Douglas Caddy

Hunt's book as offered by Amazon.com, available Feb. 23rd: American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond (Hardcover) by 1. E. Howard Hunt (Author), Greg Aunapu (Author) List Price: $25.95 Price: $17.13 Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Career spy, Watergate conspirator and prolific suspense novelist Hunt (Guilty Knowledge) collaborated with journalist Aunapu (Without a Trace) on this breezy, unrepentant memoir. Hunt (who died recently at 88) recalls the highlights of a long career, from WWII service with the fabled Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—predecessor of the CIA—to a career with the agency itself and a stint as a consultant to the Nixon White House. As a White House operative, Hunt specialized in dirty tricks and break-ins—including the Democratic National Committee's headquarters—and served 33 months in federal prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. He claims to have been a magnet for women, especially models, and shamelessly drops the names of the rich and powerful. He also played a key role in the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. As for his role in Watergate, he blames his "bulldog loyalty" and concedes only that he and his fellow conspirators did "the wrong things for the right reasons." In a postscript, Hunt urges reforming the beleaguered CIA in the image of the wartime OSS and its "daring amateurs." Hunt's nostalgic memoir breaks scant new ground in an already crowded field. (Apr.) Book Description Startling revelations from the OSS, the CIA, and the Nixon White house Think you know everything there is to know about the OSS, the Cold War, the CIA, and Watergate? Think again. In American Spy, one of the key figures in postwar international and political espionage tells all. Former OSS and CIA operative and White House staffer E. Howard Hunt takes you into the covert designs of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon: His involvement in the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and more His work with CIA officials such as Allen Dulles and Richard Helms His friendship with William F. Buckley Jr., whom Hunt brought into the CIA The amazing steps the CIA took to manipulate the media in America and abroadThe motives behind the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office Why the White House "plumbers" were formed and what they accomplished The truth behind Operation Gemstone, a series of planned black ops activities against Nixon's political enemies A minute-by-minute account of the Watergate break-in Previously unreleased details of the post-Watergate cover-up Complete with documentation from audiotape transcripts, handwritten notes, and official documents, American Spy is must reading for anyone who is fascinated by real-life spy tales, high-stakes politics, and, of course, Watergate. From the Inside Flap For three decades, E. Howard Hunt served his nation, first in the U.S. Navy, then in the OSS and CIA, before being hired by President Nixon's staff, for whom he helped plan the infamous Watergate break-in. Now he reveals what he could only hint at in his seventy-plus spy novels: his role in some of the best known and least understood events in the postwar era. And he does so without spin or excuses. From his early days as an OSS operative in China during World War II, through his decades as a covert cold warrior with the CIA, and on to his fateful years in the Nixon White House, Hunt vividly describes the rigorous training, meticulous planning, and artful deceit that are the meat and potatoes of the espionage game. He offers startling revelations about the CIA's 1954 coup in Guatemala, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, the agency's covert domestic propaganda campaign, and much more. He also discusses the 1971 break-in of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, reveals his motives for participating in Watergate, even though he thought it was a mistake, and explains why his wife was carrying $10,000 in cash when she died in a plane crash en route to Chicago in 1972. He also reveals that because his daughter failed to follow his directions and dispose of incriminating evidence, he was later able to use these materials and become the star witness against the heads of the Watergate conspiracy. In the post-Watergate years, Hunt became the focus of numerous conspiracy theories suggesting that he: participated in the JFK assassination; wrote the book by George Wallace's would-be assassin; knew the secret "alternative" motive for breaking into the DNC headquarters. Hunt debunks a number of these accusations and defends himself vigorously against the rest. Based on audiotape transcripts, interviews, handwritten memos, and documents that Hunt has kept over the years, American Spy takes you behind the scenes to meet all of the Watergate conspirators as you've never seen them before. Destined to provoke many new controversies as it puts others to rest, it is the most memorable memoir you'll read this year. From the Back Cover Startling revelations from the OSS, the CIA, and the Nixon White house Think you know everything there is to know about the OSS, the Cold War, the CIA, and Watergate? Think again. In American Spy, one of the key figures in postwar international and political espionage tells all. Former OSS and CIA operative and White House staffer E. Howard Hunt takes you into the covert designs of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon: His involvement in the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and more His work with CIA officials such as Allen Dulles and Richard Helms His friendship with William F. Buckley Jr., whom Hunt brought into the CIA The amazing steps the CIA took to manipulate the media in America and abroad The motives behind the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office Why the White House "plumbers" were formed and what they accomplished The truth behind Operation Gemstone, a series of planned black ops activities against Nixon's political enemies A minute-by-minute account of the Watergate break-in Previously unreleased details of the post-Watergate cover-up Complete with documentation from audiotape transcripts, handwritten notes, and official documents, American Spy is must reading for anyone who is fascinated by real-life spy tales, high-stakes politics, and, of course, Watergate. About the Author White House "plumber" E. HOWARD HUNT served as a covert operative for the CIA from 1950 until the 1970s, and participated in many of the agency's most secret missions, both abroad and in the United States. He is also the author of more than seventy spy novels. GREG AUNAPU is a nationally respected journalist, who worked as a freelancer for Time and People magazines for ten years, and has reported for many national news organizations. He is coauthor of two previous books, most recently, Without a Trace.

I received in the mail today a recent public statement issued by Howard Phillips, Chairman of the Conservative Caucus, which has its national headquarters in Vienna, Virginia. Howie was a member of the initial board of Directors of Young American for Freedom, having been elected to that position at the organizing meeting held at Great Elm, the family home of William F. Buckley, in Sharon, Connecticut in 1960. At the time of his election as a director, Howie was president of the student council at Harvard University. Although Jewish, he was anti-Zionist, being a member of the World Council of Judaism, The title of Howie’s document received today is “E. Howard Hunt Was An American Patriot Who Dedicated His Life To Serving His Country.” The opening paragraphs of the document are as follows: “The late Howard Hunt, who died earlier this month, was an American patriot whom I was privileged to know during the time he served on the staff of President Nixon’s White House Counsel, Chuck Colson. “When he and Gordon Liddy were arrested following the Watergate break-in, his attorney was my friend, Douglas Caddy, the founder and first National Director of Young Americans for Freedom. “Hunt frequently called to pick my brain concerning Federal funding of pro-Communist Left-Wing activists in the context of Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ programs. “At the time, I was the White House’s Office of Economic Opportunity ‘Watch Dog” and Special Assistant to then OEO Director Frank Carlucci who made decisions to fund many of these Marxist activities. “Hunt was, at one point, associated with the Mullen Company, a CIA asset, headed by future U.S. Senator Robert Bennett.” Appended to these opening paragraphs in Howie’s public statement is an article on Hunt’s death published by the New York Post on January 14, 2007 (page 7). The Post’s article reads as follows: “...In a new memoir, ‘American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond,’ due out in April, Hunt, 88, writes: ‘Having Kennedy liquidated, thus elevating himself to the presidency without having to work for it himself, could have been a very tempting and logical move on Johnson’s part. “‘LBJ had the money and the connections to manipulate the scenario in Dallas and is on record as having convinced JFK to make the appearance in the first place. He further tried unsuccessfully to engineer the passengers of each vehicle, trying to get his good buddy, Gov. [John] Connally, to ride with him instead of in JFK’s car – where...he would have been out of danger.’ “Hunt says Johnson also had easy access to CIA man William Harvey, who’d been demoted when he tired to have Fidel Castro poisoned in defiance of orders to drop covert operations against Cuba. Harvey was ‘a ruthless man who was not satisfied with his position in the CIA and its government salary,’ Hunt writes. “‘He definitely had dreams of becoming [CIA Director] and LBJ could do that for him if he were president....[LBJ} would have used Harvey because he was available and corrupt.’”

I received in the mail today a recent public statement issued by Howard Phillips, Chairman of the Conservative Caucus, which has its national headquarters in Vienna, Virginia. Howie was a member of the initial board of Directors of Young American for Freedom, having been elected to that position at the organizing meeting held at Great Elm, the family home of William F. Buckley, in Sharon, Connecticut in 1960. At the time of his election as a director, Howie was president of the student council at Harvard University. Although Jewish, he was anti-Zionist, being a member of the World Council of Judaism, The title of Howie’s document received today is “E. Howard Hunt Was An American Patriot Who Dedicated His Life To Serving His Country.” The opening paragraphs of the document are as follows: “The late Howard Hunt, who died earlier this month, was an American patriot whom I was privileged to know during the time he served on the staff of President Nixon’s White House Counsel, Chuck Colson. “When he and Gordon Liddy were arrested following the Watergate break-in, his attorney was my friend, Douglas Caddy, the founder and first National Director of Young Americans for Freedom. “Hunt frequently called to pick my brain concerning Federal funding of pro-Communist Left-Wing activists in the context of Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ programs. “At the time, I was the White House’s Office of Economic Opportunity ‘Watch Dog” and Special Assistant to then OEO Director Frank Carlucci who made decisions to fund many of these Marxist activities. “Hunt was, at one point, associated with the Mullen Company, a CIA asset, headed by future U.S. Senator Robert Bennett.” Appended to these opening paragraphs in Howie’s public statement is an article on Hunt’s death published by the New York Post on January 14, 2007 (page 7). The Post’s article reads as follows: “...In a new memoir, ‘American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond,’ due out in April, Hunt, 88, writes: ‘Having Kennedy liquidated, thus elevating himself to the presidency without having to work for it himself, could have been a very tempting and logical move on Johnson’s part. “‘LBJ had the money and the connections to manipulate the scenario in Dallas and is on record as having convinced JFK to make the appearance in the first place. He further tried unsuccessfully to engineer the passengers of each vehicle, trying to get his good buddy, Gov. [John] Connally, to ride with him instead of in JFK’s car – where...he would have been out of danger.’ “Hunt says Johnson also had easy access to CIA man William Harvey, who’d been demoted when he tired to have Fidel Castro poisoned in defiance of orders to drop covert operations against Cuba. Harvey was ‘a ruthless man who was not satisfied with his position in the CIA and its government salary,’ Hunt writes. “‘He definitely had dreams of becoming [CIA Director] and LBJ could do that for him if he were president....[LBJ} would have used Harvey because he was available and corrupt.’”

The National Student Committee for the Loyalty Oath, organized in 1959, was the initial cornerstone in the building of the mass Conservative Movement in the U.S. The strategic goal of David Franke and myself was to attract like-minded students around the country in an attempt to show that Conservatism was the wave of the future. When the Student Committee was launched I was still an undergraduate in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. A number of national publications published articles about the group, inevitably linking my name as a student to Georgetown University. As a result mail from interested persons was sent to me c/o the University. This mail was opened up without my permission by the Jesuit Vice President of the University, who was hostile to conservatives. He courteously noted with his initials that he had read my mail before it was presented to me. However, this activity suddenly ceased when he opened an envelop from Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, who was chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee. Senator Bridges’ letter enclosed a copy of the Congressional Record in which he praised our Student Committee. Apparently even a Jesuit had second thoughts about opening the private mail sent by a member of the U.S. Senate. The Student Committee led to the creation of Youth for Goldwater in early 1960 and later that fall to the founding the Young Americans for Freedom. The best history of the era is chronicled by M. Stanton Evans’ book, Revolt on the Campus, published by the Henry Regnery Company in 1962. The Conservative Movement of the 1960's bore no resemblance to what passes as the Conservative Movement of today.

Ashton: I think the questions you posed were germane and on point, but I do agree with Pat Speer that the manner in which they were asked was almost designed to cause umbrage to those to whom they were posed. I was unsurprised that Mr. Caddy declined to answer, but was rather taken aback by the retaliatory moves he made to have you turfed from the Forum. However, that's really neither here nor there..... I believe we may face three distinct possibilities: 1) It struck me at the time that Mr. Caddy may have felt constrained from responding with "Hunt lied" for reasons of attorney-client privilege. Now that Hunt is dead, perhaps Mr. Caddy no longer feels honour-bound to observe such a formality, assuming that Hunt was his client. 2) However, if Mr. Caddy were in fact retained to represent the Plumber cadre by CIA - as you are not alone in suspecting - then he may well be constrained from replying for the duration of his time on Earth, or until his [hypothesized] client [CIA] ceases to exist. 3) Then again, Mr. Caddy may just be an honourable man who has no intention of breaching attorney-client privilege, even if released from that secrecy oath by Hunt's demise. If that is the case, we shall never know whether he was/is motivated by 2) or 3). If Mr. Caddy has been released from his privilege oath by Hunt's death, I would greatly welcome his contributions in determining who retained him, and why there is so great a disconnect between the various stories told about this. Personally, I take your posts with the great dollop of humour which I suspect you intend, and sincerely hope that you continue posting your thoughts, irrespective of whether you are right or wrong about this or that hypothesis in any given case. I do find it odd that those who claim to welcome fresh perspectives and new "outside the box" thoughts in this ancient case are unwilling to entertain just that when you present it. Important new discoveries will not be made by simply retracing the same old ground on the same old paths. The Advocate magazine two years ago published a manuscript by me that recounted in great depth my role as an attorney in Watergate. An excerpt of its opening paragraphs, along with a link to the manuscript, appear below: Did gay bashing by the prosecutors cause the Watergate cover-up? Attorney Douglas Caddy's exclusive interview with The Advocate detailed the connection between homophobia and the Watergate cover-up. Now read his full account, in his own words, with supporting documents. By Douglas Caddy, original attorney for the Watergate Seven An Advocate.com exclusive posted, August 1, 2005 http://www.advocate.com/special_feature_ektid19186.asp ______________________________ Below is a link to the article in The Advocate by Mike Hudson, followed by the article itself, which introduced my manuscript: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_...16/ai_n15396922 Our "deep throat": Gay lawyer Douglas Caddy was the original lawyer for the Watergate burglars - and was, he says, targeted by the government for dirty tricks. Did the scandal grow in part from homophobia? By Mike Hudson At the end of May the world learned the solution to the biggest mystery of the Watergate scandal: Deep Throat, the anonymous tipster who leaked information to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, was Mark Felt--the number 2 guy at the FBI. The news prompted attorney Douglas Caddy, who is gay, to make his own revelations. The first lawyer to represent the Watergate burglars, Caddy believes the homophobia that led to his own harsh treatment by investigators may have escalated the cover-up that ended up driving Richard Nixon from office in August 1974. Even to political junkies, Caddy's name might not ring a bell. But he is portrayed in the classic 1976 film All the President's Men. Early on, Woodward, played by Robert Redford, walks into a courtroom for the arraignment of the five men accused of burglarizing the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in D.C.'s Watergate office complex and sits behind a mysterious well-dressed lawyer. The lawyer is anxious to avoid the reporter's repeated questions about how the burglars had obtained legal counsel without making any telephone calls since their arrest. Called Markham in the movie, in real life that lawyer was Caddy--counsel for the five men arrested during the Watergate break-in and for two better-known Watergate players: E. Howard Hunt, the ex-CIA man who supervised the break-in, and G. Gordon Liddy. "It was just as dramatic in real life as it was in the movie," Caddy tolls The Advocate with a nostalgic sigh during a phone interview from his home in Texas. "I had a hunch, a feeling of how big this could be. And I wasn't all that excited about being in the middle of it." It was June 17, 1972, and Caddy was a relatively naive 34-year-old corporate lawyer. Now a 67-year-old attorney in private practice in Houston, with five books under his belt, Caddy feels wiser for the experience but hasn't recovered from the bitter taste it left. In the film, Caddy/Markham marks the first appearance of the dark forces aligning against Woodward, the heroic reporter who, with his reporting partner Carl Bernstein, helped break open the conspiracy surrounding the break-in. But in real life, Caddy says, the situation was much more complex. The forces working against Woodward and Bernstein turned even more heavily against him because he was an openly gay man. Caddy's role in the saga began with an unlikely phone call around 3 A.M. that night from Hunt, the former CIA operative who was working from a White House office in the adjacent Old Executive Office Building. Hunt and Caddy had developed a professional relationship after meeting at a public relations firm and struck up a friendship over their shared political views. Caddy had been an early national director of Young Americans for Freedom, a young conservatives group founded in part by William F. Buckley, and had recently done volunteer work for the Committee to Reelect the President, or CREEP. He'd also done some of Hunt's legal work, such as drawing up wills or other routine matters. That night--just hours after D.C. police arrested five men for breaking into the DNC offices--Hunt told Caddy he needed to talk. The pair met at Caddy's house, and the full scope of Hunt's troubles became clear. Soon after, Liddy, one of the masterminds of the break-in, retained Caddy as his lawyer on Hunt's advice. It was also through Hunt that Caddy served briefly as counsel for the five arrested burglars. Having no experience in criminal law, Caddy enlisted the help of a criminal attorney to speak for the accused burglars. Because of this, he didn't argue before the court for any of the seven. But the question Woodward wanted answered, both in the film and in real life, turned out to be the same question government investigators soon wanted answered: Who got the burglars their legal counsel? The answer would have implicated Hunt--and by extension, the White House--in the break-in. But Caddy wouldn't talk. Eleven days after the burglary, U.S. district court judge John Sirica, who handled the case, slapped Caddy with a subpoena, compelling him to testify to a grand jury against Hunt and Liddy. Caddy refused, claiming attorney-client privilege, and was later found in contempt of court. "Never in the history of the American legal system has attorney-client privilege been disregarded so flagrantly," Caddy says. He adds with certainty, "The abuse of me was gay bashing." (In the end his right to refuse to testify against his clients was upheld by an appeals court.) "The judge and the prosecutors had different agendas, but they thought they could push me around," Caddy says, referring to Sirica, whom he says was seeking the national spotlight, and assistant U.S. attorney Earl Silbert, whom he says was attempting to protect the Nixon administration. "They thought that since I was a gay man, I could be manipulated and that I wouldn't fight, but they were wrong." (Sirica died in 1992; Silbert remains in private practice today.) With the heat on Caddy, the seven Watergate conspirators soon cut ties with him a decision that may have escalated the cover-up. The seven came to be represented by lawyer William O. Bittman, who would eventually confess to handling hush-money bribes given to the break-in suspects from sources tied to Nixon's reelection campaign. Caddy says he had steadfastly turned down offers of hush money for his clients, an assertion supported by testimony in at least one Watergate-related trial. History proved Caddy's the wiser decision, since tracking the money from CREEP to the burglars was one of the main triggers that brought the Administration's dirty tricks and domestic espionage schemes to light. Caddy also suggests that Sirica's harsh treatment encouraged Hunt and Liddy to proceed with the cover-up, fearing they--like Caddy--would not get a fair hearing. He cites Hunt's memoir, which notes, "If Sirica was treating Caddy ... so summarily, and Caddy was completely uninvolved in Watergate--then those of us who were involved could expect neither fairness nor understanding from him." Caddy believes he was targeted for dirty tricks of a different sort because he was gay. While he was always careful about his dealings within the very closeted gay population in Washington--a place where double mirrors and undercover agents were the norm at gay bars--Caddy believes the FBI and Washington police attempted to set him up with a gay lure. That assertion appears to be borne out by an 1977 Advocate interview with Earl Robert "Butch" Merritt Jr., a gay FBI informant. D.C. police "asked if [Merritt] knew one of the Watergate attorneys," the article reported. Merritt did not name Caddy but recounted that police "said [the lawyer] was gay [and] asked if I could get to know him ... 'to find out all you can about his private life.'" Merritt declined the assignment several times, he told The Advocate. Merritt's story is also reported in Jim Hougan's 1984 Watergate book, Secret Agenda. The FBI denies the charge, saying in a letter to Caddy that a lack of documents in its files shows the agency had never investigated him. Caddy also claims he testified in the first month of the case about attempts to provide hush money to his clients--testimony that was, he says, deliberately deleted from court records in order to hide the connections between the burglars and the president's men. Would the history of Watergate--a story broken by reporters told by Deep Throat to "follow the money--have been significantly changed had Caddy remained the burglars' attorney? "It's hard to say what would have happened if I remained as counsel, but I had already turned [hush money] down," he says. "There's a chance it would never have gotten to the point it did." The age of the case makes it hard to verify the details of Caddy's account. Calls to Woodward were not returned, while the FBI and the Department of Justice both declined to comment on the actions of prior administrations. Caddy's experiences changed his entire outlook on government. He spent years reviewing court cases for a legal research firm and saw corruption in "9% to 10%" of them. He claims corruption of the judicial system has reached a new high with the appointment of Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzalez and the hunt for terror suspects in full swing. "As the saying goes, I wouldn't say I left the conservative party, I'd say it left me," Caddy says. "There are elements of this government that are neo-fascist, and I feel comfortable saying that." He hopes future generations can benefit from his writings by opening their eyes to the complexity of the forces at play in the government. And of course, he hopes to inspire others to stand up for themselves if they are victims of heavy-handed tactics. "There's a lot of this going on to this day," he says. Caddy's smoking gun In the preparation of this article, Watergate attorney Douglas Caddy provided The Advocate dozens of pages of documentation, including court orders, letters from Hunt and Liddy, and other records and recollections. The magazine is now preparing to make Caddy's papers available via our online edition, www.advocate.com. After August 1 click on ISSUE LINKS to find Caddy's complete archive.

I share your concern. If anyone doubts the social consequences of societal breakdown, they need only consider what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when bands of armed thugs roamed, pillaged and looted New Orleans. That was certainly not a pretty sight, but it illustrates the advisability of being sufficiently armed to protect one's family and, if necessary, to hunt. I recommend the following as a good primer for disaster preparedness: http://www.theothersideofkim.com/index.php/lists/10115/ You will have to do a copy and paste to access the sight, because I don't know how to post a link. Christopher: I clicked on the link that you posted and the primer came right up. It is excellent. I have printed it out for handy reference. Below is a timely article that highlights the imminent danger that the world faces: The US and Israel The Real Failed States By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS www.counterpunch.org Feb. 5, 2007 http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02052007.html Growing references by the US and Israel to the Muslim Middle East as a collection of failed states are part of the propaganda campaign to strip legitimacy from Muslim states and set them up for attack. These accusations spring from the hubris of many Israelis, who see themselves as "God's Chosen People," a guarantee of immunity instead of a call to responsibility, and many Americans, who regard their country as "a city upon a hill" that is "the light of the world." But do the US and Israel fit the profile of successful states, or are they failed states themselves? A compelling case can be made that the US and Israel are failed states. Israel allegedly is a democracy, but it is controlled by a minority of Zionist zealots who commit atrocities against Palestinians in order to provoke terrorist acts that are then used to perpetuate the right-wing's hold on political power. Israel has perfected blowback as a tool of political control. The Israeli state relies entirely on coercion and has no diplomacy. It stands isolated in the world except for the US, which sustains Israel's existence with money, military weapons, and the US veto in the United Nations. Israel survives on life support from the US. A state that cannot exist without outside support is a failed state. What about the United States? The US is an even greater failure. Its existence is not dependent on life support from outside. The US has failed in another way. Not only has the state failed, but the society as well. The past six years have seen the rise of dictatorial power in the executive and the collapse of the separation of powers mandated by the US Constitution. The president has declared himself to be "The Decider." The power to decide includes the meaning and intent of laws passed by Congress and whether the laws apply to the executive. President Bush has openly acknowledged that he disobeyed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and unlawfully spied on Americans without warrants. Bush and his Attorney General could not make it more clear that their position is that Bush is above the law. It is also Bush's position that he is above the Constitution. Bush and his Attorney General maintain that as commander-in-chief in "the war on terror," the executive has the power to decide the applicability of civil liberties guaranteed in the Constitution. The US Department of Justice (sic) has taken the position that this decision is an executive decision alone beyond the authority of the judiciary and the legislature. An enfeebled and eviscerated Congress has acquiesced in the growth of executive power, even legislating unconstitutional executive powers into law. The Decider has grabbed the power to arrest people on accusation alone and to detain them indefinitely without charges or evidence. He has obtained the right to torture those whom he arrests. The Geneva Conventions do not apply to the US president, declares the Regime. Bush has obtained the right to commit people to death in military tribunals on the basis of hearsay and secret evidence alone. The Bush Regime has succeeded in moving the American state off the basis on which the Founding Fathers set it. The Bush Regime led the American people to war in Iraq based entirely on lies and deception. This is a known and undisputed fact. Congress has done nothing whatsoever about this monstrous crime and impeachable offense. Under the Nuremberg standard, unprovoked aggression is a war crime. The US established this standard. Bush has violated it with impunity. Bush and his Attorney General assert Bush's power to attack Iran independently of a Congressional declaration of war or any form of congressional approval. Bush claims that his power to attack Iran is merely an extension of his present power to conduct war in Iraq, a power seized on the basis of lies and deception. Congress has taken no action to disabuse Bush of his presumption. Bush's preparations for attacking Iran are highly visible. The entire world can see the preparations and expects the attack. Congress is mute in the face of a catastrophic widening of a war to which a large majority of the American people are now opposed. In national elections three months ago the American people used democracy in an unsuccessful attempt to restrain the Bush Regime from its warmongering ways by defeating the Republican Party and giving control of both houses of Congress to Democrats. Instead of acting, the Democrats have postured. Indeed, some have joined Bush in his warmongering. Hillary Clinton, regarded as the frontrunner for the Democratic Presidential nomination, recently declared at an affair hosted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a leading instigator of war with Iran, that Iran is a danger to the US and a great threat to Israel. Hillary's claims are preposterous. Israel has large numbers of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Iran has none. Iran has no ability to harm the US and would have no motive except for the Bush Regime's gratuitous provocations. A state in which a leading contender for the presidential nomination can make utterly absurd claims and suffer no consequence is a failed state. The United States is a failed state, because in the US it is not possible for leadership to emerge. Politics is controlled by powerful interest groups, such as AIPAC, the military-industrial complex, transnational corporations, and "security" agencies that are accumulating vast amounts of unaccountable power. The American people spoke in November and it means nothing whatsoever. The people are enfeebled because the media no longer has independence. The US media serves as propagandist for the state. It cannot be otherwise in a highly concentrated media run not by journalists but by advertising executives protecting stock values that derive from federal broadcast licenses granted by the state. Like the three monkeys, Congress sees no evil, the media speaks no evil, and the people hear no evil. In the US "news" consists of the government's propaganda. "News" in America is exactly like the "news" in George Orwell's 1984. The US is a failed state, because it is not true to any of the principles upon which it was established. All over the world today, America is seen as a rogue state, a hegemonic evil, and as the greatest threat to peace and stability. In its new identify, America is the total opposite of the Founding Fathers intention. There is no greater failure than that. Academics differentiate between failed states and rogue states. The US and Israel meet both criteria. The US and Israel lead the world in aggressive military actions and in killings of civilian populations. Both countries meet the main indicators of failed states as published in Foreign Policy's 2005 Failed States Index. The leading indicators of failed states are inequality (not merely poverty), "criminalization or delegitimization of the state, which occurs when state institutions are regarded as corrupt, illegal, or ineffective," and "demographic factors, especially population pressures stemming from refugees" and "internally displaced populations." All economic indicators show that income and wealth inequality is rapidly increasing in the US. The growth in inequality is the result of the state's policy that favors shareholders and corporate executives at the expense of American workers. The income differences between Israelis and ghettoized Palestinians are huge. Trials and investigations of leading political figures in the US and Israel are an ongoing occurrence. Currently, the former chief-of-staff of the vice president of the US is on trial for lying to the FBI in an attempt to obstruct an investigation into the Bush Regime's illegal disclosure of an undercover CIA operative. The accused claims he is the fall guy for higher ups. In Israel the president of the country is accused of rape and faces indictment. Both the US and Israel routinely ignore international law and are accused of committing war crimes by human rights organizations. The US Congress stands revealed as totally ineffective and unwilling to constrain the executive. The American people have learned that they cannot change the government's policies through elections. By fomenting the demise of the civil liberties that they are sworn to uphold, President Bush and Attorney General Gonzales have delegitimized the American state, turning it into an instrument of oppression. Israel's policies in the West Bank have displaced a million Palestinians, forcing them to be refugees from their own land. Jordan is filled with Palestinian refugees, and Palestinian existence in the West Bank is being increasingly confined to ghettos cut off from farm land, schools, medical care and from other Palestinians. President Jimmy Carter has described Israeli-occupied Palestine as "apartheid." For decades in the face of public opposition the US government has encouraged massive legal and illegal immigration of diverse peoples whose failure to assimilate is balkanizing the US population. Economic refugees from Mexico are changing the culture and allegiance of entire sections of the American southwest, and racial animosities are on the rise. In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky defined one characteristic of a failed state as a "democratic deficit, that is, a substantial gap between public policy and public opinion." We see this gap in Bush's decision to escalate the war in Iraq despite the opposition of 70% of the American public. What does democracy mean if elected leaders ignore public opinion? Another characteristic of failed states is the failure to protect their own citizens. Israel's aggressive policies against Palestinians provoke terror attacks on Israeli citizens. These attacks are then used to justify more oppression of Palestinians, which leads to more terror. Bush's military aggression in the MIddle East is the main cause of any terror threats that Americans now face. Another characteristic of a failed state is the departure of citizens. Many Israelis, seeing no future for Israel in the government's hostility to Arabs, are leaving Israel. Among Israelis themselves, the legitimacy of the Israeli state is so endangered that the Knesset has just passed a law to revoke the citizenship of "unpatriotic" Israelis. In the US a large percentage of the population has lost confidence in the government's veracity. Polls show that 40% of Americans do not believe the government's story that the 9/11 attacks were the work of Arab terrorists. Many believe the attack was a "false flag" operation carried out by elements in the Bush Regime in order to create public acceptance for its planned invasions in the Middle East. A state that cannot tolerate moral conscience in its soldiers is a failed state. The failure of the American state can be seen it its prosecution of Lt. Ehren Watada. Watada comes from a family with a military heritage. His response to the 9/11 attack was to join the military. Diagnosed with asthma, he failed his physical, but persevered and ended up with an officer's commission. Watada's problem is that he can recognize a war crime even when it is committed by a might-makes-right state. The Abu Ghraib prison tortures and the evidence that Bush deceived Americans about weapons of mass destruction caused Watada to realize that he was on the wrong side of the Nuremberg Principles, the UN Charter, and the US military code, which says American soldiers have an obligation to disobey unlawful orders. He signed up to serve his country, not to kill people for illegal and immoral reasons. Watada refused to deploy to Iraq. He is being tried for refusing deployment and for suggesting that President Bush deceived Americans. By now every attentive American knows that Bush deceived them, and our greatest patriots have said so. Watada is on trial for suggesting what everyone knows to be true. He is not being tried for veracity. He is being tried for speaking the truth. Failure to deploy is a more understandable charge. There is no army if soldiers do not follow orders. However, as the US established at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, following orders is not an excuse for participating in war crimes. At the Nazi war crimes trials, it was the US that insisted that soldiers were responsible for using judgment about the legality of their orders. That is what Lt. Watada did. His trial will not broach the subject of whether his judgment was correct. The evidence against him will merely be that he did not deploy. By trying Lt. Watada the US government is insisting that American troops are not responsible for judging the legality of their orders, only for following them. The standard applied to WW II Germans is too high to be applied to Americans. In a draft army Watada's refusal to accept illegal orders could be used by conscripted cannon fodder to derail the state's intended aggression. However, in a voluntary army in which soldiers seek to serve, permitting Lt. Watada to have his conscience does not imperil the command structure. Others less thoughtful and less aware will carry forth the state's enterprise. The case against Israel and the US does not preclude some Muslim states from also meeting the criteria for failure. However, Iraq, an artificial creation of Western colonial powers, was driven into failure and civil war by American aggression. Iran, a nation with a 5,000 year history, is certainly not a failed state. The main failed states in the Middle East are those that are US puppets. They represent American hegemony, not the interests of their people. What the US and Israel are attempting to do is to turn the entire Muslim Middle East into failed states, that is, into puppet regimes. By extending their hegemony in the Middle East, the US and Israel hope to prolong their own failed existence. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Audio clip on JFK Jr.'s plane released Feb, 6, 2007 AP Almost eight years after John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a plane crash off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, federal officials released a brief audio clip Tuesday of a conversation between a concerned airport intern and a Federal Aviation Administration dispatcher related to the fatal flight. A transcript of the conversation between Adam Budd, a 21-year-old college student employed at the Martha's Vineyard Airport, and the call center at the FAA's Automated Flight Service Station in Bridgeport, Conn., already was made public and widely reported four days after the July 16, 1999, crash. The audio released on Tuesday by the Department of Transportation in Washington was the result of a federal Freedom of Information Act request filed by broadcasters after the crash. A portion of it was aired on Boston's WFXT-TV. Budd, who generally performed clerical tasks, is recorded in a hushed tone, his voice slightly quaking as he asks if the FAA can track Kennedy's plane. "Well, who are you?" an unidentified FAA dispatcher asked. "I'm with airport operations," Budd said, failing to identify which airport until asked by the dispatcher. He then said: "Actually, Kennedy Jr.'s on board. He's uh, they want to know, uh, where he is." When the operator told him he wouldn't give the information over the phone, Budd backed off. "OK, well, if it's too much trouble, it's ... I'll just have 'em wait. ... It's not a big deal," he said, according to the 1999 transcript. Budd's call came in at 10:05 p.m., four hours before a search and rescue mission was scrambled after a family friend made a more forceful call to the Coast Guard. Kennedy, the 38-year-old son and namesake of America's 35th president, was flying with his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, 33, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, 34, when his six-seat, single-engine Piper Saratoga crashed seven miles south of his Martha's Vineyard home. All three were killed. A report of the National Transportation Safety Board blamed pilot error for the crash, saying Kennedy, who had been flying for 15 months, was not skilled enough for low-visibility nighttime flying and became disoriented in the hazy sky.

neutral shmootral, when there is a nuclear exchange and/or general warfare even if conventional and oil prices go to $200/ba and food and all things made from oil or transported get expensive and scarce there will be no neutrals.... Doug, I think a horror scenario like you posit and worse are all too possible. Iran has enough firepower and pride to sink many of our aircraftcarriers, down many of our jets, bomb the hell out of Isreal and American installations in Iraq, bomb and disable many oil installations Middle East-wide... ...and all hell could break out in the entire Middle East and spread to most other places in full or limited ways.....no one would be immune after some weeks. I would trust few to act wisely at this perilous time and there would be no time for cooling off perhaps...... ....well they wanted the end times and perhaps they will learn the meaning of what that really means...no rapture...only death, destruction and MUCH suffering worldwide. China’s Dire Prediction By Arnaud de Borchgrave THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published February 4, 2007 China is making geopolitical hay while the sun isn't shining for America. Chinese leaders have seen President Bush's approval ratings continue a downward slide all over the world, according to the BBC's latest universal survey. More important, previous public opinion polls showed China with a better image than America in friendly European countries -- with the notable exception of Poland. The rest of the world has watched the defection of some of Mr. Bush's congressional supporters. China's topsiders have heard from their close ally Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf -- "a major non-NATO ally" -- that he doesn't think the U.S. can avoid what the world will perceive as a defeat in Iraq. And perception trumps reality the world over. The global newspaper Financial Times wrote, "As authority drains from Mr. Bush, so Washington is losing its capacity to determine outcomes elsewhere. Iran is the principal beneficiary." A defector from Mr. Musharraf's camp has informed U.S. authorities the Pakistani leader's "agonizing reappraisal" about Afghanistan's future stems from his perception the U.S. cannot pull a victory rabbit out of the Iraqi hat. Hence, his perception that neither the U.S. nor NATO can muster what it takes to complete their mission in Afghanistan. Hence, in turn, Mr. Musharraf's decision to authorize his all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency to assist the bid of Taliban "moderates" to retake power in Kabul. ISI greatly assisted the original victory of Taliban in 1996. Assessing the American scene as conveyed by CNN, FOX, BBC and Al Jazeera, Chinese leaders can be forgiven if they have concluded the American Century -- the 20th -- may not be renewed in the 21st. While the American body politic has been almost totally immersed in and absorbed by Iraq and Afghanistan, China's Hu Jintao's current trip to Africa is the third to the continent by a top Chinese leader in a year. Last November, China demonstrated its growing global clout by inviting 48 African heads of state and government to a summit in Beijing where they were wined and dined in a style unmatched by their former French, British and Portuguese colonial masters. China has been buying up their production of raw materials years in advance. Pledges have been made to double aid to Africa to $5 billion, train 15,000 professionals and grant 4,000 scholarships. Vertiginous double-digit yearly growth for the fourth consecutive year has put China on track to leapfrog Germany as the world's third-largest economy. Its foreign currency reserves are accumulating at the rate of $30 million per hour and recently topped the $1 trillion mark -- about 70 percent of that in U.S. paper. It is outspending Japan on technology R&D. China is preening with self-confidence. As Ford posts a record $12.7 billion loss, China's "Chery" (which started with machines and engine technology purchased from Ford Europe for $25 million), in alliance with China's "Visionary Vehicles," is getting ready to invade the U.S. market with five different models in 2008, all designed by Pininfarina (known for Ferrari and Lamborghini designs). The Las Vegas Sands Casino, with 800 gaming tables, is now the world's largest -- not in Nevada but in Macau, China. To offset America's enormous strategic military superiority, the Chinese military concluded in the 1990s that information warfare -- or cyberwarfare -- could give China an "asymmetric" advantage over the United States. In 1998, the PLA newspaper Jiefangjun Bao said priority should be given "to learning how to launch an electronic attack on an enemy... to ensure electromagnetic control in an area and at a time favorable to us." How to take down the computer-driven sinews of a modern industrialized state quickly became a top priority for the major powers and Israel. Since then the U.S. has more than matched China's arsenal of cyberweapons -- from ultra-sophisticated logic bombs, to Trojan horses, worms, viruses and denial-of-service decoys. The 1990-91 Desert Shield and Desert Storm and the 2003 invasion of Iraq (when 50 military-specific satellites and numerous commercial birds were used) showed the Chinese how utterly dependent the U.S. had become on "satcoms." In 1998, the failure of a single satellite disabled 80 percent of the pagers in the U.S. Unmanned aircraft like the Predator achieve pinpoint bombing accuracy over the Pak-Afghan border while flown by a pilot/bombardier in a simulated cockpit thousands of miles away in Washington. Signals from Global Positioning System's satellites guide precision weapons to their targets in the same role as a rifle gunsight. Modern battlespace's eyes and ears are in orbit and vulnerable. The space equivalents of bullets and shells -- kinetic energy weapons -- to destroy or damage a target in space is the next phase of modern warfare. The 2001 Congress-mandated Commission to Assess U.S. National Security Space Management said the U.S. "is an attractive candidate for a space Pearl Harbor -- or a surprise attack on U.S. space assets aimed at crippling U.S. war-fighting and other capabilities." Chinese strategists view U.S. dependence on space as an asymmetric vulnerability while Chinese scientists are known to be working on ASAT (anti-satellite weapons, such as kinetic kill vehicles). On Jan. 11, China decided it was time to demonstrate the fragility of the U.S. military dependence on communications satellites. Without warning, China fired a missile aimed at one of its own aging communications satellites. With pinpoint accuracy, the missile pulverized the Feng Yun 1-C 500 miles above Earth, scattering thousands of tiny fragments that could easily puncture the metal skin of other satellites in orbit. The former Soviet Union did it first in 1971, followed by the U.S. in 1985, before Congress banned further tests lest they imperiled one of the several hundred satellites, many from other nations. Space as a sanctuary free from armed conflict will most probably end over the next 20 years. Speaking in flawless English at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, one-star Gen. Yao Yunzhu, who directs China's Asia-Pacific Office at the Academy of Military Science in Beijing, predicted: "Outer space is going to be weaponized in our lifetime." She is 52. If there's going to be "a space superpower," she said, "it will have company" -- China. And Beijing said China was now ready to talk turkey about an international treaty to curb the weaponization of space. But the U.S. wasn't. In fact, the administration suspended plans agreed to at a summit meeting last April to develop plans for the joint exploration of the moon. Following disengagement from Iraq, U.S. defense priorities are likely to remain focused on combating terrorism while Europe's defense agenda becomes increasingly unsupportive of U.S. policies. China is eyeing an emerging geopolitical vacuum with interest. And it has no intention to play the game of nations by U.S. rules. Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.

As Adlai Stevenson once said: "In America anyone can be President. That's the chance we take."

neutral shmootral, when there is a nuclear exchange and/or general warfare even if conventional and oil prices go to $200/ba and food and all things made from oil or transported get expensive and scarce there will be no neutrals.... Doug, I think a horror scenario like you posit and worse are all too possible. Iran has enough firepower and pride to sink many of our aircraftcarriers, down many of our jets, bomb the hell out of Isreal and American installations in Iraq, bomb and disable many oil installations Middle East-wide... ...and all hell could break out in the entire Middle East and spread to most other places in full or limited ways.....no one would be immune after some weeks. I would trust few to act wisely at this perilous time and there would be no time for cooling off perhaps...... ....well they wanted the end times and perhaps they will learn the meaning of what that really means...no rapture...only death, destruction and MUCH suffering worldwide. China’s Mystery Satellites U.S. Gauges Beijing’s ASAT Strategy By VAGO MURADIAN Defense News.Com February 2, 2007 http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=2526188&C=asia As worldwide attention focuses on China’s first successful anti-satellite missile test, U.S. officials are questioning why some Chinese spacecraft are in orbits that bring them close to key U.S. satellites, according to military sources. The big question is the scale and progress of the Chinese anti-satellite (ASAT) program, including whether the Chinese spacecraft are benign or time bombs that can someday be used to threaten the space assets on which the U.S. military and economy depend for everything from reconnaissance and dropping bombs to logistics, communications and navigation. The Chinese spacecraft don’t appear to be conducting any particular mission. Rather, “there is a menu of missions that could be performed that we are not yet clear about,” said one source. “These things aren’t being sent up there to be space rocks.” A 50-page report submitted Jan. 19 to Congress cites evidence that China is considering a covert anti-satellite network that could debilitate the United States in wartime. For more than a decade, U.S. officials have warily eyed China’s growth as a space power, particularly its interest in developing anti-satellite systems to counter an overwhelming American superiority in space. Interest peaked after a ground-based missile destroyed an obsolete Chinese weather satellite on Jan. 11. At least one previous test ended in failure, and perhaps two, sources said. Chinese officials issued assurances that the test should not be seen as threatening. The White House publicly confirmed the test as part of a coordinated effort with close allies — Australia, Britain, Canada and Japan among them — to drive home to Beijing that its anti-satellite activities have global repercussions. China’s direct-ascent anti-satellite missile is the latest test to prove counter-space capabilities. Last year, senior U.S. officials said China had attempted to use lasers to blind American satellites. By international convention, a physical attack on a nation’s satellites is considered an act of war. Tracking Spacecraft The United States uses a vast array of orbiting and ground-based systems to track spacecraft and determine their purpose. But two programs are seen as key for the future military space force; the XSS-11 and its complementary effort dubbed Angels, both by Lockheed Martin. Both aim to develop a range of capabilities that the Air Force sees as critical, including highly maneuverable spacecraft that can closely scrutinize what’s in space. XSS-11 flew in 2005 and its public mission was to demonstrate the ability to maneuver on orbit and autonomously rendezvous with orbiting satellites. Critics say that such a maneuverable spacecraft could be used to ram enemy spacecraft or attack them with weapons. The XSS-11 flight, however, brought back information that prompted top U.S. military commanders in January 2006 said they needed a better understanding of what’s in space that could jeopardize U.S. defense and economic interests. They also said they needed a more “operationally responsive” space system and the ability to quickly launch military satellites into space to replace those destroyed in an attack. Assessing China’s Strategy The Jan. 19 report, authored by Pentagon China consultant Michael Pillsbury for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, is based on the writings of more than 20 Chinese military strategists, particularly three colonels at Beijing’s National Defense University between 2001 and 2005. The commission is a congressionally chartered bipartisan panel that advises lawmakers on the strategic U.S.-China security and business relationship. Pillsbury declined to discuss whether China has already launched into orbit elements of a covert space fleet, but stressed that Beijing’s military strategists appear focused on designing a broad set of anti-satellite capabilities. "We have three books and several dozen articles from China that go back 10 years, all of which advocate all types of anti-satellite weapons and they have a consistent theme — they have to be deployed covertly so that in a crisis with America, China can shoot down some satellites as a deterrent message,” Pillsbury said. “These documents advocate multiple approaches to preemptive strikes on satellites from plasma clouds, pellets, directed-energy weapons, orbiting spacecraft and attacking ground stations with special forces,” he said. China, Pillsbury said, is convinced the United States is weaponizing space and Beijing has concluded it must develop a like capability, while simultaneously pressing for an international space weapon ban. “What’s interesting is that no matter how hard you try, you don’t find anything in Chinese writings that argues the opposite, that if you attack U.S. military satellites you will have World War III on your hands, which is why it’s better to initiate a space weapons dialogue and never have a crisis in the first place,” Pillsbury said. A Chinese military official said he could not comment on the matter. But Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, said it is difficult to determine whether the authors quoted by Pillsbury represent fringe or mainstream military thought. “The hard part of dissecting China is that we know so little of who’s who and we can’t necessarily tell as outside analysts which are credible sources,” she said. “It would be dangerous to either underestimate or overestimate Chinese capabilities, but you have to be more aware of overestimation because you don’t want to be in a situation where you panic.” Weapons in Space China in 2002 called on the United States to send a delegation to Geneva to negotiate a space weapons ban. But Washington refused because Beijing rejected verification measures and defined space weapons as including missile defense components. The Outer Space Treaty, which the United States signed in 1967, prohibited nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction in space. But American officials say that while they are committed to the peaceful use of space, they will not be party to an agreement that could hamstring their ability to defend space assets. The U.S. Congress barred the Air Force from building anti-satellite missiles in 1986, after an Air Force F-15 fighter launched a missile that destroyed an orbiting U.S. satellite. The Soviet Union also flexed its anti-satellite capabilities in the 1980s. And now China has joined the club. Asked about the new Chinese anti-satellite threat, Lt. Col. Michael Pierson, a spokesman for the U.S. Air Force Space Command, declined comment. “As a matter of principle, we do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, responses or steps to mitigate,” he said. “In broad terms, the U.S. has an inherent right of self defense and we take all threats to our sovereign space systems seriously. We monitor activities that threaten our right to use space peacefully and take appropriate steps to defend our systems against current and future threats.” Part of the problem, Pierson said, is the sheer number of operational and long-defunct spacecraft orbiting Earth. “In 1957, there was one man-made object in space. Today, we are tracking more than 14,000 man-made objects in space. So, the environment has changed,” Pierson said. And better awareness of what’s exactly in space and why has become a major initiative for the Air Force since the release of a 2000 report by the blue ribbon Space Commission panel that declared that America was vulnerable to a “space Pearl Harbor.” The panel was chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, who would become defense secretary months later and spearhead changes to the military space organization, including subsuming the U.S. Space Command into the U.S. Strategic Command to ensure a single management point for strategic space. Operationally Responsive Space To focus attention on the issue, however, Rumsfeld asked Art Cebrowski to head the Pentagon’s new Office of Force Transformation, which made operationally responsive space a priority. Cebrowski tirelessly argued that the current space infrastructure needed to be re-engineered. First, he argued, it takes too long to build military satellites and the rockets needed to place them into orbit. To ensure a failsafe space network critical to a new brand of networked warfare, he said, the United States must be able to loft satellites quickly into orbit to replace those that could be destroyed by an enemy. Publicly, Cebrowski never named China as a potential foe, but Beijing’s interest in anti-satellite systems was a key factor in his strategic thinking. To that end, Cebrowski’s office launched a series of programs, chief among them the development of small “tactical satellites” or Tac-Sats. The first of a series of such small, innovative and relatively inexpensive spacecraft by the Naval Research Laboratory, TACSAT-1 was to have been launched last year, but has been delayed because teething problems with the all-new, low-cost booster by SpaceX. The satellite and rocket together were planned to cost about $15 million. The Air Force plans to spend about $300 million over the coming five years on a host of programs to face space threats, most of which would be directed to stockpiling launchers like the Minotaur rocket by Orbital Sciences which launched TACSAT-2 in December from Wallops Island, Va. “Pearl Harbor was said for effect and may have been overstated, but we need to get serious about protecting the assets in space, not just the spacecraft, but the nodes and ground stations that contribute to that,” said Lance Lord, a retired Air Force general who until 2006 headed the service’s space command. “To underscore the importance of space situational awareness we reordered our priorities to space surveillance, defensive counter space and last, offensive counter space.” Defense in Depth “Defensive counterspace is key. You have to have defense in depth so that if you lose one spacecraft or a space-borne capability, you can reroute in a self-healing system to avoid single-point vulnerabilities. In terms of the overall system, it’s relatively robust, but not as good as it needs to be.” Space, like the sea, is open to all nations for peaceful and select military applications like reconnaissance, surveillance, communications and weather forecasting, and with that openness comes challenges, Lord said. “You have an inherent right of self defense in the commons of space and if someone is using space against you, you can take a variety of actions to defend yourself,” he said. “That is even more important now that the Chinese have proven that they are technically capable of large projects and want to be a full player in the environment and we have to appreciate how that plays into their doctrine.” Knocking out the U.S. space network, or even big pieces of it, however, would be difficult. For example, the U.S. satellites that monitor the globe for missile launches — the Defense Support Program spacecraft — are in geosynchronous orbit some 24,000 miles high, while the GPS constellation orbits the Earth at a medium altitude of some 12,000 miles. Both are too high and redundant to easily incapacitate, analysts said. More vulnerable are the series of giant Keyhole optical and Lacrosse radar reconnaissance satellites that are in low earth orbit several hundred miles high. “These are big satellites and there aren’t many of them up there are and they aren’t immediately replaceable if lost,” said Barry Watts, the former head of the Pentagon’s Program Analysis & Evaluation office who is now with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. “We’re very focused on Iraq and things like armored Humvees, and they’re important, but you have to keep you eye on the space ball because almost everything we do depends on it.” • E-mail: vmuradian@defensenews.com

BIGGEST BOOK YET ON JFK'S KILLING By CINDY ADAMS New York Post February 2, 2007 -- PROSECUTOR on the Charles Man son murder trial, Vincent Bugliosi, a name from headlines past, was DA in L.A. eight years. He also wrote award-winning crime books like "Helter Skelter," "Till Death Do Us Part" and "Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder." He's at it again. Not prosecuting. Writing. Bugliosi's just written a 1,600-page, 1,500,000-word book. The thing's larger than most coffee tables. Start it in junior high, you'll finish as a senior citizen. The title: "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy." So, why? He's setting the record straight forever and always. The man takes apart every single theory ever perpetrated. He follows the Oswald line, Ruby line, conspiracy line, every line ever even sniffed at. Following each to its nth degree with every twist around every corner behind every tree down every alley inside every crevice, he's five years late delivering the manuscript. This book's like a train hurtling through a tunnel because his ultimate conclusion? The final revelation? There ain't no revelation. It was what it was. It wasn't more than it was. A nut killed the president of the United States, and that's it, period. Bugliosi originally wanted this in separate volumes but that was - pardon the expression - shot down because readers usually buy only one. While no human alive will stick through to the end, it'll sell to every library, archive, historical society, etc. Publisher Random House, price $50, pub. date May 19.

neutral shmootral, when there is a nuclear exchange and/or general warfare even if conventional and oil prices go to $200/ba and food and all things made from oil or transported get expensive and scarce there will be no neutrals.... Doug, I think a horror scenario like you posit and worse are all too possible. Iran has enough firepower and pride to sink many of our aircraftcarriers, down many of our jets, bomb the hell out of Isreal and American installations in Iraq, bomb and disable many oil installations Middle East-wide... ...and all hell could break out in the entire Middle East and spread to most other places in full or limited ways.....no one would be immune after some weeks. I would trust few to act wisely at this perilous time and there would be no time for cooling off perhaps...... ....well they wanted the end times and perhaps they will learn the meaning of what that really means...no rapture...only death, destruction and MUCH suffering worldwide. Report: US plans strike against Iran Staff, THE JERUSALEM POST Jan. 31, 2007 The US was drawing up plans to attack sites where Iran is believed to be enriching uranium before President George W. Bush's candidacy comes to an end, the UK-based Times reported on Wednesday. According to the Times, the Bush government has been inviting defense consultants and Middle East experts to the White House and Pentagon for tactical advice. The Pentagon was reported to be considering ways for the US to destroy nuclear facilities such as Iran's main centrifuge plant at Natanz, despite the fact that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney hoped that diplomatic efforts to restrain Iran would succeed. Senior Pentagon planners recently advised the White House, however, that they did not yet have accurate intelligence as to the whereabouts of all Iran's nuclear enrichment sites. Iran's nuclear program has been generating world-wide tension in recent months, despite claims by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the research is for peaceful means. The UN has threatened to put sanctions on Iran if they do not abandon the program. According to analyst Shmuel Bar of the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center in Israel, an American strike would only trigger the Iranian regime's primordial survival impulse. This would almost certainly result in a full-scale Iranian assault on Kuwaiti and Saudi oil fields, in an attempt to exact a price that would dissuade the West from carrying its assault to the point of regime change, he told The Jerusalem Post. In addition, there is a 'real danger' that the Iranian regime could instigate labor strikes among the Shi'ites of southern Iraq, said Dr. Ian Bremer, president of the risk consultancy firm, Eurasia Group. This could drop oil production from over a million barrels per day, 'even to zero for short periods of time,' he warned. Furthermore, as several analysts pointed out, any strike that was not dramatic enough to bring down the regime and discredit Ahmadinejad outright would trigger a surge of popular support for Ahmadinejad's faction in the regime, giving him a decisive advantage in the complex power struggles that characterize Iranian politics. According to the Times report, despite speculations and divided opinions, the favored US scenario is to attack the Iranian nuclear plant with a small number of ground attack aircraft flying out of the British dependency of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The British would however have to approve the use of the American base there for an attack and would be asked to play a supporting role by providing air-to-air re-fuelling or sending out surveillance aircraft, ships and submarines. The British Foreign Office has insisted that a diplomatic solution is still possible.

Could the U.S. be brought to its knees overnight? Well, maybe not overnight but perhaps in a matter of weeks? I have never considered myself attracted to a “survival” mode of living, that is preparing for a disaster by stockpiling food and supplies and whatever it takes to survive a local or national calamity.....until now. However, for the first time in memory I sense an unease among the American population that an international event of disastrous proportions for the whole planet may be just around the corner. While the possibility of such an event has been building up steam for the past 50 years, it has drastically accelerated under the present administration of President George W. Bush whose reckless foreign policy and war initiatives have kept the world living on the edge for the past six years. His invasion of Iraq, sold by a cascade of lies, has opened up a Pandora’s Box that may not be closed within the lifetimes of those living today. One military historian has said that Bush’s Iraq initiative was the greatest strategic mistake in 2000 years. An attack in the near future upon Iran by the U.S., carried out with the Israelis and the Saudis acting in unison, may be the final spark that ignites a worldwide conflagration, one threatening the very survival of Western Civilization. Two recent events have brought home the fragility of society and how easily it might be for life in the United States to be ground to a halt within a short time span with the possibility of utter chaos ensuing. The first event was a major earthquake in the U.S. state of Hawaii, which resulted in a shutdown of electrical current for hours. Nothing that functioned by electricity worked. Many citizens found that they only had a few dollars in their pocket with no access to a working ATM. The lack of electricity brought modern society in Hawaii to a virtual standstill. Had the shutdown lasted much longer panic might have ensued. The second event was the Chinese military’s shooting down of a Chinese satellite high above the earth by means of a single missile. This is being interpreted as showing that all American satellites are equally vulnerable to such an attack. The destruction of even a small number of American satellites that perform crucial functions could cripple the U.S. economy overnight. There can be no doubt but that “sleeper” terrorist cells exist within the continental U.S., which will become activated if America and its allies in the Mid East overreach themselves by expanding the war beyond Iraq. These cells have well-thought out plans that might bring the U.S. to its knees within a short time span by sabotaging electrical facilities and major modes of transportation. Even travel by car would become impossible as there would be no way to obtain fuel as the pumps of gas stations themselves operate using electricity. So I have decided to take my own steps toward preparing for personal survival for at least a six-weeks period in the event catastrophe occurs. The Internet has a number of web sites that offer practical advice about doing so. My own plans do not include relocation but merely stockpiling of essentials. Does anyone else in the forum share the same feeling of a possible impending calamity as do I?

John is on the right track in banning forum members who continually show abusive behavior. Ashton Gray's arrival in the Watergate section, with his instanteous personal attacks on other members, had the effect of ending that particular forum as a source of new information and valuable research concerning this history-changing scandal. If abusive behavior is the standard by which a member should be banned, Ashton Gray easy meets and exceeds this criterion.

Jan. 30, 2007 17:39 US strike group transits Suez Canal By ASSOCIATED PRESS ISMAILIYA, Egypt A US Navy strike group led by the assault ship USS Bataan steamed through the Suez Canal on Tuesday on its way to join the buildup of American forces in the Middle East. The Bataan, which entered Egyptian waters Monday, spent the night at the Mediterranean harbor of Port Said and was expected to leave the Egyptian part of the Red Sea later Tuesday, a Suez Canal official said, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to the press. The seven-vessel Bataan group includes 2,200 US Marines and sailors, helicopters and Harrier fighter jets, the Navy said in Bahrain. The US Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain, will be overseeing around 50 warships in the Mideast after the arrival of the Bataan and an American aircraft carrier group in February, said US Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Brown. The Fifth Fleet normally commands a fleet of about 45 ships, about a third of them from US-allied navies, Brown said. The Navy is in the midst of a regional buildup, with the group of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis on its way as well as 21,500 US soldiers being sent to Iraq. The carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower is already in the region. The United States has not had two carriers in the Mideast since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Bataan will join a second amphibious assault ship, the USS Boxer, which was on port visit in Dubai on Tuesday. Brown said the Pentagon recently extended the tour of duty of the Boxer's US Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is in Iraq. The Bataan is on a routine six-month deployment to the region to conduct "maritime security operations" which includes boarding and searching ships suspected of carrying terrorists or nuclear components to Iran, the Navy said.

SPIEGEL ONLINE - January 29, 2007 http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiege...,462782,00.html SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH CIA'S FORMER EUROPE DIRECTOR "We Probably Gave Powell the Wrong Speech" The former chief of the CIA's Europe division, Tyler Drumheller, discusses the United States foreign intelligence service's cooperation with Germany, the covert kidnapping of suspected terrorists and a Bush adminstration that ignored CIA advice and used whatever information it could find to justify an invasion of Iraq. The US attack on Baghdad (2003): "No President on my watch has had a spotless record when it comes to the CIA." SPIEGEL: Mr. Drumheller, do you still dare to travel to Europe? Drumheller: Yes, absolutely. I was a great friend of the Europeans. I grew up in Wiesbaden. I love Germany very much. SPIEGEL: Arrest warrants have been issued in Europe for a number of your former colleagues. They are suspected of involvement in the illegal kidnappings of suspected terrorists as part of the so-called "renditions" program. Doesn't this worry you? Drumheller: No. I'm not worried, but I am not allowed to discuss the issue. SPIEGEL: One of the cases is the now famous kidnapping of Khalid el-Masri, a German-Lebanese who was taken into custody at the end of 2003 in Macedonia and later flown to Afghanistan. How could the CIA allow an innocent person to be arrested? Drumheller: I'm not allowed by the agency to comment on any of those cases or the so-called "secret prisons." I would love to, but I can't. We have a life-long secrecy agreement and they are very, very strict about what you can say. SPIEGEL: The renditions program saw the kidnapping of suspected Islamist extremists to third countries. Were you involved in the program? Drumheller: I would be lying if I said no. I have very complicated feelings about the whole issue. I do see the purpose of renditions, if they are carried out properly. Guys sitting around talking about carrying out attacks as they smoke their pipes in the comfort of a European capital tend to get put off the idea if they learn that a like-minded individual has been plucked out of safety and sent elsewhere to pay for his crimes. SPIEGEL: We disagree. At the very least, you need to be certain that the targets of those renditions aren't innocent people. Drumheller: It was Vice President Dick Cheney who talked about the "dark side" we have to turn on. When he spoke those words, he was articulating a policy that amounted to "go out and get them." His remarks were evidence of the underlying approach of the administration, which was basically to turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurences. SPIEGEL: So there was no clear guidance of what is allowed in the so called "war on terrorism"? Martin H. SimonTyler Drumheller, 54, had a 25- year career working for the CIA. In 2001, he was promoted to become the American intelligence agency's chief of European operations. The spectacular kidnappings of suspected al- Qaida terrorists -- including the German- Syrian Mohammed Haydar Zammar and the German- Syrian Khaled el- Masri -- by CIA commandos happened under his watch. Drumheller, who retired in 2005, recently published his memoir, "On the Brink," in the United States. Drumheller: Every responsible chief in the CIA knows that the more covert the action, the greater the need for a clear policy and a defined target. I once had to brief Condoleezza Rice on a rendition operation, and her chief concern was not whether it was the right thing to do, but what the president would think about it. I would have expected a big meeting, a debate about whether to proceed with the plan, a couple of hours of consideration of the pros and cons. We should have been talking about the value of the target, whether the threat he presented warranted such a potentially controversial intervention. This is no way to run a covert policy. If the White House wants to take extraordinary measures to win, it can't just let things go through without any discussion about their value and morality. SPIEGEL: Perhaps the White House wanted to gloss over its own responsibility. Drumheller: Let me give you a general thought: From the perspective of the White House, it was smart to blur the lines about what was acceptable and what was not in the war on terrorism. It meant that whenever someone was overzealous in some dark interrogation cell, President (George W.) Bush and his entourage could blame someone else. The rendition teams are drawn from paramilitary officers who are brave and colorful. They are the men who went into Baghdad before the bombs and into Afghanistan before the army. If they didn't do paramilitary actions for a living, they would probably be robbing banks. Perhaps the Bush Administration deliberately created a gray area on renditions. SPIEGEL: Investigations in the European Parliament and the German parliament, the Bundestag, are trying to ascertain the extent to which European governments cooperated with the CIA after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. How close is the relationship? Drumheller: On terrorist issues very closely -- we did some very good things with the Europeans. Two weeks after Sept. 11, August Hanning (the head of the German foreign intelligence service, the BND) came with a delegation to discuss how we can make cooperation better. Elements of the Bush administration developed the view that European personal privacy laws were somehow to blame, that the Europeans are too slow. We can be very frustrating to work with. I always said, 'Stop preaching to them.' The Europeans have been dealing with terrorism for years, we can learn from their successes and failures. Its not a good spy story, but it's actually how you do this. SPIEGEL: How important is Europe to the CIA? Drumheller: The only way we will ever be able to protect ourselves properly is if we can get a handle on the threat in Europe, since that is the continent where fanatics can best learn their most crucial lesson: How to disappear in a Western crowd. Europe has become the first line of defense for the United States. It has become a training ground for terrorists, especially since the war in Iraq has heralded an underground railroad for militants to go and fight there. It is being used for young fanatics in Europe to be smuggled into Iraq to fight Americans and, assuming they survive, to return home, where they present a more potent threat than they did before they left. Since the odds against penetrating the top of al-Qaida are phenomenally high, we must pursue the foot soldiers. SPIEGEL: But given the uproar in Germany and all over Europe, it looks highly unlikely that they will cooperate fully with the CIA. Drumheller: The guys who attacked the World Trade Center didn't fly from Kabul to New York. They came from Hamburg. So the value in befriending the local intelligence services in Europe instead of alienating them is clear: We need to ensure that they are telling us everything they know. SPIEGEL: But it was your agency that was coming up with all the wrong information concerning Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. To what degree is the intelligence community responsible for the disaster? Drumheller: The agency is not blameless and no president on my watch has had a spotless record when it comes to the CIA. But never before have I seen the manipulation of intelligence that has played out since Bush took office. As chief of Europe I had a front-row seat from which to observe the unprecedented drive for intelligence justifying the Iraq war. SPIEGEL: One of the crucial bits of information the Bush administration used to justify the invasion was the supposed existence of mobile biological weapons laboratories. That came from a German BND source who was given the code- name "Curveball." An offical investigation in the United States concluded that of all of the false statements that were made, this was the most damaging of all. Drumheller: I think it is, it was a centerpiece. Curveball was an Iraqi who claimed to be an engineer working on the biological weapons program. When he became an asylum-seeker in Germany, the BND questioned him and produced a large number of reports that were passed here through the Defense Intelligence Agency. Curveball was a sort of clever fellow who carried on about his story and kept everybody pretty well convinced for a long time. SPIEGEL: There are more than a few critics in Washington who claim that the Germans, because of Curveball, bear a large part of the repsonsibility for the intelligence mess. Drumheller: There was no effort by the Germans to influence anybody from the beginning. Very senior officials in the BND expressed their doubts, that there may be problems with this guy. They were very professional. I know that there are people at the CIA who think the Germans could have set stronger caveats. But nobody says: "Here's a great intel report, but we don't believe it." There were also questions inside the CIA's analytical section, but as it went forward, this information was seized without caveats. The administration wanted to make the case for war with Iraq. They needed a tangible thing, they needed the German stuff. They couldn't go to war based just on the fact that they wanted to change the Middle East. They needed to have something threatening to which they were reacting. SPIEGEL: The German government was convinced that "Curveball" would not be used in the now famous presentation that then US Secretary of State Colin Powell gave in 2003 before the United Nations Security Council. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell as he presented "evidence" of weapon of mass destruction in Iraq to the United Nations general assembly: "We probably gave Powell the wrong speech." Drumheller: I had assured my German friends that it wouldn't be in the speech. I really thought that I had put it to bed. I had warned the CIA deputy John McLaughlin that this case could be fabricated. The night before the speech, then CIA director George Tenet called me at home. I said: "Hey Boss, be careful with that German report. It's supposed to be taken out. There are a lot of problems with that." He said: "Yeah, yeah. Right. Dont worry about that." SPIEGEL: But it turned out to be the centerpiece in Powell's presentation -- and nobody had told him about the doubts. Drumheller: I turned on the TV in my office, and there it was. So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it. SPIEGEL: So the White House just ignored the fact that the whole story might have been untrue? Drumheller: The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy. Right before the war, I said to a very senior CIA officer: "You guys must have something else," because you always think it's the CIA. "There is some secret thing I don`t know." He said: "No. But when we get to Baghdad, we are going to find warehouses full of stuff. Nobody is going to remember all of this." SPIEGEL: After the war, the CIA was finally able to talk to "Curveball" -- something the BND had never allowed before. What was the result? Drumheller: In March 2004, a fluent German-speaking officer, one of my best guys, who had a scientific background went to Germany and worked for about two weeks. Finally, at the end of it, Curveball just sort of sat back and said: "I don't have anything more to say." But he never admitted. People here always ask, was he polygraphed? Well, lie detector tests aren't used very much in Germany. SPIEGEL: Do you think it would have make a difference if the Germans had allowed you to question Curveball earlier? Drumheller: If they had allowed us to question him the way we did in March of 2004, it would have. Maybe the whole story would have turned out in a different way. SPIEGEL: In your book, you mention a very high-ranking source who told the CIA before the war that Iraq had no large active WMD program. It has been reported that the source was Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, Naji Sabri. Drumheller: I'm not allowed to say who that was. In the beginning, the administration was very excited that we had a high-level penetration, and the president was informed. I don't think anybody else had a source in Saddam's cabinet. He told us that Iraq had no biological weapons, just the research. Everything else had been destroyed after the first Gulf War. But after a while we didn't get any questions back. Finally the administration came and said that they were really not interested in what he had to say. They were interested in getting him to defect. In the end we did get permission to get back to the source, and that came from Tenet. I think without checking with the White House, he just said: "Okay. Go ahead and see what you can do." SPIEGEL: So what happened? Drumheller: There were a lot of ironies throughout this whole story. We went on a sort of worldwide chase after this fellow, and in the end, he was in one place, and our officer was in another country asking for permission to travel. I called up people who were controlling operations, and they said: "Don't worry about it. It's too late now. The war is on. The next time you see this guy, it will be at a war crimes tribunal." SPIEGEL: Should you have pressed harder? Drumheller: We made mistakes. And it may suit the White House to have people believe in a black and white version of reality -- that it could have avoided the Iraq war if the CIA had only given it a true picture of Saddam's armaments. But the truth is that the White House believed what it wanted to believe. I have done very little in my life except go to school and work for the CIA. Intellectually I think I did everything I could. Emotionally you always think you should have something more. Interview conducted by Georg Mascolo and Holger Stark. Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links: Letter from Berlin: Germany's Secret Aid for America's War (01/17/2006) http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,395676,00.html

January 28, 2007 Word for Word | Spilt Ink You Can Teach a Spy a Novelist’s Tricks By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA The New York Times E. Howard Hunt Jr., who died last week at 88, is best remembered as the man who helped plan and bungle the 1972 Watergate break-in. An ex-C.I.A. officer with a background in dirty tricks, sabotage and other skulduggery, Mr. Hunt was particularly qualified to be a “security consultant” for President Richard Nixon. In 1954, he helped overthrow the government of Guatemala, and he was later involved in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He was also the author of more than 80 espionage and detective novels, many written under pseudonyms. Did his life imitate his art, or vice versa? It’s not always easy to tell. Mr. Hunt was a maverick who attended the Naval Academy in Annapolis. So is the deputy director of Central Intelligence in “Dragon Teeth” (1997): Vice Admiral USN (Ret.) Logan “Buck” Doremus had acquired his nickname as a famed Naval Academy fullback whose ball-carrying trademark was bucking an opponent’s defensive line. And within the Agency it was often remarked that he really should have worn a helmet while playing. In 1971, Mr. Hunt tried to discredit Dr. Daniel J. Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, by burglarizing Dr. Ellsberg’s office. In “On Hazardous Duty” (1965), Mr. Hunt had already explained the art of stealing secrets: Mentally he saw them opening the door, masking the windows with black plastic and tape, setting the suction mike near the safe dial, and feeding its output into the Base computer as Harry went through dial-rotation procedures. With the safe open they would Polaroid-photograph the interior to guide them in replacing the contents. Then the laborious work of photographing page after page of documents by the illumination of the argon flashlight, methodically repositioning documents by the Polaroid picture, locking the safe, undraping the windows, and moving out. After a highly checkered career, Mr. Hunt left the C.I.A. in 1970. In “The Berlin Ending” (1973), the fictional narrator, Neal Thorpe, describes leaving the agency: I could have had a good career there, too, he reflected, but I felt things closing in, becoming too circumscribed, too stratified and bureaucratic. I wanted more freedom, so I got out. ... Maybe my problem isn’t in making decisions but in making too many of them. Is my dissatisfaction valid or is it only restlessness — like the typist who quits her job and reapplies for it two weeks later? I’d hate to think that, but what’s the answer? Mr. Hunt was fascinated by spy hardware and technology, as he demonstrates in “Murder in State” (1990): “Last year we were waiting for a defector to come out of the UN building. A man jabbed an umbrella tip in his butt and our guy died on the UN steps. We saw the poison injected, but whatever it was, the forensics couldn’t detect it. Verdict: heart attack. The moral,” he said with a grim smile, “is to avoid umbrellas.” Gumming up the opposition’s works was Mr. Hunt’s specialty, as he relates in “Body Count” (1992): He leaned over the speedboat transom and unscrewed the gas tank cap, emptied the pouch of mothballs into the tank, and replaced the top. There was enough gasoline in the fuel lines to back the boat into open water, after which the naphthalene-gasoline mix would foul the carburetor and stop the engine. It was the first sabotage trick he had ever learned. President Nixon’s downfall came after revelations of secret tape recordings and demands by Mr. Hunt and others for “hush money.” In “Angel Eyes” (1961), cash and recordings also intersect in a case of political blackmail: I said, “There’s something for sale, Zellerhaus. Something new on the market. Yesterday it was offered for the first time. The asking price is $10,000.” “Wha ... what is it?” he burbled. “You’re the wizard with the built-in radar,” I sneered. “Figure it out. It’s what got Peachy Bolac killed. It’s the recording she made of you and Quinby that afternoon not so long ago. Made public it’s enough to put you and Quinby on the rock pile until they run out of rocks. The killer’s got it, Zellerhaus. He wants ten thousand skins.” During Watergate, there were reports that Mr. Hunt kept a gun in his White House office. His alter ego, Jack Novak, packs heat in “Sonora” (2000): At a gun shop where I was well and favorably known, I bought four boxes of .45 ACP ball ammo for the Tommy gun and a box of Black Talon .38s for my H& K pistol. From a large selection of rifles I chose a .308 caliber FAL with flash suppressor and 20-round magazine, and had it fitted with an 8-power Leupold scope while I waited. Like Mr. Hunt, David Morgan, the hero of “The Hargrave Deception” (1980), is an ex-intelligence agent involved in an illegal covert operation. And like Mr. Hunt, he testifies before a Senate committee: “A little while ago I was asked to comment on a question of morality,” he said. “Your inquiry raises deep moral issues, Senator — at least for me — since I gave my word as a representative of the United States that their participation in an activity in which this government was a coequal conspirator would never be made public by me. These men,” he went on as a wave of sound swept up around him, “were brave men, patriotic in their own view and responsive to what they felt to be the call of a higher moral duty.”

You're joking right???? Hunt "told the truth much of the time"? I'd ask you to name just one time...but I know where that would lead. A bit naive is an understatement. You're certainly entitled to your opinion, however, I do not think it's shared on this forum. Dawn I can name one time that Howard Hunt told the truth. As The New York Times notes in its obituary today, Hunt served as an intelligence officer in China during World War II. Soon after I met Hunt in 1970, he told me of his wartime service. He and a few other intelligence officers were able to infiltrate behind the Japanese lines. One of the officers was captured. Hunt and the others, vastly outnumbered, had to remain hidden while they listened in agony to the screams of their fellow officer as the Japanese flayed his skin while he was alive. When Hunt finished recounting this horrific story to me, there was tears in his eyes. His sorrow and frustration at what happened still burned within him. RIP, Howard Hunt.

Was he murdered? He had agreed to give interviews to the media in order to promote his book that was due out in March. I can imagine that the CIA was pleased to hear of his death. Can't ever rule out murder with this mob. And he died on a very congested news day--what with the scheduled STOU and more--where his obit would get buried along with his rancid putrid carcass. Good riddance ya bastard. I posted the following on July 17, 2006 in the Forum's discussion of the Watergate topic. I thought it pertinent to repost here to help round out Hunt's role in that scandal: On December 6, 1996, G. Gordon Liddy gave a sworn deposition in Washington, D.C. in which he described the origins of the Watergate scandal. The deposition was given in the following styled lawsuit: In the United States District Court for the District of Columbia Maureen K. Dean and John W. Dean, Plaintiffs v. No. 92-1807 St. Martin’s Press, Inc., (HHG)(AK) Len Colodny, Robert Gettlin, G. Gordon Liddy, and Phillip Mackin Bailley, Defendants The 148 page deposition presents an encompassing summary from the viewpoint of Mr. Liddy. There are many highlights in the deposition. Attention is called especially to: Pages 86 to 96: Planning and carrying out the first break-in on May 26, 27 and 28, 1972 Page 98: Planning the June 17, 1972 break-in upon instructions from Jeb Magruder. These are Liddy’s words: And that’s what he [Magruder] wanted. So that when I went back to Hunt and Hunt was upset. He said, “My God,” he said, “Do you know how much trouble it took us to get in there in the first place? All those three entries,” and this, that and the other thing, “And now this? With all the camera and all this film and all this exposure, I mean, the longer you are in there the more vulnerable you are.” I said, “Howard, that’s what wanted, so we have to do it.” So we set up to do that. Page 103: Describing the June 17, 1972 break-in Page 105: Liddy’s words again: But in any event, we held a council of war, so to speak. And the Cubans, they said, “Look, whatever the decision is, we are up to it.” Question: Where was this council of war occurring? Answer: This was in that – the room that Mr. Hunt and I had been in, the one with all the equipment that Mr. McCord had. And McCord, he was for doing it. Hunt was very, very loathe at first, but at any rate the decision was left up to me, because I was the operational chief. And I said, “Okay, we will go again.” And they went again. And the – they got in. The two links below both lead to the 148 page transcript of the Liddy deposition. If one link does not work, try the other. If you have trouble making a link work, copy it and place it in your browser. http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:x3l4K...clnk&cd=164 http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:x3l4K...clnk&cd=165 --------------------------------------- Also, below is The New York Time's obituary of today on Hunt's passing: January 24, 2007 E. Howard Hunt, Agent Who Organized Botched Watergate Break-In, Dies at 88 By TIM WEINER http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/obituari...amp;oref=slogin E. Howard Hunt, a cold warrior for the Central Intelligence Agency who left the spy service in disillusionment, joined the Nixon White House as a secret agent and bungled the break-in at the Watergate that brought the president down in disgrace, died Tuesday in Miami. He was 88. His death, at North Shore Medical Center, was caused by pneumonia, said his wife, Laura. “This fellow Hunt,” President Richard M. Nixon muttered a few days after the June 1972 break-in, “he knows too damn much.” That was Howard Hunt’s burden: he was entrusted with too many secret missions. His career at the C.I.A. was destroyed by the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and his time as Nixon’s master of dirty tricks ended with his arrest in the Watergate case. He served 33 months in prison for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping and emerged a broken man. “I am crushed by the failure of my government to protect me and my family as in the past it has always done for its clandestine agents,” Mr. Hunt told the Senate committee investigating the Watergate affair in 1973, when he faced a provisional prison sentence of 35 years. “I cannot escape feeling that the country I have served for my entire life and which directed me to carry out the Watergate entry is punishing me for doing the very things it trained and directed me to do.” He was a high-spirited 30-year-old novelist who aspired to wealth and power when he joined the C.I.A. in 1949. He set out to live the life he had imagined for himself, a glamorous career as a spy. But Mr. Hunt was never much of a spy. He did not conduct classic espionage operations in order to gather information. His field was political warfare: dirty tricks, sabotage and propaganda. When he left the C.I.A. in 1970 after a decidedly checkered career, he had become a world-weary cynic. Trading on the thin veneer of a reputation in the clandestine service, he won a job as a $100-a-day “security consultant” at the Nixon White House in 1971. In that role, he conducted break-ins and burglaries in the name of national security. He drew no distinction between orchestrating a black-bag job at a foreign embassy in Mexico City and wiretapping the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex. He recognized no lawful limit on presidential power, convinced that “when the president does it,” as Nixon once said, “that means it is not illegal.” Mr. Hunt and the nation found out otherwise. Mr. Hunt was intelligent, erudite, suave and loyal to his friends. But the record shows that he mishandled many of the tasks he received from the C.I.A. and the White House. He was “totally self-absorbed, totally amoral and a danger to himself and anybody around him,” Samuel F. Hart, a retired United States ambassador who first met him in Uruguay in the 1950s, said in a State Department oral history. “As far as I could tell, Howard went from one disaster to another,” Mr. Hart said, “until he hit Watergate.” Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was born in Hamburg, N.Y., on Oct. 9, 1918, the son of a lawyer and a classically trained pianist who played church organ. He graduated from Brown University in June 1940 and entered the United States Naval Academy as a midshipman in February 1941. He worked as a wartime intelligence officer in China, a postwar spokesman for the Marshall Plan in Paris and a screenwriter in Hollywood. Warner Brothers had just bought his fourth novel, “Bimini Run,” a thriller set in the Caribbean, when he joined the fledgling C.I.A. in April 1949. Mr. Hunt was immediately assigned to train C.I.A. recruits in political and psychological warfare, fields in which he was a rank amateur, like most of his colleagues. He moved to Mexico City, where he became chief of station in 1950. He brought along another rookie C.I.A. officer, William F. Buckley Jr., later a prominent conservative author and publisher, who became godfather and guardian to the four children of Mr. Hunt and his wife, the former Dorothy L. Wetzel. In 1954, Mr. Hunt helped plan the covert operation that overthrew the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. “What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign,” Mr. Hunt said in a CNN documentary on the cold war, “to terrify Arbenz particularly, to terrify his troops.” Though the operation succeeded, it ushered in 40 years of military repression in Guatemala. By the time of the coup, Mr. Hunt had been removed from responsibility. He moved on to uneventful stints in Japan and Uruguay. Not until 1960 was Mr. Hunt involved in an operation that changed history. The C.I.A. had received orders from both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his successor, President John F. Kennedy, to alter or abolish the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Hunt’s assignment was to create a provisional Cuban government that would be ready to take power once the C.I.A.’s cadre of Cuban shock troops invaded the island. He fared no better than the paramilitary planners who had vowed to defeat Mr. Castro’s 60,000-man army with a 1,500-strong brigade. The careers of the American intelligence officers who planned and executed the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961 were damaged or destroyed, as was the C.I.A.’s reputation for derring-do. Mr. Hunt spent most of the 1960s carrying out desultory propaganda tasks at the agency, among them running news services and subsidizing books that fell stillborn from the press. He funneled his talent into writing paperback spy novels. His works followed a formula of sex and intrigue but offered flashes of insight. “We become lawless in a struggle for the rule of law — semi-outlaws who risk their lives to put down the savagery of others,” says the author’s alter ego, Peter Ward, in the novel “Hazardous Duty.” He retired from the C.I.A. in 1970 and secured a job with an agency-connected public relations firm in Washington. Then, a year later, came a call from the White House. A fellow Brown alumnus, Charles W. Colson, special counsel to President Nixon, hired Mr. Hunt to carry out acts of political warfare. Within weeks, Mr. Hunt was in charge of a subterranean department of dirty tricks. He went back to C.I.A. headquarters, requesting false identification, a red wig, a voice-altering device and a tiny camera. He then burglarized the Beverly Hills office of a psychiatrist treating Dr. Daniel J. Ellsberg, a former national-security aide who had leaked a copy of the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War, to The New York Times. Mr. Hunt was looking for information to discredit Mr. Ellsberg. When the break-in became public knowledge two years later, the federal case against Mr. Ellsberg on charges of leaking classified information was dismissed. Mr. Hunt, in league with another recently retired C.I.A. officer and four Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans, then led a break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex to bug the telephone lines. The job was botched, and the team went in again to remove the taps. The burglars were arrested on the night of June 17, 1972. One had Mr. Hunt’s name and a White House telephone number in his address book, a classic failure of espionage tradecraft that proved the first thread of the web that ensnarled the president. The final blow that drove Nixon from office was one of the secret White House recordings he made — the “smoking gun” tape — in which he vowed to order the C.I.A. to shut down the federal investigation of the Watergate break-in on spurious national-security grounds. By the time Nixon resigned in August 1974, Mr. Hunt was a federal prisoner. His life was in ruins: his wife had been killed in a plane crash in 1972, his legal fees approached $1 million, he had suffered a stroke, and whatever illusions he once had that his government would protect him were shattered. Standing before the judge who imprisoned him, he said he was “alone, nearly friendless, ridiculed, disgraced, destroyed as a man.” Freed from prison just before his 60th birthday, Mr. Hunt moved to Miami, where he met and married his second wife, Laura, a schoolteacher, and started a second family. Besides his wife, he is survived by the two daughters and two sons from his first marriage: Lisa Hunt of Las Vegas, Kevan Hunt Spence of Pioneer, Calif., Howard St. John Hunt of Eureka, Calif., and David Hunt of Los Angeles; two children from his second marriage, Austin and Hollis, both of Miami; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Mr. Hunt’s last book, “American Spy: My Secret History in the C.I.A., Watergate and Beyond,” written with Greg Aunapu, is to be published on March 16 with a foreword by his old friend William F. Buckley Jr. Late in life, he said he had no regrets, beyond the Bay of Pigs.

January 24, 2007 E. Howard Hunt, Agent Who Organized Botched Watergate Break-In, Dies at 88 By TIM WEINER The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/obituari...amp;oref=slogin E. Howard Hunt, a cold warrior for the Central Intelligence Agency who left the spy service in disillusionment, joined the Nixon White House as a secret agent and bungled the break-in at the Watergate that brought the president down in disgrace, died Tuesday in Miami. He was 88. His death, at North Shore Medical Center, was caused by pneumonia, said his wife, Laura. “This fellow Hunt,” President Richard M. Nixon muttered a few days after the June 1972 break-in, “he knows too damn much.” That was Howard Hunt’s burden: he was entrusted with too many secret missions. His career at the C.I.A. was destroyed by the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and his time as Nixon’s master of dirty tricks ended with his arrest in the Watergate case. He served 33 months in prison for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping and emerged a broken man. “I am crushed by the failure of my government to protect me and my family as in the past it has always done for its clandestine agents,” Mr. Hunt told the Senate committee investigating the Watergate affair in 1973, when he faced a provisional prison sentence of 35 years. “I cannot escape feeling that the country I have served for my entire life and which directed me to carry out the Watergate entry is punishing me for doing the very things it trained and directed me to do.” He was a high-spirited 30-year-old novelist who aspired to wealth and power when he joined the C.I.A. in 1949. He set out to live the life he had imagined for himself, a glamorous career as a spy. But Mr. Hunt was never much of a spy. He did not conduct classic espionage operations in order to gather information. His field was political warfare: dirty tricks, sabotage and propaganda. When he left the C.I.A. in 1970 after a decidedly checkered career, he had become a world-weary cynic. Trading on the thin veneer of a reputation in the clandestine service, he won a job as a $100-a-day “security consultant” at the Nixon White House in 1971. In that role, he conducted break-ins and burglaries in the name of national security. He drew no distinction between orchestrating a black-bag job at a foreign embassy in Mexico City and wiretapping the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex. He recognized no lawful limit on presidential power, convinced that “when the president does it,” as Nixon once said, “that means it is not illegal.” Mr. Hunt and the nation found out otherwise. Mr. Hunt was intelligent, erudite, suave and loyal to his friends. But the record shows that he mishandled many of the tasks he received from the C.I.A. and the White House. He was “totally self-absorbed, totally amoral and a danger to himself and anybody around him,” Samuel F. Hart, a retired United States ambassador who first met him in Uruguay in the 1950s, said in a State Department oral history. “As far as I could tell, Howard went from one disaster to another,” Mr. Hart said, “until he hit Watergate.” Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was born in Hamburg, N.Y., on Oct. 9, 1918, the son of a lawyer and a classically trained pianist who played church organ. He graduated from Brown University in June 1940 and entered the United States Naval Academy as a midshipman in February 1941. He worked as a wartime intelligence officer in China, a postwar spokesman for the Marshall Plan in Paris and a screenwriter in Hollywood. Warner Brothers had just bought his fourth novel, “Bimini Run,” a thriller set in the Caribbean, when he joined the fledgling C.I.A. in April 1949. Mr. Hunt was immediately assigned to train C.I.A. recruits in political and psychological warfare, fields in which he was a rank amateur, like most of his colleagues. He moved to Mexico City, where he became chief of station in 1950. He brought along another rookie C.I.A. officer, William F. Buckley Jr., later a prominent conservative author and publisher, who became godfather and guardian to the four children of Mr. Hunt and his wife, the former Dorothy L. Wetzel. In 1954, Mr. Hunt helped plan the covert operation that overthrew the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. “What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign,” Mr. Hunt said in a CNN documentary on the cold war, “to terrify Arbenz particularly, to terrify his troops.” Though the operation succeeded, it ushered in 40 years of military repression in Guatemala. By the time of the coup, Mr. Hunt had been removed from responsibility. He moved on to uneventful stints in Japan and Uruguay. Not until 1960 was Mr. Hunt involved in an operation that changed history. The C.I.A. had received orders from both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his successor, President John F. Kennedy, to alter or abolish the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Hunt’s assignment was to create a provisional Cuban government that would be ready to take power once the C.I.A.’s cadre of Cuban shock troops invaded the island. He fared no better than the paramilitary planners who had vowed to defeat Mr. Castro’s 60,000-man army with a 1,500-strong brigade. The careers of the American intelligence officers who planned and executed the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961 were damaged or destroyed, as was the C.I.A.’s reputation for derring-do. Mr. Hunt spent most of the 1960s carrying out desultory propaganda tasks at the agency, among them running news services and subsidizing books that fell stillborn from the press. He funneled his talent into writing paperback spy novels. His works followed a formula of sex and intrigue but offered flashes of insight. “We become lawless in a struggle for the rule of law — semi-outlaws who risk their lives to put down the savagery of others,” says the author’s alter ego, Peter Ward, in the novel “Hazardous Duty.” He retired from the C.I.A. in 1970 and secured a job with an agency-connected public relations firm in Washington. Then, a year later, came a call from the White House. A fellow Brown alumnus, Charles W. Colson, special counsel to President Nixon, hired Mr. Hunt to carry out acts of political warfare. Within weeks, Mr. Hunt was in charge of a subterranean department of dirty tricks. He went back to C.I.A. headquarters, requesting false identification, a red wig, a voice-altering device and a tiny camera. He then burglarized the Beverly Hills office of a psychiatrist treating Dr. Daniel J. Ellsberg, a former national-security aide who had leaked a copy of the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War, to The New York Times. Mr. Hunt was looking for information to discredit Mr. Ellsberg. When the break-in became public knowledge two years later, the federal case against Mr. Ellsberg on charges of leaking classified information was dismissed. Mr. Hunt, in league with another recently retired C.I.A. officer and four Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans, then led a break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex to bug the telephone lines. The job was botched, and the team went in again to remove the taps. The burglars were arrested on the night of June 17, 1972. One had Mr. Hunt’s name and a White House telephone number in his address book, a classic failure of espionage tradecraft that proved the first thread of the web that ensnarled the president. The final blow that drove Nixon from office was one of the secret White House recordings he made — the “smoking gun” tape — in which he vowed to order the C.I.A. to shut down the federal investigation of the Watergate break-in on spurious national-security grounds. By the time Nixon resigned in August 1974, Mr. Hunt was a federal prisoner. His life was in ruins: his wife had been killed in a plane crash in 1972, his legal fees approached $1 million, he had suffered a stroke, and whatever illusions he once had that his government would protect him were shattered. Standing before the judge who imprisoned him, he said he was “alone, nearly friendless, ridiculed, disgraced, destroyed as a man.” Freed from prison just before his 60th birthday, Mr. Hunt moved to Miami, where he met and married his second wife, Laura, a schoolteacher, and started a second family. Besides his wife, he is survived by the two daughters and two sons from his first marriage: Lisa Hunt of Las Vegas, Kevan Hunt Spence of Pioneer, Calif., Howard St. John Hunt of Eureka, Calif., and David Hunt of Los Angeles; two children from his second marriage, Austin and Hollis, both of Miami; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Mr. Hunt’s last book, “American Spy: My Secret History in the C.I.A., Watergate and Beyond,” written with Greg Aunapu, is to be published on March 16 with a foreword by his old friend William F. Buckley Jr. Late in life, he said he had no regrets, beyond the Bay of Pigs. ------------------------ Watergate Figure E. Howard Hunt Dies Watergate Figure E. Howard Hunt Dies at 88; Organized Break-In That Led to Scandal By TIM REYNOLDS The Associated Press January 23, 2007 MIAMI - E. Howard Hunt, who helped organize the Watergate break-in, leading to the greatest scandal in American political history and the downfall of Richard Nixon's presidency, died Tuesday. He was 88. Hunt died at a Miami hospital after a lengthy bout with pneumonia, according to his son Austin Hunt. The elder Hunt was many things: World War II soldier, CIA officer, organizer of both a Guatemalan coup and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, and author of more than 80 books, many from the spy-tale genre. Yet the bulk of his notoriety came from the one thing he always insisted he wasn't a Watergate burglar. He often said he preferred the term "Watergate conspirator." "I will always be called a Watergate burglar, even though I was never in the damn place," Hunt told The Miami Herald in 1997. "But it happened. Now I have to make the best of it." While working for the CIA, Hunt recruited four of the five actual burglars Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Rolando Eugenio Martinez and Frank Sturgis, all who had worked for Hunt a decade earlier in the Bay of Pigs invasion. All four also had ties to Miami, where part of the Watergate plan was hatched. "According to street gossip both in Washington and Miami, Mr. Castro had been making substantial contributions to the McGovern campaign," Hunt told CNN in February 1992. "And the idea was ... that somewhere in the books of the Democratic National Committee those illicit funds would be found." The idea was wrong, and the fallout escalated into huge political scandal. Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974. Twenty-five men were sent to prison for their involvement in the botched plan, and a new era of skepticism toward government began. "I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land," Hunt told People magazine for its May 20, 1974, issue. "I viewed this like any other mission. It just happened to take place inside this country." The Hunt recruits and James W. McCord Jr., security director for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, were arrested June 17, 1972, at the Watergate office building. One of the burglars was found to have Hunt's White House phone number. Hunt and fellow operative G. Gordon Liddy, along with the five arrested at Watergate, were indicted on federal charges three months later. Hunt and his recruits pleaded guilty in January 1973, and McCord and Liddy were found guilty. In March 1973, McCord wrote a letter to the federal judge in his case, John J. Sirica, claiming perjury occurred and that there was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent. In a secretly recorded conversation that same month that became one of the key pieces of evidence of the White House cover-up, White House Counsel John Dean told Nixon that "we're being blackmailed ... Hunt now is demanding another $72,000 for his own personal expenses; another $50,000 to pay his attorneys' fees." After some further discussion, Nixon said: "If you need the money, I mean you could get the money. ... I mean it's not easy, but it could be done." Hunt eventually spent 33 months in prison on a conspiracy charge, and said he was bitter that he was sent to jail while Nixon was allowed to resign. "I felt that in true politician's fashion, he'd assumed a degree of responsibility but not the blame," he told The Associated Press in 1992. "It wasn't my idea to go into the Watergate." Hunt also was involved in organizing an event that foreshadowed Watergate: the burglary of the the office of the Beverly Hills psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971. Hunt and Liddy the so-called White House "plumbers" broke into Ellsberg's office to gain information about him. The break-in was revealed during the 1973 espionage trial against Ellsberg and codefendant Anthony Russo, and was one of several incidents that led to dismissal of the case because of government misconduct. Watergate was one of many wild tales some true, some not that followed Hunt through the final decades of his colorful life. His alleged involvement in the purported conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy was among the most popular spy-esque stories Hunt was linked with. One theory, which still exists in the minds of some, was that Hunt was in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot, that his image was captured in photographs from the scene. "I was in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 22, 1963," Hunt wrote in a December 1975 letter to Time magazine, a note penned while he was incarcerated at Eglin Air Force Base's prison camp. "It is a physical law that an object can occupy only one space at one time." Everette Howard Hunt was born Oct. 9, 1918, in Hamburg, N.Y., graduated from Brown University in 1940 and was commissioned as a Naval Reserve officer in Annapolis, Md. the following year. He served as a destroyer gunnery officer, was injured at sea and honorably discharged from the Navy. From 1949 through 1970 he worked for the CIA, and was involved in the operation that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz as Guatemala's president in 1954, plus the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Hunt declared bankruptcy in 1997, largely blaming his Watergate fines and legal fees. A $650,000 libel settlement he was awarded in 1981 stemming from an article alleging his involvement in the assassination of Kennedy was overturned, and he never received any of that money. "I think I've paid my debt to society," Hunt said in 1997. "I think I've paid it amply." Hunt spent his final years in a modest home in Miami's Biscayne Park neighborhood with his second wife, Laura Martin Hunt, and declined many interview requests from The Associated Press. He has a memoir coming out next month titled "American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond." Hunt's first wife, the former Dorothy Wetzel Day Goutiere, died in a plane crash in 1972. Besides his wife, Hunt was survived by six children. A memorial service was scheduled for Monday in Miami. http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2817001&page=3

Below is a more complete version of the AP story by Tim Reynolds in which Howard refutes allegations of being involved in the JFK assassination: _______ Watergate Figure E. Howard Hunt Dies Watergate Figure E. Howard Hunt Dies at 88; Organized Break-In That Led to Scandal By TIM REYNOLDS The Associated Press January 23. 2007 MIAMI - E. Howard Hunt, who helped organize the Watergate break-in, leading to the greatest scandal in American political history and the downfall of Richard Nixon's presidency, died Tuesday. He was 88. Hunt died at a Miami hospital after a lengthy bout with pneumonia, according to his son Austin Hunt. The elder Hunt was many things: World War II soldier, CIA officer, organizer of both a Guatemalan coup and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, and author of more than 80 books, many from the spy-tale genre. Yet the bulk of his notoriety came from the one thing he always insisted he wasn't a Watergate burglar. He often said he preferred the term "Watergate conspirator." "I will always be called a Watergate burglar, even though I was never in the damn place," Hunt told The Miami Herald in 1997. "But it happened. Now I have to make the best of it." While working for the CIA, Hunt recruited four of the five actual burglars Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Rolando Eugenio Martinez and Frank Sturgis, all who had worked for Hunt a decade earlier in the Bay of Pigs invasion. All four also had ties to Miami, where part of the Watergate plan was hatched. "According to street gossip both in Washington and Miami, Mr. Castro had been making substantial contributions to the McGovern campaign," Hunt told CNN in February 1992. "And the idea was ... that somewhere in the books of the Democratic National Committee those illicit funds would be found." The idea was wrong, and the fallout escalated into huge political scandal. Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974. Twenty-five men were sent to prison for their involvement in the botched plan, and a new era of skepticism toward government began. "I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land," Hunt told People magazine for its May 20, 1974, issue. "I viewed this like any other mission. It just happened to take place inside this country." The Hunt recruits and James W. McCord Jr., security director for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, were arrested June 17, 1972, at the Watergate office building. One of the burglars was found to have Hunt's White House phone number. Hunt and fellow operative G. Gordon Liddy, along with the five arrested at Watergate, were indicted on federal charges three months later. Hunt and his recruits pleaded guilty in January 1973, and McCord and Liddy were found guilty. In March 1973, McCord wrote a letter to the federal judge in his case, John J. Sirica, claiming perjury occurred and that there was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent. In a secretly recorded conversation that same month that became one of the key pieces of evidence of the White House cover-up, White House Counsel John Dean told Nixon that "we're being blackmailed ... Hunt now is demanding another $72,000 for his own personal expenses; another $50,000 to pay his attorneys' fees." After some further discussion, Nixon said: "If you need the money, I mean you could get the money. ... I mean it's not easy, but it could be done." Hunt eventually spent 33 months in prison on a conspiracy charge, and said he was bitter that he was sent to jail while Nixon was allowed to resign. "I felt that in true politician's fashion, he'd assumed a degree of responsibility but not the blame," he told The Associated Press in 1992. "It wasn't my idea to go into the Watergate." Hunt also was involved in organizing an event that foreshadowed Watergate: the burglary of the the office of the Beverly Hills psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971. Hunt and Liddy the so-called White House "plumbers" broke into Ellsberg's office to gain information about him. The break-in was revealed during the 1973 espionage trial against Ellsberg and codefendant Anthony Russo, and was one of several incidents that led to dismissal of the case because of government misconduct. Watergate was one of many wild tales some true, some not that followed Hunt through the final decades of his colorful life. His alleged involvement in the purported conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy was among the most popular spy-esque stories Hunt was linked with. One theory, which still exists in the minds of some, was that Hunt was in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot, that his image was captured in photographs from the scene. "I was in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 22, 1963," Hunt wrote in a December 1975 letter to Time magazine, a note penned while he was incarcerated at Eglin Air Force Base's prison camp. "It is a physical law that an object can occupy only one space at one time." Everette Howard Hunt was born Oct. 9, 1918, in Hamburg, N.Y., graduated from Brown University in 1940 and was commissioned as a Naval Reserve officer in Annapolis, Md. the following year. He served as a destroyer gunnery officer, was injured at sea and honorably discharged from the Navy. From 1949 through 1970 he worked for the CIA, and was involved in the operation that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz as Guatemala's president in 1954, plus the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Hunt declared bankruptcy in 1997, largely blaming his Watergate fines and legal fees. A $650,000 libel settlement he was awarded in 1981 stemming from an article alleging his involvement in the assassination of Kennedy was overturned, and he never received any of that money. "I think I've paid my debt to society," Hunt said in 1997. "I think I've paid it amply." Hunt spent his final years in a modest home in Miami's Biscayne Park neighborhood with his second wife, Laura Martin Hunt, and declined many interview requests from The Associated Press. He has a memoir coming out next month titled "American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond." Hunt's first wife, the former Dorothy Wetzel Day Goutiere, died in a plane crash in 1972. Besides his wife, Hunt was survived by six children. A memorial service was scheduled for Monday in Miami. http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2817001&page=3

Perhaps Len, with his amazing ability to limit the human toll of aerial agression, could design a strike on Israel that would destroy only its WMDs (Dimona, Nes Ziona and the rest) "and perhaps a few casualties". The mullahs might be interested in that, Len. But I doubt they'd believe you, either. Superstorms, Aliens and the Bomb 19-Jan-2007 By Whitley Strieber http://www.unknowncountry.com/journal/ As I write this, there is a phenomenal story on Unknowncountry.com that discusses the terrible weather presently sweeping the whole western world, literally from California to Poland. This is the closest we have ever come to a superstorm, and it comes a few weeks after a disturbing event involving the Gulf Stream. Quite plainly, the world's system of currents is changing, possibly collapsing, and it is possible that there is an as yet undocumented connection between the unusually harsh weather and current changes. At the same time, the world is closer to nuclear war than it has been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Israel must prevent Iran from producing U-235, and they could go online with this in a matter of months. If they do produce it, they will be able to export fissionable material to terrorist groups like Hamas, in order to enable them to create dirty bombs. The fact that the detonation of such bombs in Israel will also destroy the Palestinian people is considered an acceptable loss. Their lives are not as important as the ruin of Israel, so the fact that they must die in order to kill the Jewish state is not thought by Iran, Syria, Hamas or other concerned entities to be too great a price. In effect, all the Palestinians are to be considered suicide bombers, if the result is that Israel is eradicated. Because US intelligence has failed in Iran, there is no adequate intelligence about a single, crucial element that might have saved us from the use of nuclear weapons in the effort to prevent Iran from manufacturing U-235. Specifically, western intelligence does not possess information about the location of air intakes and vents that would enable highly accurate American 'bunker busters' to penetrate into buried Iranian nuclear facilities and destroy them. This means that there is only one way to insure that the centrifuges that are essential to the production of U-235, and are buried deeper than US bunker busters can penetrate without going down airshafts, can be destroyed: neutron bombs will have to be used. It is likely that the bombs will come from Israel, and also possible that nobody, not Iran, not the US, not Israel, will say that they have been used. A neutron bomb does not leave a radiation signature. It would be observed as a very large explosion. The sheet of devastatingly destructive neutrons that it emitted would kill every living thing for miles around, and would overload every electrical and electronic circuit it reached. But it would not persist. There would be no fallout. There would be no irradiated areas on the ground. It is possible that such a bomb has already been detonated in the Iranian desert. There was a large explosion in the area a few days ago, reported on Unknowncountry.com but entirely ignored by western media. It was briefly reported in the Iranian press, then it disappeared. However, the greater possibility is that no attack has taken place yet, and that the explosion is somehow connected with what is now a literally fantastic amount of UFO activity unfolding over Iran. Iran has always been a UFO hotspot. The September, 1976 UFO chase over Tehran remains one of the best documented UFO cases of all time, and the October 22, 2005 interview I did with General Parviz Jafari on Dreamland, who actually flew the chase plane, was one of the most fantastic experiences of my life. Over the past few months, the number of UFO events in Iran has reached a completely unprecedented level. There have been a few UFO flaps as intense: the Scandinavian "Ghost Rocket" incidents in 1946, the great American UFO wave from the July 1947 Roswell Incident to the July, 1952 Washington overflights, the Belgian events of 1989-1990 are other equally intense flaps. UFOs began to appear in numbers after the end of World War II, when atomic weapons came into use. It is possible that the danger of nulear war in Iran has attracted them to that area, as well. I am long past questioning whether or not the visitors exist. They do exist, and the United States Government has been lying about them from the beginning, and still does--as the FAA did just this past November, when it claimed that a sighting at O'Hare Airport in Chicago by United pilots and other personnel was an unusual cloud. But the United States Government is a failed institution. It has drowned its credibility beneath a torrent of lies on virtually every important issue that the world faces, over the past fifty catastrophic years. The American people support the Constitution and the institutions it created, not the parasites who have come to infect those institutions since secrecy became the center of state power with the passage of the catastrophic National Security Act of 1947. This ruined the American republic, and it is going to take a generation of wise, firm and compassionate leadership to restore it. Hopefully, that will come from one day, but right now, I don't see it. It is time to face the fact that the US government as it is now constituted is worthless junk, and to abandon its obsessive, cancerous secrecy and its endless lies. Although I am quite certain that the visitors are real, the many years I have spent in contact with them, thinking about them, talking to others in contact, reading their stories and examining my own life and feelings about them, I must state clearly and frankly that I do not know what they are. However, I have been observing them for a long time, and I feel that they are concerned with our environment, it is my belief that they are making a record of human DNA against the possibility that the species may go extinct, and that they have attempted to hybridize human beings in some way, but my observation of this in my own life has not suggested that there has been success. In fact, I think that they have had a lot of failure here that they do not fully understand, and that they think that people who enter into leadership in human society are motivated by a profound death wish, and that, for the most part, they work to impede the chances of the species to survive, and that our populations support them. They do not understand what about us that we so hate, that we would be marching like this toward extinction. When I was younger and in somewhat more direct communication with them at times, they indicated to me that they would make themselves known in the context of environmental collapse. As that is happening now, they could emerge now. However, what happens may be very different. Let me tell you why. I got the impression that they take a long view of history. They are interested in the state of mankind not only this year or in a hundred years, but in a million years and a billion years. The evolution of intelligence is important to them, and they are here to help it through a difficult time on earth, so that it can, in time, reach a state where it offers some sort of value to others. I am pretty sure that intelligent life is extremely rare, and that there is a sort of choir of consciousness, and that there is a desire that our voices be joined to it, in the interest of the new. I am trying to get used to thinking about the larger issues that face the thin web of conscious species that are spread across the cosmos, and I think people need to think about such things, too. When they do, the actions of the visitors will become more understandable. The reason I say this is that they may be taking sides in the present conflict between the west and Islam, and it is not obvious to me, if they do, that they will take the side of the west. The reason is simple. They want the species to survive, and encouraging the west might be the least effective way to accomplish that objective. The United States is by far the world's largest polluter, followed by Europe, then China and India, who are catching up fast. The problem is that the United States has willfully ignored the problem, despite the overwhelming evidence that it needs to be addressed. At present, even such outrageous violators as the Exxon Corporation are beginning to realize the peril and respond, but it may well be too late, and the visitors may consider that we've waited too long. If Islam should win the current world-historical conflict, the entire planet will be plunged into a period of economic stagnation and scientific decline that could last a very long time. The result of this would be that mankind will survive longer, and therefore have a greater chance to make the breakthroughs that it needs to join the choir of consciousness that so needs new voices. I do not think that the combination of ominous environmental strains, the possibility of nuclear war, and the sudden appearance of the visitors all over the world, and especially at the nexus of the possible nuclear conflict is an accident. They are part of our lives and part of our world, and my sense of it is that governments who pretend otherwise, at this point, do so at their peril.

Kuwait media: U.S. military strike on Iran seen by April www.chinaview.cn 2007-01-14 15:19:28 Special report: Iran Nuclear Crisis KUWAIT CITY, Jan. 14 (Xinhua) -- U.S. might launch a military strike on Iran before April 2007, Kuwait-based daily Arab Times released on Sunday said in a report. The report, written by Arab Times' Editor-in-chief Ahmed al-Jarallah citing a reliable source, said that the attack would be launched from the sea, while Patriot missiles would guard all Arab countries in the Gulf. Recent statements emanating from the United States indicated the Bush administration's new strategy for Iraq doesn't include any proposal to make a compromise or negotiate with Syria or Iran, added the report. The source told al-Jarallah that U.S. President George W. Bush recently had held a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other assistants in the White House, where they discussed the plan to attack Iran in minute detail. Vice President Dick Cheney highlighted the threat posed by Iranto not only Saudi Arabia but also the whole Gulf region, according to the source. "Tehran is not playing politics. Iranian leaders are using their country's religious influence to support the aggressive regime's ambition to expand," Dick Cheney was quoted by the source as saying. Indicating participants of the meeting agreed to impose restrictions on the ambitions of Iranian regime before April 2007 without exposing other countries in the region to any danger, the source said "they have chosen April as British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said it will be the last month in office for him. The United States has to take action against Iran and Syria before April 2007." Claiming the attack will be launched from the sea and not from any country in the region, he said "the U.S. and its allies will target the oil installations and nuclear facilities of Iran ensuring there is no environmental catastrophe or after effects." The source added that the U.S. has started sending its warships to the Gulf and the build-up would continue until Washington has the required number by the end of this month. "U.S. forces in Iraq and other countries in the region will be protected against any Iranian missile attack by an advanced Patriot missile system," the source noted. The Bush administration believes that attacking Iran will create a new power balance in the region, calming down the situation in Iraq and paving the way for their democratic project, which have to be suspended due to the interference of Tehran and Damascus in Iraq, according to the source.

Major investment bank issues warning on strike against Iran 01/15/2007 Filed by Michael Roston www.rawstory.com http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Major_in...ng_on_0115.html Warning that investors might be "in for a shock," a major investment bank has told the financial community that a preemptive strike by Israel with American backing could hit Iran's nuclear program, RAW STORY has learned. The banking division of ING Group released a memo on Jan. 9 entitled "Attacking Iran: The market impact of a surprise Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities." ING is a global financial services company of Dutch origin that includes banking, insurance, and other divisions. The report was authored by Charles Robinson, the Chief Economist for Emerging Europe, Middle East, and Africa. He also authored an update in ING's daily update Prophet that further underscored the bank's perception of the risks of an attack. ING's Robertson admitted that an attack on Iran was "high impact, if low probability," but explained some of the reasons why a strike might go forward. The Jan. 9 dispatch, describes Israel as "not prepared to accept the same doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’ that kept the peace during the Cold War. Israel is adamant that this is not an option for such a geographically small country....So if Israel is convinced Iran is aiming to develop a nuclear weapon, it must presumably act at some point." Sketching out the time line for an attack, Robertson says that "we can be fairly sure that if Israel is going to act, it will be keen to do so while Bush and Cheney are in the White House." He further suggests a February-March 2007 time line is possible for several reasons. First, there is a comparable time line with Israel's strike on Iraq's nuclear program in 1981, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's political troubles within Israel. Second, late February will see Iran's deadline to comply with UN Security Council Resolution 1737, and Israel could use a failure of Iran and the UN to follow through as justification for a strike. Finally, greater US military presence in the region at that time could be seen by Israel as the protection from retaliation that it needs. In his Jan. 15 update, Robertson points to a political reason that could make the assault more likely - personnel changes in the Bush administration may have sidelined opponents of attacking Iran. Bush recently removed General John Abizaid as commander of US forces in the Middle East, and John Negroponte as Director of National Intelligence, both of whom have stated that attacking Iran is not a priority or the right move at this time. The deployment of Patriot missile batteries, highlighted in President Bush's recent White House speech on America's Iraq policy, also pointed to a need to defend against Iranian missiles. The ING memo was first sent to RAW STORY by an anonymous tip and confirmed Monday by staff on the bank's emerging markets office, who passed along the Jan. 15 update. A screenshot of the first page is provided below. http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Major_in...ng_on_0115.html

Len - no matter how many times I post detailed, documented material from Juan Cole indicating that the 'wipe off the map' comment was a blatant mistranslation of the Iranian President's words - and despite your apparent inability to rebut Cole on this - you continue repeating the same old scare story. Oh well, I guess if I too held a 'my country right or wrong' approach to life - and 'my country' was menacing it's neighbours with, among other things, REAL nuclear weapons, I might also be desperate to hang onto this particular lie. Without it, Israel's threats to Iran are more clearly seen for precisely what they are: outrageous, dangerous, aggressive bullying that attempts to enforce egregious double standards in Israel's favour. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is and always has been a secular spokesman for the true power in Iran, the Clerical leadership, who has spoken for the obliteration of Israel so pervasively that it has become the stuff of slogans and banners. Juan Cole’s credentials as an expert in Iranian policy are not impeccable. For example: http://www.slate.com/id/2140947/ “Cole is a minor nuisance on the fringes of the academic Muslim apologist community.” It would be better put to say that in the light of international scrutiny over what is obviously Iran’s goal of uranium high enrichment, President Ahmadinejad has been told to lower the tenor of his anti-Israeli rhetoric by his handlers. The evidence that Iran is in pursuit of nuclear weapons is convincing. Unless Iran is in pursuit of advanced nuclear research (that they are only developing peaceful nuclear power capability for electricity generation is laughable) on their current course (unless the recent stall in enrichment work indicates a more permanent diplomatic shift) they should have a nuclear weapon(s) within two or three years. Would military action against Iran prevent a limited nuclear war in the Mid-east or could it cause one? The effect of a military strike against Iran could have the effect of polarizing Arabic speaking nations against Israel and possibly the US, resulting in a much more dangerous situation than would otherwise exist, even with Iran having nuclear weapons capability. The effect of any overt military action against Iran could easily backlash. The war in Iraq and the bombing of the Iraqi Osirak reactor should have taught us that. I find that reading Prof. Juan Cole's commentary in his daily blog, www.juancole.com, is extraordinary worthwhile. Below is an insightful article by him of today from a California newspaper: MISREADING THE ENEMY By Juan Cole San Jose Mercury News 1/14/2007 http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews...al/16459277.htm President Bush's escalation of the Iraq War is premised on a profound misunderstanding of who the enemies are, how to deal with them and what the limits are of U.S. power. The president cannot seem to let go of his fixation on Al-Qaida, a minor actor in Iraq, and his determination to confront Iran and Syria. He still assumes that the insurgents are outsiders to their neighborhoods and that U.S. troops can chase away the miscreants and keep them out, acting as a sort of neighborhood watch in khaki. In fact, Iraq's Sunni Arab elite is playing the spoiler, and until a deal is negotiated with its members, no one will be allowed to enjoy the new Iraq. Scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, who from the beginning spearheaded the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, express confidence that the United States, which has a $12 trillion economy, an army over a million strong, and a population of 300 million, can overwhelm Iraq. They point out that Iraq only has an economy of $100 billion, a population of 27 million, and a guerrilla movement of just tens of thousands. This comparison is deeply misleading, and it will get thousands of Americans killed. Guerrilla movements can succeed against much wealthier, more populous and better-armed enemies, as happened in Algeria in the late 1950s through 1962 when the National Liberation Front expelled the French. The real question is not America's supposed superiority (which so far has not brought it victory) but what exactly the resources and tactics of the enemy are and whether they can be defeated. The answer to the second question is ``No.'' Who is the enemy in Iraq, exactly? In the first instance, it is some 50 major Sunni Arab guerrilla groups. These have names such as the 1920 Revolution Brigades, the Army of Muhammad, and the Holy Warrior Council. Some are rooted in the Baath party, an Arab nationalist and socialist party that had ruled Iraq since 1968. Others have a base in city quarters or in rural clans. Some are made up of fundamentalist Muslims. One calls itself ``Al-Qaida'' but has no real links to Osama bin Laden and his organization, and has simply adopted the name. The Baathists and neo-Baathists, led by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri (once a right-hand man of Saddam Hussein), are probably the most important and deadliest of these guerrilla groups. These guerrilla cells are rooted in the Sunni Arab sector, some 20 percent of Iraq's population, which had enjoyed centuries of dominance in Iraq. From it came the high bureaucrats, the managers of companies, the officer corps, the people who know how to get things done. They know where some 200,000 remaining tons of hidden explosives are, secreted around the country by the former regime. They are for the most part unable to accept being ruled by what they see as a new government of Shiite ayatollahs and Kurdish warlords, or being occupied by the U.S. Army and Marines. These Iraqi Sunnis enjoy the support of millions of committed and sometimes wealthy co-religionists in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the oil kingdoms of the Persian Gulf. The Sunni Arab guerrilla cells have successfully pursued a spoiler strategy in Iraq. By engaging in assassinations, firefights and bombings, they have made it clear that if they are not happy in the new Iraq, no one is going to be. Did U.S. engineers repair electricity stations? The Sunni guerrillas sabotaged them. Did the new regime attempt to export petroleum from the northern city of Kirkuk through Turkey? The guerrillas hit the pipelines. Did the U.S. military attempt to plant 50 bases around the country? The cells targeted them for mortar attacks and roadside bombs, inflicting a steady and horrible attrition, leaving more than 25,000 GIs killed or wounded. Focus on towns and cities The Sunni guerrillas took over territory where they could, mainly concentrating on villages, towns and city quarters in the center, north and west of the country. At some points, cities like Al-Fallujah and much of Ar-Ramadi, Al-Hadithah, Samarra and Tikrit have been at least in part under their control. They have entire districts of Mosul and Baghdad. They have attempted to cut the capital off from fuel, and they steal and smuggle petroleum to support their war. In areas they only partly control, or in enemy areas, they set off bombs or send in death squads to make object lessons of opponents. The guerrillas know they cannot fight the U.S. military head-on. But they do not need to. They know something that the Americans could not entirely understand. Iraq is a country of clans and tribes, of Hatfields and McCoys, of grudges and feuds. The clans are more important than religious identities such as Sunni or Shiite. They are more important than ethnicities such as Kurdish or Arab or Turkmen. All members of the clan are honor-bound to defend or avenge all the other members. They are bands not of brothers but of cousins. The guerrillas mobilized these clans against the U.S. troops and against one another. Is a U.S. platoon traveling through a neighborhood of the Dulaim clan, where people are out shopping? They hit the convoy, and the panicked troops lay down fire around them. They kill members of the Dulaim clan. They are now defined as the American tribe, and they now have a feud with the Dulaim. Members of the Dulaim cannot hold their heads up high until they avenge the deaths of their cousins by killing Americans. Unbelievable cruelty The guerrillas also provoke clan feuds between adherents of the two major sects of Islam, the Sunni and the Shiite. They pursue this goal with unbelievable cruelty. They will blow up a big marriage party held by a Shiite clan, killing bride, groom and revelers. They know that Muslims try to bury the dead the same day, so there will be a funeral. They blow up the funeral, too. The Shiite clan knows who the Sunni clans are that support the insurgency. The Shiites who have been attacked then join the radical Mahdi Army out of anger and fear, and send death squads at night to take revenge on the Sunni clan. If American troops step in to stop the Shiites from taking revenge, that produces a feud between the U.S. and the Shiite clans. The ordinary Sunnis under attack from the vengeful Shiite death squads turn for protection to the Sunni guerrillas. The deliberately provoked feuds have the effect of mobilizing the Sunni Arabs and garnering their support for the guerrillas. The guerrillas have opened fronts against the Americans, against the police and army of the new government and against the Shiites. There is a third front, in Mosul and Kirkuk, against the Kurds. The guerrillas hit Kirkuk's oil pipelines, police, political party headquarters and ordinary Kurds in hopes of keeping the Kurdistan Regional Government from annexing oil-rich Kirkuk to itself. U.S. soldiers cannot stop the Sunni Arab guerrilla cells from setting bombs or assassinating people. That is clear after nearly four years. And since they cannot stop them, they also are powerless to halt the growing number of intense clan and religious feuds. The United States cannot stop the sabotage that hurts petroleum exports in the north and stops electricity from being delivered for more than a few hours a day. President Bush in his speech Wednesday imagined that guerrillas were coming into neighborhoods in Baghdad and in the cities of Al-Anbar province from the outside. He suggested that, as the solution to this problem, U.S. and Iraqi troops should clear them out and then hold the city quarters for some time, to stop them from coming back. But the guerrillas are not outsiders. They are the people of those city quarters, who keep guns in their closets and come out masked at night to engage in killing and sabotage. Security comes first Bush believes that $1 billion invested in a jobs program will generate employment that would make young men less likely to succumb to the blandishments of the guerrilla recruiters. But without security you cannot have a thriving economy of the sort that produces jobs, and any money you put into such a situation will just be frittered away. The guerrillas often make $300 a month, a very good salary in today's Iraq. There is little likelihood that Bush's jobs program will generate many jobs that will draw Iraqis away from their guerrilla groups and militias. For a lot of them, serving is a matter of neighborhood protection or ideological commitment. Not everything is about money. Another reason that Bush's $1 billion for jobs is not that impressive is that Iran is offering Iraq $1 billion in aid as well. And guerrillas in the southern port of Basra are estimated to be stealing and smuggling $2 billion a year from the city's oil facilities. Add all that sort of thing up, and the United States is being outspent by a wide margin. Since the Sunni Arab guerrillas cannot be defeated or stopped from provoking massive clan feuds that destabilize the country, there is only one way out of the quagmire. The United States and the Shiite government of Iraq must negotiate a mutually satisfactory settlement with the Sunni Arab guerrilla leaders. Those talks would be easier if the guerrillas would form a civil political party to act as their spokesman. They should be encouraged to do so. Their first and most urgent demand is that the United States set a timetable for withdrawal of its troops. The United States should take them up on their offer to talk once a timetable is announced. Bush's commitment of more than 20,000 troops is intended to address only one of the guerrillas' tactics, taking and holding neighborhoods. At that, he is concentrating on only a small part of the Sunni Arab territories. The guerrillas do not need to hold such neighborhoods to continue to engage in sabotage and the provocation of artificial feuds. As long as the Sunni Arabs of Iraq are so deeply unhappy, they will simply generate more guerrillas over time. Bush is depending on military tactics to win a war that can only be won by negotiation.