Paul Rigby

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:

Vote Ecker in 2008!

No cheap point scoring intended: I have too much respect and affection for your work, even when I disagree with it. Paul

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.

Jack is correct and once again Paul misleads the reader by attributing his uninformed bias to Lane through misrepresentation. Bill Miller No, Bill, Jack isn't correct, it merely suits your purpose on this occasion to pretend he is. As for Lane... 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

Not strictly true, Jack, there were sidewalk areas at either end of the southern stretch of Elm running from Houston Street to the Overpass. Second, that doesn't explain why Lane chose the only one of the three, all of whom stated they stood together, who appeared to offer this version; hence my drawing attention to the fact that only Nelson was interviewed by a different pair of FBI agents. Something afoot here, me thinks. Which still leaves Holt and Jacob, who both said all three women stood on the south curb of Elm. Interestingly, “curb” was demonstrably a contemporaneous colloquialism standing for “at the road’s southern edge.” Proof? Well, here’s a witness, as interviewed by KRLD on November 22, 1963, using the word in precisely the sense I mean, and as deployed by Holt and Jacob: You will recognise at once the identity of the interviewee: Mary Moorman. Paul

Chapter 7 of Rush To Judgment (1), “The Other Witnesses,” ostensibly constituted a short, sharp indictment of the Warren Commission’s revealing direction to Hoover that FBI interviews of witnesses need not seek “opinion as to the origin of the shoots” (2). In an asterisked footnote on the chapter’s opening page, Lane offered a specific witness. What followed was a particularly deft piece of literary gate-keeping in the service of the heavily revised Zapruder fraud: Lane thereupon offered Nelson's FBI statement: The reader of RTJ will scan the rest of the chapter, footnotes included, in vain for any indication of which side Nelson occupied on Elm; or of the light, if any, that the testimony of Nelson’s two named companions could shed on the question. No wonder: Both Holt and Jacobs told the FBI that they stood on the south curb – with Nelson (3). Of course, at a position on the south curb of Elm “approximately fifty yards” (both Holt and Jacob) from the TSBD, the group of three should have been clearly visible on the Zapruder film. In selecting the only one of the group of three women whose FBI statement did not specify the south curb, Lane sought to shield his readers from an unpleasant reality - that the Zapruder film was a rank fraud. Can authorial solicitousness run any more tender?

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

Bill, I'm puzzled. How do you get from the above, to the below? I don't mean to suggest senior members of the armed forces we're not complicit - Bethesda proves that - but don't you things the wrong way round? The CIA was the dominant force in the setting up of the patsy, not the Pentagon, or the FBI. Paul

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). A second oddity: Lane’s silence on an important feature of CBS’s June 1967 four-parter on the assassination, The Warren Report, the very series which was, ostensibly at least, the spur for A Citizen’s Dissent. Readers of the book will look long and hard – and, ultimately, in vain – for any mention of the fact that Walter Cronkite had intoned: In A Citizen’s Dissent, by contrast, Lane primly eschewed any such vulgar cry of “free the film” in favour of insisting that “CBS could have ascertained the precise movements of the [presidential] vehicle by viewing the Zapruder film…at the National Archives in Washington” (5). Lane, then, the fearless critic of the official whitewash, thus took, in 1967, a less democratic position on access to the film than CBS; and, to compound the offence, sought to hide this embarrassing fact from his readers. There was a further reason for Lane’s silence on Cronkite’s call to free the film: To do so would have compromised hopelessly a key line of attack. During the course of his attack on the 1967 CBS four-parter, Lane adduced an extract from a Boston Traveler piece written two months before the series’ broadcast. In summary, the quote revealed, courtesy of a CBS insider, that the network would only show the series if it produced new material which bolstered the desired defence of the Warren Report. Lane confined himself to noting that the journalist responsible had, while not betraying the identity of her source, “affirmed her belief” to him in the story’s “accuracy” (6). One sees immediately Lane’s problem: How to square an attack on a CBS series he condemned, with justice, as an establishmentarian whitewash, with a frank acknowledgement that within the same piece of pro-Warren Report hack work was a ringing call for the release to the public of the Z-film, the very same piece of “evidence” that Lane and fellow-first generation critics argued blew the Warren Report’s conclusions out of the water? For if the CBS series only called forth evidence it believed helpful to the cover-up, what did that make the Z-film? And lest there be any confusion as to what version of the Z-film CBS was taking about, it was the second: “In Abraham Zapruder’s film of the assassination, the fatal shot appears to move the President’s head back” (7). Lane couldn’t reconcile that contradiction - at least, not plausibly – so was perforce doubly obliged to remain silent on the matter.

Fascinating piece: http://journalof911studies.com/volume/2008..._and_Nano-1.pdf

Here's why it probably was considered prudent to have a spook urinal as co-author: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/ma...fcommons.russia In a free press, at least one leading British newspaper should surely have done a little digging into the background of MI5 putting the frighteners on an MP?

Posted at 12:22 PM in Mary Dejevsky | Permalink TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/1091659/30998390 The following is a very representative example of the spooky background to the anti-Russian campaign. Was a “Security Correspondent” really necessary as a co-author? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics...servatives.html Fox is, even by Tory standards, a charlatan and a buffoon. Much more interesting is the presence of human rights lawyer Louise Christian in this spooky milieu.

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/openhouse/2...ing-t.html#more Tuesday, 08 July 2008 Posted at 12:22 PM in Mary Dejevsky | Permalink TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/1091659/30998390

Always judge a man by his enemies and critics. Starnes ruffled another important set of establishment feathers with the following column: Here's one John J. McCloy expressing his irritation with the above at the 5 Dec 1963 Warren Commission Executive Session: http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/...X1205_0041a.htm

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9511 The JFK Assassination and 9/11: the Designated Suspects in Both Cases By Peter Dale Scott Global Research, July 5, 2008 I wish to summarize again the first striking similarity between 11/22/63 and of 9/11/01: the dubious detective work on those two days. Less than fifteen minutes after the President’s assassination, the height and weight of Kennedy’s alleged killer was posted.1 Before the last of the hijacked planes crashed on 9/11, the FBI told Richard Clarke that they had a list of alleged hijackers.2 In the case of Oswald, within fifteen minutes of the assassination and long before Oswald was picked up in the Texas Theater, Inspector Sawyer of the Dallas police put out on the police radio network, and possibly other networks, a description of the killer – "About 30, 5’10", 165 pounds."3 As noted, this height and weight exactly matched the measurements attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald in Oswald’s FBI file, and also in CIA documents about him.4 The announced height and weight were however different from Oswald’s actual measurements, as recorded by the Dallas police after his arrest: 5’9 1/2", 131 pounds.5 More importantly, there is no credible source for the posted measurements from any witness in Dallas. (The witness said to have spotted him, Howard Brennan, failed to identify Oswald in a line-up.)6 This leaves the possibility that the measurements were taken from existing files on Oswald, rather than from any observations in Dallas on November 22. If so, someone with access to those files may have already designated Oswald as the culprit, before there was any evidence to connect him to the crime. A similar situation pertains to the alleged hijackers on 9/11. For example, shortly afterwards men in Saudi Arabia complained that "the hijackers' `personal details’" released by the FBI -- "including name, place, date of birth and occupation -- matched their own."7 One of them, Saeed al-Ghamdi, claimed further that an alleged photograph shown on CNN (of an alleged Flight 93 hijacker with the same name) was in fact a photograph of himself. He speculated "that CNN had probably got the picture from the Flight Safety flying school he attended in Florida."8 If the above information is accurate, then the details posted by the FBI and CNN about the alleged hijackers cannot have derived from the events of 9/11, with which the survivors in Saudi Arabia would appear to have been uninvolved. Once again this leaves the strong possibility that the details were taken from existing files, rather than from empirical observations on September 11.9 And some of the hijackers, like Lee Harvey Oswald, may have been in CIA files for a special reason: because the CIA had an operational interest in them. Internal CIA Evidence of Operational Interest in Oswald and the Hijackers I have speculated that Oswald, like the al-Qaeda trainer Ali Mohamed, might have been a double agent reporting to the FBI about the terrorist group (Alpha 66) with which some law enforcement officers associated him. I would like now to discuss more unequivocal evidence, from internal CIA records, about an operational CIA interest in first Oswald and later two of the alleged al-Qaeda hijackers, Nawaz al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdar. In 2001 as in 1963 the CIA inexplicably withheld information about the subjects from the FBI, which ought categorically to have received it. The anomalies are extreme. This is now easy to show in the case of Oswald. On October 10, 1963, six weeks before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, CIA Headquarters sent out two messages about Oswald, a teletype to the FBI, State, and Navy, and a cable to the chief of the CIA’s Mexico City station. Both messages contained false and mutually contradictory statements, and also withheld known facts of great potential importance.10 The teletype to the FBI withheld the obviously significant information that Oswald had reportedly met in Mexico City with a Soviet Vice-Consul, Valeriy Kostikov, who was believed by CIA officers to be an officer of the KGB.11 One CIA officer, Jane Roman, helped draft both messages. In 1995 she was confronted by two interviewers with irrefutable evidence that she had signed off on erroneous information about Oswald in the CIA cable to Mexico City. After much questioning, she finally admitted, "I’m signing off on something I know isn’t true." One of the interviewers, John Newman, then asked her, "‘Is this indicative of some sort of operational interest in Oswald’s file?’ ‘Yes,’ Roman replied. ‘To me it’s indicative of a keen interest in Oswald held very closely on the need-to-know basis.’" She later repeated, "I would think there was definitely some operational reason to withhold it [the information at CIA headquarters on Oswald], if it was not sheer administrative error, when you see all the people who signed off on it."12 Other CIA officers withheld important information from the FBI in January 2000, with respect to Khalid al-Mihdar, who would later be identified as one of the al-Qaeda hijackers on September 11, 2001. The NSA overheard on a Yemeni telephone about a meeting in Malaysia which al-Mihdar would attend, along with Tewfiq bin Attash, the mastermind of the fatal attack on the USS Cole.13 It notified the CIA but not the FBI. In consequence [Khalid al-Mihdar’s] Saudi passport – which contained a visa for travel to the United States – was photocopied [in Qatar] and forwarded to CIA headquarters. The information was not shared with FBI headquarters until August 2001. An FBI agent detailed to the Bin Ladin unit at the CIA attempted to share this information with colleagues at FBI Headquarters. A CIA desk officer instructed him not to send the cable with this information. Several hours later, this same desk officer drafted a cable distributed solely within CIA alleging that the visa documents had been shared with the FBI.14 Lawrence Wright, reviewing this and other significant anomalies, reported in The Looming Tower the belief among FBI agents following bin Laden "that the agency was protecting Mihdar and [his companion, the alleged 9/11 hijacker Nawaz al-] Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them," or alternatively that "the CIA was running a joint venture with Saudi intelligence" using al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi.15 Wright himself speculated in a companion essay he wrote for The New Yorker that "The CIA may also have been protecting an overseas operation and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it."16 The Consequences of the CIA’s Withholding of Evidence As just noted, the CIA, in its teletype to the FBI of October 10, 1963, withheld the information that Oswald had reportedly met with a KGB officer, Valeriy Kostikov. Former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that this failure to inform the FBI was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963.17 In other words, the withholding enabled Oswald to play whatever role he played on that fateful day, even if it was only to become a designated patsy. FBI officials are even more bitter about the consequences of the withholding of information about al-Mihdar: But the CIA withheld information from the FBI about bin Attash (already the subject of a criminal investigation) as well, even when asked by an FBI agent, Ali Soufan, about bin Attash and the Malaysia meeting. According to Wright, The agency did not respond to his clearly stated request. The fact that the CIA withheld information about the mastermind of the Cole bombing and the meeting in Malaysia, when directly asked by the FBI, amounted to obstruction of justice in the death of the seventeen American sailors."19 In late August 2001, only days before 9/11, FBI agent Steve Bongardt, complaining about the CIA’s withholding of information about al-Mihdar, correctly predicted in an angry email to the CIA’s bin Laden unit that "someday someone will die."20 The CIA’s Dishonest Efforts to Cover-Up From the moment Congress, in the 1970s, began to evince an interest in the Kennedy assassination, former CIA officer David Phillips became a vigorous defender of the CIA’s performance. With respect to false information about Oswald in CIA cables both to and from Mexico City (where Phillips was in charge of Cuban affairs for the CIA station), Phillips’s first response was to dismiss Oswald as "a blip" of no interest.21 A similar defense of the CIA’s failure to act on al-Mihdar was offered to the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 by the Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Cofer Black: "I think that month we watchlisted about 150 people."22 The same defense was offered by Dale Watson, the FBI’s former counterterrorism chief: There were a lot of red flags prior to 9/11….So it’s a mass of information and it’s a sea of threats, and it’s like working against a maze. If you know where the end point of a maze is, it’s certainly easier to work your way back to the starting point than trying to go through the maze and sort out all the red flags.23 The problem with this excuse is that both Oswald and al-Mihdar were singled out for special CIA attention, not left floating in a sea of red flags. The cable to Mexico City which Jane Roman signed off on was not handled routinely, it was sent for signature to the CIA’s Assistant Deputy Director for Plans, Thomas Karamessines. And in the case of al-Mihdar in Malaysia, back in 2000 CIA leaders were so convinced about the potential significance of the al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia, they not only set up surveillance of it, but provided regular updates to the FBI director [Louis Freeh], the head of the CIA [George Tenet], and the national security advisor [samuel Berger].24 That Freeh and Berger were being notified at the top about the Malaysia meeting (at the same time that the regular FBI bureaucracy was being cut out) is confirmed in accounts by Terry McDermott and Philip Shenon.25 CIA officials testified falsely to congressional committees with respect to both Oswald and al-Mihdar. James Angleton was asked by the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations about a memoir written by the CIA’s station chief in Mexico City, Win Scott, and later personally retrieved for the Agency after Scott’s death by Angleton himself. Angleton testified that Scott’s "manuscript was fictional and did not include a chapter on Oswald." In fact, according to Jefferson Morley, "The only surviving manuscript is clearly nonfictional and does have a chapter on Oswald."26 Both George Tenet and Cofer Black testified before the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 that the FBI had been granted access to the information linking al-Mihdar and Tewfiq bin Attash (alias Khallad), the mastermind of the Cole bombing. The 9/11 Commission, after a lengthy review of the matter, concluded "this was not the case."27 The CIA, Oswald, and Al-Mihdar: Suppression of Vital Records That the CIA regards its relationship to the suspects Oswald and al-Mihdar as sensitive is further illustrated by its suppression of vital evidence with respect to both. Although in the 1990s all government agencies were required by law to submit their Oswald-related documents to the Assassination Records Review Board, the CIA has been vigorously resisting pressure to do this in the case of former CIA officer George Joannides. In 1963 Joannides was the case officer for AMSPELL, the CIA’s operation in support of the Cuban exile group DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil). In August 1963 the DRE was in contact with Oswald and participated with him in a radio broadcast which was later distributed with CIA help throughout Latin America.28 According to Jefferson Morley, "four decades after the fact, the most important AMSPELL records are missing from CIA archives – perhaps intentionally." Monthly reports on DRE activities were filed by CIA case officers Ross Crozier and William Kent, and these records were declassified by the ARRB for the periods September 1960-November 1962 and after May 1964. But the board was unable to locate any monthly AMSPELL reports from December 1962 to April 1964. There was a seventeen-month gap in the AMSPELL records, which coincided exactly with the period in which George Joannides handled the group.29 With respect to 9/11, all that is known about suppression so far has to do with the public record. Here it is striking that the Report of the Joint Inquiry by Congress into 9/11 has one glaring redaction of twenty-eight pages, dealing with "sources of foreign support for some of the September 11th hijackers while they were in the United States." Press reports have specified that this refers to Saudi money which reached al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi in 2000 while they were in San Diego. According to committee cochair Senator Bob Graham, The draft contained a twenty-eight page passage that detailed evidence that Saudis in the United States – Saudi government "spies," Graham called them – had provided financial and logistical support to [al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi] while they lived in Southern California.30 Similarly the 9/11 Commission failed to deal with the information on an FBI "hijacker timeline" that al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi were met at the airport on their first arrival in the United States by Omar al-Bayoumi, the transmitter of the Saudi funds, whom Graham claimed was obviously "a low-ranking Saudi intelligence agent."31 The FBI findings were leaked in an early story in Newsweek: At the airport, they were swept up by a gregarious fellow Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, who had been living in the United States for several years. Al-Bayoumi drove the two men to San Diego, threw a welcoming party and arranged for the visitors to get an apartment next to his. He guaranteed the lease, and plunked down $1,550 in cash to cover the first two months' rent.32 One month later, "In January 2003, Graham and the other members of the committee were …the focus of a criminal investigation by the FBI into whether someone on the panel had leaked classified information."33 The 9/11 Commission avoided this sensitive area. It cited the FBI Chronology a total of 52 times in its footnotes, for example at 493n55, concerning al-Mihdar’s travel from Yemen to the Malaysian meeting. But it suppressed the FBI’s report that al-Bayoumi met al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi on their arrival; and it substituted what Shenon calls an "improbable tale" supplied by al-Bayoumi himself: namely, that he had run into the two men two weeks later by accident "at a halal food restaurant" near Los Angeles.34 It is clear that two members of the 9/11 Commission staff who redacted this part of the report – Dietrich Snell and Philip Zelikow – were concerned to tone down what junior staffers considered to be "explosive material" on the Saudis.35 Shenon tells how this section of the 9/11 report was rewritten by Snell and Zelikow, until the text "removed all of the most serious allegations against the Saudis."36 But Snell and Zelikow may have been protecting the CIA as well as the Saudis. We have already noted how Lawrence Wright, looking at the extraordinary CIA record on withholding information about al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi, concluded, "It is also possible, as some FBI investigators suspect, the CIA was running a joint venture with Saudi intelligence."37 Conclusion It is clear, as everyone who has studied these matters closely and impartially concurs, that there have been cover-ups of the CIA’s relationships to first Oswald and later al-Mihdar – cover-ups which in both cases have not yet been adequately resolved. A reasonable conclusion from the available evidence is that the cover-ups were in order to conceal prior CIA operational interest in the designated subjects, just as in the case of Ali Mohamed in the early 1990s. It could of course be a coincidence that people of operational interest to the CIA became designated subjects in the deep events of JFK and 9/11. Another, more disturbing possibility is that those responsible for these events knew of the CIA’s operational interest, and exploited it in such a way as to ensure that the government would be embarrassed into covering up what really happened on those days. A lot of books about 9/11, including my own, have focused on the roles played by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld on that day. But it is clear that 9/11 involved a USG connection to at least one figure (Ali Mohamed) so sensitive that it had been covered up from the time of the Nosair murder in 1990 and the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. It is probable that Oswald’s covert USG connections also dated back to the time of his strange release from the U.S. Marine Corps in 1959, enabling him to travel to the Soviet Union.38 In short there is a substratum of covert operations underlying both events that antedates the presidencies in which they occurred. Thus one should not expect the cover-up of 9/11 in the G.W. Bush administration to dissipate simply because the Democrats take over the White House, just as the Johnson administration’s cover-up of the Kennedy assassination did not dissipate with the election of Richard Nixon.39 This is said not out of despair, but out of belief in the ultimate resilience and good sense of the American people. The analysis in this book is that America’s involvement in two disastrous wars – first Vietnam and later Iraq – was not an outcome of the people’s will, but rather in large part because of deep events that were used to manipulate that will. Thus this analysis is not an attack on America, but on that manipulative mindset that has twice succeeded in maneuvering America into war. This dominant mindset is not restricted to intelligence agencies, though it is largely rooted there. Over time it has spread into other parts of government, and has also corrupted large sections of the media and even universities. That the mindset is widespread does not however make it either omnipotent or invincible. It is important to identify the dominant mindset clearly, if we are ever going to displace it. It is important also to recognize that the dark topics discussed in this book are not representative of America as a whole. In the half century since the CIA’s first adventures in Burma and Laos, America has continued to be, as in the two centuries before it, a source of life-enhancing innovations, such as the computer and the internet. As Amy Chua has written in her book Day of Empire, I have tried to suggest in this book that the key to this rediscovery is the identification and displacement of the manipulative forces that have maneuvered America, almost unsuspectingly, into two unnecessary and disastrous wars. If there is any merit to my analysis, then, to isolate those forces, we must press for the truth about both the Kennedy assassination and 9/11. Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of the forthcoming The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, due in August 2008. This previously unpublished essay is the concluding section of the new book, which can be ordered from the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press by clicking here at http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/MFF_Store. His website is http://www.peterdalescott.net.

I accept compliments, but, like most gentlemen, I prefer cash. By the way, just how much are you making out of this little syke-war effort? Anyway, keen as ever to keep you up to speed, here's the latest from our intrepid UPI reporter. And I thought the days of fearless mainstream reportage were gone for ever! Experts are divided over the motivation and purpose of Thompson’s rare flirtation with a near- truth. “Simple incompetence,” one Langley veteran sighed, “and not remotely credible as an alternative explanation.” Others were less charitable, but preferred to remain anonymous given Thompson’s connections: “He’s lost it completely,” commented one such poster, hastily adding “a whole team of firemen, that is.” Nor was this his only significant gaff in the course of the same thread. Elsewhere, he deprived official whitewashers of one important source of fire driving the alleged “spontaneous” collapse favoured by his masters. One lasting consequence of Thompson’s bizarrely ill-considered reintervention in the case is widely bruited: He’ll lose his post as lead investigator in a suit launched against Silverstein. The legal action has been brought as part of a classic CIA wedge-and-flip operation designed to divide 9/11 dissidents from the victims; portray the dissidents as aligned with Silverstein and the bankers; and simultaneously vindicate the establishment’s fiction of collapse through fire and debris damage. “It’s a damn shame,” remarked the same veteran CIA observer, “particularly since he gained such experience of a similar op back in ’67.” If – when – Thompson does lose the job, his second-in-command is universally regarded as certain to step up. Monsieur Closeau is widely admired in powerful circles for his inability to solve a quick crossword, never mind unravel a complex CIA covert operation. UPI, “FBI, Homeland Security raid investigator’s offices in classic locked room mystery,” 5 July 2008, p. anywhere no one will see it.

Truman’s attack on the CIA in the Washington Post of 22 December 1963 was sure to prove a source of profound irritation to a murderous bureaucracy that believed itself above both criticism and the law. Dulles was still scratching vigorously four months later, even as he engrossed himself in the finer points of intimidating a Dallas doctor. Here’s the sequence in order: A week after the publication of Truman’s attack, the Washington Post rubbed editorial salt into the wound: “Truman and the CIA,” 28 December 1963, p.A8: Francis J. Gavin, “Politics, Power, and U.S. Policy in Iran, 1950-1953,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Winter 1999, (Vol. 1, No 1), pp.88-89: *Dulles had evidently developed a taste for this sort of thing during the period in question: http://www.jfk-assassination.com/warren/wch/vol3/page377.php Monday, 30 March 1964:

John Ranelagh. The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, p.217: “The origins of CAT highlight the divergence between public American policy, which in Truman’s first year was directed toward establishing a harmonious world order, and the conviction of many powerful and influential men that Truman’s policy was misconceived and that the United States would have to take steps to counter Soviet encroachments worldwide. In many ways the Office of Policy Coordination came out of this ‘private’ effort. For the story of CAT, see William M. Leary, Perilous Missions: Civil Air Transport and CIA Operations in Asia (University of Alabama Press, 1984).”

UPI, “Tinkering with the official fictions,” 4 July 2008, p.1: Experts are divided over the motivation and purpose of Thompson’s rare flirtation with a near- truth. “Simple incompetence,” one Langley veteran sighed, “and not remotely credible as an alternative explanation.” Others were less charitable, but preferred to remain anonymous given Thompson’s connections: “He’s lost it completely,” commented one such poster, hastily adding “a whole team of firemen, that is.” Nor was this his only significant gaff in the course of the same thread. Elsewhere, he deprived official whitewashers of one important source of fire driving the alleged “spontaneous” collapse favoured by his masters. One lasting consequence of Thompson’s bizarrely ill-considered reintervention in the case is widely bruited: He’ll lose his post as lead investigator in a suit launched against Silverstein. The legal action has been brought as part of a classic CIA wedge-and-flip operation designed to divide 9/11 dissidents from the victims; portray the dissidents as aligned with Silverstein and the bankers; and simultaneously vindicate the establishment’s fiction of collapse through fire and debris damage. “It’s a damn shame,” remarked the same veteran CIA observer, “particularly since he gained such experience of a similar op back in ’67.” If – when – Thompson does lose the job, his second-in-command is universally regarded as certain to step up. Monsieur Closeau is widely admired in powerful circles for his inability to solve a quick crossword, never mind unravel a complex CIA covert operation.

Dick Starnes, currently reading Jim Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable, is another year more mature today. Happy birthday, friend, and thank you for a body of extraordinary work. The following column reamins as fresh and relevant as the day it was published: May American historians and journalists yet find the courage and integrity to "rediscover" such work. Paul

Agreed. Clarification is needed on both scores. If anyone reading this in the London area is contemplating a visit to the British newspaper library at Colindale, please let me know. An email to the FBI would also seem in order. But while the fruits of further research are awaited, I think a little thinking aloud would do no harm. Let’s assume for one moment that Pilger’s recent account to Goodman did indeed debut in the Daily Mirror in the immediate aftermath of Robert Kennedy’s murder. I think this extremely unlikely, but let’s permit the possibility anyway. The question then arises - why has Pilger only now resurrected two key, pro-conspiratorial recollections after, as far one can see, effectively suppressing them in his books and journalism for the better part of 40 years? Is there an event or development that might have provoked such a change of heart? The major development is easy: The renewed interest in the case generated by the likes of Shane O’Sullivan, Robert Joling and Philip Van Pragg; and the reaction to that recrudescence of interest. Now, if Pilger is a genuine truth-teller, we may hypothesise that Pilger has been emboldened to revisit his original pro-conspiracy observations. This offers us a less than flattering portrait of Pilger the temporiser who short-changed his readers for all those years - but is, theoretically at least, a possibility. I have two problems taking this view with any seriousness. First, Pilger introduced both pro-conspiratorial observations within the familiar New Left context – to wit, that RFK was a vacuous Cold Warrior whose premature demise was thus of no great significance. So Pilger isn’t rupturing with his previous interpretative framework, but instead reinforcing it. Secondly, the tone of Pilger's contribution. I found it eerily reminsicent of what TV execs call the “So what”? response to pitchers. It runs something like this: You’re idea is great, but I’m not touching it with a barge pole because it would harm my career; I can’t admit I’m a careerist coward, so I have to pretend to be blasé on objective grounds. The latter can be any or all of the following: the idea is unfashionable; there is no anniversary peg upon which to hang such a programme; your idea isn’t as impressive as we both know it to be. And so on. One further consideration. If the cynical interpretation of Pilger’s recent contribution to Goodman’s programme is vindicated, then we have both a precedent and a pattern. In response to Stone’s JFK, the CIA cashed its Chomsky chip in the form of the book Rethinking Camelot, one of the crudest pieces of Agency revisionism yet committed to paper. Has the Pilger chip now been cashed to quash renewed interest, again on the left, in the RFK case? Paul

Inconceivable. Repeat after me until hypnotised: "Policy flows from institutions, reflecting the needs of power and privilege within them..." But remember: The CIA is not an institution; and does not reflect the needs of the US elite. By order of the Gnome.

Nat, you're being picky. After all, our heroic left-gatekeepers did pick up on the Cambodian slaughterhouse - er, but only to blame Nixon and Kissinger. They do, I concede, tend to be a little less forensic about this bit of the prelude: (1) Prince Norodom Sihanouk with Wilfred Burchett. My War with the CIA (London: Pelican, 1974), pp. 124-125. (2) Ibid., p. 133.

A fascinating piece: thanks for the heads-up. Paul