Paul Rigby

Paul...she says she was STANDING ON THE SIDEWALK, so has to be on the north curb,

since THERE IS NO SIDEWALK ALONG THE SOUTH CURB.

Jack

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...

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

Paul...she says she was STANDING ON THE SIDEWALK, so has to be on the north curb,

since THERE IS NO SIDEWALK ALONG THE SOUTH CURB.

Jack

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:

Uh, just immediately before the presidential car came into view, we were, you know, there was just tremendous excitement. And my friend who was with me, we were right ready to take the picture. And she’s not timid. She, as the car approached us, shed did holler for the president. “Mr. President, look this way!” And I’d stepped off the curb into the street to take the picture. And snapped it immediately. And that evidently was the first shot. You know I could hear the sound. And…

You will recognise at once the identity of the interviewee: Mary Moorman.

Paul

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).

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:

One of these statements by agents of the FBI is typical in its omissions (14). The deponent, Mrs Sharon Nelson, was standing about halfway between the Book Depository and the overpass (15); she obviously heard the shots and was in an excellent position to state whether she thought they came from her right or her left. The reader will scan her statement in vain for an opinion.

Lane thereupon offered Nelson's FBI statement:

Dallas, Texas

March 18, 1964

I, Mrs. Sharon Nelson nee Simons, hereby and voluntarily make the following statement to E.J. Robertson who has identified himself as a Special Agent of the FBI.

My name is Sharon Nelson nee Simmons, and I reside at 409 East 9th Street, Apt. 202, Dallas, Texas. I am a white female and am employed as a Clerk for the Texas School Book Depository.

At the time President Kennedy was shot I was standing on the sidewalk on Elm Street midway between the Texas School Book Depository Building and the underpass on Elm Street.

I was with Jeanne Holt, 2521 Pleasant Drive, Dallas, and Stella Jacob, 508 South Marsalis, Dallas, at the time the President was shot.

I did not see Lee Harvey Oswald at the time President Kennedy was shot.

I do not remember seeing any person in the Texas School Book Depository Building on the morning of November 22, 1963, who was a stranger to me.

I left the Texas School Book Depository Building at about 12.20 p.m. on November 22, and never returned to this building on that date.

I have read the above statement consisting of one and one half pages and it is true and correct to the best of my knowledge.

/s/Mrs Sharon Nelson (Simmons)

Witness: E.J. Roberston, Special Agent, FBI,

Dallas, Texas, 3/18/64

Thomas T. Trettis, Jr, Special Agent,

FBI, Dallas, Texas, 3/18/64.

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?

Notes:

(1) The UK version, published by The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966.

(2) Ibid., p.110.

(3) Testimony of Nelson, 22H665; of Jacob, 22H655; and Holt, 22H652. As I wrote on the Lancer forum in early 2006, all three women’s statements were taken on the same day, 18 March 1964.The statements of Holt and Jacob were structured by the same FBI pair, A. Raymond Switzer and Eugene F. Petrakis. The job of fashioning Simmons’, by contrast, was undertaken by E.J. Robertson and Thomas T. Trettis. The latter duo some interesting recent “form” in this area.

Five days earlier Robertson and Trettis had interviewed Jean Hill, another, albeit rather better publicised, south curb witness. This was to produce startling results. Let Harold Weisberg take up the story: “Reporting their interview with Mrs. Hill, the agents write things they must have known to be wrong. The two women [Mary Moorman, being the other – PR] were not ‘opposite the main entrance of the Texas School Book Depository Building’ but considerably west of there, opposite the location of the President’s car at the time of the fatal shot” (Photographic Whitewash, 1976, p.36).

How to make sense of this? On the surface of it, simple enough: Five days before Robertson and Trettis separated Simmons from Holt and Jacob, the same pair removed Hill and Moorman from the south curb, too. Why? Did the latter pair make one pair too many for the Z-film? Or is there another, better explanation? Answers solicited.

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!

------------

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.

-----------

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

Here's my review of JFK & The Unspeakable.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/

JFK And the Unspeakable Why He Died & Why It Matters (Orbis Books, 2008),

by James Douglas.

...So it was Moore, of the CIA's Domestic Contacts Division in Dallas who had De Mohrenschildt befriend Oswald, and it was De Mohrenschildt who arranged for the Oswalds to meet Ruth and Michael Paine, who became sponsors and benefactors of the accused assassin and his family.

Bill,

I'm puzzled. How do you get from the above, to the below?

The inclusion of Northwoods in the Dealey Plaza operation is the lynchpin that proves that the bullets that killed the President came from the Pentagon...

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

In A Citizen’s Dissent, Lane noted..."

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:

There is one further piece of evidence which we feel must now be made available to the entire public – Abraham Zapruder’s film of the actual assassination. The original is now the private property of Life magazine. A Life magazine executive refused CBS News permission to show you that film at any price, on the grounds that it is an invaluable asset to Time Inc. Life’s decision means you cannot see the Zapruder film in its proper form, as a motion picture film. We believe that the Zapruder is an invaluable asset, not of Time Inc., but of the people of the United States (4).

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.

Notes:

(1) Mark Lane. A Citizen’s Dissent: Mark Lane Replies (NY: Fawcett Crest, April 1969), pp.98-99

(2) Ibid., pp.192-3.

(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.”

(4) Richard B. Trask. National Nightmare on Six Feet of Film: Mr. Zapruder’s home movie and the murder of President Kennedy (Danvers, Mass.: Yeoman Press, 2005), p.187.

(5) Lane, loc. cit., p.118.

(6) Lane, loc. cit., p.95. The Boston Traveler reporter in question was Eleanor Roberts.

(7) Lane, loc. cit., p.153.

Fascinating piece:

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

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

Britain must get tougher with Russia, warn Conservatives

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent, and Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent

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

MP complains at being 'warned off' meeting envoy

Richard Norton-Taylor

The Guardian, Friday, 23 May 2008, p.19

A Labour MP said yesterday he was warned off meeting a Russian embassy official by a government minister and told that he was being monitored by the security services.

Andrew Mackinlay, a longstanding member of the Commons foreign affairs committee, described the approach by an unidentified minister last summer as "menacing". He said it was an example of how "craven" ministers were to the intelligence and security services.

He told the Commons he found the minister's actions unacceptable and a breach of his rights as an MP, particularly since his meetings with the Russian diplomat took place in parliament. He told the Guardian later that he was summoned twice last summer to the "headmaster's office" and the minister concerned knew what he had discussed with the Russian.

"Bearing in mind I meet the people from the Russian embassy in this building, it means the security and intelligence services are not only monitoring people coming in to this building, but monitoring honourable members who they meet, and presumably what is discussed."

He claimed intelligence officers wanted him to pass on information he learned from "casual conversations" about politics in Britain and Russia. He did not object to the fact that the Russian official was being monitored ahead of their meeting.

But he added: "What it was, was an approach by a minister warning me off doing this, and that was unacceptable to me and remains so." He called for greater parliamentary scrutiny and oversight of the intelligence services.

Helen Goodman, deputy Commons leader, told Mackinlay that the lord chancellor's proposals in the constitutional renewal bill would be a "radical change" to oversight of the security services.

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?

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/openhouse/2...ing-t.html#more

Tuesday, 08 July 2008

Who is trying to sabotage better British-Russian relations?

By Mary Dejevsky

Put the Newsnight feature together with the British intelligence report - conveniently released on the eve of the Brown-Medvedev meeting - that Russia was now the third- biggest threat to British security after al-Qa'ida and Iran(!), and you have a concerted attempt to sabotage the improvement in British-Russian relations that the Brown-Medvedev encounter might have heralded.

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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

Britain must get tougher with Russia, warn Conservatives

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent, and Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent

Last updated: 6:14 PM BST 08/07/2008

Britain must take a tougher line with Russia over its increasingly aggressive foreign policy, the Conservatives have demanded.

Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, said that ministers cannot ignore growing signs of Russian hostility, including its support for espionage and its territorial ambitions.

He spoke after tense talks between Gordon Brown and the new Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and fresh claims about Russian collusion in a London murder.

Mr Brown and Mr Medvedev had their first meeting at the G8 summit in Japan this week, but failed to solve the key issues or to dispel the image of two countries whose diplomatic relations are sub-zero.

Even as they met, British security officials confirmed that they believe that the killers of Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident poisoned in London last year, were operating with the support of parts of the Russian regime.

That sparked a sharp reply from Russian officials.

A senior aide to Mr Medvedev accused British officials of trying to undermine the relationship with Russia.

The aide said: "We are working on raising British-Russian relations out of a certain cul-de-sac. And as for various unattributed leaks, they demonstrate that unfortunately in Great Britain not everyone has such a constructive approach as we felt the Prime Minister himself has."

Louise Christian, solicitor for Mr Litvinenko's widow, Marina, later issued a statement calling on the British government to pursue Russia to the International Court of Justice.

And Mrs Litvinenko herself said she was "proud of being British" and accused the Kremlin of orchestrating a campaign of harassment against British interests in Russia to block the extradition to Britain of Andrei Luguvoi, whom the UK accuses of Mr Litvinenko's murder.

Dr Fox said the Litvinenko case was just one of several examples of unacceptable Russian behaviour.

He said: "We all want to see improved relations with Russia, but we cannot overlook the Litvenenko murder, the $189 billion rearmament programme or the attempted annexation of large tracts of the Arctic.

"Ultimately, we will have to judge Russia on its actions, not its rhetoric."

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

Who is trying to sabotage better British-Russian relations?

By Mary Dejevsky

On Monday, Gordon Brown met the new Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, on the fringe of the G8 summit in Hokkaido. It was the first meeting between the two political leaders at a time of deep depression in UK-Russian relations, and the hope was that it would lay the foundation for some improvement.

And how did the BBC report this event? At least on Newsnight, much watched by the chattering classes, entirely through the prism of a certain Boris Berezovsky, exiled Russian oligarch and self-proclaimed enemy number one of Vladimir Putin.

Newsnight claimed to have exclusive confirmation, via 'sources' in MI5, that Alexander Litvinenko's radiation poisoning in November 2006, had been carried out by Russian intelligence. Well, well. It offered nothing more than a few random, unattributed quotations, to assert what had been a favoured - if never corroborated - view since the start.

Now I assume, to give the reporter the benefit of the doubt, that his 'sources' are known to him and reliable, otherwise he would not have made such a big deal out of their assertions. And no one would expect MI5 to go on camera.

But the only person Newsnight produced In support of its new, supposedly exclusive, theory was, well, who else? but the very same Boris Berezovsky, who rehearsed the selfsame story he had peddled to the media a year ago, about how he had been targeted by an assassin at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane.

This time, Newsnight told us, in breathless excitement, the would-be assassin was a man of Chechen appearance, already named (but not arrested) in connection with the murder of the campaigning journalist, Anna Politkovskaya. He had been apprehended by the London police, but then released, without charge, to return to Russia!

Newsnight offered no explanation, nor has Berezovsky offered any, of why the police released the supposed assassin rather than charging him and putting him on trial.

Yet this needs an explanation. An arrest and trial would offer the best possible corroboration of the theory that the Russian state was involved in both the killing of Litvinenko and the alleged attempted killing of Berezovsky. Yet, even as they tried to make the case for the extradition from Moscow of Litvinenko's presumed assassin, Andrei Lugovoi, and made a diplomatic incident out of Russia's refusal, the British seem calmly to have let Berezovsky's would-be assassin go. Why?

Put the Newsnight feature together with the British intelligence report - conveniently released on the eve of the Brown-Medvedev meeting - that Russia was now the third- biggest threat to British security after al-Qa'ida and Iran(!), and you have a concerted attempt to sabotage the improvement in British-Russian relations that the Brown-Medvedev encounter might have heralded.

For all the hype, there was nothing new in the Newsnight report. It smacked rather of an elaborate - and hugely successful - put-up job by Berezovsky and his PR people to reheat old accusations and pre-empt any improvement in British-Russia relations. I wonder in whose interests that might be?

I would have expected a more critical approach to the source material by a programme such as Newsnight.

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No American journalist worked more bravely to thwart the anticipated revolt than Scripps-Howard’s Richard Starnes. His ‘reward’ was effectively to become a non-person, not just in the work of mainstream fellow-journalists and historians, but also that of nominally oppositional Kennedy assassination writers. It could have been worse: John J. McCone, Director of Central Intelligence, sought his instant dismissal; while others within the agency doubtless had more drastic punishment in mind, almost certainly of the kind meted out to CBS’ George Polk fifteen years earlier.

Always judge a man by his enemies and critics. Starnes ruffled another important set of establishment feathers with the following column:

The New York World-Telegram & Sun, Tuesday, December 3, 1963, p.25

Truth Won't Out

By Richard Starnes

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.

In a sense, of course, the special commission is investigating the role played by each of these agencies, and it is manifestly naïve to expect these cops to bear witness against themselves or, indeed, each other.

Any reporter who has wasted a portion of his young life in a hick police station thinks he knows exactly how Rubenstein, the squalid impresario of skin shows, gained access to the Dallas Municipal Building where he apparently shot and killed the man who apparently shot and killed President Kennedy. (If you contend there are too many apparentlys in that sentence, my reply is that there are too many apparentlys in the murders that took place in Dallas.)

Ruby probably had a press pass issued by the Dallas cops. Every reporter has known police buffs of the stripe of Rubenstein, and the sleazy breed invariably prizes possession of a press card.

But is anyone foolish enough to expect the Dallas Police Department to step before Chief Justice Warren and say, yes, your worship, we did give Rubenstein a press pass to which he was not entitled and he did use it to gain access to the basement where he performed the gallant act of gut-shooting a manacled prisoner?

If you believe the Dallas police will ever give up the truth about how Rubenstein got a clear shot at Oswald you will believe anything, possibly including the solemn assertion that Rubenstein was not paying off any officials for the privilege of skirting the law in operating his peltorama.

In their extravagant outpourings of grief over the death of their young President, the American people have largely overlooked the disgraceful failure of the Secret Service. We are assured that these hard-nosed federal cops could not possibly check every window along the parade route, and no one is moved to ask why they couldn't. The building from which the assassination of Mr. Kennedy is said to have taken place was a prime stake-out for a sniper, since the President's automobile had to slow for a turn beneath its windows.

Will the Secret Service candidly explain to the special commission why Oswald was permitted to rest patiently on his hunkers gnawing a chicken bone, a rifle beside him, in one of perhaps a dozen choice locations for a bushwhacker?

Again, little has been made of the fact that the President was shot not once, but twice. The autopsy findings on Mr. Kennedy have not been made public, and may never be, but suppose the first wound was not mortal? Then the lax protection that permitted a second bullet to strike home becomes a great historical scandal. Will Mr. Justice Warren and his colleagues ever know the truth of this, and if they do learn it, will they publish it?

Will the presence on the panel of Allen Dulles, erstwhile headmaster of the Central Intelligence Agency, assure us that the truth of Oswald's sojourn in the Soviet Union will ever be known? The Russians suggest they suspected him of being a spy. Can any realistic person believe any tentacle of the nation's elephantine espionage apparatus will own up to ever having Oswald on its payroll?

Can we expect the FBI to explain why Oswald was not under close surveillance? How many would-be defectors to Russia did they have to watch that day in Dallas when the President's widely-heralded visit was schedule.

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

Global Research recently published my essay entitled 9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics. In this article, I argue that 9/11 should be analyzed as a deep event (an event not fully aired or understood because of its intelligence connections) and above all as one of a series of deep events which from time to time have frustrated peace initiatives or become pretexts for war.

In support of this overall thesis I pointed to features of 9/11 which recalled similar deep events: the still not fully understood outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the JFK assassination, and the so-called Second Tonkin Gulf Incident of 1964 (an alleged attack on U.S. destroyers which we now know never happened).

The similarities between these deep events which have disturbed American history since World War Two suggest that they are not just a sequence of unrelated external accidents, but at least in part the product of some on-going deep indigenous force not yet adequately understood.

In this series of deep events, perhaps the most striking similarities are between the JFK assassination (henceforward referred to as "JFK") and 9/11. Earlier talks and articles I have delivered on this topic are developed even further in my forthcoming much expanded reissue of my early book, The War Conspiracy. As The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, it is due to be published by the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press in August 2008.

The following essay is the concluding section of the new book, and has never hitherto been published.

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:

They didn’t want the bureau meddling in their business – that’s why they didn’t tell the FBI….They purposely hid from the FBI, purposely refused to tell the bureau that they were following a man in Malaysia who had a visa to come to America….And that’s why September 11 happened. That is why it happened….They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands.18

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,

If America can rediscover the path that has been the secret to its success since its founding and avoid the temptations of empire building, it could remain the world’s hyperpower in the decades to come – not a hyperpower of coercion and military force, but a hyperpower of opportunity, dynamism, and moral force.40

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.

NOTES

1 Transcript of Dallas Police Channel Two, 12:44 PM; cf. Channel One 12:45 PM,

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/dpdtapes/; Warren Report 5, 17 Warren Commission Hearings 397, 23 Warren Commission Hearings 916.

2 Clarke, Against All Enemies, 13-14. The list of 19 names, accepted without question by the 9/11 Commission Report, was given by the FBI to the press on September 14, 2001 (Daily Telegraph, September 15, 2001,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml...15/whunt15.xml).

3 Transcript of Dallas Police Channel Two, 12:44 PM; cf. Channel One 12:45 PM,

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/dpdtapes/; Warren Report 5, 17 Warren Commission Hearings 397.

4 E.g. Dallas FBI Report from John Fain, May 12, 1960, 17 Warren Commission Hearings 704, NARA #157-10006-10213 ("Height: 5’10" Weight: 165 lbs." [inaccurate description supplied by Marguerite Oswald]); CIA HQ Cable DIR 74830 to Mexico City, 10 Oct 1963, NARA #104-10015-10048, reproduced in John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995), 512 ("five feet ten inches, one hundred sixty five pounds").

5 Fingerprint card dated "11-25-63," 17 Warren Commission Hearings 308.

6 Warren Report 5, 144; Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact (Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2006), 10-13, 78n. After seeing Oswald twice on television, Brennan picked out Oswald in a second lineup (Warren Report, 143).

7 Daily Telegraph, September 23, 2001,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml.../23/widen23.xml.

Cf. Guardian, September 21 2001,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/2...an.september112 :" Abdulaziz

Al-Omari has also come forward to say he was not on the flight from Boston that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Centre. An electrical engineer who works in Saudi Arabia, Mr Al-Omari said he was a student in Denver during the mid-1990s, and that his passport and other papers were stolen in a burglary in the US five years ago. … `The name is my name and the birth date is the same as mine,’ he told Asharq al-Aswat, a London-based Arabic newspaper. `But I am not the one who bombed the World Trade Centre in New York.’"

8 Daily Telegraph, September 23, 2001,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml.../23/widen23.xml.

9 On October 4, 2001, the FBI issued a press release showing what appeared to be photos from surveillance videotape of two hijackers, Mohammed Atta and Abdulaziz Al-Omari, entering Portland Jetport on the morning of September 11, 2001 (FBI Press Release, October 4, 2001,

http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/100401picts.htm ). If valid, these would constitute evidence from the event itself. However the photos are anomalous, in that they show two time superimposed stamps, one showing 5:45, the other showing 5:53. The photos are not cited as evidence in the 9/11 Commission Report. On July 22, 2004, the date of the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, CNN aired what they said was surveillance videotape of two hijackers, Majed Moqed and Khalid al-Mihdar. entering "at one of the security screening points at Dulles International" (CNN, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0407/22/lad.04.html ). The authenticity of the videotape has been challenged, however, because it lacks the time and date and location identification normally burned into a surveillance video image (Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall, 9/11 Revealed: The Unanswered Questions [New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005], 117-19).

10 I have argued that the conflicting messages were part of a so-called "marked card" or "barium meal" test to determine if and where leaks of sensitive information were occurring. This was a familiar technique, and was the responsibility of the CI/SIG or Counterintelligence Special Intelligence Group which drafted the two cables. See Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II: The New Revelations in U.S. Government Files,1994-1999 (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2007), 17-18, 92; also Peter Dale Scott, "Oswald and the Hunt for Popov's Mole," The Fourth Decade, III, 3 (March 1996), 3;

www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=519798.

11 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33.

12 Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 196-98. See Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33.

13 Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 310.

14 9/11 Commission Report, 502n44.

15 Wright, The Looming Tower, 312, 313.

16 Lawrence Wright, "The Agent," New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68.

17 Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City: Andrews, McMeel, & Parker, 1987), 268.

18 James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 224.

19 Wright, The Looming Tower, 329. In his New Yorker story (p. 70), Wright wrote that "By withholding the picture of Khallad [bin Attash]…the C.I.A. may in effect have allowed the September 11th plot to proceed."

20 9/11 Commission Report, 271; Wright, The Looming Tower, 353-54.

21 David Atlee Phillips, Nightwatch, 139; quoted in Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 184. Morley observes that in the 1970s Phillips offered a total of "four not entirely consistent versions of the story of Oswald’s visit to Mexico City."

22 J. Cofer Black testimony before 9/11 Congressional Joint Inquiry, 107th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 24, 2003.

23 Dale Watson testimony before Joint Inquiry, 107th Cong., 2nd Sess., September 26, 2002.

24 Amy B. Zegart, Flying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007), 117.

25 Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why TheyDid It (New York: HarperCollins, 20050, 294n45; Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (New York: Twelve/Hachette, 2008), 141.

26 Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 7, 294.

27 9/11 Commission Report, 267.

28 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 81-86; Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 170-77.

29 Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 177.

30 Shenon, The Commission, 50-51.

31 Larisa Alexandrovna, "FBI documents contradict 9/11 Commission report," RawStory, February 28, 2008, http://rawstory.com/news/2008/FBI_document...ssion_0228.html (met at the airport); Shenon, The Commission, 52 (al-Bayoumi). Al-Bayoumi "apparently did work for Dallah Avco, an aviation-services company with extensive contracts with the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation, headed by Prince Sultan, the father of the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar" ("The Saudi Money Trail," Newsweek, December 2, 2002, http://www.newsweek.com/id/66665).

32 "The Saudi Money Trail," Newsweek, December 2, 2002. The FBI "hijacker timeline" was released by the FBI on February 4, 2008. See Larisa Alexandrovna, "FBI documents contradict 9/11 Commission report, Rawstory.com, February 28, 2008,

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/FBI_document...ssion_0228.html.

33 Shenon, The Commission, 54.

34 9/11 Commission Report, 217; Shenon, The Commission, 52-53.

35 Shenon, The Commission, 398.

36 Shenon, The Commission, 398.

37 Wright, The Looming Tower, 313. Looking at the same evidence, Christopher Ketcham has raised an alternative possibility, that "the CIA may have subcontracted to Mossad, given that the agency was both prohibited by law from conducting intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and lacked a pool of competent Arabic-fluent field officers. In such a scenario, the CIA would either have worked actively with the Israelis or quietly abetted an independent operation on U.S. soil…. When in the spring of 2002 the scenario of CIA's domestic subcontracting to foreign intelligence was posed to the veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative, with whom I spoke extensively, the operative didn't reject it out of hand" (Christopher Ketcham, "Cheering Movers and Art Student Spies: What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?" CounterPunch, February 7, 2007,

http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cf...4253&page=2 ).

38 Oswald requested a dependency discharge from the Marines in August 1959, "on the ground that his mother needed his support" (Warren Report, 688). Accordingly Marine Lt. A.G. Ayers, Jr. signed a document for Oswald’s release to inactive duty on September 11, 1959 (19 WH 679, cf. 17 WH 762) "by reason of hardship (19 WH 678). However Lt. Ayers should have known that Oswald had no intention of staying in Texas to support his mother; he had already, on September 4, 1959, signed an affidavit in support of Oswald’s passport application "to attend the College of A. Schweitzer, Chur, Switzerland and the Univ of Turku, Turku, Finland" (22 WH 77-79). (It is a sign of some covert intrigue that the language of instruction at the University of Turku was Finnish, a language Oswald did not know.)

39 A significant symptom of this enduring substratum has been the Bush Administration’s protection of Samuel Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor. Berger pleaded guilty in April 2005 to having stolen 9/11 documents from the National Archives (Shenon, The Commission, 414). A condition of his plea bargain was to submit to a Justice Department polygraph test, to determine what documents had been stolen. Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a long-time critic of CIA operations in Afghanistan, revealed to the House in February 2008 that he had written to the Bush Justice Department, demanding that it administer the polygraph test, and that the Justice Department had rejected his demand (Congressional Record, February 26, 2008, House, pp. H1065-H1072). We have already seen that Berger when in office was receiving regular reports from the CIA about the presence of al-Mihdar and al-Hamzi at the Kuala Lumpur meeting (Zegart, Flying Blind, 117). It is possible that these were the reports he was stealing from the Archives, and that the Justice Department refusal to administer the polygraph test is part of a cover-up to protect the CIA’s relationship to the two Saudis.

40 Amy Chua, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance – and Why They Fall (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 342.

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.

Your silly-ass comments reported from a "Langley veteran" and "veteran CIA observer" are just drivel, the usual attempt at character assassination practiced by you and your pal Fetzer when you have no facts to cite.

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!

UPI, “Tinkering with the official fictions,” 4 July 2008, p.1:

Josiah Thompson, the discredited one-time lead salesman for the fraudulent Zapruder film, today conceded that Larry Silverstein did indeed mean “collapse the tower deliberately” when he remarked “pull it.”

The admission came in the opening post of yet another Thompsonian thread devoted to his obsessive pursuit of Professor James Fetzer, the prominent 9/11 and Zapruder film dissident. It was all the more unexpected given Thompson’s presumed intention to debunk, not reinforce, conspiratorial interpretations of Silverstein’s shocking confession:

For years, Fetzer has been trading on the interview Larry Silverstein gave a few months after 9/11. In this interview, Silverstein said he talked to “the fire commander” on the afternoon of 9/11. Given the massive loss of life earlier that day, Silverstien said he told the fire commander “to pull it.” Fetzer misinterprets “pull it” to be a term of art in demolition circles meaning “bring down the building with controlled demolitions.” As countless internet sites have already shown, “pull it” in demolition-speak means what you would think it would mean: “attach a cable to a supporting beam and pull it.

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.

What about “the modest fire at street level?” Well, that turns out to be a colorful modernist sculpture in bright orange, yellow and red that had been placed there on the mezzanine level years before 9/11.

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.

In a startling development late yesterday, a joint Homeland Security-FBI task force raided the offices of Josiah Thompson in search of basic competence. “We took a cell call from 178,000 ft,” said an FBI spokesperson, “scrambled, encrypted and very angry.” ‘It’s Thompson’s competence,” shouted the irate caller known only by the codename 'Langley,' “it’s vanished, along with a goddamn fire we needed!’”

Within minutes, a crack combined psycho-forensic rapid response team had smashed down the open office door, thrown up a ten-mile cordon around the deserted office block, and was rummaging with vigor through the debris of Thompson’s reputation, previous passports, and a stray pair of smalls of uncertain ownership. “One minute it was there,” insisted a veteran member of Homeland Security and the GOP, “the next it was gone. But no one had gone in or out of the office building according to the security tapes! By the way, I gotta ask everyone, is this thong yours?”

“It would help if we knew what we were looking for,” confided one frustrated FBI insider close to the hunt. “I mean, what in hell does self-annihilating submission to the purposes of the state-within-a-state look like when it’s at home? Or not, as the case is. At the moment, it’s the ill-equipped in pursuit of the intangible. Kinda like the war on terror in microcosm, if you ask me. Which you should, as I majored in philosophy. Only one in my FBI class.”

In the continuing absence of any sightings of Thompsons’ basic competence, eyes are increasingly turning to a legendary paranormalist. BBC journalist Jane Stanley has been contacted, informed sources confirmed late last night, and is only awaiting security clearance from the British Government, which has in turn sought permission from a much higher authority, MI6.

The New York World-Telegram & Sun, Tuesday, 24 December 1963, p.13

Truman and the CIA

By Richard Starnes

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.

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:

Former President Truman speaks with unique authority about the CIA inasmuch as the agency was organized in his Administration. When he writes, as he did in this newspaper last Sunday, that there “is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position” we can rightly sight up and take notice. Mr. Truman is concerned that the agency’s operational functions have gotten out of hand. So are many Americans.

The President makes perfectly clear that a central intelligence agency was an urgent requirement when the CIA was formed. The Chief Executive is virtually blanketed by intelligence documents from many existing agencies. He needs a central organization charged with the duty of assembling various estimates and presenting the facts without the tincture of special pleading. The intelligence reports of the various armed services obviously must reflect, consciously or unconsciously, the institutional bias of services with their own policies to defend.

The trouble is that over the years the CIA had become increasingly entangled in its own operations. It has seemed less an objective interpreter of events than a rival policy arm with a very sharp axe to grind. As Mr. Truman remarks:

“I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassments that I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue – and a subject for enemy cold war propaganda.”

President Truman emphasizes his confidence in the patriotism and ability of CIA officials. That is not in dispute. What is at issue is the wisdom of combining within the CIA functions that should be separate. Moreover, there is real doubt whether any arm of the United States Government should be involved in subversion of another government. Experience suggests that this is an area in which Americans do not excel. Morality suggests that it drains this country’s professed principles of meaning when a shadowy arm of the Government appears to practice the same subversion that we condemn in others.

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:

Note 130:

Some of the mythology concerning cover operations may have come from Truman himself. In 1963, a review of a book by Allen Dulles called The Cult of Intelligence appeared in the Washington Post, with Truman listed as the reviewer. Although generally favourable, the review called for the CIA to get out of the covert operations business. Dulles wrote a letter to Truman reminding him that it was under Truman’s guidance that such operations began:

“You will also recall that about a year after the Truman Doctrine declaration of April [March] 1947, you were also the first to take stock of the fact that the Communist subversive threat could not be met solely by the overt type of assistance which you were able to render the beleaguered countries of Greece and Turkey. This peril was evidenced by events early in 1948, with the take-over of Czechoslovakia by secret subversion, the Communist threat to Italian independence in the elections of 1948, and the communizing of Poland, Hungary and the other ‘Satellite’ countries. It was then, in June 1948, that you, through National Security Council action, approved the organization within CIA of a new office to carry out covert operations directed against secret Communist subversion…The administration which followed your own, re-affirmed the need for this type of activity. While the charter that you initially gave the CIA in this field has been slightly modified over the years by NSC action, it remains substantially as you had approved it. It was during ‘Beedle’ Smith’s directorship and again under your directive that the responsibility of the Director of Central Intelligence for covert operations was established, subject of course to the high policy guidance it has always had and to which its has faithfully adhered, despite newspaper reports to the contrary.”

Allen Dulles to the Honorable Harry S. Truman, 7 January 1964, in USNA, RG 263, History Source Collection, NN3-263-94-010, Box 18, File HS/HC, Folder 3.

Dulles then arranged a private meeting with Truman, which is described in the memo.

“I reviewed the various covert steps which had been taken under his authority in suppressing the Huk rebellion in the Philippines, of the problems we had faced during the Italian election in 1948…I then showed him the article in The Washington Post of December 22, 1963, which I suggested seemed to me to be a misrepresentation of his position. I pointed out the number of National Security Actions which…he had taken which dealt with covert operations by the CIA. He studied attentively the Post story and seemed quite astounded by it. In fact, he said that this was all wrong…At no time did Mr. Truman express other than complete agreement with the viewpoint I expressed and several times said he would see what he could do about it…He was highly disturbed at The Washington Post article.*”

Dulles came to the reasonable conclusion that the review article attributed to Truman had been written by someone else.

Memo for Mr. Lawrence R. Houston, General Counsel, from A. W. Dulles, 21 April 1964, in USNA, RG263, History Source Collection, NN3-263-94-010, Box 18, File HS/HC, Folder 3.

*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:

Mr. Dulles: I suggest, Mr. Specter, if you feel it is feasible, you send to the doctor the accounts of his press conference or conferences. And possibly, if you are willing, sir, you could send us a letter, send to the Commission a letter, pointing out the various points in these press conferences where you are inaccurately quoted, so we can have that as a matter of record. Is that feasible?

Dr. Perry: That is, sir. Would you prefer that each clipping be edited individually or a general statement?

INTERESTING COMMENT BY FORMER PRESIDENT TRUMAN PUBLISHED DECEMBER 22 1963.

Also interesting that we rarely hear of this comment. The first I heard of it was as quoted here in James W. Douglass' incredible book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.

--------------

On December 22, 1963, one month to the day after JFK's assassintion,

Former President Truman published a very carefully worded article in the

Washington Post warning the American people about the danger of the CIA

taking over the government. He wrote:

"I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and

operations of our Central Intelligence Agency--CIA...for some time I

have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original

assignment. It has become an operational and at time a policy-making

arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have

compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. We have grown up

as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to

maintain a free and open society. THere is something about the CIA

has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historica position

and I feel that we need to correct it" (note 678, Chapter 6)

Trumans's warning, with its ominous post-assassination timing, was greeted

by total silence (note 679) Had it been noticed and heeded the , the

contraversial ex-president might have been accused more justly this time

of trying to abolish the CIA, since he did indeed want to abolish its covert

activities. Ptesident Harry Truman had himself established the CIA in

1947, but not he thought, to do what he saw it doing in the fall of 1963.

He restated his radical critique of the CIA in a letter writeen six months

later (note 680, Chapter 6). The managing editor of Look magazine had

sent Truman the latest Look featuring a piece on the CIA. Truman wrote

back:

"Thank you for the copy of Look with the article on the Central Intelligence

Agency. It is, I regret to say, not true to the facts in many respects. The

CIA was set up by me for the sole purposse of getting all the available

information to the president. It was not inteneded to operate as an

international agency engaged in strange activities" (note 681, Chapter 6)

(pp.332-333, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters)

------------

"It has become an operational and at times a policy-making

arm of the Government. " Well Douglass book is full of examples of this

generalization by Truman.

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:

Josiah Thompson, the discredited one-time lead salesman for the fraudulent Zapruder film, today conceded that Larry Silverstein did indeed mean “collapse the tower deliberately” when he remarked “pull it.”

The admission came in the opening post of yet another Thompsonian thread devoted to his obsessive pursuit of Professor James Fetzer, the prominent 9/11 and Zapruder film dissident. It was all the more unexpected given Thompson’s presumed intention to debunk, not reinforce, conspiratorial interpretations of Silverstein’s shocking confession:

For years, Fetzer has been trading on the interview Larry Silverstein gave a few months after 9/11. In this interview, Silverstein said he talked to “the fire commander” on the afternoon of 9/11. Given the massive loss of life earlier that day, Silverstien said he told the fire commander “to pull it.” Fetzer misinterprets “pull it” to be a term of art in demolition circles meaning “bring down the building with controlled demolitions.” As countless internet sites have already shown, “pull it” in demolition-speak means what you would think it would mean: “attach a cable to a supporting beam and pull it.

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.

What about “the modest fire at street level?” Well, that turns out to be a colorful modernist sculpture in bright orange, yellow and red that had been placed there on the mezzanine level years before 9/11.

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.

“The most important consequence of the Cold War remains the least discussed. How and why American democracy died lies beyond the scope of this introductory essay. It is enough to note that the CIA revolt against the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy – the single event which did more than any other to hasten its end – was, quite contrary to over forty years of censorship and deceit, both publicly anticipated and publicly opposed.

No American journalist worked more bravely to thwart the anticipated revolt than Scripps-Howard’s Richard Starnes. His ‘reward’ was effectively to become a non-person, not just in the work of mainstream fellow-journalists and historians, but also that of nominally oppositional Kennedy assassination writers. It could have been worse: John J. McCone, Director of Central Intelligence, sought his instant dismissal; while others within the agency doubtless had more drastic punishment in mind, almost certainly of the kind meted out to CBS’ George Polk fifteen years earlier.

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:

New York World-Telegram & Sun, 26 November 1963, p.23

Where Violence Rings

The United States, with its unswerving dedication to violence and its cherished tradition of over-reacting, can look forward to the next months only with misgivings.

No man alive can guess how deeply the fabric of the nation has been wounded by the Byzantine horror of assassination compounded by assassination, of murder heaped upon murder. But it is foolhardy to assume that all will soon be as it was before. Indecency took the country by the throat in a raw, too-rich too-soon Texas city, and none can say what the ending will be.

Our credentials as a civilized people stand suspect before the world, of course, but the real depth of the disaster that has befallen us cannot yet be measured. In the 188th year, the republic has fallen upon unspeakably evil days, and great mischief is abroad the land. It remains to be seen whether more convulsions will rack us before it is over.

History warns us not to be optimistic on this score. We are not a mature people. When deeply hurt, we lash out; when troubled and afraid we too often seek comfort in wild excesses that remain to haunt us through history. Assailed by privation and hardship in a savage land, we slew innocent women as witches. Insane with rage at the murder of Lincoln, we fastened the vengeful Reconstruction on the South, and in doing so insured that the terrible wounds of the Civil War would fester and sicken us for a century and more.

Our initial response to the infant threat of Bolshevism was the disgrace of the Palmer raids, which made a mockery of civil rights and human decency in the winter of 1919-20. And what adult among us cannot remember the sorry episode that we customarily reduce to the convenient historical shorthand of McCarthyism? Joe McCarthy was in the van, and deserves to be memorialized in the name we give that time of trial, but behind him was an army of lip-movers, the get of witch burners and rack manipulators since the dawn of time. Americans were never able to understand the horror with which civilized nations viewed that dismal epoch; Americans knew (or thought they knew) that the hysteria was typical of us. Other people wondered and worried that it might well be typical.

We are still the children of the generations that wrested the land from savages in bloody combat. We waste our finest young men on foreign beaches and in alien jungles, we kill our families by the tens of thousands on our highways, we sell soap and celebrate violence simultaneously on the great medium for mass hypnosis that television has become, we educate our children in brutal games of cops and robbers and we don’t tell them until too late that it is not always the bad guys that get killed.

John Kennedy is a symbol of this profligate waste of our most valuable national treasure. He was not, as some would now have us believe, a household god. He was a man with all the vanity and frailty of all men, but he was uniquely a man whom the nation and the world could ill afford to waste so wantonly.

No more could we afford the grisly, bizarre sequel in Dallas. What manner of people have we become, that the wretched assassin could not be spared even long enough to get the due process that John Kennedy and so many other American men have died for?

Have the base instincts of revenge and hate imprisoned us beyond any hope of rescue? Have we embarked upon the dark sea of violence and despair that has engulfed so many civilizations that have gone before?

If we have, then heaven help our poor children. And if there remains time to turn back and retrace our way to humanity, compassion and decency, let us make the turning now. John Kennedy was cruelly taken in the summer of his life; if the foul act is to be given meaning, then it must become a signal for the moral regeneration of all the people of America.

May American historians and journalists yet find the courage and integrity to "rediscover" such work.

Paul

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.

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

I'm sensing a theme here.... lets call it the Unpublishable.... that the CIA often acts without permission of elected officials.

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.

"I then had the sense that Sukarno was no more clear than I whether State Department and CIA policies that impinged on Indonesia emanated from the same or different sources”

That confussion was warrented. I have read Subversion As Foreign Policy, and was aware of how the CIA had already made up their mind.

This only added to my surprise when I learned in Douglass that JFK was actually going to VISIT THE GUY IN HIS OWN COUNTRY! I had no idea the contrast was so stark.

Also why is this the first time I ever heard of this contrast? 1965 is one of the biggest genocides of the twentieth century; yet one hears much more of 1975 and East Timor in US """"left"""" publications. Hmmmmmm.

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:

Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk was similarly perplexed at much the same time: “I was officially informed by President Kennedy that ‘on his honour’ his country had played no role in the affairs of the Khmer Serei. I considered President Kennedy…an honourable man but, in that case, who really represented the American government? Almost at the same time as I received this assurance, traitors like Preap In were openly asserting that the CIA completely controlled the Khmer Serei – of which Preach In was a leading cadre…I was not the only one to ask who, and what is, the American government?" (1). By November 1963, after a long series of coup and assassination attempts, Sihanouk had had enough. He unilaterally terminated US economic aid, just as he had previously called a halt to US military assistance. The decision was made on the eminently practical ground that US economic aid “was being used to finance CIA-directed activities inside the country” (2).

(1) Prince Norodom Sihanouk with Wilfred Burchett. My War with the CIA (London: Pelican, 1974), pp. 124-125.

(2) Ibid., p. 133.

Three excerpts from Cook's article:

Full article: http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/index.php?na...le&sid=5263

About the author: http://www.richardccook.com/author.php

A fascinating piece: thanks for the heads-up.

Paul

Kennedy's support for Sukarno was another sign of how out of step he was with his national security state.

Ambassador Allison later recalled a “fruitless” 1957 encounter with the “head of the Far Eastern Section of the CIA,” who was utterly convinced of the “imminent Communist danger” throughout the region. Upon Allison’s return to Washington he learned that the CIA man had “reported that Sukarno was beyond redemption and that the American Ambassador seemed confused and was inclined to be soft on communism” (1). Allison’s successor similarly opposed the Agency’s policy of arming and financing revolts across Indonesia (2).

In Indonesia in mid-1963, an American academic found President Sukarno “still much concerned about the CIA’s hostility toward him…Sukarno regarded Ambassador Allison and his successor, Howard P. Jones, as separate from the CIA and acting autonomously from it. I then had the sense that Sukarno was no more clear than I whether State Department and CIA policies that impinged on Indonesia emanated from the same or different sources” (3).

(1) John M. Allison. Ambassador from the Prairie: Or Allison Wonderland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973), p. 307.

(2) Audrey R. Kahin & George McT. Kahin. Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower & Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (NY: The New Press, 1995), p. 176.

(3) Ibid., p. 269, n. 63.

In suppressing the information about the presence of a second gunman, Pilger was very obviously protecting the NL party line. Now why would a truly independent - and thoroughly fearless, we are led to believe - investigative journalist do that? Have we run into yet another "left gatekeeper"?

Here's Pilger displaying his profound fear of seeming a member of the tinfoil hat brigade in a 1992 tribute to the director of JFK:

”Like Stone and Garrison, the two reporters who pursued the Watergate affair were often dismissed as ‘paranoid’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’. Watergate was a conspiracy. The Iran-Contra scandal was a conspiracy. The ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident’ was conspiracy. The secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia was a conspiracy. The overthrow of Salvador Allende was a conspiracy,”

John Pilger. Distant Voices (London: Vintage, 1992), p.272

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?

Nor was this an isolated instance of Pilgerian accommodation with Power. Far from it. Consider this remarkable extract from the same Pilger tribute to Oliver Stone. It contains a weasel formulation to rank with anything produced by the other licensed jesters of the 1960s:

”Thousands of the 1.2 million words attacking Stone have concentrated on his portrayal of Kennedy as a ‘lost leader’. Kennedy was hardly that; but in any case, Stone devotes very little of JFK to his misguided admiration for Kennedy; and it is hardly relevant whether or not Kennedy was actually planning to take America out of Vietnam or to make piece with Fidel Castro. The point is, Kennedy was perceived in those days as a dangerous Catholic liberal who might.

You read that right: Kennedy wasn’t killed because of substantive policy differences, you understand, but purely because the CIA and the Mafia misread him. You read that right: Angleton, the Yale devotee of Eliot and the Modernists, couldn’t see through the dime novella that, if we take Pilger seriously, JFK was. Very plausible.

This absurd nonsense has another function, too - as explanation and alibi for Pilger’s failure to do anything of real substance on the coup-cum-assassination of November 1963; and is thus, at root, in perfect accord with Noam Chomsky’s CIA-serving caricature of Kennedy as a warhawk, and, of those who continue to mourn his murder and seek the truth of it, as “cargo cultists.”

We now have an answer as to how and why a journalist such as Pilger flourished in the reign of Cecil King at the Mirror – they were really on the same side.

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.

But was this just the notoriously incompetent Red Brigades acting alone? Or did they have professional help from outside, particularly from senior Nato allies worried that Italy was about to get a Communist government?

Rome has been rocked by a string of revelations that both America under Jimmy Carter and Britain under James Callaghan were worried about the rise of the Communists in Italy, and were prepared to do something about it. British Cabinet papers released in January under the 30 year rule show that the Foreign Office discussed in May 1976 the possibility of backing a right-wing coup if the Communists won the upcoming general election.

Now Steve Pieczenick, a former crisis negotiator at the US State Department, has revealed in a new book just available in Rome that he was sent from Washington the day after Moro's kidnap on March 16, 1978 to help the Italian government 'manage' the crisis. His first act was to order the distribution of a fake bulletin from the Red Brigades saying that Aldo Moro (left) had been killed.

Pieczenick says this was to prepare the Italian public for Moro's death, and to warn the terrorists that the government would not negotiate to get him back. (Italian governments, it should be noted, had no reservation about bargaining with the terrorists over kidnappings on subsequent occasions.)

It is also known - and has never been denied - that three British 'counter-terrorism experts' were dispatched to Rome at this time; they are believed to have worked for the SAS and MI6.

It is now clear that the US and UK were anxious that Moro should not come back alive. It was a decade before the Berlin Wall came down and neither government wanted to see the Communists sharing power in a Nato-member country.

The Italian Communists, led by the brilliant and charismatic Sardinian aristocrat Enrico Berlinguer, had reaped large gains in the 1975 regional elections. Then, in the general election of 1976, they came within a couple of points of the ruling Christian Democrats.

Aldo Moro, leader of the Christian Democrats, recognised that his party was exhausted by 30 years of uninterrupted rule since the war. He decided his party could only continue to rule if they agreed a programme of reforms with Berlinguer, who at this stage agreed not to demand seats in cabinet.

Moro was on his way to parliament for the vote of confidence for this arrangement when he was grabbed by a five-man Red Brigades commando group, led by Prospero Gallinari, a notorious terrorist hitman.

The year before, Gallinari had been sprung from jail in Belluno where he was doing time for murdering a judge in Genoa. In a scene reminiscent of The Great Escape, Gallinari and his mates roared out of the main gate on motorbikes 'liberated' from the guards. It sounded suspiciously easy, little was done to find him, and he only surfaced again after the murder of Moro.

Moro had been warned, allegedly, of the dire consequences if he brought the 'Reds' to power by Henry Kissinger in his last days as US Secretary of State. With only one other person in the room, a bilingual diplomat interpreting for Moro who spoke no English, Kissinger said words to the effect 'we will fix you' if he pursued a pact with the Communists. (At the same time a US diplomat called Moro a 'schmuck' at a public dinner.)

And that is what seems to have happened: a prime covert operation to remove a democratically elected politician from power. Soon, under the 30 year disclosure rule, we should get the official Whitehall documents about Britain's role in the affair.

FIRST POSTED MARCH 14, 2008

In suppressing the information about the presence of a second gunman, Pilger was very obviously protecting the NL party line. Now why would a truly independent - and thoroughly fearless, we are led to believe - investigative journalist do that? Have we run into yet another "left gatekeeper"?

Mark Twain, from his essay, “On the decay of the Art of Lying”:

Among other common lies, we have the silent lie -- the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all.

Seems to me that lying by omission staged something of a comeback at the hands of the New Left in the 1960s, not least on the subject of CIA support for Eugene McCarthy. Here, too, Pilger passes the NL test with flying colours.