Jeff Carter

1 hour ago, Kirk Gallaway said:

This has become rather boring and repetitive. I don't begrudge anybody who doesn't think the U.S. or Nato should be contributing weapons to this war. But there's been an unmistakable trend of excusing leaders for their actions that's started with Trump being helpless before  the U.S. "deep state' and now it's being done with Putin who was "left no choice" by the American Exceptionalist  deep state.

Now we have Jeff, who was repeatedly assuring us during the Russia military build that there was no way Putin would invade and this was all for show  as if he was our forum "inside man " to Putin. I thought at the time, maybe Jeff know something and I was hoping to God he was right.

Of course he wasn't  and typically the  phase where Putin is condemned for the invasion is skipped altogether and then the American Exceptional deep state made  poor Vlad do it.

Early on, every one here seemed pretty moderate in the prospect of U.S. involvement in the war, except I did find Ben's persistent warmongering toward U.S. escalation rather off putting.

It would be interesting for you to see the reaction that I've seen recently in Easter Europe. There's absolutely no trust for Putin. There is fear of further invasion, and an expression that they are just glad they're not being invaded. This fear wasn't as prevalent in Western Europe, as there's been quite a buffer zone for a long time and fears were always discounted just as we were all in disbelief when Putin finally invaded.

Of course historically Europe can never build lasting peaceful relations, and have always messed things up requiring the U.S. to get involved and become the balance of power and  contrary to what anyone says, they were never relishing that role, but by default became the Western superpower.

The present world situation for the last 50 years is the one major world superpower spends way too much on defense. In that country, there are 2 parties. One party is aggressively expansionist and has waged 3 major costly wars in the Middle East with great cost of lives and human displacement and the other party has  mopped up 2 of the wars,but rather slowly so as not to appear soft, which politically is an obsessional American no no.

Currently the Democrat's base will not allow the party  to get in a prolonged war where Americans are brought home in body bags unless there's a great justification and there's only  been one such a justification in 50 years as the Democrats voted against both the Bush wars but voted for the invasion of Afghanistan after 911, because there's no way the  U.S. would have just let that happen without retaliating.

Guess what, the world you live in isn't perfect. you can sit on the sidelines and criticize, like you've probably always done. So you want world peace? World peace lovers in  America, Canada, Europe and the world at large.  At this time, what singular party in the world is your best shot for world peace?

 

In my opinion, the continuity of neoconservative apparatchiks running U.S. foreign policy across both Republican and Democratic administrations points to the existence of a "Deep State".

3 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

John,

      Where to begin?  You're wrong about Russian history, and about the "projection" misdiagnosis.   To deny Putin's goal of re-incorporating former Soviet republics into his fascist police state is to deny 21st century reality.  To accurately perceive what he is up to is no "projection."  Look at what he has done in Chechnya and Ukraine.

      Stephen Kotkin is a professor Russian historian at our highly prestigious Princeton University here in the U.S.  He has written a number of acclaimed books about Russian history.  You have simplistically misrepresented his thesis and accurate criticism of Mearsheimer's Putin apologetics.

     I should mention that I have had a longstanding interest in Russian history, literature, and culture.  I have even served as a cantor in the Russian Orthodox Church (ROCOR) during the past quarter century.   And the man who wrote the definitive history of the ROCOR has been a personal friend of mine.

     Stephen Kotkin is quite correct about the history of Russian imperialism.  Obviously, the Russian Empire has been one of the great empires in world history-- spanning one-sixth of the world's land mass.  They played a decisive role in crushing Napoleon and Hitler.  We owe them a debt of gratitude for their defeat of the N-a-z-i  Wehrmacht in WWII.  80% of N-a-z-i military casualties in WWII occurred in Russia.

     As for Ukraine, Russia's imperialist aspirations for control of the Don Cossacks and the Crimea was first achieved by Potemkin during the reign of Catherine the Great.  But the Ukrainians have also had longstanding nationalist aspirations.  Petlyura's regime succeeded the 1918 Hetmanate before the ultimate triumph of the Bolsheviks in Ukraine, and its incorporation into the U.S.S.R.'s police state. 

     In the 1930s, the Soviet government was directly responsible for the genocidal Ukrainian famine of the Holodomor.

     Then, voila!  Ukraine achieved independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

     So, like Kotkin, I tend to view Putin's aspirations to annex the Ukraine as part of a centuries-old autocratic, Russian imperialist tradition.  It's not a projection.  It's reality.

    The imperialism of the Romanov's Russian Empire was transmuted by the Bolshevik revolution into the "imperialism" of Stalin's U.S.S.R. and Comintern.    Eastern Europeans have had no illusions about it.  Recall that Stalin and Hitler partitioned Poland before Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa.  

     Then, look at the fate of the Baltic republics and Warsaw Pact nations in the post-WWII era.   

    What is the attitude toward Moscow of people living on Russia's boundaries?  Estonia? Lithuania? Poland? Chechnya?  Georgia?

    As I said, I'm the furthest thing from an apologist for the atrocities of the CIA and U.S. military in the post-WWII era.  At the same time, I pointed out to you the contrast between the U.S. Marshall Plan in Western Europe and the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe after WWII.

     Would you have preferred to live in Dresden or Munich in the 1960s and 70s? 

     As for the present, what you think about Putin doing to Ukraine what Hitler did to England during WWII?

     Do you approve of Putin bombing civilian targets in Ukraine?

Kotkin’s “debunking” of Mearshiemer and the “Realists” in general consisted of little more than the assertion that Putin, in particular, and Russians, in general, are ruled by a flawed genetic structure which makes them inherently aggressive and unreasonable. This is the sort of essentialist racialist nonsense which has been rightfullly condemned by all humanist thinkers since at least the end of WW2 as not only absent of any quantifiable measurement but also representative of abhorrent genocidal policies. In the case of Russia / Russians, it is a view identified with the U.S. neoconservatives - who are entirely responsible for America’s Ukraine policy.  That this type of thinking would be endorsed on this forum by self-described “progressive Democrats” is appalling and yet oddly just part of the times we live in.

The neoconservatives have never been correct in analysis or prediction. Their policies have always led to carnage and disaster. Compare the year 2003 with 2022 and the names “Saddam” and “Putin” could be interchangeable in context of the presumed psychological projections.

As a sovereign nation, Cuba had the “right” to choose its alliances and maintain its national security in a manner of its choosing. The Americans, for their part, argued that the stationing of missiles in Cuba created a uniquely insecure situation for U.S. national security and therefore represented an unacceptable red-line.  The Kennedy administration was correct in their reasoning, I believe, but it is interesting how the concept of regional mutual security - the “solution” in 1962 - has been rejected out of hand in Ukraine by NATO.

The diplomatic off-ramp has been in place as a UNSC resolution since 2015. Very smart persons warned decades ago that the war which is happening now was inevitable if NATO moved into this area. The reasoning justifying this disastrous policy is actually a repudiation of the concepts espoused by the Kennedy administration in 1962.

U.S. foreign policy advice for Ukraine and Eastern Europe region are clearly separated into a Realist position ( for example: Mearshiemer, Cohen, Burns, Kennan) and a Neoconservative position (most hawkish think tanks), with the neoconservative position mostly ascendant (and responsible for events of 2014). The Realist position - best articulated by the Burns memo from 2008 (published by Wikileaks) - holds that NATO expansion into the eastern regions of Europe was a gross foreign policy error which would eventually be contested kinetically by the Russians. The neoconservative position is that Putin, if not all Russians in general, is genetically disposed to aggression and conflict and therefore must be contained by military strength and eventually entirely defeated.

The Biden administration has aligned with the neoconservative position, signalled by the return of Nuland to the State Dept. Following this realignment, the government of Ukraine announced its final rejection of the UNSC-endorsed Minsk Accords, which sought to federalize but keep intact the country, and also announced plans to reclaim all “separatist” territory by use of arms. This was supplemented with a general mobilization of troops near the Donbas region. In the late autumn of last year, the US State Department worked with Yellen’s Treasury Dept to outline a series of financial sanctions and other penalties designed to effectively ruin the Russian Federation in the event it supported the “separatist” regions slated for attack. Those penalties have so far failed to achieve the stated goal, which leaves the neoconservative faction to advocate greater military pressure, which, with news from Russia today, stands a real chance of creating an escalation logic which could get seriously out of hand.

Objectively, the Realist position is supported by the documentary record and the unfolding of events exactly as predicted years earlier. The neoconservative position is ideological, has no record of accurate predictions, and ultimately advocates total war. That last week Russia received tacit backing for its referendum plan from both China and India - the two most populous nations on our planet - underlines that the neoconservative positions of the US and EU partners in Ukraine region have little support in the rest of the world.

2 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Chris,

     Since you have mentioned Mearsheimer again, I'm re-posting Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin's explicit disagreement with Mearsheimer's opinions about Russia, NATO, and the current Ukraine crisis.

     (We discussed this six months ago, and I'm rolling the rock back up the hill.)

     As an aside, I just finished reading Mikhail Bulgakov's 1925 novel, The White Guard, about the Ukrainian civil war in 1918.  Ukrainian nationalists were fighting Russians a century ago.

     Sadly, there's a lot of bad blood there, which Putin has taken to a whole new level.

You’ve got to be kidding. Kotkin’s “explicit disagreement” amounts to determining:

- internal processes within Russia are responsible for historic patterns of autocracy, internal repression, militarism, and xenophobia. These processes and patterns are eternal and endemic to the Russian nation-state. It is therefore NATO’s responsibility to “deal” with Russia -  to defeat it through war, followed by the dismemberment of the Russian nation-state and the dissolution of its “internal processes”.   

That is some seriously unhinged craziness. Why would you repost this? Surely you do not endorse this counter-factual madness? Is it not a historic fact that the Western European countries invaded Russia numerous times? (I.e. Napoleon, England’s Crimean adventure, the Nazis…)

I will contrast that war-mongering loopiness with the extremely rational analysis by the US Ambassador to Russia William Burns writing in February 2008, which underscores the basic correctness of Realists in the Mearshimer-Kennan mold:

"NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains "an emotional and neuralgic" issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia.  In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene."

https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html

Using an anti-communist mind-set, one could suppose the coup and subsequent massacres of suspected leftists in Indonesia 1965 was a success. The ensuing strict codification of laissez-faire “free-market” economics in Indonesia provides a counter-point to Vietnam’s experience of public ownership and regulation. In direct comparison, Vietnam’s metrics in living standards, life expectancy, social development, physical infrastructure, and general quality of life far exceed that found in Indonesia. Ask any traveller who has been to both Hanoi and Jakarta.

It’s almost two years since the last U.S. federal election and Trump remains the number one topic of conversation and public hysterics. How could this be? I would wager that no American public figure has ever faced such vast cascades of flung mud: major accusations of malign foreign influence, major accusations of election chicanery, major accusations of financial impropriety, two impeachments, continual federal and state level investigation… all amplified to level 10 by an endless parade of hostile political, bureaucratic, and especially media mouthpieces.

It looks from the outside that a pertinent motivating issue is that Trump, unbelievably, remains a potent political force and all the flung mud only makes his supporters dig in deeper rather than abandon the cause. How could this be? Why do Trump’s political opponents continue to fling mud when it has been an ineffective if not counter-productive strategy?

The first inklings of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane file, directed at the Trump campaign beginning August 2016, began to creep into the light in late 2017, notably in several prescient articles by the late Robert Parry. Although the direct mechanics of this program are not yet publicly known, it has been established that the Clinton campaign, and possibly the Obama White House, worked with partisan assets in the FBI and DOJ to disrupt the Trump campaign, including planting stories alleging untoward influence by an adversary government. The brief Sussmann hearing a few months ago effectively confirmed that program. Trump filed a lawsuit last March directed at persons affiliated with Crossfire Hurricane (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.610157/gov.uscourts.flsd.610157.1.0.pdf).

What Trump’s supporters are saying is that the documents stashed at Mar-A-Lago were all relevant to the Crossfire Hurricane file, and were declassified by Trump via legal executive decisions - which is why the affidavit had to rely on the Espionage Act. They are saying that the FBI office responsible for the document raid is the same office that ran the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. If this becomes confirmed, it seems the massive partisan divide will be ever more entrenched and the political warfare ever more intensified.

When word started in late 2017 that the Trump campaign had been placed under FISA surveillance via a sketchy predicate during the 2016 campaign, it appeared as potentially one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history. It may yet achieve such status. It appears to have occurred in a milieu whereby Clinton was assured the presidency and so these machinations would never come to light. The decision to publish, in early 2017, the Intelligence Community assessment of malign foreign influence appears to have been part of an effort to upend Trump early in his term - as publicly acknowledged by John McCain - also confident of success. It was not successful, and served to ultimately reveal Crossfire Hurricane and the massive mess caused by all of this continues to paralyze U.S. politics present and future.

Disclaimer: I do not admire Trump, support his policies, or even really care or fixate on him. One has to follow the facts, wherever they lead. Trump should have been easily handled politically, not through skullduggery. It’s really late Roman Empire stuff going on.

The pan back into the Plaza has always seemed to me as representing a revelation of the black hole  which had just been punched open in the 20th Century. Maybe reading too much into it, but it is an astonishing shot in amateur filmmaking.

It really does look like the umbrella man and the dark-complected man are conversing.

Abe would be fairly described as a “nationalist”. He will probably be remembered most for the effort to overturn the “pacifist” clauses in Japan’s post-WW2 constitution to allow offensive capability to Japan’s military. While this was done in concert with the Americans - to focus military pressure on China - Abe was not fully committed to the “international rules-based order” to the extent his predecessor has become, as he also sought to arrive at friendly understandings with Russia, and perhaps see through the yet to be negotiated peace treaty left over from WW2.

Abe’s military officer grandfather participated in war crimes during WW2, and Abe made a controversial visit to a shrine venerating Japan’s military leadership from that era. This was in line with numerous rehabilitations of far right figures and organizations from WW2, kicked off by Reagan’s visit to Bitburg in the 1980s.

The “certain organization” which may have motivated the assassin is the Moonies - the Unification Church.

45 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

Nice dodge, Jeff.

How about answering the question now?

Why was Manafort willing to lie to the FBI and to Mueller's investigators about his 2016 campaign contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, even after agreeing to cooperate with the investigation in a plea deal?

Does that sound like a guy who had nothing to hide about Trump and the Kremlin interference in the U.S. election?

But let's call a spade a spade.

The reason that some of the details of the 2016 Trump campaign's contacts with Kremlin assets remain "speculative" is that Manafort stonewalled the investigation, knowing that Trump would pardon him, if convicted.

Manafort also floated a Trump pardon to his subordinate, Rick Gates, during the Mueller investigation, and had to be put in solitary for a while.

Additionally, what role did Manafort (and Trump) play in the alteration of the 2016 Republican Party platform in Cleveland that undermined U.S. support for Ukraine in their border war with the Russian Federation-- subsequent to Putin's seizure of the Crimea?

It was found that Manafort breached his plea deal on five counts - three concerning the failure to register as lobbyist/tax fraud, one about communication with someone from Trump’s administration, and one concerning “interactions and communications with Kilimnik”. which, on background, appears to relate to the August 2016 meeting cited by Weissman where the men discussed “Ukraine policy”. Reading between the lines, it appears Manafort did not live up to an expected quid pro quo regarding his plea deal and so Mueller threw the book at him - as can be determined by the harsh non-objective language which appears in the subsequent sentencing report.

Agents of the US federal government, as the details of the Mueller indictments make clear, had extensive access to the contents of electronic messages and phone communications of all persons swept up in the Russiagate investigations. In light of that, to claim that an individual like Manafort could “stonewall” the investigation by not revealing information is just stupid. It would require a mafia-like level of secrecy and care which clearly Manafort was not capable of, as the evidence of his failure to register as a lobbyist as well as the tax fraud was readily abundant. 

The 2016 Republican platform’s position on Ukraine was generated by Bannon and others connected to him, and this was not a secret. Their position - stated publicly - was the foreign policy of the U.S. was better served by a rapprochement with Russia so that both countries could join together in directing hostility towards China.

1 hour ago, Paul Brancato said:

Thanks for this post. Yes indeed our journalism usually lacks historical perspective. Everything I’ve read about Manafort, going back a few decades at least, spells crook. Do you agree? I’m not asking from the Russia collusion angle.

Manafort was a grifter and influence peddler who relocated his political consultancy business to Ukraine in hopes of gaining lucrative contracts in the milieu of the corrupt and extremely wealthy oligarchs who ran the country. The business was in fact very successful. One of the Manafort consultancy’s main clients was Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. Yanukovych is best known in the west as being the deposed President during the Ukraine 2014 coup. Various lazy journalists label Yanukovych as a “puppet” of Putin or the Russian Federation, based for the most part on his rejection in 2013 of an EU Association deal which sparked the protests which eventually brought him down. The lazy journalists also apply that moniker to Manafort, due to his consultancy work for Yanukovych, without knowing or understanding that Manafort’s advice was consistently in favour of the EU deal - the opposite of Russian preference.  Manafort’s indictment in 2018 was based on failure to register as a foreign lobbyist and tax evasion.

In February 2019, Special Counsel lawyer Andrew Weissman made a public statement that the investigation was examining suspicions about Manafort and his long-time business partner Kilimnik. Weissman stated that suspicions were generated due to an August 2016 meeting between the two men during which “Ukraine policy” was discussed. Weissman said: “This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel's office is investigating… There is an in-person meeting at an unusual time for somebody who is the campaign chairman to be spending time, and to be doing it in person." But the decade-old business partnership between Manafort and Kilimnik was based in Ukraine, directly involved “Ukraine policy”, and Manafort was attempting to build a new client base after Yanukovych’s exile. Why then is this meeting unusual? CNN reported: “At one point, the prosecutor acknowledges that Manafort may have been playing for a pardon. He acknowledges that while Manafort was lying, he had multiple motivations…”  - i.e. Manafort was a grifter and an influence peddler. The polling data conspiracy theory is entirely speculative and does not survive even cursory analysis. And yet it has become the "last stand" for the true believers.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/07/politics/paul-manafort-hearing-kilimnik/index.html

Franklin Foer’s Atlantic article essentially concedes that the Kilimnik “theory” is not only an evidence-free speculation, but investigators could not even articulate what they think may have happened. That Manafort and Kilimnik “spoke” during the 2016 campaign is repeatedly dangled as some sort of mysterious unprecedented event, but the rarely noted obvious fact is that the two men were close business partners for a decade and spoke pretty much every single day for all that time. And that Kilimnik was a trusted informant for US State Dept officials attached to the US Embassy in Kiev, and had been for years. And prior to joining Manafort, Kliminik was employed by the NED-financed International Republican Institute in Moscow for a decade as well. Foer describes Kilimnik’s relationship with Manafort as a massive political scandal, but never refers to his ties to US State or intelligence-linked IRI? What kind of journalism is that?

Rick Gates, who was a cooperative witness to Mueller and the third leg of the Manafort office, has consistently stated that the alleged Kilimnik-GRU ties are nonsense, and that the “polling data” was nothing more than what was routinely published in US mainstream media. Again, that never figures in the breathless speculation or supposedly "objective" journalism.

Fletcher Prouty’s informed opinion holds the Establishment position as: Kennedy must not win a second term in 1964.

And that the process of Kennedy’s demise was similar to the 12th century murder of Thomas Beckett after Henry II surmised - “who will rid me of this troublesome priest?”

4 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

News report that Garland is in Ukraine advising the government on prosecuting Russian war crimes. 

Meanwhile, with the extradition now approved, Garland's Justice Department is preparing to lock Julian Assange away in a SuperMax prison for 175 years for the crime of publishing investigative journalism exposing the perpetration of war crimes.

Garland's Justice Department lawyers were successful last year reversing an appeal based on downplaying Assange's suicide risk. Upon the extradition announcement, Assange was apparently stripped naked and placed in an entirely empty cell because of his suicide risk. This continues to be one of the ugliest chapters in the history of U.S./UK "justice".

2 hours ago, Greg Doudna said:

Keyvan, forget newspaper articles, no relevance here. Its the DPD inventory of what was found in the search of Ruth Paine's house on Nov 22, and later FBI documentation of the contents of the metal file boxes, as well as the testimony and statements of the officers involved, and Ruth Paine. Documents all available on the Mary Ferrell site not difficult to find.

Yes it is a fact that Walthers wrote that in his initial report. That fact (that he wrote that) is not disputed. But since those metal file boxes are traced in later DPD and FBI documents and their contents described later which are not in agreement with what Walthers originally wrote, the question is: was Walthers correct? That is the issue.

Fact: Walthers never saw what he reported. (Walthers under oath, Warren Commission testimony.)

That means either he was reporting hearsay or making it up out of whole cloth, one or the other. If it was hearsay, who would be his source? Presumably some other officer? But no other officer ever confirmed or claimed or owned the claim. So it is a claim that has no known witness to what is claimed. And no verification or corroboration after the fact. So there are two choices. One, Walthers wrote something inaccurate. Two, a gigantic conspiracy involving multiple law enforcement agencies and Walthers himself, to cover up what Walthers wrote that was not mistaken. Sometimes common sense goes to what is just more likely between two alternatives.

Fact: what was claimed (that there is no known witness who saw) has no verification of existence. No one later claims to see them. You have to ask, what happened to them, if they existed. Well, cue the Twilight Zone music and imagine (that's what is required: imagination) elaborate theories of secret second stashes of metal file boxes secretly shipped to the sheriff's office in addition to the ones delivered to Capt. Fritz at DPD as every officer reported that day. Then imagine they were all secretly disappeared. No evidence that happened, apart from a starting premise of inerrancy in Walthers' original statement (premise: no officer working for Sheriff Bill Decker would ever write a mistake).

Fact: it has never been explained how anti-Castro Cuban names and addresses are recognizeable by eyesight as distinguished from pro-Castro Cuban names, or no-Castro Cuban related names. On obvious possibility is Walthers' statement reflects some assumed association with Oswald's FPCC literature and pamphlets. In which case there is no Ruth Paine connection since Oswald's FPCC was not Ruth's doing.

Fact: never in her entire life, either before, during, or after Nov 1963, is Ruth Paine known to have been involved with Cuban organizations, Cuban activists, Cubans. You have to consider common sense: which is more likely, that Ruth had a whole hidden life of surveilling Castro activists without a speck of evidence surviving of it, or did Walthers err in a sentence in his report. 

Then on the matter of Walther's inerrancy--in his claiming something existed which he never personally saw, and no other officer has been identified as claiming to have seen it, meaning at best completely unknown and unsubstantiated hearsay--one might look at:

• Walthers suspected the Paines of being involved in the assassination that first day (from the way he wrote of them). The officers generally suspected the Paines that day of being communists. Could this be a case of officers' "confirmation bias" of assuming what they suspect?
• According to Roger Craig, fellow deputy sheriff, Walthers was not only #2 to Sheriff Decker, Decker's favorite, but crooked, corrupt. This is in Roger Craig's manuscript.
• There are reports that Craig did not tell the truth about a bullet found near the grassy knoll. That he denied having found a bullet but persons close to the family saying he privately said he actually did have such a bullet. 
• A partner of Walthers, deputy sheriff Bill Courson, is reported in Roger Craig's manuscript as saying Walthers never was inside the Texas Theatre at the time of Oswald's arrest, contrary to Walthers saying he was.
• And Walthers never stuck to his claim that there were metal file boxes filled with "pro-Castro sympathizers names", which nobody has ever been identified as having claimed to see, whose existence is contraindicated by DPD and FBI documents discussing the contents of Ruth Paine's file boxes, and Ruth Paine's testimony as well.

So yes, consider the facts, all these facts, and ask just on common sense, what makes sense. Consider the irony of how other officers' written and oral testimonies are certainly not considered inerrant by most researchers when it concerns matters such as the paper bag supposed to have carried Oswald's rifle, the finds of cartridges, or dozens of other things. But on THIS ONE PARTICULAR DETAIL in a written first-day report which has zero substantiation of any kind and plenty of counterevidence, there is a premise of THIS police officer's INERRANCY, come hell or high water. 

It is as if the bias against Ruth Paine is so strong that it overcomes common sense.

Rather than going for the simple explanation that Walthers wrote something incorrect, i.e. goofed--instead, elaborate and unsubstantiated mountains of conjectures and conspiracy theorizing gone amok are considered preferable explanations. 

No other law enforcement officer ever picked up on Walthers' claim, and Walthers himself abandoned it in 1964. But these mistakes, once started, have more lives than a cat's nine lives. They just live on and on forever, immortally as zombie theories, and here it is, in the year 2022, with people still kicking this dead horse. 

Anything to get at Ruth Paine?

Kafka, The Trial, for an analogy to forensic logic cited to accuse Ruth Paine in this case of the contents of her metal file boxes.

This post is almost entirely conjecture.

An assumption that Walthers was simply mistaken faces three hurdles:

1) Walthers was a trained police officer.

2) The report was written within hours of being at the Paine home.

3) The “Cuban sympathizers” description expresses specific detail.

Liebeler failed to ask the most pertinent question: Why did you (Walthers) write that sentence in your report?

Assumptions or speculations are not enough to fill that gap. The Warren Commission failed to resolve the issue. Liebeler instead creates an inference, without ever referring to the relevant report or even acknowledging its existence. That is a “red flag”.

The only “report” is the Supplementary Investigation Report, written by Walthers and dated November 22, 1963. The other so-called “evidence”, in context of Walthers’ description of “names and activities of Cuban sympathizers”, is, at best, an inference made by Warren Commission attorney Liebeler. The Commission had clearly noted Walthers’ description, as seen in the Rumours and Speculation section of the WR, but Liebeler notably failed to directly address this issue when he had Walthers before him.

In fact, neither Liebeler or the Rumours and Speculation segment of the WR identify or refer to Walthers’ Report, despite it being the primary document on this matter. This failure, combined with the Commission’s careful language identifying “seven” boxes, indicates a  deliberate process of making an inconvenient data point disappear.  Pleadings that Walthers’ original Report had been superseded by other “evidence” appears as little more than partisan spin.

2 hours ago, Greg Doudna said:

That is not correct. The Warren Report debunks that provenance of the metal file boxes as a false rumor. That false rumor has nothing to do with anything here. I believe you knew that and that this was just throwing more smoke on what is not complicated: that the seven metal boxes were Ruth Paine's and that the contents were Ruth Paine's phonograph records and personal papers, not Castro sympathizer surveillance records.

Warren Report p 666

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=946#relPageId=690

Speculation -  After Oswald’s arrest, the police found in his room seven metal files boxes filled with the names of Castro sympathizers.

Commission finding - The Dallas police inventories of Oswald’s property taken from his room at 1026 North Beckley Avenue do not include any file boxes. A number of small file boxes listed in the inventory as having been taken from the Paine residence in Irving contained letters, pictures, books and literature, most of which belonged to Ruth Paine, not to Oswald. No lists of names of Castro sympathizers were found among these effects (f.124)

The footnote references an inventory list and Walthers’ testimony to Liebeler. What does not appear in the footnote, or Liebeler’s questioning, is the actual Supplementary Police Report dated 11/22/63, written by Walthers, which is the precise source of the so-called “speculation”. The omission of a reference to the actual police report is a red flag, as is the incorrect attribution to the rooming house, as is the inclusion of the number “seven” in the Warren Report’s description of the supposed “speculation” as that number nowhere appears in Walthers’ Supplementary Report.

Walthers’ testimony is notably imprecise on this matter. It was Liebeler’s job to ensure precision, especially as this matter would later appear as a numbered item in the Rumours and Speculation segment of the Warren Report. Liebeler does not refer to the relevant police report, which is the primary document of concern. He instead refers to a vague “story” which he received second-hand from an unnamed source. Further, if one is to rely on Liebeler’s imprecision, it appears the unknown source of Liebeler’s referred story is also the source of the claim that Walthers in fact can’t “remember seeing any of them” - a suggestion to which Walthers in turn offers an equally vague “that could have been one” (one what?) “but I didn’t see it” (see what?). This is second-hand hearsay. On top of this, the Warren Report’s brief discussion falsely attributes the file cabinet to Oswald’s rooming house. The police report - an official document in the record, written by Walthers - refers to items found at the house jointly owned by Ruth and Michael Paine, which justifies the wording of the inquiries which have you so inflamed.

43 minutes ago, Greg Doudna said:

No my argument does not require that at all. The allegation of DiEugenio, relayed by Max Good to Ruth Paine, that Ruth Paine surveilled Castro sympathizers is a subset of the allegation that Michael and Ruth surveilled Castro sympathizers, which DiEugenio derived, as he said he did, from Walthers' first-day claim which Walthers said was mistaken. Instead of continuing to throw up this smoke which is simply gaslighting, you should ask why DiEugenio not only refuses to retract his baseless allegation against Ruth Paine, but has responded to me in nasty ways.

Of the hundreds of mistakes and confusions in reporting in the first hours and days of that weekend of the assassination by both police and reporters, for DiEugenio to fixate upon one single such that the author himself explained was mistaken, and just rely and rely and rely and insist and insist on police inerrancy in that one case and reject the officer's own correction of the error . . . as the basis for accusation of Ruth Paine on this point . . . and to wilfully refuse to retract or apologize but respond instead with nastiness and abuse. . . that is the moral wrong here. Toward Ruth Paine (and Michael Paine too).  

Walthers’ testimony never directly addresses the claim in his 11/22/63 Report, and most relevant he never says he was “mistaken”. The inference is created by Liebeler.

There are corresponding data points to the idea of surveillance activity: 1) Michael Paine at Luby’s  2) Ruth Paine later in Nicaragua.

This is simply investigative journalism or reporting. The types of questions you have reacted to are asked on programs like 60 Minutes all the time. Ruth Paine is given a platform to respond, and she does and her response appears in the film.

You are the one who started the thread with terms such as:  “irresponsible”, “shameful smear”, “utterly baseless”, and “malicious”.

1 hour ago, Greg Doudna said:

Jeff Carter, this is beginning to sound like gaslighting, in which first Ron, and now you, claim the title of this thread is imagined. I do not know why you are doing this. You say

DiEugenio, in the Max Good film:

DiEugenio: When the Dallas police went to the Paine household, one of the detectives wrote a report about taking out several filing cabinets of notations and cards and maps etcetera of Castro sympathizers. This makes a very good case, I believe, that Michael and Ruth were involved in surveillance activities of the American left. These cabinets existed until the Warren Commission. Because there are several exhibit numbers in the Warren Commission that refer to them. But the big difference is when the Warren Commission went through them, they only found something like one letter from Ruth to one of her relatives. So in other words, if the original report is accurate, somebody fiddled with the contents of those cabinets.

The closing allegation of the Max Good film, referring to 1963:

Good: Their thing is that you and Michael were involved in surveillance activities of the radical left. 

Ruth (look of disbelief): What?

Good: That you and Michael were involved in surveillance activities of the radical left. Uh, and that—

Ruth: Who would be the radical left? 

Good: Cuban sympathizers.

Ruth: Oh.

Your argument relies on stripping Michael Paine's name from the quotes you use, which creates a stricter allegation , at least in your formulation, than what is in fact being inferred.

There is a difference between saying “Ruth Paine surveilled  Cuban sympathizers” versus “Ruth Paine surveilled the American left”. Your complaint alleges the film proposes the former construct, but this is not supported by the pertinent excerpts provided. That is, an “allegation that Ruth Paine did surveillance on Castro sympathizers” is your wording and your construct. 

According to the excerpts, the film states that file boxes with information on ‘Cuban sympathizers” was found in the Paine garage in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. There is a document in the official record which says that. The film states that Ruth Paine was observed “taking notes” while interacting years later with “Nicaraguan sympathizers”. That seems to be the case, and this information was published back in the 1990s. According to the excerpts, in the film Ruth Paine is given the space to dismiss this information and she does so.

A “smear” is an attempt to “damage the reputation of (someone) by false accusations.”  The presumed accusations here have long been in the record, and might be considered disputed or controversial - but they are not “false”.

2 hours ago, Matt Allison said:

Looking into Alfa Bank was not just a target chosen at random.

 

 

But the indictment and political controversy are not about the corrupt nature of the Alfa Bank, it concerns the efforts orchestrated by representatives of the Clinton campaign to suggest direct clandestine communications - “a secret communications channel” -  between the Trump organization and this particular bank.

“In particular, and among other things, the FBI’s investigation revealed that the email server at issue was not owned or operated by the Trump Organization but, rather, had been administered by a mass marketing email company that sent advertisements for Trump hotels and hundreds of other clients.”

The indictment reveals the Clinton campaign representatives were aware at all times of the flimsy if not entirely absent factual basis of their claim, and disregarded warnings by the very researchers they were relying on that even a cursory investigation into the allegation would expose the fundamentally weak foundations on which it rested.

This information is being assiduously spun by partisan “journalists” in an effort to continue to bamboozle a targeted audience which includes, it appears, Matt and W Niederhut. I would suggest that dishonest communication strategies is one area where the GOP and Democrats are in fact the same.

The Kevin Drum piece is also extremely poor journalism, on top of the weak partisan talking points recycled endlessly by certain frequent contributors on this thread. The “debunking” of the Sussman case has never referred to the actual Indictment - which is easily available. The Indictment contains the primary information, including the timeline of events and the stated intentions of the various players. It is clear this was an operation by the Clinton campaign to deliberately “stovepipe” incorrect and misleading information into the news cycle. To say the Clinton campaign “merely passed along some information they hoped was worth checking out” is a ridiculous parsing of the available information. And this goes for the work of Mueller’s deputy Weissman as well - who on several occasions publicly promoted obviously false interpretations of the documented record, and is continuing to do so apparently.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/politics/read-sussmann-indictment/index.html

As Ben observes, the persons located in the Russiagate geography were largely grifters and influence peddlers, yet their words and activities were nearly always portrayed literally by the investigators and MSM - certain to produce a false consciousness and confuse the ability of the general public to stay informed.

Historically, political reform in the United States has occurred only through the pressure and agency of mass political movements outside the two-Party structure (i.e. 8 hr workday, women’s right to vote, New Deal, etc).  Otherwise, the logic and tendency runs to versions of lesser-evilism - which both major Parties are invested in.

It is a curious anomaly. The media persons are reading from wire service printouts. So this has been fed into the reporting cycle from an official source. The dead agent is said to be some distance away from the motorcade. The story appears very early in the afternoon, then is dropped. It could be said the dead agent then morphs into the dead police officer.

Vince - did this story originate with the Secret Service or did the Service have any involvement with the dissemination of this story?