Paul Rigby
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As I write, we have been told that the cause of death was head trauma caused when Bhutto dropped from her through-the-sunroof perch after having been shot. Immediately we are put in mind of the Rabin hit, and how evidence suggests that he might have been killed after initial shots were fired and he entered his security vehicle.
Who was inside her SUV?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/...-shot-dead.html
Key Benazir Bhutto assassination witness shot dead
The bodyguard of Benazir Bhutto, who was to be a key witness in an investigation into her assassination, has been shot dead.
Last Updated: 3:19PM BST 23 Jul 2008
Khalid Shahenshah, who was the former Pakistan prime minister's security chief at the time of her assassination, was killed in a drive-by shooting as he left his house in the southern port city of Karachi on Tuesday, police said...Who is - was - Mr Shahenshah? Three links filling in some of the background. The third contains some interesting footage of Shahenshah at Bhutto's last rally:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/EG16Df04.html
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?p...3-7-2008_pg12_2
http://www.yousufnazar.com/?p=594
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Khalid Shahenshah’s murder deepens the mystery around BB’s assassination
The murder of Khalid Shahenshah, a key witness in Benazir Bhutto’s murder case, has been blamed rather quickly on the ‘terrorists’ by Sind Home Minister. But Khalid had a highly controversial background which included a record of criminal cases, working as an activist of People’s Students Federation in the 1980s, an alleged member of Dawood Ibrahim’s gang later, and most recently as one of the body guards of Benazir Bhutto. He was sitting in the back seat of Benazir’s car when she was hit by bullets and bomb blasts and was a key witness in her murder case. He was also interviewed by the Scotland yard. His most controversial part was his antics on the stage where BB addressed her last public meeting. See the following video:
Follow link above - PR
After BB’s murder, the above video was run by many channels including DAWN News and Rehman Malik denied Khalid Shahenshah’s or his responsibility in BB’s secuirty lapses. (See Daily Times of Jan. 06, 2008)
According to the Post of January 4, 2008:
PPP sources have reported that the moment Benazir ended her address, this (servant) man was the first one to dive into her bullet proof Land Cruiser; an unusual change from past routine whilst he always boarded the vehicle after Benazir, often hanging by the external pedestals of her Cruiser, as was evident in videos.One other household servant and Dr Safdar Abbassi got seated in the rear portion of the Cruiser, and when the suicide bomber blew himself apart, Khalid was also present in the Cruiser. Afterwards he (Khalid) went over to the Zardari House, Islamabad where he lived for two days, and did not visit Naudero despite Benazir’s death, making it there on third day. When informed about the video of his antics he promptly disappeared from the scene, over the excuse of his mother’s death.
Khalid’s name figured in Asia Times reports of July 16, 2003 and October 22, 2003 as a gang member linked to the famous underworld don Dawood Ibrahim. The News in its June 18, 2006 issue published a report speculating Dawood may have moved to Waziristan.
The Newsline in its September 2001 issue had reported:
Meanwhile, not only have the Pakistani authorities turned a blind eye to the gang’s activities within Pakistan, but many in the corridors of power have partaken of Dawood’s hospitality. Dawood often throws lavish mujras for Pakistani politicians and bureaucrats. A recent guest was a former caretaker Prime Minister.These are not the only members of the establishment who have close ties with Dawood. He is said to have the protection of assorted intelligence agencies. In fact, Dawood and his men move around the city guarded by heavy escorts of armed men in civvies believed to be personnel of a top Pakistani security agency.
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Paul; thanks for reminding me what a live press is like. Sometimes you need a mirror under the nose to see just how dead ours is today. What about The Last Journalist as your title. Wait.. Im seeing trouble with your Good Morning America interview!
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Realism instructs us to expect little from the special commission created by President Johnson to investigate the death of his predecessor.
No member of the commission has any competence as investigator, nor does any have access to a disinterested investigative staff. The commission will be almost wholly dependent upon the facts made available to it by the Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Dallas Police Department.
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Can we imagine a similar comment made at the outset of the 9/11 Commission?
I mean in the Daily Newspapers; no more using to the internet to distract from the singular fact that the Corporate Press is the Lingua Beltway of our Selctions.
No we could not. That kind of journalism was possible only during a previous stage in the development of our National Security State.
Nat,I don't blame the succeeding generations of journos. It was bad enough in Starnes' day - his most assiduous readers were at Langley. Here they are monitoring the ripples from the boulders of intelligent scepticism he dumped in the lakes of mainstream acquiescence:
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...bsPageId=581135
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...bsPageId=219349
And then think of the fate of Gary Webb.
Paul
Mind you, all alibis for the press exhausted, it's still surprising we didn't hear a bit more about Zelikow's record of handling evidence when his 9/11 appointment was announced:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/05/stern.htm
Atlantic Monthly, May 2000
Books:
What JFK Really Said
By Sheldon M. Stern
The author checked the Cuban-missile-crisis transcript in The Kennedy Tapes against the recorded words. He discovered "errors that undermine its reliability for historians, teachers, and general readers.My twenty-three years as the historian at the John F. Kennedy Library, in Boston, were punctuated by intensive work on sound recordings. I conducted scores of taped oral-history interviews and verified the accuracy of the transcripts, edited President John F. Kennedy's recorded telephone conversations, and, in 1981-1982, evaluated tapes made during the Cuban missile crisis, in October of 1962, as the library prepared for their declassification. The work was fascinating and exhilarating, but the poor technical quality of the tapes frequently required that I listen to the same words dozens of times, sometimes to no avail. It was, notwithstanding, a historian's ultimate fantasy -- a chance to be a fly on the wall during one of the most dangerous moments in history, and to know, within the technical limits of the recordings, exactly what happened. I spent just over a year on the tapes, and in 1983 I received an award for "careful and perceptive editing and proofreading of the JFK tapes" from the archivist of the United States. From 1983 to 1997 the library declassified twenty-two hours of tapes, and I continued to review them before each declassification.
Imagine my surprise when, in the summer of 1997, I learned that Harvard University Press was about to publish The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow -- complete transcripts of all twenty-two hours. Months of lead time are required to prepare a book for the printer, so I was astonished that the editors could have completed this task less than a year after the majority of the tapes were released to the public.
The editors explained that they had commissioned a team of professional court reporters to prepare a set of "draft transcripts" from the Kennedy Library tapes. Audio experts, using NONOISE, a "technically advanced noise-reduction system," had then produced an improved set of tapes, subsequently checked by the court reporters to be sure that nothing had been lost. However, May and Zelikow stressed their own responsibility for the final product.
The two of us then worked with the tapes and the court reporters' drafts to produce the transcripts printed here. The laboriousness of this process would be hard to exaggerate. Each of us listened over and over to every sentence in the recordings. Even after a dozen replays at varying speeds, significant passages remained only partly comprehensible.... Notwithstanding the high professionalism of the court reporters, we had to amend and rewrite almost all their texts. For several especially difficult sessions, we prepared transcriptions ourselves from scratch. In a final stage, we asked some veterans of the Kennedy administration to review the tapes and our transcripts in order to clear up as many as possible of the remaining puzzles. The reader has here the best text we can produce, but it is certainly not perfect. We hope that some, perhaps many, will go to the original tapes. If they find an error or make out something we could not, we will enter the corrections in subsequent editions or printings of this volume.
An unforgettable moment in these unique historical records concerns JFK's apprehension that military action in Cuba might touch off the ultimate nightmare of nuclear war, which he grimly describes at a meeting on October 18 as "the final failure." Brian McGrory, of The Boston Globe, who listened to this tape with me in 1994, after it was declassified, used those words in the lead of his article on the newly released tapes. But when I checked the transcript recently, I was unable to find "the final failure." Certain that the editors must be right, since they had technically cleaner tapes, I listened again; there is no question that Kennedy says "the final failure." The editors, however, have transcribed it as "the prime failure."
I decided to check the entire transcript for October 18 against the tape, and what I discovered left me dismayed. The transcript abounds in errors that significantly undermine its reliability for historians, teachers, and general readers. Spot checks turned up similar errors in all the other transcripts. Despite the often poor sound quality of the Kennedy Library recordings, many of the relevant passages are clear enough to be heard conclusively. Since details are everything in this kind of microhistory, in which an inaccurate word or phrase can distort our perception of the historical record, we should examine some representative examples.
IN the first days of the secret meetings between Kennedy and his advisers, before the American people knew that the Soviets had missiles in Cuba, the President grappled with decisions that could determine the fate of the world. Should the United States bomb the missile sites or invade Cuba? If it became necessary to take decisive action, would the other nations of the Americas condemn the United States as the aggressor? The United States belonged to the Rio Pact, a mutual-defense treaty signed by more than twenty countries in North and South America. A two-thirds vote by the pact's member nations would authorize U.S. action against Cuba, and would preserve a unified front against the Soviets. On the October 18 tape Secretary of State Dean Rusk clearly assures the President, "I would suppose there would be no real difficulty in getting a two-thirds vote in favor of necessary action. But if we made an effort and failed to get the two-thirds vote, which I doubt would be the result, then at least we would have tried as far as the American people are concerned, to have done ... to have done our ... to have done our best on that."
Twice Rusk said that he expected to get the needed two-thirds vote. But here is how The Kennedy Tapes transcript reads (words in brackets were added by the book's editors for clarification): "But I suppose the only way we have of [using that is] getting [a] two-thirds vote to take necessary action. But if we made an effort and failed to get the two-thirds vote [unclear], then at least we will have tried as far as the American people are concerned. We'll have done that." Both of Rusk's assurances are missing. To understand Kennedy's decision-making process, readers must know what advice he was given. But this crucial evaluation of the diplomatic situation by Kennedy's highest foreign-policy official is lost in the gaps of the published transcript. (The United States did receive the two-thirds vote.) JFK's decision to begin with a blockade rather than with air raids is all the more striking given these assurances of hemispheric support for "necessary action."
The discussion soon turned to several proposed plans for bombing Soviet nuclear missiles, nuclear-capable bombers, and anti-aircraft sites in Cuba. If the missiles alone were struck, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara warned, Soviet bombers could attack the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo or even the East Coast of the United States. A key factor in any decision was whether the surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) were operational, and if not, how soon they might be. General Maxwell Taylor, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, strongly urges the President to destroy the SAMs. Even if they are not yet functional, Taylor insists, "the SAM sites would soon become operational" and compromise crucial surveillance flights. JFK observes that attacks on the nuclear missiles and bombers might be possible before the SAMs are armed. Taylor counters that "they may be operational at any time." The Kennedy Tapes has Taylor saying the "SAM site facilities have become operational" -- the very point about which Taylor was so uncertain -- and then meaninglessly telling the President that "they'll be operational at the same time." General Taylor's assessment, crucial to JFK's decision for military action, is thus reduced to a contradiction and a non sequitur.
A short time later Kennedy speculates about whether Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev should be given twenty-four hours' notice before the United States bombs the missile sites. But no hotline between the Kremlin and the White House then existed, and Kennedy was unsure how to reach the Soviet leader. "How quick is our communication with Moscow?" he asks. The Kennedy Tapes substitutes "If we have a communication with Moscow ..." obscuring Kennedy's primary concern. One adviser suggests that the President simply use the telephone. Robert Kennedy then asks, "It wouldn't really have to go in code, would it?" The Kennedy Tapes misidentifies the speaker as JFK and turns the remark into the immaterial "It wouldn't really have to be a call, would it?"
A few minutes later RFK frets about the dangers of the blockade, including the military risks in forcing "the examination of Russian ships." The Kennedy Tapes renders this as "the invasion of Russian ships," inaccurately suggesting the very sort of confrontation the blockade was meant to avoid.
Some of the most gripping moments on the tapes occur during JFK's tense meeting with the Joint Chiefs on October 19. General Earle Wheeler, the Army chief of staff, argues that only air strikes, an invasion, and a blockade "will give us increasing assurance that we really have got the offensive capability of the Cuban Soviets cornered." As transcribed in The Kennedy Tapes, however, Wheeler's recommendation -- these actions "will give us increasing assurance that we really have gone after the offensive capability of the Cuban/Soviets corner" -- would hardly have made sense to Kennedy.
General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, also bluntly tells the President that a failure to invade Cuba would be almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich before World War II. LeMay then predicts that the blockade would appear weak to the American people and our allies. "You're in a pretty bad fix," he smugly warns the President. JFK, always skeptical about the military, reminds the general with a mocking laugh "You're in with me." The Kennedy Tapes merely tells the reader that JFK makes "an unclear, joking, reply." In fact Kennedy's biting response is perfectly audible.
By Monday, October 22, the decision to begin with a blockade had been made, and the President was scheduled to give a speech to the nation that evening. As the afternoon meeting begins, JFK reiterates that the United States must respond to the situation in Cuba to preserve the balance of power and blunt the "inevitability" of Soviet advances. But, he cautions, the blockade may not work, and if it comes to bombing and invasion, "Khrushchev will not take this without a response," either in Cuba or against Berlin. The Kennedy Tapes renders this critical line as "Khrushchev will not complete this without a response," which makes no sense and deprives the reader of the tension in JFK's words.
Moments later, acknowledging the dissatisfaction of the Joint Chiefs, JFK concedes that the blockade will complicate any subsequent military steps: "I want to say very clearly to the military that I recognize that we increase your problems in any military action we have to take in Cuba by the warning we're now giving." The Kennedy Tapes transcribes this line as "I want to say very clearly to the military that I recognize the appreciable problems in any military action ..." thus losing Kennedy's key point: a failed blockade would increase the danger and difficulty of any bombing or invasion that followed.
Kennedy goes on to argue that the United States has commitments all over the world, not just in Cuba. He concludes that heavy air strikes without warning could be politically counterproductive: "I think the shock to the alliance might have been nearly fatal." The Kennedy Tapes mangles these words: "I think we get shocked, and the [damage to the] alliance might have been nearly fatal." Kennedy then raises the most chilling question: "What happens when the work on the bases goes on?" The editors miss this vital question entirely by transcribing it as "What happens when work [unclear]."
THE next day, October 23, JFK and his advisers discuss how to implement the blockade and win support in the press and on Capitol Hill. John McCone, the director of the CIA, offers to call the former President Dwight D. Eisenhower for permission to use his name in talking with members of Congress and to get "his view of this thing, as a soldier." The Kennedy Tapes, inexplicably, has McCone saying "his view of this thing, as a facilitator." At a meeting that evening JFK zeroes in on the Soviet ships approaching the quarantine line. "Now, what do we do tomorrow morning when these eight vessels continue to sail on?" he asks. "We're all clear about how we handle it?" McCone interjects, "Shoot the rudders off them, don't you?" The Kennedy Tapes muddles JFK's question -- "We're all clear about how we enter?" -- and omits McCone's reply entirely.
By October 26 the discussion had turned to how to handle press questions about ships stopped at the quarantine line. McNamara reports that just one cargo ship has been boarded. "In any case," he says, "it's been successful and I think to do any good the story must be put out immediately." The Kennedy Tapes distorts this important conclusion beyond recognition: "In any case, it was successful and I think the destroyers [unclear]." McNamara never mentions destroyers.
The participants then discuss evidence that work on the missile sites is continuing. They debate whether to add petroleum, oil, and lubricants (POL) to the list of quarantined materials immediately, or to wait twenty-four hours to see if talks proposed by UN Secretary-General U Thant produce a breakthrough. McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national security adviser, suggests that they "leave the timing [on adding POL] until we've talked about the U Thant initiative." The inaccuracy in The Kennedy Tapes is especially bizarre in this case, with Bundy saying "leave the timing until we've talked about the attack thing." These last two examples -- "the destroyers [unclear]" and "the attack thing" -- could easily leave a reader wondering what in the world these men were talking about. (Three days later, on October 29, U Thant was mentioned again. JFK asserts, "We want U Thant to know that Adlai [uN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson] is our voice." But The Kennedy Tapes transcribes this line as "We want you [unclear] to know that Adlai is our voice.")
October 27 saw the darkest moment in the crisis. An unconfirmed report was received at midday that a U-2 spy plane had been shot down over Cuba by a Soviet SAM missile, and the pilot killed. On the tape of the late-afternoon meeting Kennedy discusses whether to order an air strike on the SAM sites if the incident is repeated (a delay that produced consternation at the Pentagon). He declares that two options are on the table: begin conversations about Khrushchev's proposal to swap Soviet missiles in Cuba for U.S. missiles in Turkey, or reject discussions until the Cuban crisis is settled. Kennedy chooses the first, with the caveat that the Soviets must provide proof that they have ceased work on the missile sites. He repeatedly refers to "conversations" and "discussions" and concludes, "Obviously, they're not going to settle the Cuban question until they get some conversation on Cuba." Incredibly, The Kennedy Tapes substitutes "compensation" for "conversation." It's easy to imagine how Cold War veterans like Rusk, Bundy, and McCone would have reacted to any suggestion of compensation for the Soviets in Cuba.
On October 29, the day after Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles, the President and his advisers, relieved but not euphoric, conclude that surveillance and the quarantine will continue until the missiles have actually been removed. After a lull in the meeting, during which the conversation turns to college football, the President observes, "I imagine the Air Force must be a little mad," referring to the division of responsibility for aerial photography between the Air Force and the Joint Chiefs' photo-reconnaissance office. The Kennedy Tapes transcribes this as "I imagine the airports must be looking bad," which must leave many readers scratching their heads: the removal of the missiles had nothing to do with Cuban airports. Kennedy then ponders why, in the end, the Soviets decided to back down. He notes, "We had decided Saturday night to begin this air strike on Tuesday." No effort was made to conceal the military buildup in southern Florida, and Kennedy wonders if the impending strikes pushed the Russians to withdraw their missiles. The Kennedy Tapes, however, has JFK saying "We got the [unclear] signs of life to begin this air strike on Tuesday," making his shrewd speculation unintelligible.
ONE particular error, among scores not cited above, seems to epitomize the problems with these transcripts. On the October 18 tape Dean Rusk argues that before taking military action in Cuba, the United States should consult Khrushchev, in the unlikely event that he would agree to remove the missiles. "But at least it will take that point out of the way," The Kennedy Tapes has Rusk saying, "and it's on the record." But Rusk actually said that this consultation would remove that point "for the historical record." The historical record is indeed the issue here.
Of course, the editors of The Kennedy Tapes and other historians would never assume that any transcript is absolutely accurate. The tape itself must always remain the primary historical document. Nonetheless, as the editors affirm, "reliable transcripts -- ideally, annotated transcripts -- are essential to make the tapes intelligible." These published transcripts, however, require substantial work. The revisions suggested above will inevitably contain some errors; the editing process can never be final or perfect. But if the editors disagree with these findings, we can listen to any of these disputed passages, in private or in public, using the Kennedy Library tapes or the NONOISE tapes.
May and Zelikow, both distinguished scholars, have assured readers that if they listen to the tapes and discover errors or make out unclear remarks, corrections will be included in future editions or printings. And as we go to press, a fourth printing of the book has corrected three of the errors cited above ("the invasion of Russian ships"; "What happens when work [unclear]"; and "the [unclear] signs of life"). However, the editors have not acknowledged these corrections in the preface or identified them in the transcripts, and, of course, uncorrected copies continue to circulate. Readers deserve to know that even now The Kennedy Tapes cannot be relied on as an accurate historical document.
Nat appears to have won the point.
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As I write, we have been told that the cause of death was head trauma caused when Bhutto dropped from her through-the-sunroof perch after having been shot. Immediately we are put in mind of the Rabin hit, and how evidence suggests that he might have been killed after initial shots were fired and he entered his security vehicle.
Who was inside her SUV?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/...-shot-dead.html
Key Benazir Bhutto assassination witness shot dead
The bodyguard of Benazir Bhutto, who was to be a key witness in an investigation into her assassination, has been shot dead.
Last Updated: 3:19PM BST 23 Jul 2008
Khalid Shahenshah, who was the former Pakistan prime minister's security chief at the time of her assassination, was killed in a drive-by shooting as he left his house in the southern port city of Karachi on Tuesday, police said.Mr Shahenshah, 45, was riding in Mrs Bhutto's bullet-proof car when she was killed in a suicide attack in the northern city of Rawalpindi on December 27.
He was expected to be called to give evidence at a United Nations probe into her death.
"He was a key witness in the case and was also interviewed by the Scotland Yard experts who came to Pakistan to investigate her killing," said Waqar Mehdi, the junior information minister of Sindh province.
"There is a possibility that his killing could be linked to his status as a witness, although investigations are still underway."
A team of Scotland Yard detectives concluded in February that Mrs Bhutto was killed by a suicide bomb and not by gunfire, backing the previous Pakistani government's claim the attack was masterminded by Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan's top Taliban commander.
But the UN earlier this month agreed to set up an independent panel to investigate her slaying, following a request by Pakistan's new government.
In elections held in February, a coalition led by Mrs Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) defeated allies of President Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a military coup in 1999.
PPP officials have accused Pakistan's powerful military and intelligence services of involvement in her killing, rejecting suggestion the Taliban were responsible.
Party officials suspect that more than one attacker was involved in the murder.
Hundreds of mourners attended the funeral of Mr Shahenshah, a father of three, in Karachi. He was most recently employed as a security chief at the home of Mrs Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari.
Police have recovered the car which Mr Shahenshah's assailants used in his murder and were still investigating, Iqbal Mehmood, a senior Karachi police official said.
Zulfikar Mirza, the Sindh home minister, said it was "premature to say that Khalid was killed for being a witness in Benazir Bhutto's assassination case".
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I haven't read this entire thread, but I came across a few documents that might have something to do with bootleg Zapruders or another film of the assassination out there.
This report concerns the owner/bartender of the Golden Twenties Tavern in Dallas, whose patron, Jim Conners, claimed to have seen a film of the assassination, including the head shot, on a television at IBM on the afternoon of 11/22/63.
://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senat...276-10035.html
Then there's the story of Edward F. Bray and JFCOTT and a refrence to a film in court docs:
FBI 124-10055-10418 <LI>FBI 124-10061-10159 <LI>FBI 124-10163-10398 <LI>FBI 124-10055-10411 <LI>FBI 124-10236-10211
And then Mary Ferrell has a reference to a women who worked at the film lab in Dallas who took a "Copy" of the Zap film home with her.
DOROTHY (MRS. A. BERNARD TULLIUS) TULLIUS
----- On 11/22/63, she worked for film company that developed Zapruder film (Jamieson ?). She took a "copy" home for a few days and her brother-in-law, Bob Tullius, an auditor with Chrysler
Record:TULLIUS, DOROTHY (MRS. A. BERNARD TULLIUS)Sources:-----Mary's
Comments:On 11/22/63, she worked for film company that developed Zapruder film (Jamieson ?). She took a "copy" home for a few days and her brother-in-law, Bob Tullius, an auditor with Chrysler Corporation, viewed it then. Bernard Tullius was an electronics engineer with LTV. In 1970, Mrs. Dorothy Tullius was working in Sanger Harris' camera department. In 1994, phone is listed in name of Albert B. Tullius. On 1/13/95, Noel Twyman talked to her and she said her film was made by her nephew, Fr. Richard Tullius, priest in Grand Prairie, TX. (Is he the Richard Tullis in the AARC index? Is he the man filming on the same side of the street as Jim Altgens but wearing a hat?) (See Fr. Richard F. Tullius)<a href="http://" target="_blank"></a>
Thanks, Bill, that was very helpful. What I'm particularly keen to find is examples from 1975 of interviews with, and comments from, those who believed they'd seen the film well before: I dimly recall reading (or was it hearing?) such material years ago, but I'm damned if I can remember the source(s). It would be very instructive, of course, if those disparaging such recollections turned out to be connected with the false memory syndrome movement and its, er, financiers!
Paul
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For some essential context and much-merited scepticism, see William A. Reuben's The Atom Spy Hoax (NY: Action Books, 1954).
I have not been able to get a copy of this book. Any chance of a summary?
William A. Reuben. The Atom Spy Hoax (NY: Action Books, December 1954; this edition, May 1955), 504pp.
Contents:
Book I: The Secret
Chapter I: Hiroshima: There Is No Atom Secret 1
Chapter II: Canada: The Atom Spy Plot That Never Was 16
Chapter III: Canada: The Atom Spy Plot That Never Was (Continued) 37
Chapter IV: Canada: The Atom Spy Plot That Never Was (Continued) 84
Book II: The Blueprint
Chapter V: Lt. Redin: An A-Spy Is Still Born 113
Chapter VI: What Helps Business Helps You 119
Chapter VII: Dr. Condon: If At First You Don’t Succeed 129
Chapter VIII: A-Spies and the 1948 Elections:…Try Again 137
Chapter IX: Within Weeks An Explosion Occurred 148
Chapter X: Bentley, Budenz and Chambers, Unlimited 158
Book III: Reaction
Chapter XI: Peace Is a Four-Letter Word 203
Chapter XII: Klaus Fuchs 210
Chapter XIII: Harry Gold: “I Lied Desperately” 246
Book IV: Chain Reaction
Chapter XIV: Summer, 1950: Ninety Days That Changed The World 289
Chapter XV: Alfred Dean Slack: An “Atom Spy” Who Recanted 299
Chapter XVI: David Greenglass: The FBI Loosened His Memory 327
Chapter XVII: Julius Rosenberg: A Jello Box-Top Was The Clue 370
Chapter XVIII: Brothman-Moskowitz: Public Library Espionage 406
Chapter XIX: Ethel Rosenberg: Even the Charges Were Secret 422
Chapter XX: Ruth Greenglass: Not What She Bargained For 439
Chapter XXI: Morton Sobell: Case History of a Hoax 457
In Malcolm P. Sharp’s Was Justice Done? The Rosenberg-Sobell Case (NY: Monthly Review Press, 1956), Appendix 4 (pp.205-216), reprints Sharp’s review, New Light on the Rosenberg Case (Monthly Review, December 1955), of Reuben’s Atom Spy Hoax and John Wexley’s The Judgment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (NY: Cameron & Kahn, 1955). Extracts follow:
Mr. Reuben spends a large portion of his book in outlining the course of the leading spy cases, beginning with the publication of Gouzenko’s accusations in 1946, and their relationship to the Canadian cases, and continuing through the Rosenberg-Sobell cases. It is Mr. Reuben’s view that the excitement over the spy cases was deliberately exaggerated throughout and was a principal means of bringing on the cold war. His book is a valuable stimulus to observation…On the evidentiary problems about the spy scare in general, Mr. Reuben deserves respectful consideration. Historians, political scientists, and students of law will need to come to his presentation with an open, as well as a critical, mind. He is committed to a position, and the need for a critical mind will be apparent at the start. His first part deals with the Canadian cases. He reminds us of the acquittals and reduces the convictions to their natural size. He is more sceptical about the confession of Alan Nunn May than is Mr. Wexley, who fully shares Mr. Reuben’s and Dean Wigmore’s doubts about the dependability of confessions in general. Mr. Reuben is writing argumentatively. His bias perhaps appears most clearly in a much later chapter where, in dealing with an alleged American spy, Alfred Dean Slack, he presents the defense position, together with a citation to the report which gives a clue to a court’s strongly reasoned contrary view, which, however, he does not present…
Both Mr. Reuben and Mr. Wexley raise grave doubts about the reliability of the confessions of Fuchs, Harry Gold, and the Greenglasses, which are the basis of the proceedings against the Rosenbergs…
Other books & pamphlets by William A. Reuben:Footnote on an Historic Case: In Re Alger Hiss, No. 78 Civ. 3433. NY: The Nation Institute, 1983:1st issue. Light blue printed wraps. 65+ pp.)
The Honorable Mr. Nixon and the Alger Hiss Case (NY: Action Books, 1956)
The Mark Fein Case: The complete Story of a Young Millionaire Accused, Tried and Convicted of Murdering His Bookie (NY: Dial Press, 1967).
http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?author=W...st=sr&ac=qr
Reuben’s pamphlet, To Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, based on his August 1951 National Guardian series, led to the formation of the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg. It can be read online here:
http://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/secur...cerosenberg.pdf
Guide to the William A. Reuben papers, 1923-2003
http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/reuben.html
Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...agewanted=print
January 24, 1999'The Haunted Wood'
To the Editor, NYT:
Joseph E. Persico writes, ''What emerges . . . is proof of the guilt of certain Americans whose spying for the Soviet Union has been the subject of debate for over half a century.'' The fact that the texts of K.G.B. files purportedly summarized or copied by Allen Weinstein and Aleksandr Vassiliev are not available for independent verification must prevent any respectable historian from reaching any such conclusion.
I can testify personally that another statement by Persico is false. He writes, ''The K.G.B. archives further detail Moscow's nearly total control and orchestration of the failed worldwide public relations campaign to save Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.''
It was I and five friends who organized this campaign. No Russian or Communist agents ''orchestrated'' our activity; no such people exerted control over us. I had written a series of articles about the Rosenbergs' trial, the first of which appeared in The National Guardian on Aug. 15, 1951. Readers all over the United States wrote in response, enclosing $1, $2, $5 and $10 bills that amounted to close to $3,000 as contributions ''to the committee.'' No such committee then existed. We created it in my Manhattan apartment in October 1951, six months after the end of the trial. We used the contributions to publish the trial record and my Guardian articles in pamphlet form.
The worldwide campaign on behalf of the Rosenbergs was caused not by Moscow or its agents but by the shocking facts of the case. The Communist Party of the United States took no action on behalf of the Rosenbergs until October 1952.
William A. Reuben, New York
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m113...ag=artBody;col1
A serious flaw in Kovel - response to W. H. Locke Anderson's review of Joel Kovel's book 'Red Hunting in the Promised Land', May 1994William A. Reuben
To disagree with a review in Monthly Review by its Associate Editor of a book that is dedicated to Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff (and to Alger Hiss) is not a task to be taken lightly. But, in as comradely a spirit as I can muster, I would like to take issue with W. H. Locke Anderson's review (MR, May 1994) of Joel Kovel's Red Hunting in the Promised Land.
My main difference with Anderson's review is that he evades the meaning of the data Kovel has put together. The review is largely taken up with a tabulation of the book's contents, with Anderson mainly taking exception to what he calls Kovel's "expositional strategy." Anderson maintains that the author "seems to be saying that America's obsessional anticommunism derived from a mass confusion in the national psyche."
IN my reading of this work Kovel is saying something quite different, namely that the uniquely U.S. brand of anticommunism has enriched and made all-dominant in the governance of this land an elite few; and that the sole objective in the war against Communism was (and is) to save wealth and preserve power. As I understand his overall design (not explored in Anderson's review), Kovel has sought to come to grips with anticommunism's "black hole effect"--the demonization of those people and groups who represent "political opposition to the status quo," and how this has made robust, rational discourse on national affairs all but impossible.
Kovel's book grew out of a 1988 conference at Harvard University, "Anticommunism in the United States: History and Consequences." Although the particular topics of Red Hunting in the Promised Land have already been intensively studied and explored, there has been virtually nothing peviously written on anticommunism as an all-embracing syndrome. However, despite Kovel's keen insights and socialist sympathies, his study is based, admittedly, on no original investigation. This, in my opinion, has seriously flawed his work.
An all-pervading syndrome in the selling of the Cold War has to do with the "communist spy"--the notion that all "communists" are actual or potential spies and traitors. Kovel makes no attempt to deal with, or to understand, the alchemy of newspaper headlines (and radio and television sound bites) as an instrument to poison the public mind. Disinformation has been a vital weapon in the Cold War, and for near half-a-century the U.S. people have been bombarded with, and bamboozled by, fake and distorted and false stories about Communists and atoms and Russian spies. But Kovel seems to concede that the Establishment media's depiction of the famous Cold War "spy" cases is identical with courtroom evidence, for his textual analysis of the Cold War shies completely away from this subject (as does Anderson's review), much as if it were contaminated and dangerous to get close to. Nowhere in the text of Red Hunting in the Promised Land is there any discussion of such Cold War "communist spy" cases as Amerasia, Lieutenant Nicolai Redin, Igor Gouzenko, the Canadian "atom spies," the scores of New Deal officials headlined as part of the Elizabeth Bentley "spy" ring, Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, William Remington, Judith Coplon, Jack Soble, and Dr. Robert Soblen, and the trials in New York, Pennsylvania, California, and Hawaii of some 125 leaders of the Communist Party. Reverberating for years in the media and political dialogue, it was these trials that did so much to pollute the political climate, establish in the public mind the J. Edgar Hoover-inspired notion that criminal acts of espionage were the same as communist and left-oriented ideas (thereby finessing the guarantees of the First Amendment), and create so much of the hysteria and anticommunist hatred rooted in the idea that, in a nuclear age, it was possible for one communist-minded traitor to steal and hand over to the "enemy" a "secret" that could blow up the entire Free World.
In Kovel's entire book, there is merely a one-paragraph source note that brushes over this vast subject without scrutiny while conceding that spies did steal valuable atomic secrets for the Soviets. The author found it appropriate to write that one "indisputable" case of espionage "was that of Judith Coplon, a clerk in the Justice Department who admitted passing FBI reports to her Soviet lover." Ms. Coplon never admitted to passing government documents to anyone and was never shown by any evidence to have ever done any such thing. All charges against her have been dropped and to this day she stands in law as an innocent person--simply one of the many Americans falsely pilloried by the FBI and the Establishment media as a "communist spy."
How long, Oh Lord, how long, before we on the left recognize this spy stuff for what it is: 99.9 percent pure bunkum? Kovel is not to be faulted for overlooking this counter-evidence (it is, I suppose, too much to ask of an author of such a vast panoramic work to study original court records and government documents for himself) so much as it is to be an occasion for deep sorrow that we do not have in this country anything like a real opposition press.
COPYRIGHT 1994 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
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A group of historians are currently involved in a lawsuit seeking the release of papers in the Rosenberg case. The historians especially want the transcripts of those two crucial interviews with David and Ruth Greenglass. They are refusing to do this but did provide information that Ruth had died under an assumed name on 7th April 2008....
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USArosenberg.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USArosenbergE.htm
For some essential context and much-merited scepticism, see William A. Reuben's The Atom Spy Hoax (NY: Action Books, 1954).
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Where do you come up with this stuff. I don't post for Mack. Mack is a historian who is sitting atop the largest collection of historical images and data on the assassination that is only a phone call away. I seek information from him and pass it on.
And Mack not only saw the article, but cited details from memory to me. I asked if he could find the article and he said the museum has lots of materials to be archived. My understanding is that there are lots of boxes of materials to go through. He said as he has time to archive them ... he will keep and eye out for it. Would anyone of you doubters like to make a wager that Mack told me the truth??? Then once the article is made known - what then - apologies from anyone or will it just go quiet until the next accusation arises???
Bill Miller
Can’t wait, Bill. In the meantime, let’s enjoy this extract from the expanded – eight-page pamphlet version – of Mark Lane’s original article on the case, “Lane’s Defense Brief for Oswald,” published by the National Guardian, 19 December 1963:
”A motion picture taken of the President just before, during, and after the shooting, and demonstrated on television showed that the President was looking directly ahead when the first shot, which entered his throat, was fired. A series of still pictures taken from the motion picture and published in Life magazine on Nov. 29 show show exactly the same situation.”http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/The_critics/L...l_Guardian.html
Anyone reading this remember seeing the following interview? Or any others in a similar vein, presumably circa 1975? If so, recall any details?
February 1, 2008 at 4:48 pmrootlesscosmo
I saw* a TV interview with a woman who vividly recalled seeing JFK’s assassination on TV, the familiar motorcade, the open car, then three audible gunshots. But no TV station anywhere carried live coverage of the motorcade, and the Zapruder film–which is probably what’s merged with her memory here–had no sound. Yet she’ll go to her grave, I imagine, with that “flashbulb” image still glowing on her retinal memory.
*That is, I remember seeing.
http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2008/02...s/#comment-3424
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Well, they've nearly completed their counter-revolution: The triumph of an unaccountable elite
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9621
”Measure of America” report documents social decay of the United States
US ranks 42nd in life expectancy
By Patrick Martin
Global Research, July 20, 2008
wsws.org
A new study released Wednesday, entitled “The Measure of America,” provides a wealth of data demonstrating the profound and deepening social decay of the United States. Commissioned by the Oxfam charity and several foundations, and published by Columbia University Press, the report documents, using government figures, the dramatic decline of American society relative to other advanced industrialized countries and the mounting social disparities within the US.The study takes the methodology employed by the United Nations Development Report, widely recognized for its insights into the social conditions of less developed countries, and applies it for the first time to the study of an advanced country. The result is a portrait of America that shows much of the country’s population living in conditions that are closer to the “Third World” than to the “American Dream.”
The report analyzes figures provided by the US Bureau of the Census in its 2005 census of economic and social conditions. It thus lags significantly behind the actual deterioration in conditions of life, since the census was taken before the collapse of the sub-prime housing market and the ensuing plunge of the US economy into recession. A report based on today’s conditions would be even bleaker.
The three social scientists who prepared the study constructed an American Human Development Index which includes both median income figures and data relating to health, life expectancy and “access to knowledge” (school enrollment and the proportion of the population with college and professional degrees.) The result is a broader picture of social conditions than would be provided by a purely economic analysis.
In terms of the human development index, the United States has fallen from second place in 1990 (behind Canada) to 12th place. This decline continued through both the Clinton and Bush administrations, with the US falling to sixth in 1995, ninth in 2000, and 12th in 2005.
In certain respects, the decline is even worse. The US is 34th in infant mortality—with a level comparable to Croatia, Estonia, Poland and Cuba. US school children perform significantly below their counterparts in countries like Canada, France, Germany and Japan, and 14 percent of the population, some 40 million people, lack basic literacy and number skills.
Of the world’s 30 richest nations, which comprise the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States has the highest proportion of children living in poverty, 15 percent, and the most people in prison, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the whole population. With five percent of the world’s population, the US has 24 percent of the world’s prisoners.
The report notes: “Social mobility is now less fluid in the United States than in other affluent nations. Indeed, a poor child born in Germany, France, Canada or one of the Nordic countries has a better chance to join the middle class in adulthood than an American child born into similar circumstances.”
In overall life expectancy, the United States ranks an astonishing 42nd, behind not only Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and all the countries of Western Europe, but also Israel, Greece, Singapore, Costa Rica and South Korea. The US spends twice as much money per capita on health care as any of these countries, but its citizens live shorter lives.
Two principal contributing factors were identified in the report—the epidemic of obesity, a disease primarily of poverty and miseducation, and the lack of health insurance for 47 million Americans. The report also noted that homicide and suicide are among the 15 leading causes of death in America.
The health crisis in the United States was underscored by a second report, issued Thursday by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research group based in New York. This study found that 75 million people are either uninsured or under-insured, one quarter of the population. Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund, focused on the rising cost and diminishing availability of health care. “The central finding is that access has deteriorated,” she said.
A major factor is the immense administrative costs incurred by private insurance companies which spend billions of dollars to avoid paying claims. Much insurance company profit gouging is masked as “administrative” expenses as well. Administrative costs take 7.5 percent of US health care spending, compared to 5 percent in Germany and Switzerland, which also have private health insurers, and 1 percent or less in countries like Canada and Britain that have government-run insurance systems.
Assessing 37 separate healthcare indices, the Commonwealth study found that even in those areas where there was some improvement in absolute terms, other countries had improved by a far greater amount, pushing the US further down the table. For example, the US reduced the number of preventable deaths for people under 75 from 115 to 110 per 100,000 over the past five years. However, other countries, led by France, Japan and Australia, did much better. The US is now last among developed countries in this measure, having just slipped below Ireland and Portugal.
The Measure of America report also documents the widening social gulf within the United States, particularly in geographical terms, as it breaks down the census statistics to provide a table ranking all 50 states and all 438 congressional districts. The report greatly understates the degree of income inequality since the US economic census counts only wage and salary income, leaving out dividends, interest, capital gains and business profit, the principal forms of income for the upper class. But even with these limitations, the findings are devastating.
The executive summary of the report notes that “the average income of the top fifth of US households in 2006 was almost 15 times that of those in the lowest fifth—or $168,170 versus $11,352.” The top one percent of households possesses at least one third of the national wealth, while the bottom 60 percent possess just 4 percent of the total.
The authors observe: “Growing inequality in income distribution and wealth raises a profound question for Americans: Can the uniquely middle-class nation that emerged in the twentieth century survive into the twenty-first century? Or is it fracturing into a land of great extremes?” While not drawing any conclusion, they admit, “the answers to these questions will determine ... the future of America.”
There are staggering disparities in income, health care and educational opportunities from state to state, between urban and rural areas, and between relatively well-off areas like the Northeast and Pacific Coast and impoverished areas like much of the South and the Appalachian region.
The top ten states in terms of median income lie along the Eastern seaboard from Virginia to New Hampshire. The bottom five states include West Virginia and four states of the Deep South: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. It is worth emphasizing that the 2005 census figures were compiled before Hurricane Katrina devastated three of those states.
There are even greater disparities within states and regions. The poorest congressional district in the United States is not in the South, but in the central valley of California, around the cities of Fresno and Bakersfield, where tens of thousands of agricultural laborers toil under conditions not much improved from the time John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath.
In the 20th district of California, only 6.5 percent of adults have graduated from college, and the median household income is $16,767, below the US poverty line. Meanwhile, ten of the 20 richest congressional districts are also in California, including the Silicon Valley and the upscale suburbs of Los Angeles and San Diego.
The richest congressional district is New York’s 14th, encompassing Manhattan’s east side: 62.6 percent of the adult population have a college degree and median family income is $51,139 a year (counting only wages, not the income from capital). A short subway ride away in the Bronx is the 16th congressional district, one of the five poorest in the US, where only 8.6 percent of adults have a college degree and the median annual income is $19,113.
Summing up the findings of the report, co-author Sarah Burd-Sharps writes, “Some Americans are living anywhere from 30 to 50 years behind others when it comes to issues we all care about: health, education and standard of living.” While the US remains one of the richest nations in the world, it is “woefully behind when it comes to providing opportunity and choices to all Americans to build a better life.”
Just as revealing as the figures provided by the Measure of America report is the response to it on the part of the American media and political establishment. The report was published by Columbia University, one of the most prestigious American colleges, and its co-authors held a press conference on Capitol Hill to announce their findings. But not a single major daily newspaper carried an account, nor was the study mentioned on any of the evening television newscasts.
The regional press in California reported the dismal last-place ranking for the 20th congressional district, but not the wider findings. And Talk Radio News Service, a web site serving the largely ultra-right talk radio industry, posted an item that turned the findings upside down, under the bizarre headline, “Report: Most Americans doing better than fifty years ago.”
The silence of the media was matched by the silence of the Democratic and Republican candidates for president. Neither Obama nor McCain made mention of the findings, although both have made photo-op appearances in poverty-stricken areas like eastern Kentucky, New Orleans and inner city Detroit.
In that context, it is worth pointing out that Obama’s campaign is making little effort in the five most impoverished states, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama and West Virginia. The last four have been virtually conceded to the Republicans. The Obama campaign hopes for a heavy turnout among Mississippi’s large black population to vote for the first major party African-American candidate.
In fact, neither party is able to advance any policy to address the vast decay of American society. The Measure of America and Commonwealth Fund reports are the latest in a series of studies that depict a society—ravaged by poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, ill health and inequality—that is going backward. The sclerotic two-party system cannot provide any answer to the social disaster because it is a corrupt instrument of the financial aristocracy that is plundering the country to pile up ever-greater wealth for itself.
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http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/23429,featur...d-the-red-scare
Aldo Moro and the ‘Commie scare’
Thirty years after his murder we may finally get to know the truth about Aldo Moro, says Robert Fox
Thirty years ago this Sunday, the Italian statesman Aldo Moro was seized by the Red Brigades and eight weeks later his body was dumped in downtown Rome. It was the most spectacular assassination by the Red Brigades and the most significant killing of a leader in Europe during the entire Cold War...
Operation Gladio: CIA Network of "Stay Behind" Secret Armies
The "Sacrifice" of Aldo Moro
by Andrew G. Marshall
Global Research, July 17, 2008
Geopoliticalmonitor.com
Through NATO, working with various Western European intelligence agencies, the CIA set up a network of stay behind “secret armies” which were responsible for dozens of terrorist atrocities across Western Europe over decades. This report will focus on the stay behind army in Italy, as it is the most documented. Its codename was Operation Gladio, the ‘Sword’.An Overview
The Purpose of the ‘Stay Behind’ Armies
In the early 1950s, the United States began training networks of “stay behind” volunteers in Western Europe, so that in the event of a Soviet invasion, they would “gather intelligence, open escape routes and form resistance movements.” The CIA financed and advised these groups, later working in tandem with western European military intelligence units under the coordination of a NATO committee. In 1990, Italian and Belgian investigators started researching the links between these “stay behind armies” and the occurrence of terrorism in Western Europe for a period of 20 years.[1]
‘Secret Armies’ or Terrorist Groups?
These “stay behind” armies colluded with, funded and often even directed terrorist organizations throughout Europe in what was termed a “strategy of tension” with the aim of preventing a rise of the left in Western European politics. NATO’s “secret armies” engaged in subversive and criminal activities in several countries. In Turkey in 1960, the stay behind army, working with the army, staged a coup d’état and killed Prime Minister Adnan Menderes; in Algeria in 1961, the French stay-behind army staged a coup with the CIA against the French government of Algiers, which ultimately failed; in 1967, the Greek stay-behind army staged a coup and imposed a military dictatorship; in 1971 in Turkey, after a military coup, the stay-behind army engaged in “domestic terror” and killed hundreds; in 1977 in Spain, the stay behind army carried out a massacre in Madrid; in 1980 in Turkey, the head of the stay behind army staged a coup and took power; in 1985 in Belgium, the stay behind attacked and shot shoppers randomly in supermarkets, killing 28; in Switzerland in 1990, the former head of the Swiss stay behind wrote the US Defense Department he would reveal “the whole truth,” and was found the next day stabbed to death with his own bayonet; and in 1995, England revealed that the MI6 and SAS helped set up stay behind armies across Western Europe.[2]
The Birth of Operation Gladio
A ‘Strategy of Tension’
In 1990, the Italian Prime Minister had confirmed that Italy’s “stay behind” army, termed “Gladio” (Sword), existed since 1958, with the approval of the Italian government. In the early 1970s, Italy’s communist support was growing, so the government turned to a “Strategy of Tension” using the Gladio network. At a top secret 1972 Gladio meeting, one official referred to making a “pre-emptive attack” on the Communists. As the Guardian reported, links between Gladio in Italy, all three Italian secret services and Italy’s P2 Masonic Lodge were well documented, as the head of each intelligence unit was a member of the P2 Lodge.[3]
Setting up the Network
In 1949, the CIA helped set up the Italian secret armed forces intelligence unit, named SIFAR, staffed in part with former members of Mussolini’s secret police. It later changed its name to SID. At the end of World War 2, a former Nazi collaborator, Licio Gelli, was facing execution for his activities during the war, but managed to escape by joining the US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. In the 1950s, Gelli was recruited by SIFAR. Gelli was also head of the P2 Masonic Lodge in Italy, and in 1969, he developed close ties with General Alexander Haig, who was then Assistant to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. Through this network, Gelli became chief intermediary between the CIA and General De Lorenzo, Chief of the SID.[4]
Gladio Creates ‘Tension’
Gladio was involved in a silent coup d’état in Italy, when General Giovanni de Lorenzo forced the Italian Socialist Ministers to leave the government.[5] On December 12, 1969, a bomb exploded at the National Agrarian Bank, which killed 17 people and wounded 88 others. That afternoon, three more bombs exploded in Rome and Milan. US intelligence was informed ahead of time of the bombing, but did not inform the Italian authorities.[6] In 2000, a former Italian Secret Service General stated that the CIA “gave its tacit approval to a series of bomb attacks in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s.”[7] The bombing was linked to two neofascists and to an SID agent.[8]
Testifying in a court case trying four men accused of involvement in the 1969 bank bombing in Milan, General Gianadelio Maletti, former head of military counter-intelligence from 1971 to 1975, stated that his unit discovered evidence that explosives were supplied to a right wing Italian terrorist group from Germany, and that US intelligence may have aided in the transfer of explosives. He was quoted as saying that the CIA, “following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left and, for this purpose, it may have made use of rightwing terrorism,” and that, “I believe this is what happened in other countries as well.”[9]
The Report
The Italian government released a 300-page report on Gladio operations in Italy in 2000, documenting connections with the United States. It declared that the US was responsible for inspiring a “strategy of tension.” In examining why those who committed the bombings in Italy were rarely caught, the report said, “those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organised or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.”[10]
The Red Brigades
The Red Brigades were a leftist Italian terrorist organization that was formed in 1970. In 1974, Red Brigade founders Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini were arrested. Alberto Franceschini later accused a top member of the Red Brigades, Mario Moretti, of turning them in, and that both Moretti and another leading Red Brigade member, Giovanni Senzani, were spies for the Italian and US secret services.[11] Moretti rose up through the ranks of the Red Brigades as a result of the arrest of the two founders.
The Red Brigades and the CIA
The Red Brigades worked closely with the Hyperion Language School in Paris, which was founded by Corrado Simioni, Duccio Berio and Mario Moretti. Corrado Simoni had worked for the CIA at Radio Free Europe, Duccio Berio had been supplying the Italian SID with information of leftist groups and Mario Moretti, apart from being accused by the Red Brigades founders as being an intelligence asset, also happened to be the mastermind and murderer of former Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro. An Italian police report referred to the Hyperion Language School as “the most important CIA office in Europe.”[12]
The Murder of Aldo Moro
Moro Makes Powerful Enemies
Aldo Moro, who served as Italy’s Prime Minister from 1963 until 1968 and later, from 1973 until 1976, was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978, while still a prominent politician in the Christian Democrat Party. When he was kidnapped, Moro was on his way to Parliament to vote on inaugurating a new government, of which he negotiated, for the first time since 1947, to be backed by the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Moro’s policy of working with and bringing the Communists into the government was denounced by both the USSR and the United States.
Kissinger’s Threat
Moro was held for 55 days before his eventual murder. The reasoning was for his plan to bring the Communist Party into the government. Four years prior to his death, in 1974, Moro was on a visit as Italian Prime Minister, to the United States. While there, he met with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who told Moro, “`You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration... or you will pay dearly for it.”[13]
Moro was “Sacrificed”
Steve Pieczenik, a former State Department hostage negotiator and international crisis manager, “claimed that he played a critical role in the fate of Aldo Moro.” Pieczenik “said that Moro had been "sacrificed" for the "stability" of Italy.” He had been sent to Italy by President Jimmy Carter on the day of Moro’s kidnapping to be part of a crisis committee, of which he said was “jolted into action by the fear that Moro would reveal state secrets in an attempt to free himself.” The action the committee took was to leak a memo saying that Moro was dead, and to have the memo attributed to the Red Brigades. The purpose of this was to “prepare the Italian public for the worst and to let the Red Brigades know that the state would not negotiate for Moro, and considered him already dead.”[14] In a documentary on the subject, Pieczenik stated that, “The decision was made in the fourth week of the kidnapping, when Moro's letters became desperate and he was about to reveal state secrets,” and that, “It was an extremely difficult decision, but the one who made it in the end was interior minister Francesco Cossiga, and, apparently, also prime minister Giulio Andreotti.”[15]
Moro’s Letters
Among Moro’s released letters, which he was writing while in captivity, he stated that he feared that a shadow organization, with “other secret services of the West ... might be implicated in the destabilisation of our country.”[16] During his interrogation while in captivity, Moro even referred to “Nato's anti-guerrilla activities.” However, the Red Brigades did not use this information,[17] perhaps because, according to the founders of the Red Brigades, the leader of the organization at the time of Moro’s kidnapping, Mario Moretti, was working for the Italian or US intelligence services.[18]
Maverick Journalist Killed by President?
Shortly after Moro’s death, Italian journalist, Mino Pecorelli, a man with “excellent secret service contacts,” voiced his suspicion in a 1978 article that Moro’s death was linked to Gladio, which was not officially acknowledged until 1990. A year after Moro’s death, Pecorelli was shot dead in Rome. He claimed that the kidnapping of Moro was committed by a “lucid superpower.” In 2002, former seven-term Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, was convicted of “ordering” Pecorelli's murder.[19] Pecorelli was about to publish a book “containing damaging criticisms of [Prime Minister Giulio] Andreotti by murdered Christian Democratic leader Aldo Moro.”[20]
The Bologna Bombing
On the morning of August 2, 1980, Italy experienced its worst-ever terrorist attack at Bologna train station, which killed 85 people, and wounded more than 200 others. A long and complicated investigation was undertaken, and eventually, a trial began. In 1988, four right-wing terrorists were sentenced to life in prison. Two other defendants were convicted of slandering the investigation, “Francesco Pazienza, a former financier linked to several criminal cases in Italy, and Licio Gelli, the former grandmaster of the so-called P-2 Masonic lodge.”[21] This is the very same Licio Gelli who happened to be a CIA intermediary for the head of Italian intelligence for the Gladio network. Although later on, Gelli was acquitted of the charges.
Notes
[1] Bruce W. Nelan, Europe Nato's Secret Armies. Time Magazine: November 26, 1990:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,971772,00.html
2] PHP, Secret Warfare: Operation Gladio and NATO's Stay-Behind Armies. ISN:
http://translate.google.ca/translate?hl=en...l%3Den%26sa%3DG
[3] Ed Vulliamy, Secret agents, freemasons, fascists... and a top-level campaign of political 'destabilisation'. The Guardian: December 5, 1990:
http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cutt...n_5dec1990.html
4] Arthur E. Rowse, GLADIO: THE SECRET U.S. WAR TO SUBVERT ITALIAN DEMOCRACY. Covert Action Quarterly: December 1994
[5] PHP, Secret Warfare: Operation Gladio and NATO's Stay-Behind Armies. ISN:
http://translate.google.ca/translate?hl=en...l%3Den%26sa%3DG
[6] Philip Willan, US 'supported anti-left terror in Italy'. The Guardian: June 24, 2000:
http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cutt..._24jun2000.html
[7] CBC, CIA knew, but didn't stop bombings in Italy – report. CBC News: August 5, 2000:
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2000/08/05/cia000805.html
[8] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press, 2007: page 181
[9] Philip Willan, Terrorists 'helped by CIA' to stop rise of left in Italy. The Guardian: March 26, 2001: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/mar/26/terrorism
[10] Philip Willan, US 'supported anti-left terror in Italy'. The Guardian: June 24, 2000:
http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cutt..._24jun2000.html
[11] Philip Willan, Infiltrators blamed for murder of Italian PM. The Guardian: April 10, 1999:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/...3852325,00.html
[12 – 13] Arthur E. Rowse, GLADIO: THE SECRET U.S. WAR TO SUBVERT ITALIAN DEMOCRACY. Covert Action Quarterly: December 1994
[14] Malcolm Moore, US envoy admits role in Aldo Moro killing. The Telegraph: March 16, 2008:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/...ro-killing.html
[15] Saviona Mane, A murder still fresh. Haaretz: May 9, 2008:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/981929.html
[16] Ed Vulliamy, Secret agents, freemasons, fascists... and a top-level campaign of political 'destabilisation'. The Guardian: December 5, 1990:
http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cutt...n_5dec1990.html
[17] Philip Willan, Moro's ghost haunts political life. The Guardian: May 9, 2003:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4665179-105806,00.html
[18] Philip Willan, Infiltrators blamed for murder of Italian PM. The Guardian: April 10, 1999:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/...3852325,00.html
[19] Philip Willan, Moro's ghost haunts political life. The Guardian: May 9, 2003:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4665179-105806,00.html
[20] BBC News, Giulio Andreotti: Mr Italy. BBC: October 23, 1999:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/483295.stm
[21] AP, Four Get Life in Prison In Bombing in Bologna. The New York Times: July 12, 1988:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...754C0A96E948260
Andrew G. Marshall contributed to breaking the Climate Change consensus in a celebrated 2006 article entitled Global Warming A Convenient Lie, in which he challenged the findings underlying Al Gore's documentary. According to Marshall, 'as soon as people start to state that “the debate is over”, beware, because the fundamental basis of all sciences is that debate is never over'. Andrew Marshall has also written on the militarization of Central Africa, national security issues and the process of integration of North America. He is also a contributor to GeopoliticalMonitor.com He is currently a researcher at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) in Montreal and is studying political science and history at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. -
Obama - the new face of American totalitarianism:
Obama outlines policy of endless war
by Bill Van Auken
Any misconception that Barack Obama is running in the 2008 election as an “antiwar” candidate should have been cleared up Tuesday in what was billed by the Democratic presidential campaign as a “major speech” on national security and the US war in Iraq.Speaking before a backdrop of massed American flags at the Reagan Building in Washington, Obama made it clear that he opposes the present US policy in Iraq not on the basis of any principled opposition to neo-colonialism or aggressive war, but rather on the grounds that the Iraq war is a mistaken deployment of power that fails to advance the global strategic interests of American imperialism.
What emerges from the speech by the junior senator from Illinois is that the November election will not provide the American people with the opportunity to vote for or against war, but merely to choose which of the two colonial-style wars that US forces are presently fighting should be escalated.
As in his op-ed piece published in the New York Times on Monday, his call on Tuesday for the withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq was linked to the proposal to dispatch as many as 10,000 troops to Afghanistan to escalate the war there.
The thrust of Obama’s speech was a critique of the Bush administration’s incompetence in pursuing an imperialist strategy, combined with an implicit commitment to advance the same basic strategy in a more rational and effective manner once he enters the White House.
He summed up his policy as “a responsible redeployment of our combat troops that pushes Iraq’s leaders toward a political solution, rebuilds our military, and refocuses on Afghanistan and our broader security interests.”
Obama reiterated his campaign pledge to bring US “combat brigades” out of Iraq within 16 months of his inauguration. After this “redeployment,” however, a “residual force” would remain in Iraq carrying out counter-insurgency operations, protecting US facilities and training and supporting Iraqi puppet forces—tasks that would undoubtedly keep tens of thousands of American troops occupying the country indefinitely.
Obama stressed that he would make “tactical adjustments” to his plan based upon consultations with “commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government,” suggesting that even the partial withdrawal he proposes would unlikely unfold as quickly as promised.
The speech was scheduled in advance of a “fact-finding” tour that Obama is set to embark upon in the next week, visiting both Iraq and Afghanistan and conducting meetings with US military commanders in both countries.
Obama began his speech by invoking the legacy of US imperialism’s strategy in the aftermath of World War II, when it acted to “foster new international institutions like the United Nations, NATO and the World Bank” and rebuilt shattered European capitalism through the Marshall Plan. He contrasted that six-decade policy with what he presented as the squandered opportunity for Washington to again seize global leadership following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
“The world, too, was united against the perpetrators of this evil act, as old allies, new friends and even long-time adversaries stood by our side,” said Obama. “It was time—once again—for America’s might and moral suasion to be harnessed; it was time to once again shape a new security strategy for an ever-changing world.”
The starting point for seizing this golden opportunity, according to Obama, was to “have deployed the full force of American power to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Taliban and all of the terrorists responsible for 9/11, while supporting real security in Afghanistan.”
Instead, he charged, the Bush administration diverted these military resources into the war against Iraq, “a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.” He continued: “By any measure, our single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq is not a sound strategy for keeping America safe.”
This presentation is a gross and deliberate distortion of the motives underlying both the war in Afghanistan and the one in Iraq. Neither of them was launched with the aim of “keeping America safe,” but rather to advance definite strategic interests of American imperialism.
The central aim of the war in Afghanistan—planned well before the attacks of 9/11—was to take advantage of the power vacuum in Central Asia created by the Soviet Union’s dissolution to assert US domination over a region containing the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world.
As for the supposed targets of this operation—Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban—all of them are, in the final analysis, the products of US imperialism’s own bloody history of intervention in the region, particularly in the 1980s, when Washington poured billions of dollars into funding the Mujahedin forces fighting the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan and the Soviet army when it intervened there. Among these forces were bin Laden and those who went on to set up both Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The legacy of this CIA-directed war was the devastation of Afghanistan and protracted political chaos, which Washington sought to curb by supporting the Taliban’s coming to power.
Now, nearly seven years after the US invaded Afghanistan, Obama proclaims, “As president, I will make the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win.”
To that end, Obama vowed to send “two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan” and to press Washington’s NATO allies to make “greater contributions—with fewer restrictions” in terms of deploying their own troops.
He continued by vowing to expand the intervention in Afghanistan into neighboring Pakistan.
“The greatest threat to that security lies in the tribal regions of Pakistan, where terrorists train and insurgents strike into Afghanistan,” he warned. “We cannot tolerate a terrorist sanctuary, and as president, I won’t. We need a stronger and sustained partnership between Afghanistan, Pakistan and NATO to secure the border, to take out terrorist camps and to crack down on cross-border insurgents. We need more troops, more helicopters, more satellites, more Predator drones in the Afghan border region. And we must make it clear that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our sights.”
There is no evidence that US forces are fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or that the bulk of those attacking American and NATO forces are following orders issued by the remnants of the Taliban. The Pentagon has not reported the capture of Al Qaeda operatives in the stepped-up fighting that has claimed the lives of 69 US and NATO soldiers in the months of May and June.
The reality is that the resistance to the US-led occupation has grown dramatically as a direct product of the escalating slaughter of civilians, as seen in the July 6 US air strike that killed 47 members of a wedding party, the vast majority of them women and children. Anger has also been generated by the arbitrary detention and frequent torture of those picked up by US units and Afghan puppet troops, as well as by the gross corruption of the US-backed regime of President Hamid Karzai.
In the attack on a US base last Sunday that claimed the lives of nine US soldiers, local villagers reportedly participated, providing direct support to the insurgents who carried out the assault.
With “more troops, more helicopters, more satellites, more Predator drones,” Obama is proposing to escalate this slaughter, which will generate greater resistance and an expanded war involving more US troops and, inevitably, their deployment across the border into Pakistan.
Obama vowed to beef up the US military for a war that threatens to prove far more intense than the one in Iraq. He called for an overall increase of American ground forces by 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 marines, and “investing in the capabilities we need to defeat conventional foes and meet the unconventional challenges of our time.”
Much of the media reaction to Obama’s speech centered on speculation over whether it was aimed at reassuring his Democratic base that he is still committed to effecting a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, or if it indicated a further “move to the center” by stressing his willingness to use force as the US commander-in-chief.
In reality, the speech reflected what is becoming a consensus position within much of the American political establishment, Democratic and Republican alike. There is a growing conviction that the US can secure its strategic interests in Iraq with fewer troops and without expending the more than $10 billion a month that is compounding the deepening economic crisis of American capitalism.
To underscore this message, Obama was introduced Tuesday by former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, who, together with Republican ex-Secretary of State James Baker, chaired the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel that called for a revamped US military and diplomatic policy aimed at salvaging the American intervention in Iraq.
Both Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, have expressed concern that there are insufficient troop levels in Afghanistan to secure US domination of the country. They have indicated that they would like to deploy another 10,000 there—the same number proposed by Obama.
Even Bush, in a White House press conference Tuesday morning, sounded this theme, claiming that Washington and its NATO allies were already initiating a “surge” in Afghanistan.
As for the speech signaling a shift to the right, the reality is that Obama has sounded the same themes repeatedly since initiating his run for the presidency. While in the Democratic primaries he stressed his opposition to the 2002 Senate vote to grant Bush authorization to launch the Iraq war—a resolution that was supported by his principal rivals Hillary Clinton and John Edwards—he always made it clear that he embraced the ideological framework of the “global war on terrorism” used to justify both the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions.
Given this position and his subsequent votes to fund the war once he entered the Senate in 2005, there is little reason to believe that he would not have joined his rivals in giving Bush a blank check for an Iraq invasion had he been a US senator at the time.
Writing in Foreign Affairs a year ago, Obama stressed that the lesson of the Iraq debacle was the necessity to prepare for new US wars. “We must use this moment both to rebuild our military and to prepare it for the missions of the future,” he stressed. “We must retain the capacity to swiftly defeat any conventional threat to our country and our vital interests. But we must also become better prepared to put boots on the ground in order to take on foes that fight asymmetrical and highly adaptive campaigns on a global scale.”
While Obama’s “left” apologists will no doubt excuse the blatant militarism and warmongering in the candidate’s speech as a mere political device aimed at winning over “centrist” voters, the reality is that the candidate is spelling out what can be expected from an incoming Democratic administration in 2009.
Its policies will be determined not by the hollow campaign rhetoric about “change” that has been Obama’s specialty, but rather by the deepening economic and social crisis of American capitalism and the determination of the American ruling elite to continue using military force as a means of offsetting its economic decline.
Bill Van Auken is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Curiously, no mention whatever of the RFK assassination conspiracy. What had happened to Pilger’s insistence – to the FBI, in 1968, at least – that there was second gunman in the pantry? On the back-burner in public again? Apparently so. Why?
Paul,
sorry. I did not see this before. It prompted me to check exactly what he did say to the FBI (and LAPD).
Firstly, here is the relevant part of the transcript from the GOODMAN INTERVIEW:
JOHN PILGER: [.....] And we had been told to follow the candidate through the kitchen, because they were going out the back way. And as we waited for Kennedy to appear on stage in the ballroom at the Ambassador,one of the Kennedy workers came up to us and said, “There’s a funny-looking guy in the kitchen. He’s giving me the creeps.” Well, that was Sirhan Sirhan. And I have to say that none of us journalists where we were went off and inquired who this funny-looking guy was.Kennedy arrived, stood on the stage, made a very short speech, which ended famously with now “on to Chicago,” where the Democratic nomination would have happened, the convention there. And then, he and Ethel, his wife, and his two protectors—Bill Barry, former FBI agent, and Rosey Grier, NFL player—followed by a half a dozen journalists, including myself, started to walk towards the kitchen.Kennedy entered the kitchen. Sirhan leapt up on a serving area, pointed a gun at him and fired. He was wrestled. Kennedy fell. He was wrestled to the ground, and then there were other shots.There’s no question that there was another gunman, because one of the people who was hit, just grazed, was standing next to me, and that happened when Sirhan Sirhan had been wrestled to the ground. So that’s the interesting thing. There was another assassin or another several assassins.And then it was bedlam. And as you know, Kennedy died about twenty-four hours later.AMY GOODMAN: John Pilger, what about Robert Kennedy’s views of Vietnam? Also, of course, your view is not the standard one, that there were other assassins.JOHN PILGER: I’m sorry. I didn’t quite hear the second part. His views of Vietnam and…?AMY GOODMAN: Your view is not the standard one, that there were other assassins there. But—JOHN PILGER:Well, I told—the FBI interviewed quite a few of us, and I told the FBI at length just what had happened, the numbers of shots that were fired that I heard—I thought I heard. And I’m pretty sure I did hear them, which Sirhan Sirhan—AMY GOODMAN: How many?JOHN PILGER:—couldn’t have fired. There were two people seen running from the Ambassador Hotel, including one famous woman in a polka dot dress. A number of us thought we saw those. We can’t be absolutely sure about that.There is a new documentary out, which I haven’t seen, which I understand goes into this in depth. But—FBI REPORT:
"...did not witness the shooting or the immediate aftermath. He had no recollection of seeing Sirhan Sirhan at any time..."
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...sPageId=1081867
LAPD REPORT
"...when the Sen. left the stage and was proceeding towards the kitchen area Mr Pilger proceeded towards the main door of the Embassy Ballroom. He had gotten to a point approx 30 to 40 feet from the stage when he heard women crying etc. Several minutes later heard that the Sen. had been shot. He was unable to get into the kitchen area because of the large crowd that had gathered at that point. He stated that he did NOT [emphasis in original] here any of the shots that were fired and that he could not recall any girl in particular that had been wearing a polka dot dress."
Mr Pilger has seen the photos of Sirhan and has no recollection of seeing anyone resembling him at any time prior to the shooting."
Let's not get ahead of this, though. As Larry Hancock shows in his recent series of essays, the LAPD manufactured interviews and selectively quoted in reports.
The LAPD interview was taped. Would this tape still exist?
Other reporters at the Ambassador that night told the authorities that the rushed off to file stories. One has to assume Pilger did exactly the same. If he did, that story needs to be run down. If it is closer to the Goodman interview version than the FBI/LAPD version, we have proof of further malfeasance by the investigators. If on the other hand, it confirms what the LAPD/FBI reports state, Pilger needs to be confronted and publicly exposed.
Truth shall set us free: There is a huge public hunger for incisive political documentaries. If only the media had the courage to show them
By John Pilger
The Guardian, Film, Friday, 15 September 2006, p.5
The political documentary, that most powerful and subversive medium, is said to be enjoying a renaissance on both sides of the Atlantic. This may be true in the cinema but what of television, the source of most of our information? Like the work of many other documentary film-makers, my films have been shown all over the world, but never on network television in the US. That suppression of alternative viewpoints may help us understand why millions of Americans display such a chronic ignorance of other human beings.It was not always like this. In the 1930s, the Workers' Film and Photo League in New York produced a dazzling series of "neighbourhood documentaries" that presented the world in decidedly non-Hollywood and non-stereotypical terms, including the US, where epic documentaries such as The Scottsboro Boys and The National Hunger March recorded America's "lost period" - the incipient revolution of working people suffering the Depression and their brutal repression by the police and army. Shown in trade union halls, workers' clubs and at open-air meetings, these films were very popular. Thanks to George Clooney's superb movie Good Night, and Good Luck, we know of Edward Murrow's See It Now, which, in the 1950s, gave millions an unsentimental and truthful view of their nation, stirring and angering and empowering rather than pacifying, which is the rule today.
I learned my own lessons about the power of documentaries and their censorship in 1980, when I took two of my films, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia and Cambodia Year One, to the US in the naive belief that the networks would want to air these disclosures of Pol Pot's rule and its aftermath. All those I met were eager to buy clips that showed how monstrous the Khmer Rouge were, but none wanted the equally shocking evidence of how three US administrations had colluded in Cambodia's tragedy; Ronald Reagan was then secretly backing Pol Pot in exile. Having bombed to death hundreds of thousands of Cambodians between 1969 and 1973 - the catalyst for the rise of the Khmer Rouge, according to the CIA - Washington was imposing an economic blockade on the most stricken country on earth, as revenge for its liberation by the hated Vietnam. This siege lasted almost a decade and Cambodia never fully recovered. Almost none of this was broadcast as news or documentary.
With the two films under my arm, my last stop in Washington was PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service, which has a liberal reputation, rather like the BBC. During a viewing with a senior executive, I discerned a sharp intake of breath. "Great films, John," he said, "but ..." He proposed that PBS hire an "adjudicator" who would "assess the real public worth of your films". Richard Dudman, a journalist with the rare distinction of having been welcomed to Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, was assigned the task. In his previous Cambodia dispatches, Dudman had found people "reasonably relaxed" and urged his readers to look "on the bright side". Not surprisingly, he gave the thumbs down to my films. Later, the PBS executive phoned me "off the record". "Your films would have given us problems with the Reagan administration," he said. "Sorry."
I offer this charade as a vivid example of the fear and loathing of the independent documentary's power to circumvent those who guard official truth. Although its historical roots are often traced back to the work of Robert Flaherty, the American director who made Nanook of the North in 1922, and John Grierson, the British documentarist, in Britain the modern documentary's political power is often measured against a specious neutrality invented by John Reith, founder of the BBC, while he was writing and broadcasting anti-trade union propaganda during the 1922 general strike. The stamina and influence of this pervasive BBC myth are reflected in the rarity of truly independent political documentaries.
Some remarkable films are made, however, testaments to a faith in the documentary form. One comes readily to mind: A Letter to the Prime Minister: Jo Wilding's Diary from Iraq. Jo Wilding, a trainee lawyer and human rights worker in Iraq, produced some of the finest frontline reporting of the war online from Falluja, then under siege by the US Marines. She all but shamed the embedded army of reporters in her description of the atrocious US attack on an Iraqi city that had been no friend of Saddam Hussein. Her documentary, directed by Julia Guest, presents the evidence of a crime and asks Tony Blair to take his share of the responsibility: a basic question now asked by millions of Britons. The film was offered to TV, and rejected. It has been shown at festivals around the world, but "painfully little" in Britain, says Guest, apart from single screenings at the Barbican and a forthcoming screening on October 15 at the Curzon Soho, London.
One problem facing political documentaries in Britain is that they run the risk of being immersed in the insidious censorship of "current affairs", a loose masonry uniting politicians and famous journalists who define "politics" as the machinations of Westminster, thereby fixing the limits of "political debate". No more striking example currently presents itself than the relentless media afforded the infantile scrapping of the political twins, Blair and Gordon Brown, and their tedious acolytes, drowning out the cries of the people of Iraq, Gaza and Lebanon. Similarly, the fifth anniversary of September 11 proved a lost opportunity to rest the reverential and the ghoulish and describe how George Bush and his gang used the tragedy to violently renew their version of empire and world domination.
Like the best of commercial TV, cinema does offer hope for the political documentary, although film-makers who believe they can follow the success of Michael Moore beware. Moore's work is popular, and makes money: the two vital ingredients for distributors and exhibitors. To get into cinemas, documentaries need to have at least a hope of repeating something of Moore's success. But there is no doubt in my mind that outstanding documentaries, if promoted imaginatively, can attract huge public interest. When this has happened on television, the reward has been not so much ratings as a "qualitative" audience: that is, people who engage with the work. (When Death of a Nation, the film I made with David Munro about East Timor, was shown on ITV late at night, it prompted 5,000 phone calls a minute.)
What we need are more "citizen" documentary-makers, like Jo Wilding and Julia Guest, who are prepared to look in the mirror of our "civilised" societies and film the long rivers of blood, and their ebbing truth. It took Peter Davis's Oscar-winning 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds to make sense of the mass murder that was the invasion of Vietnam. Two sequences brilliantly achieved this. There was General William Westmoreland, the American commander, declaring: "The oriental doesn't put the same price on life as the westerner," while a Vietnamese boy sobbed over the death of his father, murdered by GIs. And there was a naked Vietnamese girl, running from a napalm attack, her body a patchwork of burns, and followed by a woman carrying a baby, the skin hanging off its body. Thanks to Hearts and Minds, they are now unforgettable evidence of the barbarity of that war.
There is a hunger among the public for documentaries because only documentaries, at their best, are fearless and show the unpalatable and make sense of the news. The extraordinary films of Allan Francovich achieved this. Francovich, who died in 1997, made The Maltese Double Cross - Lockerbie. This destroyed the official truth that Libya was responsible for the sabotage of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. Instead, an unwitting "mule", with links to the CIA, was alleged to have carried the bomb on board the aircraft. (Paul Foot's investigation for Private Eye came to a similar conclusion). The Maltese Double Cross - Lockerbie has never been publicly screened in the US. In this country, the threat of legal action from a US government official prevented showings at the 1994 London film festival and the ICA. In 1995, defying threats, Tam Dalyell showed it in the House of Commons, and Channel 4 broadcast it in May 1995.
To make sense of the current colonial war in Afghanistan, I recommend Jamie Doran's Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death, which describes how the country's liberators oversaw the secret killing of 3,000 Afghans - the number killed in the twin towers. To begin to make sense of the news, I recommend Robert Greenwald's Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, and to understand one of the major reasons why Bush and Blair invaded Iraq, I recommend Greenwald's latest, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers. All are available on DVD. In these dangerous times, with countries about to be attacked and many innocent lives already condemned, we urgently need more documentaries like these, for the simple reason that the public has a right to know in order to act.
The John Pilger film festival runs at the Barbican, London, to Thursday. Today, Pilger's Vietnam films are shown, including The Quiet Mutiny. Details: www.barbican.org.uk/film or 0845 120 7500. John Pilger - Documentaries That Changed the World is released by Network DVD
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/st...1872153,00.html
Highlight of the festival was Pilger’s documentary on the presence of a second gunman in the pantry of the Ambassador on June 5, 1968.
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So, you believe in conspiracy theories, do you? You probably also think you're the Emperor of Pluto
By Charlie Booker, The Guardian, G2, Monday July 14, 2008, p.5
I've got a theory - an untested, unprovable theory...
Yes, Charlie, we know you have: It's called the Warren Report.While lots of sad, deluded souls like you and me imagine a regal reign on Pluto – really, Charlie – grounded folk like Grauniad columnist Simon Hoggart go to important conferences and meet an ex- CIA chief. And come away gushing…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/ap...comment.uknews2
High-class rolling stones in Boulder
By Simon Hoggart
The Guardian, Saturday, 15 April 2006, p.17
I am back in Boulder, Colorado, for the 58th conference on World Affairs, which, as I may have mentioned before, is basically a piss-up with speeches, and none the worse for that. Some quite famous people do come, but most of the participants are just interesting, have something to say, are at a loose end or, in the case of the several Brits here, are good, heavy-duty bullxxxxters.I arrived two days early to help get over jetlag, and on Saturday was taken up into the mountains. (Denver is known as the mile-high city, and Boulder is even higher than that.) About 20 feet from where I am writing the Rocky Mountains suddenly start their vertical take-off. Up in the hills are the old mining towns, some now gentrified as suburbs for city people, others not much different from the way they looked a hundred years ago. For example, downtown Evergreen still has those raised wooden sidewalks you saw in the old westerns, meant to keep ladies' skirts away from the mud stirred up by the cattle being driven down the centre of the street.
In the minuscule community of Sphinx Park, Colorado, we had lunch at the Buck Snort Saloon. It's quite a long way up a dirt road, lined with old shacks, some new weekend shacks, and cars, including ancient pick-ups with wildlife living in the upholstery. It was a glorious day, with a powerful sun shining from a navy blue sky, so we sat on the wooden deck outside, perched on upended logs, munching burgers and drinking beer, while Elk Creek gurgled below. This is pretty much Brokeback Mountain territory, though that wasn't a point I made to the grizzled men gathered round the pool table.
Our main speaker on the first day was James Woolsey, who for two years was director of central intelligence, or head of the CIA. One vaguely imagines a Dr Strangelove figure, but Woolsey was sharp, funny, humane and very scary. He pointed out that it was countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, which are at the centre of al-Qaida operations, who are rolling in money due to the incredible US trade deficit. This is now around $800bn (£457bn) a year, of which $250bn is for oil. Much of that makes its way to people who bear the west no goodwill at all. "This," he said, "may be the only war in history in which both sides are funded by the same people."
I like his story about travelling with his wife to San Francisco for a class re-union. His obsessional security people told him they needed to go on different flights, and he had to travel under an alias, protected by armed secret servicemen. So he sat all the way in the back of the plane, flanked by two burly guys with bulging jackets. When they arrived a flight attendant took one of them aside and said something that made him burst out laughing.
He reported that she'd said: "I have been in this job for 20 years and have never seen such a polite and well-behaved prisoner."
...like a twelve year-old.
Ed Reardon
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So, you believe in conspiracy theories, do you? You probably also think you're the Emperor of Pluto
By Charlie Booker, The Guardian, G2, Monday July 14, 2008, p.5
I've got a theory - an untested, unprovable theory...
Yes, Charlie, we know you have: It's called the Warren Report.
I offer this by way of further dispelling the unfounded rumour that there is a “party line” at the Grauniad. No, the very thought is unthinkable.
http://film.guardian.co.uk/patterson/story...2281580,00.html
On film: Don't beat around the Bush
The political Oliver Stone has been on hiatus for a while. It'll be interesting - and infuriating - to have him back, with his Bush biopic
By John Patterson
The Guardian, Film & Music, Friday, 23 May, 2008, p.2
It seems very risky for Oliver Stone to schedule the US release of his new film, the George Bush biopic W, for October 17, just three weeks before the presidential election. Given America's aching desire to see Bush finally swagger offstage, those three weeks constitute the very last window during which this movie might strike a chord with domestic audiences. If it is released before what's shaping up to be an epoch-making, historical-firebreak election, Stone may yet connect with whoever still has energy to loathe the president. If it actually arrives in, say, January, it will feel like some relic of the recent and suddenly ancient past from which we have just, we hope, made a clean and decisive break.That said, the political Oliver Stone has been on hiatus for a long while, and it'll be interesting - and probably infuriating and exasperating - to have him back, especially given the timing. His last explicitly political outing - and his best, calmest movie - was Nixon in 1995, which came on the heels of the luridly speculative JFK in 1991 ("Counter-myth" my arse - a myth is a myth is a myth). In the meantime, he has failed to bring a long-planned Martin Luther King biopic to fruition, and recently abandoned an ambitious project about the My Lai massacre of 1968, in which US soldiers killed several hundred Vietnamese civilians. And oddly, World Trade Center, which you would have expected to be an orgy of paranoia and fevered speculation, proved about as political as Singin' in the Rain.
Stone has performed his habitual striptease of PR leaks about script and casting. Unfortunately, the first leaked excerpts from the script prompted readers to think it was all an April Fool's Day prank. Uh-oh. They were regaled with Prince Dubya partying with his fratboy pals, drunkenly picking fights with the old man, choking on that pretzel, yelling "I'm the decider!" and so on, all of which is guaranteed to outrage the righties. They were more pleased with the propaganda version of Bush in the ABC-TV special DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, a bloated and mendacious hagiography from British-born rightwingers Lionel Chetwynd and Brian Trenchard-Smith, starring Timothy Bottoms, who had also played a radically different Dubya in the short-lived but hysterical Matt Stone/ Trey Parker series Where's My Bush?
Stone's casting is promising. Josh Brolin, with a few adjustments on the Texan he essayed in No Country For Old Men, may prove as eerily convincing playing Dubya as Bruce Greenwood was as JFK in Thirteen Days. Down the marquee, we see the same old business of outsourcing the most satanic roles to British actors (see Nixon/Hopkins, and Gambon/LBJ in The Path to War). Toby Jones plays evil genius Karl Rove, and he certainly has the buttocky countenance for the role, while Thandie Newton gives us the neurotically loyal Condi Rice. Dick Cheney remains uncast as shooting commences, but rumours abound that rightwinger Robert Duvall turned it down. Big surprise: he's a Margaret Thatcher idolator and the son of an admiral, so don't be surprised if his politics resemble McCain's, or maybe even those of Cheney himself. Expect another Brit to take up the slack.
What's most worrying about W is that it might potentially freeze the debate on George Bush, the way JFK froze and then stunted serious consideration of the Kennedy assassination for years (it's scary how many people, post-1991, believe that LBJ did JFK in). I worry that we'll either be left with a mildly sympathetic final image of the worst president ever (Stone plans to emphasise his "goofiness"), or that a truly serious and accurate indictment might too easily be discredited by the right simply because of Stone's involvement. I realise Stone doesn't set the terms of historical debate, and that history will judge Bush most scathingly without any assistance from him, but since nobody's interested in history any more, Stone's portrayal may be the one that sticks with us. If that's the case, he'd better get it right.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
The Guardian: The best “liberal” daily CIA money could buy.
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All of this leads me to ask the following question: Why post an argument that was thoroughly debunked ten months earlier?
Good question - why do you persist with that "Zapruder film is genuine" nonsense? Have a stern word with yourself.
An English well-wisher.
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The tone of the Guardian articles is interesting. They do not deal with the evidence. Instead they mock...I used to work for the Guardian and built up a lot of contacts at the newspaper. Whenever any new important evidence emerges I send them the material but it is never published. I thought I arranged for David Talbot’s book to be serialized but my contact changed his mind after discussing it with the editor. The book was not even reviewed by the newspaper.
John Dugdale’s review of David Talbot’s Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (Pocket£9.99), The Guardian, Saturday Review, 14 June 2008, p.20:
Bobby Kennedy declined to discuss his brother John's assassination publicly, beyond stating that he accepted the Warren Commission's verdict that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. But secretly, Talbot argues, the young US attorney general was "America's first assassination conspiracy theorist", using men he trusted to conduct his own investigation. Brothers brilliantly evokes the Kennedys and their court - a brash yet idealistic fraternity reminiscent of Mad Men and The West Wing - and shows they saw themselves as besieged by internal enemies, who became Bobby's suspects: the mafia, angered by his war on organised crime; the CIA and Cuban exiles, both furious the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion had received only covert US support; Hoover's FBI; and military chiefs who scorned the president as soft on the Soviet threat. Expertly researched through inner-circle interviews, the book suggests a conspiracy was also behind Bobby's murder in 1968, and names two spooks who Talbot believes were part of the JFK Dallas plot.After the enormous amount of space devoted to reviewing Talbot’s Brothers, it was quite a relief to find the Grauniad returning to form this morning with this lengthy attack on anyone who doubts the wit and wisdom of Earl Warren and Zelikow. Nice to see the paper’s obsession with attacking heretics has abated:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/20...september11.usa
So, you believe in conspiracy theories, do you? You probably also think you're the Emperor of Pluto
By Charlie Booker, The Guardian, G2, Monday July 14, 2008, p.5
I've got a theory - an untested, unprovable theory - that the more interesting your life is at any given point, the less lurid and spectacular your dreams will be. Think of it as a balancing procedure carried out by the brain to stop you getting bored to death.If your waking life is mundane, it'll inject some thrills into your night-time imaginings to maintain a healthy overall fun quotient. So if you work in a cardboard box factory, and your job is to stare at the side of each box as it passes along a conveyor belt, to ensure they're all uniform and boxy enough - and you do this all day, every day, until your mind grows so dissociated and numb you can scarcely tell where the cardboard ends and your body begins - when your daily routine is THAT dull, chances are you'll spend each night dreaming you're the Emperor of Pluto, wrestling a 6ft green jaguar during a meteor storm in the desert just outside Vegas.
All well and good in the world of dreams. But if you continue to believe you're the Emperor of Pluto after you've woken up, and you go into work and start knocking the boxes around with a homemade sceptre while screaming about your birthright, you're in trouble.
I mention this because recently I've found myself bumping into people - intelligent, level-headed people - who are sincerely prepared to entertain the notion that there might be something in some of the less lurid 9/11 conspiracy theories doing the rounds. They mumble about the "controlled demolition" of WTC 7 (oft referred to as "the third tower"), or posit the notion that the Bush administration knew 9/11 was coming and let it happen anyway. I mean, you never know, right? Right? And did I tell you I'm the Emperor of Pluto?
The glaring problem - and it's glaring in 6,000 watt neon, so vivid and intense you can see it from space with your eyes glued shut - is that with any 9/11 conspiracy theory you care to babble can be summed up in one word: paperwork.
Imagine the paperwork. Imagine the level of planning, recruitment, coordination, control, and unbelievable nerve required to pull off a conspiracy of that magnitude. Really picture it in detail. At the very least you're talking about hiring hundreds of civil servants cold-hearted enough to turn a blind eye to the murder of thousands of their fellow countrymen. If you were dealing with faultless, emotionless robots - maybe. But this almighty conspiracy was presumably hatched and executed by fallible humans. And if there's one thing we know about humans, it's that our inherent unreliability will always derail the simplest of schemes.
It's hard enough to successfully operate a video shop with a staff of three, for Christ's sake, let alone slaughter thousands and convince the world someone else was to blame.
That's just one broad objection to all the bullxxxx theories. But try suggesting it to someone in the midst of a 9/11 fairytale reverie, and they'll pull a face and say, "Yeah, but ... " and start banging on about some easily misinterpreted detail that "makes you think" (when it doesn't) or "contradicts the official story" (when you misinterpret it). Like nutbag creationists, they fixate on thinly spread, cherry-picked nuggets of "evidence" and ignore the thundering mass of data pointing the other way.
And when repeatedly pressed on that one, basic, overall point - that a conspiracy this huge would be impossible to pull off - they huff and whine and claim that unless you've sat through every nanosecond of Loose Change (the conspiracy flick du jour) and personally refuted every one of its carefully spun "findings" before their very eyes, using a spirit level and calculator, you have no right to an opinion on the subject.
Oh yeah? So if my four-year-old nephew tells me there's a magic leprechaun in the garden I have to spend a week meticulously peering underneath each individual blade of grass before I can tell him he's wrong, do I?
Look hard enough, and dementedly enough, and you can find "proof" that Kevin Bacon was responsible for 9/11 - or the 1987 Zeebrugge ferry disaster, come to that. It'd certainly make for a more interesting story, which is precisely why several thousand well-meaning people would go out of their way to believe it. Throughout my twenties I earnestly believed Oliver Stone's account of the JFK assassination. Partly because of the compelling (albeit wildly selective) way the "evidence" was blended with fiction in his 1991 movie - but mainly because I WANTED to believe it. Believing it made me feel important.
Embrace a conspiracy theory and suddenly you're part of a gang sharing privileged information; your sense of power and dignity rises a smidgen and this troublesome world makes more sense, for a time. You've seen through the matrix! At last you're alive! You ARE the Emperor of Pluto after all!
Except - ahem - you're only deluding yourself, your majesty. Because to believe the "system" is trying to control you is to believe it considers you worth controlling in the first place. The reality - that "the man" is scarcely competent enough to control his own bowels, and doesn't give a toss about you anyway - is depressing and emasculating; just another day in the cardboard box factory. And that's no place for an imaginary emperor, now, is it?
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Thanks for this link. It is almost unbelievable that this was written so shortly after the assassination!
And for some of us this is a little bit scary: "the assassination itself is probably a mere prelude to an historical tragedy the scope of which is not yet discernable. "
Who Killed Whom and Why?
Dark Thoughts About Dark Events
M.S. Arnoni, The Minority of One, January 1964
How Strong Is the Junta?
By M.S.Arnoni
The Minority of One, September 1964, [(Vol 7, No 9), 58)], pp.1, 11-15
To follow, the first page and a third of one of the very best pieces written in the year following the coup:
The United States is the site of a titanic power struggle, which has already cost it the life of one President, constantly endangers the life and Constitutional powers of a second, the incumbent, President, and may deliver the country to the whims of a military-industrial cabal, whose effective power even now brings to naught many a Constitutional provision. Concealed at this struggle remains from public view, it is nonetheless involves a constant danger of civil war, in which various services and units of the U.S. military would combat each other. This is not a struggle between “ins” and “outs”; the two competing camps are integral parts of the United States power structure. Their competition is for hegemony and as long as it is not resolved, each of the two contenders has to reckon with the existence and the factual veto power of the other. This state of affairs accounts for the fact at the present juncture the United States Government lacks the effective power to make decisive moves in world diplomacy.The challengers of the Constitutional government are an aggregate of powerful forces within the executive and legislative branches as well as in private industry. Specifically, they include such organizations as the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Air Force and identifiable defense contractors. In Congress, the insurrectionists are so strong that on many important issues, and especially on arms procurement, the Government has repeatedly lost out to them. The cabal made concentrated efforts to influence the Presidential elections in 1960; in 1964, it is actually presenting its own candidate, Barry M. Goldwater, and hopes with him to capture the rest of the government as well as the cloak of Constitutional legality.
The junta controlling the insurrectionist forces is so power-entrenched that for years it has been blackmailing the White House and other echelons of the Constitutional power hierarchy into silence concerning the life-and-death struggle behind the scenes, President Johnson, even while offering determined resistance to the junta, does not dare openly to complain about its existence and activities. The U.S. Chief Justice, while investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, does not dare to tell the truth about it to this generation. Congress does not dare to turn down procurement requests of the junta even when they are made over the heads and against the explicit recommendations of the Administration. The Administration’s reorganization plans for the armed services and for the intelligence agencies have been repeatedly over-ruled by the junta. Both the Administration and the armed forces are dangerously infiltrated by the insurrectionists. In most instances, the Administration’s effective power does not suffice for the removal of these infiltrators, General Curtis E. LeMay, the Chief of the Air Force, being the most notable and frustrating case in point. In fact, General Curtis LeMay is one of the principal leaders of this rebellious junta.
Even though the allegations made here are the result of conjecture and speculation, the margin of error seems to be limited to detail, the specific composition of the junta and its specific undertakings; the actual existence of a wide rebellion in the ranks of the Administration and outside its immediate framework is presented as evident fact. Then, too, it is probable that in this conjecture there are more errors of omission than errors of statement.
The warning of the ‘military-industrial complex,’ which President Dwight D. Eisenhower sounded in his farewell address, remained something of a solitary voice in the maze of official U.S. pronouncements, but the concern which prompted it was more than shared by John F. Kennedy. Even before he had taken office, he had a study conducted with the view of asserting civilian authority over the military. The panel was headed by Senator Stuart Symington and included Clark M. Clifford, Kennedy’s liaison aide with the retiring Eisenhower Administration, Thomas Finletter, one-time Air Force Secretary, Roswell Gilpatric, one-time Air Force Under-Secretary and attorneys Fowler Hamilton and Max Leva. The report of that study group was published around the middle of December, 1960, and made the following main recommendations:
* All defence funds would be appropriated directly to the Secretary of Defense, who would have authority to spend them as he saw fit.
* Service chiefs would report directly to the Secretary of Defense; the separate departments of the Army, Navy and Air Force, with their various Secretaries, Under Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries, would be abolished.
*The Joint Chiefs of Staff would be replaced by a Military Advisory Council made up of senior officers who would be permanently separated from their respective services. The council would be headed by a Joint Staff Chairman, who would be principal military adviser to the President and the Secretary of Defense.
* Individual services would maintain their identity but would be subordinate to three separate commands: a Strategic Command, responsible for the strategic missions of all-out nuclear war; a Tactical Command, responsible for all limited war operations; a Defense Command, responsible for all continental defense missions. (Time magazine, December 19, 1960.)
Undoubtedly, the enforcement of these recommendations would suffice to bring an end to the virtually sovereign status which the military had gained and to re-establish its subordination to civilian authority. But it was precisely this potential effect which doomed the plan from the outset. President Kennedy knew how strong Congressional support of the military was and had no illusions about his chances to have curtailing legislation approved. Even Eisenhower’s reorganization plan for the Pentagon, nowhere nearly as radical and sweeping as that of the Symington panel, remained unrealized despite the fact that Congress had approved it as far back as 1958. With Carl Vinson, the traditional defender of the war industry interests, as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Symington’s recommendations would not stand a chance; the Congressman thought even Eisenhower’s reorganization plan to be much too extreme.
Aware that a frontal attack on the usurped position of the military establishment could not be successfully undertaken, John F. Kennedy, upon becoming President, tried to curtail the military by gradual measures. By the middle of 1961, the controversy over the open participation of the brass in right-wing political activities had reached its point of culmination. President Kennedy gave his unqualified support to Senator J. W. Fulbright’s campaign against the military sponsoring radical right-wing speakers, conducting “freedom” and Cold War seminars and otherwise participating in political propaganda directed to the armed forces as well as the civilian population. During a press conference on August 10, 1961, President Kennedy stated:
“The United States military, due to one of the wisest actions of our Constitutional founders, have been kept out of politics, and they continue their responsibilities, regardless of changes of Administration.
The problem always is how can the military remain removed from political life and how can civilian control of the military be effectively maintained…(The New York Times, August 11, 1961).”
How indeed?
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So let me see if I have this sequence, in all its innocence, aright:
On November 26, Lane commences work on his first literary defence of Oswald. In mid-December, said defence is published by that legendary right-wing organ, The National Guardian. Yet in January 1964, author of said defence travels to Dallas to be greeted by a journalist, professionally active in the cover-up from the outset, and – get this - a recent applicant for employment with the CIA, who just happens to hand him (Lane) a stack of photostats exonerating Oswald, and calling into doubt a number of key official claims.
And you don’t find any of this odd, curious or suspicious? Forsooth, I have another car to sell you.
Paul
“Playboy Interview: Mark Lane,” Vol 14, No 2, (February 1967), p.62:
Lane on Oswald:
“I’m inclined to believe he was a sincere leftist…”Move over, Dwight Macdonald!
PS Wonder what Garrison made of this pearl?
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I was sent a free advance copy of the book by the publisher (anyone else?).
That always raises my suspicions.
I have not read any of it yet.
Jack
Amazon UK finally came up trumps yesterday mid-morning: Chapter 5, “Saigon and Chicago” (pp.174-218), contains much to admire, but also errors, some minor, others seriously troubling. Here are some of them:
1) Douglass erroneously claims that both Starnes’ “’Arrogant’ CIA Disobeys Orders in Viet Nam” (Washington Daily News, 2 October 1963, p.3) and Arthur Krock’s “The Intra-Administration War in Vietnam” (NYT, 3 October 1963, p.34) appeared on “the same day” (p.186). How Krock managed to cite a despatch in another paper from the same day is necessarily left unexplained. To compound the matter, The Washington Daily News was an afternoon paper, the NYT a morning one, rendering Krock’s feat even more remarkable.
2) As I have observed before, Arthur Krock’s In the Nation column, “The Intra-Administration War in Vietnam,” was, very obviously and quite contrary to the impression left by Douglass (pp.185-6), a defence of the CIA and an attack on JFK (1). Krock did not attack the messenger, Starnes, for the very tactically sound reason that he was impregnable: The CIA, working in conjunction with a senior Scripps-Howard exec., had offered Starnes the chance to go Lumumba’s Congo in early 1960, shortly after he had resigned – in February 1960 - as managing editor of the New York World-Telegram & Sun.
2) Douglass regurgitates the tired old nonsense that John H. Richardson, the CIA chief of station outed by Starnes, was removed because Lodge thought him “too close to Diem” (p.186). As Richardson’s telegram to HQ of August 28 reveals, nothing could have been further from the truth: The agency man was gung-ho for a coup (2). Douglass ignores that telegram: why? Nor was this the only evidence. The Times of Vietnam had named Richardson as the coup-instigator-in-chief in its edition of 2 September 1963.
3) And if Richardson was so dedicated to the preservation of the Diem government, why did he not act to preserve it? He was station chief, after all, a position of considerable bureaucratic heft: He could have restrained, disciplined, and/or sacked the agency men agitating for Diem’s removal at any point prior to his recall. He did nothing of the sort.
4) Douglass further claims, immediately after introducing Starnes’ momentous “’Arrogant’ CIA” despatch, that Ambassador Lodge’s “response to the CIA’s ominous seizure of power in Vietnam was to harness that power to his own ambition to overthrow Diem” (p.186). What, by publicly suggesting that the CIA now posed as big a threat to Kennedy in Washington as he did to Diem in Saigon? This is absurd.
5) Another discredited claim, again targeting Lodge, is that Starnes’ primary source – there were in fact a number for the piece, as even the most cursory reading of it reveals – for “’Arrogant’ CIA” was the Ambassador. He wasn’t. Starnes emphatically repudiated the claim, one much advanced by John McCone at the time, in print in December 1963 (3).
Notes:
1. Krock’s reply to Starnes:
New York Times, 3 October 1963, p.34Intra-Administration War in Vietnam
By Arthur Krock
The Central Intelligence Agency is getting a very bad press in dispatches from Vietnam to American newspapers and in articles originating in Washington. Like the Supreme Court when under fire, the C.I.A. cannot defend itself in public retorts to criticisms of its activities as they occur. But, unlike the Supreme Court, the C.I.A. has no open record of its activities on which the public can base a judgment of the validity of the criticisms. Also, the agency is precluded from using the indirect defensive tactic which is constantly employed by all other government units under critical fire.
This tactic is to give information to the press, under a seal of confidence, that challenges or refutes the critics. But the C.I.A. cannot father such inspired articles, because to do so would require some disclosure of its activities. And not only does the effectiveness of the agency depend on the secrecy of its operations. Every President since the C.I.A. was created has protected this secrecy from claimants – Congress or the public through the press, for examples – of the right to share any part of it.
This Presidential policy has not, however, always restrained other executive units from going confidentially to the press with attacks on C.I.A. operations in their common field of responsibility. And usually it has been possible to deduce these operational details from the nature of the attacks. But the peak of the practice has recently been reached in Vietnam and in Washington. This is revealed almost every day now in dispatches from reporters – in close touch with intra-Administration critics of the C.I.A. – with excellent reputations for reliability.
One reporter in this category is Richard Starnes of the Scripps-Howard newspapers. Today, under a Saigon deadline, he related that, “according to a high United States source here, twice the C.I.A. flatly refused to carry out instructions from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge …[and] in one instance frustrated a plan of action Mr. Lodge brought from Washington because the agency disagreed with it.” Among the views attributed to United States officials on the scene, including one described as a “very high American official…who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy…are the following:
The C.I.A.’s growth was “likened to a malignancy” which the “very high official was not sure even the White House could control…any longer.” “If the United States ever experiences [an attempt at a coup to overthrow the Government] it will come from the C.I.A. and not the Pentagon.” The agency “represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone.”
Whatever these passages disclose, they most certainly establish that representatives of other Executive branches have expanded their war against the C.I.A. from the inner councils to the American people via the press. And published simultaneously are details of the agency’s operations in Vietnam that can only come from the same critical official sources. This is disorderly government. And the longer the President tolerates it – the period is already considerable – the greater will grow its potentials of hampering the real war against the Vietcong and the impression of a very indecisive Administration in Washington.
The C.I.A. may be guilty as charged. Since it cannot, or at any rate will not, openly defend its record in Vietnam, or defend it by the same confidential press “briefings” employed by its critics, the public is not in a position to judge. Nor is this department, which sought and failed to get even the outlines of the agency’s case in rebuttal. But Mr. Kennedy will have to make a judgment if the spectacle of war within the Executive branch is to be ended and the effective functioning of the C.I.A. preserved. And when he make this judgment, hopefully he also will make it public, as well as the appraisal of fault on which it is based.
Doubtless recommendations as to what his judgment should be were made to him today by Secretary of Defense McNamara and General Taylor on their return from their fact-finding expedition into the embattled official jungle in Saigon.
2. Saigon, Richardson wrote, was an “armed camp,” and the situation there at a “point of no return.” The generals backed by the CIA understood “that they have no alternative but to go forward” or else, by their inaction, permit a sharp reduction in the American presence and their country “stagger on to final defeat.” (Francis X. Winters. The Year of the Hare: America in Vietnam, January 25, 1963 – February 15, 1964 [university of Georgia Press, 1997], p.66.)
3. Starnes reveals Lodge not his source for “’Arrogant’ CIA”:
The New York World-Telegram & Sun, Tuesday, 24 December, 1963, p.13Truman and the CIA
The murmuring chorus of Americans who are deeply concerned with the growing power and headlong wilfulness of the Central Intelligence Agency has been joined by former President Truman.
Mr. Truman must be accounted an expert witness in this matter, because it was under his administration that the CIA came into being. In a copyrighted article he wrote recently that the CIA had strayed wide of the purposes for which he had organized it.
"It has," he wrote, "become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas."
For writing substantially the same thing from South Viet Nam last fall, this reporter was (and still is) subjected to a calculated behind-the-scenes campaign of opprobrium at the hands of the CIA. So, indeed, has the United States' ambassador to Saigon been subjected to the same sort of behind-the-hand attack, on the theory that he was the source of my account of the CIA's heedless bureaucratic arrogance in Saigon.
Mr. Lodge, it is now charged by CIA apologists, destroyed the effectiveness of one of the CIA's most skilful agents. It is also charged that this reporter violated a gentleman's agreement in naming the agent.
Both charges are false, meaching and disingenuous.
The name of the agent, hurriedly summoned home from Saigon within 24 hours of my account of his stewardship of the huge spook operations, was John Richardson. In my several conversations with Ambassador Lodge, Richardson's name never passed between us.
It was, indeed, not necessary for any wayfaring journals to go to any such exalted figures to descry the activities of the CIA's station chief in Saigon. Richardson, a frequent visitor at the presidential palace and a close adviser to the devious and powerful Ngo Dinh Nhu, was widely known in the Vietnamese capital. Until Mr. Lodge replaced Frederick Nolting as ambassador, most knowledgeable Americans and sophisticated Vietnamese regarded Richardson as the most powerful foreigner in Viet Nam.
It is nonsense to say that Lodge destroyed Richardson's value as a CIA agent. In Saigon, Richardson was as clandestine as a calliope with a full head of steam. It is, moreover, a libel to allege (as high CIA officials have alleged) that this reporter violated an agreement to shield Richardson's identity. In all my assiduous inquiries about the man, never once was it suggested that there was an agreement to keep his identity secret. If there had been any such agreement, I would, of course, have respected it even though it would have been plainly absurd in view of Richardson's notoriety.
This is, unfortunately, more than a parochial dispute between a reporter and a writhing, unlovely bureaucracy. The President of the United States himself has been misled by the CIA mythology regarding just how and by whom Richardson's utility as chief resident spook was destroyed. Neither Lodge nor any journalist cast Richardson in his role in Saigon. If CIA chief John McCone really believes that his man in Saigon was compromised by my dispatches (and presumably he does believe this or he would not have planted and cultivated the tale as thoroughly as he has) then he does not know what is going on in the huge, bumbling apparatus he nominally leads.
Mr. Truman knows whereof he speaks. Wise in the ways of malignant bureaucracy, he knows that unfettered and unaccountable power such as is vested in the CIA is bound to feed upon itself until it poses a threat to the very free institutions it was founded to safeguard. No man alive knows the enormous power that is now vested in the CIA, nor the wealth it dispenses, nor the policy it makes. Most people in government would be appalled if they knew that already the CIA has overflowed its huge new headquarters building in McLean, Va., but it is fact that it has done.
There is far, far too much about the CIA that is unknown to far too many Americans. We will, occasionally and from time to time, twang this same sackbut. It is not a pretty tune it plays, but it is an important one.
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One of the few truly comical sights in JFK assassination research land is that of an anti-alterationist playing what is thought to the cause’s trump card: "So they altered the film to show a rear movement of the head, and thus a frontal gunman, thus fuelling conspiracy theories, right? Please!" The sight of a grown man or woman being satisfied with such naïve and anti-historical guff remains dependably amusing. The point of this thread is to show why.
The first example combines two distinct explanatory models:
1) The lesser of two evils & 2) the utility of undefined conspirators
Jim Douglass. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it matters (NY: Orbis Books, 2008), p.456n367:
Those who would argue that the film was not altered point especially to its depiction of the backward snap of JFK’s head, providing evidence of a shot from the front. As David Wrone writes, “Why would the government steal and alter the Zapruder film to hide a conspiracy only to have that alteration contain evidence that a conspiracy killed JFK?” (David Wrone, The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003], p.122)However, if as we have seen the initial assassination scenario’s purpose included scapegoating the Soviet Union and Cuba, evidence of a conspiracy was no problem, so long as it did not implicate the U.S. government per se – as would have been the case if the film revealed the Secret Service stopping the car to facilitate the shooting.
3) The double-bubble
Peter Hain. A Putney Plot? (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1987), p.132:
A former British intelligence officer, Colin Wallace, told me in 1987: ‘The [Colonel Cheeseman] saga is know in intelligence circles as the “double-bubble” because it contains a second dimension in deception and not only deflects attention from the main target but also “bursts” leaving the investigator doubting everything he has uncovered so far.The patsy-from-the-rear stuff comprised the overt, outward layer of deception. The inner layer was the grassy knoll, a built in fall-back that has come to nothing over succeeding decades, “bursting” over its advocates with monotonous regularity. In order for the inner layer to become effective, it had first to appear to be suppressed, then championed as truth by seemingly dissident advocates. Mark Lane’s career in a nutshell, I can’t help thinking.
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One of the few truly comical sights in JFK assassination research land is that of an anti-alterationist playing what is thought to the cause’s trump card: "So they altered the film to show a rear movement of the head, and thus a frontal gunman, thus fuelling conspiracy theories, right? Please!" The sight of a grown man or woman being satisfied with such naïve and anti-historical guff remains dependably amusing. The point of this thread is to show why.
The first example combines two distinct explanatory models:
1) The lesser of two evils & 2) the utility of undefined conspirators
Jim Douglass. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it matters (NY: Orbis Books, 2008), p.456n367:
Those who would argue that the film was not altered point especially to its depiction of the backward snap of JFK’s head, providing evidence of a shot from the front. As David Wrone writes, “Why would the government steal and alter the Zapruder film to hide a conspiracy only to have that alteration contain evidence that a conspiracy killed JFK?” (David Wrone, The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003], p.122)However, if as we have seen the initial assassination scenario’s purpose included scapegoating the Soviet Union and Cuba, evidence of a conspiracy was no problem, so long as it did not implicate the U.S. government per se – as would have been the case if the film revealed the Secret Service stopping the car to facilitate the shooting.
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As for Lane...1) I traveled to Dallas at the beginning of 1964 and there met Hugh Aynesworth, a reporter for The Dallas Morning News, who gave me photostated copies of a number of original affadavits. These documents, prepared by the Dallas police, included one signed by Deputy Constable Weitzman…it reveals that Weitzman described the rifle which he and Boone had discovered as ‘a 7.65 Mauser bolt action equipped with a 4/18 scope, a thick leather brownish-black sling on it…
2) The paraffin test report in the Oswald case was among the Photostats given to me in January 1964 by Hugh Aynesworth…
Mark Lane. Rush To Judgment (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966):
Extract 1): pp.114-115; and 2) p.149
So let me see if I have this sequence, in all its innocence, aright:
On November 26, Lane commences work on his first literary defence of Oswald. In mid-December, said defence is published by that legendary right-wing organ, The National Guardian. Yet in January 1964, author of said defence travels to Dallas to be greeted by a journalist, professionally active in the cover-up from the outset, and – get this - a recent applicant for employment with the CIA, who just happens to hand him (Lane) a stack of photostats exonerating Oswald, and calling into doubt a number of key official claims.
And you don’t find any of this odd, curious or suspicious? Forsooth, I have another car to sell you.
Paul
Jim Douglass. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it matters (NY: Orbis Books, 2008), p.456n367:
Those who would argue that the film was not altered point especially to its depiction of the backward snap of JFK’s head, providing evidence of a shot from the front. As David Wrone writes, “Why would the government steal and alter the Zapruder film to hide a conspiracy only to have that alteration contain evidence that a conspiracy killed JFK?” (David Wrone, The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003], p.122)However, if as we have seen the initial assassination scenario’s purpose included scapegoating the Soviet Union and Cuba, evidence of a conspiracy was no problem, so long as it did not implicate the U.S. government per se – as would have been the case if the film revealed the Secret Service stopping the car to facilitate the shooting.
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Here are some parallels between the JFK assassination and 9/11 that come to mind after reading Scott's article. Others could be added, and I'm sure that some are more significant than others. It could be said that some indicate standard MO (e.g. Federal Bogus Investigations, the CIA withholding evidence on anything it can, and the mainstream media supporting the official story).
Vote Ecker in 2008!
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Paul...you are correct, of course...l forgot about the paving at the north end of the peristyle where Towners, Betzner, Willis, Croft et al were. I was thinking of that as the "corner" of Elm and Houston...not Elm Street itself. As for the west end near the underpass, there was no sidewalk, but a skinny strip of asphalt between curbs where it was too narrow to accommodate a lawn mower. Thanks for correcting me.Jack
No cheap point scoring intended: I have too much respect and affection for your work, even when I disagree with it.
Paul
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Before emailing Mark Lane, I thought I’d have another look at A Citizen’s Dissent, not least for enjoyment of the writing. Two aspects of it jumped out.
First, Lane was a firm advocate of photographic alteration – but only of the “still” variety. Of the famous backyard photo of Oswald posing with a rifle – not to mention the complete works of Karl Marx, a naked Cossack, and a balalaika orchestra - he wrote: “I have appeared on scores of programs broadcast by CBS stations and affiliates. In many instances, I have sought the advice of trained cameramen employed by the stations regarding the picture in question. In almost every instance those professional photographers have suggested that the picture appears to be an obviously doctored photograph” (1).
But what of the Z film? After all, both the very obviously doctored photo to which he referred, and the Zapruder film, had Life magazine in common. Would the conspirators really draw a line between falsifying a single still, and a film? Why could Life be trusted with film, when it had published a blatantly forged still? To make Lane’s unquestioning trust in the veracity of the film even more perplexing and unsatisfactory, he devoted two pages to the strange case of the Z-frames missing from, or composited in, WC Exhibit 885. He quotes from a Feb 6, 1967, Newsweek piece on the explanation for the absence of frames 208-211 in the Exhibit: Life technicians “accidentally” destroyed them (2). Very reassuring, no?
In posing such questions, I realise that Lane was not alone among the first generation of assassination researchers in this sort of photographic schizophrenia. But conformity is no defence; and neither is it tenable to argue that issue of photographic forgery is here being unfairly imposed upon a different and more “innocent” age. The subject was in the air by mid-1964 at the latest (3).
(3) Dr. Ralph L. Holloway, “From Readers’ Letters: The Assassination,” The Minority of One, May 1964, p.22: “I myself have counted seven utter impossibilities in the background shown in a Life photograph. These obvious tamperings through pictorial montage are in the realm, not of speculation, but of hard, cold fact.”
Again, by way of demonstrating that the role of Life magazine and the issue of photographic forgery were both part of this case from the outset, here's another very early attack on the shifting official explanation(s) which raises both themes:
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/the_critics/r...ns_Russell.html
16 Questions on the Assassination
By Bertrand Russell
The Minority of One, September 1964, pp. 6-8.
p.7:Several photographs have been published of the alleged murder weapon. On February 21, Life magazine carried on its cover a picture of “Lee Oswald with the weapons he used to kill President Kennedy and Officer Tippitt [sic].” On page 80, Life explained that the photograph was taken during March or April of 1963. According to the F.B.I., Oswald purchased his pistol in September 1963. The New York Times carried a picture of the alleged murder weapon being taken by police into the Dallas police station. The rifle is quite different. Experts have stated that no rifle resembling the one in the Life picture has even been manufactured. The New York Times also carried the same photograph as Life, but left out the telescopic sights. On March 2, Newsweek used the same photograph but painted in an entirely new rifle. Then on April 13 the Latin American edition of Life carried the same picture on its cover as the U.S. edition had on February 21, but in the same issue on page 18 it had the same picture with the rifle altered. How is it that millions of people have been misled by complete forgeries in the press?
Obama - Brzezinski’s glove-puppet
in Political Conspiracies
Posted
Obama: The real power behind the throne-to-be
by Eric Walberg
Global Research, July 23, 2008
Al Ahram Weekly
There are NO silver linings to the return of this vile schemer - only mounds more corpses.