Terry Mauro
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Posts posted by Terry Mauro
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Once again, the claim being made is that there was a CIA/NSA coup against Scientology around the time of Watergate. This involved the "disappearing" of L Ron Hubbard, the "theft" of the secrets of Remote Viewing by the CIA/NSA (in the persons of OT VIIs Ingo Swann, Hal Puthoff and OT L? Pat Price), and what appears from to be a major tax and land grab.
Like David Guyatt, I suspect that any Remote Viewing secrets that may have been "discovered" in the post-WW2 years by Scientology were probably occult secrets derived from the work of Ordo Templis Orientis member & JPL scientist, Jack Parsons. However, if the coup claim is correct then Scientology pre-1972-3 and post-1972-3 are very different organisations.
In passing, the following story is making the news in Blighty:
A teenager is facing prosecution for using the word "cult" to describe the Church of Scientology.The unnamed 15-year-old was served the summons by City of London police when he took part in a peaceful demonstration opposite the London headquarters of the controversial religion.
Officers confiscated a placard with the word "cult" on it from the youth, who is under 18, and a case file has been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service.
A date has not yet been set for him to appear in court.
The decision to issue the summons has angered human rights activists and support groups for the victims of cults.
The incident happened during a protest against the Church of Scientology on May 10. Demonstrators from the anti-Scientology group, Anonymous, who were outside the church's £23m headquarters near St Paul's cathedral, were banned by police from describing Scientology as a cult by police because it was "abusive and insulting".
Writing on an anti-Scientology website, the teenager facing court said: "I brought a sign to the May 10th protest that said: 'Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.'
"'Within five minutes of arriving I was told by a member of the police that I was not allowed to use that word, and that the final decision would be made by the inspector."
A policewoman later read him section five of the Public Order Act and "strongly advised" him to remove the sign. The section prohibits signs which have representations or words which are threatening, abusive or insulting.
The teenager refused to back down, quoting a 1984 high court ruling from Mr Justice Latey, in which he described the Church of Scientology as a "cult" which was "corrupt, sinister and dangerous".
After the exchange, a policewoman handed him a court summons and removed his sign.
On the website he asks for advice on how to fight the charge: "What's the likelihood I'll need a lawyer? If I do have to get one, it'll have to come out of my pocket money."
Writing on the same website, another anonymous demonstrator said: "We also protested outside another Scientology building in Tottenham Court Road which is policed by a separate force, the Metropolitan police, who have never tried to stop us using the word cult.
"We're completely peaceful protesters expressing a perfectly valid opinion. This whole thing stinks."
Liberty director, Shami Chakrabarti, said: "This barmy prosecution makes a mockery of Britain's free speech traditions.
"After criminalising the use of the word 'cult', perhaps the next step is to ban the words 'war' and 'tax' from peaceful demonstrations?"
Ian Haworth, from the Cult Information Centre which provides advice for victims of cults and their families, said: "This is an extraordinary situation. If it wasn't so serious it would be farcical. The police's job is to protect and serve. Who is being served and who is being protected in this situation? I find it very worrying.
"Scientology is well known to my organisation, and has been of great concern to me for 22 years. I get many calls from families with loved ones involved and ex-members who are in need of one form of help."
The City of London police came under fire two years ago when it emerged that more than 20 officers, ranging from constable to chief superintendent, had accepted gifts worth thousands of pounds from the Church of Scientology.
The City of London Chief Superintendent, Kevin Hurley, praised Scientology for "raising the spiritual wealth of society" during the opening
of its headquarters in 2006.
Last year a video praising Scientology emerged featuring Ken Stewart, another of the City of London's chief superintendents, although he is not a member of the group.
The group was founded by the science-fiction writer L Ron Hubbard in 1952 and espouses the idea that humans are descended from an exiled race of aliens called Thetans.
The church continues to attract controversy over claims that it separates members from their families and indoctrinates followers.
A spokeswoman for the force said today: "City of London police had received complaints about demonstrators using the words 'cult' and 'Scientology kills' during protests against the Church of Scientology.
"Following advice from the Crown Prosecution Service some demonstrators were warned verbally and in writing that their signs breached section five of the Public Order Act.
"One demonstrator continued to display a placard despite police warnings and was reported for an offence under section five. A file on the case will go to the CPS."
A CPS spokesman said no specific advice was given to police regarding the boy's placard.
"In April, prior to this demonstration, as part of our normal working relationship we gave the City of London police general advice on the law around demonstrations and religiously aggravated crime in particular.
"We did not advise on this specific case prior to the summons being issued – which the police can do without reference to us – but if we receive a file we will review it in the normal way according to the code for crown prosecutors."
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""After criminalising the use of the word 'cult', perhaps the next step is to ban the words 'war' and 'tax' from peaceful demonstrations?"
Ian Haworth, from the Cult Information Centre which provides advice for victims of cults and their families, said: "This is an extraordinary situation. If it wasn't so serious it would be farcical."
Well, it's certainly heart-warming to see another person describing the scenario and situation in the same terms I used in my above post to describe "Scientology," a church, indeed!
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...well, if you're well informed, you'll remember whether John said he was one of the shooters.
Wikipedia tells of his Cuban connections.
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Are you for real?
Enter Frank Sturgis aka Frank Fiorini into google.com, and you should be able to find enough to keep you busy for the next 24 hours..
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Ian Fleming is having a 100th Anniversary this week.
There should be a lot of mainstream media hype.
BK
I wanted to make some type of contribution, has anyone ever read the 1967 piece on the Bahama's and Organized Crime that was in Life Magazine? Seems like a correlating area, to some degree.....As for below,
disregard the fact that this is dated from 2002, I am sure it will be new information to some of us here.
The Real James Bond
Courtesy BBC.co.uk
May 9, 2002
Sensitive government files which shed light on the life of the master spy Sidney Reilly are finally opened to the public. Reilly is credited with providing Ian Fleming with the inspiration for his character James Bond. His exploits for British intelligence in Russia made him a household name in Britain in the twenties. But many suspect he may have been a double, triple or even quadruple agent.
Reilly disappeared on a mission in Russia in 1925, and today's papers may shed light on whether he was betrayed by a mole inside British intelligence. He was born Shlomo Rosenblum, in Ukraine, in 1873. He was recruited by the British intelligence and won the Military Cross for work in Russia. He was also kept under close observation by the MI5 between his volunteering and actually being enlisted into the service. His love-life was tangled: it's known that he had at least four wives (three of the marriages were bigamous) and he claimed to have at least ninety lovers. Reilly disappeared on an undercover mission in Russia in 1925. Historian Andrew Cook believes that the manner of his death proves he was never a double agent. Reilly had been working inside Russia with a shadowy organisation called The Trust, which Western Intelligence believed was trying to overthrow the Bolsheviks. In fact, The Trust was the creation of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Russian KGB: Reilly had been set up. Andrew Cook told Breakfast: "The manner of his death indicates he was not a double agent. OGPU (the fore-runner of the KGB) took him for a drive into the country. The car "broke down" and they took him for a short walk while it was being repaired. Then they shot him in the back." Compared with how executions were normally carried out, it was a kindness to do it this way.
Another Ukranian.......
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Thanks for the historical by-line, Robert. It's really interesting to confirm how the "upper" ten percent live.
"The Real James Bond"
"Historian Andrew Cook believes that the manner of his death proves he was never a double agent. Reilly had been working inside Russia with a shadowy organization called The Trust, which Western Intelligence believed was trying to overthrow the Bolsheviks."
Another aristocratic, oligarchic, fascist organization, perhaps? Because that's what all these MI5, MI6, and CIA "spy vs spy" guys remind me of. All operative shills for the rich and famous, royal and corporative, "upper" classes. Does payment for all of this come out of our taxes, as well as those of the British Commonwealth's?
Oh, to live such a "charmed" life, I'm sure.
Ter
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Who knows?
Sooner or later, we may actually get around to something of relevance in the JFK assassination.
And since neither "Para" nor "Dive"/aka SCUBA, etc; have that much bearing on the subject matter,
perhaps another avenue of "credibility" can be explored.
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31 Oct 2007
Read TopicMike Williams: Biography
I am recently retired from the United States Marine Corp, after 23 years of service; 1984-2007. My military occupational specialty, or Mos, for the last 19 years of my tour was 8541 Scout/Snipers. I have a strong background in ballistics, ammunitions, and weapons.
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Does not appear to be much in the way of research posted here in order that one can determine for themselves the "depth" of a "strong background".
However!
http://www.jfklancerforum.com/dc/dcboard.p...d=124&page=
http://www.jfklancerforum.com/dc/dcboard.p...69688&page=
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Now, as most who have been around this forum for any length of time are aware, discussion on the "clip" and it's failure to fully release from the Carcano, were long ago discussed.
However, not unlike many of the other BS scenario's, self proclaimed researchers and experts keep coming down the pike without even bothering to review what road they are on, where it leads to, or whether it even goes anywhere at all.
Attached is a "quickie" drawing which, in it's most simple terms, explains the Carcano clip mechanism as well as exactly why
anyone who attempts to make statements in regards to what the clip "should" have done, knows little on this subject matter as well.
Hopefully, everyone will download this, file it away, and then the next time someone starts this BS again, merely whip it out and explain it to these "weapons" experts.
Drawing#1 represents the inside of the receiver of the Carcano, where the loaded ammunition clip is inserted down into the receiver and en-block magazine housing.
Note that the inside of the receiver has a machined "lip" "A" in the forward area of that portion in which the clip is inserted.
Additionally, located at the rear of the inside of the receiver is a combination "clip guide" which also serves as a spring loaded holder for the clip as it provides pressure against the rear portion of the clip once inserted within the receiver.
This applied pressure forces the clip into the fully forward position within the receiver housing so that "A1"/the forward edges of the clip remain in direct contact with that lip/edge designated as "A".
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In moving along, we now look at Drawing#3 which was meant to represent an unloaded clip.
At the rear/base, one can see the groove in the clip which aligns with the clip guide within the receiver housing.
It is also noted that the base of the clip in the center, also has a "stop" lug which extends out past the rear of the clip, and which lug contacts with the spring release when the clip is fully inserted.
Of particular note in regards to the clip is the fact that the Mouth of the clip "B", has a shorter distance across it than does the rear/base of the clip.
In simple words, the sides of the clip are tapered inwards, thus closing the mouth to a smaller dimension.
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Moving to Drawing#2 which represents a clip with the ammo loaded, it is noted that when the cartridge is placed into the clip, that it forces the mouth of the clip to "open" up to a wider dimension. And, herein lies the critical importance in the "spring"/return to standard dimension for the clip after all cartridges/casings have been ejected.
When the clip is loaded with ammunition, the cartridge casing now forces the mouth of the clip outwards to a wider dimension, which makes that point designated as "A1" on the clip now "lock" itself within the lip designated as "A" on the receiver drawing.
With the outside edge of the clip locked in this "notch", and the spring release/clip guide at the rear of the clip exerting forward pressure against the clip, the clip now resides perfectly within that machined out area of the receiver.
When the last round is chambered and the cartridge casing which held the mouth of the clip open to it's designated wide mouth is gone, the spring of the steel (or brass) of the clip is supposed to allow the mouth of the clip to close sufficiently that the "A1" forward lip of the clip is no longer lodged within the "A" notch of the receiver.
This "closing" of the mouth of the clip now allows the clip to actually move forward slightly within the receiver and become loose to the extent that it may, or may not simply fall out.
However, a variety of things affect whether or not this actually happens.
Primarily, this revolves around the extent to which the clip may have had it's "mouth" stretched open to the extent that the inherent spring of the steel/brass has been stretched to the point that when the mouth closes after the last cartridge is gone, that portion of the forward edge of the clip "A1" does not close sufficiently to allow it to move forward past the notch/lip within the receiver.
In many instances when this happens, the clip will actually remain lodged inside the receiver as the pressure exerted on the rear of the clip by the clip release spring/clip guide will force the clip into a slightly binded position in which the sidewalls of the clip are in contact against the edge at the notch within the receiver.
Now!
I can take any Carcano clip, be it spring steel or brass, and force the mouth of the clip open to the extent that the clip no longer has the "spring" capability to return to the "narrow mouth" after the last cartridge is gone, and thusly make this clip hang within the receiver/magazine housing of the weapon virtually every single time.
Or!
I can take any Carcano clip, be it spring steel or brass, and force the mouth of the clip closed to the extent that the mouth of the clip will always (when no cartridge is present) remain of a dimension which is less than that part of the receiver in which the mouth must slide to upon ejection of the last cartridge, and even though the cartridge casings will hold this clip open to the extent that it will insert and function properly, the clip will virtually always fall out of the weapon after the last cartridge has been chambered and the mouth of the clip closes considerably.
Or!
There is that "mid-point" in between, in which the mouth of the casing is such that, after chambering of the last round, it will not move forward within the receiver sufficiently to allow it to fully fall out, and in which the spring release exerting pressure against the rear of the clip helps hold it in place.
And, in this instance, one merely has to push the "spring release" button which is located within the forward area of the trigger housing, which releases any forward pressure on the clip and thus allows it to fall free from the weapon.
So, if one gets themselves a Carcano; a clip; and some ammo, they will find that by either forcing the mouth of the clip slightly open or forcing it slightly closed, one can just about make the Carcano clip do as one wishes, be it hang up, fall free, or in between.
Note: Additional elements which affect this is the weapon age and internal wear of that area within the receiver where the clip rests, as well as the actual wear on the clip itself.
Some of the old brass clips have been used to the extent that they are well worn on the forward area and thusly drop more readily and more easily than do the spring steel versions.
The "Issue" of the hanging clip in the weapon recovered from the sixth floor of the TSDB is in fact a "non-issue".
And anyone who understands the functioning of the Carcano and it's clip mechanism would understand this, just as they would recognize exactly why the weapon was made with the "clip release" button within the forward area of the trigger housing.
It is recognized that since one of the "Great's" of the USMC shooting abilities has said otherwise on this subject matter, that it would be complete blasphemy for anyone else within the USMC to contradict it.
Kind of like a devout catholic telling everyone that the Pope does not speak to God.
My position would be that if God wanted me to remain ignorant of the facts, that he would not have given me the ability to overcome such ignorance of these "purported" facts.
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"Hopefully, everyone will download this, file it away, and then the next time someone starts this BS again, merely whip it out and explain it to these "weapons" experts."
Send a page to a friend
Send this email in English
Send to (Person's Name):
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Subject
Message I thought you might be interested in reading this web page: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=12804
From,
Terry Mauro
It's on its way to my computer at home, Purv. Great idea!
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Mike;
You, not unlike others, entered this forum without sufficiently doing your "homework" on anything.
Which includes JFK assassination research as well as research into the factual background of those who now or have previously posted here.
Not only that, but you also immediately accepted as fact the qualifications of those who I long ago exposed as "Faithful Followers of Dangerous Dan Marvin/aka wannabee's who know nothing", as well as those who have somewhat "embellished" upon their training, etc;
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...12757&st=30
Post #34
Professionals like Carrier and Sherry Feister are just mere idiots, although they managed to build a whole career around buffaloing folks.
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http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...=6092&st=90
Post #93
Rest assured that were my "research" capability as inept as yours would appear to be, and had I been stupid enough to "lap" of the BS as fed to you by "Dangerous Dan" Marvin, then I to would be somewhat reluctant to discuss the subject matter as well.
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http://www.manuscriptservice.com/lancer.html
16, RE: Marvin on Pitzer: Error & Embellishment
Posted by Al Carrier
No Bob, he is a retired commissioned officer with the United States Army Special Forces and his title would be Lt. Col. Daniel Marvin, USA Retired. A formal address to show respect for what he has done and earned is Lt. Col. Marvin, or Col. Marvin. But you wouldn't understand that as it is not taught at Dick Clark Productions.
Lt. Col. Marvin, Dr. Eaglesham and others have questioned my loyalty to you here and I can understand why many are challenging many things you post as there are those who are at odds with you on the inside. I am in no way versed enough in these issues that you are at odds with these people, but I continue to support and show respect for you for this simple reason. Please do not take offense, but I did check you out. I was curious because of the conflicts in issues you have here and felt it neccessary. Because of what I found of your background and the stand you are taking now on the issues of SE Asia operations, I have to believe in what you are saying because it makes no sense for you to be motivated to fabricate. I felt it was worth the effort because you are one of so few who have came forward with critical issues, and we both know that there are so many who could.
I mean no disrespect to Dr. Eaglesham with this as he also appears to be a man of honor and great knowlege. He has said in the past that his degree is unrelated and the title of Doctor is not necessary, but I am from the old school and believe in respecting ones accomplishments by way of addressing them for what they earned.
Lt. Col. Marvin, if you do take offense to me looking into your background, you should consider that I am aware you have also checked me out and I not only do not take offense to that, I respect your thoroughness.
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No Al, he is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army whose correct title is Dan Marvin, LTC Retired,
U.S. Army Quartermaster Supply Corps. (QMC).
GOT THAT!
Your great research capability should have told you that Special Forces did not become a career branch for officers until some time after the failed helicopter rescue of hostages in Iran, which was a considerable number of years after your "HERO" Dangrous Dan Marvin had retired.
Perhaps you can get someone to assist you in looking up exactly what activities it is that Quartermaster Supply Corps Officers are normally engaged in, as well as providing a little background as to why LTC Marvin wishes to misrepresent his career branch.
Had you further continued to "check out" LTC Dangerous Dan Marvin, you would have easily found many, many, items of absolute and pure BS, which should have indicated to anyone with even the "smurf" size extent of common sense that Dangerous Dan would in fact be quite dangerous. At least to himself!
As example:
1. I do believe that Dangerous Dan at one point makes reference to how "earmuff" charges are utilized to blow up earthen dams.
Both the Engineer School at Ft. Belvoir as well as the SF Engineer Course at Ft. Bragg would be highly interested in this revelation.
Since all known and published doctrine will state that an "earmuff" charge is worthless on an earthen structure, they would no doubt want to seek Dangerous Dan's method of demolition in which he achieved this unique example of usage of explosives.
Had you either known anything, or bothered to check this one out, not unlike a witness on the stand who has lost some credibility, Dangerous Dan's credibility rating would begin to take a nose dive.
2. I do believe that Dangerous Dan makes reference to the SADM device, and thereafter talks about how it was transported down in some 3/4 ton truck, etc; and that the "timer" was out of some washing machine type timer, etc.
Get Real!
Any idiot would recognize the BS in that one.
First off: I carry a Nuclear Weapons Officer skill rating, and I have never had my hands on a live nuke.
Not to mention having one driven down for me to look at by someone riding down the road in a 3/4 ton army truck.
Nuke security is tight. And if you want to get immediately shot, try to get around one.
Secondly: is the US Military Service supposed to employ the "Maytag Repairman" to ride along on missions in event the washing machine "timer" has trouble?
Dangeous Dan, had obviously "heard" the stories, and thereafter did not even bother to verify what they were about, just as you have not.
The "Timer" is in fact a combination Timer/Detonator/and PAL (Permissive Action Link) which prevents the weapon from being detonated by anyone other than those persons who are in possession of the security code to open the detonator train.
And, you can rest assured that this portion of the device did not come from the "Maytag" washing machine factory.
Thirdly: Your "Hero" references his attempt to insert a SADM by MFF (Military Free Fall/HALO) insertion into a denied area to blow up the Aswan Dam.
WHOA BOY, do I really love this one.
A. His HALO experience is absolutely "NIL", with the exception of being around the Parachute Rigger shed where the parachutes were packed.
B. Even after having graduated from the 5-week HALO/MFF school, one is still a "novice" and must thereafter continue with multiple training exercises with his team, their equipment, etc; etc; etc.
C. Jumping the SADM requires the absolute utmost in HALO experience due to the weight of the package.
In fact, some persons can not even jump it due to their body configuration and the added speed to free fall which it gives to the person carrying the device.
D. Your "Hero" references how he would jump the device and thereafer, utilizing his front hands for control, "glide" towards the target.-------YIKES!
First off, a covert HALO insertion is normally carried out at night. Not too sneaky with all of those opened canopies in the air during daylight hours.
Secondly, Unless on some friendly terms with the enemy, it is unlikely that the target will be sufficiently lighted enough that one can distinguish it in the dark.
Thirdly, The likelihood that anyone carrying the weight of a SADM device can do anything other than "fall" is quite slim, as it is somewhat difficult, with this added weight, to even manage to fall flat and stable.
Fourthly, the "Glide" to target concept goes against all military doctrine for MFF operations, in which no one is supposed to "fly/glide" around in the air.
To do so risk collision with other falling team members, therefore taking yourself as well as your team member OUT, and saving the enemy the trouble.
HALO/MFF concept is to exit as a team, fall flat and stable, open at the same altitudes, and then come together as a group (grouping) while under canopy, in order to attempt to land in a relatively close proximity to one another, it has absolutely nothing to do with "gliding" to a target.
And were one to "glide" to the target and thus open, who knows where they would land, as the old MFF canopies placed the jumper entirely at the mercy of the wind, which fequently "drifted" one a long, long way.
E. As to insertion of a nuke device into a denied area, LTC Marvin should have read up a little more on the subject matter prior to attempting to sell this BS.
Exactly what kind of idiot is it that thinks that we would allow a nuclear device to be inserted into a denied area, without some security forces on the ground to safeguard the device.
Otherwise, it would be somewhat like merely handing over a nuke to the enemy.
This one is an absolute NO BRAINER!.
Prior to any type insertion of a tactical nuclear weapon, at minimum, half of the Team would be inserted to provide physical security for the device upon it's insertion. And in all liklihood, an entire Team would be required for this security.
F. Nevertheless, let's continue with "Dangerous Dan's) scenario in which he places the device and sets the "Maytag Timer" which continues to function properly and therefore eliminates the need to insert the "Maytag Repairman" to fix it.
Absolutely NO team member contains the PAL security code which will allow the detonator train to be activated.
This can be acquired from only the highest COMMAND, and although the device could have been inserted a considerable length of time prior to implementation, secure COMMO is required in order to receive the PAL Security Code before the device can be armed.
G. Nevertheless, should "Dangerous Dan" manage to achieve all that he thinks he can, then he truely becomes "DANGEROUS" when he, in his targeting plan, ends up creating a nuclear cloud of radioactive particles, dust, etc, which would be so large as to enter the upper atmosphere and be carried to numerous surrounding countries, as well as possibley our own shores.
Now, we know exactly why and how "Dangerous Dan" got his handle.
The single most efficient utilization of any explosive device to take out a dam, is utilized on the WATER side of the dam.
The water, since it will not compress, assists in directing the majority of the force against the structure.
Not only this, but it creates virtually NO fallout cloud for contamination of foreign countries.
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Now Big Al, if you had even the "smurf smidget" of research capability, then you would have known that "Dangerous Dan" has a severe credibility problem with those of us who just may know a little on the subject matter.
That you can not even see through the BS of Dangerous Dan, which is easily researched, would appear to demonstrate a severe lack of factual research capability.
And, from where those of us who have actually "been there" see this, it demonstrates the "know nothing" capability of anyone who has fallen for the Dangerous Dan storyline.
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Al Carrier Wed Sep-25-02 03:58 PM
Charter member
posts
#4036, "RE: Mannlicher-Carcano 91/38 6.5 mm in general"
In response to Reply # 5
Hey Chris.
What you are referring to here is the gravitation pull effect that I have reported on several times on the forum. I was first trained to compensate for this at The Scout Sniper School at the Marathon Station in the keys over twenty years ago.
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Now! Neither Gerry P. Hemming, nor I am aware of some obviously "covert" Scout Sniper School at Marathon Station (Marathon Key) in Florida, where U.S. Army MP's are sent to become shooters.
Which by the way brings out the question? Is this where you obtained your "Scout Sniper" qualification as well, or did the USMC actually send you to the true Scout Sniper School.
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So, as a "Follower/Believer" of the great shooter Al Carrier (and his "Canyon Shoot" BS), this would, by association it is assumed also make you a follower of the "Dangerous Dan Marvin" line of BS'er's as well?
Now!
This forum is not the "Spanky & Our Gang" grouping over on Lancer.
And, although there are those here (as at Lancer and elsewhere) who will believe about anything and/or anyone who comes up with anything against the US Government complicity in the assassination, along with mythological multiple assassins; body snatchers and wound alterations specialists, and most anything else that by far exceeds the realms of reality, there are also some pretty intelligent researchers here as well.
And, rest assured, were my "credentials" not sufficent as well as my research that lacking, then I would have been "LNer'd" off this forum long ago by persons who far exceeded anything which you may think that you know about the assassination.
As example, your work on the "Carcano Clip" over on Lancer has gained you your own following of "believers".
However, if you will actually conduct a little research here on the "Education Forum", then you will find that here too I long ago demonstrated that I can make a Carcano Clip hang up EVERY SINGLE TIME; make a Carcano clip fall out EVERY SINGLE TIME;, or if so desired, make the clip merely hang until the last round/casing is ejected from the chamber and the "Clip Release Button" within the trigger housing is pressed.
So, other than your proclaimed ability with a rifle, you entered this forum with a severe lack of credibility in judgement of whom to and not to believe, as well as a severely lacking ability to determine factual information.
Which I might add goes right along with an obviously complete failure to examine the WC's presented evidence, as well as a study and examination of the other forensic; ballistic; pathological; and physical evidence.
In other, and simple words, you, not unlike and entire flock of other "sheeples", have merely believed what you have been told, without expending the effort to verify for yourself the actual facts of what is stated.
There mere fact that you have apparantly never given consideration that just perhaps the WC was not telling us the facts and truths in regards to THE SHOT THAT MISSED, is clear evidence that you are severely lacking in the ability to think for yourself.
Which may tend to demonstrate exactly why I was in Special Forces, and you spent a career in the USMC.
P.S. Perhaps, had Al Carrier actually known anything (Which Bill Miller accepts and believes the Al Carrier/CSI---BS), then he would have known and understood the direct correlation between the shallow depth of penetration of JFK's back wound, that the base of CE399 is deformed to 4mm X 7mm in size; that the "puncture" type wound in the back of JFK measured exactly 4mm X 7mm in size and had relatively clean cut edges; that the entering bullet carried with it, down into the wound of entry, considerable cloth from the coat and shirt of JFk, while also "punching' out a hole in the shirt, which not unlike the wound in JFK's back, exactly matches the dimensional form and outline of the base of CE399.
And, as an "old shooter" who is quite familiar with "wadcutter" bullets, it does not take even a "fifth grader" to resolve exactly which end of CE399 struck JFK in the back.
Which by the way, you also apparantly neglected to investigate!
So! Irrelevant as to your (or for that matter my) credentials, why not amaze us with your knowledge of the facts of the JFK assassination.
P.P.S. Might I advise that you watch out, as those who have been here long enough and know the protocal for factual research, can easily recognize BS!
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""covert" Scout Sniper School"
Hey Purv! Now, I FINALLY get what you were referring to in that PM you sent me. ROFLMAO!!! HAH! HAH! HAH! HAH! HAH!
Son Tay, and the whole McDonald mess lends to credibility. Im sure you can figure this out with a little effort.
Love to sit and talk, but not unlike a student in the Underwater Operations Course, I am currently "struggling" severely, merely to keep my head above water in the "credibility" Department.
P.S. Although brain cells are progressively on the downward spiral, would be more than glad to "kill" a few of the remaining, just to see you on Bourbon St. and have a laugh or tell a "war story" or two about the ole Playboy Club.
P.P.S.
You and Christina have much in common! She too can "hang tough" with the best of them.
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That would be a grand time, indeed, my friend.
And, BTW, you're treading water, just fine, as far as I'm concerned.
Well, I'm off to work. Keep them enlightened, Purv, seriously.
-
Thanks, Peter, for posting a link to Ashton's site.
1. There are only a few authors on the site. One of them is a writer of pulp mysteries named Jon D'Arme. The lead character in D'Arme's book, featured on the cover of his book, is "the Colonel". In his photos, Ashton Gray is dressed up to look like "The Colonel". There is no bio given for Jon D'Arme. Ashton Gray is therefore probably Jon D'Arme. Since Jon D'Arme is most probably a nom de plume for someone with a less dramatic name than Ashton Gray, Ashton Gray is probably another nom de plume for this same gentleman. Take a look and see if this makes sense.
http://www.omenbooks.com/Murder_at_Wisteria_Pines.html
2. Ashton has three books all set to come out. One of them is an assault on the pharmaceutical industry. When Ashton began pushing his "timeline" on the Forum, he claimed he hadn't written it, but had only discovered it online and wanted to share it with us. He told us that it was just a coincidence that the timeline was written to push scientology, and imply that the CIA's fear of L. Ron Hubbard's discoveries re remote viewing was the core cause for Watergate. (or something like that). Now, not only does he have the timeline on his website, but it appears he is pushing the scientology agenda that pharmaceuticals are evil, and that the only way to get "clear" of your problems is to get "audited" by a trained scientologist. (Of course, this isn't free.) Ashton Gray is therefore the nom de plume of a fanatic scientologist, quite possibly working with other scientologists, in order to spread the gospel according to L. Ron.
While I suspected as much from the get-go, I was sorta hoping I was wrong. If such a joker can dupe so many on this site--where people are prone to be skeptical--what hope is there really that less skeptical people will be able to see through jokers like Bugliosi and Myers, when Reclaimng History is broadcast on HBO?
I think, Pat, that you have solved the puzzle of who was or is the person known in the forum as Ashton Gray. Within days of his joining the forum he implemented a plan, likely previously conceived by him with other scientologists, to sow dissention and confusion among our members and succeeded brilliantly in doing so for quite a length of time.
While not dismissing most of what is posited above, let me ask we just slow down a bit. The book with what looks like and is likely Ashton posing on the cover is a work of fiction. Where exactly is the url for the timeline now? Ashton had sent part of it to me and it was a good timeline on Watergate. I don't like the Scientologists, though oddly enough they have at times done good research. It was my understanding from a few exchanges by private email with Ashton and from his postings on the Forum on his publisher's site that his forthcoming book on Watergate was going to be very negative toward Scientology...but I could be wrong or have been misled. It certainly did seem to be leaning toward an interest of the Plumbers and the CIA in things related to a favorite of Scientology - namely 'remote viewing', but I thought that was just to be a small part...perhaps I'm wrong. I know little of what the book will contain, in fact and the publisher's website tells little, as well.
Doug, I felt he was grossly unfair with you and I understand your enmity of him. I think we may have to await his book to see if he has any new worthwhile information. His publisher's Forum is strange indeed. At Ashton's invitation I joined. I had posted a whopping three or four posts when I was bannned for violation of [if I remember correctly, rule #14 op. cit. on the site]. I'd been asked a direct question and declined - with explanation - why I preferred not to answer fully. I could have just said I didn't know - but honesty was NOT welcome and I was banned. Very odd indeed. I don't know what to make of it all. Anyone know of past books Ashton has published? There are at least two persons on this Forum [i'll not name names] who know and communicate with Ashton frequently by email and even phone. I'd be interested to know what you think - as a post - or by private email.
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IMHO, anyone who claims to be a member of Scientology, is a weak-willed, insecure, most likely an ex-druggie, or disillusioned Jesus freak, who needs constant reassurance that they are "on the right track," spiritually. Their dogma often smacks of the same cult-type rhetoric, if you can describe it, as such, one might very possibly find in the "moonies," the "Jim Jones" followers, or the CIA. And, from what I could determine, "once a Scientologist, or believer in their doctrine, always a Scientologist, or believer in their doctrine." Kind of like what happens to people affiliated with the Central Intelligence community, wouldn't you say?
Plus, it seems like an ideal set-up for an organization needed in herding "sheeple" through the "cattle-prodding" teachings of its revered leader, L. Ron Hubbard, whom they consider as a "god."
I was interviewed and taken on a tour of the Hollywood base of operations last September, and almost brought the interviewer to tears, by countering every proposition he attempted to set forth, as the bogus nonsense it really was. They had my friend and I sit through this propaganda video, which caused me to go through spasms of uncontrollable laughter at the sheer spectacle of themselves, and what they were trying to imply by this obvious sales pitch.
I informed him that the work he and his organization were attempting to do was commendable, and certainly helpful to those individuals who lacked the capacity to think for themselves. But I, on the other hand, was in the profession of helping people via the field of medicine, and some of Scientology's theories didn't hold enough credibility for me, nor for him to think that I, could take their organization seriously.
In fact, I had been more interested in seeing how his organization had meticulously restored the buildings they had procured, which I remembered had been hotels and apartment buildings formerly occupied by elderly people, in the Hollywood foothill area. I wondered how many of the former occupants had actually been displaced by this cult-ish, farcical "company?" They weren't forthcoming with any of those details, though.
It's unfortunate, seeing as I have a friend who is deeply entrenched in their philosophy. But, he doesn't try to force any of his beliefs on me, and is a dear person, in his own right. This is how I was goaded into taking a tour of the place, not by my friend, but by the managers. I felt sorry for the way they had been brain-washed into believing that this was all life had to hold for them. I guess some folks need the kind of assurance this organization offers, and I'm just a little too jaded to believe in fairy tales anymore.
-
Mike;
You, not unlike others, entered this forum without sufficiently doing your "homework" on anything.
Which includes JFK assassination research as well as research into the factual background of those who now or have previously posted here.
Not only that, but you also immediately accepted as fact the qualifications of those who I long ago exposed as "Faithful Followers of Dangerous Dan Marvin/aka wannabee's who know nothing", as well as those who have somewhat "embellished" upon their training, etc;
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...12757&st=30
Post #34
Professionals like Carrier and Sherry Feister are just mere idiots, although they managed to build a whole career around buffaloing folks.
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http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...=6092&st=90
Post #93
Rest assured that were my "research" capability as inept as yours would appear to be, and had I been stupid enough to "lap" of the BS as fed to you by "Dangerous Dan" Marvin, then I to would be somewhat reluctant to discuss the subject matter as well.
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http://www.manuscriptservice.com/lancer.html
16, RE: Marvin on Pitzer: Error & Embellishment
Posted by Al Carrier
No Bob, he is a retired commissioned officer with the United States Army Special Forces and his title would be Lt. Col. Daniel Marvin, USA Retired. A formal address to show respect for what he has done and earned is Lt. Col. Marvin, or Col. Marvin. But you wouldn't understand that as it is not taught at Dick Clark Productions.
Lt. Col. Marvin, Dr. Eaglesham and others have questioned my loyalty to you here and I can understand why many are challenging many things you post as there are those who are at odds with you on the inside. I am in no way versed enough in these issues that you are at odds with these people, but I continue to support and show respect for you for this simple reason. Please do not take offense, but I did check you out. I was curious because of the conflicts in issues you have here and felt it neccessary. Because of what I found of your background and the stand you are taking now on the issues of SE Asia operations, I have to believe in what you are saying because it makes no sense for you to be motivated to fabricate. I felt it was worth the effort because you are one of so few who have came forward with critical issues, and we both know that there are so many who could.
I mean no disrespect to Dr. Eaglesham with this as he also appears to be a man of honor and great knowlege. He has said in the past that his degree is unrelated and the title of Doctor is not necessary, but I am from the old school and believe in respecting ones accomplishments by way of addressing them for what they earned.
Lt. Col. Marvin, if you do take offense to me looking into your background, you should consider that I am aware you have also checked me out and I not only do not take offense to that, I respect your thoroughness.
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No Al, he is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army whose correct title is Dan Marvin, LTC Retired,
U.S. Army Quartermaster Supply Corps. (QMC).
GOT THAT!
Your great research capability should have told you that Special Forces did not become a career branch for officers until some time after the failed helicopter rescue of hostages in Iran, which was a considerable number of years after your "HERO" Dangrous Dan Marvin had retired.
Perhaps you can get someone to assist you in looking up exactly what activities it is that Quartermaster Supply Corps Officers are normally engaged in, as well as providing a little background as to why LTC Marvin wishes to misrepresent his career branch.
Had you further continued to "check out" LTC Dangerous Dan Marvin, you would have easily found many, many, items of absolute and pure BS, which should have indicated to anyone with even the "smurf" size extent of common sense that Dangerous Dan would in fact be quite dangerous. At least to himself!
As example:
1. I do believe that Dangerous Dan at one point makes reference to how "earmuff" charges are utilized to blow up earthen dams.
Both the Engineer School at Ft. Belvoir as well as the SF Engineer Course at Ft. Bragg would be highly interested in this revelation.
Since all known and published doctrine will state that an "earmuff" charge is worthless on an earthen structure, they would no doubt want to seek Dangerous Dan's method of demolition in which he achieved this unique example of usage of explosives.
Had you either known anything, or bothered to check this one out, not unlike a witness on the stand who has lost some credibility, Dangerous Dan's credibility rating would begin to take a nose dive.
2. I do believe that Dangerous Dan makes reference to the SADM device, and thereafter talks about how it was transported down in some 3/4 ton truck, etc; and that the "timer" was out of some washing machine type timer, etc.
Get Real!
Any idiot would recognize the BS in that one.
First off: I carry a Nuclear Weapons Officer skill rating, and I have never had my hands on a live nuke.
Not to mention having one driven down for me to look at by someone riding down the road in a 3/4 ton army truck.
Nuke security is tight. And if you want to get immediately shot, try to get around one.
Secondly: is the US Military Service supposed to employ the "Maytag Repairman" to ride along on missions in event the washing machine "timer" has trouble?
Dangeous Dan, had obviously "heard" the stories, and thereafter did not even bother to verify what they were about, just as you have not.
The "Timer" is in fact a combination Timer/Detonator/and PAL (Permissive Action Link) which prevents the weapon from being detonated by anyone other than those persons who are in possession of the security code to open the detonator train.
And, you can rest assured that this portion of the device did not come from the "Maytag" washing machine factory.
Thirdly: Your "Hero" references his attempt to insert a SADM by MFF (Military Free Fall/HALO) insertion into a denied area to blow up the Aswan Dam.
WHOA BOY, do I really love this one.
A. His HALO experience is absolutely "NIL", with the exception of being around the Parachute Rigger shed where the parachutes were packed.
B. Even after having graduated from the 5-week HALO/MFF school, one is still a "novice" and must thereafter continue with multiple training exercises with his team, their equipment, etc; etc; etc.
C. Jumping the SADM requires the absolute utmost in HALO experience due to the weight of the package.
In fact, some persons can not even jump it due to their body configuration and the added speed to free fall which it gives to the person carrying the device.
D. Your "Hero" references how he would jump the device and thereafer, utilizing his front hands for control, "glide" towards the target.-------YIKES!
First off, a covert HALO insertion is normally carried out at night. Not too sneaky with all of those opened canopies in the air during daylight hours.
Secondly, Unless on some friendly terms with the enemy, it is unlikely that the target will be sufficiently lighted enough that one can distinguish it in the dark.
Thirdly, The likelihood that anyone carrying the weight of a SADM device can do anything other than "fall" is quite slim, as it is somewhat difficult, with this added weight, to even manage to fall flat and stable.
Fourthly, the "Glide" to target concept goes against all military doctrine for MFF operations, in which no one is supposed to "fly/glide" around in the air.
To do so risk collision with other falling team members, therefore taking yourself as well as your team member OUT, and saving the enemy the trouble.
HALO/MFF concept is to exit as a team, fall flat and stable, open at the same altitudes, and then come together as a group (grouping) while under canopy, in order to attempt to land in a relatively close proximity to one another, it has absolutely nothing to do with "gliding" to a target.
And were one to "glide" to the target and thus open, who knows where they would land, as the old MFF canopies placed the jumper entirely at the mercy of the wind, which fequently "drifted" one a long, long way.
E. As to insertion of a nuke device into a denied area, LTC Marvin should have read up a little more on the subject matter prior to attempting to sell this BS.
Exactly what kind of idiot is it that thinks that we would allow a nuclear device to be inserted into a denied area, without some security forces on the ground to safeguard the device.
Otherwise, it would be somewhat like merely handing over a nuke to the enemy.
This one is an absolute NO BRAINER!.
Prior to any type insertion of a tactical nuclear weapon, at minimum, half of the Team would be inserted to provide physical security for the device upon it's insertion. And in all liklihood, an entire Team would be required for this security.
F. Nevertheless, let's continue with "Dangerous Dan's) scenario in which he places the device and sets the "Maytag Timer" which continues to function properly and therefore eliminates the need to insert the "Maytag Repairman" to fix it.
Absolutely NO team member contains the PAL security code which will allow the detonator train to be activated.
This can be acquired from only the highest COMMAND, and although the device could have been inserted a considerable length of time prior to implementation, secure COMMO is required in order to receive the PAL Security Code before the device can be armed.
G. Nevertheless, should "Dangerous Dan" manage to achieve all that he thinks he can, then he truely becomes "DANGEROUS" when he, in his targeting plan, ends up creating a nuclear cloud of radioactive particles, dust, etc, which would be so large as to enter the upper atmosphere and be carried to numerous surrounding countries, as well as possibley our own shores.
Now, we know exactly why and how "Dangerous Dan" got his handle.
The single most efficient utilization of any explosive device to take out a dam, is utilized on the WATER side of the dam.
The water, since it will not compress, assists in directing the majority of the force against the structure.
Not only this, but it creates virtually NO fallout cloud for contamination of foreign countries.
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Now Big Al, if you had even the "smurf smidget" of research capability, then you would have known that "Dangerous Dan" has a severe credibility problem with those of us who just may know a little on the subject matter.
That you can not even see through the BS of Dangerous Dan, which is easily researched, would appear to demonstrate a severe lack of factual research capability.
And, from where those of us who have actually "been there" see this, it demonstrates the "know nothing" capability of anyone who has fallen for the Dangerous Dan storyline.
================================================================================
Al Carrier Wed Sep-25-02 03:58 PM
Charter member
posts
#4036, "RE: Mannlicher-Carcano 91/38 6.5 mm in general"
In response to Reply # 5
Hey Chris.
What you are referring to here is the gravitation pull effect that I have reported on several times on the forum. I was first trained to compensate for this at The Scout Sniper School at the Marathon Station in the keys over twenty years ago.
================================================================================
Now! Neither Gerry P. Hemming, nor I am aware of some obviously "covert" Scout Sniper School at Marathon Station (Marathon Key) in Florida, where U.S. Army MP's are sent to become shooters.
Which by the way brings out the question? Is this where you obtained your "Scout Sniper" qualification as well, or did the USMC actually send you to the true Scout Sniper School.
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So, as a "Follower/Believer" of the great shooter Al Carrier (and his "Canyon Shoot" BS), this would, by association it is assumed also make you a follower of the "Dangerous Dan Marvin" line of BS'er's as well?
Now!
This forum is not the "Spanky & Our Gang" grouping over on Lancer.
And, although there are those here (as at Lancer and elsewhere) who will believe about anything and/or anyone who comes up with anything against the US Government complicity in the assassination, along with mythological multiple assassins; body snatchers and wound alterations specialists, and most anything else that by far exceeds the realms of reality, there are also some pretty intelligent researchers here as well.
And, rest assured, were my "credentials" not sufficent as well as my research that lacking, then I would have been "LNer'd" off this forum long ago by persons who far exceeded anything which you may think that you know about the assassination.
As example, your work on the "Carcano Clip" over on Lancer has gained you your own following of "believers".
However, if you will actually conduct a little research here on the "Education Forum", then you will find that here too I long ago demonstrated that I can make a Carcano Clip hang up EVERY SINGLE TIME; make a Carcano clip fall out EVERY SINGLE TIME;, or if so desired, make the clip merely hang until the last round/casing is ejected from the chamber and the "Clip Release Button" within the trigger housing is pressed.
So, other than your proclaimed ability with a rifle, you entered this forum with a severe lack of credibility in judgement of whom to and not to believe, as well as a severely lacking ability to determine factual information.
Which I might add goes right along with an obviously complete failure to examine the WC's presented evidence, as well as a study and examination of the other forensic; ballistic; pathological; and physical evidence.
In other, and simple words, you, not unlike and entire flock of other "sheeples", have merely believed what you have been told, without expending the effort to verify for yourself the actual facts of what is stated.
There mere fact that you have apparantly never given consideration that just perhaps the WC was not telling us the facts and truths in regards to THE SHOT THAT MISSED, is clear evidence that you are severely lacking in the ability to think for yourself.
Which may tend to demonstrate exactly why I was in Special Forces, and you spent a career in the USMC.
P.S. Perhaps, had Al Carrier actually known anything (Which Bill Miller accepts and believes the Al Carrier/CSI---BS), then he would have known and understood the direct correlation between the shallow depth of penetration of JFK's back wound, that the base of CE399 is deformed to 4mm X 7mm in size; that the "puncture" type wound in the back of JFK measured exactly 4mm X 7mm in size and had relatively clean cut edges; that the entering bullet carried with it, down into the wound of entry, considerable cloth from the coat and shirt of JFk, while also "punching' out a hole in the shirt, which not unlike the wound in JFK's back, exactly matches the dimensional form and outline of the base of CE399.
And, as an "old shooter" who is quite familiar with "wadcutter" bullets, it does not take even a "fifth grader" to resolve exactly which end of CE399 struck JFK in the back.
Which by the way, you also apparantly neglected to investigate!
So! Irrelevant as to your (or for that matter my) credentials, why not amaze us with your knowledge of the facts of the JFK assassination.
P.P.S. Might I advise that you watch out, as those who have been here long enough and know the protocal for factual research, can easily recognize BS!
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""covert" Scout Sniper School"
Hey Purv! Now, I FINALLY get what you were referring to in that PM you sent me. ROFLMAO!!! HAH! HAH! HAH! HAH! HAH!
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Peter,
Apparently part of my perception about you was incorrect, and for that I surely am man enough to apologize.
I too have issues with both parties, and one of those issues is with those on the left bashing for the sake of bashing. Bashing the ridiculous for the sake of party gain.
Perhaps I placed you in a group I should not have.
Two things we agree on. Wecht and what is happening to him is pure poo, and it is time for a change in this country. Not a change in party politics, but a change in thinking in general. Our politicians have become so detached from the common working man, that they no longer can relate.
Part of that is due to the fact that politics is no longer service to the nation, it is a career. When Truman were President things were much different. If he had not written books about his presidency, he would have virtually been homeless after his term. Now the politicians sap this country, they sap the lobbyists, and are absolutely a disgrace.
I jabbed at you perhaps in reflex. Im tired Peter, tired of the the left constantly taking shots at Bush for the sake of the party.
Hillary going to the pentagon, and demanding to know when our troops will be brought home, how mortally stupid was that?? Talk about fueling the enemy, and she wants to be a President??? She can not even control her own home affairs.
Look Peter, I am probably as disgusted with the way things are, as you are. Im tired of folks bashing the US, and bashing the President.
I believe we both want the same things, I am just not sure we agree how to attain them, and isn't it always like that?
Just for the record, I am registered republican. However, should a Democrat come on scene that was worth the spit it takes to wet a postage stamp, I may well vote for them. I believe in who ever is best for the US. Sadly it has been some years since we have had anyone worth supporting.
Peace to you as well Peter,
Mike
Other than the fact that Senator Boren is not a "socialists", it is doubtful that even John Simkin can find just a whole lot that is "wrong" about him.
Though I must admit that Senator Boren was often referred to as a "Republican in Democratic Clothing".
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Let's face it, Purv. Today, what we have, and have had, especially since the late 60's and early 70's is:
1 party - 2 branches = the fascist New World Order of neocons and oligarchs ruling from the Chicago School of Economics on present day Wall Street.
Wall Street rules, and D.C. duels.
It ain't going to change without an outright revolution, but the American "sheeple" are too glued to their plasma screens, and Operation Mockingbird media shills, such as CNN, as well as, the standard commercial channels 2 through 13, to even give a damn about the truth. That's where the real dumbing-down of America has been allowed to proliferate. The fear-mongering propagandists have won.
There are too few of the enlightened minds around to make a damned bit of a difference, when you have to literally fight city hall, with so many odds against you. They're all playing two sides against the middle, and the 5 to 10 percentile at the top are the ones who are making out like bandits, at the expense of the 90 to 95 percentile at the bottom.
Good luck, because ours has just about run out.
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Deleted duplicate post on 05-11-08 19:40 PDT by T. Mauro
http://www.wethepeople.la/cockburn.htm (link to complete Civ. Action # No. 88-0727)
Referenced: The book "Out of Control by Leslie Cockburn 1987" as well as CBS 60 Min. producer Ty West, 1987
".... Richard V. SECORD, Plaintiff,
v.
Leslie COCKBURN, et al., Defendants.
Civ. A. No. 88-0727-GHR.
United States District Court,
District of Columbia.
Aug. 27, 1990
Thomas C. Green, Sharp, Green & Lankford, W. Michael Kramer, Kramer &
Associates, Michael P. McDonald, Center for Individual Rights, Washington,
D.C., for plaintiff. .....
con't
[i]( My notation: The body of this Law suit is 52 pages..... last ten pages of primary interest as to the Regan/Bush/Clinton Drug War of the 80's and 90's
note: This law suit I feel is very revealing and should be used as a reference guide to established facts as to illegal activities conducted over many years in behalf of various agencies of the United States government. It shows a referenced network of illegal activities of 'special interest',and the activities of their lobbyist to circumnavigate the law for their profits at the expense of the American tax payer.
The context of this civil action establishes a patten of deceit which dates back forty plus years as to special interest activities of various administrations within the powers of the White house and its National Security apparatus of the times.
I have not copied the complete body of the work. You can find it on the Web at the link above. However I have copied the last few pages as a reference for serious researchers.
I'm sure some will say, "What does this have to do with the JFK?". My reply.. If you cross check some of the names and operations found in this civil action you will be lead back to JM/WAVE and connected players of the early sixties and beyond and too, the CIA including Bush Sr. CIA Director before becoming President.. Special note reference to "THE DRUG WAR and SECRET AIR BASES in CENTRAL AMERICA)
Selected last pages of the Body of law suit:[/i]
"......... See generally Leslie Cockburn Affidavit at pp 33-43. The
defendant makes the showing that she relied upon many sources which
independently corroborate the statement of the unidentified "observer" whom the
plaintiff characterizes as unreliable. As paragraph 37 of her affidavit
provides:
As I testified at my deposition (Leslie Cockburn Dep. at
221-25) it had also been widely reported prior to the publication of Out of
Control that the programs that Mr. Secord oversaw involved massive bribery.
For example, the Iran-Contra Connection, a book published in 1987 prior to
publication of my book and relied upon by me, reported that:
"In Iran, Hakim made a handsome living selling military
equipment from such firms as Olin Corp., Hewlett-Packard and his own Stanford
Technology Corp. Hakim's STC had a $5.5 million contract to supply the
notorious, CIA-promoted IBEX project, which Secord oversaw. Secord reportedly
helped Hakim win another, $7.5 million contract with Iran's air force for a
sophisticated telephone monitoring system to allow the Shah to keep track of
his top commanders' communications. The Shah's secret police, SAVAK, operated
the equipment. Hakim's business methods were as controversial as his products:
He arranged the latter communications deal through the air force commander,
Gen. Mohammed Khatemi, who Hakim bribed on at least one other deal and who also
received hefty payoffs for approving the IBEX contract." (Exh. 33.)
* * * * * *
"In the most notorious case, the CIA and Rockwell International
pushed on Iran a gigantic electronic spying and communication system called
IBEX....
"The IBEX project smelled for other reasons beyond its
doubtful contribution to Iran's defensive needs. Rockwell paid huge bribes to
Iran's air force commander (and the Shah's brother-in-law), Gen. Mohammed
Khatami, to win approval for the $500 million project. Other military
contractors, including Bell Helicopter, Northrop and Grunman, hired agents who
bribed Iranian officials with handsome commissions, often amounting to millions
of dollars." (Exh. 35) (footnotes omitted) (Iran-Contra Connection at 153).
* * * * * *
"Secord headed the Air Force Military Advisory Group, which in
effect represented the U.S. arms merchants before the Shah.... That job would
have given Secord a direct role (with the CIA) in the shady deal of IBEX...."
(Exh. 35) (Iran-Contra Connection at 156) (footnotes omitted).
I also read and relied upon: Los Angeles Times, February 14,
1987 ("One source who knew him said Secord helped Hakim get Air Force
contracts, including one from the Iranian government for 15 million to install
phone taps at the main Iranian Air Force base. In turn, Hakim provided
intelligence to his contacts among U.S. intelligence officers in Iran.")
(Exh. 40); P. Maas, Manhunt at 59 (Edwin "Wilson had tried to sell the
Iranians [a surveillance system], using the good offices of General Secord in
Teheran, but despite Secord's best efforts, SAVAK wasn't in the market ...")
(Exh. 41); S. Rosenfeld, San Francisco Examiner, December 9, 1986 (linking
both Hakim and Secord to the IBEX project and describing Hakim as a "bag man
for U.S. concerns seeking approval from Iranian officials on military sales")
(Exh. 42).
Leslie Cockburn Affidavit at p 37 (footnote omitted).
Furthermore, paragraph 34 specifically details the basis of the author's
assertion that General Secord did head the Air Force Military Assistance
Advisory Group in Iran in the late 70's:
As one published source stated: "According to his Pentagon
biography Secord 'acted as chief advisor to the commander in chief of the
Iranian air force and managed all U.S. Air Force programs to Iran as well as
some Army and Navy assistance programs.' " J. Marshall, P. Scott and J.
Hunter, Iran-Contra Connection at 156 (Exh. 35). The MAAG, whose Air Force
contingent was headed by Secord, according to the authors "in effect
represented the U.S. arms merchants before the Shah." Id.
"Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi himself complained that he
sometimes was unable to tell whether various weapons systems were promoted to
further U.S. policy or to generate profits for defense contractors and fees for
their representatives....
" 'You Americans pretend to be so righteous,' fumed the
ruler when U.S. Senate investigators were alleging corruption by Iranian
military commanders in connection with defense contractors.
" 'But,' he continued in the presence of a high American
official, 'it is hard for me to believe that your MAAG officers (the military
advisory group at the U.S. Embassy) haven't already been hired by American
companies and aren't under their influence.... Are they giving me real advise
or just promoting companies?' " Los Angeles Times, 2/3/80. (Exh. 36).
Leslie Cockburn Affidavit at p 34.
The plaintiff has not cited to any record facts to demonstrate that the
author either knew that the above sources were wrong or had serious doubt as to
their credibility. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
Circuit has held that "good faith reliance on previously published sources" as
to the matters at issue "precludes a finding of actual malice as a matter of
law." Liberty Lobby v. Dow Jones, 838 F.2d at 1297.
In regard to the defendant's statements concerning "official profiteering" in
Iran, the plaintiff himself has agreed to an operative definition of the phrase
"official profiteering"; in his deposition the plaintiff admitted that if
there were price differences between the cost of the weapons to the United
States and their subsequent sale to the Iranians then those differences would
constitute "official profiteering" unless actually incurred expenses justified
the cost differentials. Secord Deposition (II) (attached to Ringel Affidavit )
at 21-30.
The author's affidavit provides:
It was well-known that the Shah was paying inflated prices for
U.S. equipment at this time and I had seen several documents demonstrating
this. For example, as noted in The Iran-Contra Connection at 156,
"Erich von Marbod, [who] had worked closely with Secord to
arrange covert financing for CIA-directed Thai guerillas fighting in Laos in
the early 1970s ... championed the Carter administration's controversial
proposal to sell Iran 8 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) planes, a
system blasted by the General Accounting Office as too advanced for Iran's
needs and overpriced." (Exh. 35)
The AWACS planes were to have been sold to the Iranians at
$102.671 million each (in addition to a separate $510.2 million contribution
for spares, maintenance support, site surveys and training) under a 1977
contract; a year later, the United States Air Force bought more sophisticated
versions of the same plane for $78.1 million each. T. Gervasi, Arsenal of
Democracy II (1981) ("Arsenal ") at 137. (Exh. 43.) The Khomeni government
cancelled Iran's order, and the planes were never delivered. Id. at 272.
Other military equipment sold or delivered to Iran by the
United States during Mr. Secord's tenure as head of the Air Force MAAG in
Teheran (1975-8) was similarly overpriced as compared to sales to other allies
or to the United States armed services. In 1974, Iran ordered several hundred
AIM 54-A air-to-air missiles for delivery in 1976 through 1978 at a cost of
$708,000 each; the 1976 unit procurement cost to the United States Navy of the
same missiles was $363,823. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute,
World Armament and Disarmament (1978) ("World Armament " ) at 264 (Exh. 44);
Arsenal at 213. Also in 1974, Iran ordered 80 F-14A Tomcat aircraft for
delivery in 1976 and 1977 at a price of $23.750 million each; in 1978, the
unit procurement cost to the United States military was $20.624 million each.
World Armament at 265; Arsenal at 97. In 1978, Iran ordered (and later
cancelled) 160 F-16 aircraft at $14.844 million each; the cost of the same
aircraft to the United States military in 1978 was $9.482 million each.
Arsenal at 272, 283. Iran ordered (and later cancelled) August 1978 delivery
of 186 AIM-9H air intercept missiles for $75,268 each; the 1975 unit
procurement *792 cost to the United States Navy was $17,176 each. Arsenal at
211, 272.
Leslie Cockburn Affidavit at p 41.
The plaintiff has failed to come forward with any record facts to put the
defendant's showing of an absence of evidence on the element of actual malice
into dispute; a reasonable jury would be unable to find under the clear and
convincing standard that the defendant acted with knowing or reckless disregard
for the truth.
3. La Penca Bombing
In regard to the defendant's statements involving the attempted assassination
of Contra leader Eden Pastora at La Penca, see footnote 1 and accompanying
text, supra, the defendant's affidavit provides:
Mr. Secord's name is not used, nor is he referred to by
implication, in connection with La Penca. I did not intend to state that, nor
did I understand the book to accuse Mr. Secord of, playing a role in the La
Penca assassination attempt.
Leslie Cockburn Affidavit at p 18. Although the plaintiff deposed the author
for two full days, he has not been able to point to any record facts to put
into dispute her showing of an absence of evidence in the plaintiff's libel
claim to support the element of actual malice in any implication of the
plaintiff in the La Penca assassination attempt.
The plaintiff contends that the fact that the defendant made her statements
in regard to the La Penca bombing on the basis of an affidavit filed by Danny
Sheehan in Avirgan v. Hull is evidence of actual malice. However, the
plaintiff can point to no record facts to demonstrate that the defendant knew
that the Sheehan affidavit was false or that she had serious doubt as to its
truth.
The plaintiff points to the "paste over page 103 containing the corrections
regarding the alleged involvement of former State Department official Richard
Armitage in drug trafficking." Plaintiff's Opposition at 37. The plaintiff
is referring to the fact that after publication of Out of Control the Sheehan
affidavit in Avirgan v. Hull was amended to delete the portions upon which
Leslie Cockburn relied for certain allegations concerning Richard Armitage. At
the request of Armitage a sticker was affixed in the unshipped copies to the
two pages of the book which discussed Mr. Armitage. That sticker explained the
post-publication withdrawal of Sheehan's original affidavit. (FN9) Entrekin
Affidavit at p 16; Leslie Cockburn Affidavit at p 17.
The plaintiff's reliance on the Armitage "paste-over" as a fact to show
that the defendant knew the Sheehan affidavit was false or that she had serious
doubt as to its truth is fundamentally misplaced. The Sheehan affidavit was
amended after publication of Out of Control and does not show that at the time
of publication that the defendant knew the affidavit was false or had serious
doubt as to its truth. To argue that evidence of actual malice exists by the
mere fact that subsequent events determine the falsity of a source or statement
would be tantamount to conflating the actual malice and falsity elements of a
libel action. Accordingly, it is hornbook libel law that post-publication
events have no impact whatever on actual malice as it bears on this lawsuit
since the existence or non-existence of such malice must be determined as of
the date of publication. See, e.g., Bose Corp. v. Consumers Union of United
States, Inc., 466 U.S. 485, 512, 104 S.Ct. 1949, 1965, 80 L.Ed.2d 502 (1984)
(evidence must establish that defendant "realized the inaccuracy at the time of
publication"); New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. at 286, 84 S.Ct. at
729 (1964) (malice must be shown "at the time of publication"); Sharon
v. Time, Inc., 599 F.Supp. 538, 564 (S.D.N.Y.1984) ("actual malice rests on the
defendant's state of mind at the time of the publication").
The plaintiff also contends that defendant's reliance on the Sheehan
affidavit is evidence of actual malice because several investigators and
reporters expressed significant doubts in an article in the February/March 1988
issue of Mother Jones about Sheehan's credibility and the veracity of his
allegations. Again, however, this article was published three months after the
publication of Out of Control and accordingly is not relevant to the author's
state of mind at the time of publication. Moreover, even assuming that the
article existed prior to or at the time of publication of Out of Control, and
that the defendant was aware that Sheehan had his detractors, the mere fact
that divided opinion exists among reporters as to the credibility of an
individual does not reflect on the defendant's state of mind and actual malice.
The plaintiff has failed to demonstrate that Ms. Cockburn was aware that other
reporters questioned the reliability of Sheehan. (FN10)
4. Drug Trafficking
This Court repeats that in order to defeat the defendants' motion for summary
judgment the plaintiff must come forward with "evidence in the record [that]
could support a reasonable jury finding that the plaintiff has shown actual
malice by clear and convincing evidence." Anderson v. Liberty Lobby, 477
U.S. at 255-56, 106 S.Ct. at 2514. The plaintiff is unable to meet this
burden with respect to the defendant's statements of and concerning the
plaintiff about drug trafficking in Southeast Asia and in Central America. See
footnote 2 and accompanying text, supra.
The plaintiff contends that "[t]he statements regarding plaintiff's alleged
involvement in drug trafficking in Southeast Asia are drawn from the Sheehan
affidavit and its unnamed sources." Plaintiff's Opposition at 39. (FN11)
The plaintiff states that defendant's reliance on the Sheehan affidavit is a
fact which is illustrative of actual malice. Again, however, the plaintiff
fails to point to any record facts to demonstrate how reliance on the Sheehan
affidavit is probative of defendant's state of mind and actual malice at the
time of publication of Out of Control. See Part 3, supra (this Court's
discussion of the Sheehan affidavit).
The defendant's affidavit provides that with respect to her statements in
regard to drug trafficking in Southeast Asia she relied on much more than the
Sheehan affidavit. The defendant in her affidavit provides a detailed showing
of the absence of evidence to support the element of actual malice in
plaintiff's libel suit on these statements. Her affidavit provides:
Both Vang Pao's and Air America's involvement in opium
trafficking, and the CIA's sponsorship of Vang Pao, were well documented by
accounts I had read prior to publication and which I credited. Those accounts
included A. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972); former CIA
agent Victor Marchetti's The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974); C.
Robbins, Air America: The Story of the CIA's Secret Airlines (1979); and R.
McGehee, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (1983). These accounts established that
Vang Pao had established a heroin laboratory at Long Tieng--the town where the CIA had its
Laotian quarters (Politics of Heroin at 248-49 and n. 23, 281 and 247: "the U.S. Bureau of
Narcotics reports that Gen. Vang Pao, Commander of the CIA's Secret Army, has
been operating a heroin factory at Long Tieng, headquarters for CIA operations
in northern Laos" (Exh. 32); Air America at 138, 232, 237-38) (Exh. 31); that
the CIA turned a blind eye (or, to use the phrase of Mr. Secord's complaint as
to other matters, "acquiesced in and condoned") towards Vang Pao's narcotics
activities (Air America at 230, 237 ("[w]hile the Meo fought the war for the
CIA, the agency turned a blind eye to their generals' profitable sideline in
opium") (Exh. 33; Cult of Intelligence at 254 (Exh. 34); Politics of Heroin
at 353 (Exh. 32) ("American involvement has gone far beyond coincidental
complicity; embassies have covered up involvement by client governments, CIA
contract airlines have carried opium, and individual CIA agents have winked at
opium traffic"); and the CIA Airline, Air America, carried opium to Long Tieng
and other locations. Id. These books are well respected and credible, and I
believed (and believe today) that the accounts I have referred to are accurate.
(The pages I refer to from these books in this affidavit are attached as Exhs.
32-34.)
Leslie Cockburn Affidavit at p 31; see also Leslie Cockburn Affidavit at p 32.
In regard to the "the allegations and implications of plaintiff's
alleged participation in drug trafficking in Central America" the only fact to
which the plaintiff points is that a number of the author's sources are
convicted felons. (FN12) The plaintiff apparently is advancing the argument
that anything a convicted felon states is false and accordingly any reliance on
such statements ipso facto constitutes evidence of actual malice. This Court
cannot accept such reasoning. The use of convicted felons cannot alone
constitute a fact of actual malice. Rather, the plaintiff must specifically
establish that there were surrounding circumstances in relying upon a
particular felon as a source which would constitute evidence of a knowing or
reckless disregard of the truth (i.e., the author knew that the particular
felon had a long history of unreliability as a source). The caselaw is clear
that the plaintiff must establish that even in relying upon an otherwise
questionable source the defendant actually possessed subjective doubt. St.
Amant v. Thompson, 390 U.S. at 730, 88 S.Ct. at 1325; Price v. Viking Penguin,
881 F.2d at 1441; Hardin v. Santa Fe Reporter, 745 F.2d at 1325-26; Loeb v.
New Times Communications, 497 F.Supp. at 93. The plaintiff has pointed to no
record facts to put at issue whether the defendant knew that the allegations of
her sources were false or had serious doubt as to the truth of their
allegations. (FN13)
As the record facts illustrate, the defendant relied upon many
sources other than convicted felons. Her sources included a United States
Senator, Senate staff members, Oliver North's notebooks and testimony before
Congress, and other published sources. See Leslie Cockburn Affidavit at pp
25-28.
Paragraph 25 of her affidavit provides, in part:
[O]n September 24, 1986, the Costa Rican Interior Minister
(Santa Elena is in Costa Rica) announced that his government had discovered and
shut down an airfield (Santa Elena) that he stated had been used for
resupplying the Contras, for drug trafficking or for both. This announcement
was reported in the September 25, 1986 edition of the New York Times (Exh. 12),
which I saw and was subsequently discussed in the Report of the Congressional
Committees investigating the Contra Affair ("Iran-Contra Report") at 142-44
(Exh. 13.) I was also aware that Lewis Tambs, the then-U.S. Ambassador to
Costa Rica was concerned in mid-1986 about the possibility of drug traffickers
using Santa Elena. I knew, for example, that CIA station chief Thomas Castillo
had testified in May, 1987 in his Iran-Contra deposition that Ambassador Tambs
wanted to place armed guards at Santa Elena to avoid the possibility of having
drug traffickers use that site. See Exh. 14 (Castillo Cong. Deposition at 483;
later released by Congress.) Thus, there was a substantial body of
information linking the Santa Elena airstrip, built with Mr. Secord's
assistance, to drug flights. (FN14)
Paragraph 28 provides in part:
I did, of course, have substantial evidence that there were
links between Contra activities generally and drug running. I spoke
with Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics[, Terrorism and International Operations
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee] members and staff on numerous
occasions prior to publication of Out of Control. Indeed, I reported on the
subcommittee's investigation, which began in the Spring of 1986, in three CBS
broadcasts prepared and broadcast prior to publication of Out of Control. In
addition to the information discussed above, I was aware of a good deal of
information linking the Contra resupply efforts and drug trafficking. For
example:
I was aware that portions of Oliver North's notebooks,
which had been produced by North to the Iran-Contra Committee in 1987,
contained a number of references to drugs or drug-smuggling and that the Senate
Subcommittee on *796 Narcotics intended to subpoena them. These diaries, and
several memoranda that I had seen prior to publication (see, e.g., Exh. 20
(memorandum from Rob Owen to Oliver North, dated April 1, 1985, discussing
"Blackie" Chamorro at p. 3)), reflected that Oliver North--Mr. Secord's contact
with the government in connection with what Mr. Secord has called "The
Enterprise"--was warned repeatedly of drug connections on the part of Contra
leaders and arms suppliers.
As detailed in my July 1987 broadcast for West 57th, two
companies, Ocean Hunter and Frigorificos de Puntarenas, that received over
$200,000 from the State Department for "humanitarian aid" to the Contras, were
deeply involved in cocaine trafficking. My sources for this link included FBI
documents, on-camera interviews, bank records, customs documents, sworn
testimony given to the Kerry Committee, and interviews with defense lawyers,
DEA bounty hunters, and Coast Guard officials, among others. State Department
documents that I had reviewed showed that Robert Owen, who worked directly
under Oliver North in the Contra resupply operation, was overseeing the Ocean
Hunter/Frigorificos accounts while the companies were under active
investigation by the DEA, Customs and the Coast Guard.
A number of newspaper reports published prior to the
release of Out of Control, some quoted in the book, reported allegations of
drug flights being made in connection with the contra effort. (See e.g., Ex.
27.) Many of these articles reported on pending congressional or other
investigations on this subject. See, e.g., "Top 'Contras' Under Scrutiny for
Corruption," Christian Science Monitor, 4/11/86; "2 Hill Panels Probing
Alleged Links Between Contras and Drug Trafficking," Washington Post, 8/8/87;
"U.S. Probing Drug Link to CIA's Flights: Officials Suspect Drug Runners Used
CIA Contra Supply Flights," Boston Globe, 4/25/87; "Inquiry Reported Into
Contra Arms," New York Times, 4/11/86; "Cocaine, Gun Charges Probed,"
Washington Post, 4/11/86; "Four Legislative Panels Study Accusations Against
Contras," Miami Herald, 5/14/86; "Big Bay Area Cocaine Ring Tied to Contras,"
San Francisco Examiner, 3/16/86.
This Court will not quote all of these newspaper articles but quotes one as
part of the defendant's showing in the record that there is an absence of
evidence to support the element of actual malice in the plaintiff's libel claim
in regard to defendant's statements that Contra activities and the activities
of drug traffickers are intimately connected. The April 11, 1986 article in
the Christian Science Monitor provides:
[C]onservative Representative Charles Stenholm (D) of Texas, ...
voted for contra aid. Despite his vote, he is also very concerned about the
allegations of corruption in the contras.
"There is no doubt in my mind that an overwhelming majority of
the members of the House want to stop communism in Nicaragua," he says. "But
the question is: How do you do it? These allegations are troubling, and I
think they are credible. I have spoken to the President, the vice-president,
and the secretary of state about them. We were very much aware of Sandinista
involvement in drugs, which has been well documented. What we did not know is
that maybe the contras are doing it, too."
The congressman, when asked, stated that it was his
understanding that one top FDN leader closely linked to FDN chief Calero was
being investigated by the US Customs Service for charges of alleged involvement
in drug trafficking.
* * * * * *
[John] Mattes [an attorney in the U.S. Public Defenders Office]
also said that in his interviews he discovered "convincing allegations" of
contra gunrunning and drug trafficking.
"A number of very serious allegations have surfaced which
suggests that those involved in the contra movement have engaged in a wide
range of criminal activities in the US and in the region," Senator Kerry told the Monitor.
"The very serious nature of these allegations strongly suggests
the need for a detailed and complete congressional inquiry."
Moreover, the defendant has further shown that there is an absence of
evidence in the record of actual malice behind any statement by the defendant
that the plaintiff himself was aware of the connection between drugs and guns
in the contra supply effort. The defendant's affidavit provides in part:
A prime example of this acquiescence is reflected by the use in
the Contra resupply operation of Contra commander Fernando ("Blackie" or "El
Negro") Chamorro despite knowledge by Oliver North, Rob Owen and Mr. Secord
that he had ties to drug traffickers. As I reported in Out of Control at 88,
Chamorro had been identified by Rob Owen in an April 1, 1985 memorandum to
Oliver North as a problem drinker who surrounded himself with profiteers and
drug runners. (Exh. 20). In an August, 1987 pre-publication telephone
interview I asked Mr. Secord about these allegations and he confirmed that he
had "heard those allegations" and "most of them are true." My notes of
this conversation (which are annexed as Exh. 30) [footnote omitted] read:
"when asked why Blackie Chamorro was chosen as the leading
commander for the southern front in light of Rob Owens memo to North about
drinking, drug trafficking, and stealing money from the USG) 'all we were was a
trucking company. I've heard those allegations. Most of them are true. I
didn't pick them. (the commandantes) the Agency picked them."
(I understand that in his deposition Mr. Secord confirmed the
accuracy of this quotation. Secord Dep. (II) at 244.)
I had other information that supported my conclusion at the
time of publication that Mr. Secord had, in fact, acquiesced in or condoned
drug activity involving the Contras. At the time Out of Control was published
I also knew (because Mr. Secord had told me) that Mr. Secord had commissioned a
former F.B.I. agent in Miami to investigate drug charges involving another arms
dealer working with the Contras (Ronald Martin), and received a report from
this agent that such charges might well be true. Yet Mr. Secord did not pursue
these allegations. (See notes of my conversation with Mr. Secord. (Exh. 30.))
Leslie Cockburn Affidavit at pp 29, 30.
The plaintiff did not meet his burden of putting into dispute the defendant's
showing of an absence of evidence of actual malice. The plaintiff's burden was
to come forward with record facts from which a reasonable jury could find
pursuant to the clear and convincing standard that the defendant wrote Out of
Control with knowing or reckless disregard for the truth. The plaintiff was
unable to point this Court to a single fact and the defendant's showing of
absence of actual malice remains undisputed on this record. Accordingly, this
Court must also grant the defendant Leslie Cockburn's motion for summary
judgment.
It hereby is
ORDERED that the defendants' motion for summary judgment be, and the same
hereby is, GRANTED.
FN1. The specific passage in Out of Control to which the
plaintiff cites provides:
Shackley and Clines were, however, besmirched enough by their
associations with Wilson to be forced to resign from the CIA by Stansfield
Turner in 1979. They thereupon joined forces with two people whose names were
to become well known to Sheehan and, much later, to the press and public:
Richard Secord, at the time an active general officer in the U.S. Air Force,
and the Iranian-born arms dealer Albert Hakim.
According to the intelligence officer's story, this group began
shipping arms, ammunition, and explosives to the remnant of Somoza's National
Guard immediately after they escaped from Nicaragua and began to reform
themselves as the contras. Later on, the same cast of characters, employing
Quintero among others, delivered lethal supplies to contras in Costa Rica, in
part through John Hull. In fact it appeared that this group had been the main
suppliers of the contras from 1979 through 1980, and again from 1984 to 1986,
during the official cutoff of U.S. assistance.
Sheehan realized he was now getting very close to the background
to La Penca. Indeed, he was told that a close associate of Quintero's, a man
by the name of John Harper, had actually given a course in Honduras on the
construction of bombs identical to the one used at La Penca.
Out of Control at 96-97.
FN2. The plaintiff generally cites to the chapters in Out of
Control entitled "The Cocaine Connection" at pages 152-167 and "Guns for Drugs"
at pages 168-188. More specifically, the plaintiff challenges the following
passages:
Scandalous though the use of Hull's strips for drugs and arms
may seem, there was another airfield in Costa Rica reportedly being used for
drug trafficking, one that puts Oliver North and his associates in even closer
conjunction with the narcotics business. The secret airfield at Santa Elena
authorized by North and Secord, promoted by Ambassador Tambs, scouted by
Station Chief Fernandez and Robert Owens and Rafael Quintero was also,
according to several sources, a transshipment point for cocaine.
Seal told [Mickey Tolliver] that not only would the flying be
interesting, the pay would be good too. He told Tolliver to go to Miami and
call a particular number. The interesting flying, thought Tolliver, could be
"anything from Campbell's soup to dead babies, but knowing Seal, it involved
drugs." He had no idea however that he was stepping into the middle of the
secret contra supply network, and that his control agents would include,
according to Tolliver, at least one high-level operative in the
North-Secord-CIA operation: Rafael Quintero.
Out of Control at 177-78, 180. *797_ The plaintiff concedes that Out of Control does
not explicitly charge him with engaging in drug trafficking for personal profit. Rather, the
plaintiff contends that the book "clearly conveys to the average reader the
message that I would stand by and condone such activities within my
organizations." Affidavit of Richard V. Secord at p 35.
FN3. The book provides:
In 1976 Richard Secord turned up in Tehran, posted to run the
air force component of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group, the main
function of which was to advise the shah to buy lots of expensive American
weapons. Weapon sales promoted by Secord involved what one observer calls
"some of the biggest bribery in Iran."
The enormous U.S. weapons sales program to Iran was, in
addition, marked by a huge disparity between the prices paid by the Iranians
and what the U.S. military paid for identical equipment. This, as we shall
see, was not the last time the Iranians were to be subject to such official
profiteering. Secord's superior and partner in these efforts was Erich von
Marbod, who had now become the senior U.S. defense representative to Iran.
Handling bribes, or as he prefers to call it, baksheesh, was the
specialty of a man whom Secord first met in Iran and who was to become the
financial comptroller of Secord's complex business organization. Albert Hakim
was a middleman who would receive bribe money from defense contractors to be
paid to Iranian officials who were purchasing the weapons. Not all the money
would pass out of his control, however. As he later testified to the
Iran-Contra committees, Hakim was trusted by the shah's generals to invest
their ill-gotten gains in Switzerland, in accounts untraceable to the true
owners of the money.
It was in this period that the network began to set up its own
proprietaries, as private companies owned by the CIA are called. Some of these
were to become famous when the Iran-Contra scandal finally burst on America.
They included the Stanford Technology Corp. and Energy Resources. Others, such
as CSF Investments Ltd., were specifically Central American in their
orientation. This was hardly a coincidence, for in 1978 the network had made a
new and fateful connection.
Out of Control at 105.
FN4. The plaintiff was indicted on Iran-Contra charges on the
very day that he filed this libel action.
FN5. More fully, the plaintiff's opposition to the stay strongly concluded:
We conclude with the observation that absent compelling
circumstances, plaintiff Secord should not be deprived of a prompt adjudication
of his libel claim. A stay will serve only to perpetuate the libel and its
circulation at the expense of plaintiff's reputation. Libel is not a form of
protected speech, and defendants should not be provided with an indefinite
license to circulate for profit false and outrageous accusations about
plaintiff while only pretending to be hobbled in their ability to defend this
case. Ms. Cockburn and her codefendants surely understood the risks involved
in publishing ugly and unprovable allegations of criminal misconduct totally
unrelated to the Iran/Contra affair. Undoubtedly they thought that plaintiff
would be distracted by other concerns and not disposed to sue and that they
could therefore exploit plaintiff's predicament with impunity. That strategy
was ill-conceived, and it ought not to be rewarded with the imposition of an
indefinite stay which would serve only defendants' objectives.
Id. at 8-9.
FN6. Indeed, plaintiff's claim of a need for additional
discovery does not even contain a specific factual proffer of what he expects
to find. Rather, he asserts only general and conclusory statements that he
expects to find actual malice after more discovery. There has been no proffer
on who or what the plaintiff will discover to find facts which can establish
actual malice.
FN7. Andrew Cockburn's affidavit provides:
In May 1987 I began working with Leslie Cockburn, editing the
manuscript of Out of Control that she had prepared and submitted to Atlantic
Monthly Press ("AMP"). During the next several months I worked with Leslie
Cockburn editing and reorganizing the manuscript. I also helped my wife
incorporate into the manuscript new material that was becoming available on an
almost daily basis as a result of the ongoing investigation of the Iran-Contra
Committees (which were then in the process of holding hearings). All writing
suggestions that I made were read by and/or discussed with Leslie to assure
their accuracy.
Andrew Cockburn Affidavit at p 3.
The plaintiff's own deposition of defendant Andrew Cockburn
establishes that he was not involved in substantively writing Out of Control as
a "co-author":
BY MR. KRAMER:
Q. Did you redraft entire paragraphs in your own words?
MR. RINGEL: Objection to form.
THE WITNESS: What do you mean by redrafting? I recommended
that paragraphs be changed.
BY MR. KRAMER:
Q. Did you do any of the changing yourself?
A. You mean did I type them or what do you mean by doing them
myself?
Q. Did you rewrite any paragraphs of the book yourself?
A. I suggested to Leslie Cockburn that paragraphs be rewritten.
Sometimes I submitted ideas. I don't really know that I rewrote. *797_ Andrew Cockburn
Deposition at 42.
FN8. Indeed, a total failure to investigate does not establish
actual malice. See, e.g., St. Amant v. Thompson, 390 U.S. at 731, 88 S.Ct. at
1325; Tavoulareas v. Piro, 817 F.2d 762, 789-90 (D.C.Cir.), cert. denied, 484
U.S. 870, 108 S.Ct. 200, 98 L.Ed.2d 151 (1987); Hardin v. Santa Fe Reporter,
Inc., 745 F.2d 1323, 1324 (10th Cir.1984). The plaintiff has cited this Court
to no caselaw providing that an author must clear her statements with the
subject of the book.
FN9. The "paste over" provides in part:
The discussion on these pages concerning Mr. Richard Armitage
was initially drawn from allegations filed by Daniel Sheehan and the Christic
Institute as counsel in a 1986 lawsuit. (See pp. 97, 262.) In June 1988, a
federal judge dismissed on summary judgment all of Sheehan's charges in the
1986 lawsuit. While Sheehan has appealed, Sheehan had on his own restated his
case shortly before the dismissal (and after the publication of this book) to
omit virtually all the allegations reported on these pages concerning Mr.
Armitage and all claims of evidentiary support. Mr. Armitage has consistently
and vigorously denied each and every one of Sheehan's allegations of wrongdoing
as "ludicrous" and "baseless."
FN10. The plaintiff contends that it is implausible that Ms.
Cockburn did not recall at her deposition whether she was aware that at the
time of publication of Out of Control other journalists were discovering
Sheehan's allegations without foundation. However, the plaintiff has the
affirmative duty to develop a record of actual malice in order to survive the
defendants' motion for summary judgment. For example, as part of preparing for
the Ms. Cockburn's deposition, the plaintiff could have interviewed journalists
who suspected the credibility of Sheehan to determine whether they had on prior
occasions discussed their views of Sheehan with Cockburn. Moreover, the
plaintiff could have produced accounts or articles critical of Sheehan which
were published prior to the time that Out of Control was published.
FN11. The defendant wrote in Out of Control that the "CIA Station [in Laos]
threw its weight behind one of the competing warlords, a certain Vang Pao" and
that Vang Pao engaged in opium trafficking, in part through the use of Air
America, the CIA's own proprietary airline. Out of Control at 100-102.
FN12. Much of plaintiff's discussion of actual malice, rather than pointing to
specific record facts, is simply conclusory argument. For example, the
plaintiff provides:
Again, the plaintiff expects to discovery that the defendants
purposefully distorted and exaggerated accounts of alleged drug trafficking by
persons indirectly linked to the Contra supply effort to make it appear,
falsely, that plaintiff and other members of Contra resupply were themselves
directly involved in such activity, in order to embarrass the Administration
and to influence public and Congressional opinion against further Contra aid.
Plaintiff's Opposition at 40. The plaintiff points to no record
basis to support his contention of what he expects to discover.
This Court further notes that when the author relies upon a
convicted felon as a source she points out that fact in Out of Control. See,
e.g., Out of Control at 168 (George Morales "jailed and eventually sentenced to
sixteen years in prison" for "the importation and sale of very large quantities
of cocaine"), 172 (Gary Betzner "was serving fifteen years on a drug charge
unrelated to his contra missions"), 178 (Geraldo Duran "served a brief jail
term in Costa Rica when apprehended with a 421-pound cocaine shipment bound for
the Bahamas") and 179 (Michael Tolliver "was serving a two-year drug sentence
on charges, as with Betzner and Morales, unrelated to CIA-White House-contra
affairs"). Accordingly, the defendant has provided a basis for the reader to
assess the credibility of the sources' allegations.
FN13. Ms. Cockburn's affidavit provides that she credited the
accounts that were detailed by these former convicted felons. Leslie Cockburn
Affidavit at pp 25 to 27. For example, as paragraph 26 of her affidavit
provides, the defendant had additional information and sources which in her
mind corroborated the credibility of Michael Tolliver:
[P]ilot Mickey Tolliver was interviewed on videotape for CBS
News and he said that his guns-for-drugs flights were carried out at the
request of Rafael Quintero. [Footnote omitted.] (A transcript is annexed as
Exh. 16.) Tolliver later repeated this story to Jack Blum (the chief
investigator for Senator Kerry's Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and
International Operations and Knut Royce (a Newsday correspondent) who published
Tolliver's story in Newsday in April 1987. (Exh. 17 is a computer print-out of
the article I read at the time of the publication.) After speaking to
Tolliver, we tracked the aircraft used by Tolliver to one Michael Palmer, a
known marijuana smuggler who, as an executive of a Florida firm named Vortex,
had received a State Department contract in early 1986 to ship Contra aid. (A
copy of a newspaper article dated March 22, 1987 relating to Vortex, with my
handwritten notes relating to the aircraft, is annexed as Exh. 18.) In my
mind this reinforced the credibility of allegations that linked drugs to
aspects of Contra supply. I believed Tolliver was telling the truth. A
further confirmation came from Shirley Brill, a former CIA employee and
long-time girlfriend of Thomas Clines, an individual who had worked with Mr.
Quintero and Mr. Secord. Ms. Brill alleged in March 1987 that Rafael Quintero
had business dealings with narcotics traffickers in south Florida. In a later
taped interview, Brill reiterated this statement. (A transcript of the
relevant portions of that tape are annexed as Exh. 19.)
FN14. The plaintiff does not dispute that he was involved in
the construction of the Santa Elena airstrip. Mr. Secord himself testified
before the Iran-Contra Committee in May 5-8, 1987 that he had been responsible
for the construction of the airstrip. Secord Cong. Testimony at 44, 62-64
(attached as Exhibit 9 to Leslie Cockburn Affidavit).
***********************************************************
Thanks, Bill. This really pieces it all together, for me.
The most ironic twist of all, if I remember this correctly, was that during the Iran-Contra hearings, Secord himself, was conducting much of the questioning of Ollie North with regard to the role he played in all of this. In fact, just about all the interrogators would eventually be implicated as part and parcel to the deal that went down. Talk about putting the fox in charge of the hen house! Much the same as putting Johannides on the HSCA as the CIA liaison.
The first I heard of John Hull's plantation air strip was in an article in Harper's Magazine, circa 1994. They referred to him as "Senator" John Hull.
I remember telling my boss, who is Costa Rican by birth, about it at the time, and gave him the magazine to read. He was astounded to see this and exclaimed, "But, he's such a well respected member of the community in Costa Rica!"
Yeah, right.
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive..."
I sure ain't proud to be an American, thanks to the dirty, double-dealing tricks played by the U.S. Government, at my expense.
Well, it's time for me to get in the wind, and head on up to The Hill Of The Seven Jackals. Working for the state really sucks.
Ter
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Deleted duplicate post on 05-11-08 19:40 PDT by T. Mauro
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Part of the article: [i'll post full article on May 15th]
".......has spent many of his waking moments gathering evidence to prove something he knew instinctively – that his brother would not have killed himself, and that someone other than his brother had fired the shotgun. His determination to prove that it was murder and not suicide has cost him his life savings, most of his earnings, and, as a final blow, he is now being forced to sell his home nestled in the Black Hills of western South Dakota to pay for the accumulated debts he has incurred over the years. The burden bthat this case has laid over him and his family is one that is difficult to describe.
Dr. Sabow has lived in nearly perpetual outrage, not only because of the murder itself but also because of the 15-year Pentagon cover-up.
Military officials have surpassed themselves in their efforts to deny the charges that Col. Sabow was murdered -- denials which have only increased
Dr. Sabow's resolve to prove otherwise.
The Murder
eThe forensic scientist who proved Dr. Sabow's theory of outright murder – Bryan Burnett – studied in minute detail all the evidence gathered at the scene by investigators in the immediate aftermath of Col. Sabow's death, including results of the initial crime scene investigation, the photos taken by the crime scene investigators, Col. Sabow's clothing, the shotgun used in the killing, as well as the pathology report by the Orange County, California, medical examiner.
Burnett's conclusions were definite: without question Col. Sabow was the victim of a murder, and not of a suicide.
Burnett based his report on irrefutable evidence, beginning with firing tests of the shotgun, which clearly showed that it leaked gunshot residue when it was fired.
According to the scenario by the Naval Investigative Service and the Pentagon, Col. Sabow was seated in a patio chair in his backyard. e scene scripted by these two organizations was that Col. Sabow placed the butt of the double-barreled shotgun on the ground next to his right foot with the breech against his right leg. eThen, while holding the barrel in hiss mouth with his left hand, he supposedly reached down to discharge the weapon with his right hand.
Because all the tests performed on the gun have proven that it leaked gunshot residue from the breech and the trigger housing, if suicide was the means of his death, then his right hand would contain evidence of gunshot resi-due.
According to their own tests, which were performed for the government by the Riverside County, California, forensic laboratory, there was no evidence of
gunshot residue on Colonel Sabow's right hand. Moreover, in this same situation, gunshot residue would have covered that portion of the pajama leg or that part of the bathrobe that would have been in contact with the breech of the shotgun.
All tests prove that there was either no gunshot residue whatsoever, or a minimal amount in these areas. Significantly, none of the residue was found on Col. Sabow's right hand: the hand which would have pulled the trigger had he committed suicide.
Because of the position of the bathrobe, which had been carefully tucked around his legs by the killers, the residue would have shown on the bathrobe but not on the pajamas, which the killers covered by the tucking in the bathrobe. eThere was a small amountt of residue on the pajamas, but it was in areas under the bathrobe.
Neither the pajamas nor the bathrobe showed levels of gunshot residue, which would confirm that the breech of the shotgun in contact was in contact with the right leg, which it would have been if it were really suicide.
Clearly, the shotgun was fired when the breech was away from the body. Further evidence of murder accumulates when Burnett pointed out that a suicide victim does not jump from a sitting position to a fully extended body position. Instead, such a victim would merely slump in the chair after death. What would make such a jump impossible is the immediate destruction of the brain stem from the shotgun blast when all the muscles would become flaccid.
Further, blood spatter that was found on the grass near the body as well as on Col. Sabow's left wrist indicates that the expiration of blood was occurring prior to the shotgun blast. The colonel was bleeding on the grass before the shotgun was fired.
Burnett also found that the bruising of the back of Col. Sabow's head shows the impression of the end of the club used to strike him. He found that the bruising of the right ear and around the eyes is typical of a basilar skull fracture. Col. Sabow had undergone seizures after being clubbed, again, prior to the shotgun blast, as indicated by the lip and tongue injuries detected on his body.
Skull X-rays taken at the autopsy were reviewed both by independent neurosurgery and neuro-radiology experts, all of whom concluded that Col. Sabow had been struck on the head by a blunt instrument, resulting in a massive depressed fracture. e The X-rayss from the autopsy report showed that his skull was partially caved in as a result of what was described as "blunt force trauma."
In layman's terms, he had been clubbed before he was made the target of the shotgun blast.
Burnett's analysis is that, after being rendered unconscious by the blow, Colonel Sabow fell on his right side, after which the shotgun was placed in his mouth, fired, and then shoved under his body to simulate suicide. His bathrobe was then carefully but inexplicably tucked around his legs.
The post-mortem examination disclosed another fact – that there was a large amount of blood in Col. Sabow's right lung; solid evidence that he was still
alive before the shotgun was discharged in his mouth by the killers. Had it been suicide, he would have died instantaneously, and there would have been no
inhaling of blood into his lung following death.
According to Burnett's report, the blood spatter both on the grass and on the body is evidence of homicide. He points out that bleeding was occurring
prior to the shotgun blast, explained by basilar skull fractures that occurred as a result of the blow to the head. Both expirated and aspirated blood is evident, which would not occur if the death were by shotgun without the prior blunt force injury.
Bloody blowback shows up on the palm of the left hand (which would not occur if he had committed suicide). And the body position makes no sense if it
were suicide. eThere was no blood on the exterior of the shotgun.
e The bathrobe tucks provide evidence of post-mortem manipulation of the body, that is, the killer or killers arranged his body, the shotgun, and straightened out his bathrobe in their effort to stage the scene. All the assembled evidence offers overwhelming verification of homicide, and there is no evidence that supports suicide.
Even more evidence of murder overlooked by the government was the complete absence of fingerprints on the shotgun used in his death, as well as the absence of bloody blowback. e tThe absence of blowback indicates that the shotgun either had not been exposed to blowback, or it had been cleaned before being placed under the Colonel's body.
It is obvious that a suicide would be unable to wipe a weapon clean. Interestingly, the FBI, when it was asked, has gone on record as saying that rarely are fingerprints found on firearms, which in fact is true in most cases. But what the FBI has omitted in its opinion is that its "rule of thumb" applies generally to pistols and revolvers, but not necessarily to shotguns and rifles, which are much more susceptible to retaining fingerprints.
Moreover, the FBI has no explanation for the absence of bloody blowback on the shotgun, unless removed by outside forces, either by washing or by other means.
Applying Dr. Nordby's logic, the simple failure to find fingerprints on the barrel of the shotgun used to kill Col. Sabow does not by itself mean that they were never there.
In his new report, Dr. Nordby also makes much of what he calls "voids" on Col. Sabow's bathrobe – meaning clean areas on the bathrobe that are devoid of bloodstains. He attributes such voids to those areas having been covered by Col. Sabow's arms at the time of the shotgun blast.
eThe drawings he made of the bathrobe in his report show that Col. Sabow's left arm certainly could have covered the left part of the bathrobe, thereby, preventing blood spatters from hitting that part of the bathrobe which his left arm apparently covered when the gun was fired.
However, Nordby exposes a major flaw in his own investigation by including his diagram of the position of Col. Sabow's right arm relative to the bathrobe, which shows the right arm coming across his chest, downward, in a position that Nordby says would allow the colonel to reach the trigger mechanism of the shotgun.
In this new scenario plotted by Nordby, he would have Col. Sabow holding the shotgun between his legs, rather than alongside his right leg, in order to fit the location of the "void" created by his right arm across his bathrobe.
Unwittingly, Dr. Nordby's diagram showing the location of the "void," or the clean area of the bathrobe covered by his right arm, specifically disproves suicide, providing even more evidence of a murder.
eThe suicide scenario posited by the Naval Investigative Service and the Pentagon, and not refuted by Dr. Nordby in his initial report, was that Col. Sabow
was seated, with his left hand holding the muzzle of the shotgun in his mouth, the gun placed alongside and outside of his right leg with his right hand pulling the trigger. In this scenario, the Colonel's right arm could not possibly have covered the bathrobe in the place that Nordby specfies.
His arm would have been along the right side of the bathrobe, and not the front, which is where Nordby diagrams it. But to justify his suicide theory, in his
supplemental report he was compelled to create a scenario where Col. Sabow held the gun between his legs, and not along-side his right leg – a shift of 180 degrees from his assumption in his first report.
Dr. Nordby seems unable to explain away the staged murder scene, the Colonel's crushed skull, the neatened up bathrobe, or the absence of gunshot residue on his right hand.
Questions Not Answered
Case Not Closed
eTh e murder tof Colonel Sabow is a flawed investigation by the military, and the cover-up together raise many more questions than there are answers.
Why was this Marine hero murdered?
Why did the military investigators carelessly rush to judgment on how he died?
Why have the Pentagon and the FBI made such great efforts to cover up the fact that he was murdered?
More importantly, what are they hiding? It is not an exaggeration to say that the Marine Corps has no interest in exposing their senior officers, nor is it a reach to understand why the military has no interest in exposing their part in illegal arms shipments or illegal drug running, even if the commander in chief had initially ordered the weapons shipments.
Whatever the reason for the cover-up, the result was the murder of a member of the United States Marine Corps who served his country honorably, as he had sworn to do, as well as a blot on the reputation of the United States military.
In her statement, Mrs. Sabow accused the Marine Corps and the federal government of engaging in lies and a cover-up in its report in order to hide the murder of her husband.
Footnote: For those who have a hard time believing that George H.W. Bush could be involved in covert operations, one must consider his experience. He was director of Central Intelligence in the 1970s, and was vice president during the Iran-Contra business in the 1980s. If you remember, at that time, he vehemently denied having anything to do with meeting with the Iranians with respect to trading weapons for hostages. He was, as he said, "out of the loop."
Not long after that denial, and during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's investigation of the matter, I was contacted by a Foreign Relations Committee staff member who asked what I knew about Bush's {to use Sr. to avoid confusion?] involvement. I knew nothing, but I called Beirut and talked to Bassem Abu Sharif, who was then Yasir Arafatâ's top aide. Abu Sharif held me to secrecy, then told me that he was present when Bush and Arafat attended a meeting in Abu Sharif's Beirut home that dealt with trading weapons for hostages.
I asked him why Arafat wouldn't make that public, as it was a hot news item at the time, and his response was that Arafat "didn't want to anger the Americans."
The Motive
eThere is no definite evidence with re-spect to who the murderer or murderers are. eT here is only suspicion, and given the government’s frenzied efforts to cover up the killing, ultimately finding the guilty party or parties will not be easy.
David Sabow believes that his brother, Col. Sabow, was part of a Marine Corps operation flying weapons to South America as part of the arms-for-drugs
operation in the Reagan era, designed to supply the Contras subsidized by the U.S.A. He is also convinced that, not long before his murder, his brother learned of the senior Marine Corps officers who were involved in bringing illegal drugs back into the country.
C-130 cargo planes were geared up so they could fly weapons south to Colombia and to bring back illegal drugs on the return trip to the United States.
Once converted, the C-123s were flown to El Toro Marine Air Station, where a senior officer would authorize the planes tested at China Lake and Twenty-nine Palms, in California, they were staged and once again flown back from El Toro Marine Air Base to Latin America, via Mexico, to be supplied to the Contras, the American-financed rebel group seeking to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.
e The aircraft used by this group were designated as "cutouts" and certified as belonging to the U.S. Forest Service's air-craft fleet, but they were controlled by U.S. military intelligence, and contracted by civilian operators for whom Plumlee and other pilots worked.
These pilots used secret air bases in Costa Rica, as well as on the notorious John Hull Ranch, as unloading and staging areas for the illegal weapons. eThey also used hidden runways in Costa Rica and El Salvador, controlled by the drug cartel, which then allowed them to bring into the United States drugs on the return trips.
eThese flyways and airstrips were s ecretly recorded by undercover flight crews and reported to various government interdiction agencies in the United
States. In 1986, an early operation known by the code name, "Penetrate," was shut down because of the politically explosive Iran-Contra matter.
In 1990, however, there was still a covert weapons operation – detailed above – that continued to fly weapons to Latin America, mostly to Bogota, Columbia, which allowed the group to bring back illegal drugs into the United States via Mexico.
eThese flyways and staging areas in Mexico were duly noted by undercover pilots and passed on to CIA and DEA personnel. According to Plumlee, an American DEA agent from Guadalajara, Mexico, by the name of Kiki Camarena, was killed because of his knowledge concerning the "CIA-Mexico" thing, as it was widely known among the covert civilian pilots.
Plumlee states that the word being spread from military personnel at El Toro through his group was that Col. Sabow had discovered illegal flights coming into El Toro Marine Air Base at 2 or 3 a.m., obviously carrying illegal contraband, and that he intended to blow the whistle.
He had also heard that Col. Sabow was going to be relieved of his duties because of his intention to report the drug ship-ments. Plumlee is convinced that Col. Sabow was murdered to silence him.
When the weapons were repaired and to be re-fueled at night, and then sent to the Southern Mexico weapons dump to transfer on to Columbia. On the return trip from Columbia, the C-123s brought cocaine back to El Toro, always at night, where the drugs were unloaded.
Tosh Plumlee, one of the civilian pilots running guns for the U.S. government in the 1980s, has told this writer that he made a number of operationally
approved trips to Latin America, trips that were described as "sanctioned drug interdiction operations."
eT hese trips were approved by military intelligence personnel attached to the Pentagon, with CIA logistical support. They were made in total secrecy to the extent that other government agencies were not aware of the existence of these flights, or of the operation.
eThe pilots were given a specific coded transponder number to squawk so their aircraft would not be challenged by U.S. Customs aircraft when patrolling the U.S. border.
When, in the 1980s, the 82 nd and 101 st Airborne were sent to Costa Rica for maneuvers, a great deal of weapons were sent with them. However, some of the weapons did not return to the United States and were later taken off the books by the military, marked as either lost or destroyed and reported to the Government Accounting Office as such.
Plumlee and other pilots have testified to Congress that they were working for a secret U.S. military intelligence operation that clandestinely sent them from the United States to bring back the so-called damaged and disappeared weapons for retrofitting and repair.
APRIL 1-15, 2008
CP
James G. Abourezk is a lawyer practicing in South Dakota. He is a former United States senator and the author of two books, Advise and Dissent, and a co-author of rough Different Eyes.
***************************************************************
I've taken the liberty to put the information in a more concise form due to the way it seemed to be chopped up and pieced together. I hope I haven't left anything out. But, it was very difficult reading it in the form that it was posted.
Was the code name for this, Operation Watchtower?
With all due respect, I think this is extremely important because it outlines to what extent the Reagan administration [a la G.H. Bush] would lend itself to subterfuge, and the type of double-dealing with which the U.S. Government has notably and totally disregarded The Geneva Accords, by engaging in drug and arms running, as well as coercion of foreign nation states, in its implication.
It's deja vu all over again, and again, and again...from Vietnam to Nicaragua to Iraq. And, the Bush family name is all over the place, each and every time.
Ter
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It's no secret that the current US Administration supports Israeli regional hegemony, by any and all means. In fact, the current US government would support anything Israel tells them to support.
Public opinion is proving more difficult to mould however. A new generation of Jews and non-Jews alike know a brutal occupation when they see one and they know who controls the MSM. The hardline Zionist opinion shapers and spin merchants are getting a bit worried as they can see reason and logic emerging on the horizon. Watch for the increasingly shrill hysteria as they realise they've lost the debate to common sense.
An individual named Melanie Phillips has revealed where she's coming from. She's got lots of shrill but no logic or compassion as she claims the Palestinians are an 'artificial' people who can be collectively punished because they are a 'terrorist population'.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/08/8810/
Published on Thursday, May 8, 2008 by The Independent/UK
The Loathsome Smearing of Israel’s Critics
by Johann Hari
In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence — and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.
My own case isn’t especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me “a Jew-lover”, “a Zionist-homo pig” and more.
Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn’t controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.
The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile “pro-Israel” writers and media monitoring groups — including Honest Reporting and Camera — said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.
Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, “Honest Reporting” claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews “poisoning the wells.” If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained — in labour — by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, “Honest Reporting” will say you didn’t explain “the real cause”: the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.
The former editor of Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups “nascent McCarthyism”. Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: “Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary … It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal.” If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.
The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: “Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and security.” Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them “Jews For Genocide”, and said they “encourage” the “killers” of Jews. Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an “artificial” people who can be collectively punished because they are “a terrorist population”. She believes that while “individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project”. Honest Reporting quotes Phillips as a model of reliable reporting.
These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter’s decision to speak to the elected Hamas government “border[ed] on anti-Semitism.” A Ha’aretz poll last month found that 64 per cent of Israelis want their government to do just that.
As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it — so last year he wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports. There is nothing there you can’t read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter’s comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B’tselem says this “bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime”. Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called “a racist”. Several universities have even refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.
These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters’ hoax for his book The Case For Israel, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that Finkelstein’s mother — who made it through Maidenek and two slave-labour camps — had collaborated with the Nazis. The campaign worked. Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the truth.
Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Reporting becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews — the majority — are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.
We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
–Johann Hari
©independent.co.uk
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Something my brother sent me from brasscheck:
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Harry,
Did you ever cross paths with Dave Robbins from the DACA?
James
James, did I fail to answer this old message? just noticed it while reading
Bill's posts of tonight. The answer is yes, I knew him very well in
connection with DACA and have been attempting to locate him as late as
this year. What do you have on Robbins? Very important.
Harry
Hi Harry,
We did indeed have a chat about that earlier in this thread.
What I can tell you is that Robbins is the chairman of that annual Republican soiree called the Victory Elephant Breakfast. You'll find Robbins in Alhambra, California.
Cheers,
James
Hi, James
The last I heard, Dave married a beautiful babe and move back to an eastern state. Am
surprised to find he is now in my once adopted hometown, Alhambra, and thank you for
the info. It always amazes me how you do it. Robbins was liaison between JBS and Gabaldon,
and likewise knows all details re; JFK/Mexico/Walker et al.
Again, thanks.
Harry
***********************************************************
"...in my once adopted hometown, Alhambra,..."
Hey Harry,
When are you going to let me take you out to dinner?
Your fellow forum member, and admirer,
Ter
Culver City, CA
310 836-4095
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Just a few on the Warren Commission, alias, the W/C ( Water Closet)....
Including a page of a letter sent to Janet Reno, from former Senator Richard Schweiker......on what he thought of the W/C....
The newspaper article is of course Tongue in Cheek.....
B........
Including a page of a letter sent to Janet Reno, from former Senator Richard Schweiker......on what he thought of the W/C....
It would be assumed that you are aware that the "page of a letter" is in fact a page of a letter sent by myself, in which I quoted Senator Schweiker's comments regarding the WC.
P.S. It is also a "roadmap" to understanding the manipulations of Specter & Company.
Well, Tom you can assume all you care to, ........No I did not know it was"" in fact a page of a letter sent by ( you ) myself, in which I quoted Senator Schweiker's comments regarding the WC."" .......
But they are Senator Schweiker's comments....Many are greatly aware of the dishonest Specter's manipulations.....
So a cheers for you, for sending such letter.......I hope you feel better now that is all straightened out.....
Ta......B.....
No I did not know it was"" in fact a page of a letter sent by ( you )
Well, hopefully, now you are aware of it.
What you provided represents page#3 of one of the multitudes of correspondences to the attention of the Attorney General, Janet Reno, and was in response to a letter which I received from the Violent Crimes Section of the FBI who had been provided with various aspects of the information.
Attached is Page#1 of this letter, and I will follow up with the other pages as well.
As well as answer Ron's questions.
Tom
P.S. Having lived in St. Anne, Manitoba; Geraldton, Ontario, as well as Regina, Saskatchewan; to include two winters on the North Slope of Alaska, I alway take into consideration the "numbing" effect of the cold on one's thought process prior to passing judgement on simple human error.
And, just as us "Southern Boys" are somewhat and sometimes afflicted with the "Dumb A**", caused by the heat and humidity, the "frozen brain" syndrone demonstrates little difference in affliction of the thought process.
****************************************************************
Hey, Purv and Bean! Nice to see you discussing some documents, here.
"P.S. Having lived in St. Anne, Manitoba; Geraldton, Ontario, as well as Regina, Saskatchewan; to include two winters on the North Slope of Alaska, I alway take into consideration the "numbing" effect of the cold on one's thought process prior to passing judgement on simple human error.
And, just as us "Southern Boys" are somewhat and sometimes afflicted with the "Dumb A**", caused by the heat and humidity, the "frozen brain" syndrone demonstrates little difference in affliction of the thought process."
And, speaking of climactic changes inherent to certain parallels located in the northern hemisphere, as well as, its effects on the body's central nervous system.
I've come to know the frozen aspect, common to the northernmost territories as "numbing of the skull syndrome," [Man! That used to leave me with such a pain right between my eyes walking against the wind towards the Hudson River, in the dead of winter, when I lived back in NY].
Then, there's the condition afflicting the southernmost territories commonly referred to as "refried brains syndrome." [Which sometimes leaves me in a "Watt's Riots" mode when the heat gets too intense.] FWIW
Love ya,
Ter
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From Harper's Magazine May 2008
NUMBERS RACKET
Why the economy is worse than we know
By Kevin Phillips
Almost four decades have passed since the United States scrapped its last currency ties to precious metals. Our copper and Nickel coinage still retains some metallic value, but not nearly enough for the purpose of currency tampering - the historic temptation of inflation-plagued or otherwise wayward governments, including, at times, our own. Instead, since the 1960's, Washington has been forced to gull its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics: the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured. The effect, over the past twenty-five years, has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed. If Washington's harping on weapons of mass destruction was essential to buoy public support for the invasion of Iraq, the use of deceptive statistics has played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it actually is.
The corruption has tainted the very measures that most shape public perception of the economy - the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI), which serves as the chief bellwether of inflation; the quarterly Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which tracks the U.S. economy's overall growth; and the monthly unemployment figure, which for the general public is perhaps the most vivid indicator of economic health or infirmity. Not only do governments, businesses, and individuals use these yardsticks in their decision-making but minor revisions in the data can mean major changes in household circumstances - inflation measurements help determine interest rates, federal interest payments on the national debt, and cost-of-living increases for wages, pensions, and Social Security benefits. And, of course, our statistics have political consequences, too. An administration is helped when it can mouth banalities about price levels being "anchored" as food and energy costs begin to soar.
The truth, though it would not exactly set Americans free, would at least open a window to wider economic and political understanding. Reader should ask themselves how much angrier the electorate might if the media, over the past five years, had been citing 8 percent unemployment (instead of 5 percent), 5 percent inflation (instead of 2 percent), and average annual growth in the 1 percent range (instead of the 3-4 percent range). We might ponder as well who profits from a low-growth U.S. economy hidden under statistical camouflage. Might it be Washington politicos and affluent elites, anxious to mislead voters, coddle the financial markets, and tamp down expensive cost-of-living increases for wages and pensions?
Let me stipulate: the deception arose gradually, at no stage stemming from any concerted or cynical scheme. There was no grand conspiracy, just accumulating opportunisms. As we will see, the political blame for the slow, piecemeal distortion is bipartisan - both Democratic and Republican administrations had a hand in the abetting of political dishonesty, reckless debt, and a casino-like financial sector. To see how, we mist revisit forty years of economic and statistical dissembling.
A SHORT HISTORY OF "POLLYANNA CREEP"
This apt phrase originated with John Williams, a California-based economic analyst and statistician who "shadows," as he puts it, the official Washington numbers. In a 2006 interview, Williams noted that although few Americans ever see the fine print, the government "always footnotes the changes and provides all the fine detail. Nonetheless, some of the changes are nothing short of remarkable, and the pattern over time is what I call Pollyanna Creep." Williams is one of the small group of economists and analysts who have paid any attention to the phenomenon. A few have pointed out the understatement of the Consumer Price Index - the billionaire bond manager, Bill Gross has described it as an "haute con job," and Bloomberg columnist John Wasik has dismissed it as "a testament to the art of spin." In 2003, a University of Chicago economist named Austan Goolsbee (now a senior economic adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign) published an op-ed in the New York Times pointing out how the government had minimized the depth of the 2001-2002 U.S. recession, having "cooked the books" to misstate and minimize the unemployment numbers. Unfortunately, the critics have tended to train their axes on a single abuse, missing the broad forest of statistical misinformation that had grown up over the past four decades.
The story starts after the inauguration of of John F. Kennedy in 1961, when high jobless number marred the image of Camelot-on-the-Potomac and the new administration appointed a committee to weigh changes. The result, implemented a few years later, was that out-of-work Americans who had stopped looking for jobs - even if this was because none could be found - were labeled "discouraged workers" and excluded from the ranks of the unemployed, where many, if not most of them had been previously classified. Lyndon Johnson, for his part, was widely rumored to have personally scrutinized and sometimes tweaked Gross National Product numbers before their release; and by the 1969 fiscal year, Johnson had orchestrated a "unified budget" that combined Social Security with the rest of the federal outlays. This innovation allowed the surplus receipts in the former to mask the emerging deficit in the latter.
Richard Nixon, besides continuing the unified budget, developed his own taste for statistical improvement. He proposed - albeit unsuccessfully - that the Labor Department, which prepared both seasonally adjusted and non-adjusted unemployment numbers, should just publish whichever number was lower. In a more consequential move, he asked his second Federal Reserve chairman, Arthur Burns, to develop what became an ultimately famous division between "core" inflation and headline inflation. If the Consumer Price Index was calculated by tracking a bundle of prices, so-called core inflation would would simple exclude, because of "volatility," categories that happened to be troublesome at that time, food and energy. Core inflation could be spotlighted when the headline number was embarrassing, as it was in 1973 and 1974. (The economic commentator Barry Ritholz has joked that core inflation is better called "inflation ex-inflation" -i.e., inflation after the inflation has been excluded.)
In 1983, under the Reagan Administration, inflation was further finagled when the Bureau of Labor Statistics decided that housing, too, was overstating the Consumer Price Index; the BLS substituted an entirely different "Owner Equivalent Rent" measurement, based on what a homeowner might get for renting his or her house. This methodology, controversial at the time but still in place today, simply sidestepped what was happening in the real world of homeowner costs. Because low inflation encourages low interest rates, which in turn make it much easier to borrow money, the BLS's decision no doubt encouraged, during the late 1980's, the large and often speculative expansion in private debt - much of which involved real estate, and some of which went spectacularly bad between 1989 and 1992 in the savings-and-loan, real estate, and junk-bond scandals. Also, on the unemployment front, as Austan Goolsbee pointed out in his New York Times op-ed, the Reagan Administration further trimmed the number by reclassifying members of the military as "employed" instead of outside the labor force.
The distortional inclinations of the next president, George H.W. Bush, came into focus in 1990, when Michael Boskin, the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, proposed to reorient U.S. economic statistics principally to reduce the measured rate of inflation. His stated grand ambition was to move the calculus away from old industrial-era methodologies toward the emerging services economy and the expanding retail and financial sectors. Skeptics, however, countered that the underlying goal, driven by worry over federal budget deficits, was to reduce federal payments - from interest on the national debt to cost-of-living outlays for government employees, retirees, and Social Security receptients.
It was left to the Clinton Administration to implement these convoluted CPI measurements, which were reiterated in 1996 through a commission headed by Boskin and promoted by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. The Clintonites also extended the Pollyanna Creep of the nation's employment figures. Although expunged from the ranks of the unemployed, discouraged workers had nevertheless been counted in the larger workforce. But in 1994, the Bureau of Labor Statistics redefined the workforce to include only that small percentage of the discouraged who had been seeking work for less than a year. The longer-term discouraged - some 4 million U.S. adults - fell out of the main monthly tally. Some now call the "hidden unemployed." For its last four years, the Clinton Administration also thinned the monthly household economic sampling by one sixth, from 60,000 to 50,000, and a disproportionate number of the dropped households were in the inner cities; the reduced sample (and a new adjustment formula) is believed to have reduced black unemployment estimates and eased worsening poverty figures.
What does "unemployment" mean?
It depends on who is counted:
On a graph with an "x" time line in years from 1994 to 2008, and a "y" percentage scale from 4 percent to 12 percent
12 percent to 9 percent - including workers who are part-time for "economic reasons."
8 percent to 7 percent - including other "marginally attached" workers.
6 percent to 5 percent - including "discouraged" workers.
6.5 percent to 5.5 percent - The official "unemployment rate."
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Despite the present Bush Administration's overall penchant for manipulating data (e.g., Iraq, climate change), it has yet to match its predecessor in economic revisions. In 2002, the administration did, however, for two months fail to publish the Mass Layoff Statistics report, because of its embarrassing nature after the 2001 recession had supposedly ended; it introduced, that same year, an "experimental" new CPI calculation (the C-CPI-U), which shaved another 0.3 percent off the official CPI; and since 2006 it has stopped publishing the M-3 money supply numbers, which captured rising inflationary impetus from bank credit activity. In 2005, Bush proposed, but Congress shunned, a new, narrower historical wage basis for calculating future retiree Social Security benefits.
By late last year, the Gallup Poll reported that public faith in the federal government had sunk below even post-Watergate levels. Whether statistical deceit played any direct role is unclear, but it does seem that citizens have got the right general idea. After forty years of manipulation, more than a few measurements of the U.S. economy have been distorted beyond recognition.
AMERICA'S "OPACITY" CRISIS
Last year, the word "opacity," hitherto reserved for Scrabble games, became a mainstay of the financial press. A credit market panic had been triggered by something called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which in some cases were too complicated to be fathomed even by the experts. The packagers and marketers of CDOs were forced to acknowledge that their hypertechnical securities were fraught with "opacity" - a convenient, ethically and legally judgment-free word for lack of honest labeling. And far from being rare, opacity is commonplace in contemporary finance. Intricacy has become a conduit for deception. Exotic derivative [my emphasis, TM] instruments with alphabet-soup initials command notional values in the hundreds of trillions of dollars, but nobody knows what they are really worth. Some days, half of the trades on major stock exchanges come from so-called black boxes programmed with everything from binomial trees to algorithms; most federal securities regulators couldn't explain them, much less monitor them.
Transparency is the hallmark of democracy. but we now find ourselves with economic statistics every bit as opaque - and as vulnerable to double-dealing - as subprime CDO. Of the "big three" statistics, let us start with unemployment. Most of the people tired of looking for work, as mentioned above, are no longer counted in the workforce, though they do still show up in one of the auxiliary unemployment numbers. The BLS has six different regular jobless measurements - U-1, U-2, U-3 (the one routinely cited), U-4, U-5, and U-6. In January 2008, the U-4 to U-6 series produced unemployment numbers ranging from 5.2 percent to 9.0 percent, all above the "official" number. The series nearest to real-world conditions is, not surprisingly, the highest: U-6, which includes part-timers looking for full-time employment as well as other members of the "marginally attached," a new catchall meaning those not looking for a job but who say they want one. Yet this does not even include the Americans who (as Austan Goolsbee puts it) have been "bought off the unemployment rolls" by government programs such as Social Security disability, whose recipients are classified as outside the labor force.
Second, is the Gross Domestic Product, which in itself represents something of a fudge: federal economists used the Gross National Product until 1991, when rising U.S. international debt costs made the narrower GDP assessment more palatable. The GDP has been subject to many further fiddles, the most manipulatable of which are the adjustments made for the presumed starting up and ending of businesses (the "birth/death of businesses" equation) and the amounts that the Bureau of Economic Analysis "imputes" to nationwide personal income data (known as phantom income boosters, or imputations; for example, the imputed income from living in one's own home, or the benefit once receives from a free checking account, or the value of employer-paid health- and life-insurance premiums). During 2007, believe it or not, imputed income accounted for some 15 percent of the GDP. John Williams, the economic statistician, is briskly contemptuous of GDP numbers over the past quarter century. "Upward growth biases built into GDP modeling since the early 1980s have rendered this important series nearly worthless," he wrote in 2004. [T]he recessions of 1990/1991 and 2001 were much longer and deeper than currently reported [and] lesser downturns in 1986 and 1995 were missed completely."
Nothing, however, can match the tortured evolution of the third key number, the somewhat misnamed Consumer Price Index. Government economists themselves admit that the revisions during the Clinton years worked to reduce the current inflation figures by more than a percentage point, but the overall distortion had been considerably more severe. Just the 1983 manipulation, which substituted "owner equivalent rent" for home-ownership costs, served to understate or reduce inflation during the recent housing boom by 3 to 4 percentage points. Moreover, since the 1990s, the CPI has been subjected to three other adjustments, all downward and all dubious: product substitution (if flank steak gets too expensive, people are assumed to shift to hamburger, but nobody is assumed to move up to filet mignon), geometric weighting (goods and servicesin which costs are rising most rapidly get a lower weighting for a presumed reduction in consumption), and, most bizarrely, hedonic adjustment, an unusual computation by which additional quality is attributed to a product or service.
The hedonic adjustment, in particular, is as hard to estimate as it is to take seriously. (That it was launched during the tenure of the Oval Office's preeminent hedonist, William Jefferson Clinton, only adds to the absurdity.) No small part of the condemnation must lie in the timing. If quality improvements are to be counted, that count should have begun in the 1950s and 1960s, when such products and services as air-conditioning, air travel, and automatic transmissions - and these are just the A's! - improved consumer satisfaction to a comparable or greater degree than have more recent innovations. That the change was made only in the late Nineties shrieks of politics and opportunism, not integrity of measurement. Most of the time, hedonic adjustment is used to reduce the effective cost of goods, which in turn reduces the stated rate of inflation. Reversing the theory, however, the declining quality of goods or services should adjust effective prices and thereby add to inflation, that side of the equation generally goes missing. "All in all," Williams points out, "if you were to peel back changes that were made in the CPI going back to the Carter years, you'd see that the CPI would now be 3.5 percent to 4 percent higher" - meaning that, because of lost CPI increases, Social Security checks would be 70 percent greater than they currently are.
Furthermore, when discussing price pressure, government officials invariably bring up "core" inflation, which excludes precisely the two categories - food and energy - now verging on another 1970s-style price surge. This year we have already seen major U.S. food and grocery companies , among them Kellogg and Kraft, report sharp declines in earnings caused by rising grain and dairy prices. Central banks from Europe to Japan worry that the biggest inflation jumps in ten to fifteen years could get in the way of reducing interest rates to cope with weakening economies. Even the U.S. Labor Department acknowledged that in January, the price of imported goods had increased 13.7 percent compared with a year earlier, the biggest surge since record-keeping began in 1982. From Maine to Australia, from Alaska to the Middle East, a hydra-headed inflation is on the loose, unleashed by the many years of rapid growth in the supply of money from the world's central banks (not least the U.S. Federal Reserve), as well as by massive public and private debt creation.
THE U.S. ECONOMY EX-DISTORTION
The real numbers, to most economically minded Americans, would be a face full of cold water. Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today's U.S. unemployment rate is somewhere between 9 percent and 12 percent; the inflation rate is a high as 7 or even 10 percent; economic growth since the recession of 2001 has been mediocre, despite a huge surge in the wealth and incomes of the super-rich, and we are falling back into recession. If what we have been sold in recent years has been delusional "Pollyanna Creep," what we really need today is a picture of our economy ex-distortion. For what it would reveal is a nation in deep difficulty not just domestically but globally.
Under measurement of inflation, in particular, hangs over our heads like a guillotine. To acknowledge it would send interest rates climbing and therebay would endanger the viability of the massive buildup of public and private debt (from less than $11 trillion in 1987 to $49 trillion last year) that props up the American economy. Moreover, the rising cost of pensions, benefits, borrowed to inflation - could join with the cost of financial bailouts to overwhelm the federal budget. As inflation and interest rates have been kept artificially suppressed, the united States has been indentured to its volatile financial sector, with its predilection for leverage and risky buccaneering.
Arguably, the unraveling has already begun. As Robert Hardaway, a professor at the University of Denver, pointed out last September, the subprime lending crisis "can be directly traced back to the [1983] BLS decision to exclude the price of housing from the CPI....With the illusion of low inflation inducing lenders to offer 6 percent loans, not only has speculation run rampant on the expectations of ever-rising home prices, but home buyers by the millions have been tricked into buying homes even though they only qualified for the teaser rates." Were mainstream interest rates to jump into the 7 to 9 percent range - which
could happen if inflation were to spur new concern - both Washington and Wall Street would be walking in quicksand. The make-believe economy of the past two decades, with its asset bubbles, would be in serious jeopardy. The U.S. dollar, off more than 40 percent against the suro since 2002, could slip down an even rockier slope.
The credit markets are fearful, and the financial markets are nervous. If gloom continues, our humbugged nation may truly regret losing sight of history, risk, and common sense.
Kevin Phillip's new book, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, was published last month by Viking.
Yupp! The real full unemployment figures have always been about double those published. Add part-timers who want full-time or those working hard, but not making enough or not getting any benefits and a rigged money system [trickle-up] and what-ya-got? Add this eye-opener to the pot 'Banking System Too Bad To Bail-Out' [ready for a depression and economic collapse? - coming to a country near you soon!]
http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=25261
But then a Nation who would have some inside it kill their own popular and duely elected President and cover it up; lie about and spin all the wars; covert ops, assassinations; government manipulations and overthrows; control the media with propaganda, etc, .....then fudging on the financial stuff is just 'small change'. America's lack of morality, false-values; greed, avarice and lies of those in control is coming home to roost - bigtime and right now. Sadly, the poorest and most vulnerable will be the ones to suffer most. So far, those guilty of building this Potemkin Village have not even been pointed-out to most, let alone decended-upon by the mobs, as they should be. Truth, Justice and a sense of either fairness or balance seems to be what is lacking most now in America. Sad, very, very sad. It is going to get MUCH worse IMO and may be beyond saving, unlesss there is an immediate 180 degree chance of direction, economy, morality, and who runs this ship of state. The Oligarchy have run it into the ground - and sucked-in all the wealth for themselves...leaving a smoking ruin for the rest. Nice.
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"Yupp! The real full unemployment figures have always been about double those published. Add part-timers who want full-time or those working hard, but not making enough or not getting any benefits and a rigged money system [trickle-up] and what-ya-got?"
The story of my life since June 19, 2006, as Reagan's "voodoo economic" scheme via the Milton Friedman-Friedrich Hayek Chicago School of Economics, come trickling down on my head in the form of a "golden shower." No "golden umbrella" waiting for this little chickadee. No, sir! Gotta keep those plebes working til they're at least 70, otherwise their Social Security benefit check will be cut in half at their "break even" point. So, forget about retiring at 62, because your benefit will be cut in half at the age of 75. But, if you work until you're 70, you won't reach your "break even" point until the age of 83. Then, they're hoping you'll drop dead by the time you reach 76, or perhaps even before you can collect. Did anyone ever explain that little scam to people? Not even, not ever!
Well, it's off to The hill Of The Seven Jackals, for me. Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it's off to work I go...
Oh yeah, tell me how lucky I am to even have a job!
-
From Harper's Magazine May 2008
NUMBERS RACKET
Why the economy is worse than we know
By Kevin Phillips
Almost four decades have passed since the United States scrapped its last currency ties to precious metals. Our copper and Nickel coinage still retains some metallic value, but not nearly enough for the purpose of currency tampering - the historic temptation of inflation-plagued or otherwise wayward governments, including, at times, our own. Instead, since the 1960's, Washington has been forced to gull its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics: the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured. The effect, over the past twenty-five years, has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed. If Washington's harping on weapons of mass destruction was essential to buoy public support for the invasion of Iraq, the use of deceptive statistics has played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it actually is.
The corruption has tainted the very measures that most shape public perception of the economy - the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI), which serves as the chief bellwether of inflation; the quarterly Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which tracks the U.S. economy's overall growth; and the monthly unemployment figure, which for the general public is perhaps the most vivid indicator of economic health or infirmity. Not only do governments, businesses, and individuals use these yardsticks in their decision-making but minor revisions in the data can mean major changes in household circumstances - inflation measurements help determine interest rates, federal interest payments on the national debt, and cost-of-living increases for wages, pensions, and Social Security benefits. And, of course, our statistics have political consequences, too. An administration is helped when it can mouth banalities about price levels being "anchored" as food and energy costs begin to soar.
The truth, though it would not exactly set Americans free, would at least open a window to wider economic and political understanding. Reader should ask themselves how much angrier the electorate might if the media, over the past five years, had been citing 8 percent unemployment (instead of 5 percent), 5 percent inflation (instead of 2 percent), and average annual growth in the 1 percent range (instead of the 3-4 percent range). We might ponder as well who profits from a low-growth U.S. economy hidden under statistical camouflage. Might it be Washington politicos and affluent elites, anxious to mislead voters, coddle the financial markets, and tamp down expensive cost-of-living increases for wages and pensions?
Let me stipulate: the deception arose gradually, at no stage stemming from any concerted or cynical scheme. There was no grand conspiracy, just accumulating opportunisms. As we will see, the political blame for the slow, piecemeal distortion is bipartisan - both Democratic and Republican administrations had a hand in the abetting of political dishonesty, reckless debt, and a casino-like financial sector. To see how, we mist revisit forty years of economic and statistical dissembling.
A SHORT HISTORY OF "POLLYANNA CREEP"
This apt phrase originated with John Williams, a California-based economic analyst and statistician who "shadows," as he puts it, the official Washington numbers. In a 2006 interview, Williams noted that although few Americans ever see the fine print, the government "always footnotes the changes and provides all the fine detail. Nonetheless, some of the changes are nothing short of remarkable, and the pattern over time is what I call Pollyanna Creep." Williams is one of the small group of economists and analysts who have paid any attention to the phenomenon. A few have pointed out the understatement of the Consumer Price Index - the billionaire bond manager, Bill Gross has described it as an "haute con job," and Bloomberg columnist John Wasik has dismissed it as "a testament to the art of spin." In 2003, a University of Chicago economist named Austan Goolsbee (now a senior economic adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign) published an op-ed in the New York Times pointing out how the government had minimized the depth of the 2001-2002 U.S. recession, having "cooked the books" to misstate and minimize the unemployment numbers. Unfortunately, the critics have tended to train their axes on a single abuse, missing the broad forest of statistical misinformation that had grown up over the past four decades.
The story starts after the inauguration of of John F. Kennedy in 1961, when high jobless number marred the image of Camelot-on-the-Potomac and the new administration appointed a committee to weigh changes. The result, implemented a few years later, was that out-of-work Americans who had stopped looking for jobs - even if this was because none could be found - were labeled "discouraged workers" and excluded from the ranks of the unemployed, where many, if not most of them had been previously classified. Lyndon Johnson, for his part, was widely rumored to have personally scrutinized and sometimes tweaked Gross National Product numbers before their release; and by the 1969 fiscal year, Johnson had orchestrated a "unified budget" that combined Social Security with the rest of the federal outlays. This innovation allowed the surplus receipts in the former to mask the emerging deficit in the latter.
Richard Nixon, besides continuing the unified budget, developed his own taste for statistical improvement. He proposed - albeit unsuccessfully - that the Labor Department, which prepared both seasonally adjusted and non-adjusted unemployment numbers, should just publish whichever number was lower. In a more consequential move, he asked his second Federal Reserve chairman, Arthur Burns, to develop what became an ultimately famous division between "core" inflation and headline inflation. If the Consumer Price Index was calculated by tracking a bundle of prices, so-called core inflation would would simple exclude, because of "volatility," categories that happened to be troublesome at that time, food and energy. Core inflation could be spotlighted when the headline number was embarrassing, as it was in 1973 and 1974. (The economic commentator Barry Ritholz has joked that core inflation is better called "inflation ex-inflation" -i.e., inflation after the inflation has been excluded.)
In 1983, under the Reagan Administration, inflation was further finagled when the Bureau of Labor Statistics decided that housing, too, was overstating the Consumer Price Index; the BLS substituted an entirely different "Owner Equivalent Rent" measurement, based on what a homeowner might get for renting his or her house. This methodology, controversial at the time but still in place today, simply sidestepped what was happening in the real world of homeowner costs. Because low inflation encourages low interest rates, which in turn make it much easier to borrow money, the BLS's decision no doubt encouraged, during the late 1980's, the large and often speculative expansion in private debt - much of which involved real estate, and some of which went spectacularly bad between 1989 and 1992 in the savings-and-loan, real estate, and junk-bond scandals. Also, on the unemployment front, as Austan Goolsbee pointed out in his New York Times op-ed, the Reagan Administration further trimmed the number by reclassifying members of the military as "employed" instead of outside the labor force.
The distortional inclinations of the next president, George H.W. Bush, came into focus in 1990, when Michael Boskin, the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, proposed to reorient U.S. economic statistics principally to reduce the measured rate of inflation. His stated grand ambition was to move the calculus away from old industrial-era methodologies toward the emerging services economy and the expanding retail and financial sectors. Skeptics, however, countered that the underlying goal, driven by worry over federal budget deficits, was to reduce federal payments - from interest on the national debt to cost-of-living outlays for government employees, retirees, and Social Security receptients.
It was left to the Clinton Administration to implement these convoluted CPI measurements, which were reiterated in 1996 through a commission headed by Boskin and promoted by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. The Clintonites also extended the Pollyanna Creep of the nation's employment figures. Although expunged from the ranks of the unemployed, discouraged workers had nevertheless been counted in the larger workforce. But in 1994, the Bureau of Labor Statistics redefined the workforce to include only that small percentage of the discouraged who had been seeking work for less than a year. The longer-term discouraged - some 4 million U.S. adults - fell out of the main monthly tally. Some now call the "hidden unemployed." For its last four years, the Clinton Administration also thinned the monthly household economic sampling by one sixth, from 60,000 to 50,000, and a disproportionate number of the dropped households were in the inner cities; the reduced sample (and a new adjustment formula) is believed to have reduced black unemployment estimates and eased worsening poverty figures.
What does "unemployment" mean?
It depends on who is counted:
On a graph with an "x" time line in years from 1994 to 2008, and a "y" percentage scale from 4 percent to 12 percent
12 percent to 9 percent - including workers who are part-time for "economic reasons."
8 percent to 7 percent - including other "marginally attached" workers.
6 percent to 5 percent - including "discouraged" workers.
6.5 percent to 5.5 percent - The official "unemployment rate."
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Despite the present Bush Administration's overall penchant for manipulating data (e.g., Iraq, climate change), it has yet to match its predecessor in economic revisions. In 2002, the administration did, however, for two months fail to publish the Mass Layoff Statistics report, because of its embarrassing nature after the 2001 recession had supposedly ended; it introduced, that same year, an "experimental" new CPI calculation (the C-CPI-U), which shaved another 0.3 percent off the official CPI; and since 2006 it has stopped publishing the M-3 money supply numbers, which captured rising inflationary impetus from bank credit activity. In 2005, Bush proposed, but Congress shunned, a new, narrower historical wage basis for calculating future retiree Social Security benefits.
By late last year, the Gallup Poll reported that public faith in the federal government had sunk below even post-Watergate levels. Whether statistical deceit played any direct role is unclear, but it does seem that citizens have got the right general idea. After forty years of manipulation, more than a few measurements of the U.S. economy have been distorted beyond recognition.
AMERICA'S "OPACITY" CRISIS
Last year, the word "opacity," hitherto reserved for Scrabble games, became a mainstay of the financial press. A credit market panic had been triggered by something called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which in some cases were too complicated to be fathomed even by the experts. The packagers and marketers of CDOs were forced to acknowledge that their hypertechnical securities were fraught with "opacity" - a convenient, ethically and legally judgment-free word for lack of honest labeling. And far from being rare, opacity is commonplace in contemporary finance. Intricacy has become a conduit for deception. Exotic derivative [my emphasis, TM] instruments with alphabet-soup initials command notional values in the hundreds of trillions of dollars, but nobody knows what they are really worth. Some days, half of the trades on major stock exchanges come from so-called black boxes programmed with everything from binomial trees to algorithms; most federal securities regulators couldn't explain them, much less monitor them.
Transparency is the hallmark of democracy. but we now find ourselves with economic statistics every bit as opaque - and as vulnerable to double-dealing - as subprime CDO. Of the "big three" statistics, let us start with unemployment. Most of the people tired of looking for work, as mentioned above, are no longer counted in the workforce, though they do still show up in one of the auxiliary unemployment numbers. The BLS has six different regular jobless measurements - U-1, U-2, U-3 (the one routinely cited), U-4, U-5, and U-6. In January 2008, the U-4 to U-6 series produced unemployment numbers ranging from 5.2 percent to 9.0 percent, all above the "official" number. The series nearest to real-world conditions is, not surprisingly, the highest: U-6, which includes part-timers looking for full-time employment as well as other members of the "marginally attached," a new catchall meaning those not looking for a job but who say they want one. Yet this does not even include the Americans who (as Austan Goolsbee puts it) have been "bought off the unemployment rolls" by government programs such as Social Security disability, whose recipients are classified as outside the labor force.
Second, is the Gross Domestic Product, which in itself represents something of a fudge: federal economists used the Gross National Product until 1991, when rising U.S. international debt costs made the narrower GDP assessment more palatable. The GDP has been subject to many further fiddles, the most manipulatable of which are the adjustments made for the presumed starting up and ending of businesses (the "birth/death of businesses" equation) and the amounts that the Bureau of Economic Analysis "imputes" to nationwide personal income data (known as phantom income boosters, or imputations; for example, the imputed income from living in one's own home, or the benefit once receives from a free checking account, or the value of employer-paid health- and life-insurance premiums). During 2007, believe it or not, imputed income accounted for some 15 percent of the GDP. John Williams, the economic statistician, is briskly contemptuous of GDP numbers over the past quarter century. "Upward growth biases built into GDP modeling since the early 1980s have rendered this important series nearly worthless," he wrote in 2004. [T]he recessions of 1990/1991 and 2001 were much longer and deeper than currently reported [and] lesser downturns in 1986 and 1995 were missed completely."
Nothing, however, can match the tortured evolution of the third key number, the somewhat misnamed Consumer Price Index. Government economists themselves admit that the revisions during the Clinton years worked to reduce the current inflation figures by more than a percentage point, but the overall distortion had been considerably more severe. Just the 1983 manipulation, which substituted "owner equivalent rent" for home-ownership costs, served to understate or reduce inflation during the recent housing boom by 3 to 4 percentage points. Moreover, since the 1990s, the CPI has been subjected to three other adjustments, all downward and all dubious: product substitution (if flank steak gets too expensive, people are assumed to shift to hamburger, but nobody is assumed to move up to filet mignon), geometric weighting (goods and servicesin which costs are rising most rapidly get a lower weighting for a presumed reduction in consumption), and, most bizarrely, hedonic adjustment, an unusual computation by which additional quality is attributed to a product or service.
The hedonic adjustment, in particular, is as hard to estimate as it is to take seriously. (That it was launched during the tenure of the Oval Office's preeminent hedonist, William Jefferson Clinton, only adds to the absurdity.) No small part of the condemnation must lie in the timing. If quality improvements are to be counted, that count should have begun in the 1950s and 1960s, when such products and services as air-conditioning, air travel, and automatic transmissions - and these are just the A's! - improved consumer satisfaction to a comparable or greater degree than have more recent innovations. That the change was made only in the late Nineties shrieks of politics and opportunism, not integrity of measurement. Most of the time, hedonic adjustment is used to reduce the effective cost of goods, which in turn reduces the stated rate of inflation. Reversing the theory, however, the declining quality of goods or services should adjust effective prices and thereby add to inflation, that side of the equation generally goes missing. "All in all," Williams points out, "if you were to peel back changes that were made in the CPI going back to the Carter years, you'd see that the CPI would now be 3.5 percent to 4 percent higher" - meaning that, because of lost CPI increases, Social Security checks would be 70 percent greater than they currently are.
Furthermore, when discussing price pressure, government officials invariably bring up "core" inflation, which excludes precisely the two categories - food and energy - now verging on another 1970s-style price surge. This year we have already seen major U.S. food and grocery companies , among them Kellogg and Kraft, report sharp declines in earnings caused by rising grain and dairy prices. Central banks from Europe to Japan worry that the biggest inflation jumps in ten to fifteen years could get in the way of reducing interest rates to cope with weakening economies. Even the U.S. Labor Department acknowledged that in January, the price of imported goods had increased 13.7 percent compared with a year earlier, the biggest surge since record-keeping began in 1982. From Maine to Australia, from Alaska to the Middle East, a hydra-headed inflation is on the loose, unleashed by the many years of rapid growth in the supply of money from the world's central banks (not least the U.S. Federal Reserve), as well as by massive public and private debt creation.
THE U.S. ECONOMY EX-DISTORTION
The real numbers, to most economically minded Americans, would be a face full of cold water. Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today's U.S. unemployment rate is somewhere between 9 percent and 12 percent; the inflation rate is a high as 7 or even 10 percent; economic growth since the recession of 2001 has been mediocre, despite a huge surge in the wealth and incomes of the super-rich, and we are falling back into recession. If what we have been sold in recent years has been delusional "Pollyanna Creep," what we really need today is a picture of our economy ex-distortion. For what it would reveal is a nation in deep difficulty not just domestically but globally.
Under measurement of inflation, in particular, hangs over our heads like a guillotine. To acknowledge it would send interest rates climbing and therebay would endanger the viability of the massive buildup of public and private debt (from less than $11 trillion in 1987 to $49 trillion last year) that props up the American economy. Moreover, the rising cost of pensions, benefits, borrowed to inflation - could join with the cost of financial bailouts to overwhelm the federal budget. As inflation and interest rates have been kept artificially suppressed, the united States has been indentured to its volatile financial sector, with its predilection for leverage and risky buccaneering.
Arguably, the unraveling has already begun. As Robert Hardaway, a professor at the University of Denver, pointed out last September, the subprime lending crisis "can be directly traced back to the [1983] BLS decision to exclude the price of housing from the CPI....With the illusion of low inflation inducing lenders to offer 6 percent loans, not only has speculation run rampant on the expectations of ever-rising home prices, but home buyers by the millions have been tricked into buying homes even though they only qualified for the teaser rates." Were mainstream interest rates to jump into the 7 to 9 percent range - which
could happen if inflation were to spur new concern - both Washington and Wall Street would be walking in quicksand. The make-believe economy of the past two decades, with its asset bubbles, would be in serious jeopardy. The U.S. dollar, off more than 40 percent against the suro since 2002, could slip down an even rockier slope.
The credit markets are fearful, and the financial markets are nervous. If gloom continues, our humbugged nation may truly regret losing sight of history, risk, and common sense.
Kevin Phillip's new book, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, was published last month by Viking.
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"Gratz is tolerable and in some ways provides valuable insights. Colby, Lamson, Lewis and Burton are intolerable...providing only
insults and opinions but never any research. I, too, am opposed to banning such provocateurs. I am in favor of ignoring them."
Is that not in and of itself an opinion? Providing only insults......wow......the pot calling the kettle black.
I read quite a bit on the forum here, when I can stomach it, and feel like sifting through piles of sniveling and adolescent fighting to scrape up the smallest bit of information. Once you remove the ridiculous, almighty, you have no degree so you know nothing crowd, once you disregard space rays, alteration ridiculousness, and all the petty school yard squabbling, it is a rather good forum.
(Although one must confess some sense of sadistic glee at the beatings Josiah Thompson has delivered to Dr. Fetzer, and his group of whimsical unrealists.)
Mr. Simkin,
I applaud you for your restraint, truly, but is there not a line that needs to be drawn? Is there ever going to be a recognizable line behind good solid educational information and discussion, and disruption? I can appreciate your views on censorship, but sometimes the unruly children in the class need to be squelched, so those eager to learn, and not tiff, can do so in an educational environment.
Not that I have any hope that anything I have said will take hold, but what the heck.....it was said.
***************************************************************
""Gratz is tolerable and in some ways provides valuable insights. Colby, Lamson, Lewis and Burton are intolerable...providing only
insults and opinions but never any research. I, too, am opposed to banning such provocateurs. I am in favor of ignoring them.""
I happen to agree with the above statement, but take a look at the tone of your reply.
"I read quite a bit on the forum here, when I can stomach it, and feel like sifting through piles of sniveling and adolescent fighting to scrape up the smallest bit of information. Once you remove the ridiculous, almighty, you have no degree so you know nothing crowd, once you disregard space rays, alteration ridiculousness, and all the petty school yard squabbling, it is a rather good forum."
(Although one must confess some sense of sadistic glee at the beatings Josiah Thompson has delivered to Dr. Fetzer, and his group of whimsical unrealists.)
You come off as a passive-aggressive, pompous little snit. The pot calling the kettle black, indeed!
"Mr. Simkin,
I applaud you for your restraint, truly, but is there not a line that needs to be drawn? Is there ever going to be a recognizable line behind good solid educational information and discussion, and disruption? I can appreciate your views on censorship, but sometimes the unruly children in the class need to be squelched, so those eager to learn, and not tiff, can do so in an educational environment."
And, as far as brown-nosing the admin goes, that, and $3.50 American, may get you a cup of Starbucks.
"Not that I have any hope that anything I have said will take hold, but what the heck.....it was said."
Especially, since everything you've said has already been stated dozens of times before. And, what makes you think that anyone will give a rat's patootey about what you've just redundantly implied, here?
Why don't you think before you make a statement, and use some logic in framing your rebuttals. Otherwise, you come off sounding no better than the ones you choose to attack.
Oh, and BTW, if you insist on accepting this as an "attack" from me, you are absolutely right. Take it as an example of your own ill-conceived handiwork.
Thank you for making my point perfectly clear.....you belong here Ms. Mauro.....you fit right in....
I was brown nosing no one simply stating my opinion, I assume there is a right to do that here is there not?
Perhaps the reason what I stated has been stated before is because it holds some validity. I have always thought that educated people could speak in a civilized manner, you are proof that they can not, you and so many others like you here on this forum.
It is very true that ignorance breeds contempt, and that is ever so apparent. You Ms. Mauro are the perfect example of one or the other.....I will allow you to decide.
*************************************************************
"It is very true that ignorance breeds contempt."
No, it's "Familiarity breeds contempt." You half-wit, since you've taken such relish in implying that I'm ignorant.
If that's your purpose here, to read for the infinite pleasure you obtain in order to express your bloviated, condescending attitude, then knock yourself out, Mister!
By all means, state your opinion seeing as you're no better than the rest of the people you take such pride and pleasure in slamming around here. Just remember, every time you toss one of your snide, little remarks out into the arena, there'll always be someone taking offense to your brand of ascerbic, and in this case, non-wit.
I see you haven't lost your touch, Terry.....
***********************************************
It's been hot as hell out here on the Pacific Coast today, David, literally.
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I recently corrected a few mistakes on Wiki's page on the single-bullet theory. Some single-bullet devotee had written that the bullet had struck Kennedy at the sixth cervical vertebra. This where Dr. Lattimer, the high-priest of the single-bullet religion, placed the wound, so that he could claim the bullet headed downwards in the neck. It had apparently gone uncorrected for years. I changed it to read that the HSCA medical panel placed the wound at the first thoracic vertebra, and created a few links to their report over on historymatters. It's been left alone for months.
While the "official" story is bunkum, places like Wiki have been over-run by single-assassin zealots, who've tried to turn the "research" of men like Lattimer, Posner, and Myers, into the "official" story, even though much of what they say is at odds with the government's investigations and conclusions. I believe we should identify the points of evidence where they differ, and make sure that Wiki--which is used by millions of people as an encyclopedia--at least tells the real "official" story, and not some bogus "official" story pushed by an eccentric penis collector like Lattimer. (Not a put-down--Lattimer's obituary revealed that he was the purchaser of Napoleon's penis when it come up at auction some years back).
*******************************************************
"I believe we should identify the points of evidence where they differ, and make sure that Wiki--which is used by millions of people as an encyclopedia--at least tells the real "official" story, and not some bogus "official" story pushed by an eccentric..."
My sentiments exactly, Pat.
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Hi Terry. How’ve you been?
My dad was more indie, I would say, but all were sources cowboy serious anticommunists who felt a great dupe after they'd helped the Cuban revolution. They had wives and little kids that followed them around too. They were front line homies not sipping and smoking in the embassies rather for hire with street knowledge the officials relied on. That’s my best guess—these guys were maybe nonofficial but with officials in the wing waiting for guys like my dad, pilots, to touch down and give ‘em the scoop. Without a paystub, who knows who works for whom? Let’s just say these guys are mostly unknown players in a multi-tiered netherworld of the time that makes for interesting stories floating around out there.
You may like this book I mentioned to Harry and Tosh, "Where the Boys are..." by Van Gosse. It points out time of 50s (beats and revolutionaries) was source, springboard of reactionary politics our gen and a yearning. Privilege breeds discontent and sympathy for the other guy sometimes, eh?
Marita-talked to her once and liked her. She’s tough and has history—an interesting woman. No one talks about her working with the refugees at a mil camp but I think that’s one of her better tales, but oops I'm off the Roselli topic again.
Now the Lisa Howard thing burns my bridges because if Talbot’s book is right then wtf? I mean we send an emissary and she does the guy? This is just so wrong on many levels. Kudos to the source (her daughter?) for her honesty.
Best to you and thanks for your interest for more on Paul Hughes take look at
www.littlebayofpigs.com
*********************************************************
Thanks for the link, Cris. I'll go and check it out right now.
Hey, the offer still stands to take you to dinner. My treat, remember?
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"Gratz is tolerable and in some ways provides valuable insights. Colby, Lamson, Lewis and Burton are intolerable...providing only
insults and opinions but never any research. I, too, am opposed to banning such provocateurs. I am in favor of ignoring them."
Is that not in and of itself an opinion? Providing only insults......wow......the pot calling the kettle black.
I read quite a bit on the forum here, when I can stomach it, and feel like sifting through piles of sniveling and adolescent fighting to scrape up the smallest bit of information. Once you remove the ridiculous, almighty, you have no degree so you know nothing crowd, once you disregard space rays, alteration ridiculousness, and all the petty school yard squabbling, it is a rather good forum.
(Although one must confess some sense of sadistic glee at the beatings Josiah Thompson has delivered to Dr. Fetzer, and his group of whimsical unrealists.)
Mr. Simkin,
I applaud you for your restraint, truly, but is there not a line that needs to be drawn? Is there ever going to be a recognizable line behind good solid educational information and discussion, and disruption? I can appreciate your views on censorship, but sometimes the unruly children in the class need to be squelched, so those eager to learn, and not tiff, can do so in an educational environment.
Not that I have any hope that anything I have said will take hold, but what the heck.....it was said.
***************************************************************
""Gratz is tolerable and in some ways provides valuable insights. Colby, Lamson, Lewis and Burton are intolerable...providing only
insults and opinions but never any research. I, too, am opposed to banning such provocateurs. I am in favor of ignoring them.""
I happen to agree with the above statement, but take a look at the tone of your reply.
"I read quite a bit on the forum here, when I can stomach it, and feel like sifting through piles of sniveling and adolescent fighting to scrape up the smallest bit of information. Once you remove the ridiculous, almighty, you have no degree so you know nothing crowd, once you disregard space rays, alteration ridiculousness, and all the petty school yard squabbling, it is a rather good forum."
(Although one must confess some sense of sadistic glee at the beatings Josiah Thompson has delivered to Dr. Fetzer, and his group of whimsical unrealists.)
You come off as a passive-aggressive, pompous little snit. The pot calling the kettle black, indeed!
"Mr. Simkin,
I applaud you for your restraint, truly, but is there not a line that needs to be drawn? Is there ever going to be a recognizable line behind good solid educational information and discussion, and disruption? I can appreciate your views on censorship, but sometimes the unruly children in the class need to be squelched, so those eager to learn, and not tiff, can do so in an educational environment."
And, as far as brown-nosing the admin goes, that, and $3.50 American, may get you a cup of Starbucks.
"Not that I have any hope that anything I have said will take hold, but what the heck.....it was said."
Especially, since everything you've said has already been stated dozens of times before. And, what makes you think that anyone will give a rat's patootey about what you've just redundantly implied, here?
Why don't you think before you make a statement, and use some logic in framing your rebuttals. Otherwise, you come off sounding no better than the ones you choose to attack.
Oh, and BTW, if you insist on accepting this as an "attack" from me, you are absolutely right. Take it as an example of your own ill-conceived handiwork.
Thank you for making my point perfectly clear.....you belong here Ms. Mauro.....you fit right in....
I was brown nosing no one simply stating my opinion, I assume there is a right to do that here is there not?
Perhaps the reason what I stated has been stated before is because it holds some validity. I have always thought that educated people could speak in a civilized manner, you are proof that they can not, you and so many others like you here on this forum.
It is very true that ignorance breeds contempt, and that is ever so apparent. You Ms. Mauro are the perfect example of one or the other.....I will allow you to decide.
*************************************************************
"It is very true that ignorance breeds contempt."
No, it's "Familiarity breeds contempt." You half-wit, since you've taken such relish in implying that I'm ignorant.
If that's your purpose here, to read for the infinite pleasure you obtain in order to express your bloviated, condescending attitude, then knock yourself out, Mister!
By all means, state your opinion seeing as you're no better than the rest of the people you take such pride and pleasure in slamming around here. Just remember, every time you toss one of your snide, little remarks out into the arena, there'll always be someone taking offense to your brand of ascerbic, and in this case, non-wit.
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Good post Bill. I'd only add to that where are the Prosecutors or Members of Congress to deal with the crimes of this Administration, and those done by and to past ones, as well.
I wrote a strongly worded email to Rep. Conyers' Office [Head of Judiciary Committee] about the Wecht Trial. They are investigating it and might be able to pull in the reigns on this out of control Prosecutor cum Persecutor. I'd also suggest letters to the editors of the two newspapers above. I think [just my guess] the mindset of the Prosecutor is such that they will ignore any letters sent to them. They are on a Jihad and don't let facts or the will of the People - nor the Law - get in their way. If enough pressure is brought on them and some of the excesses that went on before and now after the trial are made Public, things just might change. Conyers Webpage is here [with his email address] http://www.house.gov/conyers/
Also, you can add your name to the MFF letter at their website. Here is the letter:
Letter from the MFF to U.S. Attorney Buchanan
The Honorable Mary Beth Buchanan
United States Attorney
United States Attorney's Office
Western District of Pennsylvania
U.S. Post Office & Courthouse, Suite 400
Seventh Avenue and Grant Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15219
Dear Ms. Buchanan,
We are writing to urge you to cease the prosecution of Dr. Cyril Wecht. After weeks of deliberation, the jury was unable to reach a guilty verdict on a single count. The government has had its day in court and, in the words of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it's time to stop. We respectfully ask that you reconsider an apparent decision to retry this case and spend more taxpayer money pursuing an unfounded case against Dr. Wecht.
Those of us who have met Dr. Wecht find him to be a man of outstanding civic-mindedness and integrity. He put his reputation on the line during his tenure on the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, and has put his expertise and knowledge to great use since then. The renowned programs and reputation of the Cyril H. Wecht Institute for Forensic Science and Law at Duquesne University speak for themselves.
There are undoubtedly far better uses of your office than continuing to pursue this case - one which has led even jurors to question the motivation behind Dr. Wecht's prosecution.
One way to remove these questions would be to admit that the case against Dr. Wecht was found to be unproven, and bring the tarnishing of his name to a close.
Sincerely,
Rex Bradford, Senior Archivist, Mary Ferrell Foundation
Tyler Weaver, Executive Director, Mary Ferrell Foundation
Amy Agyepong, archivist, Mary Ferrell Foundation
Randolph Benson, Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies
Michael J. Cain, author
Bill Holiday, educator, Brattleboro High School
Mark Bridger, editor, Dealey Plaza Echo
Jeffrey L. Worcester II, Director, JFKMI
Colin McSween, actor and researcher
Peter Dale Scott, author
Susan Barnes, supporter of Dr. Wecht
David R. Wrone, Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
William Carter, Canadian Civil Servant
Lamar Waldron, author
Chris A. Bradford, researcher
Brenda Brody, researcher
David Reitzes, researcher
Barry Keane, Vice-Chairman, Dealey Plaza UK
John E. Shumaker, researcher
Carole Wilson, researcher
Gary Buell, citizen
Peter D. Antill, researcher
Chris Lightbrown, journalist
James Sawa, Pittsburgh researcher
John Geraghty, researcher
Donald B. Thomas, concerned citizen
Mike Dworetsky, Dealey Plaza UK
Lisa Pease, author and researcher
David H. Stern, M.D.
Alaric Rosman, retired teacher and researcher
Dick Russell, author
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/...Dr._Cyril_Wecht
****************************************************************
"http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/...Dr._Cyril_Wecht"
Peter, could you do me an extra large favor?
I'm having a hard time entering my name to the list at Mary Ferrell's. I've registered and I keep getting an error from my stmp.yahoo.mail server, which is not accepting my password. And, I've tried the main 3 ones I've used over the years at different sites, but it won't take any of them.
If you could, please enter me as: Theresa C. Mauro ARRT(N)/CNMT/CTNM Nuclear Medicine
Thank you so much. I hope this is feasible. In the meantime, I'll hook up with my friend, Allen, and see if we can find a way to correct this mail issue .
Ter
Ter, I'd gladly do so, but it won't take my name or any name...either a computer glich or a hacking trick. I'll try later.....anyone in touch with Rex to sort this out?!
It's over: There is no need for a second Wecht trial
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The federal prosecutor has had her shot at Cyril Wecht. It's time to call it a day.
Despite hundreds of exhibits, 44 witnesses, 10 weeks in court and 10 days of deliberations, the jury in the public corruption trial of the former Allegheny County coroner failed to reach a verdict yesterday on any of the charges. This was a case, don't forget, that began with 84 criminal counts, which were then reduced to 41, covering mail fraud, wire fraud and theft from an organization receiving federal funds.
On Tuesday it added up to a big zero. Still, the prosecution immediately announced it would retry the case, and U.S. District Judge Arthur Schwab set a new trial date of May 27.
That would be a travesty, not to mention a waste of public dollars. U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan put forth the best case her office could muster and, in the end, could not secure a conviction. The prosecutor should let it go. There's no point in yet another trial -- especially considering that Dr. Wecht was unsuccessfully tried by the county on similar criminal charges a generation ago.
We say this as no great fans of Cyril Wecht. While we respect him as a renowned forensic pathologist, we are well acquainted with his temper and his penchant for firing off angry letters at his critics. It has also been a long time since we have supported him politically.
When his defense argued early on that this was a political prosecution -- he being a prominent and high-achieving Democrat and Ms. Buchanan being a rising star in the Bush Justice Department -- the Post-Gazette editorial board didn't want to hear it. We said let the facts play out in court -- and they just have.
A second trial for a 77-year-old man who is not a threat to public health or safety will only raise fresh -- and this time more substantive -- charges of a political agenda at work. It will be seen as a persecution, not a prosecution, and that will tarnish the integrity of the U.S. attorney's office, regardless of who is in charge.
There are real crimes out there for the feds to bring to trial -- drug rings, mobsters, terrorists. The case against Cyril Wecht is over. It's time to file it away.
First published on April 9, 2008 at 12:00 am
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Some jurors skeptical of case against Wecht
Judge schedules new trial to begin May 27
Thursday, April 10, 2008
By Jonathan D. Silver, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Some jurors pressing to acquit Dr. Cyril H. Wecht said yesterday that they had trouble buying a central part of the government's argument: that the former Allegheny County coroner schemed to defraud the county and his private clients.
The jury announced Tuesday it was deadlocked and U.S. District Judge Arthur J. Schwab declared a mistrial. A new trial was set for May 27.
"In my opinion, the plan, the scheme was the problem for me personally," said the jury foreman, who requested anonymity in light of the judge's request that jurors not yet speak publicly.
Federal prosecutors charged Dr. Wecht with 41 offenses covering wire fraud, mail fraud and theft from an organization receiving federal funds. They alleged that the forensic pathologist improperly abused county resources in various ways to enrich himself, bilked private clients, and did so with intent.
"His main scheme was to defraud and, my goodness, I didn't see that anywhere. I kept looking for this big criminal scheme. I couldn't find it. It never surfaced for me, as far as I'm concerned," said the Rev. Stanley F. Albright, a prison chaplain who was dismissed for medical reasons during the seventh day of deliberations.
"If we all could have reached agreement on that then we would have had no problem deciding the other charges," said Rev. Albright, 71, of Monroeville.
The government had to prove Dr. Wecht's intent to defraud in order to secure a guilty verdict.
But there were other stumbling blocks. For some jurors, it was testimony from several of Dr. Wecht's private clients who said they were not bothered by his alleged fraudulent invoices.
Prosecutors said Dr. Wecht schemed to overcharge clients for airfare on his consulting trips. They also accused him of sending fake invoices for limousine rides to and from Pittsburgh International Airport when in reality he drove there in a county car accompanied by a coroner's office employee.
"Do you know how many clients Cyril Wecht had? They couldn't find one to come into that courthouse and get on the stand and say, 'Yeah, he defrauded me, I want my money back?'" Rev. Albright said.
The foreman took those concerns one step further, echoing a contention raised by the defense that no problems cropped up with Dr. Wecht's invoices until the FBI began its investigation.
"I guess what bothered me was the FBI went and informed his private clients, 'Look what Dr. Wecht is doing to you,'" the foreman said. "I can understand if they didn't know that ahead of time, OK, fine. But once they were notified, not one of them came forward and said, 'You know something, the government is right, Dr. Wecht cheated me, he robbed me, I would like to file charges, I want my money back, I want something done.'"
Also working against the government was its decision not to call certain witnesses, particularly George Hollis, the former chief histologist at the coroner's office, and Joseph Mancuso, Dr. Wecht's autopsy technician for his private practice.
Prosecutors alleged that one facet of Dr. Wecht's scheme was to have Mr. Hollis prepare tissue slides for his private cases. The bulk of that work was done at the coroner's office on county time, resulting in a backlog of county casework, the government said.
In January 2007, Mr. Hollis pleaded guilty to three federal charges and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors on the Wecht case. During the trial, there was testimony that Mr. Hollis eventually worked almost exclusively on Dr. Wecht's private cases at the county office and then lied about it to a supervisor.
During his closing argument, lead defense attorney Jerry McDevitt referred to the series of "Where's Waldo" children's books, mockingly asking "Where's Hollis?"
"These are the main players. If they would have had something to say, the government would have given them immunity and they would have been here," the foreman said.
Eileen Young, one of Dr. Wecht's former administrative assistants at the coroner's office, did testify under immunity during a grueling seven days on the stand. She was the prosecution's star witness since she essentially ran Dr. Wecht's private business, from bookkeeping to client intake to billing.
"The woman did the best she could under the circumstances, I think," Rev. Albright said. "At one point I kind of looked at the [prosecutor] like you're really badgering this woman."
Rev. Albright also said he was turned off by testimony from another Wecht secretary, Kathleen McCabe, about how FBI Agent Bradley Orsini came to her house one Palm Sunday and told her that Martha Stewart went to prison because she lied.
Defense attorneys stressed that public officials knew full well when Dr. Wecht was elected coroner that he also had a thriving private business, one that put Pittsburgh's name on the map thanks to his many media appearances on high-profile cases.
"If he was using the county car for his own business, maybe they should have asked them to reimburse them," Rev. Albright said. "How's he going to run his business, which they knew he was doing, and not be in that office? It just seemed to me that he ran his business from his office, and it overflowed into the county office and he made some enemies."
Neither Rev. Albright nor the foreman would reveal how jurors were split on the counts. However, they both expressed surprise at the swift decision to retry Dr. Wecht.
"I don't really think they had any alternative than to do that. Otherwise if they didn't do that, that might indicate they didn't even have faith in what they did," Rev. Albright said. "They cost federal taxpayers a lot of money."
The jury foreman said it would have been prudent for prosecutors to try to determine which way the jury was leaning on each count before announcing its decision. He wondered if prosecutors had any additional evidence.
"If there was other stuff then they should have presented it at the first trial," he said.
Both said the jury, split evenly between men and women at the beginning, was diligent and considered each count, trying to find evidence to back up the government's allegations. Jurors took several polls by raising hands or by written ballot.
At one point before Rev. Albright was dismissed, jurors had agreed on three counts. Over the next several days of deliberations, however, people were willing to re-evaluate their positions.
Defense attorneys have claimed that politics is at the heart of Republican U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan's prosecution of Dr. Wecht, a Democrat.
The jury foreman said he went into the trial with an open mind.
"But as the case went on my thoughts were this was being politically driven," he said.
Jonathan D. Silver can be reached at jsilver@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1962.
First published on April 10, 2008 at 12:52 am
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Yes, Peter. I read that article from one of the urls you posted above.
I still believe that list needs to be lengthened and submitted ASAP, if for nothing more than to take a stand of our own against the hypocrisy being allowed to run rampant through our In-Justice Department.
Please add my name and credentials when the glitch is repaired.
Thanks again,
Ter
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Perhaps I should throw in a few red herrings!
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"I thought people on this forum contribute to Wikipedia!
Carl."
Hmmm...this name Carl Rylander strikes a bell here, for me. Aren't you one of the contributors to Wikipedia?
I could swear you came here in their defense, last year, when we had that discussion about the accuracy of a site passing itself off as an encyclopedia, except for the issue of the contributors, who were not required to have any formal training, nor hold any certification in research, writing, or education, scientific, technical, or otherwise, in order to contribute their services. Therefore, peer review was not an enforced nor a required mode of trouble-shooting held in effect over there, which would at least guarantee said accuracy of the documentation they were attempting to pass off as "fact."
The Education Forum is a site run by licensed professional educators and contributors. That alone, should speak for itself.
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Good post Bill. I'd only add to that where are the Prosecutors or Members of Congress to deal with the crimes of this Administration, and those done by and to past ones, as well.
I wrote a strongly worded email to Rep. Conyers' Office [Head of Judiciary Committee] about the Wecht Trial. They are investigating it and might be able to pull in the reigns on this out of control Prosecutor cum Persecutor. I'd also suggest letters to the editors of the two newspapers above. I think [just my guess] the mindset of the Prosecutor is such that they will ignore any letters sent to them. They are on a Jihad and don't let facts or the will of the People - nor the Law - get in their way. If enough pressure is brought on them and some of the excesses that went on before and now after the trial are made Public, things just might change. Conyers Webpage is here [with his email address] http://www.house.gov/conyers/
Also, you can add your name to the MFF letter at their website. Here is the letter:
Letter from the MFF to U.S. Attorney Buchanan
The Honorable Mary Beth Buchanan
United States Attorney
United States Attorney's Office
Western District of Pennsylvania
U.S. Post Office & Courthouse, Suite 400
Seventh Avenue and Grant Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15219
Dear Ms. Buchanan,
We are writing to urge you to cease the prosecution of Dr. Cyril Wecht. After weeks of deliberation, the jury was unable to reach a guilty verdict on a single count. The government has had its day in court and, in the words of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it's time to stop. We respectfully ask that you reconsider an apparent decision to retry this case and spend more taxpayer money pursuing an unfounded case against Dr. Wecht.
Those of us who have met Dr. Wecht find him to be a man of outstanding civic-mindedness and integrity. He put his reputation on the line during his tenure on the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, and has put his expertise and knowledge to great use since then. The renowned programs and reputation of the Cyril H. Wecht Institute for Forensic Science and Law at Duquesne University speak for themselves.
There are undoubtedly far better uses of your office than continuing to pursue this case - one which has led even jurors to question the motivation behind Dr. Wecht's prosecution.
One way to remove these questions would be to admit that the case against Dr. Wecht was found to be unproven, and bring the tarnishing of his name to a close.
Sincerely,
Rex Bradford, Senior Archivist, Mary Ferrell Foundation
Tyler Weaver, Executive Director, Mary Ferrell Foundation
Amy Agyepong, archivist, Mary Ferrell Foundation
Randolph Benson, Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies
Michael J. Cain, author
Bill Holiday, educator, Brattleboro High School
Mark Bridger, editor, Dealey Plaza Echo
Jeffrey L. Worcester II, Director, JFKMI
Colin McSween, actor and researcher
Peter Dale Scott, author
Susan Barnes, supporter of Dr. Wecht
David R. Wrone, Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
William Carter, Canadian Civil Servant
Lamar Waldron, author
Chris A. Bradford, researcher
Brenda Brody, researcher
David Reitzes, researcher
Barry Keane, Vice-Chairman, Dealey Plaza UK
John E. Shumaker, researcher
Carole Wilson, researcher
Gary Buell, citizen
Peter D. Antill, researcher
Chris Lightbrown, journalist
James Sawa, Pittsburgh researcher
John Geraghty, researcher
Donald B. Thomas, concerned citizen
Mike Dworetsky, Dealey Plaza UK
Lisa Pease, author and researcher
David H. Stern, M.D.
Alaric Rosman, retired teacher and researcher
Dick Russell, author
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/...Dr._Cyril_Wecht
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"http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/...Dr._Cyril_Wecht"
Peter, could you do me an extra large favor?
I'm having a hard time entering my name to the list at Mary Ferrell's. I've registered and I keep getting an error from my stmp.yahoo.mail server, which is not accepting my password. And, I've tried the main 3 ones I've used over the years at different sites, but it won't take any of them.
If you could, please enter me as: Theresa C. Mauro ARRT(N)/CNMT/CTNM Nuclear Medicine
Thank you so much. I hope this is feasible. In the meantime, I'll hook up with my friend, Allen, and see if we can find a way to correct this mail issue .
Ter
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"Gratz is tolerable and in some ways provides valuable insights. Colby, Lamson, Lewis and Burton are intolerable...providing only
insults and opinions but never any research. I, too, am opposed to banning such provocateurs. I am in favor of ignoring them."
Is that not in and of itself an opinion? Providing only insults......wow......the pot calling the kettle black.
I read quite a bit on the forum here, when I can stomach it, and feel like sifting through piles of sniveling and adolescent fighting to scrape up the smallest bit of information. Once you remove the ridiculous, almighty, you have no degree so you know nothing crowd, once you disregard space rays, alteration ridiculousness, and all the petty school yard squabbling, it is a rather good forum.
(Although one must confess some sense of sadistic glee at the beatings Josiah Thompson has delivered to Dr. Fetzer, and his group of whimsical unrealists.)
Mr. Simkin,
I applaud you for your restraint, truly, but is there not a line that needs to be drawn? Is there ever going to be a recognizable line behind good solid educational information and discussion, and disruption? I can appreciate your views on censorship, but sometimes the unruly children in the class need to be squelched, so those eager to learn, and not tiff, can do so in an educational environment.
Not that I have any hope that anything I have said will take hold, but what the heck.....it was said.
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""Gratz is tolerable and in some ways provides valuable insights. Colby, Lamson, Lewis and Burton are intolerable...providing only
insults and opinions but never any research. I, too, am opposed to banning such provocateurs. I am in favor of ignoring them.""
I happen to agree with the above statement, but take a look at the tone of your reply.
"I read quite a bit on the forum here, when I can stomach it, and feel like sifting through piles of sniveling and adolescent fighting to scrape up the smallest bit of information. Once you remove the ridiculous, almighty, you have no degree so you know nothing crowd, once you disregard space rays, alteration ridiculousness, and all the petty school yard squabbling, it is a rather good forum."
(Although one must confess some sense of sadistic glee at the beatings Josiah Thompson has delivered to Dr. Fetzer, and his group of whimsical unrealists.)
You come off as a passive-aggressive, pompous little snit. The pot calling the kettle black, indeed!
"Mr. Simkin,
I applaud you for your restraint, truly, but is there not a line that needs to be drawn? Is there ever going to be a recognizable line behind good solid educational information and discussion, and disruption? I can appreciate your views on censorship, but sometimes the unruly children in the class need to be squelched, so those eager to learn, and not tiff, can do so in an educational environment."
And, as far as brown-nosing the admin goes, that, and $3.50 American, may get you a cup of Starbucks.
"Not that I have any hope that anything I have said will take hold, but what the heck.....it was said."
Especially, since everything you've said has already been stated dozens of times before. And, what makes you think that anyone will give a rat's patootey about what you've just redundantly implied, here?
Why don't you think before you make a statement, and use some logic in framing your rebuttals. Otherwise, you come off sounding no better than the ones you choose to attack.
Oh, and BTW, if you insist on accepting this as an "attack" from me, you are absolutely right. Take it as an example of your own ill-conceived handiwork.
Vince Palamara now believes Oswald did it
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
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"No. He was a low level intelligence operative who may have had something to do with it; and if the Lone Nutters insist he did the actual shooting, then there was a conspiracy and the killer (according to the LN theory) was a government operative."
Spot on, Peter. The man's own mother, whichever one she was, even claimed so on nationwide television, that "her son was "like" a double agent."