Richard Coleman

"The problem originated at the top of the CIA. Senior aides to Helms and Angleton had been tracking Oswald closely for years and failed to recognize the threat he posed to the president. When the Warren Commission started asking questions Helms and Angleton provided inaccurate or deceptive statements." Oswald posed no threat to the president whatsoever. He was pure CIA/ONI/FBI all the way. Does Jeff Morley actually think Oswald fired any shots on 11/22/63?

Jim: "This guy is over the edge." I assume you were referring to either Chomsky or Garthoff, not me! I posted this for general information. Quite a few people will be reading Chomsky's article, as Common Dreams is a popular rad/lib website. The discussion following the article is quite interesting. Your take on Chomsky is well represented.

A new Chomsky article on this subject is posted at Common Dreams: The Week The World Stood Still. A small excerpt: From the same source *, we learn further that, on August 23, 1962, the president had issued National Security Memorandum No. 181, “a directive to engineer an internal revolt that would be followed by U.S. military intervention,” involving “significant U.S. military plans, maneuvers, and movement of forces and equipment” that were surely known to Cuba and Russia. Also in August, terrorist attacks were intensified, including speedboat strafing attacks on a Cuban seaside hotel “where Soviet military technicians were known to congregate, killing a score of Russians and Cubans”; attacks on British and Cuban cargo ships; the contamination of sugar shipments; and other atrocities and sabotage, mostly carried out by Cuban exile organizations permitted to operate freely in Florida. Shortly after came “the most dangerous moment in human history,” not exactly out of the blue. Kennedy officially renewed the terrorist operations after the crisis ebbed. Ten days before his assassination he approved a CIA plan for “destruction operations” by U.S. proxy forces “against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships.” A plot to assassinate Castro was apparently initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination. The terrorist campaign was called off in 1965, but reports Garthoff, “one of Nixon’s first acts in office in 1969 was to direct the CIA to intensify covert operations against Cuba.” *Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis: Revised to Include New Revelations from Soviet & Cuban Souces by Raymond L. Garthoff The full article is here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/16

Right, thanks. I was under the impression that you had to be born on US territory, a military base, or the continental US. An afterthought: If Obama had been born overseas, but both parents were citizens, would there still be a birther movement?

Can soeone please clear this up for me? George Romney tried to run for President, but he was born in Mexico. How does that work?

This hour, NOW's Alex Wagner on MSNBC promises NEW tape of JFK talking about civil rights, George Romney, etc.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/07/27/defense-colorado-shooting-suspect-was-seeing-psychiatrist/ "... he sent the psychiatrist a package containing a notebook with descriptions of an attack." Another notebook. Lessee...."RFK must Die".....Oswald's famous (fake) diary....Bremer had a diary as I recall... I can't help but wonder what Bill Pepper thinks of all this.

Why am I starting to hear crazy conspiracy alarm bells in the back of my mind? Item: Strange, erratic bahaviour. Hair colored orange. Item: Claims amnesia - the jailers, trained psychotherapists all, believe he’s faking. Item: He was most recently studying for a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Colorado Denver, Item: He says he doesn’t know why he’s been arrested. http://www.huffingto...ref=mostpopular Sirhan Sirhan anybody? MK Ultra or whatever it’s called these days, anybody? James Holmes Claims Amnesia: Alleged 'Dark Knight' Shooter Wonders Why He's Arrested The Huffington Post | By Michael McLaughlin Posted: 07/27/2012 9:55 am Updated: 07/27/2012 11:03 am A new report says that James Holmes has told his jailers he doesn't know why he's been arrested. James Holmes, the suspected shooter in last week's movie theater massacre, has told his Colorado jailers he doesn't know why he's locked behind bars, the Daily News reports. But no one at the Arapahoe County Detention Center is buying Holmes' story, a lockup worker told the News. The jailers who come in contact with Holmes, who is sequestered from other inmates, believe he's faking amnesia. Since the 24-year-old PhD dropout was accused of killing 12 theatergoers and wounding 58 at a midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" last Friday, the media has lavished attention on Holmes' odd behavior. The suspect appeared in court on Monday with brightly dyed orange hair and made peculiar facial expressions. At times his eyes bulged and he often appeared tired. Holmes was taken into custody after he allegedly stormed the sold-out premiere of the latest Batman film. Police have said Holmes wore riot gear, used smoke bombs and armed himself with three guns during one of the most violent shootings in American history.

Going on pure memory here, but as I recall, the Connery Bond films were pretty non-ideological. The villains were part of amorphous oreganizations like SMERSH and SPECTRE. The Roger Moore Bonds were explicitly anti-soviet and anti-communist. I don't know that there's any big point to be made of this......just sayin' .

Does a bear s**t in the woods?

Len, I wasn't aware he was 92. "Long illness" isn't exactly a cause of death, but let's let it go. More importantly, did LBJ give any sign that he knew what was coming? What do you think?

Well. There's this: Excerpt from a post by John Simkin in the thread, "Thomas Hale Boggs", dated Oct. 27, 2006 (post #16): Barnard Fensterwald provides an interesting commentary on Thomas Hale Boggs in Assassination of JFK: Coincidence or Conspiracy (1974) pages 96-105 "You have got to do everything on earth to establish the facts one way or the other. And without doing that, why everything concerned, including every one of us is doing a very grave disservice. Thus House Majority Leader Hale Boggs delivered an admonishment of sorts to his Warren Commission colleagues on January 27, 1964. Along with Senator Richard Russell, and to a lesser degree, Senator John Sherman Cooper, Congressman Boggs served as a beacon of skepticism and probity in trying to fend off the FBI and CIA's efforts to "shade" and indeed manipulate the findings of the Warren Commission. Like Russell, Boggs was, very simply, a strong doubter. Several years after his death in 1972, a colleague of his wife Lindy (who was elected to fill her late husband's seat in the Congress) recalled Mrs. Boggs remarking, "Hale felt very, very torn during his work [on the Commission] ... he wished he had never been on it and wished he'd never signed it [the Warren Report]." A former aide to the late House Majority Leader has recently recalled, "Hale always returned to one thing: Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission - on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it... " Almost from the beginning, Congressman Boggs had been suspicious over the FBI and CIA's reluctance to provide hard information when the Commission's probe turned to certain areas, such as allegations that Oswald may have been an undercover operative of some sort. When the Commission sought to disprove the growing suspicion that Oswald had once worked for the FBI, Boggs was outraged that the only proof of denial that the FBI offered was a brief statement of disclaimer by J. Edgar Hoover. It was Hale Boggs who drew an admission from Allen Dulles that the CIA's record of employing someone like Oswald might be so heavily coded that the verification of his service would be almost impossible for outside investigators to establish. Boggs and Dulles had the following exchange: "Thomas Boggs: So I will ask you. Did you have agents about whom you had no record whatsoever? Allen Dulles: The record might not be on paper. But on paper [we] would have hieroglyphics that only two people knew what they meant, and nobody outside of the Agency would know and you could say this meant the agent and someone else could say it meant another agent." Congressman Boggs had been the Commission's leading proponent for devoting more investigative resources to probing the connections of Jack Ruby. With an early recognition that "the most difficult aspect of this is the Ruby aspect," Boggs had wanted an increased effort made to investigate the accused assassin's murderer. Boggs was perhaps the first person to recognize something which numerous Warren Commission critics would write about in future years: the strange variations and dissimilarities to be found in Lee Harvey Oswald's correspondence during 1960 to 1963. Some critics have advanced the theory that some of Oswald's letters - particularly correspondence to the American Embassy in Moscow, and later, to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee - may have been "planted" documents written by someone else. In 1975 and 1976, the investigations of the Senate Intelligence Committee and other Congressional groups disclosed that such uses of fabricated correspondence had been a recurring tool of the FBI's secret domestic COINTELPRO [Counter Intelligence] program as well as other intelligence operations. In any event, Warren Commission member Boggs and Commission General Counsel Lee Rankin had early on discussed such an idea: "Rankin: They [the Fair Play For Cuba Committee] denied he was a member and also he wrote to them and tried to establish as one of the letters indicate, a new branch there in New Orleans, the Fair Play For Cuba. Boggs: That letter has caused me a lot of trouble. It is a much more literate and polished communication than any of his other writing." It is also known Boggs felt that because of the lack of adequate material from the FBI and CIA the Commission members were poorly prepared for the examination of witnesses. According to a former Boggs staffer, the Congressman felt that lack of adequate file preparation and the sometimes erratic scheduling of Commission sessions served to prevent those same sessions from being adequately substantive. Consequently, Boggs cut down his participation in these sessions as the investigation stretched on through 1964. Author Sylvia Meagher has cited one of the more telling examples of the frequent inability of the Warren Commission to coordinate its members' involvement in these sessions, as illustrated by the following exchange in Warren Commission Volume 3: "Chairman Warren: Senator Cooper, at this time I am obliged to leave for our all-day conference on Friday at the Supreme Court, and I may be back later in the day, but if I don't, you continue, of course. Sen. Cooper: I will this morning. If I can't be here this afternoon whom do you want ' to preside? Chairman Warren: Congressman Ford, would you be here this afternoon at all? Rep. Ford: Unfortunately, Mr. McCloy and I have to go to a conference out of town. Chairman Warren: You are both going out of town, aren't you? Sen. Cooper: I can go and come back if it is necessary. Chairman Warren: I will try to be here myself. Will Mr. Dulles be here? Mr. McCloy: He is out of town." On April 5, 1971, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs took the floor of the House to deliver a speech that created a major stir in Washington for several weeks. Declaring that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was incompetent and senile, and charging that the FBI had, under Hoover's most recent years adopted "the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo"; Boggs demanded Hoover's immediate resignation. Boggs also charged that he had discovered that certain FBI agents had tapped his own telephone as well as the phones of certain other members of the House and Senate. In his emotional House speech, Boggs went on to say Attorney General Mitchell says he is a law and order man. If law and order means the suppression of the Bill of Rights . . . then I say "God help us." As the Washington Post noted, "The Louisiana Democrat's speech was the harshest criticism of Hoover ever heard in the House . . . It was the first attack on Hoover by any member of the House leadership." At the time, Boggs' startling speech created a sensation in Washington. Observers were uncertain as to his exact motivations in demanding Hoover's resignation, and there was an immediate critical reaction from Hoover's various defenders. It has been reported that sources within the FBI and the Attorney General's office began spreading stories that Boggs was a hopeless alcoholic. However, it was not until almost four years later that the motivation behind Boggs' outburst came into clearer focus. On January 20, 1975, the Washington Post and other news organizations reported that solid evidence had been uncovered about the existence of what Hoover and the FBI had long denied they possessed: secret damaging dossiers on various members of the House and Senate, compiled through various forms of surveillance. On the following day, January 21,1975, Washington Post reporter Ron Kessler made a further disclosure: "The son of the late House Majority Leader Boggs has told The Post that the FBI leaked to his father damaging material on the personal lives of critics of its investigation into John F. Kennedy's assassination. Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr. said his father, who was a member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination and its handling by the FBI, was given the material in an apparent attempt to discredit the critics [of the Warren Commission]. The material, which Thomas Boggs made available, includes photographs of sexual activity and reports on alleged communist affiliations of some authors of articles and books on the assassination. Boggs, a Washington lawyer, said the experience played a large role in his father's decision to publicly charge the FBI with Gestapo tactics in a 1971 speech alleging the Bureau had wiretapped his telephone and that of other Congressmen."

Hello Forum! I've been a lurker for several years, now decided to get my feet wet, jump into the fray as it were! A couple of points re Sen. Yarborough. I did a quick search on the internet and can't seem to find a cause of death for the senator, just the date. Any info on this? Seems kind of funny.... Another thing: Is there any account anywhere of the senator commenting about Lyndon Johnson's behavior or attitude that morning? They both rode in the same car and it would be interesting to know if LBJ was particularly nervous, talkative, excited, etc. I would suppose that if he knew what was coming, it would be pretty hard for him to act completely normal and casual. Any account of abnormal behaviour would be strong evidence of his advance knowledge and possible coroboration of the "party" the previous night. FWIW, I've always felt that he wasn't directly involved beforehand, so as to have deniability but that he might have gotten hints to prepare for the possibility of assuming the office, because.......hey, you never know, right? I found that Jim Hightower was an aide to Sen. Yarborough and emailed him about this, but he hasn't replied. If someone on the forum knows him, maybe you could get some info from him about this.

You might say that my introduction to political matters was watching President Kennedy’s steel-crisis speech with my family on TV in 1962. I was 18 and my main interests in life at that time were sex and drinking. I was doing none of the first (then) and lots of the other, so my knowledge of politics was nil. Nevertheless, I can still remember thinking to myself, “Wow. Presidents don’t talk like that.” True then and true now. I was stationed on a tiny Navy base in southeastern Spain in 1963, ultimately closed per JFK’s policy, when the assassination happened. That was one scary time, believe me. Two days later when Oswald was shot by Ruby, my buddies and I exchanged looks. Our comments to each other immediately were that somebody sure shut him up fast. I’ve never had any reason to change that opinion. My experience in the military, though short, was quite educational. I’ve always since been astonished, in a disgusted sort of way, at the fact that some people insist that as a radar operator, LHO only needed a CONFIDENTIAL security clearance. If that’s true, pigs fly. Over the years my interest in the assassination waxed and waned, but I never forgot it, even as my interest in progressive politics expanded. Around the time of the Shaw trial, I saw a bootleg copy of the Zapruder film at MIT in a large assembly hall. It was packed. My interests are eclectic and tend toward the exotic, but the assassinations have always been near the top. For anybody who goes back to the sixties and remembers “the death of the hippie” parade in San Francisco in 1967............I was the dead hippie. All my friends got their faces on the TV news stories about it that night, but there wasn’t one shot of me! I guess I’m still pissed about that...