Terry Mauro

"Query whether the Bushes would have been loyalists back then?" Come on, Tim. You know the answer to that. GH was even knighted by Thatcher. They've been Tories, forever. But, seriously folks, if nothing else, have a "safe" Fourth of July, or what's left of it. Here's to my Dad, rest his soul. [11/29/07 - 07/03/83] This was his favorite holiday. He was a Democrat until FDR pulled MacArthur out of Korea, after which he voted Republican for the rest of his life. Although, he did tip his hat to JFK by labelling him a conservative liberal, towards the end of The First Thousand Days. But, he still wouldn't have voted for him, had JFK lived to run for another term.

Harry, thank you this insightful piece regarding the JBS/LDS. I can't really say it surprizes me considering the fundamentalistic fervor their missionaries exhibit in their attempts to recruit converts. What I find frightening to behold is the thought of a nation being run by religious zealots, replete with their ingrained prejudicial dogmas, and doctrines. The fact that this has been allowed to occur, let alone take root behind the backs of those delegates voted into office by us, to represent us, yet who've become contaminated, and rendered impotent to protect our rights as citizens of their constituency from the usurpage of our constitutional rights, or guaranteed separation of Church and State. Yet, these charlatans masquerading as men of God have taken it upon themselves to ensure that "no one gets out of here alive" unless they believe in Joseph Smith's religious philosophy? I fail to see the difference between what is known as the Islamic Jihad, and the Fundamentalist Christian religion, be it the holy-rolling evangelists, or the Latter Day Saints, in their embrace of a war that has no business being fought in the name of God. Another thing that doesn't surprize me is the fact that Robert Mahue was involved with the LDS, and employed them to care for Howard Hughes. Hard-work ethic, you bet! Mucho mind-control, similar to that of the Scientologists, and other cult-type religious groups that prey on the weak and impressionable. Will we ever evolve beyond the superstitious rituals of those few holding all power? Or, are we destined to become cannon fodder for their whimsical anda?

EXACTAMENTE, Bill.

David Duke Tom Metzger DEFINITELY! Lyndon LaRouche WRONG! And, here's why: The Morgan-British Fascist Coup Against FDR -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- by Lonnie Wolfe Printed in the American Almanac, February, 1999 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- End of Page Table of Contents Site Map Overview Page Home Page -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It is said that history repeats itself. To the extent that this is true, it is often because those of the oligarchical mindset, tend to react in the same way across generations, to events and circumstances that might challenge their power. Usually, it takes the form of a murderous rage against those who would threaten their continued power. Thus is the history of mankind repeatedly afflicted by slaughter and destruction, caused by this oligarchical beast. Today, with their power threatened by global financial crisis, we find this financier oligarchy orchestrating a coup against their most powerful potential enemy, the American Presidency and the elected occupant of that office, William Jefferson Clinton. The ``success'' of such efforts to impose the bankers' lackey, Al Gore, as either President or co-President, must lead, as the statesman Lyndon LaRouche warns, to the slaughter of millions in a new dark age and to possible nuclear war. The import of today's events can best be grasped, as LaRouche recommends, by looking back some 66 years to the imposition of the Hitler upon Germany, in a coup orchestrated by the same London-centered financial oligarchy and its American allies who today are attempting to destroy the American Presidency. Those actions, taken during the midst of a global financial crisis, led, in short order, to the charnel house of World War II. But as LaRouche points out, such efforts were not restricted to Germany. Simultaneous with the Hitler coup in Germany, London-directed Morgan and Mellon interests were involved in organizing an attempted fascist coup in the United States against President Franklin Roosevelt. The coup plot, slated for full activation by no later than 1935, was exposed in Congressional testimony in November-December 1934 by Marine hero, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940). Earlier, in February 1933, these same networks attempted the assassination of FDR, the failure of which led to the ``blown'' coup plot option. While at least the rudimentary facts and dates of the Hitler coup are known, the bankers' fascist plot against FDR has been, to this day, blacked out of the history books. To the extent that it is discussed at all, it has been ridiculed as the delusions of Maj. Gen. Butler, whom the coup plotters proposed for their ``man on the white horse.'' But, as we shall show, it was not only very real, but, if not for the intervention of the hero, Maj. Gen. Butler, it had a chance to succeed in creating the pretext for a fascist police state in this country. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I. The Context It is the winter of 1932-33. The world is in the grips of the worst economic depression of the century. In Germany, in January 1933, a cabal of British-allied bankers have staged a parliamentary coup to topple the von Schleicher government to prevent it from implementing a radical economic development program that might threaten their political and financial power; Adolf Hitler, the choice of London and Wall Street, has been installed as the German Chancellor to protect interests of the bankers' cabal. Across the ocean, in the United States, the economy and the banking system have nearly ground to a halt, as bread lines grow. A new President is about to take office: Franklin D. Roosevelt has thrashed the hapless bankers' boy, Herbert Hoover, in the November election, and has thus been given a mandate by the American people to reverse their fortunes. Roosevelt, a patrician and cousin of arch-Anglophile President Teddy Roosevelt, is viewed with distrust by those same Wall Street interests whom TR so loyally served. Since the 1876 Species Resumption Act, but especially since Teddy Roosevelt's rule, the British-allied banking interests clustered around the Houses of Morgan and Mellon have gained increasing power over the conduct of American financial policy. Through their imposition of the Federal Reserve System, a compact of the private bankers, the Morgan-Mellon cabal has overseen an even further expansion of the power of the financier oligarchy against American national and industrial interests. Along with the Warburgs, the Meyers of Lazard Frères, Otto Kahn of Kuhn Loeb, and the Harriman interests, the Morgan-Mellon cabal at that point constituted a ``secret government'' more powerful than any President, while having a substantial numbers of Congressmen and Senators on their effective payroll. A combination of Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of Treasury, and Eugene Meyer, as Fed chairman, have dictated financial policy to the hapless Hoover. Together with their confederate, Montagu Norman at the Bank of England, and other European banking interests, they have presided over the deepening Depression collapse 1929-32[fn1]. During this century, no President had dared to challenge the power of this financial cabal. However, FDR, with his mandate from the American people, is now in a position to do so. As Governor of New York, and during the 1932 Presidential campaign, FDR has made clear his understanding of the use of the power of the executive branch of government to shape policy initiatives, and to mobilize support for them. Should Roosevelt exert the full power of the Presidency, as defined by the U.S. Constitution, including power over financial and economic policy, he could take away power from the financial oligarchy, the Morgan-Mellon led cabal, restoring a balance between financial and industrial capital. That, for the cabal, would have been bad enough; but as 1932 became 1933, Morgan's spies learned that Roosevelt might be considering more radical measures, ones that could take control of America's most precious commodity--its sovereign credit-- away from Wall Street and the London-based financial oligarchy who controlled the Morgan interests. American credit, and therefore government economic policy, had been held under the thumb of the private financial markets and their banking houses, like Morgan. Should a President Roosevelt seize control of the nation's credit, and deploy it for a recovery program based not upon continued bankers' looting, but on economic development, and should he rally the American people to that program, the power of the London-based financial oligarchs might be broken. With their power thus threatened, the financial oligarchs were ready to choose radical action: Roosevelt had to be eliminated, and the institution of the Presidency destroyed or weakened. Thus was set in motion here in the U.S. a series of actions paralleling the overthrow of the von Schleicher government in Germany, that would have led to the American equivalent of the Hitler coup. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- II. A Hail of Bullets On the evening of Feb. 15, 1933 Roosevelt, who had been vacationing in the Caribbean prior to his scheduled March 4 inauguration, landed in Miami for political meetings. He arrived aboard the yacht of Vincent Astor, of the British-dominated Astor financial interests. A crowd of some 10,000 gathered near the waterfront, waiting to see the President-elect. As FDR, speaking from the seat of an open car, concluded brief remarks, several shots rang out. Five people on or near the bandstand directly behind the President-elect were hit, although FDR, miraculously, was not. The man firing the shots, Giuseppe Zingara, a brickmason from New Jersey, was immediately branded an ``anarchist.'' When Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, wounded in the hail of bullets, died three weeks after the attack, it fed speculation that he, not Roosevelt, had been the target of what was called in the press a ``mob hit.'' It was reported that Chicago mob boss Frank Nitti had put Cermak on a ``hit list'' and that FDR ``just happened to be there.'' But Zingara's own statements, prior and during the trial, made it clear that he had been targetting FDR, and that the others had been hit by mistake in the botched assassination attempt. Contemporary newspaper accounts speak of the assassin's arm being deflected by a woman in the crowd. Her report was that the shooter had carefully prepositioned himself to have a clear shot at Roosevelt, and that the gun was pointed, at a range of less than 30 feet, directly at FDR; had she not hit his arm, FDR would have been hit, and likely killed. With Cermak's death, Zingara was rushed to trial and execution in less than 90 days from the time of the shooting. It was, the contemporary media accounts claimed, an ``open-and-shut case''; after all, the FBI, under the personal direction of J. Edgar Hoover, had conducted an ``exhaustive'' investigation, concluding that Zingara was a ``lone assassin'' acting from an emotionally disturbed and bizarre political analysis. No competent invesigation of the assassination attempt has ever been done. Such an investigation would have had to proceed from the question cui bono? (Who benefits?). From there, the trail would likely have led to the center of the London-Wall Street cabal, whose members had been meeting for months, in secret, to discuss how to deal with the ``Roosevelt problem.'' An even cursory examination of the evidence presented in the ``railroad trial'' shows that the FBI report was a coverup, and that many contradictions were left unresolved, even as the assassin was dispatched to the Florida electric chair. For example, given his apparent meager resources, both mental and monetary, how was it possible that Zingara was placed in a perfect position to assassinate the President-elect? How was this preplanning accomplished, and who if anyone might have assisted in this, including in providing the necessary information about the rally and the placement of the President (i.e., Zingara was aware that he was going to speak from a car and not from the bandstand)? There is also the ample clinical evidence that Zinagra's mental state coheres with what would today be called a ``zombie assassin,'' with significant memory gaps about how he came to do what he did; the methods of creating such zombie-assassins, using political and religious belief structures, were already known and in practice in the circles of British Intelligence associated with the Freudians of the London Tavistock Clinic. The FBI report merely dismissed all talk of conspiracies as out of the question, and investigated no possible leads. If Roosevelt had been killed, the country would have been plunged into a Constitutional crisis. No President-elect had ever died before assuming office; under such circumstances, there is no clearly specified succession. It might have been the case that a new election would have been called, and the bankers' boy Hoover might have remained in office. The paralysis and chaos would have played directly into the Morgan cabal's hands. For some months prior to the assassination attempt, Hoover and others in the Morgan-Mellon-controlled Hoover administration, at the behest of former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, had been working on ``contingency plans'' for emergency measures to be taken to preserve law and order should there be a ``breakdown'' of government under the strains of the Depression. These involved suspension of sections of the Constitution, by executive order, including many provisions of the Bill of Rights, and the declaration of martial law to deal with unrest and riots. With the Morgan interests prepared to bankroll provocations, the absence of a viable Presidential authority to resist them would have presented the window of opportunity to install a Bonapartist police state in this country. (Less than two weeks after the Miami assassination attempt on FDR, on Feb. 27, the German parliament building, the Reichstag, was burned to the ground in an arson attack. That incident was used as a pretext for a wave of terror against Nazi opponents and rivals, and it led to the activation government by decree, giving the Hitler police state its dictatorial powers.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- III. The Coup Plot Takes Shape Roosevelt assumed office March 4, 1933 and almost immediately realized the worst fears of the Morgan-Mellon cabal. In bold actions, starting with his declaration of a bank holiday, and removal of the dollar from the credit-strangulation of the gold standard, he showed that he intended to assert the primacy of Presidential power over the whims and policies of the financial oligarchy.[fn2] Having failed to kill him in February, some time before June 1933, a new operation against FDR and the Presidency was set in motion. This involved, as an option, the creation of an armed fascist ``people's militia,'' to be led by a ``popular'' military figure, who would move on Washington and force the resignation of the President. On the surface, such a plot appears impractical, even impossible. However, one must remember that in 1933, outright support for fascist ideology had been promoted for a decade both by the media, and by such outright pro-fascist, mass-based organizations as the Morgan-created American Legion; thus, there were already significant numbers of armed fascist organizations. Further, there was a large base of radicalized veterans around which to recruit forces to such a people's militia. They included most prominently the feeling of betrayal among veterans over the failure of the government to pay promised bonuses to those who fought in World War I, and the fact that Roosevelt, to battle the British effort to drain the U.S. of its gold reserve, had ended the covertability of dollars for gold.[fn3] There is also every reason to believe that the tiny U.S. military officer corps, and especially the various state national guards, were rife with Morgan-Mellon agents and, in some cases, outright proto-fascists, linked to the Legion networks. This, along with FBI Director ``Gay'' Edgar Hoover's treasonous persuasion, which included an expressed hatred for FDR, could (and did) allow the coup plot to proceed. While it is not likely that the plot that we describe below could ever have succeeded in ``seizing power,'' under the circumstances and conditions described, such an insurrectionary operation could create a ``Reichstag fire''-like pretext for a Bonapartist coup against Constitutional government, perhaps including a successful ``inside job'' assassination of Roosevelt. The chosen hapless leader of the insurrection were himself a likely candidate for assassination, with power then ceded to a ``coalition of national unity,'' under the thumb of the Morgan-Mellon interests. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IV. `The Man on the White Horse' The man that the Morgan crowd chose for the role of ``The Man on the White Horse,'' Smedley Butler, seems an unlikely candidate for a coup leader. Twice decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor, he had served with distinction in every American military action of the 20th century to the time. A Quaker from a prominent Pennsylvania family, he thought of himself as a patriot who would never betray the values embodied in the Constitution. He had been both the most distinguished serving officer in the nation, and also its most outspoken. He had even served for two years on special assignment as police commissioner of Philadelphia in 1920s, where he fought the rackets while respecting constitutionally guaranteed rights, only to be hamstrung by partisan politics. Even more important, Butler was the loudest and most open critic of the use of the military for purposes outside the interests of the United States, for the bankers' debt collection and related policies. In December 1929, speaking to veterans in Pittsburgh, he stated that in his deployment in 1912 in Nicaragua, he had helped rig elections in favor of the Wall Street-backed candidate. He was immediately called on the carpet by Navy Secretary Charles Francis Adams, a man whose name was later to appear on the Morgan preferred list of investors. In August 1931, Butler, in a speech to the American Legion, declared: ``I have spent 33 years ... being a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.... ``I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City (Bank) boys to collect revenue in. I helped rape half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.... In China, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.... I had ... a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotions. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents....'' To the dismay of the bankers who directed the Legion, Butler's remarks were greeted with riotous applause. Butler was an overt anti-fascist, who in 1931, openly denounced Mussolini as a murderer and thug, and warned against signing treaties with him. When the Italian government filed a protest, all hell broke loose: the Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, cabled a personal apology, on behalf of Herbert Hoover, to ``Il Duce,'' while Butler, the commandant of the Quantico Marine base at the time, was placed under arrest and told that he was to be court-martialed by direct order of the President of the United States, with the full approval of Navy Secretary Adams. The plans for the court martial provoked a tremendous outpouring of support for Butler. The anti-fascist local press charged that the Hoover administration was kowtowing to the ``thug'' Mussolini and throwing up for sacrifice America's most distinguished military figure. Franklin Roosevelt, then the governor of New York, and a friend of Butler's dating from FDR's days as Secretary of the Navy, worked to help the General, and spoke out against what was being done. Hoover and Adams were forced to back down: the court martial was cancelled, and Butler was given only a mild reprimand. He refused, however, to retract his statement. Such credentials would seem to disqualify Butler as a coup-plot leader, but in fact, they were precisely the kind of credible cover the plotters required: Who would even think of linking Smedley Butler to the Morgan-Mellon cabal, or to fascist ideas? Butler, who had some financial difficulties, could be enticed into their web with some money, or so the bankers' cabal thought, and with the appeal that he would be doing the country and his beloved veterans a service. Perhaps they figured that if Butler took their bait, he would wind up dead in the coup attempt. But as with many of the oligarchical mindset, they failed to understand Butler's commitment to his country and Constitution. While ignorant of many of the forces behind the coup, Butler ``smelled a rat,'' and able to summon forth the courage to withstand the ridicule heaped upon him for ``going public'' with what he knew, for taking a step that he saw necessary to save his country. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- V. The First Overtures Butler had worked aggressively for Roosevelt's 1932 election, campaigning on FDR's behalf around the country and rallying support among veterans. He particularly attacked the idea circulated by the Legion and others that Roosevelt's election would pave the way for a socialist or communist takeover. On July 7, speaking in New York, Butler demanded that the government be rescued from the ``clutches of the greedy and dishonest''; in remarks that were later to echo in Roosevelt's first inaugural address, Butler stated: ``Today, with all our wealth, a deadly gloom hangs over us. Today, we appear to be divided. There has developed, through the past few years, a new Tory class, a group that believes that the nation, its resources and its manpower was provided by the Almighty for its own special use and profit.... On the other side is the great mass of the American people who still believe in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution of the United States. ``This Tory group, through its wealth, its power and its influence, has obtained a firm grip on our government, to the detriment of our people and the well-being of our nation. We will prove to the world that we meant what we said a century and half ago--that this government was instituted not only to secure for our people the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but the right to eat and to all our willing millions, the right to work.'' Four months after FDR's inauguration, the coup plotters made their first approach to Butler. It appears from evidence later presented to Congress, and from Butler's own account, that they had a three-phase approach to the recruitment of the fiery former General: first, they would win his confidence, by appearing to stage a revolt in the Morgan-controlled American Legion; then, they would plant doubt, using ``inside'' information about FDR's intentions toward the nation and its veterans; and finally, they would indicate the scope of the coup and necessity for an armed insurrectionary action. The first people to approach Butler, on July 1, 1933, were Bill Doyle, the commander of the Mass. American Legion, and Gerald C. MacGuire, who was a former commander of the Connecticut department of the Legion.[fn4] MacGuire was in the employ of Col. Grayson M.P. Murphy, who ran a leading New York brokerage firm that traded in stocks and international bond syndications, working with the House of Morgan. Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy, who was on Morgan's ``preferred lists,'' was a director of Morgan's Guaranty Trust bank and several Morgan-connected corporations. He and his banking house had played an important role in syndicating Morgan loans to fascist Italy, for which he was decorated by Mussolini. Murphy came from a long line of traitors. The Mallet-Prevost families have run British intelligence since the eighteenth century.[fn5] Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy carried on his family's tradition of treason as a high ranking officer in a private intelligence operation that reported to the Morgan cabal, and interfaced directly with British Intelligence, with a specialty in black operations. In February 1919, Murphy had been one of 200 elite U.S. officers who met in Paris with the guidance of Morgan & Company operatives to found the Legion. Murphy personally underwrote that operation to the tune of $125,000, and solicited additional funds from allies of Morgan in the industrial and financial community. In the first meeting with Butler, MacGuire did most of the talking, claiming that he represented a group of ``powerful'' ``influentials'' who were prepared to assist Butler in cleaning up the Legion. He asked Butler to address the upcoming Legion convention, and planted the seed that Roosevelt was blocking their efforts to get him invited. Butler declined their invitation to speak from the floor. Another approach was made in August by the two coup plotters, this time proposing that there would be a staged demonstration, with Butler giving a ``rabble-rousing'' speech, on demand of the crowd. ``A speech about what?'' Butler asked. Butler was handed a speech that had ``Morgan'' written all over it: it was a defense of the British gold standard, featuring a demand that the Roosevelt policy severing the U.S. from gold be reversed immediately, so that the soldiers' bonuses could be paid with ``sound money.'' Butler was later to learn that the speech had been written by John W. Davis, the former Democratic presidential candidate who was chief counsel to J.P. Morgan and Company, and the personal lawyer for J.P. Morgan, himself.[fn6] A short time later, McGuire appeared again to ask that Butler address the convention, telling him that he had a warchest assembled from powerful people. Butler, having long ago smelled a rat, played along, and demanded that he be told who the ``nine men'' backing this effort were. MacGuire would name only three, but the names were revealing: Murphy; another financier, Robert S. Clark, a member of Morgan's ``preferred list'' and an heir to the Singer Sewing fortune;[fn7] and John S. Mills, who married into the Du Pont family. Ultimately, Butler demanded, and was allowed to meet with one of the principals. Robert S. Clark, a Morgan crony who was one of the founders of Legion, came to see the General and asked him to attend the Legion convention as his guest. He urged Butler to make the gold speech: ``I have $30 million dollars,'' Clark told him. ``I don't want to lose it. I am willing to spend half the $30 million to save the other half....'' When Butler said that Roosevelt was not about to listen to a bunch of soldiers about the gold standard or fiscal policy, Clark stated, ``You know the President is weak. He will come right along with us. He was born in this class. He was raised in this class and he will come back. He will run true to form. In the end he will come around. But we have to be prepared to sustain him when he does.'' When Butler exploded at being offered an outright bribe to deliver the speech, Clark backed off, and announced that he was withdrawing his own support from the effort. A new man was then brought in to head the Legion, Frank N. Belgrano, Jr., a senior vice president of the bank that handled Mussolini's business accounts in the United States and internationally, Gianinni's Bank of Italy/Bank of America. About this time, word was communicated to the White House that an operation of some kind against FDR was underway. A former New York City detective, Val O'Farrell, got wind of what was happening from informants and sent a confidential letter to Roosevelt's personal secretary, Col. Louis Howe, detailing the offers made to Butler and praising the General for refusing them. O'Farrell indicated that it was his belief that a wide-ranging plot was underway. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- VI. Putting Fascism on the Agenda At the end of October 1933, MacGuire again approached Butler. This time he revealed that his sponsors were interested in recruiting soldiers to an organization that would supercede the Legion: ``a great big superorganization to maintain democracy.'' Morgan partner Thomas Lamont chose an address before the Foreign Policy Association to make the announcment, heaping praise on Mussolini and his methods, and stating that fascism, as an economic and political policy, ``works.'' ``We count ourselves liberal, I suppose,'' he told the FPA. ``Are we liberal enough to be willing for the Italian people to have the sort of government they apparently want.'' Fascism or some variant, stated Lamont, was not to be ruled out as policy for the United States. Articles extolling the virtues of fascism appeared throughout the Morgan-Mellon controlled media; for example, the entire July 1934 issue of Henry Luce's Fortune magazine was a paean to Mussolini! In an editorial by Laird Goldsborough, the British-linked foreign editor of the magazine, readers were told: ``Fascism is achieving in a few years or decades such a conquest of the spirit of man as Christianity achieved only in ten centuries.... The good journalist must recognize in Fascism certain ancient virtues of the race, whether or not they happen to be momentarily fashionable in his own country. Among these are Discipline, Duty, Courage, Glory, and Sacrifice.'' As this statement indicates, there was a sizeable section of the Anglo-American establishment who were outright fascists. At the center of these pro-fascist interests were the Morgans, the Mellons, and Harrimans--the same networks who backed the Hitler coup, and who earlier had financed Mussolini's rise to power in Italy, and continued to fund his government. But beyond this core grouping, there were those who expressed a preference for fascist-like government. For example, through the 1920s and 1930s, the overt fascist elements of the establishment were funding the creation of various proto-fascist and outright fascist paramilitary organizations. The Morgan-created American Legion that Colonels Murphy and Clark had helped found, started out as just such an organization. In the early 1930s, money started pouring in from these circles to fascist organizations, recruited in part from the American Legion and the Ku Klux Klan. Morgan operatives help insert into the propaganda stream that fed their members a virulent hatred for the ``communist'' New Deal and the ``Red-lover'' Roosevelt, America's ``new dictator.'' These groups included the Silver Shirts, the stormtroopers led by the Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith. Others, such as the Crusaders, spurned the fascist epithet, but nonetheless avowed fascist policy goals to crush organized labor and the ``Reds,'' and the Sentinels of the Republic, funded by the Morgan-allied Pew and Pitcairn families. The Scottish Rite Freemasons, in the tradition of the treasonous Albert Pike, helped John H. Kirby establish the Southern Committee to Uphold the Consitution, which, like the Klan itself, was financed with ``Northern money.'' In Hollywood, the actor Victor McLaglen, who was reputed to be an operative of British Intelligence, established the California Light Brigade, which was ready to march at a moment's notice against any threat to ``Americanism.'' He was rewarded for his efforts with an Academy Award for ``Best Actor'' by pro-fascist Louis Mayer's Academy of Motion Picture Arts in 1935.[fn8] Such organizations spawned cells throughout the country. They were in no way impeded in their operations by the FBI, under the direction of Masonic operative ``Gay'' Edgar Hoover. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- VI. The League of Treason The umbrella organization for the establishment, at the heart of the coup plot, encompassing both the hard and soft-core fascists, was the American Liberty League. Set up in August 1934, this ``League of Treason'' included some of the coup plotters, along with others who backed the fascist goals of the coup; all were unified in their hatred of FDR and the New Deal. The two people running the League were, Jouett Shouse, a protágá of Du Pont lawyer and Morgan operative, John J. Raskob. A former Congressman from Kansas and Assistant Secretary of Treasury during the Wilson administration, Shouse had gained the reputation of a political ``fixer,'' much like the present day Robert Strauss. In 1928, the banker's operative Raskob, a former director of General Motors, was moved into the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, running the disastrous election campaign of Al Smith, insuring a Hoover victory. Not wishing to give up control of the party to the political machines, Raskob brought in Shouse as the executive director of the national committee. As soon as Roosevelt was in a position to do it, he moved to get rid of both of these ``inside'' men. The League's initiating executive committee were Morgan-allied stooges: Morgan's lawyer, John W. Davis, the former Democratic presidential candidate; Iránáe Du Pont, who ran the Du Pont fortune now controlled by the Morgan interests; Nathan Miller, the former GOP governor of New York and a Morgan preferred list member; Rep. James Wadsworth of New York, a Republican and supporter of the gold standard; and Al Smith, the ``happy warrior'' who had been totally corrupted by Morgan money, and who had headed the corporation that built and ran the Empire State Building. This group was expanded to include additional prominent leaders of finance and business, with a heavy emphasis on Morgan allies. On its Advisory Council, were, among 200 others: Dr. Samuel Hardin Church, who ran the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and who was a mouthpiece for the Mellons; W.R. Perkins of National City Bank; Alfred Sloan, the man the Morgans selected to run General Motors; David Reed, a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, who in May 1932, said on the floor of the Senate, ``I do not often envy other countries and their governments, but I say that if this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now;'' E.T. Weir of Weirton Steel, who was also known as a supporter of fascism. On its Executive Committee was Morgan stooge and former New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph M. Proskauer, the general counsel to the Consolidated Gas Company; J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil and the funder of the openly fascist Sentinels of the Republic; and Hal Roach, the Hollywood producer, who like many of his compatriots was an open admirer of Mussolini, and who was later to become a partner with Mussolini's son in a Hollywood production company, R.A.M. (``Roach and Mussolini'') Films, Inc.. The League's treasurer was none other than Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy! The League was active, with a high profile, attacking FDR and the New Deal, especially through 1934-35. With the exposure and collapse of the coup plot, it soon disappeared from the political map. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- VIII. Marching Orders The coup plotters sent MacGuire to Europe for seven months, starting in December 1933. There he met with fascist leaders in Italy, Germany, and France and consulted with Morgan operatives in Paris and London. By the time he returned, the plan for an American fascist coup was well advanced. One month later, he approached Butler again, this time revealing details of an elaborate strategy to take power, and effectively oust Roosevelt. Meeting in a deserted restaurant in the Bellevue Hotel in Philadeplhia, MacGuire told Butler that the time had come to assemble an army. In Europe, ex-soldiers were the backbone of ``fighting'' political organizations, Here, he said, that might not work. Instead, he proposed that an organization mimic the French ``Fiery Cross'' which had been organized around an economic purpose. He explained that the ``Fiery Cross'' had a core membership of about 500,000 officers and non-commissioned officers, but that each member was responsible for organizing at least 10 others, covertly, giving the organization a ``fighting strength'' of more than 5 million. MacGuire revealed that Wall Street was about to cut off credit to the New Deal. ``There is not any more money to give him,'' MacGuire now claimed. ``Eighty percent of the money is now in government bonds, and he can't keep this racket up much longer.... He has either got to get more money out of us or he has got to change the method of financing the government, and we are going to see that he does not change that method. He will not change it.'' This will force a collapse of the New Deal programs; the new fighting organization would ``sustain'' the President when he abandoned the New Deal, MacGuire stated. When Butler questioned such logic, MacGuire responded: ``Did it ever occur to you that the President is overworked?'' MacGuire asked. He said that the ``overworked President'' needed help and that an ``Assistant President'' was needed. This ``assistant President'' would take over much of Roosevelt's job and could take the blame for the change of policy. MacGuire said that it ``wouldn't take any constitutional change to authorize another cabinet official, somebody to take over the details of the office--to take them off the President's shoulders.'' He mentioned that the position would be sort of a ``super Secretary'' or what he referred to as a ``Secretary of General Affairs.'' MacGuire claimed that the American people would be more than willing to swallow this: ``We have got all the newspapers. We will start a campaign that the President's health is failing. Everybody can tell by looking at him and the dumb American people will fall for it in a second.'' MacGuire then indicated that Roosevelt was already surrounded by allies of the Morgan coup plotters. He said that they had hoped that the pro-fascist Gen. Hugh Johnson, who Roosevelt had put in charge of the National Recovery Administration and who had expressed admiration for Mussolini, was the man the Morgan group would have preferred as this General Secretary. But according to MacGuire, Roosevelt was going to fire him because he ``talked too damn much.'' MacGuire told Butler that, within a year following this discussion, the coup plotters wanted him to march his army of 500,000 people into Washington. He stressed that there would be no revolution, that everything would be ``Constitutional'': It had all been worked out, in advance. The Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, would resign, as would Vice President John Nance Garner; the sense given was that both these figures were ``in'' on the plot, or minimally, that Morgan and their allies had enough ``chits'' to call in that they could be counted on to do what they were instructed. According to MacGuire, Roosevelt would allow the plotters to appoint a new Secretary of State. If Roosevelt, with 500,000 men occupying Washington, was willing to ``return to his class,'' he would be allowed to remain on as President. ``We'd do with him what Mussolini did to the King of Italy,'' MacGuire told Butler, saying that the President's function would become ceremonial much like the then President of France. But, if Roosevelt refused to go along, MacGuire insisted, he ``would be forced to resign, whereupon under the Constitution, the Presidential succession would place the Secretary of State in the White House.'' Butler was to tell a Congressional committee that MacGuire thought that all this could take place bloodlessly--a ``cold coup.'' All that was needed was a ``show of force in Washington'' and that he, Butler, would be ``the man on the white horse'' who would ``ride to the rescue of capitalism.'' An armed show of force was the ``only way to save the capitalist system,'' MacGuire asserted. Butler, playing along with MacGuire to discover who was behind this plot, said that what was being proposed would cost a great deal of money. He was told not to worry. MacGuire already had ``$3,000,000 to start with, on the line, and we can get $300,000,000 if we need it.'' He reminded Butler that the banker Clark had told the General that he was personally willing to commit as much as $15 million. He then told Butler that even more powerful people than Clark stood directly behind the plan. When he was in Europe, he reported, he had held meetings at the Paris office of Morgan & Hodges, Morgan's Paris operation. He claimed that the Morgan group had strong reservations about Butler, fearing that he might try to double-cross them. He stressed that the others involved, however, had gotten the Morgan interests to agree that Butler was the best man to ``get the soldiers together,'' implying that Grayson Murphy, Clark, and himself had backed the General. Butler tried to probe further, asking when there would be signs of the coming together of a larger and more powerful organization which would provide public backing for this plot. He was astonished when he was told that ``within a few weeks'' there would be an organization of some of the most powerful people in the land who would come together to ``defend the Constitution.'' MacGuire explained the manner in which this organization, which he would not name, would function using a musical analogy: It was to serve the purpose of ``the villagers or chorus in an opera,'' establishing the setting and the scene, for the great action to take place. That organization was the American Liberty League. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IX. Exposing the Plot When the Liberty League appeared on the scene some two weeks later, just as MacGuire had promised, Butler believed it urgent to expose the plot. Realizing that the Morgan interests would slander him and try to deny their influence over events, he now sought help in gaining some independent collaboration of what he had been told. Butler turned to Tom O'Neill, the city editor of the Philadelphia Record, who assigned his star reporter, Paul Comley French, to investigate the story. French, who also wrote for the New York Evening Post, was set up by Butler to talk to MacGuire, posing as an intermediary to discuss the General's further participation in Macguire's plans. In early September 1934, French went to see MacGuire at his offices on the premises of Grayson M.P. Murphy and Company in New York. In the meeting, French was able to substantiate every allegation about the plot that Butler had attributed to MacGuire. ``We need a fascist government,'' French was to quote MacGuire as saying in his testimony before a Congressional committee, ``to save the nation from the Communists....'' MacGuire repeated this theme several times during his conversation with French. MacGuire, seeing that French was more interested in questions of policy than the crusty General, informed French that his backers had already devised a plan to end unemployment: ``It was the plan that Hitler had used in putting all of the unemployed in labor camps or barracks--enforced labor. That would solve it [the unemployment problem] overnight.'' He also claimed that they would force all people in the nation to ``register'' and carry identification papers. ``He said that would stop a lot of these communist agitators who were running around the country,'' French later told the Congressional committee. MacGuire reported that those behind him were going to create a deliberate financial crisis for the administration. They were prepared to choke off credit to the New Deal programs, force interest rates higher, and force the rates that the government would have to pay to borrow up towards the then astronomical levels of 5% or more. This, MacGuire said would produce a ``new crash.'' He then described how the crash would unleash the ``left,'' creating new agitation and disruptions, especially among the growing numbers of new unemployed. With the nation consumed in chaos, the time would be right for the ``man on the white horse'' to ride into Washington, force the overturning of the elected government, the end of ``Presidential rule'' and the start of a new, fascist era for the nation. MacGuire told French that it would be no problem getting the soldiers' army weapons from the Du Pont-controlled Remington Arms Company; the Du Pont interests were fully in support of the plans, MacGuire stated. With corroboration in hand, Butler felt it now was necessary to go public. Before he could make his decision on how to proceed, he was approached by investigators for the Special House Committee to Investigate Nazi Activities in the United States. The committee had, through their own sources, heard of a plot to overthrow the government that had involved the General. It was arranged for General Butler to testify in executive session on Nov. 20, when the committee was in New York. Three days before Butler was to testify, French broke the coup story simultaneously in the Record and the Post, under the banner headline ``$3,000,000 Bid for Fascist Army Bared;'' the story featured direct statements from Butler, naming most of the names he was later to reveal in his testimony. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- X. The General Names the Names As the hearing opened, Butler thought it necessary to make a brief statement concerning his involvement in the plot: ``May I preface my remarks, by saying sir, that I have one interest in all of this and that is to try to do my best to see that democracy is maintained in this country?'' Cutting him short, committee co-chair Rep. John McCormack, Democrat of Massachusetts, who was later to become Speaker of House, stated, ``Nobody who has either read or known about General Butler would have anything but that understanding.'' Butler then proceeded to tell the story, in great detail, that we have described above. As he proceeded, he was asked for clarification on several points. The General provided what additional details he could, but never ventured into speculation, sticking to the statements made directly to him by those involved in the conspiracy. He was followed as a witness by Paul Comley French, who from his own direct contact with MacGuire, was able to corroborate all the pertinent details of the fascist plot, and added additional details revealed by MacGuire, including the fascist policies preferred by the coup's backers. In all, their testimony lasted approximately two hours. Butler and French were followed in the afternoon by Gerald MacGuire, who meekly claimed that he was merely a $150 a week bond salesman, and denied that there was any plot. He told the committee that he had merely gone to talk to the General about buying some bonds. Several times, under direct examination, MacGuire denied asking Butler to lead any organization of soldiers or of discussing any plans to march such ``troops'' on Washington. The New York Times led a furious campaign to ridicule the charges, quoting a string of denials from the prominent people the General named. The next day, MacGuire entered the committee room with his lawyer, and the doors were closed once again. Once again he denied all charges that he had approached General Butler with plans for a fascist coup, or that he had asked him to lead an army of ex-soliders to march on Washington. Emerging from the hearing room, Committee co-chair Rep. Samuel Dickstein (D-N.Y.) told reporters, supposedly off the record, after MacGuire's testimony that the bond salesman was ``hanging himself'' by contradictions in his account of events and by forced admissions when confronted with evidence developed by investigators. The Times and those who dictated its policy were clearly upset by what was occurring and didn't think it sufficient to merely mangle and manage the news. Its lead editorial the following day was entitled, ``Credulity Unlimited,'' and began: ``A Washington correspondent asked: `What can we believe?' Apparently, anything, to judge by the number of people who lend a credulous ear to the story of General Butler's 500,000 Fascists in buckram marching on Washington to seize the government. Details are lacking to lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.... The whole story sounds like a gigantic hoax. General Butler himself does not appear to more than half credit it. He and some others, however, ask us to follow the famous saying of Tertullian: `I believe it because it is impossible.' It does not merit serious discussion, but if the army and the navy authorities, or the Congressional committee can develop any `facts' about, let them do so quickly, so as to prevent this nation from appearing as gullible as were the Germans in the case of the Hauptmann von Kopenick [the innocent person the Nazis blamed for the Reichstag fire].'' MacGuire returned for a third and final time as a witness on Nov. 23. MacGuire now claimed that he had only spoken to Butler about financial backing for a contracting concern. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, MacGuire maintained his complete innocence of all charges made by Butler. He denied anything and everything that he could, and then feigned loss of memory on what couldn't be denied. On Nov. 26, the Committee released an 8,000 word statement summarizing the testimony and providing details of the plot. In discussing the evidence, it showed that MacGuire swore several times his denial of the details of Butler testimony about the expenditure of monies for purposes described in the General's testimony, only to have committee investigators substantiate each of the General's claims. Rep. Dickstein had sent Roosevelt a copy of the report, and FDR sent the Congressman a reply on Nov. 30: ``I am very interested in having it,'' wrote the President. ``I take it that the Committee will proceed further.'' The plotters ordered an intensification of the ridicule of General Butler. The vehicle chosen was Time magazine, the Luce interest's mass circulation ``current events'' rag. Under the headline, ``Plot without Plotters,'' the December 3 Time ran an artfully crafted parody of Butler's testimony as its lead article. After mocking the details of the plot and the Morgan involvement, Time opined, ``Such was the nightmarish page of future United States history pictured last week in Manhattan by General Butler himself to the Special House Committee investigating un-American Activities. No military officer of the United States since the late tempestuous George Custer has succeeded in floundering in so much hot water as Smedley Darlington Butler.'' Interviewed 27 years later by author Jules Archer, the still-feisty Rep. McCormack commented: ``Time has always been about as filthy a publication as ever existed. I've said it publicly many times. The truth gets no coverage at all....'' -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- XI. Damage Control The Morgan interests now turned their efforts to make sure that the charge of the Committee would not be renewed and the investigation shut down. It would have taken direct intervention from the White House to force the issue, but no such intervention was forthcoming. On Feb. 15, 1935, the Committee published its findings in a report submitted to the House on its full investigation. The section dealing with the Butler testimony began with the following paragraphs: ``In the last few weeks of the Committee's official life, it received evidence that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country. ``No evidence was presented and this committee had none to show a connection between this effort and any fascist activity of any European country. ``There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed expedient. ``The committee received evidence from Major General Smedley D. Butler (ret.), twice decorated by the Congress of the United States. He testified before the committee of conversations with one Gerald C. MacGuire in which the latter is alleged to have suggested the formation of a fascist army under the leadership of General Butler. ``MacGuire denied these allegations under oath, but your committee was able to verify all the pertinent statements of General Butler, with the exception of the direct statement suggesting the creation of the organization. This however was corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principal, Robert Sterling Clark of New York, while MacGuire was abroad studying various forms of organizations of fascist character....'' The committee had thus stated that it had confirmed a plot to seize the government of the United States by force, organized by interests whose control by Morgan and allied circles was already widely established. The Morgan-controlled media proceeded to ``bury'' the story. It would have stayed buried had not the journalist John L. Spivak, who wrote for the Communist-linked magazine New Masses, been ``inadvertently'' given the full transcript of the closed hearings, which he proceeded to publish in an expose of at least part of the treasonous plot. Through such efforts, and through the speaking and radio appearances of Butler, the ``Morgan Fascist Coup Plot'' was kept before the American people, such that despite the censorship of the Morgan controlled media, its broad outline is remembered by many an FDR supporter who lived through that troubled time. When Butler died in 1940, Roosevelt led the nation in mourning. ``I grieve to hear of Smedley's passing....'' he wrote to his widow. ``My heart goes out to you and the family in this great sorrow.''[fn9] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- XII. Conclusion In the darkest days of the Depression, the London-financial interests attempted two coups. The one in Germany succeeded in installing Adolf Hitler and his Nazi police state as their instrumentality. The one in the United States failed in its design for a fascist police state. The courageous actions of the republican patriot Smedley Butler brought the plot to the light of day; from the moment of its exposure, it could not take place as planned. In so doing, Butler had given the greatest American President of this century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the time needed to make America ``coup proof,'' despite the fascist intent of the financier interests centered around the House of Morgan and its allies. Where the Hitler coup plotters used the weaknesses of the Weimar Constitution to destroy Germany[fn10], Roosevelt used the strengths of the U.S. republican Constitution, in the powers given the President, to launch a revolution against the power of the financial oligarchy. While stopping short of destroying the power of the Morgan interests and their allies, FDR was able to hold them in check, through various banking reform measures, such as the Glass-Steagall Act and the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Most importantly, Roosevelt revolutionized the Democratic Party, making it the bulwork for defense of such policies by bringing in labor, minorities, and others, around the principle that government has the responsibility to act to preserve the General Welfare of each of its citizens, leaving as his legacy a social safety net that includes the minimum wage and social security. If Roosevelt had been eliminated, as the plotters desired, who knows what would have been possible. In 1971, the former Speaker of the House, John McCormack told Jules Archer that Roosevelt and the nation owed General Butler a debt of gratitude for his exposure of the Morgan plot: ``If General Butler had not been the patriot that he was, and if they [the plotters] had been able to maintain their secrecy, the plot certainly might very well have succeeded, having in mind the conditions existing at the time.... If the plotters had gotten rid of Roosevelt, there is no telling what might have taken place....'' Today, once again in the middle of a global financial crisis, a new coup is in progress, one that would destroy the Presidency, the social policy that is the legacy of FDR, and the consitutuency-based Democratic Party, which represents the political bulwork against a banker's dictatorship. Through deregulation, they have already ripped away many of the fetters that Roosevelt put on the bankers' power. As Lyndon LaRouche has warned, that coup must be defeated to defend our republic from a fate even worse than envisioned by Morgan coup plotters back in 1933. To accomplish this, we must, as LaRouche calls for, rally the forces to rebuild the Democratic Party in the image of the party of FDR. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes 1.See Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., ``Al Gore and Adolf Hitler,'' EIR, Jan. 8, 1999. 2.For a discussion of Roosevelt's battle with the Morgan interests, and more generally his fight against the British imperial system, see L. Wolfe, New Federalist, July 4-July 27, 1994 and Aug. 28, 1995. 3.In late July 1932, a Bonus Army of thousands of starving, out-of-work veterans descended on Washington to demand that the Congress pass the Bonus Bill, giving them their promised bonus for World War I. By the time the bill was defeated in the GOP-controlled Senate, the veterans had set up an encampment. At the urging of various Morgan-Mellon operatives within his administration, and FBI director Hoover, the President ordered the Army to drive the veterans from Washington. The bloodshed and brutality of the armed eviction shocked the nation--and provided impetus for recruitment of veterans to anti-government, fascist paramilitary organizations. 4. The quoted conversations between Butler and the coup plotters, and all similar conversations are taken from the book The Plot to Seize the White House, by Jules Archer (Hawthorne Books, 1973). Archer had obtained hitherto secret transcipts of testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which investigated the coup plot and heard from Butler and other witnesses. Archer was also able to obtain records of the Committee's investigators. His reporting was reviewed by the former Speaker of the House and the co-chair of the HUAC committee investigating the plot, Rep. John McCormack (D-Mass.). 5. For more information on the Mallet-Prevost family, see Anton Chaitkin, Treason in America, EIR, 1999. 6. Davis also headed the ``Committee for a Sound Dollar,'' organized by Morgan interests to lobby for the British gold standard. This group, as Congressional investigators found, was used as a conduit of funds for the coup plot. 7. Historian Anton Chaitkin recently discovered that Marty Peretz, chief personal adviser to Al Gore, and owner and publisher of The New Republic, married the great-niece and heir of Robert Sterling Clark, fascist protagonist of the coup plot against FDR. 8. For more about how Hollywood served as a fascist propaganda machine during this period, see is L. Wolfe, ``Don't Entrust Yours Kids to Walt Disney, The New Federalist, Jan. 16, 1995. 9. As FDR began mobilizing the nation in the late 1930s to fight fascism in Europe, there was an outright break between the President and Butler, with Butler espousing isolationist policies. However, despite Butler's ``leftist'' attacks on FDR as being a puppet of ``Wall Street arms racketeers,'' Roosevelt never attacked Butler. 10. For example, the Weimar Constitution provided for ``rule by emegency decree,'' with the approval of the President. This was the provision was used by Hitler to establish the Nazi police state. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Top of Page Table of Contents Site Map Overview Page Home Page -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The preceding article is a rough version of the article that appeared in The American Almanac. It is made available here with the permission of The New Federalist Newspaper. Any use of, or quotations from, this article must attribute them to The New Federalist, and The American Almanac -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Publications and Subscriptions for sale. 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Courtesy from my friend and fellow collaborator, Dawn Meredith. "Bill Frist" Salon article requires registration: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/06/...l/index_np.html Deadly immunity Salon.com | June 16, 2005 By Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Ga. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session -- only private invitations to 52 attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva, and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly "embargoed." There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left. The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. "I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants -- in one case, within hours of birth -- the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children. Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening. "You can play with this all you want," Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group. The results "are statistically significant." Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting's first day, was even more alarmed. "My gut feeling?" he said. "Forgive this personal comment -- I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on." But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line. "We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits," said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Delaware. "This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country." Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, expressed relief that "given the sensitivity of the information, we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let's say, less responsible hands." Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared flatly that the study "should not have been done at all" and warned that the results "will be taken by others and will be used in ways beyond the control of this group. The research results have to be handled." In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the damage than at protecting children's health. The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to "rule out" the chemical's link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten's findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been "lost" and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism. Vaccine manufacturers had already begun to phase thimerosal out of injections given to American infants -- but they continued to sell off their mercury-based supplies of vaccines until last year. The CDC and FDA gave them a hand, buying up the tainted vaccines for export to developing countries and allowing drug companies to continue using the preservative in some American vaccines -- including several pediatric flu shots as well as tetanus boosters routinely given to 11-year-olds. The drug companies are also getting help from powerful lawmakers in Washington. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children. On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government's vaccine-related documents -- including the Simpsonwood transcripts -- and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas. In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the "Eli Lilly Protection Act" into a homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. Congress repealed the measure in 2003 -- but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders. "The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists," says Andy Olsen, a legislative assistant to Frist. Even many conservatives are shocked by the government's effort to cover up the dangers of thimerosal. Rep. Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana, oversaw a three-year investigation of thimerosal after his grandson was diagnosed with autism. "Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly related to the autism epidemic," his House Government Reform Committee concluded in its final report. "This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin." The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act, the committee added, out of "institutional malfeasance for self protection" and "misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry." The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed. I was drawn into the controversy only reluctantly. As an attorney and environmentalist who has spent years working on issues of mercury toxicity, I frequently met mothers of autistic children who were absolutely convinced that their kids had been injured by vaccines. Privately, I was skeptical. I doubted that autism could be blamed on a single source, and I certainly understood the government's need to reassure parents that vaccinations are safe; the eradication of deadly childhood diseases depends on it. I tended to agree with skeptics like Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, who criticized his colleagues on the House Government Reform Committee for leaping to conclusions about autism and vaccinations. "Why should we scare people about immunization," Waxman pointed out at one hearing, "until we know the facts?" It was only after reading the Simpsonwood transcripts, studying the leading scientific research and talking with many of the nation's preeminent authorities on mercury that I became convinced that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real. Five of my own children are members of the Thimerosal Generation -- those born between 1989 and 2003 -- who received heavy doses of mercury from vaccines. "The elementary grades are overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of neurological or immune-system damage," Patti White, a school nurse, told the House Government Reform Committee in 1999. "Vaccines are supposed to be making us healthier; however, in 25 years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids. Something very, very wrong is happening to our children." More than 500,000 kids currently suffer from autism, and pediatricians diagnose more than 40,000 new cases every year. The disease was unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among 11 children born in the months after thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931. Some skeptics dispute that the rise in autism is caused by thimerosal-tainted vaccinations. They argue that the increase is a result of better diagnosis -- a theory that seems questionable at best, given that most of the new cases of autism are clustered within a single generation of children. "If the epidemic is truly an artifact of poor diagnosis," scoffs Dr. Boyd Haley, one of the world's authorities on mercury toxicity, "then where are all the 20-year-old autistics?" Other researchers point out that Americans are exposed to a greater cumulative "load" of mercury than ever before, from contaminated fish to dental fillings, and suggest that thimerosal in vaccines may be only part of a much larger problem. It's a concern that certainly deserves far more attention than it has received -- but it overlooks the fact that the mercury concentrations in vaccines dwarf other sources of exposure to our children. What is most striking is the lengths to which many of the leading detectives have gone to ignore -- and cover up -- the evidence against thimerosal. From the very beginning, the scientific case against the mercury additive has been overwhelming. The preservative, which is used to stem fungi and bacterial growth in vaccines, contains ethylmercury, a potent neurotoxin. Truckloads of studies have shown that mercury tends to accumulate in the brains of primates and other animals after they are injected with vaccines -- and that the developing brains of infants are particularly susceptible. In 1977, a Russian study found that adults exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those given to American children still suffered brain damage years later. Russia banned thimerosal from children's vaccines 20 years ago, and Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have since followed suit. "You couldn't even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe," says Haley, who heads the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky. "It's just too darn toxic. If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken. If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you put it in a petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage." Internal documents reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed thimerosal, knew from the start that its product could cause damage -- and even death -- in both animals and humans. In 1930, the company tested thimerosal by administering it to 22 patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being injected -- a fact Lilly didn't bother to report in its study declaring thimerosal safe. In 1935, researchers at another vaccine manufacturer, Pittman-Moore, warned Lilly that its claims about thimerosal's safety "did not check with ours." Half the dogs Pittman injected with thimerosal-based vaccines became sick, leading researchers there to declare the preservative "unsatisfactory as a serum intended for use on dogs." In the decades that followed, the evidence against thimerosal continued to mount. During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it "poison." In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lilly's own studies discerned that thimerosal was "toxic to tissue cells" in concentrations as low as one part per million -- 100 times weaker than the concentration in a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to promote thimerosal as "nontoxic" and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants. In 1977, 10 babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords. In 1982, the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products that contained thimerosal, and in 1991 the agency considered banning it from animal vaccines. But tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within 24 hours of birth, and 2-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis. The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger. The same year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck's vaccine programs, warned the company that 6-month-olds who were administered the shots would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury. He recommended that thimerosal be discontinued, "especially when used on infants and children," noting that the industry knew of nontoxic alternatives. "The best way to go," he added, "is to switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives." For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was money. Thimerosal enables the pharmaceutical industry to package vaccines in vials that contain multiple doses, which require additional protection because they are more easily contaminated by multiple needle entries. The larger vials cost half as much to produce as smaller, single-dose vials, making it cheaper for international agencies to distribute them to impoverished regions at risk of epidemics. Faced with this "cost consideration," Merck ignored Hilleman's warnings, and government officials continued to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for children. Before 1989, American preschoolers received only three vaccinations -- for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of 22 immunizations by the time they reached first grade. As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded. During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury during a period critical for brain development. Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury that children would receive from the mandated vaccines. "What took the FDA so long to do the calculations?" Peter Patriarca, director of viral products for the agency, asked in an e-mail to the CDC in 1999. "Why didn't CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood immunization schedule?" But by that time, the damage was done. Infants who received all their vaccines, plus boosters, by the age of 6 months were being injected with levels of ethylmercury 187 times greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury, a related neurotoxin. Although the vaccine industry insists that ethylmercury poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body, several studies -- including one published in April by the National Institutes of Health -- suggest that ethylmercury is actually more toxic to developing brains and stays in the brain longer than methylmercury. Officials responsible for childhood immunizations insist that the additional vaccines were necessary to protect infants from disease and that thimerosal is still essential in developing nations, which, they often claim, cannot afford the single-dose vials that don't require a preservative. Dr. Paul Offit, one of CDC's top vaccine advisors, told me, "I think if we really have an influenza pandemic -- and certainly we will in the next 20 years, because we always do -- there's no way on God's earth that we immunize 280 million people with single-dose vials. There has to be multidose vials." But while public-health officials may have been well-intentioned, many of those on the CDC advisory committee who backed the additional vaccines had close ties to the industry. Dr. Sam Katz, the committee's chair, was a paid consultant for most of the major vaccine makers and shares a patent on a measles vaccine with Merck, which also manufactures the hepatitis B vaccine. Dr. Neal Halsey, another committee member, worked as a researcher for the vaccine companies and received honoraria from Abbott Labs for his research on the hepatitis B vaccine. Indeed, in the tight circle of scientists who work on vaccines, such conflicts of interest are common. Rep. Burton says that the CDC "routinely allows scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on intellectual advisory committees that make recommendations on new vaccines," even though they have "interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight." The House Government Reform Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisors who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine laced with thimerosal "had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine." Offit, who shares a patent on the vaccine, acknowledged to me that he "would make money" if his vote to approve it eventually leads to a marketable product. But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist's direct financial stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment. "It provides no conflict for me," he insists. "I have simply been informed by the process, not corrupted by it. When I sat around that table, my sole intent was trying to make recommendations that best benefited the children in this country. It's offensive to say that physicians and public-health people are in the pocket of industry and thus are making decisions that they know are unsafe for children. It's just not the way it works." Other vaccine scientists and regulators gave me similar assurances. Like Offit, they view themselves as enlightened guardians of children's health, proud of their "partnerships" with pharmaceutical companies, immune to the seductions of personal profit, besieged by irrational activists whose anti-vaccine campaigns are endangering children's health. They are often resentful of questioning. "Science," says Offit, "is best left to scientists." Still, some government officials were alarmed by the apparent conflicts of interest. In his e-mail to CDC administrators in 1999, Paul Patriarca of the FDA blasted federal regulators for failing to adequately scrutinize the danger posed by the added baby vaccines. "I'm not sure there will be an easy way out of the potential perception that the FDA, CDC and immunization-policy bodies may have been asleep at the switch re: thimerosal until now," Patriarca wrote. The close ties between regulatory officials and the pharmaceutical industry, he added, "will also raise questions about various advisory bodies regarding aggressive recommendations for use" of thimerosal in child vaccines. If federal regulators and government scientists failed to grasp the potential risks of thimerosal over the years, no one could claim ignorance after the secret meeting at Simpsonwood. But rather than conduct more studies to test the link to autism and other forms of brain damage, the CDC placed politics over science. The agency turned its database on childhood vaccines -- which had been developed largely at taxpayer expense -- over to a private agency, America's Health Insurance Plans, ensuring that it could not be used for additional research. It also instructed the Institute of Medicine, an advisory organization that is part of the National Academy of Sciences, to produce a study debunking the link between thimerosal and brain disorders. The CDC "wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe," Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the IOM's Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. "We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect" of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee's chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was "inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation" between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result "Walt wants" -- a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC. For those who had devoted their lives to promoting vaccination, the revelations about thimerosal threatened to undermine everything they had worked for. "We've got a dragon by the tail here," said Dr. Michael Kaback, another committee member. "The more negative that [our] presentation is, the less likely people are to use vaccination, immunization -- and we know what the results of that will be. We are kind of caught in a trap. How we work our way out of the trap, I think is the charge." Even in public, federal officials made it clear that their primary goal in studying thimerosal was to dispel doubts about vaccines. "Four current studies are taking place to rule out the proposed link between autism and thimerosal," Dr. Gordon Douglas, then-director of strategic planning for vaccine research at the National Institutes of Health, assured a Princeton University gathering in May 2001. "In order to undo the harmful effects of research claiming to link the [measles] vaccine to an elevated risk of autism, we need to conduct and publicize additional studies to assure parents of safety." Douglas formerly served as president of vaccinations for Merck, where he ignored warnings about thimerosal's risks. In May of last year, the Institute of Medicine issued its final report. Its conclusion: There is no proven link between autism and thimerosal in vaccines. Rather than reviewing the large body of literature describing the toxicity of thimerosal, the report relied on four disastrously flawed epidemiological studies examining European countries, where children received much smaller doses of thimerosal than American kids. It also cited a new version of the Verstraeten study, published in the journal Pediatrics, that had been reworked to reduce the link between thimerosal and autism. The new study included children too young to have been diagnosed with autism and overlooked others who showed signs of the disease. The IOM declared the case closed and -- in a startling position for a scientific body -- recommended that no further research be conducted. The report may have satisfied the CDC, but it convinced no one. Rep. David Weldon, a Republican physician from Florida who serves on the House Government Reform Committee, attacked the Institute of Medicine, saying it relied on a handful of studies that were "fatally flawed" by "poor design" and failed to represent "all the available scientific and medical research." CDC officials are not interested in an honest search for the truth, Weldon told me, because "an association between vaccines and autism would force them to admit that their policies irreparably damaged thousands of children. Who would want to make that conclusion about themselves?" Under pressure from Congress, parents and a few of its own panel members, the Institute of Medicine reluctantly convened a second panel to review the findings of the first. In February, the new panel, composed of different scientists, criticized the earlier panel for its lack of transparency and urged the CDC to make its vaccine database available to the public. So far, though, only two scientists have managed to gain access. Dr. Mark Geier, president of the Genetics Center of America, and his son, David, spent a year battling to obtain the medical records from the CDC. Since August 2002, when members of Congress pressured the agency to turn over the data, the Geiers have completed six studies that demonstrate a powerful correlation between thimerosal and neurological damage in children. One study, which compares the cumulative dose of mercury received by children born between 1981 and 1985 with those born between 1990 and 1996, found a "very significant relationship" between autism and vaccines. Another study of educational performance found that kids who received higher doses of thimerosal in vaccines were nearly three times as likely to be diagnosed with autism and more than three times as likely to suffer from speech disorders and mental retardation. Another soon-to-be-published study shows that autism rates are in decline following the recent elimination of thimerosal from most vaccines. As the federal government worked to prevent scientists from studying vaccines, others have stepped in to study the link to autism. In April, reporter Dan Olmsted of UPI undertook one of the more interesting studies himself. Searching for children who had not been exposed to mercury in vaccines -- the kind of population that scientists typically use as a "control" in experiments -- Olmsted scoured the Amish of Lancaster County, Penn., who refuse to immunize their infants. Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted calculated that there should be 130 autistics among the Amish. He found only four. One had been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power plant. The other three -- including one child adopted from outside the Amish community -- had received their vaccines. At the state level, many officials have also conducted in-depth reviews of thimerosal. While the Institute of Medicine was busy whitewashing the risks, the Iowa Legislature was carefully combing through all of the available scientific and biological data. "After three years of review, I became convinced there was sufficient credible research to show a link between mercury and the increased incidences in autism," says state Sen. Ken Veenstra, a Republican who oversaw the investigation. "The fact that Iowa's 700 percent increase in autism began in the 1990s, right after more and more vaccines were added to the children's vaccine schedules, is solid evidence alone." Last year, Iowa became the first state to ban mercury in vaccines, followed by California. Similar bans are now under consideration in 32 other states. But instead of following suit, the FDA continues to allow manufacturers to include thimerosal in scores of over-the-counter medications as well as steroids and injected collagen. Even more alarming, the government continues to ship vaccines preserved with thimerosal to developing countries -- some of which are now experiencing a sudden explosion in autism rates. In China, where the disease was virtually unknown prior to the introduction of thimerosal by U.S. drug manufacturers in 1999, news reports indicate that there are now more than 1.8 million autistics. Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, autistic disorders also appear to be soaring in India, Argentina, Nicaragua and other developing countries that are now using thimerosal-laced vaccines. The World Health Organization continues to insist thimerosal is safe, but it promises to keep the possibility that it is linked to neurological disorders "under review." I devoted time to study this issue because I believe that this is a moral crisis that must be addressed. If, as the evidence suggests, our public-health authorities knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children, their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine. "The CDC is guilty of incompetence and gross negligence," says Mark Blaxill, vice president of Safe Minds, a nonprofit organization concerned about the role of mercury in medicines. "The damage caused by vaccine exposure is massive. It's bigger than asbestos, bigger than tobacco, bigger than anything you've ever seen." It's hard to calculate the damage to our country -- and to the international efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases -- if Third World nations come to believe that America's most heralded foreign-aid initiative is poisoning their children. It's not difficult to predict how this scenario will be interpreted by America's enemies abroad. The scientists and researchers -- many of them sincere, even idealistic -- who are participating in efforts to hide the science on thimerosal claim that they are trying to advance the lofty goal of protecting children in developing nations from disease pandemics. They are badly misguided. Their failure to come clean on thimerosal will come back horribly to haunt our country and the world's poorest populations. add your comments

John Ritchson and I have been going over formulating plans for making the trip down there this past year, and hopefully making a side trip to Austin to hook up with Dawn and Erick, depending on my cash flow and time allotted. My new equipment won't be up and running until December or January, so I don't have to worry about leaving for applications classes until after the holidays. It'll be great meeting up with everyone! I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Ter <{POST_SNAPBACK}> <{POST_SNAPBACK}> "Please share with John that I've been trying to reach him; I know his presentation topic but sometime in the next couple of months I will be finalizing the actual speakers schedule and will need to know if he has any preferences as well as provide him with some other background material including the final schedule (well as final as it gets until everyone actually appears in Dallas...grin)." I sure will, Larry. I'm trying to call him as I'm typing this, right now. I just got his voicemail recording and repeated your message to him, that I quoted above. If you don't have his phone number, e-mail me at: tmauro@pacbell.net and I'll send it off, straight away. Warmest regards, Ter

OFF TOPIC. MONSTER - SUICIDE - AMERICA From the 1970 release "Monster" Words and music by John Kay, Jerry Edmonton, Nick St. Nicholas and Larry Byrom (Monster) Once the religious, the hunted and weary Chasing the promise of freedom and hope Came to this country to build a new vision Far from the reaches of kingdom and pope Like good Christians, some would burn the witches Later some got slaves to gather riches But still from near and far to seek America They came by thousands to court the wild And she just patiently smiled and bore a child To be their spirit and guiding light And once the ties with the crown had been broken Westward in saddle and wagon it went And 'til the railroad linked ocean to ocean Many the lives which had come to an end While we bullied, stole, and bought our homeland We began the slaughter of the red man But still from near and far to seek America They came by thousands to court the wild And she just patiently smiled and bore a child To be their spirit and guiding light The blue and grey they stomped it They kicked it just like a dog And when the war over They stuffed it just like a hog And though the past has its share of injustice Kind was the spirit in many a way But its protectors and friends have been sleeping Now it's a monster and will not obey (Suicide) The spirit was freedom and justice And its keepers seem generous and kind Its leaders were supposed to serve the country But now they won't pay it no mind 'Cause the people grew fat and got lazy And now their vote is a meaningless joke They babble about law and order But it's all just an echo of what they've been told Yeah, there's a monster on the loose Its got our heads into a noose And it just sits there watchin' Our cities have turned into jungles And corruption is stranglin' the land The police force is watching the people And the people just can't understand We don't know how to mind our own business 'Cause the whole world's got to be just like us Now we are fighting a war over there No matter who's the winner We can't pay the cost 'Cause there's a monster on the loose Its got our heads into a noose And it just sits there watching (America) America where are you now? Don't you care about your sons and daughters? Don't you know we need you now We can't fight alone against the monster © Copyright MCA Music (BMI) All rights for the USA controlled and administered by MCA Corporation of America, INC

John Ritchson and I have been going over formulating plans for making the trip down there this past year, and hopefully making a side trip to Austin to hook up with Dawn and Erick, depending on my cash flow and time allotted. My new equipment won't be up and running until December or January, so I don't have to worry about leaving for applications classes until after the holidays. It'll be great meeting up with everyone! I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Ter

Tim are your "declaring your independence" of mind, thought, and deed here, or are you merely penning yourself another constitutional amendment. Hey, why didn't you answer me back about Boca Chica, or do you not bother to answer PM's sent to you through this forum? You don't have to reply on site. I gave you my e-mail address: tmauro@pacbell.net. I'm seriously interested in knowing what it looks like today. Thanks, Ter

It was on Mandrax, the U.K.'s equivalent of Quaalude or Sopor. I was married to someone in the music business, at the time. But, more importantly before that, I had been a Playboy Bunny at the New York Club where I became roommates with my co-workers, Devon Wilson, and Michelle McKay Kellgren. This was around 1964-67. Devon ended up living with Jimi in 67', and Michelle, who's brother was Gary Kellgren, owner of The Record Plant Studios, maintained our close friendship throughout the late sixties, and early 70's, when Devon died of a "supposed" overdose, about a year after Michelle and I had re-located to L.A. in 1971. As a matter of fact, the day Jimi died in the early morning hours of September 18th, that evening Michelle showed up at my apartment in the Chatsworth which was located at 72nd Street and Riverside Drive, over by the Westside Highway. She had Jerry Stickles, Jimi's Road Manager, and and a couple of Jimi's roadies with her, and they proceeded to set up a base of operations at my aparment, being that Jimi's apartment on E. 11th St. in The Village was in utter chaos. It was Jerry who told us that Jimi had gone to one of his female acquaintance's apartment, and she had made him a tuna salad sandwich. He had gotten high on Mandrax and passed out for the night. Apparently, he had regurgitated his food during his sleep, but he and his friend were so drugged out that he wasn't able to awaken himself, nor was his friend able to arouse herself in order to turn him onto his side, which would have saved his life. So, he ended up aspirating the contents of his stomach into his lungs, which caused him to suffocate. As for Mike Jeffries, the crook who took advantage of Jimi's financial resources, and ended up bilking the Hendrix family out of much of the royalties that should have been forthcoming to them. Well, he ended up going down in a flaming aircrash. A fitting retribute, as it was rumored among the music business crowd in NYC, that Jeffries had Devon suicided by a forced overdose of heroin, supposedly because Jimi had named her as a beneficiary of either a life insurance policy, or in a hand-written will that Jeffries had destroyed shortly after Devon's death, and before his own ill-fated flight. That's the actual story as I remember it. Michelle is still alive but I haven't spoken with her since 1983. We lost contact after I had re-married someone totally uninvolved with the music business, and moved out to Redlands, CA in 1982. Her brother, Gary died in a swimming pool accident at his home in the Hollywood Hills in August 1977. FWIW

Don't even bother. You've already broken enough rules to put you away for, how many years did they say? I won't even follow it up with that already over-worked remark about the fork. But, so are we.

I'm in total agreement with you guys here, BTW. Here's something I remember posted by Chris Cox from this forum's database, regarding Blakely's appointment of Georges E. Johannides to the committee, that I found important enough to save for my personal files on Johannides: (9) G. Robert Blakey statement on the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003. I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency co-operated with the committee. My reasons follow: The committee focused, among other things, on (1) Oswald, (2) in New Orleans, (3) in the months before he went to Dallas, and, in particular, (4) his attempt to infiltrate an anti-Castro group, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil or DRE. These were crucial issues in the Warren Commission's investigation; they were crucial issues in the committee's investigation. The Agency knew it full well in 1964; the Agency knew it full well in 1976-79. Outrageously, the Agency did not tell the Warren Commission or our committee that it had financial and other connections with the DRE, a group that Oswald had direct dealings with! What contemporaneous reporting is or was in the Agency's DRE files? We will never know, for the Agency now says that no reporting is in the existing files. Are we to believe that its files were silent in 1964 or during our investigation? I don't believe it for a minute. Money was involved; it had to be documented. Period. End of story. The files and the Agency agents connected to the DRE should have been made available to the commission and the committee. That the information in the files and the agents who could have supplemented it were not made available to the commission and the committee amounts to willful obstruction of justice. Obviously, too, it did not identify the agent who was its contact with the DRE at the crucial time that Oswald was in contact with it: George Joannides. During the relevant period, the committee's chief contact with the Agency on a day-to-day basis was Scott Breckinridge. (I put aside our point of contact with the office of chief counsel, Lyle Miller) We sent researchers to the Agency to request and read documents. The relationship between our young researchers, law students who came with me from Cornell, was anything but "happy." Nevertheless, we were getting and reviewing documents. Breckinridge, however, suggested that he create a new point of contact person who might "facilitate" the process of obtaining and reviewing materials. He introduced me to Joannides, who, he said, he had arranged to bring out of retirement to help us. He told me that he had experience in finding documents; he thought he would be of help to us. I was not told of Joannides' background with the DRE, a focal point of the investigation. [i don't believe THAT for a minute, either. TM] Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee. He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents. In fact, I have now learned, as I note above, that Joannides was the point of contact between the Agency and DRE during the period Oswald was in contact with DRE. That the Agency would put a "material witness" in as a "filter" between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would co-operate with the investigation. The committee's researchers immediately complained to me that Joannides was, in fact, not facilitating but obstructing our obtaining of documents. I contacted Breckinridge and Joannides. Their side of the story wrote off the complaints to the young age and attitude of the people. They were certainly right about one question: the committee's researchers did not trust the Agency. Indeed, that is precisely why they were in their positions. We wanted to test the Agency's integrity. I wrote off the complaints. I was wrong; the researchers were right. I now believe the process lacked integrity precisely because of Joannides. For these reasons, I no longer believe that we were able to conduct an appropriate investigation of the Agency and its relationship to Oswald. Anything that the Agency told us that incriminated, in some fashion, the Agency may well be reliable as far as it goes, but the truth could well be that it materially understates the matter. What the Agency did not give us none but those involved in the Agency can know for sure. I do not believe any denial offered by the Agency on any point. The law has long followed the rule that if a person lies to you on one point, you may reject all of his testimony. I now no longer believe anything the Agency told the committee any further than I can obtain substantial corroboration for it from outside the Agency for its veracity. We now know that the Agency withheld from the Warren Commission the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Had the commission known of the plots, it would have followed a different path in its investigation. The Agency unilaterally deprived the commission of a chance to obtain the full truth, which will now never be known. Significantly, the Warren Commission's conclusion that the agencies of the government cooperated with it is, in retrospect, not the truth. We also now know that the Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the Agency. Many have told me that the culture of the Agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story. I am now in that camp. [You're a day late and a dollar short, Blakey. TM] (10) G. Robert Blakey was interviewed by ABC News in 2003. ABC News: Let me ask you: 40 years after the fact and 25 years after your investigation, who killed John F. Kennedy? Blakey: Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Kennedy. Two shots from behind. The evidence is simply overwhelming. You have to be lacking in judgment and experience in dealing with the evidence to think that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill President Kennedy. That's really not the problem. The problem is: Was there something beyond Lee Harvey Oswald? And now what you do is you look at the evidence. ABC News: How many shots were fired at Dealey Plaza? Blakey: What we did is determine that there were in fact four shots. Our scientists looked at a tape we found, and they did a scientific analysis of it, and it indicated four shots in the plaza, three from the depository and one from the grassy knoll. That meant there were two shooters in the plaza, two shooters in the plaza equal a conspiracy. The first shot from the depository by Lee Harvey Oswald missed. The second shot about 1.6 seconds later, hit the president in the back of the neck. (The bullet exited Kennedy and) hit John Connally. It hit his wrist, hit his leg. Now six seconds from the second shot, we think a shot came from the grassy knoll. It missed the president. The shot from the grassy knoll missed. The X-rays, the autopsy, all of that indicates the president was not hit by a shot from any other direction. Seven-tenths of a second after that, the third shot, fourth in the row, third shot from the depository, hits the president right in the back of the head. The shot from the grassy knoll is not only supported by the acoustics, which is a tape that we found of a police motorcycle broadcast back to the district station. It is corroborated by eyewitness testimony in the plaza. There were 20 people, at least, who heard a shot from the grassy knoll. ABC News: In your book you point the finger squarely at Carlos Marcello and his organization. Why would he want to kill Kennedy? Blakey: Carlos Marcello was being subject to the most vigorous investigation he had ever experienced in his life, designed to put him in jail. He was in fact summarily, without due process, deported to Guatemala. He took the deportation personally. He hated the Kennedys. He had the motive, the opportunity and the means in Lee Harvey Oswald to kill him. I think he did through Oswald. ABC News: How central is Jack Ruby's murder of Oswald to your understanding of this case? Blakey: To understand who killed President Kennedy and did he have help, I think you have to understand what happened to the assassin of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald. I see Jack Ruby's assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald as a mob hit. This is in direct contradiction to the Warren Commission. The Warren Commission portrayed, wrongly I think, Jack Ruby as a wild card who serendipitously got into position to kill Oswald. I think in fact he stalked him. I can show you from the Warren Commission's evidence that he tried to get into where he was being interrogated, number one. That he tried to get in where there was going to be a lineup, number two. That he was seen around the garage, where he was announced that he was going to be moved. And we know, from Jack Ruby himself, that he had a gun with him at the time of the lineup. I believe that Ruby was able to get in to kill Oswald through the corrupt cooperation of the Dallas P.D., that he was let in through a back door and he was given an opportunity to kill Oswald. I see that, therefore, as a mob hit. And if that's a mob hit, there is only one reason for it, and that is to cover up the assassination of the president himself. You kill the killer. ABC News: Since you believe that Lee Oswald shot the president, and you also believe that Carlos Marcello was behind the assassination, what connections do you point to between Oswald and Marcello? Blakey: I can show you that Lee Harvey Oswald knew, from his boyhood forward, David Ferrie, and David Ferrie was an investigator for Carlos Marcello on the day of the assassination, with him in a court room in New Orleans. I can show you that Lee Harvey Oswald, when he grew up in New Orleans, lived with the Dutz Murret family (one of Oswald's uncles). Dutz Murret is a bookmaker for Carlos Marcello. I can show you that there's a bar in New Orleans, and back in the '60s, bars used to have strippers and the strippers circuit is from Jack Ruby's strip joint in Dallas to Marcello-connected strip joints in the New Orleans area. So I can bring this connection. Did Lee Harvey Oswald grow up in a criminal neighborhood? Yes. Did he have a mob-connected family? Did he have mob-connected friends? Was he known to them to be a crazy guy? He's out publicly distributing Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. If you wanted to enlist him in a conspiracy that would initially appear to be communist and not appear to be organized crime, he's the perfect candidate. Ex-Marine, marksman, probably prepared to kill the president for political reasons. Could he be induced to kill the president for organized crime reasons unbeknownst to him? I think the answer is yes and compelling. (11) Letter signed by a group of authors including G. Robert Blakey, Anthony Summers, John McAdams, Gerald Posner, in the New York Review of Books (18th December, 2003) [Hey Tim, we've even got your best friend, Mr. McAdams here! TM ] As published authors of divergent views on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, we urge the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense to observe the spirit and letter of the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Act by releasing all relevant records on the activities of a career CIA operations officer named George E. Joannides, who died in 1990. Joannides's service to the US government is a matter of public record and is relevant to the Kennedy assassination story. In November 1963, Joannides served as the chief of the Psychological Warfare branch in the CIA's Miami station. In 1978, he served as the CIA's liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). The records concerning George Joannides meet the legal definition of "assassination-related" JFK records that must be "immediately" released under the JFK Records Act. They are assassination-related because of contacts between accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and a CIA-sponsored Cuban student group that Joannides guided and monitored in August 1963. Declassified portions of Joannides's personnel file confirm his responsibility in August 1963 for reporting on the "propaganda" and "intelligence collection" activities of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE), a prominent organization known in the North American press as the Cuban Student Directorate. George Joannides's activities were assassination-related in at least two ways. (1) In August 1963, Oswald attempted to infiltrate the New Orleans delegation of the DRE. The delegation—dependent on $25,000 a month in CIA funds provided by Joannides—publicly denounced Oswald as an unscrupulous sympathizer of Fidel Castro. (2) After Kennedy was killed three months later, on November 22, 1963, DRE members spoke to reporters from The New York Times and other news outlets, detailing Oswald's pro-Castro activities. Within days of the assassination, the DRE published allegations that Oswald had acted on Castro's behalf. The imperative of disclosure is heightened by the fact that the CIA has, in the past, failed to disclose George Joannides's activities. In 1978, Joannides was called out of retirement to serve as the agency's liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The agency did not reveal to the Congress his role in the events of 1963, compromising the committee's investigation. In 1998, the Agency again responded inaccurately to public inquiries about Joannides. The Agency's Historic Review Office informed the JFK Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) that it was unable to identify the case officer for the DRE in 1963. The ARRB staff, on its own, located records confirming that Joannides had been the case officer. This is not a record that inspires public confidence or quells conspiracy-mongering. To overcome misunderstanding, the CIA and the Defense Department should make a diligent good-faith effort to identify and release any documents about George Joannides. The government should make these records public in conjunction with the fortieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 2003, so as to help restore public confidence and to demonstrate the agencies' commitment to compliance with the JFK Assassination Records Act. Thanks to John Simkin, and to Chrissie Cox for pointing this out. Ter

Francesca, is that a picture of you that I have, that Cameron took back in Dallas 2 years ago? Dixie met you, too. That was when Jesse Ventura was in town, also. You post at Prouty's too, right? Welcome to The Education Forum, girl! I'm going to try and make it this year, too, if they'll let me take the time off from work. Take care. Ter

John and Andy: I hope you've done the requisite damage control needed here. I've attempted to edit out the profanity as well as the irrelevant. And, have put in bold blackwhat appears to be Gibson's retorts. And now, to shed some light on this major gaff of yours, Buddy, or was it merely some vain attempt at a publicity stunt?: Groups Home | Help | Sign in Web Images Groups News Froogle Local more » Advanced Groups Search Preferences Members: Sign in New users: Join Google Groups Create a new group About Google Groups Topic in alt.conspiracy.jfk Start a new topic - Subscribe to this group - About this group Fixed font - Proportional font Bud Gibson confesses he threatened lives of FBI employees !!! All 13 messages in topic - view as tree Salvador Astucia Jun 14, 8:34 pm show options Have you ever heard of Louis M. Reigel, III, Assistant Director of the FBI's Cyber Division? From what I understand, both Reigel and Martinez have given young Bud Gibson (aka, Gibson Vendettuoli) permission to threaten FBI agents as he chooses. Reigel wrote the following letter to Senator Barbara Mikulski, whom had requested information from the FBI on John Doe's behalf: ======== quote on =========== [May 9, 2005] Dear Senator Mikulski: I am writing in response to your letter of April 12, 2005, on behalf of [John Doe]. The FBI's investigation of the matter in question determined that [John Doe] was espousing certain views in an online chat room, which others found to be offensive. As a result, another individual from the chat room retaliated by emailing to the FBI various hate threats, which were purported to be from [John Doe]. The actual sender of this message was located in Providence, Rhode Island, and was interviewed by the FBI. The United States Attorney's Office reviewed the investigative results and declined prosecution. Accordingly, the FBI is precluded from taking any further investigative action in this matter. I hope this information will be of assistance to you. Sincerely yours, Louis M. Reigel, III Assistant Director [FBI] Cyber Division ======== quote off =========== In other words, the young psycho punk, Bud Gibson (aka, Gibson Vendettuoli), had a hissy fit because he read something he didn't like on the Internet. He responded by forging the poster's name to an email and sent it to an FBI office. The email contained threats against the lives of FBI employees. But, according to Louis Reigel, the US Attorney's office determined that the young lad was justified in threatening to murder FBI employees because his feelings had been hurt by a stranger. (Ain't that too f**king bad.) The FBI quickly agreed and the matter was dropped. Is Louis M. Reigel, III the biggest f**king a**hole to walk the face of the earth or what? One would think that lots of FBI agents would agree with that sentiment. Mr. Reigel said it's okay to threaten the lives of FBI employees. So much for the Patriot Act. "Salvador Astucia" <cropduster...@cs.com> wrote in message news:1118718720.137203.279150@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com... Kid, the identity of John Doe is not the point here. The point is you publicly confessed to being a terrorist. You publicly admitted that you sent a threatening email to an FBI office. You admitted that you made a written threat, in the same email, to murder several FBI employees using "massive firearms." What you have NOT explained is why you are still "free as a bird." Just because the FBI found no massive firearms at your residence means nothing. You still made the threat. You've already confessed to the FBI that you sent the threatening email, which is an extreme act of terrorism in and of itself. You also publicly admitted, in this Usenet discussion forum, to making the threat. The big question is why the f**k aren't you in a juvenile detention center, in jail, in a reform school, or in a mental institution? The fact that you have not been detained or punished at all puts a lie to President Bush's entire war on terrorism and the bogus Patriot Act, which obviously means nothing. You're nothing but a mentally disturbed teenage terrorist and the Federal Government could care less. A word of warning, kid. I wouldn't be so cocky about thinking the entire FBI supports you. I've made sure that every special agent in every FBI field office knows your name and knows what you did. You may have a protector in the Boston office, but I wouldn't bet that every agent thinks you're a God. ... read more » Reply Salvador Astucia Jun 15, 8:49 pm show options Newsgroups: rec.music.beatles, alt.conspiracy.jfk From: "Salvador Astucia" <cropduster...@cs.com> - Find messages by this author Date: 15 Jun 2005 17:49:53 -0700 Local: Wed,Jun 15 2005 8:49 pm Subject: Re: Bud Gibson confesses he threatened lives of FBI employees !!! Reply | Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse G Vendo wrote: "Salvador Astucia" <cropduster...@cs.com> wrote in message news:1118795682.892043.287560@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com... G Vendo wrote: Bud Gibson (aka, Gibson Vendettuoli, aka, G Vendo) wrote: A. I did not confess to being a terrorist. Having no weapons, I technically wouldn't be one, would I? The general public certainly regards sending an email containing a death threat to an FBI office as an act of terrorism, even if you don't. Besides terrorism laws, there are federal laws against threatening federal agents, even it's only a verbal or written threat, without the use of actual weapons. And I am sure there is a federal law of some sort which makes it a crime to make death threats against federal employees at large, even if the threat was made as a prank. Assuming there were three FBI agents at the FBI office where you sent the email, if the jail time is six months per agent threatened, and another six months for sending the threatening email outright, you would serve a minimum of two years. That's six months times three for threatening three agents, 1.5 years, plus another six months for making a death threat against federal employees, 2 years total. But given the times in which we live, where fighting terrorism is the number one priority of the FBI and other agencies, I'm sure a good prosecutor could come up with enough terrorism laws you broke to put you away for at least twenty years. But none of that happened for some reason. In fact, according to you, the FBI agents who interviewed you thought your actions were justified. This is what you wrote: B. The reason I am not anywhere is because, as the Office so aptly put it, my actions were justified. To which I replied: That's very interesting. The FBI told you it's okay to send emails which threaten to kill FBI employees? To which Bud Gibson replied: No, they didn't. They said if I wanted their attention, I should just call (they gave me a card). So in other words, the agent who interviewed you said something like this: "You poor little kid. A stranger posted a message on an Internet discussion forum that you disagreed with. You might have over-reacted a bit by forging the poster's name to an email which threatened to commit mass-murder against FBI employees. But your heart was in the right place. You were doing what FBI agents are trained to do: circumvent the First Amendment at all costs. Good job kid! But next time, try to be a little more subtle. Here's my card. Give me a call next time someone writes something you disagree with in an Internet chat room. We'll work together to make his life miserable. That's my job." Is that roughly how the discussion went? - Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - "user name" <whocares...@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:1118860192.267940.13890@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com... GV - stop feeding this xxxxx, or at least keep this s**t out of rec.music.beatles. He's like a recurring rash. G Vendo wrote: "Salvador Astucia" <cropduster...@cs.com> wrote in message news:1118795682.892043.287560@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com... G Vendo wrote: A. I did not confess to being a terrorist. Having no weapons, I technically wouldn't be one, would I? xxxx! You confessed publicly, here, and privately to the FBI that you sent an email in which you threatened to murder several FBI employees. In both confessions, you stated that the email was sent to an FBI office. I know personally from Agent Muollo, of the Baltimore field office, that FBI agents (presumably from Boston) identified your computer as the source of the emails. Sending such an email, even if you did it as a prank, is a serious offense, certainly an act of terrorism. So yes, you have indeed confessed to being a terrorist. It's time to start revealing names of adults who encouraged you. There's no need to take the rap for their actions. Sorry, Libelous Sal, but I'm not taking the rap for anyone. The only person involved is me. If there were anyone else involved, I believe your friends as a result of double standard at the Eff-Bee-Eye could find them. Did Andy Walker tell you to send the threatening email to the FBI? No. I don't know Andy Walker any better than he knows me. What little I know about him is that he co-runs the Education Forum. I don't know him or his e-mail address. Whether he actually is forwarding some conspiracy or not is none of my concern. How about your uncle Nik Janev, the fat lounge singer who does Meatloaf impersonations in Australia? Was Janev involved? Nik Janev is not my uncle, and I am not related to him in any way. In fact, at one point, he was to have been my employee, playing the lead in a musical I am writing called "Don Claude Devious." Things are at a stand-still with regards to that show (or rather, Nik's involvement in it) right now. The one thing I will say about Nik is he has a great voice from what I heard on his website, I hope his work with Fishtank is successful, and Matt I am definitely not; I didn't even know that person in the photo was called Matt until you brought it to everyone's attention. All I knew was that the kid in the picture was his nephew, and that's not me. You're too much of a punk to do this by yourself. Maybe I just like being an a**hole who wants to put anti-Semitic authors that threaten to break people's noses in jail. B. The reason I am not anywhere is because, as the Office so aptly put it, my actions were justified. That's very interesting. The FBI told you it's okay to send emails which threaten to kill FBI employees? No, they didn't. They said if I wanted their attention, I should just call (they gave me a card). They were also surprised I didn't hack to get you removed from the Education Forum (like most would have), I went the right way about doing it by speaking to administrators. I also informed them of your broken nose threat. Why am I not surprised? I believe what you're saying is true because in only re-enforces my belief that the FBI is one f**ked up organization. Again did Andy Walker or Nik Janev put you up to it? By the way, Nik Janev uses the alias, Nick Andrews on rec.music.beatles. Correct? Nope. I don't even know Andy Walker. As for Nik, all I know is that he was supposed to be working for me. I haven't spoken to him, I didn't even know his e-mail address for a long time. In fact, I thought his name was Nik Janek until my collaborator on "Don Claude" pointed me to his website. As for his being Nick Andrews, I'm quite sure it's not him. C. I don't know you, but I know a lot about you. You only know two things about me, only one of which is true. How can you then determine that I am mentally disturbed? Anyone who boasts about sending an email which threatens to murder FBI employees is mentally disturbed, in my opinion. Actually committing the deed is bad enough, but boasting about it is nuts. Ahem...I was not boasting about it, Dave. Look over the e-mail and tell me there's a boasting tone. There's an angry tone, a tone that expresses exasperation at you bringing up what I (and several others, from your article) consider water under the bridge, but I would not boast about such a thing. D. I do not think the entire FBI supports me. As a matter of fact, I don't trust the FBI. Don't give me that crap, you little s**t. You would be in jail or in a mental hospital if the FBI and Justice Department weren't protecting you. They know why I did it, and they know that I won't do it again (I agreed not to). As for whether I would be in a detention facility, that would depend on how seriously they took the threat and whether they went after me or you based on the info I supplied. You seem smart enough to understand that if anyone else had done the same thing you did, the Justice Department would not only arrest them, but a US Attorney would probably be pushing for capitol punishment or life imprisonment. They'd cut you a little slack because you're a punk kid, but not much. They'd spare your life, if you call your present existence living, obviously the result of bad parenting. Bad parenting my a**. I have loving, caring parents. They are great people personally. If you met them, you'd probably like them. However, that I would depend on whether or not you brought up your opinion of Jews, because my family doesn't discriminate against anyone. If anyone else had done the same thing I did, AND HAD THE RESOURCES, THE CAPABILITY, AND THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO IT, then they'd be in jail. I have none of the three. The JFK assassination has a lesson there for us all: don't let the FBI investigate your murder; Brilliant comment :-) Maybe you're not crazy, just stupid. It is a good comment. Even after our brief contact over Sharpgate, I still didn't trust them. I've done enough JFK research on my own to know they had a hand in it. I'm not crazy, and certainly not stupid either, not with a 106 IQ. if it's a conspiracy, they'll cover their part of the deal. I am the farthest from thinking that anybody in the FBI, much less anyone on this newsgroup, supports me. You're a f**king xxxx! There's obviously a major league a**hole in Boston's FBI field office who is protecting you. There's another a**hole in the Justice Department who is protecting you as well. Stop bulls****ing. I don't know anyone in Boston who works at an FBI field office. I'm certain there are a few major league a**holes in the FBI; there are a few in any working situation. As for the Justice Department, the only people I know who worked for the Justice Department are people I've read about in books on the JFK murder. I'm not bulls****ing you, man, it's just you're so used to hearing what you want to hear that you ignore all evidence to the contrary, much like Big Jim Garrison did. Go crawl back in your hole. G Hopefully someone from the FBI or the local cops will arrest you soon and put you in a mental hospital in a straight jacket for ten or twenty years, and give you lots of medication. A. I don't need the medication. I have no problems. Maybe I'm a little antisocial, but I'm not a people person. B. I'm not going to a mental hospital for a threat that I would be unable to carry out whether in or out of such a facility. C. Hopefully your using a double standard comes back and hits you in the a** ("Your Honor, this man is obviously not a fan of authority, and he has badmouthed the FBI on several occasions, etc., etc., and now he comes for help to an agency he has maligned"). That last line was from a script I wrote c. 2001 about a fictional JFK researcher who uncovers the truth and they try to silence him. So fitting here. GVendo Salvador ... read more » Reply whosoever Jun 16, 9:06 pm show options Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.jfk, rec.music.beatles From: "whosoever" <someb...@nycmail.com> - Find messages by this author Date: 16 Jun 2005 18:06:25 -0700 Local: Thurs,Jun 16 2005 9:06 pm Subject: Re: Bud Gibson confesses he threatened lives of FBI employees !!! Reply | Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse Salvador Astucia wrote: Today the House of Representatives handed George Bush, the FBI and the DOJ their respective a**holes on a platter when they voted to restrict the Patriot Act. I'm loving it, guys. I've never seen anybody get so happy over *limits* before. Knock yourself out, dude. Reply End of messages watch this topic

Especially, if a connection could be made to Sullivan and Cromwell...but then again, I'm possibly grasping at straws to even allow a thought like that to enter my mind, right?

Terry, No problems. You might not necessarily accept it, but you listen with good graces. I'd love to be able to refute what you said about job creation, but there are two problems for me: 1. I'm Australian, and don't know about the situation in the US. 2. We have the Indian call-centres as well. Perhaps a more global-centric approach is needed. I am a strong supporter of of manned space programmes and to be frank, don't really mind who does it - as long as we advance. I believe the abandoment of the US manned lunar landing programme was a terrible mistake. I would have thought that we could, by this time, have had a viable lunar settlement in operation. I believe the science and technology is there, but the political will is not. We are just too concerned with engaging in local concerns rather than taking the longer view. That being said, there were indeed many benefits from the space programme. Apart from those directly employed in NASA and associated aerospace industry, the "space race" gave us much. The launch of satellites gave us global communications, weather forecasting, geophysical assessment, etc. The implementation of GPS / GLONASS means improved safety in navigation. The exploration of the moon has given us greater understanding of how we came to be here. A lot of the NASA-initiated research was subsequently used in aviation 9both civil and military. There have been a lot of benefits. Were they worth the cost? I don't know - what price is knowledge? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I like your mindset, Evan. Being from Australia, you haven't become jaded as those of us Americans, possessing a more socially liberal stance on life, have been forced to literally "eat crow", under the general auspices of the fascist regime presently in place in our legislative houses and halls of justice, in D.C. It would be ideal for all nations to be able to particpate, contribute, and benefit from a global space effort, I agree with that prospect. But, until the U.S. is able to extricate itself from the greed-ridden philosophical and economical agendas of the Chicago School of Economics that have been permeating Wall Street, and weakening our industrial sector for the past 40 years, I personally have not one iota of faith in any viable contribution of which the U.S. would be able to offer, as long as its obsessive fixation on war, along with the conquest of oil-producing countries, remains as the standard of its gold mark of excellence. That is the reason the term "global" has left such a bitter taste in the mouths of those whose jobs have been out-sourced to the Third World. It should never have to come to this, had those lost jobs been replaced, or at least been upgraded to something other than a paradigm shift downward to the service sector of minimum wage positions now requiring people to work three positions in order to make a wage similar in amount to that of the what their lost technical position had paid. But, I'm beginning to sound redundant, here. I just wish the U.S. had something better to offer the world instead of its continual support of Third World dictatorships along with its exploitation of these countries' laboring classes, all in the name of saving American corporations' an almighty dollar. Peoples' lives don't count in the good old U.S.A. anymore, only dollars. By Wall Street's standards, "Money talks, bullxxxx walks." And, if there could be any global effort in the way of a space program, I would only hope that a similar effort in creating an alternate source of fuel/energy could be undertaken, as well. The only way that I can foresee of any amiable exchange of ideas culminating in a global effort to advance our present civilizations is if we are able to extricate ourselves from having to depend on another country's resources for our own sense of self-sufficiency. Other than that, we'll continue to be perceived by other nations, as the blood-suckers we've apparently become.

You know, I won't bother to belabor the point. A new space program would've once been the shot in the arm our technical-industrial manufacturing base could've used, but that was before the days of out-sourcing. Now, it's cheaper to have third world countries doing the jobs and making the parts that were once the backbone of the American economy, for next to nothing wages. Case in point: I used to be able to call a company like G.E., for example, and get their home office in the midwest, and be able to speak to their applications and technical support system in one phone call connection. In the past three years, that has all changed to my call being picked up by an operator in India, who then pages my engineer in San Diego, to tell him to call me in Culver City. In a way, that's the kind of progress that might be attributed to how the space program helped change our lives by the convenience of satellite signal transfer. All well and good, except for the loss of a few hundred American jobs in the midwest. My point now is, even if I were to write my congressman to suggest to him that we need to jumpstart a new space program, who is going to benefit from it? In our quest for progress, it looks as if we're losing, even if we seem to be ahead. Were all those Apollo missions for the benefit of future cellphone customers, of which I am not. Or, were they simply for future gps systems and global linkage through the miracle of fiber optics. Would our children, or our grandchildren be guaranteed employment from which they'd be able to support a family, or buy a home? Before I make that call or e-mail my representative with a suggestion, I would hope that there might be more opportunities for my country's future generations than that of a job in WalMart or Burger King. It would be interesting to see how they'd manage a new space program in this era of globalism, though. Thanks refreshing my memory with the timeline on the space missions.

" a similar line of reasoning - might be made that because of the design flaw in the DC-10, all DC-10 flights were faked and it is impossible for any aircraft to carry more than four passengers or exceed the speed of sound." That's not my line of reasoning, at all. Reproducibility is how I would measure the amount of faith I'd be willing to place in a Moon project. But, go back and continue your debate. Sorry, to have interrupted you.

I've already mentioned that I'm not in either your camp or White's camp on the matter. I'm going on the assumptions I've made from observance over time, of the space program, itself. That doesn't make one stupid, as you seem to believe, but merely entitled to expression one's opinion. You seem to relish casting aspersions at whomever you would deem in opposition to your theory, or who may not agree with your slant on it. They haven't been able to reproduce the feat on a regular basis, otherwise they'd have bought up the Moon and subdivided it by now. Practice makes perfect and I haven't seen anything that is convincible to me, on that aspect of the space program. I'm sorry to all you hardworking NASA employees, if I'm not exactly in pocket on this one, and more supportive of your efforts, but the jurie's out on this one until it becomes a more common occurrence but I doubt that's ever going to happen in my lifetime.

Thanks so much for you meaningless (once again) post David. I think I got removed from the board in question because I strongly disputed Whites photographic knowlege. And we all know that cant be allowed on that board now can it. Paid by NASA or any governmental agency or contractor...nope, but I'm so very happy for you. Now do you have anything of value to add to the discussion or are you just going to play your regular game? I'm guessing it will just be more of your guard dog barking. Bark away David, it seems its about all the value you have in this discussion. Oh and by the way why would I need a Moorman cd since the original came through me and went out unedited. But I'm glad to see you find perhaps the best scan available of the Thompson #5 copy neg worthless. It speaks volumes. Perhaps you would prefer to work with White over compressed and soft Zippo? Bye Bye Spot. good doggie. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well, what d'ya know! If it isn't the Annual NASA xxxxx Convention blowing into town. I could care less if they went to the Moon, especially after what happened to the Challenger shuttle in the mid 80's. You would've thought the Apollo project might have at least guaranteed the safe passage of Kristie Macauliff, et.al, in what was a supposedly simple maneuver, like orbitting the Earth's stratosphere, right? Don't you think they should've gotten the kinks out of it by then? Go back to the drawing board, Lamson. You and the rest of your cronies. Tell me something I don't already know. You guys are boring the hell out of me. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> If you are bored than don't read, no one is forcing you. But than again the cheap shot made you feel better eh? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> If you are bored than don't read, no one is forcing you. Don't worry. I have no intention of reading any further, that is unless something convincing might be presented in the interim. But than again the cheap shot made you feel better eh? Hey, my cheap shot pales in comparison to your condescending asides regarding the subject.

Everything. If they couldn't get the Challenger off the ground that day, not to mention the disasterous break up of the most recent one over Texas, how are you so sure we ever made it to the Moon, in the first place? Orbitting the Earth seems a more simple feat than getting a foot on the Moon, don't you agree? And, it's been 36 or so years since the Apollo program. Why haven't NASA and JPL been able to perfect a simple craft such as the shuttle. I am well aware of the physics involved to perform the job. Why weren't the stop-gaps in place for Christa? There should've been no expense spared in the case of the "O" rings, nor any corners cut as far as in the provision of the materials used in that craft. Oh, and BTW, it depends on which newspapers you read. I specifically saw her name written with a "K". And furthermore, I'm not in agreement with any of you, Lamson, White, or the Man in the Moon, for that matter. Can you honestly tell me why the pictures that came back from the Mars rover, dune-buggy, remote viewing cam looked like the high desert out in Barstow, only bathed in henna? I'm not saying it can't be done, but don't you think we should've been doing it more frequently by now, had it been such a do-able feat in the first place?

Excuse me Gibson, but what the hell are you trying to pull, now? First of all, cut the crap with this, "I am just a kid." All you are is a trouble maker from what I've been able to surmize from your any of your prior antics. Why don't you go peddle your bio somewhere else. We're not interested and furthermore, we don't give a rat's ass one way, OR the other. If you think you may have gotten Simkin, or Andy, or any one else libelled in whatever scam you've gotten yourself into, I suggest you and your old man hire some attorneys of equal caliber to the ones who've just spared Michael Jackson's sorry ass, to defend yours. We could care less!

Thanks so much for you meaningless (once again) post David. I think I got removed from the board in question because I strongly disputed Whites photographic knowlege. And we all know that cant be allowed on that board now can it. Paid by NASA or any governmental agency or contractor...nope, but I'm so very happy for you. Now do you have anything of value to add to the discussion or are you just going to play your regular game? I'm guessing it will just be more of your guard dog barking. Bark away David, it seems its about all the value you have in this discussion. Oh and by the way why would I need a Moorman cd since the original came through me and went out unedited. But I'm glad to see you find perhaps the best scan available of the Thompson #5 copy neg worthless. It speaks volumes. Perhaps you would prefer to work with White over compressed and soft Zippo? Bye Bye Spot. good doggie. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well, what d'ya know! If it isn't the Annual NASA xxxxx Convention blowing into town. I could care less if they went to the Moon, especially after what happened to the Challenger shuttle in the mid 80's. You would've thought the Apollo project might have at least guaranteed the safe passage of Kristie Macauliff, et.al, in what was a supposedly simple maneuver, like orbitting the Earth's stratosphere, right? Don't you think they should've gotten the kinks out of it by then? Go back to the drawing board, Lamson. You and the rest of your cronies. Tell me something I don't already know. You guys are boring the hell out of me.

FWIW. We seem to have fallen [a long way] from grace since this was first implemented. I remember hearing the name, "Punta Del Este" regarding this very meeting being mentioned on the news at the time. I was about to enter my Senior year in High School in September and thought it might be a good topic for discussion to bring to my P.A.D. class. [P.A.D. - Problems in American Democracy] Therefore, I was increasingly dismayed to discover, by the 1980's, what I began to perceive to be an outright fraud being perpetrated on our neighbors to the South, such as Argentina and Brazil, by the IMF and The World Bank. I guess it's like they say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." The Avalon Project at Yale Law School Declaration of Punta del Este; August 17, 1961(1) Declaration to the Peoples of America Assembled in Punta del Este, inspired by the principles consecrated in the Charter of the Organization of American States, in Operation Pan America and in the Act of Bogota, the representatives of the American Republics hereby agree to establish an Alliance for Progress; a vast effort to bring a better life to all the people of the Continent. This Alliance is established on the basic principle that free men working through the institution of representative democracy can best satisfy man's aspirations, including those for work, home and land, health and schools. No system can guarantee true progress unless it affirms the dignity of the individual which is the foundation of our civilization. Therefore the countries signing this declaration in the exercise of their sovereignty have agreed to work toward the following goals during the coming years: To improve and strengthen democratic institutions through application of the principle of self-determination by the people. To accelerate economic and social development, thus rapidly bringing about a substantial and steady increase in the average income in order to narrow the gap between the standard of living in Latin American countries and that enjoyed in the industrialized countries. To carry out urban and rural housing programs to provide decent homes for all our people. To encourage, in accordance with the characteristics of each country, programs of comprehensive agrarian reform, leading to the effective transformation, where required, of unjust structures and systems of land tenure and use; with a view to replacing latifundia and dwarf holdings by an equitable system of property so that, supplemented by timely and adequate credit, technical assistance and improved marketing arrangements, the land will become, for the man who works it, the basis of his economic stability, the foundation of his increasing welfare, and the guarantee of his freedom and dignity. To assure fair wages and satisfactory working conditions to all our workers; to establish effective systems of labor-management relations and procedures for consultation and cooperation among government authorities, employers' associations, and trade unions in the interests of social and economic development. To wipe out illiteracy; to extend, as quickly as possible, the benefits of primary education to all Latin Americans; and to provide broader facilities, on a vast scale, for secondary and technical training and for higher education. To press forward with programs of health and sanitation in order to prevent sickness, combat contagious disease, and strengthen our human potential. To reform tax laws, demanding more from those who have most, to punish tax evasion severely, and to redistribute the national income in order to benefit those who are most in need, while, at the same time, promoting savings and investment and reinvestment of capital. To maintain monetary and fiscal policies which, while avoiding the disastrous effects of inflation or deflation, will protect the purchasing power of the many, guarantee the greatest possible price stability, and form an adequate basis for economic development. To stimulate private enterprise in order to encourage the development of Latin American countries at a rate which will help them to provide jobs for their growing populations, to eliminate unemployment, and to take their place among the modern industrialized nations of the world. To find a quick and lasting solution to the grave problem created by excessive price fluctuations in the basic exports of Latin American countries on which their prosperity so heavily depends. To accelerate the integration of Latin America so as to stimulate the economic and social development of the Continent. This process has already begun through the General Treaty of Economic Integration of Central America and, in other countries, through the Latin American Free Trade Association. This declaration expresses the conviction of the nations of Latin America that these profound economic, social and cultural changes can come about only through the self-help efforts of each country. Nonetheless, in order to achieve the goals which have been established with the necessary speed, domestic efforts must be reinforced by essential contributions of external assistance. The United States, for its part. pledges its efforts to supply financial and technical cooperation in order to achieve the aims of the Alliance for Progress. To this end, the United States will provide a major part of the minimum of twenty billion dollars principally in public funds, which Latin America will require over the next ten years from all external sources in order to supplement its own efforts. The United States will provide from public funds as an immediate contribution to the economic and social progress of Latin America, more than one billion dollars during the twelve months which began on March 13,1961, when the Alliance for Progress was announced. The United States intends to furnish development loans on a long-term basis, where appropriate, running up to fifty years and at very low or zero rates of interest. For their part, the countries of Latin America agree to devote a steadily increasing share of their own resources to economic and social development. and to make their reforms necessary to assure that all share fully in the fruits of the Alliance for Progress. Further, as a contribution to the Alliance for Progress, each of the countries of Latin America will formulate comprehensive and well-conceived national programs for the development of its own economy. Independent and highly qualified experts will be made available to Latin American countries in order to assist in formulating and examining national development plans Conscious of the overriding importance of this declaration, the signatory countries declare that the Inter-American community is now beginning a new era, when it will supplement its institutional, legal cultural and social accomplishment with immediate and concrete actions to secure a better life, under freedom and democracy, for the present and future generations. (1) The special meeting of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council which began at Punta del Este, Uruguay, on August 5 was concluded on August 17 with the signing of a declaration and a charter by all members of the Organization of American States except Cuba. [my emphasis. TCM]

He was an honorable man, and a hero, IMHO. FWIW. I also admired him for his prolific writing, as well as his ideology. He was a REAL MAN, in every sense of the word. His children should be proud of him.