Paul Rigby
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From the POV of the beneficiaries of the war on abstract nouns, the assassination is such a timely boon:
the nascent Caliphate gets nukes;
US special forces get bases on the Iran border...
http://indiapost.com/article/india/1711/
Benazir's last address: Pakistan is in dangerFriday, 12.28.2007, 10:22am (GMT-7)
ISLAMABAD: Minutes before she was assassinated, former premier Benazir Bhutto had said her Pakistan People's Party would "save the country" from extremists and terrorists if it was voted to power. "The country is in danger-- bomb blasts are taking place everywhere, be it Swat, South Waziristan or the Eid prayers in Charsadda.
We have to save the country with the power of the people," Bhutto told thousands of PPP supporters at Liaquat Bagh in Rawalpindi on Thursday. "I appeal all of you to vote for us to save the country," she repeatedly said in her address. The 54-year-old PPP chairperson praised her father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, saying he had made Pakistan's defense impregnable and put the country on the path of prosperity and democracy. "Nobody could dare to think of breaking the country or doing terror and extremist acts when the People's Party was in power.
But the country had to suffer whenever a dictator took over," she said. Bhutto said that PPP would never let its workers down after coming to power and there would be rule of law in the country. She referred to reports that foreign troops would be sent to help fight resurgent Taliban and al Qaida in the area bordering Afghanistan.
"Why should foreign troops come in? We can take care of this, I can take care of this, you can take care of this," she said. "Political orphans tried hard to delay the polls. They planned the proclamation of emergency rule in the country and wanted President (Pervez) Musharraf to stay in uniform for five more years but all such bids failed miserably," she said.
The 54-year-old leader, who died a few minutes later after she was shot by a suicide attacker, regretted that the year 2007 had witnessed the removal of the Chief Justice of Pakistan "twice", detention of judges of the superior judiciary and the military operation on Islamabad's Lal Masjid that resulted in the loss of over 100 lives.
She said that addressing unemployment, rising inflation and lack of healthcare and education facilities would top the PPP's agenda if it was elected to power.
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Ironically, she was wearing a bullet-proof vest, and should not have stuck her head out of the top of the vehicle.
From an Indian website boasting a number of impressively insightful posters:
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewtopic...p=435946#435946Bullets in abdomen will confirm that it is either armour piercing bullets, confirming army's involvement or someone shooting from inside the SUV, which means someone close to BB is involved in the assassination.
This also explains the hurry in burying the body without a proper post mortem.
Who was inside the car with BB? Why are they not being interviewed? Where is the driver of the SUV? What did he see? Why is none of the security personnel being interviewed. Questions... Questions... Let us see how this gets played out in the next few days.
Did Bhutto's bullet proof vest extend to cover her entire abdomen, I wonder?
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A brief tribute to the recently deceased Sylvan Fox is to be found here:
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Main_PageSylvan Fox Dies at 79
Dec 24, 2007: Sylvan Fox, Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times journalist and editor, died on Dec 22 at the age of 79. He was the author of The Unanswered Questions About President Kennedy's Assassination (1965), a fact omitted from his New York Times obituary (see below) and other coverage. The NYT has an online guestbook where tributes may be written.
Details of the single book on the case attributed to Fox can be found, among other places, here. Note the year of publication and the number of pages:
http://www.paperbackswap.com/book/details/...s+AssassinationISBN: 94826
Publisher: Award Books
Publication Date: 1965
Pages: 221
Book Type: Paperback
“If you prefer to believe that you have been given the final answers to the assassination, don't read this book. Otherwise, you are in for an unsettling experience...in the highest tradition of journalism,”
Edwyn Silberling, Chief of Organized Crime and Racketeering section of the US State Dept Of Justice under Robert Kennedy.
Americana Resources, however, currently offers what appears to be a follow-up volume published a decade on. Confusingly, a click on the photographic image of the book’s cover discloses the original title, Unanswered Questions; while a look at the number of pages reveals a different number, 237, as opposed to the original’s 221. Am I right in thinking that the title offered below was essentially a reprint of the original, with a brief update in the light of info emerging during Watergate?
http: //amres.com/catalogs/PLKB.aspSylvan Fox, "The Answered Questions About President Kennedy's Assassination," (Award Books, 1975, 237pp):
"Shatters the Warren Commission Cover-up...includes the latest revelations on "The CIA and the Cuban Connection."
Anyway, to the three obits I could find. By far the best is the last of the three. Predictably, perhaps, it came from a blogger:
newsday.com/news/obituaries/ny-lifox245513857dec24,0,1370528.storyNewsday.com
Pulitzer-winning journalist Sylvan Fox dies at 79
BY JENNIFER BARRIOS
jennifer.barrios@newsday.com
December 24, 2007
His aunt named him Sylvan Fox, saying that the name would look good in print.
That name appeared in print many times as Fox became an esteemed journalist who earned the field's top prize for his quick and elegant writing.
The former editor at Newsday and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist died on Saturday from complications of pneumonia. Fox was 79.
Yesterday, family and former colleagues remembered him as a dedicated and talented writer, with a knowledge base so vast that he seemed able to pluck nearly any fact from thin air.
Fox was born in Brooklyn on June 2, 1928. He studied piano and composition at the Juilliard School, meeting his future wife there but not earning a degree.
He received a bachelor's degree in philosophy at Brooklyn College, then moved to California, where he earned a master's degree in musicology from U.C. Berkeley.
But it wasn't until he found a reporting job at a small paper in upstate New York that he realized his true calling was journalism, said his wife, Gloria Fox.
"He found it absolutely what he wanted to do and he was very successful at it right from the beginning," she said.
Fox quickly advanced to several different papers in New York before landing a job as a reporter at the now-defunct New York World-Telegram and Sun.
It was as a rewrite man at that paper that he won the most prestigious prize in journalism in 1963, for his work the previous year writing about an airplane crash in Jamaica Bay that killed 95 people.
Fox spent hours taking notes from reporters in the field and updating the story for all seven editions of the paper, his wife said, capping the exhausting day by meeting her for dinner.
"The first thing he said to me was, 'If I ever am going to win a Pulitzer Prize, it would be for what I did today,'" she recalled.
Fox also worked at The New York Times in several positions, including that of bureau chief in wartime Saigon in 1972.
He left for a job at Newsday after "a very stressful time" in Vietnam, his wife said. Fox worked at Newsday first as an editor supervising coverage of Nassau County, and retired as editor of the editorial pages in 1988.
Jim Klurfeld, who took over the job when Fox retired, remembered him as a "consummate journalist."
"He was right to the point, a brilliant mind," Klurfeld said. "Sylvan was a great intellectual. There was no topic he didn't seem to know something about."
Howard Schneider, former editor of Newsday, remembered Fox as a tough editor who took pride in the newspaper.
"He could be imposing, even a stern figure, but he had a wry sense of humor," said Schneider, who was the Queens editor under Fox. "Whenever he was exasperated with my performance, he would say I was the son he wished he never had."
In addition to his wife, Fox is survived by a daughter, Erica Fox of Manhattan.
The funeral will be held today at noon at Gramercy Park Memorial Chapel in Manhattan. Fox will be interred at New Montefiore Cemetery in West Babylon.
Copyright © 2007, Newsday Inc.
The NYT version is distinguished, as the Mary Ferrell website notes (see above), by a characteristic piece of censorship:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/nyregion...nyt&emc=rssSylvan Fox, 79, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Dies
By Eric Konigsberg
December 23, 2007
Sylvan Fox, the first “rewrite man” to be singled out for a Pulitzer Prize, died on Saturday at New York University Medical Center. Mr. Fox, who also worked as a reporter and editor for The New York Times, was 79 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was complications from pneumonia, his wife, Gloria Fox, said.
Mr. Fox was a reporter at The New York World-Telegram & The Sun when, on March 1, 1962, he was part of a team assigned to cover an airplane crash on Long Island that killed all 95 passengers. While his fellow reporters at the paper rushed to the crash site and phoned him with their unprocessed notes, Mr. Fox calmly worked the facts into order and delivered an article within a half-hour of the accident.
He then rewrote the article for seven editions of the paper, adding new details as they came in. Within 90 minutes of the crash, he had produced a 3,000-word article. The Pulitzer was awarded to Mr. Fox and two colleagues in the now-obsolete category of “local story, edition time.”
From 1967 to 1973, Mr. Fox worked as a reporter and editor at The Times.
Mr. Fox grew up in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and was a classically trained pianist. He spent four years at the Juilliard School of Music, but left without a degree because of his decision to change his major from piano to musical composition.
It was at Juilliard that he met the woman who became his wife, Gloria Endleman, a fellow piano student. They married when he was 20 and she was 17. Mr. Fox graduated from Brooklyn College with a degree in philosophy, then earned a master’s degree, in musicology, from the University of California, Berkeley.
Mr. Fox worked as a reporter at several newspapers in upstate New York before he came to The World-Telegram as a rewrite man. He left the paper over a salary dispute in 1966 and took a job as the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner in charge of press relations. But he returned to journalism a year later when Arthur Gelb, The Times’s metropolitan editor, offered him a job.
On Mr. Fox’s first day at the paper, according to Mr. Gelb’s memoir, news broke of a bank robbery in Brooklyn, and Mr. Fox was instructed to “forget about orientation and get to work on the story, which was tailor-made for him,” Mr. Gelb wrote. The following morning’s edition of The Times carried Mr. Fox’s byline on the front page.
Mr. Fox held several other jobs at The Times, including a stint as the Saigon bureau chief in 1973. He then spent 15 years at Newsday, where he was editorial page editor from 1979 to 1988.
Besides his wife, Mr. Fox is survived by a daughter, Erica.
The blogger responsible for the third and final obit, “balev,” includes a link back to a thread on this forum. Plainly we are dealing with a sage and discerning critic:
http://inmyheartblog.wordpress.com/2007/12...st-dies-dec-22/Sylvan Fox, 79, U.S., journalist, dies, Dec. 22
Posted on December 26, 2007 by balev
Sylvan Fox, 79, a journalist whose beats ranged from Vietnam, to the Kennedy assassination, to a memorable plane crash, and who won a Pulitzer Prize as a newspaper rewrite man, died Saturday, Dec. 22, 2007, of complications from pneumonia.
Fox won his Pulitzer Prize for being part of a team covering an airplane crash on Long Island, New York, in which all 95 passengers were killed. Fox was in the office of the now-defunct World-Telegram & Sun newspaper fielding all the field reporters’ calls and then turning out a complete story 30 minutes after the crash. He kept rewriting the article and turned in a 3,000-word piece within 90 minutes of the event.
He later took his wife out to dinner, she told Long Island’s Newsday, where Fox worked before his retirement.
“The first thing he said to me was, ‘If I ever am going to win a Pulitzer Prize, it would be for what I did today,’” she said.
(In My Heart editor’s note: This incident tells us a few things. First, as a journalist, I can admire the speed with which Fox turned out his prose. Remember - this was in the days of manual typewriters, where editing and rewriting were slower than in today’s computerized world. Plus, despite what must have been a crazy few hours, as the paper kept “replating” the front page with updated details, Fox was able to leave the story and his office after his final deadline. In today’s world, the reporter would likely be up all night updating the paper’s website, writing a blog entry, filing an audio report and then being shipped off to TV talk shows to hype the story.)
But the plane crash was neither the first nor the last story in Fox’s career.
Fox grew up in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., and graduated from Tilden H.S. in 1945. He spent four years at the Juilliard School of Music, but left without a degree. He met his future wife, Gloria Endleman, also a piano student, at Juilliard. They married when he was 20 and she was 17.
Fox worked as a reporter at several newspapers in upstate New York after receiving a Master’s in music composition. His first newspaper job convinced him journalism was his calling.
“He found it absolutely what he wanted to do and he was very successful at it right from the beginning,” Gloria Fox told Newsday.
While at the World-Telegram, Fox wrote one of the first books questioning the findings of the Warren Commission inquest into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The book, “The Unanswered Questions About President Kennedy’s Assassination,” is long out of print, but is frequently cited in Kennedy assassination literature.
James Tracy Crown, author of “The Kennedy Literature: A Bibliographical Essay on John F. Kennedy,” wrote:
“The question about the official version of the Dallas slaying raised by Fox’s widely distributed paperback seem to have spurred a number of other skeptics to continue their research. Fox’s critique may have been the result of his job as city editor of the late New York World-Telegram & Sun, a paper where the deep press room doubts about the government version of Dallas kept popping into print much more frequently than in other papers.”
Fox left the struggling World-Telegram in 1966, which folded soon afterward, for a post as New York Police deputy commissioner for press relations, but returned to journalism a year later and began a six-year stint as a reporter and editor at the New York Times that included a tour as Saigon bureau chief in the waning days of the Vietnam War.
While he was in Vietnam, Fox wrote exposes of the South Vietnam’s brutal use of so-called “tiger cages” to house anti-government prisoners.
One website’s review of the tiger cage scandal focused on Fox’s reporting:
A firsthand account of the treatment given prisoners under the Saigon regime that appeared in the New York Times March 2, issue details the conditions and methods of torture used. The information comes from four former prisoners and was secured in an interview conducted by Sylvan Fox. The prisoners have been held in the infamous Con Son Island prison. They were released from that prison on February 16.
The former prisoners, fearing for their lives, refused to have their names published. A 23-year-old Buddhist activist told Fox that he was “beaten and tortured off and on for a whole year” at the national police headquarters in Saigon after his arrest in December, 1967. He described being beaten with a stick “until I vomited blood or until the blood came out of my eyes or ears.” His jailers manacled prisoners’ hands behind their backs and then hung them from the ceilings by the handcuffs until they became unconscious.
The ex-prisoner described the notorious “tiger cages” as small, concrete trenches with bars on top. In these cells, as many as seven prisoners would be squeezed into a space five feet wide, six feet long and six feet deep.
Fox left the Times after his Vietnam assignment, which his wife said was a “very stressful time” for Newsday on Long Island, first as an editor supervising local coverage and then as editorial page editor until his retirement in 1988.
Jim Klurfeld, who took over the job when Fox retired, remembered him as a “consummate journalist,” Newsday reported.
“He was right to the point, a brilliant mind,” Klurfeld said. “Sylvan was a great intellectual. There was no topic he didn’t seem to know something about.”
Howard Schneider, former editor of Newsday, remembered Fox as a tough editor who took pride in the newspaper.
“He could be imposing, even a stern figure, but he had a wry sense of humor,” said Schneider, who was the Queens editor under Fox. “Whenever he was exasperated with my performance, he would say I was the son he wished he never had.”
Besides his wife, Fox is survived by a daughter, Erica.
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Try here: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/...iew#cnnSTCVideo
The video showing the handgun is entitled "Details on how Bhutto died," which is 3 mins 10 secs long.
Clearer footage on this Indian website: http://broadband.indiatimes.com/videoshow/2660784.cms
Two stills from video here:
http://www.teeth.com.pk/blog/2007/12/29/mo...fore-the-blast/
This intrigued me, as it seemed eerily reminiscent of something I remember reading on the Colosio assassination in Mexico:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/sto...ernational/home
Bhutto aides cast doubt on official account of her deathReuters and Associated Press
December 29, 2007 at 8:23 AM EST
Ms. Rehman did not see the attacker, and was looking the other way just prior to the attack as she and a colleague suddenly noticed they were surrounded by unfamiliar faces.
"We were seeing people who were unfamiliar suddenly wearing Bhutto badges," she said.
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Try here: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/...iew#cnnSTCVideo
The video showing the handgun is entitled "Details on how Bhutto died," which is 3 mins 10 secs long.
Clearer footage on this Indian website: http://broadband.indiatimes.com/videoshow/2660784.cms
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Re: gunfire...
There was footage shown on TV here where you could see at least one person firing a pistol at her. You could see it right before the assassin detonated.
I'll see if the footage is online somewhere.
Try here: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/...iew#cnnSTCVideo
The video showing the handgun is entitled "Details on how Bhutto died," which is 3 mins 10 secs long.
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Karachi, 27 Dec. (AKI) - (by Syed Saleem Shahzad) - A spokesperson for the al-Qaeda terrorist network has claimed responsibility for the death on Thursday of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
...Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid ...
Very obliging. I wonder if he was paid in dollars - or euros?
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However, one of Miss Bhutto's aide rejected the government's explanation of her death as a "pack of lies".
Telegraph TV: Benazir Bhutto's funeral in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh
Brigadier Javed Cheema, a ministry spokesman, said Miss Bhutto had died from a head wound she sustained when she smashed against the sunroof's lever as she tried to shelter inside the car.
"The lever struck near her right ear and fractured her skull," Mr Cheema said.
But the explanation was ridiculed by Farooq Naik, Miss Bhutto's top lawyer and a senior official in her Pakistan People's Party.
"It is baseless. It is a pack of lies," he said.
"Two bullets hit her, one in the abdomen and one in the head. It was a serious security lapse."
Love to know how a bullet hit her in the abdomen if the shooter was indeed firing from below - and Bhutto was protected from the chest down!
The acting head of Miss Bhutto's party, Amin Fahim, admitted that she could have survived the blast if she had not stood up through the sunroof of her vehicle to acknowledge her supporters."She fell down in the seat and we thought she was unconscious. She could have survived had she been sitting," said Mr Fahim.
Doubt it - see above!
Does anyone have a reliable source for the inhabitants of Bhutto's vehicle at the time of the shooting?
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...a narrative has now been established which permits the US to depose/dispose of Musharraf and blame it on either Al Qaeda or Bhutto's supporters.
Interim replacement: General Ashfaq Kiyani, loyal servant of the American totalitarian imperium
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,,2233092,00.html
Sharif to follow, it would appear, but what then?
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From the POV of the beneficiaries of the war on abstract nouns, the assassination is such a timely boon:
the nascent Caliphate gets nukes;
US special forces get bases on the Iran border;
India is compelled to move even further into the sea powers embrace;
the MIC gets a huge shot in the arm.
And that's only four. Yes, one sees at once why we can discount CIA involvement.
Three more:
the US protection racket can rachet up a level to ensure the newly-menaced Gulf States continue to trade oil in dollars; and spend their vast reserves on yet more US weaponry they will likely never use and will never really control;
the next US President will have her foreign policy options determined before she gets her feet under the White House desk;
a narrative has now been established which permits the US to despose of Musharraf and blame it on either Al Qaeda or Bhutto's supporters.
Favourite nonsense question of the moment comes from the Times online: Can Pakistan democracy survive?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...o&HBX_OU=50
Bronwen Maddox, take a bow.
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As I write, we have been told that the cause of death was head trauma caused when Bhutto dropped from her through-the-sunroof perch after having been shot. Immediately we are put in mind of the Rabin hit, and how evidence suggests that he might have been killed after initial shots were fired and he entered his security vehicle.
Who was inside her SUV?
Outstanding - the practical application of the key paradigm.
From the POV of the beneficiaries of the war on abstract nouns, the assassination is such a timely boon:
the nascent Caliphate gets nukes;
US special forces get bases on the Iran border;
India is compelled to move even further into the sea powers embrace;
the MIC gets a huge shot in the arm.
And that's only four. Yes, one sees at once why we can discount CIA involvement.
Paul
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Paul-- how about some more Starnes articles for Christmas. I have been moderately good.
A second Christmas cracker for you, Nat, and this one with a distinctly local relevance. It’s a Starnes column from the autumn of 1965 on a rarely described, yet utterly crucial development, of the period: The CIA campaign to remake the Republican Party by destroying its liberal Eastern Establishment wing. Starnes saw the actions of William F. Buckley, Jr. – by whom he was “man-marked” by the Agency in the pages of Scripps-Howard in 1964 – as an attack on something even deeper (highlighted):
The Washington Daily New, 29 October 1965, p.25The Picture in New York Is Negative
By Richard Starnes
It can be argued that no sane person cares what sort of government New York City finally collapses under, that its docile proles have long since forfeited their right to a municipal corporation with some elements of decency and efficiency.
New York haters (which includes most of the rest of the country) profess to feel this way already but it is a shortsighted view. If New York can’t be made to work, then our civilization is doomed, for New York is no more than an early example of the city-state mutation that is overtaking all of us.
For this reason it is important to watch the forthcoming election in the nation’s biggest city, however disagreeable the task may become. It is moreover most important to probe for some sensible rationale in the antics of one William F. Buckley Jr., for Buckley is the force that seems destined to deny New York its last chance for effective government.
What makes Buckley run? Why is he so implacably determined to destroy the candidacy of John Lindsay? We can dismiss Mr. Buckley’s own apologia, which is largely pious doubletalk having to do with restoring the vestal purity of the Republican Party. The truth is far more complicated, and it is sad to speculate that Mr. Buckley himself is very likely unaware of it.
And yet, it is a truth that matches the facts of Mr. Buckley’s destructive candidacy, just as it matches the facts of Sen. Goldwater’s somewhat larger enterprise last year.
Sen. Goldwater, of course, did not want to win. Beyond that, he wanted to lose on as large a scale as possible. In his conscious mind, which rarely reaches a plateau suitable to cope with electronic gadgets for flag raising, Sen. Goldwater is horrified at such a suggestion. But it is true.
The fact is that the Goldwaters and Buckleys of this world, the Birchers and other such filberts, are united in a desperate attempt to prove that self-government will not work. They do not oppose Mr. Lindsay because he might not be a good major, but simply because they are terrified at the thought he might be a good one.
Their progenitors hated and feared FDR not because he couldn’t make the New Deal work, but for fear he would make it work. Sen. Goldwater probably never really understood what he was doing, but what he was doing was bending every effort toward destroying the two-party system, which is an essential ingredient of effective democratic government.
Mr. Buckley, an intellectual attitudinizer who poses as a right-wing Republican, is no such thing. He is a philosophical anarchist, dedicated in the present instance to proving that the people of New York are doltish swine who are incapable of ruling themselves. There is no better means of doing this than to assure that the sad, gray little man who is Mayor Wagner’s residual legatee is elected. If he succeeds (as he appears to be in some danger of doing) he will surely prove it, because the worn-out old hacks in the Democratic fold have spent two decades showing they are incompetent to deal with the city’s problems.
Mr. Lindsay is not the target. Mr. Buckley, like Sen. Goldwater before him, is persuaded that ordinary people are not capable of ordering their own affairs. The fight in New York is on this point and on this point only, and for that reason it is important to everyone in the nation.
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Paul-- how about some more Starnes articles for Christmas. I have been moderately good.
For anyone who hasn't read these Starns articles PLEASE DO SO. I was astonished at the open reference to the division between the CIA and the military. Nothing quite like these primary sources to show how palpable the rift between the CIA and the administration was in 1963!
The wish of New York's finest public educator must be gratified - in the battle for youthful hearts and minds, Nat, you're all we have! (Or so it sometimes seems...)
Here's Dick Starnes with an early piece on the newly emergent CIA line of defence that was to carry through to the late 1980s. Note the debut of the Angletonian "Monster Plot" nonsense:
The Washington Daily News, 11 October 1965, p.31Undercover and Underhand
By Richard Starnes
The Central Intelligence Agency has undertaken a long term task in reconstructing its public image, a reflection which heretofore has swung between the extremes of sinister empire building and ordinary bureaucratic all-thumbsmanship.
The grand design is lovely in its simplicity: Criticism and critics are to be suppressed and/or discredited; and simultaneously the large espionage apparatus is to be presented in the best possible light.
There is, to be sure, nothing original in the CIA’s techniques. Any reporter bright enough and tough enough to cross the large and unlovely spy agency knows full well that he will be assailed and blackguarded in a disgracefully underhanded manner.
Two notable (and notably unmoved) victims of this technique are the authors of the best book to date on the CIA, “The Invisible Government.” The authors, David Wise and Thomas Ross, have lately experienced a renewed episode of this sort of shabby efflorescence.
A notoriously complaisant spokesman for such organisms as the CIA wrote recently that any other nation would have hanged of imprisoned the authors, which could lead only to the conclusion that economic reprisals are not the only fate the powerful spy agency would like to visit on reporters it deems wayward.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk even joined the attacks when he told a recent audience that “The Invisible Government” was being widely used by communist agents in Asia and Africa and that it was, moreover, replete with errors of fact.
The first charge may well be true but it is not true that the book is inaccurate. To my knowledge the CIA has failed to show that it contains any significant inaccuracies. As to its alleged use by communists, it should be pointed out that its authors have done what they could to avoid this by refusing to sanction translated editions in communist bloc nations.
Apart from the routine blackguarding of journalists who err, the CIA has lately undertaken a curious exercise in historical syllogism. In the last fortnight it has circulated in the House and Senate, and elsewhere in the Nation’s Capital, a document purporting to blueprint a master Soviet plan to “defame and discredit” the American spy apparatus. The CIA describes a “Bureau of Disinformation” established by the Russian KGB in 1959, and to it lays the major role in the CIA busting that is said to be afoot.
The question occurs why, if the vile conspiracy has been underway for six years, the CIA is only now warning our lawgivers of it: More important, of course, is the CIA’s heavy borrowing from the tarnished techniques made infamous by the late Joe McCarthy.
In his ultimate paranoia, Sen. McCarthy saw the hand of communist conspiracy in every breath of criticism directed at him. You were for him and all his wicked foolishness, or you were a slavering Bolshevik bent upon impressing American womanhood into vile servitude in Red Army brothels.
With some superficial refinements, this is the path upon which the CIA has apparently embarked. Communists are its critics, hence it is implicit that all its critics are communists. It is an error that apprentice logicians frequently commit, and it is a sad earnest of the CIA’s misunderstanding of the role of a government agency in a democracy.
Paul
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Yes, Blair's Attorney General - the man who ruled legal the blatantly illegal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq - is working for Moscow in destabilising the current ruler of Georgia. I wonder which Russian intel front paid for Goldsmith's jaunt?
Of course, and rather more sanely, it might just be Tisdall's original story was little more than a Foreign Office/MI6 piece of nonsense; and the real drivers of change in puppet in Georgia are our old friends, the CIA and its lapdogs in MI6.
This morning's press offered confirmation that Tisdall - and The Guardian - lied in its account of who was seeling to overthrow the current Georgian regime. Tisdall's column should properly be renamed "MI6/CIA Briefing." Who served up this proof? Why, that well known organ of Moscow disinformation, The Guardian. Note, incidentally, the continued role of the legal "beard" of the illegal assault - and mass murder of the inhabitants of - Iraq, Lord Goldsmith:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/st...2232001,00.html
Robert Booth, “Georgian oligarch claims he is assassination target,” The Guardian, Monday, 24 December 2007, p.7A Surrey-based billionaire who is seeking to become president of the former Soviet republic of Georgia claims he is being targeted in an assassination plot.
Badri Patarkatsishvili, who amassed a £6bn fortune from the privatisation of state industries in Russia in the 1990s, has hired lawyers including Lord Goldsmith, the former attorney general, after he received taped evidence of an assassin apparently being briefed to kill him.
Methods discussed in the 45-minute audio tape included a plan to murder him in the UK or Israel, where he also has a home, or as he flies in his private plane from Tiblisi, the Georgian capital, to Batumi on the Black Sea. Patarkatsishvili also claimed that six to eight weeks ago a squad of four Georgians came to London, "sent to do something against me".
Lord Goldsmith said yesterday Patarkatsishvili was taking the threat "very seriously". He added: "I am aware that he has given instruction to other advisers that police be informed of the threat. Debevoise & Plimpton has been retained to represent him and the managers for other investments in Georgia in connection with his presidential election campaign, protection of the campaign and the protection of assets in Georgia."
Elections are due on January 5, but Patarkatsishvili has delayed his return to Georgia because he feels unsafe.
He helped finance the "rose revolution" that swept the current president, Mikhail Saakashvili, to power four years ago. Then relations soured. Patarkatsishvili backed opposition protests in Georgia last month in which hundreds were injured and a state of emergency was called.
Police stormed and took off air the Imedi television channel, which was founded by Patarkatsishvili and is managed by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Standard Bank, a Georgian commercial bank which is closely linked to the tycoon, has been taken over by state administrators.
Patarkatsishvili has described the current regime as "a dictatorial junta" and said in an interview last month: "My election slogan will be 'Georgia without Saakashvili is Georgia without terror'."
He told the Sunday Times this weekend: "I have 120 bodyguards but I know that's not enough. I don't feel safe anywhere and that is why I'm particularly not going to Georgia."
Patarkatsishvili claimed he heard about the plot to kill him 10 days ago. The taped conversation is thought to be between Uvais Akhmadov, a Chechen warlord, and an official in Georgia's interior ministry.
According to transcripts published in the Sunday Times, the official described Patarkatsishvili as "a political problem" and said Georgia did not want to be seen to be involved in an assassination abroad.
"Because of that I called you. This person is very frequently in London, constantly. In a month he'll spend two weeks there, two weeks in Israel. I've been given a clear order to check whether there is the possibility on your side to help us in this business ...
"We want this person to disappear completely, with his escorts, with everything. So that everyone basically disappears."
A spokesman for the Georgian embassy in London said the alleged plot "sounded like a conspiracy theory most probably designed to boost a presidential candidate's profile".
In answer to my initial challenge, the evidence is now in: Novosti told the truth, the Guardian lied.
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Jim Murray Contact sheet with many thanks to John Woods. Hard to imagine all this trouble over a skull fragment, when Harry Holmes throws them in the garbage. Walthers appears to be keenly interested. No surprise that Walthers would have changed his story after-the-fact. Anyone have his original statements? I don't find anything in the DPD files except one report by 'B Walters [sic]' and it's not related to a .45 round.
Lee,
Do you have a copy of the documentary "The Garrison Tapes"? If so, just over half an hour into it, you'll find a remarkably clear image of both the discharged shell and the man retrieving it.
Paul
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<B>I'll share with everyone what Gary Mack had...
I cannot explain the story told by Sgt. Steve Ellis for he, based on the Paschall and Bell films, was in the underpass ahead of Curry at the time of the fatal shot. Perhaps like many others over the years, Ellis embellished his story? After all, who would want to admit an assassination had just taken place a few feet behind him yet the officer never knew it until another cop, Jim Chaney, told him? Gary Mack"[/i]
And what of Chaney's own words, as supported by Altgens #5, and other supporting testimony? Or is that all a bit too difficult to deal with in the absence of a more comprehensive briefing?
You're in questionable 'company' if you are 'tight' w/ Mr. Mack...I've called him out publicly in another thread to post publicly - or go back to Langley.What oft was thought, Peter, but ne'er so well expressed. Reminds me of the utility of a long-forgotten dig at Edmund Burke:
Oft have I wondered that on Dallas ground
No poison toad has e'er been found.
Stands revealed the secret of that city's great lack
She saved it all to create a Mack!
With apologies to Burns.
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I'm not a JFK buff, but I don't think Robin thinks it was the mafia. Last I read (and I don't always read JFK related articles), he considered that the LBJ connection was very important.
David,
Without labouring the point, that was Ramsay's position a few years back; and I'm no more impressed by the LBJ thesis, either. His early insistence on the Mob's centrality to events Elm induced in me a degree of suspicion I've never quite been able to shake off.
That noted, it would be churlish not to acknowledge his great work on other subjects, and my own debt to him: I think the Round Table material, for example, consistently outstanding, and something that has changed my view of things considerably, even if the US end of it - from Mahan on - is notably absent. For that, and much else besides, I thank him.
Have a good Christmas,
Paul
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Rosa Moncton is, in my opinion, a horrible witch.
Couldn't agree more. Absolutely ghastly. Typical upper-crust RC-ers: more establishment than the establishment.
Btw Paul, have you read the latest LOBSTER and Garrick Alder's very able dissection of the cocked-up cover-up that was Operation Paget? very telling, I thought.I look forward to borrowing a friend's copy when he gets home from his travels. There's fascinating stuff in most editions, but I rate Ramsay on JFK and Elm Street rank old rope: "It looks like the Mafia and it always did," or some rubbish, wasn't it?
Paul
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Well! (with perceived English accent), it took long enough, but it seems you finally have a Dianagate! Congratulations...may the truth follow. She was murdered, I'm quite sure.
Peter,
The truth never follows in Britain. For that could lead to meaningful accountability - and that would never do.
Paul
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The story of Rosa Monckton’s “friendship” with Diana is an important one. For years, Fayed has insisted that the relationship between his son and Diana was serious: The establishment has routinely trotted out Rosa Monckton to pour scorn on the very notion. Seems like the “mad Egyptian” had Rosa sussed.
This is an excellent piece on Rosa Monckton's background and the improbability of her "friendship" with Diana:
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Article in today's Guardian by Mark Lawson on the death of Diana compares it to the death of JFK.
Mark Lawson
Friday December 15, 2006
The Guardian
So what, according to the doubters, was the motive of the palace and MI6 for having Diana killed? Because, stupid, she was pregnant with a half-Muslim half-brother to the second in line to the throne.
Stevens, though, skewers this theory with two types of blood. A sample from Diana lacked the procreative hormones; while Rosa Monckton, a friend who holidayed with the princess 10 days before her death, is insistent that Diana was menstruating during that trip, a fact that a close female companion might reasonably know.
Now, of course, our spooks are more than capable of having swapped Diana's tell-tale test-tube for the blood of a virgin Parisian nun, but can we really believe that Rosa Monckton is such a lackey of the British establishment that she would heroically invent this period detail, while also keeping her journalist husband, Dominic Lawson (no relation), from the story of the century?
Two pieces in this morning’s British press covering a dramatic Friday in the Diana inquest. In one, yet another link in the case to Britain’s far-right MI6 is whitewashed; but not in the other. The paper which sought to hide the former is, yes, The Guardian, our fearless “liberal” daily.
The story of Rosa Monckton’s “friendship” with Diana is an important one. For years, Fayed has insisted that the relationship between his son and Diana was serious: The establishment has routinely trotted out Rosa Monckton to pour scorn on the very notion. Seems like the “mad Egyptian” had Rosa sussed.
First up, the censored MI6 version from Owen Boycott in this morning’s Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,331568524-103573,00.html
Now for some proper journalism from the Daily Telegraph’s Nick Allen:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml...5/ndiana315.xml
Ian Burnett, QC, counsel for the inquest, said that Mr Fayed had stated: "Rosa Monckton was used to discredit my statements about a relationship between my son and Princess Diana. Rosa Monckton established a relationship with Princess Diana simply to pass information she obtained to MI6."Both Monckton’s husband, journalist Dominic Lawson, and her brother, Anthony, have previously been identified as either an MI6 asset (hubby) or officer (her brother). Try this link for background:
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For the benefit of those without the Richard Trask book cited by John Costella, here is the relevant extract:
That Day in Dallas: The Photographers Capture on Film The Day President Kennedy Died (Danvers, Mass: Yeoman Press, expanded edition, 2000), p.115 & p.119:
At about this time Bill Lord of ABC News did a brief interview of Chaney, recording his activities for a broadcast over WFAA television. Chaney recalled of the motorcade incident:
"I was riding on the right rear fender. We had proceeded west on Elm Street at approximately 15 to 20 miles per hour. We heard the first shot. I thought it was a motorcycle backfiring and, uh, I looked back over to the left and also President Kennedy looked back over his left shoulder. Then the, uh, second shot came, well then I looked back just in time by the second bullet. He slumped forward into Mrs. Kennedy’s lap, and uh, it was apparent to me that we’re being fired upon. I went ahead of the President’s car to inform Chief Curry that the President had been hit. And then he instructed us over the air to take him to Parkland Hospital, and he had Parkland standing by. I went on up ahead of the – to notify the officer that was leading the escort that he had been hit and we’re going to have to move out. [The shot,] it was back over my right shoulder” (24).”
(24) Bill Lord interview of James Chaney for WFAA-TV, 11/22/63.
Hargis confirms Chaney in early newspaper interview:
“Motorcade Cop Tells How It Happened,” Sunday News (New York), 24 November 1963, p.25:Dallas, Nov. 23 (Special) - B. W. Hargis, 31, Dallas motorcycle patrolman who was riding in President Kennedy’s motorcade, gave this account today of the assassination:
“We turned left onto Elm St. off Houston, about half a block from where it happened. I was right alongside the rear fender on the left hand side of the President’s car, near Mrs. Kennedy.
When I heard the first explosion, I knew it was a shot. I thought that Gov. Connally had been hit when I saw him turn toward the President with a real surprised look.
Splattered With Blood
“The President then looked like he was bent over or that he was leaning toward the Governor, talking to him.
As the President straightened back up, Mrs. Kennedy turned toward him, and that was when he got hit in the side of his head, spinning it around.
I was splattered with blood.
Then I felt something hit me. It could have been concrete or something, but I thought at first I might have been hit.
Then I saw the limousine stop, and I parked my motorcycle at the side of the road, got off and drew my gun.
And They Took Off
“Then this Secret Service agent (in the President’s car) got his wits about him and they took off. The motorcycle officer on the right side of the car was Jim Chaney. He immediately went forward and announced to the chief that the President had been shot.”
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Yes, of course, there are inconsistencies in the statements, but one can cull some truth from them, as long as one fights the desire to cherry-pick the evidence to prove a point.
But, Pat, that's precisely what you've done - cherry-picked them to support the proposition that the films are genuine.
The pattern in eyewitness statements is quite clear. They're refashioned, chiefly by the FBI, to support the films. If the films were genuine, there would have been no such need.
The films prove that Chaney didn't pull his scooter forward of the limo.Quite the wrong way round: the eyewitness statements make nonsense of the films!
And here's the rub - the films don't match Altgens #5.
Paul
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I hope John will add to this thread, now that he has "released" his smoking gun.
In case you did not hear him explain it on Dr. Jim's Dynamic Duo internet radio
show last nght, he presents UNIMPEACHABLE WITNESSES (police chief, secret
service chief, policemen, etc) who describe an innocuous event (at the time) all
verifying that MOTORCOP CHENEY IMMEDIATELY RODE FORWARD IN THE
MOTORCADE TO INFORM THOSE IN THE LEAD CAR OF THE SHOOTING.
Extant films and photos DO NOT SHOW CHENEY GOING FORWARD as described.
There is no reason for anyone to lie about Cheney's ride, THEREFORE THE FILMS
AND PHOTOS ARE NECESSARILY FORGED. All describe the actions of Cheney
very consistently and believeably.
Any jury in the world would accept this testimony over questionable photos.
Jack
For the benefit of those without the Richard Trask book cited by John Costella, here is the relevant extract:
That Day in Dallas: The Photographers Capture on Film The Day President Kennedy Died (Danvers, Mass: Yeoman Press, expanded edition, 2000), p.115 & p.119:
At about this time Bill Lord of ABC News did a brief interview of Chaney, recording his activities for a broadcast over WFAA television. Chaney recalled of the motorcade incident:
“I was riding on the right rear fender. We had proceeded west on Elm Street at approximately 15 to 20 miles per hour. We heard the first shot. I thought it was a motorcycle backfiring and, uh, I looked back over to the left and also President Kennedy looked back over his left shoulder. Then the, uh, second shot came, well then I looked back just in time by the second bullet. He slumped forward into Mrs. Kennedy’s lap, and uh, it was apparent to me that we’re being fired upon. I went ahead of the President’s car to inform Chief Curry that the President had been hit. And then he instructed us over the air to take him to Parkland Hospital, and he had Parkland standing by. I went on up ahead of the – to notify the officer that was leading the escort that he had been hit and we’re going to have to move out. [The shot,] it was back over my right shoulder” (24).”(24) Bill Lord interview of James Chaney for WFAA-TV, 11/22/63.
Bhutto Murder
in Political Conspiracies
Posted
An omission now rectified:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml.../wbhutto130.xml
The interviewee is "Dr. Safdar Abbassi, her chief political adviser, who was sitting behind her."
Not a hint of shot from within Bhutto's vehicle, of course, but then not a mention of the fact that Bhutto had to be transferred to another car from the motorcade en route to hospital. For that minor detail, see Sherry Rehman's interview with CNN anchor Stephen Frazier at this link:
Abassi was one of two major beneficiaries from, among other factors, the shake up in Bhutto's security following the Karachi attack on Bhutto in October: http://www.paktribune.com/news/index.shtml?194124
The piece in question is entitled: "Rehman Malik sidetracked by Naheed Khan and Safdar Abbasi," Friday, 9 November 2007
For the rejigging of Bhutto's security arrangements in October post-Karachi, follow this link:
http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=10706
So, first Malik gets the job of ensuring Bhutto stays alive, then Naheed Khan and Safdar Abbasi sideline him. Khan and Abassi are reportedly in the SUV when Bhutto is shot. Abassi is seemingly unaware of any suspicious activity within Bhutto's vehicle at the time of her death.
I would be very interested in hearing from any Pakistani readers with more direct knowledge of the background of both Khan and Abassi.