Douglas Caddy

W. Mark Felt, Watergate Deep Throat, Dies at 95 By TIM WEINER The New York Times December 19, 2008 W. Mark Felt, who was the No. 2 official at the F.B.I. when he helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon by resisting the Watergate cover-up and becoming Deep Throat, the most famous anonymous source in American history, died Thursday. He was 95 and lived in Santa Rosa, Calif. His death was confirmed by Rob Jones, his grandson. In 2005, Mr. Felt revealed that he was the one who had secretly supplied Bob Woodward of The Washington Post with crucial leads in the Watergate affair in the early 1970s. His decision to unmask himself, in an article in Vanity Fair, ended a guessing game that had gone on for more than 30 years. The disclosure even surprised Mr. Woodward and his partner on the Watergate story, Carl Bernstein. They had kept their promise not to reveal his identity until after his death. Indeed, Mr. Woodward was so scrupulous about shielding Mr. Felt that he did not introduce him to Mr. Bernstein until this year, 36 years after they cracked the scandal. The three met for two hours one afternoon last month in Santa Rosa, where Mr. Felt had retired. The reporters likened it to a family reunion. Mr. Felt played a dual role in the fall of Nixon. As a secret informant, he kept the story alive in the press. As associate director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he fought the president’s efforts to obstruct the F.B.I.’s investigation of the Watergate break-in. Without Mr. Felt, there might not have been a Watergate — shorthand for the revealed abuses of presidential powers in the Nixon White House, including illegal wiretapping, burglaries and money laundering. Americans might never have seen a president as a criminal conspirator, or reporters as cultural heroes, or anonymous sources like Mr. Felt as a necessary if undesired tool in the pursuit of truth. Like Nixon, Mr. Felt authorized illegal break-ins in the name of national security and then received the absolution of a presidential pardon. Their lives were intertwined in ways only they and a few others knew. Nixon cursed his name when he learned early on that Mr. Felt was providing aid to the enemy in the wars of Watergate. The conversation was recorded in the Oval Office and later made public. “We know what’s leaked, and we know who leaked it,” Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, told the president on Oct. 19, 1972, four months after a team of washed-up Central Intelligence Agency personnel hired by the White House was caught trying to wiretap the Democratic Party’s national offices at the Watergate complex. “Somebody in the F.B.I.?” Nixon asked. “Yes, sir,” Mr. Haldeman replied. Who? the president asked. “Mark Felt,” Mr. Haldeman said. “Now why the hell would he do that?” the president asked in a wounded tone. No one, including Mr. Felt, ever answered that question in full. Mr. Felt later said he believed that the president had been misusing the F.B.I. for political advantage. He knew that Nixon wanted the Watergate affair to vanish. He knew that the White House had ordered the C.I.A. to tell the bureau, on grounds of national security, to stand down in its felony investigation of the June 1972 break-in. He saw that order as an effort to obstruct justice, and he rejected it. That resistance led indirectly to Nixon’s resignation. Mr. Felt had expected to be named to succeed J. Edgar Hoover, who had run the bureau for 48 years and died in May 1972. The president instead chose a politically loyal Justice Department official, L. Patrick Gray III, who later followed orders from the White House to destroy documents in the case. The choice infuriated Mr. Felt. He later wrote that the president “wanted a politician in J. Edgar Hoover’s position who would convert the bureau into an adjunct of the White House machine.” Hoover had sworn off break-ins without warrants — “black bag jobs,” he called them — in 1966, after carrying them out at the F.B.I. for four decades. The Nixon White House hired its own operatives to steal information, plant eavesdropping equipment and hunt down the sources of leaks. The Watergate break-in took place six weeks after Hoover died. While Watergate was seething, Mr. Felt authorized nine illegal break-ins at the homes of friends and relatives of members of the Weather Underground, a violent left-wing splinter group. The people he chose as targets had committed no crimes. The F.B.I. had no search warrants. He later said he ordered the break-ins because national security required it. In a criminal trial, Mr. Felt was convicted in November 1980 of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans. Nixon, who had denounced him in private for leaking Watergate secrets, testified on his behalf. Called by the prosecution, he told the jury that presidents and by extension their officers had an inherent right to conduct illegal searches in the name of national security. “As Deep Throat, Felt helped establish the principle that our highest government officials are subject to the Constitution and the laws of the land,” the prosecutor, John W. Nields, wrote in The Washington Post in 2005. “Yet when it came to the Weather Underground bag jobs, he seems not to have been aware that this same principle applied to him.” Seven months after the conviction, President Ronald Reagan pardoned Mr. Felt. Then 67, Mr. Felt celebrated the decision as one of great symbolic value. “This is going to be the biggest shot in the arm for the intelligence community for a long time,” he said. After the pardon, Nixon sent him a congratulatory bottle of Champagne. Mr. Felt then disappeared from public view for a quarter of a century, denying unequivocally, time and again, that he had been Deep Throat. It was a lie he told to serve what he believed to be a higher truth. William Mark Felt was born in Twin Falls, Idaho, on Aug. 17, 1913. After graduating from the University of Idaho, he was drawn to public service in Washington and went to work for Senator James P. Pope, a Democrat. In 1938, he married his college sweetheart, Audrey Robinson, in Washington. They were wed by the chaplain of the House of Representatives. She died in 1984. The couple had a daughter, Joan, and a son, Mark. They and four grandsons survive Mr. Felt. Days before Pearl Harbor, after earning a law degree in night classes at George Washington University, Mr. Felt applied to the F.B.I. and joined it in January 1942. He spent most of World War II hunting German spies. After stints in Seattle, New Orleans and Los Angeles, Hoover named him special agent in charge of the Salt Lake City and Kansas City offices in the late 1950s. Rising to high positions at the headquarters in the 1960s, he oversaw the training of F.B.I. agents and conducted internal investigations as chief of the inspection division. In early 1970, while waiting in an anteroom of the West Wing of the White House, Mr. Felt chanced to meet a Navy lieutenant delivering classified messages to the National Security Council staff. The young man in dress blues was Bob Woodward. By his own description fiercely ambitious and in need of adult guidance, Mr. Woodward tried to wring career counseling from his elder. He left the White House with the number to Mr. Felt’s direct line at the F.B.I. On July 1, 1971, Hoover promoted Mr. Felt to deputy associate director, the third in command at the headquarters, beneath Hoover’s right-hand man and longtime companion, Clyde A. Tolson. With both of his superiors in poor health, Mr. Felt increasingly took effective command of the daily work of the F.B.I. When Mr. Hoover died and Mr. Tolson retired, he saw his path to power cleared. But Nixon denied him, and he seethed with frustrated ambition in the summer of 1972. One evening that summer, a few weeks after the Watergate break-in, Mr. Woodward, then a neophyte newspaperman, knocked on Mr. Felt’s door in pursuit of the story. Mr. Felt decided to co-operate with him and set up an elaborate system of espionage techniques for clandestine meetings with Mr. Woodward. If Mr. Woodward needed to talk, he would move a flowerpot planted with a red flag on the balcony of his apartment on P Street in Washington. If Mr. Felt had a message, Mr. Woodward’s home-delivered New York Times would arrive with an inked circle on Page 20. Mr. Woodward would leave his apartment by the back alley that night and take one taxi to a downtown hotel, then a second to an underground parking garage in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Va. Within weeks, Mr. Felt steered The Post to a story establishing that the Watergate break-in was part of “a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage” directed by the White House. For the next eight months, he did his best to keep the newspaper on the trail, largely by providing, on “deep background,” anonymous confirmation of facts reporters had gathered from others. The Post’s managing editor, Howard Simons, gave him his famous pseudonym, taken from the pornographic movie then in vogue. By June 1973, Mr. Felt was forced out of the F.B.I. Soon he came under investigation by some of the same agents he had supervised, suspected of leaking information not to The Post but to The New York Times. He spent much of the mid-1970s testifying in secret to Congress about abuses of power at the F.B.I. Millions of Americans knew him only as a shadowy figure in the 1976 movie made from the Watergate saga, “All the President’s Men,” which made “Woodward and Bernstein” legends of American journalism. In the movie, Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook) gives Mr. Woodward (Robert Redford) probably the most famous bit of free advice in the history of investigative journalism. It was a three-word road map to the heart of the matter: “Follow the money.” Mr. Felt never said it. It was part of the myth that surrounded Deep Throat.

The BBC is reporting that Felt = 100% Deep Throat - a rather long leap and journalistic misdeed, IMO. They said the same on BBC TV news today. However, they did show a news conference where Mark Felt denied he was Deep Throat. As he said, he would admit it if it was true as he thought it would have been his moral duty to remove a corrupt politician from power. However, he said, it was not possible to take credit for being Deep Throat. Thank you your commentary above. It is most revealing about Mark Felt, as my upcoming book will show. Also illuminating is today's New York Times online obituary, whose sixth paragraph begins with these words: "Without Mr. Felt, there might not have been a Watergate..." Stayed tuned for .......

In tapes, LBJ accuses Nixon of treason Johnson thought meddling derailed planned Vietnam peace talks on eve of 1968 election, according to final recordings made public. By Mark Lisheron AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Friday, December 05, 2008 http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news...05lbjtapes.html Just days before the pivotal 1968 presidential election featuring Vice President Hubert Humphrey's bid to succeed him, President Lyndon Baines Johnson suspected Humphrey's Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, of political sabotage that he called treason, according to the final recordings of Johnson's presidency to be publicly released. As Johnson tried to arrange peace talks between North and South Vietnam on the eve of the election, he and his closest advisers received information indicating that Nixon allies had asked that South Vietnam avoid peace talks until after the election, the tapes show. Johnson and his advisers, Humphrey included, kept their concerns secret at the time. But given that Nixon defeated Humphrey by just 500,000 votes out of 73 million cast and that Nixon's suspected perfidy involved the unpopular war in Vietnam, there is ample cause to wonder how history might have been changed had the concerns Johnson voiced 40 years ago been made public. The LBJ Library made those conversations public Thursday with the release of 42 hours of recordings made from May 1968 until the Johnson family left the White House in January 1969. Johnson's daughters, Luci Baines Johnson and Lynda Johnson Robb , were on hand to listen to and comment on the tapes and their father. Harry Middleton, the first director of the LBJ Library and the original overseer of the LBJ tape project, said Thursday that he was satisfied that the body of material complied with Johnson's wish that the American people be given the opportunity to see the 36th president of the United States "with the bark off." Betty Sue Flowers, the current director, praised Middleton's decision 15 years ago to countermand the wishes of his old boss that the tapes be kept private for 50 years after his death. Johnson died in 1973. "He had the foresight to say no to President Johnson," Flowers said at a news conference Thursday. "It was easier to do when he was dead," Johnson Robb shot back from her seat in the small audience. The final recordings take their place alongside more than 600 hours that have been released as they were processed and archived by the library over the past decade. The conversations span the breadth of Johnson's ascendancy after the assassination of President John Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 , until January 1969. In these last months of 1968 alone, Johnson is heard offering to Sen. Edward Kennedy and his family condolences after the assassination of his brother, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Robert Kennedy; discussing his reasoning for the continued bombing of North Vietnam; and reacting to the Soviet Union's invasion of Czechoslovakia. With an election hanging in the balance, however, there is added drama in the flurry of calls in late October and early November concerning Johnson's attempt to bring the North and South Vietnamese governments together for the first time to discuss peace. On March 31, under heavy pressure from the anti-war wing of his Democratic Party, Johnson shocked the American people by saying he would not run for re-election or accept his party's nomination. Instead, Johnson endorsed Humphrey, who inherited the warmonger label critics had hung on Johnson. Luci Baines Johnson recalled the agony of her father, who she said sincerely wanted a just end to the war. She said she and her sister were stung by the protesters who picketed outside the White House. "The last thing you would hear before you went to bed at night were protesters chanting, 'Hey, hey LBJ, how many boys did you kill today?' " Johnson said as her sister dabbed at tears. To test the good faith of the North Vietnamese, Johnson ordered that all bombing in the north cease on Oct. 31 , six days before voters were to go the polls. The cease-fire gave the Humphrey campaign an immediate jolt — polls showed Nixon's 8-percentage-point lead had shrunk to 2 points. The precise nature of any communication between Nixon's allies and the South Vietnamese government isn't revealed in the tapes — nor is the way Johnson and his advisers learned of them. In the tapes, Johnson tells Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "It's pretty obvious to me it's had its effect." In a segment aired at the news conference, Johnson tells Sen. Everett Dirksen , the Republican minority leader, that it will be Nixon's responsibility if the South Vietnamese don't participate in the peace talks. "This is treason," LBJ says to Dirksen. "I know," Dirksen replies, very softly. Confronting Nixon by telephone on Nov. 3, Johnson outlines what had been alleged and how important it was to the conduct of the war for Nixon's people not to meddle. "My God," Nixon says to Johnson, "I would never do anything to encourage the South Vietnamese not to come to that conference table." Instead, Nixon pledged to help in any way Johnson or Rusk suggested, "To hell with the political credit, believe me." For Johnson and his top advisers, it wasn't a matter of whether Nixon was telling the truth but whether accusing Nixon of meddling would give the appearance that Johnson — rather than Nixon — was using the war to influence the election. In the end, the South Vietnamese stayed away from the proposed peace talks. And Johnson listened to his advisers and suggested to Humphrey that he not use what he had learned. "For God's sake, you want everybody to know you don't play politics with human lives, that we did what's right," Johnson tells Rusk on one of the recordings. In several of the recordings, Johnson wonders what will become of a Democratic Party so riven by the war that it would not unite behind Humphrey. "I'm sorry I let you down a little," Humphrey tells Johnson. "No, you didn't; no you didn't," Johnson replies. "A lot of other folks (did), not you. You fought well and hard."

More Nixon tapes, records being made public Presidential memo dramatizes White House dilemma over Vietnam The Associated Press updated 1:17 p.m. CT, Tues., Dec. 2, 2008 WASHINGTON - Documents released Tuesday from the Nixon years shed new light on just how much the Nixon White House struggled with growing public unrest over the protracted war in Vietnam. Newly released information Tuesday from Richard M. Nixon's years in the presidency includes nearly 200 hours of White House tape recordings and 90,000 pages of documents. A newly declassified memo to Nixon from his secretary of defense at the time reflects just how much the administration felt and discussed public pressure — even as it weighed U.S. geopolitical strategy — in anguished internal debate over war policy. The seven-page document cautions the president against a proposal from the military brass to conduct a high-intensity air and naval campaign against North Vietnam. Then-Defense Secretary Melvin Laird said such a plan would involve the United States in "expanded costs and risks with no clear resultant military or political benefits." With peace talks "seemingly stalled in Paris, with combat activity levels reduced in South Vietnam, but with seemingly rising levels of discontent in the United States, we should review the overall situation and determine the best course of action," the defense secretary writes the president on Oct. 8, 1969. "The sum total of the considerations ... casts grave doubt on the validity and efficacy" of the proposal from the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, the memo concludes. At the time of Laird's memo, the Nixon administration was secretly conducting a massive bombing of Cambodia to destroy sanctuaries for North Vietnamese enemy troops. "We must, for example, act in a fashion which will maintain the support of the American people," Laird wrote, outlining a number of objectives. The Nixon administration didn't go forward with the Joint Chiefs' plan. But in December 1972, it launched what became known as the "Christmas bombing" of Hanoi when peace talks hit a dead-end. The effort stirred even more anger with the American public. North Vietnam called it a terrorist act. Laird became the biggest proponent of the concept called Vietnamization, urging Nixon to follow through on a policy of troop withdrawals, putting the burden of fighting the conflict on South Vietnamese troops. The massive B-52 strikes over Hanoi and Haiphong in the last two weeks of December 1972 were a gambit to shock North Vietnam into a serious posture in peace negotiations. The newly released tapes cover the period leading up to the bombing as well as the execution and are expected to include Oval Office discussions about the assault. The recordings are of Nixon's White House conversations from November 1972 to January 1973 and cover his re-election that fall, steps to bomb North Vietnam and also to make peace with it. Historians hoped for insights into the 1972 "Christmas bombing," one of the most controversial acts in a divisive war and the most concentrated air attack of the conflict. The documents take historians closer than the latest tapes do to the Watergate scandal that gathered force in 1973 and peaked with Nixon's resignation in disgrace in August 1974. The records include 65,000 pages from the files of J. Fred Buzhardt, Nixon's attorney in the titanic struggle over White House tapes that ultimately betrayed Nixon's complicity in the scandal. Other Watergate figures are represented in the collection, too. Thousands of pages are being released from the files of Nixon aides Charles W. Colson, H.R. Haldeman, Patrick J. Buchanan and John W. Dean. As well, there are more than 8,000 pages of correspondence from and to Nixon's political lieutenants at the Committee to Re-Elect the President, John Mitchell and committee deputy Jeb Magruder. Burglars working for the committee broke into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex in June 1972, setting off a chain of events that tied Nixon's top men and the president himself to a cover-up of illegal political machinations. Over the years, a mountain of paper and tape has emerged shedding light on the inner workings of a president who operated in great secrecy but, ironically, seemed to chronicle every step for history. This is the 12th release of Nixon White House tapes since 1980. More than 2,200 hours of tape recordings from the Nixon White House now are available, according to the National Archives, which joined the Nixon presidential library in Yorba Linda, Calif., in releasing the material Tuesday. All the recordings in the latest release are being put online while the papers can be seen at the two institutions. URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28012809/

On November 28, 2008, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration released a document that had been requested in connection with a book that I am writing on Watergate. This is only one of several hundred documents provided by the National Archives and my posting to the Forum at this time is concerned with only one investigation conducted by the Plumbers Task Force of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, U. S. Department of Justice. Below is the pertinent excerpt from the document: Memorandum June 27, 1975 To: The Files From: Nick A----. (last name is obscured by overlapping initials “NA”) Set forth below are my summaries of six relative minor investigations conducted by the Plumbers Task Force. None of these investigations were very extensive but they should be referenced in a miscellaneous category to indicate that this office looked into the allegations involved. To the extent possible, I have listed them chronologically. Diem Cables An investigation was conducted in July and August, 1973, into the allegations that State Department cables had been fabricated by E. Howard Hunt to implicate the Kennedy Administration in the assassination of Vietnamese Premier Diem. [FOIA ((3) – Rule 6(e). Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Grand Jury.] On July 23, 1973, I interviewed William Lambert, the Life reporter, whom Hunt had approached with the cables to attempt to entice Life to print an expose of the Kennedy Administration’s involvement in the Diem assassination. Hunt and Colson were interviewed on August 7, 1973, and August 15, 1973, respectively. Colson denied he had instructed Hunt to fabricate the cables, but after his plea in the Fielding case Colson related to Bill Merrill a different version of this incident which was not recorded. Charges were not brought forth simply because it was concluded that no crime had been made out by these activities.

From: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/ In our 6th annual JFK Assassination Special, a panel of experts including JFK Historian Lamar Waldron, and E. Howard Hunt's son, Saint John Hunt will share startling new evidence as we close in on finding out who really murdered the late president. Saturday, November 22, 2008

My view is that if asked, he would join in. Did he tell his son anything important about Watergate? I do not know about any information on Watergate that Howard might have passed to Saint John. I have in the past been in email correspondence with Saint John and will send him an email at this time and pose your question to him. I am in possession of new material about Watergate that hopefully will be published in book form early next year. I wish Howard were still alive so that I could run this material by him for his opinion as it is explosive in its content. It appears that certain personnel in military intelligence and the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police were aware of the Liddy-Hunt break-in plan two weeks before the plan was executed, which resulted in the arrests of the five persons inside the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972.

Thank you for posting this. It is a shame the film does not cover David Morales in any detail. There was some interesting photographs of Bill Harvey that I had not seen before. I assume they came from Hunt. The disappointing thing about the video is that Hunt's comments are speculative and do not appear to be based on any hard evidence. I am not convinced that Cord Meyer's motive concerned the fact that JFK had "cuckolded" him. Mary Pinchot Meyer had actually divorced Cord Meyer in 1958, five years before the assassination. I am sure that Hunt knew who was behind the assassination but I am not convinced that he tells us everything he knows on the video. I suspect it was just another "limited hangout". My recollection of listening to the full audio tape is that Hunt asserts that he was asked to join in participating in The Big Event but passed on it. The full audio tape is somewhat more definitive in some respects than the video. The release of the video at this time may indicate that his son, St. John, might still have information given to him by his father that may become public sometime in the future.

Howard Hunt’s Deathbed Video The following is reprinted from www.unknowncountry.com of this date: E. Howard Hunt's audio interview saying that the CIA was responsible for the JFK assassination was covered by the Associated Press, Rolling Stone and many others. In this video, released exclusively by PrisonPlanet.com, Hunt goes much further, naming CIA Agents Cord Meyer, who had been cuckolded by JFK, and William K. Harvey, who had been sidelined by Robert Kennedy after he tried to mount an unauthorized action against Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the people who managed the assassination for LBJ. To watch the video, click on the link below: http://www.radiodujour.com/people/hunt_saint_john/

A Hale Chief? Better Check Up on That. By Robert Dallek Sunday, October 19, 2008 Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...id=opinionsbox1 The American public seems pretty sure that it knows everything it needs to know about whether John McCain and Barack Obama are healthy enough to be president. I'm not. And whenever I think about whether both men are fit to serve, physically speaking, I think about the sinking feeling I had one lovely spring afternoon in 2002 when an archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library wheeled out the cartload of files showing how badly we had all been deceived about JFK's health. The secret details of Kennedy's medical history were buried in 10 beat-up old cartons of records the library had held for 40 years. Past requests for access to these materials had all been refused by a committee of loyalists that included one of JFK's closest advisers, speechwriter Ted Sorensen. To my surprise, the committee had given me the chance to read the files; I had to agree not to photocopy them but was free to take notes or read passages into a tape recorder. Now I -- along with a physician friend, Jeffrey Kelman -- felt as if I were breaching a wall of secrecy. Here were not the usual neat boxes of presidential records, preserved in red-blue-and-silver-trimmed containers, but musty cardboard cartons that seemed to have sat untouched in some corner of the library since Janet Travell, one of Kennedy's physicians, had given them to the library after JFK's assassination in November 1963. Between May 1955 and October 1957, Kennedy had been hospitalized nine times for a total of 44 days, including one 19-day period and two week-long stretches. Despite his public image of "vigah," as his accent rendered it, he suffered from bouts of colitis, accompanied by abdominal pain, diarrhea and dehydration; agony in his back triggered by osteoporosis of the lumbar spine; prostatitis, marked by severe pain and urinary infections; and Addison's disease, a form of adrenal insufficiency. Some of his difficulties, such as his back pain and Addison's, were open secrets among the press corps during his 1960 run for the White House, but the extent and severity of his problems -- to say nothing of the promiscuous variety of medications and doctors he relied upon to maintain his health -- had remained undisclosed. That's largely because the Kennedy campaign made every effort to hide his health problems -- obviously convinced that these disclosures, combined with his youth and Catholicism, would sink him. Kennedy was following in a little-known but troubling tradition in American politics -- and one we should remember when we assume that McCain and Obama have told us everything we need to know. Since that day at the Kennedy library, I have been advocating the full disclosure of all presidential candidates' medical histories, physical and psychological, in no small measure because the Kennedy campaign's deceptions were in line with the deceits or shadings offered by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt during their own presidential bids. Unbeknownst to the public, Wilson had suffered several small strokes before he ran in 1912 and continued to suffer them while in office; they proved to be preludes to a massive stroke in September 1919 that left him with a paralyzed left arm and leg and limited cognitive function. He could not stay alert for sustained periods of time or keep anything resembling a normal presidential work schedule. But the White House hid, as best it could, the extent of the president's incapacity from the public. Even though Wilson still had 18 months remaining in his term, which was being dominated by an economic recession and widespread fears of radicalism provoked by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the press, foolishly, deferred to the president's desire for privacy. White House subordinates declined to reveal the truth about the president's condition -- an amazing display of recklessness. The public did not fully understand how badly Roosevelt's health was failing when he ran for a fourth term in 1944. He died the following April, during the waning months of World War II, of a cerebral hemorrhage brought on by arteriosclerosis. When Winston Churchill's physician saw FDR at Yalta in February 1945, the British doctor predicted that the president would be dead in a matter of months. After his death, shocked Americans wondered whether he should have run again in 1944 and whether he had performed as effectively as he might have at the Yalta conference with Stalin. If Wilson, Roosevelt and Kennedy had fully disclosed their health problems, it might have cost them the Oval Office. Wilson would have been pressured to resign, something he considered doing in January 1920, and turn the presidency over to his vice president, former Indiana governor Thomas R. Marshall. Wilson's and his closest advisers' decision to keep the president's disability secret was an undemocratic abuse of presidential power. If FDR and JFK had allowed the public to know about their own health problems in 1944 and 1960, respectively, they might well have lost. Then again, Roosevelt's hold over the electorate remained considerable, so he might have prevailed. And if JFK had leveled with the public about the pain he bore, he might have been seen as heroic for achieving so much despite his suffering. But such calculations are beside the point, then and now. Politicians' political problems are their own. Their health problems belong to all of us, and if candidates don't like that, they need not run for president. It was and is the public's right to have the fullest possible information about a potential president's physical condition. If you want to be the most powerful person in the world, you will also have to be one of the least private. Voters deserve to know the full picture -- no ifs, ands or buts. Those who squirm at this standard often point to the examples of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, both of whom suffered from depression, and argue that these titans might never have taken office if they had offered full disclosure of their emotional struggles. I do not take so dim a view of the electorate and believe that American and British voters would still have recognized their greatness. Democracy rests on informed decision-making, and I see no decent argument for secrecy -- especially if we may be passing the world's largest nuclear arsenal into ailing hands. So on Oct. 3, when I read a full-page ad in the New York Times by 2,768 medical doctors calling on John McCain to release fully his health records to the public, I cheered. The voters' judgments should rest on the fullest possible information about the presidential candidates' potential performance in office. The fact that McCain could be our oldest elected president, a 72-year-old man with a history of skin cancer and a largely untested running mate, makes it all the more urgent that we know more about his health before voting. It's admirable that he shared 1,173 pages of his medical records with a small number of reporters during a three-hour period in May. But the limits the McCain campaign imposed on the review of those materials -- the eyebrow-raising time constraints, the exclusion of a New York Times reporter with an M.D. from the pool, the refusal to permit photocopying -- raise questions about what medical experts might find if given unrestricted access. The requirement for full disclosure should apply to Barack Obama as well. His campaign has released only a single page of information about his health history. He is just 47 and seemingly in excellent health, but nobody is immune from illnesses that voters might want to take account of in November. And remember, we all thought JFK was the picture of youthful vigor, too. Advances in modern medicine and in public understanding of diseases suggest that someone with a history of cancer or some other life-threatening illness need not be seen as barred from serving as president. But in an era when presidents shoulder such staggering responsibilities, voters in the United States -- and people around the world -- are entitled to know as much as possible about the person who will have so much to say about all our lives and futures. rdallek@aol.com Robert Dallek is the author of "An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963." His latest book is "Harry S. Truman."

New Kennedy tape revealed http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/#27168561 Tape of informal conversation with JFK on January 5, 1960 before he was elected president. It was recorded at his home in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. A portion of the tape was played on the NBC Nightly News today, October 13, 2008.

It seems clear that this Rosen is just another republican hatchet man, out to redeem poor John Mitchell, wrongly maligned all these years. That this book comes at a time when another Republican Attorney General, appropriately named A.G. has been exposed as a political hack and criminal, is just a coincidence, of course. Dean has written a few books bad-mouthing the Bushies for their crimes. It was just a matter of time before they fought back. I suspect this is it. Note: I don't necessarily agree with all that Valentine writes below or with the tone of his writing but I think it deserves a reading. _________________ Mission CREEP: From John Mitchell to John McCain Strong Man, Straw Dog and the FoxNews Circus By DOUGLAS VALENTINE www.counterpunch.org October 11-12, 2008 http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine10122008.html A lot of people believe, as Joe Biden recently said, that Sarah Palin and her running mate John McCain are going “over the edge” in a desperate attempt to assassinate Barack Obama’s character. Biden and other critics specifically cite the frenzied calls at Palin-McCain rallies to “kill” the “terrorist” Obama – calls for violence that go unheard by the sleepy Secret Service. In response, Palin and McCain cite Obama’s “attacks” on “hardworking middle class Americans,” code words that transform fascism, racism and religious fanaticism into righteousness. Their allies in government (like the Secret Service) tacitly turn a blind eye; they commit no overt acts to further the Palin-McCain conspiracy but advance it through sins of omission. Indeed, as America sinks deeper in the morass of the Wall Street meltdown, the Republican Party finds invisibility a virtue. Look around their rabid rallies and nowhere will you see any sign of its amoral leader for the last eight years, the washed-up and universally despised George W Bush. In the maelstrom of freewheeling capitalism and mass murder Bush engendered, mere mendacity, however, is a minor sin. Palin-McCain exhortations that Obama is untruthful about his associations with “domestic terrorists” are repeated every day as “news” by the mainstream media, while the frothing mouthpiece of the Republican Party, Fox News, broadcasts 24/7 the Big Lie that Barack “Hussein” (Palinesque wink and wiggle) Obama is really a Communist Muslim born in Africa who seeks to destroy America. Soon Fox will certainly unearth documentary evidence of his membership in Al Qaeda. It’s pathetic the way the mindless Republican hordes fall prey to Palin-McCain fear-mongering. But violence has its greatest appeal to “the silent majority” in hard times, and nothing is quite as American as visiting death and destruction upon the enemy within. Back in the 1960s there will still signs that said, “n, Don't Let the Sun Set on You in,” say, “Arizona,” where McCain opposed a national holiday for Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, ostensibly because King called the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” King got his holiday, after being assassinated, and McCain remains “a great purveyor.” The murder and mayhem incited by Palin-McCain at their lynch mob rallies even has mainstream hack David Gergen saying, “There is a free-floating sort of whipping-around anger that could really lead to some violence. And I think we’re not far from that.” Duh. David Brooks, Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, is “appalled” by Palin-McCain Black Shirt tactics and recently described Palin, a working class heroine in the minds of many deluded individuals, as a "fatal cancer to the Republican party.” Maybe so. Then again, maybe Palin will incite some James Earl Ray wanna-be to kill Obama, thus solving all the Republican part’s current problems? In any case, Brooks’ use of the word “cancer” is no accident, and harkens back to March 1973, when President Nixon’s erstwhile legal counsel, John Dean, famously said, in reference to the brewing Watergate scandal, that there was a “cancer” growing within the White House. Unlike cancer, the meaning of Watergate is open to interpretation. For Dean, it means the June 1972 break-in and telephone bugging of Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. In his 2004 book, Worse than Watergate, Dean claimed that when it comes to lies and cover-up, the Bush regime makes the Nixon administration look like amateurs. Lies and cover-ups are still the Republican strong suit, he admits, but they are worse today because Nixon’s was a petty crime which pales in comparison to the Bush Regime deceiving the world about 9/11 and using it to justify an unnecessary war in Iraq. This seems a very limited interpretation and many of us consider the Watergate scandal more than a petty crime. We see it as a symbolic validation of the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements. We cannot separate Watergate from racism and the Vietnam War, just as we cannot separate Bush and Iraq. Watergate, we know, led to the investigation and disgrace of the CIA, FBI and military, all of which conspired with the Nixon White House in an all-out right-wing assault (including murder) on the rights of all Americans. Nothing like that ever came from the Left. Ultimately, for anyone involved in the Anti-War or Civil Rights movements of the 1960’s, Watergate was the culmination of a culture war that has been revived by Bush, advanced by Fox News, and taken to its logical extreme by Palin and McCain. The Straw Man Working for Fox News is a curse, if you wish others to take you seriously. To work for Fox is to condemn yourself to the sideshow in the carnival, along with Snake Boy, the Bearded Lady, Table Top Joe, and the famous mistakes of nature featured on Fox News: Bill “The Human Vibrator” O’Reilly, Sean “Hermaphrodite” Hannity, and Ann “Fly Trap” Coulter. One such Fox freak, James Rosen, has written a book that purports to be a scholastic work about Watergate. Titled The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, it is over 600 pages long – and reads like it were 10,000. I crossed paths with Rosen a few years ago while researching my new book on the CIA’s usurpation of federal drug law enforcement during the Watergate era. Rosen and I were both speaking with E. Howard Hunt, the veteran CIA officer and pathological xxxx convicted of organizing the Watergate break-in. During this period I learned that Rosen, in the early 1990s, had gotten a grant from William F. Buckley to begin working on the Mitchell biography. Buckley, it should be noted, was Hunt’s CIA partner in Mexico in the early 1950s. Although born and raised in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he apparently developed his fondness for sideshows and mutants, Rosen adopted Buckley’s class affectations and traded off his patron’s right wing contacts like Hunt. The result is that Rosen is now Fox’s premier “war on terror” correspondent and Playboy’s resident scholar on Watergate. Pretentious to a fault, like Buckley, Rosen even asserts that The Washington Post was “extraneous” to the outcome of Watergate, as were Woodward and Bernstein. If that doesn’t give you a sense of Rosen’s scholasticism, consider that he makes his money at Fox by painting Bush regime war criminals like Condoleezza Rice in flattering colors. The geek has no shame at all, and in Strong Man he pours lipstick with a fire hose on Mitchell. The result is nauseating. Voted the funniest celebrity in Washington, Rosen had me holding my stomach and vomiting into a barf bag as he presented beady-eyed AG as a champion of civil rights and a super-hero fighting anti-war subversives. Anyone who was alive and aware in the 1960’s knows that Mitchell was a Wall Street bond lawyer whom Nixon chose as his campaign manager in 1968. (Written before the recent financial calamity, Strong Man argues that the denizens of Wall Street are paragons of virtue.) Nixon was so grateful after stealing the election that he made Mitchell his first attorney general, a job Mitchell had no training or talent for. In 1972 Nixon put Mitchell in charge of his re-election committee (CREEP) and set Mitchell as a collision course with the Watergate scandal. Nixon loved Mitchell so much that he let him take the fall in the cover-up, and Mitchell has the distinction of being the highest US government official to serve prison time. Rosen, like Nixon, is infatuated with Mitchell, and for equally perverse and exploitive reasons. But Mitchell, a fat Wall Street lawyer, was too boring to rate a book to himself. So Rosen’s bloated book isn’t really about Mitchell at all. It’s about revising history. As Rosen once boasted, “Wilde said that our lone duty to history is to continually rewrite it.” And Rosen does his re-writing by the shovel full. Those of who were there know that Mitchell led the domestic war against civil rights demonstrators and anti-war protestors. Mitchell hated us with a vengeance and, according to Rosen, rightfully so! You can feel Rosen trembling with glee as he quotes Mitchell comparing us to “another group of civilians who roamed the streets of Germany in the 1920s bullying people, shouting down those who disagreed with them and denying other people their civil rights. They were called Hitler’s Brown Shirts.” Talk about turning mortgage debt and junk bonds into gold! As we all knew back then, Mitchell and his felonious minions at Justice were the proudest bald headed fascists of the day. But Rosen is undeterred by fact and, by his account (hold your barf bag near) Mitchell also single-handedly desegregated the South’s public schools. Negro and Negro-loving white community organizers played no significant role whatsoever. Think that’s bad? Well, it gets worse. Revising Watergate for Modern Consumption Although Rosen admits that Mitchell's role in the Watergate bugging and cover-up “is indisputable,” he claims that Mitchell was “framed” by a “wicked alliance” of co-conspirators “eager to tell lies." Which brings us to Rosen’s “call girl” conspiracy theory, in which John Dean ordered the Watergate burglary and the CIA, under Democrat Richard Helms, assisted. What, inquiring people ask, is the “call girl” theory? According to Rosen, it’s the fact that employees at the Democratic National Committee “were assisting in getting the Democrats connected with the prostitutes at the Columbia Plaza.” And John Dean bugged the Watergate because his wife Maureen was one of the calls girls! According to Rosen, “Dean’s unique knowledge of all the players and their complex interconnections…makes him the only logical answer in the three-decades-old mystery of …who among the president’s men pressured Jeb Magruder [Mitchell’s deputy at CREEP] to send [Howard Hunt’s partner, G. Gordon] Liddy and his team back into the DNC.” “This is not your father’s Watergate,” Rosen quips. No, it definitely is not. It’s The X-Files meets Desperate Housewives. Or, as John Dean says about Rosen, “I will probably deal with him in court. His material, to put it mildly, is bullxxxx.” History as It Was Rosen the Straw Man really hates John Dean and anything that smacks of civil rights or anti-war liberalism. Then again, what else would one expect from a Fox News geek? Rosen’s hatred of Dean and love of Mitchell is steadfast in the face of the awful truth. The major fact being that Mitchell approved G. Gordon Liddy's Gemstone Plan to subvert George McGovern’s 1972 campaign through black bag jobs, assassination, kidnapping, rumor mongering and any other means necessary. Liddy, who enjoyed eating the heads off of living rats (not to prove his strength, but because he liked the taste), presented Mitchell with his plan in January 1972. As the top law enforcement officer in America, Mitchell had the legal imperative to Just Say No. If he had been half the circus Strong Man Rosen pretends, fat flabby Mitchell would have kicked Liddy out of his office. But Nixon’s moral compass showed his true colors and agreed to Liddy’s crazy plan, thus giving the world Watergate and Rosen something to re-write about. The other sad fact is that Mitchell was unscrupulous and corrupt, and narrowly dodged a charge that he and Nixon’s Commerce Secretary helped Robert Vesco (a drug smuggler fugitive living under the DEA’s nose in Costa Rica) with the Securities and Exchange Commission, after Vesco made a secret $200,000 cash contribution to Nixon's 1972 presidential campaign. The SEC, notably, was then chaired by former OSS spy William Casey, later Reagan’s DCI. (People rarely realize that the CIA is more closely allied with Wall Street than the it is to The White House.) Vesco was acquainted with Nixon's brothers, Edward and Donald, and the latter's son worked as Vesco’s bagman to CREEP. After the payoff, Mitchell immediately connected Vesco’s emissary to Casey. Rosen also fails to mention that Mitchell approved the CIA’s infiltration of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. BNDD Director John Ingersoll told me that someone asked him to participate in the Watergate cover-up. Ingersoll had two friends in the Nixon Administration – Mitchell and Dean – but he wouldn’t say which one it was. Mitchell has also been linked to mobster Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters, wing nut Howard Hughes, and mob activities at the same Vegas casinos where McCain feels compelled to play craps. Truth be told, Mitchell got off easy when in the fall in 1974 he was indicted on charges of conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice. He was convicted of suborning his CREEP deputy’s perjured testimony before the Watergate grand jury. Mitchell went to prison without complaining that he was framed. He never corrected the false notion that he commanded John F. Kennedy during World War II, or the “bogus suggestion that he played hockey for the New York Rangers.” It was as if he knew that a false Messiah like Rosen would one day come along and pretend that all the charges against him were Lies! Damned Lies! Like Nixon would say, “And Bush is not a war criminal.” Rosen spent 17 years sifting through the evidence and carefully discarding anything that pointed at Mitchell. What remains in Strong Man is as credible as the barrage of partisan distortions one hears daily, hourly, minute-by-endless minute on Fox News. And by mutating John Mitchell from a villain into a victim, James Rosen has proven himself a carnival act worthy of inclusion in the right wing-nut hall of shame. Douglas Valentine is the author of four books which are available at his websites http://www.members.authorsguild.net/valentine/ and http://www.douglasvalentine.com/index.html His fifth book, The Strength of the Pack: The Politics, Personalities and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped The DEA, will be published in September 2009 by Trine Day.

Is McCain Able? by Fred Reed http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed147.html www.lewrockwell.com October 4, 2008 I frankly don’t believe John McCain’s medical records, or at any rate the portions released to the New York Times. The man was held in solitary for years, tortured until bones fractured, until he confessed to war crimes, until he tried to hang himself. That he broke can’t be held against him: Almost anyone would have. (In my view GIs should be told to confess to anything whatever right from the start.) But the assertion that he came through unscathed, warm and humorous and psychically sound, just isn’t plausible. It doesn’t happen that way. Now, PTSD. A lot of people, including vets, don’t believe that PTSD exists. I didn’t. One reason is that they tend to think of it as something verging on the psychotic, as for example seeing nonexistent snipers in the hedgerows of suburban Philadelphia. The other common notion is that those who have it dive under tables at the sound of a backfire. Vets tend to think, “I don’t know anybody like that. I certainly don’t see snipers in the rafters. This whole PTSD business sounds like a crock.” So it does. But it isn’t. And of course many people, chiefly men, regard with suspicion anything that smells of psychobabble, anything touchy-feely. To them PTSD sounds like Can’t-Get-a-Date Personality Disorder – something for Oprah to talk about to bored housewives. So they dismiss it. Let me de-babble the discussion and state a simple fact: A lot of guys come back from wars really, truly messed up in the head, and it doesn’t go away. They aren’t going to talk to you about it. They figure it’s none of your goddamned business. If you push, they will tell you so, angrily. If you weren’t in those forsaken paddies, they think, if you didn’t go through what they did, you’re off their radar screens. They’ll talk to you about football, the weather, and whatever happened in the newspaper yesterday. Just don’t even try to talk about Viet Nam. Or whatever war it was. They don’t want to think about it, and talking about it to weenies feels like being naked in a train station. There are a lot of these brain-burnt guys out there. They don’t want your pity. They don’t pity themselves. They just don’t want to expose that part of themselves to you. They put a wall around themselves. You can’t see it. It’s there. Often they seem like fairly normal guys with three divorces who drink too much and their children say, “It was like he was somewhere else.” Perfectly normal guys who have had seventeen jobs because their bosses are always useless bastards. Perfectly normal guys who live out in the desert and do serious scuba or hang glide because they just don’t give a xxxx. Not all. Some manage to hold it together and become things thought to be respectable, such as senators or writers or defense attorneys. A subsurface lode of hostility can be useful in a trial lawyer. Anger is energizing. It can fuel a career. With PTSD, or whatever you want to call it, the anger is the giveaway. These vets carry a load of subterranean fury that you don’t want to look at. As they would say, I xxxx you not one pound. I know a lot of these guys. A buddy of mine – two tours in bad places, killed a whole lot of people up close – now has no tolerance for frustration. He's ready to spread your teeth over a wide radius if you even seem to think about getting in his face. Admirable? No. But don’t make the experiment. Sounds like McCain. His explosiveness is notorious. Another guy I know, writer, freelanced all his life because he couldn’t get along with people in offices. A writer can package this as sturdy independence, as being a colorful maverick. The fellow is approximately sane, or at least apparently sane. Get three drinks in him, bring up the war, and his voice starts shaking and it’s time to change the subject right now. A fair few PTSD guys become writers: It’s solitary, you don’t have to put up with bosses, and you don’t have to be stable. How do these vets get this way? Not by anything you want to hear about, anything that you will see on the nightly news. The RPG hits your tank, the cherry juice cooks off, and three of your buddies burn to death screaming because they couldn’t get out fast enough. You lose a leg and half your face to a mortar round. You just see things: A Chicom 122 cuts a cyclo driver in half and you watch him trying to crawl with his guts hanging out. He doesn’t crawl long. You get shot down over Hanoi and spend years being tortured. The military is a fun place. You have all sorts of unusual experiences. It messes your head up. I promise. I said anger – yes, but anger at what? At whom? Here I’m on soft ground because vets don’t talk much about this stuff among themselves. At least those I know don’t. But, to the extent that I am competent to judge, they aren’t mad at those who shot them, or shot at them. “The VC were only doing their job.” They hate those who sent them to a pointless war, who exposed them in thousands to Agent Orange, knowing that it was poisonous and carcinogenic, at those posing fat-ass pols who sent them to die for nothing while they ate prime rib in DC. Or they just hate. Psychologically the verb can be intransitive. They don’t know what they hate, but don’t get in the way of it. Not all respond this way. Some choose to intensify their patriotism – it avoids admitting that you have been suckered – and direct their hatred at the hippies, the liberals, the press, all of whom they figure lost the war. But the anger is still there. Most of the time, you don’t notice it. They turn off, often seem emotionally cold. But that explosive venom remains. We’re not talking about a fiery Irish temper. We’re talking half crazy. Those who seek help, typically from the VA, end up on Thissa-dol and Thatta-dol, on antidepressants and calmants and even antipsychotics. They sorta help. Sorta isn’t good enough with men who control carrier battle groups. From the New York Times story, “Mr. McCain also learned to control his temper and not to become angry over insignificant things, the doctors said.” I don’t believe it. It doesn’t fit accounts of people who know him. It isn’t how heads work. McCain is well known for his violent and irrational temper. A friend of mine, Ken Smith, was flack for Governor Mecham of Arizona during a meeting with McCain. The governor somehow irritated McCain. Says Ken, “McCain was leaning forward with a clinched fist. I reached out my left arm, as politely and as non-threatening as I could, and I pushed McCain back. What I remember is how taut and hard his body was, not from working out and lifting weights, but rather from anger and adrenalin. I made an excuse to leave and get them apart.” For what he went through in Vietnamese jails he deserves sympathy and admiration. It isn’t qualification for the presidency. October 4, 2008 Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well and the just-published A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be. Visit his blog. Find this article at: http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed147.html

Three crashes early in his career led Navy officials to question or fault his judgment. By Ralph Vartabedian and Richard A. Serrano Los Angeles Times October 6, 2008 http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na...0,7633315.story John McCain was training in his AD-6 Skyraider on an overcast Texas morning in 1960 when he slammed into Corpus Christi Bay and sheared the skin off his plane's wings. McCain recounted the accident decades later in his autobiography. "The engine quit while I was practicing landings," he wrote. But an investigation board at the Naval Aviation Safety Center found no evidence of engine failure. The 23-year-old junior lieutenant wasn't paying attention and erred in using "a power setting too low to maintain level flight in a turn," investigators concluded. The crash was one of three early in McCain's aviation career in which his flying skills and judgment were faulted or questioned by Navy officials. In his most serious lapse, McCain was "clowning" around in a Skyraider over southern Spain about December 1961 and flew into electrical wires, causing a blackout, according to McCain's own account as well as those of naval officers and enlistees aboard the carrier Intrepid. In another incident, in 1965, McCain crashed a T-2 trainer jet in Virginia. After McCain was sent to Vietnam, his plane was destroyed in an explosion on the deck of an aircraft carrier in 1967. Three months later, he was shot down during a bombing mission over Hanoi and taken prisoner. He was not faulted in either of those cases and was later lauded for his heroism as a prisoner of war. As a presidential candidate, McCain has cited his military service -- particularly his 5 1/2 years as a POW. But he has been less forthcoming about his mistakes in the cockpit. The Times interviewed men who served with McCain and located once-confidential 1960s-era accident reports and formerly classified evaluations of his squadrons during the Vietnam War. This examination of his record revealed a pilot who early in his career was cocky, occasionally cavalier and prone to testing limits. In today's military, a lapse in judgment that causes a crash can end a pilot's career. Though standards were looser and crashes more frequent in the 1960s, McCain's record stands out. "Three mishaps are unusual," said Michael L. Barr, a former Air Force pilot with 137 combat missions in Vietnam and an internationally known aviation safety expert who teaches in USC's Aviation Safety and Security Program. "After the third accident, you would say: Is there a trend here in terms of his flying skills and his judgment?" Jeremiah Pearson, a Navy officer who flew 400 missions over Vietnam without a mishap and later became the head of human spaceflight at NASA, said: "That's a lot. You don't want any. Maybe he was just unlucky." Naval aviation experts say the three accidents before McCain's deployment to Vietnam probably triggered a review to determine whether he should be allowed to continue flying. The results of the review would have been confidential. The Times asked McCain's campaign to release any military personnel records in the candidate's possession showing how the Navy handled the three incidents. The campaign said it would have no comment. Navy veterans who flew with McCain called him a good pilot. "John was what you called a push-the-envelope guy," said Sam H. Hawkins, who flew with McCain's VA-44 squadron in the 1960s and now teaches political science at Florida Atlantic University. "There are some naval aviators who are on the cautious side. They don't get out on the edges, but the edges are where you get the maximum out of yourself and out of your plane. That's where John operated. And when you are out there, you take risks." The young McCain has often been described as undisciplined and fearless -- a characterization McCain himself fostered in his autobiography. "In his military career, he was a risk-taker and a daredevil," said John Karaagac, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies and the author of a book on McCain. "What was interesting was that he got into accidents, and it didn't rattle his nerves. He takes hits and still stands." McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, had a privileged status in the Navy. He was invited to the captain's cabin for dinner on the maiden voyage of the Enterprise in 1962, a perk other aviators and sailors attributed to his famous name, recalled Gene Furr, an enlisted man who shared an office and went on carrier deployments with McCain over three years. On another occasion, McCain was selected to make a commemorative landing on the Enterprise and had his picture taken in front of a cake in the officers' galley, Furr said. McCain's commanders sarcastically dubbed him "Ace McCain" because of his string of pre-Vietnam accidents, recalled Maurice Rishel, who commanded McCain's VA-65 squadron in early 1961, when it was deployed in the Mediterranean. Still, Rishel said, "he did his job." Here is a closer look at those three incidents: Corpus Christi, Texas, March 12, 1960 McCain was practicing landings in his AD-6 Skyraider over Corpus Christi Bay when he lost several hundred feet of altitude "without realizing it" and struck the water, according to the Naval Aviation Safety Center accident report on file at the Naval Historical Center in Washington. The plane, a single-engine propeller plane designed for ground attack, sank 10 feet to the bottom of the bay. McCain swam to the surface and was plucked from the water by a rescue helicopter. While he has contended that the engine quit, investigators collected extensive evidence indicating otherwise. Cockpit instruments that froze on impact showed the engine was still producing power. When water quenched the exhaust stack, it preserved a bright blue color, showing that the engine was still hot. And an aviator behind McCain reported that the engine was producing the black smoke characteristic of Skyraiders. Investigators determined that McCain was watching instruments in his cockpit that indicated the position of his landing gear and had lost track of his altitude and speed. The report concluded: "In the opinion of the board, the pilot's preoccupation in the cockpit . . . coupled with the use of a power setting too low to maintain level flight in a turn were the primary causes of this accident." Southern Spain, around December 1961 McCain was on a training mission when he flew low and ran into electrical wires. He brought his crippled Skyraider back to the Intrepid, dragging 10 feet of wire, sailors and aviators recalled. In his 1999 autobiography, "Faith of My Fathers," McCain briefly recounts the incident, calling it the result of "daredevil clowning" and "flying too low." McCain did not elaborate on what happened, and The Times could find no military records of the accident. When he struck the wires, McCain severed an oil line in his plane, said Carl Russ, a pilot in McCain's squadron. McCain's flight suit and the cockpit were soaked in oil, added Russ, who nonetheless said McCain was a good pilot. The next day, McCain went to the flight deck with his superior officers and some of the crew to inspect the damage. A gaggle of sailors surrounded the plane. Clark Sherwood, an enlistee responsible for hanging ordnance on the squadron's planes, recalled standing on the deck with McCain. "I said, 'You're lucky to be alive.' McCain said, 'You bet your ass I am,' " Sherwood said. "He almost bought the farm." Sherwood, now a real estate agent in New Jersey, said he considered McCain a hero. Calvin Shoemaker, a retired test pilot for the Skyraider's manufacturer, Douglas Aircraft, said extended low-level flights are difficult in any aircraft and for that reason Skyraiders were seldom flown at altitudes below 500 feet. After hearing a description of McCain's record, Shoemaker said the aviator appeared to be a "flat-hatter," an old aviation term for a showoff. Cape Charles, Va., Nov. 28, 1965 Over the Eastern Shore of Virginia, McCain descended below 7,000 feet on a landing approach in a T-2 trainer jet, according to accident records. He said he heard an explosion in his engine and lost power. He said he tried unsuccessfully to restart the engine. He spotted a local drag strip and considered trying to glide to a landing there but finally had to eject at 1,000 feet. The plane crashed in the woods. McCain escaped injury and was picked up by a farmer. In his autobiography, McCain said he had flown on a Saturday to Philadelphia to watch the annual Army-Navy football game with his parents. The accident report does not mention Philadelphia but rather indicates that McCain departed from a now-closed Navy field in New York City on Sunday afternoon and was headed to Norfolk, Va. In a report dated Jan. 18, 1966, the Naval Aviation Safety Center said it could not determine the cause of the accident or corroborate McCain's account of an explosion in the engine. A close examination of the engine found "no discrepancies which would have caused or contributed to engine failure or malfunction." The report found that McCain, then assigned to squadron VT-7 in Meridian, Miss., had made several errors: He failed to switch the plane's power system to battery backup, which "seriously jeopardized his survival chances." His idea of landing on the drag strip was "viewed with concern and is indicative of questionable emergency procedure." The report added, "It may be indeed fortunate that the pilot was not in a position to attempt such a landing." McCain also ejected too late and too low, was not wearing proper flight equipment and positioned his body improperly before ejecting, the report said. The official record includes comments from pilots in his own squadron who defended McCain's actions as "proper and timely." About two weeks after issuing its report, the safety center revised its findings and said the accident resulted from the failure or malfunction of an "undetermined component of the engine." Edward M. Morrison, a mechanic for VT-7 who is now retired and living in Washington state, said that the plane McCain checked out that day had just been refurbished and that he knew of no engine problems. "McCain came to the flight line that day, carrying his dress whites, and said, 'Give me a pretty plane,' " Morrison said. "Nobody had ever asked me for a pretty plane before. I gave him this one because it was freshly painted. The next time I saw him, I said, 'Don't ever ask me for a pretty plane again.' I think he laughed." In Vietnam McCain was a pilot on the carrier Forrestal, off the coast of Vietnam, when one of the worst accidents in Navy history killed 134 crew members and damaged or destroyed various aircraft, including McCain's. On July 29, 1967, he and other pilots were preparing for a bombing raid when a Zuni rocket from one of the planes misfired. The rocket hit the plane next to McCain's, killing the pilot, igniting jet fuel and touching off a chain of explosions, according to the Navy investigation. McCain, who jumped from the nose of his jet and ran through the flames, suffered minor shrapnel wounds. Three months later, McCain was on his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam when a surface-to-air missile struck his A-4 attack jet. He was flying 3,000 feet above Hanoi. A then-secret report issued in 1967 by McCain's squadron said the aviators had learned to stay at an altitude of 4,000 to 10,000 feet in heavy surface-to-air missile environments and look for approaching missiles. "Once the SAM was visually acquired, it was relatively easy to outmaneuver it by a diving maneuver followed by a high-G pull-up. The critical problem comes during multiple SA-II attacks (6-12 missiles), when it is not possible to see or maneuver with each missile." The American aircraft had instruments that warned pilots with a certain tone when North Vietnamese radar tracked them and another tone when a missile locked on them. In his autobiography, McCain said 22 missiles were fired at his squadron that day. "I knew I should roll out and fly evasive maneuvers, 'jinking,' in fliers' parlance, when I heard the tone," he wrote. But, he said, he continued on and released his bombs. Then a missile blew off his right wing. Vietnam veterans said McCain did exactly what they did on almost every mission. Frank Tullo, an Air Force pilot who flew 100 missions over North Vietnam, said his missile warning receiverconstantly sounded in his cockpit. "Nobody broke off on a bombing run," said Tullo, later a commercial pilot and now an accident investigation instructor at USC. "It was a matter of manhood." ralph.vartabedian@ latimes.com richard.serrano@latimes.com

Coasttocoastam, the worldwide radio program, had as its guest last night Roland Haas, who was a paid assassin for the CIA for many years. He has written a book about his experience and below is a biographical sketch from the book's website. In answer to a question on the radio program, Haas said that he did not believe Oswald acted alone and that there was a conspiracy afterwards to cover up the role played by others. He said JFK's assassination could well have involved rogue officers employed by the CIA. His interview confirmed in my mind how "normal" and "routine" it would have been for LBJ to have a stone killer, Mac Wallace, on call to perform wet jobs when so ordered by LBJ. Haas was employed by the CIA. Wallace was an economist with the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Both carried out their hits while being employed by agencies of the U.S. government. ENTER THE PAST TENSE MY SECRET LIFE AS A CIA ASSASSIN By Roland W. Haas 978-1-59797-086-0 Cloth $24.95 6 x 9 320 pages http://www.enterthepasttense.com/1.html While at Purdue University on an NROTC scholarship in 1971, Roland Haas was recruited to become a CIA deep clandestine operative. He underwent intensive training to prepare for insertion into hostile areas, including High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) parachuting and weapons instruction. In the course of his first mission (to East and West Germany, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bulgaria, Romania, and Austria), he assassinated several international drug dealers. On his return, he was thrown into an Iranian prison, where was physically and psychologically tortured. Over the next thirty years, he served the agency on an as-needed basis, engaging in such activities as hunting down and eliminating members of the Red Army Faction and extracting Soviet Spetsnaz officers from East Germany. His cover jobs included being a part owner of an Oakland health club, which brought him into close contact with steroid abuse in professional athletics, drug abuse in general, and the Hell’s Angels, whom he believes tried to have him killed. He also served in Germany as site commander for the Conventional Forces in Europe weapons treaty. His most recent cover was as the deputy director of intelligence in the U.S. Army Reserve Command, which involved him with the Guantanamo detention facility. The gripping story of one man’s journey from skinny, troubled immigrant kid to highly trained covert operations specialist working for the CIA during the Cold War Contains a foreword by former intelligence officer Col. Ben Malcom, USA (Ret.), author of White Tigers: My Secret War in Korea Please send copies of any reviews or articles referencing this title to Claire Noble at the letterhead address. For an author interview or any additional information, please contact Claire Noble at 703.996.1017 or Claire@booksintl.com. 22841 Quicksilver Drive Dulles, Virginia 20166-2012 Tel 703.661.1548 Fax 703.661.1547 Contact: Claire Noble Phone: 703.996.1017 claire@booksintl.com About the Author Roland Haas Roland Haas served thirty years as a CIA deep clandestine operative. He also taught English composition, as well as German, Russian, and English literature at Purdue University, University of Maryland and the University of California at Berkeley. Presently he is assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence and command senior intelligence officer of the U.S. Army Reserve Command at Fort McPherson, Georgia. He lives with his wife, Marilyn, and children, Annemarie and Damien, in Peachtree, Georgia. http://www.enterthepasttense.com/1.html

Does this depend on the Democrats winning the election? No, it depends on how soon I can finish the book that I am writing. A major step forward in that regard came today when I received key documents that had been sought from the U.S. National Archives.

I would not have thought that Liddy was the type of man the CIA would have recruited. McCord was of course CIA and it seems to me that he did everything he could to get the Watergate team caught. In my view it as a CIA operation to bring down Nixon. More likely it was a military intelligence-CIA joint operation. Some of the great mysteries of Watergate will be in the news sometime after the November election, along with answers to these mysteries. As to McCord working for the Mullen Company, I never heard his name mentioned by Robert Mullen while he owned the company. Maybe Robert Bennett, who purchased the Mullen Company, might have established such a employment relationship. Liddy was, and is today, essentially a loner who never could have fit into the CIA mode, although he was once a FBI agent.

The Continuing Menace of Nazi secret research August 2, 2008 http://www.unknowncountry.com/?PHPSESSID=c...d18f6322399833e The following is from a description of Dreamland’s program of August 2, 2008. You can listen free to the program by clicking on Dreamland at the top of the above link to the Unknown Country page: Dreamland favorite Joseph Farrell is back, this time revealing secrets about concealed Nazi advances in physics to our resident expert on official secrecy, Jim Marrs. This interview contains information about temporal displacements, the truth about the Philadelphia Experiment, and the shocking advances that were obtained from Nazi leaders after World War II ended, and how they have been hidden. Then Linda Howe interviews Ryan Wood on Majestic 12 documents, UFO secret research and the JFK assassination. http://www.unknowncountry.com

Nov. 22, 1963 Conspiracy or No, One Day Has Stretched To Fill a Writer's Years By Neely Tucker Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, July 24, 2008; C01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...ml?hpid=topnews Max Holland, who appears to be coherent, is in his book-lined study, just off the kitchen in his house in Silver Spring. He's going over the Zapruder film. Again. And again. And . . . Birds are chirping outside. The sun is out. Inside, it's dark, quiet among the filing cabinets. He's been at work on his book about the Warner Commission investigation into President Kennedy's assassination for 12 years. For. Twelve. Years. And right here -- in just the fifth paragraph! -- you already have the overwhelming desire to take him by the collar and shout: Max!!! Buddy!!! SNAP OUT OF IT!!! Abort, abort! Entire human beings have disappeared in Dealey Plaza!! It's the Bermuda Triangle of pop culture! But he's saying, "Now, you see right here . . . " He's pointing to Secret Service agents on the screen. "I don't want to overwhelm you . . ." This is a short story about American paranoia. It is slightly scary. It is about how even good writers and responsible people can fall into the rabbit hole of Washington research -- a tumble that leads you down, down, down to the Elm Street of the mind, below the Texas School Book Depository and in front of the grassy knoll, a few minutes past noon, in a world where it is always Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963. And Holland, 57, isn't even a conspiracy theorist babbling about the CIA and Castro! He says Lee Harvey Oswald did it and did it alone! His goal, he says, is to heal our national paranoia about Kennedy's murder, to lay to rest the lingering belief that there was some sort of conspiracy (which most Americans believe), and to have this traumatic event finally settled in the national id. He wants people to understand that Oliver Stone's "JFK" actively misstated events, that Don DeLillo's "Libra," which has shooters on the grassy knoll, was a good novel but only that. A former writer for the Nation, he has already won the prestigious J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, worth a nifty $45,000, for his book, "A Need to Know: Inside the Warren Commission." That was way back in 2001. He's gotten another $131,000 in book advances. His publisher is Knopf, one of the most respected in the business. His research is so prodigious that it has already birthed two other books, both about tape recordings from the Johnson White House that deal with the Kennedy killing. This leads you to believe that he's not going to show you that the limo driver actually turned and fired the fatal third shot into Kennedy (as one popular video on YouTube has it). So, maybe against your better judgment, you lean over, and look really hard at the Zapruder film unspooling on his screen . . . and the Secret Service guys in the second car are reacting to something just as the film starts. See the heads turn? Now, if you calculate that "mediated nervous reaction," and the car's position, and the memories of several witnesses and the speed of the film at 18.3 frames per second, and remember 4.9 seconds elapsed between the second and third shots . . . then you get the revelation that Oswald's first shot, the one that missed, took place before the Zapruder film. Pause. Gulp. Yes, kids, before. Somehow, he's saying, the most studied 19 seconds of film in American history has consistently fooled everyone, because everyone has taken it as an article of faith that three shots were captured on the (soundless) film. Nah. Holland theorizes the first shot likely dinged off a traffic mast overhanging the street and not a tree branch, as most people have thought. This means he fired earlier than people have believed and thus had far more time -- a total of just over 11 seconds -- to fire the second and third rounds. This makes it far more understandable how he could have been the lone gunman, and thus bolsters the Warren Commission's finding on that point. "Everyone has been late to the first shot," he says, pulling back from the computer screen. This is but one tiny bit of data he says will come out in "A Need to Know," which pledges to be the definitive history of the commission, that body of seven politicians, lawyers and Washington heavyweights who conducted the official inquiry into the assassination and whose 888-page report later became mocked as a hastily done coverup. Conspiracy theories and distrust in government from later events like Vietnam and Watergate have grown like ivy over the founding documents, Holland says. They obscure the time period, the Cold War, that produced a sometimes flawed but nonetheless accurate report. It's a time capsule from the era, after McCarthyism but before Vietnam spiraled out of control, when America was trembling but the cultural fissures had not yet shifted. "If I restore faith in the Warren Commission, I'll put to rest some of the disturbing questions people have had," Holland says. This is the tantalizing promise the assassination makes: That you're on to something everybody has missed. So you catalogue obscure CIA memos, a Bay of Pigs document, comments by FBI field agents in Dallas, Jack Ruby, the mob, Oswald saying, "I'm a patsy," the magic bullet that hit both Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally . . . and then 10 years go by, and you're looking at the same bits of homemade footage on Dealey Plaza, convinced you've just about got it nailed down. Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who knew both Kennedy and Oswald, spent 13 years working on "Marina and Lee," a book that sought to be the definitive word on the assassin. It was published in 1977. Gerald Posner's years-in-the-making 624-page "Case Closed," which sought to be the last word on the case, was published in 1994. Vincent Bugliosi spent 20 years on "Reclaiming History," his 1,648-page tome that sought to settle everything, once and for all. That was last year. And still, here sits Max Holland, working on a book that he says will go a good 600 pages. He has to have a draft to the publisher by October. There is still, after 12 years, no publication date. "He gets really mad when people ask what's taking so long," says his wife, Tamar Gutner, a political science professor at American University. "He's a very responsible researcher," says Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University history professor and author of several books about the 1960s. "The ultimate painstaking research person and serious writer," says McMillan. "He's an excellent reporter . . . honest and objective," says Al Goldberg, the historian on the Warren Commission. "Transparently and pathetically irresponsible." Whoa! This last is from Dale Myers, who won an Emmy for his computer animation work on the Zapruder film. He studied the assassination for 35 years and developed a computer-generated, three-dimensional model of the assassination sequence. He thinks Oswald did it, too. But he ridicules Holland's analysis of an early first shot. He goes into great detail about the position of the car, the traffic mast on Elm Street, and Oswald's perch above it all. "He's out to lunch, to put it kindly," Myers says. None of this really matters. What matters is the American belief in the paranoid. "People want to believe there must be some momentous history behind this momentous event, that there was some group that really wanted to turn the page rather than just one lone, crazy assassin," says Kazin, the history professor. "The thing that's great about Max is that he doesn't go for that." Thomas Mallon, a novelist who spent about a year on a nonfiction book about Oswald's landlord, didn't think his project would be too hard. Then he found himself in Parkland Hospital (where Kennedy and Oswald were taken after they were shot) after his neck and shoulders seized with tension from the stress of it all. He says now that he had been sucked into the "space-time wormhole" of the assassination. He was amazed by the whole subculture of the self-appointed Kennedy researchers and by "the pedantry you fall into, the obsessiveness that really does come with the territory." A few miles away but still inside the Beltway, Max Holland is still deep in Nov. 22, 1963, looking for answers to mysteries that are never going to be solved. He turns back to his computer, pulls out one of his thousands of files, and settles in for another day's work. The sun is glinting off Oswald's rifle. America. Paranoia. There's something out there.

U.S. Judge Upholds Secrecy of Rosenberg Testimony By BENJAMIN WEISER The New York Times July 23, 2008 A federal judge in Manhattan, weighing the secrecy of the grand jury process against the interests of public accountability, refused on Tuesday to unseal the grand jury testimony of a critical witness in the Rosenberg atomic espionage case. But with no objection from the government about the release of testimony from three dozen or so other witnesses, those records could be released soon. The witness who objected to having his testimony made public, David Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg, was a co-conspirator and a key government witness whose testimony helped convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were executed at Sing Sing on June 19, 1953. Mr. Greenglass, now 86, is one of the most controversial figures in the enduring spy case, historians say, as years after his sister’s execution he recanted his testimony that she had typed some of his espionage notes. He had testified against her to spare his wife, Ruth, from prosecution, and is widely seen as helping to cause Ethel’s conviction and execution. A group of historians had petitioned for the release of the still-secret testimony, running more than 1,000 pages, of the witnesses who appeared before the grand jury in the Rosenberg case and a related one in 1950 and 1951. The government agreed to the unsealing of testimony from most of the witnesses, objecting only to that of about 10, including Mr. Greenglass, who were still alive and did not consent or could not be found. In refusing to release Mr. Greenglass’s testimony while he is alive, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein stressed the importance of grand jury secrecy as well as accountability. But he added that not permitting others to disclose what a witness has said before the grand jury “is an abiding value that I must respect.” Mr. Greenglass was not in court, but his lawyer, Daniel N. Arshack, wrote to Judge Hellerstein, saying that the circumstances that led to Mr. Greenglass’s testimony were “complex and emotionally wrought,” and had thrust him and his family “into an unwanted spotlight which has dogged their lives ever since.” “The unequivocal and complete promise of secrecy,” Mr. Arshack wrote, “provided the protection that the guarantee of secrecy is designed to provide.” Judge Hellerstein said that he would wait to rule on the other witnesses for whom the government was still objecting until further efforts were made to track them down or ascertain that they had died. But he made it clear that he wanted that search to occur expeditiously, saying “time is precious” for historians and researchers. The petitioners, led by the National Security Archives, a nonprofit group at George Washington University, had argued that the significance of the case, which they called “perhaps the defining moment of the early Cold War,” should trump the traditional confidentiality rules that govern the grand jury process. The government, while not disputing the case’s historic importance, has said that the court should abide by the views of living witnesses who objected to the release of their testimony. Otherwise, the government said, witnesses could be discouraged from speaking candidly before grand juries in the future. David C. Vladeck, a lawyer who argued for the petitioners, praised the outcome of the case and the expected release of the other testimony. “All of this is very good news,” he said. He added that he was disappointed in the ruling on Mr. Greenglass, but said that “at some point we’ll get the records,” alluding to the government’s position that historians can renew their request after a witness’s death. The historians supporting the release of the Rosenberg records hold diverse political views and opinions about the case. One of the petitioners is Sam Roberts, a reporter for The New York Times, who wrote a book on Mr. Greenglass. One scholar who was not involved in the petition, David Oshinsky, said that even without release of the Greenglass testimony, the testimony of the other witnesses should help clear up questions about the evidence against Ethel Rosenberg. “My sense is that what this may do is further implicate Julius while to some degree further exonerating Ethel,” said Mr. Oshinsky, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. He added that if there turned out to be very little other evidence against Ethel Rosenberg, “then the entire case does take a turn, and that is of vital importance.”

Lawsuit on F.B.I. Informant Seeks a Mobster’s Link to Kennedy’s Assassination By ALAN FEUER The New York Times July 22, 2008 A New Jersey paralegal with a longstanding interest in government corruption filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department and the F.B.I. on Monday, seeking the release of the full case file on a murderous Brooklyn Mafia informant — papers she believes may shed light on the possible involvement of a dead New Orleans crime boss in the killing of President John F. Kennedy. The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Washington by the paralegal, Angela Clemente, asks the Federal Bureau of Investigation to make public any documents it may still hold related to the mobster, Gregory Scarpa Sr., who for nearly 30 years led a stunning double life as a hit man for the Colombo crime family and, in the words of the F.B.I, a “top echelon” informant for the bureau. In her suit, Ms. Clemente asked the bureau to release all papers connected to Mr. Scarpa (who died of AIDS in 1994 after receiving a blood transfusion), especially those related to Carlos Marcello, a New Orleans don suspected by some of having played a role in the Kennedy assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. Ms. Clemente filed a Freedom of Information Act request for Mr. Scarpa’s file in April, and the F.B.I. acknowledged her request in a letter on June 9, saying that bureau officials would search their records for relevant papers. Ms. Clemente’s lawyer, James Lesar, said that the F.B.I. had not yet told her if it would release the file or not, but that under federal law, a lawsuit can be filed compelling the release of records 20 working days after such a letter is received. John Miller, a spokesman for the F.B.I., did not return phone calls on Monday seeking comment on Ms. Clemente’s suit. Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said officials would review the suit and respond if needed in court. In pursuing the Scarpa file and its potential to flesh out Mr. Marcello’s possible role in the Kennedy killing, Ms. Clemente is following a trail blazed in part by G. Robert Blakey, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame who also served as the chief counsel and staff director to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which from 1977 to 1979 investigated the killings of President Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While the Warren Commission said there was no link between Mr. Marcello and the president’s death, Mr. Blakey’s report to the House was considerably more circumspect, saying the F.B.I.’s “handling of the allegations and information about Marcello was characterized by a less than vigorous effort to investigate its reliability.” Ms. Clemente is in possession of several heavily redacted papers from the Scarpa file, which suggest, however vaguely, she said, that Mr. Scarpa, who spied on numerous gangsters for the F.B.I., may also have spied on Mr. Marcello. Professor Blakey, reached by phone at his office at Notre Dame on Monday, said he had seen the papers, adding that no matter what the unredacted versions might eventually reveal, he was convinced that he should have seen them 30 years ago, while conducting his Congressional investigation. “The issue here is not what’s in them,” Professor Blakey said, “so much as that they seem to have held them back from me. I thought I had the bureau file on Marcello — now it turns out I didn’t, did I? So I’m not a small, I’m a major, supporter of what Angela is trying to do.” Ms. Clemente, 43, often refers to herself as a “forensic intelligence analyst.” She has been researching Mr. Scarpa for nearly a decade as part of a broader project on the improper use of government informants. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office has said her work on Mr. Scarpa was instrumental in helping the office file quadruple murder charges against Mr. Scarpa’s former F.B.I. handler, Roy Lindley DeVecchio. The charges against Mr. DeVecchio were dropped midtrial in October when Tom Robbins, a reporter for The Village Voice, suddenly showed prosecutors taped interviews he made years ago with the main prosecution witness, Mr. Scarpa’s mistress, suggesting that she had changed her account and damaged her credibility. Faced with the sudden demise of years of investigative work, Ms. Clemente went back, she said, to the redacted papers she already had. She said she was intrigued, after additional study, to discover references to Mr. Scarpa’s apparent involvement in F.B.I. projects in New Orleans in the late 1950s and early 1960s — well before his publicly acknowledged role in helping the Kennedy administration learn the whereabouts of three slain civil rights workers by traveling to Mississippi to threaten a member of the Ku Klux Klan. She said the F.B.I. had fought her “tooth and nail” in her efforts to obtain the full Scarpa file for Mr. DeVecchio’s trial. The F.B.I. did not return phone calls seeking comment on that allegation as well. “And that,” she said, “is what really piqued my curiosity.”

******************************************************** "I knew Charlie Black when I served as legal counsel to the National Conservative Political Action Committee in 1975-76. He was a bigoted creature of Senator Jesse Helms, both being from North Carolina. He gained his wealth and influence by riding the back of Ronald Reagan, who bequeathed to us the likes of the Bushes and Black. Thomas Frank's article in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) hits the mark and shows how if McCain were elected president, Black's evil influence would be amplified." Which "Charlie Black" is this? Am I missing something, here? Thanks, Ter Charlie Black is one of McCain's closest advisers. He made news recently by telling Fortune Magazine that a terrorist attack on America before the November election would benefit McCain. His right wing/opportunistic roots go way back -- to the early days of Jesse Helms in North Carolina and the early years of Young Americans for Freedom.

We, the Salt of the Earth, Take Precedence by Paul Craig Roberts www.lewrockwell.com July 2, 2008 Which country is the rogue nation? Iraq? Iran? Or the United States? Syndicated columnist Charley Reese asks this question in a recently published article. Reese notes that it is the US that routinely commits "acts of aggression around the globe." The US government has no qualms about dropping bombs on civilians whether they be in Serbia, the Middle East, or Africa. It is all in a good cause – our cause. This slaughtering of foreigners doesn’t seem to bother the American public. Americans take it for granted that Americans are superior and that American purposes, whatever they be, take precedence over the rights of other people to life and to a political existence independent of American hegemony. The Bush regime has come up with a preemption doctrine that justifies attacking a country in order to prevent the country from possibly becoming a future threat to the US. "Threat" is broadly defined. It appears to mean the ability to withstand the imposition of US hegemony. This insane doctrine justifies attacking China and Russia, a direction in which the Republican presidential candidate John McCain seems to lean. The callousness of Americans toward the lives of other peoples is stunning. How many Christian churches ask God’s forgiveness for having been rushed into an error that has killed, maimed, and displaced a quarter of the Iraqi population? How many Christian churches ask God to give better guidance to our government so that it does not repeat the error and crime by attacking Iran? The indifference of Americans to others flows from "American exceptionalism," the belief that Americans are graced with a special mission to impose their virtue on the rest of the world. Like the French revolutionaries, Americans don’t seem to care how many people they kill in the process of spreading their exceptionalism. American exceptionalism has swelled Americans’ heads, filling them with hubris and self-righteousness and making Americans believe that they are the salt of the earth. Three recent books are good antidotes for this unjustified self-esteem. One is Patrick J. Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. Another is After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh, and a third is John Pilger’s Freedom Next Time. Buchanan’s latest book is by far his best. It is spell-binding from his opening sentence: "All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away." As the pages turn, the comfortable myths, produced by history written by the victors, are swept aside. The veil is lifted to reveal the true faces of British and American exceptionalism: stupidity and deceit. Buchanan’s strength is that he lets the story be told by Britain’s greatest 20th century historians and the memoirs of the participants in the events that destroyed the West’s dominance and moral character. Buchanan’s contribution is to assemble the collective judgment of a hundred historians. As I read the tale, it is a story of hubris destroying judgment and substituting in its place blunder and miscalculation. Both world wars began when England, for no sound or sensible reason, declared war on Germany. Winston Churchill was a prime instigator of both wars. He seems to have been a person who needed a war stage in order to be a "great man." The American President Woodrow Wilson shares responsibility with Britain and France for the Versailles Treaty, which dismembered Germany, stripping her of territory and putting millions of Germans under foreign rule, and imposed reparations that Britain’s greatest economist, John Maynard Keynes, correctly predicted to be unrealistic. All of this was done in violation of assurances given to Germany that there would be no reparations or boundary changes. Once Germany surrendered, the assurances were withdrawn, and a starvation blockade forced German submission to the new harsh terms. Hitler’s program was to put Germany back together. He was succeeding without war until Churchill provoked Chamberlain into an insane act. Danzig was 95 percent German. It had been given to Poland by the Versailles Treaty. Hitler was negotiating its return and offered in exchange a guarantee of Poland’s frontiers. The Polish colonels, assessing the relative strengths of Poland and Germany, understood that a deal was better than a war. But suddenly, the British Prime Minister issued Poland a guarantee of its existing territory, including Danzig, whose inhabitants wished to return to Germany. Buchanan produces one historian after another to testify that British miscalculations and blunders, culminating in Chamberlain’s worthless and provocative "guarantee" to Poland, brought the West into a war that Hitler did not want, a war that destroyed the British Empire and left Britain a dependency of America, a war that delivered Poland, a chunk of Germany, all of Eastern Europe, and the Baltic states to Joseph Stalin, a war that left the Western allies with a 45-year cold war against the nuclear-armed Soviet Union. People resist the shattering of their illusions, and many are angry with Buchanan for assembling the facts of the case that distinguished historians have provided. Churchill admirers are outraged that their hero is revealed as the first war criminal of World War II. It was Churchill who initiated the policy of terror bombing civilians in non-combatant areas. Buchanan quotes B.H. Liddell Hart: "When Mr. Churchill came into power, one of the first decisions of his government was to extend bombing to the non-combatant area." In holding Churchill to account, Buchanan makes no apologies for Hitler, but the ease with which Churchill set aside moral considerations is discomforting. Buchanan documents that Churchill’s plan was to destroy 50% of German homes. Churchill also had plans for using chemical and biological warfare against German civilians. In 2001 the Glasgow Sunday Herald reported Churchill’s plan to drop five million anthrax cakes onto German pastures in order to poison the cattle and through them the people. Churchill instructed the RAF to consider drenching "the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany" with poison gas "in such a way that most of the population would be requiring constant medical attention." "It is absurd to consider morality on this topic," the great man declared. Paul Johnson, a favorite historian of conservatives, notes that Churchill’s policy of terror bombing civilians was "approved in cabinet, endorsed by parliament and, so far as can be judged, enthusiastically backed by the bulk of the British people." Thus, the terror bombing of civilians, which "marked a critical stage in the moral declension of humanity in our times," fulfilled "all the conditions of the process of consent in a democracy under law." British historian F.J.P. Veale concluded that Churchill’s policy of indiscriminate bombing of civilians caused an unprecedented "reversion to primary and total warfare" associated with "Sennacherib, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane." The Americans were quick to follow Churchill’s lead. General Curtis LeMay boasted of his raid on Tokyo: "We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9–10 than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined." MacDonogh’s book, After the Reich, dispels the comfortable myth of generous allied treatment of defeated Germany. Having discarded all moral scruples, the allies fell upon the vanquished country with brutal occupation. Hundreds of thousands of women raped; hundreds of thousands of Germans died in deportations; a million German prisoners of war died in captivity. MacDonogh calculates that 2.5 million Germans died between the liberation of Vienna and the Berlin airlift. Nigel Jones writes in the conservative London Sunday Telegraph: "MacDonogh has told a very inconvenient truth," a story long "cloaked in silence since telling it suited no one." The hypocrisy of the Nuremberg trials is that the victors were also guilty of crimes for which the vanquished were punished. The purpose of the trials was to demonize the defeated in order to divert attention from the allies’ own war crimes. The trials had little to do with justice. In Freedom Next Time, Pilger shows the complete self-absorption of American, British and Israeli governments whose policies are unimpeded by any moral principle. Pilger documents the demise of the inhabitants of Diego Garcia. The Americans wanted Diego Garcia for an air base, so the British packed up the 2,000 residents, people with British passports under British protection, and deported them to Mauritius, one thousand miles away. To cover up its crime against humanity, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office created the fiction that the inhabitants, which had been living in the archipelago for two or three centuries, were "a floating population." This fiction, wrote a legal adviser, bolsters "our arguments that the territory has no indigenous or settled population." Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart conspired to mislead the UN about the deported islanders by, in Stewart’s words, " presenting any move as a change of employment for contract workers – rather than as a population resettlement." Pilger interviewed some of the displaced persons, but emotional blocs will shield patriotic Americans and British from the uncomfortable facts. Rational skeptics can find a second documented account of the Anglo-American rape of Diego Garcia online. An entire people were swept away. Two thousand people were in the way of an American purpose – an air base – so we had our British dependency deport them. Several million Palestinians are in Israel’s way. Pilger’s documented account of Israel’s crushing of the Palestinians shows that our "democratic ally" in the Middle East is capable of any evil and has no remorse or mercy. Israel is an apt student of the British and American empires’ attitudes toward lesser beings. They simply don’t count. Those who are the salt of the earth take precedence over everything. July 2, 2008 Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail] a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, has just been released by Random House.

I knew Charlie Black when I served as legal counsel to the National Conservative Political Action Committee in 1975-76. He was a bigoted creature of Senator Jesse Helms, both being from North Carolina. He gained his wealth and influence by riding the back of Ronald Reagan, who beqeathed to us the likes of the Bushes and Black. Thomas Frank's article in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) hits the mark and shows how if McCain were elected president, Black's evil influence would be amplified. --------------- THE TILTING YARD By THOMAS FRANK Charlie Black's Cronies July 2, 2008 Wall Street Journal Doing some research in the Library of Congress recently, an associate of mine came across a curious artifact of the Young Americans for Freedom, the high-spirited conservative group of the Vietnam era. It is a songbook prepared for YAF's 1971 convention, and in its mimeographed pages you will find a lyric poking fun at "Adlai [stevenson] the bald-headed Com-Symp," and another moaning that, in the State Department, "everyone's a Commie slave." All good clean fun, surely. Turn a few pages, though, and you will find that the righteous ones also lifted their young voices to warble "Cara al Sol," the humor-free anthem of Spanish fascism. Many YAFers later rose to positions of great political influence. From direct mailers to congressmen to campaign managers, the group put its stamp on our era in no small way. This year's most prominent YAF graduate is Charlie Black, who was an officer of the group in the period when it sang fascist hymns and who now serves as a senior adviser to Republican John McCain. Last week, Mr. Black triggered a media storm by musing publicly on how a terrorist attack would improve Mr. McCain's chances to win the presidential election in November. Mr. Black is a difficult man to pin down. The articles he wrote for the YAF's magazine back in 1972 are anodyne stuff, unremarkable apart from his youthful passion to "take on liberalism everywhere it rules...." But he's also kept some questionable company over the years. In 1975 he founded, with the help of fellow YAFer Terry Dolan, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which would contrive so brilliantly to poison the political atmosphere over the next decade. NCPAC's method was to raise money through terrifying direct-mail solicitations – "the shriller you are, the better it is to raise money," Mr. Dolan said – and then to spend it on terrifying TV commercials assailing this or that liberal politician. In 1980 the group helped defeat four Democratic senators, making it an overnight sensation and an omen of the money-driven, all-negative political future. NCPAC's calling card was slime. It constantly attacked members of Congress for votes they hadn't cast and positions they hadn't taken – "there have been a few mistakes made in terms of research," was all Mr. Black would admit – and the group's main accomplishment was dodging the campaign-finance laws of the day. Mr. Dolan was NCPAC's main personality, a boasting bully fond of shocking statements. He once bragged to a reporter that "We could say whatever we want about an opponent of a Senator Smith and the senator wouldn't have to say anything. A group like ours could lie through its teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean." Then there was Roger Stone, who became Mr. Black's colleague in his 1980s lobbying firm Black, Manafort & Stone. Another YAFer, Mr. Stone made his reputation for scummy politics in the 1972 Nixon campaign, and has since become such a well-known impresario of calumny that Matt Labash, writing last year in the Weekly Standard, described him as "a U.S. Army of treachery: He screws more people before 9 a.m. than most people do in a whole day." But what are dirty tricks without some sort of payoff? Conservatives often promise to wage war on the welfare state; what they don't brag about is the way they redirect the proceeds of the welfare state into the pockets of their own kind – the favored lobby firms, the well-connected contractors. Here, too, Mr. Black has a story he might relate. During the Reagan years, the Department of Housing and Urban Development allegedly began steering contracts to clients of political favorites; one gang thus favored was Mr. Black's firm, and in particular, Mr. Black's partner, Paul Manafort. The firm took in over $300,000 lobbying HUD for funds, some of it to rehab a New Jersey housing development that, according to the Boston Globe, "New Jersey officials said they did not want and was a waste of taxpayers money." Allegations also flew about Mr. Black's own role in the HUD scandal, but no wrongdoing was ever proven in court. Mr. Manafort, for his part, became a principal in a lobbying firm headed until recently by Rick Davis, John McCain's campaign manager. It's an interesting bunch Mr. Black has run with, and taken all together they help us understand the larger picture. What unites the conservatives of the 1970s with their pocket-lining counterparts today? A persistent derision for the notion that government might someday be conducted on the level. As that old YAF songbook put it, "Keep the faith with cynicism / Cut the opposition down!" Write to thomas@wsj.com

Perhaps the below "corrections" may serve to steer history into the correct direction. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When the bullet hit him, he said he felt like he had been kicked in the ribs and couldn't breathe. Which in itself fully clarifies that when he was yelling "My God they are going to kill us all" http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/conn_n.htm he said, "My God, they are going to kill us all." -------------------------------------------------------------- Having observed a few persons take one through the chest, I have yet to see one who clearly stated anything like this. Kinda makes one doubt that JBC was hit in the chest at this time. ------------------------------------------------------------------ and as he recoiled to the right, just crumpled like a wounded animal to the right, he said, "My God, they are going to kill us all." Nope! Don't think so! Personally, I prefer Jackie's descriptive adjective: "squealing like a pig". ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I do not, for one second, believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission." Well! Since the WC fairy tale also includes THE SHOT THAT MISSED, and you are/were fully aware that there was no SHOT THAT MISSED, then it would be entirely understandable as to why you would not only not believe the WC, but you would also know that it was an intentional lie.-------Largely to CYA! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Connally felt he served his country best by concealing his doubts about the Warren Commission's whitewash[/b] How about: John Connally felt that he served HIS INTERESTS BEST by concealing the facts of the assassination! With of course the primary aid and assistance of his political criminal/crony, LBJ. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Had Connally spoken out, as a high-ranking political figure Then, his "high-ranking" political career would have been instantly shot as well! And history would have accurately recorded that in lieu of THE SHOT THAT MISSED, we would have THE GOVERNOR WHO DUCKED!--------Right into the line of fire for the third shot, I might add! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- but his silence may have contributed to the growing perception that our elected leaders can rewrite history to fit their political agendas. In that regards, one just may want to check into what he and LBJ demonstratedly convinced people in Texas as to the "truth". -------------------------------------------------------- Connnally's note serves as yet another reminder that in our Democratic Republic, or what's left of it, few things are seldom as they seem ----------------------------------------------------------- To many, this is of course quite accurate, and JBC was among the top in pulling the wool over the eyes of most americans. However, there are a few of us who possess the ability to "look thru" the BS, and not suprisingly, things are in fact EXACTLY AS THEY SEEM. Not long before he died, Connally relented and granted an interview to Robert Caro. LBJ had long been dead. Who knows what Connally told Caro about the assassination? I first met Caro, who now is up in years also, in 1986 and when I asked him at a public meeting if he planned to discuss Mac Wallace in his LBJ biography, he grabbed the the lapels my suit and asked who I was and how he could talk to me further. I gave him my card but heard nothing more from him. At this point late in his life I think Caro realizes that there is nothing to lose by telling what Connally and other LBJ cronies have confided in him about the assassination. His final book on LBJ may rewrite history.