Douglas Caddy

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.

Kennedy Targeted on 1963 Ireland Trip By SHAWN POGATCHNIK The Associated Press Thursday, December 28, 2006; 8:31 PM DUBLIN, Ireland -- President John F. Kennedy was the subject of three separate death threats during his visit to Ireland in 1963, according to newly declassified police documents released Friday. The documents released by the Irish Justice Department said police received two anonymous telephoned warnings in the weeks before the arrival of the United States' first Irish Catholic president. A third threat went to the newsroom of the Irish Independent newspaper. Kennedy's June 26-29 visit went ahead trouble free as he was greeted by adoring crowds in Dublin, Cork, Galway and at his family homestead in County Wexford, in southeast Ireland. He was assassinated in Dallas five months later. One threat claimed a sniper would target Kennedy as his motorcade traveled from Dublin Airport to the residence of the Irish president at the start of his visit. The second warned a bomb at Shannon Airport, in southwest Ireland, would detonate as Air Force One was about to depart. According to the documents the third threat, phoned to the newspaper, indicated that Kennedy would be attacked at Dublin Airport, although the method wasn't specified. The documents detailed police security concerns _ and also reflected officials' desire to impress both U.S. visitors and onlookers in Britain, Ireland's colonial master until 1922. In a letter, Commissioner Daniel Costigan, the commander of Ireland's national police force in 1963, described the Kennedy tour as "the most important visit to this country since the establishment of the state, with worldwide publicity. British journalists are likely to be ready to criticize any fault in arrangements." He wrote that although unlikely, "we cannot overlook the possibility" of an assassination attempt. Costigan said his officers would use binoculars to monitor rooftops along the route of the presidential motorcade. He said an unspecified number of police would be armed with handguns, rifles and submachine guns _ an exceptional measure in a country with a largely unarmed police force _ to engage any would-be sniper. The documents indicated that 6,404 police officers were on duty the night Kennedy arrived, and 2,690 lined the U.S. president's route from Dublin airport to the Phoenix Park mansion of Irish President Eamon de Valera. ___ On the Net: JFK Library & Museum guide to 1963 visit, http://www.jfklibrary.org

The new British film “638 Ways to Kill Castro” contains a clip with new information about Oswald. To view the clip, click on the link below: http://www.638waystokillcastro.com/video.asp

I am told that in the early morning hours of today, Robert Duncan was interviewed on the international radio show Coasttocoastam. In answer to a question about John Kennedy, he stated that a week before his death JFK spoke at Columbia University. During the course of his speech, according to Duncan, JFK said that he had uncovered an immense plot and was determined to tell the American people about it before he left office. Has anyone in the Forum ever heard of such a statement by JFK and, if so, is any more information available about it? Below is the link that summarizes Duncan’s fascinating interview on the radio program: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2006/12/05.html#recap

Feral cats, beware By Chan Akya Asia Times (Hong Kong) December 2, 2006 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/HL02Ag01.html With the US government firmly on the back foot in Iraq and President George W Bush rendered a lame duck by a Democratic Congress, the end of the American century is approaching rather faster than previously expected. [1] My characterization of the United States as Garfield may have been too gentle in the context of what is likely to happen going forward, when the cat becomes feral. The death of any superpower usually carries with it a combination of military and economic defeat and, as with the Soviet Union's demise in the 1990s, America's decline will prove equally cruel. Iraq has descended into a civil war in recent weeks, as a feckless US military attempts to recover lost ground with the same failed tactics of the past few years. Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. Bush, reeling from stunning losses in mid-term elections, had to fire defense chief Donald Rumsfeld, but has since failed to signal any changes in strategy. The matter may not be entirely up to him as insurgents and terrorists, sensing a potential shift in US strategy, have stepped up their attacks to record levels. This makes an early US exit not only more likely, but also more ignominious. For a people imbued with a sense of infallibility, this turn of events would be nothing short of a catastrophic reality check. As with the end of the Vietnam conflict, it might take 10 years or more for any resurgence in national optimism in the US. The difference is that this time around, putative successors are much better positioned to inherit the mantle of superpowers. Echoes elsewhere The impact of a significant foreign-policy setback is hardly minor for any economy, and will be quite marked for the US economy. A decline in government spending on the "military-industrial complex" would reduce profits for many US companies, especially the ones that tend to fund policymakers or send their executives into politics. The downward adjustment of such sectors would, however, pale in comparison to the impact of reduced optimism at the top level. Simply put, US consumers would be less likely to spend on new houses, cars or home improvements. The notion of "keeping up with the Joneses", which underpins vast swaths of the US economy, would operate in reverse under such circumstances, with people cutting their spending in competition. Financial markets are already signaling the possibility that the US confronts a recession at home, as the US dollar has declined sharply in recent days. While the prestige factor mentioned above is only part of the story, the other part is the likely monetary easing that makes the currency less attractive going forward. Stock markets have also seen a wobble in recent days. The immediate impact of a decline in the US economy is of course negative for exporting countries, including China, Japan and pretty much the whole Middle East. However, to the extent that China and India continue to build their infrastructure, and allow their currencies to appreciate against the US dollar, one can expect increased consumption from these countries to take up the slack created by the US decline. The worst-positioned countries are those that do most of their business with the US today, namely those in Latin America. Some financial commentators have pointed out that a falling US dollar is good for the country's exports. This might be the case when a country produces anything that others want to buy, but that's largely not the case with the US. In a previous article, [2] I wrote: The US has lost its competitive edge in manufacturing ... The simple fact is that after the Cold War ended, US innovation stopped dead in its tracks. Evaluate the engineering aspects of any American car, and you are likely to walk away completely unimpressed. A six-liter engine used by US car companies produces the same power as an engine half that size from the Germans, and one-third of the size by the Japanese (tuned, admittedly). Leave out engineering, and simple design dynamics don't work either - Detroit has not produced a single desirable car in the past decade. The United States came to the forefront of righting human-rights wrongs such as racism, but only when its economic prosperity was threatened by the status quo. Now, America's lost competitiveness in manufacturing comes alongside its declining demographics (when keeping immigrants out of calculations), and rising threats from the likes of India and China in all areas of the global economy that it currently dominates. In this high-pressure economic environment, rising geopolitical risks argue for an unwelcome acceleration of the country's transition. Much like a worker who becomes a wife-beater when threatened with losing his job, the US lashes out, with its anger directed toward garnering any resource advantage that it can to lengthen its reign at the top. As I pointed out then, the US is unlikely to go quietly into the night. It will attempt to lash out at the rest of the world, particularly at its potential successors - the Eurozone, Russia and China.[3] Of these, the Eurozone has neither the military nor social mandate to pose a strategic counterbalance to the US. This leaves Russia and China to consider. I have already written about the latter in the aforementioned article, concluding that China would make necessary accommodations to its currency and economic policy to avoid confrontation with the US. Russia's role, though, is more intriguing. Russia's sinister game That President Vladimir Putin has stepped up his great Asian game comes as no surprise in the context described above. To a large extent, his strategy has been shaped by the impact of a dying Soviet Union on the national psyche, something that he has personally mourned more than once. A shameful withdrawal of the US from Iraq guarantees a strong role for his country in the immediate aftermath, particularly given the proximity of concerns with Iran, whose potential to disturb southern Russian regions has never been doubted in Moscow. The assassinations of various dissidents, including journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko, show a return to the "bad old days" of the KGB under Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev, while apparent intransigence on energy businesses show that the Kremlin is keen to maximize every advantage it perceives. What this means for Putin himself is a matter of much conjecture, but it seems a fairly safe bet that he will not slide into oblivion quite as easily as president Boris Yeltsin did. At the logical extreme, one can expect that Russia will hold Europe hostage with its gas supplies, while increasing its shrill behavior on world forums against US interests. This would in turn cause the US to dial back its old suspicions on Russia. The nomination of Robert Gates (of "Mikhail Gorbachev is a fraud" fame) as US defense secretary makes it ever more likely that the US would prefer to pick battles with known enemies, particularly one that appears to be so willing to become recognized once again as the strategic counterbalance to the US. The only event that could derail this train would be a large terrorist attack on Russia, perhaps mounted by Chechen Muslims. [4] Similarly, a bigger attack on the US may make Americans more amenable to concessions for the Russians, making any conflict escalation unlikely. Over the longer term, though, Russia's tilt toward regaining the Soviet Union's lost dominance is ill-conceived for both historical and demographic reasons. However, it provides just enough breathing room for China to emerge fully into the limelight. For this reason, more than anything else, China's foreign policy in the next few months is likely to "encourage" adventurism on the part of the Russians, while playing lip service to the United States. Notes 1. Garfield with guns, Asia Times Online, September 2. 2. In-Sen!, Asia Times Online, September 16. 3. China's four-play, Asia Times Online, November 11. 4. It is interesting to note that Alexander Litvinenko alleged that it was the KGB rather than the Chechens who bombed Moscow apartment buildings.

I was listening to the radio show when the new witness called in. It is my recollection that she said the police officer, whom she claimed was Tippit, told the driver to move the car, which he reluctantly did. So when the shooter exited the building running soon thereafter he was perplexed for a moment as the car was not where it should have been but was instead in a nearby location where it could not be seen. The shooter, holding the rifle, then started running at a gallop with his jacket blowing in the wind towards a nearby tunnel under a road and the police officer immediately pursued him in his vehicle. That was the last that was seen by the new witness. She did say that she later learned that the driver of the car that was forced to move was named "Elrod." For a small charge anyone can listen to the rebroadcast of the radio show. I would do so but my schedule prevents me. Hopefully my recollection of what I heard around 3 a.m. in the morning is accurate. The account by the new witness had a ring of truth to it, which was remarked upon by the primary guest being interviewed on the show.

Alex Jones’ fantastic new video TerrorStorm can be seen in its entirety on Google. It is highly recommended. To view it, clink on the link below. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=786048453686176230

JFK Assassination Special IV From the coastocoastam radio show of Nov. 22, 2006 In a special 4-hour program, various guests individually presented information and conclusions about the conspiratorial aspects of the JFK assassination. In the first hour, Paul Groody, the mortician in charge of Lee Harvey Oswald's burial, and the exhumation of his body in 1981, presented details about a possible second 'Oswald.' In November 1963, he said he removed the top of Oswald's skull as part of the postmortem procedure-- yet the exhumed body's skull showed no markings or damage. View material we received from Groody. [see link at end of article] Author Jim Marrs noted that a paraffin test on Oswald showed that he didn't have gunpowder residue, as a person would that had fired a rifle, and that voice stress analysis of his statement "I'm just a patsy," suggested he was telling the truth. The problem, said Marrs, is that Oswald never got a fair trial. Kennedy, he said, may have become a target because he authorized the printing of money through the Treasury (which was interest free) instead of using the Federal Reserve. Researcher Lamar Waldron updated his work with new details from FBI files concerning mob lawyer Morris Shenker and the confession of one of Shenker's clients. Three Mafia bosses organized the killing of JFK, Waldron reported, and Bobby Kennedy couldn't prosecute them because they had information about a coup JFK had planned in Cuba. Radio host and filmmaker Alex Jones posited that the JFK assassination was a case of infighting amongst the Global Elite, and that Kennedy sided with the European elite, rather than the American/British branch. LBJ was a puppet for the Elite and the Mafia provided "low level trigger men," said Jones, who argued that JFK was killed for a "cocktail of reasons" including his plan to withdraw troops from Viet Nam. Jones also shared that his new video, Terrorstorm, can be viewed for free at Google Video. Author Brad Steiger cited the possibility that Howard Hughes was involved in the assassination, as he was a passionate Nixon supporter. He also outlined the connections between David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby and the city of New Orleans. Additionally, a caller to the show named Velma, 85 years old, shared her account of seeing a gunman running out of a building at Dealey Plaza. Neither his appearance nor gun matched that of Oswald's, she said, adding that she kept quiet for many years to protect her family. For more on the JFK assassination, check out recaps from our shows in 2003, 2004 and 2005. http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2006/11/22.html#recap

From westword.com Originally published by Westword 2006-10-05 Kill the Messenger The tragic death of one of America's most important investigative journalists By Nick Schou http://www.westword.com/Issues/2006-10-05/...news2_full.html A college dropout with 20 years of reporting experience and a Pulitzer Prize on his résumé, Gary Webb broke the biggest story of his career in August 1996 when he published "Dark Alliance," a three-part series for The San Jose Mercury News that linked the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to America's crack-cocaine explosion via the Nicaraguan contras, a right-wing army that aimed to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government during the 1980s. Many reporters had written about the CIA's collusion with contra drug smugglers, but nobody had ever discovered where those drugs ended up once they reached American soil. "Dark Alliance" provided the first dramatic answer to that mystery. But in the months following its publication, the story was subjected to ferocious attacks by the nation's biggest newspapers — the New York Times,the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times — and soon, Webb found himself out of a job. After being assigned to a tiny regional bureau, Webb quit the paper and never worked in daily journalism again. Nick Schou's new book, Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Gary Webb, examines the tragic unraveling of one of America's most talented yet enigmatic investigative journalists. The following excerpt is being printed with the permission of Nation Books. All rights are reserved. After days of unrelenting winter rain from a powerful Pacific storm, the clouds moved east and the skies cleared above the Sacramento valley. The snowcapped peaks of the western range of the Sierra Nevada glowed pink in the glinting early morning sun. On days like this, Gary Webb normally would have taken the day off to ride his motorcycle into the mountains. Although it was a Friday morning, Webb didn't need to call in sick. In fact, he hadn't been to work in weeks. When his ex-wife garnished his wages, seeking child support for their three kids, Webb asked for an indefinite leave from the small weekly alternative paper in Sacramento where he had been working the past four months. He told his boss he could no longer afford the $2,000 mortgage on his house in Carmichael, a suburb 20 miles east of the state capital. There was no time for riding. Today, December 10, 2004, Webb was going to move in with his mother. It wasn't his first choice. First, he asked his ex-girlfriend if he could share her apartment. The two had dated for several months and continued to live together until their lease expired a year earlier, when Webb had bought his new house. They had remained friends, and at first she had said yes, but she changed her mind at the last minute, not wanting to lead him on in the hope that they'd rekindle a romance. Desperate, Webb asked his ex-wife, Sue, if he could live with her until he regained his financial footing. She refused. "I don't feel comfortable with that," she said. "You don't?" Sue recalls that her ex-husband's words seemed painfully drawn out. "I don't know if I can do that," she said. "Your mother will let you move in. You don't have any other choice." Besides losing his house, Webb had also lost his motorcycle. The day before he was to move, it had broken down as he was riding to his mother's house in a nearby retirement community. After spotting Webb pushing the bike off the road, a helpful young man with a goatee and a spider-web tattoo on his elbow had given him a lift home. Webb arranged to get a pickup truck, but when he went back to retrieve his bike, it had disappeared. That night, Webb spent hours at his mother's house. At her urging, he typed up a description of the suspected thief. But Webb didn't see much point in filing a police report. He doubted he'd ever see his bike again. He had been depressed for months, but the loss of his bike seemed to push him over the edge. He told his mother he had no idea how he was going to ever make enough money to pay child support and pay rent or buy a new home. Although he had a paying job in journalism, Webb knew that only a reporting gig with a major newspaper would give him the paycheck he needed to stay out of debt. But after sending out 50 résumés to daily newspapers around the country, nobody had called for an interview. His current job couldn't pay the bills, and the thought of moving in with his mother, at age 49, was more than his pride would allow. "What am I going to do with the rest of my life?" he asked. "All I want to do is write." It was 8 p.m. by the time Webb left his mother's house. She offered to cook him a dinner of bacon and eggs, but Webb declined, saying he had to go home. There were other things he had to do. She kissed him goodbye and told him to come back the next day with a smile on his face. "Things will be better," she said. "You don't have to pay anything to stay here. You'll get back on your feet." The next morning, Anita Webb called her son to remind him to file a police report for the stolen bike. His phone rang and rang. She didn't bother leaving a message, figuring the movers already had arrived. They had. It's possible they heard the phone ringing. As they approached his house, they noticed a note stuck to his front door. "Please do not enter," it warned. "Call 911 for an ambulance. Thank you." When her son failed answer the phone for more than an hour, Anita Webb began to panic. Finally, she let the answering machine pick up. "Gary, make sure you file a police report," she said. Before she could finish, the machine beeped and an unfamiliar voice began to speak: "Are you calling about the man who lives here?" It is normally the policy of the Sacramento County Coroner's office not to answer the telephone at the scene of a death, but apparently the phrase "police report" startled the coroner into breaking that rule. At some point early that morning, Gary Webb had committed suicide. The coroners found his body in a pool of blood on his bed, his hands still gripping his father's 38-caliber pistol. On his nightstand were his Social Security card — apparently intended to make it easier for his body to be identified — a cremation card and a suicide note, the contents of which have never been revealed by his family. The house was filled with packed boxes. Only his turntable, DVD player and TV were unpacked. In the hours before he shot himself in the head, Webb had listened to his favorite album, Ian Hunter Live, and had watched his favorite movie, the Sergio Leone spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. In a trash can was a poster Webb had saved from his first journalism job with the Kentucky Post. The poster was an open letter to readers from Vance Trimble, Webb's first editor. Decades earlier, Webb had clipped it from the pages of the paper. Although he had always admired its message, something about it must have been too much to bear in his final moments. Trimble had written that, unlike some newspapers, the Post would never kill a story under pressure from powerful interests. "There should be no fetters on reporters, nor must they tamper with the truth, but give light so the people will find their own way," his letter stated. That morning, Sue Webb was at home in Folsom, just minutes away from Carmichael, when her cell phone started ringing. She was about to walk out the door to bring her fourteen-year-old daughter, Christine, to school. Because Sue was running late for a business meeting in Stockton, she didn't answer. But when she recognized the number of the caller as Kurt, her ex-husband's brother, she began to worry. "I was standing in the bathroom, and when I saw that number, I knew something had happened," she says. "I kept saying, 'No, this is not happening, this is not happening.' I was afraid to pick up the phone." Thoughts raced through her mind. Two days earlier, Webb had taken Christine to a doctor's appointment. At the doctor's office, there was a copy of Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham, which Webb had loved reading to her years earlier. He jokingly asked her if she wanted him to read it aloud to her. When he dropped Christine off at Sue's house later that day, Christine said her father made a special point of walking up to the door to kiss her goodbye. "He told her to be good to her mom," Sue says. "And he handed her some little bottles of perfume and said, 'I love you.' When she asked him if he wanted to come in, he said no." Sue put her daughter in the car and drove a few blocks to the entrance of the middle-class neighborhood of tract houses where she lives on a wooded hillside on the outskirts of town. "I couldn't stand it anymore, because the phone kept ringing," she says. "It was Anita, and she was just sobbing. And I said, 'Is he gone?' and she said, 'Yes.' And I just pulled off the road and started crying and said, 'Christine, your daddy's dead.' We had to get out of the car, and we sat on the grass together and just started crying. I don't even know how long we sat there." A woman driving by pulled over and asked what was wrong. Sue gave her the number of the health-care company where she worked as a sales agent. She asked the woman to call and let them no she wouldn't be able to keep her appointments that day. Then she called her twenty-year-old son, Ian, and Eric, her sixteen-year-old, who was already at school, to tell them to meet her and Christine at Anita's house. "I had to tell them on the phone what had happened because they wouldn't let me hang up," she says. When she arrived at Anita's house, Ian was sitting on the front lawn, tears streaming down his face. "The police had already left," she says. "I told him not to go inside." A block away from the house was a bench with a view of a duck pond. The tranquil scene seemed surreal, dreamlike, frozen in time. "I remember feeling this sense of loss. It was the weirdest thing in the world. I had moved to California to be with Gary and had left my family behind and suddenly I felt alone. And I knew almost immediately that he had killed himself." That afternoon, Sue met Kurt at the coroner's office. "They took us into a room, and the coroner came in and told us that Gary had shot himself and what gun he had used," she says. "It was his dad's gun that he had found when he was a security guard at a hospital in Cincinnati. Some patient had left it there, and his dad had kept it. He used to keep it under the bed. I'd get mad because we had kids, and he'd stick it in the closet." Kurt asked the coroner if he was certain it was a suicide. "There's no doubt in my mind," he answered. He added that sometimes, people who shoot themselves have bruises on their fingers from squeezing the trigger. Apparently the will to live is so strong that suicide victims often grip the gun so tightly and for so long they lose blood circulation in their hands. "Gary had bruises on his fingers," Sue says. A few days later, four letters arrived at Sue's house, one each for her and the three kids. Webb had mailed them before he died. He sent a separate letter to his mother, and a last will and testament to his brother Kurt. He told his children that he loved them, that Ian would make a woman happy someday, and that he didn't want his death to dissuade Eric from considering a career in journalism. His will divided his assets, including his just-sold house, among his wife and children. His only additional wish was that his ashes be spread in the ocean so he could "bodysurf for eternity." While it was Gary Webb who pulled the trigger, the bullet that ended his life was a mere afterthought to the tragic unraveling of one of the most controversial and misunderstood journalists in recent American history. "Dark Alliance" was the first major news expose? to be published simultaneously in print and on the Internet. Ignored by the mainstream media at first, the story nonetheless spread like wildfire through cyberspace and talk radio. It sparked angry protests around the country by African-Americans who had long suspected the government had allowed drugs into their communities. Their anger was fueled by the fact that "Dark Alliance" didn't just show that the contras had supplied a major crack dealer with cocaine or that the cash had been used to fund the CIA's army in Central America but also strongly implied that this activity had been critical to the nationwide explosion of crack cocaine that had taken place in America during the 1980s. It was an explosive charge, although a careful reading of the story showed that Webb had never actually stated that the CIA intentionally started the crack epidemic. In fact, Webb never believed the CIA had conspired to addict anybody to drugs. Rather, he believed that the agency had known that the contras were dealing cocaine and hadn't lifted a finger to stop them. He was right, and the controversy over "Dark Alliance" — which many consider to be the biggest media scandal of the 1990s — would ultimately force the CIA to admit it had lied for years about what it knew and when it knew it. In the wake of "Dark Alliance," the series and Webb himself were subjected to unprecedented attacks in the mainstream media, which took advantage of the story's most serious flaw — implying but failing to prove the CIA helped spark the crack epidemic — to assert that the CIA had no ties whatsoever to the drug ring Webb exposed. The attacks continued even after Webb's death. The Los Angeles Times published an obituary that ran in newspapers across the nation and summed up his life by claiming that he was author of "discredited" stories about the CIA. The paper would later publish a lengthy feature story revealing that Webb had suffered from clinical depression for more than a decade — even before he wrote "Dark Alliance." Titled "Written in Pain," it painted Webb as a troubled, manic-depressive man who had repeatedly cheated on his wife, and a reckless "cowboy" of a journalist. Such a portrait offers only a misleading caricature of a much more complicated man. Interviews with dozens of Webb's friends, family members and colleagues reveal that Webb was an idealistic, passionate and meticulous journalist, not a cowboy. Those who knew him before "Dark Alliance" made him famous and then infamous say he was happy until he lost his career. His colleagues, with the exception of some reporters and editors at the Mercury News who found him arrogant and self-promoting, almost universally loved, respected and even revered him. The controversy over "Dark Alliance" was the central event in Webb's life and the critical element in his eventual depression and suicide. His big story, despite major flaws of hyperbole abetted and even encouraged by his editors, remains one of the most important works of investigative journalism in recent American history. The connection that Webb uncovered between the CIA, the contras and Los Angeles' crack trade was real — and radioactive. Webb was hardly the first American journalist to lose his job after taking on the country's most secretive government agency in print. Every serious reporter or politician that tried to unravel the connection between the CIA, the Nicaraguan contras and cocaine had lived to regret it. Senator John Kerry investigated it through congressional hearings that were stonewalled by the Reagan administration, and for this, he was alternately ridiculed and ignored in the media. Journalists such as the AP's Bob Parry quit their jobs after being repeatedly shut down by their editors. Some reporters, working on the ground in Central America, had even been subjected to police harassment and death threats for pursuing it. Webb was simply the most widely and maliciously maligned of these reporters to literally die for the story. The recent history of American journalism is full of media scandals, from the fabulist fabrications of the New Republic's Stephen Glass and the New York Times' Jayson Blair to Judith Miller's credulous and entirely discredited reporting on Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction for the New York Times, which helped pave the way for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Webb, despite his stubborn refusal to admit his own errors, hardly deserves to be held in such company. What truly distinguishes his fate is his how he was abandoned by his employer in the face of unprecedented and ferocious attacks by the nation's major newspapers, the likes of which had never been seen before or occurred since. The controversy over "Dark Alliance" forced Webb from journalism and ultimately led him to take his own life. Besides Webb, however, nobody else lost a job over the story — nobody at the CIA, certainly, and not even any of Webb's editors, who happily published his work, only to back away from it under withering media attacks before getting on with their lives and receiving promotions. Gary Webb's tragic fate, and the role of America's most powerful newspapers in ending his career, raises an important question about American journalism in an era when much of the public perceives the fourth estate as an industry in decline, a feckless broadcaster of White House leaks with a penchant for sensationalized, consumer-driven tabloid sex scandals. Webb spent two decades uncovering corruption at all levels of power, at the hands of public officials representing all ideological facets of the political spectrum. Indeed, his very fearlessness in taking on powerful institutions and officials was an ultimately fatal character trait that nonetheless embodies the sort of journalistic ethic that should be rewarded and celebrated in any healthy democratic society. In 2002, Webb reflected on his fall from grace in the book Into the Buzzsaw, a compendium of first-person accounts by journalists whose controversial stories pushed them from their chosen profession. His words are worth remembering now more than ever. "If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me," Webb concluded. "And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job..... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress." http://www.westword.com/Issues/2006-10-05/...news2_full.html

Autopsy: No Arabs on Flight 77 By Thomas R. Olmsted, M.D Originally published 07/6/03. Updated 9/28/06 Sierra Times Please click on the link below and then click on the images to read the official documents that accompany the article: http://www.sierratimes.com/03/07/02/article_tro.htm Now Updated: No Arabs on Flight 77: Part II -The Passengers I am an ex Naval line officer and a psychiatrist in private practice in New Orleans, a Christian and homeschool dad. It troubled me a great deal that we rushed off to war on the flimsiest of evidence. I considered various ways to provide a smoking gun of who and why Sept 11th happened. Astute observers noticed right away that there were no Arabic sounding names on any of the flight manifests of the planes that “crashed” on that day. FOIA Cover Page A list of names on a piece of paper is not evidence, but an autopsy by a pathologist, is. I undertook by FOIA request, to obtain that autopsy list and you are invited to view it below. Guess what? Still no Arabs on the list. It is my opinion that the monsters who planned this crime made a mistake by not including Arabic names on the original list to make the ruse seem more believable. When airline disasters occur, airlines will routinely provide a manifest list for anxious families. You may have noticed that even before Sep 11th, that airlines are pretty meticulous about getting an accurate headcount before takeoff. It seems very unlikely to me, that five Arabs sneaked onto a flight with weapons. This is the list provided by American of the 56 passengers: On September 27th, the FBI published photos of the “hijackers” of Flight 77: Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), does a miraculous job and identified nearly all the bodies on November 16th 2001. Official Autopsy List - Page 2 The AFIP suggest these numbers; 189 killed, 125 worked at the Pentagon and 64 were “passengers” on the plane. The AA list only had 56 and the list just obtained has 58. They did not explain how they were able to tell “victims” bodies from “hijacker” bodies. In fact, from the beginning NO explanation has been given for the extra five suggested in news reports except that the FBI showed us the pictures to make up the difference, and that makes it so. Now, being the trusting sort, I figured that the government would want to quickly dispel any rumors so we could get on with the chore of kicking Osama/Sadaam’s butt (weren’t these originally two different people?). It seemed simple to me. . .produce the names of all the bodies identified by the AFIP and compare it with the publicized list of passengers. So, I sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the AFIP and asked for an expedited response, because we were getting ready to send our boys to war on the pretext that Osama/Sadaam had done the deed. Fourteen months later, a few US soldiers dead, many Iraqi civilians pushing up daisies, and I finally get the list. Believe me that they weren’t a bit happy to give it up, and I really have no idea why they choose now to release it. Official Autopsy List - Page 2 No Arabs wound up on the morgue slab; however, three ADDITIONAL people not listed by American Airline sneaked in. I have seen no explanation for these extras. I did give American the opportunity to “revise” their original list, but they have not responded. The new names are: Robert Ploger, Zandra Ploger, and Sandra Teague. The AFIP claims that the only “passenger” body that they were not able to identify is the toddler, Dana Falkenberg, whose parents and young sister are on the list of those identified. The satanic masterminds behind this caper may be feeling pretty smug about the perfect crime, but they have left a raft of clues tying these unfortunates together. Stay tuned for part two to take a much closer look of the cast of characters on this ill-fated flight. Click on Images for Full Size Graphic

September 25, 2006 A Regression in Consciousness Flying Saucers and the Decline of the Left By ALEXANDER COCKBURN counterpunch.org http://www.counterpunch.org/ The world is in tumult, but here in the heart of Empire the level of creative political energy runs flat along the bottom of the graph. As Iraq disintegrates amid frightful slaughter, US generals propose to bring to life the mad plan they once ascribed to Saddam Hussein, to dig a defensive ditch round Baghdad, one of the larger cities on the planet. In Afghanistan the Taliban are once again on the rise. Amid these vivid implosions of the "war on terror," the US antiwar movement is near dead. Here in the homeland, the mightiest names of the auto-industrial age have their backs to the wall. Tens of thousands of men and women face grim times as Ford and GM shutter plant after plant. Yet the pulse of organized labor amid this devastation is feeble. From the environmental movement there is an even fainter heartbeat, even as an actual conspiracy -- official concealment of the toxic toll on New Yorkers from the 9/11 attack -- finally comes to light. There's no convincing energy plan beyond posturing about ANWR; no protest at the giveaways of public lands. Less than two months from the midterm elections, the Democrats cower from confrontation with a widely hated President. When Bush tries to annul America's always frail commitment to the Geneva Conventions on torture, Joe Biden complacently announces that the Democrats are happy to sit this one out and let Republican Senators McCain, Warner and Graham attempt to mount a counterattack. This is the way to rally millions of antiwar voters in November? Bush's present bounce in the polls shows the bankruptcy of Democratic strategy, as supervised by Rahm Emanuel. Outrage burns in many an American breast, but there's scant outlet for it in the political arena. A friend of mine took his family to the annual Puyallup Fair near Tacoma, Washington. There was a CNN booth, in which a mini "Democracy Wall", an 8-by-4-foot sheet of butcher paper, was available for people to scrawl their sentiments in felt-tip. Fast as the CNN staffers changed the paper, scores more hastened forward to scribble their views, almost all of them harsh in language toward both CNN and the President. Families photographed each other in postures vulgarly disrespectful to the life-size cutout of Wolf Blitzer. When an older man -- he turned out to be the retired commander of a nuclear submarine -- rebuked the crowd and called for loyalty to Bush, the mood turned ugly, and for reasons of his personal safety he was advised to leave. "And yet," said my friend, the anthropologist David Price, "try getting these people to an antiwar rally." It's as dismal a political landscape as I can remember in thirty years. Yet some discover a silver lining. They find it in the 9/11 conspiracy cult, which I have discussed here in recent weeks. A politically sophisticated leftist in Washington, DC, wrote to thank me for my attack, but added, "To me the most interesting thing (in the US) is how many people are willing to believe that Bush either masterminded it [the 9/11 attacks] or knew in advance and let it happen. If that number or anything close to that is true, that's a huge base of people that are more than deeply cynical about their elected officials. That would be the real news story that the media is missing, and it's a big one." "I'm not sure I see the silver lining about cynicism re government," I answered. "People used to say the same thing about the JFK conspiracy buffs and disbelief in the Warren Commission. Actually, it seems to demobilize people from useful political activity. I think the nuttishness stems from despair and political infantilism. There's no worthwhile energy to transfer from such kookery. It's like saying some lunatic shouting to himself on a street corner has the capacity to be a great orator. The nearest thing to it all is the Flying Saucer craze. 'Open up the USAF archives!' It's a Jungian thing." The 9/11-ers, who've insulted me and other radical critics for years as "gatekeepers for the neocons", "CIA agents," and "fearful for their jobs", are wounded when I call them nuts.* I've had many e-mails repeating their delirious litanies about NORAD, the collapse of the WTC buildings or the "missile" that really struck the Pentagon. On this last matter, Chuck Spinney, now retired after years of brilliant public service exposing the Pentagon's budgetary outrages, wrote to me that "there ARE pictures taken of plane hitting Pentagon -- they were taken by the surveillance cameras at Pentagon's heliport, which was right next to impact point. I have seen themÖboth stills and moving pictures. I just missed seeing it personally, but the driver of the van I just got out of in South Parking saw it so closely that he could see the terrified faces of passengers in windows. I knew two people who were on the plane. One was ID'd by dental remains found in the Pentagon." This won't faze the nuts. They're immune to any reality check. Spinney worked for the government ... They switched the dental records ... The Boeing 757 was flown to Nebraska for a rendez-vous with President Bush, who shot the passengers, burned the bodies on the tarmac and gave Spinney's friend's teeth to Dick Cheney to drop through a hole in his trousers amid the debris in the Pentagon, the same way the paleontologists did in the Sussex gravel pit when they faked Piltdown Man. Such fantasists are not the foot soldiers of any movement for constructive social change. Richard Aldrich's book on British intelligence, The Hidden Hand (2002), describes how a report for the Pentagon on declassification recommended that "interesting declassified material" such as information about the JFK assassination "could be released and even posted on the Internet, as a 'diversion,'" and used to "reduce the unrestrained public appetite for 'secrets' by providing good faith distraction material". Aldrich adds, "If investigative journalists and contemporary historians were absorbed with the vexatious, but rather tired, debates over the grassy knoll, they would not be busy probing into areas where they were unwelcome." By the same token, I'm sure that the Bush gang, and all the conspirators of capital, are delighted at the obsessions of the 9/11 cultists. It's a distraction from the 1,001 real plots of capitalism that demand exposure and political challenge. "The tendency to occultism is a symptom of regression in consciousness", Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia. "The veiled tendency of society towards disaster lulls its victims in a false revelation, with a hallucinated phenomenon. In vain they hope in its fragmented blatancy to look their total doom in the eye and withstand it ... The offal of the phenomenal world becomes, to sick consciousness, the mundus intelligibilis." Note: A shorter version of this column ran in the print edition of The Nation that went to press last Wednesday.

Theory that U.S. orchestrated Sept. 11 attacks 'not absurd': Sept. 12, 2006 CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - President Hugo Chavez said Tuesday that it's at least plausible that the U.S. government was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. Chavez did not specifically accuse the U.S. government of having a hand in the Sept. 11 attacks, but rather suggested that theories of U.S. involvement bear examination. The Venezuelan leader, an outspoken critic of U.S. President George W. Bush, was reacting to a television report investigating a theory that the Twin Towers were brought down with explosives after hijacked airplanes crashed into them in 2001. "The hypothesis is not absurd . . . that those towers could have been dynamited," Chavez said in a speech to supporters. "A building never collapses like that, unless it's with an implosion." "The hypothesis that is gaining strength . . . is that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack or act against its own people and against citizens of all over the world," Chavez said. "Why? To justify the aggressions that immediately were unleashed on Afghanistan, on Iraq." Chavez has said the U.S. launched those wars to ensure its political and economic power. The U.S. government says al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden masterminded the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "A plane supposedly crashed into the Pentagon, but no one ever found a single remnant of that plane," Chavez said, citing a television program he had seen on Venezuela's state television. Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro raised the same theories in an earlier speech Tuesday, and called for an independent investigation. "It's really worrisome to think that all of that could have been a great conspiracy against humanity," Maduro said. "An independent international investigation must be carried out one day to discover the truth about the events of Sept. 11."

Oliver Stone hints at darker 9/11 film in future www.globeandmail.com Sept. 12, 2006 Moscow -- U.S. filmmaker Oliver Stone, who surprised many with the patriotic flavour of his new film World Trade Center, hinted in Moscow yesterday that he is considering a more controversial follow-up investigating the "conspiracy" around 9/11. "There is a great story in a movie, a conspiracy by a group of people in the American administration who have an agenda and who used 9/11 to further that agenda," he told journalists in Russia. There could be a "fascinating project [on] what happened after Sept. 11," the director said at his packed press conference on the fifth anniversary of the attacks. Stone accused U.S. President George W. Bush of mishandling the fight against Osama bin Laden's militants and using the crisis to stoke fear and bolster his own power at home in a way that was "right out of George Orwell." AFP

The SS Brotherhood of the Bell A new book by Joseph Farrell In 1945, a mysterious Nazi secret weapons project code-named The Bell left its underground bunker in lower Silesia, with its project documentation, and the 4-star SS general Hans Kammler. Taken aboard a massive six engine Junkers 390 ultra-long range aircraft, The Bell, Kammler, and all project records disappeared completely, along with the gigantic Junkers 390 carrying them. It has been speculated that it flew to Argentina. As a prelude to this disappearing act, the SS murdered most of the scientists and technicians involved with the project, a secret weapon that, according to one German Nobel prize-winning physicist, was given a classification of decisive for the war--the highest security classification. Farrell investigates the technologies researched by the Nazis and challenges to the conventional views of the end of World War Two. There are a number of revelations in the book about the Kennedy assassination. For one of the most enlightening but disturbing discussions of the entire subject, you are directed to the September 9, 2006 edition of Dreamland, a free Internet radio program. Jim Marrs and Whitley Strieber interview author Joseph Farrell on Dreamland in an exchange of new and vital information. To listen to the free program, go to the link below and click on the section titled “Listen Now” at the top of the masthead: http://www.unknowncountry.com/

How They Let the Guilty Parties of 9/11 Slip Off the Hook The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts By ALEXANDER COCKBURN Weekend Edition Counterpunch September 9/10 , 2006 http://www.counterpunch.org/ You trip over one fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracy nuts -- -- the ones who say Bush and Cheney masterminded the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- in the first paragraph of the opening page of the book by one of their high priests, David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor. “In many respects,” Griffin writes, “the strongest evidence provided by critics of the official account involves the events of 9/11 itself… In light of standard procedures for dealing with hijacked airplanes… not one of these planes should have reached its target, let alone all three of them.” The operative word here is “should”. One characteristic of the nuts is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous belief in American efficiency, thus many of them start with the racist premise that “Arabs in caves” weren’t capable of the mission. They believe that military systems work the way Pentagon press flacks and aerospace salesmen say they should work. They believe that at 8.14 am, when AA flight 11 switched off its radio and transponder, an FAA flight controller should have called the National Military Command center and NORAD. They believe, citing reverently (this is from high priest Griffin) “the US Air Force’s own website”, that an F-15 could have intercepted AA flight 11 “by 8.24, and certainly no later than 8.30”. They appear to have read no military history, which is too bad because if they did they’d know that minutely planned operations – let alone responses to an unprecedented emergency -- screw up with monotonous regularity, by reason of stupidity, cowardice, venality, weather and all the other whims of providence. According to the minutely prepared plans of the Strategic Air Command, an impending Soviet attack would have prompted the missile silos in North Dakota to open, and the ICBMs to arc towards Moscow and kindred targets. The tiny number of test launches actually attempted all failed, whereupon SAC gave up testing. Was it badly designed equipment, human incompetence, defense contractor venality or… CONSPIRACY? (In that case, presumably, a Communist conspiracy, as outlined by ancestors of the present nuts, ever intent on identifying those who would stab America in the back.) Did the British and French forces in 1940 break and flee a Wehrmacht capable of only one lunge, because of rotten leadership, terrible planning, epic cowardice, or … CONSPIRACY? Did the April 24, 1980 effort to rescue the hostages in the US embassy in Teheran fail because a sandstorm disabled three of the eight helicopters, because the helicopters were poorly made, because of a lousy plan or because of agents of William Casey and the Republican National Committee poured sugar into their gas tanks in yet another CONSPIRACY? Have the US military’s varying attempts to explain why F-15s didn’t intercept and shoot down the hijacked planes stemmed from absolutely predictable attempts to cover up the usual screw-ups, or because of CONSPIRACY? Is Mr Cohen in his little store at the end of the block hiking his prices because he wants to make a buck, or because his rent just went up or because the Jews want to take over the world? August Bebel said anti-Semitism is the socialism of the fools. These days the 9/11 conspiracy fever threatens to become the “socialism” of the left, and the passe-partout of many libertarians. It’s awful. My in-box overflows each day with fresh “proofs” of how the WTC buildings were actually demolished, often accompanied by harsh insults identifying me as a “gate-keeper” preventing the truth from getting out. I meet people who start quietly, asking me “what I think about 9/11”. What they are actually trying to find out is whether I’m part of the coven. I imagine it was like being a Stoic in the second century A.D. going for a stroll in the Forum and meeting some fellow asking, with seeming casualness, whether it’s possible to feed 5,000 people on five loaves of bread and a couple of fish. Indeed, at my school in the 1950s the vicar used to urge on us Frank Morison’s book, Who Moved The Stone? It sought to demonstrate, with exhaustive citation from the Gospels, that since on these accounts no human had moved the stone from in front of Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, it must beyond the shadow of a doubt have been an angel who rolled it aside and let Jesus out, so he could astonish the mourners and then Ascend. Of course Morison didn’t admit into his argument the possibility that angels don’t exist, or that the gospel writers were making it up. It’s the same pattern with the 9/11 nuts, who proffer what they demurely call “disturbing questions”, though they disdain all answers but their own. They seize on coincidences and force them into sequences they deem to be logical and significant. Like mad Inquisitors, they pounce on imagined clues in documents and photos, torturing the data –- as the old joke goes about economists -- till the data confess. Their treatment of eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence is whimsical. Apparent anomalies that seem to nourish their theories are brandished excitedly; testimony that undermines their theories – like witnesses of a large plane hitting the Pentagon -- is contemptuously brushed aside. Anyone familiar with criminal, particularly death penalty defense – I had such an opportunity for a number of years – will know that there are always anomalies the prosecution cannot account for and that the defense teams can exploit, in hopes of swaying a jury either in the guilt or penalty phase of a trial. Time and again I would see the defense team spend days and weeks, even months, back-checking on a possibly vulnerable link in the evidentiary chain that could be attacked, at least to the all-important level of creating “reasonable doubt” in the mind of a juror. Expert witnesses would be imported at great expense –- unlike states such as Texas, the justice system of California is generous in the provision of money for death penalty defense -- to challenge the prosecution’s forensic evidence. Such challenges weren’t hard to mount. Contrary to prosecutorial claims, there is far less instrinsic certainty in forensic evaluation than is commonly supposed, as regards fingerprints, landing marks on bullets and so forth. But minute focus of a death penalty defense team on one such weak link often leads to a distorted view of the whole case. I remember more than one case where, after weeks of interviewing witnesses at one particular crime scene, the defense’s investigator had collected enough witness reports to mount a decent attack on this aspect of the prosecution’s overall case. At least this is what I thought, hearing the daily bulletins of the investigator. But when, in such instances, the camera pulled back, so to speak, and I saw the prosecution’s whole case – chain of evidence, cumulative witness statements, accused’s own movements and subsequent statements – it became clear enough to me and, in that case to the juries , that the accused were incontestably guilty. But even then, such cases had a vigorous afterlife, with the defense trying to muster up grounds for an appeal, on the basis of testimony and evidence withheld by the prosecution, faulty rulings by the judge, a prejudiced jury member and so on. A seemingly “cut and dried case” is very rarely beyond challenge, even though in essence it actually may well be just that, “cut and dried”. Anyone who ever looked at the JFK assassination will know that there are endless anomalies and loose ends. Eyewitness testimony – as so often – is conflicting, forensic evidence possibly misconstrued, mishandled or just missing. But in my view, the Warren Commission, as confirmed in almost all essentials by the House Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, had it right and Oswald fired the fatal shots from the Schoolbook Depository. The evidentiary chain for his guilt is persuasive, and the cumulative scenarios of the conspiracy nuts entirely unconvincing. But of course – as the years roll by, and even though no death bed confession has ever buttressed those vast, CIA-related scenarios -- the nuts keep on toiling away, their obsessions as unflagging as ever. Naturally, there are conspiracies. I think there is strong evidence that FDR did have knowledge that a Japanese naval force in the north Pacific was going to launch an attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt thought it would be a relatively mild assault and thought it would be the final green light to get the US into the war. Of course it’s very probable that the FBI or US military intelligence, even the CIA, had penetrated the Al Qaeda team planning the 9/11 attacks; that intelligence reports – some are already known – piled up in various Washington bureaucracies pointing to the impending onslaught and even the manner in which it might be carried out. The history of intelligence operations is profuse with example of successful intelligence collection, but also fatal slowness to act on the intelligence, along with eagnerness not to compromise the security and future usefulness of the informant, who has to prove his own credentials by even pressing for prompt action by the plotters. Sometime an undercover agent will actually propose an action, either to deflect efforts away from some graver threat, or to put the plotters in a position where they can be caught red-handed. In their penetrations of environmental groups the FBI certainly did this. Long before the Yom Kippur war, a CIA analyst noted Egyptian orders from a German engineering firm, and deduced from the type and size of equipment thus ordered that Egypt was planning an attack across the Suez canal. He worked out the probable size of the Egyptian force and the likely time window for the attack. His superiors at the CIA sat on the report. When the Egyptian army finally attacked on October 6, 1973 the CIA high command ordered up the long-buried report, dusted it off and sent it over to the White House, marked “current intelligence”. Was there a “conspiracy” by the CIA high command to allow Israel to be taken by surprise? I doubt it. Bureaucratic inertia and caution prevailed, until the moment came for decisive CYA acitvity. The nuts make dizzying “deductive” leaps. There is a one particularly vigorous coven which has established to its own satisfaction that the original NASA moon landing was faked, and never took place. This “conspiracy” would have required the complicity of thousands of people , all of whom have kept their mouths shut. The proponents of the “fake moon landing” plot tend to overlap with the JFK and 9/11 nuts. One notorious “deductive” leap involves flight 77, which on 9/11 ended up crashing into the Pentagon. There are photos of the impact of the “object” -- i.e., the Boeing 757, flight 77 -- that seem to show the sort of hole a missile might make. Ergo, the nuts assert, it WAS a missile and a 757 didn’t hit the Pentagon. As regards the hole, my brother Andrew -- writing a book about Rumsfeld and the DoD during his tenure -- has seen photos taken within 30 minutes of Pentagon impact clearly showing outline of entire plane including wings. This was visible momentarily when the smoke blew away And if it was a missile, what happened to the 757? Did the conspirators shoot it down somewhere else, or force it down and then kill the passengers? Why plan to demolish the towers with pre-placed explosives if your conspiracy includes control of the two planes that hit them. Why bother with the planes at all. Why blame Osama if your fall guy is Saddam Hussein? Why involve the Israeli “art students”. The nuts simultaneously credit their targets – the Bush-Cheney “conspirators” -- with superhuman ingenuity and grotesque carelessness. In Webster Griffin Tarpley’s book “9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA” he writes that “in an interview with Parade magazine, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld also referred to the object which hit the Pentagon as a ‘missile’. Was this a Freudian slip by the loquacious defense chief?” (And, a nut might add, is it mere coincidence that Webster Griffin Tarpley shares one of his names with David Ray Griffin? The demolition scenario is classic who-moved-the-stonery. The WTC towers didn’t fall down because they were badly built as a consequence of corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the Port Authority, and because they were struck by huge planes loaded with jet fuel. No, they fell because Dick Cheney’s agents methodically planted demolition charges in the preceding days. It was a conspiracy of thousands, all of whom –- party to mass murder –- have held their tongues ever since. The “conspiracy” is always open-ended as to the number of conspirators, widening steadily to include all the people involved in the execution and cover-up of the demolition of the Towers and the onsslaujght on the Pentagon, from the teams acquiring the explosives and themissile, inserting the explosives in the relevant floors of three vast buildings, (moving day after day among the unsuspecting office workers), then on 9/11 activating the detonators. Subsequently the conspiracy includes the disposers of the steel and rubble, the waste recyclers in Staten Island and perhaps even the Chinese who took the salvaged incriminating metal for use in the Three Gorges dam, where it will submerged in water and concretye for ever. Tens of thousands of people, all silent as the tomb to this day. Of course the buildings didn’t suddenly fall at a speed inexplicable in terms of physics unless caused by carefully pre-placed explosives, detonated by the ruthless Bush-Cheney operatives. High grade steel can bend disastrously under extreme heat. People inside who survived the collapse didn’t hear a series of explosions. As discussed in Wayne Barrett and Dan Collin’s excellent book Grand Illusion, about Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, helicopter pilots radioed warnings nine minutes before the final collapse that the South Tower might well go down and, repeatedly, as much as 25 minutes before the North Tower’s fall. What Barrett and Collins brilliantly show are the actual corrupt conspiracies on Giuliani’s watch: the favoritism to Motorola which saddled the firemen with radios that didn’t work; the ability of the Port Authority to skimp on fire protection, the mayor’s catastrophic failure in the years before 9/11/2001 to organize an effective unified emergency command that would have meant that cops and firemen could have communicated; that many firemen wouldn’t have unnecessarily entered the Towers; that people in the Towers wouldn’t have been told by 911 emergency operators to stay in place; and that firemen could have heard the helicopter warnings and the final Mayday messages that prompted most of the NYPD men to flee the Towers. That’s the real political world, in which Giuliani and others have never been held accountable. The nuts disdain the real world because, like much of the left and liberal sectors, they have promoted Bush, Cheney and the Neo-Cons to an elevated status as the Arch Demons of American history, instead of being just one more team running the American empire, a team of more than usual stupidity and incompetence (characteristics I personally favor in imperial leaders.) The Conspiracy Nuts have combined to produce a huge distraction, just as Danny Sheehan did with his Complaint, that mesmerized and distracted much of the Nicaraguan Solidarity Movement in the 1980s, and which finally collapsed in a Florida courtroom almost as quickly as the Towers. * Footnote: I should add that one particular conspiracy nut, seeing that Roosevelt’s grandson Ford – a schoolteacher in Los Angeles – was for a while, some years ago, on the board of CounterPunch’s parent non-profit, the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity – wrote an enormous onslaught on CounterPunch a while ago, “proving” to his own satisfaction that CounterPunch was a pawn of the Democratic Party, the CIA and kindred darker forces. I suppose the fact that CounterPunch attacked the Democratic Party and the CIA on a weekly basis was just one more example of our cunning in deflecting suspicion away from our true sponsors. The fact that from time to time that we also quite regularly attacked FDR – and posited his foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor – should again be taken as evidence of our cunning in deflecting suspicion away from Ford’s supervisory roile in our affairs. In fact we’d put Ford on the board in the hopes (vain, as they turned out to be) that he would persuade film stars to give CounterPunch money. A much shorter, earlier version of the column ran in the print edition of The Nation that went to press last Thursday.

Dawn: Not only Anderson Cooper has to be watched but others, too, it seems from the following article. ------------ 10 Miami journalists take U.S. pay Miami Herald Sept. 8, 2006 At least 10 local journalists accepted U.S. government pay for programs on Radio Martí or TV Martí. El Nuevo Herald fired two of them Thursday for conflict of interest. BY OSCAR CORRAL ocorral@MiamiHerald.com At least 10 South Florida journalists, including three from El Nuevo Herald, received regular payments from the U.S. government for programs on Radio Martí and TV Martí, two broadcasters aimed at undermining the communist government of Fidel Castro. The payments totaled thousands of dollars over several years. Those who were paid the most were veteran reporters and a freelance contributor for El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language newspaper published by the corporate parent of The Miami Herald. Pablo Alfonso, who reports on Cuba and writes an opinion column, was paid almost $175,000 since 2001 to host shows on Radio Martí and TV Martí. El Nuevo Herald freelance reporter Olga Connor, who writes about Cuban culture, received about $71,000, and staff reporter Wilfredo Cancio Isla, who covers the Cuban exile community and politics, was paid almost $15,000 in the last five years. Alfonso and Cancio were dismissed after The Miami Herald questioned editors at El Nuevo Herald about the payments. Connor's freelance relationship with the newspaper also was severed. Alfonso and Cancio declined to comment. Connor was unavailable for comment. Jesús Díaz Jr., president of the Miami Herald Media Co. and publisher of both newspapers, expressed disappointment, saying the payments violated a ''sacred trust'' between journalists and the public. ''Even the appearance that your objectivity or integrity might have been impaired is something we can't condone, not in our business,'' Díaz said. ``I personally don't believe that integrity and objectivity can be assured if any of our reporters receive monetary compensation from any entity that he or she may cover or have covered, but particularly if it's a government agency.'' Other journalists receiving payments from the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which runs Radio and TV Martí, included: Diario Las Americas opinion page editor Helen Aguirre Ferre and reporter/columnist Ariel Remos; Channel 41 news director Miguel Cossio; and syndicated columnist Carlos Alberto Montaner, whose opinions appear in the pages of El Nuevo Herald and The Miami Herald. GOVERNMENT PROJECT Radio and TV Martí are U.S. government programs created to promote democracy and freedom in Cuba. Their programming cannot be broadcast within the United States because of anti-propaganda laws. Radio and TV Martí have received $37 million this year. The payments to journalists were discovered in documents recently obtained by The Miami Herald as a result of a federal Freedom of Information Request filed on Aug. 15. OWN RESPONSIBILITY Pedro Roig, the director of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting since 2003, said he has sought to improve the quality of news by, among other things, hiring more Cuban exile journalists as contractors. He said it's each journalist's responsibility to adhere to their own ethics and rules. ''We consider them to be good journalists, and people who were formed inside that system who got out [of Cuba] and adapted and made good,'' Roig said. ``In reality, I feel very satisfied.'' Journalism ethics experts called the payments a fundamental conflict of interest. Such violations undermine the credibility of reporters to objectively cover key issues affecting U.S. policy toward Cuba, they said. Iván Román, executive director of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, said the payments from TV and Radio Martí posed a clear conflict of interest. ''It's definitely a line that journalists shouldn't be crossing,'' said Román, a former El Nuevo Herald journalist. ``It's clear the medium has a particular agenda. If they cover Cuban issues, it could be seen as a conflict.'' El Nuevo Herald Executive Editor Humberto Castelló said he hadn't been aware that the three writers were being paid by the federal government. ''I lament very much that I had not been informed before by them,'' Castelló said. ``We discussed the situation with them and they were both dismissed immediately.'' POPULAR FIGURES The journalists involved are among the most popular in South Florida, and many were reporting on issues involving Radio or TV Martí for their news organizations. Channel 41 reporter Juan Manuel Cao, who received $11,400 this year from TV Martí, made news in July when he confronted Castro during an appearance in Argentina by pressing the Cuban leader to explain why his government had not allowed a well-known doctor and dissident, Hilda Molina, to leave the island to visit her son in Argentina. During the exchange, Castro openly questioned Cao if anyone was paying him to ask that question. The Cuban government has long contended that some South Florida Spanish-language journalists were on the federal payroll. ''There is nothing suspect in this,'' Cao said. ``I would do it for free. But the regulations don't allow it. I charge symbolically, below market prices.'' DEFENDS ROLE Ferre, the opinion page editor for Diario las Americas, was paid $4,325 from 2001 to 2005. She said the payments did not compromise her journalistic integrity. She was paid to be a guest on TV Martí shows and said her point of view was never suppressed. ''Guests are being paid for their time that they have to take in order to be able to accommodate the program,'' she said. Ethicists say that it's common for journalists to be compensated by other media outlets but not by the government, built on principles that espouse an independent press. ' 'This is such an obvious textbook case,'' said University of Florida journalism professor Jon Roosenraad. 'This is exactly like a business reporter during the day going out and moonlighting as a PR [public relations] person for a local company at night and then going back to the paper the next day and writing about `his' company.'' Total payouts since 2001 range from $1,550 to Radio Mambi commentator Ninoska Perez-Castellón to $174,753 for El Nuevo Herald's Alfonso, the government payment records show. The payments -- which range from $75 to $100 per appearance -- are to host or appear on the government-produced shows. The Miami Herald's review of dozens of articles by the El Nuevo Herald journalists -- including several about TV Martí or Radio Martí -- found no instance in which the reporters or columnists disclosed that they had received payment. Two ethics experts compared it to the case of Armstrong Williams in 2005, when it was revealed that the Bush administration had paid the prominent pundit to promote its education policy, No Child Left Behind, on his nationally syndicated television show. Herald staff writers Jasmine Kripalani, Luisa Yanez, Casey Woods and Alfonso Chardy contributed to this report.

Doug, thank you for this posting. It seems that Operation Mockingbird is alive and well. There is no doubt that you need to travel to discover the truth about the world. I thought the Soviet Union and China had good systems of government until I visited these countries. I also thought that the UK had a good welfare state and transport system until I visited other European countries. I have also found my visits to the United States enlightening. Overall it is a better country than the one that is portrayed in Hollywood movies. However, your media was far worse than I expected. Recent surveys show that young people all over the world are highly suspicious of the media and are more likely to get their news from the internet. This is a healthy development and in the long term will help to undermine the power of organizations like the CIA. Anderson Cooper's CIA Secret http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2006/09/...-cia-secret.php Anderson Cooper has long traded on his biography, carving a niche for himself as the most human of news anchors. But there's one aspect of his past that the silver-haired CNN star has never made public: the months he spent training for a career with the Central Intelligence Agency. Following his sophomore and junior years at Yale—a well-known recruiting ground for the CIA—Cooper spent his summers interning at the agency's monolithic headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in a program for students interested in intelligence work. His involvement with the agency ended there, and he chose not to pursue a job with the agency after graduation, according to a CNN spokeswoman, who confirmed details of Cooper's CIA involvement to Radar. "Whatever summer jobs or internships our anchors had in college couldn't be less consequential," she added. He has kept the experience a secret, sources say, out of concern that, if widely known, it might compromise his ability to travel in foreign countries and even possibly put him at greater risk from terrorists. "He doesn't want to be any more of a target than he already is," says one Anderson confidante. On the other hand, as Bob Woodruff and others have learned, American journalists are already prime targets in the world's conflict zones, and are typically accused of having CIA ties even where none exist. And by not disclosing his training before now, Cooper has arguably made it into a potential issue. "It creates the appearance of something smelly there," says a former CNN official who knows Cooper. (Particularly in light of the period Anderson spent studying Vietnamese at the University of Hanoi after college. Soon after, Cooper apparently gave up his Bond fantasy to pursue a career in journalism—except for a brief period when he starred as host of ABC's reality show, The Mole.) According to the spokeswoman, Cooper told his bosses at CNN about his time with the agency. But even if he hadn't, says Walter Isaacson, who headed the network from 2001 to 2003 and is now president of the Aspen Institute, it's not the sort of thing that would automatically require disclosure, since the stint was brief and far in the past. "I think what he did was probably fine and cool, and I've got no problems with it," he added. 09/06/06 8:00 AM

16 Questions on the Assassination By Bertrand Russell The Minority of One, 6 September 1964, pp. 6-8 This article was published in the September 1964 issue of M.S. Arnoni’s The Minority of One. The official version of the assassination of President Kennedy has been so riddled with contradictions that it is been abandoned and rewritten no less than three times. Blatant fabrications have received very widespread coverage by the mass media, but denials of these same lies have gone unpublished. Photographs, evidence and affidavits have been doctored out of recognition. Some of the most important aspects of the case against Lee Harvey Oswald have been completely blacked out. Meanwhile, the F.B.I., the police and the Secret Service have tried to silence key witnesses or instruct them what evidence to give. Others involved have disappeared or died in extraordinary circumstances. It is facts such as these that demand attention, and which the Warren Commission should have regarded as vital. Although I am writing before the publication of the Warren Commission’s report, leaks to the press have made much of its contents predictable. Because of the high office of its members and the fact of its establishment by President Johnson, the Commission has been widely regarded as a body of holy men appointed to pronounce the truth. An impartial examination of the composition and conduct of the Commission suggests quite otherwise. The Warren Commission has been utterly unrepresentative of the American people. It consisted of two Democrats, Senator Russell of Georgia and Congressman Boggs of Louisiana, both of whose racist views have brought shame on the United States; two Republicans, Senator Cooper of Kentucky and Congressman Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, the latter of whom is a leader of his local Goldwater movement and an associate of the F.B.I.; Allen Dulles, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Mr. McCloy, who has been referred to as the spokesman for the business community. Leadership of the filibuster in the Senate against the Civil Rights Bill prevented Senator Russell from attending hearings during the period. The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Earl Warren, who rightly commands respect, was finally persuaded, much against his will, to preside over the Commission, and it was his involvement above all else that helped lend the Commission an aura of legality and authority. Yet many of its members were also members of those very groups which have done so much to distort and suppress the facts about the assassination. Because of their connection with the Government, not one member would have been permitted under U.S. law to serve on a jury had Oswald faced trial. It is small wonder that the Chief Justice himself remarked that the release of some of the Commission’s information “might not be in your lifetime” Here, then, is my first question:Why were all the members of the Warren Commission closely connected with the U.S. Government? If the composition of the Commission was suspect, its conduct confirmed one’s worst fears. No counsel was permitted to act for Oswald, so that cross-examination was barred. Later, under pressure, the Commission appointed the President of the American Bar Association, Walter Craig, one of the supporters of the Goldwater movement in Arizona, to represent Oswald. To my knowledge, he did not attend hearings, but satisfied himself with representation by observers. In the name of national security, the Commission’s hearings were held in secret, thereby continuing the policy which has marked the entire course of the case. This prompts my second question: If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security? Indeed, precisely the same question must be put here as was posed in France during the Dreyfus case: If the Government is so certain of its case, why has it conducted all its inquiries in the strictest secrecy? At the outset the Commission appointed six panels through which it would conduct its enquiry. They considered: (1) What did Oswald do on November 22, 1963? (2) What was Oswald’s background? (3) What did Oswald do in the U.S. Marine Corps, and in the Soviet Union? (4) How did Ruby kill Oswald? (5) What is Ruby’s background? (6) What efforts were taken to protect the President on November 22? This raises my fourth question: Why did the Warren Commission not establish a panel to deal with the question of who killed President Kennedy? All the evidence given to the Commission has been classified “Top Secret,” including even a request that hearings be held in public. Despite this the Commission itself leaked much of the evidence to the press, though only if the evidence tended to prove Oswald the lone assassin. Thus, Chief Justice Warren held a press conference after Oswald’s wife, Marina, had testified. He said, that she believed her husband was the assassin. Before Oswald’s brother Robert testified, he gained the Commission’s agreement not to comment on what he said. After he had testified for two days, the newspapers were full of stories that “a member of the Commission” had told the press that Robert Oswald had just testified that he believed that his brother was an agent of the Soviet Union. Robert Oswald was outraged by this, and he said that he could not remain silent while lies were told about his testimony. He had never said this and he had never believed it. All that he had told the Commission was that he believed his brother was innocent and was in no way involved in the assassination. The methods adopted by the Commission have indeed been deplorable, but it is important to challenge the entire role of the Warren Commission. It stated that it would not conduct its own investigation, but rely instead on the existing governmental agencies—the F.B.I., the Secret Service and the Dallas police. Confidence in the Warren Commission thus presupposes confidence in these three institutions. Why have so many liberals abandoned their own responsibility to a Commission whose circumstances they refuse to examine? It is known that the strictest and most elaborate security precautions ever taken for a President of the United States were ordered for November 22 in Dallas. The city had a reputation for violence and was the home of some of the most extreme right-wing fanatics in America. Mr. and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson had been assailed there in 1960 when he was a candidate for the Vice-Presidency. Adlai Stevenson had been physically attacked when he spoke in the city only a month before Kennedy’s visit. On the morning of November 22, the Dallas Morning News carried a full-page advertisement associating the President with Communism. The city was covered with posters showing the President’s picture and headed “Wanted for Treason.” The Dallas list of subversives comprised 23 names, of which Oswald’s was the first. All of them were followed that day, except Oswald. Why did the authorities follow many persons as potential assassins and fail to observe Oswald’s entry into the book depository building while allegedly carrying a rifle over three feet long? The President’s route for his drive through Dallas was widely known and was printed in the Dallas Morning News on November 22. At the last minute the Secret Service changed a small part of their plans so that the President left Main Street and turned into Houston and Elm Streets. This alteration took the President past the book depository building from which it is alleged that Oswald shot him. How Oswald is supposed to have known of this change has never been explained.Why was the President’s route changed at the last minute to take him past Oswald’s place of work? After the assassination and Oswald’s arrest, judgment was pronounced swiftly: Oswald was the assassin, and he had acted alone. No attempt was made to arrest others, no road blocks were set up round the area, and every piece of evidence which tended to incriminate Oswald was announced to the press by the Dallas District Attorney, Mr. Wade. In such a way millions of people were prejudiced against Oswald before there was any opportunity for him to be brought to trial. The first theory announced by the authorities was that the President’s car was in Houston Street, approaching the book depository building, when Oswald opened fire. When available photographs and eyewitnesses had shown this to be quite untrue, the theory was abandoned and a new one formulated which placed the vehicle in its correct position. Meanwhile, however, D.A. Wade had announced that three days after Oswald’s room in Dallas had been searched, a map had been found there on which the book depository building had been circled and dotted lines drawn from the building to a vehicle on Houston Street, showing the alleged bullet trajectory had been planned in advance. After the first theory was proved false, the Associated Press put out the following story on November 27: “Dallas authorities announced today that there never was a map.” The second theory correctly placed the President’s car on Elm Street, 50 to 75 yards past the book depository, but had to contend with the difficulty that the President was shot from the front, in the throat. How did Oswald manage to shoot the President in the front from behind? The F.B.I. held a series of background briefing sessions for Life magazine, which in its issue of December 6 explained that the President had turned completely round just at the time he was shot. This too, was soon shown to be entirely false. It was denied by several witnesses and films, and the previous issue of Life itself had shown the President looking forward as he was hit. Theory number two was abandoned. In order to retain the basis of all official thinking, that Oswald was the lone assassin, it now became necessary to construct a third theory with the medical evidence altered to fit it. For the first month no Secret Service agent had ever spoken to the three doctors who had tried to save Kennedy’s life in the Parkland Memorial Hospital. Now two agents spent three hours with the doctors and persuaded them that they were all misinformed: the entrance wound in the President’s throat had been an exit wound, and the bullet had not ranged down towards the lungs. Asked by the press how they could have been so mistaken, Dr. McClelland advanced two reasons: they had not seen the autopsy report—and they had not known that Oswald was behind the President! The autopsy report, they had been told by the Secret Service, showed that Kennedy had been shot from behind. The agents, however, had refused to show the report to the doctors, who were entirely dependent on the word of the Secret Service for this suggestion. The doctors made it clear that they were not permitted to discuss the case. The third theory, with the medical evidence rewritten, remains the basis of the case against Oswald at this moment. Why has the medical evidence concerning the President’s death been altered out of recognition? Although Oswald is alleged to have shot the President from behind, there are many witnesses who are confident that the shots came from the front. Among them are two reporters from the Forth Worth Star Telegram, four from the Dallas Morning News, and two people who were standing in front of the book depository building itself, the director of the book depository and the vice-president of the firm. It appears that only two people immediately entered the building: the director, Mr. Roy S. Truly, and a Dallas police officer, Seymour Weitzman. Both thought that the shots had come from in front of the President’s vehicle. On first running in that direction, Weitzman was informed by “someone” that he thought the shots had come from the building, so he rushed back there. Truly entered with him in order to assist with his knowledge of the building. Mr. Jesse Curry, the Chief of Police in Dallas, has stated that he was immediately convinced that the shots came from the building. If anyone else believes this, he has been reluctant to say so to date. It is also known that the first bulletin to go out on Dallas police radios stated that “the shots came from a triple overpass in front of the presidential automobile.” In addition, there is the consideration that after the first shot the vehicle was brought almost to a halt by the trained Secret Service driver, an unlikely response if the shots had indeed come from behind. Certainly Mr. Roy Kellerman, who was in charge of the Secret Service operation in Dallas that day, and travelled in the presidential car, looked to the front as the shots were fired. The Secret Service has had all the evidence removed from the car, so it is no longer possible to examine it. What is the evidence to substantiate the allegation that the President was shot from behind? Photographs taken at the scene of the crime could be most helpful. One young lady standing just to the left of the presidential car as the shots were fired took photographs of the vehicle just before and during the shooting, and was thus able to get into her picture the entire front of the book depository building. Two F.B.I. agents immediately took the film which she took. Why has the F.B.I. refused to publish what could be the most reliable piece of evidence in the whole case? In this connection it is noteworthy also that it is impossible to obtain the originals of photographs bearing upon the case. When Time magazine published a photograph of Oswald’s arrest—the only one ever seen—the entire background was blacked out for reasons which have never been explained. It is difficult to recall an occasion for so much falsification of photographs as has happened in the Oswald case. The affidavit by Police Office Weitzman, who entered the book depository building, stated that he found the alleged murder rifle on the sixth floor. (It was first announced that the rifle had been found on the fifth floor, but this was soon altered.) It was a German 7.65 mm. Mauser. Late the following day, the F.B.I. issued its first proclamation. Oswald had purchased in March 1963 an Italian 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano. D.A. Wade immediately altered the nationality and size of the weapon to conform to the F.B.I. statement. Several photographs have been published of the alleged murder weapon. On February 21,Life magazine carried on its cover a picture of “Lee Oswald with the weapons he used to kill President Kennedy and Officer Tippitt [sic].” On page 80, Life explained that the photograph was taken during March or April of 1963. According to the F.B.I., Oswald purchased his pistol in September 1963.The New York Times carried a picture of the alleged murder weapon being taken by police into the Dallas police station. The rifle is quite different. Experts have stated that no rifle resembling the one in the Life picture has even been manufactured. The New York Times also carried the same photograph as Life, but left out the telescopic sights. On March 2, Newsweek used the same photograph but painted in an entirely new rifle. Then on April 13 the Latin American edition of Life carried the same picture on its cover as the U.S. edition had on February 21, but in the same issue on page 18 it had the same picture with the rifle altered. How is it that millions of people have been misled by complete forgeries in the press? The authorities interrogated Oswald for nearly 48 hours without allowing him to contact a lawyer, despite his repeated requests to do so. The director of the F.B.I. in Dallas was a man with considerable experience. American Civil Liberties Union lawyers were in Dallas requesting to see Oswald and were not allowed to do so. By interrogating Oswald for 48 hours without access to lawyers, the F.B.I. created conditions which made a trial of Oswald more difficult. A confession or evidence obtained from a man held 48 hours in custody is likely to be inadmissible in a U.S. court of law. The F.B.I. director conducted his interrogation in a manner which made the use of material secured in such a fashion worthless to him. This raises the question of whether he expected the trial to take place. Another falsehood concerning the shooting was a story circulated by the Associated Press on November 23 from Los Angeles. This reported Oswald’s former superior officer in the Marine Corps as saying that Oswald was a crack shot and a hot-head. The story was published widely. Three hours later AP sent out a correction deleting the entire story from Los Angeles. The officer had checked his records and it had turned out that he was talking about another man. He had never known Oswald. To my knowledge the correction has yet to be published by a single major publication. The Dallas police took a paraffin test on Oswald’s face and hands to try to establish that he had fired a weapon on November 22. The Chief of the Dallas Police, Jesse Curry, announced on November 23 that the result of the test “proves Oswald is the assassin.” The Director of the F.B.I. in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in charge of the investigation stated: “I have seen the paraffin test. The paraffin test proves that Oswald had nitrates and gunpowder on his hands and face. It proves he fired a rifle on November 22.” Not only does this unreliable test not prove any such thing, it was later discovered that the test on Oswald’s face was in fact negative, suggesting that it was unlikely he fired a rifle that day. Why was the result of the paraffin test altered before being announced by the authorities? Oswald, it will be recalled, was originally arrested and charged with the murder of Patrolman Tippitt [sic]. Tippitt was killed at 1:06 p.m. on November 22 by a man who first engaged him in conversation, then caused him to get out of the stationary police car in which he was sitting and shot him with a pistol Miss Helen L. Markham, who states that she is the sole eye-witness to this crime, gave the Dallas police a description of the assailant. After signing her affidavit, she was instructed by the F.B.I., the Secret Service and many police officers that she was not permitted to discuss the case with anyone. The affidavit’s only description of the killer was that he was a “young white man.” Miss Markham later revealed that the killer had run right up to her and past her, brandishing the pistol, and she repeated the description of the murderer which she had given to the police. He was, she said, “short, a little heavy, and had somewhat bushy hair.” (The police description of Oswald was that he was of average height, or a little taller, was slim and had receding fair hair.) Miss Markham’s affidavit is the entire case against Oswald for the murder of Patrolman Tippitt, yet District Attorney Wade asserted: “We have more evidence to prove Oswald killed Tippit than we have to show he killed the President.” The case against Oswald for the murder of Tippitt, he continued, was an absolutely strong case. Why was the only description of Tippitt’s killer deliberately omitted by the police from the affidavit of the sole eye-witness? Oswald’s description was broadcast by the Dallas police only 12 minutes after the President was shot. This raises one of the most extraordinary questions ever posed in a murder case: Why was Oswald’s description in connection with the murder of Patrolman Tippitt broadcast over Dallas police radio at 12:43 p.m. on November 22, when Tippitt was not shot until 1:06 p.m.? According to Mr. Bob Considine, writing in the New York Journal American, there had been another person who had heard the shots that were fired at Tippitt. Warren Reynolds had heard shooting in the street from a nearby room and had rushed to the window to see the murderer run off. Reynolds himself was later shot through the head by a rifleman. A man was arrested for this crime but produced an alibi. His girl-friend, Betty Mooney McDonald, told the police she had been with him at the time Reynolds was shot, according to Mr. Considine. The Dallas police immediately dropped the charges, even before Reynolds had time to recover consciousness, and attempt to identify his assailant. The man at once disappeared, and two days later the police arrested Betty Mooney McDonald on a minor charge and it was announced that she had hanged herself in the police cell. She had been a striptease artist in Jack Ruby’s nightclub, according to Mr. Considine. Another witness to receive extraordinary treatment in the Oswald case was his wife, Marina. She was taken to the jail while her husband was still alive and shown a rifle by Chief of Police Jesse Curry. Asked if it were Oswald’s, she replied that she believed Oswald had a rifle but that it didn’t look like that. She and her mother-in-law were in great danger following the assassination because of the threat of public revenge on them. At this time they were unable to obtain a single police officer to protect them. Immediately after Oswald was killed, however, the Secret service illegally held both women against their will. After three days they were separated and Marina has never again been accessible to the public. Held in custody for nine weeks and questioned almost daily by the F.B.I. and Secret Service, she finally testified to the Warren Commission and, according to Earl Warren, said that she believed her husband was the assassin. The Chief Justice added that the next day they intended to show Mrs. Oswald the murder weapon and the Commission was fairly confident that she would identify it as her husband’s. The following day it was announced that this had indeed happened. Mrs. Oswald, we are informed, is still in the custody of the Secret Service. To isolate a witness for nine weeks and to subject her to repeated questioning by the Secret Service in this manner is reminiscent of police behavior in other countries, where it is called brainwashing. The only witness produced to show that Oswald carried a rifle before the assassination stated that he saw a brown paper parcel about two feet long in the back seat of Oswald’s car. The rifle which the police “produced” was almost 3½ feet long.How was it possible for Earl Warren to forecast that Marina Oswald’s evidence would be exactly the reverse of what she had previously testified? After Ruby had killed Oswald, D.A. Wade made a statement about Oswald’s movements following the assassination. He explained that Oswald had taken a bus, but he described the point at which Oswald had entered the vehicle as seven blocks away from the point located by the bus driver in his affidavit. Oswald, Wade continued, then took a taxi driven by a Daryll Click, who had signed an affidavit. An inquiry at the City Transportation Company revealed that no such taxi driver had ever existed in Dallas. Presented with this evidence, Wade altered the driver’s name to William Whaley. The driver’s log book showed that a man answering Oswald’s description had been picked up at 12:30. The President was shot at 12:31. D.A. Wade made no mention of this. Wade has been D.A. in Dallas for 14 years and before that was an F.B.I. agent.How does a District Attorney of Wade’s great experience account for all the extraordinary changes in evidence and testimony which he has announced during the Oswald case? These are only a few of the questions raised by the official versions of the assassination and by the way in which the entire case against Oswald has been conducted. Sixteen questions are no substitute for a full examination of all the factors in this case, but I hope that they indicate the importance of such an investigation. I am indebted to Mr. Mark Lane, the New York criminal lawyer who was appointed counsel for Oswald by his mother, for much of the information in this article. Mr. Lane’s enquiries, which are continuing, deserve widespread support. A Citizen’s Committee of Inquiry has been established in New York, at Room 422, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York. N.Y. (telephone YU9-6850) for such a purpose, and comparable committees are being set up in Europe. In Britain, I invited people eminent in the intellectual life of the country to join a “Who Killed Kennedy Committee,” which at the moment of writing consists of the following people: Mr. John Arden, playwright; Mrs. Carolyn Wedgwood Benn, from Cincinnati, wife of Anthony Wedgwood Benn, M.P.; Lord Boyd-Orr, former director-general of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization and a Nobel Peace Prize winner; Mr. John Calder, publisher; Professor William Empsom, Professor of English Literature at Sheffield University; Mr. Victor Golancz, publisher; Mr. Michael Foot, Member of Parliament; Mr. Kingsley Martin, former editor of the New Statesman; Sir Compton Mackenzie, writer; Mr. J.B. Priestley, playwright and author; Sir Herbert Read, art critic; Mr. Tony Richardson, film director; Dr. Mervyn Stockwood, Bishop of Southwark; Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University; Mr. Kenneth Tynan, Literary Manager of the National Theatre; and myself. We view the problem with the utmost seriousness. U.S. Embassies have long ago reported to Washington world-wide disbelief in the official charges against Oswald, but this has scarcely been reflected by the American press. No U.S. television program or mass circulation newspaper has challenged the permanent basis of all the allegations—that Oswald was the assassin, and that he acted alone. It is a task which is left to the American people. http://www.solstice.us/russell/16questions.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

Ashton Gray’s weirdo theories about Watergate are right up there with those crazies that assert six million Jews did not perish in the Holocaust, American astronauts did not walk on the Moon, and Elvis is still alive and walking around.

I met Spencer Oliver’s father, Bob Oliver, several times when I was employed by General Foods Corporation in the years immediately preceding Watergate. His father was retained by The Mullen Company, a CIA-organized front, which was the public relations/lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. used by General Foods. Robert Mullen and Oliver’s father on occasion traveled to White Plains, N.Y. to advise the corporate leaders of General Foods. When Robert Bennett purchased The Mullen Company in 1970, he continued the retainer relationship with Oliver’s father. As to the assertion by a member of the Forum that there were no break-ins at the Democratic Party headquarters in Watergate prior to June 17, 1972, or “bugs” planted there, the reader’s attention in called to the posting of the sworn deposition of Gordon Liddy in this thread. Liddy provides specific details of the prior break-ins, exposing the gross absurdity of the member’s la-la-land assertion.

Livermore Scientists Reignite JFK Assassination Debate August 21, 2006 KTVU TV Oakland, California LIVERMORE - It's been the subject of numerous arguments, books and a major Hollywood movie and now scientists at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory have turned up the heat again on just who assassinated President John F. Kennedy. The researchers say metallurgical chemical "fingerprints" on the bullets that killed the president and wounded then Texas Governor John Connally may have been misinterpreted and that the government's crucial "single gunman theory" has been thrown into doubt. "It basically shatters what some people call the best physical evidence around," chemist Pat Grant, director of the lab's highly respected Forensic Science Center told the San Jose Mercury News. Grant and Lab metallurgist Erik Randich found that the chemical "fingerprints" used to identify which bullets the fragments came from were not quite the "smoking gun" as thought pointing to Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman. The FBI used five bullet fragments recovered from the limousine, Connally's body, the president's brain and from a stretcher for its initial tests using what is known as "neutron activation" analysis. Those tests proved inconclusive, but later tests by chemist Vincent Guinn -- a renowned specialist in neutron activation -- on the bullet lead pointed directly at Oswald. Guinn said the fragments came from just two bullets -- both of which came from Oswald's Russian-manufactured rifle. Randich said the Lawrence Livermore tests came to a different result. "We don't know if there were two bullets," said Randich. "There could have been two bullets, but the lead composition data shows there could be anywhere from one to five bullets." http://www.ktvu.com/news/9709821/detail.html ------------- Challenge to Lone Gunman theory By Betsy Mason CONTRA COSTA TIMES Sunday, August 20, 2006 http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/15321194.htm LIVERMORE - More than four decades after his death, John F. Kennedy's assassination remains the hottest cold case in U.S. history, and the clues continue to trickle in. Now Lawrence Livermore Laboratory scientists say a key piece of evidence supporting the lone gunman theory should be thrown out. A new look at clues gleaned from studies of crime-scene bullet fragments shows they may have been misinterpreted. "It basically shatters what some people call the best physical evidence around," said chemist Pat Grant, director of the lab's Forensic Science Center. Grant and Livermore Lab metallurgist Erik Randich found that the chemical "fingerprints" used to identify which bullets the fragments came from are actually more like run-of-the-mill tire tracks than one-of-a-kind fingerprints. "I've spoken with people on both sides of the conspiracy divide and there's no question but that (Randich and Grant's) work is going to be very difficult, if not outright impossible, to refute," said Gary Aguilar, a San Francisco ophthalmologist and single-bullet skeptic who has studied the Kennedy assassination for more than a decade. "It looks impregnable." The government's claim that Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed Kennedy spawned a vitriolic debate between conspiracy theorists and lone gunman supporters that rages to this day. In 1964, the Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the assassination, concluded that Oswald fired just three shots from the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas: The first missed entirely. The second passed through the president's neck, into Texas Governor John Connally's body under his right arm, out through his chest and then splintered his wrist and wounded his left thigh. The third fatally hit Kennedy in the head. Even though three bullets were involved, this scenario became known as the "single-bullet theory" because it requires the second bullet to account for all the nonfatal injuries to both Kennedy and Connally. The injuries to Kennedy's neck and to Connally happened within a split second of each other. So either the injuries to both men came from a single bullet from Oswald or from at least two bullets from more than one shooter. Oswald's rifle couldn't have fired two shots in such rapid succession. So in order for Oswald to be the lone gunman, it had to be a single bullet. Skeptics and believers alike say the bullets amount to the most important piece of physical evidence for the single-bullet theory. Throwing it out is like removing a leg from a four-legged table. "Warren Commission defenders consider this evidence central to the single-bullet theory," Aguilar said. But Grant and Randich say the bullet lead analysis was faulty. Both Randich and Grant are forensic scientists at Livermore Lab but researched the JFK case on their own time. Their work is the latest chapter in an ongoing saga. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, the FBI analyzed five bullet fragments recovered from the limousine, the governor's wrist, the president's brain and from a hospital stretcher. The FBI used a technique known as "neutron activation" analysis to find the precise composition of the fragments. By determining the exact amounts of impurities in the lead, such as antimony and silver, they hoped to be able to tell which fragments came from the same bullet. But the FBI decided it couldn't draw any conclusions from the results. In 1976, the U.S. House of Representatives formed an assassination committee to investigate the deaths of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. The move was largely a response to hundreds of books, documentaries and magazine pieces questioning the government's version of the JFK assassination, as well as public outcry following the first airing of Abraham Zapruder's home movie of the assassination on the television show, "Good Night America." The committee called in nuclear chemist Vincent Guinn, one of the world's foremost experts on neutron activation, to reanalyze the bits of bullet lead. Unlike the FBI, Guinn drew a very clear conclusion. He said the antimony in the fragments clearly showed they all came from two, and only two, bullets of the type used by Oswald's gun, which supports the Warren Commission's lone gunman theory. According to Guinn, one set of fragments from the president's brain and the limousine in front of the president had around .06 percent antimony, and all came from the bullet that killed JFK. The other set of fragments from the governor's wrist and a nearly intact bullet found on a stretcher at the hospital had closer to .08 percent antimony and were pieces of the infamous "single bullet." Based on evidence including the bullet lead, the committee concluded in 1979 that both shots had come from Oswald's gun. They did not, however, rule out the possibility of a conspiracy. In fact, they strongly suspected a second shooter was present that day, but based on Guinn's data, any second shooter had missed the target. Or maybe not. "It turns out that if you really analyze the results correctly, then the results are wrong," said Grant. Fatal flaw Randich and Grant's study grew out of work Randich did in 2002 that exposed a fatal flaw in the FBI's use of bullet-lead evidence to connect suspects with crime scenes in thousands of criminal cases during the past three decades. The FBI claimed that like a fingerprint, each batch of lead has a unique chemical signature, so the specific amounts of impurities in a lead bullet could match it with other bullets from the same batch. For example, if bullets at a suspect's house were found to have the same impurity signature as a bullet or fragment found at a murder scene, it was treated as evidence tying the suspect to the crime. Randich's training as a metallurgist told him there was something wrong with this reasoning. "I realized these people could put my sons in jail with bogus science," he said. "I thought I ought to do something about it." By analyzing years of data kept by lead smelters, Randich found that batches are not unique, and bullets from different batches of bullets poured months or years apart could have the same chemical signature. And bullets poured from the start of a batch could differ slightly, but measurably, from those at the end. He has testified in about a dozen cases. Because of his work, courts now reject bullet-lead analysis and the FBI no longer uses it as evidence. According to Guinn, the type of bullets used by Oswald happened to have highly variable amounts of antimony. Guinn said the variation between bullets of this type was so great that he could use it to tell individual bullets apart, even from the same batch of lead. Randich and Grant say that assumption is dead wrong. They analyzed the same type of bullets and showed that within a single bullet, there is a significant variation in impurities on a microscopic scale. The range of concentrations of impurities in each bullet is large enough to make small fragments from different parts of the same bullet have very different chemical fingerprints. Some of the fragments in the JFK case are so small that the differences in antimony could be explained entirely by this microscopic variation, instead of by differences between bullets, they said. Randich and Grant's study was published in July in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. "We don't know if there were two bullets," said Randich. "There could have been two bullets, but the lead composition data shows there could be anywhere from one to five bullets." The bullet found on the stretcher is missing some lead, but not enough to account for all the other fragments. So there had to be more than one bullet. But Grant and Randich say there is no way to tell how many more, at least from the bullet lead. That evidence "knits together the core physical evidence into an airtight case against Lee Oswald," according to a 2004 paper by Larry Sturdivan and Ken Rahn in an issue of Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry that celebrated Vincent Guinn after his death. "It is, thus, the key to resolving the major controversies in the JFK assassination and putting the matter to rest," the paper said. Rahn, an atmospheric chemist recently retired from the University of Rhode Island, stands by this statement and Guinn's research despite Randich and Grant's study. He says he believes it is possible that microscopic variation occurs within bullets of this type, but Grant and Randich can't say for sure whether it happened in the JFK bullets because they didn't analyze those particular fragments. Rahn thinks it is far more likely the fragments fell into two distinct groups, one with .06 percent antimony and the other with .08 percent, because they came from two distinct bullets. This fits the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald was the lone shooter, and two of the three bullets he shot hit the occupants of the president's limousine, Rahn said. Grant counters that the two groups of bullet fragments might not actually be that distinct. The margin of error associated with the antimony analysis means that, statistically, the concentrations are too close to separate into groups. Although Randich and Grant's research doesn't solve the Kennedy assassination, it certainly does weaken the case for a lone gunman. "In recent years, the (bullet) fragment evidence has become one of the key struts supporting the single-bullet theory," Aguilar said. "Randich and Grant have knocked this slat out from under the theory." Betsy Mason covers science and the national laboratories. Reach her at bmason@cctimes.com or 925-847- 2158. http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/15321194.htm

The CIA-Contra-Crack Connection, 10 Years Later Reporter Gary Webb was the victim of his own hyperbole, but he never got credit for what he got right. By Nick Schou NICK SCHOU is an editor for OC Weekly. His book, "Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb," will be published in October. Los Angeles Times August 18, 2006 TEN YEARS AGO today, one of the most controversial news articles of the 1990s quietly appeared on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News. Titled "Dark Alliance," the headline ran beneath the provocative image of a man smoking crack — superimposed on the official seal of the CIA. The three-part series by reporter Gary Webb linked the CIA and Nicaragua's Contras to the crack cocaine epidemic that ripped through South Los Angeles in the 1980s. Most of the nation's elite newspapers at first ignored the story. A public uproar, especially among urban African Americans, forced them to respond. What followed was one of the most bizarre, unseemly and ultimately tragic scandals in the annals of American journalism, one in which top news organizations closed ranks to debunk claims Webb never made, ridicule assertions that turned out to be true and ignore corroborating evidence when it came to light. The whole shameful cycle was repeated when Webb committed suicide in December 2004. Many reporters besides Webb had sought to uncover the rumored connection between the CIA's anti-communism efforts in Central America and drug trafficking. "Dark Alliance" documented the first solid link between the agency and drug deals inside the U.S. by profiling the relationship between two Nicaraguan Contra sympathizers and narcotics suppliers, Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses, and L.A.'s biggest crack dealer, "Freeway" Ricky Ross. Two years before Webb's series, the Los Angeles Times estimated that at its peak, Ross' "coast-to-coast conglomerate" was selling half a million crack rocks per day. "f there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles' streets with mass-marketed cocaine," the article stated, "his name was 'Freeway' Rick." But after Webb's reporting tied Ross to the Nicaraguans and showed that they had CIA connections, The Times downgraded Ross' role to that of one "dominant figure" among many. It dedicated 17 reporters and 20,000 words to a three-day rebuttal to "Dark Alliance" that also included a lengthy musing on whether African Americans disproportionately believe in conspiracy theories. All three major U.S. dailies, The Times included, debunked a claim that Webb actually never made — that the CIA deliberately unleashed the crack epidemic on black America. The controversy over this non-assertion obscured Webb's substantive points about the CIA knowingly doing business south of the border with Nicaraguans involved in the drug trade up north. The Washington Post titled one of its stories "Conspiracy Theories Can Often Ring True; History Feeds Blacks' Mistrust." The New York Times chipped in with a scathing critique of Webb's entire career, suggesting that he was a reckless reporter prone to getting his facts wrong. "That article included virtually none of the good things Gary did," said Webb's former Cleveland Plain Dealer colleague, Walt Bogdanich, now a New York Times editor. "It didn't include the success he achieved or the wrongs he righted — and they were considerable. It wasn't fair, and it made him out to be a freak." There is no denying that the papers were right on one serious count — "Dark Alliance" contained major flaws of hyperbole that were both encouraged and ignored by his editors, who saw the story as a chance to win a Pulitzer Prize, according to Mercury News staffers I interviewed. Webb asserted, improbably, that the Blandon-Meneses-Ross drug ring opened "the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles," helping to "spark a crack explosion in urban America." The story offered no evidence to support such sweeping conclusions, a fatal error that would ultimately destroy Webb, if not his editors. At first, the Mercury News defended the series, but after nine months, Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos wrote a half-apologetic letter to readers that defended "Dark Alliance" while acknowledging obvious mistakes. Webb privately (and accurately) predicted the mea culpa would universally be misperceived as a total retraction, and he publicly accused the paper of cowardice. In return, he was banished to a remote bureau in Cupertino, Calif.; he resigned a few months later. Meanwhile, spurred on by Webb's story, the CIA conducted an internal investigation that acknowledged in March 1998 that the agency had covered up Contra drug trafficking for more than a decade. Although the Washington Post and New York Times covered the report — which confirmed key chunks of Webb's allegations — the L.A. Times ignored it for four months, and largely portrayed it as disproving the "Dark Alliance" series. "We dropped the ball on that story," said Doyle McManus, the paper's Washington bureau chief, who helped supervise its response to "Dark Alliance." Unable to find suitable employment, a bewildered Webb left journalism, endured a difficult divorce and battled growing depression and financial despair. But even his suicide failed to dull the media's contempt for "Dark Alliance." The L.A. Times and the New York Times published brief obituaries dismissing Webb as the author of "discredited" stories linking the CIA to Southern California drug sales. Unlike the media pariahs who came after "Dark Alliance" — most notably fabulists Stephen Glass of the New Republic and Jayson Blair of the New York Times — Webb didn't invent facts. Contrary to the wholly discredited reporting on Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction by New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Webb was the only victim of his mistakes. Nobody else died because of his work, and no one, either at the CIA or the Mercury News, is known to have lost so much as a paycheck. The editors involved with the story, including Managing Editor David Yarnold, survived the scandal to receive generous promotions. History will tell if Webb receives the credit he's due for prodding the CIA to acknowledge its shameful collaboration with drug dealers. Meanwhile, the journalistic establishment is only beginning to recognize that the controversy over "Dark Alliance" had more to do with poor editing than bad reporting. "In some ways, Gary got too much blame," said L.A. Times Managing Editor Leo Wolinsky. "He did exactly what you expect from a great investigative reporter." http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commen...-opinion-center

The article below offers a brief look at the financial empire amassed by LBJ as described in Barr McClellan's book, LBJ killed JFK. McClellan described an entire floor in an office building in Austin that contained LBJ's financial records, which came to his attention when he worked as an attorney for the law firm that represented LBJ. August 16, 2006 L. H. Marks, 90, Dies; Helped Lyndon Johnson Get Rich By DOUGLAS MARTIN The New York Times Leonard H. Marks, a communications lawyer who helped Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife acquire the television stations that built their fortune and who later served as director of the United States Information Agency in the Johnson administration, died Friday in Washington. He was 90. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Kent Jenkins, a family friend. Mr. Marks said he became a lawyer because his father, who held minor political posts, told him he could make money and still be a politician. He more than accomplished both goals. By the time President Johnson appointed him director of the U.S.I.A., which officially conveys the American image to the world, Mr. Marks’s Washington law firm represented more than 400 broadcasting licensees. As director of the information agency, he had the task of communicating the United States’ views on the Vietnam War, which he ultimately told President Johnson was futile. It was the only time Johnson was ever angry at him, Mr. Marks said in an interview with Bar Report, published by the District of Columbia Bar Association. Among Mr. Marks’s first private clients were Johnson, then a congressman, and his wife, Lady Bird. With an inheritance, Mrs. Johnson had bought a radio station, which was licensed to operate only at night. Mr. Marks got it licensed not only to operate 24 hours a day, but also to use a superior frequency. It was his idea that the Johnsons apply to the Federal Communications Commission to buy the television station in Austin, the Texas capital. He said that Johnson resisted, but that Mrs. Johnson said yes. “That was the beginning of the L.B.J. family fortune,” Mr. Marks said in the interview. As charges that he had pulled political strings to get the lucrative and sought-after station dogged Johnson, Mr. Marks repeatedly explained that Mrs. Johnson was simply a shrewd businesswoman. “She could read a balance sheet the way a truck driver reads a road map,” he said. Leonard Harold Marks was born on March 5, 1916, in Pittsburgh, where his father held elected and appointed political jobs in law enforcement. He went to the University of Pittsburgh, where he was student-body president, majored in political science and graduated at 19. He taught for four years at the university’s law school, after graduating from it with honors. In 1942, he moved to Washington and became assistant to the general counsel of the F.C.C. He oversaw the agency’s Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, which monitored foreign radio broadcasts. In 1946, he joined Marcus Cohn to form the law firm Cohn & Marks. In 1948, he married the former Dorothy Ames, a reporter for Variety and other newspapers; she died in 2001. Mr. Marks is survived by two sons, Stephen Ames Marks, of Arnold, Md., and Robert Evans Marks, of Greenwich, Conn., and five grandchildren. During the 1950’s, Mr. Marks traveled to India, Turkey and elsewhere to lecture on communications under a State Department program. In 1962, at the request of Edward R. Murrow, then director of the information agency, he led a privately financed program to distribute thousands of American books abroad. He said in an interview with Merle Miller in “Lyndon: An Oral Biography” (1980) that he decided early that Johnson was going to be president and refrained from asking any favors for other clients that might later embarrass him. But he had no problems promoting Johnson and was treasurer of his 1964 presidential campaign. During the 1960 campaign, Johnson, then running for vice president, and John F. Kennedy, the presidential candidate, were reported to be at odds and met in New York for a joint television appearance to defuse rumors. Johnson was given two minutes, compared with Kennedy’s 20, but, after protesting, he got five. “I’ve got an eight-minute speech,” Johnson protested. Mr. Marks was in charge of the cue cards. He displayed the speech as written, all eight minutes’ worth. When he was appointed as director of the U.S.I.A., succeeding Carl T. Rowan, some questioned his journalistic inexperience, but the president praised his leadership potential. In an unusual token of respect, Mr. Johnson invited Mr. Marks to National Security Council meetings, at which Mr. Marks argued that military factors should overrule public opinion, according to Robert Dallek in “Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times” (1998). Among his initiatives at the information agency were hiring skilled local storytellers to spread American views at Vietnamese fish markets and bringing six Egyptians, including Anwar el-Sadat, who was not yet president, to chat with Johnson. Mr. Marks led many international and national efforts in communications, press freedom, space, foreign policy and humanitarian matters, including serving as president of the International Rescue Committee, which aided Vietnamese boat people in the 1970’s. When President Johnson’s body lay in state in the Capitol in 1973, Mr. Marks recalled Mrs. Johnson as saying “that the thing Lyndon hated was to be by himself.” He and other close friends gathered to keep overnight watch on the coffin. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/16/us/16mar...agewanted=print

With the assassination of John Kennedy the course of history was changed. Would the world be living on the edge today as a result of the Middle East conflict if Kennedy had served out his full term in office and, most likely, been re-elected? This is a legitimate question, although no one knows the answer. Perhaps the greatest statesman in living memory, one who eclipses the public adoration for Kennedy, is Winston S. Churchill. Churchill played a key role some 85 years ago in shaping the Middle East conflict of today. There are those who argue that Churchill’s statements in the article below reflect anti-Semitism on his part. Such a conclusion is best left to the individual reader. There is no doubt, however, that as early as 1920 Churchill was laying plans for the creation of the nation of Israel, which took place some 28 years later. As he writes below, “Of course, Palestine is far too small to accommodate more than a fraction of the Jewish race, nor do the majority of national Jews wish to go there. But if, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.” Churchill’s essay is offered as an authenticated historical document to help understand how the world got to its present geopolitical situation. Zionism Versus Bolshevism A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People by the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill Illustrated Sunday Herald (London) February 8, 1920 [Caption of accompanying photograph showing Churchill on his horse: “Mr. Churchill inspecting his old regiment, the 4th Hussars, at Aldershot last week”] Some people like Jews and some do not, but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world. Disraeli, the Jew Prime Minister of England, and Leader of the Conservative Party, who was always true to his race and proud of his origin, said on a well-known occasion: “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews.” Certainly when we look at the miserable state of Russia, where of all countries in the world the Jews were the most cruelly treated and contrast it with the fortunes of our own country, which seems to have been so providentially preserved amid the awful perils of these times, we must admit that nothing has since happened in the history of the world has falsified the truth of Disraeli’s confident assertion. Good and Bad Jews The conflict between good and evil which proceeds unceasingly in the breast of man nowhere reaches such an intensity as in the Jewish race. The dual nature of mankind is nowhere more strongly or more terribly exemplified. We owe it to the Jews in the Christian revelation a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural world, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilisation. And it may well be that this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested, would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible. It would seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of the Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical. “National” Jews There can be no greater mistake than to attribute to each individual a recognisable share in the qualities which make up the national character. There are all sorts of men – good, bad and, for the most part, indifferent – in every country, and in every race. Nothing is more wrong than to deny to an individual, on account of race or origin, his right to be judged on his personal merits and conduct. In a people of peculiar genius like the Jews, contrasts are more vivid, the extremes are more widely separated, the resulting consequences are more decisive. At the present fateful period there are three main lines of political conception among the Jews, two of which are helpful and hopeful in a very high degree of humanity, and the third absolutely destructive. First there are the Jews who, dwelling in every country throughout the world, identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life, and, while adhering faithfully to their own religion, regard themselves as citizens in the fullest sense of the State which has received them. Such a Jew living in England would say, “I am an Englishmen practising the Jewish faith.” This is a worthy conception and useful in the highest degree. We in Great Britain well know that during the great struggle the influence of what may be called the “National Jews” in many lands was cast predominately on the side of the Allies; and in our own Army Jewish soldiers have played a most distinguished part, some rising to the command of armies, other winning the Victoria Cross for valour. The National Russian Jews, in spite of the disabilities under which they have suffered, have managed to play an honourable and useful part in the national life even of Russia. As bankers and industrialists, they have strenuously promoted the development of Russia’s economic resources and they were foremost in the creation of those remarkable organisations, the Russian Co-Operative Societies. In politics, their support has been given, for the most part, to liberal and progressive movements, and they have been among the staunchest upholders of friendship with France and Great Britain. In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews, The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faiths of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. Terrorist Jews There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunatharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek – all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astounding. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews, every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers is astonishing. “Protector of the Jews” Needless to say, the most intense passions of revenge have been excited in the breasts of the Russian people. Wherever General Denikin’s authority could reach, protection was always accorded to the Jewish population, and strenuous efforts were made by his officers to prevent reprisals and to punish those guilty of them. So much was this the case that the Petlurist propaganda against General Denikin denounced him as the Protector of the Jews. The Misses Healy, nieces of Mr. Tim Healy, in relating their personal experiences in Kieff, have declared that to their knowledge on more than one occasion officers who committed offenses against Jews were reduced to the ranks and sent out of the city to the front. But the hordes of brigands by whom the whole vast expanse of the Russian Empire is becoming infested do not hesitate to gratify their lust for blood and for revenge at the expenses of the innocent Jewish population whenever an opportunity occurs. The brigand Makkno, the hordes of Petlurs and of Greforieff, who signalised their every success by the most brutal massacres, everywhere found among the half-stupified, half-infuriated population an eager response to anti-Semitism in its worst and foulest forms. The fact that in many cases Jewish interests and Jewish places of worship are excepted by the Bolsheviks from their universal hostility has tended more and more to associate the Jewish race in Russia with the villainies which are now being perpetrated. This is an injustice on millions of helpless people, most of whom are themselves sufferers from the revolutionary regime. It becomes, therefore, specially important to foster and develop any strongly marked Jewish movement which leads directly away from these fatal associations. And it is here that Zionism has such a deep significance for the whole world at the present time. A Home for the Jews Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to the international communism, it presents to the Jews a national idea of a commanding character. It has fallen to the British Government, as the result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish people all over the world a home and a centre of national life. The statesmanship and historic sense of Mr. Balfour were promptly to seize this opportunity. Declarations have been made which have irrevocably decided the policy of Great Britain. The fiery energies of Dr. Weissmann, the leader for all practical purposes, of the Zionist project, backed by many of the most prominent British Jews, and supported by the authority of Lord Allenby, are all directed to achieving the success of this inspiring movement. Of course, Palestine is far too small to accommodate more than a fraction of the Jewish race, nor do the majority of national Jews wish to go there. But if, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire. Zionism has already become a factor in the political convulsions of Russia, as a powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international communistic system. Nothing could be more significant than the furor with which Trotsky has attacked the Zionists generally, and Dr. Weissmann in particular. The cruel penetration of his mind leaves him in no doubt that his schemes of a world-wide communistic State under Jewish domination are directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal, which directs the energies and the hopes of Jews in every land towards a simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal. The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than the struggle for the soul of the Jewish people. Duty of Loyal Jews It is particularly important in these circumstances that the national Jews in every country who are loyal to the land of their adoption should come forward on every occasion, as many of them in England have already done, and take a prominent part in every measure for combating the Bolshevik conspiracy. In this way they will be able to vindicate the honour of the Jewish name and make it clear to all the world that the Bolshevik movement is not a Jewish movement, but is repudiated vehemently by the great mass of the Jewish race. But a negative resistance of Bolshevism in any field is not enough. Positive and practicable alternatives are needed in the moral as well as in the social sphere; and in building up with the utmost rapidity a Jewish national centre in Palestine which may become not only a refuge to the oppressed from the unhappy lands of Central Europe, but which will also be a symbol of Jewish unity and the temple of Jewish glory, a task is presented on which many blessings rest.

After reading the piece below from today's New York Times, I asked myself the question, "What role did the CIA agent(s) assigned to monitor news that might appear in the Times play in delaying publication of the disputed article in question until after the last election, thus assuring Bush's victory?" August 13, 2006 The New York Times The Public Editor Eavesdropping and the Election: An Answer on the Question of Timing By BYRON CALAME THE NEW YORK TIMES’S Dec. 16 article that disclosed the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping has led to an important public debate about the once-secret program. And the decision to write about the program in the face of White House pressure deserved even more praise than I gave it in a January column, which focused on the paper’s inadequate explanation of why it had “delayed publication for a year.” The article, written by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, has been honored with a Pulitzer and other journalistic prizes. But contradictory post-publication comments by Times editors and others about just how long the article was held have left me increasingly concerned about one key question: Did The Times mislead readers by stating that any delay in publication came after the Nov. 2, 2004, presidential election? In my January column, in which I refused to rely on anonymous sources, I noted that I was left “puzzled” by the election question. But I have now learned from Bill Keller, the executive editor, that The Times delayed publication of drafts of the eavesdropping article before the 2004 election. This revelation confirms what anonymous sources had told other publications such as The Los Angeles Times and The New York Observer in December. A number of readers critical of the Bush administration have remained particularly suspicious of the article’s assertion that the publication delay dated back only “a year” to Dec. 16, 2004. They contend that pre-election disclosure of the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping could have changed the outcome of the election. Since the Times article appeared, I have grown increasingly intrigued by changes in the way the delay has been described in the paper and in comments by Mr. Keller. A background paragraph in a follow-up article on Dec. 31 said, “The administration first learned that The New York Times had obtained information about the secret eavesdropping program more than a year ago.” Mr. Keller also began using the “more than a year” language. My decision to take another look at the extent of the delay came after reading Mr. Keller’s response to an online question in April during “Talk to the Newsroom,” a feature on nytimes.com. Eric Sullivan, from Waunakee, Wis., commented: “I’d like to know why you sat on the N.S.A. story. You probably changed the course of an election and likely history to come.” Mr. Keller’s rather matter-of-fact acceptance of Mr. Sullivan’s presumptions caught my eye: “Whether publishing earlier would have influenced the 2004 election is, I think, hard to say. Judging from the public reaction to the N.S.A. eavesdropping reflected in various polls, one could ask whether earlier disclosure might have helped President Bush more than hurt.” Mr. Keller, who wouldn’t answer any questions for my January column, recently agreed to an interview about the delay, although he saw it as “old business.” But he had some new things to say about the delay and the election. Internal discussions about drafts of the article had been “dragging on for weeks” before the Nov. 2 election, Mr. Keller acknowledged. That process had included talks with the Bush administration. He said a fresh draft was the subject of internal deliberations “less than a week” before the election. “The climactic discussion about whether to publish was right on the eve of the election,” Mr. Keller said. The pre-election discussions included Jill Abramson, a managing editor; Philip Taubman, the chief of the Washington bureau; Rebecca Corbett, the editor handling the story, and often Mr. Risen. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, was briefed, but Mr. Keller said the final decision to hold the story was his. Mr. Keller declined to explain in detail his pre-election decision to hold the article, citing obligations to preserve the confidentiality of sources. He has repeatedly indicated that a major reason for the publication delays was the administration’s claim that everyone involved was satisfied with the program’s legality. Later, he has said, it became clear that questions about the program’s legality “loomed larger within the government than we had previously understood.” But last week Mr. Keller e-mailed me a description of how that picture had changed by December 2005, and it cast some new light on the pre-election situation for me. It implied that the paper’s pre-election sources hadn’t been sufficiently “well-placed and credible” to convince him that questions about the program’s legality and oversight were serious enough to make it “responsible to publish.” But by December, he wrote, “We now had some new people who could in no way be characterized as disgruntled bureaucrats or war-on-terror doves saying we should publish. That was a big deal.” Holding a fresh draft of the story just days before the election also was an issue of fairness, Mr. Keller said. I agree that candidates affected by a negative article deserve to have time — several days to a week — to get their response disseminated before voters head to the polls. So why did the Dec. 16 article say The Times had “delayed publication for a year,” specifically ruling out the possibility that the story had been held prior to the Nov. 2 election? “It was probably inelegant wording,” Mr. Keller said, who added later, “I don’t know what was in my head at the time.” Were the wording and the sensitivity of the election-day timing issue discussed internally? “I don’t remember,” Mr. Keller said in an interview. He does remember discussing that “I wanted to own up to holding it.” And The Times does deserve credit for disclosing that it had held the story. It was more than inelegant, however, to report flatly that the delay had lasted “a year.” Characterizing it as “more than a year,” as Mr. Keller and others later did, would have been technically accurate. But that phrase would have represented a fuzziness that Times readers shouldn’t have to put up with when a hotly contested presidential election is involved. Given the importance of this otherwise outstanding article on warrantless eavesdropping — and now the confirmation of pre-election decisions to delay publication — The Times owes it to readers to set the official record straight. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/opinion/...amp;oref=slogin