Ashton Gray

Woo hoo! Procrastination paid. Someone else went and did the work.

Hey! That's my trick.

Thanks Ashton.

Glad to help on the rare occasions when I can.

Ashton

Dawn: a question...

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, Pat! <Tweet! Whistle> Yoo-hoo!

Quit shuckin' and jivin' and dodgin' and slitherin' and sidewindin' Pat. Everybody can see what you're doing. Just answer the pertinent question of material fact:

Do you claim that there was one "forged Diem cable," or that there was more than one "forged Diem cable"?

Still waiting...

Ashton

John, Here's a quote that I find very relevant to the topic of propaganda and Operation Mockingbird:

The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."

- William Colby, former CIA Director

Colby probably was in as good a position to make such a statement as anybody in the world, given that he was chief architect of the biggest public fraud of CIA "confessions" ever perpetrated. I don't know, really, of anything else quite so fitting to the topic of "Propaganda, Disinformation and Corruption."

Just a few months after Colby, as CIA Director for Covert Operations, had crouched with Helms in cowering secrecy over every step of the CIA's Watergate hoax through 1972 (itself very likely a cover for a still-undisclosed CIA assassination in a Mediterranean Muslim country), Colby micro-engineered every step of the post-Watergate CIA "revelations" that ultimately came out during Gerald Ford's so-called presidency.

But Colby's little "let's all go to the confessional booth" melodrama was begun as early as 7 May 1973. By then Colby was CIA's Director of Operations. It was then—with Nixon still in office, with the Watergate hearings raging, and almost precisely coordinated with Daniel Ellsberg's case being thrown out based on the CIA Liddy/Hunt/Fielding op Colby had helped in—that Colby wrote the very memo that was circulated to CIA personnel, inviting them to "come forward with anything the CIA might have done that exceeded the limits of the Agency's charter." The memo that Colby wrote, though, was not circulated over Colby's name, but over then-(briefly)-CIA Director Schlesinger's name.

It takes a considerable effort to comprehend in full just how much happened during this incredibly compressed time frame of only about a week in early-to-mid-May 1973. No sooner had Schlesinger issued the Colby-written memo than Schlesinger was shuffled over to the Department of Defense on 9 May 1973, and Colby was named as the new DCI—although he wouldn't officially take the reins until 4 September 1973. This is so typical of the kind of CIA shell game demonstrated over and over and over that I find it somewhat amazing how little this super-concentration of very questionable CIA-related events has been remarked.

In addition to all this sudden flurry of motion and swirling memos and personnel in these few days in May, the one thing that has gone completely unremarked is that at almost exactly the same time—while exposure of the actual CIA involvement in the Ellsberg affair and Watergate were at risk—William Colby ordered CIA Project Officer Ken Kress on or about 10 May 1973 to put on hold plans to increase the scope of the CIA's biggest secret: the Remote Viewing program at SRI being conducted at that very moment for CIA by NSA's Hal Puthoff, Ingo Swann, and Pat Price—all three of them having entered Scientology and reached its highest levels before having been granted the secret CIA contract.

In fact, the creation of the CIA's super-secret program had exactly paralleled the events of "Watergate" in downright surreal ways, as I've at least somewhat covered on the second page of the R. Spencer Oliver thread in the Watergate forum. Naturally, as CIA Director for Covert Operations, Colby had been in on the ground floor of that entire operation.

So it is out of this maelstrom that the infamous "Family Jewels" of the CIA ultimately came into being: supposedly 693 pages turned in to Acting DCI Colby of reported CIA "abuses" and "excesses." (These are euphemisms they "felt comfortable with" for, e.g., premeditated murder.) There was one "abuse" for each page, plus a twenty-six page summarizing report.

But guess what was missing entirely. Guess what never came to light, ever, anywhere, at all, through all of the ensuing exaltation and ecstasy of purported unbosoming by the CIA that followed. I'll give you a hint: the initials are "RV."

A book could be written about what actually was behind this sudden rush to supposed "confessions" by CIA—under Colby's careful direction: this spontaneous, endogenous spasm of "ethics" in a secretive beast of bureaucracy that never once before or since has exhibited any such innate character or conscience.

And a companion volume could be written not only about what became of this eruption of self-incrimination (does this have a familiar ring?), but about the enormous congressional and media deception and fraud perpetrated around it with a dog-and-pony show of Barnum & Bailey proportions. And who was ringmaster? William Colby.

Without writing that companion volume, suffice it to say here in brief that the legendary "Family Jewels" at all relevant times were in the complete possession and control of three people: William Colby, Henry Kissinger, and Gerald Ford. And when Ford finally sprung the trap to have the machinery of an "investigation" supposedly rigged up, who else would get the nod but his and Colby's and Kissinger's own boss: Rockefeller.

Of course the Rockefeller camp is where our own beloved Douglas Caddy had craw— No; I mean had apprenticed.

Operation Mockingbird of course was used to the hilt by Colby throughout the operation, his primary source of "Ooooooooo! Disclosures!" being first Seymour Hersch of the New York Times (who else—same scum who had cooperated in the CIA's Pentagon Papers op, same M.O.).

So with lights and cameras and gasps and "startling revelations," the CIA laughed up their sleeves at the marks gawking at the Congressional circus clowns in the Greatest Limited Hangout on Earth, while the dirtiest, filthiest secrets remained safely buried behind the tent—just as Colby, Ford, and Kissinger had arranged.

They even had the sniggering joy of having Gottlieb telling the "investigators" straight to their corn-fed hayseed faces that the records had been destroyed, so they would never, ever get to the truth. In your face, congressboy.

And the whole time it was going on, only a stone's throw across the river, CIA went right on running the biggest secret operation they'd ever run.

It's little wonder that when approached outside the Senate hearing room and asked about William Colby likely being replaced by George Bush, Senator Church's voice was shaking with anger when he said, "There is no question in my mind but that concealment is the new order of the day. Hiding evil is the trademark of a totalitarian government."

Of course the crowning glory of Propaganda, Disinformation and Corruption (stay tuned) came only after Colby had thrown himself on the sword (sound familiar?) and passed the baton to a really, really honest and fine statesman—this time, doncha' know—to carry on with the now squeaky-clean, sparkling new CIA: George Herbert Walker Bush. (He continued to hide the supersecret Remote Viewing program in the basement, too. And he especially continued to hide how CIA had come by it, and his role in just that.)

And the crowning glory of Propaganda, Disinformation and Corruption about the foregoing is, of course, practically a bible of so-called researchers: "The Department of Dirty Tricks," by Thomas Powers, published August 1979 in yet another Mockingbird mouthpiece, Atlantic Monthly.

Powers told it just the way the CIA and cronies wanted it told, with all the right touches to paint a sappy melodrama of bad things happening to good people. <SPIT!> Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know: some of you reading this probably have that article under your pillow, and I'm the big, bad Ashton boogey man, the Resident Heretic, telling you things you don't want to hear about heroes.

Well, if you do count yourself "in that number," I advise you to suck it up and walk it off. Because if you think all this is ugly, you ain't seen ugly yet.

But I believe we're all going to before it's over.

Ashton Gray

I already have a page on Colby.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SScolby.htm

However, I would like to add the quote to it. Do you know when and where he said it?

...I'll see if I can find a bonafide source for that dubious quote I posted.

(If I can't then maybe you can just post it and claim that "truthiness" is on your side.

You know, from the gut.)

This page lists the source as Colby being quoted by Dave McGowan in Derailing Democracy:

http://mtracy9.tripod.com/cia_media.htm

Ashton

Dawn, if you, as a lawyer, can't see that the creation of a fake cable...fake the cable...seeing the cable...saw this cable, makes the cable.

Ohhhhh, Pat. Before this, you were saying "cables" (plural). Now suddenly you are blathering on about "a cable" and "the cable" (singular), while of course trying to smear me—but also while again slinking and dodging around giving a straight answer to the Core Question of the Cult of the Forged Diem Cable(s).

So I'm going to give you another chance. Here you go:

Do you claim that there was one "forged Diem cable," or that there was more than one "forged Diem cable"?

Come on, Pat. It looks so bad when you keep running from answering this question. You can do it. Which is it?

Ashton

I'll take that as your acknowledgment that the Diem cables actually existed...

"Cables"? Plural?

Why, Pat: was it a religious paroxysm that caused you to type "cables" instead of "cable"?

I ask because one of the supreme disciples in your Cult of the Forged Diem Cable(s), John Dean, said very unmistakably that there was "one cable regarding the involvement of persons in the Kennedy administration in the fall of the Diem regime in Vietnam."

And you've reported that your other star witness to the Divine miracle—Colson's pet media whore William Lambert—set forth his lamentations of "Hunt's repeatedly showing him a cable and of his own attempts to get a copy of that cable."

What exactly is the core belief of your Cult of the Forged Diem Cable(s), O High Priest Pat, regarding how many of these invisible miracles existed? I've asked you this before and you've done nothing but dodge it.

So, no, High Priest Pat: I have not joined your cult that believes so fanatically in the noseeum cable(s). And if you're going to keep trying to hold the faithful or get new converts to your cult, answer the core question of your faith:

Do you claim that there was one "forged Diem cable," or that there was more than one "forged Diem cable"?

You have the pulpit and your flock is waiting reverently for more fleecing.

Ashton the Heretic

And what is the point of it doing that?

Distraction.

Always starts out with a nice, friendly, very reasonable sounding, allying warm glow. Can't set a trap without bait.

Ashton

My reason, I suppose is more than justice, and finally playing a part, however small, in getting the truth historically recognised. Its because I feel something changed for the worse that day, and we are still paying the price now, for our failure as a society to overturn the official lies that disfigure our historical narrative of the 1960s and beyond. The guns of Dallas served not only to silence Kennedy, but as a warning to all future leaders about what the elite would tolerate, and what they would not. And Brother, haven't those guns worked, the total political cowardice of the last 40+ years speaks volumns

Just want to add my small voice to say what a poignant and insightful reason you've expressed, Stephen. I can't think of a way it could be expressed better.

If we have a hope, perhaps it's that our combined dogged persistence and refusal to accept the official lies might one day coalesce into enough support to provide someone in an official position with sufficient backing and courage to break down the barriers and allow the truth, however unpleasant it might be, to spill out.

Ashton

I have an idea. Why don't we find Hunt, Liddy et al and invite them out for some wine and conversation. Chuck Colson too, with whom I have been dying to have a conversation for now 33 odd years.

Ms. Meredith, please add me to the guest list. Oh: and Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Caddy. Please don't leave them over in the "Listening Post." (No telling what they might do alone together.)

I'll rent a travel film for the training of businessmen, and we can get a banquet room under the name "Ameritas." Could we actually get the same "Continental Room" banquet hall in the Watergate? That would be delightful.

While we're waiting for dessert, I want to look directly into Hunt and Liddy's eyes and ask them point blank where they actually were and what they actually were doing over Memorial Day weekend 1972. And I so hope Hunt tries to tell me he was hiding in the liquor closet of the Continental Room peeing into a bottle of Scotch, and that Liddy says, "I don't recall exactly where I was, but was somewhere in the vicinity."

Ashton

Hee, hee...good to get silly in the late afternoon here in Beantown. Check out the link and see if you can send the Dobie and Maynard pic to Pat in lieu of Hunt/Liddy in front of Fielding's office. Go ahead, he'll buy it.

Of course a CIA op can't happen without a Cuban in it. That's Bernard Barker peeking in from the side. No, really. It was right after he met with Hunt and Douglas Caddy at that bar in D.C.

Ashton

Pat, let me make a suggestion:

You get yourself some nice big 8 x 10 glossies of E. Howard Hunt and John "Pinnochio" Dean and Chucky "Come to Jesus" Colson and L. Patrick "I Burned 'Em Three Times!" Gray—plus any other proven and entirely impeached liars you feel warm and fuzzy about—and forge yourself some Diem cables, and get some candles and some goat skulls, and make yourself a little shrine to The Diem Cables Religion. Then every time you feel the urge to annoy me about it, just kneel down in front of your little shrine, bow your head, and thank your enshrined gods for having given you this faith that you so fervently cling to.

And then leave me the F#%$! ALONE about it!

There. Then we'll all be happy. Deal?

Ashton Gray

Donald Gibson, Black Op Radio, Part One

Donald Gibson, Black Op Radio, Part Two

Some interesting stuff, if you have the time.

Gibson says McCloy and Dulles worked for the Rockefellers and Morgans. He says the the Bundy brother, Dean Acheson, the Lodges, McCloy, Dulles, the Rostow brothers were very high up in the "establishment". He also implies LBJ was a corrupt politican, but not a part of this power group that was running the country at the time. He thinks Johnson was used, with or without his knowledge.

Stan, what are the chances of getting a transcript of this done and posted? Is there any way you can do it or get someone to do it?

Ashton

You must stay high a lot, "Ash," since you can't tell that "should be answered" means that I am answering John's post, rather than posting John's post

Not high, Dan; just mesmerized, I guess, by your garden of syntax.

As I said, from now on I will go back to staying out of your way (so long as you don't bait me again).

Before you whine and swoon anymore about how you've been "baited," let's have everyone read your delightful attempt at a hatchet job on me all the way back on 25 June 2006: He ain't no new Messiah; but is he close enough (for rock-n-roll)? Now that's a piece of work from a piece of work.

And maybe we could all learn a lesson from this.

Well, the record shows you're a real specialist at appointing and annointing yourself spokesperson for the throngs of "we" and "us" that apparently populate the inside of your skull (cheering, I hope). And while I'm not so brazen as to pretend to speak for others, and am perfectly content speaking only for myself, I can say with a great deal of certainty that I have learned a lesson from this: so into the Twit File you go with Pat Speer.

*PLONK*

Ashton

(QUOTING DANIEL WAYNE DUNN): "...and by the further implied argument that (anything constituting) opposition to the Vietnam War was also wrong, evil, TREASON against the Commander in Chief in time of war."

I sure am glad you fielded that, John, in your usual eloquence. Having vociferously opposed that war, I found the sweeping generality you quoted to be either too stupid or too dishonest even to acknowledge, especially after I had gone to the trouble of putting the actual Treason statutes right in his face.

Of course, you or others may have some alternate explanation for such malign hyperbole as you quoted other than stupidity or dishonesty. But when I see something that so grossly distorts my position, and attempts to smear it like dung all over me using a mealy-mouthed device like "implied argument," I sit back in my chair and wonder:

"Is this person actually this swamp-stump stupid, or is this person willfully being dishonest and deceitful?"

And I never, for some reason, can think of any third alternative. Of course I'd be happy for anyone to help me out in this effort.

Hmm. I see there has been no progress.

In some quarters, there never will be. In many other quarters, there are bulldozer advances. And so we roll right on.

After all, veritas tu liberabit, as Ash would say.

Well, you said it. But I'll sure second it.

Ashton

PS: John's thoughtful post should be answered though, so I will attach it here...

Ummm. P'ernt of Order, yer Honor: It seems that you attached "Dan's Tortured and Anguished Infinitely Rambling Stream of Consciousness on the Ashton Problem" instead of "John's Thoughtful Post."

If you could be so kind as to make some baronial and lordly gesture of correction—once you are able to stop Laughing Out Loud, of course—toward this lowly peon, I 'low that I will then honor your request to ignore you henceforth and forever more. I feel this is something that I, even with my carefully analyzed and cataloged frailties and faults, can, in fact, accomplish. I will try, my Liege.

And I remain, as always, your 'umble whipping boy and personal Moriarity,

Ashton Gray

P.S. And "John" who? John Simkin? John Gillespie? John Galt?

I think what some of us have trouble relating to are the Scientology aspects of the argument.

I see. By "us," do you mean you have mice, or is this a quiet plea for help on a multiple-personality syndrome thing you're wrestling with?

As for "the Scientology aspects," I tend to think that Mssrs. Helms and Gottlieb might, in their current circumstances, be rather impervious to your complaints about their having dragged Scientology into all of this.

I believe Puthoff and Swann are still consuming air, though, and of course you always can direct a complaint here:

Department of Official Complaints About Scientology Being Used in Covert Strategic Intelligence by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America

Please let us all know what they say.

For a moment I almost had the fleeting thought that you might be complaining to me for having reported the facts. But then I said to myself, "Self, you know Danny-boy isn't that stupid, to start some inane 'let's shoot the messenger' campaign."

It was a great relief.

I've checked out Keller's "Remote Viewing Timeline" a few times

http://www.sc-i-r-s-ology.pair.com/rvtimeline/index.html

and it's still hard to figure out the attitude towards Scientology.

Are you sitting down, Dan? Because it appears that we agree on something. And I think that's just how it should be in a timeline that merely is laying out, dispassionately and disinterestedly, a concatenation of relevant events in time sequence. Don't you?

Apparently Scientology was of great interest to the early CIA as part of CIA's investigation and experimentation in mind control.

"Early CIA?" The program ran at least until 1995. (Our shiny new proposed Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, had it secretly running under his stewardship as DCI. Isn't that a comforting thought?)

But the overall gist in this area of the Timeline is that CIA was trying to co-opt L. Ron Hubbard's work for CIA's own uses. So Hubbard's death (disappearance?) was an occasion where CIA basically succeeded in a take-over of Scientology?

Are you sayin' or askin'? I don't see that stated in the timeline anywhere, so until you say otherwise, I'm labelling this "The Daniel Wayne Dunn Theory of CIA Take-Over of Scientology."

Is Scientology as we know it today some bastardized, CIA-controlled travesty and betrayal of what Hubbard originally intended?

Wow! Now that's a damned good question, Dan! Now that you mention it, it seems to me that I have read somewhere that all the original Scientology texts have been reissued in "new, improved" versions, and that quite a few people have taken it upon themselves to compare these to older editions and found significant changes, additions, and omissions.

But according to that timeline, the originals are all now buried underground in titanium-doored vaults (one of which was transferred to the federal government in a land-swap deal), so—I guess that's one of the imponderables that none of us will ever be able to have an answer to.

This is an interesting conspiracy theory, as it has some similarities to elements of Shi'a Islam.

Dan, Dan, Dan. You do this to me all the time. Just when it looks like you're going to be able to maybe ride without training wheels, you make a sharp left turn and go crashing over the cliff like Wile E. Coyote and punch a Dan-shaped hole in the desert floor below.

The idealization of original great leaders as martyrs is important in both cases...

Oh, Jesus Christ! (No pun intended.) Why don't we all just hand out free government-issue tampons to anyone showing stigmata, and thin out the martyr herd a little bit instead of increasing its population. Whaddaya say, Dan? Please?

But, speaking of martyrs, here you trot out another one:

Aside from the Scientology aspects, the larger problem is the overwhelming emphasis on and critique of Daniel Ellsberg and the leaking of the Pentagon Papers.

Snipping here "The Reader's Digest Guide to the Collected Works of Ashton Gray" so we can get to your point (assuming there is one) about the alleged "larger problem":

It's clear enough that Ashton hates the CIA (about which he evidently knows more than most). But he seems to hate even more Daniel Ellsberg, the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, and in general TREASON against the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States in time of war (the leaking of the Pentagon Papers being one instance of this TREASON).

Is that what's "clear enough" to you from all I have written? Well, I don't want this to come as an ice-water bath to your assessment, Dan, but "hate" is anathema in my own personal philosophy of life, and is something I don't indulge in.

I do not hate Daniel Ellsberg. I do not hate E. Howard Hunt, Richard Helms, the CIA, or any person or agency on this earth. That includes you, in case you even care.

What I do feel passionately about, and write passionately about, and care passionately about is institutional deceit, fraud, and crime by the people paid with the sweat of our own brows to keep us secure from just such things and to tell us the truth.

And I will continue to care about, and write about, and speak about such injustices as long as I draw breath, no matter how much you or anyone else objects to my so speaking, or to my tone, or to my language, or to my assertiveness, or to my rhetoric, or to my sarcasm, or to any other flaw I have that can be carped about or criticized or worried at with a pointy object.

But however fiery my rhetoric, however snide the curl of my lip, however caustic my comebacks, I do not hate, and will not be induced or lured into the fatal trap of hatred, where all hopes of effectiveness and probity and justice are finally consumed.

If there is any foundation for the various "hells" described in religions of man, it almost surely must be the bottomless and inescapable pit of hatred.

Ashton Gray

Ashton, have you got a date for the Helms testimony?

John, I don't know how I missed your post back in July, but having found it by accident in a search, the Helms testimony was Thursday, 2 August 1973.

Not only that, but apparently I owe James Richards a mea culpa or three or seventeen in this thread, since the confusion I alluded to above about which former Deputy Director CIA testified on the same day as Helms was my confusion, and mine alone. So James, it now seems you were absolutely correct: that it was, indeed, General Cushman and not General Vernon Walters who testified that day—although there are records, obviously incorrect, if not downright maliciously false—saying it was Walters and not Cushman.

I apparently made the mistake of a cursory reference to the incorrect records when responding on this point back in July. So please accept my undiluted apology for having mounded up more confusion in an area already knee-deep in it.

Ashton

Does anyone have a compiled list of documents that have been withheld under the Carte Blanche that King George wrote out for himself on the back of the Constitution?

Ashton,

That's a question we have been trying to answer for years now. Jim Lesar, the authority on the matter, gets a runaround from NARA when he asks the question. Lesar said that when specific records were with held by ARRB, a note to that effect was officially published in the Congressional Record and/or National Register? - but no list(s) compiled.

Thanks for the info, Bill.

Personally, I don't see a damned syllable anywhere in the Constitution—or on back of it, for that matter—that grants anyone an authority on any grounds to withhold the fact of existence of any document, anywhere, at any time, produced by a paid and accountable servant of the citizens of the United States.

The entire relationship of citizens to public servants has been completely inverted since at least 1913, and I for one am of the opinion that it's about time it got turned right-side-up again.

First step, I guess, would be to get them stop sucking at the public teat long enough to answer a question.

Ashton

Hello, Ms. Bronstein.

Re: Ashton Gray's posts, I've read quite a few. And I'm not very knowledgable about Watergate, tho' I want to remedy that, in particular how it relates to President Kennedy's murder. And from what little I do know I believe they were closely related.

Careful, now; I fear you may be drifting somewhat toward the Ashton direction. Better furl the jib and trim the sheets.

So I'm surprised to see him say that the Bay of Pigs was just the Bay of Pigs (and a cigar is just a cigar) in Nixon-speak...

Oh, dear me. I'm a bit surprised myself to see you have "read quite a few" of my posts, then have elected to make an issue of a mere opinion I expressed concerning a very smoky opinion issued by H.R. Haldeman years after the fact—and have done so to the complete exclusion of a mini-encyclopedia of exhaustively researched solid and incontrovertible facts that I have posted.

With all due respect, from where I sit this is somewhat on the order of razing the cornfield to find a weed.

Now that you've found one, though, I'm happy to pull at it with you. I'd be very entertained to hear not only the foundation, but the relevance—to you—for divining what Nixon meant when he said "the whole Bay of Pigs thing."

And I'll even start the pulling: I for one think "the whole Bay of Pigs thing" goes much, much deeper than thee or we currently know, and by "Bay of Pigs," I mean as the Bay of Pigs, of the Bay of Pigs, and for the Bay of Pigs. Amen. And I have very solid foundation, indeed, for not just believing, but knowing damned well, that Nixon was dead center in the initial planning of the Bay of Pigs—literally. In fact, where I've discussed this before, I've documented that fact, including Nixon's liaison with the CIA factions who engineered that infamous international fiasco—a few things you omitted in your maize-razing and weed-pulling.

In the same post I very overtly and decisively drew the connection from Bay of Pigs straight through the Kennedy assassination to Watergate, and I invite your attention to that post in a topic I started: Nixon, Cushman, Hunt and the Bay of Pigs

Then I would be absolutely enthralled to hear from you what Nixon "really meant" when he mouthed the words "Bay of Pigs," and to learn your sources and foundation (hoping dearly that it eschews tea leaves, telepathy, or embarrassing references to "body language").

...and that Nixon had no hand in JFK's death. (I hope I'm not misrepresenting his opinions.)

The administrators thoughtfully have provided a search function and quoting capabilities. The use of them in tandem will completely obviate the possibility of such misrepresentation. Perhaps you would be kind enough to use them and quote what you're referring to in some semblance of context.

so far I'm leaning in the opposite from Ashton direction.

Well, now, I sure never said a cigar is just a cigar. Monica Lewinsky settled that question once and for all.

Pleasure to make your acquaintance.

Ashton

...First, S. 3006 sets forth the grounds on which the release of documents may be postponed, but this list does not contemplate nondisclosure of executive branch deliberations or law enforcement information of the executive branch (including the entities listed in sections 3(2) (G) through (K)), and it provides only a narrow basis for nondisclosure of national security information. My authority to protect these categories of information comes from the Constitution and cannot be limited by statute. Although only the most extraordinary circumstances would require postponement of the disclosure of documents for reasons other than those recognized in the bill, I cannot abdicate my constitutional responsibility to take such action when necessary. The same applies to the provision purporting to give certain congressional committees "access to any records held or created by the Review Board." This provision will be interpreted consistently with my authority under the Constitution to protect confidential executive branch materials and to supervise and guide executive branch officials.

...George Bush

The White House

Does anyone have a compiled list of documents that have been withheld under the Carte Blanche that King George wrote out for himself on the back of the Constitution?

Ashton

Now please TRY to straighten out your conspiracies here for Pat will ya?

Oh, that's easy: John J. McCloy was a primary mover in setting up the core of CIA as early as late September or early October 1945 as an extra-political, extra-ideological covert machine for the sole purpose of continuing to serve the most powerful international banking, oil, and arms dynasties that these same core people had served during the war, without regard to national boundaries or political or economic ideologies or systems.

This isn't even "secret." This entire forum, and God knows how many internet pages devoted to the connections and links of these people and their cronies, puts it so completely in your face that you have to work around the clock to make believe it's some other way.

That's all CIA has ever been or done, its programs and activities coinciding with the intent and directions of American presidents and congresses only when those happened to be in alignment with their actual mandates, plans, programs, and targets—set not by any congress or president, but by moneyed interests whose internationally-generated fortunes depend entirely on being operated amorally and apolitically across any and all boundaries, real or conceptual. When these dual "masters" have been at odds, CIA uniformly has gone right on with its own agenda, and demonstrated the most blatant, arrogant contempt for any American agency, official, or body that ever has had the unmitigated gall to question its activities or demand accountability or disclosure.

When evaluated against the above, every single known "outrageous crime" of CIA (not to mention 4 million linear miles of REDACTION helping to hide the still-unexposed ones) is seen to be not an "outrageous crime" at all, but "business as usual." At least the way the CIA does business. Drug running, arms running, murder, kidnapping, assassination, torture, coups, manufactured wars, double agents, psychiatric atrocities, attempts at mind control: Hey—it's what makes their world go 'round and keeps the coffers full.

Ashton

Ashton, didn't that same FBI memo state that Parrott was "possibly a student at the University of Houston and active in politics in the Houston area?"

Absolutely so, Michael.

And as the resident CIA apologist has now so astutely (and accommodatingly—a tip o' the Ashton hat) pointed out, the James Parrott "lead" was a blatant red herring, one of the first planted. And who better to plant it than George H. W. Bush.

My little self-rhyming couplet about "two little Parrotts" was there expressly to point up one of the CIA's favorite psy-ops: the Principle of the Duplicate, which I covered in a post back in July: CIA Psy-Ops of Watergate and Beyond. It's like a bloody CIA fingerprint. They scatter duplicates everywhere they want to obfuscate and confuse. Watergate is littered with them, as I've covered elsewhere.

And here, within minutes of the assassination, comes George H. W. Bush, who just happens to be armed with a "tip" about some guy with the name of Parrott threatening to kill the president in a Texas town—but not Dallas.

I wouldn't recommend anyone spending even a few minutes pondering why George H. W. Bush would wait until after the President had been shot to report this alarming threat, when news of Kennedy's trip to Texas had been being spread like good longhorn fertilizer two-feet deep the length an breadth of the state. If you ignore my advice and do start thinking about it, and your head starts to spin on your shoulders like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, don't blame me.

Meanwhile, Bush's "tip" of course led to a Bircher dead end (as the resident CIA apologist has rushed to remind us—another tip o' the Ashton hat). And of course there were no U.S. gu'mint plants in and around the Birch society. Nawwwwwww. Oh, hell no!

But by God, we got us a classic CIA-bloody-fingerprint "twosie" in there. And it happened to pop up—from Bush the Elder himself, no less—just when the CIA's Thomas Parrott somehow went right off the radar faster than a New Mexico UFO.

Funny how these things seem to coincide.

So that's ratcheted that particular Parrott boy waaaaay on up there in my book.

Ashton

I believe that the relationship between John J. McCloy and General Maxwell Taylor is a primary key to this topic as well.

Well, there's no way to approach General Maxwell Taylor in context of Kennedy without tripping over the Special Group, and there's no way to trip over the Special Group without stumbling into a fairly low-key career CIA crud (but I repeat myself) named Thomas A. Parrott.

< Who?>

He was the butler. No, I'm sorry: he was the secretary. He was the secretary for the Special Group starting all the way back around February 1957, under Eisenhower, right up to at least October 1963—the very month before JFK was assassinated.

But to back up the truck a ways:

According to his testimony, Thomas A. Parrott joined the CIA in September of 1949, starting out in the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which Parrott himself describes as "a euphemism for, I guess, the Dirty Tricks Department." His first CIA gig was "as Deputy to [REDACTED] in charge of planning." (Parenthetically, the redacted part might or might not have been Directorate for Plans, whoever that might have been in 1949.)

Then around September 1950, Parrott became Chief of the Operations Staff of OPC through about the middle of 1952, when he became Deputy Director of the Soviet Division of CIA.

Around November 1954 Parrott got transferred to somewhere that is redacted in his Church Committee testimony. Well, curiously, in about November 1954, Tracy Barnes became head of CIA headquarters in Frankfurt. And among some of the more notorious CIA goons in Frankfurt at the time were William Harvey, Ted Shackley, David Morales—and one Tom Parrott. So much for redaction of Parrott's testimony.

(This ain't the butler.)

So then the next we know about Tommy boy is that sometime in 1957 he returns from "The Frankfurt Formerly Known As 'Redacted'" to the United States, and takes his place as "the so-called Board Assistant to Allen Dulles for the Operations Coordinating Board."

(No, this definitely is not the butler.)

So it is a sideline of his being assistant to CIA Director Allen Dulles that Parrott starts doing secretary duties for the Special Group.

Although the Special Group is a hit-and-miss proposition at the time, in early 1959 Eisenhower directs that it start meeting weekly. And the quiet little Parrott is perched there at every one of 'em. Right on through Kennedy's inauguration, right on through the Bay of Pigs fiasco, right on through the Cuban missle crisis—and all the while he is sitting there as old-school CIA.

He's there at meetings that include various combinations of Landsdale and McCone and Bissell and Taylor and Cabell and JFK and RFK.

In December 1962 he's there at the formation of the Special Group Augmented, formed to deal with Cuba, and becomes not only its secretary, but also the secretary of the Counterinsurgency Group, about which he says: "That got to be so much paperwork where I finally had to get an assistant and shed much of that because the MONGOOSE and Special Group then was fairly time-consuming. Also, at that point I had a number of other duties with General Maxwell Taylor in the White House, all involved with Intelligence. But this was just one of them." So was the inception of ZR/RIFLE.

If anybody in the world was in a better position than Thomas A. Parrott to have almost completely unencumbered access to the top policies and covert activities of the most powerful nation on the face of the earth at the time, or to the secrets of the Kennedy administration, and if anybody in the world was in a better position to broker information in any direction, I sure would like to know who it might have been.

And when and where do we next hear the name "Parrott"?

Only in one of the strangest, most surreal events that can be pointed to in the infinitely surreal aftermath of the murder of John F. Kennedy:

It is 1:45 p.m. on the afternoon of 22 November 1963. The President of the United States has just been shot only minutes before. The telephone at the FBI office in Dallas rings. On the line, calling long distance from Tyler, Texas is Mr. George H. W. Bush, President of the Zapata Off-shore Drilling Company of Houston, Texas.

Citizen Bush has rushed to a telephone to place into the record "hearsay that he recalled hearing in recent weeks, the day and source unknown. He stated that one JAMES PARROTT has been talking of killing the President when he comes to Houston [sic]."

• "Two little Parrotts sitting in a Bush,
  And what the hell are you going to rhyme with 'Bush'?"
  

Ashton Gray

A bio brief on J. Walton Moore.

It seems he was in Tsingtao China in 1948; the same time Robert Emmett Johnson was there. Now that is most interesting indeed.

Why, yes: it is. And below are a few more Curious Coincidences in The Life and Times of J. Walton Moore (garnished, for better or worse, with a generous topping of other nuts and fruits):

30 c. December 1941

As a result of his purported injuries received in a fall from a ladder aboard the destroyer Mayo in the North Atlantic, E. Howard Hunt is deemed not fit for full duty, and is offered the option of shore duty as a supply officer, or an honorable medical discharge. Hunt chooses the discharge. [NOTE: No date at all is given for this, except it is after his purported convalescence, so is estimated as late December 1941. Note also that Weberman says Hunt was given "an honorable medical discharge in late 1942," but the 1942 date almost has to be a typo, or is just plain wrong. Also, Weberman says that Hunt's discharge was for "a hearing problem," not as the result of any injuries aboard a ship. The most likely interpretation is that Hunt's "discharge" was largely cosmetic to facilitate undercover operations, and that the record has been sheep-dipped.]

1 c. January 1942

Although James Walton Moore's employment is listed as being "FBI Washington DC" from January 1942 to January 1945, his residence is listed in the referenced document as being "San Francisco, Calif." from 1942 to 1945. [NOTE: This seems to indicate that Moore is with the San Francisco FBI office during these dates. See 6 January 1945, when he enters the U.S. Navy. Moore's relocation from D.C. to San Francisco seems to be very close in time to E. Howard Hunt's "discharge" from the Navy.]

1 c. February c. 1943

E. Howard Hunt ostensibly has become a "war correspondent" for Life magazine (part of Time, Inc.). He flies to San Francisco, reportedly en route to the Pacific, and meets there with Tony Jackson. [NOTE: James Walton Moore is also based in San Francisco.]

Skipping for now Hunt's entirely undistinguished "war correspondent" career—of which not a word ever managed to make publication—let's travel up memory lane toward the present to a strange confluence of events at the beginning of 1945:

1 c. January 1945

Estimated from the cited narrative, it is around this time that E. Howard Hunt leaves Washinigton, D.C. traveling to Calcutta, India, ostensibly en route to Kunming, China and OSS Detachment 202. While in Calcutta, Hunt purportedly discovers "lists of OSS agents in Burma, India, and China" that have been taken without authorization by a civilian Indian "Morale Operations (psychological warfare) expert." Hunt reportedly turns the contraband lists over to "OSS headquarters downtown" in Calcutta.

6 January 1945

James Walton Moore, employed by the FBI since April 1940, begins service in the U.S. Navy on 6 January 1945. At an unspecified date in 1945 (presumed here to be linked to his service in the Navy pending other data), his residence is listed in the referenced document as changing from San Francisco, California to "North China," with no indication of where in North China.

1 c. February 1945

Estimated from the cited narrative, it is around this time that E. Howard Hunt flies from Calcutta, India to Kunming, China, where he is met by Ed Welch (who Hunt had done OSS training with), and joins OSS Detachment 202. The commanding officer of 202 is Colonel Richard Heppner, a Princeton alumnus who was also a peacetime member of William Donovan's New York law firm. Another member of Donovan's law firm heading an OSS field team is Captain Walter Mansfield. Administratively, OSS/China is divided into Secret Intelligence (collection), Special Operations (sabotage), Morale Operations (psychological warfare), and the Operational Groups (commando units). OSS has a liaison office with the Nationalist Army of China in Chungking, and maintains "forward bases" in Chengtu, Hsian, and Chinkiang (also called Jiangsu, and which Hunt spells Chihkiang). Field OSS teams are supplied with gum opium and gold bars or U.S.-minted gold louis d'or coins as mediums of exchange with the locals.

1 c. March 1945

About a month after E. Howard Hunt's arrival at OSS Detachment 202 base at Kunming, the group he had trained with on Catalina Island arrives, including Lucien Conein. Also connected with OSS Detachment 202 are Paul Helliwell, Louis Hector, and Paul Child. Colonel Ray Peers is commanding officer of Detachment 101 in Burma.

1 c. June 1945

E. Howard Hunt goes on several OSS missions spanning an uncertain amount of time, but around early summer 1945. He goes to Hsian, then on to Chengtu, where the base commander is Major David Longacre, then returns to Hsian where he joins a team headed by Captain Bob Rodenburg and travels to undisclosed locations in "North China." He is on this trip for about a month to six weeks. [NOTE: James Walton Moore is based somewhere in "North China."]

A downright confusing parallel track to the above concerns the movements and whereabouts of Dorothy Wetzel (who will become Dorothy Hunt) during some of the overlapping time periods. Its confusion arises (as is most often the case) from the inability to get confirmation on certain dates, but what can be said with certainty is that for some period of time she was based in Bern, Switzerland at the same time that Allen Dulles and Mary Bancroft were based in Bern as lovebirds. Dorothy Wetzel was there working in the Treasury Department's Hidden Assets Division, locating Germany's— Well, hidden assets.

I found this particularly interesting because this also parallels the time period when Walt Rostow is with the "oily boys," including Charles P. Cabell, directing bombing runs on German oil assets, to the material benefit of certain American and British oil interests. Isn't all that peculiar.

And while John Simkin's bio page on Dorothy Wetzel/Hunt says the met her future husband in Shanghai at the end of the war, Hunt's autobiography indicates that he left Shanghai almost immediately after the announced disbanding of OSS (which he says he read in a Shanghai newspaper, which would make it about 30 September 1945), and arrived back in the United States on Thanksgiving Day 1945—which was 22 November. And Weberman claims that Dorothy Wetzel did not transfer from Bern to Shanghai until April 1946—months after Hunt purportedly had left Shanghai.

According to E. Howard, he first met Dorothy "in the spring of 1948" on the occassion of his hiring by Averell Harriman at a meeting at the Washington headquarters of the CIA front Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) Dorothy being at that time one of Harriman's secretaries. Imagine that.

And let's not even get into what ECA may or may not have had to do with the International Trade Mart and Clay Shaw in N'Awleeeans. But please do allow me to mention only in passing the little-heralded occasion of E. Howard Hunt having stopped off in New Orleans in or about January 1946, on his way to Acapulco, where he says he went to "renew old acquaintances and make new friends." I just bet he did.

There's one final curious note, which I realize is wandering even further afield from the James Walton Moore coincidences, but I can't seem to let it go: Hunt claims in his autobiography <koff, hack> that he was "asked" before he left China (by whom he studiously does not say) if he wanted to join "the newly created Central Intelligence Group" (CIG). But CIG will not be officially created until 24 January 1946, long after Hunt has returned to the United States (22 November 1945), and even after he has traveled on to Acapulco, Mexico. This indicates that the creation of CIG was planned at some level, by someone, as early as the end of September or beginning of October 1945—exactly when McCloy was squirreling away the units and personnel he wanted preserved into peacetime covert work—and that Hunt was in that loop. According to Hunt, he "declined politely and firmly" to join CIG. On that count, Hunt, as usual, is almost certainly a goddamned xxxx.

The fun just keeps on coming, doesn't it?

Ashton

The main question that needs answering is why did George W. Bush nominate Robert Gates as his Defense Secretary? He must have known that this decision would resurrect the two scandals in his father’s career: October Surprise and Iran-Contra.

It's part of why I said I think the Bush dynasty is circling the wagons. Their choices of loyalists who have protected their dirtiest secrets have eroded, not only through natural attrition, but through revelations in a variety of places—over the past five to ten years especially.

Personally, I don't believe that Bush the Younger is in the grip of any psychobabble repressed desire to do Daddy harm. On the contrary, my opinion, with what I consider to be some foundation, is that Bush the Younger was involved as early as May 1972 in some of Papa George's dirtiest deeds, which may even account for Little George's AWOL adventures and whereabouts.

I think they believe that they have October Surprise and Iran-Contra "contained and explained" enough that it's a lesser evil to have to defend than having the still-sealed crawl-space under the house opened up to public scrutiny and the bodies exhumed.

It's exactly why I wrote Actual Notice—TREASON and MISPRISION OF TREASON on 18 July 2006, and stand by every syllable and punctuation mark at this instant.

Ashton