Douglas Caddy
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Three crashes early in his career led Navy officials to question or fault his judgment.
By Ralph Vartabedian and Richard A. Serrano
Los Angeles Times
October 6, 2008
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na...0,7633315.story
John McCain was training in his AD-6 Skyraider on an overcast Texas morning in 1960 when he slammed into Corpus Christi Bay and sheared the skin off his plane's wings.
McCain recounted the accident decades later in his autobiography. "The engine quit while I was practicing landings," he wrote. But an investigation board at the Naval Aviation Safety Center found no evidence of engine failure.
The 23-year-old junior lieutenant wasn't paying attention and erred in using "a power setting too low to maintain level flight in a turn," investigators concluded.
The crash was one of three early in McCain's aviation career in which his flying skills and judgment were faulted or questioned by Navy officials.
In his most serious lapse, McCain was "clowning" around in a Skyraider over southern Spain about December 1961 and flew into electrical wires, causing a blackout, according to McCain's own account as well as those of naval officers and enlistees aboard the carrier Intrepid. In another incident, in 1965, McCain crashed a T-2 trainer jet in Virginia.
After McCain was sent to Vietnam, his plane was destroyed in an explosion on the deck of an aircraft carrier in 1967. Three months later, he was shot down during a bombing mission over Hanoi and taken prisoner. He was not faulted in either of those cases and was later lauded for his heroism as a prisoner of war.
As a presidential candidate, McCain has cited his military service -- particularly his 5 1/2 years as a POW. But he has been less forthcoming about his mistakes in the cockpit.
The Times interviewed men who served with McCain and located once-confidential 1960s-era accident reports and formerly classified evaluations of his squadrons during the Vietnam War. This examination of his record revealed a pilot who early in his career was cocky, occasionally cavalier and prone to testing limits.
In today's military, a lapse in judgment that causes a crash can end a pilot's career. Though standards were looser and crashes more frequent in the 1960s, McCain's record stands out.
"Three mishaps are unusual," said Michael L. Barr, a former Air Force pilot with 137 combat missions in Vietnam and an internationally known aviation safety expert who teaches in USC's Aviation Safety and Security Program. "After the third accident, you would say: Is there a trend here in terms of his flying skills and his judgment?"
Jeremiah Pearson, a Navy officer who flew 400 missions over Vietnam without a mishap and later became the head of human spaceflight at NASA, said: "That's a lot. You don't want any. Maybe he was just unlucky."
Naval aviation experts say the three accidents before McCain's deployment to Vietnam probably triggered a review to determine whether he should be allowed to continue flying. The results of the review would have been confidential.
The Times asked McCain's campaign to release any military personnel records in the candidate's possession showing how the Navy handled the three incidents. The campaign said it would have no comment.
Navy veterans who flew with McCain called him a good pilot.
"John was what you called a push-the-envelope guy," said Sam H. Hawkins, who flew with McCain's VA-44 squadron in the 1960s and now teaches political science at Florida Atlantic University. "There are some naval aviators who are on the cautious side. They don't get out on the edges, but the edges are where you get the maximum out of yourself and out of your plane. That's where John operated. And when you are out there, you take risks."
The young McCain has often been described as undisciplined and fearless -- a characterization McCain himself fostered in his autobiography.
"In his military career, he was a risk-taker and a daredevil," said John Karaagac, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies and the author of a book on McCain. "What was interesting was that he got into accidents, and it didn't rattle his nerves. He takes hits and still stands."
McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, had a privileged status in the Navy. He was invited to the captain's cabin for dinner on the maiden voyage of the Enterprise in 1962, a perk other aviators and sailors attributed to his famous name, recalled Gene Furr, an enlisted man who shared an office and went on carrier deployments with McCain over three years.
On another occasion, McCain was selected to make a commemorative landing on the Enterprise and had his picture taken in front of a cake in the officers' galley, Furr said.
McCain's commanders sarcastically dubbed him "Ace McCain" because of his string of pre-Vietnam accidents, recalled Maurice Rishel, who commanded McCain's VA-65 squadron in early 1961, when it was deployed in the Mediterranean. Still, Rishel said, "he did his job."
Here is a closer look at those three incidents:
Corpus Christi, Texas, March 12, 1960
McCain was practicing landings in his AD-6 Skyraider over Corpus Christi Bay when he lost several hundred feet of altitude "without realizing it" and struck the water, according to the Naval Aviation Safety Center accident report on file at the Naval Historical Center in Washington.
The plane, a single-engine propeller plane designed for ground attack, sank 10 feet to the bottom of the bay. McCain swam to the surface and was plucked from the water by a rescue helicopter.
While he has contended that the engine quit, investigators collected extensive evidence indicating otherwise. Cockpit instruments that froze on impact showed the engine was still producing power. When water quenched the exhaust stack, it preserved a bright blue color, showing that the engine was still hot. And an aviator behind McCain reported that the engine was producing the black smoke characteristic of Skyraiders.
Investigators determined that McCain was watching instruments in his cockpit that indicated the position of his landing gear and had lost track of his altitude and speed.
The report concluded: "In the opinion of the board, the pilot's preoccupation in the cockpit . . . coupled with the use of a power setting too low to maintain level flight in a turn were the primary causes of this accident."
Southern Spain, around December 1961
McCain was on a training mission when he flew low and ran into electrical wires. He brought his crippled Skyraider back to the Intrepid, dragging 10 feet of wire, sailors and aviators recalled.
In his 1999 autobiography, "Faith of My Fathers," McCain briefly recounts the incident, calling it the result of "daredevil clowning" and "flying too low." McCain did not elaborate on what happened, and The Times could find no military records of the accident.
When he struck the wires, McCain severed an oil line in his plane, said Carl Russ, a pilot in McCain's squadron. McCain's flight suit and the cockpit were soaked in oil, added Russ, who nonetheless said McCain was a good pilot.
The next day, McCain went to the flight deck with his superior officers and some of the crew to inspect the damage. A gaggle of sailors surrounded the plane.
Clark Sherwood, an enlistee responsible for hanging ordnance on the squadron's planes, recalled standing on the deck with McCain. "I said, 'You're lucky to be alive.' McCain said, 'You bet your ass I am,' " Sherwood said. "He almost bought the farm." Sherwood, now a real estate agent in New Jersey, said he considered McCain a hero.
Calvin Shoemaker, a retired test pilot for the Skyraider's manufacturer, Douglas Aircraft, said extended low-level flights are difficult in any aircraft and for that reason Skyraiders were seldom flown at altitudes below 500 feet.
After hearing a description of McCain's record, Shoemaker said the aviator appeared to be a "flat-hatter," an old aviation term for a showoff.
Cape Charles, Va., Nov. 28, 1965
Over the Eastern Shore of Virginia, McCain descended below 7,000 feet on a landing approach in a T-2 trainer jet, according to accident records. He said he heard an explosion in his engine and lost power. He said he tried unsuccessfully to restart the engine.
He spotted a local drag strip and considered trying to glide to a landing there but finally had to eject at 1,000 feet. The plane crashed in the woods. McCain escaped injury and was picked up by a farmer.
In his autobiography, McCain said he had flown on a Saturday to Philadelphia to watch the annual Army-Navy football game with his parents. The accident report does not mention Philadelphia but rather indicates that McCain departed from a now-closed Navy field in New York City on Sunday afternoon and was headed to Norfolk, Va.
In a report dated Jan. 18, 1966, the Naval Aviation Safety Center said it could not determine the cause of the accident or corroborate McCain's account of an explosion in the engine. A close examination of the engine found "no discrepancies which would have caused or contributed to engine failure or malfunction."
The report found that McCain, then assigned to squadron VT-7 in Meridian, Miss., had made several errors: He failed to switch the plane's power system to battery backup, which "seriously jeopardized his survival chances." His idea of landing on the drag strip was "viewed with concern and is indicative of questionable emergency procedure."
The report added, "It may be indeed fortunate that the pilot was not in a position to attempt such a landing."
McCain also ejected too late and too low, was not wearing proper flight equipment and positioned his body improperly before ejecting, the report said.
The official record includes comments from pilots in his own squadron who defended McCain's actions as "proper and timely."
About two weeks after issuing its report, the safety center revised its findings and said the accident resulted from the failure or malfunction of an "undetermined component of the engine."
Edward M. Morrison, a mechanic for VT-7 who is now retired and living in Washington state, said that the plane McCain checked out that day had just been refurbished and that he knew of no engine problems.
"McCain came to the flight line that day, carrying his dress whites, and said, 'Give me a pretty plane,' " Morrison said. "Nobody had ever asked me for a pretty plane before. I gave him this one because it was freshly painted. The next time I saw him, I said, 'Don't ever ask me for a pretty plane again.' I think he laughed."
In Vietnam
McCain was a pilot on the carrier Forrestal, off the coast of Vietnam, when one of the worst accidents in Navy history killed 134 crew members and damaged or destroyed various aircraft, including McCain's.
On July 29, 1967, he and other pilots were preparing for a bombing raid when a Zuni rocket from one of the planes misfired.
The rocket hit the plane next to McCain's, killing the pilot, igniting jet fuel and touching off a chain of explosions, according to the Navy investigation. McCain, who jumped from the nose of his jet and ran through the flames, suffered minor shrapnel wounds.
Three months later, McCain was on his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam when a surface-to-air missile struck his A-4 attack jet. He was flying 3,000 feet above Hanoi.
A then-secret report issued in 1967 by McCain's squadron said the aviators had learned to stay at an altitude of 4,000 to 10,000 feet in heavy surface-to-air missile environments and look for approaching missiles.
"Once the SAM was visually acquired, it was relatively easy to outmaneuver it by a diving maneuver followed by a high-G pull-up. The critical problem comes during multiple SA-II attacks (6-12 missiles), when it is not possible to see or maneuver with each missile."
The American aircraft had instruments that warned pilots with a certain tone when North Vietnamese radar tracked them and another tone when a missile locked on them.
In his autobiography, McCain said 22 missiles were fired at his squadron that day. "I knew I should roll out and fly evasive maneuvers, 'jinking,' in fliers' parlance, when I heard the tone," he wrote. But, he said, he continued on and released his bombs. Then a missile blew off his right wing.
Vietnam veterans said McCain did exactly what they did on almost every mission.
Frank Tullo, an Air Force pilot who flew 100 missions over North Vietnam, said his missile warning receiverconstantly sounded in his cockpit.
"Nobody broke off on a bombing run," said Tullo, later a commercial pilot and now an accident investigation instructor at USC. "It was a matter of manhood."
ralph.vartabedian@ latimes.com
richard.serrano@latimes.com
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Coasttocoastam, the worldwide radio program, had as its guest last night Roland Haas, who was a paid assassin for the CIA for many years. He has written a book about his experience and below is a biographical sketch from the book's website.
In answer to a question on the radio program, Haas said that he did not believe Oswald acted alone and that there was a conspiracy afterwards to cover up the role played by others. He said JFK's assassination could well have involved rogue officers employed by the CIA.
His interview confirmed in my mind how "normal" and "routine" it would have been for LBJ to have a stone killer, Mac Wallace, on call to perform wet jobs when so ordered by LBJ. Haas was employed by the CIA. Wallace was an economist with the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Both carried out their hits while being employed by agencies of the U.S. government.
ENTER THE PAST TENSE
MY SECRET LIFE AS A CIA ASSASSIN
By Roland W. Haas
978-1-59797-086-0 Cloth $24.95 6 x 9 320 pages
http://www.enterthepasttense.com/1.html
While at Purdue University on an NROTC scholarship in 1971, Roland Haas was recruited to become a CIA deep clandestine operative. He underwent intensive training to prepare for insertion into hostile areas, including High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) parachuting and weapons instruction. In the course of his first mission (to East and West Germany, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bulgaria, Romania, and Austria), he assassinated several international drug dealers. On his return, he was thrown into an Iranian prison, where was physically and psychologically tortured. Over the next thirty years, he served the agency on an as-needed basis, engaging in such activities as hunting down and eliminating members of the Red Army Faction and extracting Soviet Spetsnaz officers from East Germany. His cover jobs included being a part owner of an Oakland health club, which brought him into close contact with steroid abuse in professional athletics, drug abuse in general, and the Hell’s Angels, whom he believes tried to have him killed. He also served in Germany as site commander for the Conventional Forces in Europe weapons treaty. His most recent cover was as the deputy director of intelligence in the U.S. Army Reserve Command, which involved him with the Guantanamo detention facility.
The gripping story of one man’s journey from skinny, troubled immigrant kid to highly trained covert operations specialist working for the CIA during the Cold War
Contains a foreword by former intelligence officer Col. Ben Malcom, USA (Ret.), author of White Tigers: My Secret War in Korea
Please send copies of any reviews or articles referencing this title to Claire Noble at the letterhead address. For an author interview or any additional information, please contact Claire Noble at 703.996.1017 or Claire@booksintl.com.
22841 Quicksilver Drive Dulles, Virginia 20166-2012 Tel 703.661.1548 Fax 703.661.1547
Contact: Claire Noble Phone: 703.996.1017 claire@booksintl.com
About the Author Roland Haas
Roland Haas served thirty years as a CIA deep clandestine operative. He also taught English composition, as well as German, Russian, and English literature at Purdue University, University of Maryland and the University of California at Berkeley. Presently he is assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence and command senior intelligence officer of the U.S. Army Reserve Command at Fort McPherson, Georgia. He lives with his wife, Marilyn, and children, Annemarie and Damien, in Peachtree, Georgia.
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Some of the great mysteries of Watergate will be in the news sometime after the November election, along with answers to these mysteries.
Does this depend on the Democrats winning the election?
No, it depends on how soon I can finish the book that I am writing. A major step forward in that regard came today when I received key documents that had been sought from the U.S. National Archives.
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I have seen mention made various places of Liddy's CIA connection and although it certainly could be logical, that does not make it a fact. He surely interacted with the CIA, but whether he was working directly for them is tough to say. I find it most curious that in the index of his autobiography "Will", CIA is referenced as being on pages 141-149 but is only mentioned on 147 (twice), 148 (once), and 149 (once). The time frame covered is Liddy's exit from Treasury and entrance to the White House staff - what eventually became the Plumbers. Is this a typo or is Liddy coyly trying to tell us something?
I would not have thought that Liddy was the type of man the CIA would have recruited. McCord was of course CIA and it seems to me that he did everything he could to get the Watergate team caught. In my view it as a CIA operation to bring down Nixon.
More likely it was a military intelligence-CIA joint operation.
Some of the great mysteries of Watergate will be in the news sometime after the November election, along with answers to these mysteries.
As to McCord working for the Mullen Company, I never heard his name mentioned by Robert Mullen while he owned the company. Maybe Robert Bennett, who purchased the Mullen Company, might have established such a employment relationship. Liddy was, and is today, essentially a loner who never could have fit into the CIA mode, although he was once a FBI agent.
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The Continuing Menace of Nazi secret research
August 2, 2008
http://www.unknowncountry.com/?PHPSESSID=c...d18f6322399833e
The following is from a description of Dreamland’s program of August 2, 2008. You can listen free to the program by clicking on Dreamland at the top of the above link to the Unknown Country page:
Dreamland favorite Joseph Farrell is back, this time revealing secrets about concealed Nazi advances in physics to our resident expert on official secrecy, Jim Marrs.
This interview contains information about temporal displacements, the truth about the Philadelphia Experiment, and the shocking advances that were obtained from Nazi leaders after World War II ended, and how they have been hidden.
Then Linda Howe interviews Ryan Wood on Majestic 12 documents, UFO secret research and the JFK assassination.
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Nov. 22, 1963
Conspiracy or No, One Day Has Stretched To Fill a Writer's Years
By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 24, 2008; C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...ml?hpid=topnews
Max Holland, who appears to be coherent, is in his book-lined study, just off the kitchen in his house in Silver Spring. He's going over the Zapruder film. Again. And again. And . . .
Birds are chirping outside. The sun is out. Inside, it's dark, quiet among the filing cabinets.
He's been at work on his book about the Warner Commission investigation into President Kennedy's assassination for 12 years.
For. Twelve. Years.
And right here -- in just the fifth paragraph! -- you already have the overwhelming desire to take him by the collar and shout: Max!!! Buddy!!! SNAP OUT OF IT!!! Abort, abort! Entire human beings have disappeared in Dealey Plaza!! It's the Bermuda Triangle of pop culture! But he's saying, "Now, you see right here . . . "
He's pointing to Secret Service agents on the screen.
"I don't want to overwhelm you . . ."
This is a short story about American paranoia. It is slightly scary. It is about how even good writers and responsible people can fall into the rabbit hole of Washington research -- a tumble that leads you down, down, down to the Elm Street of the mind, below the Texas School Book Depository and in front of the grassy knoll, a few minutes past noon, in a world where it is always Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963.
And Holland, 57, isn't even a conspiracy theorist babbling about the CIA and Castro! He says Lee Harvey Oswald did it and did it alone! His goal, he says, is to heal our national paranoia about Kennedy's murder, to lay to rest the lingering belief that there was some sort of conspiracy (which most Americans believe), and to have this traumatic event finally settled in the national id. He wants people to understand that Oliver Stone's "JFK" actively misstated events, that Don DeLillo's "Libra," which has shooters on the grassy knoll, was a good novel but only that.
A former writer for the Nation, he has already won the prestigious J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, worth a nifty $45,000, for his book, "A Need to Know: Inside the Warren Commission." That was way back in 2001. He's gotten another $131,000 in book advances. His publisher is Knopf, one of the most respected in the business. His research is so prodigious that it has already birthed two other books, both about tape recordings from the Johnson White House that deal with the Kennedy killing.
This leads you to believe that he's not going to show you that the limo driver actually turned and fired the fatal third shot into Kennedy (as one popular video on YouTube has it). So, maybe against your better judgment, you lean over, and look really hard at the Zapruder film unspooling on his screen . . . and the Secret Service guys in the second car are reacting to something just as the film starts.
See the heads turn? Now, if you calculate that "mediated nervous reaction," and the car's position, and the memories of several witnesses and the speed of the film at 18.3 frames per second, and remember 4.9 seconds elapsed between the second and third shots . . . then you get the revelation that Oswald's first shot, the one that missed, took place before the Zapruder film.
Pause. Gulp.
Yes, kids, before.
Somehow, he's saying, the most studied 19 seconds of film in American history has consistently fooled everyone, because everyone has taken it as an article of faith that three shots were captured on the (soundless) film. Nah. Holland theorizes the first shot likely dinged off a traffic mast overhanging the street and not a tree branch, as most people have thought. This means he fired earlier than people have believed and thus had far more time -- a total of just over 11 seconds -- to fire the second and third rounds. This makes it far more understandable how he could have been the lone gunman, and thus bolsters the Warren Commission's finding on that point.
"Everyone has been late to the first shot," he says, pulling back from the computer screen.
This is but one tiny bit of data he says will come out in "A Need to Know," which pledges to be the definitive history of the commission, that body of seven politicians, lawyers and Washington heavyweights who conducted the official inquiry into the assassination and whose 888-page report later became mocked as a hastily done coverup.
Conspiracy theories and distrust in government from later events like Vietnam and Watergate have grown like ivy over the founding documents, Holland says. They obscure the time period, the Cold War, that produced a sometimes flawed but nonetheless accurate report. It's a time capsule from the era, after McCarthyism but before Vietnam spiraled out of control, when America was trembling but the cultural fissures had not yet shifted.
"If I restore faith in the Warren Commission, I'll put to rest some of the disturbing questions people have had," Holland says.
This is the tantalizing promise the assassination makes: That you're on to something everybody has missed. So you catalogue obscure CIA memos, a Bay of Pigs document, comments by FBI field agents in Dallas, Jack Ruby, the mob, Oswald saying, "I'm a patsy," the magic bullet that hit both Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally . . . and then 10 years go by, and you're looking at the same bits of homemade footage on Dealey Plaza, convinced you've just about got it nailed down.
Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who knew both Kennedy and Oswald, spent 13 years working on "Marina and Lee," a book that sought to be the definitive word on the assassin. It was published in 1977. Gerald Posner's years-in-the-making 624-page "Case Closed," which sought to be the last word on the case, was published in 1994. Vincent Bugliosi spent 20 years on "Reclaiming History," his 1,648-page tome that sought to settle everything, once and for all.
That was last year.
And still, here sits Max Holland, working on a book that he says will go a good 600 pages. He has to have a draft to the publisher by October. There is still, after 12 years, no publication date.
"He gets really mad when people ask what's taking so long," says his wife, Tamar Gutner, a political science professor at American University.
"He's a very responsible researcher," says Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University history professor and author of several books about the 1960s.
"The ultimate painstaking research person and serious writer," says McMillan.
"He's an excellent reporter . . . honest and objective," says Al Goldberg, the historian on the Warren Commission.
"Transparently and pathetically irresponsible."
Whoa! This last is from Dale Myers, who won an Emmy for his computer animation work on the Zapruder film. He studied the assassination for 35 years and developed a computer-generated, three-dimensional model of the assassination sequence. He thinks Oswald did it, too.
But he ridicules Holland's analysis of an early first shot. He goes into great detail about the position of the car, the traffic mast on Elm Street, and Oswald's perch above it all.
"He's out to lunch, to put it kindly," Myers says.
None of this really matters. What matters is the American belief in the paranoid.
"People want to believe there must be some momentous history behind this momentous event, that there was some group that really wanted to turn the page rather than just one lone, crazy assassin," says Kazin, the history professor. "The thing that's great about Max is that he doesn't go for that."
Thomas Mallon, a novelist who spent about a year on a nonfiction book about Oswald's landlord, didn't think his project would be too hard. Then he found himself in Parkland Hospital (where Kennedy and Oswald were taken after they were shot) after his neck and shoulders seized with tension from the stress of it all. He says now that he had been sucked into the "space-time wormhole" of the assassination. He was amazed by the whole subculture of the self-appointed Kennedy researchers and by "the pedantry you fall into, the obsessiveness that really does come with the territory."
A few miles away but still inside the Beltway, Max Holland is still deep in Nov. 22, 1963, looking for answers to mysteries that are never going to be solved. He turns back to his computer, pulls out one of his thousands of files, and settles in for another day's work.
The sun is glinting off Oswald's rifle. America. Paranoia. There's something out there.
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A group of historians are currently involved in a lawsuit seeking the release of papers in the Rosenberg case. The historians especially want the transcripts of those two crucial interviews with David and Ruth Greenglass. They are refusing to do this but did provide information that Ruth had died under an assumed name on 7th April 2008.
In 1942 David Greenglass joined the United States Army. Promoted to the rank of sergeant, he was transferred to Los Alamos, where attempts were being made to develop the atom bomb. In 1945 Greenglass left the army and open a small machine shop in Manhattan with his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg. However, the business did badly and Greenglass left the partnership.
On 5th September 1945, Igor Gouzenko, a KGB intelligence officer based in Canada, defected to the West claiming he had evidence of an Soviet spy ring based in Britain. Gouzenko provided evidence that led to the arrest of 22 local agents and 15 Soviet spies in Canada. Some of this information from Gouzenko resulted in Klaus Fuchs being interviewed by MI5. Fuchs denied any involvement in espionage and the intelligence services did not have enough evidence to have him arrested and charged with spying. However, after repeated interviews with Jim Skardon he eventually confessed on 23rd January 1950 to passing information to the Soviet Union. Six weeks later Fuchs was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
In June 1950 the FBI arrested Harry Gold, who confessed to helping Klaus Fuchs in his espionage activities in the United States. He named David Greenglass as being a member of the spy ring. In July 1950 Greenglass was arrested by the FBI and accused of spying for the Soviet Union. Under questioning, he admitted acting as a spy and named Julius Rosenberg as one of his contacts. He denied that his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, had been involved but confessed that his wife, Ruth Greenglass, had been used as a courier.
Julius Rosenberg was arrested but refused to implicate anybody else in spying for the Soviet Union. Joseph McCarthy had just launched his attack on a so-called group of communists based in Washington. J. Edgar Hoover saw the arrest of Rosenberg as a means of getting good publicity for the FBI. Hoover sent a memorandum to the US attorney general Howard McGrath saying: "There is no question that if Julius Rosenberg would furnish details of his extensive espionage activities it would be possible to proceed against other individuals. Proceeding against his wife might serve as a lever in these matters."
Hoover ordered the arrest of Ethel Rosenberg and her two children were taken into care. Julius and Ethel were put under pressure to incriminate others involved in the spy ring. Neither offered any further information.
Ten days before the start of the trial of the Rosenbergs the FBI re-interviewed David Greenglass. He was offered a deal if he provided information against Ethel Rosenberg. This included a promise not to charge his wife, Ruth Greenglass, with being a member of the spy ring. Greenglass now changed his story. In his original statement, he said that he handed over atomic information to Julius Rosenberg on a street corner in New York. In his new interview, Greenglass claimed that the handover had taken place in the living room of the Rosenberg's New York flat.
In her FBI interview Ruth Greenglass argued that "Julius then took the info into the bathroom and read it, and when he came out he told (Ethel) she had to type this info immediately. Ethel then sat down at the typewriter... and proceeded to type info which David had given to Julius".
The trial of Ethel Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg began on 6th March 1951. David Greenglass was questioned by the chief prosecutor's assistant, Roy Cohn. After Greenglass testified to his passing sketches of a high explosive lens mold he provided incriminating detail of the Rosenberg's espionage activity.
Ruth Greenglass testified as to how she was asked by Julius Rosenberg to inquire of her husband, recently stationed in Los Alamos, whether he would be willing to provide information on the progress of the Manhattan Project. She also testified that Ethel Rosenberg spent a January evening in 1945 typing her husband's handwritten notes from Los Alamos.
The Rosenberg's defense attorney, Emanuel Bloch, argued that Greenglass was lying in order to gain revenge because he blamed Rosenberg for their failed business venture and to get a lighter sentence for himself. (He did not know about the deal done with Ruth Greenglass.)
In his summation, the chief prosecutor, Irving Saypol, declared: "This description of the atom bomb, destined for delivery to the Soviet Union, was typed up by the defendant Ethel Rosenberg that afternoon at her apartment at 10 Monroe Street. Just so had she, on countless other occasions, sat at that typewriter and struck the keys, blow by blow, against her own country in the interests of the Soviets."
Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death and remained on death row for twenty-six months. Nobel prize-winner, Jean-Paul Sartre, called the case "a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation". The Rosenbergs remained on death row for twenty-six months. They both refused to confess and provide evidence against others and they were eventually executed on 19th June, 1953. As one political commentator pointed out, they died because they refused to confess and name others.
As a reward for his co-operation, Greenglass was only sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was released after only serving ten years. Greenglass went to live with his wife under an assumed name.
In December 2001, Sam Roberts, a New York Times reporter, traced David Greenglass, who was living under an assumed name with Ruth Greenglass. Interviewed on television under a heavy disguise, he acknowledged that his and his wife's court statements had been untrue. "Julius asked me to write up some stuff, which I did, and then he had it typed. I don't know who typed it, frankly. And to this day I can't even remember that the typing took place. But somebody typed it. Now I'm not sure who it was and I don't even think it was done while we were there."
David Greenglass said he had no regrets about his testimony that resulted in the execution of Ethel Rosenberg. "As a spy who turned his family in, I don't care. I sleep very well. I would not sacrifice my wife and my children for my sister... You know, I seldom use the word sister anymore; I've just wiped it out of my mind. My wife put her in it. So what am I going to do, call my wife a xxxx? My wife is my wife."
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USArosenberg.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USArosenbergE.htm
U.S. Judge Upholds Secrecy of Rosenberg Testimony
By BENJAMIN WEISER
The New York Times
July 23, 2008
A federal judge in Manhattan, weighing the secrecy of the grand jury process against the interests of public accountability, refused on Tuesday to unseal the grand jury testimony of a critical witness in the Rosenberg atomic espionage case.
But with no objection from the government about the release of testimony from three dozen or so other witnesses, those records could be released soon.
The witness who objected to having his testimony made public, David Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg, was a co-conspirator and a key government witness whose testimony helped convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were executed at Sing Sing on June 19, 1953.
Mr. Greenglass, now 86, is one of the most controversial figures in the enduring spy case, historians say, as years after his sister’s execution he recanted his testimony that she had typed some of his espionage notes. He had testified against her to spare his wife, Ruth, from prosecution, and is widely seen as helping to cause Ethel’s conviction and execution.
A group of historians had petitioned for the release of the still-secret testimony, running more than 1,000 pages, of the witnesses who appeared before the grand jury in the Rosenberg case and a related one in 1950 and 1951.
The government agreed to the unsealing of testimony from most of the witnesses, objecting only to that of about 10, including Mr. Greenglass, who were still alive and did not consent or could not be found.
In refusing to release Mr. Greenglass’s testimony while he is alive, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein stressed the importance of grand jury secrecy as well as accountability.
But he added that not permitting others to disclose what a witness has said before the grand jury “is an abiding value that I must respect.”
Mr. Greenglass was not in court, but his lawyer, Daniel N. Arshack, wrote to Judge Hellerstein, saying that the circumstances that led to Mr. Greenglass’s testimony were “complex and emotionally wrought,” and had thrust him and his family “into an unwanted spotlight which has dogged their lives ever since.”
“The unequivocal and complete promise of secrecy,” Mr. Arshack wrote, “provided the protection that the guarantee of secrecy is designed to provide.”
Judge Hellerstein said that he would wait to rule on the other witnesses for whom the government was still objecting until further efforts were made to track them down or ascertain that they had died.
But he made it clear that he wanted that search to occur expeditiously, saying “time is precious” for historians and researchers.
The petitioners, led by the National Security Archives, a nonprofit group at George Washington University, had argued that the significance of the case, which they called “perhaps the defining moment of the early Cold War,” should trump the traditional confidentiality rules that govern the grand jury process.
The government, while not disputing the case’s historic importance, has said that the court should abide by the views of living witnesses who objected to the release of their testimony. Otherwise, the government said, witnesses could be discouraged from speaking candidly before grand juries in the future.
David C. Vladeck, a lawyer who argued for the petitioners, praised the outcome of the case and the expected release of the other testimony. “All of this is very good news,” he said.
He added that he was disappointed in the ruling on Mr. Greenglass, but said that “at some point we’ll get the records,” alluding to the government’s position that historians can renew their request after a witness’s death.
The historians supporting the release of the Rosenberg records hold diverse political views and opinions about the case. One of the petitioners is Sam Roberts, a reporter for The New York Times, who wrote a book on Mr. Greenglass.
One scholar who was not involved in the petition, David Oshinsky, said that even without release of the Greenglass testimony, the testimony of the other witnesses should help clear up questions about the evidence against Ethel Rosenberg.
“My sense is that what this may do is further implicate Julius while to some degree further exonerating Ethel,” said Mr. Oshinsky, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian.
He added that if there turned out to be very little other evidence against Ethel Rosenberg, “then the entire case does take a turn, and that is of vital importance.”
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Lawsuit on F.B.I. Informant Seeks a Mobster’s Link to Kennedy’s Assassination
By ALAN FEUER
The New York Times
July 22, 2008
A New Jersey paralegal with a longstanding interest in government corruption filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department and the F.B.I. on Monday, seeking the release of the full case file on a murderous Brooklyn Mafia informant — papers she believes may shed light on the possible involvement of a dead New Orleans crime boss in the killing of President John F. Kennedy.
The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Washington by the paralegal, Angela Clemente, asks the Federal Bureau of Investigation to make public any documents it may still hold related to the mobster, Gregory Scarpa Sr., who for nearly 30 years led a stunning double life as a hit man for the Colombo crime family and, in the words of the F.B.I, a “top echelon” informant for the bureau.
In her suit, Ms. Clemente asked the bureau to release all papers connected to Mr. Scarpa (who died of AIDS in 1994 after receiving a blood transfusion), especially those related to Carlos Marcello, a New Orleans don suspected by some of having played a role in the Kennedy assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.
Ms. Clemente filed a Freedom of Information Act request for Mr. Scarpa’s file in April, and the F.B.I. acknowledged her request in a letter on June 9, saying that bureau officials would search their records for relevant papers. Ms. Clemente’s lawyer, James Lesar, said that the F.B.I. had not yet told her if it would release the file or not, but that under federal law, a lawsuit can be filed compelling the release of records 20 working days after such a letter is received.
John Miller, a spokesman for the F.B.I., did not return phone calls on Monday seeking comment on Ms. Clemente’s suit. Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said officials would review the suit and respond if needed in court.
In pursuing the Scarpa file and its potential to flesh out Mr. Marcello’s possible role in the Kennedy killing, Ms. Clemente is following a trail blazed in part by G. Robert Blakey, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame who also served as the chief counsel and staff director to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which from 1977 to 1979 investigated the killings of President Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
While the Warren Commission said there was no link between Mr. Marcello and the president’s death, Mr. Blakey’s report to the House was considerably more circumspect, saying the F.B.I.’s “handling of the allegations and information about Marcello was characterized by a less than vigorous effort to investigate its reliability.”
Ms. Clemente is in possession of several heavily redacted papers from the Scarpa file, which suggest, however vaguely, she said, that Mr. Scarpa, who spied on numerous gangsters for the F.B.I., may also have spied on Mr. Marcello.
Professor Blakey, reached by phone at his office at Notre Dame on Monday, said he had seen the papers, adding that no matter what the unredacted versions might eventually reveal, he was convinced that he should have seen them 30 years ago, while conducting his Congressional investigation.
“The issue here is not what’s in them,” Professor Blakey said, “so much as that they seem to have held them back from me. I thought I had the bureau file on Marcello — now it turns out I didn’t, did I? So I’m not a small, I’m a major, supporter of what Angela is trying to do.”
Ms. Clemente, 43, often refers to herself as a “forensic intelligence analyst.” She has been researching Mr. Scarpa for nearly a decade as part of a broader project on the improper use of government informants. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office has said her work on Mr. Scarpa was instrumental in helping the office file quadruple murder charges against Mr. Scarpa’s former F.B.I. handler, Roy Lindley DeVecchio.
The charges against Mr. DeVecchio were dropped midtrial in October when Tom Robbins, a reporter for The Village Voice, suddenly showed prosecutors taped interviews he made years ago with the main prosecution witness, Mr. Scarpa’s mistress, suggesting that she had changed her account and damaged her credibility.
Faced with the sudden demise of years of investigative work, Ms. Clemente went back, she said, to the redacted papers she already had. She said she was intrigued, after additional study, to discover references to Mr. Scarpa’s apparent involvement in F.B.I. projects in New Orleans in the late 1950s and early 1960s — well before his publicly acknowledged role in helping the Kennedy administration learn the whereabouts of three slain civil rights workers by traveling to Mississippi to threaten a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
She said the F.B.I. had fought her “tooth and nail” in her efforts to obtain the full Scarpa file for Mr. DeVecchio’s trial. The F.B.I. did not return phone calls seeking comment on that allegation as well.
“And that,” she said, “is what really piqued my curiosity.”
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I knew Charlie Black when I served as legal counsel to the National Conservative Political Action Committee in 1975-76. He was a bigoted creature of Senator Jesse Helms, both being from North Carolina. He gained his wealth and influence by riding the back of Ronald Reagan, who beqeathed to us the likes of the Bushes and Black. Thomas Frank's article in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) hits the mark and shows how if McCain were elected president, Black's evil influence would be amplified.
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THE TILTING YARD By THOMAS FRANK
Charlie Black's Cronies
July 2, 2008
Wall Street Journal
Doing some research in the Library of Congress recently, an associate of mine came across a curious artifact of the Young Americans for Freedom, the high-spirited conservative group of the Vietnam era.
It is a songbook prepared for YAF's 1971 convention, and in its mimeographed pages you will find a lyric poking fun at "Adlai [stevenson] the bald-headed Com-Symp," and another moaning that, in the State Department, "everyone's a Commie slave." All good clean fun, surely. Turn a few pages, though, and you will find that the righteous ones also lifted their young voices to warble "Cara al Sol," the humor-free anthem of Spanish fascism.
Many YAFers later rose to positions of great political influence. From direct mailers to congressmen to campaign managers, the group put its stamp on our era in no small way.
This year's most prominent YAF graduate is Charlie Black, who was an officer of the group in the period when it sang fascist hymns and who now serves as a senior adviser to Republican John McCain. Last week, Mr. Black triggered a media storm by musing publicly on how a terrorist attack would improve Mr. McCain's chances to win the presidential election in November.
Mr. Black is a difficult man to pin down. The articles he wrote for the YAF's magazine back in 1972 are anodyne stuff, unremarkable apart from his youthful passion to "take on liberalism everywhere it rules...."
But he's also kept some questionable company over the years. In 1975 he founded, with the help of fellow YAFer Terry Dolan, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which would contrive so brilliantly to poison the political atmosphere over the next decade. NCPAC's method was to raise money through terrifying direct-mail solicitations – "the shriller you are, the better it is to raise money," Mr. Dolan said – and then to spend it on terrifying TV commercials assailing this or that liberal politician. In 1980 the group helped defeat four Democratic senators, making it an overnight sensation and an omen of the money-driven, all-negative political future.
NCPAC's calling card was slime. It constantly attacked members of Congress for votes they hadn't cast and positions they hadn't taken – "there have been a few mistakes made in terms of research," was all Mr. Black would admit – and the group's main accomplishment was dodging the campaign-finance laws of the day.
Mr. Dolan was NCPAC's main personality, a boasting bully fond of shocking statements. He once bragged to a reporter that "We could say whatever we want about an opponent of a Senator Smith and the senator wouldn't have to say anything. A group like ours could lie through its teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean."
Then there was Roger Stone, who became Mr. Black's colleague in his 1980s lobbying firm Black, Manafort & Stone. Another YAFer, Mr. Stone made his reputation for scummy politics in the 1972 Nixon campaign, and has since become such a well-known impresario of calumny that Matt Labash, writing last year in the Weekly Standard, described him as "a U.S. Army of treachery: He screws more people before 9 a.m. than most people do in a whole day."
But what are dirty tricks without some sort of payoff? Conservatives often promise to wage war on the welfare state; what they don't brag about is the way they redirect the proceeds of the welfare state into the pockets of their own kind – the favored lobby firms, the well-connected contractors. Here, too, Mr. Black has a story he might relate.
During the Reagan years, the Department of Housing and Urban Development allegedly began steering contracts to clients of political favorites; one gang thus favored was Mr. Black's firm, and in particular, Mr. Black's partner, Paul Manafort. The firm took in over $300,000 lobbying HUD for funds, some of it to rehab a New Jersey housing development that, according to the Boston Globe, "New Jersey officials said they did not want and was a waste of taxpayers money." Allegations also flew about Mr. Black's own role in the HUD scandal, but no wrongdoing was ever proven in court. Mr. Manafort, for his part, became a principal in a lobbying firm headed until recently by Rick Davis, John McCain's campaign manager.
It's an interesting bunch Mr. Black has run with, and taken all together they help us understand the larger picture. What unites the conservatives of the 1970s with their pocket-lining counterparts today? A persistent derision for the notion that government might someday be conducted on the level. As that old YAF songbook put it, "Keep the faith with cynicism / Cut the opposition down!"
Write to thomas@wsj.com
********************************************************
"I knew Charlie Black when I served as legal counsel to the National Conservative Political Action Committee in 1975-76. He was a bigoted creature of Senator Jesse Helms, both being from North Carolina. He gained his wealth and influence by riding the back of Ronald Reagan, who bequeathed to us the likes of the Bushes and Black. Thomas Frank's article in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) hits the mark and shows how if McCain were elected president, Black's evil influence would be amplified."
Which "Charlie Black" is this? Am I missing something, here?
Thanks,
Ter
Charlie Black is one of McCain's closest advisers. He made news recently by telling Fortune Magazine that a terrorist attack on America before the November election would benefit McCain. His right wing/opportunistic roots go way back -- to the early days of Jesse Helms in North Carolina and the early years of Young Americans for Freedom.
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We, the Salt of the Earth, Take Precedence
by Paul Craig Roberts
www.lewrockwell.com
July 2, 2008
Which country is the rogue nation? Iraq? Iran? Or the United States? Syndicated columnist Charley Reese asks this question in a recently published article.
Reese notes that it is the US that routinely commits "acts of aggression around the globe." The US government has no qualms about dropping bombs on civilians whether they be in Serbia, the Middle East, or Africa. It is all in a good cause – our cause.
This slaughtering of foreigners doesn’t seem to bother the American public. Americans take it for granted that Americans are superior and that American purposes, whatever they be, take precedence over the rights of other people to life and to a political existence independent of American hegemony.
The Bush regime has come up with a preemption doctrine that justifies attacking a country in order to prevent the country from possibly becoming a future threat to the US. "Threat" is broadly defined. It appears to mean the ability to withstand the imposition of US hegemony. This insane doctrine justifies attacking China and Russia, a direction in which the Republican presidential candidate John McCain seems to lean.
The callousness of Americans toward the lives of other peoples is stunning. How many Christian churches ask God’s forgiveness for having been rushed into an error that has killed, maimed, and displaced a quarter of the Iraqi population?
How many Christian churches ask God to give better guidance to our government so that it does not repeat the error and crime by attacking Iran?
The indifference of Americans to others flows from "American exceptionalism," the belief that Americans are graced with a special mission to impose their virtue on the rest of the world. Like the French revolutionaries, Americans don’t seem to care how many people they kill in the process of spreading their exceptionalism.
American exceptionalism has swelled Americans’ heads, filling them with hubris and self-righteousness and making Americans believe that they are the salt of the earth.
Three recent books are good antidotes for this unjustified self-esteem. One is Patrick J. Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. Another is After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh, and a third is John Pilger’s Freedom Next Time.
Buchanan’s latest book is by far his best. It is spell-binding from his opening sentence: "All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away." As the pages turn, the comfortable myths, produced by history written by the victors, are swept aside. The veil is lifted to reveal the true faces of British and American exceptionalism: stupidity and deceit.
Buchanan’s strength is that he lets the story be told by Britain’s greatest 20th century historians and the memoirs of the participants in the events that destroyed the West’s dominance and moral character. Buchanan’s contribution is to assemble the collective judgment of a hundred historians.
As I read the tale, it is a story of hubris destroying judgment and substituting in its place blunder and miscalculation. Both world wars began when England, for no sound or sensible reason, declared war on Germany. Winston Churchill was a prime instigator of both wars. He seems to have been a person who needed a war stage in order to be a "great man."
The American President Woodrow Wilson shares responsibility with Britain and France for the Versailles Treaty, which dismembered Germany, stripping her of territory and putting millions of Germans under foreign rule, and imposed reparations that Britain’s greatest economist, John Maynard Keynes, correctly predicted to be unrealistic. All of this was done in violation of assurances given to Germany that there would be no reparations or boundary changes. Once Germany surrendered, the assurances were withdrawn, and a starvation blockade forced German submission to the new harsh terms.
Hitler’s program was to put Germany back together. He was succeeding without war until Churchill provoked Chamberlain into an insane act. Danzig was 95 percent German. It had been given to Poland by the Versailles Treaty. Hitler was negotiating its return and offered in exchange a guarantee of Poland’s frontiers. The Polish colonels, assessing the relative strengths of Poland and Germany, understood that a deal was better than a war. But suddenly, the British Prime Minister issued Poland a guarantee of its existing territory, including Danzig, whose inhabitants wished to return to Germany.
Buchanan produces one historian after another to testify that British miscalculations and blunders, culminating in Chamberlain’s worthless and provocative "guarantee" to Poland, brought the West into a war that Hitler did not want, a war that destroyed the British Empire and left Britain a dependency of America, a war that delivered Poland, a chunk of Germany, all of Eastern Europe, and the Baltic states to Joseph Stalin, a war that left the Western allies with a 45-year cold war against the nuclear-armed Soviet Union.
People resist the shattering of their illusions, and many are angry with Buchanan for assembling the facts of the case that distinguished historians have provided.
Churchill admirers are outraged that their hero is revealed as the first war criminal of World War II. It was Churchill who initiated the policy of terror bombing civilians in non-combatant areas. Buchanan quotes B.H. Liddell Hart: "When Mr. Churchill came into power, one of the first decisions of his government was to extend bombing to the non-combatant area."
In holding Churchill to account, Buchanan makes no apologies for Hitler, but the ease with which Churchill set aside moral considerations is discomforting.
Buchanan documents that Churchill’s plan was to destroy 50% of German homes. Churchill also had plans for using chemical and biological warfare against German civilians. In 2001 the Glasgow Sunday Herald reported Churchill’s plan to drop five million anthrax cakes onto German pastures in order to poison the cattle and through them the people. Churchill instructed the RAF to consider drenching "the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany" with poison gas "in such a way that most of the population would be requiring constant medical attention."
"It is absurd to consider morality on this topic," the great man declared.
Paul Johnson, a favorite historian of conservatives, notes that Churchill’s policy of terror bombing civilians was "approved in cabinet, endorsed by parliament and, so far as can be judged, enthusiastically backed by the bulk of the British people." Thus, the terror bombing of civilians, which "marked a critical stage in the moral declension of humanity in our times," fulfilled "all the conditions of the process of consent in a democracy under law."
British historian F.J.P. Veale concluded that Churchill’s policy of indiscriminate bombing of civilians caused an unprecedented "reversion to primary and total warfare" associated with "Sennacherib, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane."
The Americans were quick to follow Churchill’s lead. General Curtis LeMay boasted of his raid on Tokyo: "We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9–10 than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."
MacDonogh’s book, After the Reich, dispels the comfortable myth of generous allied treatment of defeated Germany. Having discarded all moral scruples, the allies fell upon the vanquished country with brutal occupation. Hundreds of thousands of women raped; hundreds of thousands of Germans died in deportations; a million German prisoners of war died in captivity.
MacDonogh calculates that 2.5 million Germans died between the liberation of Vienna and the Berlin airlift.
Nigel Jones writes in the conservative London Sunday Telegraph: "MacDonogh has told a very inconvenient truth," a story long "cloaked in silence since telling it suited no one."
The hypocrisy of the Nuremberg trials is that the victors were also guilty of crimes for which the vanquished were punished. The purpose of the trials was to demonize the defeated in order to divert attention from the allies’ own war crimes. The trials had little to do with justice.
In Freedom Next Time, Pilger shows the complete self-absorption of American, British and Israeli governments whose policies are unimpeded by any moral principle.
Pilger documents the demise of the inhabitants of Diego Garcia. The Americans wanted Diego Garcia for an air base, so the British packed up the 2,000 residents, people with British passports under British protection, and deported them to Mauritius, one thousand miles away.
To cover up its crime against humanity, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office created the fiction that the inhabitants, which had been living in the archipelago for two or three centuries, were "a floating population." This fiction, wrote a legal adviser, bolsters "our arguments that the territory has no indigenous or settled population."
Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart conspired to mislead the UN about the deported islanders by, in Stewart’s words, " presenting any move as a change of employment for contract workers – rather than as a population resettlement."
Pilger interviewed some of the displaced persons, but emotional blocs will shield patriotic Americans and British from the uncomfortable facts. Rational skeptics can find a second documented account of the Anglo-American rape of Diego Garcia online. An entire people were swept away.
Two thousand people were in the way of an American purpose – an air base – so we had our British dependency deport them.
Several million Palestinians are in Israel’s way. Pilger’s documented account of Israel’s crushing of the Palestinians shows that our "democratic ally" in the Middle East is capable of any evil and has no remorse or mercy. Israel is an apt student of the British and American empires’ attitudes toward lesser beings. They simply don’t count.
Those who are the salt of the earth take precedence over everything.
July 2, 2008
Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail] a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, has just been released by Random House.
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I knew Charlie Black when I served as legal counsel to the National Conservative Political Action Committee in 1975-76. He was a bigoted creature of Senator Jesse Helms, both being from North Carolina. He gained his wealth and influence by riding the back of Ronald Reagan, who beqeathed to us the likes of the Bushes and Black. Thomas Frank's article in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) hits the mark and shows how if McCain were elected president, Black's evil influence would be amplified.
---------------
THE TILTING YARD By THOMAS FRANK
Charlie Black's Cronies
July 2, 2008
Wall Street Journal
Doing some research in the Library of Congress recently, an associate of mine came across a curious artifact of the Young Americans for Freedom, the high-spirited conservative group of the Vietnam era.
It is a songbook prepared for YAF's 1971 convention, and in its mimeographed pages you will find a lyric poking fun at "Adlai [stevenson] the bald-headed Com-Symp," and another moaning that, in the State Department, "everyone's a Commie slave." All good clean fun, surely. Turn a few pages, though, and you will find that the righteous ones also lifted their young voices to warble "Cara al Sol," the humor-free anthem of Spanish fascism.
Many YAFers later rose to positions of great political influence. From direct mailers to congressmen to campaign managers, the group put its stamp on our era in no small way.
This year's most prominent YAF graduate is Charlie Black, who was an officer of the group in the period when it sang fascist hymns and who now serves as a senior adviser to Republican John McCain. Last week, Mr. Black triggered a media storm by musing publicly on how a terrorist attack would improve Mr. McCain's chances to win the presidential election in November.
Mr. Black is a difficult man to pin down. The articles he wrote for the YAF's magazine back in 1972 are anodyne stuff, unremarkable apart from his youthful passion to "take on liberalism everywhere it rules...."
But he's also kept some questionable company over the years. In 1975 he founded, with the help of fellow YAFer Terry Dolan, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which would contrive so brilliantly to poison the political atmosphere over the next decade. NCPAC's method was to raise money through terrifying direct-mail solicitations – "the shriller you are, the better it is to raise money," Mr. Dolan said – and then to spend it on terrifying TV commercials assailing this or that liberal politician. In 1980 the group helped defeat four Democratic senators, making it an overnight sensation and an omen of the money-driven, all-negative political future.
NCPAC's calling card was slime. It constantly attacked members of Congress for votes they hadn't cast and positions they hadn't taken – "there have been a few mistakes made in terms of research," was all Mr. Black would admit – and the group's main accomplishment was dodging the campaign-finance laws of the day.
Mr. Dolan was NCPAC's main personality, a boasting bully fond of shocking statements. He once bragged to a reporter that "We could say whatever we want about an opponent of a Senator Smith and the senator wouldn't have to say anything. A group like ours could lie through its teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean."
Then there was Roger Stone, who became Mr. Black's colleague in his 1980s lobbying firm Black, Manafort & Stone. Another YAFer, Mr. Stone made his reputation for scummy politics in the 1972 Nixon campaign, and has since become such a well-known impresario of calumny that Matt Labash, writing last year in the Weekly Standard, described him as "a U.S. Army of treachery: He screws more people before 9 a.m. than most people do in a whole day."
But what are dirty tricks without some sort of payoff? Conservatives often promise to wage war on the welfare state; what they don't brag about is the way they redirect the proceeds of the welfare state into the pockets of their own kind – the favored lobby firms, the well-connected contractors. Here, too, Mr. Black has a story he might relate.
During the Reagan years, the Department of Housing and Urban Development allegedly began steering contracts to clients of political favorites; one gang thus favored was Mr. Black's firm, and in particular, Mr. Black's partner, Paul Manafort. The firm took in over $300,000 lobbying HUD for funds, some of it to rehab a New Jersey housing development that, according to the Boston Globe, "New Jersey officials said they did not want and was a waste of taxpayers money." Allegations also flew about Mr. Black's own role in the HUD scandal, but no wrongdoing was ever proven in court. Mr. Manafort, for his part, became a principal in a lobbying firm headed until recently by Rick Davis, John McCain's campaign manager.
It's an interesting bunch Mr. Black has run with, and taken all together they help us understand the larger picture. What unites the conservatives of the 1970s with their pocket-lining counterparts today? A persistent derision for the notion that government might someday be conducted on the level. As that old YAF songbook put it, "Keep the faith with cynicism / Cut the opposition down!"
Write to thomas@wsj.com
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A couple of years ago I posted this article by Doug Thompson, Is Deception the Best Way to Serve Your Country? (30th March, 2006) on my webpage on John Connally.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_do...ion_the_bes.htm
David Lifton has emailed me and asked if I could find anymore information on this story. Please post your thoughts on the Forum:
I met John Connally on a TWA flight from Kansas City to Albuquerque earlier that year. The former governor of Texas, the man who took one of the bullets from the assassination that killed President John F. Kenney, was headed to Santa Fe to buy a house.
The meeting wasn't an accident. The flight originated in Washington and I sat in the front row of the coach cabin. During a stop in Kansas City, I saw Connally get on the plane and settle into a first class seat so I walked off the plane and upgraded to a first class seat right ahead of the governor. I not only wanted to meet the man who was with Kennedy on that day in Dallas in 1963 but, as the communications director for the re-election campaign of Congressman Manuel Lujan of New Mexico, I thought he might be willing to help out on what was a tough campaign.
When the plane was in the air, I introduced myself and said I was working on Lujan's campaign. Connally's face lit up and he invited me to move to the empty seat next to him.
"How is Manuel? Is there anything I can do to help?"
By the time we landed in Albuquerque, Connally had agreed to do a fundraiser for Lujan. A month later, he flew back into New Mexico where Amy and I picked him up for the fundraiser. Afterwards, we took him to dinner.
Connolly was both gracious and charming and told us many stories about Texas politics. As the evening wore on and the multiple bourbon and branch waters took their effect, he started talking about November 22, 1963, in Dallas.
"You know I was one of the ones who advised Kennedy to stay away from Texas," Connally said. "Lyndon (Johnson) was being a real asshole about the whole thing and insisted."
Connally's mood darkened as he talked about Dallas. When the bullet hit him, he said he felt like he had been kicked in the ribs and couldn't breathe. He spoke kindly of Jackie Kennedy and said he admired both her bravery and composure.
I had to ask. Did he think Lee Harvey Oswald fired the gun that killed Kennedy?
"Absolutely not," Connally said. "I do not, for one second, believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission."
So why not speak out?
"Because I love this country and we needed closure at the time. I will never speak out publicly about what I believe."
We took him back to catch a late flight to Texas. He shook my hand, kissed Amy on the cheek and walked up the ramp to the plane.
We saw Connally and his wife a couple of more times when they came to New Mexico but he sold his house a few years later as part of a bankruptcy settlement. He died in 1993 and, I believe, never spoke publicly about how he doubted the findings of the Warren Commission.
Connnally's note serves as yet another reminder that in our Democratic Republic, or what's left of it, few things are seldom as they seem. Like him, I never accepted the findings of the Warren Commission. Too many illogical conclusions.
John Kennedy's death, and the doubts that surround it to this day, marked the beginning of the end of America's idealism. The cynicism grew with the lies of Vietnam and the senseless deaths of too many thousands of young Americans in a war that never should have been fought. Doubts about the integrity of those we elect as our leaders festers today as this country finds itself embroiled in another senseless war based on too many lies.
John Connally felt he served his country best by concealing his doubts about the Warren Commission's whitewash but his silence may have contributed to the growing perception that our elected leaders can rewrite history to fit their political agendas.
Had Connally spoken out, as a high-ranking political figure with doubts about the "official" version of what happened, it might have sent a signal that Americans deserve the truth from their government, even when that truth hurts.
Perhaps the below "corrections" may serve to steer history into the correct direction.
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When the bullet hit him, he said he felt like he had been kicked in the ribs and couldn't breathe.
Which in itself fully clarifies that when he was yelling "My God they are going to kill us all"
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/conn_n.htm
he said, "My God, they are going to kill us all."
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Having observed a few persons take one through the chest, I have yet to see one who clearly stated anything like this.
Kinda makes one doubt that JBC was hit in the chest at this time.
------------------------------------------------------------------
and as he recoiled to the right, just crumpled like a wounded animal to the right, he said, "My God, they are going to kill us all."
Nope! Don't think so!
Personally, I prefer Jackie's descriptive adjective: "squealing like a pig".
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I do not, for one second, believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission."
Well! Since the WC fairy tale also includes THE SHOT THAT MISSED, and you are/were fully aware that there was no SHOT THAT MISSED, then it would be entirely understandable as to why you would not only not believe the WC, but you would also know that it was an intentional lie.-------Largely to CYA!
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John Connally felt he served his country best by concealing his doubts about the Warren Commission's whitewash[/b]
How about: John Connally felt that he served HIS INTERESTS BEST by concealing the facts of the assassination!
With of course the primary aid and assistance of his political criminal/crony, LBJ.
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Had Connally spoken out, as a high-ranking political figure
Then, his "high-ranking" political career would have been instantly shot as well!
And history would have accurately recorded that in lieu of THE SHOT THAT MISSED, we would have THE GOVERNOR WHO DUCKED!--------Right into the line of fire for the third shot, I might add!
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but his silence may have contributed to the growing perception that our elected leaders can rewrite history to fit their political agendas.
In that regards, one just may want to check into what he and LBJ demonstratedly convinced people in Texas as to the "truth".
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Connnally's note serves as yet another reminder that in our Democratic Republic, or what's left of it, few things are seldom as they seem
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To many, this is of course quite accurate, and JBC was among the top in pulling the wool over the eyes of most americans.
However, there are a few of us who possess the ability to "look thru" the BS, and not suprisingly, things are in fact EXACTLY AS THEY SEEM.
Not long before he died, Connally relented and granted an interview to Robert Caro. LBJ had long been dead. Who knows what Connally told Caro about the assassination?
I first met Caro, who now is up in years also, in 1986 and when I asked him at a public meeting if he planned to discuss Mac Wallace in his LBJ biography, he grabbed the the lapels my suit and asked who I was and how he could talk to me further. I gave him my card but heard nothing more from him.
At this point late in his life I think Caro realizes that there is nothing to lose by telling what Connally and other LBJ cronies have confided in him about the assassination. His final book on LBJ may rewrite history.
No editing done. -
SueAnn Arrigo's Explosive Revelations
Exposing Pentagon and CIA Corruption
By STEPHEN LENDMAN
June 11, 2008
www.counterpunch.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/lendman06112008.html
Information for this article comes from long-time business, finance and political writer and analyst Bob Chapman who publishes the bi-weekly International Forecaster. It's power-packed with key information and a valued source for this writer. He obtained voluminous material directly from its source. People need to know it. Read on.
SueAnn Arrigo is the source. She was a high-level CIA insider. Her title was Special Operations Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). She also established the Remote Viewing Defense protocols for the Pentagon in her capacity as Remote Viewing Advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). It earned her a two-star general rank in the military. She called it a "ploy" so the Pentagon could get more of her time and have her attend monthly Joint Chiefs of Staff meetings. Only high-level types are invited, and she was there from October 2003 to July 2004.
Part of her job involved intelligence gathering on Iraq and Afghanistan - until August 2004 when she refused to spread propaganda about a non-existant Iranian nuclear weapons program and left. She followed in the footsteps of others at CIA who resigned for reasons of conscience and became critics - most notably Ray McGovern, Ralph McGehee, and Phil Agee.
On May 16, 2008, Arrigo sent extensive government corruption and cover-up information to Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee - in 12 separate cases. This article covers four of them or about one-third of what Congress got. The 12 are explosive and revealing but just the tip of the iceberg:
-- of government corruption and war profiteering;
-- sweetheart deals and kickbacks;
-- high-level types on the take;
-- trillions of missing dollars;
-- on September 10, 2001, Rumsfeld admitting "According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions;"
-- imagine the current amount;
-- its corrosive effect on the nation; and people should
-- demand accountability - who profits, who pays and what are the consequences of militarism gone mad.
SueAnn Arrigo offers a glimpse and at great personal risk. In August 2001, DCI George Tenet told her to assemble "a moving van full of Pentagon documents showing Defense Contractor kickbacks to Pentagon officials." She did as instructed but not to expose corruption as she learned - to conceal it and in her judgment so CIA could divert defense business to Halliburton and "Carlyle-related contractors." She stated: "The mood at the CIA and Pentagon was 'war is coming' because the Bush Family stands to make billions from it -- so get ready."
Arrigo was shocked at what she found and how brazenly the Pentagon wrote it up because it feels untouchable, especially since 2001. That notion proved misguided after CIA used the material to blackmail or bribe its officials "into 'working on' the Halliburton-Carlyle team." Top CIA types were involved, and Tenet laid it out for Arrigo: You've "given me the keys to the kingdom. (These) documents will make me rich."
She collected three types. Her report covers one but has plenty of incriminating evidence. Her precise recall of dates and names is incomplete, but events are factually right and damning on how Washington operates. It's always been this way but never to the degree as under George Bush. Arrigo exposes the scheme - the systematic looting of the treasury to enrich contractors and high-level officials at Pentagon, CIA and others well-placed in government. Precise amounts are unknown, but at mimimum are countless multi-billions, even trillions - at taxpayer expense and diverted from essential social and infrastructure needs.
Case 1: Ordering Unneeded New Fighter Aircraft
Arrigo discovered high-level Pentagon corruption. It involved bid-rigging and implicated "an Air Force general on the JCS and a Defense Contractor, Boeing." She disclosed it to JCS Chairman Hugh Shelton and DCI George Tenet, and in both instances drew blanks. She also reported it to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress. It was vetted and confirmed, but left unaddressed the larger issue of whether new generation planes are needed at an enormous cost to taxpayers. Arrigo believed not, and several Air Force generals agreed. Not other JCS members, however, who she learned are on the take.
There's more. They "had the gall to try to force through another unneeded plane contract for Boeing." At an early 2004 JCS meeting, Arrigo complained about the previous undelivered order because it didn't meet Pentagon specifications. Yet one general in particular tried "to force the US military to buy another (unneeded) upgrade." One other JCS member backed her to no avail, and the new order went through. Arrigo rightfully concluded that new plane orders were to enrich Boeing and high-level Pentagon types getting kickbacks for their cooperation.
She also learned how much - an average $22,000 "for each (JCS meeting) vote according to their bank" records. Not US ones. CIA-arranged Swiss accounts specifically for this purpose. Everyone at the meeting cashed in, except Arrigo and one dissenting general. More disturbing is that this is standard Pentagon practice - handouts to contractors; kickbacks to complicit brass; and taxpayers out multi-billions - year after year.
Jeff St. Clair wrote about it in his 2005 book "Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror." It's an explosive account of how contractors like Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Bechtel and the Bush family-connected Carlyle Group scam multi-billions at taxpayer expense and not a whiff of it in the mainstream. It's the reason US annual "defense" spending tops $1.1 trillion (conservatively) with all military, homeland security, veterans, NASA, debt service and other allocations included.
Case 2: Halliburton Delivers Half Full Cartons to the Pentagon's "Swing Shift"
Arrigo refers to the Pentagon's Receiving Department "swing shift" personnel. They alone are on the take so other shifts are shut out and can't report it. As a CIA insider, she checked and found damning evidence - about "the military (not) getting supplies to the troops on time." She also learned that Halliburton has its "Representative to the CIA," and one at the Pentagon as well. Both get federal salaries but neither was "hired by CIA or the military through their personnel departments. Neither had done military training or trained at (CIA's) 'Farm' as a spy." Arrigo was disturbed and with good reason when orders from the top said back off.
It got worse. Arrigo worked at CIA for over 30 years and reported directly to Tenet. But she wasn't prepared for what she found - a new section at the Agency without her knowledge. It employed 40 people, all working for Halliburton "while being paid by the US taxpayer as if they were CIA." It was secret. No files were on them. They were never interviewed, never vetted, and she concluded: "CIA had a back door in its security to let Halliburton put anyone they wanted in (its) hallways. It was an outrageous (breach) of US National Security," and in a post-9/11 "war on terrorism" climate.
She was shocked and told Tenet. His reply: "Yes, I know." Head of CIA building security also knew. Arrigo asked what he'd do about it. His answer: "Keep my mouth shut so I can stay alive and I suggest you do the same." She asked if he, CIA or Halliburton would kill her if she talked. He didn't think so. Would national security firm CACI do it because it's affiliated with Halliburton and also has a CIA back door for its personnel at the Agency.
Arrigo dug deeper. She got inside Halliburton's area and asked questions. Why was the company shipping half the contracted for amounts and shortchanging the troops and taxpayers. It was no different for war zones. Halliburton "set up the same corrupt system of swing shift receivers (for) at least 3 continents. They received the cartons and signed (off) that the goods were all received properly. Then the shortages later were chalked up to thefts or war damage, etc."
Arrigo again informed Tenet. His answer: "This is nothing new," then added: "Have a report about it on my desk before Christmas (2001)." It got worse. Arrigo told Tenet he's responsible for "correct(ing) Halliburton's short-shipping and its invasion of the CIA." He said he couldn't because the White House tied his hands. Call Congress, Arrigo said. DCI "should be a man of courage." Tenet ignored her, so Arrigo faxed documents revealing Halliburton fraud to GAO - omitting national security secrets. One of them crowed about the scheme's profitability, and having high-level officials involved made it foolproof.
It was clever and even more devious than Arrigo imagined. Halliburton uses each shortage complaint as a new order. "In that way (it) never (loses) by having to make good for (what's) missing," and (it gets) paid double for the same merchandise.
Arrigo knew too much, took risks to learn it, and what happened next is shocking. Halliburton's "CIA Representative" confronted her, tore out her phone, ransacked her office, removed every shred of paper, and hauled her off bodily "to a prison cell" inside its basement offices. She was intimidated and threatened. Thought she might be killed. She survived, but the message was clear. She complained to Tenet. Showed him her bruises. He responded dismissively: "There, there, everything will be all right in the morning."
GAO still has Arrigo's files. It began investigating but stopped. She thinks that Congress can resume it and asked Waxman to do it. That's where things now stand.
Case 3: The White House Conspiracy to Cook the Books - Halliburton, Carlyle and CIA
In 2002, Arrigo tried a new tact - ingratiating herself with "Halliburton's Man" and using it to her advantage. She offered cooperation for access to his space and make him think she was on his side. It worked, went on for four and one-half months through late May, and it paid off - with plenty of insider knowledge "about Halliburton and how it works." Enough to fill a book, she says, but her account sticks to highlights.
First off, it's pure myth that Dick Cheney stopped running the company. "He called in orders to the man I worked for almost every day and sometimes two or more times a day. He remained (Halliburton's) functional head in all but name. No one....had the power to override his orders." Second, Cheney never divested himself of Halliburton profits. "He merely hid how (he got them) through a series of shell companies."
One of Arrigo's jobs was to liaison between Halliburton and CIA's "creative accounting departments." In other words, their co-conspiratorial treasury looting efforts, and Arrigo got insider access to it. Her advanced math and computer software training qualified her. In a few months, she became expert in how CIA and Halliburton hid their "financial illegalities."
She explained - "Computers are good ways to fool most people because (they don't) look inside of them." They can be programmed "to print out one set of books for regulators, another for Defense Contractors, another for the Pentagon, another for the taxpayer," and so forth. It's simple. Decide what you want, and machines will create it in any desired form. The trick is doing it expertly, most criminals can't, so they need professionals to do it for them. It means crimes are never secret, and many computer experts know about them. CIA has always been tainted, kept it secret since inception, so far has been untouchable, but remains vulnerable to exposure by people of conscience like Arrigo.
She explained: Halliburton has eight software programmers at CIA. Its home office has many more. She was on conference calls with 60 of them on ways to conceal illegalities and assure none of it leaks out. The company has less expertise than CIA so the Agency took charge to make the two systems compatible. It took several years and over 100 programmers. They came, left for other jobs, and took insider knowledge with them. It risks more leaks about Halliburton, other contractors, CIA, the Pentagon, high-ups in government, and the Basel-based Bank of International Settlements for its part in corruption.
Many investigations are ongoing, but huge pressure is exerted to quash them. It's feared leaks may unravel the whole scheme - a vast corruption web involving countless numbers of contractors, related companies, and many high level government and Pentagon insiders. Cover-up software hides it. Taxpayers fund it. Amounts keep getting greater, and they're up to unimaginable levels.
Arrigo explained the system. Suppose Halliburton sold product A in 100 Lot Sizes, in Quantity X at Price Y to the Pentagon on a given date. Most civilian invoices disclose this. Pentagon ones don't so contractors can cheat and Pentagon brass profit. Missing information conceals whether all merchandise was delivered as nothing indicates quantities shipped. Further, repackaging also hides proper amounts. Omitting the price alone conceals whether a shipment was shorted, but CIA is more clever than that. It experimented with "tested receivers at some of its front companies" to learn how best to deceive them. What works best is "shifting prices around like random noise" - one day this cost, another a different one, and so forth.
One company used a "gross overcharge method" that looked suspicious. It got receivers to discover the real price, and that defeated CIA's scheme. When it works, it cooks the books, and no one's the wiser. Ledger entries are inflated, undercut, omitted, added, or varied in amounts of similar transactions. Like a "professional crime institution," CIA is expert at falsifying books so no one catches on. How? By random price variations to keep auditors off balance and unable to discover corruption patterns.
Another example:
CIA varies its front company prices monthly. Suppose Halliburton made a purchase "when it (used) a cost inflation idea of cheating. Halliburton (has) an incentive to inflate the cost of its purchases (to) justify (its) high (price) to the military." So as standard practice it uses CIA's highest price and claims that amount for its cost.
But comparing two sets of books reveals the scheme. So methodology became more sophisticated to conceal it. Halliburton takes CIA prices and doubles them on its books. It then claims the Agency recorded half the charge "accidently," says its front company promised a 50% discount, but never delivered. CIA looks bad, and it balked. No matter. Halliburton still does it, but CIA has "lots of fronts with lots of customers and worse problems (to hide) than merely jacking up prices. Some fronts (are) fictitious and (make) no products." Others have real customers plus fake ones to launder money. CIA tries to "make (their) crimes 'undetectable.' " Halliburton hopes to "sneak by" until caught, then find a way to weasel out of it with minimal damage or cost.
Case 4: Halliburton's Rigged Back Door Accounting Computer at the Pentagon
In early 2002, GAO got damning evidence: that Halliburton overbills and short-ships - deliberate fraudulent acts as standard company practice, confident it can get away with it, and most often it does.
GAO has the goods to expose it from Halliburton and Pentagon invoices. They reveal a problem. They don't match, are grossly inflated, and payments exceed amounts billed - by about 35%. Arrigo met with GAO and compared notes. Halliburton has similar Pentagon and CIA-paid staff, and George Bush approved it in a secret Executive Order Arrigo has for proof. She gave it to GAO plus other documents showing national security is compromised and taxpayers cheated - hugely.
One document lists Halliburton's CIA and Pentagon staff, what little official records discloses about them, their secret office locations, and information on their private security staff. Arrigo discovered that Halliburton's top CIA man served time for felony fraud. Another at Pentagon was convicted as well - for stealing Army vehicles, then profiteering by transshipping them overseas.
Dick Cheney knew, blocked background checks to conceal it, but Arrigo found out and about the Pentagon fraud that followed. She has a handwritten Cheney memo instructing his man "to make sure that the Pentagon pays us all that it owes us and then some." CIA's forgery department verified the writing is Cheney's.
Arrigo also has a letter from Halliburton's Pentagon man to his CIA counterpart, and it's damning. He brags how he's "getting more than we bargained for (from) the Pentagon" and suggested they get together to compare notes. They did and Arrigo taped it. The evidence once more is damning - about how easy it is to scam the system; befriend accounting personnel; install company programmers; check bills supposedly behind in payments; install a special software code for higher amounts; and do all of the above at Pentagon and CIA.
Arrigo informed George Tenet so he'd stop "Halliburton from ripping off the American taxpayer via the CIA and Pentagon." Tenet hardly blinked and responded casually: "Well, you certainly have done a thorough job as usual." He then offered to inform the White House to "correct the problem." Arrigo did herself, GAO as well, and later learned that the Bush administration (likely Dick Cheney) blocked an investigation.
This article covers four of Arrigo's 12 cases. Their evidence is damning and shows systemic contractor, government, CIA and Pentagon fraud involving enormous amounts of money. One or more articles will follow if more material can be obtained. It's not what Pentagon and CIA want outed so getting it is never simple and revealing it not without risks.
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
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I just ran across this thread and thought I would add a little something that I came up with when the story first made the news.
The Rolling Stone article states that Hunt’s son, St. John Hunt, “had been a meth addict for twenty years, a meth dealer for ten of those years,” and had come to Miami “borrowing money to fly because he was broke.” It was then that he allegedly heard his father's confession about the JFK assassination.
The article continues, “At the moment, Saint doesn’t have a job; his felonies have gotten in the way. He has to borrow money to put gas in his Cutlass. Beach chairs substitute for furniture in the tiny apartment where, until recently, he lived with an ex-girlfriend, herself a reformed meth addict, and two kids, one hers, one theirs.”
“In 2001, on the heels of two drug busts, Saint decided to go straight. With his ex-girlfriend, their daughter and her son, he stayed in a series of shelters.”
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/138...e_howard_hunt/1
The whole story from "St. John Hunt" was a bunch of garbage, and that's why the story quickly died.
There is the little matter of the tape recording left by Howard Hunt to be played by St. John after his father's death. I knew Howard quite well and I can attest that it is his voice on the recording. So even if one wants to question the credibility of St. John, which I don't, the real story is the actual tape recording of his father's words implicating LBJ and certain named CIA agents in JFK's assassination.
Douglas, forgive me for going off topic slightly, but with your personal knowledge of HH, do you have any insight into his motives for writing the five novels under his pen name David St. John? The subject matter of these 5 books is more than curious I think?
David
No, I can provide no insight into his motives. In the months prior to the Watergate break-in, Hunt had asked me as his attorney to represent him in his dealings with publishers on several books that he was working on. That effort ended, of course, when Watergate broke.
I am not familiar with the curious subject matter of the 5 books that he authored under the pen name David St. John. Could you enlight me on this? I am certain other forum members would be interested in this also.
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I just ran across this thread and thought I would add a little something that I came up with when the story first made the news.
The Rolling Stone article states that Hunt’s son, St. John Hunt, “had been a meth addict for twenty years, a meth dealer for ten of those years,” and had come to Miami “borrowing money to fly because he was broke.” It was then that he allegedly heard his father's confession about the JFK assassination.
The article continues, “At the moment, Saint doesn’t have a job; his felonies have gotten in the way. He has to borrow money to put gas in his Cutlass. Beach chairs substitute for furniture in the tiny apartment where, until recently, he lived with an ex-girlfriend, herself a reformed meth addict, and two kids, one hers, one theirs.”
“In 2001, on the heels of two drug busts, Saint decided to go straight. With his ex-girlfriend, their daughter and her son, he stayed in a series of shelters.”
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/138...e_howard_hunt/1
The whole story from "St. John Hunt" was a bunch of garbage, and that's why the story quickly died.
There is the little matter of the tape recording left by Howard Hunt to be played by St. John after his father's death. I knew Howard quite well and I can attest that it is his voice on the recording. So even if one wants to question the credibility of St. John, which I don't, the real story is the actual tape recording of his father's words implicating LBJ and certain named CIA agents in JFK's assassination.
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Irish writer and filmmaker Shane O'Sullivan will discuss his investigation into the many unsolved questions in the assassination of Robert Kennedy, 40 years ago. The coasttocoastam radio program starts at 10 PM (Pacific time.)
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Vanity Fair blog on Scott and Barr McClellan
http://www.vanityfair.com/ontheweb/blogs/d...-friend-mc.html
June 3, 2008
David Friend | Politics and Power
By David Friend: McClellan Does a Hit Job on—L.B.J.?!
This is a story about a Texan named McClellan.
This McClellan has the good fortune to toil in the inner circle of a Texan president. His colleagues confide in him, telling him dastardly tales of dark and possibly illegal deeds. And yet he soldiers on, choosing to play along with what turns out to be an epic charade, all the while talking the tall Texan talk—and taking home a fat and handsome paycheck. Then one day he finds himself free of his former employers. He is unencumbered, unabashedly so. He decides to burn his bridges and write a scathing tell-all book, one that will finally set the record straight, forever tarnishing a president’s legacy.
In this instance, I’m not referring to Scott McClellan, George W. Bush’s former press secretary, who has just published the Texas-sized take-down of his boss, What Happened. Instead, I’m describing his father, Texas attorney and author Barr McClellan, who for years worked in Lyndon Johnson’s old law firm.
As I’ve scanned the blogs and watched the endless pundit parade, I’ve noticed that a key puzzle piece has been missing from the Scott McClellan narrative. Why would this loyal lieutenant choose to “out” his old cronies and tell the unvarnished truth? Perhaps his most overriding and deep-seated motive is that he has admired how his own father—disgruntled by the behavior of the men connected with a power-hungry president—cashed in on his own connections to power and chose to spin yarns about a nefarious administration in his 2003 book, Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK.
Earlier this year, while writing a piece for the April issue of Vanity Fair on a Texan named Jack Worthington—a man who claimed to have reason to believe he might be the illegitimate son of President John F. Kennedy—I was taken with Worthington’s frequent references to the writings of Barr McClellan. Among McClellans’s many controversial theses:
LBJ’s lawyer Edward Clark enlisted hitman Mac Wallace as the second JFK gunman in Dallas (largely based on a single indistinct fingerprint smudge found in the Texas Book Depository).
Big Oil had been motivated to fund JFK’s assassination because Kennedy had threatened to undermine their profits through the oil-depletion allowance, a subsidy Johnson would retain during his five years in office.
LBJ may or may not have been involved in having his own sister, Josefa Johnson, murdered.
Clark purportedly received a deferred $2 million payoff for helping maneuver LBJ into the Oval Office, a payoff McClellan believes was somehow partly filtered through the King Ranch, the Texas hideaway down the road from where, a generation later, Big Oil ally Dick Cheney—top lieutenant to Nixon, Ford, and both Bushes—would shoot and wound his friend Harry Whittington, yet another Texas lawyer, in a 2006 duck-hunting accident.
In a subsequent History Channel documentary, “The Guilty Men,” in which Barr McClellan figures prominently, a woman named Madeleine Brown (allegedly a long-time LBJ mistress) asserts that in November 1963, the vice president told her the night before JFK’s assassination: “Those blankety-blank Kennedys will never embarrass me again. That’s no threat, that’s a promise.”
In the elder McClellan’s case, the conspiratorial assertions are based on murky evidence. They relate to high crimes and misdemeanors supposedly committed decades ago by men who are, and remain, quite dead. In the younger McClellan’s case, by contrast, the conspiratorial assertions have the ring of truth. And they describe the actions of men and women who still hold the reigns of power and who have not yet been held accountable for their deeds.
As with most stories, the moral of the latest McClellan tale may best be gleaned by focusing on the family angle: The bitter lemon doesn’t fall far from the tree.
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The Man Who Would Be Jack
A Claim to Camelot
Postscript June 2008
Vanity Fair Magazine
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2008/06/postscript200806
On the heels of our April story on Jack Worthington—the Canada-based banker who believes he could be the illegitimate son of John F. Kennedy (“A Claim to Camelot”)—four readers have approached Vanity Fair to disclose that they harbor similar suspicions about themselves.
Deborah of Riverside County, California, insists she’s the product of an affair her mother had with J.F.K. in the early 60s. Cindy of Wisconsin believes that both she and her sister are daughters of the slain president. “My sister’s the spitting image of Caroline,” she says. “My mother knew his brother Joseph. [i know that JFK director] Oliver Stone purchased a diaper from Caroline years ago. He has Kennedy DNA.” Dianne of Boston says, “Worthington and I have the same biological father,” and Shirley of Florida e-mailed in broken English, “I am John Kennedy daughter by a first marriage.… O by the way, [J.F.K.] picked astronauts by their name which was my mama name Kennedy, Shepard, Cooper and Young and I will do DNA today.” (J.F.K. has long been rumored to have legally married a woman named Durie Malcom, in 1947.)
Farther afield, Jennifer of Fresno contends that Joseph Kennedy and Greta Garbo sired her grandfather. And a woman from Belgium says in an e-mail that as “the ex-lover of John-John” she has long thought her son may be J.F.K.’s grandchild.
Inspired by Vanity Fair’s article, a New Yorker named William Kennedy sent what he purports to be the president’s 1954 last will and testament, arguing that by law Worthington may be able to compel the Kennedy family to produce DNA in order to determine if he is, in fact, a blood relative. In a similar vein, the son of a deceased attorney for one of J.F.K.’s alleged lovers says he has access to sealed court documents that may help prove that the president had a child with a woman referred to as “Alicia” in Seymour Hersh’s 1997 book, The Dark Side of Camelot.
Strangest of all is the claim by Texas P.R. man Farris Rookstool III, who asserts that not only did he spend years as an F.B.I. expert examining the J.F.K.-assassination files (which turns out to be true) but, quite coincidentally, he also dated Worthington’s sister Nancy in the 1990s (which she confirms).
All of which is a way of saying that for the time being we’re Kennedy Conspiracy’d out, thank you.
Read “A Claim to Camelot,” by David Friend.
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In the article referenced by Doug Caddy, Paul Craig Roberts writes:The ease with which the Bush Regime has run roughshod over the law and Constitution indicates that the brownshirt mentality to which many Americans have succumbed has sufficient attractive power to cause a professor from one of the country’s great liberal institutions to serve the cause of tyranny. The conservative movement has produced a cadre of brownshirts that might yet succeed in destroying the American Constitution.
In 2000 Roberts wrote about the Democratic Party's attempts to get a recount in the State of Florida for Gore. Excerpts from two of his articles:
Massive Democratic vote fraud has made this election a close one. Having sized up Republicans as cowardly and timid, Democrats decided that they could steal the election behind a barrage of lies and propaganda laid down by their faithful allies at CNN and the TV networks. These Nazi-style propaganda machines are playing a decisive role in the destruction of American constitutional democracy....Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris has been demonized by the Democratic Party’s Propaganda Ministry (the TV networks and CNN). Adolf Hitler best described the tactic that Democrats are using against Harris. Success, Hitler says, comes from unleashing "a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked person break down." This tactic, Hitler says, is most successful against "the bourgeoisie [Republicans], which is neither morally nor mentally equal to such attacks."Once Bush assumes the office to which he has been elected, Republicans must turn their attention to dismantling the Democratic Party’s Propaganda Ministry that masquerades as a news media. The most obvious solution is nationalization. Give the corrupt media the socialism it wants, and run the organizations as strict news outlets with all editorializing and opinion banned.Once Americans can get the facts, they will realize that a Nazi Party (a k a the Democratic Party) has grown up in their midst.Six years later Roberts would write:
Former vice president Al Gore gave what I believe to be the most important political speech in my lifetime, and the New York Times, "the newspaper of record," did not report it. Not even excerpts....Gore challenged the American people to step up to the task of defending the Constitution, a task abandoned by the media, the law schools, and the Democratic and Republican parties. If we fail, darkness will close around us.Paul Craig Roberts served in the Reagan Administration. The disillusionment among members of the conservative movement since Bush was elected President in 2000 has become rampant. The last time I voted for a republican for president was in 1984. My guess is it was about that time that John Dean, a former republican and conservative, also started to be appalled at what we were witnessing. Mr. Roberts, a talented and influential columnist, just took a bit longer to reach our conclusion that the sociopaths and opportunists who had hijacked the conservative movement pose a threat to the whole world.
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This thread started in late 2006. Imminent war with or an attack on Iran was predicted by several members of this forum citing such luminaries as Scott Ritter among others. Early on I expressed my doubts. The "March" referred to in the title was March 2007. But that month came and went and there was no attack, but the dire predictions that one was imminent continued. Then 2007 came to an end and there was still no attack, but the predictions continued. Now March 2008 has come and gone and there hasn't been an attack but several members of this forum citing such luminaries as Scott Ritter among others continue to predict war with or an attack on Iran is imminent and I still have my doubts.
At this point I think the US (or Israel) going to war with Iran is extremely unlikely. An attack on her nuclear facilities though not quite as hard to conceive seems unlikely as well. Limited attacks on other military assets, hard to say Time will tell.
'Bush intends to attack Iran before the end of his term'
JPost.com Staff , THE JERUSALEM POST May. 20, 2008
US President George W. Bush intends to attack Iran in the upcoming months, before the end of his term, Army Radio quoted a senior official in Jerusalem as saying Tuesday.
The official claimed that a senior member of the president's entourage, which concluded a trip to Israel last week, said during a closed meeting that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were of the opinion that military action was called for.
However, the official continued, "the hesitancy of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice" was preventing the administration from deciding to launch such an attack on the Islamic Republic, for the time being.
The report stated that according to assessments in Israel, recent turmoil in Lebanon, where Hizbullah de facto established control of the country, was advancing an American attack.
Bush, the officials said, opined that Hizbullah's show of strength was evidence of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's growing influence. They said that according to Bush, "the disease must be treated - not its symptoms."
In an address to the Knesset during his visit here last week, Bush said that "the president of Iran dreams of returning the Middle East to the Middle Ages."
"America stands with you in firmly opposing Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions," Bush said. "Permitting the world's leading sponsor of terror to possess the world's deadliest weapon would be an unforgivable betrayal of future generations. For the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon."
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1210668683139&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
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TV commentator George Knapp on the international radio show coasttocoastam interviewed John Lear on May 18, 2008. Lear stated that only recently had he concluded that the landing on the Moon in 1969 was faked. For those who want more information I suggest that they pay the small cost to listen to a rebroadcast of the show. The following is a summary placed on the coasttocoastam website:
First hour guest, John Lear talked about how the Apollo lunar landings were faked in order to instill the idea that the moon is an airless, lifeless place. There are 4,000 astronauts in a secret corps, which is part of the US Strategic Command, and they first landed on the moon in 1962 and Mars in 1966, he suggested. For more, view material he sent us in tandem with this discussion.
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Douglas Caddy has agreed to answer questions on the Forum. Please post your questions on this thread and he will do his best to answer them.
(1) In September, 1960, you joined forces with Marvin Liebman and William F. Buckley to establish the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). Do you still hold right-wing views?
My views coincide one-hundred percent with those of Paul Craig Roberts as expressed below:
The Conservative Movement: From Failure to Threat
by Paul Craig Roberts
May 19, 2008
Find this article at:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts247.html
UC Berkeley tenured law professor John Yoo epitomizes the failure of the conservative movement in America. Known as "the torture professor," Yoo penned the Department of Justice (sic) memos that gave a blank check to sadistic Americans to torture detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. The human rights violations that John Yoo sanctioned destroyed America’s reputation and exposed the Bush Regime as more inhumane than the Muslim terrorists. The acts that Yoo justified are felonies under US law and war crimes under the Nuremberg standard.
Yoo’s torture memos are so devoid of legal basis that his close friend and fellow conservative member of the Federalist Society, Jack Goldsmith, rescinded the memos when he was appointed head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Yoo’s extremely shoddy legal work and the fervor with which he served the evil intentions of the Bush Regime have led to calls from distinguished legal scholars for Yoo’s dismissal from Berkeley’s Boalt Hall.
I sympathize with the calls for Yoo’s dismissal. In the new edition of The Tyranny of Good Intentions, my coauthor and I write: "Liberty has no future in America if law schools provide legitimacy to those who would subvert the US Constitution."
However, John Yoo is but the tip of the iceberg. Scapegoating Yoo diverts attention from a neoconservative movement that has become the greatest enemy of the US Constitution.
In theory conservatives adore the Constitution and seek to protect it with appeals to "original intent." In practice conservatives hate the Constitution as the protector of homosexuals and abortionists. Conservatives regard civil liberties as coddling devices for criminals and terrorists. They see the First Amendment as a foolish protection for sedition. The neoconservative magazine, Commentary, has called for the New York Times to be prosecuted for informing Americans that President Bush was illegally spying on them without warrants.
The conservative assault on the US Constitution is deeply entrenched. The Federalist Society, an organization of Republican attorneys from which the Republican Party chooses its Justice Department appointees and nominees to the federal bench, was organized as an assault on the checks and balances in the Constitution.
The battle cry of the Federalist Society is "energy in the executive." The society has its origin in Republican frustrations from the days when Republicans had a "lock on the presidency," but had their agenda blocked by a Democratic Congress. The Federalist Society set about producing rationales for elevating the powers of the executive in order to evade the checks and balances the Founding Fathers wrote into the political system.
With the Bush Regime we have seen President Nixon’s claim that "it’s not illegal if the President does it" carried to new heights. With the complicity of Democrats, Bush and Cheney have appointed attorneys general who have elevated the presidency above the law.
Just as liberals used judicial activism in the federal courts to achieve their agenda, the conservatives are using the Department of Justice to concentrate power in the executive branch in order to achieve their agenda. In America the Constitution has no friends. It is always in the way of one agenda or the other and, thus, always under threat.
For now, however, the threat is from the right. Conservatives have confused loyalty to country, which is loyalty to the Constitution, with loyalty to the Bush Regime. It is purely a partisan loyalty based in emotion--"you are with us or against us."
When I was a young man conservatives were frustrated that facts, reason and analysis could not penetrate liberal emotion. Today facts, reason and analysis cannot penetrate conservative emotions. When I write a factual column describing how we have been deceived into wars that are clearly not in our interest, self-described conservatives indignantly write to me: "If you hate America so much, why don’t you move to Cuba!" Conservatives have become so intellectually pathetic that they regard my defense of civil liberties as an anti-American act.
Today’s conservatives are so poorly informed that they cannot understand that to lose the Constitution is to lose the country.
John Yoo was a willing accomplice of inhumane and illegal acts. But his greatest crime is that he was a willing participant in the Bush Regime’s assault on the Constitution, which protects us all. If Yoo is to be held accountable, what about George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and his aides, attorneys general Gonzalles and Mukasey, Yoo’s Justice Department boss, now federal judge Bybee, Rumsfeld, Rice, Hadley, and the legion of neocon brownshirts that comprise the regime’s subcabinet? Is Yoo any more culpable than anyone else who served the corrupt, evil, and anti-American Bush Regime?
The ease with which the Bush Regime has run roughshod over the law and Constitution indicates that the brownshirt mentality to which many Americans have succumbed has sufficient attractive power to cause a professor from one of the country’s great liberal institutions to serve the cause of tyranny. The conservative movement has produced a cadre of brownshirts that might yet succeed in destroying the American Constitution.
May 19, 2008
Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail] a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, has just been released by Random House.
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I don't believe this allegation by Rosen of Faux News Channel is historically accurate but since it may attract some public attention I am posting this article about his new book:
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New Watergate book says John Dean ordered break-in
By Steve Holland
Reuters US Online Report Top News
May 19, 2008 01:03 EST
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new book on the scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon alleges that White House counsel John Dean ordered the infamous Watergate break-in in 1972, a charge Dean strongly rejected.
James Rosen, a Fox News Channel correspondent in Washington, made the charge based on interviews and an exhaustive review of documents for "The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate."
The biography is being released this week about Nixon's attorney general, a central Watergate figure.
Dean called Rosen's assertion "pathetic."
The Watergate scandal began with the bungled election-year break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington on June 17, 1972. The aim was to wiretap the telephones.
Initially dismissed by the White House as a "third-rate burglary," the scandal was slow in evolving and had no impact on the outcome of the 1972 election -- Nixon easily defeated Democratic Sen. George McGovern to win a second term.
But by 1974 investigators had traced Watergate and various other political scandals back to the White House and Nixon was forced to resign on August 9, 1974.
Dean was most famous for telling Nixon in a taped Oval Office conversation in 1973 that Watergate was "a cancer growing on the presidency."
Though convicted of several Watergate-related felonies, he has been widely viewed as somewhat of a sympathetic figure in the case because he became a key witness for the prosecution, thus reducing his prison time.
Rosen quoted from a 1990 interview from another central Watergate figure, Jeb Magruder, that "the first plan that we got had been initiated by Dean."
To help build his case, Rosen quoted from a statement that Magruder made in a legal deposition in 1995 about "Gemstone," Watergate planner G. Gordon Liddy's code-name for the burglary:
"Question: 'Is it true that John Dean was one of the people in the White House that was pushing for the Gemstone plan?'
"Magruder: 'Yes.'
"Question: ... Is it, in fact, truthful that you and John Dean had prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in?'
"Magruder: 'Yes."'
Dean told Reuters, "I hope this book is being sold as fiction, for if it is not, readers are being defrauded."
"His conclusions are pathetic. Rosen has simply ignored all the sworn testimony to the contrary, including my own," he said.
Rosen notes that Dean has always denied ordering the break-in. "I wasn't even aware of the Watergate until after it happened," Rosen quotes Dean as saying in 1999.
Many previous accounts have alleged that Mitchell ordered the break-in.
Rosen's book also alleges that the doomed wiretapping was deliberately sabotaged by the CIA.
Rosen says he had a rich trove of previously undiscovered information to scour for his book, including 5,000 pages of executive session testimony by key witnesses before the Senate Watergate committee, including Dean, Magruder, James McCord, E. Howard Hunt and Alexander Haig.
Source: Reuters US Online Report Top News
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The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder
By Vincent Bugliosi
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19903.htm
10/05/08 "CommonDreams" -- - There is direct evidence that President George W. Bush did not honorably lead this nation, but deliberately misled it into a war he wanted. Bush and his administration knowingly lied to Congress and to the American public — lies that have cost the lives of more than 4,000 young American soldiers and close to $1 trillion.
A Monumental Lie
In his first nationally televised address on the Iraqi crisis on October 7, 2002, six days after receiving the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a classified CIA report, President Bush told millions of Americans the exact opposite of what the CIA was telling him -a monumental lie to the nation and the world.
On the evening of October 7, 2002, the very latest CIA intelligence was that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the U.S. This same information was delivered to the Bush administration as early as October 1, 2002, in the NIE, including input from the CIA and 15 other U.S. intelligence agencies. In addition, CIA director George Tenet briefed Bush in the Oval Office on the morning of October 7th.
According to the October 1, 2002 NIE, "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW [chemical and biological warfare] against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger case for making war." The report concluded that Hussein was not planning to use any weapons of mass destruction; further, Hussein would only use weapons of mass destruction he was believed to have if he were first attacked, that is, he would only use them in self-defense.
Preparing its declassified version of the NIE for Congress, which became known as the White Paper, the Bush administration edited the classified NIE document in ways that significantly changed its inference and meaning, making the threat seem imminent and ominous.
In the original NIE report, members of the U.S. intelligence community vigorously disagreed with the CIA's bloated and inaccurate conclusions. All such opposing commentary was eliminated from the declassified White Paper prepared for Congress and the American people.
The Manning Memo
On January 31, 2003, Bush met in the Oval Office with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In a memo summarizing the meeting discussion, Blair's chief foreign policy advisor David Manning wrote that Bush and Blair expressed their doubts that any chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons would ever be found in Iraq, and that there was tension between Bush and Blair over finding some justification for the war that would be acceptable to other nations. Bush was so worried about the failure of the UN inspectors to find hard evidence against Hussein that he talked about three possible ways, Manning wrote, to "provoke a confrontation" with Hussein. One way, Bush said, was to fly "U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, [falsely] painted in UN colors. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach" of UN resolutions and that would justify war. Bush was calculating to create a war, not prevent one.
Denying Blix's Findings
Hans Blix, the United Nation's chief weapons inspector in Iraq, in his March 7, 2003, address to the UN Security Council, said that as of that date, less than 3 weeks before Bush invaded Iraq, that Iraq had capitulated to all demands for professional, no-notice weapons inspections all over Iraq and agreed to increased aerial surveillance by the U.S. over the "no-fly" zones. Iraq had directed the UN inspectors to sites where illicit weapons had been destroyed and had begun to demolish its Al Samoud 2 missiles, as requested by the UN. Blix added that "no evidence of proscribed activities have so far been found" by his inspectors and "no underground facilities for chemical or biological production or storage were found so far." He said that for his inspectors to absolutely confirm that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) "will not take years, nor weeks, but months."
Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief UN nuclear inspector in Iraq and director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the UN Security Council that, "we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq."
The UN inspectors were making substantial progress and Hussein was giving them unlimited access. Why was Bush in such an incredible rush to go to war?
Hussein Disarms, so Bush … Goes to War
When it became clear that the whole purpose of Bush's prewar campaign — to get Hussein to disarm — was being (or already had been) met, Bush and his people came up with a demand they had never once made before — that Hussein resign and leave Iraq. On March 17, 2003, Bush said in a speech to the nation that, "Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict." Military conflict — the lives of thousands of young Americans on the line — because Bush trumped up a new line in the sand?
The Niger Allegation
One of the most notorious instances of the Bush administration using thoroughly discredited information to frighten the American public was the 16 words in Bush's January 28, 2003 State of the Union speech: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The Niger allegation was false, and the Bush administration knew it was false.
Joseph C. Wilson IV, the former ambassador to Iraq, was sent to Niger by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate a supposed memo that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake (a form of lightly processed ore) to Iraq by Niger in the late 1990s. Wilson reported back to the CIA that it was "highly doubtful" such a transaction had ever taken place.
On March 7, 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei told the UN Security Council that "based on thorough analysis" his agency concluded that the "documents which formed the basis for the report of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic." Indeed, author Craig Unger uncovered at least 14 instances prior to the 2003 State of the Union address in which analysts at the CIA, the State Department, or other government agencies that had examined the Niger documents "raised serious doubts about their legitimacy — only to be rebuffed by Bush administration officials who wanted to use them."
On October 5 and 6, 2002, the CIA sent memos to the National Security Council, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and to the White House Situation Room stating that the Niger information was no good.
On January 24, 2003, four days before the president's State of the Union address, the CIA's National Intelligence Council, which oversees all federal agencies that deal with intelligence, sent a memo to the White House stating that "the Niger story is baseless and should be laid to rest."
The 9/11 Lie
The Bush administration put undue pressure on U.S. intelligence agencies to provide it with conclusions that would help them in their quest for war. Bush's former counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, said that on September 12, 2001, one day after 9/11, "The President in a very intimidating way left us — me and my staff — with the clear indication that he wanted us to come back with the word that there was an Iraqi hand behind 9/11."
Bush said on October 7, 2002, "We know that Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy — the United States of America. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high level contacts that go back a decade," and that "Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses." Of Hussein, he said on November 1, 2002, "We know he's got ties with Al Qaeda."
Even after Bush admitted on September 17, 2003, that he had "no evidence" that Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11, he audaciously continued, in the months and years that followed, to clearly suggest, without stating it outright, that Hussein was involved in 9/11.
On March 20, 2006, Bush said, "I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack on America."
Vincent Bugliosi received his law degree in 1964. In his career at the L.A. County District Attorney's office, he successfully prosecuted 105 out of 106 felony jury trials, including 21 murder convictions without a single loss. His most famous trial, the Charles Manson case, became the basis of his classic, Helter Skelter, the biggest selling true-crime book in publishing history. The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder is available May 25.
To listen to Bugliosi discuss his book, click on the link below:
Yes, it is quite surprising, to me, that he apparently has this 'right', while having gotten things about Dallas nearly totally wrong, and also not correct on Manson. Doug, do you happen to know him? If so, what is he like personally?
No, I do not personally know Mr. Bugliosi. However, he exhibited tremendous courage as an attorney in attacking the U.S. Supreme Court following it biased decision that elected George W. Bush as President in 2000. I cite and praise Bugliosi in the script of my play about that decision, which can be found at www.douglascaddy.com
Mishaps mark John McCain's record as naval aviator
in Political Conspiracies
Posted
Is McCain Able?
by Fred Reed
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed147.html
www.lewrockwell.com
October 4, 2008
I frankly don’t believe John McCain’s medical records, or at any rate the portions released to the New York Times. The man was held in solitary for years, tortured until bones fractured, until he confessed to war crimes, until he tried to hang himself.
That he broke can’t be held against him: Almost anyone would have. (In my view GIs should be told to confess to anything whatever right from the start.) But the assertion that he came through unscathed, warm and humorous and psychically sound, just isn’t plausible. It doesn’t happen that way.
Now, PTSD. A lot of people, including vets, don’t believe that PTSD exists. I didn’t. One reason is that they tend to think of it as something verging on the psychotic, as for example seeing nonexistent snipers in the hedgerows of suburban Philadelphia. The other common notion is that those who have it dive under tables at the sound of a backfire. Vets tend to think, “I don’t know anybody like that. I certainly don’t see snipers in the rafters. This whole PTSD business sounds like a crock.”
So it does. But it isn’t.
And of course many people, chiefly men, regard with suspicion anything that smells of psychobabble, anything touchy-feely. To them PTSD sounds like Can’t-Get-a-Date Personality Disorder – something for Oprah to talk about to bored housewives. So they dismiss it.
Let me de-babble the discussion and state a simple fact: A lot of guys come back from wars really, truly messed up in the head, and it doesn’t go away. They aren’t going to talk to you about it. They figure it’s none of your goddamned business. If you push, they will tell you so, angrily.
If you weren’t in those forsaken paddies, they think, if you didn’t go through what they did, you’re off their radar screens. They’ll talk to you about football, the weather, and whatever happened in the newspaper yesterday. Just don’t even try to talk about Viet Nam. Or whatever war it was. They don’t want to think about it, and talking about it to weenies feels like being naked in a train station.
There are a lot of these brain-burnt guys out there. They don’t want your pity. They don’t pity themselves. They just don’t want to expose that part of themselves to you. They put a wall around themselves. You can’t see it. It’s there.
Often they seem like fairly normal guys with three divorces who drink too much and their children say, “It was like he was somewhere else.” Perfectly normal guys who have had seventeen jobs because their bosses are always useless bastards. Perfectly normal guys who live out in the desert and do serious scuba or hang glide because they just don’t give a xxxx.
Not all. Some manage to hold it together and become things thought to be respectable, such as senators or writers or defense attorneys. A subsurface lode of hostility can be useful in a trial lawyer. Anger is energizing. It can fuel a career.
With PTSD, or whatever you want to call it, the anger is the giveaway. These vets carry a load of subterranean fury that you don’t want to look at. As they would say, I xxxx you not one pound. I know a lot of these guys. A buddy of mine – two tours in bad places, killed a whole lot of people up close – now has no tolerance for frustration. He's ready to spread your teeth over a wide radius if you even seem to think about getting in his face. Admirable? No. But don’t make the experiment.
Sounds like McCain. His explosiveness is notorious.
Another guy I know, writer, freelanced all his life because he couldn’t get along with people in offices. A writer can package this as sturdy independence, as being a colorful maverick. The fellow is approximately sane, or at least apparently sane. Get three drinks in him, bring up the war, and his voice starts shaking and it’s time to change the subject right now.
A fair few PTSD guys become writers: It’s solitary, you don’t have to put up with bosses, and you don’t have to be stable.
How do these vets get this way? Not by anything you want to hear about, anything that you will see on the nightly news. The RPG hits your tank, the cherry juice cooks off, and three of your buddies burn to death screaming because they couldn’t get out fast enough. You lose a leg and half your face to a mortar round. You just see things: A Chicom 122 cuts a cyclo driver in half and you watch him trying to crawl with his guts hanging out. He doesn’t crawl long. You get shot down over Hanoi and spend years being tortured. The military is a fun place. You have all sorts of unusual experiences.
It messes your head up. I promise.
I said anger – yes, but anger at what? At whom? Here I’m on soft ground because vets don’t talk much about this stuff among themselves. At least those I know don’t. But, to the extent that I am competent to judge, they aren’t mad at those who shot them, or shot at them. “The VC were only doing their job.” They hate those who sent them to a pointless war, who exposed them in thousands to Agent Orange, knowing that it was poisonous and carcinogenic, at those posing fat-ass pols who sent them to die for nothing while they ate prime rib in DC.
Or they just hate. Psychologically the verb can be intransitive. They don’t know what they hate, but don’t get in the way of it.
Not all respond this way. Some choose to intensify their patriotism – it avoids admitting that you have been suckered – and direct their hatred at the hippies, the liberals, the press, all of whom they figure lost the war. But the anger is still there. Most of the time, you don’t notice it. They turn off, often seem emotionally cold. But that explosive venom remains. We’re not talking about a fiery Irish temper. We’re talking half crazy.
Those who seek help, typically from the VA, end up on Thissa-dol and Thatta-dol, on antidepressants and calmants and even antipsychotics. They sorta help. Sorta isn’t good enough with men who control carrier battle groups.
From the New York Times story, “Mr. McCain also learned to control his temper and not to become angry over insignificant things, the doctors said.” I don’t believe it. It doesn’t fit accounts of people who know him. It isn’t how heads work.
McCain is well known for his violent and irrational temper. A friend of mine, Ken Smith, was flack for Governor Mecham of Arizona during a meeting with McCain. The governor somehow irritated McCain. Says Ken, “McCain was leaning forward with a clinched fist. I reached out my left arm, as politely and as non-threatening as I could, and I pushed McCain back. What I remember is how taut and hard his body was, not from working out and lifting weights, but rather from anger and adrenalin. I made an excuse to leave and get them apart.”
For what he went through in Vietnamese jails he deserves sympathy and admiration. It isn’t qualification for the presidency.
October 4, 2008
Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well and the just-published A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be. Visit his blog.
Find this article at:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed147.html