Douglas Caddy

They told me Douglas Caddy was an attorney who was representing the Watergate burglars and that Douglas Caddy was a communist and pro-Cuban and was a leader of the Young Americans for Freedom.

A communist, pro-Cuban and leader of YAF.....??????????!!!!!!!!! Who were they kidding and how stupid was this would-be assassin and informant?

Well, given that someone in intelligence wanted to kill you, I suppose because they felt something(s) your Watergate clients may have told you - or that you could piece together from what they had, is interesting. I'm sure you know more about Watergate than you've said, and in part that is out of your pledge of confidentiality to your clients. I hope, however, when you can you will tell us [the American People] more of what you know, or clues you know of - that might shed light on why they might want to kill you, Martha Mitchell, destroy Nixon, take-over the Government by stealth, and do all the many strange things that were parts of 'Watergate'. Just knowing who it was that wanted you dead, might say a lot. That you posted it on the JFK thread is, as well!.....

When Robert Merritt informed me of the 1972 conspiracy to assassinate me, I was both taken back and puzzled. I asked myself why would these CIA intelligence agents want this done? The reasons they gave Merritt were that I posed a nationals security threat and that I was a homosexual.

There is no way to know what was in their minds. However, to try to figure out their thinking, I decided to engage in role playing to see how I looked in their eyes. By doing this, I may have come up with a scenario as to why they were so concerned. This is as follows:

When I was graduated from New York University Law School in 1966, I went to work for General Foods Corporation, then the world's largest food manufacturer. My assignment was to advise the corporate officers on government relations, legislation and regulation that might affect the company's operations. In 1969 General Food transferred me to Washington, D.C. I was to open an office for the company after a year that would handle government relations, with the emphasis on lobbying.

General Foods told me that for the first year I would be working out of the offices of the public relations firm that had long handled its government relations. This firm was the Robert Mullen Company. What General Foods did not tell me was that the Mullen Company was a CIA front, having been incorporated in 1949 by the CIA and that General Foods was a partner in this arrangement.

So I started carrying out my General Foods assignment, which consisted primarily of close coordination with the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the national trade organization that represented food manufacturers.

In mid-1970 Robert Mullen informed me that Howard Hunt was joining the staff of his company. Hunt and I quickly found we had something in common: I had worked closely with William F. Buckley, Jr. in founding the conservative movement and Buckley not only was the godfather to Hunt's children but had served under Hunt years previously in the CIA's office in Mexico City.

Howard Hunt and his wife, Dorothy, became my closest friends in Washington. Howard and I conversed daily on any number of topics.

At one point Robert Mullen told Hunt and me that he was making plans to retire and asked if we were interested in buying his company, making payments on the purchase price from the profits over the future years. In the end Robert Mullen sold his company to Robert Bennett, a key associate of the Howard Hughes operation and of the CIA. Today Robert Bennett, Senator from Utah, serves in the U.S. Senate, where he is known as the tool and operative of the CIA.

I left General Foods in late 1970 and joined Gall, Lane and Kilcullen, a law firm in Washington, as an attorney. Hunt immediately became a client and I handled his personal and business matters.

In early 1972, the law firm assigned me to do volunteer presidential campaign legal work out of the office of John Dean, then White House Counsel to President Nixon. Hunt was pleased to learn of this assignment.

Around April 1972, two months before the Watergate case broke open, Hunt invited me to join him and the CIA's General Counsel in what turned out to be a meeting about whether I would be interested in working for the CIA. If I were interested, the General Counsel told me that my CIA assignment would be to construct and open a luxurious hotel on the seashore in Nicaragua, then dominated by the Sandinistas. I told them I would think about it but in my heart knew that I could not accept CIA employment because the vetting process would inevitably reveal that I was homosexual. The CIA did not employ anyone who was homosexual. As with other federal agencies, there was a constant witch hunt against homosexuals, who were driven out and blackballed.

On June 17, 1972, the Watergate case broke with the arrests of the five burglars inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The same day Hunt and Gordon Liddy retained me as an attorney to represent them and the five arrested individuals.

On June 28, eleven days later, Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Carl Shoffler showed up with four intelligence agents at the apartment of Robert Merritt where they attempted to enlist Merritt in assassinating me, as disclosed in Merritt's affidavit.

Why did they want me eliminated? One must look at it through their eyes:

(1) I was one of Howard Hunt's closest friends and his attorney in the Watergate case. What had Hunt told me about the CIA operations during the period of our friendship? Did I know some of the CIA's darkest secrets? After all, Hunt was a protégé of Richard Helms, the Director of the CIA, and had worked for the agency his entire life.

(2) What had I learned while working inside the Robert Mullen Company as an employee of General Foods Corporation? Had I gained access to the CIA files and documents inside the Mullen Company and acquired knowledge of its world wide operations? [For example, Robert Mullen had once spoken to me on the telephone when he was sent by the CIA to Chile to organize the media campaign to overthrow Allende.]

(3) Could I have recorded the conversation that I had with Hunt and the CIA's General Counsel about the Nicaragua plan?

(4) Had Hunt told me about the role played by key CIA officers and agents in the assassination of President John Kennedy? In his deathbed confession that was audio recorded in January 2004, Hunt fingered CIA officers Cord Meyer, David Philips, Frank Sturgis and David Morales as being part of the assassination plan that originated with Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

In summary, it appeared to these CIA agents on June 28, 1972, that I had somehow worked myself into a position of knowing too much about the CIA, and thus of being a potential national security threat and of being a hated homosexual to boot. They feared that the mushrooming Watergate case could lead to my opening a Pandora's Box that threatened to expose some of the darkest secrets of the CIA. So the easiest solution would be to make me a casualty of a domestic Operation Condor (see article below.)

In reality, these agents' fears were unfounded. Hunt was always circumspect in what he told me, I never even thought of examining the files and documents housed inside the Mullen Company, I did not record the conversation between the CIA's General Counsel, Hunt and me about Nicaragua, and I knew nothing about the CIA agents' role in the JFK assassination.

Actually, I did not know for certain that the Robert Mullen Company was a CIA front until Senator Howard Baker disclosed this in his separate report released as part of the final report of the Senate Watergate Committee.

But the CIA agents on June 28, 1972, feared the worst and concocted a plan to remedy the situation.

What probably made them later change their course was that on June 28, 1972, I was served in the courthouse with a subpoena to appear "Forthwith" before the Grand Jury investigating the Watergate scandal and this event made national headlines. In short, I became too hot to be offed.

Very interesting stuff and I didn't know you worked for Mullen or had a personal friendship with Hunt - nor that the CIA asked you to become a Contra hotelier! May I ask Doug how and when after 'all this and Watergate' it changed you as a person and your political thinking. It seems to me you'd no longer entertain working for the CIA or their ilk. Two other things, I don't know of any high-level CIA who were homosexual, but they certainly had many lower-level assets and operatives who were [Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, your would-be assassin, and many others one could name]. Perhaps they used it as an extra 'hook' to assure their 'loyalty' - or else! Thanks for the disclosures above on your life. You should write a book! Lastly, did you have any contact with Hunt near the end of his life and could you opine on his deathbed 'version' of the events of Dallas based on either what he might have said or hinted to you, or your knowing the man?

While Howard Hunt and I conversed on many occasions, never once did the topic of JFK's assassination come up. I never dreamed that

he had knowledge about the role played in it by CIA agents as disclosed in his death bed confession.

Statement of Douglas Caddy regarding Robert Merritt’s affidavit of July 29, 2009:

When Robert Merritt informed me on July 17, 2009, of the 1972 conspiracy to assassinate me, I was both taken back and puzzled. I asked myself why would these CIA intelligence agents want this done? The reasons they gave Merritt were that I posed a nationals security threat and that I was a homosexual.

There is no way to know what was in their minds. However, to try to figure out their thinking, I decided to engage in role playing to see how I looked in their eyes. By doing this, I may have come up with a scenario as to why they were so concerned. This is as follows:

When I was graduated from New York University Law School in 1966, I went to work for General Foods Corporation, then the world’s largest food manufacturer. My assignment was to advise the corporate officers on government relations, legislation and regulation that might affect the company’s operations. In 1969 General Food transferred me to Washington, D.C. I was to open an office for the company after a year that would handle government relations, with the emphasis on lobbying.

General Foods told me that for the first year I would be working out of the offices of the public relations firm that had long handled its government relations. This firm was the Robert Mullen Company. What General Foods did not tell me was that the Mullen Company was a CIA front, having been incorporated in 1949 by the CIA and that General Foods

was a partner in this arrangement.

So I started carrying out my General Foods assignment, which consisted primarily of close coordination with the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the national trade organization that represented food manufacturers.

In mid-1970 Robert Mullen informed me that Howard Hunt was joining the staff of his company. Hunt and I quickly found we had something in common: I had worked closely with William F. Buckley, Jr. in founding the conservative movement and Buckley not only was the godfather to Hunt’s children but had served under Hunt years previously in the CIA’s office in Mexico City.

Howard Hunt and his wife, Dorothy, became my closest friends in Washington. Howard and I conversed daily on any number of topics.

At one point Robert Mullen told Hunt and me that he was making plans to retire and asked if we were interested in buying his company, making payments on the purchase price from the profits over the future years. In the end Robert Mullen sold his company to Robert Bennett, a key associate of the Howard Hughes operation and of the CIA. Today Robert Bennett, Senator from Utah, serves in the U.S. Senate, where he is known as the tool and operative of the CIA.

I left General Foods in late 1970 and joined Gall, Lane and Kilcullen, a law firm in Washington, as an attorney. Hunt immediately became a client and I handled his personal and business matters.

In early 1972, the law firm assigned me to do volunteer presidential campaign legal work out of the office of John Dean, then White House Counsel to President Nixon. Hunt was pleased to learn of this assignment.

Around April 1972, two months before the Watergate case broke open, Hunt invited me to join him and the CIA’s General Counsel in what turned out to be a meeting about whether I would be interested in working for the CIA. If I were interested, the General Counsel told me that my CIA assignment would be to construct and open a luxurious hotel on the seashore in Nicaragua, then dominated by the Sandinistas. I told them I would think about it but in my heart knew that I could not accept CIA employment because the vetting process would inevitably reveal that I was homosexual. The CIA did not employ anyone who was homosexual. As with other federal agencies, there was a constant witch hunt against homosexuals, who were driven out and blackballed.

On June 17, 1972, the Watergate case broke with the arrests of the five burglars inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The same day Hunt and Gordon Liddy retained me as an attorney to represent them and the five arrested individuals.

On June 28, eleven days later, Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Carl Shoffler showed up with four intelligence agents at the apartment of Robert Merritt where they attempted to enlist Merritt in assassinating me, as disclosed in Merritt’s affidavit.

Why did they want me eliminated? One must look at it through their eyes:

(1) I was one of Howard Hunt’s closest friends and his attorney in the Watergate case. What had Hunt told me about the CIA operations during the period of our friendship? Did I know some of the CIA’s darkest secrets? After all, Hunt was a protégé of Richard Helms, the Director of the CIA, and had worked for the agency his entire life.

(2) What had I learned while working inside the Robert Mullen Company as an employee of General Foods Corporation? Had I gained access to the CIA files and documents inside the Mullen Company and acquired knowledge of its world wide operations? [For example, Robert Mullen had once spoken to me on the telephone when he was sent by the CIA to Chile to organize the media campaign to overthrow Allende.]

(3) Could I have recorded the conversation that I had with Hunt and the CIA’s General Counsel about the Nicaragua plan?

(4) Had Hunt told me about the role played by key CIA officers and agents in the assassination of President John Kennedy? In his deathbed confession that was audio recorded in January 2004, Hunt fingered CIA officers Cord Meyer, David Philips, Frank Sturgis and David Morales as being part of the assassination plan that originated with Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

In summary, it appeared to these CIA agents on June 28, 1972, that I had somehow worked myself into a position of knowing too much about the CIA, and thus of being a potential national security threat and of being a hated homosexual to boot. They feared that the mushrooming Watergate case could lead to my opening a Pandora’s Box that threatened to expose some of the darkest secrets of the CIA. So the easiest solution would be to make me an early casualty of a domestic Operation Condor (see article below.)

In reality, these agents’ fears were unfounded. Hunt was always circumspect in what he told me, I never even thought of examining the files and documents housed inside the Mullen Company, I did not record the conversation between the CIA’s General Counsel, Hunt and me about Nicaragua, and I knew nothing about the CIA agents’ role in the JFK assassination.

Actually, I did not know for certain that the Robert Mullen Company was a CIA front until Senator Howard Baker disclosed this in his separate report released as part of the final report of the Senate Watergate Committee.

But the CIA agents on June 28, 1972, feared the worst and concocted a plan to remedy the situation.

What probably made them later change their course was that on June 28, 1972, I was served in the courthouse with a subpoena to appear “Forthwith” before the Grand Jury investigating the Watergate scandal and this event made national headlines. In short, I became too hot to be offed.

----------------------------------

Shades of Operation Condor

by Jacob G. Hornberger

by Jacob G. Ho

Find this article at:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/riggenbach3-1.html

July 30, 2009

The CIA’s assassination plan, which it chose to keep secret from Congress, brings to mind Operation Condor, a similar plan run by DINA, which was Chile’s counterpart to the CIA under the dictatorial regime of military strongman Augusto Pinochet.

After Pinochet took power in a coup, his agents proceeded to round up communists and other opponents to his regime and torture, sexually abuse, rape, indefinitely incarcerate, and kill them, without any trials or due process of law. It was during that time, in fact, that the CIA, which supported Pinochet, played a role, as yet undetermined, in the murder of a young American journalist named Charles Horman.

Pinochet knew that his war on communism, however, could not be limited to Chile, given that communists were located all over the world. Thus, Chile, along with other South American right-wing regimes, established Operation Condor, a secret program of assassination, torture, and political repression. According to Wikipedia, files discovered in 1992 in Paraguay revealed that Operation Condor succeeded in murdering 50,000 people, “disappearing” another 30,000, and incarcerating 400,000.

One day in 1976, however, Operation Condor hit a stumbling block here in the United States. As part of its global war on communism, it took out Chilean citizen Orlando Letelier with a car bomb that succeeded in killing not only him but also his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt. The killing took place on the streets of Washington, D.C.

What’s wrong with that, you ask? Weren’t Chile and the other members of Operation Condor involved in a major war? Didn’t they have the right to kill the enemy, wherever the enemy happened to be found? Wasn’t the entire world, including the United States, a battlefield in the global war on communism?

After all, what was different about the Letelier assassination and the CIA’s firing of a missile into a car in 2002 in Yemen that was carrying suspected terrorists, including one who was an American citizen? Didn’t the car in Yemen contain people who the CIA was sure were terrorists or terrorist sympathizers? Didn’t the car in Washington contain people that DINA was sure were communists or communist sympathizers, one of whom was a Chilean citizen?

There were some Americans who didn’t feel that Operation Condor should be permitted to extend its global war on communism to the United States. Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt were murder victims, they argued. The wartime analogy was hogwash, they said. Letelier, after all, was really just a former member of the cabinet in Chile’s Salvador Allende regime, which had been ousted in the Pinochet coup, who had continued his political battle against Pinochet’s dictatorship in the United States.

The Operation Condor agents who killed Letelier and Moffitt were ultimately indicted for murder in a U.S. District Court in Washington.

As it turned out, the DINA agent who orchestrated the murder of Letelier and Moffitt was a man named Michael Townley, who also – surprise, surprise – had worked for the CIA. Owing to public pressure, Townley was extradited to the United States to stand trial. The feds ultimately offered him a plea bargain that required him to testify against his underlings and that enabled him to live the rest of his life here in the United States under the federal witness protection program.

Assuming the CIA is telling the truth in its claim that it never carried out its assassination program, did the CIA factor in the Letelier-Moffitt case in deciding not to carry through with its assassination program? Perhaps. After all, if CIA assassins were to be arrested in a foreign country and indicted for murder, how would they be able to distinguish what they did from what Operation Condor did to Letelier and Moffitt?

July 30, 2009

Jacob Hornberge] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

They told me Douglas Caddy was an attorney who was representing the Watergate burglars and that Douglas Caddy was a communist and pro-Cuban and was a leader of the Young Americans for Freedom.

A communist, pro-Cuban and leader of YAF.....??????????!!!!!!!!! Who were they kidding and how stupid was this would-be assassin and informant?

Well, given that someone in intelligence wanted to kill you, I suppose because they felt something(s) your Watergate clients may have told you - or that you could piece together from what they had, is interesting. I'm sure you know more about Watergate than you've said, and in part that is out of your pledge of confidentiality to your clients. I hope, however, when you can you will tell us [the American People] more of what you know, or clues you know of - that might shed light on why they might want to kill you, Martha Mitchell, destroy Nixon, take-over the Government by stealth, and do all the many strange things that were parts of 'Watergate'. Just knowing who it was that wanted you dead, might say a lot. That you posted it on the JFK thread is, as well!.....

When Robert Merritt informed me of the 1972 conspiracy to assassinate me, I was both taken back and puzzled. I asked myself why would these CIA intelligence agents want this done? The reasons they gave Merritt were that I posed a nationals security threat and that I was a homosexual.

There is no way to know what was in their minds. However, to try to figure out their thinking, I decided to engage in role playing to see how I looked in their eyes. By doing this, I may have come up with a scenario as to why they were so concerned. This is as follows:

When I was graduated from New York University Law School in 1966, I went to work for General Foods Corporation, then the world’s largest food manufacturer. My assignment was to advise the corporate officers on government relations, legislation and regulation that might affect the company’s operations. In 1969 General Food transferred me to Washington, D.C. I was to open an office for the company after a year that would handle government relations, with the emphasis on lobbying.

General Foods told me that for the first year I would be working out of the offices of the public relations firm that had long handled its government relations. This firm was the Robert Mullen Company. What General Foods did not tell me was that the Mullen Company was a CIA front, having been incorporated in 1949 by the CIA and that General Foods was a partner in this arrangement.

So I started carrying out my General Foods assignment, which consisted primarily of close coordination with the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the national trade organization that represented food manufacturers.

In mid-1970 Robert Mullen informed me that Howard Hunt was joining the staff of his company. Hunt and I quickly found we had something in common: I had worked closely with William F. Buckley, Jr. in founding the conservative movement and Buckley not only was the godfather to Hunt’s children but had served under Hunt years previously in the CIA’s office in Mexico City.

Howard Hunt and his wife, Dorothy, became my closest friends in Washington. Howard and I conversed daily on any number of topics.

At one point Robert Mullen told Hunt and me that he was making plans to retire and asked if we were interested in buying his company, making payments on the purchase price from the profits over the future years. In the end Robert Mullen sold his company to Robert Bennett, a key associate of the Howard Hughes operation and of the CIA. Today Robert Bennett, Senator from Utah, serves in the U.S. Senate, where he is known as the tool and operative of the CIA.

I left General Foods in late 1970 and joined Gall, Lane and Kilcullen, a law firm in Washington, as an attorney. Hunt immediately became a client and I handled his personal and business matters.

In early 1972, the law firm assigned me to do volunteer presidential campaign legal work out of the office of John Dean, then White House Counsel to President Nixon. Hunt was pleased to learn of this assignment.

Around April 1972, two months before the Watergate case broke open, Hunt invited me to join him and the CIA’s General Counsel in what turned out to be a meeting about whether I would be interested in working for the CIA. If I were interested, the General Counsel told me that my CIA assignment would be to construct and open a luxurious hotel on the seashore in Nicaragua, then dominated by the Sandinistas. I told them I would think about it but in my heart knew that I could not accept CIA employment because the vetting process would inevitably reveal that I was homosexual. The CIA did not employ anyone who was homosexual. As with other federal agencies, there was a constant witch hunt against homosexuals, who were driven out and blackballed.

On June 17, 1972, the Watergate case broke with the arrests of the five burglars inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The same day Hunt and Gordon Liddy retained me as an attorney to represent them and the five arrested individuals.

On June 28, eleven days later, Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Carl Shoffler showed up with four intelligence agents at the apartment of Robert Merritt where they attempted to enlist Merritt in assassinating me, as disclosed in Merritt’s affidavit.

Why did they want me eliminated? One must look at it through their eyes:

(1) I was one of Howard Hunt’s closest friends and his attorney in the Watergate case. What had Hunt told me about the CIA operations during the period of our friendship? Did I know some of the CIA’s darkest secrets? After all, Hunt was a protégé of Richard Helms, the Director of the CIA, and had worked for the agency his entire life.

(2) What had I learned while working inside the Robert Mullen Company as an employee of General Foods Corporation? Had I gained access to the CIA files and documents inside the Mullen Company and acquired knowledge of its world wide operations? [For example, Robert Mullen had once spoken to me on the telephone when he was sent by the CIA to Chile to organize the media campaign to overthrow Allende.]

(3) Could I have recorded the conversation that I had with Hunt and the CIA’s General Counsel about the Nicaragua plan?

(4) Had Hunt told me about the role played by key CIA officers and agents in the assassination of President John Kennedy? In his deathbed confession that was audio recorded in January 2004, Hunt fingered CIA officers Cord Meyer, David Philips, Frank Sturgis and David Morales as being part of the assassination plan that originated with Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

In summary, it appeared to these CIA agents on June 28, 1972, that I had somehow worked myself into a position of knowing too much about the CIA, and thus of being a potential national security threat and of being a hated homosexual to boot. They feared that the mushrooming Watergate case could lead to my opening a Pandora’s Box that threatened to expose some of the darkest secrets of the CIA. So the easiest solution would be to make me a casualty of a domestic Operation Condor (see article below.)

In reality, these agents’ fears were unfounded. Hunt was always circumspect in what he told me, I never even thought of examining the files and documents housed inside the Mullen Company, I did not record the conversation between the CIA’s General Counsel, Hunt and me about Nicaragua, and I knew nothing about the CIA agents’ role in the JFK assassination.

Actually, I did not know for certain that the Robert Mullen Company was a CIA front until Senator Howard Baker disclosed this in his separate report released as part of the final report of the Senate Watergate Committee.

But the CIA agents on June 28, 1972, feared the worst and concocted a plan to remedy the situation.

What probably made them later change their course was that on June 28, 1972, I was served in the courthouse with a subpoena to appear “Forthwith” before the Grand Jury investigating the Watergate scandal and this event made national headlines. In short, I became too hot to be offed.

------------------------------------

Shades of Operation Condor

by Jacob G. Hornberger

Find this article at:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/riggenbach3-1.html

July 30, 2009

The CIA’s assassination plan, which it chose to keep secret from Congress, brings to mind Operation Condor, a similar plan run by DINA, which was Chile’s counterpart to the CIA under the dictatorial regime of military strongman Augusto Pinochet.

After Pinochet took power in a coup, his agents proceeded to round up communists and other opponents to his regime and torture, sexually abuse, rape, indefinitely incarcerate, and kill them, without any trials or due process of law. It was during that time, in fact, that the CIA, which supported Pinochet, played a role, as yet undetermined, in the murder of a young American journalist named Charles Horman.

Pinochet knew that his war on communism, however, could not be limited to Chile, given that communists were located all over the world. Thus, Chile, along with other South American right-wing regimes, established Operation Condor, a secret program of assassination, torture, and political repression. According to Wikipedia, files discovered in 1992 in Paraguay revealed that Operation Condor succeeded in murdering 50,000 people, “disappearing” another 30,000, and incarcerating 400,000.

One day in 1976, however, Operation Condor hit a stumbling block here in the United States. As part of its global war on communism, it took out Chilean citizen Orlando Letelier with a car bomb that succeeded in killing not only him but also his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt. The killing took place on the streets of Washington, D.C.

What’s wrong with that, you ask? Weren’t Chile and the other members of Operation Condor involved in a major war? Didn’t they have the right to kill the enemy, wherever the enemy happened to be found? Wasn’t the entire world, including the United States, a battlefield in the global war on communism?

After all, what was different about the Letelier assassination and the CIA’s firing of a missile into a car in 2002 in Yemen that was carrying suspected terrorists, including one who was an American citizen? Didn’t the car in Yemen contain people who the CIA was sure were terrorists or terrorist sympathizers? Didn’t the car in Washington contain people that DINA was sure were communists or communist sympathizers, one of whom was a Chilean citizen?

There were some Americans who didn’t feel that Operation Condor should be permitted to extend its global war on communism to the United States. Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt were murder victims, they argued. The wartime analogy was hogwash, they said. Letelier, after all, was really just a former member of the cabinet in Chile’s Salvador Allende regime, which had been ousted in the Pinochet coup, who had continued his political battle against Pinochet’s dictatorship in the United States.

The Operation Condor agents who killed Letelier and Moffitt were ultimately indicted for murder in a U.S. District Court in Washington.

As it turned out, the DINA agent who orchestrated the murder of Letelier and Moffitt was a man named Michael Townley, who also – surprise, surprise – had worked for the CIA. Owing to public pressure, Townley was extradited to the United States to stand trial. The feds ultimately offered him a plea bargain that required him to testify against his underlings and that enabled him to live the rest of his life here in the United States under the federal witness protection program.

Assuming the CIA is telling the truth in its claim that it never carried out its assassination program, did the CIA factor in the Letelier-Moffitt case in deciding not to carry through with its assassination program? Perhaps. After all, if CIA assassins were to be arrested in a foreign country and indicted for murder, how would they be able to distinguish what they did from what Operation Condor did to Letelier and Moffitt?

July 30, 2009

Jacob Hornberge] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

AFFADAVIT

1972 CONSPIRACY TO ASSASSINATE DOUGLAS CADDY,

Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven

I, Robert Merritt, attest to the following facts regarding my involvement with the Watergate attorney Douglas Caddy, who represented the burglars known as the Watergate Seven. On Saturday, June 17, 1972, five burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee offices in Watergate and were arrested at 2:30 A. M. by Washington, D.C. Police Officer Carl Shoffler. At the time the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department employed me as a Confidential Informant and assigned me to work directly with Officer Shoffler. Two weeks before the arrests at Watergate I provided information to Shoffler about the planned break-in of the DNC that I had obtained as a Confidential Informant from a highly unusual source. By using this advance information, Shoffler developed a successful triangulation strategy that in effect set the burglars up in a form of entrapment. The Watergate scandal thus began and ultimately forced the resignation of President Nixon.

Shoffler came to my apartment in Washington, D.C. late in the morning of the day of the events at Watergate and exulted in having made the arrests. He told me that he had secretly telephoned the Washington Post soon after the arrests to tip the newspaper off to what had occurred. He then demanded his special birthday present from me, which I was only too happy to perform.

(First meeting) Three days later, on June 20, 1972, Shoffler showed up at my apartment with his supervisor, Police Sgt. Paul Leeper. They asked me if I knew someone by the name of Douglas Caddy, who lived at the Georgetown House, a high-rise apartment, at 2121 P St., N. W., which was directly across the street from my apartment. They told me Douglas Caddy was an attorney who was representing the Watergate burglars and that Douglas Caddy was a communist and pro-Cuban and was a leader of the Young Americans for Freedom.

They wanted me to establish a sexual relationship with Douglas Caddy to find out how Douglas Caddy knew to show up for the arraignment of the burglars after their arrest. They asserted that Douglas Caddy had to be in on the conspiracy with the burglars and that in the past he had been shadowed when he frequented a leather-Levi gay bar in Greenwich Village in Manhattan.

Shoffler and Leeper related that Douglas Caddy had been working as a White House attorney in a sensitive position. They claimed that I was butch enough to entice Douglas Caddy, a masculine gay guy, into a sexual affair to obtain the information they wanted. They told me that this was the most important thing that I could do for my country and that I would be well-paid if I undertook the assignment. Their initial offer was $10,000.

I asked Shoffler about who it was that so desperately wanted this information from Douglas Caddy and he said that it was from very high up sources in the Department of Justice and the U. S. Attorney’s office.

I did not commit to doing the assignment.

Two days later, on June 22, 1972, which was my birthday, Shoffler came to my apartment to give me my birthday present. He spent the entire day with me. Afterwards, when we were relaxing in bed, he gently tried to persuade me to cooperate with him and Leeper regarding the Douglas Caddy assignment. I emphatically told him “No.” I didn’t know Douglas Caddy and I didn’t know how to get to know him and I was bothered that undertaking the assignment could lead to the destruction of another gay person who apparently was still in the closet and merely attempting to represent his clients.

We talked about the break-in and Shoffler told me straight out that the burglars were hired indirectly by one of the 100 families of America, which Shoffler named as the Kennedy Family.

Shoffler said, “The intention of the Watergate break-in was to destroy the Nixon presidency. President Nixon was guilty of nothing in its planning.”

Shoffler said that there were hidden motivations involved, such as the fear of law enforcement agencies that their turf would be reduced by President Nixon through a

scheme known as the Houston Plan, the CIA’s concern that President Nixon planned to reorganize the intelligence agencies and their operations, and the Defense Department’s opposition to President Nixon’s new China policy.

I asked Shoffler if he was angry at me for refusing to take the Caddy assignment and he smiled at me and said he was glad that I didn’t.

(Third meeting) In the March 1973, nine months after the initial overture and a month after the first Watergate trial ended, I met with Shoffler and Leeper, FBI agents Terry O’Connor and Bill Tucker and their FBI Agent-In-Charge, whose name escapes me. Leeper did most of the talking. He again tried to persuade me to take on the Douglas Caddy assignment, making an initial offer of $25,000. I refused outright. The group then said that I could be paid as much as $100,000 if I took the assignment but I still refused without providing any explanation. Once it was understood that I would not accept the offer, Leeper declared that the least I could do was to spread the rumor around Washington, D. C. that Douglas Caddy was gay in an effort to force him to come out of the closet. Their intention was to defame Douglas Caddy. This was the last attempt to persuade me to take the Douglas Caddy assignment. The group departed angrily, with the exception Shoffler, who secretly winked at me as he went out the door.

DISCLOSURE OF SECOND MEETING

On June 17, 2009, 37 years after Watergate, I notified Douglas Caddy, now an attorney in Houston, Texas, of a well kept secret and informed him of a new Watergate revelation. (Previously I had disclosed to Douglas Caddy that there had been two meetings regarding the Caddy assignment as discussed above.)

I then informed Douglas Caddy that there had been a second meeting about the Caddy assignment. It took place on June 28, 1972, with Shoffler and four others agents who were never introduced to me. I am quite certain that these agents were from either Military Intelligence or the CIA. I know that they were not FBI agents from their manner and the special type of assignment they asked me to do regarding Douglas Caddy.

Shoffler and these agents met with me in my apartment at 2122 P Street, N.W. Douglas Caddy did in fact live across the street from me in the Georgetown House at 2121 P St., N.W.

One of the agents, whom I will never forget, had two plastic bags, one containing two small blue pills and another that had a laboratory test tube with a small gelatin substance that was approximately ¼ inch in diameter. He referred to it as a suppository.

The assignment was to become intimately acquainted with Douglas Caddy as quickly as possible.

The exact description of the assignment was to engage in oral sex with Douglas Caddy and in doing so I was suppose to fondle his b---- and a--, and at the same time insert the small gelatin like suppository into his rectum, which would have caused death within minutes.

If there were any delay in the lethal process that would prevent me from leaving fast from his presence, then I was to take the small blue pills, which would have caused me nausea, providing me with an excuse to leave for home immediately.

The agents told me that Douglas Caddy had to be eliminated without fail.

My first reaction was that they were “nuts.” But then Shoffler pulled me aside and whispered that this was a very real and serious situation and the decision was entirely up to me.

The agents were planning a pre-arrange way for me to meet Douglas Caddy, which they did not disclose at the time.

I asked the agents what the reason was that they wanted for me to go to this length and why they and the government were taking such a risk. I was told that this matter involved a high national security situation that they were not at liberty to disclose. The agents stated that their orders did not allow them to know the answers and that they were only following orders from their superiors who sometimes did not know the answers either and merely implemented instructions from those above. However, from the agents’ comments I inferred that because Douglas Caddy was gay, that was reason enough.

The agents informed me that I would be well taken care of for this assignment. They also said that I would never have to worry about anything for the rest of my life.

I was totally repulsed by the entire assignment and proposition. After I emphatically refused, the agents swore me to secrecy and left.

Only in July of 1986 when I was subpoenaed by Shoffler to testify before the grand jury in the Lenny Bias case in Upper Marlboro, Maryland did he ever discuss this subject again. At that time he said, “Butch, I am glad that you did not go through with that Douglas Caddy assignment because I found out that those two little blue pills would have caused your instant death.”

I regret that I never disclosed these facts until now. I suppressed this information out of fear for my life.

Some of the background information in this affidavit about my relationship with Shoffler as a Confidential Informant was disclosed by Jim Hougan in his 1984 best-selling book, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (see pages 320-323). Some was also disclosed in the Watergate Special Prosecution Force Memorandums of its two interviews of me and one of Officer Carl Shoffler in 1973.

This sworn statement is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

I, Robert Merritt, swear in this affidavit that the facts are true to the best of my knowledge under the penalty of perjury.

Robert Merritt

Subscribed and sworn to before me on the 28th of July, 2009, to certify which witness my hand and seal of office.

Notary Public in and for the State of New York

Ricardo S. Castro

Notary Public, State of New York

No. 01CA5041272

Qualified in Bronx County

Comm. Exp. 08/29/09

__________________________

7/29/09

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Wall Street Journal

Editorial Page

March 24, 1998

WHAT IF JUDGE SIRICA WERE WITH US TODAY?

By Douglas Caddy

(Mr. Caddy is a Houston lawyer)

The Clinton scandals, with all the claims of coverup and executive privilege, are certainly reminiscent of Watergate. But there is a crucial difference: This case lacks a John Sirica, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia who played such a crucial role in Watergate. The untold historical record reveals that the early actions of Sirica, who assigned the Watergate case to himself, helped spur the subsequent coverup and obstruction of justice that ultimately led to the resignation of President Nixon and the criminal convictions of many Watergate figures.

The Watergate scandal began at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972, when Washington, D.C. police arrested five men on burglary charges at the Watergate office building. At 3:05 a.m. E. Howard Hunt phoned me from his White House office and asked if he could come immediately to my Washington residence. I had been Hunt’s personal attorney for several years.

Hunt arrived half an hour later and informed me what had transpired earlier at the Watergate. He retained me to represent him in the case and then called G. Gordon Liddy, who also hired me. At that time, about two hours after the burglary, both Hunt and Liddy requested I also represent the five people arrested, four Cuban-Americans and James McCord, who were then incarcerated in the D.C. jail.

On June 28 – 11 days later – while working on the case in the federal courthouse in Washington, I was served with a subpoena bearing the name of Chief Judge Sirica, to appear “forthwith” before the federal grand jury investigating the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the grand jury room.

From June 28 until July 19 I was to appear before the grand jury on six occasions and answer hundreds of questions. I drew the line, however, on the advice of my own legal counsel, at answering 38 questions we felt invaded my clients’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel and the attorney-client privilege. A typical question: “Between the hours of Friday at midnight, June 16, and 8:30 a.m. Saturday, June 17, did you receive a visit from Mr. Everett Howard Hunt?” We believed answering such questions would incriminate Hunt and Liddy, who had not been arrested, and would violate their constitutional rights.

Judge Sirica, rejecting such arguments out of hand, threatened to jail me for contempt of court. When I went before the grand jury on July 13, I refused to answer the 38 questions. Within an hour I was back before Judge Sircia, who immediately held me in contempt of court and ordered me to jail. Five days later, on July 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the contempt citation and ordered me to testify under threat of being jailed again. The opinion, which I found gratuitously insulting, declared: “Even if such a relationship does exist, certain communications, such as consultation in furtherance of a crime, are not within the privilege.”

In his July 19, 1972, Oval Office tape, Nixon is recorded as expressing dismay to John Ehrlichman: “Do you mean the circuit court ordered an attorney to testify?”

Ehrlichman replied, “It [unintelligible] me, except that this damn circuit that we’ve got here, with

[Judge David] Bazelon and so on, it surprises me every time they do something.”

Nixon then asked, “Why didn’t he appeal to the Supreme Court?”

The answer is that my attorneys and I believe we had built a strong enough court record that if Hunt, Liddy and the five arrested individuals were found guilty, their convictions could be overturned on appeal because of Sirica’s and the appeals court’s abuse of me as their attorney.

However, Judge Sirica’s actions had an unintended consequence. Hunt and Liddy, seeing their attorney falsely accused by Judge Sirica of being a participant in their crime, realized early on that they were not going to get a fair trail, so they embarked on a coverup involving “hush money.” As Hunt has written: “If Sirica was treating Caddy – an Officer of the Court – so summarily, and Caddy was completely uninvolved in Watergate – then those of us who were involved could expect neither fairness nor understanding from him. As events unfolded, this conclusion became tragically accurate.”

Liddy appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals, claiming that my being forced to testify denied him his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The court upheld his conviction: “The evidence against appellant...was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge, there is no reasonable possibility it contributed to the conviction.” Neither Judge Sirica nor the appeals court acknowledged that their assault on the attorney-client privilege helped spur the ensuing coverup and obstruction of justice.

I was never indicted, named an unindicted co-conspirator, disciplined by the Bar or even contacted by the Senate Watergate Committee or the House Judiciary Committee, whose staff included a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham.

Now the issue of the attorney-client privilege is again being raised, this time by Monica Lewinsky’s first lawyer, Francis D. Carter, who has been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and bring the notes he took while representing Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Carter got involved when Vernon Jordan referred Ms. Lewinsky to him in January. On March 4, Mr. Carter’s attorney, Charles Ogletree, argued before Chief Judge Norma Hollaway Johnson that the subpoena should be quashed: “Once you start to allow the government to intrude on the attorney-client relationship and allow them to pierce the attorney-client privilege, clients will no longer have a sense of confidence and respect that lawyers should have.”

Coming days will reveal how Mr. Carter fares in his fight to protect Ms. Lewinsky’s constitutional rights and what effect this will have on the case’s ultimate outcome. To date, at least, Judge Johnson has shown a restraint that her predecessor Judge Sirica did not.

http://www.metroweekly.com/feature/?ak=3296

Inside Man

Butch Merritt was a leading spy in America's homegrown cold war against homosexuals

Interview by Will O'Bryan

Published on March 13, 2008

Earl Robert Merritt Jr., a.k.a. Butch Merritt, claims humble beginnings outside Charleston, W.Va. Had he remained in West Virginia, it's nearly certain his life would have been quite a bit simpler than the path he took to Washington as a young man, not long after President Kennedy was assassinated, though he says his move was prompted, in part, by sexual abuse at a Catholic high school he attended.

A few years after landing in the nation's capital and coming out as a gay man, Merritt says he was recruited by Carl Shoffler of the Metropolitan Police Department to spy on the District's GLBT community in a time of simmering civic discontent, anti-war demonstrations and COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), the acronym for the FBI's effort to spy on Americans....

This story reminds me of Don Norton, not the fisherman, the gay piano player at the officer's club who was recruited to spy on gay military officers. Norton thought he was recruited by the CIA, but when his name came out in the Garrison case the internal CIA files had nothing on him. He was probably ONI or Army.

It's also interesting how Merritt went from an informant to a rock throwing agitator.

BK

The excerpt below is from a Xerox copy of an undated column by columnist Drew Pearson. While the column’s exact date cannot be pinpointed at this time, reference in it to former Vice President Spiro Agnew leads one to believe it was published in the Washington Post sometime in the months immediately after Agnew’s resignation as Vice President, which took place on October 18, 1973.

Columnist Drew Pearson was one of Robert Merritt’s biggest supporters. He told Merritt that he was publishing the column as a “life insurance policy’ to protect Merritt from potential physical harm, which is one reason Merritt executed his recent affidavit regarding me and why I posted it in the forum today.

POLICE PLOT FAILS

By Jack Anderson

Washington – The Washington police attempted to plant an informant in the household of Ethel Kennedy, widow of the late Sen. Robert Kennedy, in 1971 to spy on the Kennedy crowd.

The informant, E. Robert Merritt, Jr., also committed burglaries and other dirty deeds, not only for the police but for the FBI. Indeed, confidential FBI files say of him, “Nothing has developed…to indicate that the informant has furnished other than reliable information. “

The police provided Merritt with Ethel Kennedy’s private phone number and home address. He was instructed to apply for a job opening as a gardener-driver at the Kennedy residence and then to use the position to gather information about the friends, associates and members of the Kennedy family.

This particular plot fell through but he completed many even more bizarre undercover assignments. Under the guidance of his lawyer Alan Cilman, the 31-year old Merritt has now told us about some of his exploits:

+When the antiwar demonstrators descended upon Washington on May Day 1971, the police asked Merritt to infiltrate the inner circle and to spy on activist leaders Jack Davis, Rennie Davis and a young lawyer named Ray Twohig. The police gave Merritt pills and marijuana to plan on Twohig. Merritt was also instructed to distribute bad drugs, including blue-stripped capsules that caused nausea, and to disrupt the demonstrations by cutting microphone wires.

+ At the instigation of FBI agent William Tucker, Merritt entered the Red House Bookstore, which was associated with prison reform, and swiped mail which he turned over to the FBI.

+The undercover operative also picked up a box of address envelopes left outside the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and delivered them to FBI agent Terry O’Connor.

+Merritt was also instructed to spy on the Institute for Policy Studies, a respected left-wing research group. Told to take anything he “could get away with,” he walked off with a sack that turned out to contain first class letters. He turned the mail over to the FBI’s Tucker, who retained it for study and later asked him to return it.

+Both the FBI and Washington police asked Merritt for any gossip he could glean about the following members of Congress: Senator Tom Eagleton D-Mo., Hubert Humphrey D-Minn., Ted Kennedy D-Mass., Charles Mathias R-Md., George McGovern D-S.D., Lee Metcalf D-Mont., Ed Muskie D-Maine, William Proxmire D.-Wis., Abraham Ribicoff D-Conn., and Stuart Symington D.-Mo. Also Representatives Bella Abzub D-N.Y., Mario Biaggi D-N.Y., Shirley Chisholm D-N.Y,, John Conyers D-Mich., Ron Dellums D-Calif., Don Edwards D-Calif., Walter Fauntroy D-N.C., Richard Ichord D-Mo, Claude Pepper D-Fla. and Charles Wiggins D-Calif.

Footnote: The two FBI agents, William Tucker and Terry O’Connor, declined to comment. Tucker’s superior, Nick Stames, also refused to comment but promised to investigate any questions of impropriety. Some of the Washington policemen, involved with Merritt, had no comment; others did not return our calls.

WASHNGTON WHIRL

+There’s more that meets the eye to the sudden confession of Jack Ford, the President’s son, that he has smoked pot…..

+Ex-Vice President Spiro Agnew’s name may be dragged back into the headlines. The FBI is investigating reports that certain builders, with the right political connections, were granted governmental leases. One of Agnew’s cronies, the FBI has learned, wangled a questionable $45 million lease.

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.

Testimony of Marcus G. Raskin before Select Committee on Intelligence (Pike Committee)

Re: Earl Robert Merritt.

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...sPageId=1489947

The excerpt below is from a Xerox copy of an undated column by columnist Drew Pearson. While the column’s exact date cannot be pinpointed at this time, reference in it to former Vice President Spiro Agnew leads one to believe it was published in the Washington Post sometime in the months immediately after Agnew’s resignation as Vice President, which took place in October 1973.

Columnist Drew Pearson was one of Robert Merritt’s biggest supporters. He told Merritt that he was publishing the column as a “life insurance policy’ to protect Merritt from potential physical harm, which is one reason Merritt executed his recent affidavit regarding me and why I posted it in the forum today.

POLICE PLOT FAILS

By Jack Anderson

Washington – The Washington police attempted to plant an informant in the household of Ethel Kennedy, widow of the late Sen. Robert Kennedy, in 1971 to spy on the Kennedy crowd.

The informant, E. Robert Merritt, Jr., also committed burglaries and other dirty deeds, not only for the police but for the FBI. Indeed, confidential FBI files say of him, “Nothing has developed…to indicate that the informant has furnished other than reliable information. “

The police provided Merritt with Ethel Kennedy’s private phone number and home address. He was instructed to apply for a job opening as a gardener-driver at the Kennedy residence and then to use the position to gather information about the friends, associates and members of the Kennedy family.

This particular plot fell through but he completed many even more bizarre undercover assignments. Under the guidance of his lawyer Alan Cilman, the 31-year old Merritt has now told us about some of his exploits:

+When the antiwar demonstrators descended upon Washington on May Day 1971, the police asked Merritt to infiltrate the inner circle and to spy on activist leaders Jack Davis, Rennie Davis and a young lawyer named Ray Twohig. The police gave Merritt pills and marijuana to plan on Twohig. Merritt was also instructed to distribute bad drugs, including blue-stripped capsules that caused nausea, and to disrupt the demonstrations by cutting microphone wires.

+ At the instigation of FBI agent William Tucker, Merritt entered the Red House Bookstore, which was associated with prison reform, and swiped mail which he turned over to the FBI.

+The undercover operative also picked up a box of address envelopes left outside the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and delivered them to FBI agent Terry O’Connor.

+Merritt was also instructed to spy on the Institute for Policy Studies, a respected left-wing research group. Told to take anything he “could get away with,” he walked off with a sack that turned out to contain first class letters. He turned the mail over to the FBI’s Tucker, who retained it for study and later asked him to return it.

+Both the FBI and Washington police asked Merritt for any gossip he could glean about the following members of Congress: Senator Tom Eagleton D-Mo., Hubert Humphrey D-Minn., Ted Kennedy D-Mass., Charles Mathias R-Md., George McGovern D-S.D., Lee Metcalf D-Mont., Ed Muskie D-Maine, William Proxmire D.-Wis., Abraham Ribicoff D-Conn., and Stuart Symington D.-Mo. Also Representatives Bella Abzub D-N.Y., Mario Biaggi D-N.Y., Shirley Chisholm D-N.Y,, John Conyers D-Mich., Ron Dellums D-Calif., Don Edwards D-Calif., Walter Fauntroy D-N.C., Richard Ichord D-Mo, Claude Pepper D-Fla. and Charles Wiggins D-Calif.

Footnote: The two FBI agents, William Tucker and Terry O’Connor, declined to comment. Tucker’s superior, Nick Stames, also refused to comment but promised to investigate any questions of impropriety. Some of the Washington policemen, involved with Merritt, had no comment; others did not return our calls.

WASHNGTON WHIRL

+There’s more that meets the eye to the sudden confession of Jack Ford, the President’s son, that he has smoked pot…..

+Ex-Vice President Spiro Agnew’s name may be dragged back into the headlines. The FBI is investigating reports that certain builders, with the right political connections, were granted governmental leases. One of Agnew’s cronies, the FBI has learned, wangled a questionable $45 million lease.

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.

Testimony of Marcus G. Raskin before Select Committee on Intelligence (Pike Committee)

Re: Earl Robert Merritt.

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...sPageId=1489947

STATE OF NEW YORK

COUNTY OF NEW YORK

Affidavit of Robert N. Wall

I, Robert N. Wall, being duly sworn, depose and say on the basis of my own knowledge:

1. I am currently a resident of Buffalo, New York

2. During the period 1965-1970, I was a Special Agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and during the period 1967-1970, I was assigned to the Washington, D.C. Field Office of the F.B.I. During that time, it came to my attention that the records of banks in the Washington, D.C. area could be obtained for the purposes of our investigation. My understanding is that these records were obtained by a special agent in the Washington, D.C. Field Office who had developed relations with various officers and employees of banks in this area. These banking records were not obtained through any legal procedures (eg. Grand Jury subpoenas or otherwise), but as an accommodation to the F.B.I.

3. I, as well as other agents investigating the so-called “New Left” and “black” organizations, were able to obtain the banking records we were interested in by requesting them from the agent on this detail. In was in this context that I saw the banking records of the Institute for Policy Studies, during the period 1968-1970.

4. By banking records of the Institute for Policy Studies, I mean a list of checks issued by IPS showing check number, date of issuance, maker, payee, and endorser, if any, with respect to the Institute of Policy Studies account at the Riggs National Bank in Washington, D.C.

5. While the checks written by the Institute for Policy Studies were routinely obtained, the F.B.I. was also able, on special request, to obtain comparable information with respect to the IPS account of deposits made in the Riggs National Bank.

6. In addition to the financial records of the IPS, the F.B.I. was able to secure in similar fashion the financial records of The New School for Afro-American Thought, The Drum and Spear Bookstore, the Center for Black Education, and those of selected individuals, including Stokely Carmichael and Jean Hughes.

Then personally appeared before me the above-named Robert N. Wall and made oath that the foregoing statements subscribed by him are true.

Robert N. Wall

12/16/71

Bella Greene

Notary Public, State of New York

No. 21-1351249

Qualified in Kings County

Commission expires March 30, 1973

AFFADAVIT

1972 CONSPIRACY TO ASSASSINATE DOUGLAS CADDY,

Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven

I, Robert Merritt, attest to the following facts regarding my involvement with the Watergate attorney Douglas Caddy, who represented the burglars known as the Watergate Seven. On Saturday, June 17, 1972, five burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee offices in Watergate and were arrested at 2:30 A. M. by Washington, D.C. Police Officer Carl Shoffler. At the time the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department employed me as a Confidential Informant and assigned me to work directly with Officer Shoffler. Two weeks before the arrests at Watergate I provided information to Shoffler about the planned break-in of the DNC that I had obtained as a Confidential Informant from a highly unusual source. By using this advance information, Shoffler developed a successful triangulation strategy that in effect set the burglars up in a form of entrapment. The Watergate scandal thus began and ultimately forced the resignation of President Nixon.

Shoffler came to my apartment in Washington, D.C. late in the morning of the day of the events at Watergate and exulted in having made the arrests. He told me that he had secretly telephoned the Washington Post soon after the arrests to tip the newspaper off to what had occurred. He then demanded his special birthday present from me, which I was only too happy to perform.

(First meeting) Three days later, on June 20, 1972, Shoffler showed up at my apartment with his supervisor, Police Sgt. Paul Leeper. They asked me if I knew someone by the name of Douglas Caddy, who lived at the Georgetown House, a high-rise apartment, at 2121 P St., N. W., which was directly across the street from my apartment. They told me Douglas Caddy was an attorney who was representing the Watergate burglars and that Douglas Caddy was a communist and pro-Cuban and was a leader of the Young Americans for Freedom.

They wanted me to establish a sexual relationship with Douglas Caddy to find out how Douglas Caddy knew to show up for the arraignment of the burglars after their arrest. They asserted that Douglas Caddy had to be in on the conspiracy with the burglars and that in the past he had been shadowed when he frequented a leather-Levi gay bar in Greenwich Village in Manhattan.

Shoffler and Leeper related that Douglas Caddy had been working as a White House attorney in a sensitive position. They claimed that I was butch enough to entice Douglas Caddy, a masculine gay guy, into a sexual affair to obtain the information they wanted. They told me that this was the most important thing that I could do for my country and that I would be well-paid if I undertook the assignment. Their initial offer was $10,000.

I asked Shoffler about who it was that so desperately wanted this information from Douglas Caddy and he said that it was from very high up sources in the Department of Justice and the U. S. Attorney’s office.

I did not commit to doing the assignment.

Two days later, on June 22, 1972, which was my birthday, Shoffler came to my apartment to give me my birthday present. He spent the entire day with me. Afterwards, when we were relaxing in bed, he gently tried to persuade me to cooperate with him and Leeper regarding the Douglas Caddy assignment. I emphatically told him “No.” I didn’t know Douglas Caddy and I didn’t know how to get to know him and I was bothered that undertaking the assignment could lead to the destruction of another gay person who apparently was still in the closet and merely attempting to represent his clients.

We talked about the break-in and Shoffler told me straight out that the burglars were hired indirectly by one of the 100 families of America, which Shoffler named as the Kennedy Family.

Shoffler said, “The intention of the Watergate break-in was to destroy the Nixon presidency. President Nixon was guilty of nothing in its planning.”

Shoffler said that there were hidden motivations involved, such as the fear of law enforcement agencies that their turf would be reduced by President Nixon through a

scheme known as the Houston Plan, the CIA’s concern that President Nixon planned to reorganize the intelligence agencies and their operations, and the Defense Department’s opposition to President Nixon’s new China policy.

I asked Shoffler if he was angry at me for refusing to take the Caddy assignment and he smiled at me and said he was glad that I didn’t.

(Third meeting) In the March 1973, nine months after the initial overture and a month after the first Watergate trial ended, I met with Shoffler and Leeper, FBI agents Terry O’Connor and Bill Tucker and their FBI Agent-In-Charge, whose name escapes me. Leeper did most of the talking. He again tried to persuade me to take on the Douglas Caddy assignment, making an initial offer of $25,000. I refused outright. The group then said that I could be paid as much as $100,000 if I took the assignment but I still refused without providing any explanation. Once it was understood that I would not accept the offer, Leeper declared that the least I could do was to spread the rumor around Washington, D. C. that Douglas Caddy was gay in an effort to force him to come out of the closet. Their intention was to defame Douglas Caddy. This was the last attempt to persuade me to take the Douglas Caddy assignment. The group departed angrily, with the exception Shoffler, who secretly winked at me as he went out the door.

DISCLOSURE OF SECOND MEETING

On June 17, 2009, 37 years after Watergate, I notified Douglas Caddy, now an attorney in Houston, Texas, of a well kept secret and informed him of a new Watergate revelation. (Previously I had disclosed to Douglas Caddy that there had been two meetings regarding the Caddy assignment as discussed above.)

I then informed Douglas Caddy that there had been a second meeting about the Caddy assignment. It took place on June 28, 1972, with Shoffler and four others agents who were never introduced to me. I am quite certain that these agents were from either Military Intelligence or the CIA. I know that they were not FBI agents from their manner and the special type of assignment they asked me to do regarding Douglas Caddy.

Shoffler and these agents met with me in my apartment at 2122 P Street, N.W. Douglas Caddy did in fact live across the street from me in the Georgetown House at 2121 P St., N.W.

One of the agents, whom I will never forget, had two plastic bags, one containing two small blue pills and another that had a laboratory test tube with a small gelatin substance that was approximately ¼ inch in diameter. He referred to it as a suppository.

The assignment was to become intimately acquainted with Douglas Caddy as quickly as possible.

The exact description of the assignment was to engage in oral sex with Douglas Caddy and in doing so I was suppose to fondle his b---- and a--, and at the same time insert the small gelatin like suppository into his rectum, which would have caused death within minutes.

If there were any delay in the lethal process that would prevent me from leaving fast from his presence, then I was to take the small blue pills, which would have caused me nausea, providing me with an excuse to leave for home immediately.

The agents told me that Douglas Caddy had to be eliminated without fail.

My first reaction was that they were “nuts.” But then Shoffler pulled me aside and whispered that this was a very real and serious situation and the decision was entirely up to me.

The agents were planning a pre-arrange way for me to meet Douglas Caddy, which they did not disclose at the time.

I asked the agents what the reason was that they wanted for me to go to this length and why they and the government were taking such a risk. I was told that this matter involved a high national security situation that they were not at liberty to disclose. The agents stated that their orders did not allow them to know the answers and that they were only following orders from their superiors who sometimes did not know the answers either and merely implemented instructions from those above. However, from the agents’ comments I inferred that because Douglas Caddy was gay, that was reason enough.

The agents informed me that I would be well taken care of for this assignment. They also said that I would never have to worry about anything for the rest of my life.

I was totally repulsed by the entire assignment and proposition. After I emphatically refused, the agents swore me to secrecy and left.

Only in July of 1986 when I was subpoenaed by Shoffler to testify before the grand jury in the Lenny Bias case in Upper Marlboro, Maryland did he ever discuss this subject again. At that time he said, “Butch, I am glad that you did not go through with that Douglas Caddy assignment because I found out that those two little blue pills would have caused your instant death.”

I regret that I never disclosed these facts until now. I suppressed this information out of fear for my life.

Some of the background information in this affidavit about my relationship with Shoffler as a Confidential Informant was disclosed by Jim Hougan in his 1984 best-selling book, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (see pages 320-323). Some was also disclosed in the Watergate Special Prosecution Force Memorandums of

its two interviews of me and one of Officer Carl Shoffler in 1973.

This sworn statement is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

I, Robert Merritt, swear in this affidavit that the facts are true to the best of my knowledge under the penalty of perjury.

Robert Merritt

Subscribed and sworn to before me on the 28th of July, 2009, to certify which witness my hand and seal of office.

Notary Public in and for the State of New York

Ricardo S. Castro

Notary Public, State of New York

No. 01CA5041272

Qualified in Bronx County

Comm. Exp. 08/29/09

__________________________

7/29/09

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Wall Street Journal

Editorial Page

March 24, 1998

WHAT IF JUDGE SIRICA WERE WITH US TODAY?

By Douglas Caddy

(Mr. Caddy is a Houston lawyer)

The Clinton scandals, with all the claims of coverup and executive privilege, are certainly reminiscent of Watergate. But there is a crucial difference: This case lacks a John Sirica, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia who played such a crucial role in Watergate. The untold historical record reveals that the early actions of Sirica, who assigned the Watergate case to himself, helped spur the subsequent coverup and obstruction of justice that ultimately led to the resignation of President Nixon and the criminal convictions of many Watergate figures.

The Watergate scandal began at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972, when Washington, D.C. police arrested five men on burglary charges at the Watergate office building. At 3:05 a.m. E. Howard Hunt phoned me from his White House office and asked if he could come immediately to my Washington residence. I had been Hunt’s personal attorney for several years.

Hunt arrived half an hour later and informed me what had transpired earlier at the Watergate. He retained me to represent him in the case and then called G. Gordon Liddy, who also hired me. At that time, about two hours after the burglary, both Hunt and Liddy requested I also represent the five people arrested, four Cuban-Americans and James McCord, who were then incarcerated in the D.C. jail.

On June 28 – 11 days later – while working on the case in the federal courthouse in Washington, I was served with a subpoena bearing the name of Chief Judge Sirica, to appear “forthwith” before the federal grand jury investigating the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the grand jury room.

From June 28 until July 19 I was to appear before the grand jury on six occasions and answer hundreds of questions. I drew the line, however, on the advice of my own legal counsel, at answering 38 questions we felt invaded my clients’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel and the attorney-client privilege. A typical question: “Between the hours of Friday at midnight, June 16, and 8:30 a.m. Saturday, June 17, did you receive a visit from Mr. Everett Howard Hunt?” We believed answering such questions would incriminate Hunt and Liddy, who had not been arrested, and would violate their constitutional rights.

Judge Sirica, rejecting such arguments out of hand, threatened to jail me for contempt of court. When I went before the grand jury on July 13, I refused to answer the 38 questions. Within an hour I was back before Judge Sircia, who immediately held me in contempt of court and ordered me to jail. Five days later, on July 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the contempt citation and ordered me to testify under threat of being jailed again. The opinion, which I found gratuitously insulting, declared: “Even if such a relationship does exist, certain communications, such as consultation in furtherance of a crime, are not within the privilege.”

In his July 19, 1972, Oval Office tape, Nixon is recorded as expressing dismay to John Ehrlichman: “Do you mean the circuit court ordered an attorney to testify?”

Ehrlichman replied, “It [unintelligible] me, except that this damn circuit that we’ve got here, with

[Judge David] Bazelon and so on, it surprises me every time they do something.”

Nixon then asked, “Why didn’t he appeal to the Supreme Court?”

The answer is that my attorneys and I believe we had built a strong enough court record that if Hunt, Liddy and the five arrested individuals were found guilty, their convictions could be overturned on appeal because of Sirica’s and the appeals court’s abuse of me as their attorney.

However, Judge Sirica’s actions had an unintended consequence. Hunt and Liddy, seeing their attorney falsely accused by Judge Sirica of being a participant in their crime, realized early on that they were not going to get a fair trail, so they embarked on a coverup involving “hush money.” As Hunt has written: “If Sirica was treating Caddy – an Officer of the Court – so summarily, and Caddy was completely uninvolved in Watergate – then those of us who were involved could expect neither fairness nor understanding from him. As events unfolded, this conclusion became tragically accurate.”

Liddy appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals, claiming that my being forced to testify denied him his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The court upheld his conviction: “The evidence against appellant...was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge, there is no reasonable possibility it contributed to the conviction.” Neither Judge Sirica nor the appeals court acknowledged that their assault on the attorney-client privilege helped spur the ensuing coverup and obstruction of justice.

I was never indicted, named an unindicted co-conspirator, disciplined by the Bar or even contacted by the Senate Watergate Committee or the House Judiciary Committee, whose staff included a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham.

Now the issue of the attorney-client privilege is again being raised, this time by Monica Lewinsky’s first lawyer, Francis D. Carter, who has been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and bring the notes he took while representing Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Carter got involved when Vernon Jordan referred Ms. Lewinsky to him in January. On March 4, Mr. Carter’s attorney, Charles Ogletree, argued before Chief Judge Norma Hollaway Johnson that the subpoena should be quashed: “Once you start to allow the government to intrude on the attorney-client relationship and allow them to pierce the attorney-client privilege, clients will no longer have a sense of confidence and respect that lawyers should have.”

Coming days will reveal how Mr. Carter fares in his fight to protect Ms. Lewinsky’s constitutional rights and what effect this will have on the case’s ultimate outcome. To date, at least, Judge Johnson has shown a restraint that her predecessor Judge Sirica did not.

AFFADAVIT

1972 CONSPIRACY TO ASSASSINATE DOUGLAS CADDY,

Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven

I, Robert Merritt, attest to the following facts regarding my involvement with the Watergate attorney Douglas Caddy, who represented the burglars known as the Watergate Seven. On Saturday, June 17, 1972, five burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee offices in Watergate and were arrested at 2:30 A. M. by Washington, D.C. Police Officer Carl Shoffler. At the time the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department employed me as a Confidential Informant and assigned me to work directly with Officer Shoffler. Two weeks before the arrests at Watergate I provided information to Shoffler about the planned break-in of the DNC that I had obtained as a Confidential Informant from a highly unusual source. By using this advance information, Shoffler developed a successful triangulation strategy that in effect set the burglars up in a form of entrapment. The Watergate scandal thus began and ultimately forced the resignation of President Nixon.

Shoffler came to my apartment in Washington, D.C. late in the morning of the day of the events at Watergate and exulted in having made the arrests. He told me that he had secretly telephoned the Washington Post soon after the arrests to tip the newspaper off to what had occurred. He then demanded his special birthday present from me, which I was only too happy to perform.

(First meeting) Three days later, on June 20, 1972, Shoffler showed up at my apartment with his supervisor, Police Sgt. Paul Leeper. They asked me if I knew someone by the name of Douglas Caddy, who lived at the Georgetown House, a high-rise apartment, at 2121 P St., N. W., which was directly across the street from my apartment. They told me Douglas Caddy was an attorney who was representing the Watergate burglars and that Douglas Caddy was a communist and pro-Cuban and was a leader of the Young Americans for Freedom.

They wanted me to establish a sexual relationship with Douglas Caddy to find out how Douglas Caddy knew to show up for the arraignment of the burglars after their arrest. They asserted that Douglas Caddy had to be in on the conspiracy with the burglars and that in the past he had been shadowed when he frequented a leather-Levi gay bar in Greenwich Village in Manhattan.

Shoffler and Leeper related that Douglas Caddy had been working as a White House attorney in a sensitive position. They claimed that I was butch enough to entice Douglas Caddy, a masculine gay guy, into a sexual affair to obtain the information they wanted. They told me that this was the most important thing that I could do for my country and that I would be well-paid if I undertook the assignment. Their initial offer was $10,000.

I asked Shoffler about who it was that so desperately wanted this information from Douglas Caddy and he said that it was from very high up sources in the Department of Justice and the U. S. Attorney’s office.

I did not commit to doing the assignment.

Two days later, on June 22, 1972, which was my birthday, Shoffler came to my apartment to give me my birthday present. He spent the entire day with me. Afterwards, when we were relaxing in bed, he gently tried to persuade me to cooperate with him and Leeper regarding the Douglas Caddy assignment. I emphatically told him “No.” I didn’t know Douglas Caddy and I didn’t know how to get to know him and I was bothered that undertaking the assignment could lead to the destruction of another gay person who apparently was still in the closet and merely attempting to represent his clients.

We talked about the break-in and Shoffler told me straight out that the burglars were hired indirectly by one of the 100 families of America, which Shoffler named as the Kennedy Family.

Shoffler said, “The intention of the Watergate break-in was to destroy the Nixon presidency. President Nixon was guilty of nothing in its planning.”

Shoffler said that there were hidden motivations involved, such as the fear of law enforcement agencies that their turf would be reduced by President Nixon through a

scheme known as the Houston Plan, the CIA’s concern that President Nixon planned to reorganize the intelligence agencies and their operations, and the Defense Department’s opposition to President Nixon’s new China policy.

I asked Shoffler if he was angry at me for refusing to take the Caddy assignment and he smiled at me and said he was glad that I didn’t.

(Third meeting) In the March 1973, nine months after the initial overture and a month after the first Watergate trial ended, I met with Shoffler and Leeper, FBI agents Terry O’Connor and Bill Tucker and their FBI Agent-In-Charge, whose name escapes me. Leeper did most of the talking. He again tried to persuade me to take on the Douglas Caddy assignment, making an initial offer of $25,000. I refused outright. The group then said that I could be paid as much as $100,000 if I took the assignment but I still refused without providing any explanation. Once it was understood that I would not accept the offer, Leeper declared that the least I could do was to spread the rumor around Washington, D. C. that Douglas Caddy was gay in an effort to force him to come out of the closet. Their intention was to defame Douglas Caddy. This was the last attempt to persuade me to take the Douglas Caddy assignment. The group departed angrily, with the exception Shoffler, who secretly winked at me as he went out the door.

DISCLOSURE OF SECOND MEETING

On June 17, 2009, 37 years after Watergate, I notified Douglas Caddy, now an attorney in Houston, Texas, of a well kept secret and informed him of a new Watergate revelation. (Previously I had disclosed to Douglas Caddy that there had been two meetings regarding the Caddy assignment as discussed above.)

I then informed Douglas Caddy that there had been a second meeting about the Caddy assignment. It took place on June 28, 1972, with Shoffler and four others agents who were never introduced to me. I am quite certain that these agents were from either Military Intelligence or the CIA. I know that they were not FBI agents from their manner and the special type of assignment they asked me to do regarding Douglas Caddy.

Shoffler and these agents met with me in my apartment at 2122 P Street, N.W. Douglas Caddy did in fact live across the street from me in the Georgetown House at 2121 P St., N.W.

One of the agents, whom I will never forget, had two plastic bags, one containing two small blue pills and another that had a laboratory test tube with a small gelatin substance that was approximately ¼ inch in diameter. He referred to it as a suppository.

The assignment was to become intimately acquainted with Douglas Caddy as quickly as possible.

The exact description of the assignment was to engage in oral sex with Douglas Caddy and in doing so I was suppose to fondle his b---- and a--, and at the same time insert the small gelatin like suppository into his rectum, which would have caused death within minutes.

If there were any delay in the lethal process that would prevent me from leaving fast from his presence, then I was to take the small blue pills, which would have caused me nausea, providing me with an excuse to leave for home immediately.

The agents told me that Douglas Caddy had to be eliminated without fail.

My first reaction was that they were “nuts.” But then Shoffler pulled me aside and whispered that this was a very real and serious situation and the decision was entirely up to me.

The agents were planning a pre-arrange way for me to meet Douglas Caddy, which they did not disclose at the time.

I asked the agents what the reason was that they wanted for me to go to this length and why they and the government were taking such a risk. I was told that this matter involved a high national security situation that they were not at liberty to disclose. The agents stated that their orders did not allow them to know the answers and that they were only following orders from their superiors who sometimes did not know the answers either and merely implemented instructions from those above. However, from the agents’ comments I inferred that because Douglas Caddy was gay, that was reason enough.

The agents informed me that I would be well taken care of for this assignment. They also said that I would never have to worry about anything for the rest of my life.

I was totally repulsed by the entire assignment and proposition. After I emphatically refused, the agents swore me to secrecy and left.

Only in July of 1986 when I was subpoenaed by Shoffler to testify before the grand jury in the Lenny Bias case in Upper Marlboro, Maryland did he ever discuss this subject again. At that time he said, “Butch, I am glad that you did not go through with that Douglas Caddy assignment because I found out that those two little blue pills would have caused your instant death.”

I regret that I never disclosed these facts until now. I suppressed this information out of fear for my life.

Some of the background information in this affidavit about my relationship with Shoffler as a Confidential Informant was disclosed by Jim Hougan in his 1984 best-selling book, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (see pages 320-323). Some was also disclosed in the Watergate Special Prosecution Force Memorandums of its two interviews of me and one of Officer Carl Shoffler in 1973.

This sworn statement is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

I, Robert Merritt, swear in this affidavit that the facts are true to the best of my knowledge under the penalty of perjury.

Robert Merritt

Subscribed and sworn to before me on the 28th of July, 2009, to certify which witness my hand and seal of office.

Notary Public in and for the State of New York

Ricardo S. Castro

Notary Public, State of New York

No. 01CA5041272

Qualified in Bronx County

Comm. Exp. 08/29/09

__________________________

7/29/09

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Wall Street Journal

Editorial Page

March 24, 1998

WHAT IF JUDGE SIRICA WERE WITH US TODAY?

By Douglas Caddy

(Mr. Caddy is a Houston lawyer)

The Clinton scandals, with all the claims of coverup and executive privilege, are certainly reminiscent of Watergate. But there is a crucial difference: This case lacks a John Sirica, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia who played such a crucial role in Watergate. The untold historical record reveals that the early actions of Sirica, who assigned the Watergate case to himself, helped spur the subsequent coverup and obstruction of justice that ultimately led to the resignation of President Nixon and the criminal convictions of many Watergate figures.

The Watergate scandal began at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972, when Washington, D.C. police arrested five men on burglary charges at the Watergate office building. At 3:05 a.m. E. Howard Hunt phoned me from his White House office and asked if he could come immediately to my Washington residence. I had been Hunt’s personal attorney for several years.

Hunt arrived half an hour later and informed me what had transpired earlier at the Watergate. He retained me to represent him in the case and then called G. Gordon Liddy, who also hired me. At that time, about two hours after the burglary, both Hunt and Liddy requested I also represent the five people arrested, four Cuban-Americans and James McCord, who were then incarcerated in the D.C. jail.

On June 28 – 11 days later – while working on the case in the federal courthouse in Washington, I was served with a subpoena bearing the name of Chief Judge Sirica, to appear “forthwith” before the federal grand jury investigating the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the grand jury room.

From June 28 until July 19 I was to appear before the grand jury on six occasions and answer hundreds of questions. I drew the line, however, on the advice of my own legal counsel, at answering 38 questions we felt invaded my clients’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel and the attorney-client privilege. A typical question: “Between the hours of Friday at midnight, June 16, and 8:30 a.m. Saturday, June 17, did you receive a visit from Mr. Everett Howard Hunt?” We believed answering such questions would incriminate Hunt and Liddy, who had not been arrested, and would violate their constitutional rights.

Judge Sirica, rejecting such arguments out of hand, threatened to jail me for contempt of court. When I went before the grand jury on July 13, I refused to answer the 38 questions. Within an hour I was back before Judge Sircia, who immediately held me in contempt of court and ordered me to jail. Five days later, on July 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the contempt citation and ordered me to testify under threat of being jailed again. The opinion, which I found gratuitously insulting, declared: “Even if such a relationship does exist, certain communications, such as consultation in furtherance of a crime, are not within the privilege.”

In his July 19, 1972, Oval Office tape, Nixon is recorded as expressing dismay to John Ehrlichman: “Do you mean the circuit court ordered an attorney to testify?”

Ehrlichman replied, “It [unintelligible] me, except that this damn circuit that we’ve got here, with

[Judge David] Bazelon and so on, it surprises me every time they do something.”

Nixon then asked, “Why didn’t he appeal to the Supreme Court?”

The answer is that my attorneys and I believe we had built a strong enough court record that if Hunt, Liddy and the five arrested individuals were found guilty, their convictions could be overturned on appeal because of Sirica’s and the appeals court’s abuse of me as their attorney.

However, Judge Sirica’s actions had an unintended consequence. Hunt and Liddy, seeing their attorney falsely accused by Judge Sirica of being a participant in their crime, realized early on that they were not going to get a fair trail, so they embarked on a coverup involving “hush money.” As Hunt has written: “If Sirica was treating Caddy – an Officer of the Court – so summarily, and Caddy was completely uninvolved in Watergate – then those of us who were involved could expect neither fairness nor understanding from him. As events unfolded, this conclusion became tragically accurate.”

Liddy appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals, claiming that my being forced to testify denied him his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The court upheld his conviction: “The evidence against appellant...was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge, there is no reasonable possibility it contributed to the conviction.” Neither Judge Sirica nor the appeals court acknowledged that their assault on the attorney-client privilege helped spur the ensuing coverup and obstruction of justice.

I was never indicted, named an unindicted co-conspirator, disciplined by the Bar or even contacted by the Senate Watergate Committee or the House Judiciary Committee, whose staff included a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham.

Now the issue of the attorney-client privilege is again being raised, this time by Monica Lewinsky’s first lawyer, Francis D. Carter, who has been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and bring the notes he took while representing Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Carter got involved when Vernon Jordan referred Ms. Lewinsky to him in January. On March 4, Mr. Carter’s attorney, Charles Ogletree, argued before Chief Judge Norma Hollaway Johnson that the subpoena should be quashed: “Once you start to allow the government to intrude on the attorney-client relationship and allow them to pierce the attorney-client privilege, clients will no longer have a sense of confidence and respect that lawyers should have.”

Coming days will reveal how Mr. Carter fares in his fight to protect Ms. Lewinsky’s constitutional rights and what effect this will have on the case’s ultimate outcome. To date, at least, Judge Johnson has shown a restraint that her predecessor Judge Sirica did not.

Poster's note: There are a lot of subjects covered in this 2003 article by Gary North. The ones that interested me most were 1) who ordered the bubble top removed from JFK's vehicle in Dallas? and 2) how the Bushes and the Hinckleys are related. I know a lot of Forum members will not agree with some of North's contentions but his work is still worth reading.

_____________________________

November 24, 2003

On a Bright Sunny Day in Dallas

by Gary North

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north231.html

Last week was the 40th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination. There were several television programs devoted to this event, especially on PBS.

In this report, I’m going to present a missing piece of the puzzle, one that you have never heard about. It was not mentioned in the Warren Commission report. Oliver Stone did not include it in his movie, "JFK." It’s not that this missing piece has been actively suppressed. It’s that it was published in a little-known book that seemingly had nothing to do with the assassination. No one paid any attention. The book then sank without a trace. I bought a copy in a book remainder bin years ago, where books that don’t sell well at retail are sold at dirt-cheap prices, and then forgotten.

The Kennedy assassination has been studied in detail and written about by thousands of people. The amount of published information on the event is staggering. The basic outline has been known for years. But the devil is in the details.

A majority of Americans say that they don’t trust the Warren Commission’s theory of the lone gunman. Some surveys indicate that as few as ten percent of the American public believe that Oswald acted alone. Yet nobody has offered anything like a plausible alternative that has gained the support of a significant minority of the general public or historians. That Lee Harvey Oswald doesn’t seem capable of having fired all those shots is clear. The problem is in finding evidence for the necessary split-second coordination with a second assassin.

An author trying to defend any assassination thesis must ignore or downplay implausible facts, either lone gunman facts or coordinated conspiracy facts. The resulting theories have all been implausible. That’s the way facts are when you take a close look, from subatomic physics to the Big Bang.

In this report, I am going to make three simple points: (1) history is very complex; (2) the writing of history is an inexact and highly biased art; (3) our lives and even our world turn on events that cannot be predicted or defended against.

LEE HARVEY OSWALD

Consider Lee Harvey Oswald in November, 1963. He was a former Marine. He was a former defector to the Soviet Union – the first discharged Marine ever to defect to the USSR. He had renounced in writing his U.S. citizenship. At the time of this renunciation, he had written to one American official that he intended to turn over to the Soviets the Navy’s radar codes, which he did. The Navy had to change its codes. He was not merely a defector; he was a traitor. Yet in 1962, he returned to the U.S. with his Russian wife, and nobody in Washington blinked an eye. They knew he was back. He was de-briefed by the CIA, which the CIA continues to deny, but for which there is written evidence: a "smoking document." The FBI, the CIA, military intelligence, and the Navy ignored him.

In 1962, he tried to assassinate an anti-Communist retired general, Edwin Walker. He then moved to New Orleans, where he got involved with pro-Cuba activism as a one-man member of a local Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He was visible enough to have been filmed on the streets, handing out leaflets, and be recorded in a radio debate. The films and audio tapes still exist.

Oswald had been a Marxist since his teenage years. He had been openly a Marxist in the Marines, yet he was given access to radar codes. In a letter to his brother, sent from Moscow, he had said, "I want you to understand what I say now, I do not say lightly, or unknowingly, since I’ve been in the military. . . . In the event of war I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American Government – Any American." Edward Jay Epstein, a specialist in the JFK assassination, noted two decades ago, " Although his letter was routinely intercepted by the CIA and microfilmed, no discernable attention was paid to the threat contained in it." Epstein continues:

After the failed assassination, Oswald went to New Orleans, where he became the organizer for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Aside from printing leaflets, staging demonstrations, getting arrested and appearing on local radio talk shows in support of Castro that summer, Oswald attempted to personally infiltrate an anti-Castro group that was organizing sabotage raids against Cuba. He explained to friends that he could figure out his "anti-imperialist" policy by "reading between the lines" of the Militant and other such publications. In August, he wrote the central committee of the Communist Party USA asking "Whether in your opinion, I can compete with anti-progressive forces above ground, or whether I should always remain in the background, i.e. underground". During this hot summer, while Oswald spent evenings practicing sighting his rifle in his backyard, the Militant raged on about the Kennedy Administration’s "terrorist bandit" attacks on Cuba. And as the semi-secret war against Castro escalated, Oswald expressed increasing interest in reaching Cuba.

It gets even more interesting.

Telling his wife that they might never meet again, he left New Orleans two weeks later headed for the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. To convince the Cubans of his bona fides – and seriousness – he had prepared a dossier on himself, which included a 10 page résumé, outlining his revolutionary activities, newspaper clippings about his defection to the Soviet Union, propaganda material he had printed, documents he had stolen from a printing company engaged in classified map reproduction for the U.S Army, his correspondence with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee executives and photographs linking him to the Walker shooting.

Oswald applied for a visa at the Cuban Embassy on the morning of September 27th, 1963. He said that he wanted to stop in Havana en route to the Soviet Union. On the application, the consular office who interviewed him, noted: "The applicant states that he is a member of the American Communist Party and Secretary in New Orleans of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Despite such recommendations, Oswald was told that he needed a Soviet visa before the Cuban visa could be issued. He argued over this requisite with the Cuban counsel, Eusebio Azque, in front of witnesses, and reportedly made wild claims about services he might perform for the Cuban cause. During the next five days, he traveled back and forth between the Soviet and Cuban embassies attempting to straighten out the difficulty.

I generally trust Epstein as a researcher. His biography on Armand Hammer, Dossier, is a masterpiece. His investigation of Oswald was detailed, and his first book on the assassination became a best-seller, Inquest (1966). He later earned a Ph.D. from Harvard. He is no crackpot. He is a conventional historian of the assassination. He thinks the lone gunman thesis is correct. But what he wrote a generation ago about that lone gunman’s activities before the assassination has yet to get into the textbooks. Epstein’s findings about Oswald point either to the utter bureaucratic incompetence of military intelligence, the CIA, the FBI, and the State Department, or else to a conspiracy. Textbook writers do not want to consider either possibility.

There is another factor: the media never did want to play up the fact that Oswald was a long-time traitor and a Marxist. From the day of the assassination, the media tried to blame the equivalent of "a vast right wing conspiracy" in Dallas. It was "the climate of right-wing opinion in Dallas" that pundits said had killed Kennedy. On the contrary, what killed Kennedy was a Marxist revolutionary, committed to violence philosophically, who had been allowed to return to the United States. But this truth has never been palatable to the media or the textbook writers.

You think this has changed? Not a chance. On Thursday evening, November 20, PBS broadcast a recently produced one-hour show, "JFK: Breaking the News." It dealt with the power of television to cover live news, which was first demonstrated on that weekend in 1963. The show spends at least five minutes to the right wing climate of opinion in Dallas. It shows that there were conservative Democrats who – gasp! – opposed Kennedy’s liberal politics. The shame of it! The audacity! To oppose this great man! The fact that the liberal media actively covered up his daily adulteries, which were security risks, given the Mob connection of some of them – a fact presented earlier in the week on the PBS documentary, "The Kennedys" – is rarely mentioned, and was never mentioned until several best-selling books revealed all this in the early 1990’s.

The only reference to the truth about the political perspective of Oswald in that documentary was a brief sentence in retrospect by CBS's Bob Shieffer ("Face the Nation"), who had been a reporter in Fort Worth at the time. He admitted that Oswald was a leftist, but added, "a nut." Oswald became a nut only after the media found out about his Marxist politics. Prior to this embarrassing revelation, which was deliberately concealed by the media at the time, there was no mention of a "nut assassin" theory. For hours, the national TV commentators had been blaming the "climate of fear" in Dallas. The documentary shows Walter Cronkite's announcement of Kennedy's death. Crokite had just been talking on-screen about Adlai Stevenson's recent confrontation with conservatives in Dallas. As soon as it was known that Oswald was a leftist, he was transformed into a lone nut. The politics of lone nuts is irrelevant, having nothing to do with their actions, you see. There is never a "climate of fear" among leftists, producing a Sirhan Sirhan or an Arthur Bremer. Such assassins are instantly forgotten, as are their political views. Shieffer's segment was shown long after Jane Pauly's voice-over and film clips had pilloried the anti-Kennedy Democrats in Dallas as pig-headed, insensitive no-nothings.

The media have never forgiven conservatives in 1963 for not buying into Camelot, despite the fact that the myth of Camelot was entirely Jackie Kennedy’s, who convinced Theodore White to promote it after her husband died (another fact discussed on "The Kennedys"). Most of all, they have never forgiven Oswald for not being a right-winger, and therefore representative of an entire political outlook.

The irony of this neglect of Oswald’s Marxist roots was made greater by what followed the airing of "JFK: Breaking the News." PBS ran an updated version of Frontline’s 1993 3-hour documentary, "Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?" This superb documentary shows exactly who he was and what he was: a dedicated lifelong Marxist who wanted to do something big for the cause and big for his reputation. But it received little attention in 1993, and I doubt that it received much last week.

The show also reveals that Lyndon Johnson was briefed on Oswald within hours, and he deliberately told the press, meaning the publishers and wire service owners, not to mention Oswald’s time in Russia and his subsequent Marxist agitation in New Orleans. The implication – never mentioned – is that Johnson controlled the press.

The narrator says that Johnson feared a world war, the assassination having come only a year after the Cuban missile crisis. I suggest an additional reason: Johnson did not want to let the American public know that this was a gigantic failure of the American intelligence community, meaning the same kind of Keystone Cops failure that has marked everything associated with 9-11, from before 9-11 until today.

Neither documentary mentioned the following story. This is the one that has grabbed my attention ever since I bought and read that remaindered book.

THE BUBBLE TOP

For those who explain history in terms of impersonal forces, the unique event is irrelevant. For those who favor a conspiracy view of history, the unique event has meaning only in terms of the conspiracy. As for me, I am a believer in the overwhelming significance of the unique event. Remove it, and everything would have turned out differently. Here is my favorite example of the unique event, itself the product of a series of unique events, that changed everything.

Unique event: Late November can be cold in Dallas. But on that crucial day, it was warm. Forecasters had predicted cool weather. That was why Jackie Kennedy was wearing a wool suit.

Unique event: Kennedy had spoken that morning in Fort Worth, 30 miles west of Dallas. Instead of driving to Dallas, the President and his entourage flew from Ft. Worth to Dallas, landing at Love Field. (There was no DFW airport in 1963. DFW was Lyndon Johnson’s gift to air travel.)

Unique event: At Love Field were stationed the cars that would carry the President and the others through the 11-mile motorcade trip to downtown Dallas. Both cars were convertibles. The President’s car had a removable plastic bubble, just in case bad weather made it too cold or too wet for comfort.

Unique event: Love Field that day had an outdoor phone line connected to the desk of The Dallas Times Herald. A local reporter used it to phone in stories about the scheduled motorcade.

Then came a truly unique series of events. Here is the published account by the on-site reporter.

Just before the plane was scheduled to leave Fort Worth for the short flight to Dallas, the rewrite man, Stan Weinberg, asked me if the bubble top was going to be on the presidential limousine. It would help to know now, he said, before he wrote the story later under pressure. It had been raining early that morning, and there was some uncertainty about it.

I told Stan that I would find it. I put the phone down and walked over to a small ramp where the motorcade limousines were being held in waiting. I spotted Forrest Sorels, the agent in charge of the Dallas Secret Service office. I knew Mr. Sorrels fairly well, because I was then the regular federal beat reporter. . . .

I looked down the ramp. The bubble top was on the president’s car.

Rewrite wants to know if the bubble top’s going to stay on, I said to Mr. Sorrels, a man of fifty or so who wore dignified glasses and resembled a preacher or bank president.

He looked at the sky and then hollered over at one of his agents holding a two-way radio in his hand. What about the weather downtown? he asked the agent.

The agent talked into his radio for a few seconds, then listened. Clear, he hollered back.

Mr. Sorrels yelled back at the agents standing by the car: "Take off the bubble top!"

Just over twelve hours later, I was part of the bedlam at the Dallas police station along with hundreds of other reporters. I went into the police chief’s outer office to await the breakup of a meeting in Chief Jesse Curry’s main office. I had no idea who was in there.

The door opened and out walked several men. One of them was Forrest Sorrels. He looked tired and sad. And bewildered. He saw me and I moved toward him. His eyes were wet. He paused briefly, shook his head slightly and whispered, "Take off the bubble top."

The history of mankind is filled with "what if" and "if only" events that surround every major event. In American history, this is one of the big what-ifs, yet it is still unknown to the public.

A plastic bubble might not have stopped the bullets that hit the passengers in that limousine, but it would have given any sharpshooter concern. A bullet can be deflected. There is no guarantee that an undeflected bullet will hit its target, and a plastic bubble would have added greatly to the uncertainty. Would the assassin or assassins have pulled the trigger(s)?

There is also no way to know if someone other than Forrest Sorrels might have decided after the plane landed to take off the bubble top. What we do know, and what Mr. Sorrels knew that day, is this: a seemingly peripheral question by a rewrite man, relayed through a reporter, led to a call downtown by a two-way radio. Assessment: "Clear." Events in Dallas on that fateful day were never clear again.

This story would be known by almost no one, had it not been for the reporter’s subsequent career, which justified a book publishing company’s taking a risk by publishing his autobiography. The Dallas reporter subsequently became America’s most prominent playwright-novelist-newscaster, Jim Lehrer, of the "Lehrer News Hour." His book is titled, A Bus of My Own. It was published in 1992. It did not sell well.

I suspect that more people have learned about this unique "what-if" event today than have learned about it over the last eleven years.

JOHNSON REPLACES KENNEDY

Our lives are influenced by events far beyond our capacity to perceive at the time or understand after the fact, let alone predict in advance. On that bright, sunny day in Dallas, Lyndon Johnson became President. He subsequently escalated a war in Vietnam that Kennedy had begun. America changed dramatically because the sun was shining in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

The can-do optimism of New Deal political liberalism did not survive the Kennedy assassination and the war in Vietnam. Two months after the assassination, the Beatles arrived in America, setting off what was to become the counter-culture of the 1960’s. But what we think of as "the sixties" actually began in February, 1964. November 22, 1963, remains the great divide.

Johnson’s "guns and butter" spending policies expanded the federal deficit. The war in Vietnam and the war on poverty had to be paid for. Johnson preferred to borrow and inflate rather than raise taxes, except for a minor and temporary 10% income tax surcharge in 1968. To hide the reality of the deficit, Johnson persuaded Congress in 1968 to allow him to put the Social Security Administration surplus into the general fund’s accounting system. Prior to 1968, the trust funds were outside of the general fund’s accounting system. Ever since 1968, the government has counted undispersed trust fund income as present income receipts rather than as long-term obligations, i.e., debts. That decision made it easier for subsequent administrations to hide what is happening to the retirement schemes of Americans. It will have enormous effects for decades, beginning no later than 2011, when the baby boomers begin to retire.

If the bubble top had been installed, it is doubtful that any of this would have happened. None of this was inevitable, humanly speaking. If there was a pattern here – and I believe there was – no conspiracy established it. (Read Psalm 2.)

CONTROL OF AND BY THE PRESS

We forget what America has become since that day in 1963. Presidential motorcades are no longer organized for public viewing. A convertible for a President is as old hat as a top hat at the President’s inauguration – last seen at Kennedy’s inauguration. Presidents no longer make themselves visible to the public on the streets at scheduled events. Jimmy Carter walked up Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day in 1977. After "cousin John" Hinckley shot Reagan in 1981, things changed.

In 1981, the press played the same game of "pretend it’s not there." George Bush was in line to succeed President Reagan. Had Hinckley used a .38 or a .357, Bush probably would have succeeded to the Presidency. In the ancient game of "Who Wins?" he would have been the obvious winner.

The day after the failed attempt, the following story was released on the news wires by the Associated Press. It was run in the Houston Post. It was run almost nowhere else. On the day of the assassination, Scott Hinckley, the brother of John, was scheduled to have dinner with Neil Bush, brother of George W. Bush and son of then-Vice President Bush. The Hinckleys were initially reported as having made large donations to George Bush Sr.’s presidential campaign, but the family denied this, and there was no follow-up by the press. The story of the hastily cancelled dinner engagement received virtually no attention by the media. Only the Web has kept it alive.

Had the press investigated the story, some reporter might have come across the curious fact that the Bushes and the Hinckleys are related. The genealogical link goes back to the same founding father, Samuel Hinckley (1652–1698).

On this, see this genealogical site.

No one in the media noticed this until my wife’s brother-in-law began working on the family tree of my wife and her sister. He came across the web site, with its link to Samuel Hinckley, whose name did not register with him, and he sent me the information on the Bush connection. I saw "Hinckley," and the alarm bell went off. I looked more closely. The genealogist had not missed the connection.

• Samuel Hinckley m. Martha Lathrop (see 8732, below)

• Samuel Hinckley m. Zerviah Breed

• Abel Hinckley m. Sarah Hubbard

• Abel Hinckley m. Elizabeth Wheeler

• Alfred Hinckley m. Elizabeth Stanley

• Francis Edward Hinckley m. Amelia Smith

• Percy Porter Hinckley m. Katherine Arvilla Warnock

• John Warnock Hinckley m. Jo Anne Moore

• JOHN WARNOCK HINCKLEY (b. 1955), attempted assassin

I this information to subscribers on October 5, 2001: "News Stories That Are Somehow Not Worth Pursuing." This story remains not worth pursuing in the eyes of the media. No one picked it up. I did not think anyone would.

If you think that the media have learned their collective lesson, you are naïve. The same suppression goes on. Consider 9-11. Consider United Airlines Flight 93 over western Pennsylvania. The media ignore the obvious: debris was scattered up to eight miles away from the crash site. Are we to believe that this debris bounced? No, we are to believe the story of the brave victims who crashed the plane. We are not to inquire about that scattered debris. We are to forget about it. No establishment reporter asks the obvious: Was the plane shot down high above the landscape? Were it not for the Web, these facts would be lost.

http://www.flight93crash.com

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article....RTICLE_ID=30682

CONCLUSION

It is a grand illusion to believe that what we do today can immunize ourselves from the fallout from the seemingly random events of life. We can buy gold, we can live in gated communities, but the hard realities of life penetrate the high walls of our long-term plans.

Uncertainty is a fact of life. This is why we should rejoice that there are entrepreneurs out there who put their capital on the line to assist future consumers in their quest to reduce uncertainty. Someone must deal with uncertainty. Capitalism’s great gift to mankind is that it allows specialists to do this merely for the opportunity to reap a profit by opening their wallets to the possibility of losses. This is a cheap price for services rendered.

Rumors Fly About Palin’s “Iceberg Scandal”

by Muriel Kane

www.rawstory.com

http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/07/03/rum...ceberg-scandal/

Update: BradBlog now suggests that Palin’s resignation was due to an upcoming Federal indictment for embezzlement. Max Blumenthal at The Daily Beast adds more details.

In the wake of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s surprise resignation on Friday, rumors are beginning to circulate that she might have acted in anticipation of a previously unsuspected scandal being revealed.

Alaskan blogger Shannyn Moore suggested at Huffington Post that “rumors of an ‘iceberg scandal’ have been circulating” even before today’s announcement.

“Resignation is certainly out of character for Sarah Palin,” Moore noted. “Senator Mark Begich had a meeting with Sarah Palin two days ago with no mention of her leaving office. Palin’s press secretary, David Murrow had posted on his Facebook page Wednesday, ‘David Murrow is considering life’s ironies.’ He was hired less than a month ago. Yesterday he wrote, ‘There’s gonna be some fireworks this weekend!’”

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo similarly suggested, “Remember that based on the public record, Palin is a wildly unethical public official, guilty at a minimum of numerous instances of abusing her authority as governor. And a lot of very damaging information has come out about her in the last few days — though mainly embarrassing information about her character rather than new evidence of bad acts. I would not be surprised if this latest round of revelations shook something else loose that we haven’t heard about yet.”

Moore later spoke by phone with BradBlog’s Brad Friedman and told him that “Palin is ‘resigning as part of damage control’ due to a scandal this is ‘not of a family nature.’”

“The governor would not be able to continue her job when it comes out,” Moore told Friedman. “Why would Mark Sanford not resign, but Sarah Palin did? Her family didn’t even know about the resignation until they were standing with her by the lake when she made her announcement.”

Update: BradBlog is now reporting additional information received from Alaskans who follow Palin: “I’ve now been able to get independent information from multiple sources that all of this precedes what are said to be possible federal indictments against Palin, concerning an embezzlement scandal related to the building of Palin’s house and the Wasilla Sports Complex built during her tenure as Mayor. Both structures, it is said, feature the ’same windows, same wood, same products.’ Federal investigators have been looking into this for some time, and indictments could be imminent, according to the Alaska sources.”

Max Blumenthal at The Daily Beast offers additional details:

One logical place to start looking is the affair that has Alaska political circles buzzing: an alleged scandal centered around a building contractor, Spenard Building Supplies, with close ties to Palin and her husband, Todd.

Many political observers in Alaska are fixated on rumors that federal investigators have been seizing paperwork from SBS in recent months, searching for evidence that Palin and her husband Todd steered lucrative contracts to the well-connected company in exchange for gifts like the construction of their home on pristine Lake Lucille in 2002. The home was built just two months before Palin began campaigning for governor, a job which would have provided her enhanced power to grant building contracts in the wide-open state. …

Though Todd Palin told Fox News he built his Lake Lucille home with the help of a few “buddies,” according to Barrett’s report, public records revealed that SBS supplied the materials for the house. While serving as mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin blocked an initiative that would have required the public filing of building permits—thus momentarily preventing the revelation of such suspicious information.

Just months before Palin left city hall to campaign for governor, she awarded a contract to SBS to help build the $13 million Wasilla Sports Complex. The most expensive building project in Wasilla history, the complex cost the city an additional $1.3 million in legal fees and threw it into severe long-term debt. For SBS, however, the bloated and bungled project was a cash cow.

Questions about the construction of Palin’s house are not new. An article last fall by Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice offered many of the same speculations that are now being presented by Blumenthal and others as possible explanations for Palin’s resignation.

If these allegations turn out to be accurate, Palin’s problems would be ironically similar to the scandal which torpedoed former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens’ career. That also involved improvements to his home for which he made no payment.

http://www.garynorth.com

My Marketing Strategy for the Only Historian Who Was in Dealey Plaza at the Moment JFK Was Shot

By Gary North

June 30, 2009

A friend of mine has a unique selling proposition: he was the only Ph.D-holding historian to witness the Kennedy assassination.

Do you think there is a market for a book here? I do. So does he.

For over four decades, he has studied the assassination. He has taught history classes on it. He has had hundred of students dig into the files.

He has been writing a book on this for 30 years. He never finishes. I am afraid he will die before going public.

Yesterday, I outlined the following marketing strategy for him.

1. Create a WordPress blog on the assassination. (Pay $5/month to avoid ads.)

2. Create a separate forum that is linked to the blog. (Use Hostgator: unlimited domains)

3. Do a series of brief YouTube videos on aspects of the event. Create a JFK channel. Talking head. Free.

4. Direct viewers to your blog and forum on each video.

5. Build a readership.

6. Self-publish the book (Lightning Source). Make 70% per sale, since you sell to your own list.

7. Include a CD-ROM with links to the evidence.

8. Update forever.

9. Create a mailing list.

Notice my strategy: multiple outlets, all free or very cheap. Each outlet moves the reader to a sale.

Develop followers. Develop mailing lists (www.Aweber.com). Contact your readers for free.

By eliminating the middle man, you keep the bulk of the profits from all sales. Don't share what you don't need to share. "Do not render unto middlemen the things that need not belong to middlemen."

Authors no longer need to get their books published by a third party publisher. They should self-publish, get lots of sales, and then approach a publisher with evidence of sales. They can demand and get a 15% royalty, plus a large advance payment against royalties. This forces the book company to spend a lot of marketing money.

Note: Because Robert Merritt's book will discuss Howard Hunt's role in both Watergate and the JFK assassination, I am posting this notice prepared by me in this topic of the Education Forum as well as in the Watergate topic:

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.

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.

I’m not sure what you think the series proves though the authors tone changed a bit it was satirical till the end. Take for example the following from the last essay

“Only out of sheer desperation did I try to arrest one of the goons following me and then follow my flimsy leads up the Greek police ladder, finally catching one of the goons wet-handed in the lavatory of the department of government security. And only then did I know the extent of Bilderberg's paranoia: they had set the state police on me.

So who is the paranoid one? Me, hiding in stairwells, watching the pavement behind me in shop windows, staying in the open for safety? Or Bilderberg, with its two F-16s, circling helicopters, machine guns, navy commandos and policy of repeatedly detaining and harassing a handful of journalists? Who's the nutter? Me or Baron Mandelson? Me or Paul Volker, the head of Obama's economic advisory board? Me or the president of Coca-Cola?

It makes me want to spit, the absurdity of it: the cost, not just in Greek tax euros, but on my peace of mind, of having (conservatively) a dozen Jack Bauers assigned to tailing me. I hope the operation at least had a cool name: Operation Catastrophic Overreaction, perhaps”

He still shows no signs of thinking Baron Mandelson, Paul Volker and “the president of Coca-Cola” et al are plotting world domination but rather is making a point about to use his own words the security forces’ “Catastrophic Overreaction”.

he has a point as Christopher points such secrecy fuels speculation. But then again he was poking around uninvited and apparently with no press credentials at a meeting of large number of VIVIP’s in a city and country that had been rocked by violent riots and sporadic attacks from extremists groups 4 – 5 months earlier in a world still jittery from 9/11, 3/11, 7/7 etc.

He is very funny but made his intent clear at the end of his first article from the day before the meeting started “Charlie Skelton will be filing regular updates from Athens until he is arrested by shadowy figures in dark glasses”

I’m surprised you’re into Gary North an extremist proponent of Austrian School economics and an almost Taliban style Christian theocracy where women who get abortions, people who help them, children who curse their parents and homosexuals would be stoned to death.

http://tomgpalmer.com/2004/09/25/gary-nort...xuals-to-death/

Oddly you also said you admire Lyndon Larouche whose economics are almost the polar opposite of North’s but shares his hated of gays. I find it odd that an openly gay man would be a fan of gay bashing extremists, how many Jews do you think support David Duke? or Blacks support Jared Taylor?

I view myself as a consumer in the marketplace of ideas., which is why I read your postings in the Forum.

The picture you paint of Gary North does not do him justice. I subscribe to his website primarily to get his views on finance and business. For example, below is a worthwhile article by him that he made available today to his readers:

http://www.garynorth.com

It's Not Just Foreclosures. It's Why.

Gary North

June 1, 2009

I have already reported on Fitch's estimate that two-thirds to three-quarters of all loan modifications lead to foreclosure within a year.

How did Fitch come up with this estimate? Diane Olick of CNBC called Fitch to find out. What she was told throws new light on what is about to this the economy. The borrowers can't pay other debts, either.

It's the back end that is driving the home owners to default. Fitch talked to loan servicers in other parts of the economy. This included the auto loan industry, the credit card industry, and even student loans. Same story everywhere: the borrowers are in over their heads. They have stopped paying.

In the good old days, people stopped paying their mortgage last. These days, that may still be true, but it's irrelevant. Too many debtors have stopped paying at all.

The fact that a loan modification lowers their monthly payments isn't enough to save their lifestyles, which had been based on debt rather than repayment.

The fall in housing prices accelerates the "stop paying" scenario. The owners have no equity to defend.

Yes, a foreclosure hurts their credit rating. So what? They have stopped paying other debts, too. They have given up on their credit rating.

This means that there will be no recovery in housing this year or next year. Housing prices will continue to fall.

The consumer markets are funded by debt. But Americans' willingness to take on more debt is now much reduced. We find this in other reports. Consider this. Consumer spending has been contracting. Consumers say they will use their income tax refunds for savings or to retire debt. Talk is cheap, but it's amazing that they say this. In March, consumer outstanding debt levels fell at an annual rate of over 5%.

Consumer credit has fallen in 6 of the last 8 months. Yet for years, this increased by 7% per year. This is an unprecedented reversal.

Austrian School economics think this is healthy. Keynesians don't.

Outstanding revolving debt -- mostly credit cards -- fell $5.4 billion, representing a 6.8% annualized pace, to $945.9 billion in March. Having dropped for six months in a row, credit-card debt is down 1.2% in the past year.

Until February, credit-card debts had never fallen on a year-over-year basis since the record keeping began in 1969.

This is not business as usual. This recession is different.

Jim Garrison is the New Orleans District Attorney portrayed by Kevin Costner in the Oliver Stone move, JKF. The Garrison Tapes document the real-life effort of Garrison, in his own words, to finger and prosecute members of the CIA for the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

http://media.abovetopsecret.com/media/1956...n_Tapes_Part_1/

The article below is from Gary North’s Specific Answers website. Gary North’s invaluable website, subscription based, has provided me with countless insights into how the real world works, not only in the realm of finance and business but in other key areas as well.

__________________

May 30, 2009

Charlie Skelton was assigned by the Guardian to cover the 2009 meeting in Greece. At first, he did not take it seriously. After run-ins with the Greece police for daring to try to cover the meeting, he finally figured out what and whom he was dealing with. They have power. He has none. It miffed him.

I have never read anything like this in the mainstream press -- not in 40 years of reading.

Spend an hour reading this series. It could change your outlook permanently -- or reconfirm it.

Start with the oldest first (bottom-up).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/cha...ilderberg-files

George Knapp hosts broadcaster John Barbour on coasttocoastam tonight, who will discuss his work on the JFK assassination. Parts of Barbour's interview with the late Jim Garrison will be played.

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

2 Ex-Timesmen Say They Had a Tip on Watergate First

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

The New York Times

May 25, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/business...mp;ref=politics

The Watergate break-in eventually forced a presidential resignation and turned two Washington Post reporters into pop-culture heroes. But almost 37 years after the break-in, two former New York Times journalists have stepped forward to say that The Times had the scandal nearly in its grasp before The Post did — and let it slip.

Robert M. Smith, a former Times reporter, says that two months after the burglary, over lunch at a Washington restaurant, the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, L. Patrick Gray, disclosed explosive aspects of the case, including the culpability of the former attorney general, John Mitchell, and hinted at White House involvement.

Mr. Smith rushed back to The Times’s bureau in Washington to repeat the story to Robert H. Phelps, an editor there, who took notes and tape-recorded the conversation, according to both men. But then Mr. Smith had to hand off the story — he had quit The Times and was leaving town the next day to attend Yale Law School.

Mr. Smith kept the events to himself for more than three decades, but decided to go public after learning that Mr. Phelps planned to include it in his memoir.

In the days after that 1972 lunch, the Times bureau was consumed by the Republican convention, and then Mr. Phelps left on a monthlong trip to Alaska.

So what happened to the tip, the notes, the tape? Were they pursued to no effect? Simply forgotten?

“I have no idea,” said Mr. Phelps, now 89, who describes the episode in a memoir, “God and the Editor: My Search for Meaning at The New York Times” (Syracuse University Press), published last month.

Former colleagues he interviewed said they never knew of the material, he said, leading him to guess that the fact that it came to nothing “was probably my fault.”

If his and Mr. Smith’s accounts are correct, The Times missed a chance to get the jump on the greatest story in a generation.

It also means that both of the top two F.B.I. officials were leaking information about the scandal. W. Mark Felt, the associate director of the agency at the time, was identified in 2005 as Deep Throat, the secret source for Bob Woodward, the Post reporter who, with his colleague Carl Bernstein, rode the story to fame.

On June 17, 1972, a group of men were caught breaking into and trying to wiretap the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex. On Aug. 16, Mr. Smith and Mr. Gray, who had been made acting director in May, went to lunch — a date shown in Mr. Gray’s records, which were kept by his son, Edward Gray, who helped his father write a book about his experience in the Nixon administration. Patrick Gray died in 2005.

“My dad liked Robert Smith and gave him some interviews,” said Edward Gray, 64, and took him to lunch at Sans Souci, a fashionable restaurant, to bid him farewell. He says he finds it hard to imagine his father, who disapproved of leaks, divulging the kinds of secrets Mr. Smith recalls.

But that lunch “was more between a mentor and a young man than between an acting director of the F.B.I. and a reporter,” Mr. Gray said. “I’m sure my dad may have let his hair down a little bit with Bob Smith, but only because he didn’t think he was a reporter anymore.”

Mr. Smith said he sat across the table from Patrick Gray, listening in shock to details about Donald Segretti, who helped run the Nixon campaign’s “dirty tricks” operation, and John Mitchell, who had stepped down as attorney general to run Nixon’s re-election campaign.

“He told me the attorney general was involved in a cover-up,” Mr. Smith said, “and I said, ‘How high does it go? To the president?’ And he sat there and looked at me and he didn’t answer. His answer was in the look.”

Returning to the bureau “in a super-charged state,” he said, he found Mr. Phelps and marched him into the editor’s office. “I was too excited to sit down. I paced up and back.”

Then he left for law school, and watched over the following months as Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein leapt ahead of the competition. Mr. Phelps left The Times for The Boston Globe in the mid-1970s.

Mr. Smith, who worked at the Justice Department after graduating from Yale and then went into private practice, spent more than three decades wondering what happened to his tip. When Mr. Phelps set out to write his book, he called Mr. Smith to compare recollections.

“The fact that he had seen Gray and he had talked to me after his lunch, that I remembered,” Mr. Phelps said. But he said it was not until Mr. Smith jogged his memory that he recalled what revelations had the young reporter so excited.

In the book, he wrote, “We never developed Gray’s tips into publishable stories. Why we failed is a mystery to me.”

“My memory is fuzzy on the crucial point of what I did with the tape,” he wrote.

Mr. Smith said that knowing the episode would be described in Mr. Phelps’s book persuaded him, for the first time, that he was free to tell it. Until then, “I couldn’t breach the source confidentiality with Pat Gray,” even after Mr. Gray had died.

“What he did was, in my mind, a quite wonderful thing, and no one knows about it.”

http://larouchepac.com/lpactv?nid=10201

Lyndon LaRouche is a dangerous man. He makes you think. About 30 years ago I was introduced to his writings and speeches by two of his dedicated associates, Harley Schlanger and his lovely wife, Susan. I am most appreciative of their doing so. I do not always find myself in agreement with what LaRouche advocates but even his critics admit that he is thought-provoking and discusses subjects in public that no one else does. I mean, who on television but LaRouche regularly talks about the relevance of Plato and ancient Greece to today's problems? LaRouche in his discourses cuts across intellectual lines and weaves economics, politics, military, religion and social issues together in a way that challenges the listener to pause and reflect. One thing does amaze me as shown in this video: his mind is just as sharp as it was when I first heard him three decades ago and he doesn't look as though he has aged a bit, even though he must be way up in years.

The Bailout Bubble – the Bubble to End All Bubbles

by Gerald Celente

The biggest financial bubble in history is being inflated in plain sight. This is the Mother of All Bubbles, and when it explodes, it will signal the end to the boom/bust cycle that has characterized economic activity throughout the developed world. Either unwilling or unable to call the bubble by its proper name, the media, Washington, and Wall Street describe the stupendous government expenditures on rescue packages, stimulus plans, buyouts, and takeovers as emergency measures needed to salvage the severely damaged economy.

All of this terminology is econo-jargon. It's like calling torture "enhanced interrogation techniques." Washington is inflating the biggest bubble ever: the Bailout Bubble. This is much bigger than the Dot-com and Real Estate bubbles which hit speculators, investors, and financiers the hardest. However destructive the effects of these busts on employment, savings and productivity, the Free Market Capitalist framework was left intact. But when the Bailout Bubble explodes, the system goes with it.

The economic framework of the United States has been restructured. Federal interventionist policies have given the government equity stakes, executive powers and management control of what was once private enterprise. To finance these buyouts, rescue and stimulus packages – instead of letting failed businesses fail and bankrupt banks and bandit brokerages go bankrupt – trillions of dollars are being injected into the stricken economy.

Phantom dollars, printed out of thin air, backed by nothing ... and producing next to nothing ... defines the Bailout Bubble. Just as with the other bubbles, so too will this one burst. But unlike Dot-com and Real Estate, when the Bailout Bubble pops, neither the President nor the Federal Reserve will have the fiscal fixes or monetary policies available to inflate another. With no more massive economic bubbles left to blow up, they'll set their sights on bigger targets. Given the pattern of governments to parlay egregious failures into mega-failures, the classic trend they follow, when all else fails, is to take their nation to war. Since the Bailout Bubble is neither called nor recognized as a bubble, its sudden and spectacular explosion will create chaos. A panicked public will readily accept any Washington/Wall Street/Main Stream Media alibi that shifts the blame for the catastrophe away from the policy makers and onto some scapegoat.

At this time we are not forecasting a war. However, the trends in play are ominous. While we cannot pinpoint precisely when the Bailout Bubble will burst, we are certain it will. When it does, it should be understood that a major war could follow.

May 15, 2009

Gerald Celente is founder and director of The Trends Research Institute, author of Trends 2000 and Trend Tracking (Warner Books), and publisher of The Trends Journal. He has been forecasting trends since 1980, and recently called “The Collapse of ’09.”

Find this article at:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/celente6.html

I have decided to review Vincent Bugliosi's book "Reclaiming History" in reference

to the comments and criticism he makes towards "The Men on the Sixth Floor"

Please feel free to follow the following link to Amazon and comment on the article

or even vote on it. I also welcome your input on this forum.

Thanks,

Glen Sample

http://www.amazon.com/gp/community-content...mp;x=6&y=11

Six mistakes Bugliosi makes regarding my book.

April 13, 2009

A response By Glen Sample to Vincent Bugliosi's critique of "The Men on the Sixth Floor" contained in his Book "Reclaiming History."

Vincent Bugliosi's "Reclaiming History", a five pound monster of a book, is thought by many to be the nail in the coffin of conspiracy theorists. Indeed, his experience as a prosecutor has served him well in his response to some of the silly JFK assassination theories that have been forwarded over the decades. Like shooting fish in a barrel, Bugliosi takes them all on, dismissing them one after another. For this I applaud him.

I have a few problems, however, with the way he has described my research. Let me explain. I am the author of "The Men on the Sixth Floor", a book that Mr. Bugliosi describes as a "pathetic story" that no rational person would believe. Lets see.

The second paragraph contains the first annoying problem. He misnames my main character.

He calls Loy Factor "Lawrence Lloyd Factor, a Chickasaw Indian from Fillmore, Oklahoma.

Actually, Lawrence Loy Factor was his name. Now, this may seem a small point, but it was definitely a red flag for me, because after all, this is supposed to be the last word in the JFK case; the crushing blow to "conspiracy buffs" the world over. Lets not start the process by misnaming the story's main character.

The second bone I have to pick with Mr. Bugliosi is the liberty he takes in explaining the details of our book. For example in the same paragraph as the misnamed Loy Factor occurs, he says that Factor, for "some undisclosed reason" decided to tell his cellmate, Mark Collom, the "Whopper" of a story about his participation with the assassins of JFK.

Actually, the reason was disclosed.

Mark and Loy were both quarantined for a period of many weeks together in the prison hospital. Their friendship grew, and thus Loy's trust in Mark allowed him to disclose this secret that previously had only been revealed to Loy's deceased wife. Mark helped Loy by reading his trial transcripts and helping Loy with his case. Decades later, when Mark and I found Loy in rural Oklahoma, it was obvious that a bond still existed between the two men. Bugliosi strives to give the impression, that Factor was spinning this tale to anyone who would listen, when the opposite is true. Factor told no one else this story. Twenty years later, when Mark and I eventually found and interviewed him, he was afraid to talk and even refused further interviews. It was only through our patience, gentle coaxing and Loy's trust in his old friend, that he agreed to talk further.

Thirdly, a description of Loy Factor's initial introduction to Mac Wallace lacks integrity and is a thinly disguised arrogant barb, designed to malign Loy and his story. Mr. Bugliosi describes wrongly that Wallace approached Factor at the funeral of U.S. Senator Sam Rayburn's funeral and "asked about Loy's ability as a marksman." Factor, he says, responds by saying "it was right good." That is not what happened. Wallace introduced himself to Factor and the two men conversed for some time, until finally President Kennedy arrived by limousine. It was then that Loy made the observation that the president lacked security. Then the conversation turned to Loy's interest in guns and hunting. It was Loy who broached the subject of his ability as a marksman, not Mac Wallace. And Loy never responded by saying it was "right good."

Bugliosi then takes his fourth punch with a rather silly observation. In our acknowledgements, Mark and I express our thanks to the many researchers, writers and witnesses who have helped us along the way. We also thank our wives, who, as one can imagine, were inconvenienced by our long ordeal of travel, research, interviews, time and expense etc. in compiling the information for our story. "They not only allowed us our fantasy, but they encouraged it", is what we wrote. Mr. Bugliosi describes this as a "Freudian slip", saying that the statement actually meant that the authors didn't believe what they themselves were writing. I can assure you that the authors did believe their story. Hundreds of e-mails and letters from all over the world have voiced the same sentiment from others also. Actually "Reclaiming History" quotes Robin Ramsay's ("Who Shot JFK?) statement that the authors (Sample & Collom) have "solved the case".

The fifth misrepresentation that Mr. Bugliosi makes is concerning the murder trial of Mac Wallace in 1952. He writes:

(quote) "In 1952, he (Wallace) was convicted in Austin, Texas, of murdering a golf pro, John Douglas Kinser, who had been having an affair with Wallace's estranged wife. He received a five-year suspended prison sentence. The authors see the dark hand of LBJ in the very light sentence, since Wallace's lawyer, John Cofer, was one of LBJ's main lawyers in his successful post-election legal battle for the U.S Senate against former governor Coke Stevenson in 1948. How Cofer would have the power to bring about Wallace's light sentence, the authors don't say. In a 1986 interview with the Dallas Times Herald, D. L. Johnson, one of the jurors in the Kinser case, said that he was the only juror who favored an outright acquittal for Kinser and that he forced the guilty-with-a-suspended-sentence verdict by threatening to cause a hung jury if he didn't get his way." (end quote)

While most of the above quote is true, Bugliosi asserts that our "seeing the dark hand of LBJ" is a strange assumption on our part! Attorney Cofer was one of many players in this trial, tightly manipulated by Lyndon Johnson and his Texas connections. Bugliosi neglects to tell his readers that D.L. Johnson was the first cousin and good friend of Gus Lanier, who during the trial sat at the defense table of Wallace and his main lawyers. (Who also included another LBJ friend - Polk Shelton) He also leaves out an important snippet from an intelligence file included in our book:

(quote from "The Men on the Sixth Floor")

"And apparently the Johnson influence went even deeper. In Wallace's Naval intelligence file, supplied to us, (dated 20 July, 1961) Johnson is alluded to as bribing Bob Long, the prosecuting attorney in the case. The following quote is from page 4 of the 19 page file, paragraph 10. The SUBJECT referred to is Malcolm Wallace:

"Billy Roy WILDER and Richard C. AVENT, both assistant district attorneys who assisted in the procurement of SUBJECT's file, added their comments concerning rumors which persisted at the time of SUBJECT's trial. WILDER alleged that Bob LONG, former district Attorney, was reported to have been the recipient of valuable property in the city of Austin as a result of his suppression of certain aspects involving political ramifications." (end quote)

Also William Barrett, the famous newspaper writer from Dallas, was convinced of LBJ's involvement in the Wallace murder trial. We report on this in our book:

(Quote from "The Men on the Sixth Floor") I was able to contact Mr. Barrett when I returned from Dallas. He confirmed the above information, and told me without hesitation that in his own mind, he is absolutely sure, beyond doubt, that Malcolm Wallace had the help of Lyndon Johnson in his legal battle.

Much later, we found The Texas Observer article (Nov. 7, 1986) by Bill Adler, which added further support to a "fixed" jury in the Wallace case:

"Not long after the trial, several of the jurors telephoned Doug Kinser's parents to apologize for voting for a suspended sentence, but said they did so only because threats had been made against their families, according to Al Kinser, a nephew of Kinser's who along with his father, still runs the Pitch and Putt golf course." (end quote)

Mr. Bugliosi implies that anyone "seeing the dark hand of LBJ" in the murder trial of Mac Wallace is irrational. I disagree. In fact, the "dark hand of LBJ" can be seen in another murder - that of Henry Marshall.

And that was the sixth mistake that Mr. Bugliosi makes in reference to our book - that there is no credible evidence that Malcolm Wallace murdered Henry Marshall. But there is ample reason to believe that Wallace was the murderer. One very strong reason is found in chapter 13 in our book - The Estes Documents. Although Mr. Bugliosi valiantly tries to discredit the source of these letters to and from the U. S. Justice Department and Billie Sol Estes, the fact remains that in 1984 Billie Sol Estes names Malcolm Wallace as the killer. But prior to these letters, Estes appeared before a Robertson County Texas grand jury and testified under oath to the same thing. Below is a news story of the confession that Mr.Bugliosi for some reason left out:

(quote)

By David Hanners Staff writer of The News. Franklin, Texas -

"Convicted swindler Billie Sol Estes told a grand jury that Lyndon B. Johnson was one of four men who planned the 1961 murder of an agriculture official, three sources close to the grand jury said Thursday. The sources said Estes testified that the group feared the official would link Estes' illegal activities to Johnson.

Estes, who was given immunity from prosecution to testify before a Robertson County grand jury Tuesday, told grand jurors that Johnson felt pressure to silence Henry Harvey Marshall of Bryan, a regional U.S.... Department of Agriculture official in charge of the federal cotton allotment program, sources said....

The sources, who asked to remain anonymous because grand jury testimony is secret under state law, said Estes testified that he had attended at least three meetings with Johnson - two in Washington and one at the Driskill Hotel in Austin - during which they discussed the need to stop Marshall from disclosing Estes' fraudulent business dealings and his ties with Johnson.

Estes testified that he later balked at the idea of killing Marshall, according to sources. Marshall had resisted attempts to transfer him from Bryan to Agriculture Department headquarters in Washington in order to silence him. Sources said Estes' testimony implicated:

Johnson, who had just been elected vice president. Estes and his family have repeatedly said that Estes was a political ally of LBJ, and that Estes made repeated campaign contributions to LBJ's campaigns. Johnson assumed the presidency on the death of John F. Kennedy, on Nov. 22, 1963. He was elected in 1964 to a full term, but chose in 1968 not to seek re-election. He died at his ranch in Stonewall, Texas, on Jan. 22, 1973.

Clifton C. Carter, a close Johnson political aide and troubleshooter who later served as Executive Director and Treasurer of the Democratic National Committee. Carter died of natural causes in Arlington (Va.) Hospital Sept. 21, 1971.

Malcolm Everett (Mac) Wallace, the president of the 1945 student body at the University of Texas at Austin and a onetime U. S. Agriculture Department economist. Wallace, whom sources said Estes identified as Marshall's killer, previously had avoided a prison term on a 1952 murder conviction in Austin. Wallace died, sources said, in a Northeast Texas automobile accident in 1971.

A relative found Marshall's body June 3, 1961, on his Robertson County ranch. He had been shot five times, and his bolt-action .22 caliber rifle was found nearby. (NOT a shotgun as Bugliosi states) His death originally was ruled a suicide by a local justice of the peace, but the ruling came into question a year later when news broke of Marshall's investigation of Estes' cotton allotments.

U.S. Marshall Clint Peoples, who as a Texas Ranger captain began investigating the Murder in 1962, said Thursday that Marshall "was blowing the whistle" on Estes' scheme to defraud the government's cotton allotment program.

Peoples, who persuaded Estes to testify before the grand jury Tuesday, refused to name the people whom Estes implicated in the conspiracy.

"I asked him (Estes) why he didn't testify at the first grand jury in 1962, and he said if he had, he would have been a dead man," said John Paschall, the district attorney.

Paschall said records from the 1962 grand jury revealed that Marshall approved 138 cotton allotments for Estes from Jan. 17 to June 3, 1961. But, Peoples said, "The facts are that Henry Marshall was told to approve them (Estes' cotton allotments)." Before 1961, Estes, a Pecos millionaire who had made much of his money through federally subsidized farm programs, had become a key Democratic power broker and fund-raiser for the campaigns of Johnson, Yarborough and then-Gov. John Connally. Less than a year later, Estes' multi-million dollar empire - built on non-existent grain storage elevators and cotton allotments he obtained fraudulently - collapsed.

In March 1962, Estes was indicted on fraud charges. Two months later, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman said Marshall had been the only man who could provide some of the answers to questions about Estes' involvement in the cotton allotment program.

Days later, a state district judge in Bryan authorized the exhumation of Marshall's body. An autopsy by Harris County Medical Examiner Joseph Jachimczyk revealed that Marshall suffered not only five gunshot wounds to his lower left abdomen but also carbon monoxide poisoning and a head injury. The bruise to Marshall's head occurred before his death, Jachimczyk said, and would have been incapacitating."

Sybil Marshall, the wife of the slain Agriculture Department official, said Thursday, "I'm kind of shocked. I don't know what to think."

Mrs. Marshall said her family always believed her husband had been murdered. "I can't believe he would do that to himself (commit suicide), she said. "He was a good man."

Estes, despite two federal trials and subsequent prison terms in the following two decades, steadfastly had refused to discuss his relationship with Lyndon Johnson or the Marshall murder. Called to testify before a 1962 grand jury investigating Marshall's death, Estes repeatedly invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination, according to press reports at the time.

"Daddy's silence... allowed Lyndon Johnson to become president," Estes' daughter, Pam Estes, wrote in a book about her father titled BILLIE SOL, which was released last week.

"During that time, Daddy had been supplying Lyndon Johnson with large infusions of cash, not only for his own political needs but for people Johnson himself chose to help.

"Sometimes Johnson would send people like Ralph Yarborough directly to Daddy for fund-raising help. On other occasions, Johnson would get bundles of cash from Daddy and distribute it himself. Since those transactions were all cash, there is no reliable way of knowing how much money went to Johnson or what became of it.

"Daddy has steadfastly refused to talk about that part of his life with anyone, even me," she wrote. Wallace, whom sources said Estes named as the triggerman in Marshall's murder, at one time had dated Johnson's sister, Josefa, according to a friend of the Johnson family who asked not to be identified. Johnson's sister died in 1961.

However, Horace Busby, a close friend of Johnson's, said Johnson met Wallace only once, when Carter brought Wallace to Johnson's home in Washington. Wallace was convicted in 1952 of killing John Douglas Kinser of Austin. Testimony in that case revealed that Kinser had been having an affair with Wallace's wife. Wallace was sentenced to a five-year prison term, which was suspended.

Wallace was represented in his 1952 trial by Austin criminal defense lawyer John Cofer, now deceased. Cofer, a longtime LBJ confidant, had represented Johnson in the Jim Wells County "Box 13" voter fraud case in 1948. Because of the slim edge of 87 votes he received from Box 13, Johnson won a runoff election against Coke Stevenson for the U.S. Senate.

Cofer defended Estes in his 1962 fraud trial. Ms. Estes said in her book that Cofer was hired "at the insistence of Lyndon Johnson."

Cofer rested Estes' case without calling any defense witnesses. "I feel that that was done to make sure there was no opportunity of implicating Lyndon Johnson during any testimony or cross examination," Ms. Estes wrote.

"It should be clear by now that it was Lyndon Johnson who paved the way for the preferential treatment Daddy received from the Agriculture Department," she wrote..."

(end quote)

There is more evidence that Malcolm Wallace was the murderer of Henry Marshall, but space on this venue does not allow for it.

These are six examples of how Vincent Bugliosi's "Reclaiming History" has distorted the facts of our book. It makes me wonder how many other distortions exist within his books pages.

Glen Sample

Glen: Congratulations on your work above citing the six examples. It is well written and moderate in tone, which means it will be carefullly read by researchers in the years to come.

Doug

UN top torture investigator lashes out at Obama

20 April, 2009, 13:18

Russian Today

http://www.russiatoday.ru/Top_News/2009-04...t_at_Obama.html

The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak has said that it is illegal for Barack Obama’s administration not to prosecute CIA officers who carried out torture sanctioned by the Bush administration.

It follows the release a few weeks back of Bush-era memos showing the sanctioning of interrogation methods like simulated drowning, sleep deprivation and forcing prisoners into stress positions.

Nowak insists that the US must try those who had been carrying out harsh interrogation techniques. He says the US is among the countries who have signed the UN Convention Against Torture and every country that signs this international document has to abide by it. If not, this can be seen as a breach of international law which could have negative consequences for the already tarnished American image.

“The United States, like all other states that are part of the UN Convention Against Torture, is committed to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bringing all persons against whom there is sound evidence to court,” the expert told the Austrian daily Der Standard.

Now the UN torture investigator has said that the US should be committed to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bring in all the evidence to court.

It is important, he says, that even though some officers claim they were simply carrying out orders, this should not release them from accountability.

Manfred Nowak has said that an independent investigation should be carried out and the victims should be compensated.

Whether or not these calls will be heard at the White House remains to be seen. Nowak now plans to travel to Washington for a range of meetings with American officials.

American President Barack Obama has said that those CIA officers who were simply carrying out orders of the Bush administration should not be prosecuted and added that nothing would be gained by spending time and energy laying blame for the past.

On the other hand, the media, Internet blogs and human rights organizations have been saying that Barack Obama, during his election campaign, promised transparency and accountability. He has shown transparency when he exposed the Bush memos to the public, but accountability is something the American public has yet to see.

Nowak is not the first to criticise Obama's decision to protect CIA interrogators. Earlier, different human rights groups have voiced their concerns over the decision, saying charges are necessary to prevent future abuses and hold people accountable.

Washington, however, is unlikely to face any legal sanctions for its apparent breach of international law, but “naming and shaming has its impact and usually governments try not to be criticized,” Nowak added.

Jeez...

Doug Valentine is a friend of mine. So is James Rosen. And, like Valentine, who authored the brilliant "Strength of the Wolf," Rosen has written one of the best works of investigative journalism to have been published in the past ten years.

That he works for Fox is irrelevant, except in the sense that it makes it easy for liberals to dismiss his book without having read it or considered his arguments. Sadly, Doug's criticism of the book is really no more than an ad hominem attack.

In fact, "Strong Man" is a massively well-documented biography, packed with new information, that moves the Watergate story forward by leaps and bounds. While the book has been attacked by the likes of John Dean, I know of no factual errors in its pages - and its thesis is in no way refuted by Dean's name-calling (or Doug's).

My own interest in the matter is well-known. "Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA" was the first book to discuss the Columbia Plaza call-girl operation and its links to the DNC, and to suggest that the break-in itself had been sabotaged by James McCord. Who ordered the break-in is, of course, an essential question and one, moreover, that has never been satisfactorily answered - until the appearance of Rosen's "Strong Man."

That said, let me suggest that until we're able to put aside our political biases and think outside the Fox News/Post News box, we will never understand what Watergate was really all about (and, trust me, it was about a lot more than DNC Chairman Larry O'Brien's strategy for winning New Hampshire).

Jim Hougan

Earlier this week James Rosen telephoned Robert Merritt, with whom I am collaborating on a new book tentatively titled “Watergate Exposed.”

Apparently, Mr. Rosen had read the topic about our book I posted on the Forum April 6 and had some questions that he wanted to pose to Mr. Merritt. In the course of their conversation as reported to me by Mr. Merritt, Mr. Rosen expressed dismay at a harsh comment that I had written on the Forum about his Watergate book published last year. When Mr. Merritt mentioned this I was disturbed because I could not remember what I had written. So I went back to the Forum and found that I wrote last May 19 that that Mr Rosen's allegation that John Dean ordered the Watergate break-in was not "historically accurate."

Frankly, I am dismayed to discover that I had so carelessly and irresponsibly written such a comment about Mr. Rosen’s book based, not on my reading of the book (which I had not), but on a news article about the book. I have since remembered that at the time I was upset Mr. Rosen had fingered John Dean as the mastermind behind the break-in. I have long believed that Dean has been made the scapegoat by some because of his early and decisive testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee. It has always appeared to me that Dean had no choice but to so testify as he was about to be made the fall-guy for what had occurred.

In any event I owe Mr. Rosen an apology. He had put in 17 years of research into Watergate and had written a book that contained much new information and here I was in the Forum criticizing his work when I had not even read it. This was totally irresponsible on my part and I hope that I never again dash off such a comment about an author's book without first doing my own basic research.

Yesterday I ordered Mr. Rosen’s book from Barnes and Noble and expect delivery within the next few days. I look forward to reading the fruit of Mr. Rosen’s in-depth research and will post my review of his book in the Forum in the near future.

Elizabeth Warren's Devasting Report to Congress

"Liquidate the Banks; Fire the Executives!"

By MIKE WHITNEY

www.counterpunch.org

April 10-12, 2009

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney04102009.html

On Tuesday, a congressional panel headed by ex-Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren released a report on Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's handling of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). Warren was appointed to lead the five-member Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) in November by Senate majority leader Harry Reid. From the opening paragraph on, the Warren report makes clear that Congress is frustrated with Geithner's so-called "Financial Rescue Plan" and doesn't have the foggiest idea of what he is trying to do. Here are the first few lines of "Assessing Treasury's Strategy: Six Months of TARP":

"With this report, the Congressional Oversight Panel examines Treasury’s current strategy and evaluates the progress it has achieved thus far. This report returns the Panel’s inquiry to a central question raised in its first report: What is Treasury’s strategy?"

Six months and $1 trillion later, and Congress still cannot figure out what Geithner is up to. It's a wonder the Treasury Secretary hasn't been fired already.

From the report:

"In addition to drawing on the $700 billion allocated to Treasury under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (EESA), economic stabilization efforts have depended heavily on the use of the Federal Reserve Board’s balance sheet. This approach has permitted Treasury to leverage TARP funds well beyond the funds appropriated by Congress. Thus, while Treasury has spent or committed $590.4 billion of TARP funds, according to Panel estimates, the Federal Reserve Board has expanded its balance sheet by more than $1.5 trillion in loans and purchases of government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) securities. The total value of all direct spending, loans and guarantees provided to date in conjunction with the federal government’s financial stability efforts (including those of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as well as Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board) now exceeds $4 trillion."

So, while Congress approved a mere $700 billion in emergency funding for the TARP, Geithner and Bernanke deftly sidestepped the public opposition to more bailouts and shoveled another $3.3 trillion through the back door via loans and leverage for crappy mortgage paper that will never regain its value. Additionally, the Fed has made a deal with Treasury that when the financial crisis finally subsides, Treasury will assume the Fed's obligations vis a vis the "lending facilities", which means the taxpayer will then be responsible for unknown trillions in withering investments.

From the report:

"To deal with a troubled financial system, three fundamentally different policy alternatives are possible: liquidation, receivership, or subsidization. To place these alternatives in context, the report evaluates historical and contemporary efforts to confront financial crises and their relative success. The Panel focused on six historical experiences: (1) the U.S. Depression of the 1930s; (2) the bank run on and subsequent government seizure of Continental Illinois in 1984; (3) the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and establishment of the Resolution Trust Corporation; (4) the recapitalization of the FDIC bank insurance fund in 1991; (5) Sweden’s financial crisis of the early 1990s; and (6) what has become known as Japan’s “Lost Decade” of the 1990s. The report also surveys the approaches currently employed by Iceland, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and other European countries."

This statement shows that the congressional committee understands that Geithner's lunatic plan has no historic precedent and no prospect of succeeding. Geithner's circuitous Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP)--which is designed to remove toxic assets from bank balance sheets--is an end-run around "tried-and-true" methods for fixing the banking system. In the most restrained and diplomatic language, Warren is telling Geithner that she knows that he's up to no good.

From the report:

"Liquidation avoids the uncertainty and open-ended commitment that accompany subsidization. It can restore market confidence in the surviving banks, and it can potentially accelerate recovery by offering decisive and clear statements about the government’s evaluation of financial conditions and institutions."

The committee agrees with the vast majority of reputable economists who think the banks should be taken over (liquidated) and the bad assets put up for auction. This is the committee's number one recommendation.

The committee also explores the pros and cons of conservatorship (which entails a reorganization in which bad assets are removed, failed managers are replaced, and parts of the business are spun off) and government subsidization, which involves capital infusions or the purchasing of troubled assets. Subsidization, however, carries the risk of distorting the market (by keeping assets artificially high) and creating a constant drain on government resources. Subsidization tends to create hobbled banks that continue to languish as wards of the state.

Liquidation, conservatorship and government subsidization; these are the three ways to fix the banking system. There is no fourth way. Geithner's plan is not a plan at all; it's mumbo-jumbo dignified with an acronym; PPIP. The Treasury Secretary is being as opaque as possible to stall for time while he diverts trillions in public revenue to his scamster friends at the big banks through capital injections and nutty-sounding money laundering programs like the PPIP.

From the report:

"Treasury’s approach fails to acknowledge the depth of the current downturn and the degree to which the low valuation of troubled assets accurately reflects their worth. The actions undertaken by Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board and the FDIC are unprecedented. But if the economic crisis is deeper than anticipated, it is possible that Treasury will need to take very different actions in order to restore financial stability."

This is a crucial point; the toxic assets are not going to regain their value because their current market price--30 cents on the dollar for AAA mortgage-backed securities--accurately reflects the amount of risk they bear. The market is right and Geithner is wrong; it's that simple. Many of these securities are comprised of loans that were issued to people without sufficient income to make the payments. These "xxxx's loans" were bundled together with good loans into mortgage-backed securities. No one can say with any certainty what they are really worth. Naturally, there is a premium for uncertainty, which is why the assets are fetching a mere 30 cents on the dollar. This won't change no matter how much Geithner tries to prop up the market. The well has been already poisoned.

Also, according to this month’s Case-Schiller report, housing prices are falling at the fastest pace since their peak in 2006. That means that the market for mortgage-backed securities (MBS) will continue to plunge and the losses at the banks will continue to grow. The IMF recently increased its estimate of how much toxic mortgage-backed papaer the banks are holding to $4 trillion.

The banking system is underwater and needs to be resolved quickly before another Lehman-type crisis arises sending the economy into a protracted Depression. Geithner is clearly the wrong man for the job. His PPIP is nothing more than a stealth ripoff of public funds which uses confusing rules and guidelines to conceal the true objective, which is to shift toxic garbage onto the public's balance sheet while recapitalizing bankrupt financial institutions.

So, why is Geithner being kept on at Treasury when his plan has already been thoroughly discredited and his only goal is to bailout the banks through underhanded means?

That question was best answered by the former chief economist of the IMF, Simon Johnson, in an article which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly:

"The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming... is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government - a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF's staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation; recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression we're running out of time." (The Atlantic Monthly, May 2009, by Simon Johnson)

The banks have a stranglehold on the political process. Many of their foot soldiers now occupy the highest offices in government. It's up to people like Elizabeth Warren to draw attention to the silent coup that has taken place and do whatever needs to be done to purge the moneylenders from the seat of power and restore representative government. It's a tall order and time is running out.

* http://cop.senate.gov/reports/library/report-040709-cop.cfm Elizabeth Warren's 8 minute video summary of the COP report.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com

One of Ed "Tree Frog," whose South Florida group of JFK assassination researchers have contributed much to the known record, including this bit of information, which Ed passed around in response to Jim D's review of Lamar Waldron's Legacy of Secrecy.

"...the coup was set for Dec 1st 1963 according to Lamar.... unfortunately his "coup plotter in chief "Juan Ameida Bosque was on a Britannia Airways flight to Algeria on the 28 th November 1963;the head of a 162 man Cuban delegation;these were long standing arrangements.....so as the "coup plotter" met top Algerian officials the uprising would take place and um well the plotter would have to manage the chaos from a distance...nuts plain nuts......this info is in the CIA cable traffic from the specific time period....also as you know NSA was closely monitoring Cuban communications...and zip was going on.......when I mentioned this to Lamar in Dallas a few years ago now he was almost lost for words; very unusual for Lamar..........last year he told me had seen the document and felt that it did not alter his ideas or opinion....."

Being married to a conspiracy theory is apparently difficult to divorce.

Did anybody hear the radio show? Bill Kelly

I heard the last half-hour of the interview of Lamar Waldron on coasttocoastam on April 4.

The link below leads to a summary of his remarks on the show.

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2009/04/04.html