Douglas Caddy
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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.”
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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
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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
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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:
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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.
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I think this is a very important story, though it is ten years too late.
It's a shame that the New York Times didn't think Morley vs. CIA was that significant a decade ago, but now all of a sudden, or is it finally, important?
And many thanks to Scott Shane for writing this and getting it published in the NYT. A feather in his cap.
Particularly telling are the quotes attributed to Holland and Posner, last gasps of those fighting for continued secrecy, secret networks, covert operations, hidden history and fake records, all of which they take pride in defending and perpetuating.
For them however, the game will soon be up, and there will be no more secrets.
It's the end of the Secret Era, and pretty soon, everybody will know, or at least have the capability of knowing pretty much anything. And who killed JFK will be peanuts.
When Allen Dulles, William Harvey, JJ Angleton and Helms wrote memos, do you think they ever thought for one second that these documents would ever see the light of day and be read by the general public? No they didn't, and now that we have what the JFK Act released, and see how these records lead us to others, there is no end in sight Max.
And Dealey Plaza is connected to Paperclip, and the double-agents, and the Mafia and whether or not Obama is to live out his term of office, and Posner is wrong when he says that the secret records won't support the truth of what really happened, and that the real assassins didn't leave a paper trail.
They all leave trails, it's just that Holland and Posner are all about closing doors and avenues of interest and lines of inquiry and aren't really concerned about how JFK was really murdered, and who killed him, because its not in their interest to find out.
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.”
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.
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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
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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]
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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.
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Whenever a whistle-blower emerges publicly with explosive knowledge, vested forces that do not want this information known invariably mount a campaign to undermine his credibility. This appears to be the case with Robert Merritt's attempt to tell what he knows about Watergate and other government scandals in a book about his life. A COINTELPRO campaign been mounted in recent weeks that alleges Robert Merritt died years ago and that the person behind the book project is a fraud and impersonator. The purpose of this smear by officials of certain government agencies is to prevent the book from being published and to suppress the valuable information and evidence possessed by Robert Merritt.
In my capacity as original attorney for the Watergate Seven defendants, I wish to take this opportunity to quash such rumors by asserting that I have thoroughly investigated Robert Merritt's background and can attest that he is who he says he is – a key figure in the Watergate scandal and someone who has had a working relationship with law enforcement entities beginning in 1970.
I have collaborated with Robert Merritt, also known as Tony Merritt, over the past year in the preparation of his book. He obtained voluminous documents from the U.S. National Achieves and other government sources that support the verbal information he has given me. More relevant are personal papers and documents he has provided me that establish beyond any reasonable doubt that he is who he says he is. Among these are his birth certificate, social security card, marriage certificate, his government finger print record, and undercover Confidential Informant Identification card.
On a personal note, Robert Merritt recounted to me not long ago an incident that occurred just a few days after the Watergate arrests involving Carl Schoffler, the arresting police officer of the Watergate burglars, that took place while I was walking my dog near my residence in Washington, D.C. Shoffler drove up to within a few feet of where I was and glared at me, obviously attempting to harass or intimate me. I remember that there was one other person in Schoffler's car – and it turns out it was Robert Merritt, who has described this event in detail to me. Only Schoffler and Robert Merritt could have known of this incident, which on its face appears trivial, but isn't, since such action by the police against an attorney representing defendants in a criminal case violates all codes of official conduct.
We are a few short weeks away from finishing the book's manuscript, which will quickly dispel any doubt about Robert Merritt's credibility and will re-write the history of the origins of Watergate. It will show that Robert Merritt, in his capacity as confidential informant, informed Shoffler of the planned break-in at Watergate two weeks before the arrests at Watergate on June 17, 1972. It will also show that Shoffler subsequently devised the perfect set-up, a unique form of entrapment of those arrested that ultimately led to the downfall of President Nixon.
Nothing, not even the current COINTELPRO campaign, is going to prevent Robert Merritt's story from being publicly told.
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.
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Whenever a whistle-blower emerges publicly with explosive knowledge, vested forces that do not want this information known invariably mount a campaign to undermine his credibility. This appears to be the case with Robert Merritt's attempt to tell what he knows about Watergate and other government scandals in a book about his life. A COINTELPRO campaign been mounted in recent weeks that alleges Robert Merritt died years ago and that the person behind the book project is a fraud and impersonator. The purpose of this smear by officials of certain government agencies is to prevent the book from being published and to suppress the valuable information and evidence possessed by Robert Merritt.
In my capacity as original attorney for the Watergate Seven defendants, I wish to take this opportunity to quash such rumors by asserting that I have thoroughly investigated Robert Merritt's background and can attest that he is who he says he is – a key figure in the Watergate scandal and someone who has had a working relationship with law enforcement entities beginning in 1970.
I have collaborated with Robert Merritt, also known as Tony Merritt, over the past year in the preparation of his book. He obtained voluminous documents from the U.S. National Achieves and other government sources that support the verbal information he has given me. More relevant are personal papers and documents he has provided me that establish beyond any reasonable doubt that he is who he says he is. Among these are his birth certificate, social security card, marriage certificate, his government finger print record, and undercover Confidential Informant Identification card.
On a personal note, Robert Merritt recounted to me not long ago an incident that occurred just a few days after the Watergate arrests involving Carl Schoffler, the arresting police officer of the Watergate burglars, that took place while I was walking my dog near my residence in Washington, D.C. Shoffler drove up to within a few feet of where I was and glared at me, obviously attempting to harass or intimate me. I remember that there was one other person in Schoffler's car – and it turns out it was Robert Merritt, who has described this event in detail to me. Only Schoffler and Robert Merritt could have known of this incident, which on its face appears trivial, but isn't, since such action by the police against an attorney representing defendants in a criminal case violates all codes of official conduct.
We are a few short weeks away from finishing the book's manuscript, which will quickly dispel any doubt about Robert Merritt's credibility and will re-write the history of the origins of Watergate. It will show that Robert Merritt, in his capacity as confidential informant, informed Shoffler of the planned break-in at Watergate two weeks before the arrests at Watergate on June 17, 1972. It will also show that Shoffler subsequently devised the perfect set-up, a unique form of entrapment of those arrested that ultimately led to the downfall of President Nixon.
Nothing, not even the current COINTELPRO campaign, is going to prevent Robert Merritt's story from being publicly told.
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.
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Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?
The gagged whistleblower goes on the record.
Sibel Edmonds and Philip Giraldi
Published in The American Conservative
November 2009
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/nov/01/00006/
Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She went to work as a Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI five days after 9/11. Part of her job was to translate and transcribe recordings of conversations between suspected Turkish intelligence agents and their American contacts. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after she raised concerns that one of the translators in her section was a member of a Turkish organization that was under investigation for bribing senior government officials and members of Congress, drug trafficking, illegal weapons sales, money laundering, and nuclear proliferation. She appealed her termination, but was more alarmed that no effort was being made to address the corruption that she had been monitoring.
A Department of Justice inspector general’s report called Edmonds’s allegations “credible,” “serious,” and “warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI.” Ranking Senate Judiciary Committee members Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have backed her publicly. “60 Minutes” launched an investigation of her claims and found them believable. No one has ever disproved any of Edmonds’s revelations, which she says can be verified by FBI investigative files.
John Ashcroft’s Justice Department confirmed Edmonds’s veracity in a backhanded way by twice invoking the dubious State Secrets Privilege so she could not tell what she knows. The ACLU has called her “the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America.”
But on Aug. 8, she was finally able to testify under oath in a court case filed in Ohio and agreed to an interview with The American Conservative based on that testimony. What follows is her own account of what some consider the most incredible tale of corruption and influence peddling in recent times. As Sibel herself puts it, “If this were written up as a novel, no one would believe it.”
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PHILIP GIRALDI: We were very interested to learn of your four-hour deposition in the case involving allegations that Congresswoman Jean Schmidt accepted money from the Turkish government in return for political favors. You provided many names and details for the first time on the record and swore an oath confirming that the deposition was true.
Basically, you map out a corruption scheme involving U.S. government employees and members of Congress and agents of foreign governments. These agents were able to obtain information that was either used directly by those foreign governments or sold to third parties, with the proceeds often used as bribes to breed further corruption. Let’s start with the first government official you identified, Marc Grossman, then the third highest-ranking official at the State Department.
SIBEL EDMONDS: During my work with the FBI, one of the major operational files that I was transcribing and translating started in late 1996 and continued until 2002, when I left the Bureau. Because the FBI had had no Turkish translators, these files were archived, but were considered to be very important operations. As part of the background, I was briefed about why these operations had been initiated and who the targets were.
Grossman became a person of interest early on in the investigative file while he was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey [1994-97], when he became personally involved with operatives both from the Turkish government and from suspected criminal groups. He also had suspicious contact with a number of official and non-official Israelis. Grossman was removed from Turkey short of tour during a scandal referred to as “Susurluk” by the media. It involved a number of high-level criminals as well as senior army and intelligence officers with whom he had been in contact.
Another individual who was working for Grossman, Air Force Major Douglas Dickerson, was also removed from Turkey and sent to Germany. After he and his Turkish wife Can returned to the U.S., he went to work for Douglas Feith and she was hired as an FBI Turkish translator. My complaints about her connection to Turkish lobbying groups led to my eventual firing.
Grossman and Dickerson had to leave the country because a big investigation had started in Turkey. Special prosecutors were appointed, and the case was headlined in England, Germany, Italy, and in some of the Balkan countries because the criminal groups were found to be active in all those places. A leading figure in the scandal, Mehmet Eymür, led a major paramilitary group for the Turkish intelligence service. To keep him from testifying, Eymür was sent by the Turkish government to the United States, where he worked for eight months as head of intelligence at the Turkish Embassy in Washington. He later became a U.S. citizen and now lives in McLean, Virginia. The central figure in this scandal was Abdullah Catli. In 1989, while “most wanted” by Interpol, he came to the U.S., was granted residency, and settled in Chicago, where he continued to conduct his operations until 1996.
GIRALDI: So Grossman at this point comes back to the United States. He’s rewarded with the third-highest position at the State Department, and he allegedly uses this position to do favors for “Turkish interests”—both for the Turkish government and for possible criminal interests. Sometimes, the two converge. The FBI is aware of his activities and is listening to his phone calls. When someone who is Turkish calls Grossman, the FBI monitors that individual’s phone calls, and when the Turk calls a friend who is a Pakistani or an Egyptian or a Saudi, they monitor all those contacts, widening the net.
EDMONDS: Correct.
GIRALDI: And Grossman received money as a result. In one case, you said that a State Department colleague went to pick up a bag of money…
EDMONDS: $14,000
GIRALDI: What kind of information was Grossman giving to foreign countries? Did he give assistance to foreign individuals penetrating U.S. government labs and defense installations as has been reported? It’s also been reported that he was the conduit to a group of congressmen who become, in a sense, the targets to be recruited as “agents of influence.”
EDMONDS: Yes, that’s correct. Grossman assisted his Turkish and Israeli contacts directly, and he also facilitated access to members of Congress who might be inclined to help for reasons of their own or could be bribed into cooperation. The top person obtaining classified information was Congressman Tom Lantos. A Lantos associate, Alan Makovsky worked very closely with Dr. Sabri Sayari in Georgetown University, who is widely believed to be a Turkish spy. Lantos would give Makovsky highly classified policy-related documents obtained during defense briefings for passage to Israel because Makovsky was also working for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
GIRALDI: Makovsky is now working for the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, a pro-Israeli think tank.
EDMONDS: Yes. Lantos was at the time probably the most outspoken supporter of Israel in Congress. AIPAC would take out the information from Lantos that was relevant to Israel, and they would give the rest of it to their Turkish associates. The Turks would go through the leftovers, take what they wanted, and then try to sell the rest. If there were something relevant to Pakistan, they would contact the ISI officer at the embassy and say, “We’ve got this and this, let’s sit down and talk.” And then they would sell it to the Pakistanis.
GIRALDI: ISI—Pakistani intelligence—has been linked to the Pakistani nuclear proliferation program as well as to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
So the FBI was monitoring these connections going from a congressman to a congressman’s assistant to a foreign individual who is connected with intelligence to other intelligence people who are located at different embassies in Washington. And all of this information is in an FBI file somewhere?
EDMONDS: Two sets of FBI files, but the AIPAC-related files and the Turkish files ended up converging in one. The FBI agents believed that they were looking at the same operation. It didn’t start with AIPAC originally. It started with the Israeli Embassy. The original targets were intelligence officers under diplomatic cover in the Turkish Embassy and the Israeli Embassy. It was those contacts that led to the American Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations and then to AIPAC fronting for the Israelis. It moved forward from there.
GIRALDI: So the FBI was monitoring people from the Israeli Embassy and the Turkish Embassy and one, might presume, the Pakistani Embassy as well?
EDMONDS: They were the secondary target. They got leftovers from the Turks and Israelis. The FBI would intercept communications to try to identify who the diplomatic target’s intelligence chief was, but then, in addition to that, there are individuals there, maybe the military attaché, who had their own contacts who were operating independently of others in the embassy.
GIRALDI: So the network starts with a person like Grossman in the State Department providing information that enables Turkish and Israeli intelligence officers to have access to people in Congress, who then provide classified information that winds up in the foreign embassies?
EDMONDS: Absolutely. And we also had Pentagon officials doing the same thing. We were looking at Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. They had a list of individuals in the Pentagon broken down by access to certain types of information. Some of them would be policy related, some of them would be weapons-technology related, some of them would be nuclear-related. Perle and Feith would provide the names of those Americans, officials in the Pentagon, to Grossman, together with highly sensitive personal information: this person is a closet gay; this person has a chronic gambling issue; this person is an alcoholic. The files on the American targets would contain things like the size of their mortgages or whether they were going through divorces. One Air Force major I remember was going through a really nasty divorce and a child custody fight. They detailed all different kinds of vulnerabilities.
GIRALDI: So they had access to their personnel files and also their security files and were illegally accessing this kind of information to give to foreign agents who exploited the vulnerabilities of these people to recruit them as sources of information?
EDMONDS: Yes. Some of those individuals on the list were also working for the RAND Corporation. RAND ended up becoming one of the prime targets for these foreign agents.
GIRALDI: RAND does highly classified research for the U.S. government. So they were setting up these people for recruitment as agents or as agents of influence?
EDMONDS: Yes, and the RAND sources would be paid peanuts compared to what the information was worth when it was sold if it was not immediately useful for Turkey or Israel. They also had sources who were working in some midwestern Air Force bases. The sources would provide the information on CD’s and DVD’s. In one case, for example, a Turkish military attaché got the disc and discovered that it was something really important, so he offered it to the Pakistani ISI person at the embassy, but the price was too high. Then a Turkish contact in Chicago said he knew two Saudi businessmen in Detroit who would be very interested in this information, and they would pay the price. So the Turkish military attaché flew to Detroit with his assistant to make the sale.
GIRALDI: We know Grossman was receiving money for services.
EDMONDS: Yes. Sometimes he would give money to the people who were working with him, identified in phone calls on a first-name basis, whether it’s a John or a Joe. He also took care of some other people, including his contact at the New York Times. Grossman would brag, “We just fax to our people at the New York Times. They print it under their names.”
GIRALDI: Did Feith and Perle receive any money that you know of?
EDMONDS: No.
GIRALDI: So they were doing favors for other reasons. Both Feith and Perle were lobbyists for Turkey and also were involved with Israel on defense contracts, including some for Northrop Grumman, which Feith represented in Israel.
EDMONDS: They had arrangements with various companies, some of them members of the American Turkish Council. They had arrangements with Kissinger’s group, with Northrop Grumman, with former secretary of state James Baker’s group, and also with former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft.
The monitoring of the Turks picked up contacts with Feith, Wolfowitz, and Perle in the summer of 2001, four months before 9/11. They were discussing with the Turkish ambassador in Washington an arrangement whereby the U.S. would invade Iraq and divide the country. The UK would take the south, the rest would go to the U.S. They were negotiating what Turkey required in exchange for allowing an attack from Turkish soil. The Turks were very supportive, but wanted a three-part division of Iraq to include their own occupation of the Kurdish region. The three Defense Department officials said that would be more than they could agree to, but they continued daily communications to the ambassador and his defense attaché in an attempt to convince them to help.
Meanwhile Scowcroft, who was also the chairman of the American Turkish Council, Baker, Richard Armitage, and Grossman began negotiating separately for a possible Turkish protectorate. Nothing was decided, and then 9/11 took place.
Scowcroft was all for invading Iraq in 2001 and even wrote a paper for the Pentagon explaining why the Turkish northern front would be essential. I know Scowcroft came off as a hero to some for saying he was against the war, but he was very much for it until his client’s conditions were not met by the Bush administration.
GIRALDI: Armitage was deputy secretary of state at the time Scowcroft and Baker were running their own consulting firms that were doing business with Turkey. Grossman had just become undersecretary, third in the State hierarchy behind Armitage.
You’ve previouly alluded to efforts by Grossman, as well as high-ranking officials at the Pentagon, to place Ph.D. students. Can you describe that in more detail?
EDMONDS: The seeding operation started before Marc Grossman arrived at the State Department. The Turkish agents had a network of Turkish professors in various universities with access to government information. Their top source was a Turkish-born professor of nuclear physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was useful because MIT would place a bunch of Ph.D. or graduate-level students in various nuclear facilities like Sandia or Los Alamos, and some of them were able to work for the Air Force. He would provide the list of Ph.D. students who should get these positions. In some cases, the Turkish military attaché would ask that certain students be placed in important positions. And they were not necessarily all Turkish, but the ones they selected had struck deals with the Turkish agents to provide information in return for money. If for some reason they had difficulty getting a secuity clearance, Grossman would ensure that the State Department would arrange to clear them.
In exchange for the information that these students would provide, they would be paid $4,000 or $5,000. And the information that was sold to the two Saudis in Detroit went for something like $350,000 or $400,000.
GIRALDI: This corruption wasn’t confined to the State Department and the Pentagon—it infected Congress as well. You’ve named people like former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, now a registered agent of the Turkish government. In your deposition, you describe the process of breaking foreign-originated contributions into small units, $200 or less, so that the source didn’t have to be reported. Was this the primary means of influencing congressmen, or did foreign agents exploit vulnerabilities to get what they wanted using something like blackmail?
EDMONDS: In early 1997, because of the information that the FBI was getting on the Turkish diplomatic community, the Justice Department had already started to investigate several Republican congressmen. The number-one congressman involved with the Turkish community, both in terms of providing information and doing favors, was Bob Livingston. Number-two after him was Dan Burton, and then he became number-one until Hastert became the speaker of the House. Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, was briefed on the investigations, and since they were Republicans, she authorized that they be continued.
Well, as the FBI developed more information, Tom Lantos was added to this list, and then they got a lot on Douglas Feith and Richard Perle and Marc Grossman. At this point, the Justice Department said they wanted the FBI to only focus on Congress, leaving the executive branch people out of it. But the FBI agents involved wanted to continue pursuing Perle and Feith because the Israeli Embassy was also connected. Then the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted, and everything was placed on the back burner.
But some of the agents continued to investigate the congressional connection. In 1999, they wiretapped the congressmen directly. (Prior to that point they were getting all their information secondhand through FISA, as their primary targets were foreigners.) The questionably legal wiretap gave the perfect excuse to the Justice Department. As soon as they found out, they refused permission to monitor the congressmen and Grossman as primary targets. But the inquiry was kept alive in Chicago because the FBI office there was pursuing its own investigation. The epicenter of a lot of the foreign espionage activity was Chicago.
GIRALDI: So the investigation stopped in Washington, but continued in Chicago?
EDMONDS: Yes, and in 2000, another representative was added to the list, Jan Schakowsky, the Democratic congresswoman from Illinois. Turkish agents started gathering information on her, and they found out that she was bisexual. So a Turkish agent struck up a relationship with her. When Jan Schakowsky’s mother died, the Turkish woman went to the funeral, hoping to exploit her vulnerability. They later were intimate in Schakowsky’s townhouse, which had been set up with recording devices and hidden cameras. They needed Schakowsky and her husband Robert Creamer to perform certain illegal operational facilitations for them in Illinois. They already had Hastert, the mayor, and several other Illinois state senators involved. I don’t know if Congresswoman Schakowsky ever was actually blackmailed or did anything for the Turkish woman.
GIRALDI: So we have a pattern of corruption starting with government officials providing information to foreigners and helping them make contact with other Americans who had valuable information. Some of these officials, like Marc Grossman, were receiving money directly. Others were receiving business favors: Pentagon associates like Doug Feith and Richard Perle had interests in Israel and Turkey. The stolen information was being sold, and the money that was being generated was used to corrupt certain congressmen to influence policy and provide still more information—in many cases information related to nuclear technology.
EDMONDS: As well as weapons technology, conventional weapons technology, and Pentagon policy-related information.
GIRALDI: You also have information on al-Qaeda, specifically al-Qaeda in Central Asia and Bosnia. You were privy to conversations that suggested the CIA was supporting al-Qaeda in central Asia and the Balkans, training people to get money, get weapons, and this contact continued until 9/11…
EDMONDS: I don’t know if it was CIA. There were certain forces in the U.S. government who worked with the Turkish paramilitary groups, including Abdullah Çatli’s group, Fethullah Gülen.
GIRALDI: Well, that could be either Joint Special Operations Command or CIA.
EDMONDS: Maybe in a lot of cases when they said State Department, they meant CIA?
GIRALDI: When they said State Department, they probably meant CIA.
EDMONDS: Okay. So these conversations, between 1997 and 2001, had to do with a Central Asia operation that involved bin Laden. Not once did anybody use the word “al-Qaeda.” It was always “mujahideen,” always “bin Laden” and, in fact, not “bin Laden” but “bin Ladens” plural. There were several bin Ladens who were going on private jets to Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. The Turkish ambassador in Azerbaijan worked with them.
There were bin Ladens, with the help of Pakistanis or Saudis, under our management. Marc Grossman was leading it, 100 percent, bringing people from East Turkestan into Kyrgyzstan, from Kyrgyzstan to Azerbaijan, from Azerbaijan some of them were being channeled to Chechnya, some of them were being channeled to Bosnia. From Turkey, they were putting all these bin Ladens on NATO planes. People and weapons went one way, drugs came back.
GIRALDI: Was the U.S. government aware of this circular deal?
EDMONDS: 100 percent. A lot of the drugs were going to Belgium with NATO planes. After that, they went to the UK, and a lot came to the U.S. via military planes to distribution centers in Chicago and Paterson, New Jersey. Turkish diplomats who would never be searched were coming with suitcases of heroin.
GIRALDI: And, of course, none of this has been investigated. What do you think the chances are that the Obama administration will try to end this criminal activity?
EDMONDS: Well, even during Obama’s presidential campaign, I did not buy into his slogan of “change” being promoted by the media and, unfortunately, by the naïve blogosphere. First of all, Obama’s record as a senator, short as it was, spoke clearly. For all those changes that he was promising, he had done nothing. In fact, he had taken the opposite position, whether it was regarding the NSA’s wiretapping or the issue of national-security whistleblowers. We whistleblowers had written to his Senate office. He never responded, even though he was on the relevant committees.
As soon as Obama became president, he showed us that the State Secrets Privilege was going to continue to be a tool of choice. It’s an arcane executive privilege to cover up wrongdoing—in many cases, criminal activities. And the Obama administration has not only defended using the State Secrets Privilege, it has been trying to take it even further than the previous terrible administration by maintaining that the U.S. government has sovereign immunity. This is Obama’s change: his administration seems to think it doesn’t even have to invoke state secrets as our leaders are emperors who possess this sovereign immunity. This is not the kind of language that anybody in a democracy would use.
The other thing I noticed is how Chicago, with its culture of political corruption, is central to the new administration. When I saw that Obama’s choice of chief of staff was Rahm Emanuel, knowing his relationship with Mayor Richard Daley and with the Hastert crowd, I knew we were not going to see positive changes. Changes possibly, but changes for the worse. It was no coincidence that the Turkish criminal entity’s operation centered on Chicago.
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Sibel Edmonds is a former FBI translator and the founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. Philip Giraldi is a former CIA officer and The American Conservative’s Deep Background columnist.
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From The Times (U.K.)
September 30, 2009
Gore Vidal: ‘We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US’
The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ‘rotting away’ — and don’t expect Barack Obama to save it
Tim Teeman
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_an...icle6854221.ece
A conversation with Gore Vidal unfolds at his pace. He answers questions imperiously, occasionally playfully, with a piercing, lethal dryness. He is 83 and in a wheelchair (a result of hypothermia suffered in the war, his left knee is made of titanium). But he can walk (“Of course I can”) and after a recent performance of Mother Courage at London’s National Theatre he stood to deliver an anti-war speech to the audience.
How was his friend Fiona Shaw in the title role? “Very good.” Where did they meet? Silence. The US? “Well, it wasn’t Russia.” What’s he writing at the moment? “It’s a little boring to talk about. Most writers seem to do little else but talk about themselves and their work, in majestic terms.” He means self-glorifying? “You’ve stumbled on the phrase,” he says, regally enough. “Continue to use it.”
Vidal is sitting in the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, where he has been coming to stay for 60 years. He is wearing a brown suit jacket, brown jumper, tracksuit bottoms; his white hair twirled into a Tintin-esque quiff and with his hooded eyes, delicate yet craggy features and arch expression, he looks like Quentin Crisp, but accessorised with a low, lugubrious growl rather than camp lisp.
He points to an apartment opposite the hotel where Churchill stayed during the Second World War, as Downing Street was “getting hammered by the Nazis. The crowds would cheer him from the street, he knew great PR.” In a flash, this memory reminds you of the swathe of history Vidal has experienced with great intimacy: he was friends with JFK, fought in the war, his father Gene, an Olympic decathlete and aeronautics teacher, founded TWA among other airlines and had a relationship with Amelia Earhart. (Vidal first flew and landed a plane when he was 10.) He was a screenwriter for MGM in the dying days of the studio system, toyed with being a politician, he has written 24 novels and is hailed as one of the world’s greatest essayists.
Related Links
I knew JFK, and believe me Obama’s the better leader
Then and Now
He has crossed every boundary, I say. “Crashed many barriers,” he corrects me.
Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.” America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”
His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.” He retains some optimism about Obama “because he doesn’t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a xxxx. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.”
Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”
Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.
Vidal now believes, as he did originally, Clinton would be the better president. “Hillary knows more about the world and what to do with the generals. History has proven when the girls get involved, they’re good at it. Elizabeth I knew Raleigh would be a good man to give a ship to.”The Republicans will win the next election, Vidal believes; though for him there is little difference between the parties. “Remember the coup d’etat of 2000 when the Supreme Court fixed the selection, not election, of the stupidest man in the country, Mr Bush.”
Vidal says forcefully that he wished he’d never moved back to the US to live in Hollywood, from his clifftop home in Ravello, Italy, in 2000. His partner of 53 years, Howard Austen, who died in 2003, collated a lifetime’s-span of pictures of Vidal, for a new book out this autumn, Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare (an oddly clunky title). The cover shows what a beautiful young man Vidal was, although his stare is as hawkish as it is today.
He observes presidential office-holders balefully. “The only one I knew well was Kennedy, but he didn’t impress me as a good president. It’s like asking, ‘What do I think of my brother?’ It’s complicated. I’d known him all my life and I liked him to the end, but he wrecked his chances with the Bay of Pigs and Suez crises, and because everyone was so keen to elect Bobby once Jack had gone, lies started to be told about him — that he was the greatest and the King of Camelot.”
Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”
Vidal adds menacingly: “Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”
While materially comfortable, Vidal’s was not a happy childhood. Of his actress and socialite mother Nina, he says: “Give her a glass of vodka and she was as tame as could be. Growing up is going to be difficult if the one person you hate is your mother. I felt trapped. I was close to my grandparents and my father was a saint.” His parents’ many remarriages means that even today he hasn’t met all his step-siblings.
He wrote his first novel, Williwaw, at 19. In 1948, he was blacklisted by the media after writing The City and the Pillar, one of the earliest novels to deal graphically with homosexual desire. “You’ll be amazed to know it is still going strong,” he says. The “JT” it is dedicated to is James “Jimmy” Trimble, Vidal’s first love and, he once said, the love of his life. “That was a slight exaggeration. I said it because there wasn’t any other. In the new book there are wonderful pictures of him from our schooldays. He was a great athlete.” Here his voice softens, and he looks emotional, briefly. “We were both abandoned in our dormitory at St Alban’s [boarding school]. He was killed at the Battle of Iwo Jima [in 1945] because of bad G2 [intelligence].”
Vidal says Trimble’s death didn’t affect him. “No, I was in danger of dying too. A dead man can’t grieve a dead man.” Has love been important to him? “Don’t make the error that schoolteacher idiots make by thinking that gay men’s relationships are like heterosexual ones. They’re not.” He “wouldn’t begin to comment” on how they are different.
In 1956 he was hired by MGM, collaborated on the screenplay for Ben Hur and continued to write novels, most notoriously Myra Breckenridge about a transsexual. It is his satires, essays and memoirs — Live From Golgotha, Palimpsest and most recently, Point to Point Navigation — which have fully rounded our vision of this thorny contrarian, whose originality springs simply, and naturally, from having deliberately unfixed allegiances and an enduring belief in an American republic and railing sadness at how that ideal has been corrupted.
Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims. “And I was torn, my grandfather [the Democrat Senator Thomas Gore] had bought Oklahoma into the Union.” McVeigh claimed he had done it as a protest against tyrannical government. The writer Edmund White took the correspondence as the basis for a play, Terre Haute (the jail McVeigh was incarcerated in before he was executed in 2001), imagining an encounter between the bomber and Vidal charged with desire.
“He’s a filthy, low writer,” Vidal says of White. “He likes to attack his betters, which means he has a big field to go after.” Had he wanted to meet McVeigh? “I am not in the business of meeting people,” Vidal says. “That play implies I am madly in love with McVeigh. I looked at his [White’s] writing and all he writes about is being a fag and how it’s the greatest thing on Earth. He thinks I’m another queen and I’m not. I’m more interested in the Constitution and McVeigh than the loving tryst he saw. It was vulgar fag-ism.”
Vidal says that he hates labels and has said he believes in homosexual acts rather than homosexual people. He claims his relationship with Austen was platonic (though they reputedly met at a legendary New York bath-house). He was once quoted as saying that he’d had sex with a 1,000 men by the time he was 25. It must have been a little strange for Austen, Vidal’s life companion, to source those pictures of Trimble, his first, perhaps only, love.
Vidal puts on a scornful, campy voice. “People ask [of he and Austen], ‘How did you live together so long?’ The only rule was no sex. They can’t believe that. That was when I realised I was dealing with a public too stupid by half. They can’t tell the difference between ‘The Sun rose in the East’ and ‘The Sun is made of yeast’.” Was sex important to Vidal? “It must have been yes.”
He is single now. “I’m not into partnerships,” he says dismissively. I don’t even know what it means.” He “couldn’t care less” about gay marriage. “Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.” You could have been the first gay president, I say. “No, I would have married and had nine children,” he replies quickly and seriously. “I don’t believe in these exclusive terms.”
Impaired mobility doesn’t bother him — he “rose like a miracle” on stage at the National — and he doesn’t dwell on mortality either. “Either you accept there is such a thing or you’re so dumb that you can’t grasp it.” Is he in good health? “No, of course not. I’m diabetic. It’s odd, I’ve never been fat and I don’t like candy, which most Americans are hooked on.”
There is a trace of thwarted ambition about him. “I would have liked to have been president, but I never had the money. I was a friend of the throne. The only time I envied Jack was when Joe [Kennedy, JFK’s father] was buying him his Senate seat, then the presidency. He didn’t know how lucky he was. Here’s a story I’ve never told. In 1960, after he had spent so much on the presidential campaign, Joe took all nine children to Palm Beach to lecture them. He was really angry. He said, ‘All you read about the Kennedy fortune is untrue. It’s non-existent. We’ve spent so much getting Jack elected and not one of you is living within your income’. They all sat there, shame-faced. Jack was whistling. He used to tap his teeth: they were big teeth, like a xylophone. Joe turned to Jack and he says, ‘Mr President, what’s the solution?’ Jack said, ‘The solution is simple. You all gotta work harder’.” Vidal guffaws heartily.
Hollywood living proved less fun. “If there was a social whirl, you can be sure I would not be part of it.” He does a fabulous impression of Katharine Hepburn complaining about playing the matriarch in Suddenly Last Summer, which he wrote. “I hate this script,” he recalls Hepburn saying . “I’m far too healthy a person to know people like this.” Vidal snorts. “She had Parkinson’s. She shook like a leper in the wind.”
I ask what he wants to do next. “My usual answer to ‘What am I proudest of?’ is my novels, but really I am most proud that, despite enormous temptation, I have never killed anybody and you don’t know how tempted I have been.”
That wasn’t my question, I say. “Well, given that I’m proudest that I haven’t killed anybody, I might be saving something up for someone.” A perfect line: we both laugh.
Is he happy? “What a question,” he sighs and then smiles mischievously. “I’ll respond with a quote from Aeschylus: ‘Call no man happy till he is dead’.”
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Whenever a whistle-blower emerges publicly with explosive knowledge, vested forces that do not want this information known invariably mount a campaign to undermine his credibility. This appears to be the case with Robert Merritt’s attempt to tell what he knows about Watergate and other government scandals in a book about his life. A COINTELPRO campaign been mounted in recent weeks that alleges Robert Merritt died years ago and that the person behind the book project is a fraud and impersonator. The purpose of this smear by officials of certain government agencies is to prevent the book from being published and to suppress the valuable information and evidence possessed by Robert Merritt.
In my capacity as original attorney for the Watergate Seven defendants, I wish to take this opportunity to quash such rumors by asserting that I have thoroughly investigated Robert Merritt’s background and can attest that he is who he says he is – a key figure in the Watergate scandal and someone who has had a working relationship with law enforcement entities beginning in 1970.
I have collaborated with Robert Merritt, also known as Tony Merritt, over the past year in the preparation of his book. He obtained voluminous documents from the U.S. National Achieves and other government sources that support the verbal information he has given me. More relevant are personal papers and documents he has provided me that establish beyond any reasonable doubt that he is who he says he is. Among these are his birth certificate, social security card, marriage certificate, his government finger print record, and undercover Confidential Informant Identification card.
On a personal note, Robert Merritt recounted to me not long ago an incident that occurred just a few days after the Watergate arrests involving Carl Schoffler, the arresting police officer of the Watergate burglars, that took place while I was walking my dog near my residence in Washington, D.C. Shoffler drove up to within a few feet of where I was and glared at me, obviously attempting to harass or intimate me. I remember that there was one other person in Schoffler’s car – and it turns out it was Robert Merritt, who has described this event in detail to me. Only Schoffler and Robert Merritt could have known of this incident, which on its face appears trivial, but isn’t, since such action by the police against an attorney representing defendants in a criminal case violates all codes of official conduct.
We are a few short weeks away from finishing the book’s manuscript, which will quickly dispel any doubt about Robert Merritt’s credibility and will re-write the history of the origins of Watergate. It will show that Robert Merritt, in his capacity as confidential informant, informed Shoffler of the planned break-in at Watergate two weeks before the arrests at Watergate on June 17, 1972. It will also show that Shoffler subsequently devised the perfect set-up, a unique form of entrapment of those arrested that ultimately led to the downfall of President Nixon.
Nothing, not even the current COINTELPRO campaign, is going to prevent Robert Merritt’s story from being publicly told.
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.
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I also exhibit a "blank stare", and I submit that I have a much higher than average familiarity with the contents of the documents Ray McGovern says are so important.
My contention is that they do not matter to the degree McGovern thinks that they do, because Obama ignores what they say about the role of Obama's close advisor, John Rizzo, and the releases have not led to any consistancy in Obama's reaction to what the documents reveal, as to law breaking and crimes against humanity. Holder's appointed "special prosecutor" was appointed by Bush's AG Mukasey, back in January, 2008, to investigate the CIA's destruction of "the torture tapes", and has revealed no progress in nearly two years in that investigation, only to be given a new, narrow mandate by Holder to investigate those who physically meted out the torture, but not those who ordered it. Even this feeble whitewash from Holder, has cauised the shrill right, like BABY CHENEY, to launch a campaign of outrage and threats......
I am not buying what Ray McGovern is selling because Obama is so far ftom his own prior commitments, and has failed as president, so far....to uphold the rule of law, as if he thinks he has any choice in the matter, despite the comparatively few gestures of good will and sincerity he and Eric Holder have effected by the long promised, and then delayed and heavily redacted releases of torture authorization documents McGovern has described and laid on so much praise for. The US has not begun to meet it's treaty obligations to investigate and to prosecute, or candidate Obama's clear stances and higher commitment to roll back the damage and put the US government back on the footing it has always claimed to support, prior to the degradations of Bush/Cheney:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/200...ions/index.htmlSo we're supposed to roll into these negotiations righteously complaining about Iran's "obvious lack of due process." For the last eight years and counting, we've been imprisoning tens of thousands of Muslims around the world with no charges of any kind. Keeping people who have never been charged with any crime shackled in orange jumpsuits and locked in cages for years on a Cuban island has become our national symbol. Just yesterday, the Obama administration demanded that a court rule it has the power to abduct people anywhere in the world, ship them to Afghanistan, and keep them indefinitely imprisoned there with no trial of any kind -- which is exactly what we've been doing for years and still are (in a dank and nasty prison which happens to be right over Iran's Eastern border). Our current President just recently advocated and is currently devising a scheme of so-called "preventive detention" whereby he'd be empowered to lock up people indefinitely for crimes they might commit in the future. We continue to abduct people from all over the world and ship them to third-party countries for interrogation and detention ("renditions") without any pretense of due process. And right over Iran's own Western border, we not only continue to occupy Iraq, but maintain prisons in which thousands of people are imprisoned by our military without any charges of any kind -- including an Iraqi journalist who works for Reuters who was ordered released by an Iraqi court yet continues to languish in an American prison in Iraq, merely one of numerous foreign journalists we imprisoned for years, in Iraq and elsewhere, with no charges at all....
....What would we say if the Iranians replied that how they run their prison system and how they formulated responses to internal rebellions are state secrets which cannot be revealed by courts without jeopardizing their security and that, under Iranian law, government officials enjoy immunity for any official acts they ordered, even if those acts constitute severe human rights violations? Or maybe the Iranians can produce some internal memos from some of their lawyer-underlings which conclude that the threats posed to their security by these street protests -- as well as the
coming from more powerful, nuclear-armed countries -- justified the harsh techniques that were used on prisoners (they could even cite a Washington Post Editorial in support of that immunity theory). What would we say about that?http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/200...gram/index.html
It's now apparent that the biggest sham in American politics is Barack Obama's pledge to close Guantanamo and, more generally, to dismantle the Bush/Cheney approach to detaining accused Terrorists.
In August, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that Guantanamo detainees -- people abducted from around the world and shipped to our prison in Cuba -- have the constitutional right to habeas corpus (a court review of their imprisonment). Then-candidate Obama issued a statement lavishly praising that ruling:
"....The Court's decision is a rejection of the Bush Administration's attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo - yet another failed policy supported by John McCain. This is an important step toward reestablishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus. Our courts have employed habeas corpus with rigor and fairness for more than two centuries, and we must continue to do so as we defend the freedom that violent extremists seek to destroy. We cannot afford to lose any more valuable time in the fight against terrorism to a dangerously flawed legal approach."
That was so moving.
Yesterday, the Obama DOJ -- as expected -- filed a legal brief (.pdf) which adopted the arguments originally made by the Bush DOJ to insist that detainees whom they abduct from around the world and then ship to Bagram (rather than Guantanamo) lack any constitutional rights whatsoever, including habeas review. The Obama administration is appealing from a decision (.pdf) by Bush-43-appointed District Court Judge John Bates which, applying Boumediene, held that detainees at Bagram who are originally detained outside of Afghanistan have the right to habeas review (Afghan citizens detained in Afghanistan have none, he found). In other words, after Obama praised Boumediene as "defending the freedom that violent extremists seek to destroy," he's now attempting to make a complete mockery of that decision by insisting that it is inapplicable as long as he decides to ship detainees from, say, Thailand to Bagram rather than Guantanamo. Obama apparently sees "our core values" as nothing more than an absurd shell game, where the U.S. Government can evade the limits of the Constitution by simply moving the locale of its due-process-free detention system.
Back in April, when the Obama DOJ announced it would appeal the decision, I wrote at length about the Bagram issue, and yesterday, in the wake of this new filing, numerous commentators made excellent points about these shenanigans. Spencer Ackerman notes that, the day before the ruling, the administration leaked that they were creating "new procedures" for Bagram detainees which are very similar to Guantanamo's "Combatant Status Review Tribunals" -- the very Bush/Cheney system the Boumediene court rejected as unconstitutional. This means that, at best, the Bagram detainees will now languish in prison for still more years with no habeas review while the Obama DOJ spends years litigating whether its "new system" is a sufficient Constitutional replacement for habeas review. Ackerman quotes David Remes, the legal director of the non-profit Appeal for Justice law firm who represents 19 Guantanamo detainees, as saying: "It’s another stall. And one I would have expected from the Bush administration but not the Obama administration."
Worse still, both British journalist Andy Worthington and The New Yorker's Amy Davidson highlight this rather odd and disturbing sentence from The New York Times article on the Bagram appeal:
Officials say the importance of Bagram as a holding site for terrorism suspects captured outside Afghanistan and Iraq has risen under the Obama administration, which barred the Central Intelligence Agency from using its secret prisons for long-term detention and ordered the military prison at Guantánamo closed within a year.
Why would the closing of Guantanamo and the shuttering of secret CIA prisons increase the "importance of Bagram" -- unless Bagram was going to replace and replicate those specific weapons, which Obama is ostensibly "ending" because they became politically unpalatable as Bush/Cheney symbols? .....
....The two candidates' starkly different reactions to that ruling was supposed to underscore one of the true differences between them: that Obama, the Constitutional Law Professor, would insist on adherence to core Constitutional liberties even while prosecuting the War on Terror, but McCain wouldn't. Yet here we are, barely more than a year later, and the Obama DOJ is filing a legal brief chock full of Bush/Cheney/McCain arguments about how "Habeas rights under the U.S. Constitution do not extend to enemy aliens detained in the active war zone at Bagram" and "No court has ever extended the Great Writ so far" and granting such rights "risks opening habeas claims brought by detainees in other theaters of war during future military actions" and doing so would pose "impediments to the military mission and threats to the national interest." As The New York Times' Charlie Savage wrote about the District Court proceeding: "The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team."
If the Obama administration were to prevail, it would render Boumediene -- and the promised closing of Guantanamo -- absurd nullities. Who needs Guantanamo if you can just ship them to Bagram instead and deny them all rights? And who cares if the Boumediene Court found that detainees have a right of habeas review if that right magically vanishes the minute you send them off to Afghanistan instead of Cuba? Here's what Obama said when he voted against the Military Commissions Act, the statute which denied habeas rights to War on Terror detainees (the same statute on which the Obama DOJ is now relying to deny those rights at Bagram):
"Mr. President, I would like to address the habeas corpus amendment that is on the floor and that we just heard a lengthy debate about between Senator Specter and Senator Warner.
A few years ago, I gave a speech in Boston that people talk about from time to time. In that speech, I spoke about why I love this country, why I love America, and what I believe sets this country apart from so many other nations in so many areas. I said:
"That is the true genius of America--a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles; that we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm; that we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door --"
Without hearing a sudden knock on the door....."
....The same person who spoke those pretty, pretty lyrics is now arguing that the U.S. Government must have the power to abduct people, ship them to Bagram, and imprison them with no court review. It's true, as Adam Serwer notes, that we cannot know for certain if the Obama administration is, in fact, using Bagram as its new Guantanamo until they stop concealing the information about the numbers, identities, and places of capture of Bagram detainees which the ACLU has been seeking. But we do know that they are desperately seeking to preserve the power to use Bagram as exactly that. When that is combined with the fact that they have already announced they will continue "renditions" -- abducting people from around the world and shipping them off to third countries with no legal process -- the danger is as severe as it is self-evident: by shipping them to Bagram, they will be denied all of the rights which they would have if brought to Guantanamo.
No wonder they want to close Guantanamo: who wants to be bothered with irritating habeas reviews -- 28 out of 33 have resulted in judicial findings that insufficient evidence exists to justify the detention -- when you can just ship them off to the Black Hole of Bagram and imprison them for as long as you want with no court interference? Apparently, what the Bush administration did that was so terrible, the heinous "shredding of the Constitution" they perpetrated, wasn't about the fact that they imprisoned people indefinitely with no charges -- but that they did it in Cuba rather than somewhere else. Who knew that such grave Constitutional transgressions -- such severe denial of fundamental rights -- could be fixed so easily with a little change of scenery?
UPDATE: Digby, citing this report from torture expert Jeffrey Kaye, notes what might very well be the most despicable document of the Bush era, which is obviously saying quite a bit. But if you close your eyes really tightly and only look forward, you may be able blissfully to ignore it all.
If familiarization with the documents Ray McGovern says are a requirement for admittance to his conference are so vital, why didn't he include links to them?
Am I missing something or is there nothing more to this than pure speculation by someone who hasn't worked for the CIA for almost 20 years?Torture and Accountability
By RAY McGOVERN
www.counterpunch.org
September 16, 2009
....What those who wish to attend the workshop will receive:
--A NO ADMITTANCE notice for those who have not read at least portions of:
1 - The four Department of Justice memoranda on torture, which President Obama decided to bear the political cost of releasing on April 16; and
2 - The CIA Inspector General’s “Special Review” of May 7, 2004 released, pursuant to an ACLU lawsuit, on August 24, 2009. (Yes, that’s a wait of more than five years. Pay no heed to the heavy redaction. There is quite enough readable prose to “sicken” you.)
Fair labeling: do not read these before bedtime. And think a bit on what Obama and Holder may be expecting of us at this point. How often has President Obama told us “make me do” the right thing? Are we unable to imagine effective ways to do that?
--Those qualifying for admittance can expect a challenge to find effective ways to ensure that the history books read by our children and grandchildren will record that:
—The Bush/Cheney chapter on torture as an immoral aberration in the life of our country, and
—At least some of us refused to act as “silent Germans.”
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/04/...hn-rizzos-lies/The OLC Memos, “Erroneous and Inflammatory Assumptions,” and John Rizzo’s Lies
By: emptywheel Thursday April 16, 2009 7:18 pm
In his statement on the torture memos today, Obama suggested that some of the "assumptions" about what Americans had done were wrong, and that releasing the memos would correct these "assumptions."
First, the interrogation techniques described in these memos have already been widely reported. Second, the previous Administration publicly acknowledged portions of the program - and some of the practices - associated with these memos. Third, I have already ended the techniques described in the memos through an Executive Order. Therefore, withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time. This could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past, and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States.[my emphasis]
This suggests (though weakly) that the OLC memos--and not other evidence--should be taken as authoritative on the events surrounding our interrogation program.
Though, on several counts, this is not true.
The most troubling example pertains to Abu Zubaydah's mental state before he was tortured. ......
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/08/24/working-thread/
IG Report: Working Thread
By: emptywheel Monday August 24, 2009
Spencer and the Washington Independent have posted the documents.
There is significantly more in here.
One thing to note: IG was complaining about water dousing in 2004. And then they wrote the 2005 memos to include water dousing, done on Hassan Ghul, sometime in 2004. Interesting timing.
The report started because of illegal techniques used with al-Nashiri, among others. Yet Durham hasn't found any reason to show that the torture tapes were destroyed because of that?
It says CTC with Office of Technical Services came up with the techniques. I suspect Jeff Kaye will have a lot to say about that combination.
Note, it doesn't say that OGC (John Rizzo) was also working with DOD's GC (Jim Haynes) to come up with the torture techniques, thereby hiding SERE's involvement.
"OGC briefed DO officers" at interrogation sites on what was legal. Doesn't say whether OGC briefed the contractors. But in any case, Rizzo bears some responsibility here, right?
Okay, this is significant. .....
It seems significant....and outrageous, that.....if Ray McGovern is indeed giving Obama credit where it is due, that Obama has kept John Rizzo as his principle advisor on counter-terrorism, to the point where he has had to avoid appointing Rizzo to any official position requiring Senate confirmation hearings, because of Rizzo's personal culpablilty in formulating, executing, and then attempting to justify and cover up the very offenses that McGovern claims Obama is so committed to ending an bringing accountability for. Rizzo's alleged role has cost him any chance of appointment to a position he was originally considered for....such as DCI, but it has not cost him his role as a principle Obama advisor.....why?
Ex-CIA chiefs seek halt to interrogations probe
The Associated Press
Friday, Sept. 18, 2009 | 12:50 p.m.
Seven former CIA directors asked President Barack Obama on Friday to quash a criminal probe of harsh interrogations of terror suspects during the Bush administration.
The CIA directors, who served both Democratic and Republican presidents and include three who worked under President George W. Bush, made their request in a letter sent Friday to the White House.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced last month that he was appointing an independent counsel to investigate possible incidents of abuse by CIA personnel during interrogations that went beyond guidelines imposed by the Bush administration.
The incidents were referred by the CIA inspector general to the Justice Department during the Bush administration, but Justice officials at the time prosecuted only one case.
"If criminal investigations closed by career prosecutors during one administration can so easily be reopened at the direction of political appointees in the next, declinations of prosecution will be rendered meaningless," wrote the former directors.
The seven former CIA directors included Michael Hayden, Porter Goss and George Tenet, who served under Bush; John Deutch and James Woolsey, who worked for President Bill Clinton; William Webster, who served under President George H.W. Bush; and James Schlesinger, who ran the agency under President Richard Nixon. Tenet also served under Clinton.
They urged Obama to reverse Holder's Aug. 24 decision to reopen the investigation of interrogations following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said the agency is cooperating with the Justice Department review "in part to see that they move as expeditiously as possible."
"The director has stood up for those who followed legal guidance on interrogation, and he will continue to do so," said Gimigliano.
In their letter, the former directors warned that the investigations could discourage CIA officers from doing the kind of aggressive intelligence work needed to counter terrorism and may inhibit foreign governments from working with the United States.
"As a result of the zeal on the part of some to uncover every action taken in the post-9/11 period, many countries may decide that they can no longer safely share intelligence or cooperate with us on future counter-terrorist operations. They simply cannot rely on our promises of secrecy," the letter says.
The letter said the CIA referred fewer than 20 incidents to Bush administration prosecutors, including the case of CIA contractor David Passaro. Passaro was prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to eight years for beating an Afghan detainee in 2007. The detainee later died.
One former CIA official familiar with the cases now under review said that Bush-era Justice lawyers declined to prosecute either because they were not certain they could win conviction or because some of the CIA personnel involved had already been disciplined by the agency. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the cases.
Though not a signatory to the letter, current CIA Director Leon Panetta also opposed Holder's investigation.
"I think the reason I felt the way I did is because I don't believe there's a basis there for any kind of additional action," Panetta said.
"My concern is ... that we don't get trapped by the past. My feeling is ultimately, we're going to be able to move on," he told reporters this week
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Am I missing something or is there nothing more to this than pure speculation by someone who hasn't worked for the CIA for almost 20 years?
Torture and Accountability
By RAY McGOVERN
www.counterpunch.org
September 16, 2009
Unlike many of my progressive friends, for me the current administration’s behavior on torture is a glass half full. In my view, the real scandal is how very few have taken a sip.
Sure, President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have adopted some of the secrecy habits of the previous administration. But, for heaven’s sake, read what Obama and Holder have gone ahead and released—and done—before you grouse any louder about the torture photos and other data still suppressed.
Lecturing around the country, I have come to expect blank stares when I ask how many in the audience have read any of the downright sickening “torture memos” appearing under Department of Justice letterhead. You know, the ones that Obama released on April 16; remember?
Nor have many read the horse’s-mouth “Special Review” by the CIA’s own Inspector General on torture and interrogation, which was released on August 24. Sure, it’s heavily redacted, but I am tired of hearing about delicate stomachs as an excuse for not reading and pondering the 60 per cent of that report that survived. Think for a moment, would you, about the detainees’ stomachs.
I feel fortunate to be part of the “Five for Truth” presentations and workshops that Veterans for Peace is arranging for New Mexico – at Taos, Santa Fe and Albuquerque – on Oct. 9, 10 and 11. The presenters will be Ann Wright, David Swanson, Cindy Sheehan, Elliot Adams, and I.
In thinking through how I might organize the workshop on “Torture and Intelligence,” I decided to bar those who have not read significant portions of the Justice Department torture memos and/or the CIA IG report. And if no one comes, well, so be it.
For me, the attendance will be a microcosmic answer to whether American citizens, including progressives, care enough about the torture conducted in their name that they will have the courage to learn more about it and then to hold accountable those responsible. I think we can safely assume that Obama and Holder are even more interested in a bottom-line answer to that.
We Five for Truth were asked to provide background on our workshops, including what a participant could expect to learn and references for further study. For me, this was an opportunity to do a short précis, distilling the abundant evidence now available on torture. Why, for example, is President Obama so wary of letting justice take its proper course regarding CIA functionaries and contractors (not to mention administration insiders).
If we can extrapolate from the glass half full—the courage that the President and Holder have shown on the issue of torture—we might have to conclude that they need strong support from us, the American people. So far, I am afraid, what they see is a preponderance of “quiet Germans.”
Here’s what I sent to the Veterans For Peace organizers:
Workshop on Torture and Intelligence
On April 16, President Barack Obama released official memoranda demonstrating serious crimes by the previous administration. The documents reveal that top CIA officials solicited and obtained from handpicked Department of Justice lawyers legal opinions based on an extraordinary premise; namely, that so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” did not amount to torture unless they caused “pain equivalent to organ failure or death.”
With that very high threshold, the CIA was given free rein to use harsh techniques like waterboarding and sleep deprivation, to name just two of the torture techniques that find antecedents in the Spanish Inquisition.
Several detainees died in CIA custody; the murders appear to qualify as capital offenses under 18 U.S.C. 2441, the War Crimes Act passed into law in 1996 by a Republican-controlled Congress.
The president clearly is conflicted about what to do. That he wants to put this issue on the back burner is clear. Why, is less clear. What goes without saying — but shouldn’t — is that it is highly risky business to pursue felons who are armed and dangerous and fear the prospect of many years in prison or even execution, if they are brought to justice.
And yet, Obama has done what he promised in letting Attorney General Eric Holder decide to put a prosecutor on the case. As a result, those responsible for the torture are at more risk than ever. And so, one might argue, is Obama.
What might the president be expecting from us?
What an attendee will learn:
--In April, Obama faced down very strong pressure from, among others, CIA director Leon Panetta (not to mention Panetta’s four immediate predecessors) against releasing four Justice Department memoranda setting forth “approved” torture techniques. Why?
--Obama was quite aware at the time that the court-ordered release of the explosive findings of the CIA Inspector General’s investigation was imminent. It would add to our knowledge of how heinous the CIA abuses actually were — and from the horse’s mouth.
What did Obama expect — or at least hope — would happen once those damning findings were made public?
--Attorney General Eric Holder, reportedly “sickened” after reading the CIA Inspector General report and facing growing pressure to hold accountable those responsible for the deaths and torture of detainees, has now authorized a preliminary investigation.
This is precisely the fateful step that Dick Cheney and the corral of “anonymous” intelligence sources favored by the Washington Post have been agitating so strongly to prevent. The danger, as they see it, is that the whole ball of twine will unravel and that people will end up with prison terms or even worse.
Are Holder and Obama willing to run that risk? What are they likely to do, or avoid doing, if they conclude that most Americans don’t give a hoot about torture carried out in their name?
--Cheney’s current gambit is to make it crystal clear that he is not going down alone; that — as he told Bob Schieffer — it was his boss who “signed off” on waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques. The former vice president is betting on Obama not having the stomach to pursue a former president for crimes that the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) trivialize as “policy differences.”
Conflicted though he may be, President Obama did take a solemn oath to ensure that the laws of the land are faithfully executed. What would give him the political support — and the courage — to ensure that justice is pursued, this time not exempting rotten apples at the top of the proverbial barrel?
--What about the “just-following-orders” excuse, which was summarily dismissed at the post-WWII Nuremburg Tribunal? Does Obama’s and Holder’s curious willingness so far to accept that defense bespeak a preference for letting the torturers off rather than run the very real risks of bringing them to justice?
Is it not the case that men and women instinctively know that it is wrong to abuse the person of another human being? But what about fear of the consequences of disobeying an order?
There, at least the Nazi torturers had a stronger argument. They could expect to be shot in the head, whereas CIA operatives and contractors might expect to receive a bad fitness report. Do Obama and Holder really think they can hold to the view that “just following orders” is an adequate defense? Should we acquiesce in that?
--The entire civilized world cooperated after WWII to ban torture. Our own tradition goes back to Patrick Henry who insisted that the “rack and the screw” were artifacts of the Old World and needed to be left behind there. And Gen. George Washington strongly insisted from the outset that, whatever the practices of the English, torture was not to be tolerated in the new American army. Where are the Patrick Henrys, the George Washingtons, of today?
--How is it that the issue of torture, an intrinsic evil in the same moral category as rape and slavery, has gotten divorced from the realm of morality and been given a completely different focus; i. e., does torture “work?”
Torture does not provide reliable information; but that’s not the main point. Why is it that religious leaders, by and large, cannot find their voices? Why do they take the course of least resistance, adopting as their model the cowardice of the institutional churches of Nazi Germany? What are the implications for us?
What those who wish to attend the workshop will receive:
--A NO ADMITTANCE notice for those who have not read at least portions of:
1 - The four Department of Justice memoranda on torture, which President Obama decided to bear the political cost of releasing on April 16; and
2 - The CIA Inspector General’s “Special Review” of May 7, 2004 released, pursuant to an ACLU lawsuit, on August 24, 2009. (Yes, that’s a wait of more than five years. Pay no heed to the heavy redaction. There is quite enough readable prose to “sicken” you.)
Fair labeling: do not read these before bedtime. And think a bit on what Obama and Holder may be expecting of us at this point. How often has President Obama told us “make me do” the right thing? Are we unable to imagine effective ways to do that?
--Those qualifying for admittance can expect a challenge to find effective ways to ensure that the history books read by our children and grandchildren will record that:
—The Bush/Cheney chapter on torture as an immoral aberration in the life of our country, and
—At least some of us refused to act as “silent Germans.”
Ray McGovern was an Army officer and CIA analyst for almost 30 year. He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (Verso). He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com
A shorter version of this article appeared at Consortiumnews.com.
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Exclusive: 27-Year CIA Vet says Obama May be Afraid of the CIA ... For Good Reason...
Alluding to the assassination of JFK, long-time high-level CIA analyst says Panetta and the President 'afraid of these guys because these guys have a whole lot to lose if justice takes its course'...
Posted By Brad Friedman On 11th September 2009 @ 15:00 In CIA, BRAD BLOG Media Appearance, Barack Obama, Dept. of Defense, Torture, Eric Holder, Bush Legacy, Leon Panetta | 6 Comments
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7408
During my interview last night with 27-year CIA analyst Ray McGovern on the Mike Malloy Show [1] (which I've been guest hosting all this week), the man who used to personally deliver the CIA's Presidential Daily Briefings to George Bush Sr., among other Presidents, offered an extraordinarily chilling thought --- particularly coming from someone with his background.
In a conversation at the end of the hour (audio and transcript below), as I was trying to pin him down for an opinion on whether or not he felt it was appropriate for CIA Director Leon Panetta to have reportedly attempted to block a lawful investigation [2] into torture and other war crimes committed by the CIA, McGovern alluded to a book about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and noted he felt it likely that both Panetta and President Obama may have reason to fear certain elements of the CIA.
"Let me just leave you with this thought," he said, "and that is that I think Panetta, and to a degree President Obama, are afraid --- I never thought I'd hear myself saying this --- I think they're afraid of the CIA."...
McGovern went on to note "the stakes are very high here," in relation to Attorney General Eric Holder's recently announced investigation [3] of the CIA now under the direction of Panetta. "His main advisers and his senior staff are liable for prosecution for war crimes. The War Crimes statute includes very severe penalties, including capitol punishment for those who, if under their custody, detainees die. And we know that at least a hundred have, so this is big stakes here."
He then recommended James W. Douglass' new book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters [4] .
"He makes a very very persuasive case that it was President Kennedy's, um, the animosity that built up between him and the CIA after the Bay of Pigs, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because he was reaching out to the Russians and so forth and so on. It's a very well-researched book and his conclusion is very alarming," the long-time CIA veteran noted in what turned out to be a chilling end to our interview in which he described "two CIAs".
One, he says, was created by President Truman to "give him the straight scoop without any fear or favor. And then its covert action arm, which really doesn't believe --- which doesn't belong in this agency." McGovern referred to that CIA "advisedly" as the President's "own personal gestapo" which acts without oversight by the Congressional committees once tasked to do so.
"And so if you're asking why Obama and Panetta are going very very kid-glove-ish with the CIA, I think part of the reason, or the explanation is they're afraid of these guys because these guys have a whole lot to lose if justice takes its course."
"So, it's pretty scary. Yes, it is," he concluded.
* * *
• The complete audio archive of the entire interview (appx. 37 mins.) can be download here [5] or heard online here...
• The final few minutes (appx. 6 mins) containing the conversation described above, as transcribed below, can be heard here...
The transcript of the above-described 9/10/09 conversation between Brad Friedman and 27-year CIA analyst Ray McGovern on the Mike Malloy Show, follows below...
BRAD FRIEDMAN: Was it appropriate, in your opinion, for Panetta to try to block this lawful investigation into torture by Eric Holder's investigation. Is that the appropriate thing for a CIA Director to do?
RAY MCGOVERN: Well, you and I know that it's not appropriate if he's Director. If he sees his role as the agency's lawyer --- which apparently he does --- then there's nothing unlawful about him pleading their special causes. The stakes are very high here. His main advisers and his senior staff are liable for prosecution for war crimes. The War Crimes statute includes very severe penalties, including capitol punishment...
BF: Yeah...
RM: ... for those who, if under their custody, detainees die. And we know that at least a hundred have, so this is big stakes here.
And let me just leave you with this thought, and that is that I think Panetta, and to a degree President Obama, are afraid --- I never thought I'd hear myself saying this --- I think they're afraid of the CIA.
And you look in history...look to the incredible book written recently by Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable [6] . He makes a very very persuasive case that it was President Kennedy's, um, the animosity that built up between him and the CIA after the Bay of Pigs, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because he was reaching out to the Russians and so forth and so on. It's a very well-researched book and his conclusion is very alarming.
And so if you're asking why Obama and Panetta are going very very kid-glove-ish, with the CIA, I think part of the reason, or the explanation is they're afraid of these guys because these guys have a whole lot to lose if justice takes its course. And that's why I think Attorney General Holder is to be applauded.
I'm really just delighted to have somebody from The Bronx, where I grew up, try to do something to wipe out the blot that Colin Powell has put on The Bronx.
BF: Even though its a narrow investigation, you still applaud it. But Ray McGovern, 27-year CIA analyst, you're saying that there is reason to be concerned about the CIA --- that Barack Obama should be concerned.
Having been there 27 years, I guess you know what you're talking about. Uh...but that's a chilling thought I gotta say, Ray.
RM: Well, read the book. James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable [6] . Uh, Brad, as you probably know, there are two CIAs. Okay? The one that was set up by Truman to give him the straight scoop without any fear or favor. And then its covert action arm, which really doesn't believe --- which doesn't belong in this agency --- but is the one that is entitled, so to speak, by one sentence in the National Security Act of 1947 which says 'the Director of Central Intelligence shall perform such other functions and duties as the President shall direct.'
That gives the President the ability to use the CIA as his own personal gestapo --- and I use the word advisedly --- the only check on that are what used to be called the oversight committees of Congress, now they're called the overlooked committees of the Congress...
BF: Indeed.
RM: So it's pretty scary. Yes, it is.
Article printed from The BRAD BLOG: http://www.bradblog.com
URL to article: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7408
URLs in this post:
[1] Mike Malloy Show: http://MikeMalloyShow.com
[2] block a lawful investigation: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7380
[3] recently announced investigation: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7372
[4] JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/157075755...-20&linkCod
e=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1570757550
[5] download here: http://www.bradblog.com/audio/MikeMalloy_B...91009_Hour1.mp3
[6] JFK and the Unspeakable: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/157075755...-20&linkCod
e=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1570757550
[7] JFK and the Unspeakable: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/157075755...-20&linkCod
e=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1570757550
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A Clash of Camelots
Within months of J.F.K.’s death, the president’s widow asked William Manchester to write the authorized account of the assassination. He felt he couldn’t refuse her. Two years later, nearly broken by the task, Manchester found himself fighting a bitter, headline-making battle with Jackie and Bobby Kennedy over the finished book. The author chronicles the toll Manchester’s 1967 best-seller, The Death of a President, exacted—physically, emotionally, and financially—before it all but disappeared.
BY SAM KASHNER
VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE
OCTOBER 2009
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A Clash of Camelots
Within months of J.F.K.’s death, the president’s widow asked William Manchester to write the authorized account of the assassination. He felt he couldn’t refuse her. Two years later, nearly broken by the task, Manchester found himself fighting a bitter, headline-making battle with Jackie and Bobby Kennedy over the finished book. The author chronicles the toll Manchester’s 1967 best-seller, The Death of a President, exacted—physically, emotionally, and financially—before it all but disappeared.
BY SAM KASHNER
VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE
OCTOBER 2009
http://www.lewrockwell.com/spl/death-of-a-president.html
I thought that it would be bound in black and put away on dark library shelves. —Jacqueline Kennedy
It has never gone away, the nightmare of November 22, 1963. Each time one revisits the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, “one hopes for once the story will be different—the car swerves, the bullets miss, and the splendid progress continues. But each time, like a recurrent nightmare, the handsome head is shattered,” as Gore Vidal wrote in his World Journal Tribune review of William Manchester’s highly detailed, passionate, and greatly beleaguered account, The Death of a President.
Visit VF.com’s Kennedys archive. Plus: Sam Kashner on the definitive J.F.K. assassination book.
Of all the books written about the Kennedy assassination—by some counts more than 2,000—the one book commissioned by the Kennedys themselves and meant to stand the test of time has virtually disappeared. The fight over Manchester’s book—published on April 7, 1967, by Harper & Row after more than a year of bitter, relentless, headline-making controversy over the manuscript—nearly destroyed its author and pitted him against two of the most popular and charismatic people in the nation: the slain president’s beautiful grieving widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, and his brother Robert F. Kennedy. And the struggle would bring to both Jackie and Bobby a public-relations nightmare.
A day after the president’s body was flown to Washington, his casket lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda, before final interment in Arlington National Cemetery. Kennedy’s family had wanted the president to be buried in Brookline, Massachusetts, next to his father and to his son Patrick, who had died two days after he was born. But Jacqueline realized that her husband belonged to the American people, and so she insisted on a burial at Arlington.
For two days before the burial, the line of citizens waiting to file by the catafalque reached five miles, snaking through the chill, solemn streets of the capital. For the procession from the Rotunda to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, where the funeral Mass was held, Mrs. Kennedy didn’t want to ride in one of the government’s black Cadillacs, so she walked, leading a delegation from 92 nations. Charles de Gaulle, who towered over the other heads of state as they followed the horse-drawn caisson down Constitution Avenue, later reflected that President Kennedy’s widow “gave the world an example of how to behave.” Manchester later noted that, in the hours after the tragedy, “Jacqueline Kennedy was virtually the government of this country and held it together.” After the assassination, she had stood beside Lyndon B. Johnson in her blood-splattered Chanel suit as he was sworn into office. Now, at the president’s funeral, in her black widow’s garb, she symbolized the nation’s grief. For five years in a row, a Gallup poll named her “the most admired woman in the world.”
Following the ordeal of the funeral, Jacqueline resolved to leave the White House as quickly as possible. Before departing, she had a plaque inscribed with the words “In this room lived John Fitzgerald Kennedy, with his wife Jacqueline, during the two years, ten months, and two days he was president of the United States” and placed it in the Lincoln bedroom. (The Nixons would later have the plaque removed.) Eleven days after the funeral, Jacqueline sought refuge at her temporary home at 3038 N Street, in Georgetown.
Beset by writers clamoring for interviews, Jacqueline decided to designate one to produce the official story of the assassination. In part, she wanted to stop Jim Bishop, a syndicated columnist living in Florida, who was already preparing a book. He was the author of The Day Lincoln Was Shot and a just-finished book, A Day in the Life of President Kennedy, but according to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and special assistant to Kennedy, the First Lady considered Bishop a “hack” who asked too many personal questions. She preferred that no book be written, but as that was impossible, she went in search of an author.
William Manchester was not her first choice. Theodore H. White, a family favorite (The Making of the President 1960), and Walter Lord (A Night to Remember) turned her down. Then Pierre Salinger, the Kennedys’ press secretary, suggested Manchester, a onetime foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun and the author of novels and nonfiction books on H.L. Mencken, the Rockefellers, and President Kennedy.
Most important, he had worshipped John F. Kennedy. His 1962 Portrait of a President was so respectful it was described as “adoring.” Kennedy, not surprisingly, liked Portrait, and Jacqueline had read Manchester’s profile of the president that had appeared in Holiday magazine in 1962. His prose had an emotionally rich, poetic quality that impressed her.
J.F.K. had in fact sat for interviews with Manchester, a not unpleasant experience. “I’d see Jack at the end of his last appointment for the day,” Manchester told the journalist Seymour Hersh. “We’d have a daiquiri and sit on the Truman balcony. He’d smoke a cigar and I’d have a Heineken.”
Duty Calls
Manchester, an ex-Marine, was square-jawed, dark-haired, solidly built. When he first met the president he was 39, Kennedy 44. Both men had been born in Massachusetts, but Manchester’s ancestors, who had settled in Attleboro, had arrived long before the Kennedys. The two men may have bonded over their similar W.W. II experiences. (Both had received Purple Hearts, Manchester fighting on Okinawa, J.F.K. commanding PT 109 in the South Pacific’s Solomon Islands.) Manchester later wrote that the president “was brighter than I was, braver, better-read, handsomer, wittier, and more incisive. The only thing I could do better was write.”
In 1964, Manchester was living in a white 18th-century frame house on High Street in Middletown, Connecticut, with his wife, Judy, and their three children. He was working part-time as a managing editor for American Education Publications and, on a Wesleyan fellowship, was writing a history of the Krupp manufacturing family. On February 5, he was sitting in his office on the second floor of Wesleyan’s Olin Library when he received an early-morning telephone call from Salinger. He initially thought it was his friend Jerry—J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye—so he was caught off guard when Kennedy’s press secretary made the offer for him to write the authorized account of the assassination. At first reluctant to take on such a burden, Manchester turned to his secretary and asked, “How can I say no to Mrs. Kennedy?”
“You can’t,” she replied.
He resigned his post at Wesleyan the same day. Suddenly Manchester found himself “jobless, a middle-aged, highly educated vagrant.”
There was never any question that the proposed book would be published by Harper & Row, which had brought out John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage and Robert Kennedy’s 1960 investigation into union corruption, The Enemy Within. They had both been edited by Evan Welling Thomas III, who had come up with the title for the former book. In his 22 years at Harper & Brothers, later Harper & Row, Thomas had published many prominent politicians and statesmen—mostly Democrats—and John Cheever was among his handful of fiction writers. Tall, slim, aristocratic, Thomas came by his interest in politics honestly as the son of Norman Thomas, the famous American socialist and perennial presidential candidate. There were other Kennedy connections at Harper & Row as well. Cass Canfield, the president of Harper and chairman of the Executive Committee, was a product of Groton, Harvard, and Oxford. Canfield’s son had been briefly married to Jacqueline’s sister, Lee Bouvier, before her marriage to Prince Radziwill. “Cass was, I guess, Jackie’s friend. He was sort of a high-society type,” recalls Thomas’s son, Evan Thomas, now Newsweek’s editor-at-large and the author of a well-regarded biography of Robert Kennedy. “I remember my father once saying that Cass was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and enjoyed the taste of it. The family legend is that Profiles in Courage came to Harper through Cass.”
But it was Thomas who went to see John F. Kennedy in the hospital, where he was recovering from major back surgery, to persuade him to write Profiles in Courage, which would win the 1957 Pulitzer Prize. Thomas was impressed by Kennedy’s physical courage and charisma. “In the hospital when I saw him, he was lying on his back, writing on a board. It was impossible not to be charmed by him.” He was charmed, too, by Robert Kennedy when he worked on The Enemy Within. “Daddy started dealing with Bobby,” the younger Thomas recalls. “He liked Bobby—he admired his toughness.”
To see complete article: http://www.lewrockwell.com/spl/death-of-a-president.html
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What Really Happened to JFK Jr.
Now that Teddy Kennedy has died, a great American political dynasty that was a generations-long irritant to the far right has ended. But if JFK Jr. had not died in a tragic air accident, that would not be true.
Jim Marrs revisits that accident and asks some provocative questions. For example, who turned off the fuel supply to the engine? (It was found turned off in the remains of the plane.) Also, why, given that he had reported that he was on approach, did it take so long for rescuers to react to the fact that the plane didn't land?
And why was there ANOTHER crash that was so similar, right down to the mysteriously cut off fuel supply?
Listen to one of the great experts on the hidden history of our time as he explores the explosive reason why this great dynasty has ended--and why so many of its members were killed off.
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Assassinations and Coups
Keeping Track of the Empire's Crimes
By WILLIAM BLUM
August 6, 2009
www.counterpunch.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/blum08062009.html
If you catch the CIA with its hand in the cookie jar and the Agency admits the obvious — what your eyes can plainly see — that its hand is indeed in the cookie jar, it means one of two things:
a) the CIA's hand is in several other cookie jars at the same time which you don't know about and they hope that by confessing to the one instance they can keep the others covered up; or
its hand is not really in the cookie jar — it's an illusion to throw you off the right scent — but they want you to believe it.There have been numerous news stories in recent months about secret CIA programs, hidden from Congress, inspired by former vice-president Dick Cheney, in operation since the September 11 terrorist attacks, involving assassination of al Qaeda operatives or other non-believers-in-the-Empire abroad without the knowledge of their governments. The Agency admits to some sort of program having existed, but insists that it was canceled; and if it was an assassination program it was canceled before anyone was actually assassinated. Another report has the US military, not the CIA, putting the plan — or was it a different plan? — into operation, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the program. (The Guardian, July 13, 2009.)
All of this can be confusing to those following the news. And rather irrelevant. We already know that the United States has been assassinating non-believers, or suspected non-believers, with regularity, and impunity, in recent years, using unmanned planes (drones) firing missiles, in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, if not elsewhere. (Even more victims have been produced from amongst those who happened to be in the same house, car, wedding party, or funeral as the non-believer.) These murders apparently don't qualify as "assassinations", for somehow killing "terrorists" from 2000 feet is morally and legally superior to doing so from two feet away.
But whatever the real story is behind the current rash of speculation, we should not fall into the media's practice of at times intimating that multiple or routine CIA assassination attempts would be something shocking or at least very unusual.
I've compiled a list of CIA assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, against prominent foreign political figures, from 1949 through 2003, which, depending on how you count it, can run into the hundreds (targeting Fidel Castro alone totals 634 according to Cuban intelligence)2; the list can be updated by adding the allegedly al Qaeda leaders among the drone attack victims of recent years. Assassination and torture are the two things governments are most loath to admit to, and try their best to cover up. It's thus rare to find a government document or recorded statement mentioning a particular plan to assassinate someone. There is, however, an abundance of compelling circumstantial evidence to work with. The following list does not include several assassinations in various parts of the world carried out by anti-Castro Cubans employed by the CIA and headquartered in the United States.
1949 - Kim Koo, Korean opposition leader
1950s - CIA/Neo-Nazi hit list of more than 200 political figures in West Germany
to be "put out of the way" in the event of a Soviet invasion
1950s - Chou En-lai, Prime minister of China, several attempts on his life
1950s, 1962 - Sukarno, President of Indonesia
1951 - Kim Il Sung, Premier of North Korea
1953 - Mohammed Mossadegh, Prime Minister of Iran
1950s (mid) - Claro M. Recto, Philippines opposition leader
1955 - Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India
1957 - Gamal Abdul Nasser, President of Egypt
1959, 1963, 1969 - Norodom Sihanouk, leader of Cambodia
1960 - Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Kassem, leader of Iraq
1950s-70s - José Figueres, President of Costa Rica, two attempts on his life
1961 - Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, leader of Haiti
1961 - Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the Congo (Zaire)
1961 - Gen. Rafael Trujillo, leader of Dominican Republic
1963 - Ngo Dinh Diem, President of South Vietnam
1960s-70s - Fidel Castro, President of Cuba, many attempts on his life
1960s - Raúl Castro, high official in government of Cuba
1965 - Francisco Caamaño, Dominican Republic opposition leader
1965-6 - Charles de Gaulle, President of France
1967 - Che Guevara, Cuban leader
1970 - Salvador Allende, President of Chile
1970 - Gen. Rene Schneider, Commander-in-Chief of Army, Chile
1970s, 1981 - General Omar Torrijos, leader of Panama
1972 - General Manuel Noriega, Chief of Panama Intelligence
1975 - Mobutu Sese Seko, President of Zaire
1976 - Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica
1980-1986 - Muammar Qaddafi, leader of Libya, several plots and attempts upon his life
1982 - Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of Iran
1983 - Gen. Ahmed Dlimi, Moroccan Army commander
1983 - Miguel d'Escoto, Foreign Minister of Nicaragua
1984 - The nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate
1985 - Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanese Shiite leader (80 people killed in the attempt)
1991 - Saddam Hussein, leader of Iraq
1993 - Mohamed Farah Aideed, prominent clan leader of Somalia
1998, 2001-2 - Osama bin Laden, leading Islamic militant
1999 - Slobodan Milosevic, President of Yugoslavia
2002 - Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Afghan Islamic leader and warlord
2003 - Saddam Hussein and his two sons
For those of you who collect lists about splendid US foreign policy post-World War II, here are a few more that, lacking anything better to do, I've put together: Attempts to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which had been democratically-elected. (* = successful ouster of a government.)
Albania 1949-53
East Germany 1950s
Iran 1953 *
Guatemala 1954 *
Costa Rica mid-1950s
Syria 1956-7
Egypt 1957
Indonesia 1957-8
British Guiana 1953-64 *
Iraq 1963 *
North Vietnam 1945-73
Cambodia 1955-70 *
Laos 1958-60 *
Ecuador 1960-63 *
Congo 1960 *
France 1965
Brazil 1962-64 *
Dominican Republic 1963 *
Cuba 1959 to present
Bolivia 1964 *
Indonesia 1965 *
Ghana 1966 *
Chile 1964-73 *
Greece 1967 *
Costa Rica 1970-71
Bolivia 1971 *
Australia 1973-75 *
Angola 1975, 1980s
Zaire 1975
Portugal 1974-76 *
Jamaica 1976-80 *
Seychelles 1979-81
Chad 1981-82 *
Grenada 1983 *
South Yemen 1982-84
Suriname 1982-84
Fiji 1987 *
Libya 1980s
Nicaragua 1981-90 *
Panama 1989 *
Bulgaria 1990 *
Albania 1991 *
Iraq 1991
Afghanistan 1980s *
Somalia 1993
Yugoslavia 1999
Ecuador 2000 *
Afghanistan 2001 *
Venezuela 2002 *
Iraq 2003 *
After his June 4 Cairo speech, President Obama was much praised for mentioning the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh. But in his talk in Ghana on July 11 he failed to mention the CIA coup that ousted Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966, referring to him only as a "giant" among African leaders. The Mossadegh coup is one of the most well-known CIA covert actions. Obama could not easily get away without mentioning it in a talk in the Middle East looking to mend fences. But the Nkrumah ouster is one of the least known; indeed, not a single print or broadcast news report in the American mainstream media saw fit to mention it at the time of the president's talk. Like it never happened.
And the next time you hear that Africa can't produce good leaders, people who are committed to the welfare of the masses of their people, think of Nkrumah and his fate. And think of Patrice Lumumba, overthrown in the Congo 1960-61 with the help of the United States; Agostinho Neto of Angola, against whom Washington waged war in the 1970s, making it impossible for him to institute progressive changes; Samora Machel of Mozambique against whom the CIA supported a counter-revolution in the 1970s-80s period; and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (now married to Machel's widow), who spent 28 years in prison thanks to the CIA.
William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power. and West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.
He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com
its hand is not really in the cookie jar — it's an illusion to throw you off the right scent — but they want you to believe it.
Life Magazine, LBJ and the Assassination of JFK
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
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.