat from which to observe the unprecedented drive for intelligence justifying the Iraq war. SPIEGEL: One of the crucial bits of information the Bush administration used to justify the invasion was the supposed existence of mobile biological weapons laboratories. That came from a German BND source who was given the code- name "Curveball." An offical investigation in the United States concluded that of all of the false statements that were made, this was the most damaging of all. Drumheller: I think it is, it was a centerpiece. Curveball was an Iraqi who claimed to be an engineer working on the biological weapons program. When he became an asylum-seeker in Germany, the BND questioned him and produced a large number of reports that were passed here through the Defense Intelligence Agency. Curveball was a sort of clever fellow who carried on about his story and kept everybody pretty well convinced for a long time. SPIEGEL: There are more than a few critics in Washington who claim that the Germans, because of Curveball, bear a large part of the repsonsibility for the intelligence mess. Drumheller: There was no effort by the Germans to influence anybody from the beginning. Very senior officials in the BND expressed their doubts, that there may be problems with this guy. They were very professional. I know that there are people at the CIA who think the Germans could have set stronger caveats. But nobody says: "Here's a great intel report, but we don't believe it." There were also questions inside the CIA's analytical section, but as it went forward, this information was seized without caveats. The administration wanted to make the case for war with Iraq. They needed a tangible thing, they needed the German stuff. They couldn't go to war based just on the fact that they wanted to change the Middle East. They needed to have something threatening to which they were reacting. SPIEGEL: The German government was convinced that "Curveball" would not be used in the now famous presentation that then US Secretary of State Colin Powell gave in 2003 before the United Nations Security Council. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell as he presented "evidence" of weapon of mass destruction in Iraq to the United Nations general assembly: "We probably gave Powell the wrong speech." Drumheller: I had assured my German friends that it wouldn't be in the speech. I really thought that I had put it to bed. I had warned the CIA deputy John McLaughlin that this case could be fabricated. The night before the speech, then CIA director George Tenet called me at home. I said: "Hey Boss, be careful with that German report. It's supposed to be taken out. There are a lot of problems with that." He said: "Yeah, yeah. Right. Dont worry about that." SPIEGEL: But it turned out to be the centerpiece in Powell's presentation -- and nobody had told him about the doubts. Drumheller: I turned on the TV in my office, and there it was. So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it. SPIEGEL: So the White House just ignored the fact that the whole story might have been untrue? Drumheller: The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy. Right before the war, I said to a very senior CIA officer: "You guys must have something else," because you always think it's the CIA. "There is some secret thing I don`t know." He said: "No. But when we get to Baghdad, we are going to find warehouses full of stuff. Nobody is going to remember all of this." SPIEGEL: After the war, the CIA was finally able to talk to "Curveball" -- something the BND had never allowed before. What was the result? Drumheller: In March 2004, a fluent German-speaking officer, one of my best guys, who had a scientific background went to Germany and worked for about two weeks. Finally, at the end of it, Curveball just sort of sat back and said: "I don't have anything more to say." But he never admitted. People here always ask, was he polygraphed? Well, lie detector tests aren't used very much in Germany. SPIEGEL: Do you think it would have make a difference if the Germans had allowed you to question Curveball earlier? Drumheller: If they had allowed us to question him the way we did in March of 2004, it would have. Maybe the whole story would have turned out in a different way. SPIEGEL: In your book, you mention a very high-ranking source who told the CIA before the war that Iraq had no large active WMD program. It has been reported that the source was Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, Naji Sabri. Drumheller: I'm not allowed to say who that was. In the beginning, the administration was very excited that we had a high-level penetration, and the president was informed. I don't think anybody else had a source in Saddam's cabinet. He told us that Iraq had no biological weapons, just the research. Everything else had been destroyed after the first Gulf War. But after a while we didn't get any questions back. Finally the administration came and said that they were really not interested in what he had to say. They were interested in getting him to defect. In the end we did get permission to get back to the source, and that came from Tenet. I think without checking with the White House, he just said: "Okay. Go ahead and see what you can do." SPIEGEL: So what happened? Drumheller: There were a lot of ironies throughout this whole story. We went on a sort of worldwide chase after this fellow, and in the end, he was in one place, and our officer was in another country asking for permission to travel. I called up people who were controlling operations, and they said: "Don't worry about it. It's too late now. The war is on. The next time you see this guy, it will be at a war crimes tribunal." SPIEGEL: Should you have pressed harder? Drumheller: We made mistakes. And it may suit the White House to have people believe in a black and white version of reality -- that it could have avoided the Iraq war if the CIA had only given it a true picture of Saddam's armaments. But the truth is that the White House believed what it wanted to believe. I have done very little in my life except go to school and work for the CIA. Intellectually I think I did everything I could. Emotionally you always think you should have something more. Interview conducted by Georg Mascolo and Holger Stark. Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links: Letter from Berlin: Germany's Secret Aid for America's War (01/17/2006) http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,395676,00.html

January 28, 2007 Word for Word | Spilt Ink You Can Teach a Spy a Novelist’s Tricks By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA The New York Times E. Howard Hunt Jr., who died last week at 88, is best remembered as the man who helped plan and bungle the 1972 Watergate break-in. An ex-C.I.A. officer with a background in dirty tricks, sabotage and other skulduggery, Mr. Hunt was particularly qualified to be a “security consultant” for President Richard Nixon. In 1954, he helped overthrow the government of Guatemala, and he was later involved in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He was also the author of more than 80 espionage and detective novels, many written under pseudonyms. Did his life imitate his art, or vice versa? It’s not always easy to tell. Mr. Hunt was a maverick who attended the Naval Academy in Annapolis. So is the deputy director of Central Intelligence in “Dragon Teeth” (1997): Vice Admiral USN (Ret.) Logan “Buck” Doremus had acquired his nickname as a famed Naval Academy fullback whose ball-carrying trademark was bucking an opponent’s defensive line. And within the Agency it was often remarked that he really should have worn a helmet while playing. In 1971, Mr. Hunt tried to discredit Dr. Daniel J. Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, by burglarizing Dr. Ellsberg’s office. In “On Hazardous Duty” (1965), Mr. Hunt had already explained the art of stealing secrets: Mentally he saw them opening the door, masking the windows with black plastic and tape, setting the suction mike near the safe dial, and feeding its output into the Base computer as Harry went through dial-rotation procedures. With the safe open they would Polaroid-photograph the interior to guide them in replacing the contents. Then the laborious work of photographing page after page of documents by the illumination of the argon flashlight, methodically repositioning documents by the Polaroid picture, locking the safe, undraping the windows, and moving out. After a highly checkered career, Mr. Hunt left the C.I.A. in 1970. In “The Berlin Ending” (1973), the fictional narrator, Neal Thorpe, describes leaving the agency: I could have had a good career there, too, he reflected, but I felt things closing in, becoming too circumscribed, too stratified and bureaucratic. I wanted more freedom, so I got out. ... Maybe my problem isn’t in making decisions but in making too many of them. Is my dissatisfaction valid or is it only restlessness — like the typist who quits her job and reapplies for it two weeks later? I’d hate to think that, but what’s the answer? Mr. Hunt was fascinated by spy hardware and technology, as he demonstrates in “Murder in State” (1990): “Last year we were waiting for a defector to come out of the UN building. A man jabbed an umbrella tip in his butt and our guy died on the UN steps. We saw the poison injected, but whatever it was, the forensics couldn’t detect it. Verdict: heart attack. The moral,” he said with a grim smile, “is to avoid umbrellas.” Gumming up the opposition’s works was Mr. Hunt’s specialty, as he relates in “Body Count” (1992): He leaned over the speedboat transom and unscrewed the gas tank cap, emptied the pouch of mothballs into the tank, and replaced the top. There was enough gasoline in the fuel lines to back the boat into open water, after which the naphthalene-gasoline mix would foul the carburetor and stop the engine. It was the first sabotage trick he had ever learned. President Nixon’s downfall came after revelations of secret tape recordings and demands by Mr. Hunt and others for “hush money.” In “Angel Eyes” (1961), cash and recordings also intersect in a case of political blackmail: I said, “There’s something for sale, Zellerhaus. Something new on the market. Yesterday it was offered for the first time. The asking price is $10,000.” “Wha ... what is it?” he burbled. “You’re the wizard with the built-in radar,” I sneered. “Figure it out. It’s what got Peachy Bolac killed. It’s the recording she made of you and Quinby that afternoon not so long ago. Made public it’s enough to put you and Quinby on the rock pile until they run out of rocks. The killer’s got it, Zellerhaus. He wants ten thousand skins.” During Watergate, there were reports that Mr. Hunt kept a gun in his White House office. His alter ego, Jack Novak, packs heat in “Sonora” (2000): At a gun shop where I was well and favorably known, I bought four boxes of .45 ACP ball ammo for the Tommy gun and a box of Black Talon .38s for my H& K pistol. From a large selection of rifles I chose a .308 caliber FAL with flash suppressor and 20-round magazine, and had it fitted with an 8-power Leupold scope while I waited. Like Mr. Hunt, David Morgan, the hero of “The Hargrave Deception” (1980), is an ex-intelligence agent involved in an illegal covert operation. And like Mr. Hunt, he testifies before a Senate committee: “A little while ago I was asked to comment on a question of morality,” he said. “Your inquiry raises deep moral issues, Senator — at least for me — since I gave my word as a representative of the United States that their participation in an activity in which this government was a coequal conspirator would never be made public by me. These men,” he went on as a wave of sound swept up around him, “were brave men, patriotic in their own view and responsive to what they felt to be the call of a higher moral duty.”

You're joking right???? Hunt "told the truth much of the time"? I'd ask you to name just one time...but I know where that would lead. A bit naive is an understatement. You're certainly entitled to your opinion, however, I do not think it's shared on this forum. Dawn I can name one time that Howard Hunt told the truth. As The New York Times notes in its obituary today, Hunt served as an intelligence officer in China during World War II. Soon after I met Hunt in 1970, he told me of his wartime service. He and a few other intelligence officers were able to infiltrate behind the Japanese lines. One of the officers was captured. Hunt and the others, vastly outnumbered, had to remain hidden while they listened in agony to the screams of their fellow officer as the Japanese flayed his skin while he was alive. When Hunt finished recounting this horrific story to me, there was tears in his eyes. His sorrow and frustration at what happened still burned within him. RIP, Howard Hunt.

Was he murdered? He had agreed to give interviews to the media in order to promote his book that was due out in March. I can imagine that the CIA was pleased to hear of his death. Can't ever rule out murder with this mob. And he died on a very congested news day--what with the scheduled STOU and more--where his obit would get buried along with his rancid putrid carcass. Good riddance ya bastard. I posted the following on July 17, 2006 in the Forum's discussion of the Watergate topic. I thought it pertinent to repost here to help round out Hunt's role in that scandal: On December 6, 1996, G. Gordon Liddy gave a sworn deposition in Washington, D.C. in which he described the origins of the Watergate scandal. The deposition was given in the following styled lawsuit: In the United States District Court for the District of Columbia Maureen K. Dean and John W. Dean, Plaintiffs v. No. 92-1807 St. Martin’s Press, Inc., (HHG)(AK) Len Colodny, Robert Gettlin, G. Gordon Liddy, and Phillip Mackin Bailley, Defendants The 148 page deposition presents an encompassing summary from the viewpoint of Mr. Liddy. There are many highlights in the deposition. Attention is called especially to: Pages 86 to 96: Planning and carrying out the first break-in on May 26, 27 and 28, 1972 Page 98: Planning the June 17, 1972 break-in upon instructions from Jeb Magruder. These are Liddy’s words: And that’s what he [Magruder] wanted. So that when I went back to Hunt and Hunt was upset. He said, “My God,” he said, “Do you know how much trouble it took us to get in there in the first place? All those three entries,” and this, that and the other thing, “And now this? With all the camera and all this film and all this exposure, I mean, the longer you are in there the more vulnerable you are.” I said, “Howard, that’s what wanted, so we have to do it.” So we set up to do that. Page 103: Describing the June 17, 1972 break-in Page 105: Liddy’s words again: But in any event, we held a council of war, so to speak. And the Cubans, they said, “Look, whatever the decision is, we are up to it.” Question: Where was this council of war occurring? Answer: This was in that – the room that Mr. Hunt and I had been in, the one with all the equipment that Mr. McCord had. And McCord, he was for doing it. Hunt was very, very loathe at first, but at any rate the decision was left up to me, because I was the operational chief. And I said, “Okay, we will go again.” And they went again. And the – they got in. The two links below both lead to the 148 page transcript of the Liddy deposition. If one link does not work, try the other. If you have trouble making a link work, copy it and place it in your browser. http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:x3l4K...clnk&cd=164 http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:x3l4K...clnk&cd=165 --------------------------------------- Also, below is The New York Time's obituary of today on Hunt's passing: January 24, 2007 E. Howard Hunt, Agent Who Organized Botched Watergate Break-In, Dies at 88 By TIM WEINER http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/obituari...amp;oref=slogin E. Howard Hunt, a cold warrior for the Central Intelligence Agency who left the spy service in disillusionment, joined the Nixon White House as a secret agent and bungled the break-in at the Watergate that brought the president down in disgrace, died Tuesday in Miami. He was 88. His death, at North Shore Medical Center, was caused by pneumonia, said his wife, Laura. “This fellow Hunt,” President Richard M. Nixon muttered a few days after the June 1972 break-in, “he knows too damn much.” That was Howard Hunt’s burden: he was entrusted with too many secret missions. His career at the C.I.A. was destroyed by the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and his time as Nixon’s master of dirty tricks ended with his arrest in the Watergate case. He served 33 months in prison for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping and emerged a broken man. “I am crushed by the failure of my government to protect me and my family as in the past it has always done for its clandestine agents,” Mr. Hunt told the Senate committee investigating the Watergate affair in 1973, when he faced a provisional prison sentence of 35 years. “I cannot escape feeling that the country I have served for my entire life and which directed me to carry out the Watergate entry is punishing me for doing the very things it trained and directed me to do.” He was a high-spirited 30-year-old novelist who aspired to wealth and power when he joined the C.I.A. in 1949. He set out to live the life he had imagined for himself, a glamorous career as a spy. But Mr. Hunt was never much of a spy. He did not conduct classic espionage operations in order to gather information. His field was political warfare: dirty tricks, sabotage and propaganda. When he left the C.I.A. in 1970 after a decidedly checkered career, he had become a world-weary cynic. Trading on the thin veneer of a reputation in the clandestine service, he won a job as a $100-a-day “security consultant” at the Nixon White House in 1971. In that role, he conducted break-ins and burglaries in the name of national security. He drew no distinction between orchestrating a black-bag job at a foreign embassy in Mexico City and wiretapping the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex. He recognized no lawful limit on presidential power, convinced that “when the president does it,” as Nixon once said, “that means it is not illegal.” Mr. Hunt and the nation found out otherwise. Mr. Hunt was intelligent, erudite, suave and loyal to his friends. But the record shows that he mishandled many of the tasks he received from the C.I.A. and the White House. He was “totally self-absorbed, totally amoral and a danger to himself and anybody around him,” Samuel F. Hart, a retired United States ambassador who first met him in Uruguay in the 1950s, said in a State Department oral history. “As far as I could tell, Howard went from one disaster to another,” Mr. Hart said, “until he hit Watergate.” Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was born in Hamburg, N.Y., on Oct. 9, 1918, the son of a lawyer and a classically trained pianist who played church organ. He graduated from Brown University in June 1940 and entered the United States Naval Academy as a midshipman in February 1941. He worked as a wartime intelligence officer in China, a postwar spokesman for the Marshall Plan in Paris and a screenwriter in Hollywood. Warner Brothers had just bought his fourth novel, “Bimini Run,” a thriller set in the Caribbean, when he joined the fledgling C.I.A. in April 1949. Mr. Hunt was immediately assigned to train C.I.A. recruits in political and psychological warfare, fields in which he was a rank amateur, like most of his colleagues. He moved to Mexico City, where he became chief of station in 1950. He brought along another rookie C.I.A. officer, William F. Buckley Jr., later a prominent conservative author and publisher, who became godfather and guardian to the four children of Mr. Hunt and his wife, the former Dorothy L. Wetzel. In 1954, Mr. Hunt helped plan the covert operation that overthrew the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. “What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign,” Mr. Hunt said in a CNN documentary on the cold war, “to terrify Arbenz particularly, to terrify his troops.” Though the operation succeeded, it ushered in 40 years of military repression in Guatemala. By the time of the coup, Mr. Hunt had been removed from responsibility. He moved on to uneventful stints in Japan and Uruguay. Not until 1960 was Mr. Hunt involved in an operation that changed history. The C.I.A. had received orders from both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his successor, President John F. Kennedy, to alter or abolish the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Hunt’s assignment was to create a provisional Cuban government that would be ready to take power once the C.I.A.’s cadre of Cuban shock troops invaded the island. He fared no better than the paramilitary planners who had vowed to defeat Mr. Castro’s 60,000-man army with a 1,500-strong brigade. The careers of the American intelligence officers who planned and executed the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961 were damaged or destroyed, as was the C.I.A.’s reputation for derring-do. Mr. Hunt spent most of the 1960s carrying out desultory propaganda tasks at the agency, among them running news services and subsidizing books that fell stillborn from the press. He funneled his talent into writing paperback spy novels. His works followed a formula of sex and intrigue but offered flashes of insight. “We become lawless in a struggle for the rule of law — semi-outlaws who risk their lives to put down the savagery of others,” says the author’s alter ego, Peter Ward, in the novel “Hazardous Duty.” He retired from the C.I.A. in 1970 and secured a job with an agency-connected public relations firm in Washington. Then, a year later, came a call from the White House. A fellow Brown alumnus, Charles W. Colson, special counsel to President Nixon, hired Mr. Hunt to carry out acts of political warfare. Within weeks, Mr. Hunt was in charge of a subterranean department of dirty tricks. He went back to C.I.A. headquarters, requesting false identification, a red wig, a voice-altering device and a tiny camera. He then burglarized the Beverly Hills office of a psychiatrist treating Dr. Daniel J. Ellsberg, a former national-security aide who had leaked a copy of the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War, to The New York Times. Mr. Hunt was looking for information to discredit Mr. Ellsberg. When the break-in became public knowledge two years later, the federal case against Mr. Ellsberg on charges of leaking classified information was dismissed. Mr. Hunt, in league with another recently retired C.I.A. officer and four Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans, then led a break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex to bug the telephone lines. The job was botched, and the team went in again to remove the taps. The burglars were arrested on the night of June 17, 1972. One had Mr. Hunt’s name and a White House telephone number in his address book, a classic failure of espionage tradecraft that proved the first thread of the web that ensnarled the president. The final blow that drove Nixon from office was one of the secret White House recordings he made — the “smoking gun” tape — in which he vowed to order the C.I.A. to shut down the federal investigation of the Watergate break-in on spurious national-security grounds. By the time Nixon resigned in August 1974, Mr. Hunt was a federal prisoner. His life was in ruins: his wife had been killed in a plane crash in 1972, his legal fees approached $1 million, he had suffered a stroke, and whatever illusions he once had that his government would protect him were shattered. Standing before the judge who imprisoned him, he said he was “alone, nearly friendless, ridiculed, disgraced, destroyed as a man.” Freed from prison just before his 60th birthday, Mr. Hunt moved to Miami, where he met and married his second wife, Laura, a schoolteacher, and started a second family. Besides his wife, he is survived by the two daughters and two sons from his first marriage: Lisa Hunt of Las Vegas, Kevan Hunt Spence of Pioneer, Calif., Howard St. John Hunt of Eureka, Calif., and David Hunt of Los Angeles; two children from his second marriage, Austin and Hollis, both of Miami; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Mr. Hunt’s last book, “American Spy: My Secret History in the C.I.A., Watergate and Beyond,” written with Greg Aunapu, is to be published on March 16 with a foreword by his old friend William F. Buckley Jr. Late in life, he said he had no regrets, beyond the Bay of Pigs.

January 24, 2007 E. Howard Hunt, Agent Who Organized Botched Watergate Break-In, Dies at 88 By TIM WEINER The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/obituari...amp;oref=slogin E. Howard Hunt, a cold warrior for the Central Intelligence Agency who left the spy service in disillusionment, joined the Nixon White House as a secret agent and bungled the break-in at the Watergate that brought the president down in disgrace, died Tuesday in Miami. He was 88. His death, at North Shore Medical Center, was caused by pneumonia, said his wife, Laura. “This fellow Hunt,” President Richard M. Nixon muttered a few days after the June 1972 break-in, “he knows too damn much.” That was Howard Hunt’s burden: he was entrusted with too many secret missions. His career at the C.I.A. was destroyed by the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and his time as Nixon’s master of dirty tricks ended with his arrest in the Watergate case. He served 33 months in prison for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping and emerged a broken man. “I am crushed by the failure of my government to protect me and my family as in the past it has always done for its clandestine agents,” Mr. Hunt told the Senate committee investigating the Watergate affair in 1973, when he faced a provisional prison sentence of 35 years. “I cannot escape feeling that the country I have served for my entire life and which directed me to carry out the Watergate entry is punishing me for doing the very things it trained and directed me to do.” He was a high-spirited 30-year-old novelist who aspired to wealth and power when he joined the C.I.A. in 1949. He set out to live the life he had imagined for himself, a glamorous career as a spy. But Mr. Hunt was never much of a spy. He did not conduct classic espionage operations in order to gather information. His field was political warfare: dirty tricks, sabotage and propaganda. When he left the C.I.A. in 1970 after a decidedly checkered career, he had become a world-weary cynic. Trading on the thin veneer of a reputation in the clandestine service, he won a job as a $100-a-day “security consultant” at the Nixon White House in 1971. In that role, he conducted break-ins and burglaries in the name of national security. He drew no distinction between orchestrating a black-bag job at a foreign embassy in Mexico City and wiretapping the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex. He recognized no lawful limit on presidential power, convinced that “when the president does it,” as Nixon once said, “that means it is not illegal.” Mr. Hunt and the nation found out otherwise. Mr. Hunt was intelligent, erudite, suave and loyal to his friends. But the record shows that he mishandled many of the tasks he received from the C.I.A. and the White House. He was “totally self-absorbed, totally amoral and a danger to himself and anybody around him,” Samuel F. Hart, a retired United States ambassador who first met him in Uruguay in the 1950s, said in a State Department oral history. “As far as I could tell, Howard went from one disaster to another,” Mr. Hart said, “until he hit Watergate.” Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was born in Hamburg, N.Y., on Oct. 9, 1918, the son of a lawyer and a classically trained pianist who played church organ. He graduated from Brown University in June 1940 and entered the United States Naval Academy as a midshipman in February 1941. He worked as a wartime intelligence officer in China, a postwar spokesman for the Marshall Plan in Paris and a screenwriter in Hollywood. Warner Brothers had just bought his fourth novel, “Bimini Run,” a thriller set in the Caribbean, when he joined the fledgling C.I.A. in April 1949. Mr. Hunt was immediately assigned to train C.I.A. recruits in political and psychological warfare, fields in which he was a rank amateur, like most of his colleagues. He moved to Mexico City, where he became chief of station in 1950. He brought along another rookie C.I.A. officer, William F. Buckley Jr., later a prominent conservative author and publisher, who became godfather and guardian to the four children of Mr. Hunt and his wife, the former Dorothy L. Wetzel. In 1954, Mr. Hunt helped plan the covert operation that overthrew the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. “What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign,” Mr. Hunt said in a CNN documentary on the cold war, “to terrify Arbenz particularly, to terrify his troops.” Though the operation succeeded, it ushered in 40 years of military repression in Guatemala. By the time of the coup, Mr. Hunt had been removed from responsibility. He moved on to uneventful stints in Japan and Uruguay. Not until 1960 was Mr. Hunt involved in an operation that changed history. The C.I.A. had received orders from both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his successor, President John F. Kennedy, to alter or abolish the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Hunt’s assignment was to create a provisional Cuban government that would be ready to take power once the C.I.A.’s cadre of Cuban shock troops invaded the island. He fared no better than the paramilitary planners who had vowed to defeat Mr. Castro’s 60,000-man army with a 1,500-strong brigade. The careers of the American intelligence officers who planned and executed the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961 were damaged or destroyed, as was the C.I.A.’s reputation for derring-do. Mr. Hunt spent most of the 1960s carrying out desultory propaganda tasks at the agency, among them running news services and subsidizing books that fell stillborn from the press. He funneled his talent into writing paperback spy novels. His works followed a formula of sex and intrigue but offered flashes of insight. “We become lawless in a struggle for the rule of law — semi-outlaws who risk their lives to put down the savagery of others,” says the author’s alter ego, Peter Ward, in the novel “Hazardous Duty.” He retired from the C.I.A. in 1970 and secured a job with an agency-connected public relations firm in Washington. Then, a year later, came a call from the White House. A fellow Brown alumnus, Charles W. Colson, special counsel to President Nixon, hired Mr. Hunt to carry out acts of political warfare. Within weeks, Mr. Hunt was in charge of a subterranean department of dirty tricks. He went back to C.I.A. headquarters, requesting false identification, a red wig, a voice-altering device and a tiny camera. He then burglarized the Beverly Hills office of a psychiatrist treating Dr. Daniel J. Ellsberg, a former national-security aide who had leaked a copy of the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War, to The New York Times. Mr. Hunt was looking for information to discredit Mr. Ellsberg. When the break-in became public knowledge two years later, the federal case against Mr. Ellsberg on charges of leaking classified information was dismissed. Mr. Hunt, in league with another recently retired C.I.A. officer and four Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans, then led a break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex to bug the telephone lines. The job was botched, and the team went in again to remove the taps. The burglars were arrested on the night of June 17, 1972. One had Mr. Hunt’s name and a White House telephone number in his address book, a classic failure of espionage tradecraft that proved the first thread of the web that ensnarled the president. The final blow that drove Nixon from office was one of the secret White House recordings he made — the “smoking gun” tape — in which he vowed to order the C.I.A. to shut down the federal investigation of the Watergate break-in on spurious national-security grounds. By the time Nixon resigned in August 1974, Mr. Hunt was a federal prisoner. His life was in ruins: his wife had been killed in a plane crash in 1972, his legal fees approached $1 million, he had suffered a stroke, and whatever illusions he once had that his government would protect him were shattered. Standing before the judge who imprisoned him, he said he was “alone, nearly friendless, ridiculed, disgraced, destroyed as a man.” Freed from prison just before his 60th birthday, Mr. Hunt moved to Miami, where he met and married his second wife, Laura, a schoolteacher, and started a second family. Besides his wife, he is survived by the two daughters and two sons from his first marriage: Lisa Hunt of Las Vegas, Kevan Hunt Spence of Pioneer, Calif., Howard St. John Hunt of Eureka, Calif., and David Hunt of Los Angeles; two children from his second marriage, Austin and Hollis, both of Miami; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Mr. Hunt’s last book, “American Spy: My Secret History in the C.I.A., Watergate and Beyond,” written with Greg Aunapu, is to be published on March 16 with a foreword by his old friend William F. Buckley Jr. Late in life, he said he had no regrets, beyond the Bay of Pigs. ------------------------ Watergate Figure E. Howard Hunt Dies Watergate Figure E. Howard Hunt Dies at 88; Organized Break-In That Led to Scandal By TIM REYNOLDS The Associated Press January 23, 2007 MIAMI - E. Howard Hunt, who helped organize the Watergate break-in, leading to the greatest scandal in American political history and the downfall of Richard Nixon's presidency, died Tuesday. He was 88. Hunt died at a Miami hospital after a lengthy bout with pneumonia, according to his son Austin Hunt. The elder Hunt was many things: World War II soldier, CIA officer, organizer of both a Guatemalan coup and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, and author of more than 80 books, many from the spy-tale genre. Yet the bulk of his notoriety came from the one thing he always insisted he wasn't a Watergate burglar. He often said he preferred the term "Watergate conspirator." "I will always be called a Watergate burglar, even though I was never in the damn place," Hunt told The Miami Herald in 1997. "But it happened. Now I have to make the best of it." While working for the CIA, Hunt recruited four of the five actual burglars Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Rolando Eugenio Martinez and Frank Sturgis, all who had worked for Hunt a decade earlier in the Bay of Pigs invasion. All four also had ties to Miami, where part of the Watergate plan was hatched. "According to street gossip both in Washington and Miami, Mr. Castro had been making substantial contributions to the McGovern campaign," Hunt told CNN in February 1992. "And the idea was ... that somewhere in the books of the Democratic National Committee those illicit funds would be found." The idea was wrong, and the fallout escalated into huge political scandal. Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974. Twenty-five men were sent to prison for their involvement in the botched plan, and a new era of skepticism toward government began. "I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land," Hunt told People magazine for its May 20, 1974, issue. "I viewed this like any other mission. It just happened to take place inside this country." The Hunt recruits and James W. McCord Jr., security director for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, were arrested June 17, 1972, at the Watergate office building. One of the burglars was found to have Hunt's White House phone number. Hunt and fellow operative G. Gordon Liddy, along with the five arrested at Watergate, were indicted on federal charges three months later. Hunt and his recruits pleaded guilty in January 1973, and McCord and Liddy were found guilty. In March 1973, McCord wrote a letter to the federal judge in his case, John J. Sirica, claiming perjury occurred and that there was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent. In a secretly recorded conversation that same month that became one of the key pieces of evidence of the White House cover-up, White House Counsel John Dean told Nixon that "we're being blackmailed ... Hunt now is demanding another $72,000 for his own personal expenses; another $50,000 to pay his attorneys' fees." After some further discussion, Nixon said: "If you need the money, I mean you could get the money. ... I mean it's not easy, but it could be done." Hunt eventually spent 33 months in prison on a conspiracy charge, and said he was bitter that he was sent to jail while Nixon was allowed to resign. "I felt that in true politician's fashion, he'd assumed a degree of responsibility but not the blame," he told The Associated Press in 1992. "It wasn't my idea to go into the Watergate." Hunt also was involved in organizing an event that foreshadowed Watergate: the burglary of the the office of the Beverly Hills psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971. Hunt and Liddy the so-called White House "plumbers" broke into Ellsberg's office to gain information about him. The break-in was revealed during the 1973 espionage trial against Ellsberg and codefendant Anthony Russo, and was one of several incidents that led to dismissal of the case because of government misconduct. Watergate was one of many wild tales some true, some not that followed Hunt through the final decades of his colorful life. His alleged involvement in the purported conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy was among the most popular spy-esque stories Hunt was linked with. One theory, which still exists in the minds of some, was that Hunt was in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot, that his image was captured in photographs from the scene. "I was in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 22, 1963," Hunt wrote in a December 1975 letter to Time magazine, a note penned while he was incarcerated at Eglin Air Force Base's prison camp. "It is a physical law that an object can occupy only one space at one time." Everette Howard Hunt was born Oct. 9, 1918, in Hamburg, N.Y., graduated from Brown University in 1940 and was commissioned as a Naval Reserve officer in Annapolis, Md. the following year. He served as a destroyer gunnery officer, was injured at sea and honorably discharged from the Navy. From 1949 through 1970 he worked for the CIA, and was involved in the operation that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz as Guatemala's president in 1954, plus the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Hunt declared bankruptcy in 1997, largely blaming his Watergate fines and legal fees. A $650,000 libel settlement he was awarded in 1981 stemming from an article alleging his involvement in the assassination of Kennedy was overturned, and he never received any of that money. "I think I've paid my debt to society," Hunt said in 1997. "I think I've paid it amply." Hunt spent his final years in a modest home in Miami's Biscayne Park neighborhood with his second wife, Laura Martin Hunt, and declined many interview requests from The Associated Press. He has a memoir coming out next month titled "American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond." Hunt's first wife, the former Dorothy Wetzel Day Goutiere, died in a plane crash in 1972. Besides his wife, Hunt was survived by six children. A memorial service was scheduled for Monday in Miami. http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2817001&page=3

Below is a more complete version of the AP story by Tim Reynolds in which Howard refutes allegations of being involved in the JFK assassination: _______ Watergate Figure E. Howard Hunt Dies Watergate Figure E. Howard Hunt Dies at 88; Organized Break-In That Led to Scandal By TIM REYNOLDS The Associated Press January 23. 2007 MIAMI - E. Howard Hunt, who helped organize the Watergate break-in, leading to the greatest scandal in American political history and the downfall of Richard Nixon's presidency, died Tuesday. He was 88. Hunt died at a Miami hospital after a lengthy bout with pneumonia, according to his son Austin Hunt. The elder Hunt was many things: World War II soldier, CIA officer, organizer of both a Guatemalan coup and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, and author of more than 80 books, many from the spy-tale genre. Yet the bulk of his notoriety came from the one thing he always insisted he wasn't a Watergate burglar. He often said he preferred the term "Watergate conspirator." "I will always be called a Watergate burglar, even though I was never in the damn place," Hunt told The Miami Herald in 1997. "But it happened. Now I have to make the best of it." While working for the CIA, Hunt recruited four of the five actual burglars Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Rolando Eugenio Martinez and Frank Sturgis, all who had worked for Hunt a decade earlier in the Bay of Pigs invasion. All four also had ties to Miami, where part of the Watergate plan was hatched. "According to street gossip both in Washington and Miami, Mr. Castro had been making substantial contributions to the McGovern campaign," Hunt told CNN in February 1992. "And the idea was ... that somewhere in the books of the Democratic National Committee those illicit funds would be found." The idea was wrong, and the fallout escalated into huge political scandal. Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974. Twenty-five men were sent to prison for their involvement in the botched plan, and a new era of skepticism toward government began. "I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land," Hunt told People magazine for its May 20, 1974, issue. "I viewed this like any other mission. It just happened to take place inside this country." The Hunt recruits and James W. McCord Jr., security director for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, were arrested June 17, 1972, at the Watergate office building. One of the burglars was found to have Hunt's White House phone number. Hunt and fellow operative G. Gordon Liddy, along with the five arrested at Watergate, were indicted on federal charges three months later. Hunt and his recruits pleaded guilty in January 1973, and McCord and Liddy were found guilty. In March 1973, McCord wrote a letter to the federal judge in his case, John J. Sirica, claiming perjury occurred and that there was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent. In a secretly recorded conversation that same month that became one of the key pieces of evidence of the White House cover-up, White House Counsel John Dean told Nixon that "we're being blackmailed ... Hunt now is demanding another $72,000 for his own personal expenses; another $50,000 to pay his attorneys' fees." After some further discussion, Nixon said: "If you need the money, I mean you could get the money. ... I mean it's not easy, but it could be done." Hunt eventually spent 33 months in prison on a conspiracy charge, and said he was bitter that he was sent to jail while Nixon was allowed to resign. "I felt that in true politician's fashion, he'd assumed a degree of responsibility but not the blame," he told The Associated Press in 1992. "It wasn't my idea to go into the Watergate." Hunt also was involved in organizing an event that foreshadowed Watergate: the burglary of the the office of the Beverly Hills psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971. Hunt and Liddy the so-called White House "plumbers" broke into Ellsberg's office to gain information about him. The break-in was revealed during the 1973 espionage trial against Ellsberg and codefendant Anthony Russo, and was one of several incidents that led to dismissal of the case because of government misconduct. Watergate was one of many wild tales some true, some not that followed Hunt through the final decades of his colorful life. His alleged involvement in the purported conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy was among the most popular spy-esque stories Hunt was linked with. One theory, which still exists in the minds of some, was that Hunt was in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot, that his image was captured in photographs from the scene. "I was in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 22, 1963," Hunt wrote in a December 1975 letter to Time magazine, a note penned while he was incarcerated at Eglin Air Force Base's prison camp. "It is a physical law that an object can occupy only one space at one time." Everette Howard Hunt was born Oct. 9, 1918, in Hamburg, N.Y., graduated from Brown University in 1940 and was commissioned as a Naval Reserve officer in Annapolis, Md. the following year. He served as a destroyer gunnery officer, was injured at sea and honorably discharged from the Navy. From 1949 through 1970 he worked for the CIA, and was involved in the operation that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz as Guatemala's president in 1954, plus the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Hunt declared bankruptcy in 1997, largely blaming his Watergate fines and legal fees. A $650,000 libel settlement he was awarded in 1981 stemming from an article alleging his involvement in the assassination of Kennedy was overturned, and he never received any of that money. "I think I've paid my debt to society," Hunt said in 1997. "I think I've paid it amply." Hunt spent his final years in a modest home in Miami's Biscayne Park neighborhood with his second wife, Laura Martin Hunt, and declined many interview requests from The Associated Press. He has a memoir coming out next month titled "American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond." Hunt's first wife, the former Dorothy Wetzel Day Goutiere, died in a plane crash in 1972. Besides his wife, Hunt was survived by six children. A memorial service was scheduled for Monday in Miami. http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2817001&page=3

Perhaps Len, with his amazing ability to limit the human toll of aerial agression, could design a strike on Israel that would destroy only its WMDs (Dimona, Nes Ziona and the rest) "and perhaps a few casualties". The mullahs might be interested in that, Len. But I doubt they'd believe you, either. Superstorms, Aliens and the Bomb 19-Jan-2007 By Whitley Strieber http://www.unknowncountry.com/journal/ As I write this, there is a phenomenal story on Unknowncountry.com that discusses the terrible weather presently sweeping the whole western world, literally from California to Poland. This is the closest we have ever come to a superstorm, and it comes a few weeks after a disturbing event involving the Gulf Stream. Quite plainly, the world's system of currents is changing, possibly collapsing, and it is possible that there is an as yet undocumented connection between the unusually harsh weather and current changes. At the same time, the world is closer to nuclear war than it has been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Israel must prevent Iran from producing U-235, and they could go online with this in a matter of months. If they do produce it, they will be able to export fissionable material to terrorist groups like Hamas, in order to enable them to create dirty bombs. The fact that the detonation of such bombs in Israel will also destroy the Palestinian people is considered an acceptable loss. Their lives are not as important as the ruin of Israel, so the fact that they must die in order to kill the Jewish state is not thought by Iran, Syria, Hamas or other concerned entities to be too great a price. In effect, all the Palestinians are to be considered suicide bombers, if the result is that Israel is eradicated. Because US intelligence has failed in Iran, there is no adequate intelligence about a single, crucial element that might have saved us from the use of nuclear weapons in the effort to prevent Iran from manufacturing U-235. Specifically, western intelligence does not possess information about the location of air intakes and vents that would enable highly accurate American 'bunker busters' to penetrate into buried Iranian nuclear facilities and destroy them. This means that there is only one way to insure that the centrifuges that are essential to the production of U-235, and are buried deeper than US bunker busters can penetrate without going down airshafts, can be destroyed: neutron bombs will have to be used. It is likely that the bombs will come from Israel, and also possible that nobody, not Iran, not the US, not Israel, will say that they have been used. A neutron bomb does not leave a radiation signature. It would be observed as a very large explosion. The sheet of devastatingly destructive neutrons that it emitted would kill every living thing for miles around, and would overload every electrical and electronic circuit it reached. But it would not persist. There would be no fallout. There would be no irradiated areas on the ground. It is possible that such a bomb has already been detonated in the Iranian desert. There was a large explosion in the area a few days ago, reported on Unknowncountry.com but entirely ignored by western media. It was briefly reported in the Iranian press, then it disappeared. However, the greater possibility is that no attack has taken place yet, and that the explosion is somehow connected with what is now a literally fantastic amount of UFO activity unfolding over Iran. Iran has always been a UFO hotspot. The September, 1976 UFO chase over Tehran remains one of the best documented UFO cases of all time, and the October 22, 2005 interview I did with General Parviz Jafari on Dreamland, who actually flew the chase plane, was one of the most fantastic experiences of my life. Over the past few months, the number of UFO events in Iran has reached a completely unprecedented level. There have been a few UFO flaps as intense: the Scandinavian "Ghost Rocket" incidents in 1946, the great American UFO wave from the July 1947 Roswell Incident to the July, 1952 Washington overflights, the Belgian events of 1989-1990 are other equally intense flaps. UFOs began to appear in numbers after the end of World War II, when atomic weapons came into use. It is possible that the danger of nulear war in Iran has attracted them to that area, as well. I am long past questioning whether or not the visitors exist. They do exist, and the United States Government has been lying about them from the beginning, and still does--as the FAA did just this past November, when it claimed that a sighting at O'Hare Airport in Chicago by United pilots and other personnel was an unusual cloud. But the United States Government is a failed institution. It has drowned its credibility beneath a torrent of lies on virtually every important issue that the world faces, over the past fifty catastrophic years. The American people support the Constitution and the institutions it created, not the parasites who have come to infect those institutions since secrecy became the center of state power with the passage of the catastrophic National Security Act of 1947. This ruined the American republic, and it is going to take a generation of wise, firm and compassionate leadership to restore it. Hopefully, that will come from one day, but right now, I don't see it. It is time to face the fact that the US government as it is now constituted is worthless junk, and to abandon its obsessive, cancerous secrecy and its endless lies. Although I am quite certain that the visitors are real, the many years I have spent in contact with them, thinking about them, talking to others in contact, reading their stories and examining my own life and feelings about them, I must state clearly and frankly that I do not know what they are. However, I have been observing them for a long time, and I feel that they are concerned with our environment, it is my belief that they are making a record of human DNA against the possibility that the species may go extinct, and that they have attempted to hybridize human beings in some way, but my observation of this in my own life has not suggested that there has been success. In fact, I think that they have had a lot of failure here that they do not fully understand, and that they think that people who enter into leadership in human society are motivated by a profound death wish, and that, for the most part, they work to impede the chances of the species to survive, and that our populations support them. They do not understand what about us that we so hate, that we would be marching like this toward extinction. When I was younger and in somewhat more direct communication with them at times, they indicated to me that they would make themselves known in the context of environmental collapse. As that is happening now, they could emerge now. However, what happens may be very different. Let me tell you why. I got the impression that they take a long view of history. They are interested in the state of mankind not only this year or in a hundred years, but in a million years and a billion years. The evolution of intelligence is important to them, and they are here to help it through a difficult time on earth, so that it can, in time, reach a state where it offers some sort of value to others. I am pretty sure that intelligent life is extremely rare, and that there is a sort of choir of consciousness, and that there is a desire that our voices be joined to it, in the interest of the new. I am trying to get used to thinking about the larger issues that face the thin web of conscious species that are spread across the cosmos, and I think people need to think about such things, too. When they do, the actions of the visitors will become more understandable. The reason I say this is that they may be taking sides in the present conflict between the west and Islam, and it is not obvious to me, if they do, that they will take the side of the west. The reason is simple. They want the species to survive, and encouraging the west might be the least effective way to accomplish that objective. The United States is by far the world's largest polluter, followed by Europe, then China and India, who are catching up fast. The problem is that the United States has willfully ignored the problem, despite the overwhelming evidence that it needs to be addressed. At present, even such outrageous violators as the Exxon Corporation are beginning to realize the peril and respond, but it may well be too late, and the visitors may consider that we've waited too long. If Islam should win the current world-historical conflict, the entire planet will be plunged into a period of economic stagnation and scientific decline that could last a very long time. The result of this would be that mankind will survive longer, and therefore have a greater chance to make the breakthroughs that it needs to join the choir of consciousness that so needs new voices. I do not think that the combination of ominous environmental strains, the possibility of nuclear war, and the sudden appearance of the visitors all over the world, and especially at the nexus of the possible nuclear conflict is an accident. They are part of our lives and part of our world, and my sense of it is that governments who pretend otherwise, at this point, do so at their peril.

Kuwait media: U.S. military strike on Iran seen by April www.chinaview.cn 2007-01-14 15:19:28 Special report: Iran Nuclear Crisis KUWAIT CITY, Jan. 14 (Xinhua) -- U.S. might launch a military strike on Iran before April 2007, Kuwait-based daily Arab Times released on Sunday said in a report. The report, written by Arab Times' Editor-in-chief Ahmed al-Jarallah citing a reliable source, said that the attack would be launched from the sea, while Patriot missiles would guard all Arab countries in the Gulf. Recent statements emanating from the United States indicated the Bush administration's new strategy for Iraq doesn't include any proposal to make a compromise or negotiate with Syria or Iran, added the report. The source told al-Jarallah that U.S. President George W. Bush recently had held a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other assistants in the White House, where they discussed the plan to attack Iran in minute detail. Vice President Dick Cheney highlighted the threat posed by Iranto not only Saudi Arabia but also the whole Gulf region, according to the source. "Tehran is not playing politics. Iranian leaders are using their country's religious influence to support the aggressive regime's ambition to expand," Dick Cheney was quoted by the source as saying. Indicating participants of the meeting agreed to impose restrictions on the ambitions of Iranian regime before April 2007 without exposing other countries in the region to any danger, the source said "they have chosen April as British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said it will be the last month in office for him. The United States has to take action against Iran and Syria before April 2007." Claiming the attack will be launched from the sea and not from any country in the region, he said "the U.S. and its allies will target the oil installations and nuclear facilities of Iran ensuring there is no environmental catastrophe or after effects." The source added that the U.S. has started sending its warships to the Gulf and the build-up would continue until Washington has the required number by the end of this month. "U.S. forces in Iraq and other countries in the region will be protected against any Iranian missile attack by an advanced Patriot missile system," the source noted. The Bush administration believes that attacking Iran will create a new power balance in the region, calming down the situation in Iraq and paving the way for their democratic project, which have to be suspended due to the interference of Tehran and Damascus in Iraq, according to the source.

Major investment bank issues warning on strike against Iran 01/15/2007 Filed by Michael Roston www.rawstory.com http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Major_in...ng_on_0115.html Warning that investors might be "in for a shock," a major investment bank has told the financial community that a preemptive strike by Israel with American backing could hit Iran's nuclear program, RAW STORY has learned. The banking division of ING Group released a memo on Jan. 9 entitled "Attacking Iran: The market impact of a surprise Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities." ING is a global financial services company of Dutch origin that includes banking, insurance, and other divisions. The report was authored by Charles Robinson, the Chief Economist for Emerging Europe, Middle East, and Africa. He also authored an update in ING's daily update Prophet that further underscored the bank's perception of the risks of an attack. ING's Robertson admitted that an attack on Iran was "high impact, if low probability," but explained some of the reasons why a strike might go forward. The Jan. 9 dispatch, describes Israel as "not prepared to accept the same doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’ that kept the peace during the Cold War. Israel is adamant that this is not an option for such a geographically small country....So if Israel is convinced Iran is aiming to develop a nuclear weapon, it must presumably act at some point." Sketching out the time line for an attack, Robertson says that "we can be fairly sure that if Israel is going to act, it will be keen to do so while Bush and Cheney are in the White House." He further suggests a February-March 2007 time line is possible for several reasons. First, there is a comparable time line with Israel's strike on Iraq's nuclear program in 1981, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's political troubles within Israel. Second, late February will see Iran's deadline to comply with UN Security Council Resolution 1737, and Israel could use a failure of Iran and the UN to follow through as justification for a strike. Finally, greater US military presence in the region at that time could be seen by Israel as the protection from retaliation that it needs. In his Jan. 15 update, Robertson points to a political reason that could make the assault more likely - personnel changes in the Bush administration may have sidelined opponents of attacking Iran. Bush recently removed General John Abizaid as commander of US forces in the Middle East, and John Negroponte as Director of National Intelligence, both of whom have stated that attacking Iran is not a priority or the right move at this time. The deployment of Patriot missile batteries, highlighted in President Bush's recent White House speech on America's Iraq policy, also pointed to a need to defend against Iranian missiles. The ING memo was first sent to RAW STORY by an anonymous tip and confirmed Monday by staff on the bank's emerging markets office, who passed along the Jan. 15 update. A screenshot of the first page is provided below. http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Major_in...ng_on_0115.html

Len - no matter how many times I post detailed, documented material from Juan Cole indicating that the 'wipe off the map' comment was a blatant mistranslation of the Iranian President's words - and despite your apparent inability to rebut Cole on this - you continue repeating the same old scare story. Oh well, I guess if I too held a 'my country right or wrong' approach to life - and 'my country' was menacing it's neighbours with, among other things, REAL nuclear weapons, I might also be desperate to hang onto this particular lie. Without it, Israel's threats to Iran are more clearly seen for precisely what they are: outrageous, dangerous, aggressive bullying that attempts to enforce egregious double standards in Israel's favour. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is and always has been a secular spokesman for the true power in Iran, the Clerical leadership, who has spoken for the obliteration of Israel so pervasively that it has become the stuff of slogans and banners. Juan Cole’s credentials as an expert in Iranian policy are not impeccable. For example: http://www.slate.com/id/2140947/ “Cole is a minor nuisance on the fringes of the academic Muslim apologist community.” It would be better put to say that in the light of international scrutiny over what is obviously Iran’s goal of uranium high enrichment, President Ahmadinejad has been told to lower the tenor of his anti-Israeli rhetoric by his handlers. The evidence that Iran is in pursuit of nuclear weapons is convincing. Unless Iran is in pursuit of advanced nuclear research (that they are only developing peaceful nuclear power capability for electricity generation is laughable) on their current course (unless the recent stall in enrichment work indicates a more permanent diplomatic shift) they should have a nuclear weapon(s) within two or three years. Would military action against Iran prevent a limited nuclear war in the Mid-east or could it cause one? The effect of a military strike against Iran could have the effect of polarizing Arabic speaking nations against Israel and possibly the US, resulting in a much more dangerous situation than would otherwise exist, even with Iran having nuclear weapons capability. The effect of any overt military action against Iran could easily backlash. The war in Iraq and the bombing of the Iraqi Osirak reactor should have taught us that. I find that reading Prof. Juan Cole's commentary in his daily blog, www.juancole.com, is extraordinary worthwhile. Below is an insightful article by him of today from a California newspaper: MISREADING THE ENEMY By Juan Cole San Jose Mercury News 1/14/2007 http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews...al/16459277.htm President Bush's escalation of the Iraq War is premised on a profound misunderstanding of who the enemies are, how to deal with them and what the limits are of U.S. power. The president cannot seem to let go of his fixation on Al-Qaida, a minor actor in Iraq, and his determination to confront Iran and Syria. He still assumes that the insurgents are outsiders to their neighborhoods and that U.S. troops can chase away the miscreants and keep them out, acting as a sort of neighborhood watch in khaki. In fact, Iraq's Sunni Arab elite is playing the spoiler, and until a deal is negotiated with its members, no one will be allowed to enjoy the new Iraq. Scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, who from the beginning spearheaded the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, express confidence that the United States, which has a $12 trillion economy, an army over a million strong, and a population of 300 million, can overwhelm Iraq. They point out that Iraq only has an economy of $100 billion, a population of 27 million, and a guerrilla movement of just tens of thousands. This comparison is deeply misleading, and it will get thousands of Americans killed. Guerrilla movements can succeed against much wealthier, more populous and better-armed enemies, as happened in Algeria in the late 1950s through 1962 when the National Liberation Front expelled the French. The real question is not America's supposed superiority (which so far has not brought it victory) but what exactly the resources and tactics of the enemy are and whether they can be defeated. The answer to the second question is ``No.'' Who is the enemy in Iraq, exactly? In the first instance, it is some 50 major Sunni Arab guerrilla groups. These have names such as the 1920 Revolution Brigades, the Army of Muhammad, and the Holy Warrior Council. Some are rooted in the Baath party, an Arab nationalist and socialist party that had ruled Iraq since 1968. Others have a base in city quarters or in rural clans. Some are made up of fundamentalist Muslims. One calls itself ``Al-Qaida'' but has no real links to Osama bin Laden and his organization, and has simply adopted the name. The Baathists and neo-Baathists, led by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri (once a right-hand man of Saddam Hussein), are probably the most important and deadliest of these guerrilla groups. These guerrilla cells are rooted in the Sunni Arab sector, some 20 percent of Iraq's population, which had enjoyed centuries of dominance in Iraq. From it came the high bureaucrats, the managers of companies, the officer corps, the people who know how to get things done. They know where some 200,000 remaining tons of hidden explosives are, secreted around the country by the former regime. They are for the most part unable to accept being ruled by what they see as a new government of Shiite ayatollahs and Kurdish warlords, or being occupied by the U.S. Army and Marines. These Iraqi Sunnis enjoy the support of millions of committed and sometimes wealthy co-religionists in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the oil kingdoms of the Persian Gulf. The Sunni Arab guerrilla cells have successfully pursued a spoiler strategy in Iraq. By engaging in assassinations, firefights and bombings, they have made it clear that if they are not happy in the new Iraq, no one is going to be. Did U.S. engineers repair electricity stations? The Sunni guerrillas sabotaged them. Did the new regime attempt to export petroleum from the northern city of Kirkuk through Turkey? The guerrillas hit the pipelines. Did the U.S. military attempt to plant 50 bases around the country? The cells targeted them for mortar attacks and roadside bombs, inflicting a steady and horrible attrition, leaving more than 25,000 GIs killed or wounded. Focus on towns and cities The Sunni guerrillas took over territory where they could, mainly concentrating on villages, towns and city quarters in the center, north and west of the country. At some points, cities like Al-Fallujah and much of Ar-Ramadi, Al-Hadithah, Samarra and Tikrit have been at least in part under their control. They have entire districts of Mosul and Baghdad. They have attempted to cut the capital off from fuel, and they steal and smuggle petroleum to support their war. In areas they only partly control, or in enemy areas, they set off bombs or send in death squads to make object lessons of opponents. The guerrillas know they cannot fight the U.S. military head-on. But they do not need to. They know something that the Americans could not entirely understand. Iraq is a country of clans and tribes, of Hatfields and McCoys, of grudges and feuds. The clans are more important than religious identities such as Sunni or Shiite. They are more important than ethnicities such as Kurdish or Arab or Turkmen. All members of the clan are honor-bound to defend or avenge all the other members. They are bands not of brothers but of cousins. The guerrillas mobilized these clans against the U.S. troops and against one another. Is a U.S. platoon traveling through a neighborhood of the Dulaim clan, where people are out shopping? They hit the convoy, and the panicked troops lay down fire around them. They kill members of the Dulaim clan. They are now defined as the American tribe, and they now have a feud with the Dulaim. Members of the Dulaim cannot hold their heads up high until they avenge the deaths of their cousins by killing Americans. Unbelievable cruelty The guerrillas also provoke clan feuds between adherents of the two major sects of Islam, the Sunni and the Shiite. They pursue this goal with unbelievable cruelty. They will blow up a big marriage party held by a Shiite clan, killing bride, groom and revelers. They know that Muslims try to bury the dead the same day, so there will be a funeral. They blow up the funeral, too. The Shiite clan knows who the Sunni clans are that support the insurgency. The Shiites who have been attacked then join the radical Mahdi Army out of anger and fear, and send death squads at night to take revenge on the Sunni clan. If American troops step in to stop the Shiites from taking revenge, that produces a feud between the U.S. and the Shiite clans. The ordinary Sunnis under attack from the vengeful Shiite death squads turn for protection to the Sunni guerrillas. The deliberately provoked feuds have the effect of mobilizing the Sunni Arabs and garnering their support for the guerrillas. The guerrillas have opened fronts against the Americans, against the police and army of the new government and against the Shiites. There is a third front, in Mosul and Kirkuk, against the Kurds. The guerrillas hit Kirkuk's oil pipelines, police, political party headquarters and ordinary Kurds in hopes of keeping the Kurdistan Regional Government from annexing oil-rich Kirkuk to itself. U.S. soldiers cannot stop the Sunni Arab guerrilla cells from setting bombs or assassinating people. That is clear after nearly four years. And since they cannot stop them, they also are powerless to halt the growing number of intense clan and religious feuds. The United States cannot stop the sabotage that hurts petroleum exports in the north and stops electricity from being delivered for more than a few hours a day. President Bush in his speech Wednesday imagined that guerrillas were coming into neighborhoods in Baghdad and in the cities of Al-Anbar province from the outside. He suggested that, as the solution to this problem, U.S. and Iraqi troops should clear them out and then hold the city quarters for some time, to stop them from coming back. But the guerrillas are not outsiders. They are the people of those city quarters, who keep guns in their closets and come out masked at night to engage in killing and sabotage. Security comes first Bush believes that $1 billion invested in a jobs program will generate employment that would make young men less likely to succumb to the blandishments of the guerrilla recruiters. But without security you cannot have a thriving economy of the sort that produces jobs, and any money you put into such a situation will just be frittered away. The guerrillas often make $300 a month, a very good salary in today's Iraq. There is little likelihood that Bush's jobs program will generate many jobs that will draw Iraqis away from their guerrilla groups and militias. For a lot of them, serving is a matter of neighborhood protection or ideological commitment. Not everything is about money. Another reason that Bush's $1 billion for jobs is not that impressive is that Iran is offering Iraq $1 billion in aid as well. And guerrillas in the southern port of Basra are estimated to be stealing and smuggling $2 billion a year from the city's oil facilities. Add all that sort of thing up, and the United States is being outspent by a wide margin. Since the Sunni Arab guerrillas cannot be defeated or stopped from provoking massive clan feuds that destabilize the country, there is only one way out of the quagmire. The United States and the Shiite government of Iraq must negotiate a mutually satisfactory settlement with the Sunni Arab guerrilla leaders. Those talks would be easier if the guerrillas would form a civil political party to act as their spokesman. They should be encouraged to do so. Their first and most urgent demand is that the United States set a timetable for withdrawal of its troops. The United States should take them up on their offer to talk once a timetable is announced. Bush's commitment of more than 20,000 troops is intended to address only one of the guerrillas' tactics, taking and holding neighborhoods. At that, he is concentrating on only a small part of the Sunni Arab territories. The guerrillas do not need to hold such neighborhoods to continue to engage in sabotage and the provocation of artificial feuds. As long as the Sunni Arabs of Iraq are so deeply unhappy, they will simply generate more guerrillas over time. Bush is depending on military tactics to win a war that can only be won by negotiation.

I see where my former Watergate client, Howard Hunt, is fingering LBJ as the culprit in the Kennedy assassination. My educated guess is that at some point in time in the last year or so Hunt has been a reader of this Forum as he gathered information to support his thesis. Below is a another news report about Hunt's proposed book: ------------------------------------- Convicted Watergate 'plumber' claims LBJ may have had JFK assassinated 01/14/2007 Filed by Ron Brynaert www.rawstory.com http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Convicte...J_may_0114.html In a soon-to-be-published book, a former CIA agent, convicted for his role as a "plumber" in the Watergate scandal, claims that former President Lyndon B. Johnson may have played a role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. According to the New York Post's gossip column, Page Six, "E. Howard Hunt – the shadowy former CIA man who organized the Watergate break-in and was once eyed in the assassination of President Kennedy – bizarrely says that Lyndon Johnson could be seen as a prime suspect in the rubout." "Only the most far-out conspiracy theorists believe in scenarios like Hunt's," the column continues. "But in a new memoir, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond, due out in April, Hunt, 88, writes: 'Having Kennedy liquidated, thus elevating himself to the presidency without having to work for it himself, could have been a very tempting and logical move on Johnson's part.'" In 2004, the History Channel aired a program called The Guilty Men, which was partially based on a book by Barr McClellan, who alleged that "the law firm he quit a quarter-century ago was involved in convoluted plots that link Johnson to at least 11 deaths, including President Kennedy's." After much criticism, the cable channel apologized to its viewers, then aired a follow-up special which included a panel of three historians who "debunked" the claim. "We have a great responsibility and this time we did not live up to it," History Channel executive vice president Dan Davids said. "We hold ourselves accountable. As we have said before, nothing is more important to us than the accuracy of our programming and the integrity of our network." "LBJ had the money and the connections to manipulate the scenario in Dallas and is on record as having convinced JFK to make the appearance in the first place," Hunt writes, according to the tabloid. "He further tried unsuccessfully to engineer the passengers of each vehicle, trying to get his good buddy, Gov. [John] Connolly, to ride with him instead of in JFK's car – where...he would have been out of danger." A blurb from Hunt's publisher states that in American Spy, "a legendary CIA operative and central figure in the Watergate scandal at last tells his story." "Now in his late eighties, Hunt looks back over his storied career, revealing what really happened and debunking the many rumors that have swirled around him," the blurb continues. "Writing with his characteristic salty wit, he brings to life his exploits in the CIA, offering surprising revelations about the agency’s Latin American operations–and its masterly manipulation of politics and the media in the U.S." Adding, "He details the 'black bag jobs' of the White House plumbers, explains why he agreed to participate in the Watergate burglary–even though he thought it was a bad idea–and sheds new light on the aftermath of the break-in. He sets the record straight on rumors about his first wife’s death and accusations that have linked him to the JFK assassination and the George Wallace shooting. And finally, he offers an insider’s advice on how the CIA must now reshape itself to regain its edge and help win the war on terrorism." Excerpts from Page Six column: # Hunt says Johnson also had easy access to CIA man William Harvey, who'd been demoted when he tried to have Fidel Castro poisoned in defiance of orders to drop covert operations against Cuba. Harvey was "a ruthless man who was not satisfied with his position in the CIA and its government salary," Hunt writes. "He definitely had dreams of becoming [CIA director] and LBJ could do that for him if he were president . . . [LBJ] would have used Harvey because he was available and corrupt." Hunt denies any hand in the assassination, insisting he wasn't one of three mysterious hobos who were photographed at the scene.

Less Than Zero by William S. Lind 1/13/2007 www.lewrockwell.com On the surface, President Bush's Wednesday night speech adds up to precisely nothing. The President said, "It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq," but the heart of his proposal, adding more than 20,000 U.S. troops, represents no change in strategy. It is merely another "big push," of the sort we have seen too often in the past from mindless national and military leadership. Instead of Dave Petraeus, why didn't Bush ask Sir Douglas Haig to take command? Relying on more promises from Iraq's nominal government and requiring more performance from the Iraqi army and police are equally empty policies. Both that government and its armed forces are mere fronts for Shiite networks and their militias. If the new troops we send to Baghdad work with Iraqi forces against the Sunni insurgents, we will be helping the Shiites ethnically cleanse Baghdad of Sunnis. If, as Bush suggested, our troops go after the Shiite militias in Baghdad and elsewhere, we will find ourselves in a two-front war, fighting Sunnis and Shiites both. We faced that situation briefly in 2004, and we did not enjoy it. All this, again, adds up to nothing. But if we look at the President's proposal more carefully, we find it actually amounts to less than zero. It hints at actions that may turn a mere debacle into disaster on a truly historic scale. First, Mr. Bush said that previous efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two reasons, the second of which is that "there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have." This suggests the new "big push" will be even more kinetic that what we have done in the past, calling in more firepower – airstrikes, tanks, artillery, etc. – in Baghdad itself. Chuck Spinney has already warned that we may soon begin to reduce Baghdad to rubble. If we do, and the President's words suggest we will, we will hasten our defeat. In this kind of war, unless you are going to take the "Hama model" and kill everyone, success comes from de-escalation, not from escalation. Second, the President not only upped the ante with Syria and Iran, he announced two actions that only make sense if we plan to attack Iran, Syria or both. He said he has ordered Patriot missile batteries and another U.S. Navy aircraft carrier be sent to the region. Neither has any conceivable role in the fighting in Iraq. However, a carrier would provide additional aircraft for airstrikes on Iran, and Patriot batteries would in theory provide some defense against Iranian air and missile attacks launched at Gulf State oil facilities in retaliation. To top it off, in questioning yesterday on Capitol Hill, the Tea Lady, aka Secretary of State Rice, refused to promise the administration would consult with Congress before attacking Iran or Syria. As I have said before and will say again, the price of an attack on Iran could easily be the loss of the army we have in Iraq. No conceivable action would be more foolish than adding war with Iran to the war we have already lost in Iraq. Regrettably, it is impossible to read Mr. Bush's dispatch of a carrier and Patriot batteries any other way than as harbingers of just such an action. The final hidden message in Mr. Bush's speech confirms that the American ship of state remains headed for the rocks. His peroration, devoted once more to promises of "freedom" and democracy in the Middle East and throughout the world, could have been written by the most rabid of the neo-cons. For that matter, perhaps it was. So long as our grand strategy remains that which the neo-cons represent and demand, namely remaking the whole world in our own image, by force where necessary, we will continue to fail. Not even the greatest military in all of history, which ours claims to be but isn't, could bring success to a strategy so divorced from reality. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush's words give the lie to those who have hoped the neo-cons' influence over the White House had ebbed. From Hell, or the World Bank which is much the same place, Wolfi had to be smiling. No, Incurious George has offered no new strategy, nor new course, nor even a plateau on the downward course of our two lost wars and failed grand strategy. He has chosen instead to escalate failure, speed our decline and expand the scope of our defeat. Headed toward the cliff, his course correction is to stomp on the gas. January 13, 2007 William Lind [send him mail] is an analyst based in Washington, DC. Find this article at: http://www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind118.html

Military analyst believes recent US actions could signal Iran conflict soon 01/12/2007 @ 2:35 pm Filed by David Edwards www.rawstory.com http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Video_Re...ignal_0112.html US forces raided a facility that Iran claimed was being used for diplomatic purposes, alleging that Iranians were funneling weapons to the enemy. Six Iranians were captured in the raid at the consulate, with one being released earlier today. Several analysts consider parts of President Bush's latest speech as an obvious threat to Iran. One, John Pike of GlobalSecurity, notes that U.S. actions could signal a conflict in the near future. "It's really unclear what the President was saying," Pike said. "It's a little more clear what the United States is actually doing, [President Bush] was basically calling on Iran not to interfere with Iraq, not to further interfere with Iraq." Pike added, "But, also, look at what he said the United States is going to do. As previously reported, several weeks ago, the aircraft carrier, John Stennis, is being dispatched to the Persian Gulf. That gives the United States two aircraft carriers in the Gulf. Round the clock operations. He also, surprisingly, announced that the United States was going to be deploying Patriot anti-missile interceptors to the region. It's difficult to imagine whose missiles those would be shooting down other than Iran. It's looks to me like the United States is, at least, raising its capabilities in preparation for possible military confrontation with Iran." Pike provides a time frame in which the U.S. or Israel might first strike Iran, explaining, "I think the month of February is certainly a time of heightened probability. It's very difficult to understand exactly what the thinking is at the White House and in the Israeli government but for sometime now we've been saying that 2007 is probably the time, if there's going to be military action, it's probably going to come this year. Possible as soon as next month. Probably no later that August of this year." Nearly a year ago, Pike warned about a "cycle of escalation." "When the Americans or Israelis are thinking about [military force], I hope they will sit down and think about everything the ayatollahs could do to make our lives miserable and what we will do to discourage them," John Pike said in Feb. 2006. "There could be a cycle of escalation," Pike added.

From the Houston Chronicle of Wednesday January 10, 2007: JFK ASSASSINATION OFFICIAL DIES AT 86 Dr. Charles Petty, who opened the Dallas County medical examiner’s office and served as medical adviser to a U.S. House committee that reviewed President Kennedy’s assassination, died Tuesday. He was 86. Petty, a native of Seattle, was not in Dallas when Kennedy was shot in 1963. But he worked with the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s to review the findings. In a 2003 appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live, Petty said he concluded that Kennedy was struck by two bullets.

I think you're right John, but judging by Iran's reponse I don't think they are going to be bluffed. Both Israel and the US know that using even small scale nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's facilities is too risky. If anything goes wrong the whole world, not just the Arab world, would condemn Israel and the US. The justification of using nuclear force to prevent a second holocaust, which is currently being put forward by sections of the western media, doesn't hold up under serious scrutiny. Just as Israel will baulk at the prospect of using a nuclear weapon, so would Iran if it ever possessed one. The consequence of Iran ever using a nuclear weapon to destroy Israel would be the complete destruction of Iran within hours. Iran will build a nuclear weapon one day, and they already have an adequate missile delivery system. The US and Israel will have to accept that the balance of power within the region will inevitably change. That's what all the fuss is about---the US and Israel are having trouble coming to terms with this reality. Iran threatens to block strategic oil strait Pakistan Daily Times January 9, 2007 http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?p..._9-1-2007_pg7_4 TEHRAN: A senior officer in the volunteer Basij militia said on Monday Iran could block oil traffic through the strategic Strait of Hormuz if the West threatens its economy over Tehran’s nuclear programme. “Given Iran’s authority over the Strait of Hormuz, the passageway to more than 40 percent of the world’s energy, we have become so strong that the world’s economic and energy security are in the hands of Iran,” deputy Basij commander General Majid Mir Ahmadi was quoted as saying by the semi-official Fars news agency. “We can exert pressure on the US and British economies as much as we ourselves are put under pressure,” he said. “US allies, especially those who host US military sites or facilitate American strategies against us, are exposed to our threat,” Mir Ahmadi added. “This is the Islamic republic’s strategy in the Persian Gulf – security for everyone or for nobody.” Meanwhile, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said that Tehran would never yield to international pressure to deprive it of its right to nuclear technology, state radio said. “The Iranian nation will surely not abandon its right and Iranian officials have no right to deprive the nation of its right,” Khamenei was quoted as saying on the occasion of the Shia feast of Eidul Ghadir. Khamenei, who was shown on television, was making his first public appearance since rumours appeared on websites on Thursday that he had died. Iran last week denied the reports. Khamenei has final say on all state matters in the Islamic republic, including Iran’s nuclear standoff with the West. agencies

New Oil Law Means Victory in Iraq for Bush By Chris Floyd t r u t h o u t | UK Correspondent Monday 08 January 2007 http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010807A.shtml I. Surging Toward the Ultimate Prize The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not that he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and online. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand. At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday reported. The new bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world," says the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. "It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government's parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March. As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come. This law has been in the works since the very beginning of the invasion - indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush administration brought in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and Fluor, the politically-wired oil servicing firm, to devise "contingency plans" for divvying up Iraq's oil after the attack. Once the deed was done, Carroll was made head of the American "advisory committee" overseeing the oil industry of the conquered land, as Joshua Holland of Alternet.com has chronicled in two remarkable reports on the backroom maneuvering over Iraq's oil: "Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil and "The US Takeover of Iraqi Oil." From those earliest days until now, throughout all the twists and turns, the blood and chaos of the occupation, the Bush administration has kept its eye on this prize. The new law offers the barrelling buccaneers of the West a juicy set of production-sharing agreements (PSAs) that will maintain a fig leaf of Iraqi ownership of the nation's oil industry - while letting Bush's Big Oil buddies rake off up to 75 percent of all oil profits for an indefinite period up front, until they decide that their "infrastructure investments" have been repaid. Even then, the agreements will give the Western oil majors an unheard-of 20 percent of Iraq's oil profits - more than twice the average of standard PSAs, the Independent notes. Of course, at the moment, the "security situation" - i.e., the living hell of death and suffering that Bush's "war of choice" has wrought in Iraq - prevents the Oil Barons from setting up shop in the looted fields. Hence Bush's overwhelming urge to "surge" despite the fierce opposition to his plans from Congress, the Pentagon and some members of his own party. Bush and his inner circle, including his chief adviser, old oilman Dick Cheney, believe that a bigger dose of blood and iron in Iraq will produce a sufficient level of stability to allow the oil majors to cash in the PSA chips that more than 3,000 American soldiers have purchased for them with their lives. The American "surge" will be blended into the new draconian effort announced over the weekend by Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki: an all-out war by the government's Shiite militia-riddled "security forces" on Sunni enclaves in Baghdad, as the Washington Post reports. American troops will "support" the "pacification effort" with what Maliki says calls "house-to-house" sweeps of Sunni areas. There is of course another phrase for this kind of operation: "ethnic cleansing." The "surged" troops - mostly long-serving, overstrained units dragooned into extended duty - are to be thrown into this maelstrom of urban warfare and ethnic murder, temporarily taking sides with one faction in Iraq's hydra-headed, multi-sided civil war. As the conflict goes on - and it will go on and on - the Bush administration will continue to side with whatever faction promises to uphold the "hydrocarbon law" and those profitable PSAs. If "Al Qaeda in Iraq" vowed to open the nation's oil spigots for Exxon, Fluor and Halliburton, they would suddenly find themselves transformed from "terrorists" into "moderates" - as indeed has Maliki and his violent, sectarian Dawa Party, which once killed Americans in terrorist actions but are now hailed as freedom's champions. So Bush will surge with Maliki and his ethnic cleansing for now. If the effort flames out in a disastrous crash that makes the situation worse - as it almost certainly will - Bush will simply back another horse. What he seeks in Iraq is not freedom or democracy but "stability" - a government of any shape or form that will deliver the goods. As the Independent wryly noted in its Sunday story, Dick Cheney himself revealed the true goal of the war back in 1999, in a speech he gave when he was still CEO of Halliburton. "Where is the oil going to come from" to slake the world's ever-growing thirst, asked Cheney, who then answered his own question: "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies." And therein lies another hidden layer of the war. For Iraq not only has the world's second largest oil reserves; it also has the world's most easily retrievable oil. As the Independent succinctly notes: "The cost-per-barrel of extracting oil in Iraq is among the lowest in the world because the reserves are relatively close to the surface. This contrasts starkly with the expensive and risky lengths to which the oil industry must go to find new reserves elsewhere - witness the super-deep offshore drilling and cost-intensive techniques needed to extract oil form Canada's tar sands." This is precisely what Cheney was getting at in his 1999 talk to the Institute of Petroleum. In a world of dwindling petroleum resources, those who control large reserves of cheaply-produced oil will reap unimaginable profits - and command the heights of the global economy. It's not just about profit, of course; control of such resources would offer tremendous strategic advantages to anyone who was interested in "full spectrum domination" of world affairs, which the Bush-Cheney faction and their outriders among the neo-cons and the "national greatness" fanatics have openly sought for years. With its twin engines of corporate greed and military empire, the war in Iraq is a marriage made in Valhalla. II. The Win-Win Scenario And this unholy union is what Bush is really talking about when he talks about "victory." This is the reason for so much of the drift and dithering and chaos and incompetence of the occupation: Bush and his cohorts don't really care what happens on the ground in Iraq - they care about what comes out of the ground. The end - profit and dominion - justifies any means. What happens to the human beings caught up in the war is of no ultimate importance; the game is worth any number of broken candles. And in plain point of fact, the Bush-Cheney faction - and the elite interests they represent - has already won the war in Iraq. I've touched on this theme before elsewhere, but it is a reality of the war that is very often overlooked, and is worth examining again. This ultimate victory was clear as long ago as June 2004, when I first set down the original version of some of the updated observations below. Put simply, the Bush Family and their allies and cronies represent the confluence of three long-established power factions in the American elite: oil, arms and investments. These groups equate their own interests, their own wealth and privilege, with the interests of the nation - indeed, the world - as a whole. And they pursue these interests with every weapon at their command, including war, torture, deceit and corruption. Democracy means nothing to them - not even in their own country, as we saw in the 2000 election. Laws are just whips to keep the common herd in line; they don't apply to the elite, as Bush's own lawyers and minions have openly asserted in the memos, signing statements, court cases and presidential decrees asserting the "inherent power" of the "unitary executive" to override any law he pleases. The Iraq war has been immensely profitable for these Bush-linked power factions (and their tributary industries, such as construction); billions of dollars in public money have already poured into their coffers. Halliburton has been catapulted from the edge of bankruptcy to the heights of no-bid, open-ended, guaranteed profit. The Carlyle Group is gorging on war contracts. Individual Bush family members are making out like bandits from war-related investments, while dozens of Bush minions - like Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Joe Allbaugh - have cashed in their insider chips for blood money. The aftermath of the war promises equal if not greater riches. Even if the new Iraqi government maintains nominal state control of its oil industry, there are still untold billions to be made in PSAs for drilling, refining, distributing, servicing and securing oilfields and pipelines. Likewise, the new Iraqi military and police forces will require billions more in weapons, equipment and training, bought from the US arms industry - and from the fast-expanding "private security" industry, the politically hard-wired mercenary forces that are the power elite's latest lucrative spin-off. And as with Saudi Arabia, oil money from the new Iraq will pump untold billions into American banks and investment houses. But that's not all. For even in the worst-case scenario, if the Americans had to pull out tomorrow, abandoning everything - their bases, their contracts, their collaborators - the Bush power factions would still come out ahead. For not only has their already-incalculable wealth been vastly augmented (with any potential losses indemnified by US taxpayers), but their deeply-entrenched sway over American society has also increased by several magnitudes. No matter which party controls the government, the militarization of America is so far gone now it's impossible to imagine any major rollback in the gargantuan US war machine - 725 bases in 132 countries, annual military budgets topping $500 billion, a planned $1 trillion in new weapons systems already moving through the pipeline. Indeed, the Democratic "opposition" has promised to expand the military. Nor will either party conceivably challenge the dominance of the energy behemoths - or stand against the American public's demand for cheap gas, big vehicles, and unlimited consumption of a vast disproportion of the world's oil. As for Wall Street - both parties have long been the eager courtesans of the investment elite, dispatching armies all over the world to protect their financial interests. The power factions whose influence has been so magnified by Bush's war will maintain their supremacy regardless of the electoral outcome. [by the way, to think that all of this has happened because a small band of extremist ideologues - the neo-cons - somehow "hijacked" US foreign policy to push their radical dreams of "liberating" the Middle East by force and destroying Israel's enemies is absurd. The Bush power factions were already determined to pursue an aggressive foreign policy; they used the neo-cons and their bag of tricks - their inflated rhetoric, their conspiratorial zeal, their murky Middle East contacts, their ideology of brute force in the name of "higher" causes - as tools (and PR cover) to help bring about a long-planned war that had nothing to do with democracy or security or any coherent ideology whatsoever beyond the remorseless pursuit of wealth and power, the blind urge to be top dog.] So Bush and his cohorts have won even if the surge fails and Iraq lapses into perpetual anarchy, or becomes an extremist religious state; they've won even if the whole region goes up in flames, and terrorism flares to unprecedented heights - because this will just mean more war-profiteering, more fear-profiteering. And yes, they've won even though they've lost their Congressional majority and could well lose the presidency in 2008, because war and fear will continue to fill their coffers, buying them continuing influence and power as they bide their time through another interregnum of a Democratic "centrist" - who will, at best, only nibble at the edges of the militarist state - until they are back in the saddle again. The only way they can lose the Iraq War is if they are actually arrested and imprisoned for their war crimes. And we all know that's not going to happen. So Bush's confident strut, his incessant upbeat pronouncements about the war, his complacent smirks, his callous indifference to the unspeakable horror he has unleashed in Iraq - these are not the hallmarks of self-delusion, or willful ignorance, or a disassociation from reality. He and his accomplices know full well what the reality is - and they like it.

January 8, 2007 Nuking Iran Are Bush's Wars Winding Down or Heating Up? By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts01082007.html Most Americans believe that Bush's Iraqi misadventure is over. The occupation has lost the support of the electorate, the Congress, the generals and the troops. The Democrats are sitting back waiting for Bush to come to terms with reality. They don't want to be accused of losing the war by forcing Bush out of Iraq. There are no more troops to commit, and when the "surge" fails, Bush will have no recourse but to withdraw. A little longer, everyone figures, and the senseless killing will be over. Recent news reports indicate that this conclusion could be an even bigger miscalculation than the original invasion. On January 7 the London Times reported that it has learned from "several Israeli military sources" that "Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons." The Israeli Foreign Ministry denied the report. The Times reports that "Israeli and American officials have met several times to consider military action. Military analysts said the disclosure of the plans could be intended to put pressure on Tehran to halt enrichment, cajole America into action or soften up world opinion in advance of an Israeli attack." In other news reports Israeli General Oded Tira is quoted as follows: "President Bush lacks the political power to attack Iran. As an American strike in Iran is essential for our existence, we must help him pave the way by lobbying the Democratic Party (which is conducting itself foolishly) and US newspaper editors. We need to do this in order to turn the Iranian issue to a bipartisan one and unrelated to the Iraq failure." General Tira gives the Israel Lobby the following tasks: (1) "turn to Hilary Clinton and other potential presidential candidates in the Democratic Party so that they support immediate action by Bush against Iran," (2) exert influence on European countries so that "Bush will not be isolated in the international arena again," and (3) "clandestinely cooperate with Saudi Arabis so that it also persuades the US to strike Iran." Israel's part, General Tira says, is to "prepare an independent military strike by coordinating flights in Iraqi airspace with the US. We should also coordinate with Azerbaijan the use of air bases in its territory and also enlist the support of the Azeri minority in Iran." British commentators report that "the British media appears to be softening us up for an attack on Iran." Robert Fox writing in The First Post (January 6) says, "Suddenly the smell of Britons being prepared for an attack on Iran is all pervasive." On January 7 the Jerusalem Post reported that Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told the Israeli newspaper that "iran with nuclear weapons is unacceptable" and that "the use of force against Teheran remained an option." The Jerusalem Post notes that "Hoyer is considered close to the Jewish community and many Israeli supporters have hailed his elevation in the House." Hoyer was the Israel Lobby's first victory over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who preferred Rep. John Murtha for the post. Murtha was the first important Democrat to call for withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. On November 20 the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reported that President Bush said he would understand if Israel chose to attack Iran. Bush showed that he was in Israel's pocket when he blocked the world's attempt to stop Israel's bombing of Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure. Many commentators believe that the failure of the neoconservatives' "cakewalk war" has destroyed their influence. This is a mistaken conclusion. The neoconservatives are long time allies of Israel's right-wing Likud Party and are part of the Israel Lobby in the US. The Israel Lobby represents the views of only a minority of American Jews but nevertheless essentially owns both political parties and most of the US media. As the neoconservatives are an important part of this powerful lobby, they remain extremely influential. The Lobby works to increase the neoconservatives' influence. To appreciate the Lobby's influence, try to find columnists in the major print media and TV commentators who are not apologists for Israel, who do not favor attacking Iran, and who support withdrawing from Iraq. Recently, Billy "One-Note" Kristol, a rabid propagandist for war against Muslims, was given a column in Time magazine. Why would Time think its readers want to read a war propagandist? Could the reason be that the Israel Lobby arranged for Time to receive lucrative advertising contracts in exchange for a column for Kristol? Neoconservatives have called for World War IV against Islam. In Commentary magazine Norman Podhoretz called for the cultural genocide of Islamic peoples. The war is already opened on four fronts: Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iran. The Bush administration has used its Ethiopian proxies to overthrow the Somalian Muslims who overthrew the warlords who drove the US from Somalia. The US Navy and US intelligence are actively engaged with the Ethiopian troops in efforts to hunt down and capture or kill the Somalian Muslims. US Embasy spokesman Robert Kerr in Nairobi said that the US has the right to pursue Somalia's Islamists as part of the war on terror. For at least a year the Bush administration has been fomenting and financing terrorist groups within Iran. Seymour Hersh and former CIA officials have exposed the Bush administration's support of ethnic-minority groups within Iran that are on the US State Department's list of terrorist organizations. Last April US Representative Dennis Kucinich wrote a detailed letter to President Bush about US interference in Iran's internal affairs. He received no reply. The Israeli/neoconservative plan, of which Bush may be a part or simply be a manipulated element, is to provoke a crisis with Iran in which the US Congress will have to support Israel. Both the Israeli government and the American neoconservatives are fanatical. It is a mistake to believe that either will be guided by reason or any appreciation of the potentially catastrophic consequences of an attack on Iran. US aircraft carriers sitting off Iran's coast are sitting ducks for Iran's Russian missiles. The neoconservatives would welcome another "new Pearl Harbor." The US media is totally unreliable. It cannot go against Israel, and it will wrap itself in the flag just as it did for the invasion of Iraq. The American public has been deceived (again) and believes that Iran is on the verge of possessing nuclear armaments to be used to wipe Israel off the map. The fact that Americans are such saps for propaganda makes effective opposition to the neoconsevatives' plan for WW IV practically impossible. Large percentages of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attack. Recent polls show that 32% still believe that Iraq gave substantial support to al-Qaeda, and 18% believe that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attack. WXIA-TV in Atlanta posted viewers comments about Hussein's execution on its web site. Atlantan Janet Wesselhoft was confident that Saddam Hussein is "the one who started terrorism in this country, he needs to be put to rest." Even the London Times is in the grip of Israeli propaganda. In its report of Israel's plan to attack Iran with nuclear weapons, the Times says that Iranian president "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has declared that 'Israel must be wiped off the map.'" It has been shown by a number of credible experts that this quote is a made-up concoction taken completely out of context. Ahmadinejad said no such thing. In a world ruled by propaganda, lies become truths. The power of the Israel Lobby is so great that it has turned former President Jimmy Carter, probably the most decent man ever to occupy the Oval Office and certainly the president who did the most in behalf of peace in the Middle East, into an anti-semite, an enemy of Israel. The American media, from its "conservative" end to its "liberal" end did its best to turn Carter into a pariah for telling a few truths about Israel's mistreatment of the Palestinians in his book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. If truth be known, there is nothing to stop the Israeli/neoconservative cabal from widening the war in the Middle East. As I previously reported, the neoconservatives believe that the use of nuclear weapons against Iran would force Muslims to realize that they have no recourse but to submit to the Isreali/US will. The use of nuclear weapons is being rationalized as necessary to destroy Iran's underground facilities, but the real purpose is to terrorize Islam and to bring it to heel. Until the US finds the courage to acquire a Middle East policy of its own, Americans will continue to reap the evil sowed by the Israel Lobby. Paul Craig Roberts 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 coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts01082007.html

John: Your assertion about the role of Israel in the upcoming war against Iran is proven to be accurate, if one is to believe the following article from today's Times (U.K.): The Sunday Times January 07, 2007 Focus: Mission Iran Israel will not tolerate Iran going nuclear and military sources say it will use tactical strikes unless Iran abandons its programme. Is Israel bluffing or might it really push the button? Uzi Mahnaimi in New York and Sarah Baxter in Washington report In an Israeli air force bunker in Tel Aviv, near the concert hall for the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, Major General Eliezer Shkedi might one day conduct operations of a perilous kind. Should the order come from the Israeli prime minister, it will be Shkedi’s job as air force commander to orchestrate a tactical nuclear strike on Iran. Two fast assault squadrons based in the Negev desert and in Tel Nof, south of Tel Aviv, are already training for the attack. On a plasma screen, Shkedi will be able to see dozens of planes advance towards Iran, as well as the electronic warfare aircraft jamming the Iranian and Syrian air defences and the rescue choppers hovering near the border, ready to move in and pluck out the pilots should the mission go wrong. Another screen will show live satellite images of the Iranian nuclear sites. The prime target will be Natanz, the deep and ferociously protected bunker south of Tehran where the Iranians are churning out enriched uranium in defiance of the United Nations security council. If things go according to plan, a pilot will first launch a conventional laser-guided bomb to blow a shaft down through the layers of hardened concrete. Other pilots will then be ready to drop low-yield one kiloton nuclear weapons into the hole. The theory is that they will explode deep underground, both destroying the bunker and limiting the radioactive fallout. The other potential targets are Iran’s uranium conversion facility at Isfahan — uncomfortably near a metropolis of 4.5m people — and the heavy water power reactor at Arak, which might one day be able to produce enough plutonium to make a bomb. These will be hit with conventional bombs. In recent weeks Israeli pilots have been flying long-haul as far as Gibraltar to simulate the 2,000-mile round trip to Natanz. “There is no 99% success in this mission. It must be a perfect 100% or better not at all,” one of the pilots expected to fly on the mission told The Sunday Times. The Israelis say they hope as fervently as the rest of the world that this attack will never take place. There is clearly an element of sabre-rattling in their letting it be known the plan exists and that the pilots are already in training. But in the deeply dangerous and volatile Middle East, contingency plans can become horrible reality. NO nuclear weapon has been fired in anger since the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Should Israel take such a drastic step, it would inflame world opinion — particularly in Muslim states — and unleash retaliation from Iran and its allies. But Israelis have become increasingly convinced that a “second holocaust” of the Jews is brewing, stoked by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president and chief Holocaust denier, who has repeatedly called for Israel to be destroyed. Western Europe and the United States have been trying to persuade Tehran to drop its nuclear ambitions, using the carrot of co-operation with a legitimate nuclear energy programme and the stick of UN sanctions. But they have had no effect. As a result, Israel sees itself standing on its own and fighting for its very existence. It got a taste of what Iran was capable of during last summer’s war in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah, Tehran’s proxy troops fighting from bunkers secretly built by Iranian military engineers, humiliated the Israeli army and rained missiles into northern Israel. Every Israeli government has vowed never to let Iran acquire nuclear weapons. Ariel Sharon, when he was prime minister, ordered the military to be ready for a conventional strike on Iran’s nuclear programme. Since then, however, the Iranians have strengthened their nuclear facilities and air defences, making a conventional strike less likely to succeed. “There are 24 strong batteries around Natanz, making it one of the most protected sites on earth,” said an Israeli military source. Its centrifuge halls, where the uranium is enriched, are heavily protected at least 70ft underground. Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, recently “let slip” the world’s worst-kept secret that Israel is a nuclear power; Israeli defence experts are now openly debating the use of nukes against Iran. Shlomo Mofaz, a reservist colonel in Israeli military intelligence, believes that tactical nuclear weapons will be required to penetrate the defences that Iran has built around its nuclear facilities. Israel developed tactical nuclear weapons in the early 1970s for use on the battlefield. In an attack on Iran, its air force would be expected to use a low-yield nuclear device of 1 kiloton (equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT), loaded on a bunker-buster missile. “If the nuclear device explodes deep underground there will be no radioactive fallout,” said Dr Ephraim Asculai of the Tel Aviv Institute for Strategic Studies, who worked for the Israel Atomic Energy Commission for more than 40 years. Professor Peter Zimmerman, a nuclear physicist at King’s College, London, was less sure. “The definition of low-yield nuclear weapons is not easy,” he said. “I assume that it includes any device which is less than 5 kilotons. If such a bunker-buster missile is exploded at 70ft below ground” — thought to be the minimum depth of the hidden centrifuges in Natanz — “some radioactive fallout is expected.” Nonetheless, Professor Martin Van Creveld, an Israeli military expert, said last week that tactical nuclear weapons were “the only way, if there is a way at all, to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites”. Some senior American defence analysts agree. One source with ties to the Pentagon said: “There is no way for Israel to engage effectively in such a strike without using nuclear weapons.” But, he asked: “Would the Israelis dare?” For all their military preparations, not even the Israelis are sure of the answer. Their decision rests to a great extent on their assessment of two further questions. How close is Tehran to having a nuclear bomb? And what does Washington really intend to do about it? The actions and rhetoric of Ahmadinejad have been deliberately provocative. Last week he boasted that the Iranians would not only continue their atomic programme but also give a “historic slap in the face” to nations that opposed it. He has vowed that America, Israel and Britain will disappear “like the pharaohs” of Egypt and he believes that oil-rich Iran is well on its way to becoming the regional superpower. Next month, on the anniversary of the Islamic revolution, he intends to celebrate what he calls his country’s mastery of nuclear technology. He promised that 3,000 centrifuges would be ready by the end of last year and that 60,000 would ultimately be in place. In the event, technical problems have slowed the programme. The Iranians are believed to have installed only 500 centrifuges at Natanz and they will reach 2,000 by spring at the earliest. This is enough, however, to convince some Israelis that Iran is reaching the “point of no return” at which it has the technical know-how to build a nuclear bomb. Ahmadinejad insists that Iran is developing only peaceful nuclear energy, but the development of long-range ballistic missiles such as the Shehab-3 suggests a different story. Israeli intelligence sources say Iran recently tested this missile with dummy nuclear weapons for its warheads. “The Iranians are progressing quickly with their delivery platform for their future nuclear weapons,” said a source. “With an approximate range of 1,000 miles, the Shehab-3 can reach all of Israel.” Meir Dagan, head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, has told members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, that his organisation assumes the Iranians will have a complete nuclear device by 2009. In these circumstances, sabre-rattling by the Israelis has its uses. Whether or not Israel intends to go nuclear, it might be in its interest to spread the word that it will. “In the cold war, we made it clear to the Russians that it was a virtual certainty that nukes would fly and fly early,” said an American defence source. “Israel may be adopting the same tactics: ‘You produce a weapon; you die’.” Michael Rubin, an expert on Iran at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, believes it could be a dangerous ruse. “You never want to threaten something you don’t follow through on,” he said. Rubin believes the Israeli debate about using tactical nuclear weapons is “much more likely to be about pressing the United States to do the job”. President George W Bush included Iran in his original “axis of evil”. Bogged down now in Iraq, he has cooled on the idea of attacking Iran. At a private meeting in the Oval Office last autumn, he was openly sceptical that America possessed enough intelligence data to carry out the job thoroughly. Robert Gates, the new US defence secretary, told Congress at his confirmation hearings last month that he would be willing to give the order for strikes on Iran only as an “ absolute last resort”. However, the Bush administration is still tempted to deliver a punishing blow to Iran for its regional meddling in Iraq and Lebanon. At the very least, it would like the swaggering regime in Tehran to believe that the United States might yet decide to cut it down to size. The nomination of Admiral William Fallon, a former navy fighter pilot, to command US military operations in the area is regarded as a sign of forward planning. Fallon does not have a reputation as a hawk, but in the words of a Pentagon source: “If you go after Iran, you have a naval war on your hands.” Retired Colonel Sam Gardiner, a former National War College professor who has wargamed airstrikes on Iran, believes an American attack remains a possibility. The current deployment of a second US aircraft carrier strike force to the Gulf region, as well as British minesweepers, is a “huge deal”, he said. “It is only necessary to do that if you are planning to strike Iran and deal with the consequences” — including an attempt to shut the Strait of Hormuz, the sea route for much of the world’s oil from the Gulf states. General John Abizaid, whom Fallon is due to replace, warned last year that an American attack on Iran could cripple oil supplies, unleash a “surrogate” terrorist army and provoke Iranian missile attacks on America’s Middle Eastern allies. Should Israel launch a tactical nuclear strike, the consequences could be catastrophic. Gardiner believes that there would not only be “low DNA operations” — difficult to trace directly back to the Iranians — such as terrorist attacks, but the Muslim world would also be so inflamed that the stability of pro-western regimes would be threatened. “It doesn’t take much imagination to see Pakistan (a nuclear power) falling to Islamic fundamentalists,” Gardiner said. “It could mean that in order to prevent Iran getting nuclear weapons, we could be handing them to a terrorist nation.” According to a senior British defence official, an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran is simply unthinkable: “The damage to Israel to be the only state to use nuclear weapons in anger since 1945 is dangerous stuff. They cannot be seen to be taking the lead on this.” Or can they? Ephraim Sneh, Israel’s deputy defence minister, said recently: “At the end of the day it is always down to the Jews to deal with the problem.” US analysts concur that America would never give its consent for such an operation, but as in the attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear plant in 1981, it may not object all that vociferously after the event. Nor is it thought that Sunni powers such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt would mourn the humbling of Shi’ite Iran, their main regional rival. Are Israel’s plans an elaborate bluff or not? In today’s dangerously volatile world, who will dare to make that call? Strike one: Israel took out Saddam’s reactor in 1981 IF Israeli forces attack nuclear sites in Iran, it will not be their first pre-emptive strike against a perceived nuclear threat. In 1981 Israeli jets bombed a reactor in Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein getting nuclear weapons. The Iraqi dictator had built a 40-megawatt research reactor just south of Baghdad with the aid of France, which supplied technology, expertise and about 27lb of uranium-235. Fearing this could be used in the long term to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, Israel decided to destroy what became known as the Osirak reactor. Israel’s first move was in 1980 when war broke out between Iraq and Iran: its chief of army intelligence urged Iran to bomb Osirak. A pair of Iranian jets attacked the site, but damage was minor. So Israel decided to bomb it, secretly building a dummy site and carrying out full dress rehearsals. On June 7, 1981, Israel launched Operation Opera: six F-15I and eight F-16I jets flew over Jordanian and Saudi Arabian airspace and caught Iraqi defences by surprise. The raid crippled the reactor. Many countries, including the United States, condemned the attack. Opposition parties in Israel claimed that it had been cynically timed to coincide with a looming election. Some Iraqi scientists later said the attack spurred Saddam to redouble his efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Attempts were made to rebuild the Osirak facility. However, Saddam’s nuclear ambitions were again halted when coalition forces bombed Osirak during the 1991 Gulf war. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2535177,00.html

I received two emails from Floyd Stephens last year and provided him with any information that I had that might help him in his research project. In response to my encouraging him to post in the forum what he had learned, he wrote that for the time being he wanted to proceed quietly without drawing too much attention to his endeavor. I respected his desire to do so. However, in light of his passing, I think it might be his wish that the contents of his two emails to me be posted now as a means of furthering research into a great historical event, JFK's assassination. These are reproduced below. Of course, there is no way of knowing what he learned subsequently to writing his emails that might have changed the content of these. ------------------------------------------ A couple of questions about Billie Sol, Jun 24 2006, 02:35 AM Mr. Caddy My name is Floyd Stephens and I am a new member of the forum. I have read your bio and wonder if you would be open to a couple of questions about your contact with Mr. Estes. I have seen your correspondence to the department of justice and their replies via the net , but how and when did you come to know and represent Mr. Estes. I guess what I am getting at is did you represent Mr. Estes at Franklin, were you at the 1984 grand jury hearing with him. Secondly, were you present for Mr. Estes' short lived meeting with the FBI agents. Is there any light you can shed as to his change of mind concerning that meeting. Do you still represent or keep in touch with Mr. Estes any more. I have talked to Glen Sample in California a couple of months ago, we had a real nice conversation and he has an amazing story. A puzzle he started piecing together that led him to Johnson by way of Mr. Estes via Malcolm Wallace via Loy Factor. This puzzle is still yet in complete, in talking with Glen I ask what's the next piece to which he responded find out about Mr. Estes' meeting with Marina Oswald Porter. In his recent book Mr. Estes writes of his meeting with Marina and he made a curious statement.... You see Marina knew both Jack Ruby And Malcolm Wallace, and I'll say no more than that. I attempted to bring this up to Mr. Carroll and seek his response through the Marina Oswald topic within this forum, but was immediately shot down in his usual holier than thou attitude. I did not think that this question was out of line, but he did. Do you have views to Mr. Estes' statement? I never paid that much attention to the assassination, until about two years ago right after my Fathers passing. Two days after his funeral his house was burnt and the next day the rest of the structures that were adjacent to his home were torched also. I was told that the house was burnt to destroy any old evidence my father may have had that would connect him or the sheriffs department to the death of Henry Marshall, say what! And then there's that strange suicide, the mortician had some concerns of foul play, but the authorities closed the case any way that very afternoon. And this time I'm not talking about Henry Marshall in 1961 , but rather one of the sheriffs departments main suspects in the above mentioned arson in 2004, some things never change when your form Booger County. I thank you in advance for any reply you may have, and wish only the best for you in your endeavors. Respectfully, Floyd Stephens Class of 1977, Franklin, Texas ---------------------- May our conversation continue?, Jun 25 2006, 01:21 AM Dear Mr. Caddy I was delighted to receive your response and look forward to anything that you can provide me with. About three months after my Fathers death I sought out and found Mr. Estes up in Grandbury. We talked of Franklin and Henry Marshall it seems he was also a little curious about what I know. Mr. Estes and I have talked on the phone about 7 or 8 times, in fact he called me last week while he was killing time up at Scott and White Hospital in Temple Texas. His wife was up there for a couple of days and his other daughter Cathy lives in Leander Texas about 8 miles from me. Mr. Estes said that he is still having a little trouble with his leg that he broke last year. I am going to visit him in Grandbury in a couple of weeks. He hasn't elaborated much on his discussion with Marina, but I am working on him. One of my old friends in Franklin told me of a visit that Mr. Estes paid to Sheriff Howard Stegall the morning of his first grand jury appearance in Robertson County back in 1962. He remembered the white caddies pulling up his Fathers driveway, it only took a minute or so before Howard ran them off, yelling don't you ever come back here again. I haven't related this story to Mr. Estes yet , but I plan to try to get his version of it. He has recently been discussing the Henry Marshall thing in much more detail speaking of my Father and the Sheriff as he knew or knew of them. I don't press him too hard, but yet I long to know what he knows. I first became aware of the Henry Marshall thing over twenty-five years ago when my Mother told me that my father was involved in a killing with some of his law enforcement buddies there in Franklin. She had no details for me of the crime but knew for sure that my Father was involved. This stunned me, because I had spent my highschool years in Franklin and never heard of Henry Marshall or any kind of killing to which she referred. I was in the same class as the son and daughter of L M Owens the brother-in-law that found Henryand I delivered eggs to the sheriffs son-in-law Pryce Metcalf's egg processing facility. I hauled hay with the son of the local game warden who was on the scene June 3 1961. Could every one know but me? I left Texas when I was 4 or 5 and didn't return until I was in highschool. The people were always nice to me and everyone knew who I was and knew my Father. I now that they did know. A year or two after my Mothers revelation I heard a story as related to by my father to another person from my past. This was the story of what happened that afternoon that Henry Marshall died. It was a tell of a botched payoff that got out of hand, everything was going OK, then Henry said that he would be part of it and he was leaving, he began to fight with the group and that's when someone hit him in the head with a rifle. The whack caved in his orbital bone and left his eyeball dangling, that's when they knew Henry must die and that's when he died. I have shared this story with only a select few. No one in Franklin knows that I know what went down back then. I continue to research on a low key, slowly piecing together what I may find along the way. I noticed a generations theme forming within the story that I am putting together, sort of a Sin of The Fathers type of premise. I believe that Franklin and what happened there is the geniuses of the conspiracy. One thing lead to another and it kept compounding until it consumed a president and forever tainted the fabric of our country. To me Franklin has became a microcosm, sort of a biopsy of the conspiracy to be studied and understood. From this knowledge I hope to better understand what happened in a broader since to our nation as a whole, how the Sin of The Fathers has transpired through the generations to bring us to the point where we are at today. Douglas, please hold these things I communicate to you in confidence. I find it much easier to do what I am doing with out drawing attention to myself. Respectfully, Floyd Stephens

The New York Times today prints a large photograph of a group of American troops with the caption underneath: "Soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division boarded a plane yesterday in North Carolina. About 3,300 are to be sent to Kuwait by the end of the week." Another ominous development is reported below: Second U.S. carrier group to deploy to Gulf: sources By Kristin Roberts Wed Jan 3, 4:40 PM ET Reuters The Pentagon will send a second aircraft carrier and its escort ships to the Gulf, defense officials said on Wednesday, as a warning to Syria and Iran and to give commanders more flexibility in the region. Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Bremerton, Washington-based USS John C. Stennis strike group would deploy this month. It will put 5,000 more U.S. sailors in the region, bringing the total to 16,000. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier group entered the Gulf in December. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman declined to comment, saying the Defense Department would not discuss future deployments or ship movements. But military analysts said the move was intended to demonstrate U.S. resolve in the face of acts by Iran and Syria that it sees as provocative, such as Tehran's pursuit of its nuclear program. The Stennis had been scheduled to deploy to the Pacific region. But the Pentagon agreed instead to send the carrier group to the Gulf after a request from U.S. Central Command, the military command responsible for Middle East operations. Senior defense officials have said that request was aimed at increasing Central Command's flexibility in a variety of operations and providing deterrence in the region. INCREASED U.S. PRESENCE Washington has locked horns with Tehran over the Iranian nuclear program. American defense officials also regularly charge Iran and Syria with fanning sectarian violence in Iraq and contributing to the deteriorating situation there by providing arms and technologies. The second carrier, while adding relatively few service members to the region, is valuable as a symbol of America's increased presence in the Gulf, military analysts said. Longer term, however, the Bush administration must decide if it will keep two carrier groups in the Gulf indefinitely. Defense Secretary Robert Gates previously said the increased American presence in the Gulf was a message to the region as a whole and not a response to any specific action by Iran. "I think the message that we are sending to everyone, not just Iran, is that the United States is an enduring presence in this part of the world," Gates told reporters on a December visit to Baghdad. "We will be here for a long time and everybody needs to remember that -- both our friends and those who might consider themselves our adversaries."

Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007 “Project Censored is one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured that our newspapers and our broadcasting outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism.” – Walter Cronkite http://www.projectcensored.org/censored_2007/index.htm

To understand what is happening in the Mideast, Professor Juan Cole’s daily blog is required reading. Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan, is a frequent guest on PBS’ Lehrer New Hour. Last Friday, before Suddam’s death, Prof. Cole in his blog printed a commentary by Larisa Alexandrovna, editor of www.rawstory.com. So perceptive are her observations that they merit immediate attention. http://www.juancole.com/ By Larisa Alexandrovna 'PROLOGUE: When someone does something obviously egregious, we tend to look past it because it is our nature to believe that people are naturally sane, good, and honest. We cannot imagine that anyone would willfully destroy their own country, violate their own laws, trample on their own people, and do it with such naked bravado while the world looked on. But people have done it and do it even still, because there is also a darker side to human nature. Those of us who see the good in people look past actions that appear to be willfully evil not only because it is in our nature but it is also a foundation of our culture, as Americans, we believe guilt must be proved. So we do not see what is going on before our eyes and directly in front of us. We look past it, around it, through it, but not at it. We cannot look directly at it, because if we do, we lose the vision of our beloved America and see something so sinister, that our minds would rather collapse than accept it. But chess forces us to abandon our preconceptions and emotions. It pushes us to think in terms of cause and effect and it forces us to consider each action and counteraction in terms of the whole game. That is to say, chess forces us to think beyond our own present and fixed position, forcing us to reason every possible outcome of each action and counteraction. Furthermore, chess teaches us to calculate not against a person, or a group, or a nation, but against a strategy that has no inherent religious, moral, or human characteristics. Master players can suspend their fixated self at will. Sadly, I am no master, and so I continue to struggle in seeing the game despite my human nature as an obstacle. But sometimes, it just happens, something sets it off and there you are, inside the board, walking each action out in your mind and seeing the whole from beginning to end. QUESTIONS AND SEEING THE BOARD Sometime this morning, all the various and truly bizarre events the Bush administration has been engaged in recently with regard to troop levels and surges suddenly crystallized for me, as though I were sitting at a chess board and seeing the entire strategy unfold before my eyes. This is of course my opinion and I may very well be wrong. In fact, I hope I am wrong. But the news that Saddam Hussein would be executed soon, and then the news that it would be in the next 48 hours, boggled my mind. Why on earth would anyone want to set off an ideological bomb during an already chaotic situation? I do not defend Saddam Hussein, not by any measure. But when Iraq is falling into total chaos and civil war, and as American troops continue to die, why would anyone want to add fuel to that fire, enough fuel to destroy what is left? Suspend your emotions and think strategically. Now look at the question again and in context. The administration is stalling as it supposedly weighs its Iraq options, when in fact they have already made their decision. How do I know they have made their decision? One need only look at the slow leaks coming out, not the least of which was Joe Lieberman’s op-ed in the Washington Post, to understand that we are going to be sending more troops to Iraq. So why does the administration wait to tell us this? In the meantime, naval carriers are deployed to send Iran “a warning,” as though the threats thus far and the passing of sanctions are not warning enough. Add to that the detainment of Iranian diplomats invited to Iraq by the Iraqi leadership. Why is the US arresting diplomats invited to a country that the US claims is a sovereign nation governing itself? And what about those sanctions, which ultimately mean nothing and sadly mean everything? The sanctions are so watered down as to have no real effect on the Iranian population or economy. Why even bother passing them? Why censor Dr. Leverett's opinion piece on Iran when the CIA already cleared it? Now given this entire context, ask yourself again why Saddam Hussein is being executed now, during Hajj even? What is the urgency? THE UGLY STRATEGY I SEE This is what I think may be playing out, my opinion of course. And yes, the strategy is so brazenly obvious, arrogant, and antithetical to everything America is supposed to be and stand for that it will be difficult to digest. What the Bush administration appears to be waiting for, stalling for, while they allegedly mull over the Iraq question, is for the naval carriers and other key assets to fall into position. This will happen in the first week of January. Saddam Hussein is being executed (and I would not be surprised if every major network aired it) to enrage tempers and fuel more violence in Iraq. This violence will justify an immediate need for a troop surge, although I think it will be described as temporary. Remember too that the British press has for the past week done nothing but report that Britain will be attacked by the New Year. Clearly they are preparing themselves for a contingency, and that contingency is the massive violence that will erupt across the Muslim world as they watch (and I really believe it will be televised) Saddam’s hanging just before the New Year. Why is the rush to execute Saddam Hussein not account for Hajj? Or does it? The carriers will be in position. I imaging there will be an event of some sort in Iraq, or the violence will spill into friendly (our friends) territory. It will be dramatic, even more so than the immediate violence. The attacks will be blamed on Iran, with the help of the Saudis and Pakistan. Iran will be blamed for something that happens in Iran. The naval carriers, again, will be in position. The sanctions, as watered down as they are, have given the administration the blank check they needed from the world (and they still have their blank check from Congress) to order aerial strikes. The surge troops will be in position, and I estimate that ground support will begin around late February, early March. Saddam’s execution and the violence will also be a convenient cover while the administration moves pieces into position. But what the planners in the administration don’t seem to realize is that the Persians are the most expert of chess players, and they are a patient, strategy minded opponent. They are watching this develop, all of it, and they too are planning their counteraction. They know better than to strike first, because in doing so, they would lose the moral argument in the eyes of the world, as well as the advantage of counteraction. The US has a superior air force, but Iran has a formidable navy, and while the house of Saud will fuel this, the fallout will be fatal. Why? Here is why: Because the US is too stretched to be able to protect Israel, and Israel cannot sustain a long term attack. They can sustain a few hits, but they will not be able to sustain a full blown attack. If you have any doubt, go back to the recent war with Lebanon. The British will pull out, despite promises of support. Blair is on his way out, and the British public will not tolerate support for Israel, because of its help in supporting US imperialistic aggression. Whatever terrorist cells lurk in the US, and make no mistake, our administration has done little to address this issue, will be activated. Also consider that the house of Saud is not prepared to defend itself against an uprising, and that the US cannot protect it while simultaneously operating on three different fronts and covertly in god knows how many. Despite the various sectarian differences in the Muslim world, there are two enemies that they all agree to fight and die fighting against: the US and Israel. This attack will set off a Muslim counterattack so large, that nothing will be able to stop it or contain it. But our leadership does not see this, because they cannot think strategically and won't think in human terms, so they are left with nothing but arrogance. And we ae left with a world ablaze. Note: Larisa Alexandrovna maintains the blog At-Largely and is Managing Editor - of Raw Story.