Anthony Thorne
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Posts posted by Anthony Thorne
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Prominent scientist Richard Garwin joined IBM in the 50’s, stayed there till his retirement from the company in the 90’s, and took part in the 1982 Committee on Ballistic Acoustics report that was formed by the National Academy of Sciences to discredit the HSCA’s claim of there being a ‘high probability’ of a second gunman.
Garwin also served on - and, from memory, at one point led - the Defense Science Board, and remained on the DSB for decades. In the early 80’s, Congressman Jack Brooks led an attack against the DSB in multiple hearings, and quoted claims of them being an ‘old boys network’ of defense contractors and high ranking military officials, using their position to make profits for the weapons industry. Next time you look at that photo of LBJ taking the oath of office on Air Force One, take note of Brooks on the right side of the photo. Years later, he was the only politician keeping a serious eye on what the DSB was doing.
In late 1988, the DSB released a Summer Study warning the Pentagon that declining military expenditures would imminently threaten the entire US technology base, with a flow on effect for the country’s ability to maintain a global lead in weapons technology. Sec Def Frank Carlucci expressed alarm, and the issue became a key point of discussion among the Principals Committee of the National Security Council - the wing of the NSC that operated without Presidential oversight. Future Lockheed President Norm Augustine helped assemble the DSB report, and his Martin Marietta employee John Deutch, later head of the CIA, also assisted. Augustine spoke at a series of Army briefings to congress in 1990 and again stressed the importance of the US maintaining a lead with its technology base.
. EVIDENCE OF DECISION author Graham Allison - Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and on the NSC Principals Committee - served as an advisor to Carlucci and Dick Cheney through this period. After the DSB report was issued, Allison began running a series of American Assembly conferences for the Council of Foreign Relations, gathering together military, intelligence, political and media figures to discuss the future directions of the US following the Cold War. In 1991, the American Assembly conference was titled RETHINKING AMERICA’S SECURITY: BEYOND COLD WAR TO NEW WORLD ORDER, and a higher than usual number of neoconservatives attended. Samuel Huntington attended and would write his CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS book soon afterwards, and Paul Wolfowitz spoke about ‘The New Defense Strategy’, a precursor to the infamous Defense Planning Guidance report he released several months later in early 1992. L Paul Bremer, then at Kissinger Associates, also attended. Bremer was formerly Reagan’s ‘ambassador at large’ for counter-terrorism, and later became an executive for Marsh & McLennan, though from memory he didn’t bother to note how many of his employees had died when he was interviewed about the attacks on 9/11.
Back to Richard Garwin, if you scroll through the JASON reports for 1997 you can see one particular report from October of that year, with a group of JASON scientists performing a study for the Pentagon. Garwin was one of the lead scientists of the study group. The report discusses using nano-technology to pursue new methods of high-explosives, with the Pentagon seeking ‘advances in the field’. The JASON report gave advice as to how the military could best achieve those advances in nanothermite explosives. Two weeks after the report was delivered, MITRE head Victor DeMarines, a recipient, was working alongside Phillip Zelikow on his Harvard Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group - co-run by John Deutch - and Garwin commenced several months work alongside Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld on the latter’s Missile Commission. Several DSB members appear in Zelikow’s group, and more are recipients of the JASON report, so it was quite a month for them. The report has been online for years, and has been overlooked by pretty much everyone.https://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/he.pdf
That same fortnight at Harvard, btw, DeMarines spoke at a conference, and in response to a question, whimsically voiced aloud how injecting fake simulated aircraft into a radar would be a useful method of warfare during an attack on another country. If I get time this weekend, I’ll post a screenshot of the transcript..
You can trace all that back to the DSB Summer Study from 1988. And Brooks was possibly the only politician to notice that something bad was going on with the DSB.
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Good list so far. I’ll add Mal Hyman’s Burying the Lead, which is very solid. I’m reading it right now. Donald Gibson’s two books are also recommended.
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Thanks Joseph, I'll have a listen. I enjoyed all your Black Op Radio podcasts a few years back.
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The O’Neill interview has now had more than two million views.
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A very good article that I'm still digesting. The part that noted a guy in the narrative as being a member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was funny. Checking Wikipedia, that band went through more than a dozen different configurations with many different members, so good luck in figuring out who the guy was.
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Cool, thank you Larry. I'll be paying attention to all of your works that you've cited there.
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Larry, is this (with the chapters cited) the book on the JFK case that you mentioned you had been working on? Or is that another volume?
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As usual with MSN articles, the 'backlash' sparked by Rogan is two anonymous idiots they quote from Twitter.
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The full interview has received nearly half a million views already, and will shift a lot more copies of O'Neill's book.
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1975 Gary Cartwright article on Ruby. Some colourful stuff, and a few too many Warren Commission supporters quoted for my tastes.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/who-was-jack-ruby/
Article on Bud Shrake, mentioning his novel.
https://www.thewittliffcollections.txstate.edu/research/a-z/shrake.html
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Jim, it’s a novel.
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Both guys knew Ruby, apparently.
From an Amazon review.
“The strength of the book is capturing the selfishness of the era.Rarely have more self-absorbed characters been put on print. The one of the great pleasures of the book is identifying the real life parallels. John Lee is Shrake himself. Buster is Gary Cartwright. Jingo, the star stripper, is the Jago,Ruby's star attraction. Big Earl and Little Earl are H.L. Hunt and Hassie Hunt. Clint Murchison, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Cowboys' QB Don Meredith,Shrake's literary twin Dan Jenkins, and North Dallas Forty author Peter Gent all show up in various incarnations.”
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Rob,
The Muckrock guys have a whole site dedicated to lodging FOIA requests and helping others do the same.
Guide to lodging FOIA requests.
https://www.muckrock.com/project/foia-101-tips-and-tricks-to-make-you-a-transparency-master-234/
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There’s a different Dylan you need to worry about.
Jaffe’s fellow executive producer on this project is listed as ‘documentarian Dylan Howard’.
This is the same Dylan Howard who pops up midway through the following Ronan Farrow article, helping Harvey Weinstein spy on various actresses with the help of Mossad contacts working in the US that Howard had regularly worked with throughout his career.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies/amp
Dylan Howard also appears in Farrow’s recent non-fiction bestseller CATCH AND KILL, also about the Weinstein case. Howard eventually sued Farrow to try and prevent Farrow from publishing.
And then Dylan Howard sued booksellers in Australia, threatening a lawsuit if they carried the book.
To give you more of an idea of the guy, here’s another story about Howard, attempting to blackmail Amazon head Jeff Bezos.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2019/02/11/dylan-howard-jeff-bezos-national-enquirer/
When the Farrow story broke, a lot of Australian journalists and editors started commenting about it on Twitter. Some of them were glad to see Howard’s career being curtailed, and mentioned that he was the nastiest and most unscrupulous guy they’d ever worked with. “Too many horror stories to count”, said one. Ronan Farrow confirmed that Howard - who started his career with Rupert Murdoch - had been doing nefarious work for Weinstein with a private, Mossad-sourced spying company, Black Cube, so it’s no wonder Howard got pissed and threatened everyone who had ever heard of the story with a lawsuit. After Farrow described him as being involved in Mossad spying and blackmail, Howard wrote a ‘tell all’ book about Jeffrey Epstein, giving everyone the ‘full story’ of what had happened in that complicated tale. And now Howard is suddenly interested in the JFK case? Someone should tell Jaffe to watch his back. -
The Fensterwald book is on Google Books, and there’s a search-the-text option, but for some reason it’s glitchy. A search brings up the relevant page numbers but the usual page preview is screwy and not displaying the actual text results for people to read. Only the page number is visible - but entering the text does bring up a result for page 96, as you noted.
FWIW though, it’s the first half of the quote, about the FBI lying its eyes out, that brings up the positive result from the text search on the Google books page. When I typed the second part, about Oswald, I didn’t get a result.
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As soon as the document hits the numbers and tables, I’m unable to get anything from it at all. It’s also unclear to me whether this PDF is just an excerpt from the analysis, or the whole thing.
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It's here, but the contents of the document are all Greek to me.
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=7154#relPageId=1&tab=page
It was a pain to find it btw - but Bill Kelly had it linked within an article on his blog.
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Jim I’ll be happy to. Will include all I’ve said in this thread and whatever else I can dig up. Will have to see how long it takes for normal life to return so I can access the book though.
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Ron, when I eventually get hold of the book of the conference, I'll be going through all the participants, everything that was discussed, and going through a lot of online and archival sources to see what pops up in relation.
The CFR are an important group but there is a lot of crossover between these various think tanks and policy boards. And - visible in the participants already cited at the CSIS conference - there are advisors who rarely get discussed in JFK assassination literature, but who I suspect also play their part in nudging things forward.
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I think it would be a good article too. I want to read the book of the conference before I write about it further. There’s probably enough rope in that book for the more strident contributors to hang themselves, figuratively speaking.
Lederberg is quite a guy and had a hand in putting together a lot of the neocon heavy conferences through the late 80’s and into the 90’s.
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At one point in the late 70's, CSIS sent a working group to Italy. They had another conference there and, from memory, basically advocated for anything up to a coup to stop the Communists taking power.
And this chunk of the Militarist Monitor article on the group sums up how bad things eventually got with CSIS. They had their fingers in everything.
QuoteThe CSIS focus on national security and "advancing the global interests" of the U.S. made it a favorite of the Reagan administration. The center specializes in studies of crisis management, with an emphasis on how the U.S. should manage crises in other countries. There is little question that it influenced policy during the Reagan administration. (2) For example, the CSIS group on Strategy and Arms Control, headed by Robert Kupperman, held regular discussions on the role of arms control in the prevention of nuclear war, alternative approaches to arms control negotiations, and strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. deterrence posture. These discussions were attended by Rep. Les Aspin, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, Sen. Jeff Bingaman from the Senate Armed Services Committee, and chief of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Kenneth Adelman. (1) A recent article in the Journal of Commerce notes that CSIS has sent an unsolicited suggestion to the Bush administration promoting the creation of an assistant to the president to integrate international economic policy with domestic and other foreign policies. (8)
CSIS activities are centered around media promotion of its conservative, anticommunist policies and strategies. In 1985, the Center logged in 4,100 media appearances. It looks upon international incidents as opportunities to present its analyses and viewpoints to the public. (2) For example, during the three days after the U.S. bombing of Libya, three CSIS fellows appeared on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour. The director of the CSIS Soviet program appeared on ABC, NBC, and McNeil-Lehrer news programs and on ABC’s "Nightline."(2) Robert H. Kupperman, CSIS director of science and technology, appeared on BBC, CBS "Nightwatch," CNN, Natl Public Radio and was quoted in a number of national weekly news magazines. (2) During the six weeks following the bombing, CSIS fellows had a total of 650 media contacts presenting their expertise and analysis to the public. (2)
A 1985 article from UPI cites Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Kupperman of CSIS among the "experts" on terrorism who placed the blame for the attempted assassination of the Pope in 1981 on the Soviets. (4)
The CSIS staff are regularly used by the British media for "independent" comment on international affairs. In 1988, Michael Ledeen, who was heavily involved in the Iran-Contra affair, was interviewed as a CSIS expert on the Middle East. (9)
In 1985, two CSIS scholars, Georges A. Fauriol and Eva Loser, released a background report on the Guatemalan presidential elections. The study avoided details about the Guatemalan government atrocities, citing a few human rights violations, but blaming them on the guerilla movement. The report credited General Efrain Rios Montt’s regime–which tallied 15,000 civilian deaths in 17 months–with "revitalization of the rural environment."(5) In 1988, CSIS released another Fauriol study,"The Third Century: U.S. Latin American Policy Choices for the 1990s." This study presents a more sophisticated overview of the political situation than earlier CSIS studies. It suggests diplomatic solutions, but retains the possibility of intervention, if needed. (37)
CSIS produces a large volume of books and reports in the areas of defense, economics and energy, governance, national and international security, refugee policy, and regional studies. The latter includes Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America, the USSR and Eastern Europe, and Western Europe and the NATO Alliance. (3) The quality of scholarship in the CSIS documents has been questioned. A Washington Post article quotes one of the Institute’s own scholars as saying in reference to CSIS publications,"I was appalled by the complete lack of scholarship."(2)
During his administration, President Reagan chose CSIS as a favorite site for speeches attacking those who opposed his plans for aid to the Nicaraguan contras. (2) In return, CSIS became a major media defender of the administration and ofparticipants in the Iran-Contra affair. George Carver of CSIS stated on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour that the "23-count indictment of North et. al. doesn’t allege the violation of a single criminal statute–that it isn’t a criminal charge but rather is a bill of attainder."(7)
CSIS has become institutionalized in the arena of public policy. (2) Not only do numerous members of Congress sit on its advisory board, but it also gives frequent seminars, briefings, and colloquia to members of Congress on topical issues. (1,2) CSIS scholars are often requested to testify formally before Congress. In 1987, James Schlesinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Amos A. Jordan, David M. Abshire and Robert Hunter testified before the Senate Armed Services and Senate Foreign Relations committees on the strategic consequences of U.S. foreign policy choices. (1)
Government Connections: Admiral Thomas Moorer (ret. ) was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a member of Team B, a group assembled in the mid-1970s by then-CIA director George Bush to study Soviet military capabilities and intentions. The Team B findings laid the foundation for the revitalization of the Committee on the Present Danger. (11)
Richard V. Allen served on President Richard Nixon’s foreign security staff. (11) He resigned from government to join Overseas Companies of Portugal where he became the Washington advocate for white rule in South Africa. He later became involved in the Robert Vesco investment scandal. (11) Allen became President Reagan’s first National Security Adviser and in that position was a core member of the group that shaped foreign policy for the administration. (11) Over a series of rather murky events that again tarnished his image, Allen lost his job as National Security Adviser. However, he remained in the administration as a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. (11)
But this letter below (click on it to see the names more clearly) shows you what a force they eventually became. Beyond the content of the letter - Frederick Seitz, the guy cited in MERCHANTS OF DOUBT as a key figure in propagating global warming denial, asks a prestigious scientist to join a panel with a future CIA head to advocate for increased defense spending - the letter shows the CSIS membership at the beginning of the Reagan administration. It's a who's who. Ray Cline is there, with Alexander Haig as a Vice Chair, and at the bottom you get an additional gang of researchers, including both of the Wohlstetters, and the onetime head of Israeli military intelligence (Yariv). These guys meant business.
Side note - in the history of the United States, there have been just a handful of commissions on dealing with government secrecy, and two of them were run by figures mentioned in the text of the letter, Seitz in the early 70's, and Woolsey in the early 90's with the Joint Security Commission. The third guy in the letter, Joshua Lederberg, joined the board of Procter and Gamble with Dick Cheney and spent the 90's asking for increased bioterrorism funding.
Robert Kupperman, cited in the text I quoted above, was originally Assistant Director at the Office of Emergency Preparedness during the Johnson administration. He took his experience with running crisis drills there to CSIS at the beginning of the 80's, and CSIS really took them to heart. For the next twenty years, the CSIS guys would run panels simulating everything from global terrorism to anthrax attacks to financial meltdowns, with Woolsey frequently playing the President.
I find it quite something that this group formed its mind-set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, brought Gerald Ford in, immediately made a point of gathering Joint Chiefs, hawks and CIA figures at a conference, then published a massive guidebook for government in the fortnight between Kennedy's death and the formation of the Warren Commission.
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Jim. I agree. Coming at the time that it did, with the people involved, it’s quite a conference. When the university libraries reopen (which could be next year) I’ll be having a look at the book, as I’m curious to see what they had to talk about.
i had also never heard of the conference until recently. But I found out the info I outlined above by digging into CSIS, and working backwards.
Fred Landis wrote an eye opening article on CSIS for Inquiry magazine in the late 70’s - ‘Georgetown’s Ivory Tower for Old Spooks’ - and it’s quite a read. There’s an excerpt online here
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP88-01315R000200020001-3.pdf
and from memory the full version can also be found online somewhere. If I can find it again I’ll link it.
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Haha, Posner still keeping the company line going, a bit like King Canute on the beach.
Lumpkin, Gannaway, and the DPD-Army Intelligence network
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
Thanks David.
Jack Crichton was part of the Office of Emergency Planning (OEP). The OEP later changed its name to the Office of Emergency Preparedness, and had Robert Kupperman as its Assistant Director from 1967 to 1973. In the Nixon admin, Kupperman oversaw emergency planning and undertook crisis simulations to run through contingencies. After leaving government, he ended up at CSIS in the later 70's, and stayed there for years, eventually kickstarting the CSIS trait of overseeing crisis drills, which they did again and again, for reasons which you can really only speculate about. In the early 80's CSIS ran a 'crisis simulation' of an attack on NYC which was broadcast nationally in the US on network television. James Woolsey, Michael Ledeen and John Lehman - the future Secretary of the Navy and a future 9/11 Commissioner - all took part in that one. Mother Jones did an article about it the month that it happened. The scenario for the NYC attack was quite colorful. Palestinian terrorists scuttle an oil tanker off the coast of Manhattan, then detonate a nuke, flooding NYC with a tidal wave of burning fire. Top marks to the guy who thought of that one. TV cameras filmed Woolsey, Lehman and the rest of those nuts for three days straight, then cut the footage down to an hour or so for the broadcast.