Paul Rigby

Pilger is known for his carelessness with and misrepresentation of the facts to the extent that “to pliger” and “pligerize” have entered the lexicon meaning to play fast and loose with the truth.

Both verb and noun - "pilgerism" - coined by Auberon Waugh, the veteran MI5 urinal, in the pages of Private Eye, if memory serves.

But I confess to a certain sympathy with those who find Pilger inconsistent, and his judgments intermittently suspect. Anyone who's read his 1968 Daily Mirror piece on a visit to Dallas for the fifth anniversary of JFK's assassination will find his more recent take on JFK and RFK more than a little curious.

As for Washington not being behind the Colombian incursions into Ecuador, really, Len, that's ridiculous.

Paul

See this article on I.F. Stone from the Left liberal site Common Dreams. Then also see my link to this site, and another posters comment about this site. This could be a chance to educate many on the nature of "left-gatekeeping"

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/16/9646/

Nat,

You're the educator, deploy as you think appropriate:

I.F. Stone, “Donovan Shut His Eyes To Farcical Greek Trial,” The Compass, Sunday, 10 August 1952, pp.5 & 24:

The white wash report issued by the Lippmann committee on the murder of CBS correspondent George Polk gives the impression that the American correspondents on the scene agreed with Gen. William J. Donovan that the trial with which the Greek government closed the case was “efficiently and honestly conducted.”

One needs only turn to the CBS broadcast on the trial, reprinted as an appendix to the report, to see that this was not true. CBS sent its Rome correspondent, Winston Burdett, and its Middle East correspondent, Alexander Kendrick, to cover the trial of the Greek newspaperman, Stakhtopolous, who had at last confessed what the Greek government wanted the world to believe.

The Greek government’s “thesis,” as Burdett said in that broadcast, was that Polk – though critical of the Greek government and friendly to the Communist rebels – was killed by the Communists for the purpose of “discrediting the Government, and thus halting American aid.”

“Often,” Burdett said of the trial, “the judges seemed more concerned to prove this thesis than to determine the exact degree of guilt of the accused man.”

Burdett described “their anxiety to impress the world with the innocence of the Greek government.” He said this was “reflected in their leading questions.” Witnesses were asked, “Who had the most to gain from killing him and then advertising the murder? What’s your personal opinion?” Burdett added, “Invariably, witnesses answered that the Communists must have done it.”

Donovan was supposed to be investigating the murder of Polk on behalf of a committee of distinguished American newspapermen headed by Walter Lippmann. Yet he managed to overlook the most important aspect of the trial from the standpoint of American foreign correspondents. Let us turn again to that CBS broadcast on the trial. This time it is Alexander Kendrick speaking.

Kendrick said that a great deal of the testimony “revolved about personalities, thoughts, methods and writings of foreign correspondents in Greece – especially American correspondents.” The trial ended, Kendrick told the radio audience that day, with a series of vitriolic attacks by the Greek rightist press against foreign correspondents, “calling them spies, Communist dupes, fellow-travelers, drunkards, liars, bar-flies.”

The CBS correspondent said: “It was sometimes hard to figure out whether this was a trial for the murder of Polk, or a trial of Polk and other foreign correspondents who have tried to report the Greek story objectively to American listeners and readers.” Kendrick declared that what shock him most “about some of the trail testimony was the undercurrent of feeling that the United States has nothing to complain about, because only one American correspondent was murdered whereas several others might have been, and indeed, perhaps should have been.”

Like Donovan, the American Consul General in Salonika, Raleigh Gibson, also managed not to see this aspect of the trial. Gibson told the press the trial was “conducted in a way that the Greek judiciary should be proud of.” And Donovan, as we have seen, informed Lippmann that Gibson was the kind of a Consul General Americans should be proud of. Let us check again with the broadcasts by the CBS men at the trial.

Burdett told the radio audience when the trial ended: “The most startling thing for Western observers was the fact that under Greek law there are no rules of evidence at all.” Burdett said: “Everything from vague hearsay to personal opinion is tossed in together.” The judges displayed their partisanship openly. Burdett described the scene: “From the bench came a shower of leading questions that would have made an American lawyer in an American court demand a mistrial then and there.”

Donovan is an experienced and able trial lawyer. It is extraordinary how much he managed not to see in that courtroom. “The story of the murder itself,” Dr. E. M. Morgan had warned Walter Lippmann in that analysis of the Stakhtopolous confession withheld until now, “is fantastic.” The fantasy was lost on Donovan. But Burdett noted: “For the story of the actual murder, we have only the word of one man,” Stakhtopolous.

Professor Morgan, on analyzing the confession at the request of the Lippmann committee a month before the trial, said “the whole performance cries out for cross-examination.” Burdett indicated some of the discrepancies at the trial which called for sharp questioning.

Stakhtopolous claimed to have taken Polk in a taxi to the harbour where the CBS man met his death. “No Salonika taximan remembers them,” Burdett reported.

Stakhtopolous claimed to have dined that night with Polk at the Luxembourg Café. “The café proprietor,” Burdett pointed out, “does not remember seeing them that night.”

The autopsy showed that Polk had dined on lobster. “The proprietor,” Burdett went on, “also says that he did not serve lobster that night.”

Though these discrepancies were pointed out to the prosecutor, he never summoned the local taximan nor the proprietor as a witness.

Stakhtopolous testified that when he was put ashore that night “Polk’s unconscious bleeding body still lay in the rowboat.” Only later did his murderers throw the body into the bay. Burdett asked: “Why? What is the object of a bound man in a boat if you return to shore with his body aboard?” Burdett added: “The Greeks are poor cross-examiners and nobody thought of asking Stakhtopolous about that.”

The truth is that the trial was a subtle piece of flim-flam. It was a trial in which there was no one anxious to cross-examine because both the prosecution and the defense were on the same side. Stakhtopolous had confessed the theory the Greek government had advanced from the beginning.

Another American newspaperman who covered the trial put his finger on the crucial point. Tender-hearted Constantine Poulos, a newspaperman of integrity, an American of Greek origin who knew the language and the country well, attended the trial for the Newsmen’s Commission of Investigation (not to be confused with the Lippmann committee).

Poulos summed up his impressions in an article for the May 28, 1949, issue of The Nation. He began by reporting that just before the jury retired, the prosecutor said: “Legally, I am required to be on this side of the court. Actually, my position is beside the defense. We are on the same side. We agree as to the perpetrators of the crime. The only difference between us is whether or not Gregory Stakhtopolous knew that Polk was to be murdered.” Who was to cross-examine when the prosecutor and the defense agreed on the theory of this crime?

As Polous wrote in The Nation: “From the moment Polk’s body was found in the Bay of Salonika the Greek authorities have insisted that he was murdered by the Communists. This trial, conducted by the same authorities, was designed to prove they were right.”

Lippmann and his colleagues were not born yesterday. They knew what was happening. But to stand up for justice would have been to clash with the powers that be, to risk one’s own liaison with that nice warm intimate world of State Department contacts, to invite suspicion upon oneself. To suggest that maybe there was one crime which was not committed by the Communists had its dangers. And they went along.

Now three years later, in the midst of the summer doldrums, with the murder almost forgotten, they drop their final report into the hopper, as if deliberately to attract as little attention as possible, like shamefaced men walking rapidly away from a crime they should have averted. Between the lines, from under the unctuous phrases, from amid the smugly self-serving declarations, one may still reconstruct the way that they and General Donovan and the State Department helped the Greek government hush up pertinent facts on the murder of newspaper colleague, a decent and fine young man, an honourable reporter.

The committee says ingenuously that it “hopes this case will not be forgotten.” Some day perhaps the truth will be known, and these men will blush for their role in its unfolding. It would take the bitter pen of a Juvenal adequately to sum up this typical example of a spectacle familiar in every age and society – the readiness of the respectables to gloss over the worst crimes rather than risk their own standing in the circles of wealth and power.

Ghost Walks in Greece

"Readers of the Daily Compass may recall a series of columns I wrote last summer attacking as whitewash the belated report turned in on the George Polk murder by the newspaperman’s committee of which Walter Lippmann was chairman and for which Major General William Donovan of the OSS was chief investigator."

Details of four of the five parts of Stone’s series, entitled “The Polk Murder Whitewash,” as found in The Daily Compass, August 1952, as very kindly furnished by Peter Filardo of the Taniment Library at NYU:

1) “‘Confession’ Worthless, Legal Expert Declares,” Wednesday, 6 August 1952, pp.5 & 11

2) “The Crime of Hush-Up,” Thursday, 7 August 1952, pp.5 & 14

3) “General Donovan’s Role,” Friday, 8 August 1952, pp.5 & 14

4) “Donovan Shut His Eyes To Farcical Greek Trial,” Sunday, 10 August 1952, pp.5 & 24

Full version of the latter:

I.F. Stone, “Donovan Shut His Eyes To Farcical Greek Trial,” The Compass, Sunday, 10 August 1952, pp.5 & 24:

The white wash report issued by the Lippmann committee on the murder of CBS correspondent George Polk gives the impression that the American correspondents on the scene agreed with Gen. William J. Donovan that the trial with which the Greek government closed the case was “efficiently and honestly conducted.”

One needs only turn to the CBS broadcast on the trial, reprinted as an appendix to the report, to see that this was not true. CBS sent its Rome correspondent, Winston Burdett, and its Middle East correspondent, Alexander Kendrick, to cover the trial of the Greek newspaperman, Stakhtopolous, who had at last confessed what the Greek government wanted the world to believe.

The Greek government’s “thesis,” as Burdett said in that broadcast, was that Polk – though critical of the Greek government and friendly to the Communist rebels – was killed by the Communists for the purpose of “discrediting the Government, and thus halting American aid.”

“Often,” Burdett said of the trial, “the judges seemed more concerned to prove this thesis than to determine the exact degree of guilt of the accused man.”

Burdett described “their anxiety to impress the world with the innocence of the Greek government.” He said this was “reflected in their leading questions.” Witnesses were asked, “Who had the most to gain from killing him and then advertising the murder? What’s your personal opinion?” Burdett added, “Invariably, witnesses answered that the Communists must have done it.”

Donovan was supposed to be investigating the murder of Polk on behalf of a committee of distinguished American newspapermen headed by Walter Lippmann. Yet he managed to overlook the most important aspect of the trial from the standpoint of American foreign correspondents. Let us turn again to that CBS broadcast on the trial. This time it is Alexander Kendrick speaking.

Kendrick said that a great deal of the testimony “revolved about personalities, thoughts, methods and writings of foreign correspondents in Greece – especially American correspondents.” The trial ended, Kendrick told the radio audience that day, with a series of vitriolic attacks by the Greek rightist press against foreign correspondents, “calling them spies, Communist dupes, fellow-travelers, drunkards, liars, bar-flies.”

The CBS correspondent said: “It was sometimes hard to figure out whether this was a trial for the murder of Polk, or a trial of Polk and other foreign correspondents who have tried to report the Greek story objectively to American listeners and readers.” Kendrick declared that what shock him most “about some of the trail testimony was the undercurrent of feeling that the United States has nothing to complain about, because only one American correspondent was murdered whereas several others might have been, and indeed, perhaps should have been.”

Like Donovan, the American Consul General in Salonika, Raleigh Gibson, also managed not to see this aspect of the trial. Gibson told the press the trial was “conducted in a way that the Greek judiciary should be proud of.” And Donovan, as we have seen, informed Lippmann that Gibson was the kind of a Consul General Americans should be proud of. Let us check again with the broadcasts by the CBS men at the trial.

Burdett told the radio audience when the trial ended: “The most startling thing for Western observers was the fact that under Greek law there are no rules of evidence at all.” Burdett said: “Everything from vague hearsay to personal opinion is tossed in together.” The judges displayed their partisanship openly. Burdett described the scene: “From the bench came a shower of leading questions that would have made an American lawyer in an American court demand a mistrial then and there.”

Donovan is an experienced and able trial lawyer. It is extraordinary how much he managed not to see in that courtroom. “The story of the murder itself,” Dr. E. M. Morgan had warned Walter Lippmann in that analysis of the Stakhtopolous confession withheld until now, “is fantastic.” The fantasy was lost on Donovan. But Burdett noted: “For the story of the actual murder, we have only the word of one man,” Stakhtopolous.

Professor Morgan, on analyzing the confession at the request of the Lippmann committee a month before the trial, said “the whole performance cries out for cross-examination.” Burdett indicated some of the discrepancies at the trial which called for sharp questioning.

Stakhtopolous claimed to have taken Polk in a taxi to the harbour where the CBS man met his death. “No Salonika taximan remembers them,” Burdett reported.

Stakhtopolous claimed to have dined that night with Polk at the Luxembourg Café. “The café proprietor,” Burdett pointed out, “does not remember seeing them that night.”

The autopsy showed that Polk had dined on lobster. “The proprietor,” Burdett went on, “also says that he did not serve lobster that night.”

Though these discrepancies were pointed out to the prosecutor, he never summoned the local taximan nor the proprietor as a witness.

Stakhtopolous testified that when he was put ashore that night “Polk’s unconscious bleeding body still lay in the rowboat.” Only later did his murderers throw the body into the bay. Burdett asked: “Why? What is the object of a bound man in a boat if you return to shore with his body aboard?” Burdett added: “The Greeks are poor cross-examiners and nobody thought of asking Stakhtopolous about that.”

The truth is that the trial was a subtle piece of flim-flam. It was a trial in which there was no one anxious to cross-examine because both the prosecution and the defense were on the same side. Stakhtopolous had confessed the theory the Greek government had advanced from the beginning.

Another American newspaperman who covered the trial put his finger on the crucial point. Tender-hearted Constantine Poulos, a newspaperman of integrity, an American of Greek origin who knew the language and the country well, attended the trial for the Newsmen’s Commission of Investigation (not to be confused with the Lippmann committee).

Poulos summed up his impressions in an article for the May 28, 1949, issue of The Nation. He began by reporting that just before the jury retired, the prosecutor said: “Legally, I am required to be on this side of the court. Actually, my position is beside the defense. We are on the same side. We agree as to the perpetrators of the crime. The only difference between us is whether or not Gregory Stakhtopolous knew that Polk was to be murdered.” Who was to cross-examine when the prosecutor and the defense agreed on the theory of this crime?

As Polous wrote in The Nation: “From the moment Polk’s body was found in the Bay of Salonika the Greek authorities have insisted that he was murdered by the Communists. This trial, conducted by the same authorities, was designed to prove they were right.”

Lippmann and his colleagues were not born yesterday. They knew what was happening. But to stand up for justice would have been to clash with the powers that be, to risk one’s own liaison with that nice warm intimate world of State Department contacts, to invite suspicion upon oneself. To suggest that maybe there was one crime which was not committed by the Communists had its dangers. And they went along.

Now three years later, in the midst of the summer doldrums, with the murder almost forgotten, they drop their final report into the hopper, as if deliberately to attract as little attention as possible, like shamefaced men walking rapidly away from a crime they should have averted. Between the lines, from under the unctuous phrases, from amid the smugly self-serving declarations, one may still reconstruct the way that they and General Donovan and the State Department helped the Greek government hush up pertinent facts on the murder of newspaper colleague, a decent and fine young man, an honourable reporter.

The committee says ingenuously that it “hopes this case will not be forgotten.” Some day perhaps the truth will be known, and these men will blush for their role in its unfolding. It would take the bitter pen of a Juvenal adequately to sum up this typical example of a spectacle familiar in every age and society – the readiness of the respectables to gloss over the worst crimes rather than risk their own standing in the circles of wealth and power.

Was I.F. Stone born on the 21 November 1963?

Why would anyone want to withdraw the first version of the Zapruder film and edit it? Herbers is again of use here. In the same piece he tells us what troubled the holders of the film:

“…The known facts about the bullets, and the position of the assassin, suggested that he started shooting as the President’s car was coming toward him, swung his rifle in an arc of almost 180 degrees and fired at least twice more."

Paul Mandel had at least one precursor.

A little elaboration is in order.

Why was it necessary to suppress the first version of the Zapruder film on November 25/26, and revise it? One key element of any answer lies with the Parkland press conference. The insistence of Perry and Clark that Kennedy was shot from the front threw a significant spanner in the works, not least because their expert, disinterested, first-hand, matter-of-fact descriptions were broadcast live. How to preserve the credibility of both the patsy-from-the-rear scenario, and the similarly pre-planned supporting film?

The solution was to suppress the film-as-film, hastily edit it, and meanwhile bring the public round by degree through the medium of the written word. Here’s the latter process in action.

Note how in example 1, the first shot, which does not impact, is fired while the presidential limousine is on Houston:

John Herbers, “Kennedy Struck by Two Bullets, Doctor Who Attended Him Says,” New York Times, November 27, 1963, p.20:

“…The known facts about the bullets, and the position of the assassin, suggested that he started shooting as the President’s car was coming toward him, swung his rifle in an arc of almost 180 degrees and fired at least twice more.

A rifle like the one that killed President Kennedy might be able to fire three shots in two seconds, a gun expert indicated after tests.

A strip of color movie film taken by a Dallas clothing manufacturer with an 8-mm camera tends to support this sequence of events.

The film covers about a 15-second period. As the President’s car come abreast of the photographer, the President was struck in the front of the neck.”

In this second example, the first shot, which now does impact, occurs as the turn is made from Houston onto Elm:

Arthur J. Snider (Chicago Daily News Service), “Movies Reconstruct Tragedy,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, (Evening edition), November 27, 1963, section 2, p.1:

“Chicago, Nov. 27 – With the aid of movies taken by an amateur, it is possible to reconstruct to some extent the horrifying moments in the assassination of President Kennedy.

As the fateful car rounded the turn and moved into the curving parkway, the President rolled his head to the right, smiling and waving.

At that instant, about 12:30 p.m., the sniper, peering through a four-power telescope sight, fired his cheap rifle.”

The 6.5 mm bullet – about .25 caliber – pierced the President’s neck just below the Adam’s apple. It took a downward course.”

And here’s the process completed in example 3, with the presidential limousine now “50 yards past Oswald” on Elm:

Paul Mandel, “End to Nagging Rumors: The Six Critical Seconds,” Life, 6 December 1963:

“The doctor said one bullet passed from back to front on the right side of the President’s head. But the other, the doctor reported, entered the President’s throat from the front and then lodged in his body.

Since by this time the limousine was 50 yards past Oswald and the President’s back was turned almost directly to the sniper, it has been hard to understand how the bullet could enter the front of his throat. Hence the recurring guess that there was a second sniper somewhere else. But the 8mm film shows the President turning his body far around to the right as he waves to someone in the crowd. His throat is exposed–toward the sniper’s nest–just before he clutches it,”

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/mandel.htm

The film-as-film could not be shown while the above process of fraudulent harmonisation - of medical testimony and the lone-assassin-from-the-rear – was undertaken. More, it was predicated on the removal of the left turn from Houston onto Elm. Showing of that turn would have furnished visual-pictorial refutation of the entire elaborate deceit.

Here's the CIA again engaged in the progressive unfolding of an entirely fictitious narrative, albeit two years earlier:

”The lack of accurate information did not deter some reporters at news desks in the United States, particularly in Miami. In its first edition, The Miami News carried a banner story by its Cuban expert, Hal Hendrix, who reported the rumors that the Isle of Pines had been shelled by sea and bombed, and that Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother, had been captured. Before long Miami’s Cuban exiles were reading in the second edition ‘unconfirmed reports’ that the Isle of Pines had fallen ‘and the thousands of political prisoners freed,’ and the flat assertion that ‘the invaders seemed to using their aircraft to increasing advantage. After covering the landings, the planes swept inland, shooting up and bombing Castro’s defenders who were gathered in large numbers.’ Also duly reported was the rumor that Fidel himself had a four-engine jet prop plane ready at the San Julian Air Base to flee the country,”

Haynes Johnson. The Bay of Pigs: The Invasion of Cuba by Brigade 2506 (London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1965), p.120.

Hendrix was notoriously active on 22 November, briefing extensively, on a non-attributable basis, to fellow pressmen on the Russo-Communist background of the alleged assassin. It's hard to resist the notion that the same figures who handled Hendrix on both occasions were not a million miles away from the creation and management of the spin campaign waged 27 Nov - 6 December in respect of the Zapruder film.

Paul

(quote].... as far as Denise Pointing is concerned, what can I say other than; you Lone Nuts have been dancing for a long, long time.... You're not attempting to be the next Gary Mack are ya son?

Didn't Vincent Van Gogh say something like that just before he finished going crazy and cut his ear off .... don't end up like Van Gogh, David - GET HELP!!!

(/quote]

I really think its too late for David "Gramps" Healy to get help now Bill, the kindest thing would be if someone had him committed. Oh, and if Healy = Van Gogh, does that make Rigby his little sunflower. LOL. Denis.

Syke-warfare for the under-tens, courtesy of Ponticus, the man who doesn't know his middle from his end!

I.F. Stone’s Weekly, 25 April 1953, (Vol. 1, No. 15), p.3:

Ghost Walks in Greece

"Readers of the Daily Compass may recall a series of columns I wrote last summer attacking as whitewash the belated report turned in on the George Polk murder by the newspaperman’s committee of which Walter Lippmann was chairman and for which Major General William Donovan of the OSS was chief investigator."

On good days, the post brings something more than outrageous demands from a motley assortment of utility companies. Today was one such.

Details of four of the five parts of Stone’s series, entitled “The Polk Murder Whitewash,” as found in The Daily Compass, August 1952, as very kindly furnished by Peter Filardo of the Taniment Library at NYU:

1) “‘Confession’ Worthless, Legal Expert Declares,” Wednesday, 6 August 1952, pp.5 & 11

2) “The Crime of Hush-Up,” Thursday, 7 August 1952, pp.5 & 14

3) “General Donovan’s Role,” Friday, 8 August 1952, pp.5 & 14

4) “Donovan Shut His Eyes To Farcical Greek Trial,” Sunday, 10 August 1952, pp.5 & 24

To follow, the first half page or so of the last itemised:

“Donovan Shut His Eyes To Farcical Greek Trial,” Sunday, 10 August 1952, pp.5 & 24:

The white wash report issued by the Lippmann committee on the murder of CBS correspondent George Polk gives the impression that the American correspondents on the scene agreed with Gen. William J. Donovan that the trial with which the Greek government closed the case was “efficiently and honestly conducted.”

One needs only turn to the CBS broadcast on the trial, reprinted as an appendix to the report, to see that this was not true. CBS sent its Rome correspondent, Winston Burdett, and its Middle East correspondent, Alexander Kendrick, to cover the trial of the Greek newspaperman, Stakhtopolous, who had at last confessed what the Greek government wanted the world to believe.

The Greek government’s “thesis,” as Burdett said in that broadcast, was that Polk – though critical of the Greek government and friendly to the Communist rebels – was killed by the Communists for the purpose of “discrediting the Government, and thus halting American aid.”

“Often,” Burdett said of the trial, “the judges seemed more concerned to prove this thesis than to determine the exact degree of guilt of the accused man.”

Burdett described “their anxiety to impress the world with the innocence of the Greek government.” He said this was “reflected in their leading questions.” Witnesses were asked, “Who had the most to gain from killing him and then advertising the murder? What’s your personal opinion?” Burdett added, “Invariably, witnesses answered that the Communists must have done it.”

Donovan was supposed to be investigating the murder of Polk on behalf of a committee of distinguished American newspapermen headed by Walter Lippmann. Yet he managed to overlook the most important aspect of the trial from the standpoint of American foreign correspondents. Let us turn again to that CBS broadcast on the trial. This time it is Alexander Kendrick speaking.

Kendrick said that a great deal of the testimony “revolved about personalities, thoughts, methods and writings of foreign correspondents in Greece – especially American correspondents.” The trial ended, Kendrick told the radio audience that day, with a series of vitriolic attacks by the Greek rightist press against foreign correspondents, “calling them spies, Communist dupes, fellow-travelers, drunkards, liars, bar-flies.”

This extract is from the expanded – eight-page pamphlet version – of Mark Lane’s original article on the case, “Lane’s Defense Brief for Oswald,” published by the National Guardian, 19 December 1963:

”A motion picture taken of the President just before, during, and after the shooting, and demonstrated on television showed that the President was looking directly ahead when the first shot, which entered his throat, was fired. A series of still pictures taken from the motion picture and published in Life magazine on Nov. 29 show show exactly the same situation.”

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/The_critics/L...l_Guardian.html

Where do you come up with this stuff. I don't post for Mack. Mack is a historian who is sitting atop the largest collection of historical images and data on the assassination that is only a phone call away. I seek information from him and pass it on.

And Mack not only saw the article, but cited details from memory to me. I asked if he could find the article and he said the museum has lots of materials to be archived. My understanding is that there are lots of boxes of materials to go through. He said as he has time to archive them ... he will keep and eye out for it. Would anyone of you doubters like to make a wager that Mack told me the truth??? Then once the article is made known - what then - apologies from anyone or will it just go quiet until the next accusation arises???

Bill Miller

Can’t wait, Bill. In the meantime, let’s enjoy this extract from the expanded – eight-page pamphlet version – of Mark Lane’s original article on the case, “Lane’s Defense Brief for Oswald,” published by the National Guardian, 19 December 1963:

”A motion picture taken of the President just before, during, and after the shooting, and demonstrated on television showed that the President was looking directly ahead when the first shot, which entered his throat, was fired. A series of still pictures taken from the motion picture and published in Life magazine on Nov. 29 show show exactly the same situation.”

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/The_critics/L...l_Guardian.html

I am sad to report the following....the Barack Obama’s campaign has apologized to two Muslim women who were barred from sitting behind Obama during his rally on Monday in Detroit. Obama campaign volunteers prevented Hebba Aref and Shimaa Abdelfadeel from sitting behind the podium because they were wearing traditional Muslim headscarves. A campaign volunteer told one of the women that because of the political climate it was not good for her to be seen on television or associated with Obama.

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9338

In The Great Tradition: Obama Is A Hawk

by John Pilger

Global Research, June 15, 2008

New Statesman

John Pilger reaches back into the history of the Democratic Party and describes the tradition of war-making and expansionism that Barack Obama has now left little doubt he will honour.

In 1941, the editor Edward Dowling wrote: "The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it." What has changed? The terror of the rich is greater than ever, and the poor have passed on their delusion to those who believe that when George W Bush finally steps down next January, his numerous threats to the rest of humanity will diminish.

The foregone nomination of Barack Obama, which, according to one breathless commentator, "marks a truly exciting and historic moment in US history", is a product of the new delusion. Actually, it just seems new. Truly exciting and historic moments have been fabricated around US presidential campaigns for as long as I can recall, generating what can only be described as bullxxxx on a grand scale. Race, gender, appearance, body language, rictal spouses and offspring, even bursts of tragic grandeur, are all subsumed by marketing and "image-making", now magnified by "virtual" technology. Thanks to an undemocratic electoral college system (or, in Bush's case, tampered voting machines) only those who both control and obey the system can win. This has been the case since the truly historic and exciting victory of Harry Truman, the liberal Democrat said to be a humble man of the people, who went on to show how tough he was by obliterating two cities with the atomic bomb.

Understanding Obama as a likely president of the United States is not possible without understanding the demands of an essentially unchanged system of power: in effect a great media game. For example, since I compared Obama with Robert Kennedy in these pages, he has made two important statements, the implications of which have not been allowed to intrude on the celebrations. The first was at the conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the Zionist lobby, which, as Ian Williams has pointed out, "will get you accused of anti-Semitism if you quote its own website about its power". Obama had already offered his genuflection, but on 4 June went further. He promised to support an "undivided Jerusalem" as Israel's capital. Not a single government on earth supports the Israeli annexation of all of Jerusalem, including the Bush regime, which recognises the UN resolution designating Jerusalem an international city.

His second statement, largely ignored, was made in Miami on 23 May. Speaking to the expatriate Cuban community – which over the years has faithfully produced terrorists, assassins and drug runners for US administrations – Obama promised to continue a 47-year crippling embargo on Cuba that has been declared illegal by the UN year after year.

Again, Obama went further than Bush. He said the United States had "lost Latin America". He described the democratically elected governments in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua as a "vacuum" to be filled. He raised the nonsense of Iranian influence in Latin America, and he endorsed Colombia's "right to strike terrorists who seek safe-havens across its borders". Translated, this means the "right" of a regime, whose president and leading politicians are linked to death squads, to invade its neighbours on behalf of Washington. He also endorsed the so-called Merida Initiative, which Amnesty International and others have condemned as the US bringing the "Colombian solution" to Mexico. He did not stop there. "We must press further south as well," he said. Not even Bush has said that.

It is time the wishful-thinkers grew up politically and debated the world of great power as it is, not as they hope it will be. Like all serious presidential candidates, past and present, Obama is a hawk and an expansionist. He comes from an unbroken Democratic tradition, as the war-making of presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton demonstrates. Obama's difference may be that he feels an even greater need to show how tough he is. However much the colour of his skin draws out both racists and supporters, it is otherwise irrelevant to the great power game. The "truly exciting and historic moment in US history" will only occur when the game itself is challenged.

I am sad to report the following....the Barack Obama’s campaign has apologized to two Muslim women who were barred from sitting behind Obama during his rally on Monday in Detroit. Obama campaign volunteers prevented Hebba Aref and Shimaa Abdelfadeel from sitting behind the podium because they were wearing traditional Muslim headscarves. A campaign volunteer told one of the women that because of the political climate it was not good for her to be seen on television or associated with Obama.

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9360

Obama and AIPAC

by Stephen Zunes

Global Research, June 17, 2008

Huffington Post - 2008-06-12

In many respects, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has played right into the hands of cynics who have long doubted his promises to create a new and more progressive role for the United States in the world. The very morning after the last primaries, in which he finally received a sufficient number of pledged delegates to secure the Democratic presidential nomination and no longer needed to win over voters from the progressive base of his own party, Obama -- in a Clinton-style effort at triangulation -- gave a major policy speech before the national convention of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Embracing policies which largely backed those of the more hawkish voices concerned with Middle Eastern affairs, he received a standing ovation for his efforts.

His June 3 speech in Washington in many ways constituted a slap in the face of the grass roots peace and human rights activists who have brought him to the cusp of the Democratic presidential nomination.

In other respects, however, he pandered less to this influential lobbying group than many other serious aspirants for national office have historically. And at least part of his speech focused on convincing the largely right-wing audience members to support his positions rather than simply underscoring his agreement with them.

Much of the media attention placed upon his speech centered on the ongoing debate between him and incipient Republican presidential nominee John McCain on Iran. While embracing many of the same double-standards regarding nuclear nonproliferation issues and UN resolutions as does the Bush administration and congressional leaders of both parties, Obama did insert some rationality into the debate regarding the need for negotiations with that regional power rather than maintaining the current U.S. policy of diplomatic isolation and threats of war.

When it came to Israel and Palestine, however, Obama appeared to largely embrace a right-wing perspective which appeared to place all the blame for the ongoing violence and the impasse in the peace process on the Palestinians under occupation rather than the Israelis who are still occupying and colonizing the parts of their country seized by the Israeli army more than 40 years ago.

Progressive Israeli Reactions While there were some faint glimmers of hope in Obama's speech for those of us who support Israeli-Palestinian peace, progressive voices in Israel were particularly disappointed.

Israeli analyst Uri Avneri, in an essay entitled "No, I Can't!", expressed the bitterness of many Israeli peace activists for "a speech that broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning." Avneri goes on to observe the irony of how Obama's:

"dizzying success in the primaries was entirely due to his promise to bring about a change, to put an end to the rotten practices of Washington and to replace the old cynics with a young, brave person who does not compromise his principles. And lo and behold, the very first thing he does after securing the nomination of his party is to compromise his principles."

Avneri addressed the view of many Israelis that "Obama's declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace. And what is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the Palestinian people."

Support for Further Militarization In his speech, Obama rejected the view that the Middle East already has too many armaments and dismissed pleas by human rights activists that U.S. aid to Israel -- like all countries -- should be made conditional on adherence to international humanitarian law. Indeed, he further pledged an additional $30 billion of taxpayer-funded military aid to the Israeli government and its occupation forces over the next decade with no strings attached. Rather than accept that strategic parity between potential antagonists is the best way, short of a full peace agreement, to prevent war and to maintain regional security, Obama instead insisted that the United States should enable Israel to maintain its "qualitative military edge."

Over the past three years, the ratio of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip killed by Israeli forces relative to the number of Israeli civilians in Israel killed by Palestinians is approximately 50 to one and has been even higher more recently. However, Obama chose only to mention the Israeli deaths and condemn Hamas, whose armed wing has been responsible for most of the Israeli casualties, and not a word about the moral culpability of the Israeli government, which Amnesty International and other human rights groups have roundly criticized for launching air strikes into Gaza's densely crowded refugee camps and related tactics.

Since first running for the U.S. Senate, Obama has routinely condemned Arab attacks against Israeli civilians but has never condemned attacks against Arab civilians by Israelis. This apparent insistence that the lives of Palestinian and Lebanese civilian are somehow less worthy of attention than the lives of Israeli civilians have led to charges of racism on the part of Obama.

Despite his openness to talk with those governing Iran and North Korea, Obama emphasized his opposition to talking to those governing the Gaza Strip, even though Hamas won a majority in the Palestinian parliament in what was universally acknowledged as a free election. Though a public opinion poll published in the leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz showed that 64% of the Israeli population support direct negotiations between Israel and Hamas (while only 28% expressed opposition), Obama has chosen to side with the right-wing minority in opposing any such talks.

Furthermore, Obama insists that Hamas should have never been even allowed to participate in the Palestinian elections in the first place because of their extremist views, which fail to recognize Israel and acts of terrorism by its armed wing. Yet he has never objected to the Israelis allowing parties such as National Union -- which defends attacks on Arab civilians and seeks to destroy any Palestinian national entity, and expel its Arab population -- to participate in elections or hold high positions in government.

He insisted that Hamas uphold previous agreements by the Fatah-led Palestine Authority with Israel, but did not insist that Israel uphold its previous agreements with the Palestine Authority, such as withdrawing from lands re-occupied in 2001 in violation of U.S.-guaranteed disengagement agreements.

In reference to Obama's speech, the anchor to Israel's Channel 2 News exclaimed that it was "reminiscent of the days of Menachem Begin's Likud" referring to the far right-wing Israeli party and its founder, a notorious terrorist from the 1940s who later became prime minister. By contrast, back in February, while still seeking liberal Democratic votes in the primaries, Obama had explicitly rejected the view which, in his words, identifies being pro-Israel with "adopting an unwaveringly pro-Likud view of Israel." Now that he has secured the nomination, however, he has appeared to have changed his tune.

Endorsing Israel's Annexation of Jerusalem Most disturbing was Obama's apparent support for Israel's illegal annexation of greater East Jerusalem, the Palestinian-populated sector of the city and surrounding villages that Israel seized along with the rest of the West Bank in June 1967.

The UN Security Council passed a series of resolutions (252, 267, 271, 298, 476 and 478) calling on Israel to rescind its annexation of greater East Jerusalem and to refrain from any unilateral action regarding its final status. Furthermore, due to the city's unresolved legal status dating from the 1948-49 Israeli war on independence, the international community refuses to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, with the United States and other governments maintaining their respective embassies in Tel Aviv.

Despite these longstanding internationally-recognized legal principles, Obama insisted in his speech before AIPAC that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."

Given the city's significance to both populations, any sustainable peace agreement would need to recognize Jerusalem as the capital city for both Israel and Palestine. In addition to its religious significance for both Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims, Jerusalem has long been the most important cultural, commercial, political, and educational center for Palestinians and has the largest Palestinian population of any city in the world. Furthermore, Israel's annexation of greater East Jerusalem and its planned annexation of surrounding settlement blocs would make a contiguous and economically viable Palestinian state impossible. Such a position, therefore, would necessarily preclude any peace agreement. This raises serious questions as to whether Obama really does support Israeli-Palestinian peace after all.

According to Uri Avneri, Obama's "declaration about Jerusalem breaks all bounds. It is no exaggeration to call it scandalous." Furthermore, says this prominent observer of Israeli politics, every Israeli government in recent years has recognized that calls for an undivided Jerusalem

"constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to any peace process. It has disappeared -- quietly, almost secretly -- from the arsenal of official slogans. Only the Israeli (and American-Jewish) Right sticks to it, and for the same reason: to smother at birth any chance for a peace that would necessitate the dismantling of the settlements."

Obama argued in his speech that the United States should not "force concessions" on Israel, such as rescinding its annexation of Jerusalem, despite the series of UN Security Council resolutions explicitly calling on Israel do to so. While Obama insists that Iran, Syria, and other countries that reject U.S. hegemonic designs in the region should be forced to comply with UN Security Council resolutions, he apparently believes allied governments such as Israel are exempt.

Also disturbing about his statement was a willingness to "force concessions" on the Palestinians by pre-determining the outcome of one of the most sensitive issues in the negotiations. If, as widely interpreted, Obama was recognizing Israel's illegal annexation of greater East Jerusalem, it appears that the incipient Democratic nominee -- like the Bush administration -- has shown contempt for the most basic premises of international law, which forbids any country from expanding its borders by force.

However, the Jerusalem Post reported that the Obama campaign, in an attempt to clarify his controversial statement, implied that the presumed Democratic presidential nominee was not actually ruling out Palestinian sovereignty over parts of Jerusalem and that "undivided" simply meant that "it's not going to be divided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was in 1948-1967." The campaign also replied to the outcry from his speech by declaring that "Jerusalem is a final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties' as part of "an agreement that they both can live with." This implies that Obama's recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel does not necessarily preclude its Arab-populated eastern half becoming the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Israel, however, has shown little willingness to withdraw its administration and occupation forces from greater East Jerusalem voluntarily. Obama's apparent reluctance to pressure Israel to do so makes it hard to imagine that he is really interested in securing a lasting peace agreement.

It Could Have Been Worse

Perhaps, as his campaign claims, Obama was not rejecting the idea of a shared co-capital of Jerusalem. And perhaps his emphasis on Israeli suffering relative to Palestinian suffering was simply a reflection of the sympathies of the audience he was addressing and was not indicative of anti-Arab racism. If so, the speech could have been a lot worse.

Indeed, Obama's emphasis on peace, dialogue, and diplomacy is not what the decidedly militaristic audience at AIPAC normally hears from politicians who address them.

Obama did mention, albeit rather hurriedly, a single line about Israeli obligations, stating that Israel could "advance the cause of peace" by taking steps to "ease the freedom of Palestinians, improve economic conditions" and "refrain from building settlements." This is more than either Hillary Clinton or John McCain was willing to say in their talks before the AIPAC convention. And, unlike the Bush administration, which last year successfully pressured Israel not to resume peace negotiations with Syria, Obama declared that his administration would never "block negotiations when Israel's leaders decide that they may serve Israeli interests."

Furthermore, earlier in his career, Obama took a more balanced perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, aligning himself with positions embraced by the Israeli peace camp and its American supporters. For example, during his unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, Obama criticized the Clinton administration for its unconditional support for the occupation and other Israeli policies and called for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He referred to the "cycle of violence" between Israelis and Palestinians, whereas most Democrats were insisting that it was a case of "Palestinian violence and the Israeli response." He also made statements supporting a peace settlement along the lines of the 2003 Geneva Initiative and similar efforts by Israeli and Palestinian moderates.

Unlike any other major contenders for president this year or the past four election cycles, Obama at least has demonstrated in the recent past a more moderate and balanced perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As president, he may well be better than his AIPAC speech would indicate. Though the power of the "Israel Lobby" is often greatly exaggerated, it may be quite reasonable to suspect that pressure from well-funded right-wing American Zionist constituencies has influenced what Obama believes he can and cannot say. As an African-American whose father came from a Muslim family, he is under even more pressure than most candidates to avoid being labeled as "anti-Israel."

Ironically, a strong case can be made that the right-wing militaristic policies he may feel forced to defend actually harm Israel's legitimate long-term security interests.

A Political Necessity?

If indeed Obama took these hard-line positions during his AIPAC speech in order to seem more electable, it may be a serious mistake. Most liberal Democrats who gave blind support to the Israeli government in the 1960s and 1970s now have a far more even-handed view of the conflict, recognizing both Israeli and Palestinian rights and responsibilities. In addition, voters under 40 tend to take a far more critical view of unconditional U.S. support for Israeli policies than those of older generations. There is a clear generational shift among American Jews as well, with younger Jewish voters -- although firmly supporting Israel's right to exist in peace and security -- largely opposing unconditional U.S. support for the occupation and colonization of Arab lands. The only major voting group that supports positions espoused by AIPAC are right-wing Christian fundamentalists, who tend to vote Republican anyway.

Furthermore, Obama has been far more dependent on large numbers of small donors from his grassroots base and less on the handful of wealthy donors affiliated with such special interest groups as AIPAC. This speech may have cost him large numbers of these smaller, progressive donors without gaining him much from the small numbers of larger, more conservative donors.

Indeed, there may not be a single policy issue where Obama's liberal base differs from the candidate more than on Israel/Palestine. Not surprisingly, the Green Party and its likely nominee, former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, along with independent candidate Ralph Nader, are both using this issue to gain support at the expense of Obama.

Only hours after his AIPAC speech, the Nader campaign sent out a strongly worded letter noting how, unlike Obama and McCain, Nader supports the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements and would change U.S. Middle East policy. The widely-circulated response to the speech makes the case that, in contrast to Obama, "Nader/Gonzalez stands on these issues with the majority of Israelis, Palestinians, Jewish-Americans and Arab Americans."

Betraying the Jewish Community

Through a combination of deep-seated fear from centuries of anti-Semitic repression, manipulation by the United States and other Western powers, and self-serving actions by some of their own leaders, a right-wing minority of American Jews support influential organizations such as AIPAC to advocate militaristic policies that, while particularly tragic for the Palestinians and Lebanese, are ultimately bad for the United States and Israel as well. Obama's June 3 speech would have been the perfect time for Obama, while upholding his commitment to Israel's right to exist in peace and security, to challenge AIPAC's militarism and national chauvinism more directly. Unfortunately, while showing some independence of thought on Iran, he apparently felt the Palestinians were not as important

Taking a pro-Israel but anti-occupation position would have demonstrated that Obama was not just another pandering politician and that he recognized that a country's legitimate security needs were not enhanced by invasion, occupation, colonization and repression

"That truly would have been "change you can believe in."

The December 1996 edition (32) of Robin Ramsay’s Lobster contained a book review by John Newsinger, “SAS: the Stiff Memoir,” pp.10-12. Peter Stiff’s See You In November (Alberton, SA: Galago, 1983), charted a career of service first with the official SAS – Borneo, Aden, Thailand/Laos – then with one of its numerous unofficial offshoots, David Stirling’s Watchguard International, and, finally, a Rhodesian intelligence service, the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO). Newsinger noted how routine assassination and terrorism were to such as Stiff, and went on to quote at length the following extract from his book. It was new to me, and continues to impress, for it was/is that rare thing, a brief, lucid, and logical typology of assassination:

“The art of assassination, like anything else, can be taught from a text book as it is in the SAS and other special force units. There are even various set terms used for the exercise, which are built around four words: positive, non-positive, direct and indirect.

The most certain way of killing someone is by a direct positive method. An example would be to walk up to a person, press a gun against his body and pull the trigger.

Direct non-positive is the next most likely method to be successful. This would include hiding on a roof with a rifle and shooting the target as he entered the house opposite. This would be direct because the assassin was actively involved and present when it happened and non-positive because the target was moving and the range didn’t exclude the possibility of a miss.

Next in order comes indirect positive. This method is where the would-be killer waits until his victim is asleep in his bed and then climbs the garden wall and plants a bomb under his car. It is indirect because the man who plants the bomb leaves once he has done so, but it is positive because when the victim detonates the charge with his car, it is a strictly no nonsense goodbye. There remains a possible element of failure though, because someone else might come out the next morning to wash the car and reap the consequences.

The least certain method is the indirect non-positive method. This is when someone poisons the milk on the doorstep in the early morning. It is indirect because the poisoner will not be there to oversee the result…and non-positive because the target might only decide to have black tea and not drink the milk at all,” (pp.129-130).

Both Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X were killed by the most reliable method of all, according to Stiff’s typology, the direct positive. I believe JFK was, too. It would be of interest to know a) how the US Secret Service classified assassination attempts, and how it trained to counter them; and c) whether CIA and US Special Forces worked with a similar typology.

Just for Denis Ponticus!

I first came across a dating of and location for the Muchmore film’s debut in Barbie Zeliger’s Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory (University of Chicago Press, 1992), which directed the reader – see p.68 n7 (p.233) - to the December 2, 1963, edition of Broadcasting: The Businessweekly of Television and Radio (Vol 65, No 23), and a piece entitled “A World Listened and Watched.” On p.37, I found the following:

“United Press International claimed it provided the first film for TV of President Kennedy’s assassination when it sold sequences shot by Dallas amateur photographer Marie Muchmore to WNEW-TV New York, which showed it last Tuesday (Nov. 26). The 8mm film, which was enlarged to 16mm, shows the President being hit by the bullets as Mrs Kennedy and a Secret Service agent try to help him. UPI Newsfilm rushed additional copies to its subscribers around the world.”

For those interested in doing their own research in this area, it would seem useful to add to this thread a little background on the owner of Broadcasting magazine, info first posted on the Lancer site:

http://www.jfklancerforum.com/dc/dcboard.p...ing_type=search

Wed Feb-08-06 12:34 PM

The choice of Broadcasting magazine was logical, given its nature, together with the background and politics of Sol J. Taishoff, its co-founder (in 1931) and, in 1963, publisher and editor. Born, like David J. Sarnoff, in Byelorussia, Taishoff was held sufficiently pliant by the U.S. military and intelligence communities to be one of eight men, as of 1972, entrusted with overseeing all broadcasting in the U.S. in a time of national emergency. By coincidence, doubtless, another of the eight, Philip T. Foss, came from the Eastman Kodak Company. (For further particulars, see David Wise’s The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power (New York: Random House, 1973), p.135n in the first edition.)

Paul

But one doesn't have to rely on these...witnesses because there is Mary Woodard in her interview in "Breaking the News" where she said the President was turned to his right and waving to her and the women next to her when the first loud shot sounded and hit him. Mary says that at this moment the President stopped his wave and brought his arm inside the car. It just so happens that this too happens between on the Zapruder film between the Betzner and Willis photo. Its the only time that JFK abruptly stops his wave ... is out in front of Woodard ... and coincides with what Betzner and Willis said about when the first shot was fired.

And not this Mary Woodward, surely?

“The cars behind stopped and several men – Secret Service men, I suppose – got out and started rushing forward, obstructing our view of the President’s car.”

“Witness From the News Describes Assassination,” Dallas Morning News, 23 November 1963, section 1, page 3.

Funny how you never reference this earliest print appearance of Woodward's observations. Again, can't think why!

Paul

Phil Willis said that he heard the first shot and took his photo.

Willis: Then my next shot was taken at the very--in fact, the shot caused me to squeeze the camera shutter, and I got a picture of the President as he was hit with the first shot. So instantaneous, in fact, that the crowd hadn't had time to react.

So here are two witnesses who don't have to guess at what Zapruder frame they took their photos. No interpretations needed from either witness. Its a simple matter of one man (Betzner) knowing that he just took his photo and then heard the first loud shot and the other photographer (Willis) heard the first loud shot which caused him to take his photo. These photos match Z186 (Betzner) and Z202 (Willis). This means that no matter what anyone el;se says when they think the first shot was fired ... they locked it in between their photos.

You don't mean this Phil Willis do you, Bill?

Mr. Willis: In slide No. 6, people were still on the ground and I took that picture, knowing that the party had come to a temporary halt before proceeding on to the underpass, and I have an arrow there which shows the back of the Secret Service agent climbing onto the back of the presidential car.

http://www.jfk-assassination.com/warren/wch/vol7/page497.php

No? Thought not. Glad to have helped nip that potential source of confusion in the bud. After all, there ain't no halt in the Zap fake, is there?

Paul

Paul- please excuse my unseemly exemption from exceptionalism. Maybe its because Im half of an Australian. They can get churlish about the prevailing

Catholicisms.

Im sure there will be plenty of Hart and Hoffstater available. Perhaps that curiously timed (January 1964) work The Paranoid Style of American Politics?

Comforting reading for the gallows!

I feel an attack of De Maistre coming on - The Executioner, "the horror and the bond" of human society!

Right?

I continue to wonder at the lack of writing on the RFK Assassination even among those who research Cold War History and the assassinations.

Recently while reading parts of Thurston Moores new book on RFK The Last Campaign, I was struck by RFKs response to ""left'" (I put quotes around it, because I think its highly debateable about which WAS really more left, and also because of the history of the controlled nature of "'left"' dissent in the form of psy-ops within US media during the Cold War) critics who blasted RFK for making some Law and Order sounds during the Indiana Primary. RFK's response was "If Gene McCarthy had ever done anything for Civil Rights he wouldn't need to show he cared about white people " NOT A DIRECT QUOTE. Now that by itself, sounds like pandering, but the author points out that RFK spoke to the same audiences about what was going on in the "inner cities" and said pretty much the same things that he said to black audiences.

Now which do you think would be more frightening to the Military Industrial Complex: a candidate with almost no major African American support, McCarthy, who also had no chance of winning the nomination, or a candidate that actually showed signs of TAKING THE OFFENSIVE AGAINST THE SOUTHERN STRATEGY EVEN IN THE VERY YEAR OF ITS BIRTH; Perhaps RFK's background at the center of power-- during tensest moments of the Cold War-- was seen as a much more dangerous threat.

He might take more of the center of the party in a new direction, without descendng into the identity politics that Democrats have been paid so well to never emerge from. Perhaps RFK was so dangerous because he would not roll over and conceed that Watts and rural Indiana WERE really opposites. He might have found a way to make class trump race as FDR to some extent did. Of course the New Deal Coalition was on much shakier ground in 1968, as

compared to the 1930's, but what comes accross in Moore's book is that RFK was not yet ready to let it crumble. Above all he was improvising; dangerously for those who wanted to continue the US movement rightward from a CFR multilatteral (1945-63) to American Security Council unilateral (1963-present) US foreign policy coalition.

Why does Amy Goodman and Companies insist on emphasizing the contrast of RFK '68 with RFK '61--while quoting disproportionatly from the latter-- and never bring up the contrast between RFK '1968 and the Corporate Democrats of today?

Was Bobby killed because he touched the REAL third Rail of American politics: the rule that says Race OR Class: NEVER BOTH!!!?

Nat,

An American discussing CLASS? The orange jump-suit awaits. I have contacted Clive Stafford Smith in anticipation of the inevitable. We had better start discussing reading matter for your incarceration. The complete works of Gnome C of any interest?

Paul

I am even thinking of founding a new group DDT-911 – “Disco Ducks for Truth - 9/11 truth”

A great pity Zelikow beat you to the punch. He called his band "The Commission," which sounds alarmingly "mod," but did permit the easy adaptation of The Merton Parkas truly awful, "You Need Patsies." Or was that "Wheels"? Anyway, a dynamite combo nevertheless, from all accounts, many of them presumably Swiss.

Paul

http://www.xs4all.nl/~ac/global/achtergrond/bilderberg.htm

The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unification

by Mike Peters 4:04pm Sun Aug 26 '01

The present article is concerned with one specific facet of American power-structure research which, I believe, has important implications for the study of power in the UK. This is the subject of power-elite networks and forums, conceptualised as arenas for the conduct of intra-capitalist and inter-corporate strategic debates and long-range social planning, from which wider 'democratic' interference is carefully excluded.

Fascinating - more of the same, please.

Paul

PS For a quite brilliant meditation on post-WWII corporate "liberalism," see George Parkin Grant's Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Ottawa: Carleton Univ Press, 1995 reprint). A taster:

"A society dominated by corporations could not vote for an independent defence policy. The power of the American government to control Canada does not lie primarily in its ability to exert direct pressure; the power lies in the fact that the dominant classes in Canada see themselves at one with the continent on all essential matters. Dominant classes get the kind of government they want," p.56.

As for Canada, so for the rest of the totalitarian American imperium.

...is Ike wanted to do it to a defense? Bumping off or deposing Diem seems to indicate he wasn't ready to disengage in Vietnam

Ike never wanted to engage in Vietnam in the first place - it was a classic Dulles bros. end-run round which saw Diem installed in the first place - see the thread on Richard Starnes' "Arrogant" CIA despatch on the JFK assassination forum for details.

... by mid-1962 the JCS and heads of the CIA were JFK appointees.

McCone wasn't Kennedy's first choice; and the pool of card-carrying members of ADA from which he could draw for both the Agency and JCS was, how shall I put, a tad dry.

Paul

So the info is at best 3rd hand 'X' told Touhy who told Alinsky who told Allsop, assuming none of them were making it up or misunderstood what they were told there is the question of who told 'X' or did he have direct knowledge?

Fair summary. In answer - I don't know.

Use of different caliber guns would be an unnecessary risk/complication

The 1st hit of a Google search for cermak autopsy yields the following

“…autopsy on Mayor Cermak by Drs Meyer and Tice (made public after Zangara’s electrocution) which stated that the cause of Mayor Cermak’s…”

That was from a paper published the following year:

John Joseph Kindred, “Insanity in its Medico-Legal Relations to Some Notable Criminal and Civil Cases”, American Journal Psychiatry, July 1934; 91: 137-146

The 1st page of the paper (which doesn’t contain the quote) can be seen on the page linked below. If you are willing to part with $ 7 you can read the whole thing.

http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/pdf_extract/91/1/137

In any case an autopsy was performed we even know:

- the last names of the doctors

- approximately when it was released. Zangara was executed March 20, 1933 the paper was presented at a scientific meeting held May 29 – June 2 that same year

- were and approximately when it was performed Cermak died in Miami on March 6 http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9022145/Anton-J-Cermak

Presumably you can get a copy by filing an FOIA request or perhaps even by asking the Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office though they make no mention of how access records from before 1956 and say you need to go there on the page linked below.

http://www.miamidade.gov/medexam/transcrip...ords_bureau.asp

Excellent info, for which constructive response you have my thanks. I'll pursue later this week and update.

Paul

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9289

9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics

By Prof. Peter Dale Scott

Global Research, June 11, 2008

The Deep State and 9/11

The unthinkable – that elements inside the state would conspire with criminals to kill innocent civilians – has become not only thinkable but commonplace in the last century. A seminal example was in French Algeria, where dissident elements of the French armed forces, resisting General de Gaulle’s plans for Algerian independence, organized as the Secret Army Organization and bombed civilians indiscriminately, with targets including hospitals and schools.1 Critics like Alexander Litvinenko, who was subsequently murdered in London in November 2006, have charged that the 1999 bombings of apartment buildings around Moscow, attributed to Chechen separatists, were in fact the work of the Russian secret service (FSB).2

Similar attacks in Turkey have given rise to the notion there of an extra-legal "deep state" – a combination of forces, ranging from former members of the CIA-organized Gladio organization, to "a vast matrix of security and intelligence officials, ultranationalist members of the Turkish underworld and renegade former members of the [Kurdish separatist] PKK."3 The deep state, financed in part by Turkey’s substantial heroin traffic, has been accused of killing thousands of civilians, in incidents such as the lethal bomb attack in November 2005 on a bookshop in Semdinli. This attack, initially attributed to the Kurdish separatist PKK, turned out to have been committed by members of Turkey's paramilitary police intelligence service, together with a former PKK member turned informer.4 On April 23, 2008, the former Interior Minister Mehmet Agar was ordered to stand trial for his role in this dirty war during the 1990s.5

In my book The Road to 9/11, I have argued that there has existed, at least since World War Two if not earlier, an analogous American deep state, also combining intelligence officials with elements from the drug-trafficking underworld.6 I also pointed to recent decades of collaboration between the U.S. deep state and al-Qaeda, a terrorist underworld whose drug-trafficking activities have been played down in the 9/11 Commission Report and the mainstream U.S. media.7

Still to be explained is the suppressed anomalous fact that al-Qaeda’s top trainer on airplane hijackings, Ali Mohamed, was simultaneously a double-agent reporting to the FBI, and almost certainly still maintained a connection to the CIA which had used him as an agent and helped bring him to this country in the 1980s.8 It is not disputed that Ali Mohamed organized the Embassy bombing in Kenya; and that he did so after the RCMP, who had detained him in Vancouver in the presence of another known terrorist, released Mohamed on instructions from the FBI.9

From this historic background of collaboration, I would offer a hypothesis for further investigation: that the American deep state is somehow implicated with al-Qaeda in the atrocity of 9/11; and that this helps explain the conspicuous involvement of the CIA and other U.S. agencies in the ensuing cover-up.

Sibel Edmonds, the Turkish-American who was formerly an FBI translator, has publicly linked both al-Qaeda and American officials to the Turkish heroin trafficking that underlies the Turkish deep state. Although she has been prevented from speaking directly by an extraordinary court order,10 her allegations have been summarized by Daniel Ellsberg:

Al Qaeda, she's been saying to congress, according to these interviews, is financed 95% by drug money - drug traffic to which the US government shows a blind eye, has been ignoring, because it very heavily involves allies and assets of ours - such as Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan - all the 'Stans - in a drug traffic where the opium originates in Afghanistan, is processed in Turkey, and delivered to Europe where it furnishes 96% of Europe's heroin, by Albanians, either in Albania or Kosovo - Albanian Muslims in Kosovo - basically the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army which we backed heavily in that episode at the end of the century….Sibel says that suitcases of cash have been delivered to the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, at his home, near Chicago, from Turkish sources, knowing that a lot of that is drug money.11

In 2005 Sibel Edmonds’ charges were partly aired in Vanity Fair. There it was revealed that she had had access to FBI wiretaps of conversations among members of the American-Turkish Council (ATC), about bribing elected US officials, and about "what sounded like references to large-scale drug shipments and other crimes."12

9/11: Not a Coup d’Etat, but One of a Series of American Deep Events

In 2003 Italian journalist Maurizio Blondet published a book entitled 11 settembre: colpo di stato (September 11th: A Coup d’Etat, [Milan, Effedieffe, 2002]).13 Over the years the view of 9/11 as a "coup d’état" has been endorsed by a number of observers, including Gore Vidal.14 In May 2008 a Google search for "coup d’état + 9/11" yielded 297,000 hits. One of the most recent hits, from Ed Encho, has suggested that the heart of the coup may have been the introduction on 9/11, without debate or even notice, of so-called "Continuity of Government" (COG) orders – secret orders still unknown but with constitutional implications.15 Unquestionably, as the 9/11 Commission Report states, COG, the fruit of two decades of secret Cheney-Rumsfeld collaboration, was implemented on 9/11.16 As we shall see, it is not clear just what this implied, either then or today. But journalists have claimed that earlier versions of COG plans involved suspension of the constitution.17

However to call 9/11 a coup d’état exaggerates the difference between the current weakened condition of the public state, and the prior state of affairs that has been building for years, indeed for decades, towards just such a dénouement. For half a century the constitution and laws of the open or public state have been first evaded, then eroded, then increasingly challenged and subverted, by the forces of the deep state. I wish to suggest that this erosion has been achieved in part through a series of important deep events in post-war American history – events aspects of which (it is clear from the outset) will be ignored or suppressed in the mainstream media.

Recent history has seen a number of such events, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that are so inexplicable by the public notions of American politics that most Americans tend not even to think of them. Instead most accept the official surface explanations for them, even if they suspect these are not true. Or if others say they believe that "Oswald acted alone," they may do so in the same comforting but irrational state of mind that believes God will reward the righteous and punish the wicked.

Thus on the one hand we must see that America has reached a condition where traditional civil rights are flagrantly restricted as never before – as when former Attorney General Gonzalez told a shocked congressional committee that "There is no expressed grant of habeas corpus in the Constitution."18 At the same time, we must see that 9/11, as an unexplained or deep event nudging us away from constitutional normalcy and into an unnecessary permanent state of war, is not unprecedented. It is one of a series of similar unexplained events, all of which have had similar results, reaching back to the second Tonkin Gulf incident, the Kennedy assassination, even the misremembered outset of the Korean War.

The simulated "surprise" of the Bush administration to the 9/11 attack is indeed analogous to the simulated "surprise" of the Truman administration to the outbreak of war in Korea on June 25, 1950. The historian Bruce Cumings, in a volume of 957 pages, has recalled the curious behavior in previous weeks of high levels in Washington:

The CIA predicts, on June 14, a capability for invasion [of South Korea] at any time. No one disputes that. Five days later, it predicts an impending invasion. . . . Now, Corson … says that the June 14 report leaked out to "informed circles," and thus "it was feared that administration critics in Congress might publicly raise the issue. In consequence, a White House decision of sorts was made to brief Congress that all was well in Korea." . . . Would it not be the expectation that Congress would be told that all was not well in Korea? That is, unless a surprised and outraged Congress is one’s goal.19

In his exhaustive analysis of the war’s origins, Cumings sees this U.S. deception by high level officials as a response to manipulated events, which in turn were the response to the threat of an imminent expulsion of the Chinese Nationalist KMT from Taiwan, together with a peaceful reunification of Korea. The details are complex, but of relevance to 9/11, not least because of the involvement of the opium-financed KMT:

By late June, [u.S. Secretary of State Dean] Acheson and Truman were the only high officials still balking at a defense of the ROC [the "Republic of China," the KMT Chinese Nationalist remnant on Taiwan]….Sir John Pratt, an Englishman with four decades of experience in the China consular service and the Far Eastern Office, wrote the following in 1951: "The Peking Government planned to liberate Formosa on July 15 and, in the middle of June, news reached the State Department that the Syngman Rhee government in South Korea was disintegrating. The politicians on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel were preparing a plan to throw Syngman Rhee out of office and set up a unified government for all Korea."….Thus the only way out, for Chiang [Kai-shek, the KMT leader], was for Rhee to attack the North, which ultimately made Acheson yield and defend Nationalist China [on Taiwan].20

Meanwhile, in South Korea,

an Australian embassy representative sent in daily reports in late June, saying that "patrols were going in from the South to the North, endeavouring to attract the North back in pursuit. Plimsoll warned that this could lead to war and it was clear that there was some degree of American involvement as well." [According to former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam,] "The evidence was sufficiently strong for the Australian Prime Minister to authorize a cable to Washington urging that no encouragement be given to the South Korean government."21

Cumings also notes the warning in late April from an American diplomat, Robert Strong, that "desperate measures may be attempted by [the Chinese] Nationalist Government to involve [u.S.] in [a] shooting war as [a] means of saving its own skin."22 In chapters too complex to summarize here, he chronicles the intrigues of a number of Chiang’s backers, including the China Lobby in Washington, General Claire Chennault and his then nearly defunct airline CAT (later Air America), former OSS chief General William Donovan, and in Japan General MacArthur and his intelligence chief Charles Willoughby. He notes the visit of two of Chiang’s generals to Seoul, one of them on a U.S. military plane from MacArthur’s headquarters. And he concludes that "Chiang may have found …on the Korean peninsula, the provocation of a war that saved his regime [on Taiwan] for two more decades:"

Anyone who has read this text closely to this point, and does not believe that Willoughby, Chiang, [Chiang’s emissary to Seoul, General] Wu Tieh Cheng, Yi Pōm-sōk, [syngman] Rhee, Kim Sōk-won, Tiger Kim, and their ilk were capable of a conspiracy to provoke a war, cannot be convinced by any evidence.

He adds that anti-conspiratorialist Americans "are prey to what might be called the fallacy of insufficient cynicism" -- a charge that may be revived, if it can ever be shown that 9/11 also was "a conspiracy to provoke a war."23

9/11, Tonkin Gulf, and the JFK Assassination

In 1964 Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, in response to Secretary of Defense McNamara’s assurances that there was "unequivocal proof" of a second "unprovoked attack" on U.S. destroyers. Today we know not only that there was no such second attack, but that the combined harassments of CIA-controlled PT boats and US destroyers in North Vietnamese waters were so provocative as to invite one. George Ball, who at the time was an Undersecretary of State, later commented in a 1977 BBC radio interview that

Many of the people who were associated with the war were looking for any excuse to initiate bombing. The sending of a destroyer up the Tonkin Gulf was primarily for provocation. ... There was a feeling that if the destroyer got into some trouble, that it would provide the provocation we needed.24

The Tonkin Gulf deep event presents a number of similarities to the Korean deep event in 1950. Tonkin Gulf also can be analyzed into three different phases: the deception of Congress by high level officials, preceded by provocative intrigues in Asia, and reinforced by deceptive manipulation of reports inside the NSA. (All three phases can also be discerned in the provocative maneuvers in 1968 of the U.S.S. Pueblo, in an incident or deep event that did not lead, as some clearly wished, to a military response against North Korea.)25

We now know from a recently declassified in-house NSA history that on August 4, 1964, NSA possessed 122 pieces of SIGINT (signals intelligence) which taken together indicated clearly that there was no second North Vietnamese attack on August 4: "Hanoi’s navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on 2 August." But of these 122 pieces, the White House was supplied with only fifteen – "only SIGINT that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers."26

Meanwhile, over at CIA, "By the afternoon of Aug. 4, the CIA’s expert analyst on North Vietnam … had concluded that probably no one had fired on the U.S. ships. He included a paragraph to that effect in the item he wrote for the Current Intelligence Bulletin, which would be wired to the White House and other key agencies and appear in print the next morning. And then something unique happened. The Director of the Office of Current Intelligence, a very senior officer …, descended into the bowels of the agency to order the paragraph deleted. He explained: `We’re not going to tell LBJ that now. He has already decided to bomb North Vietnam’"27

The parallel events in NSA and CIA illustrate how a shared bureaucratic mindset, or propensity for military escalation, can generate synergistic responses in diverse milieus, without there having necessarily been any conspiratorial collusion between the two agencies.

Of more than passing interest is the fact that the CIA in the 1960s still had senior officers who believed that sooner or later a showdown with the Chinese Communists was inevitable, and had renewed General Chennault’s old proposal for a large-scale landing by Chiang on the Chinese mainland.28 This seems to explain a series of manipulative escalatory moves in Laos, shortly before the Tonkin Gulf incidents, with a similar momentum towards expanding the U.S. war beyond South Vietnam. In 1963-64 one notes again, as in 1950, the intriguing of local KMT elements, in this case forces directly involved in the opium traffic.29

As for 9/11, the paradox between surface tranquility and alarming warnings is as evident as it was in 1950. Even the 9/11 Commission Report acknowledges that in the summer of 2001 "the system was blinking red" for an al-Qaeda attack. Its record amply refutes Condoleezza Rice’s claim in May 2002 that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would … try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."30 Yet in the midst of this crisis the CIA in August 2001 was flagrantly withholding crucial evidence from the FBI that, if shared, would have assisted the FBI in its current efforts to locate one of the alleged hijackers, Khaled al-Mihdar. This withholding provoked an FBI agent to predict at that time, accurately, that "someday someone will die."31

As I describe in the forthcoming expanded reissue of my book The War Conspiracy, this culpable withholding of crucial evidence from the FBI by the CIA closely parallels the CIA’s withholding from the FBI of important information about Lee Harvey Oswald in October 1963. Former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that this withholding was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963.32 Without these withholdings, in other words, neither the Kennedy assassination nor 9/11 could have unfolded in the manner in which they did.

And without understanding the details, we can safely conclude that operations of the CIA – the deep state -- were somehow implicated, whether innocently or conspiratorially, in the background of both the JFK assassination and 9/11. With respect to the CIA’s withholding of information from the FBI about Oswald, even a former CIA officer, Jane Roman, has agreed that this indicates "some sort of [CIA] operational interest in Oswald’s file."33 Lawrence Wright, commenting in The New Yorker about the CIA’s analogous withholding of information about al-Mihdar, has reached the similar conclusion that "The CIA may also have been protecting an overseas operation and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it."34

In short, from this perspective, 9/11 is not wholly without precedent in U.S. history. It should be seen not as a unique departure from orderly constitutional government – a coup d’état – but as yet another unexplained deep event of the sort that has continued to erode the American constitutional system of open politics and civil liberties.

9/11: Not Just Another Deep Event, But a Constitutional Deep Event

It is however a deep event of a new and unprecedented order. Deep events related to political control of this country are far more frequent than most of us like to recognize. Since the conspicuous assassinations of the 1960s and early 1970s – all deep events -- at least six politicians have also died in single-plane crashes. Although many of these crashes were probably accidental, it is striking that only one Republican has died in this fashion, as opposed to five Democrats.35 Official accounts of the deaths of three of these Democrats – Senator Paul Wellstone, and Congressmen Hale Boggs and Nick Begich, have been challenged, as has the very suspicious "accidental" death in a 1970 single-plane crash of UAW labor leader Walter Reuther.36

Of these deep events, some – notably the JFK assassination -- stand out as having had structural impact on American political society. America’s three major wars since World War Two – Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq – have all been preceded by deep events that have cumulatively contributed to America’s current war-based economy. Looked at in this way, 9/11 falls into a sequence in which it is preceded by the Second Tonkin Gulf Incident and by the intrigues and lies in June 1950 concerning Korea.

But of all these deep events, 9/11 can be seen as the first to have had not only structural but constitutional implications. For with the introduction of COG before 10:00 AM on September 11, 2001, the status of the U.S. constitution in American society has changed, in ways that still prevail. What COG means in practice is still largely unknown to us. It is clear though that in abridging habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment, the innovations after COG and 9/11 made the U.S. constitutional situation more like the situation in Britain, where written statutes are explicitly restricted supplemented by an undefined royal prerogative: a collection of powers belonging to the Sovereign which have no statutory basis.37

Abuse of the British royal prerogative was one of the explicit grievances which ultimately led to the American Revolution. Then as now it was linked to imperial arrangements for standing armies to wage war. It could be said that in America today, the powers needed for imposing U.S. global dominance in the world have again come to restrict the scope of the constitutional public state.

The extent to which presidential power is limited by congressional statute has been and will be continuously and extensively debated. It is clear however that the George W. Bush administration has revived the extreme or monarchical view expressed, for the first time in American political history, by former president Richard Nixon: that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."38

Jack Goldsmith, a former Assistant Attorney General in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, has reported that, inside the White House, Cheney’s legal advisor David Addington frequently argued that "the Constitution empowers the President to exercise prerogative powers to do what is necessary in an emergency to save the country."39 Goldsmith concluded that "The presidency in the age of terrorism – the Terror Presidency – suffers from many of the vices of [Nixon’s] Imperial Presidency."40

Cheney, supported by Addington, made clear in his Iran-Contra Minority Report of 1987 his belief that "the Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of prerogative that will permit him to exceed the law." Cheney supported this claim by pointing to Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, which Jefferson, without using the word "prerogative," justified by "the laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of serving our country when in danger."41 But the Cheney-Addington defense of an on-going prerogative in an on-going war on terror has far more in common with 17th-century British monarchical legal theory, than with Jefferson’s single resort to such action, after a lifetime of attacking the notion of prerogative power.42

As part of the case for an unrestrained or monarchical view of executive power, we have seen the contention that the President may disregard or marginalize treaty obligations prohibiting torture. Before COG was declared on September 11, 2001, a network of laws, developed through checks and balances by all three branches of federal government, prohibited torture. "It was not to last."43

In keeping with Cheney’s COG planning in the 1980s, the Bush administration has made similar inroads on habeas corpus, a right conferred by Magna Carta, reaffirmed by the English parliament in a statute of 1679, and mentioned in the U.S. constitution. Nevertheless, in defining the constitutional crisis we now face, it is important to see that it is not an unprecedented and anomalous event, but rooted in developments over decades.

9/11, Deep Events, and the Global Dominance Mindset in American Society

The continuity of past deep events is part of the problem facing those who wish to understand and correct what underlies them. For the mainstream U.S. media (as we now clearly see them) have become so implicated in past protective lies about Korea, Tonkin Gulf, and the JFK assassination that they, as well as the government, have now a demonstrated interest in preventing the truth about any of these events from coming out.44

This means that the current threat to constitutional rights does not derive from the deep state alone. As I have written elsewhere, the problem is a global dominance mindset that prevails not only inside the Washington Beltway but also in the mainstream media and even in the universities, one which has come to accept recent inroads on constitutional liberties, and stigmatizes, or at least responds with silence to, those who are alarmed by them.45 Just as acceptance of bureaucratic groupthink is a necessary condition for advancement within the state, so acceptance of this mindset’s notions of decorum has increasingly become a condition for participation in mainstream public life.

In saying this, I mean something more narrow than the pervasive "business-defined consensus" which Gabriel Kolko once asserted was "a central reality," underlying how "a ruling class makes its policies operate."46 I would agree that, at least since the Reagan era, the mindset I am describing has become more and more clearly identified with the mentality of an overworld determined to protect its privileges and even enlarge them at the expense of the rest of society.

But the mindset I mean is narrower in focus – originally concerned with defending and now increasingly concerned with enlarging America’s dominance in the world, in an era of finite and increasingly scarcer resources. And it is also, increasingly, less a consensus than an arena of serious division and debate.

It is clear that the mindset is not monolithic. There have been recurring notable dissents within it, such as when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed in the New York Times that the Bush administration, in defiance of the FISA Act, was engaged in warrantless electronic surveillance of telephone calls inside the United States.47 But on other issues, notably the Iraq War, the Times has conspicuously failed to play the judicious critical role that it did with respect to the U.S. war in Vietnam. In general, as Kristina Borjesson reports in her devastating book, "Investigative reporting is dwindling…because it is expensive, attracts lawsuits, and can be hostile to the corporate interests and/or government connections of a news division’s parent company."48 And as to critical thinking about 9/11, as before about the Kennedy assassination, the Post has predictably gone out of its way to depict the 9/11 truth movement as a "cacophonous and free-range…bunch of conspiracists."49

According to a survey of Lexis Nexis, the New York Times did not report Attorney General Gonzalez’ newsworthy claim that "There is no expressed grant of habeas corpus in the Constitution." (The Washington Post reported it, without comment, in a story of 197 words.)50 And on the question of torture even a liberal Harvard University professor, Michael Ignatieff, has argued in a University Press book from an even-handed starting point – "A democracy is committed to both the security of the majority and the rights of the individual" -- to an alarming defense of "coercive questioning."51

In this state of affairs, I shall argue, the Internet provides an opportunity for opposition, of potentially immense political importance.

Deep Events as Intrigues within the Global Dominance Consensus

Many critics of American foreign policy on the left tend to stress its substantial coherence over time, from the War-Peace Studies for post-war planning of the Council on Foreign Relations in the 1940s, to Defense Secretary Charles Wilson’s plans in the 1950s for a "permanent war economy," to Clinton’s declaration to the United Nations in 1993 that the U.S. will act "multilaterally when possible, but unilaterally when necessary."52

This view of America’s policies has persuaded some, notably Alexander Cockburn, to lament the displacement of coherent Marxist analysis by the "fundamental idiocy" and "foolishness" of "9/11 conspiracism."53 But it is quite possible to acknowledge both that there are ongoing continuities in American policy and also important, hidden, and recurring internal divisions, which have given rise to America’s structural deep events. These events have always involved friction between Wall Street and the Council on Foreign Relations, on the one hand, and the increasingly powerful oil- and military-dominated economic centers of the Midwest and the Texas Sunbelt on the other.

At the time that General MacArthur, drawing on his Midwest and Texas support, threatened to challenge Truman and the State Department, the opposition was seen as one between the traditional Europe-Firsters of the Northeast and new-wealth Asia-Firsters. In the 1952 election, the foreign policy debate was between Democratic "containment" and Republican "rollback." Bruce Cumings, following Franz Schurmann, wrote later of the split, even within the CIA, between "Wall Street internationalism" on the one hand and "cowboy-style expansionism" on the other.54

Many have followed Michael Klare in defining the conflict as one, even within the Council on Foreign Relations, between "traders" and warrior "Prussians."55 Since the rise to eminence of the so-called "Vulcans" – notably Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz, backed by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – the struggle has frequently been described as a struggle between the multilateralists of the status quo and the unilateralists seeking indisputable American hegemony.56

Underlying every one of the deep events I have mentioned, and others such as the U-2 incident, can be seen this contest between traderly (multilateralist) and warriorly (unilateralist) approaches to the maintenance of U.S. global dominance. For decades the warriorly faction was clearly a minority; but it was also an activist and well-funded minority, in marked contrast to the relatively passive and disorganized traderly majority. Hence the warriorly preference for war, thanks to ample funding from the military-industrial complex and also to a series of deep events, was able time after time to prevail.

The 1970s can be seen as a turning-point, when a minority CFR faction, led by Paul Nitze, united with corporate executives from the military-industrial complex like David Packard and pro-Zionist future neocons like Richard Perle to forge a succession of militant political coalitions, such as the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). Cheney and Rumsfeld, then in the Ford White House, participated in this onslaught on the multilateral foreign policy of Henry Kissinger.57 In the late 1990s Cheney and Rumsfeld, even while secretly refining the COG provisions put into force on 9/11, also participated openly in the successor organization to the CPD, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

From his office interfacing between CIA and the U.S. Air Force, Col. L. Fletcher Prouty deduced that there was a single Secret Team, within the CIA but not confined to it, responsible for not only the Tonkin Gulf incidents (timed to enable already planned military action against North Vietnam) but other deep events, such as the U-2 incident of 1960 (which in Prouty’s opinion was planned and timed to frustrate the projected summit conference between Eisenhower and Khrushchev) and even the assassination of President Kennedy (after which the Secret Team "moved to take over the whole direction of the war and to dominate the activity of the United States of America").58

In language applicable to both Korea in 1950 and Tonkin Gulf in 1964, Prouty argued that CIA actions followed a pattern of actions which "went completely out of control in Southeast Asia:"

The clandestine operator… prepares the stage by launching a very minor and very secret, provocative attack of a kind that is bound to bring open reprisal. These secret attacks, which may have been made by third parties or by stateless mercenaries whose materials were supplied secretly by the CIA, will undoubtedly create reaction which in turn is observed in the United States…. It is not a new game. [but] it was raised to a high state of art under Walt Rostow and McGeorge Bundy against North Vietnam, to set the pattern for the Gulf of Tonkin attacks.59

I mention Prouty’s thesis here in order to record my partial dissent from it. In my view his notion of a "team" localizes what I call the global dominance mindset too narrowly in a restricted group who are not only like-minded but in conspiratorial communication over a long term. He exhibits the kind of conspiratorialist mentality once criticized by G. William Domhoff:

We all have a tremendous tendency to want to get caught up in believing that there's some secret evil cause for all of the obvious ills of the world …. [Conspiracy theories] encourage a belief that if we get rid of a few bad people, everything will be well in the world.60

My own position is still that which I articulated years ago in response to Domhoff:

I have always believed, and argued, that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to `a few bad people,’ but to the institutional and parapolitical arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically governed.61

Quoting what I had written, Michael Parenti added, "In sum, national security state conspiracies [or what I would call deep events] are components of our political structure, not deviations from it."62

The outcome of the deep events I have mentioned so far has been chiefly a series of victories for the warriors.63 But there have been other structural deep events, notably Watergate in 1972-74 and Iran-Contra in 1986-87, which can be interpreted, if not as victories for the traders, at least as temporary setbacks for the warriors. In The Road to 9/11 I have tried to show that Cheney and Rumsfeld, while in the Ford White House, bitterly resented the setback represented by the post-Watergate reforms, and immediately set in motion a series of moves to reverse them. I argue there that the climax of these moves was the imposition after 9/11 of their long-planned provisions for COG, formulated under their supervision since the early 1980s.

Thus since World War Two the warriorly position, initially that of a marginal but conspiratorial minority, has moved since the Reagan and Bush presidencies into a more and more central position. This is well symbolized by the rise in influence since 1981 of the Council for National Policy, originally funded by Texas oil billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt and explicitly designed to offset the influence of the Council on Foreign Relations.64 Comparing the 1950s with the present decade, it is striking how much the status of the State Department has declined vis-à-vis the Pentagon. With the accelerated militarization of the U.S. economy, the question arises whether a more traderly foreign policy can ever again prevail.

And since 9/11, especially with the institution of unknown COG procedures, some have talked of the overall subversion of democracy, by a new Imperial Presidency in the Bush White House.65

9/11, the Threat to Constitutional Rights, and Congress

A skeptic might observe that there is still a Congress, with constitutional powers to review and restrict what the executive does. And it is true that a joint congressional committee, in 2002, did investigate CIA and FBI activities before and after 9/11.66 The powers of Congress have been weakened, however. A crucial section of this report, dealing precisely with the CIA’s and Saudi government’s relationship to the alleged hijacker al-Mihdar, was classified and withheld by the administration. When some of the explosive information was leaked to Newsweek, the committee members and staff (rather than the Saudi government) became the focus of a criminal leak investigation by the FBI.67 The chairman, Senator Bob Graham thought the leak investigation was an obvious effort by the administration to intimidate Congress. And if that was the intention, it worked. Members of the joint committee and their staffs were frightened into silence about the investigation.68

It would appear that the election of Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress has done little to change this state of affairs. Warrantless electronic surveillance (which the President has referred to as a COG provision)69 was endorsed by the new 110th Congress in the Protect America Act of 2007, an act which restricted FISA Court supervision as the President had wished. This same 110th Congress failed to undo the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which (as Robert Parry wrote in the Baltimore Chronicle) "effectively eliminated habeas corpus for non-citizens, including legal resident aliens."70

Just as alarmingly, Congress has shown little or no desire to challenge, or even question, the over-arching assumptions of the war on terror. We are still in a proclaimed national emergency that was first proclaimed by President Bush on September 14, 2001.71 As the Washington Times wrote on September 18, 2001, "Simply by proclaiming a national emergency on Friday, President Bush activated some 500 dormant legal provisions, including those allowing him to impose censorship and martial law." The Washington Times was referring to presidential Proclamation 7463 of September 14, 2001, "Declaration of National Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks." The state of emergency that was subsequently declared on September 23, 2001, by Executive Order 13224, was again formally extended by the president on September 20, 2007.72

COG, NSPD-51, and the Challenge to Congressional Checks and Balances

The constitutional implications of this state of emergency were aggravated by the President’s "National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive" (NSPD)-51, of May 9, 2007, which decreed (without even a press release) that

When the president determines a catastrophic emergency has occurred, the president can take over all government functions and direct all private sector activities to ensure we will emerge from the emergency with an "enduring constitutional government."73

The Directive, without explicitly saying so, appeared to override the post-Watergate statutory provisions for congressional regulation enacted in 1977 by the National Emergencies Act.74

Among major newspapers, only the Washington Post reported NSPD-51 at all, noting that the "directive formalizes a shift of authority away from the Department of Homeland Security to the White House."75 It added that

After the 2001 attacks, Bush assigned about 100 senior civilian managers to rotate secretly to locations outside of Washington for weeks or months at a time to ensure the nation's survival, a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing "continuity of operations plans."

However the Post failed to note that these continuity of operations (COG) plans, which reportedly involve suspension of the Constitution and possibly Congress, were secret -- the fruit of secret planning over two decades by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, even during periods of time when neither of the two men held a government position.76

After urging from constituents, including many members of the 911truth movement, Congressman Peter deFazio did attempt to see the Continuity of Government (COG) plans in the classified Appendices of NSPD-51. Both he, and eventually the entire House Committee on Homeland Security, were denied the opportunity to see these appendices, on the grounds that the Committee did not possess the requisite clearances. This should have been a line in the sand for Congress to assert its constitutional rights and duties. As I have reported elsewhere,

The story, ignored by the mainstream press, involved more than the usual tussle between the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. Government. What was at stake was a contest between Congress's constitutional powers of oversight, and a set of policy plans that could be used to suspend or modify the constitution.77

But it appears that the current Congress will do nothing to support Congressman deFazio’s efforts at congressional oversight of COG.

Congress and the On-Going Cover-Up of 9/11

Furthermore, the 110th Congress took no action to ensure that all government agencies will collaborate with the National Archives, in fulfillment of the 9/11 Commission’s commitment to release its supporting records to the public in 2009.78 A law to ensure this is badly needed.

The FBI has been declassifying documents cooperatively with respect to this commitment, and recently the CIA has begun to cooperate as well.79 But some federal agencies, notably the FAA and Pentagon, are not collaborating with the 9/11 Commission’s commitment at all. It may take a law to get them to do so. Both the FAA and the Pentagon declined to release important records to the 9/11 Commission, despite its statutory powers, until required to do so by judicial subpoena.80 But the law which created the 9/11 Commission in 2002 made no legal determination for the future of its records.81

This is a matter of concern, because 9/11 has clearly initiated a major readjustment of our traditional constitutional balances and civil rights. I submit that a vigorous defense of the constitutional traditions of this country requires vigorous pressure for the release of the 9/11 Commission’s records, so that we can begin to resolve the mysteries of how this constitutional crisis arose.

In short, we are living in an on-going state of emergency whose exact limits are unknown, on the basis of a controversial deep event – 9/11 -- that is still largely a mystery. Without endorsing the notion that a coup d’état has occurred, I would categorically assert that a radically hegemonic mindset, located primarily in Vice-President Cheney’s office, is currently using 9/11, the war on terror, and secret COG rules to assert prerogative limitations on the checks and balances of the U.S. constitution, without any significant challenge from a compliant Congress and media.

9/11, the Public, and Internet Politics

This raises the question whether the public, about to vote in the 2008 election, can exercise the constitutional restraints that Congress and the media have failed to supply. The answer, I submit, lies in what I would call Internet Politics, the mobilization of nationwide pressures on candidates in the next election through internet coordination.

There is I believe a latent majority of Americans who could agree to ask all candidates to

a) review and revise the Military Commissions Act of 2006, to unequivocally restore habeas corpus, within the limitations of the U.S. Constitution, Article One, Section 9;

unequivocally outlaw torture;

c) review and restrict the provisions for warrantless electronic surveillance in the Protect America Act of 2007.

d) vote for The American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 (H.R. 3835), which addresses these and other issues. This bill was introduced by U.S. Rep. Ron Paul on October 15, 2007, and is supported by both the Republican American Freedom Agenda, and the Democratic American Freedom Campaign.82

Those in the 911truth movement could ask candidates to take two further steps

d) insist on the right of the Homeland Security Committees in Congress to review the COG appendices to National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD)-51;

e) support a law to force all government agencies to collaborate with the National Archives, in fulfillment of the 9/11 Commission’s commitment to release its supporting records to the public in 2009.83

But social thought is socially fashioned. For it to be effective it must be mobilized, and become more than a chorus of bloggers croaking from our backwater lilypads in the blogomarsh. Clearly it would take a strenuous concerted effort to create or persuade a movement, such as MoveOn, to take on all these issues.

Is it possible that some organization can be persuaded to accept this challenge, and take the first steps in mobilizing such a force?

NOTES

1 In the single month of March 1962, the OAS set off an average of 120 bombs per day ("The Generals' Putsch," http://countrystudies.us/algeria/34.htm).

2 BBC News, November 24, 2006: "Alexander Litvinenko wrote a book in which he alleged Federal Security Service (FSB) agents in Russia coordinated the 1999 apartment block bombings in the country that killed more than 300 people."

3 Gareth Jenkins, "Susurluk and the Legacy of Turkey’s Dirty War," Terrorism Monitor, May 1, 2008,

http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/ar...ticleid=2374142.

4 Nicholas Birch, Irish Times, November 26, 2005,

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/200...FR26TURKEY.html.

Former Turkish president and prime minister Suleyman Demirel later commented on this incident that "It is fundamental principle that there is one state. In our country there are two….There is one deep state and one other state ….The state that should be real is the spare one, the one that should be spare is the real one." (Jon Gorvett, "Turkey’s `Deep State’ Surfaces in Former President’s Words, Deeds in Kurdish Town," Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2006, http://www.washington-report.org/archives/...06/0601037.html ).

5 Jenkins, "Susurluk and the Legacy of Turkey’s Dirty War." A Google search on June 7, 2008, for "Semdinli + PKK" in major world English-language publications yielded 157 results. Of these just two were from the United States. Of these one (Washington Times, December 6, 2005) did not mention the deep state’s involvement in the incident at all. The other (Newsweek, November 28, 2005) defined the deep state without mentioning its underworld involvement. A similar search for "deep state" revealed the same paucity of coverage in the U.S. media.

6 Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 4-7, 14-17, etc.

7 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 121-22, 124-27, 163-69.

8 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 139-42, 150-60, etc.; Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI –and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him (New York: Regan/HarperCollins, 2006).

9 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 153; citing Toronto Globe and Mail, November 22, 2001. It is no accident that the mainstream U.S. press have been silent, not just concerning this important fact, but also about the two books recording it: Peter Lance’s Triple Cross and my own The Road to 9/11. Triple Cross finally got mentioned by name in the New York Times, but only because its publisher, Judith Regan, was dismissed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (New York Times, December 19, 2006).

10 On October 18, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the State Secrets Privilege in order to prevent disclosure of the nature of Edmonds' work on the grounds that it would endanger national security.

11 Daniel Ellsberg with Kris Welch, KPFA, 8/26/06,

http://wotisitgood4.blogspot.com/2006/10/e...ases-of-al.html.

12 Vanity Fair, September 2005. According to the ATC web site, "As one of the leading business associations in the United States, the American-Turkish Council (ATC) is dedicated to effectively strengthening U.S.-Turkish relations through the promotion of commercial, defense, technology, and cultural relations. Its diverse membership includes Fortune 500, U.S. and Turkish companies, multinationals, nonprofit organizations, and individuals with an interest in U.S.-Turkish relations." It is thus comparable to the American Security Council, whose activities in 1963 are discussed in Scott, Deep Politics, e.g. 292.

Edmonds has been partially corroborated by Huseyin Baybasin, another Turkish heroin kingpin now in jail in Holland, in his book Trial by Fire: "I handled the drugs which came through the channel of the Turkish Consulate in England." But as he adds: "I was with the Mafia but I was carrying this out with the same Mafia group in which the rulers of Turkey were part." Baybasin claimed he was assisted by Turkish officers working for NATO in Belgium ("The Susurluk Legacy," By Adrian Gatton, Druglink Magazine, Nov/Dec 2006, http://adriangatton.com/archive/1990_01_01_archive.html).

13 Also in 2003 former government consultant Chalmers Johnson declared, in an interview, that what happened in Florida after the 2000 election was a "coup d’état" (Critical Asian Studies, 35, no. 2 [2003], 303). In the same year Bill Moyers, a veteran of the Johnson White House, wrote of the G.W. Bush to realign government as "the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, that has occurred in our lifetime" (Text of speech to the Take Back America conference sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future, June 4, 2003, Washington, DC,

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0610-11.htm).

14 Interview with Alex Jones, November 2, 2006, http://jonesreport.com/articles/021106_vidal.html.

15 Ed Encho, "9/11: Cover For a Coup D'Etat?" OpEdNews, May 27, 2008,

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=7521.

16 9/11 Commission Report, 38, 326; Scott, Road to 9/11, 228-29.

17 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 183-87; citing Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins, Death Threats, and the FBI: The Covert War against the Central America Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 184; Alfonso Chardy, Miami Herald, July 5, 1987.

18 Robert Parry, "Gonzales Questions Habeas Corpus," Baltimore Chronicle, January 19, 2007, http://baltimorechronicle.com/2007/011907Parry.shtml.

19 Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol II, 611, 613; quoting William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial, 1977), 315–21; whole passage quoted in Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 61. Cumings quotes further from Dean Rusk’s testimony to Congress on June 20: ‘‘We see no present indication that the people across the border have any intention of fighting a major war for that purpose’’ (taking over South Korea). He notes that General Ridgway later said he "was shocked" by Dean Rusk’s reassuring testimony.

20 Cumings, Origins, II, 600-01. My selective quotations cannot do justice to the complexity of Cumings’ book, which presents three different possible explanations for the outbreak of the war. Cumings depicts a contest for the future of the peninsula -- and also Taiwan -- in which local leaders on both sides were looking for support from their respective megapowers.

21 Cumings, Origins, II, 547; citing Gavin McCormack, Cold War/Hot War (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1983), 97; E. Gough Whitlam, A Pacific Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981), 57-58.

22 Cumings, Origins, II, 527.

23 Cumings, Origins, II, 600, 601. Yi Pōm-sōk was a pro-Chiang advocate in Seoul of attacking North Korea. Kim Sōk-won was a Korean commander who had previously attacked North Korea. Tiger Kim was a Korean veteran of the Japanese army close to Rhee, and a war criminal.

24 James Bamford, Body of Secrets (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 301. William Bundy has taken issue with this judgment, arguing that escalating the war north "didn’t fit in with our plans at all" (Robert McNamara, "The Tonkin Gulf Resolution," in Andrew Jon Rotter, Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Vietnam War Anthology [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991], 83). But Ball was correct in reporting that bombing fit in with some people’s plans.

25 Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 178-215.

26 Robert J. Hanyok, "Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964," Cryptologic Quarterly, declassified in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 132,

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/relea00012.pdf.

27 Ray McGovern, "CIA, Iran & the Gulf of Tonkin," ConsortiumNews, January 12, 2008, http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/011108a.html.

28 Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 132, cf. 67; citing Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), 318, 314.

29 Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 88, 93-103.

30 "National Security Advisor Holds Press Briefing," White House Website, May 16, 2002,

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/20...0020516-13.html.

We now know that on 9/11 there were a number of war games and exercises, including an exercise at the National Reconnaissance Office near Dulles Airport, testing responses "if a plane were to strike a building." (Scott, Road to 9/11, 215-16; Evening Standard [London], August 22, 2002; Boston Globe, September 11, 2002,

http://www.boston.com/news/packages/sept11...ne_exercise.htm ).

31 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 352-54 (FBI agent). After 9/11 another FBI agent was even more bitter: "They [CIA] didn’t want the bureau meddling in their business – that’s why they didn’t tell the FBI…. 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" (James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies [New York: Doubleday, 2004], 224).

32 Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City: Andrews, McMeel, & Parker, 1987), 268; quoted in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 389.

33 Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 196-98; discussion in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 387-88.

34 Lawrence Wright, "The Agent," New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; discussion in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 388-89.

35 Republican Senators Heinz and Tower also died in plane crashes, but after collisions between two aircraft. Conservative Democrat Larry McDonald died when the civilian airliner KAL 007 was shot down by Soviet interceptors in September 1983.

36 Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 201, 206: "In the years before the fatal crash there had been assassination attempts against Walter and Victor [Reuther]. (Victor believes the attempt against him was intended as a message to Walter.) In each of these instances, state and federal law-enforcement agencies showed themselves at best lackadaisical in their investigative efforts, suggesting the possibility of official collusion or at least tolerance for the criminal deeds. … Third, like the suspicious near-crash that occurred the previous year, the fatal crash also involved a faulty altimeter in a small plane. It is a remarkable coincidence that Reuther would have been in two planes with the exact same malfunctioning in that brief time frame....In a follow-up interview with us, Victor further noted: `Animosity from government had been present for some time [before the fatal crash]. It was not only Walter's stand on Vietnam and Cambodia that angered Nixon, but also I had exposed some CIA elements inside labor, and this was also associated with Walter .... There is a fine line between the mob and the CIA There is a lot of crossover. Throughout the entire history of labor relations there is a sordid history of industry in league with Hoover and the mafia .. . . You need to check into right-wing corporate groups and their links to the national security system.’ Checking into such things is no easy task. The FBI still refuses to turn over nearly 200 pages of documents regarding Reuther's death, including the copious correspondence between field offices and Hoover. And many of the released documents-some of them forty years old-are totally inked out. It is hard to fathom what national security concern is involved or why the FBI and CIA still keep so many secrets about Walter Reuther's life and death."

37 See discussion in Jack N. Rakove, "Taking the Prerogative out of the Presidency: An Originalist Perspective," Presidential Studies Quarterly 37.1, 85–100; Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr. and Aziz Z. Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, Presidential Power in a Time of Terror (New York: Rodale, 2007), 153-58

38 Interview with David Frost, aired May 11, 1977; in Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 159; Robert D. Sloane, "The Scope of Executive Power in the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction," Boston University Law Review 88:341,

http://www.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizat...ents/SLOANE.pdf, 346.

39 Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment inside the Bush Administration (New York : W.W. Norton, 2007), 82.

40 Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency, 183

41 Minority Report, Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, 100th Congress. 1st Session, H. Rept No 100-433, S. Rept No. 100-216, p. 465.

42 Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 174.

43 Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 72; cf. Sloane, "The Scope of Executive Power," 347.

44 Cf. the investigative journalist and media critic Philip Weiss, "When Black Becomes White," in Kristina Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), 186: "The mainstream media’s response [to theories of the Kennedy assassination] has been a dull one – to solemnly and stoically report the government’s assertions, over and over."

45 Scott, War Conspiracy, 10, 383, 395.

46 Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Beacon, 1969), xii-xiii.

47 James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. "Spying Program Snared U.S. Calls", New York Times, December 21, 2005.

48 Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw, 13. Even former George W. Bush spokesman Scott McClellan has referred to the media in his book as "complicit enablers" of Bush administration war propaganda (Scott McClellan, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception [New York: Public Affairs, 2008], 70, 125).

49 Washington Post, September 8, 2006. Cf. BBC, "Paranoia paradise," April 4, 2002,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1909378.stm. \

The common tactic of such essays is to focus on absurdly eccentric beliefs, and try to pass them off as representative of all those criticizing received anti-conspiratorial opinion.

50 Washington Post, January 23, 2007. However on May 4, 2008, the Post discussed the remark in a favorable review of former Republican Congressman Mickey Edwards’ book Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost -- And How It Can Find Its Way Back.

51 Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 8.

52 E.g. Paul L. Atwood, "War and Empire Are and Always Have Been the American Way of Life," Global Policy Forum, February 2006,

http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/history...2006history.htm.

53 Alexander Cockburn, "The Age of Irrationality: The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the American Left," CounterPunch, November 28, 2006,

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11282006.html.

54 Cumings, Origins, II, 123; cf. 13-14; Herbert Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power: An

Inquiry into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics (New York: Random House, 1974).

55 Michael Klare, Beyond the "Vietnam Syndrome" (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1981).

56 E.g. Robert Wright, "All Quiet on the Western Front," Slate, October 11, 2001,

http://www.slate.com/id/117170/ .

57 Scott, Road to 9/11, 57-61, etc. Cf. Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983).

58 L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (1997), http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/.

59 Prouty, The Secret Team (1997), Chapter II.

60 G. William Domhoff, in Jonathan Vankin, Conspiracies, Cover-Ups, and Crimes: Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 125-26.

61 Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 11.

62 Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996),

63 This has been doubted in the case of the JFK assassination, notably by Chomsky. For my latest contribution to this old argument, see Scott, War Conspiracy (2008).

64 Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 14; Michael Standaert, Skipping Towards Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2006), 112-14.

65 Charlie Savage, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (New York: Little Brown, 2007), 51. Strangely, Savage does not mention COG by name, but he refers to the decade of COG planning in the 1980s as evidence for his case that a "cabal of zealots" has been planning for "the return of the imperial presidency" ever since Cheney and Rumsfeld lost their posts in the Ford Administration.

66 U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.

67 See "The Saudi Money Trail," Newsweek, December 2, 2002.

68 Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (New York: Twelve/Hachette, 2008), 54-55.

69 "Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed `every 45 days’ as part of planning to assess threats to `the continuity of our government’"

(Christopher Ketcham, "The Last Round-Up," Radaronline, May 15, 2008,

http://circleof13.blogspot.com/2008/05/last-roundup.html).

Cf. President’s Radio Address, December 15, 2005,

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/20...2/20051217.html :

"The activities I authorized are reviewed approximately every 45 days. Each review is based on a fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to the continuity of our government and the threat of catastrophic damage to our homeland."

70 Parry, "Gonzales Questions Habeas Corpus," Baltimore Chronicle, January 19, 2007.

71 9/11 Commission Report, 38, 326; Scott, The Road to 9/11, 228-29.

72 White House Notice of September 20, 2007,

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/20...20070920-9.html.

73 Jerome Corsi, "Bush makes power grab," WorldNetDaily, May 23, 2007, \

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article....RTICLE_ID=55824.

74Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, "National Emergency Powers," updated August 30, 2007, pp. 10ss,

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/98-505.pdf.

75 Washington Post, May 10, 2007.

76 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 183-87; citing James Mann, "The Armageddon Plan," Atlantic Monthly (March 2004), http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200403/mann; James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 138–45; James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 70-74. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, "Congress, the Bush Adminstration and Continuity of Government Planning: The Showdown", Counterpunch, March 31, 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/scott03312008.html.

77 Peter Dale Scott, "Congress, the Bush Adminstration and Continuity of Government Planning: The Showdown", Counterpunch, March 31, 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/scott03312008.html.

78 Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 312, cf. 9/11 Commission, Media Advisory, August 20, 2004, which set a date of January 9, 2009.

79 The National Archives started a pilot project for the declassification of Commission records. According to their interim report, dated June 22, 2007, they have made progress with the Commission’s internal files. However the following excerpt shows that of other agencies, only the FBI was cooperating in 2007:

FBI Decisions:

Declassified: 98 documents (241 pages)

Declassified, but needs referral elsewhere: 31 documents (132 pages)

Sanitized: 100 documents (400 pages)

Sanitized and needs referral elsewhere: 170 documents (1,067 pages)

Withheld in full: 4 documents (15 pages)

The CIA, the agency with the second highest number of pages in this pilot, has indicated that they have "made no decision regarding how and when it will apply any resources to this request."

Other than FBI, we have received no official response from the other referral agencies ("Update on the Declassification of the Records of the 9/11 Commission," June 22, 2007, http://www.archives.gov/declassification/p...07-tilley.pdf.)

The CIA subsequently resolved to review relevant records.

80 John Farmer, " ‘United 93’: The Real Picture," Washington Post, April 30, 2006. Cf. Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 87: "The staff front office suggested that the NORAD situation bordered on willful concealment."

81 Public Law 107-306, Nov. 27, 2002, Title VI, Section 610.

82 Amerrican Freedom Agenda, http://www.americanfreedomagenda.org; American Freedom Campaign,

http://www.americanfreedomcampaign.org.

83 Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 312, cf. 9/11 Commission, Media Advisory, August 20, 2004, which set a date of January 9, 2009.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. He is the author of the forthcoming book (reissued and much enlarged) The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, due in August 2008. It can be pre-ordered from the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press at http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/MFF_Store. Scott’s website is http://www.peterdalescott.net.

As a recovering Chomskyite hand-painting left-of-center milk cartons so that I may be of service to others, I have to chime in here.

I agree that what stands out more than anything else about Chomsky's Kennedy Vendeta is the absolute lack of context that he provides in terms of the premanent military bureacracy and CIA. There is no discussion of military pressures and CIA pressures from Chomsky. Never is the Laos neutralization and JFKs refusal to send in ground troups to southern Vietnam in 1961 mentioned as it effected the changeg in the number of US military advisers between 1961 and 1963. From Chomsky its just "Mad Dog Kennedy even rose the number of US Military personnel in Vietnam!". I have heard the attempts of Mellon and her Ex to deride the Laos neutralization and even the potential RFK neuralization plan of 1968 as bloodbaths in another name.

These depictions are absurd. As absurd as the sometimes stated and often unstated assumption (hummed mantra, in the case of other left of center writers who are allowed to circulate-- see Chalmers Johnson) that... all together now... "The President is at all times that Master of the CIA, and the latter can do nothing contrary to the wishes of the Commander in Chief" This seems to be the line good leftists must toe if they ever want to make it out of Southend Press.

Let us just imagine the legnth of memorial walls with names of the dead. Walls both built and those left unbuilt because it would maybe comeet with the one we can see from the moon.

Neutralization: Just Another Bloodbath? Reminds me of Barry Goldwatter's description of nuclear weapons as "just another weapon".

To enemies of the possible in 1961 and 1968, I pose the question: can you imagine another president-- that implies his ability to actually BE the president-- making a better choice, given the Cold War structure of american society in 1968? No I don't mean a protester in the street with more ethically sound positions than RFK on the Vietnam War. I mean a presidente with the (nominal?) power to end the damn thing.

Given the quality of this response, I hereby entrust parts 6-10 of this series to Mr. N. Heidenheimer. Time to hose down the Augean stable of Anglosphere pseudo-dissent.

Paul

I'd like to know the precise nature of what the USAF were funding Chomsky to research, whether he was witting, and when & why he decided to refuse further DoD funding?

Me, too.

3. Chomsky on the Lone Nutter in the White House, 1961-63

Stone’s JFK, whatever its precise strengths and weaknesses, provoked a new generation to look at the assassination. This bubble of interest had to be swiftly deflated, and America’s centre-left preserved from contamination by conspiratorialist froth. Who better to inject the narcotic of conformity than the CIA’s favourite left-gatekeeper, the Gnome?

Rethinking Camelot, the preferred delivery mechanism, is one of the crudest pieces of CIA hackwork ever written. Much of it is laughably bad. Consider the question of responsibility for the US assault on Vietnam.

Early on in the book - all the quotation to follow are from the Verso paperback edition published in London in 1993 – Chomsky serves up one of those impressive-seeming, quasi-aphoristic criterion which so intoxicate his army of academic exegetes and hagiographers: “Policy flows from institutions reflecting the needs of power and privilege within them, and can be understood only if these factors are recognized, including the case now under review” (p.9). That eternal verity solemnly proclaimed, Chomsky proceeds to ignore it more or less entirely for the rest of the book.

How so? The text is littered with a mantra which makes nonsense of Chomsky’s assertion: It wasn’t an institution what done it, after all, it was that bloody awful man Kennedy. Single-handedly. He was a macho Irish Papist, don’t you know? Count the violations of Chomsky’s own tenet:

“Kennedy escalated” (p.2); “John F. Kennedy’s escalation” (p.23); “Kennedy’s escalation” (p.27); “Kennedy…escalated the war” (p.37); “JFK raised the level of US attack” (p.43); “As he prepared to escalate the war…in late 1961” (p.46); “Kennedy’s 1961-62 escalation” (p.51); “his 1961-1962 escalation” (p.67).

Just in case his less nimble readers missed the point, the Gnome served up a variation on the theme. Subtlety, as we shall see, was not his strongpoint:

”Kennedy’s war” (p.2); “Kennedy’s war” (p.36); “Kennedy’s war” (p.39); “Kennedy’s war” (p.52); “Kennedy’s war” (p.53); “Kennedy’s war” (p.69); “Kennedy’s war” (p.73); “Kennedy’s war” (p.81); “Kennedy’s war” (p.86); “Kennedy’s war” (p.105).

Still not got it? Chomsky had a third variant on the same basic slogan:

”Kennedy…his aggression” (p.15); “Kennedy moved on to armed attack” (p.25); “JFK’s aggression” (p.32); “JFK’s aggression” (p.35); “Kennedy’s aggression” (p.52); “Kennedy’s aggression” (p.63); “JFK’s 1961-1962 aggression” (p.66); “JFK’s aggression” (p.115).

In case you were unaware of basic history US involvementin Vietnam sharply increased under JFK. At the end of 1960 there were about 800 US ‘advisors’ there (and 9 had been killed) by the end of 1963 there were 16,300 (and 118 had been killed). That was a 20x increase in manpower in a 3 year period for which Kennedy was president all but 58 days. The amount of US military equipment and other aid increased in similar fashion. It would also be interesting to see Chomsky’s quotes in context rather than surgically edited.

Impressively sophisticated stuff: If you can’t convince ‘em with the quality of your argument or evidence, beat ‘em into submission by mindless repetition.

Sounds like the Rigby Doctrine to me!

Glad you're enjoying the series! As for the claims of Chomsky re: Kennedy's policies towards Vietnam, what a pity Chomsky entirely omitted all context - and contours! Small details, you know, like the fact that attempts to assassinate and overthrow Diem began as early as 1957; or that Kennedy repeatedly refused to escalate on the scale demanded by the Joint Chiefs and the CIA.

Paul

I also have no doubt that there would be copious amounts of money to spend of sinking the treaty by US interests as the EU is seen by them as an economic threat both as a competing currency and a trading bloc. A good investment.

Defeat of the Lisbon treaty has no effect on the EU either as a single currency or as a trading bloc.

Try again.

Common "defence" (ie aggression) and foreign policy positions. A central objective of the treaty's designers was the creation of an EU diplomatic service. It remains to be seen how big a blow the rejection of the treaty will prove.

The key thing, however, would appear to be the desire of the Pentagon and the criminal rackets which supply it to prevent the EU developing a common defence procurement policy. The Pentagon finds it very easy to achieve bilateral arms sales coups, and is not above murdering a Dutch politician to achieve same: It wouldn't be so easy in the face of a Franco-German alliance controlling the preponderance of purchasing, which is assuredly what would - may yet still - happen.

Paul

From Kenneth Allsop’s The Bootleggers: The Story of Chicago’s Prohibition Era (London: Arrow Books, July 1970 reprint), pp. 243-4:

“It has always been accepted that Cermak’s death was accidental, that he was hit by a bullet fired by Guiseppi Zangara, a deranged anarchist, who was later electrocuted. No, said Touhy. In the crowd near Zanagara was another armed man – a Capone killer. In the flurry of shots six people were hit – but the bullet that struck Cermak was a .45, and not from a .32-calibre pistol used by Zangara, and was fired by an unknown Capone man who took advantage of the confusion to accomplish his mission.”

Did Allsop provide any citation for his claim about the bullet being from a 45, was from Roger Touhy? When did Touhy (who died in 1959 supposedly say this and to whom? How did he come to know this? Why would such a plot use weapons of different caliber?

Was an autopsy performed on Cermak?

I would presume so.

All good questions. In order:

a) Allsop does not provide a citation for the .45 calibre - frustratingly. Hence my question marks.

Ibid., p.243: "After Touhy's death, Saul D. Alinsky, the sociologist who was a member of the Joliet Prison classification board at the time of Touhy's commitment there, came forward and made public a story that he said had 'been commonly known for many years in many circles in Chicago'..."

c) Touhy, a gangster, claimed to have been in alliance with Cermak to defeat the Thompson-Capone alliance.

d) Use of different calibre bullets/handguns - this would only be risky if autopsies were common and compotent (or, at least, not subject to political interference a la JFK's). Hence my question about Cermak's. I don't know the answer.

Paul