Mark Gorton

Jeb Bush was involved in the conspiracy to kill Barry Seal. True or false?

I am pleased to be able to announce that new polling functionality has been added to the Political Conspiracies section of the Education Forum. Registered users of the Education Forum will see a "Start New Poll" button next to the "Start New Topic" button. Clicking on the "Start New Poll" button creates a new thread with a poll as the first item. Two types of polling are offered: 1) multiple choice polling and 2) statement evaluation. Statement evaluation allows for a particular statement to be proposed and then registered Education Forum users can vote on the truth or falsehood of that statement. Users are able to comment upon polls as they would a regular forum thread. It is my hope that the voting functionality allows the Education Forum community to understand where there is a consensus on issues and where there is disagreement. Hopefully, this information can allow the conversations on the Education Forum to be more productive. I would like to thank Riley Lynch for his hard work developing this software, and I would also like to thank John Simkin for being so gracious to allow my the freedom to experiment with this new functionality. This software is still in beta, so I expect that there may be bugs of which we are not aware. If you notice any bugs, have any issues, or have suggestions on how the new functionality can be improved, please leave a comment or contact me, and we will do our best to resolve any problems. Thanks, Mark

John, Thanks for voting, and thanks for being open to me working to add functionality to the Education Forum. Best Regards, Mark

Users of the Watergate section of the Education Forum will now notice that a "Start New Poll" button has been added to the website. By clicking on this button, users can start a new thread based upon a poll. Other users of the website can then vote on that poll or make comments on the thread. This functionality has been developed by Riley Lynch with a tiny bit of help from me. My hope is that this voting functionality can help members of the Education Forum gain consensus about issues which are currently under debate. I have been impressed by the depth and breadth of knowledge of members of the Education Forum community. The Education Forum is a great place for discussion; however, the limits of forum technology make it hard to know if a consensus exists in the community on a particular topic. The polling functionality that has just been released offers a mechanism to see what sort of consensus exists among members of the Education Forum community. It is my hope that the results gained from these polls can help guide future discussion among Education Forum members. This functionality is being deployed in a beta version in only the Watergate section of the forum. The Watergate section is relatively low traffic, so I hope that we can test and fix any bugs which are identified by users. Riley and I have done our best to debug the software before rolling it out live. However, it is impossible for two people to fully anticipate all the issues which may be encountered in live use. Once the polling functionality has been more thoroughly tested and debugged, I hope to deploy it in all the topic areas of the forum under the Controversial Issues in History heading. The voting functionality supports two different types of poll: multiple choice or statement evaluation. With multiple choice, users can pick from among a number of options. The statement evaluation allows users to rate the truth or accuracy of a particular proposition. The polling functionality which you see is just the first feature that I hope to add to the Education Forum. With just a little bit of modification, the polling functionality that you see can be expanded to allow the community to produce sorted lists (e.g. best books on a topic, etc.). I very much hope that members of the Education Forum community like the voting functionality that we have developed. I welcome any feedback that people may have. Please let me know if you encounter bugs or other usability issues. Best Regards, Mark

This is the first poll launched on the Education Forum using the new polling functionality developed by Riley Lynch. Please feel free to give your evaluations of the statement.

Watergate was a CIA plot to depose Nixon. True or false?

Chris, Thanks! The quote you linked to on JFK Lancer is exactly what I was thinking about. But do you (or does anyone) know the source and if it has been vetted? I am pasting the quote below: "I was 12 years old when JfK was assassinated. We were living in Springfield, VA and my father was a staff officer at the Pentagon. Unknown to us, the family at the time, his duty assignment was to Dep. Dir of War Plans/Operations, which in Air Force talk is counter-intelligence. He came home late the evening of the assassination and as we sat around the kitchen table talking about 'Oswald' killing Kennedy, he interrupted us and said Oswald did not kill Kennedy, and said that Kennedy was killed by a "Military Coup". We naturally thought he had not see the news on the TV, and said so. He went on to explain to us some of the basic details on the 'deactivation' of the Military and the Pentagon, secure communications being taken off line, etc. Years later, after his death in 1993, we discovered from another retired staff officer at the ceremony that my father indeed worked counter intelligence for the Air Force. His positions after the Pentagon were Deputy Chief of Staff to Admiral Wilkinson, USFJ-3/J-5, and later he was Director of Plans and Analysis, and later Director of Plans and Operations. His military file confirms the above. What he said about 'who' was responsible for the deactivation of the Pentagon, disabling secure communications for the entire facility and Chiefs of Staff and 'intelligence'/counter-intelligence... "the second Kennedy was assassinated", is perfectly in line with what Barr McClennan writes in his book... my dad said there was only one person who could have shut down the (whole) Pentagon.. "the (new) President", Johnson." Thanks, Mark

Somewhere in my reading, I remember coming across the story of a man who was working in a senior position in the pentagon on Nov 22, 1963. He worked at the main military communications hub of the pentagon. He came home from work that day, and his family told him that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman who killed JFK. He told his family that he knew that there had been a coup d'etat because shortly after the assassination, the communication system for the senior command and control of the US military had been taken off line. I believe that it might have been his son who later relayed this story. However, I cannot remember where I read this. Can someone let me know the source of this info? Does anyone know if this story has been verified and how solid it is? I would very much appreciate it. Thanks, Mark

Len, It seems you have the tendency to dismiss the entire body of work by a person because some of their statements may not be accurate. I would suggest that this mindset is unhelpful when trying to understand the truth about a complicated situation. Using this technique, you could dismiss Albert Einstein's work on relativity because he was wrong about quantum mechanics. And similarly, you try to dismiss 4 entire books on the subject of Watergate because they "push contradictory theories". For the most part, these books cover different aspects of Watergate and are mostly complementary rather than contradictory. (Have you even read these books?) And secondly, when dealing with hidden conspiracies, the amount that is know changes over time, so books written at different times frequently have different perspectives. Some books do a very good job on certain aspects of a situation but are later proven to be wrong about other aspects. That does not mean that the entire book is worthless. When trying to gain an understanding of a situation, I would suggest an approach which seems to differ from your approach. Rather than being inclined to dismiss entire books or the body of work by a person because there is a flaw with one aspect of the work, I would suggest trying to find what is right with each work and what you can learn from it. You seem to have fairly strong views, and you have no trouble finding fault with what many people say. So may I ask, in your view, who is behind the JFK assassination? Who would you say have the best understanding of the JFK assassination? Best Regards, Mark

Len, The legal definition of treason is broader that then language in the constitution. From wikipedia, "However, Congress has, at times, passed statutes creating related offenses that punish conduct which undermines the government or the national security, such as sedition in the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, or espionage and sedition in the 1917 Espionage Act, which do not require the testimony of two witnesses and have a much broader definition than Article Three treason." If you really care more about the details, you can see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition#United_States. And here are a couple examples of people who have been tried for treason without having anything to do with an enemy power (from wikipedia), "Most states have provisions in their constitutions or statutes similar to those in the U.S. Constitution. The Extradition Clause specifically defines treason as an extraditable offense. There have been only two documented prosecutions for treason on the state level, that of Thomas Dorr for treason against the state of Rhode Island for his part in the Dorr Rebellion, and that of John Brown for treason against the state of Virginia for his part in the raid on Harpers Ferry. In 1859, he and a few of his sons infiltrated Harpers Ferry—a military base in Virginia—in an attempt to steal the weapons that were kept there. His goal was to give these weapons to slaves, and lead them in an armed rebellion, but his attempt was unsuccessful. His sons were killed in the ensuing battle, and he was captured, and then tried, and convicted, for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia. He was sentenced to death by hanging, which was performed on December 2, 1859.[27]" I understand that you "call'em like I see'em", however, you completely dismiss the work of Sherman Skolnick for doing exactly the same thing. You have a strong tendency to dismiss or minimize evidence of conspiracies. Another phrase for these conspiracies is government based criminality. So by minimizing or denying this criminality, you have the effect of aiding this criminal activity. If you were simply making statements about sporting events, there would be no harm in a "call'em like I see'em" attitude. But when it comes to making statements that have the effect of protecting criminal conspiracies, such an attitude is ethically suspect. For very solid evidence of GHW Bush's involvement in the Coup of '63 and Watergate, you should read "Family of Secrets". It is a very solid and well researched book. You can also look at: http://www.jfkmurdersolved.com/bush.htm The cover up of the Coup of '63 was a truly massive, highly redundant operation. The situation was dynamic and the Cabal was always running multiple efforts at covering-up and maintaining control of the presidency. The Cabal behind the Coup of '63 was very powerful, but they were not all powerful, and as such they were constantly adjusting their tactics. It seems like the Cabal's first choice for president in 1968 was Nelson Rockefeller, however, due to his infidelity, he disqualified himself. (This would explain why Prescott Bush was so morally outraged about Rockefeller's infidelity because by failing to be outwardly morally upstanding, Rockefeller was endangering all of their lives.) Understanding the mindset and motivations of the Cabal is really one of the most interesting things about researching the secret history of the US. The relationship between the Cabal and Nixon is fascinating and not simple. I don't understand Nixon very well, and getting a better understanding of Nixon is one of the research projects on my list. Nixon was no angel, but he wasn't the complete sleezebag he has been made out to be. In fact, the "Tricky Dick" branding of Nixon is partially a product of the Cabal. Nixon's early political career was sponsored by Prescott Bush, so he had some close relations with the Cabal. However, Nixon was not one of them and not fully under their control, and once he achieved his second term, Nixon showed distressing amounts of independence and a determination to find out what ugly secrets were hidden in the CIA. The Cabal was always working in the realm of what was possible. In 1972, they would have loved to pick GWH Bush or Gerald Ford as president, but they could not swing that. So they settled for what they could. The fact that they had the Nixon white house booby trapped was a real advantage for the Cabal. It gave them comfort that Nixon was ultimately controllable, and this made Nixon more appealing to them than the Democratic alternatives. If you are interested in learning more about Watergate, I would recommend you read: "Family of Secrets", "Secret Agenda", "Silent Coup" and "The Cowboy and Yankee War".

Len, The killing of JFK was most certainly an act of treason, and the creation of a false scandal to cause the removal of Nixon was also an act of treason. Both of these are very serious crimes that undermine the democratic foundations of the United States. I have spent years studying these events, and I have convinced myself beyond a shadow of a doubt that several major treasonous conspiracies have been hidden in recent history. As a citizen of the United States, I consider it my responsibility to work to uncover the truth and help bring these crimes to light. Only through an active effort by the electorate can a democracy remain strong. I do not make my statements lightly. I understand how serious are these claims. I would not make these statements if I have not spent years studying to be certain of what I say. You have a tendency to dismiss all claims that differ from your world view out of hand. A certain level of skepticism is healthy, but dismissing valid evidence of criminal activity has the effect of protecting criminals and promoting ongoing criminal activity. If we were discussing sports or movies, I would be fine with you saying whatever you wanted, but your consistent denial of criminal activity even in cases where the evidence is overwhelming is an act that aids and abets the criminals, and when we are dealing with criminal activity that includes treason, your comments and actions make you, in your own small way, an accessory to treason. I do understand the gravity of what I have just said, and it has taken me years of study to have the level of confidence to make such statements. I hope you take this chance to reflect how a false debate can prevent our system from moving forward and gaining justice when their has been a crime. Sincerely, Mark

Sorry. Jeb's father (not grandfather) GHW Bush was guilty of 3 counts of treason. His grandfather Prescott was guilty of treason during WWII for helping the nazi war industries while the U.S. was at war with Germany. The October Surprise counts as treason for GHW Bush. Paying an enemy foreign country (Iran) to hold U.S. citizens as hostages longer and stealing arms from U.S. weapons stockpiles to ship to an enemy country (Iran) in order to induce them to hold U.S. hostages longer is treason. For more info of Prescott Bush's treason, please see http://rense.com/general26/dutch.htm . I also suspect brother George W Bush of treason for conspiring with the Saudi's to bring about 9/11. However, I do not yet have firm enough evidence to prove this. I suspect that in the next 20 or 30 years we will get enough evidence to prove that the Bush family was one of the prime movers behind 9/11. However, at this time, we just have a lot of circumstantial evidence and alignment of some facts, but not enough for hard proof. In terms of why now: the fear of speaking openly about the Coup of 63 is dying away, and more and more evidence is constantly being compiled in more compelling ways. The internet itself makes a difference. The internet is a great research tool. Amazon allows easy access to books that only 15 years ago would have been very, very difficult to get. Each year, it gets easier and easier to learn about and explain the Coup of '63. And once the public understands the Coup of '63 and the birth of the cabal, then a whole bunch of other crimes (including CIA drug smuggling and Barry Seal) become easier to discuss, accept, and understand. The reason that most Americans don't know about the giant list of crimes perpetrated by the Cabal is not that the evidence is not available, but instead that these crimes clash too sharply with our idea of how America works, but once the public begins to understand the Cabal, all these other crimes become much easier to comprehend. Each year, the forces of the cover up get weaker, and the forces of truth get stronger.

The upcoming Billy O'Reilly JFK movie and the 50th anniversary JFK assassination celebration planned for Dallas show that even 49 years after the fact some very powerful interests are still committed to maintaining the old fiction of the JFK assassination. I was born after the assassination, so the JFK assassination is history to me. Most of the participants are dead and the ever shrinking number who are left are getting quite old. So I have been interested in understanding who still cares enough to bother to keep covering up this crime. As I have studied the assassination and the ongoing criminal enterprise birthed by the assassination, I have come to realize how the thread of corruption that can be traced back to the JFK assassination runs up unto today. I have been amazed to learn to what extent the established ruling class is still vulnerable to the hidden mass of festering secrets that can be traced directly back to the JFK assassination. Perhaps the most vulnerable major politician is Jeb Bush. When the public finally understands that his father was guilty of three counts of treason (Coup of '63, Watergate, October Surprise), the entire Bush family will be discredited. Whether the Bush family likes it or not, the truth is seeping out. I suspect that the public may become widely aware of the Bush family history of treason during the next election. Any halfway decent opposition researcher with an internet connection can amass a huge amount of information that could easily go viral on facebook. People have been able to get away with crimes, but escaping history is much, much harder, and the Bush family will not be able to escape the judgment of history.

Len, I am not an expert on what stories were know at the time that Rodney Stich published them and what has come out in the following 15 years, so it is hard for me to answer your question. Many of the stories that Rodney relates fit in with larger scandals that are well known (as I mentioned BCCI, Inslaw, October Surprise, S&L fraud, etc.), so the new evidence that he provides fits in with much other evidence. I do not know if anyone has spent the time to run down the leads that Rodney generated and see if they can be verified. It would take a huge amount of work, but it would be a worthwhile project for a researcher. It seems like the stories he relates differ from you worldview to a large enough extent that you completely discount them. I am not saying that everything he published is 100% accurate, but I see no reason to discount these stories out of hand as you do. From my research, many of the shocking stories that Rodney Stitch relates are consistent with other shocking tales. However, if you doubt the existence of an evil cabal that was quickened by the JFK assassination, then you have a much more serious divergence from my point of view. I agree that Rodney Stitch relays several stories that are not backed up by independent accounts, and as such are not as reliable as stories with multiple points of back up. However, the JFK assassination has been shown to be a massive conspiracy and this has been established many times over. When I first started looking at the JFK assassination, I too assumed it had to be small to keep it quiet. But as I learned more, I realized that the secret to hiding the truth of the JFK assassination was not having it be tiny but almost the opposite. Hundred of people have given testimony that demonstrates pieces of the conspiracy behind the JFK assassination. And their stories are available for anyone willing to look for them and pay attention. However, the forces behind the JFK assassination were extremely powerful and they understood how to use power to control public perception. The Dallas police department, FBI, CIA, LBJ, CFR, elements of the military and others all conspired to hide the truth, and it has taken years for the research community to be able to show all these hidden machinations. All of this has been proved many times over by this point. Have you read JFK and the Unspeakable and LBJ Mastermind of the JFK Assassination? Together both of those books do a decent job of showing the scope of the conspiracy and also documenting the scale of the conspiracy over and over. For someone who spends as much time as you do focused on these issues, I would suggest that you would be well served to read these books and study up on the topic. It really is the gateway to understanding the hidden history of the United States for the last 50 years. I see you have over 7000 posts on the education forum, so you must have spent a lot of time on this stuff. May I ask what draws you to the education forum? I have a hard time understanding your perspective. Is there something you are trying to accomplish? Is there some truth or answers you are seeking? Thanks, Mark

Robert, Thanks for the recommendation. I just read "Operation Cyanide", and I found it to be a very well researched, very even handed book. I had never paid much attention to Israel's attack on the USS Liberty, but there has been a small community of people dedicated to finding out the truth. And given 35 years of dedicated research, and people coming forward to talk, much of the story has come out. There appears to be little doubt that the attack on the USS Liberty was a false flag attack intended to be blamed upon Egypt and to give the US pretext to invade Egypt. The attack was planned by LBJ, his close inner circle and a similar small group of people high up in the Israeli military/government. U.S. attack planes armed with nuclear weapons were launched from US aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. There is testimony that they were on their way to nuke Cairo before being recalled. I find the thought that the U.S. would nuke another country for no real reason to be so beyond my estimate of how humans behave that I have a hard time believing it. I think LBJ was a crazed, power hungry, inhuman person, but I still have a hard time thinking he would just nuke Cairo. I don't even really see how he would benefit. But every other aspect of the story seems perfectly plausible, and all people interested in knowing the secret history of the U.S. during the last 500 years should read this book. "Operation Cyanide" is well written, interesting and moves quickly. Also in the book are interesting stories how U.S. military personnel in unmarked uniforms participated in the hostilities during the 6 day war. LBJ and a small group of U.S. military and intelligence personnel helped Israel plan and conceive the entire war. Even without the USS Liberty incident, these revelations are shocking. U.S. planes may have flown sorties against Egypt on the first day of the war.

Len, Most of Rodney Stitches sources are names. Some are alive or at least lived long enough to make similar statements/videos that at least document that Rodney was quoting them correctly. A bunch of the people who talked to him are ex-military pilots (Chip Tatum, etc.) So their common background, flying in WWII, working for the govt after the war, unjustly imprisoned by a corrupt system is pretty similar. I gave my copy of Defrauding America to my mother, so I am doing this from memory, so I have a hard time with some names and details. In terms of examples of stuff that Rodney writes about that are well documented: BCCI, Inslaw, October Surprise, SNL Fraud, etc. Only a small fraction of what he writes about (Operation Whalewatch, Operation Mount Rushmore, etc.) are not documented elsewhere (to the best of my knowledge). I don't know much about Sherman Skolnick. I have just been looking at his website, and he certainly does claim a lot of stuff without documentation. And some of his stuff strikes me as false. I would not look at him as a solid source, but I have found that there can be use in having guys who are not afraid to be out there. Some of their speculation later proves to be valid, so I consider Skolnick more an interesting source of ideas to be tested rather than a solid researcher. However, it seems the biggest difference in our perception is that you don't agree about the existence of the secret cabal. This is a very big point. There have always been groups of powerful people who have operated behind the scenes. But the criminal cabal that I refer to was solidified/quickened during the JFK assassination/Coup of 63. These guys were bonded together by a need to keep the secret of the assassination hidden. Imagine yourself one of the gang that was responsible for the Coup. These guys spend the rest of their lives afraid of getting caught. What they did was treason and people get hung for treason. They can never rest, and they are bonded in a common mission to keep the dark secrets hidden. These are guys who form a network that transcends their tenor in govt. This network operates with the compartmentalized confines of intelligence organizations. Due to the nature of the places they work, these guys can do pretty much whatever they want and very few people will ever know about it. One of the secrets of success of the cabal is its ability to control/influence the presidency. Controlling the presidency gives anyone a lot of power, including the power to stop most legal investigations. LBJ is a founding father of the cabal. Ford is one of their boys, and GHW Bush first as VP then as president is heir to LBJ's throne. Clinton gets invited in as a hard partying junior member. The cabal over time is responsible for a huge amount of crime: RFK's killing, dozens and dozens of other deaths to cover-up the Coup of 63, Watergate, MLK's killing, shooting George Wallace, October Surprise, and on and on. I believe that all of the stuff I have just said is not particularly new or shocking. I would be curious to see where your thinking diverges from mine. Do you think the JFK assassination was a full scale coup d'etat? Mark

Len, My knowledge of Rodney Stitch is just from reading "Defrauding America" and looking a bit at his website. Defrauding America has lots of stuff in it. The first part is Rodney Stitch's own story. I assume that most of this story can be checked out through court records, but his story sounds plausible to me. And other than the fact that an honest American can be thrown into jail for being too honest, nothing about Rodney's own story is particularly unbelievable to me. The vast majority of "Defrauding America" is a compilation of scandals that are well documented elsewhere: BCCI, Inslaw, SNL fraud, the October Surprise, CIA drug running, etc. Rodney does have interviews with people who add information to these scandals, but even without the new interviews he does, there is lots of evidence of these scandals. What makes "Defrauding America" different is Rodney Stitch's access to a number of deep cover black ops guys who tell him their story. He meets some of these guys in jail and wins their trust due to their common backgrounds and experiences. These guys risk their lives because they are honest, patriotic Americans. They trust Rodney because they know him and he is willing to take them seriously. Some of their claims are breathtaking, and the mainstream media would not be very receptive to their claims. It is the story of these black ops guys who were involved in some of the most dirty stuff out there that make up the bulk of new revelations in the book. Many of these revelations have only one source, so it is hard to know if they are telling the truth. So a big question becomes, can you trust the stories of these black ops guys? A lot of what they say is shocking, but I am inclined to credit most of these stories as true. Here is my logic for trusting them; 1) We know that there is a secret cabal who is doing a lot of nasty stuff. 2) Many crimes of the cabal have come to light over time and are documented by the mainstream press and sometimes even government investigation 3) It stands to reason that only a small fraction of the actual crimes are ever brought to light and documented, so the existence of other crimes is very reasonable. 4) Most of the crimes by the cabal/secret govt are run in highly compartmentalized ways, so only a small number of people would know the details 5) The guys telling these stories are exactly the sort of black ops people who know what is really going on 6) Many of these guys have no incentive to make up crimes that don't exist. They have no reason to lie about this stuff. 7) A large number of people are killed to keep these stories quiet, so although we don't know the details of what the dead people would have said, we can infer that something really, really nasty was going on. And the stories from Defrauding America align with the evidence provided by the bodies. Have you read "Defrauding America"? It is worth reading to evaluate its claims for yourself. I know a lot less about Skolnick. I have read only a tiny bit of stuff from him, so I can't really say. I just ordered a collection of his writings, so I can take a look myself. This now goes on the reading list. My quick feeling about Skolnick is that he has done some great research at times in his life. He was able to perceive the incredible corruption of the American government, and this perception frames his writings. He writes about a very broad range of stuff, and I doubt he can be really expert about it all. Some of his stuff is well documented, so some of his work can be tested for its validity. I think he is an honest person who does not make stuff up, but I do think he has a tendency to speculate based on incomplete information. You certainly can't take everything he says a gospel, but he is more right about these things than the New York Times, etc. (Not that that is saying very much).

Len, Do you have specific examples where either Rodney Stitch's or Sherman Skolnick's claims were proven to be false. And Stitch never claimed to have the tapes of J. Edgar Hoover discussing the planning of the JFK assassination. Stitch was told (I forget by who) that that person had heard these tapes. The tapes were supposedly then given to Larry McDonald who supposedly was planning to to bring them to the public, but then McDonald's flight was shot down. I admit that the story of these tapes is a bit thin. It sounds plausible to me that the CIA would be tapping Hoover's phone, and the conversation that is described matches a very sophisticated and advanced understanding the JFK assassination. But why would they not make copies of these tapes? That does not make sense to me. In any event, Stitch does not present the story of the tapes as being gospel. He presents it as a data point that is not corroborated by anything else, but that is quite interesting and the reader should consider it. Even if the story of the tapes turns out to be a lie, it would not impugn Stitches credibility.

Len, Why do you find Skolnick and Stitch to be unreliable?

While reading "The Immaculate Deception, The Bush Crime Family Exposed", by Russell Bowen, I came across an interesting assertion by Chicago journalist and researcher Sherman Skolnick (pages 162-165). Skolnick claims to seen court records which private transactions between GHW Bush and Saddam Hussien involving kickbacks from the entire gulf region. Skolnick claims that oil companies paid kickbacks to Saddam Hussien. These kickbacks were then split with GHW Bush. The money apparently flowed through accounts at BNL (Banco Nazionale del Lavoro) in Chicago. The total amount of these kickbacks were $10 billion, and this amount was supposedly split between Saddam and Bush. So if this is true, GHW Bush received $5 Billion for just this one scheme. In Defrauding America, Rodney Stitch writes of bank accounts of GHW Bush in BCCI containing $200M. This is the only concrete number of money stolen by Bush that I have seen. But going by the rule of thumb that we only know about 5% of the money stolen, this would give an estimate of GHW Bush stealing $5 Billion over time. GHW Bush ran a giant drug trafficking operation for years that must have generated hundreds of millions or billions in profits. If a mid-level operative like Barry Seal can make tens of millions, the guy at the top must be making hundreds of millions or billions. Based on pretty sparse evidence, I estimate that GHW Bush has stolen $10B -$20 B over time. But this is really just an estimate based on little hard evidence. And it strikes me as likely that the Bush family was able to steal billions during the second Iraq war, but I have not had time to do much research on this topic. I would be very interested if anyone has other info about the amount of money Bush has stolen over time.

While reading "The Immaculate Deception, The Bush Crime Family Exposed" by Russell Bowen, I came across the interesting fact that the Texas campaign fund of Hugh Liedtke, who cofounded Zapata Off Shore with George HW Bush, had been used to partly finance the Watergate break in. (page 20). I find this fact interesting because it is yet another piece of evidence that George HW Bush was a high level planner of the Watergate takedown of Nixon. Although the hierarchy of the cabal behind the Watergate conspiracy is sketchy, based on sparse evidence, it could be that George HW Bush was the (or one of the) senior members of the Watergate conspiracy. I assume that the hierarchy of the cabal behind the Watergate conspiracy is the same as the cabal working to maintain the cover up the Coup of '63. By 1972, the LBJ and Allen Dulles out of the picture, GHW Bush could be the inheritor of the mantle as head of the cabal. In Defrauding America, Rodney Stitch writes of 3 factions fighting for control of the CIA. One faction was old OSS people, the second ONI people, and the third CIA people under the leadership of GHW Bush. The Bush faction won out in the long term, and my gut feeling is that one of the outcomes of the Watergate takedown of Nixon was the ascendancy of GHW Bush to the head of the cabal.

Very nice article. Perhaps the most interesting part of the article are the details about the programs to manufacture programmed killers. For a long time, I thought that the idea of that a person could be programmed to kill was crazy, but there seem to be a number of situations where a programmed killer in the best explanation that fits the available facts. And when you have these people receiving treatment from doctors involved in CIA mind control experiments, it gets hard to conclude that this is not what is going on.

Dallas Diminishes JFK, His Legacy, And Those Who Care About Democracy If you wonder whether the JFK coverup could possibly still be going on 50 years later, all you need to do is visit Dallas. Full story here.

I agree that one of the most important things we as a community can do is document and call out the mainstream media for their lies, cover-ups and refusals to face deep seated government corruption. In the course of my reading over the past few years, I have come across many cases of bad behavior on the part of the main stream media. However, I am not aware of any comprehensive resource on this topic. I can see that John Simkin is beginning an effort document the media manipulation in the context of the JFK assassination. John's work is important and noble. However, we need to do more to show how the media has deliberately turned a blind eye to high level government corruption over the course of the last 50 years and up until today. Ultimately, we need to call out this shoddy reporting and editing as it happens. And engage with the reporters and editors and let them know they are being watched and held to account. Historycommons.org has some very useful tools for documenting this sort of media coverage as it happens. However, their tools are difficult to use and somewhat unwelcoming. I am hoping to be able to help them improve their tools so that the education forum community can more easily use them, but this is a long term software development project that will not show any results for a while. I am also thinking about organizing a conference for the 50th anniversary of the Coup of '63 in New York City in Sept or Oct of 2013. If anyone is interested in helping with this conference, please let me know. Thanks, Mark

Here is more detail from the history commons blog, Sept 11, 2009. Identity of CIA Officer Responsible for pre-9/11 Failures, Tora Bora Escape, Rendition to Torture Revealed Filed under: Complete 911 Timeline,Document Collection — kevinfenton @ 1:52 am Tags: CIA, FBI, Richard Blee, Tom Wilshire 1 Vote The name of the CIA officer who ran Alec Station, the agency’s bin Laden unit, in the run-up to 9/11 can be revealed. Known by a variety of aliases in the media until now, such as “Rich” in Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, “Richard” in the 9/11 Commission report and “Rich B” in George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm, his real name is Richard Blee. Blee was a key figure in the pre-9/11 intelligence failures, the CIA station chief in Afghanistan when Osama bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora and instrumental in setting up the Bush administration’s rendition and torture policies. I confirmed Blee’s identity in this document, notes drafted by a 9/11 Commission staffer, apparently in preparation of the drafting of the final report. The notes were found along with thousands of other 9/11 Commission files at the National Archives by History Commons contributor Erik Larson, who uploaded them to the 9/11 Document Archive at Scribd. I previously blogged other interesting aspects of the notes here and here. Blee is mentioned several times in the 9/11 Commission’s files, but his name is always redacted, as it has been in the media until now. However, in one case the people doing the redactions let it slip past them. His name is disclosed on page 41 of the notes, where a comment says: “No one anticipated (well a few like Clarke, Black, Blee) what these people would do, or their single-minded determination, or that it would adapt to events and change to be more lethal.” Clarke is White House counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke, who Blee met with to discuss the an impending al-Qaeda attack in the summer of 2001. Black is Cofer Black, the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) and Blee’s boss at the time. Before this, much information was known about Blee. His first name was given in at least four books and a key break was provided by former CIA Director George Tenet, who disclosed the initial of his surname in his 2007 book. Tenet even has an entry for “B., Rich” in the index and named the book’s eighth chapter after a comment Blee made to him in July 2001 about the location of the next al-Qaeda attack: “They’re coming here.” Harper’s journalist Ken Silverstein revealed in a January 2007 article about Blee (under the pseudonym “James”) that he was the son of a well-known former CIA officer. Taken together, this meant that the officer’s first name was Richard, his surname began with the letter B and his father had also been a CIA officer–a relatively small group of people. His father was David Blee, an Office of Strategic Services veteran who was honoured as one of the CIA’s finest fifty employees ever at ceremony on 18 September 1997. Blee came to fame within the agency in the mid-1960s, when he spirited Stalin’s daughter out of India and to the west. However, his main contribution was to sweep away the influence of paranoid counterintelligence chief James Angleton and build a network of spies in the Eastern Bloc. He also rated a mention by the Church Committee. David Blee died in August 2000. James Risen’s obituary in the New York Times mentions that one of his sons was called Richard. Involvement in Pre-9/11 Failures One of the best-known pre-9/11 failures was the failure by the CIA in January 2000 to pass on to the FBI the information that one of the hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar, had a US visa, and would therefore probably soon arrive in the US. FBI officers detailed to the CIA learned of the information, but one of Blee’s deputies, Tom Wilshire, prevented them from passing it on to the bureau. While it was wrong of Wilshire to keep information from the bureau, it is perhaps not so unusual for the CIA to withhold information from the FBI. However, Blee’s actions at this time are more bizarre. The CIA had been monitoring a summit of al-Qaeda leaders in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which began on 5 January. On 8 January three of the summit attendees, Almihdhar, his partner Nawaf Alhazmi and al-Qaeda leader Khallad bin Attash, left for Bangkok, and Alec Station received a cable from the field reporting this. The CIA claims that its officers in Bangkok could not pick up the surveillance at the airport and that the three men were lost. The next day Alec Station sent a high-priority NIACT (night action) cable urging the station in Bangkok to find them. Although the other summit attendees had also dispersed at the same time as the three men who flew to Bangkok, on 12 January Blee claimed to his bosses that the surveillance in Kuala Lumpur was continuing. The 9/11 Commission, suggested that Blee “may not have known that in fact Almihdhar and his companions had dispersed and the tracking was falling apart.” The interview of Blee received high-level attention on the commission. It was led by the commission’s executive director Philip Zelikow and two team leaders, Kevin Scheid and Barbara Grewe. It is unclear how Blee could possibly have been unaware of this, as his unit had previously both received and sent at least one cable stating they had left for Bangkok and he would presumably have asked his subordinates for an update in the four days between the hijackers’ departure from Kuala Lumpur and the 12 January briefing. The commission’s formulation—that Blee “may not have known”—also begs the question: Well, did he know or not? If he did, he withheld key information from his bosses during the high threat period of the millennium alert. If he did not know, it means his subordinates withheld the information from him. The next day, Bangkok station reported that it could not find the three men. Nevertheless, Blee went back to his superiors on 14 January and told them officials were continuing to track the summit’s attendees, who had now dispersed to various countries. Here, the commission’s report is clear, finding, “there is no evidence of any tracking efforts actually being undertaken by anyone after the Arabs disappeared into Bangkok.” It is clear the information received by Blee’s superiors was incorrect. Given the improbability of Blee’s subordinates wanting or being able to conceal the real state of affairs from him for nearly a week, it appears that it was Blee that decided to withhold the information from them. There has been speculation that the reason the information was withheld was to enable the CIA, perhaps using a group of former employees or confederates, to monitor Almihdhar and Alhazmi in the US without having to worry about a competing FBI surveillance team. The above analysis indicates that Blee wanted not only the FBI, but also his own superiors off his back. The hypothesis that the withholding of the information from the bureau was not sanctioned by the CIA’s management is supported by the behaviour of the agency’s station in Kuala Lumpur. Four local stations performed badly regarding information about Almihdhar in the run-up to 9/11: Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Sana’a and Islamabad. Whereas the performance of the three last-named stations is so shocking—at various times they withheld information they must have known was crucial—that it indicates they were acting in bad faith, the errors by Kuala Lumpur station could be attributed to the usual mistakes that creep into anyone’s performance. In addition, on three separate occasions Kuala Lumpur went the extra mile and tried to move the issue forward. If the withholding of the information from the bureau was approved by the CTC’s leadership, why was Kuala Lumpur not on board with this? “They’re Coming Here” As most of the heavy lifting in the efforts to keep information about Almihdhar and Alhazmi from the FBI was done by Wilshire, Blee does not resurface in the story until July 2001. On 4 July, Almihdhar re-entered the US. The next day, Wilshire, who had by then gone on loan to the FBI, apparently as the deputy chief of its International Terrorism Operations Section, wrote an alarming e-mail. In it he told unnamed Alec Station managers that he thought Almihdhar was linked to the current high level of threat reporting. Five days after the e-mail, Black briefed Tenet about current threat reporting. The briefing was so alarming that it “literally made my hair stand on end,” Tenet recalled. He then immediately took Blee and Black to the White House, requesting anemergency meeting with National Security Condoleezza Rice so that Blee could brief her on the threat reporting. The meeting was also attended by Clarke and Rice’s deputy Stephen Hadley, and caused controversy when it was omitted from the 9/11 Commission’s final report, but highlighted in one of Bob Woodward’s books. There is no indication that Blee mentioned Almihdhar or Malaysia to anybody there, at this time or at any other. The withholding of the information about Almihdhar in January 2000 and subsequent occasions only makes sense if the hijackers were being followed by people linked to those who were withholding the information, and Blee sits at the centre of that web. It is therefore highly likely that Blee knew all about the hijackers’ entries and residences in the US by this time from following Almihdhar and Alhazmi, but that he withheld this information deliberately. Had he told the people at the meeting of this information, there would have been plenty of time to prevent the attacks—over two months to round the hijackers up. Three days after the meeting, Wilshire sent another e-mail to the Counterterrorist Center, this time warning that Khallad was a “major-league killer,” pointing out that he had been identified by a CIA mole in al-Qaeda, and saying that it would be a good time to re-examine the Malaysia summit documents to get more information about him. On the same day this e-mail was sent Blee wrote an e-mail to another CIA officer entitled “Identification of Khallad,” so it is highly likely Blee received this e-mail. Wilshire wrote a third e-mail on 23 July. This time it was very clear: When the next big op is carried out by [bin Laden’s] hardcore cadre, [Khallad bin Attash] will be at or near the top of the command food chain—and probably nowhere near either the attack site or Afghanistan. That makes people who are available and who have direct access to him of very high interest. Khalid Almihdhar should be very high interest anyway, given his connection to the [redacted]. Blee made the comment that left such an impression on Tenet around this time. Tenet wrote: … magine how I and everyone else in the room reacted during one of my updates in late July when, as we speculated about the kind of attacks we could face, Rich B. suddenly said, with complete conviction, “They’re coming here.” I’ll never forget the silence that followed. At this time, Blee certainly had reason to make such a comment: he was the government official most responsible for gathering the warning signs in the summer of threat and thus the most highly aware of them. He must have been aware of the hijackers’ presence in the US and was also involved in efforts to keep this presence hidden from both the bureau and his own superiors. Even if he did not figure out that the hijackers were linked to the threat reporting by himself, he must have known this because Wilshire told him so repeatedly and documented this with a clear paper trail. Even if we suppose that Blee was cut off from the surveillance of the hijackers, Alec Station claims to have realised Almihdhar and Alhazmi were in the US on August 21 and communicated this to the FBI. (Coincidentally, this was one day before Blee’s nemesis FBI manager John O’Neill retired from the bureau and Ali Soufan, a bureau agent who had been asking questions about a possible al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia, went back to Yemen.) At this point Alec Station knew (1) there was going to be a major al-Qaeda attack, (2) Almihdhar was one of the terrorists probably involved in the attack, and (3) Almihdhar was in the US. With this information, it does not take a genius to work out the likely location of the attack was inside the US. Yet the FBI’s search for Almihdhar, overseen by Wilshire, was a catastrophe. The case against Blee can be summed up like this: some intelligence community employees at and linked to Alec Station deliberately withheld information from the FBI in general and the USS Cole investigators in particular about Almihdhar and Alhazmi. Two of the officials who were involved in one example of this in January 2000, Doug Miller and Mark Rossini, have confessed to their part and implicated Wilshire and one of his subordinates. It stretches credulity well beyond breaking point to suggest that the group centred on Blee and Wilshire withheld information deliberately in January 2000, but that its subsequent inability to pass on the same and similar information was due to overwork and understaffing, especially given the most peculiar circumstances in which the information was not passed. Although it is Wilshire that did most of the work, it is hard to imagine that a deputy unit chief could practice such a deception, leading us to suspect his boss, Blee. This suspicion is greatly enhanced by Blee’s incorrect briefings of his superiors on 12 and 14 January 2000 and his failure to mention to anyone the evident links between the high threat and the Malaysia meeting in numerous discussions in the summer of 2001. In addition, his position as a child of a CIA hero would have given him access to a network of intelligence community professionals. If he did want “off-the-books” surveillance of the two hijackers in San Diego, he would have known who to call. It is certainly possible to dream up scenarios in which the surveillance of the hijackers inside the US somehow broke down, or to theorise that the hijackers, who were employing a countersurveillance technique when taking flights, were smarter than the people monitoring them. Both these scenarios would clear Blee of the most serious charge of deliberately allowing the attacks. However, neither of these scenarios seem likely at the moment. Perhaps further research will allow them to be either confirmed or ruled out. Another question to ask is: did Blee benefit from the attacks? Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars offers us an insight into the debate inside the CIA about what action to take against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. It portrays Blee as an officer most interested in providing increased assistance to Northern Alliance chief Ahmed Shah Massoud, with whom he met repeatedly. However, Blee was frustrated in this by others at the White House and agency, who did not trust Massoud. As we now know, all this changed after 9/11 and the US is still bogged down there along with its allies. In addition, as we will see, it was Blee that got himself appointed head of the CIA arm of the war… What Richard Blee Did Next Following the attacks, Blee was made station chief in Kabul, replacing Gary Berntsen, an officer who had realised the back door was open for bin Laden to escape from the battle of Tora Bora. Knowing some of the local warlords could not be trusted, Berntsen had repeatedly requested US ground forces to close off the escape routes and encircle bin Laden. However, he was unsuccessful, and Blee arrived to take over on 9 December. Although there are numerous stories about bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora, he seems to have still been there at this time. For example, in The One Percent Doctrine author Ron Suskind has bin Laden making a radio broadcast there on 15 December. Had bin Laden been captured or killed there, it certainly would have provided some degree of closure for the US and the world, and probably significantly changed the course of subsequent events, possibly including a swift withdrawal from Afghanistan and a different public perception of the security vs. liberty trade-off. One can speculate about Blee’s role, but there is no evidence, let alone proof, one way or the other. On the other hand, it would be interesting to read his first cables from Afghanistan and compare them to Berntsen’s. As CIA station chief in Afghanistan, he must have overseen all the abuses of prisoners that occurred there. One example for them all, from the Washington Post: In November 2002, a newly minted CIA case officer in charge of a secret prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets, according to four U.S. government officials aware of the case. The Afghan guards — paid by the CIA and working under CIA supervision in an abandoned warehouse code-named the Salt Pit — dragged their captive around on the concrete floor, bruising and scraping his skin, before putting him in his cell, two of the officials said. As night fell, so, predictably, did the temperature. By morning, the Afghan man had frozen to death. While Tora Bora is shrouded in the fog of war, the rendition of Ibn Shaikh al-Libi is not. Al-Libi, who had run training camps for radicals in Afghanistan, was captured by Pakistani forces trying to flee the country in November and handed over to the US in December. His questioning was initially headed by FBI agent Russell Fincher, who used the bureau’s traditional rapport-building techniques and began to extract nuggets of information from al-Libi. Fincher had previously worked on the Cole investigation–he was one of the agents the Blee/Wilshire group had withheld information about Almihdhar and Alhazmi from before 9/11. FBI veteran Jack Cloonan was working with Fincher from headquarters. He later told the American Prospect: “They’re getting good stuff, and everyone’s getting the raw 302s [interview summaries] — the agency, the military, the director. But for some reason, the CIA chief of station in Kabul is taking issue with our approach.” Newsweek also fingered Blee as the official responsible for starting the interagency contest: The CIA station chief in Afghanistan, meanwhile, appealed to the agency’s hawkish counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black. He in turn called CIA Director George Tenet, who went to the White House. Al-Libi was handed over to the CIA. More details of the discussions over al-Libi between the CIA, FBI and White House can be found elsewhere. However, this was the key battle between the agency and the bureau over the handling of detainees and determined the outcome of later contests, in particular the fight over Abu Zubaida. The CIA’s victory led to the “enhanced interrogation techniques” and everything they gave rise to. After the agency took control of al-Libi, they put him on a plane to Cairo, where he was tortured into confessing a fictitious link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. This information then found its way into Colin Powell’s famous speech to the UN making the case for war with Iraq. Ali Soufan, one of the Cole investigators from whom the Blee/Wilshire group had withheld information before 9/11, interviewed Abu Zubaida after his capture and got some useful information out of him. However, the CIA, led by its SERE contractors, muscled in on the interrogation and started implementing its torture tactics. Soufan was disgusted and protested what was happening, but eventually left the site of the interrogation. Before 9/11, one of the mechanisms used to justify withholding the information was the “wall,” a term sometimes used to mean different things, but basically a set of regulations governing information sharing between and inside agencies. After 9/11, the wall came down, and information was shared freely in the panic to prevent what was then assumed to be the next attack. However, as Soufan wrote in an April 2009 New York Times op-ed: One of the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the C.I.A. and F.B.I., similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him. Blee, whose subordinates built up an impressive track record of failing to share information with the FBI before the attacks, helped re-institute the barriers that enabled the information to be withheld after them. In particular, this led to information not being obtained by Fincher and Soufan, two of the very agents he and his associates had been withholding information from not six months previously. We must ask: is this just a coincidence? Or could Blee reasonably foresee that shipping al-Libi to Egypt and getting control of detainees for the CIA would hurt the FBI’s access to information? Finally, there is the question of the CIA’s assassination programme, devised but never implemented after 9/11, although it was put into practice by the military in another form. The first mention of it in the press I can find is in Dana Priest’s groundbreaking November 2005 exposé of the CIA’s black sites, “The CTC’s chief of operations argued for creating hit teams of case officers and CIA paramilitaries that would covertly infiltrate countries in the Middle East, Africa and even Europe to assassinate people on the list [of high-value targets], one by one.” Although Blee was appointed chief of Alec Station around June 1999, there was a reorganisation at the Counterterrorist Center in the first half of the next year and Blee’s position was upgraded. In a 2007 article Silverstein gives his positions in chronological order: a posting to Algeria (which was in the early 90s), work on Iraq (mid-90s), chief of operations at the CTC with oversight of Alec Station and renditions, and station chief in Kabul (a position he took up in December 2001). Therefore it appears that after his short stint as Alec Station chief, the position he moved to was CTC chief of operations. This makes him the official Priest has arguing “for creating hit teams.” As we can see, he built up a very consistent track record: withholding information before 9/11, assassination teams, rendition and torture. Thankfully, it seems he has now left the agency.