Douglas Caddy
-
Posts
10,921 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Store
Posts posted by Douglas Caddy
-
-
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:
-
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
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.
-
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.
Hmmmm. Interesting. I thought once CIA always CIA. I like Anderson Cooper, but will watch him a bit more closely now to see if there is an overt pro gov. spin.
Dawn
"
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.
-
Last night, Sunday, July 30, Dr. Steven Greer appeared on Art Bell’s international radio show, coasttocoastam. While his talk was devoted primarily to the SETI project, he did relate that his Disclosure Project had obtained an important 1991 CIA document. The document on its page 6 states that the CIA’s Public Affairs Office, "PAO now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation. This has helped us turn some intelligence failure stories into intelligence success stories, and it has contributed to the accuracy of countless others. In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods."
Doug, thank you for this posting. It seems that Operation Mockingbird is alive and well.
I've been doing some international travel lately and I'm always surprised at what the news shows in European or Latin American countries. You could watch a Spanish language newscast on US cable stations and see more than you do on the US networks.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.
-
Up until today I'd not heard of a bait and switch operation where the bait was something no one wanted to bite into. When the CIA connection to the burglars was exposed the FBI wanted to back off, and NIXON used this to try to get them to back off. More importantlly, however, the CIA initially went along with this. Why would they do this if their goal was to have these men investigated? Why not just provide this info to Pat Gray, who, according to Ashton Gray, was not gray at all, but a deep black operative of the CIA? Why not have Dean confess before the trail led to him, if he was indeed a CIA puppet? Ashton, you say your conclusions are a no-brainer and I agree, in that you'd have to be lacking a brain to go along with them. (Apologies to Henny Youngman.)
Ashton, I think you really need to modify your theory if you expect any reasonable person to believe it. Anyone the least bit informed knows of Nixon and Colson and their dirty tricks. I think the real question is why you find it necessary to clear Nixon. Perhaps you think the CIA lacked the motive to frame Nixon if he was in fact dirty, so in order to prop up your Nixon-was-framed scenario you bend over backwards to make Nixon look clean. You insult the intelligence of everyone on this forum in the process. Please explain to us again how Segretti was a Hunt operation, when Segretti was in play long before he met Hunt... And why was it again that the CIA waited until after the 72 election to spring the trap and bring about Nixon's downfall? Oh yeah, you already explained this--so they could put their agent Gerry Ford in the White House. Since the only evidence connecting Ford to an intelligence agency connects him to the FBI, please explain to us how Ford's presidency benefitted either the CIA or the FBI. History shows us that the most intense investigations of U.S. intelligence actvities began during Ford's reign, and were, in part, spurred on by Ford's behavior. How was this part of a plot, and what did this plot accomplish?
What upsets me the most about your theory is its lack of humanity. A dark force called the CIA manipulated everyone to perform some dark deeds in order to destroy a white knight named Richard Nixon. In your view, no one acted out of conscience. No one acted out of patriotism. But even less believably, no one acted out of self-interest. Dozens of men fell willingly on the sword given them by the CIA in order to discredit the squeaky-clean Nixon? I find the story makes more sense when the characters in it behave like humans and not drones. Perhaps you've been reading too much science-fiction?
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.
-
On 28th May, 1972, McCord and his team broke into the DNC's offices and placed bugs on the telephones of Larry O'Brien, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and R. Spencer Oliver, executive director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen.
Some historians have been puzzled by the decision to place bugs on Oliver's telephone. Jim Hougan (Secret Agenda) has pointed out that Oliver's father was a lawyer who worked with Robert F. Bennett, the head of the Robert Mullen & Co. Oliver also represented Howard Hughes.
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.
-
[
Doug, thank you for this posting. It seems that Operation Mockingbird is alive and well.
[
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.
-
Sadly, though having the means to travel and to take advantage of the wealth of media sources [read alternative and foreign] today via internet or even cable/satellite most Americans avail themselves of neither. The media is controlled more than in any other major country. Fox, for example is just the neocon cheerleader channel; even the vaulted NYT is tightly controlled [never once had an article critical of nor questioning WC, for example - yet did nice bookreview of the Posner toiletpaper book]. Shows that have tried to peek behind the curtain...like Bill Moyer's show have been under pressure or shut down. Even this absolute falsehood of the 'liberal' media is a CIA spin IMO...it is clearly owned by, and run for the benefit of those far to the right of 'liberal'. The only thing liberal about the media is 'liberally' controlled. History is also controlled in America. Do I hear a mockingbird?.....
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
-
HERE'S AN ARTICLE THAT BEGAN AS AN ABSTRACT FOR A COPA CONFERENCE PRESENTATION.
One of the more visible editors at NANA is Sidney Goldberg, whose wife Nancy is the New York "literary agent" who advised Linda Tripp to secretly tape record Monica Lewinsky.
Lucianne had claimed to be a NANA reporter in the 1970s when she was on the presidential campaign trail "covering" George McGovern. At that time she operated with hidden tape recorders and sexy bimbos in a Watergate-era scandal that was merely typical of the way NANA works its influence, not as independent journalists, but as direct, covert manipulators of events.
xxxyyyzzz
When my first book, The Hundred Million Dollar Payoff, was published in 1974, I was contacted by Sid Goldberg after my appearance on NBC’s Today Show. At his invitation I met with him and his wife, Lucianne, on my next visit to Manhattan.
Sid asked me to write an article comprised five parts based on the contents of my book, which was then serialized by NANA to newspapers around the country.
Lucianne stayed in communication with me over the years and I conferred with her on several occasions on later trips to Manhattan. She was intensely interested in what had occurred in Watergate.
When Billie Sol Estes wanted to tell the story of his relationship with LBJ in book form, I arranged for Lucianne to fly to Dallas where I met her and we drove to Abilene to meet with Billie sol regarding his proposed book. She indicated that she would serve as his literary agent when he finally decided to write his book.
Lucianne was one of the few people with whom I came into contact who had actually met Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, the stone-killer retained by LBJ to do his bidding.
She recounted this in an article that appeared in The Texas Observer of November 7, 1986, titled “The Killing of Henry Marshall.” This particular article, written by Bill Adler under a grant from the Texas Investigative Reporters Fund, is “must’ reading for those interested in the LBJ-Billie Sol Estate-Cliff Carter-Malcolm “Mac” Wallace relationship. [Earlier this year I sent to John Simkin a copy of the article through the postal facilities, along with other assassination materials. John has cited the article subsequently in writing in the Forum.]
The key paragraphs that mention Lucianne appeared on page 18 of the Observer’s article and are as follows:
“Three months after Mac Wallace walked out of the Travis County Courthouse [where he had been convicted of the killing of John Kinser, the lover of LBJ’s sister], he went to work for Temco, Inc., in its electronics and missiles plant in Garland [Texas]. Except for a short spell, he remained with the company until February of 1961. It was in January of that year, claims Billie Sol Estes, that Wallace, Billie Sol, Cliff Carter and Johnson met at Johnson’s house in Washington to discuss killing Henry Marshall. Little is known about Wallace’s whereabouts that month, other than at some point he was arrested in Dallas for public drunkenness; it cannot be confirmed that Wallace was in Washington around the time of the inauguration – when the meeting supposedly took place.
“But Wallace knew Cliff Carter. The two were in Washington together the previous summer, when Johnson was making a run for the 1960 presidential nomination. Wallace was seen at least three times at campaign functions, always accompanied by Cliff Carter, according to Lucianne Goldberg, who worked in the campaign press office. Goldberg recalled that Carter introduced her to Wallace at a hospitality suite at the Mayflower Hotel. ‘I just knew him and remember him because that was sort of what we were all about – remembering everybody you meet, because you never knew where they were going to end up,’ said Goldberg, who was 23 and known as Lucy Cummings back then. ‘We were all on the make, as young people around politicians are.’
“Goldberg, now a literary agent in New York, told the Observer she noticed Wallace ‘a couple of times’ at Johnson’s campaign headquarters at the Ambassador Hotel. ‘I’d be sitting at my desk and there’d be a lot of people milling around and I’d see him with his thumbs hooked in his belt the way those [Texas] guys do.’ Goldberg could not recall any conversation she had with Wallace, ‘other than, ‘wanna have a drink,’ that kind of thing, which I never did.’”
-
Last night, Sunday, July 30, Dr. Steven Greer appeared on Art Bell’s international radio show, coasttocoastam. While his talk was devoted primarily to the SETI project, he did relate that his Disclosure Project had obtained an important 1991 CIA document. The document on its page 6 states that the CIA’s Public Affairs Office, "PAO now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation. This has helped us turn some intelligence failure stories into intelligence success stories, and it has contributed to the accuracy of countless others. In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods."
The CIA paper is dated 20 December 1991, during the administration of President George H. W. Bush (who was a former CIA Director), and was prepared for the then Director of Central Intelligence. To read the full document, go to the link below:
http://www.disclosureproject.org/
Also noteworthy are the remarks on the PBS’ Lehrer News Hour last Thursday, July 27, by Lawrence Pintak, director of the TV journalism program at the American University in Cairo. He's a former Middle East correspondent for CBS. His recent book is "Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam and the War of Ideas."
Mr. Pintak pointed out how the American public is denied access to major news broadcasts that are available in other parts of the world, including the Middle East, which raises the question of the role of the CIA in controlling what Americans see and hear.
Mr. Pintak stated, “ You cannot overemphasize the impact that images have. American television is sanitized. We don't see the real blood and gore of war.
“Now, it's a cultural thing, sure, but you turn on the television in the Arab world, you are seeing the disemboweled babies, you are seeing the burned children, you are seeing the pieces of flesh in the streets. And that has a visceral impact.
“Americans, we talk about this plethora of prisms now in the Arab world with this media revolution, but Americans in many ways still live in an information ghetto, because we are not seeing the images coming out of the Arab world.
“Arabs, if I stood at home in Cairo, I have 300-odd stations. I can watch Al-Jazeera. I can watch Al-Arabiya. I can watch Al-Manar. I can watch CNN, and the BBC, and FOX News, and MSNBC. So an Arab can surf across the spectrum. Americans can't.
“Jamal's [Dajani’s LinkTV, also a particpant on the News Hour program] wonderful project is a drop in the budget, as I'm sure he'll agree, 100,000 people seeing it on the Web a month, something like that. It's a step in the right direction. But in general, Americans don't see what Arabs see. And so we say, ‘Why do they hate us? Why don't they like what we're doing?’
Because we're not seeing the impact of what we're doing.”
To read Mr. Pintak’s remarks in full, go to:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/july-...isms_07-27.html
-
Simkin, you're a disgrace. The fact that you're allowed anywhere near a classroom is terrifying. You're not an "educator" of any kind; you're a left-wing radical socialist who long ago dispensed with any of notion of fairness or objectivity. Your hate-fueled anti-Americanism has reached OCD levels. There are 193 countries in the world, but you're fixated on just one. Incredibly, every negative event in the last 75 years has somehow been traced back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. America can never be a victim; only an aggressor. The stupefying, murderous crimes of the Communist world and the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalism elicit nary a mention. Why worry about Bin Laden when you can rehash a bogeyman like Joe McCarthy for the umpteenth time, right? Why despair about the lack of civil liberties and human rights in the Arab world when you can kick around a dead horse like Watergate, right? Why scrutinize the anti-democratic and corrupt reigns of Castro, Assad, Putin and the Palestinian Authority when you can ascribe crazy, sinister motivations to an innocent collegiate group like YAF? Why recognize a demonstrably guilty man like Lee Harvey Oswald when you can make all sorts of reckless, fact-free accusations instead. You don't know a goddamn thing about this country, other than you wish it and its leaders ill will. Bush isn't dangerous; you're dangerous. Men like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Joe Kennedy were wrong in the early 1940s and you're just as clueless today. I believe the Soviets coined a term for Western apologists seduced by tyrannical regimes: "useful idiots." Try making yourself a little less "useful" to democracy's enemies before entering your twilight years.
John Dean derides 'imperial presidency'
July 27, 2006
MICHAEL R. BLOOD
Associated Press
LOS ANGELES - John Dean, the White House lawyer who famously helped blow the whistle on the Watergate scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office, says the country has returned to an "imperial presidency" that is putting the United States and the world at risk.
In his new book, "Conservatives Without Conscience," Dean looks at Republican-controlled Washington and sees a bullying, manipulative, prejudiced leadership edging the nation toward a dark era.
"Are we on the road to fascism?" he writes. "Clearly, we are not on that road yet. But it would not take much more misguided authoritarian leadership, or thoughtless following of such leaders, to find ourselves there.
"I am not sure which is more frightening," he adds, "another major terror attack or the response of authoritarian conservatives to that attack."
Dean, who served 127 days in prison for his part in the Nixon administration's Watergate cover-up, recently talked to The Associated Press about the ascendancy of the conservative right and the two-fisted style of political leadership he says was central to its rise.
"We have returned to the imperial presidency," he said. "We have an unchecked presidency."
More than three decades ago, the 67-year-old Dean was a young White House lawyer when he warned President Richard M. Nixon that the cover-up of a break-in at Democratic national headquarters in Washington's Watergate complex was "a cancer growing on the presidency."
Dean, who later pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, went on to become the star witness at the congressional Watergate hearings, implicating several high-ranking administration officials.
His book is anchored to a discussion of authoritarianism, a school of thought that, in the simplest terms, tries to explain why some people lead and others follow. The classic authoritarian personality - mostly found in men - thirsts for power, is exploitive, cheats to win, opposes equality, intimidates and is mean-spirited.
This headstrong leadership style marks the current Republican right in varying degrees, he says, starting with President Bush and moving on down through the leadership ranks. The Bush White House, Dean says, has "given authoritarianism a new legitimacy," the same legitimacy he says it enjoyed before Nixon's presidency unraveled.
Authoritarian thinking, Dean writes, "was the principal force behind almost everything that went wrong with Nixon's presidency."
For anyone familiar with Dean's writing, the sharp stabs at the Bush administration will come as no surprise. His latest book is a sequel of sorts to his 2004 best seller, "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush."
Dean's current book has been steadily climbing best-seller lists, with publisher Viking ordering a second run for a total of 180,000 copies.
Booksellers pointed to Dean's prominence and his engaging writing style for the book's success despite a flood of political commentaries in recent years.
"Books like this one, whether they be on one side or the other, there is a lot of interest from consumers," said Bill Nasshan, senior vice president of books for Borders Group, Inc.
Booksellers also are not concerned about oversaturation in the current events section.
"
We expect a lot more of these books to be published. With the coming midterm election, the country is more divided than it's ever been," said Bob Wietrak, vice president of merchandising at Barnes & Noble Inc.
In "Conservatives Without Conscience," Dean pays Bush a backhanded compliment, saying that while the president is "not a puppet" it is Vice President Dick Cheney who is the White House's dominant authoritarian.
"
Cheney has swallowed the presidency," Dean says.
While his journey from Nixon White House insider to Bush administration antagonist has evolved over the years, Dean told the AP that his politics haven't changed drastically during that time. He still sees himself as a defender of the conservative values championed by the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican icon to whom his latest book is dedicated.
But Dean says his version of Republicanism doesn't square with the authoritarians who have dominated his former party in recent years, from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to White House strategist Karl Rove.
He sees them drifting from traditional conservative values, citing, among other examples, deficit spending and the federal budget debt.
"My views have changed very little over the last 40 years," Dean said. "The Republican Party and conservatism have moved so far to the right that I'm now left of center.
"This country works best as a centrist nation. I think, basically, the electorate is centrist. You have the debate being set by the extremes."
-
On July 11, I posted information in the Forum about how to get your book published by a major book publisher using a literary agent.
Today I wish to call your attention to new technology that permits you to publish your book yourself or to utilize the services of an electronic publisher. No literary agent is required. These alternative means of publishing provide a way to get your book produced economically when you desire only a limited number of printed copies.
Below is an article from The New York Times that summarizes the latest development using free software from the Internet. Beneath the article I have provided a link to this free software as well as links to the four major electronic publishers.
July 20, 2006
The New York Times
Technology Rewrites the Book
By PETER WAYNER
When Steve Mandel, a management trainer from Santa Cruz, Calif., wants to show his friends why he stays up late to peer through a telescope, he pulls out a copy of his latest book, “Light in the Sky,” filled with pictures he has taken of distant nebulae, star clusters and galaxies.
“I consistently get a very big ‘Wow!’ The printing of my photos was spectacular — I did not really expect them to come out so well.” he said. “This is as good as any book in a bookstore.”
Mr. Mandel, 56, put his book together himself with free software from Blurb.com. The 119-page edition is printed on coated paper, bound with a linen fabric hard cover, and then wrapped with a dust jacket. Anyone who wants one can buy it for $37.95, and Blurb will make a copy just for that buyer.
The print-on-demand business is gradually moving toward the center of the marketplace. What began as a way for publishers to reduce their inventory and stop wasting paper is becoming a tool for anyone who needs a bound document. Short-run presses can turn out books economically in small quantities or singly, and new software simplifies the process of designing a book.
As the technology becomes simpler, the market is expanding beyond the earliest adopters, the aspiring authors. The first companies like AuthorHouse, Xlibris, iUniverse and others pushed themselves as new models of publishing, with an eye on shaking up the dusty book business. They aimed at authors looking for someone to edit a manuscript, lay out the book and bring it to market.
The newer ventures also produce bound books, but they do not offer the same hand-holding or the same drive for the best-seller list. Blurb’s product will appeal to people searching for a publisher, but its business is aimed at anyone who needs a professional-looking book, from architects with plans to present to clients, to travelers looking to immortalize a trip.
Blurb.com’s design software, which is still in beta testing, comes with a number of templates for different genres like cookbooks, photo collections and poetry books. Once one is chosen, it automatically lays out the page and lets the designer fill in the photographs and text by cutting and pasting. If the designer wants to tweak some details of the template — say, the position of a page number or a background color — the changes affect all the pages.
The software is markedly easier to use — although less capable — than InDesign from Adobe or Quark XPress, professional publishing packages that cost around $700. It is also free because Blurb expects to make money from printing the book. Prices start at $29.95 for books of 1 to 40 pages and rise to $79.95 for books of 301 to 440 pages.
Blurb, based in San Francisco, has many plans for expanding its software. Eileen Gittins, the chief executive, said the company would push new tools for “bookifying” data, beginning with a tool that “slurps” the entries from a blog and places them into the appropriate templates.
The potential market for these books is attracting a number of start-ups and established companies, most of them focusing on producing bound photo albums. Online photo processing sites like Kodak Gallery (formerly Ofoto), Snapfish and Shutterfly and popular packages like the iPhoto software from Apple let their customers order bound volumes of their prints.
These companies offer a wide variety of binding fabrics, papers, templates and background images, although the styles are dominated by pink and blue pastels. Snapfish offers wire-bound “flipbooks” that begin at $4.99. Kodak Gallery offers a “Legacy Photo Book” made with heavier paper and bound in either linen or leather. It starts at $69.99. Apple makes a tiny 2.6-by-3.5-inch softbound book that costs $3.99 for 20 pages and 29 cents for each additional page.
The nature and style of these options are changing as customers develop new applications. “Most of the people who use our products are moms with kids,” says Kevin McCurdy, a co-founder of Picaboo.com in Palo Alto, Calif. But he said there had been hundreds of applications the company never anticipated: teachers who make a yearbook for their class, people who want to commemorate a party and businesses that just want a high-end brochure or catalog.
Picaboo, like Blurb, distributes a free copy of its book design software, which runs on the user’s computer. Mr. McCurdy said that running the software on the user’s machine saves users the time and trouble of uploading pictures. The companies that offer Web-based design packages, however, point out that their systems do not require installing any software and also offer a backup for the user’s photos.
As more companies enter the market, they are searching for niches. One small shop in Duvall, Wash., called SharedInk.com, emphasizes its traditional production techniques and the quality of its product. Chris Hickman, the founder, said that each of his books was printed and stitched together by “two bookbinders who’ve been in the industry for 30 or 40 years.” The result, he said, is a higher level of quality that appeals to professional photographers and others willing to pay a bit more. Books of 20 pages start at $39.95.
Some companies continue to produce black-and-white books. Lulu.com is a combination printer and order-fulfillment house that prints both color and black-and-white books, takes orders for them and places them with bookstores like Amazon.com.
Lulu works from a PDF file, an approach that forces users to rely on basic word processors or professional design packages. If this is too complex, Lulu offers a marketplace where book designers offer their services. Lulu does offer a special cover design package that will create a book’s cover from an image and handle the specialized calculations that compute the size of the spine from the number of pages and the weight of the paper.
A 6-by-9-inch softcover book with 150 black-and-white pages from Lulu would cost $7.53 per single copy.
These packages are adding features that stretch the concept of a book, in some cases undermining the permanent, fixed nature that has been part of a book’s appeal. The software from SharedInk.com, for instance, lets a user leave out pages from some versions of the book. If Chris does not like Pat, for instance, then the copy going to Chris could be missing the pages with Pat’s pictures.
Blurb is expanding its software to let a community build a book. Soon, it plans to introduce a tool that would allow group projects, like a Junior League recipe book, to be created through Blurb’s Web site. The project leader would send out an e-mail message inviting people to visit the site and add their contributions to customized templates, which would then be converted into book pages.
“Books are breaking wide open,” Ms. Gittins said. “Books are becoming vehicles that aren’t static things.”
-
Mr. Caddy,
When Hunt came to my residence about an hour after the arrests, having a short time earlier telephoned me from his office in the Executive Office Building that adjoins the White House, I was amazed that he did not fully comprehend the significance of what had occurred at the Watergate complex and its potential grave impact.
From what you know, why was the Watergte broken into?
Steve Thomas
Liddy deposition on how the Watergate break-in came about:
On December 6, 1996, G. Gordon Liddy gave a sworn deposition in Washington, D.C. in which he described the origins of the Watergate scandal. The deposition was given in the following styled lawsuit:
In the United States District Court for the District of Columbia
Maureen K. Dean and John W. Dean, Plaintiffs
v.
No. 92-1807
St. Martin’s Press, Inc., (HHG)(AK)
Len Colodny, Robert Gettlin,
G. Gordon Liddy, and
Phillip Mackin Bailley,
Defendants
The 148 page deposition presents an encompassing summary from the viewpoint of Mr. Liddy.
There are many highlights in the deposition. Attention is called especially to:
Pages 86 to 96: Planning and carrying out the first break-in on May 26, 27 and 28, 1972
Page 98: Planning the June 17, 1972 break-in upon instructions from Jeb Magruder.
These are Liddy’s words:
And that’s what he {Magruder] wanted. So that when I went back to Hunt and Hunt was upset. He said, “My God,” he said, “Do you know how much trouble it took us to get in there in the first place? All those three entries,” and this, that and the other thing, “And now this? With all the camera and all this film and all this exposure, I mean, the longer you are in there the more vulnerable you are.”
I said, “Howard, that’s what wanted, so we have to do it.” So we set up to do that.
Page 103: Describing the June 17, 1972 break-in
Page 105: Liddy’s words again:
But in any event, we held a council of war, so to speak. And the Cubans, they said, “Look, whatever the decision is, we are up to it.”
Question: Where was this council of war occurring?
Answer: This was in that – the room that Mr. Hunt and I had been in, the one with all the equipment that Mr. McCord had. And McCord, he was for doing it. Hunt was very, very loathe at first, but at any rate the decision was left up to me, because I was the operational chief. And I said, “Okay, we will go again.” And they went again. And the – they got in.
The two links below both lead to the 148 page transcript of the Liddy deposition. If one link does not work, try the other. If you have trouble making a link work, copy it and place it in your browser.
-
UNITED STATES v. GEORGE GORDON LIDDY
United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
509 F.2d 428
Before: BAZELON, Chief Judge, WRIGHT, McGOWAN, LEVENTHAL, ROBINSON, MacKINNON, and WILKEY, Circuit Judges, sitting en banc.
LEVENTHAL, Circuit Judge.
Attorney Caddy:
Thanks for posting this. Interesting reading. My husband- also a criminal defense attorney- does a lot of appeallate work, so I read these decsions all the time. (I also read all the briefs, as well as the entire court record to see if I think he's missed any points of error).
Nice try, but the court was correct in affirming. (And, as you know, they give great deference to the trial court).
I have a couple of questions:
Why was it not a conflict of interest for you to represent multiple defendants? (I know the "correct" answer to this and what I do, but curious as to your answer). (I promise this is not a "trick question").
While I do not expect you to violate privilege, what is your personal opinion re the events of 6/17/72? By this do you:
1. Believe the defendants were working at Nixon's -(or one of his dirty trickster's )-behest?
2 If so why? What were they after? (And please, no Mo Dean trick book).
3. If not, who do you believe they were wroking for?
("themselves" is not an answer anyone would consider plausible).
Note I am NOT asking you to tell me what they told you in confidence, as that is privileged, so I would not ever ask you this. I am merely asking your opinion. I trust you do form personal opinions, irrespective of the job you must do in zealously defending your client(s). We all do so-it's just human nature. And we all talk about it around here, as a kind of comic relief. (I once had a client who got caught with an ATM machine. He told me he FOUND it at the camp- (Ben McCulloch) - across the st. from where it was stolen. I laughed for days. As did everyone I told. (I never told the client's name of course, that is how we keep the privilege here. No names)
So having personal opinions is part of being human. Your defendants just happen to be famous, otherwise they are standard, every day B and E guys.
I appreciate your response.
Dawn
ps I read the Wall Street article the date it was published. In fact saved it.
Fascinating. I use the Bill/Monica -and- her- mother -forced- to -testify example all
the time with parents of my Juvenile clients when they are giving me a hard time about
needing to speak in private with the child the have just hired me to represent. THEN they
"get it". (No, privilege between parent/child)
Of course, eventually there would have been a problem with multiple legal representation of all seven defendants – McCord and the four Cuban-Americans arrested at Watergate on June 17, 1972, and Hunt and Liddy who were not arrested then.
After I was served with a subpoena on June 28, 1972, to appear “Forthwith” before the federal grand jury investigating the case, I had to withdraw completely from representation of any of the seven defendants as my role had been changed to being a witness.
But even after this event, the four Cuban-American were represented by one attorney – Henry Rothblatt, while Hunt, Liddy and McCord each retained their own counsel. So a majority of the seven defendants were still represented by one attorney, Rothblatt, as the case went to trial in January 1973.
As to the other questions you pose, I think the answers to these can be found in the sworn deposition of Gordon Liddy of December 6, 1996, that I posted in the Forum today.
-
On December 6, 1996, G. Gordon Liddy gave a sworn deposition in Washington, D.C. in which he described the origins of the Watergate scandal. The deposition was given in the following styled lawsuit:
In the United States District Court for the District of Columbia
Maureen K. Dean and John W. Dean, Plaintiffs
v.
No. 92-1807
St. Martin’s Press, Inc., (HHG)(AK)
Len Colodny, Robert Gettlin,
G. Gordon Liddy, and
Phillip Mackin Bailley,
Defendants
The 148 page deposition presents an encompassing summary from the viewpoint of Mr. Liddy.
There are many highlights in the deposition. Attention is called especially to:
Pages 86 to 96: Planning and carrying out the first break-in on May 26, 27 and 28, 1972
Page 98: Planning the June 17, 1972 break-in upon instructions from Jeb Magruder.
These are Liddy’s words:
And that’s what he [Magruder] wanted. So that when I went back to Hunt and Hunt was upset. He said, “My God,” he said, “Do you know how much trouble it took us to get in there in the first place? All those three entries,” and this, that and the other thing, “And now this? With all the camera and all this film and all this exposure, I mean, the longer you are in there the more vulnerable you are.”
I said, “Howard, that’s what wanted, so we have to do it.” So we set up to do that.
Page 103: Describing the June 17, 1972 break-in
Page 105: Liddy’s words again:
But in any event, we held a council of war, so to speak. And the Cubans, they said, “Look, whatever the decision is, we are up to it.”
Question: Where was this council of war occurring?
Answer: This was in that – the room that Mr. Hunt and I had been in, the one with all the equipment that Mr. McCord had. And McCord, he was for doing it. Hunt was very, very loathe at first, but at any rate the decision was left up to me, because I was the operational chief. And I said, “Okay, we will go again.” And they went again. And the – they got in.
The two links below both lead to the 148 page transcript of the Liddy deposition. If one link does not work, try the other. If you have trouble making a link work, copy it and place it in your browser.
-
The following is excerpted from the 1974 hearings of the U.S. Committee on the Judiciary on the Nomination of Earl J. Silbert to be United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. Silbert was the original Watergate prosecutor:
Senator Hart: Now, by the middle of July [1972], wasn’t the bulk of the case presented in the indictment known to you?
Mr. Silbert: No, sir.
Senator Hart: Let me make the record a little fuller. The July 21, 1972, FBI summary memorandum, which if there is no objection we will have printed at this point in the record, indicates fairly fully the evidence of the conspiracy of the seven, their actions, even the financial trail of the money. The so-called Mexican and Dahlberg checks which came into CREEP were cashed in the bank of Mr Barker and later were traced when some of the bills were found on the defendants.
[The summary memorandum referred to follows:]
U.S. Department of Justice
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Washington, D.C., July 21, 1972
JAMES WALTER McCORD, Jr.
Burglary of the Democratic Party National Headquarters
Washington, D.C.
There follows a summary of pertinent investigation conducted of the captioned matter through
July 20, 1972:
Burglary and Arrests: At approximately 2:30 a.m., June 17, 1972, officers of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) apprehended five individuals in an executive conference room of the Democratic Party National Headquarters located on the 6th floor of the Watergate Apartments, 2600 Virginia Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. At the time of the arrest, the subjects had in their possession burglary tools, electronic and photographic equipment and were wearing surgical-type plastic gloves.
Those arrested were identified as James Walter McCord, Jr., using the alias Richard Warren; Bernard Barker, using the alias Frank Carter; Eugenio Rolando Martinez y Creaga, using the alias Gene Valdes; Frank Anthony Sturgis, also known as Frank Anthony Fiorini, using the aliases Joseph Di Alberto and Edward Hamilton; and Virgirio Gonzales, using the alias Raoul Godoy.
All subjects refused to be interviewed, refused to state for whom they were working, from where they came or their purpose for being in the building. They were all charged with Burglary, Section 1801, Title 22, District of Columbia Code, and were held on $50,000 bond except for McCord, a Rockville, Maryland resident, whose bond was set at $30,000. All but Sturgis have since been released from District of Columbia jail on bond.
McCord, who appears to be the leader of this group, retired from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on August 31, 1970, and at the time of his arrest he was Chief of Security for the Committee to Reelect the President. The remaining subjects are all known to have Cuban backgrounds and either worked with or participated in CIA activities against the Castro Government.
Note: The remainder of the lengthy summary memorandum is omitted here but can be read in its entirety on page 83-89 of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. The summary memorandum firmly establishes for the legal and historical record the approximate time of the arrests of the five individuals in the Watergate building.
-
John Dean discusses his book Conservatives Without Conscience and Leonard Colodny's book Silent Coup.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_jo...rvatives_ha.htm
In this July 10, 2006 op/ed piece Dean also discusses Watergate and Colson, Liddy, and Hunt.
Triumph of the Authoritarians
By John W. Dean
The Boston Globe
Friday 14 July 2006
Contemporary conservatism and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners' bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest - none of this struck me as based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told, today's so-called conservatives are quite radical.
For more than 40 years I have considered myself a "Goldwater conservative," and am thoroughly familiar with the movement's canon. But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon "imperial presidency" on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.
What true conservative calls for packing the courts to politicize the federal judiciary to the degree that it is now possible to determine the outcome of cases by looking at the prior politics of judges? Where is the conservative precedent for the monocratic leadership style that conservative Republicans imposed on the US House when they took control in 1994, a style that seeks primarily to perfect fund-raising skills while outsourcing the writing of legislation to special interests and freezing Democrats out of the legislative process?
How can those who claim themselves conservatives seek to destroy the deliberative nature of the US Senate by eliminating its extended-debate tradition, which has been the institution's distinctive contribution to our democracy? Yet that is precisely what Republican Senate leaders want to do by eliminating the filibuster when dealing with executive business (namely judicial appointments).
Today's Republican policies are antithetical to bedrock conservative fundamentals. There is nothing conservative about preemptive wars or disregarding international law by condoning torture. Abandoning fiscal responsibility is now standard operating procedure. Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, tongue-lashing attacks on homosexuals are not found in Russell Krik's classic conservative canons, nor in James Burham's guides to conservative governing. Conservatives in the tradition of former senator Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan believed in "conserving" this planet, not relaxing environmental laws to make life easier for big business. And neither man would have considered employing Christian evangelical criteria in federal programs, ranging from restricting stem cell research to fighting AIDs through abstinence.
Candid and knowledgeable Republicans on the far right concede - usually only when not speaking for attribution - that they are not truly conservative. They do not like to talk about why they behave as they do, or even to reflect on it. Nonetheless, their leaders admit they like being in charge, and their followers grant they find comfort in strong leaders who make them feel safe. This is what I gleaned from discussions with countless conservative leaders and followers, over a decade of questioning.
I started my inquiry in the mid-1990s, after a series of conversations with Goldwater, whom I had known for more than 40 years. Goldwater was also mystified (when not miffed) by the direction of today's professed conservatives - their growing incivility, pugnacious attitudes, and arrogant and antagonistic style, along with a narrow outlook intolerant of those who challenge their thinking. He worried that the Republican Party had sold its soul to Christian fundamentalists, whose divisive social values would polarize the nation. From those conversations, Goldwater and I planned to study why these people behave as they do, and to author a book laying out what we found. Sadly, the senator's declining health soon precluded his continuing on the project, so I put it on the shelf. But I kept digging until I found some answers, and here are my thoughts.
For almost half a century, social scientists have been exploring authoritarianism. We do not typically associate authoritarianism with our democracy, but as I discovered while examining decades of empirical research, we ignore some findings at our risk. Unfortunately, the social scientists who have studied these issues report their findings in monographs and professional journals written for their peers, not for general readers. With the help of a leading researcher and others, I waded into this massive body of work.
What I found provided a personal epiphany. Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, "enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades.
Authoritarianism's impact on contemporary conservatism is beyond question. Because this impact is still growing and has troubling (if not actually evil) implications, I hope that social scientists will begin to write about this issue for general readers. It is long past time to bring the telling results of their empirical work into the public square and to the attention of American voters. No less than the health of our democracy may depend on this being done. We need to stop thinking we are dealing with traditional conservatives on the modern stage, and instead recognize that they've often been supplanted by authoritarians.
John W. Dean, former Nixon White House counsel, just published his seventh nonfiction book, Conservatives Without Conscience.
-
The Soviet Union was an evil empire and so is 'ours' [shamefully admitting to sharing citizenship with Brendan]. My vision of humanity has no place for persons who [like Bush and his Gang] hate, who try to control others, who deceive and steal, who like to kill and torture, who want to control others, who are not in balance with Gaia, who think they are better or 'god-given', who do not want justice for ALL, who think that a few rich ruling over the mass of the poor is a norm to be preserved, who think that men are better than women or white better than non-white or rich better than poor or we better then them, or Christian better than non-Christian nor America Uber Alles. I was in Berlin celebrating the fall of the Wall and will equally welcome the fall of the American Empire. I will let history decide who are the real patriots. We have a very good [far from perfect] constitution but it has been killed along with the 'nation', law, our freedoms. We are going all over the world doing very little good and huge amounts of harm (since WW2), death, destruction, hatefully, imperialisticly, stupidly, inhumanly. There are good people in America - NONE of which are now running the 'show'. Stop thinking football games...there are more options than 'them and us'.....more that two options. Bush is IMHO something akin to a Stalin. Open your eyes...and more importantly your heart, if you have one....most of the 'enemies' are invented or created to further the aims of the Oligarchs.... Uno Mundo, Peace, Justice, Sanity for ALL - not control and riches for a very few. I'd love to see Bush tried in court for War Crimes, treason, corruption, theft, illegal actions one after another - and crimes against the planet, peace, justice, sanity, life. I'd not mind if his former CIA buddies Sadam Hussein and bin Laden were there too...and many other leaders, foreign and domestic. I fight for truth,justice and what is right, not my 'flag' and der Fuhrer. The old paradigms have gotten us to where we are today...at the brink. Think.
Bush: Worse Than Nixon
The writer was on Richard Nixon's "enemies list," but Bush's power grab has him really worried.
By Morton H. Halperin
MORTON H. HALPERIN served in the administrations of presidents Johnson, Nixon and Clinton. He is a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress and the director of U.S. Advocacy for the Open Society
Los Angeles Times
July 16, 2006
THE BUSH administration's warrantless wiretapping program may have shocked and surprised many Americans when it was revealed in December, but to me, it provoked a case of deja vu.
The Nixon administration bugged my home phone — without a warrant — beginning in 1973, when I was on the staff of the National Security Council, and kept the wiretap on for 21 months. Why? My boss, national security advisor Henry Kissinger, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believed that I might have leaked some information to the New York Times. When I left the government a few months later and went to work on Edmund Muskie's presidential campaign (and began actively working to end the war in Vietnam), the FBI continued to listen in and made periodic reports on everything it heard to President Nixon and his closest associates in the White House.
Recent reports that the Bush administration is monitoring political opponents who belong to antiwar groups also sounded familiar to me. I was, after all, No. 8 on Nixon's "enemies list" — a curious compilation of 20 people about whom the White House was unhappy because they had disagreed in some way with the administration.
The list, compiled by presidential aide Charles Colson, included union leaders, journalists, Democratic fundraisers and me, among others, and was part of a plan to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies," as presidential counsel John Dean explained it in a 1971 memo. I always suspected that I made the list because of my active opposition to the war, though no one ever said for sure (and I never understood what led Colson to write next to my name the provocative words, "a scandal would be helpful here").
As I watch the Bush administration these days, it's hard not to notice the clear similarities between then and now. Both the Nixon and Bush presidencies rely heavily on the use of national security as a pretext for the usurpation of unprecedented executive power. Now, just as in Nixon's day, a president mired in an increasingly unpopular war is taking extreme steps, including warrantless surveillance, that many people believe threaten American civil liberties and violate the Constitution. Both administrations shroud their actions in secrecy and attack the media for publishing what they learn about those activities.
But there also are important differences, and at first blush, it is hard to say which administration's policies are worse. Much of what the Nixon administration did was clearly illegal and in violation of the Constitution. Nixon and his colleagues seemed to understand that and worked hard to keep their activities secret. On the occasions when their actions became public, administration officials tried to blame others for them.
These actions were not limited to its warrantless wiretap program and the investigation of political opponents by the IRS and other agencies. They also included, among other things, the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist (to find evidence discrediting Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times) and the effort to have the CIA persuade the FBI to call off the investigation of the Watergate burglary (by asserting that it threatened national security).
Although the Nixon administration did argue (like the Bush administration) that virtually anything the president did to promote national security was lawful, it never presented an argument to justify these particular transgressions.
By contrast, as far as we know, the Bush administration has not engaged in any such inherently illegal activities. Nor has it, to our knowledge, specifically targeted its political opponents (aside from the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame).
But even though Nixon's specific actions might have been more obviously illegal and more "corrupt" (in the sense that they were designed to advance his own career over his rivals), President Bush's claim of nearly limitless power — including the ability to engage in a range of activities that pose a fundamental threat to the constitutional order and to our civil liberties — overshadows all comparisons.
Among the many such activities are the seizure of U.S. citizens and their indefinite detention without charge or access to lawyers; warrantless wiretaps of citizens in violation of procedures mandated by Congress; and the seizing of individuals in foreign countries and their movement to third countries, where they have been subjected to torture in violation of U.S. laws and treaty obligations.
When these activities have leaked out, the president has not sought to deny them but has publicly defended them (and attacked the press for printing the information). The administration has vigorously opposed all efforts to have the courts review its actions, and when the Supreme Court has overruled the president, as it has several times now, the administration has given the court holdings the narrowest possible interpretation.
Congress has been treated with equal disdain. When the Senate voted overwhelmingly to prohibit torture and cruel and degrading treatment by all agencies, including the CIA, Vice President Dick Cheney warned lawmakers that they were overstepping their bounds and threatening national security. When Congress persisted and attached the language to a defense appropriations bill, the president signed the law with an accompanying statement declaring his right to disobey the anti-torture provisions.
The administration has repeatedly failed to inform Congress or its committees of what it was doing, or has told only a few selected members in a truncated way, preventing real oversight. Even leading Republicans, such as Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, have voiced strong concerns.
During the Nixon years, the laws governing what the president could do and under what circumstances he needed to inform Congress were murky. There were no intelligence committees in Congress, and there was no Intelligence Oversight Act. There was no legislated prohibition on national security surveillance.
In response to Watergate and the related scandals of the Nixon years, however, Congress constructed a careful set of prohibitions, guidelines and requirements for congressional reporting.
Bush's systematic and defiant violation of these rules, as well as of the mandates of the Constitution and international law, pose a challenge to our constitutional order and civil liberties that, in the end, constitutes a far greater threat than the lawlessness of Richard Nixon.
-
Until recently I thought that I might attempt to contact John Dean to see if he were interested in joining the Forum. However, in light of the destructive postings of Ashton Gray, I have decided that encouraging Dean or anyone else who has a direct knowledge to join the Forum is not a viable option.
Do you make John Dean's decisions for him about where to participate or not? (Now that's 64 questions. Ka-ching!)
Regardless of whether you answer or not, it's good to know that you and ol' John Wesley are in touch with each other. If you do talk to him, please pass on my regards, and let him know I'm doing a small series in the Watergate forum, growing his legend. Significantly.
By all means, I'd love for there to be two Watergate-related attornies here running from me.
Do you think you could get Liddy and Hunt to join the game? Hell, I'll type with only one hand if I could get all four of you here, and especially if Alfred Baldwin would come back out from under the porch. Come on, Doug. If you could drag Colson away from the pulpit long enough, bring him along, too! Let's all play Question-and-Evade! I'm ready. Six against one. You can't beat those odds!
Oh! While we're on the subject of Hunt and Baldwin, and since Baldwin has lost his voice, and since you apparently are close to him, too: I don't think Hunt came to your apartment at all on the morning of June 17, 1972, but instead followed Baldwin, who was driving the van to McCord's house, then took Baldwin where he needed to be taken after Baldwin had planted the "evidence" there. And I think you know, too. I think you were and are Hunt's alibi for being in knowing collusion with Baldwin on planting the "evidence" at McCord's house, after Hunt had planted his "evidence" in the White House, which is precisely why you're avoiding all my questions about that. Did I ring the bell, Doug? Do I win a kewpie doll?
Please see if you can round up all your Watergate pals. Bring 'em on.
Ashton Gray
UNITED STATES v. GEORGE GORDON LIDDY
United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
509 F.2d 428
Before: BAZELON, Chief Judge, WRIGHT, McGOWAN, LEVENTHAL, ROBINSON, MacKINNON, and WILKEY, Circuit Judges, sitting en banc.
LEVENTHAL, Circuit Judge.
Appellant Liddy seeks reversal of his conviction on charges relating to the burglary and wiretapping of the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate apartment-office building complex in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 17, 1972. Appellant was named in six counts of an eight count indictment returned against seven defendants1 on September 15, 1972. On January 8, 1973, jury selection began before then Chief Judge John J. Sirica of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Shortly after the trial commenced, five defendants changed their pleas to guilty. On January 30, 1973, the remaining defendants, appellant Liddy and James W. McCord, Jr., were found guilty by the jury. Appellant was convicted of conspiracy in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371 (count 1), burglary in violation of 22 D.C. Code § 1801(
(counts 2 and 3), and unlawful endeavor to intercept oral and wire communications and interception of communications in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2511(1)(a) (counts 4, 5, and 8). * * * * * *
IV. INSTRUCTION REGARDING RETAINING OF COUNSEL
On direct examination, attorney Michael Douglas Caddy testified as follows: At approximately 3:40 a.m. Saturday morning, June 17, 1972, Howard Hunt arrived at his apartment and arranged with him to secure counsel for the five men arrested in the Democratic National Committee’s offices an hour and a half earlier.
At about 4:45 a.m. Hunt called Liddy and both Hunt and Caddy explained to Liddy the steps that had been taken to retain an attorney for those men. During this conversation, Liddy indicated that he desired to have Caddy represent him in this matter.
Appellant assigns as error the trial judge’s instruction that the jury could draw no adverse inferences from the fact that Liddy retained counsel but could consider the time and other surrounding circumstances at which Mr. Liddy retained Mr. Caddy with respect to the state of mind of Mr. Liddy only. Appellant claims that allowing the jury to draw inferences of guilty knowledge from his efforts to obtain counsel imposes a penalty on the exercise of his Sixth Amendment rights.40 Liddy cites the Government’s emphasis in closing argument on the unusual hour at which he retained counsel as evidence of the prejudicial nature of the alleged error.
Appellant bases his Sixth Amendment claim on Griffin v. California, 380 U.S. 609 (1965). In that case the Court held that comment on the defendant’s failure to testify was forbidden by the Fifth Amendment, because it was tantamount to a penalty for exercising a constitutional right. Id. at 614-15. A number of courts, including this court, have extended the principle announced in Griffin to prohibit comment on the defendant’s failure to make an exculpatory statement upon arrest.
There is disagreement as to whether a defendant’s silence at the time of arrest can be used to impeach his testimony at trial. Compare United States v. Hale, 498 F.2d 1038 (D.C. Cir. 1974); Johnson v. Patterson, 475 F.2d 1066 (10th Cir.), cert. denied, 414 U.S. 878 (1973) with United States v. Ramirez, 441 F.2d 950 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 404 U.S. 869 (1971). This disagreement appears to be grounded primarily on diverse conclusions reached in attempts to harmonize the Supreme Court’s decision in Harris v. New York, 401 U.S. 222 (1971), and Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966).
There is only scant law on the applicability of the penalty analysis employed in Griffin to the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Some courts have found reversible error in circumstances in which the prosecutor has commented on the defendant’s silence and request for counsel upon arrest. Those cases, though containing language referring generally to the right to counsel, appear to be bottomed on considerations involving the rights of an accused facing police interrogation - a context in which the right to counsel is intimately bound up with the privilege against self-incrimination. They are thus of marginal value in ascertaining the applicability of Griffin to the Sixth Amendment claim raised in the present case.
In the present case, the trial judge instructed the jury that no adverse inferences could be drawn from the fact that appellant Liddy exercised his constitutional right to counsel. The trial judge, however, drew a distinction between the fact of hiring counsel and the time and circumstances under which an attorney was retained by the defendant.
Although it is the latter action of the trial judge that is contested on this appeal, we may usefully begin our discussion by approval of his instruction prohibiting the drawing of an adverse inference from the mere fact of hiring an attorney, at least when the circumstances are such that admission of evidence of such a request provokes the possibility that it will be taken as self-incriminatory. This prohibition of adverse inference from the fact of hiring an attorney seems to us to be a fair corollary to the Supreme Court’s opinion in Griffin. We should, perhaps, refer to our opinion in Jones v. United States, 111 U.S.App.D.C. 276, 296 F.2d 398 (en banc 1961), cert. denied, 370 U.S. 913 (1962), although it was not cited by parties. Insofar as Jones, which rejects a Sixth Amendment claim, uses the broad principle that the expression of a desire to have a lawyer never impinges on the right to have one, we think it is superseded by the reasoning of Griffin. * * *
In view of the peculiarities of the fact situation in Jones, we see no point in speculating on the result that would and should have ensued if it had been decided after Griffin. Certainly, the broadside rejection of the Sixth Amendment contention was not sound.
The trial judge erred, however, in limiting the application of the principle of Griffin with a ruling that apparently considered that it is generally proper to take into account the time and circumstances of retaining an attorney, and to draw whatever inferences as seem appropriate. Such a distinction generally raises problems that hobble the right to seek counsel. To the extent that an inference of criminality is operative, it invites probing of the very process of selection of counsel - who, why, when and where - and pressing the defendant to come forward with evidence concerning this process. The mischief of the approach is underlined by its semantic subtleties, which opens the door to maneuver and misunderstanding. It would be a rare case indeed where the prosecutor could not point out that the incriminating feature of the employment of counsel - in the absence of explanation - rests not in the employment as such but in the time and circumstances surrounding that event, and inferences therefrom that reflect adversely on the defendant.45
The Third Circuit recently examined the application of Griffin to a Sixth Amendment contention in United States ex rel Macon v. Yeager, 476 F.2d 613 (3rd Cir.), cert. denied, 414 U.S. 855 (1973). In that case the prosecutor in his summation to the jury commented upon the fact that the defendant called an attorney the morning after the alleged crime and argued that this action cast doubt on the defendant’s claim that the shooting was an accident. Id. at 614. Although the defendant neither objected to the comment nor requested an instruction, the court held that there was plain error that required a reversal of the conviction. The court read Griffin as an absolute prohibition against the imposition of any penalty for the exercise of a constitutional right in a criminal law context. Id. at 615-16.
We agree with the Third Circuit’s analysis that the admission of a request for counsel raises Sixth Amendment problems under Griffin. We are not called upon in this case to determine whether the Third Circuit was correct in treating Griffin as a bar that is absolute - whether, for example, it would apply where the request for or retainer of counsel was part of the actions constituting the offense, sometimes called the res gestae, so that omission of the request or retainer would distort the underlying account of the witnesses or undercut the likelihood that it would be considered reasonable or natural.
In the present case, even if it be assumed that there was error in the admission of evidence, the prosecutor’s summation, or the instruction, or all of these, the error would be harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. In Macon, where the Third Circuit found reversible error, the prosecutor’s comment was directed at the credibility of the accused’s story which was a central issue in the case. 476 F.2d at 616. Here, the time at which Liddy retained counsel was but one of a number of factors that linked him to Hunt and the five defendants apprehended a couple of hours earlier. Moreover, the effect of the error was mitigated by the fact that evidence of part of Liddy’s 5:00 a.m. conversation with Caddy was clearly admissible to show Liddy’s involvement in his action of retaining counsel for those arrested during the break-in. His assertion of a right to Sixth Amendment protection against any use of his statements to obtain counsel for himself certainly does not prohibit inquiry into portions of his conversation with Caddy relating to his action in obtaining counsel for others. This evidence of Liddy’s efforts on behalf of the five defendants only a few hours after their arrest was probative of his involvement in their venture.
The evidence against the appellant, summarized at the outset of the opinion, was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge there is no reasonable possibility that it contributed to the conviction.
* * *
Affirmed.
--------------------------------------------
This 1998 article by me from the Wall Street Journal puts in perspective the 1974 U.S. Court of Appeals Decision in U.S. v. Liddy:
The Wall Street Journal
Editorial Page
March 24, 1998
WHAT IF JUDGE SIRICA WERE WITH US TODAY?
By Douglas Caddy
(Mr. Caddy is a Houston lawyer)
The Clinton scandals, with all the claims of coverup and executive privilege, are certainly reminiscent of Watergate. But there is a crucial difference: This case lacks a John Sirica, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia who played such a crucial role in Watergate. The untold historical record reveals that the early actions of Sirica, who assigned the Watergate case to himself, helped spur the subsequent coverup and obstruction of justice that ultimately led to the resignation of President Nixon and the criminal convictions of many Watergate figures.
The Watergate scandal began at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972, when Washington, D.C. police arrested five men on burglary charges at the Watergate office building. At 3:05 a.m. E. Howard Hunt phoned me from his White House office and asked if he could come immediately to my Washington residence. I had been Hunt’s personal attorney for several years.
Hunt arrived half an hour later and informed me what had transpired earlier at the Watergate. He retained me to represent him in the case and then called G. Gordon Liddy, who also hired me. At that time, about two hours after the burglary, both Hunt and Liddy requested I also represent the five people arrested, four Cuban-Americans and James McCord, who were then incarcerated in the D.C. jail.
On June 28 – 11 days later – while working on the case in the federal courthouse in Washington, I was served with a subpoena bearing the name of Chief Judge Sirica, to appear “forthwith” before the federal grand jury investigating the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the grand jury room.
From June 28 until July 19 I was to appear before the grand jury on six occasions and answer hundreds of questions. I drew the line, however, on the advice of my own legal counsel, at answering 38 questions we felt invaded my clients’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel and the attorney-client privilege. A typical question: “Between the hours of Friday at midnight, June 16, and 8:30 a.m. Saturday, June 17, did you receive a visit from Mr. Everett Howard Hunt?” We believed answering such questions would incriminate Hunt and Liddy, who had not been arrested, and would violate their constitutional rights.
Judge Sirica, rejecting such arguments out of hand, threatened to jail me for contempt of court. When I went before the grand jury on July 13, I refused to answer the 38 questions. Within an hour I was back before Judge Sircia, who immediately held me in contempt of court and ordered me to jail. Five days later, on July 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the contempt citation and ordered me to testify under threat of being jailed again. The opinion, which I found gratuitously insulting, declared: “Even if such a relationship does exist, certain communications, such as consultation in furtherance of a crime, are not within the privilege.”
In his July 19, 1972, Oval Office tape, Nixon is recorded as expressing dismay to John Ehrlichman: “Do you mean the circuit court ordered an attorney to testify?”
Ehrlichman replied, “It [unintelligible] me, except that this damn circuit that we’ve got here, with
[Judge David] Bazelon and so on, it surprises me every time they do something.”
Nixon then asked, “Why didn’t he appeal to the Supreme Court?”
The answer is that my attorneys and I believe we had built a strong enough court record that if Hunt, Liddy and the five arrested individuals were found guilty, their convictions could be overturned on appeal because of Sirica’s and the appeals court’s abuse of me as their attorney.
However, Judge Sirica’s actions had an unintended consequence. Hunt and Liddy, seeing their attorney falsely accused by Judge Sirica of being a participant in their crime, realized early on that they were not going to get a fair trail, so they embarked on a coverup involving “hush money.” As Hunt has written: “If Sirica was treating Caddy – an Officer of the Court – so summarily, and Caddy was completely uninvolved in Watergate – then those of us who were involved could expect neither fairness nor understanding from him. As events unfolded, this conclusion became tragically accurate.”
Liddy appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals, claiming that my being forced to testify denied him his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The court upheld his conviction: “The evidence against appellant...was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge, there is no reasonable possibility it contributed to the conviction.” Neither Judge Sirica nor the appeals court acknowledged that their assault on the attorney-client privilege helped spur the ensuing coverup and obstruction of justice.
I was never indicted, named an unindicted co-conspirator, disciplined by the Bar or even contacted by the Senate Watergate Committee or the House Judiciary Committee, whose staff included a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham.
Now the issue of the attorney-client privilege is again being raised, this time by Monica Lewinsky’s first lawyer, Francis D. Carter, who has been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and bring the notes he took while representing Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Carter got involved when Vernon Jordan referred Ms. Lewinsky to him in January. On March 4, Mr. Carter’s attorney, Charles Ogletree, argued before Chief Judge Norma Hollaway Johnson that the subpoena should be quashed: “Once you start to allow the government to intrude on the attorney-client relationship and allow them to pierce the attorney-client privilege, clients will no longer have a sense of confidence and respect that lawyers should have.”
Coming days will reveal how Mr. Carter fares in his fight to protect Ms. Lewinsky’s constitutional rights and what effect this will have on the case’s ultimate outcome. To date, at least, Judge Johnson has shown a restraint that her predecessor Judge Sirica did not.
-
UNITED STATES v. GEORGE GORDON LIDDY
United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
509 F.2d 428
Before: BAZELON, Chief Judge, WRIGHT, McGOWAN, LEVENTHAL, ROBINSON, MacKINNON, and WILKEY, Circuit Judges, sitting en banc.
LEVENTHAL, Circuit Judge.
Appellant Liddy seeks reversal of his conviction on charges relating to the burglary and wiretapping of the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate apartment-office building complex in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 17, 1972. Appellant was named in six counts of an eight count indictment returned against seven defendants1 on September 15, 1972. On January 8, 1973, jury selection began before then Chief Judge John J. Sirica of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Shortly after the trial commenced, five defendants changed their pleas to guilty. On January 30, 1973, the remaining defendants, appellant Liddy and James W. McCord, Jr., were found guilty by the jury. Appellant was convicted of conspiracy in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371 (count 1), burglary in violation of 22 D.C. Code § 1801(
(counts 2 and 3), and unlawful endeavor to intercept oral and wire communications and interception of communications in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2511(1)(a) (counts 4, 5, and 8). * * * * * *
IV. INSTRUCTION REGARDING RETAINING OF COUNSEL
On direct examination, attorney Michael Douglas Caddy testified as follows: At approximately 3:40 a.m. Saturday morning, June 17, 1972, Howard Hunt arrived at his apartment and arranged with him to secure counsel for the five men arrested in the Democratic National Committee’s offices an hour and a half earlier.
At about 4:45 a.m. Hunt called Liddy and both Hunt and Caddy explained to Liddy the steps that had been taken to retain an attorney for those men. During this conversation, Liddy indicated that he desired to have Caddy represent him in this matter.
Appellant assigns as error the trial judge’s instruction that the jury could draw no adverse inferences from the fact that Liddy retained counsel but could consider the time and other surrounding circumstances at which Mr. Liddy retained Mr. Caddy with respect to the state of mind of Mr. Liddy only. Appellant claims that allowing the jury to draw inferences of guilty knowledge from his efforts to obtain counsel imposes a penalty on the exercise of his Sixth Amendment rights.40 Liddy cites the Government’s emphasis in closing argument on the unusual hour at which he retained counsel as evidence of the prejudicial nature of the alleged error.
Appellant bases his Sixth Amendment claim on Griffin v. California, 380 U.S. 609 (1965). In that case the Court held that comment on the defendant’s failure to testify was forbidden by the Fifth Amendment, because it was tantamount to a penalty for exercising a constitutional right. Id. at 614-15. A number of courts, including this court, have extended the principle announced in Griffin to prohibit comment on the defendant’s failure to make an exculpatory statement upon arrest.
There is disagreement as to whether a defendant’s silence at the time of arrest can be used to impeach his testimony at trial. Compare United States v. Hale, 498 F.2d 1038 (D.C. Cir. 1974); Johnson v. Patterson, 475 F.2d 1066 (10th Cir.), cert. denied, 414 U.S. 878 (1973) with United States v. Ramirez, 441 F.2d 950 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 404 U.S. 869 (1971). This disagreement appears to be grounded primarily on diverse conclusions reached in attempts to harmonize the Supreme Court’s decision in Harris v. New York, 401 U.S. 222 (1971), and Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966).
There is only scant law on the applicability of the penalty analysis employed in Griffin to the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Some courts have found reversible error in circumstances in which the prosecutor has commented on the defendant’s silence and request for counsel upon arrest. Those cases, though containing language referring generally to the right to counsel, appear to be bottomed on considerations involving the rights of an accused facing police interrogation - a context in which the right to counsel is intimately bound up with the privilege against self-incrimination. They are thus of marginal value in ascertaining the applicability of Griffin to the Sixth Amendment claim raised in the present case.
In the present case, the trial judge instructed the jury that no adverse inferences could be drawn from the fact that appellant Liddy exercised his constitutional right to counsel. The trial judge, however, drew a distinction between the fact of hiring counsel and the time and circumstances under which an attorney was retained by the defendant.
Although it is the latter action of the trial judge that is contested on this appeal, we may usefully begin our discussion by approval of his instruction prohibiting the drawing of an adverse inference from the mere fact of hiring an attorney, at least when the circumstances are such that admission of evidence of such a request provokes the possibility that it will be taken as self-incriminatory. This prohibition of adverse inference from the fact of hiring an attorney seems to us to be a fair corollary to the Supreme Court’s opinion in Griffin. We should, perhaps, refer to our opinion in Jones v. United States, 111 U.S.App.D.C. 276, 296 F.2d 398 (en banc 1961), cert. denied, 370 U.S. 913 (1962), although it was not cited by parties. Insofar as Jones, which rejects a Sixth Amendment claim, uses the broad principle that the expression of a desire to have a lawyer never impinges on the right to have one, we think it is superseded by the reasoning of Griffin. * * *
In view of the peculiarities of the fact situation in Jones, we see no point in speculating on the result that would and should have ensued if it had been decided after Griffin. Certainly, the broadside rejection of the Sixth Amendment contention was not sound.
The trial judge erred, however, in limiting the application of the principle of Griffin with a ruling that apparently considered that it is generally proper to take into account the time and circumstances of retaining an attorney, and to draw whatever inferences as seem appropriate. Such a distinction generally raises problems that hobble the right to seek counsel. To the extent that an inference of criminality is operative, it invites probing of the very process of selection of counsel - who, why, when and where - and pressing the defendant to come forward with evidence concerning this process. The mischief of the approach is underlined by its semantic subtleties, which opens the door to maneuver and misunderstanding. It would be a rare case indeed where the prosecutor could not point out that the incriminating feature of the employment of counsel - in the absence of explanation - rests not in the employment as such but in the time and circumstances surrounding that event, and inferences therefrom that reflect adversely on the defendant.45
The Third Circuit recently examined the application of Griffin to a Sixth Amendment contention in United States ex rel Macon v. Yeager, 476 F.2d 613 (3rd Cir.), cert. denied, 414 U.S. 855 (1973). In that case the prosecutor in his summation to the jury commented upon the fact that the defendant called an attorney the morning after the alleged crime and argued that this action cast doubt on the defendant’s claim that the shooting was an accident. Id. at 614. Although the defendant neither objected to the comment nor requested an instruction, the court held that there was plain error that required a reversal of the conviction. The court read Griffin as an absolute prohibition against the imposition of any penalty for the exercise of a constitutional right in a criminal law context. Id. at 615-16.
We agree with the Third Circuit’s analysis that the admission of a request for counsel raises Sixth Amendment problems under Griffin. We are not called upon in this case to determine whether the Third Circuit was correct in treating Griffin as a bar that is absolute - whether, for example, it would apply where the request for or retainer of counsel was part of the actions constituting the offense, sometimes called the res gestae, so that omission of the request or retainer would distort the underlying account of the witnesses or undercut the likelihood that it would be considered reasonable or natural.
In the present case, even if it be assumed that there was error in the admission of evidence, the prosecutor’s summation, or the instruction, or all of these, the error would be harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. In Macon, where the Third Circuit found reversible error, the prosecutor’s comment was directed at the credibility of the accused’s story which was a central issue in the case. 476 F.2d at 616. Here, the time at which Liddy retained counsel was but one of a number of factors that linked him to Hunt and the five defendants apprehended a couple of hours earlier. Moreover, the effect of the error was mitigated by the fact that evidence of part of Liddy’s 5:00 a.m. conversation with Caddy was clearly admissible to show Liddy’s involvement in his action of retaining counsel for those arrested during the break-in. His assertion of a right to Sixth Amendment protection against any use of his statements to obtain counsel for himself certainly does not prohibit inquiry into portions of his conversation with Caddy relating to his action in obtaining counsel for others. This evidence of Liddy’s efforts on behalf of the five defendants only a few hours after their arrest was probative of his involvement in their venture.
The evidence against the appellant, summarized at the outset of the opinion, was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge there is no reasonable possibility that it contributed to the conviction.
* * *
Affirmed.
----------------------------------------
This 1998 article by me from The Wall Street Journal puts in perspective the 1974 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals decision in U.S. v. Liddy.
The Wall Street Journal
Editorial Page
March 24, 1998
WHAT IF JUDGE SIRICA WERE WITH US TODAY?
By Douglas Caddy
(Mr. Caddy is a Houston lawyer)
The Clinton scandals, with all the claims of coverup and executive privilege, are certainly reminiscent of Watergate. But there is a crucial difference: This case lacks a John Sirica, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia who played such a crucial role in Watergate. The untold historical record reveals that the early actions of Sirica, who assigned the Watergate case to himself, helped spur the subsequent coverup and obstruction of justice that ultimately led to the resignation of President Nixon and the criminal convictions of many Watergate figures.
The Watergate scandal began at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972, when Washington, D.C. police arrested five men on burglary charges at the Watergate office building. At 3:05 a.m. E. Howard Hunt phoned me from his White House office and asked if he could come immediately to my Washington residence. I had been Hunt’s personal attorney for several years.
Hunt arrived half an hour later and informed me what had transpired earlier at the Watergate. He retained me to represent him in the case and then called G. Gordon Liddy, who also hired me. At that time, about two hours after the burglary, both Hunt and Liddy requested I also represent the five people arrested, four Cuban-Americans and James McCord, who were then incarcerated in the D.C. jail.
On June 28 – 11 days later – while working on the case in the federal courthouse in Washington, I was served with a subpoena bearing the name of Chief Judge Sirica, to appear “forthwith” before the federal grand jury investigating the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the grand jury room.
From June 28 until July 19 I was to appear before the grand jury on six occasions and answer hundreds of questions. I drew the line, however, on the advice of my own legal counsel, at answering 38 questions we felt invaded my clients’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel and the attorney-client privilege. A typical question: “Between the hours of Friday at midnight, June 16, and 8:30 a.m. Saturday, June 17, did you receive a visit from Mr. Everett Howard Hunt?” We believed answering such questions would incriminate Hunt and Liddy, who had not been arrested, and would violate their constitutional rights.
Judge Sirica, rejecting such arguments out of hand, threatened to jail me for contempt of court. When I went before the grand jury on July 13, I refused to answer the 38 questions. Within an hour I was back before Judge Sircia, who immediately held me in contempt of court and ordered me to jail. Five days later, on July 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the contempt citation and ordered me to testify under threat of being jailed again. The opinion, which I found gratuitously insulting, declared: “Even if such a relationship does exist, certain communications, such as consultation in furtherance of a crime, are not within the privilege.”
In his July 19, 1972, Oval Office tape, Nixon is recorded as expressing dismay to John Ehrlichman: “Do you mean the circuit court ordered an attorney to testify?”
Ehrlichman replied, “It [unintelligible] me, except that this damn circuit that we’ve got here, with
[Judge David] Bazelon and so on, it surprises me every time they do something.”
Nixon then asked, “Why didn’t he appeal to the Supreme Court?”
The answer is that my attorneys and I believe we had built a strong enough court record that if Hunt, Liddy and the five arrested individuals were found guilty, their convictions could be overturned on appeal because of Sirica’s and the appeals court’s abuse of me as their attorney.
However, Judge Sirica’s actions had an unintended consequence. Hunt and Liddy, seeing their attorney falsely accused by Judge Sirica of being a participant in their crime, realized early on that they were not going to get a fair trail, so they embarked on a coverup involving “hush money.” As Hunt has written: “If Sirica was treating Caddy – an Officer of the Court – so summarily, and Caddy was completely uninvolved in Watergate – then those of us who were involved could expect neither fairness nor understanding from him. As events unfolded, this conclusion became tragically accurate.”
Liddy appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals, claiming that my being forced to testify denied him his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The court upheld his conviction: “The evidence against appellant...was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge, there is no reasonable possibility it contributed to the conviction.” Neither Judge Sirica nor the appeals court acknowledged that their assault on the attorney-client privilege helped spur the ensuing coverup and obstruction of justice.
I was never indicted, named an unindicted co-conspirator, disciplined by the Bar or even contacted by the Senate Watergate Committee or the House Judiciary Committee, whose staff included a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham.
Now the issue of the attorney-client privilege is again being raised, this time by Monica Lewinsky’s first lawyer, Francis D. Carter, who has been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and bring the notes he took while representing Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Carter got involved when Vernon Jordan referred Ms. Lewinsky to him in January. On March 4, Mr. Carter’s attorney, Charles Ogletree, argued before Chief Judge Norma Hollaway Johnson that the subpoena should be quashed: “Once you start to allow the government to intrude on the attorney-client relationship and allow them to pierce the attorney-client privilege, clients will no longer have a sense of confidence and respect that lawyers should have.”
Coming days will reveal how Mr. Carter fares in his fight to protect Ms. Lewinsky’s constitutional rights and what effect this will have on the case’s ultimate outcome. To date, at least, Judge Johnson has shown a restraint that her predecessor Judge Sirica did not.
(counts 2 and 3), and unlawful endeavor to intercept oral and wire communications and interception of communications in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2511(1)(a) (counts 4, 5, and 8). * * *
Is anyone interested in Apollo missions...
in The Apollo Moon Landings
Posted
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