Douglas Caddy

Break the CIA in Two By Ray McGovern Former CIA Agent December 22, 2009 Consortiumnews.com http://consortiumnews.com/2009/122209a.html Editor’s Note: Exactly 46 years ago, President Harry Truman looked back on the still-young CIA, which he had helped create, and was alarmed at how its original purpose – to provide unvarnished information to top policymakers – was being perverted by the agency’s growing role in covert operations. Nearly a half century since Truman’s warning, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern marvels at Truman’s prescience and suggests that the only answer today is to separate out – and protect – the agency’s core analytical function: After the CIA-led fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, President John Kennedy was quoted as saying he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” I can understand his anger, but a thousand is probably too many. Better is a Solomon solution; divide the CIA in two. That way we can throw out the bath water and keep the baby. Covert action and analysis do not belong together in the same agency — never have, never will. That these two very different tasks were thrown together is an accident of history, one that it is high time to acknowledge and to fix. The effects of this structural fault became clear to President Harry Truman as he watched the agency at work in its first decade and a half. He was aghast. Like oil on water, covert action fouls the wellspring of objective analysis — the main task for which Truman and the Congress established the CIA in 1947. The operational tail started wagging the substantive tail almost right away. It has done so ever since — with very unfortunate consequences. An accident of history? How so? Covert action practitioners, many of whom showed great courage and imagination in the European and Far Eastern theaters of World War II arrived home wondering whether there was still a call for their expertise. With the Soviet Union taking over large chunks of Europe and the KGB plying its covert-action wares worldwide, the question answered itself; a counter capability was needed. The big mistake was shoehorning it into an agency being created to fulfill an entirely different mission. As former CIA analyst Mel Goodman points out in Failure of Intelligence, there was uncertainty and confusion over where to place responsibility for this capability. The term “covert action” is a euphemism covering the broad genus of dirty tricks, from overthrowing governments (we now blithely call that particular species “regime change”) to open but nonattributable broadcasting into denied areas. Defense Secretary James Forrestal didn’t want the Pentagon to be responsible for covert action in peacetime. And, to their credit, neither did senior leaders of the fledgling CIA. They were no neophytes, and could see that covert operations might easily end up tainting the intelligence product if one Director were responsible for the two incompatible activities. The experience of the past 62 years has showed, time and time again, that their concern was well founded as the covert action side has not only polluted CIA analyses but also expanded into high-tech warfare. Predators Trying to overthrow governments via covert action is one thing. Flying Predator drones with Hellfire missiles is quite another. There would be real hellfire on that from Harry Truman, were he still with us. Even former CIA Director George Tenet of flexible conscience had second thoughts about the CIA assuming responsibility for flying the Predator and firing Hellfires. In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, he writes that there was a “legitimate question about whether aircraft firing missiles…should be the function of the military or CIA.” Resorting to the all-purpose catch-all (and excuse-all), Tenet adds, “But that was before 9/11.” Of equal importance is the kind of question to which Tenet normally paid little heed; namely, what would flying Predators do to CIA credibility. Think about it for a minute. You are ordered and given funding to conduct Predator attacks on “suspected al-Qaeda bases” in Pakistan. (U.S. armed forces cannot do it since the Pentagon is not supposed to be striking countries with whom we are not at war.) You salute, find some contractors to help, and conduct those attacks. The President then asks his CIA morning briefer about the effectiveness of the drone attacks, including the longer-term political as well as military effects. When the briefer checks with the substantive analysts watching Pakistan, he learns that the attacks are very effective — indeed, the very best recruitment tool Osama bin Laden and the Taliban could imagine. Jihadists are flocking to Pakistan and Afghanistan like moths to a light blub. Problem. Do you think mealy-mouthed CIA Director Leon Panetta will have the courage to whisper that unwelcome finding to the President? Suppose Gen. David Petraeus or Gen. Stanley McChrystal find out. No NIE on Af-Pak The proof is in the pudding. Were not Panetta a self-described “creature of the Congress” (be wise, compromise), he would have long since ordered up a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on prospects for Afghanistan AND — far more important — Pakistan. Would you believe that at this stage there is still no such NIE? And the reason Panetta and his managers are keeping their heads way down is the same reason former CIA Director George Tenet for years shied away from doing an NIE on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The findings would smell like skunks at a picnic. It was only after Sen. Bob Graham, then-Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the White House in September 2002, “No National Intelligence Estimate, no congressional vote on war with Iraq,” that Tenet was ordered by the White House to commission an NIE with pre-ordained conclusions. Tht NIE was to be completed in record time (less than three weeks), in order to emerge several weeks before the mid-term elections and it was to reflect the alarmist views expressed by Vice President Dick Cheney in a major speech on Aug. 26, 2002. In Tenet’s memoir he admits that Cheney “went well beyond what our analysis could support.” But never mind; Tenet and his lieutenants had become quite accomplished in cooking intelligence to order. And so they did. Like Cheney’s speech, the Estimate was wrong on every major count — deliberately so. At the conclusion of an exhaustive investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Chair from 2007 to 2009, bemoaned the fact that the Bush/Cheney administration “presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.” Non-existent? You mean fabricated or forged? With the advent of the George W. Bush administration we had learned about “faith-based intelligence,” but the mind boggles at the use of “non-existent” intelligence. What Harry Said For those of you who may have forgotten, Dec. 22 is the 46th anniversary of the most important op-ed of all the 381,659 written about the CIA since its founding. Do not feel bad if you missed it; the op-ed garnered little attention — either at the time or subsequently. The draft came from Independence, Missouri, and was published in the Washington Post early edition on Dec. 22, 1963. The first and the last two sentences of Harry Truman’s unusual contribution bear repeating: “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency…. “We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.” Truman began by describing what he saw as CIA’s raison d’être, emphasizing that a President needs “the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots.” He stressed that he wanted to create a “special kind of an intelligence facility” charged with the collection of “all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have these reports reach me as President without “treatment or interpretations” by departments that have their own agendas. A Warning The “most important thing,” he said, “was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.” It is a safe bet that Truman had uppermost in mind how senior CIA officials tried to mousetrap President John Kennedy into committing U.S. armed forces to attack Cuba, rather than to sit by and let Fidel Castro’s troops kill or capture the rag-tag band of CIA-trained invaders at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. The operation was a disaster, pure and simple. Truman was no doubt aware of how Kennedy initially gave the go-ahead to a CIA plan that had been approved by President Dwight Eisenhower; how the new President belatedly saw the trap; and how he had the courage to face down the tricksters and then take responsibility for the consequences that came of having trusted them. Still, Kennedy did not feel he could follow his instinct to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” Instead, he fired CIA Director Allen Dulles, a quintessential Establishment figure — something one does at one’s peril. Allen Dulles later played a key role in selecting those who were allowed to testify before the Warren Commission on the JFK assassination, and in shaping its highly questionable findings. In JFK and the Unspeakable, published last year, author James Douglass adduces persuasive evidence that some of Dulles’s old buddies were involved in the murder of President Kennedy. It may be just coincidence that President Truman chose to publish his CIA op-ed exactly one month after Kennedy was killed, but it seems equally possible that he deliberately chose that first monthiversary. ‘Disturbed’ at CIA Operational Role In his Dec. 22, 1963, op-ed, Truman addresses the structural fault alluded to above: “For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment [collection, analysis, and reporting]. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas…. “Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue…” “The last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.” Think Iran. In early 1963 when I began work at the CIA it had been almost a decade since the overthrow of the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mosaddeq in August 1953. The joint CIA and British intelligence “Operation Ajax” was cited proudly as a singularly successful covert action operation. Just before electing Mosaddeq in 1951, the Iranian Parliament had nationalized Iran’s oil industry, which until then had been controlled exclusively by the British government-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company — Britain’s largest overseas investment at the time. Unfortunately for Britain, there were upstarts in Iran (“militants,” in today’s parlance) who made bold to think that Iranians should be able to profit from the vast oil reserves in Iran. Winston Churchill asked Truman to order the fledgling CIA to join the British service, MI-6, in arranging a coup. Truman said No. (I can imagine him saying, Hell, No!) Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower, however, said Yes. And the coup that Eisenhower approved goes a long way toward explaining why the Iranians don’t much like us. After throwing out Mosaddeq and bringing in the Shah, the Iranian people suffered untold horrors at the hands of SAVAK, the Shah’s notorious secret police. Every Iranian knew/knows that the CIA and MI-6 did what the British would call a “brilliant” job training SAVAK. Many students of Iran believe that it was SAVAK’s widespread and widely known torture, as much as Ayatollah Khomeini’s charisma, that brought revolution and dumped the Shah in 1979. And the Oil? And who got control of the oil? That seems always to be the question, doesn’t it? The Shah let the U.S. and U.K. split 80 percent of control, with the rest going to French and Dutch interests. The Shah got 50 percent of the revenues. When the Shah and SAVAK became history, the new Iranian government took control of its oil. Today, there is scant applause among thinking people for the “singularly successful” U.S.-U.K.-sponsored coup in Iran. The same goes for the CIA-run coup in Guatemala the following year. American media initially sold both operations as victories over leftist leaning governments vulnerable to Communist blandishments. But it was really about oil in Iran, as it was about land claimed by the United Fruit Company in Guatemala. But the kind of suffering in store for the people of both countries was the same. Having learned from the British how this kind of thing is done, CIA operatives were ready to try out their newly acquired skills and succeeded in overthrowing the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, who had been elected President in 1950 with 65 percent of the vote. His offense was giving land to the peasants — unfarmed land that private corporations earlier had set aside for themselves. The United Fruit Company was allergic to real land reform in Guatemala and lobbied hard for Washington to remove Arbenz. The Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster, who happened to be shareholders of the United Fruit Company, took the line that Arbenz’ actions smacked of “Communism.” Then-CIA Director Allen Dulles stoked fears by describing Guatemala as a “Soviet beachhead in the Western hemisphere.” The overthrow of Arbenz in 1954 made Guatemala safe for United Fruit, but not for democracy. The coup ended a hopeful decade-long experiment with representative democracy known as the “Ten Years of Spring.” The outcome’s implications for democracy in Central American were immense. Other examples could be adduced, but let us stop here with the two with which Harry Truman would have been most familiar — from a statecraft point of view. (I doubt that he held stock in either Big Oil or United Fruit.) At the end of his op-ed, Truman puts his conclusion right out there with characteristic straightforwardness: “I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President … and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.” Media Un-Reaction A blockbuster op-ed, no? Well, no. Investigator Raymond Marcus is among those struck by the curious lack of response — one might say embargo — regarding Truman’s Washington Post article. Marcus has written: “According to my information, it was not carried in later editions that day, nor commented on editorially, nor picked up by any other major newspaper, or mentioned in any national radio or TV broadcast.” What are we to make of this? Was/is it the case, as former CIA Director William Colby is quoted as saying in a different connection, that the CIA “owns everyone of any significance in the major media?” Or at least that it did in the Sixties? How much truth lies beneath Colby’s hyperbole? Did the CIA and its White House patrons put out the word to squelch a former President’s op-ed already published in an early edition of the Post? Or is there a simpler explanation. Do any of you readers perhaps know? The tradecraft term of art for a “cooperating” journalist, businessperson, or academic is “agent of influence.” Some housebroken journalists actually have previously worked for the CIA. Some take such scrupulous notes that they end up sounding dangerously close to their confidential government sources. Think back, for example, to those vengeful days in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and the macho approach being modeled by President Bush and aped down the line by CIA operatives and their “agents of influence.” CIA operative Gary Schroen told National Public Radio that, just days after 9/11, Counterterrorist chief Cofer Black sent him to Afghanistan with orders to “Capture bin Laden, kill him, and bring his head back in a box on dry ice.” As for other al Qaeda leaders, Black reportedly said, “I want their heads up on pikes.” This quaint tone — and language — reverberated among Bush-friendly pundits. One consummate insider, Washington Post veteran Jim Hoagland went a bit overboard in publishing a letter to President Bush on Oct. 31, 2001. It was no Halloween prank. Rather, Hoagland strongly endorsed what he termed the “wish” for “Osama bin Laden’s head on a pike,” which he claimed was the objective of Bush’s “generals and diplomats.” At the same time, there are dangers in sharing too much information with pet insider/outsiders. In his open letter to Bush, Hoagland lifted the curtain on the actual neoconservative game plan by giving Bush the following ordering of priorities. “The need to deal with Iraq’s continuing accumulation of biological and chemical weapons and the technology to build a nuclear bomb can in no way be lessened by the demands of the Afghan campaign. You must conduct that campaign so that you can pivot quickly from it to end the threat Saddam Hussein’s regime poses.” Hoagland had the “pivot” idea three weeks before Donald Rumsfeld called Gen. Tommy Franks to tell him the President wanted him to shift focus to Iraq. Franks and his senior aides had been working on plans for attacks on Tora Bora where bin Laden was believed hiding but attention, planning, and resources were abruptly diverted toward Iraq. And Osama bin Laden walked out of Tora Bora through the mountain passes to Pakistan, according to a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee report. The point here is that some media favorites are extremely well briefed partly because they are careful not to bite the hands that feed them by criticizing the CIA. Still less are they inclined to point out basic structural faults — not to mention the crimes of recent years. So it is up to those of us who know something of intelligence and how structural faults, above-the-law mentality, and flexible consciences can spell disaster. Split Up the Agency So, here’s what can be done: Expunge the one sentence in the National Security Act of 1947 that enables a President to direct the CIA to perform “other such functions and duties related to intelligence.” Make it crystal clear that the sense conveyed by that sentence, whether the sentence itself stays in or is deleted, cannot authorize activities that violate international or U.S. criminal law — crimes like kidnapping and torture. “Such other functions and duties?” What was meant by this wording were activities in addition to what President Truman describes in his op-ed as the “original assignment” of the CIA — a central place with access to all intelligence collection that enables analysts to advise the President with candor, without bureaucratic “treatment” or interpretations, and not sparing him “unpleasant facts” so as not to “upset” him. (Remember, the founding mission of the CIA was to ensure that a future President wasn’t blindsided by another Pearl Harbor attack, the way Truman’s predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt was.) As Truman himself suggests, terminate “such other functions and duties” or put those operations elsewhere. And imagine into existence different, effective ways to exercise oversight, not totally dependent on the highly politicized “overlook” committees of the Congress. That done, there will still be a baby NOT to be thrown out with the bath water. The good news is that there remains a core of analysts willing and able to seek truth and speak truth to power. This was shown in 2007, when Tom Fingar, a senior analyst with integrity and courage, led to conclusion a National Intelligence Estimate that helped prevent the attack that Dick Cheney, the neoconservatives, and Israel were planning on Iran. That NIE assessed with high confidence that Iran had ceased working on the warhead-related part of its nuclear program in the fall of 2003 — a judgment that holds to this day, however unpopular and unwelcome it may be among those who would have the President give Israel carte blanche to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. That is the capability Truman wanted — the baby that must be rescued and reared. But the baby is still in danger. With Tom Fingar now retired, the absence of an NIE on Afghanistan/Pakistan speaks volumes to the timidity that also remains inside the CIA’s hierarchy. It boggles the mind that, amid all the assessment and reassessment prior to the President’s decision to escalate by sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, no policymaker wanted to know what the 16 agencies of the intelligence community were thinking. Gloom Avoidance Gen. Petraeus and Gen. McChrystal are not interested in CIA analysis, just CIA drones (the aircraft). Sources inside the intelligence community tell us that the analysts assess the prospects for success of the generals’ “Af-Pak” approach as very low, but that this word does not seem to be getting to the President. It is not entirely clear whether it is a case of Panetta being reluctant to relay to Obama the kind of “unpleasant facts” or “bad news” that Truman wanted the CIA to give him in a straightforward way, or that Obama himself has discouraged such truth seeking/telling lest the abysmal prognosis of the analysts leak and complicate his Faustian bargain with the top brass — and cause even more political damage with his dissatisfied Democratic “base.” As things get still worse in “Af-Pak,” and they will, it will be important for Obama to have a group of analysts able to give him an objective read on the quagmire into which his benighted policies have led, and how he might attempt to pull himself and U.S. troops out. Perhaps then he will ask. So save that baby. Throw out the other one with the bathwater. Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-year career at the CIA, he worked for nine CIA directors, several of them at close remove. Primarily a substantive analyst and briefer, he nonetheless served in all four of CIA’s main directorates and, during one of his postings abroad, helped manage a large covert action project. He co-founded of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) in January 2003.

Ian Punnett welcomed award-winning investigative reporter Russ Baker, who discussed the connections between the Bush family and the intelligence community, as well as startling evidence that shed new light on the JFK assassination and Watergate. According to his research, George H.W. Bush's affiliation with the CIA began as far back as 1953, as opposed to Bush's "official" joining of the organization in 1976. Two elements that led him to this conclusion were that Bush was briefed on the JFK assassination by the CIA on the day after Kennedy's murder and he also appeared to be using his oil company to set up "fronts" for the intelligence agency around the world. However, Baker said, these CIA outlets were merely part of a larger agenda driven by wealthy elites who have designs on shaping the world to their end. Stressing that the Bush family are merely players in this group of power brokers, Baker said, "they're not the guys running the thing. They are just operatives." He dismissed the notion that it is an organized group, suggesting that it is more of a collection of like-minded, powerful people working together to consolidate their power. "It's not this absolute club or anything like that," Baker explained, "you're talking about a mindset." Ultimately, he expressed concern that this coterie continues to exert its power, "I think what we're looking at is a very sensitive and fragile situation that perpetuates to this day." He suggested that the Watergate scandal was one historic event that this faction, including George H.W. Bush (who was head of the RNC at the time), played a hand in orchestrating. Baker put forth the idea that Richard Nixon, previously put into power by these elites, had begun to move away from their influence. As such, the Watergate event was developed as a means to drive Nixon out of office in a "cleaner" fashion than they had eliminated JFK. According to Baker, this explains why the break-in seemed so poorly done, how the story ended up in the press, and why Nixon was so befuddled by what had happened. "It's almost like a rolling coup d'etat," he observed, "when you're in these permanent bureaucracies, you don't have a lot of use for these elected presidents. They're an annoyance and a problem for you."

This is a summary of Russ Baker's interview on coasttocoastam on Dec. 5: Ian Punnett welcomed award-winning investigative reporter Russ Baker, who discussed the connections between the Bush family and the intelligence community, as well as startling evidence that shed new light on the JFK assassination and Watergate. According to his research, George H.W. Bush's affiliation with the CIA began as far back as 1953, as opposed to Bush's "official" joining of the organization in 1976. Two elements that led him to this conclusion were that Bush was briefed on the JFK assassination by the CIA on the day after Kennedy's murder and he also appeared to be using his oil company to set up "fronts" for the intelligence agency around the world. However, Baker said, these CIA outlets were merely part of a larger agenda driven by wealthy elites who have designs on shaping the world to their end. Stressing that the Bush family are merely players in this group of power brokers, Baker said, "they're not the guys running the thing. They are just operatives." He dismissed the notion that it is an organized group, suggesting that it is more of a collection of like-minded, powerful people working together to consolidate their power. "It's not this absolute club or anything like that," Baker explained, "you're talking about a mindset." Ultimately, he expressed concern that this coterie continues to exert its power, "I think what we're looking at is a very sensitive and fragile situation that perpetuates to this day." He suggested that the Watergate scandal was one historic event that this faction, including George H.W. Bush (who was head of the RNC at the time), played a hand in orchestrating. Baker put forth the idea that Richard Nixon, previously put into power by these elites, had begun to move away from their influence. As such, the Watergate event was developed as a means to drive Nixon out of office in a "cleaner" fashion than they had eliminated JFK. According to Baker, this explains why the break-in seemed so poorly done, how the story ended up in the press, and why Nixon was so befuddled by what had happened. "It's almost like a rolling coup d'etat," he observed, "when you're in these permanent bureaucracies, you don't have a lot of use for these elected presidents. They're an annoyance and a problem for you."

Russ Baker, author of the best-seller book, "Family of Secrets", will be the guest on the radio show coasttocoastam Saturday night, December 5. He spoke at the recent COPA conference in Dallas and in his informative remarks stressed that those assembled had not focused enough research upon the connection of George H.W. Bush to the Kennedy assassination. Bush was in Dallas on the day of the assassination but created a false trail of his whereabouts on that day by later making a long distance phone call from Tyler, Texas. After hearing Mr. Baker speak at COPA, I subsequently sent him an email about something that should have been included in his book. In 1986, I was informed by a contract agent under contract with the IRS Criminal Intelligence Division that the IRS had uncovered an illegal $10 million fund set up by George H.W. Bush as part of the presidential campaign to re-elect Reagan-Bush in 1984. The fund was administered by Bob Eckels, the County Judge of Harris County (Houston, Texas), who was close to Bush. After he retired, Eckels told the Houston Chronicle and Houston Post newspapers that he was writing a book about deep, dark secrets that he knew, which I interpreted as being a threat to tell about the secret $10 million illegal fund, among other things. I filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in the late 1980's, requesting the Commission to look into the illegal campaign fund. The Commission took my request seriously and launched an investigation. However, before it could complete its work Bob Eckels suddenly died. His unexpected death raised a question in my mind. So while the Commission was unable to complete its investigation, it did issue a formal opinion for the record that it had found "reason to believe" that the $10 million fund had existed. The FBI later interviewed me about the fund but the agents seemed only interested in finding out how I had had learned about the fund rather than investigating its illegality. As a postscript, the IRS District Director for Houston resigned the day after Clinton was elected President in 1992.

CIA’s Lost Magic Manual Resurfaces www.wired.com By Noah Shachtman November 24, 2009 | 1:37 pm | http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/11/ci...nual-resurfaces At the height of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency paid $3,000 to renowned magician John Mulholland to write a manual on misdirection, concealment, and stagecraft. All known copies of the document — and a related paper, on conveying hidden signals — were believed to be destroyed in 1973. But recently, the manuals resurfaced, and have now been published as “The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.” Topics include working a clandestine partner, slipping a pill into the drink of the unsuspecting, and “surreptitious removal of objects by women.” This wasn’t the first time a magician worked for a western government. Harry Houdini snooped on the German and the Russian militiaries for Scotland Yard. English illusionist Jasper Maskelyne is reported to created dummy submarines and fake tanks to distract Rommel’s army during World War II. Some reports even credit him with employing flashing lights to “hide” the Suez Canal. But Mulholland’s contributions were far different, because they were part of a larger CIA effort, called MK-ULTRA, to control people’s minds. Which lead to the Agency’s infatuation with LSD, as David Hambling recounted here a few weeks ago: In the infamous Operation Midnight Climax, unwitting clients at CIA brothels in New York and San Francisco were slipped LSD and then monitored through one-way mirrors to see how they reacted. They even killed an elephant with LSD. Colleagues were also considered fair game for secret testing, to the point where a memo was issued instructing that the punch bowls at office Christmas parties were not to be spiked. The Boston Globe has put together a great visual summary of some of Mulholland’s best tricks for the CIA: the shoelace pattern that means “follow me”; the hidden compartment to smuggle in an agent; the best ways to appear dumb and non-threatening. Because there’s no better misdirection than appearing to be a fool. [Neat trick: @earth_battalion]

According to the link in John's post above, National Geographic has scheduled the show again for this coming Sunday. I plan to watch it then.

I had not planned on attending the COPA Conference but once I read its agenda that John Geraghty posted on the Forum I knew that I could not afford to miss it. Even so I was only able to attend the Saturday afternoon portion of the conference on November 21. The excellent speakers provided keen insights and valuable information. John Geraghty’s efforts made possible the Internet broadcasting of portions of the conference and videotaping of the speakers. I had especially regretted not being able to attend Jim Douglass’ talk Friday night about his book, JFK and The Unspeakable. However, while sitting in my home in Houston this Monday evening I was able to watch on my computer a video of Mr. Douglass’ presentation, which ranks among the most impressive and worthwhile that I have ever heard. So while I was not physically present Friday evening at the lecture, I watched and listened to it three days later – thanks to able recording work done by John Geraghty. Now anyone in the world can hear this important presentation as well as those made by other speakers. Thank you, John.

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2009/11/22 George Knapp presided over the 7th annual JFK Special, featuring three acclaimed Kennedy assassination researchers. He was joined by award-winning journalist 1. Jim Marrs along with TV producer and critic John Barbour in the first half of the program, as well as conspiracy expert Kenn Thomas in the latter half of the show. "It only seems controversial," Marrs said of the Kennedy assassination, because there is a such a glaring difference of opinion between those who believe the government's version of events and "those who have actually studied the case." Barbour and Marrs cited a myriad of suspicious elements involving the Kennedy assassination, such as the FBI's handling of evidence following the murder and issues with the veracity of the gunpowder tests administered to Lee Harvey Oswald. Barbour noted that the spent shell casings, allegedly from the shooting, were found sitting on the book depository's 6th floor windowsill, "one inch apart and facing the street." An amused Marrs observed that such a scenario would be impossible because, when discharging a spent shell from that type of gun, "it flings it over your right shoulder." They also discussed the nature of the enduring mystery surrounding the murder of Kennedy. Marrs explained that much of the confusion about the event has been created on purpose. "The cover-up has been based on obfuscation," he observed, noting that all the various suspects and factions blamed for the assassination only serve to make the case harder to truly solve. "All the facts were there, they were just never investigated," Barbour concurred. Ultimately, Marrs mused, the true story of what happened on that day in Dallas will never be "officially" known because it is simply too troubling to be revealed by the government. In the second half of the program, Kenn Thomas focused on the connection between the JFK assassination and infamous esoteric figure Fred Crisman. Thomas detailed how the enigmatic Crisman was named as the prime suspect for being the Grassy Knoll shooter by two independent sources, one of which was prosecutor Jim Garrison. Potentially placing him at the scene of the crime, Thomas said, is the "three tramps" photo where the character known as "Frenchie" is a "spitting image of Crisman." Thomas also addressed various theories which tied JFK's murder to mind control, UFOs, and even Nazi scientists imported via Project Paperclip. http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2009/11/22

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/article/the-...ed-reading-list Link to books on the JFK assassination as recommended by Jim Marrs, John Barbour and Kenn Thomas

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/ JFK Special on coasttocoastam radio show tonight with over 535 radio stations broadcasting it. The show is also available on the Internet. Guests: Jim Marrs, John Barbour and Kevin Thomas. It begins 10 PM Pacific Time and 1 AM Eastern Time

High Tech Tries to Lift Veil on 18 ½ Tantalizing Minutes in Watergate The New York Times November 22, 2009 By Sam Roberts Stymied in its digital effort to fill in the mysterious 18 ½-minute gap in the Watergate tapes, the government will apply high technology to the paper trail to try to answer the scandal’s most intriguing question: What did President Richard M. Nixon know, and when did he know it? The National Archives and Records Administration said Wednesday that it was convening a team of forensic document examiners to study two pages of handwritten notes taken by H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, during a meeting between them on June 20, 1972, at the Old Executive Office Building, next to the White House. Eighteen and a half minutes of conversation were erased from the tape of that meeting before it and other Watergate tapes were surrendered by Nixon to a special prosecutor. Haldeman’s notes, preserved at the National Archives, are believed to be the only existing record of the meeting, which occurred three days after Nixon campaign operatives were arrested for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, at the Watergate office complex in Washington. The forensic team will try to determine, among other things, whether any additional notes were taken by Haldeman or anyone else at the meeting, and whether the two pages were doctored to remove or add notes afterward, presumably in an effort to protect the president. The ink and paper will be subjected to tests to detect variations in light invisible to the naked eye and to find any indentations from writing on other pages. The tests can also determine whether carbon copies were made. The tests will be conducted by the preservation research and testing division of the Library of Congress and by forensic investigators from the Treasury inspector general for tax administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The results are expected to be available early next year. In 2003, the National Archives said it had given up trying to retrieve the missing conversation from the tape itself, which, like Haldeman’s notes, is preserved in a climate-controlled vault. Experts appointed in 1973 by a federal judge, John J. Sirica, concluded that the conversation had been deliberately erased. On the audible portion of the tape, Nixon says of the Democratic headquarters, “My God, the committee isn’t worth bugging, in my opinion. That’s my public line” — suggesting, perhaps, that his private line differed. In his 1978 memoir, Haldeman wrote that he could not remember details of the conversation. But his diaries, published soon after his death in 1993, suggest that he and Nixon may have plotted to impede the F.B.I.’s inquiry into the break-in.

I was surprised this posting did not have much impact with members. However, I sent the information out to selected researchers who did see the significance of this information. Several will be using this information in books they are working on. Unfortunately, it came too late for Doug Horne to include it in his book (due out next month). The information comes from James Wagenvoord, the editorial business manager and assistant to Life Magazines Executive Editor. He has supplied me with a lot more information about this story but I am not at liberty to publish it at the moment. I found this posting fascinating and shared it with a non-member of the Forum who at one time was a key executive at LIFE.

Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets By Noah Shachtman October 19, 2009 www.wired.com http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/ex...onitoring-firm/ America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon. In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day. Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords. “That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill. Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (”Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface. In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room. Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns against the company. “Anything that is out in the open is fair game for collection,” says Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues at the Federation of American Scientists. But “even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source.’” Visible chief executive officer Dan Vetras says the CIA is now an “end customer,” thanks to the In-Q-Tel investment. And more government clients are now on the horizon. “We just got awarded another one in the last few days,” Vetras adds. Tighe disputes this — sort of. “This contract, this deal, this investment has nothing to do with any agency of government and this company,” he says. But Tighe quickly notes that In-Q-Tel does have “an interested end customer” in the intelligence community for Visibile. And if all goes well, the company’s software will be used in pilot programs at that agency. “In pilots, we use real data. And during the adoption phase, we use it real missions.” Neither party would disclose the size of In-Q-Tel’s investment in Visible, a 90-person company with expected revenues of about $20 million in 2010. But a source familiar with the deal says the In-Q-Tel cash will be used to boost Visible’s foreign languages capabilities, which already include Arabic, French, Spanish and nine other languages. Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the government field. In late 2008, the company teamed up with the Washington, DC, consulting firm Concepts & Strategies, which has handled media monitoring and translation services for U.S. Strategic Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others. On its website, Concepts & Strategies is recruiting “social media engagement specialists” with Defense Department experience and a high proficiency in Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu or Russian. The company is also looking for an “information system security engineer” who already has a “Top Secret SCI [sensitive Compartmentalized Information] with NSA Full Scope Polygraph” security clearance. The intelligence community has been interested in social media for years. In-Q-Tel has sunk money into companies like Attensity, which recently announced its own web 2.0-monitoring service. The agencies have their own, password-protected blogs and wikis — even a MySpace for spooks. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available information, including web 2.0 sites. Doug Naquin, the Center’s Director, told an audience of intelligence professionals in October 2007 that “we’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence…. We have groups looking at what they call ‘citizens media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the internet. Then there’s social media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs.” But, “the CIA specifically needs the help of innovative tech firms to keep up with the pace of innovation in social media. Experienced IC [intelligence community] analysts may not be the best at detecting the incessant shift in popularity of social-networking sites. They need help in following young international internet user-herds as they move their allegiance from one site to another,” Lewis Shepherd, the former senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, says in an e-mail. “Facebook says that more than 70 percent of its users are outside the U.S., in more than 180 countries. There are more than 200 non-U.S., non-English-language microblogging Twitter-clone sites today. If the intelligence community ignored that tsunami of real-time information, we’d call them incompetent.”

New Details About the Transfer of Power to LBJ By Steven M. Gillon Resident Historian of the History Channel The Huffington Post November 3, 2009 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-m-gil...o_b_342822.html Exactly when did doctors give up their efforts to save Kennedy's life? And when did Lyndon Johnson learn that JFK was dead? These are the central questions that need to be addressed in understanding the transfer of power on November 22, 1963. The questions may be obvious; the answers are not. The Warren Commission concluded that Kennedy was shot at 12:30 pm. He was declared dead at 1:00 pm, and Johnson was informed at 1:20 pm. Most authors writing about the assassination, even those who question the conclusions of the Warren Commission, have accepted this timeline. New documents recently opened to the public call into question key parts of this timeline. The first piece of evidence is a long memorandum prepared by Parkland hospital administrator Jack Price, who was standing outside Trauma Room #1 as President Kennedy was wheeled in on a stretcher. Price gave the memorandum, which outlined his actions over the next few hours, to author William Manchester. Last year, Manchester's children granted me access to their father's rich collection of materials housed at Wesleyan University for my new book, The Kennedy Assassination - 24 Hours After. According to the document, Price wrote that Dr. Kemp Clark, one of a team of physicians working on Kennedy, came out of Trauma #1 "and told me that the president was dead and that he would sign the death certificate." Clark did not record the precise time of his conversation with Dr. Clark, but he did note that just after they finished speaking he walked down the hall and saw a priest come in the door. Price asked his assistant to escort the priest to the Trauma room. The priest was the 70-year-old Reverend Oscar Huber. His arrival at the hospital is crucial to fixing an approximate time for when doctors had given up working on Kennedy. The most reliable source for establishing the time of Huber's arrival is Dave Powers. As a special assistant to the president, Powers played many roles - receptionist, gatekeeper, greeter, and repository of trivia. On trips like this one in Texas, he was responsible for keeping track of the schedule, making sure the presidential party did not fall too far behind. As they were running into the hospital with the President's body, Powers had instructed secret service agent Jack Reedy to find a priest. For the next few minutes he kept checking his watch, asking the secret service: "What's the story on the priest?" Standing outside the emergency room with Mrs. Kennedy, he occupied himself by writing down everything he saw, including the names of the doctors as they responded to the call for help. "Now I was carrying the President's schedule and I was writing this thing down in pencil or ink," he told NBC newsman Sandor Vanocur in an oral history at the JFK Library. In a handwritten note that he turned over to Manchester, Powers stated that he saw the priest coming down the hall at 12:50 pm. If true, it would mean that Dr. Clark had already determined that Kennedy was dead at least 10 minutes before the official time stated by the Warren Commission. If the doctors were ready to declare Kennedy dead at 12:50 pm, why then was the official time listed as 1:00 pm? The time of death was a fiction created to satisfy Mrs. Kennedy. According to Catholic doctrine, the last rites had to be delivered before the soul left the body. If her husband was already officially dead before Father Huber had a chance to administer the sacrament, it would not have been valid. "Father do you think the sacrament had effect," she asked Huber in the emergency room. He tried to ally her fears. "I am convinced that his soul had not left his body," he said. "This was a valid last sacrament." Whether doctors had stopped working on JFK around 12:50 pm or at 1:00 pm, may seem like a minor point. The issue is vitally important, however, to understanding the timing of the transfer of power. For the first few minutes after they arrived at Parkland Hospital, those around the President may have been able to maintain false hope that doctors could save Kennedy. But by roughly 12:50 pm, when Dr Clark told Jack Price that he was ready to sign the death certificate, it was clear that doctors had stopped trying to save his life. The President was dead, and everyone knew it. Within a few minutes, the secret service notified its office in Washington. Shortly after 1:00 pm, Robert Kennedy would get a phone call at his home in Virginia informing him that the wounds his brother suffered proved fatal. Yet, Lyndon Johnson, standing in a cubicle a few yards away, was still in the dark. The chaos and confusion of the moment, and the profound sense of grief and loss among Kennedy's close aides, only partially explains the delay in telling LBJ that he was now President. Kennedy aides were in denial that their beloved JFK was dead, but also that LBJ, a man they despised, was now President. When did they finally tell Johnson the news? LBJ told the Warren Commission that White House appointments secretary Kenneth O'Donnell notified him of Kennedy's death at 1:20 pm. Johnson's statement, however, does not stand up to scrutiny. Just as Kennedy aides pushed back the official time of death to 1:00 pm, it appears that Johnson may have pushed back the clock as well. LBJ Secret service agent Emory Roberts directly contradicted LBJ's timeline. In a lengthy interview with Manchester, Roberts claimed that he was the one who broke the news. "At 1:13 pm I told Lyndon Johnson that President Kennedy was dead," he told Manchester. "One of my agents had told me that the President was dead and I checked with the agent outside the door of trauma room 1. I went to Johnson. Cliff Carter, Rufus Youngblood, Mrs. Johnson, and the President were there. I said, 'the President is dead, sir.'" According to Roberts, Johnson turned to Cliff Carter and told him to make a note of the time. "Someone mentioned that the time was 1:13 pm," he noted. Oddly enough, Cliff Carter, LBJ's chief aide on the trip, contradicted his boss and supported Roberts' account. On the ride back to Washington on Air Force One, Carter dictated notes about the events he witnessed at Parkland Hospital. He observed that Roberts was the first to deliver the news, and that two minutes later O'Donnell entered the room and made the announcement again. Carter repeated the story to Manchester. "There have been many wrong accounts of this." Roberts "did the notifying," he recalled. "He just said, 'Mr. Johnson, the President is dead.'" How could Johnson have been mistaken about such important details? It's possible given the extraordinary pressure he was under that he simply misremembered the sequences of events. More likely, Johnson was using O'Donnell as political cover to blunt any criticism that might emerge from Kennedy loyalists, especially RFK, that he had been overeager to assume the presidency. Despite receiving a steady stream of pessimistic reports about Kennedy's condition, and being informed explicitly by the secret service that JFK was dead, Johnson refused to take charge until he received the word from O'Donnell. Technically, the powers of the presidency transferred to Johnson at 12:30 pm when the fatal third bullet shattered Kennedy's brain. For a variety of reasons -chaos and confusion at the hospital, the grief of Kennedy's close advisors and friends, their distrust and disdain for the new President, and LBJ's insecurity -- the United States was without a functioning head of state for nearly 40 minutes. Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-m-gil...html?view=print

The New York Review of Books November 9, 2009 Who's in Big Brother's Database? By James Bamford The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency by Matthew M. Aid Bloomsbury, 423 pp., $30.00 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23231#

An individual who has direct knowledge advised Robert Merritt yesterday that a certain Intelligence Agency in the U.S. is using Spoof Tel to contact potential literary agents and publishers to warn them against publishing: WATERGATE EXPOSED By Robert Merritt A Confidential Informant Tells How the Watergate Burglars Were Set-Up and Reveals Other Government Dirty Tricks As told to Douglas Caddy Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven For those unfamiliar with Spoof Tel, your attention is directed to its link below: http://www.spooftel.com/

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jack Nelson dies at 80; journalist helped raise L.A. Times to national prominence His investigative coverage of the civil rights movement and Watergate helped solidify The Times' reputation. The paper's Washington bureau grew into a journalistic powerhouse under his leadership. By Elaine Woo Los Angeles Times 6:08 AM PDT, October 21, 2009 Jack Nelson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, author and longtime Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, whose hard-nosed coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the Watergate scandal in the 1970s helped establish the paper's national reputation, has died. He was 80. "Jack finally slipped away a couple of hours ago," his wife, journalist Barbara Matusow, said in an e-mail to friends. Nelson was recruited from the Atlanta Constitution in 1965 as part of publisher Otis Chandler's effort to transform The Times into one of the country's foremost dailies. An aggressive reporter who had exposed abuses at Georgia's biggest mental institution, Nelson went on to break major stories on the civil rights movement for The Times, particularly in his coverage of the shooting of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo and the massacre of black students at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg. As the Watergate scandal unfolded during President Richard M. Nixon's reelection drive, he scored an exclusive interview with Alfred C. Baldwin III, an ex- FBI agent hired by White House operatives, who witnessed the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972. The stories resulting from Nelson's interview with Baldwin were the first to link the burglary "right to the heart of the Nixon reelection campaign," David Halberstam wrote in his 1979 media history "The Powers That Be." Named in 1975 to lead the Washington bureau, Nelson oversaw its evolution over the next 21 years into what Gene Roberts Jr., former managing editor of the New York Times and a onetime rival of Nelson's on the civil rights beat, called "arguably one of the finest bureaus ever in Washington." "Just his work at the Constitution would be a distinguished career for most journalists," Roberts said. "Then add that he was one of the most effective reporters in the civil rights era, all before you even get to him being bureau chief in Washington. "All in all, I would say he was one of the most important journalists of the 20th century." A slender man with a Southerner's easy manner, Nelson was born Oct. 11, 1929, in Talladega, Ala., where his father ran a fruit store during the Depression. He drew Talladega's citizens into the shop with vaudevillian humor ("Lady, you dropped your handkerchief," pause, "in St. Louis yesterday"), displaying a talent for connecting with people that would bolster his later success as a reporter. "He said sometimes being a reporter is a lot like being a good salesman," said Richard T. Cooper, a longtime friend and Washington bureau editor for the Tribune Co., which owns The Times. "You had to be able to sell yourself to people, convince them that they should answer your question or show you the records" or buy a bag of fruit from your father's store. Nelson and his family moved to Georgia and eventually to Biloxi, Miss., where he graduated from Notre Dame High School in 1947. Without stopping for college (he later studied briefly at Georgia State College), the teenager launched his journalism career after answering an ad for a job at the Biloxi Daily Herald. Soon he earned the nickname "Scoop" for aggressive reporting on corrupt officials and gambling payoffs. In 1952, after a stint writing press releases for the Army, he joined the staff of the Atlanta Constitution. In a series of articles on Georgia's Milledgeville Central State Hospital for the mentally ill, he exposed an array of abuses, including experimental treatments of patients without consent, alcohol and drug abuse by on-duty doctors, and nurses who were allowed to perform major surgery. As a result of his reporting, the hospital was overhauled and Nelson won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in 1960. When he joined the Los Angeles Times five years later, the civil rights movement had been underway for a decade, but The Times "had no coverage of the South. We were doing terribly covering the South," recalled former managing editor George Cotliar, who was national news editor in the 1960s. So the paper hired Nelson to close the gap. He opened The Times' Atlanta bureau and immediately began covering the voting rights demonstrations in Selma, Ala., where on "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, state troopers and local lawmen clubbed and tear-gassed 600 civil rights marchers en route to Montgomery. "He just annihilated every other paper. He was ahead of everyone on everything," said Cotliar, who called Nelson "the toughest, hardest-charging, finest reporter I've known in my 40 years in the business." Then- Alabama Gov. George Wallace was outraged by Nelson's stories, which quoted sources critical of Wallace's failure to protect the marchers. According to Bill Kovach, who covered the protests for the Nashville Tennessean and later was Washington bureau chief for the New York Times and editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the governor singled out Nelson for ridicule, pointing out to white audiences "outsiders like Jack Nelson there of the L.A. Times -- that one there with the burr haircut -- trying to tell us Alabamians how to run our state." In 1970 Nelson experienced the wrath of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover when, after an eight-month investigation, he wrote a story about how the agency and police in Meridian, Miss., shot two Ku Klux Klan members in a sting operation bankrolled by the local Jewish community. One of the Klan members, a woman, died in the ambush. Hoover attempted to suppress the story by smearing Nelson as a drunk, which he was not. ("What they didn't realize," the reporter later quipped to Hoover biographer Curt Gentry, "is that you can't ruin a newspaper man by branding him a drunk.") Although by defying Hoover he lost his FBI sources, he wrote the story, which ran on Page One. "He just could not be intimidated," said Karl Fleming, who was Newsweek's civil rights correspondent in the 1960s. Twenty years later, Nelson dusted off his notes from the KKK story and wrote "Terror in the Night" (1993), a book that described the shooting in the context of the Klan's shift from battling blacks to targeting Jews, whom it had begun to regard as the real leaders of the civil rights movement. Nelson wrote several other books, including "The Censors and the Schools" (1963) with Gene Roberts Jr.; "The Orangeburg Massacre"http://bit.ly/3MQbU7 (1970), co-written with Jack Bass; "The FBI and the Berrigans" (1972), co-written by Ronald J. Ostrow; and "High School Journalism in America" (1974). In 1972, two years after he joined the Washington bureau, Nelson was, according to Halberstam, "one of the two or three best-known and most respected investigative reporters in Washington." But, like most of the Washington press corps, he was frustrated by the Washington Post's dominance of the Watergate break-in story. The scales tipped in favor of The Times for a brief time when Nelson received a tip from colleague Ostrow that there was an eyewitness to the Watergate burglary. Nelson began knocking on doors in Connecticut, where Baldwin, the ex-FBI man, and his lawyers lived. "He was a good reporter because he was always prepared and plain didn't take 'no' for an answer," said William F. Thomas, editor of The Times from 1971 to 1989. "That was his biggest asset right there.?.?.?. Anybody who looked at the set of his jaw knew they were in for something." After much back and forth, including Nelson's rejection of the lawyers' attempt to sell him Baldwin's story, he was granted an interview. He listened for five hours as Baldwin unwound a fascinating tale of his recruitment by ex- CIA man James McCord, his encounters with G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, and his job monitoring wiretaps on Democratic phones and then delivering sealed sets of the tapes to Nixon's re-election committee. Baldwin also told of sitting across the street from the Watergate office complex while the burglary unfurled and spying Hunt slip away as the police closed in. When word of Nelson's scoop leaked out, federal prosecutors threatened to revoke Baldwin's immunity, and Baldwin's lawyers pleaded with Nelson to drop the story. Federal Judge John J. Sirica issued a gag order, and then-Washington bureau chief John Lawrence spent a few hours in detention after he, Nelson and Ostrow refused to turn over the tapes of the Baldwin interview. The Times took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the paper. On Oct. 5, 1972, the paper ran a Page One news story by Nelson and Ostrow detailing Baldwin's revelations, as well as a first-person account by Baldwin as told to Nelson. Halberstam called the Baldwin story "perhaps the most important Watergate story so far, because it was so tangible, it had an eyewitness, and it brought Watergate to the very door of the White House.?.?.?. It was a great victory for the Los Angeles Times." Nelson became bureau chief in 1975, when it had 15 reporters and three editors. By 1980 the bureau was described by Time magazine as "one of the two or three best" in Washington. By 1996, when Nelson turned the job over to White House correspondent Doyle McManus, it was one of the biggest, as well, with 36 reporters and seven editors. In a town consumed by politics, Nelson was a well-connected insider who held a coveted seat as a regular commentator on public television's "Washington Week in Review."http://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek As bureau chief he brought presidents, senators, congressmen, Cabinet members and other Washington power-brokers to The Times' offices for regular breakfast sessions with reporters that were broadcast on C-SPAN. "That raised our profile tremendously.?.?.?. We all got our calls returned faster," Cooper said. Known for backing his staff and pushing hard on investigative stories, Nelson made The Times a must-read for Washington's power elite. "The depth and scope of the Washington bureau under Jack was very impressive," said Roberts, a former chairman of the Pulitzer board who was the New York Times' managing editor from 1994 to 1997. "We certainly paid attention to what the Los Angeles Times was doing in its Washington bureau." A Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and founding member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Nelson served as chief Washington correspondent until his retirement at the end of 2001. In recent years he taught journalism as a visiting professor at the USC and produced a report on government secrecy as a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. In 2005 he served on the independent Commission on Federal Election Reform co-chaired by former President Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III. He is survived by his wife, Barbara Matusow; and three children from a previous marriage, Karen, John and Steven.

The New York Times Shines a Light into the JFK-CIA-Joannides Scandal by Jacob G. Hornberger Recently by Jacob G. Hornberger: Oswald, the CIA, and Kennedy www.lewrockwell.com October 21, 2009 Last Friday, October 16, the New York Times, for the first time, shined a light onto the JFK-CIA-Joannides scandal with a story entitled “C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery.” The story soon began appearing in other mainstream newspapers and on Internet websites. Never mind that the scandal has been brewing since 1998, when it was discovered that the CIA had intentionally covered up a key role that a CIA agent named George Joannides had played in the months leading up the JFK assassination and, later, in the investigation of the assassination itself. Better late than never, I suppose. The documents had been released pursuant to the 1992 John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which had been enacted in response to Oliver Stone’s movie JFK and which mandated the release of all government documents relating to Kennedy’s murder. The documents revealed that Joannides had served as a CIA liaison to an anti-Castro student group known as the DRE and had supervised the funneling of large sums of CIA money into the organization. As I pointed out last week in an article dated October 14, when he was living in New Orleans in the months before the assassination Lee Harvey Oswald had had an encounter with a leader of the New Orleans branch of the DRE, a man named Carlos Bringuier. Later, in the 1970s when the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated the Kennedy assassination, the CIA called Joannides back from retirement to serve as a liaison between the CIA and the House committee. Ostensibly his job was to facilitate CIA cooperation with the House investigation. But there was one big problem in all this. No one but Joannides and the CIA knew about Joannides’ prior relationship with the DRE. Not the Warren Commission. Not the House Committee. For some reason known only to the CIA and Joannides, the information was kept secret from the people whose task was to conduct a full and complete investigation into the Kennedy assassination. Even worse, the CIA had the audacity to select as liaison the person who was the subject of the secret, raising the obvious question: Was Joannides called back from retirement to serve as a barrier rather than a facilitator? Or as the Times put it, “That concealment has fueled suspicion that Mr. Joannides’s real assignment was to limit what the House Committee could learn about C.I.A. activities.” Discovering Joannides’ role in the documents released in the late 1990s, a relentless journalist named Jefferson Morley, who used to work at the Washington Post, requested the CIA to produce all its files on Joannides, a request the CIA steadfastly refused to grant. In 2003 Morley filed suit against the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act. Despite a favorable ruling from a federal Court of Appeals, the CIA has engaged in years of stonewalling, absolutely refusing to this day to divulge the Joannides files to Morley and the public. Last August I published an article entitled “Appoint a Special Prosecutor in the JFK-Joannides Matter,” in which I argued that President Obama should appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and possibly prosecute people in the CIA for fraud and obstruction of justice. (At the end of that article is a list of links to all of Jefferson Morley’s articles on the subject, which I highly recommend, as they make for a fascinating read.) Federal Judge John R. Tunheim, who was chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board stated, as quoted in the New York Times article, “I think we were probably misled by the agency. This material should be released.” The Times also quoted G. Robert Blakey, the House Committee’s staff director: “If I’d known his role in 1963, I would have put Joannides under oath – he would have been a witness, not a facilitator. How do we know what he didn’t give us?” What the CIA’s position? Not surprisingly, it resorts to the old standard bromide for keeping things secret, even when the information is half-a-century old – “national security.” Or perhaps there are other reasons. As the opening sentence in the New York Times articles asks, “Is the Central Intelligence Agency covering up some dark secret about the assassination of John F. Kennedy?” Gerald Posner, whose book Case Closed argued against a conspiracy theory, is a bit more cynical, stating: “Most conspiracy theorists don’t understand this. But if there really were a C.I.A. plot, no documents would exist.” Presumably, Posner is suggesting that if the CIA really was involved in the plot to kill Kennedy, the agency would have cleaned up and doctored its files a long time ago to ensure that no such evidence ever surfaced in a CIA document. Nonetheless, the public is entitled to see the Joannides records and to see precisely what role Joannides played with the DRE. Equally important, people have a right to know why the CIA knowingly and intentionally misled the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee, and the American people by deliberately failing to disclose these material facts. Forty-five years of misleading the public with secrecy, fraud, and deception in a matter as important as the Kennedy assassination are enough. It’s time for the CIA to stop the stonewalling and immediately release the Joannides documents. October 21, 2009 Jacob Hornberger [send him mail] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Gerald Celente has a proven record of forecasting. The link below is to his latest Trends Journal. http://www.lewrockwell.com/celente/Future-...012-Celente.pdf

Below is the weekend column by Alexander Cockburn of CounterPunch. The key paragraph in it reads as follows: "Actually it’s a measure of how sloppy the Nixon people were that across the entire Watergate Scandal they failed to excavate Carl Bernstein’s family ties to the Communist Party, nor the fact that every few weeks Bernstein would take time off from his investigative labors with Bob Woodward and drive up to Vermont to visit his cousin Shoshana who at that time was living under an alias in Brattleboro, one jump ahead of the FBI which had her on its Ten Most Wanted list as a radical bomber. People often overestimate the surveillance capacities of the state. One leak of that info to one of Nixon’s pet columnists and the Watergate scandal would have been over." Weekend Edition October 16-19, 2009 CounterPunch Diary White House v. Fox News: a War Obama Can Win By ALEXANDER COCKBURN www.counterpunch.org The jousting between the White House and Fox News is drawing grave warnings from pundits to Obama’s team that this is a losing issue for their man. They quote the old tag, "Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel." Certainly the jabbing has been refreshingly vigorous. Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, explains Obama’s refusal to appear on Fox News by saying, "Fox News often operates either as the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party. We're going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent." "I want to show you right where the enemy is located," Beck screams to his adoring three-million audience as he circles Rupert Murdoch's Fox News headquarters in green ink on a map of New York. "This is the enemy, America!" Surely, it was a no-brainer for the White House. Fox’s troupe of right wingers will trash Obama, whatever Dunn says. Why not please your own political base by showing a little backbone and giving Murdoch a slap on the snout? Besides, history suggests that if the White House keeps up the small arms fire and doesn’t lose its cool, in the end it will carry the day, and edge Fox as a network operation into the Glen Beck insane asylum, viewed with derision by even more millions of Americans. Many presidents have seen political benefit in setting up the press as irresponsible mudslingers, overpaid, lazy and politically biased, which is most people reckon it is anyway. The champion here was Richard Nixon who unleashed Pat Buchanan and the late William Safire, and those famous lines for vice president Spiro Agnew, including the rather plyful "nattering nabobs of negativism." Actually it’s a measure of how sloppy the Nixon people were that across the entire Watergate Scandal they failed to excavate Carl Bernstein’s family ties to the Communist Party, nor the fact that every few weeks Bernstein would take time off from his investigative labors with Bob Woodward and drive up to Vermont to visit his cousin Shoshana who at that time was living under an alias in Brattleboro, one jump ahead of the FBI which had her on its Ten Most Wanted list as a radical bomber. People often overestimate the surveillance capacities of the state. One leak of that info to one of Nixon’s pet columnists and the Watergate scandal would have been over. But in some of the famous exchanges from Nixon-time, it was the president who came out ahead in the eyes of public opinion. I can remember watching the clash between Nixon and Dan Rather in a press conference in 1974 as the Watergate scandal neared its climax. When Rather stood up, Nixon’s people in the room booed and Rather’s colleagues cheered. Nixon, on the stage, looked down at Rather and asked with heavy sarcasm, 'Are you running for something?' Dan, snapped back, 'No, sir, are you?' Many people took Rather’s response as smartass, and out of place. But then, Rather was never the brightest bulb on the block. Nixon’s chief weapon of coercion before the 1972 election was the Joint Operating Agreement, which suspended normal anti-trust rules so that competing newspapers in one town could, in the name of newspaper preservation, collude in fixing advertising rates. In the ’72 race Nixon collection a record number of newspaper endorsements. Another weapon in the wars between White House and press was a tax audit or an indictment. In the 1930s,Moe Annenberg, with close mob ties and co-owner of the Race Wire, ATT’s fourth biggest customer, owned The Philadelphia Inquirer and used it to support Republican politicians in Pennsylvania and attack Roosevelt. FDR promptly turned for help to David Stern, publisher of the Philadelphia Record and the New York Post. Stern promoted an IRS investigation and Moe pulled three years in jail. (Moe was the father of a former US ambassador to the Court of St James, Walter Annenberg – who spent many diligent years winching his family’s reputation out of the mud.) Some presidents, like Kennedy and Reagan, had no need to foment a public feud with the press, since the press in all essentials was in their pockets anyway. Carter furnishes the classic case of someone who simply lost the initiative and fatally allowed the press to make fun of him as a wimp, in his canoe, beating off a giant rabbit with a paddle, or passing out during a jog, or whining about "malaise". The most intricate story is that of the jousting between the Clintons and the press, from the moment, almost fatal to his initial presidential campaign, that Murdoch’s National Star exposed Clinton’s long affair in Little Rock with Gennifer Flowers in January, 1993. Hillary Clinton threw down the gauntlet on January 27, 1998, at the onset of the Lewinsky affair, when she told Matt Lauer of NBC that "the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president." At the time plenty of people made fun of HRC for this, but it was undoubtedly smart politics, just as the attack on Fox News is now. It fired up Clinton’s base, and allowed an extensive cottage industry to thrive, unearthing the rightwing conspirators and their financial backers, such as Richard Mellon Scaife. Seventy-five years ago, it mattered greatly to FDR what the Philadelphia Inquirer was saying about him. Obama’s White House probably cares about the New York Times and the Washington Post but not much else. The Wall Street Journal has loathed Obama from the getgo. The Fox Network is really the only enemy with mass appeal and as I suggested at the start it’s not political rocket science to go after it. Tone matters here. The barbs should not be whiny, but caustic and good humored, to the effect that this is not a news medium but the propaganda wing of the Republican Party, as Dunn says. It’s essential not to blink. Glenn Beck is connected to sanity by a pretty thin mooring rope. A few months of this and he’ll probably pop, either going back on the bottle or slithering into a psychotic break, though some would say this is a nightly event anyway.

C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery By SCOTT SHANE The New York Times Occtober 17, 2009 WASHINGTON — Is the Central Intelligence Agency covering up some dark secret about the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Probably not. But you would not know it from the C.I.A.’s behavior. For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundreds of documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance. The files in question, some released under direction of the court and hundreds more that are still secret, involve the curious career of George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans in 1963. In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations — but never told the committee of his earlier role. That concealment has fueled suspicion that Mr. Joannides’s real assignment was to limit what the House committee could learn about C.I.A. activities. The agency’s deception was first reported in 2001 by Jefferson Morley, who has doggedly pursued the files ever since, represented by James H. Lesar, a Washington lawyer specializing in Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. “The C.I.A.’s conduct is maddening,” said Mr. Morley, 51, a former Washington Post reporter and the author of a 2008 biography of a former C.I.A. station chief in Mexico. After years of meticulous reporting on Mr. Joannides, who died at age 68 in 1990, he is convinced that there is more to learn. “I know there’s a story here,” Mr. Morley said. “The confirmation is that the C.I.A. treats these documents as extremely sensitive.” Mr. Morley’s quest has gained prominent supporters, including John R. Tunheim, a federal judge in Minnesota who served in 1994 and 1995 as chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board, created by Congress to unearth documents related to the case. “I think we were probably misled by the agency,” Judge Tunheim said, referring to the Joannides records. “This material should be released.” Gerald Posner, the author of an anti-conspiracy account of the Kennedy assassination, “Case Closed” (Random House, 1993), said the C.I.A.’s withholding such aged documents was “a perfect example of why nobody trusts the agency.” “It feeds the conspiracy theorists who say, ‘You’re hiding something,” ’ Mr. Posner said. After losing an appeals court decision in Mr. Morley’s lawsuit, the C.I.A. released material last year confirming Mr. Joannides’s deep involvement with the anti-Castro Cubans who confronted Oswald. But the agency is withholding 295 specific documents from the 1960s and ’70s, while refusing to confirm or deny the existence of many others, saying their release would cause “extremely grave damage” to national security. “The methods of defeating or deterring covert action in the 1960s and 1970s can still be instructive to the United States’ current enemies,” a C.I.A. official wrote in a court filing. An agency spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said the C.I.A. had opened to Judge Tunheim’s board all files relevant to the assassination and denied that it was trying to avoid embarrassment. “The record doesn’t support that, any more than it supports conspiracy theories, offensive on their face, that the C.I.A. had a hand in President Kennedy’s death,” Mr. Gimigliano said. C.I.A. secrecy has been hotly debated this year, with agency officials protesting the Obama administration’s decision to release legal opinions describing brutal interrogation methods. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, came under attack from Republicans after she accused the C.I.A. of misleading Congress about waterboarding, adding, “They mislead us all the time.” On the Kennedy assassination, the deceptions began in 1964 with the Warren Commission. The C.I.A. hid its schemes to kill Fidel Castro and its ties to the anti-Castro Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil, or Cuban Student Directorate, which received $50,000 a month in C.I.A. support during 1963. In August 1963, Oswald visited a New Orleans shop owned by a directorate official, feigning sympathy with the group’s goal of ousting Mr. Castro. A few days later, directorate members found Oswald handing out pro-Castro pamphlets and got into a brawl with him. Later that month, he debated the anti-Castro Cubans on a local radio station. In the years since Oswald was named as the assassin, speculation about who might have been behind him has never ended, with various theories focusing on Mr. Castro, the mob, rogue government agents or myriad combinations of the above. Mr. Morley, one of many writers to become entranced by the story, insists he has no theory and is seeking only the facts. His lawsuit has uncovered the central role in overseeing directorate activities of Mr. Joannides, the deputy director for psychological warfare at the C.I.A.’s Miami station, code-named JM/WAVE. He worked closely with directorate leaders, documents show, corresponding with them under pseudonyms, paying their travel expenses and achieving an “important degree of control” over the group, as a July 1963 agency fitness report put it. Fifteen years later, Mr. Joannides turned up again as the agency’s representative to the House assassinations committee. Dan Hardway, then a law student working for the committee, recalled Mr. Joannides as “a cold fish,” who firmly limited access to documents. Once, Mr. Hardway remembered, “he handed me a thin file and just stood there. I blew up, and he said, ‘This is all you’re going to get.’ ” But neither Mr. Hardway nor the committee’s staff director, G. Robert Blakey, had any idea that Mr. Joannides had played a role in the very anti-Castro activities from 1963 that the panel was scrutinizing. When Mr. Morley first informed him about it a decade ago, Mr. Blakey was flabbergasted. “If I’d known his role in 1963, I would have put Joannides under oath — he would have been a witness, not a facilitator,” said Mr. Blakey, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame. “How do we know what he didn’t give us?” After Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “J.F.K.” fed speculation about the Kennedy assassination, Congress created the Assassination Records Review Board to release documents. But because the board, too, was not told of Mr. Joannides’s 1963 work, it did not peruse his records, said Judge Tunheim, the chairman. “If we’d known of his role in Miami in 1963, we would have pressed for all his records,” Judge Tunheim said. No matter what comes of Mr. Morley’s case in Federal District Court in Washington, Mr. Tunheim said he might ask the current C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, to release the records, even if the names of people who are still alive must be redacted for privacy. What motive could C.I.A. officials have to bury the details of Mr. Joannides’s work for so long? Did C.I.A. officers or their Cuban contacts know more about Oswald than has been revealed? Or was the agency simply embarrassed by brushes with the future assassin — like the Dallas F.B.I. officials who, after the assassination, destroyed a handwritten note Oswald had previously left for an F.B.I. agent? Or has Mr. Morley spent a decade on a wild goose chase? Max Holland, who is writing a history of the Warren Commission, said the agency might be trying to preserve the principle of secrecy. “If you start going through the files of every C.I.A. officer who had anything to do with anything that touched the assassination, that would have no end,” Mr. Holland said. Mr. Posner, the anti-conspiracy author, said that if there really were something explosive involving the C.I.A. and President Kennedy, it would not be in the files — not even in the documents the C.I.A. has fought to keep secret. “Most conspiracy theorists don’t understand this,” Mr. Posner said. “But if there really were a C.I.A. plot, no documents would exist.”

Oswald, the CIA, and Kennedy by Jacob G. Hornberger President, The Future of Freedom Foundation October 16, 2009 by Jacob G. Hornberger Recently by Jacob G. Hornberger: Did The CIA Have More Motive Than Oswald? http://www.lewrockwell.com/hornberger/hornberger167.html In my recent article on Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA, I raised the possibility that Oswald was working deep undercover for the CIA when he defected to the Soviet Union and then returned to the United States as a communist sympathizer. There are a few other things about Oswald that have long mystified me. When Oswald was living in New Orleans in the period prior to the assassination, he got into an altercation with a pro-Castro Cuban named Carlos Bringuier while Oswald was distributing pamphlets promoting The Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Cuba organization that the CIA considered to be subversive. As a result of that altercation, Oswald was arrested for disorderly conduct and taken to the local jail in New Orleans. While he was incarcerated, he asked to talk to a FBI agent. Lo and behold, a FBI agent named John Quigley came to the jail and visited with Oswald for an hour and a half. Now, I ask you: How many communist sympathizers have that much influence? Indeed, how many ordinary people do you know who, after being arrested for disorderly conduct by the local police, would be able to summon a FBI agent who would come and visit them in jail? That seems rather unusual to me. After all, the offense of disorderly conduct, especially at the local level, is as far from being a federal crime as one can get. Nonetheless, here is a FBI agent responding positively to a request by a supposed communist sympathizer jailed for the local crime of disorderly conduct and visiting with him for an hour and a half. Another oddity is the Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets that Oswald was distributing. Some of the pamphlets had a return street address stamped on them – 544 Camp St. Yet, that was not the address of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee or even Oswald’s address. It was actually an address that housed the same building in which a 20-year veteran of the FBI was running his private detective agency – a man named Guy Banister. Perhaps just a coincidence, but a strange one at that. But the obvious question arises: What would happen if people responded favorably to the pamphlet by sending letters to that address? How would such letters ever get to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee or to Oswald? I wonder if Oswald thought about that when he was distributing the pamphlets. Wouldn’t you think that that would matter to him? There is another interesting aspect of the altercation that resulted in Oswald’s arrest. Carlos Bringuier, the man with whom Oswald had the altercation, was associated with a fiercely anti-Castro Cuban group named the DRE. During the House Select Committee hearings on the JFK assassination in the 1970s, the CIA called a man out of retirement named George Joannides to serve as a liaison between the CIA and the House Committee. In the 1990s, after Joannides had died, documents revealed that he had served as a CIA conduit that was funneling money into the DRE during the time of Oswald’s altercation with Bringuier. Yet, that fact had never been revealed to the House Committee or anyone else, including the Warren Commission, and no one was ever able to question Joannides about it. Since then, the CIA has steadfastly refused to open up and disclose its Joannides files to the public. Several years ago, a former Washington Post journalist named Jefferson Morley sued the CIA seeking disclosure of the Joannides files, a suit that is still pending and which the CIA continues to fiercely oppose even today, on national-security grounds. See my article, “Appoint a Special Prosecutor in the JFK-Joannides Matter.” Another weird aspect of this case involved a note that Oswald delivered a couple of weeks prior to the assassination to a FBI agent in Dallas named James Hosty. Immediately after Oswald was assassinated, Hosty destroyed the note. Hosty later claimed that in the note Oswald threatened Hosty for harassing Oswald’s wife. Of course, that’s possible. And it’s also possible that the reason Hosty destroyed the note was to protect the FBI from embarrassment over having received such a note two weeks before Kennedy was assassinated and not having reported it to the Secret Service. But how often does one see a FBI agent scrambling to destroy evidence in one of the most important murder cases in history? After all, two days after the assassination there was no way that Hosty could have been certain that Oswald wasn’t part of a conspiracy to kill the president, one that would later be prosecuted in court. Thus, Hosty had to know that despite Oswald’s death, Hosty was potentially engaging in obstruction of justice by destroying evidence that could later be pertinent in a conspiracy-to-murder case. Finally, I think that one of the most fascinating aspects to Oswald’s post-arrest statements was his statement “I’m a patsy.” Ordinarily, when a person is denying guilt, his reaction is simply one that is limited to denying guilt, such as: “I didn’t do it. I’m innocent. They have the wrong guy.” Oswald did more than that. He not only protested his innocence, he went a step further and suggested that someone or some people had set him up and were framing him. What would cause him to go off in that direction rather than simply claim that he was innocent of the crime? In his book Brothers, David Talbot writes, “Robert Kennedy had one other phone conversation on November 22 that sheds light on his thinking that afternoon. He spoke to Enrique ‘Harry’ Ruiz-Williams, a Bay of Pigs veteran who was his closest associate in the Cuban exile community. Kennedy stunned his friend by telling him point-blank, ‘One of your guys did it.’” Some 45 years after the JFK assassination, one cannot help but wonder whether Robert Kennedy was right. October 16, 2009 Jacob Hornberger [send him mail] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

AN ASIA TIMES EXCLUSIVE Al-Qaeda's guerrilla chief lays out strategy By Syed Saleem Shahzad October 15, 2009 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ15Df03.html ANGORADA, South Waziristan, at the crossroads with Afghanistan - A high-level meeting on October 9 at the presidential palace between Pakistan's civil and military leaders endorsed a military operation against the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda in the South Waziristan tribal area - termed by analysts as the mother of all regional conflicts. At the same time, al-Qaeda is implementing its game plan in the South Asian war theater as a part of its broader campaign against American global hegemony that began with the attacks in the United States of September 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda's target remains the United States and its allies, such as Europe, Israel and India, and it does not envisage diluting this strategy by embracing Muslim resistances on narrow parameters. In this context, militant activity in Pakistan is seen as a complexity rather than as a part of al-Qaeda's strategy. [To read the entire article, click on the link below] http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ15Df03.html

Did The CIA Have More Motive than Oswald? by Jacob G. Hornberger October 13, 2009 http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2009-10-13.asp For the life of me, I still don’t understand what Lee Harvey Oswald’s motive was for killing President John F. Kennedy. The lone-assassin theorists say that he was a lonely and disgruntled communist sympathizer who sought glory and fame for killing someone as powerful as the president of the United States. But if that’s the case, why would Oswald deny that he killed the president? Why would he claim that he was “a patsy,” i.e., someone who had been set up to take the fall? Why wouldn’t he proudly admit that he had killed the president of the United States? If he were seeking glory and fame, how would that be achieved through a successful denial of having committed the act? Moreover, if Oswald intended to deny commission of the offense, I’ve never understood why he would leave such an easy trail behind him, such as the purchase receipt for the Carcano rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository. If he was going to deny killing the president, wouldn’t he have been better off simply going to a gun shop and purchasing a rifle with cash? There were no background checks back then. I’m no expert on the Kennedy assassination but it seems to me that many of the things that people point to in support of Oswald’s guilt are also consistent with his having served in a deep undercover role for the CIA or other U.S. intelligence, as many people have alleged. In fact, early on there were assertions that Oswald was a federal undercover agent. According to a biographical sketch of Waggoner Carr, the Texas Attorney General who led the investigation in Texas into the assassination and worked with the Warren Commission, “Carr testified that Lee Harvey Oswald was working as an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was receiving $200 a month from September 1962 until his death in November, 1963. However, the Warren Commission preferred to believe J. Edgar Hoover, who denied Carr’s affirmations.” Yet, the problem is that Hoover could be expected to lie about such an association and thus, his denial is meaningless. Much has been made about Oswald’s communist sympathies, including his defection to the Soviet Union and his affiliation with a group called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Yet, those actions are entirely consistent with being a CIA undercover agent. For one thing, Oswald was a Marine. Most people who join the Marines are patriotic individuals who have the utmost loyalty to their government. How likely is it that a person who hates America is going to join the U.S. Marine Corps? Not very likely at all. In fact, wouldn’t the Marines be a likely place that the CIA would do recruiting? Many people point to Oswald’s dysfunctional behavior, including his propensity for violence, citing the fact that he beat his wife. But the problem is that the CIA has a history of attracting dysfunctional people to work there, including alcoholics and people who have a propensity for violence. Indeed, what better types of people to assassinate and torture than dysfunctional people with a propensity for violence? The thing that I have long found mystifying is the U.S. government’s reaction to Oswald when he returned from the Soviet Union. Did they arrest and indict the guy? Did they even subpoena him to appear before a federal grand jury? Did they harass him? No, none of the above. Don’t forget that Oswald was a former Marine who had security clearance and had worked at a military base in Japan where the super-secret U-2 spy plane was based. He was also a man who purportedly defected to the Soviet Union, supposedly tried to give up his U.S. citizenship, and presumably was willing to divulge all the secret information that he had acquired as a Marine to the Soviet communists, who were a much bigger threat to the United States during the Cold War than the terrorists are today. Yet, U.S. officials didn’t lay a hand on him when he returned to the United States. Compare that treatment to how they treated, for example, John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban. How come they didn’t subject Oswald, whose case was much more egregious than Lindh’s, to the same treatment? Moreover, I’ve never understood how Oswald was able to learn the Russian language so well. It’s not easy to teach one’s self a foreign language, especially one as difficult as Russian. It’s even more difficult when one has a full-time job, which Oswald had in the Marines. He certainly couldn’t have afforded a private tutor. Since he obviously learned Russian while he was in the military, how was that accomplished? Did the government provide the language training and, if so, why? What would have been the CIA’s motive in developing Oswald as a deep undercover operative posing as a communist sympathizer? Well, don’t forget it was during the Kennedy administration that the CIA was in partnership with the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro. Since the CIA was developing such weird assassination schemes as poison pens and infected scuba suits to kill Castro, it doesn’t seem beyond the pale that they would also consider sneaking a trained assassin with communist credentials into the country to get rid of the communist leader. Of course, the fact that Oswald might have been operating deep undercover doesn’t negate the possibility that he did in fact assassinate Kennedy or participate in a conspiracy to kill the president. If such were the case, the motive for denying commission of the offense would be stronger, along with the CIA’s denial of Oswald’s employment with the agency. Of course, there are those who claim that it is inconceivable that the CIA, being the patriotic agency it is, would ever have participated in such a dastardly scheme. Last Sunday, October 11, the New York Times published a book review detailing the history of Ramparts magazine, a leftist publication that was revealing in the 1960s some of the bad things that the CIA was engaged in. What I found fascinating was the CIA’s response: “Outraged, the C.I.A. retaliated with a secret investigation of Ramparts’ staff and investors in hopes of uncovering foreign influence, but it found nothing…. The agency fought back with even more snooping — clearly illegal — as it ‘investigated’ 127 writers and researchers and 200 other Americans connected to the magazine.” So, the CIA was clearly not above retaliating against Americans who went after the CIA and was clearly not above breaking the law to do it. Now, consider the threat issued by President John F. Kennedy to “tear the CIA into a million pieces.” That threat was issued after Kennedy had fired CIA Director Allen Dulles, which occurred after Kennedy had supposedly betrayed the CIA by refusing to provide air support for the CIA-directed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, whose aim was to kill Castro or oust him from power. Let’s not forget, also, that the CIA was not above using ruthless means against foreign presidents, including assassination. Guatemala (coup), Iran (coup), Cuba (invasion and assassination attempts), and Vietnam (coup and assassination) come to mind, to mention a few. “But they would never have done bad things to an American?” Oh? What about Project MK-ULTRA, the nasty and infamous mind-control project in which CIA officials conspired to employ LSD experiments against unsuspecting Americans? “But they never would have employed their assassination talents or their partnership with Mafia assassins against an American president.” Maybe, maybe not. But let’s not forget that the CIA sees itself as the ultimate, permanent guardian of U.S. national security. What if it concluded that a young, inexperienced president himself was jeopardizing the national security of our country by establishing secret contacts with communist leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, by plans to surrender Vietnam to the communists by withdrawing U.S. troops, just as he had surrendered Cuba to the communists, by philandering with a Mafia girlfriend, a Hollywood starlet, and even a wife of a CIA agent, and by threatening to destroy the CIA, America’s loyal and permanent guardian of security and liberty? Would the CIA simply stand by and refuse to protect America from such a threat, even while it was doing everything it could to protect U.S. national security abroad with assassinations and coups? For an excellent discussion of that question, see JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass. Most likely though, we’ll never know have a definitive answer to that question because if the CIA did participate in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, there is virtually no possibility that such a crime would have ever been uncovered without a hard-driving, honest, independent federal prosecutor with grand-jury subpoena powers charged with the specific task of targeting CIA officials for investigation and possible prosecution for murder. And we all know that the CIA and its supporters would never have permitted that to happen. Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.

Robert Merritt received two telephone calls on Monday, September 28, from a high police officer in the Intelligence Division of the New York City Police Department. In the first call the officer said he had been instructed by NYPD, which was acting upon orders from undisclosed government officials in Washington, D.C., to ask Merritt not to publish his book titled, "Watergate Exposed: How the Watergate Burglars Were Set-up" of which I am co-author. In the second follow-up call the police officer made reference to what he had read about the book on the EducationForum and acknowledged that the subject matter was so detailed and credible that there was no way that the book's eventual publication could be blocked. Did he give a reason why the book shouldn't be published? Stranger yet the second call....one cop - playing 'bad cop / good cop'....I guess you've not heard the last of him.... The officer from NYPD Intelligence Division, whose name I have, called Robert Merritt again yesterday. He disclosed that he had a Military Intelligence background. He said that he had thoroughly investigated Merritt's record as a confidential informant that spanned over 30 years and found him extremely credible. He told Merritt that Merritt's story about Watergate deserved to be told and that if it were told in book form it would cause a number of investigations to be launched. He confided to Merritt that he was worried about Merritt's personal safety as he could get himself killed for writing about what he knew. He also said that I should be worried about my safety but to a lesser degree. The same officer from NYPD Intelligence Division, whose initials are P.C., telephoned Robert Merritt again today, October 7, 2009. This time, according to Merritt, it appeared that the officer was reading from a prepared script. He was agressive and theatening. No more Mr. Nice Guy. He claimed that publication of Merritt's book would lead to a number of investigations and that the public uproar would be defeafening. He attempted to warn Merritt that both he and I could face forceful retaliation, Merritt more than myself, and that death was an option under consideration by those powerful parties who oppose the book's publication. In any event, Merritt and I are taking precautions that if something were to happen to both of us, our manuscript, "Watergate Exposed", would be published on the Internet and copies of the manuscipt would be sent to multiple sources for distribution. In short, one way or another the truth about Watergate will be told in book form or in another form and all efforts to suppress it will ultimately fail.