W. Niederhut

My question for David Josephs and the forum. Has any U.S. agency other than the CIA ever organized a political assassination op -- other than the Navy SEALS hit on Osama Bin Laden?

Yeah, where are the flying custard pies when we could really use one on a JFKA thread? 🤥 "Griffith, you military-industrial slut!"

Ron, Here's what I find puzzling. Greg Abbott, and other opponents of gun control, have tended to blame our epidemic of mass shootings on mental illness. But, if that is the case, why don't these guys support red flag laws and stronger background checks, to regulate access to guns by the mentally ill? Their position makes no sense. The cases where mentally ill shooters fall through the cracks are legion. Time and time again, we see a pattern where angry, mentally ill young men are able to acquire guns and commit mass shootings without effective interventions. One of the worst recent examples was the guy in Colorado Springs who shot people at the LGBT nightclub. The guy was being treated for a mental illness, and had threatened to murder people, including his own grandparents. He had even been arrested for making bomb threats, but the El Paso County police did not confiscate his guns! And his mother bought him some body armor for Christmas, while hiring a lawyer to expunge his arrest record! LIke the mother of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter, this guy's mother (in Colorado Springs) often went to the shooting range with her son. The red flags were everywhere in that case, but no one intervened. In fact, the Republican El Paso County Sherriff expressed opposition to red flag laws!

Interesting Americana here, Ron. There were some legendary football players in this 1962 AFL Championship game, including George Blanda, Len Dawson, and Billy Cannon. Dawson played for Hank Stram's KC Chiefs in the first Super Bowl back in the day, (after the Dallas Texans had moved to Kansas City in 1963.) Blanda went on to play for Al Davis and the Oakland Raiders (kicker and back up QB) until he was in his late 40s. Billy Cannon was a Heisman Trophy winner at LSU, where he led the Tigers to a National Championship. I think Cannon also ended his pro career playing for Al Davis and the Raiders. (Incidentally, I first attended an AFL game at Mile Hi Stadium in 1964, between the Denver Broncos and the San Diego Chargers, but I was an avid Baltimore Colts fan in those days. The Broncos were perennial bottom feeders in the AFL until 1977.)

Ron, I remember all of these old hits from 1963. As for the original Broadway production of Camelot, Richard Burton did a credible job as King Arthur, but the real show-stopper was the previously unknown French Canadian singer Robert Goulet in the role of Sir Lancelot. Goulet rocketed to fame for his signature performance in the Broadway recording of Lerner & Loewe's song, If Ever I Would Leave You. In fact, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, themselves, chose to cast the unknown Canadian with Richard Burton and Julie Andrews.

This year's Pultizer Prizes for History and Biography. These both look interesting. History "Awarded to Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, by Jefferson Cowie (Basic Books), a resonant account of an Alabama county in the 19th and 20th centuries shaped by settler colonialism and slavery, a portrait that illustrates the evolution of white supremacy by drawing powerful connections between anti-government and racist ideologies." Biography "Awarded to G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, by Beverly Gage (Viking), a deeply researched and nuanced look at one of the most polarizing figures in U.S. history that depicts the longtime FBI director in all his complexity, with monumental achievements and crippling flaws."

Thanks for the commentary, Anthony. I agree that Michael Griffith seems to be strangely obsessed with gratuitously disparaging 9/11 researchers, while concurrently refusing to tell us which ones he believes to be "deranged nutjobs." No doubt, some "9/11 Truthers" are "nutty," but many seem perfectly sane and knowledgeable.

Ron, Michael Griffith has never responded to my request for the names of the 9/11 Truthers whom he calls "deranged nutjobs." He may be referring to me, and I won't deny that I was kind of a wild and crazy guy in my teen years, before I was psychoanalyzed and became somewhat dull and boring.

Anthony, I'm not sure which "9/11 Truthers" you are referring to here. Many "9/11 Truthers" are scholars with wide ranging intellectual interests and graduate level educations. For example, Laurent Guyenot studied both engineering and history at the Sorbonne. Ron Unz studied history and physics at Harvard and Stanford. David Ray Griffin is a professor of philosophy and religion. I studied physics, chemistry, history, and medicine at Brown and Harvard. It's true that the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth have focused mainly on the science data relating to the WTC demolitions, but most of them are probably familiar with the JFKA research. Obviously, we're all "deranged nutjobs," as Michael Griffith keeps telling the forum.

Good point. It would be a too shocking for the American public to learn the truth about 9/11 so prematurely. These things take time. It has only been 21 years and 8 months. As T.S. Eliot said, "Most people can't handle too much reality." Perhaps in another 37 years? 🙄

What's interesting, though, is that we're reading this headline in Rupert Murdoch's NYPost -- a U.S. mainstream media publication. As in the case of Tucker Carlson's recent JFKA monologue on Fox, we're seeing an apparent frontal assault on the 59 & 1/2 year Mockingbird suppression of the truth about the JFK assassination in the U.S. M$M.

Well said, Jeff. I agree with your general point about Oliver Stone providing a valuable service by his willingness to interview "demonized adversaries" of the U.S.-- Fidel, Chavez, Putin, et.al. It's consistent with Oliver's invaluable role in telling the Untold History" of the U.S. Deep State and military industrial complex. In Putin's case, I agree that he did a remarkable job of stabilizing the sinking Russian Federation ship of state after 1995, and I actually admired the man prior to 2007. My point is that many people in the West, (including the Trump/Fox cult) seem to have overlooked the dark side of Putin's history during the past 15-20 years-- the step-wise transformation of the fledgling post-Soviet democracy into the present day Neo-Stalinist police state.

THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY I noticed that King Charles seated Prince Harry in the cheap seats at the Coronation ceremony today, and that Harry was not part of the procession to Buckingham Palace. Kind of sad. Does anyone know whether DNA tests have shown that Charles is not Harry's biological father?

It's a dangerous strategy, given Putin's history of brutalizing the LGBT community in the Russian Federation. My guess is that these guys will be killed, and/or sent to the Gulag.

Addendum: Ironically, Paul, the problem with our Education Forum discussions about Putin is precisely the opposite of what you have described. To wit, the Putin apologists have been "singularly focused" on the crimes of the U.S. and NATO, while adamantly refusing to study or discuss the history of Putin's neo-Soviet police state in the 21st century!

Paul, I have said this all along in our discussions here about Putin, Ukraine, NATO, and the U.S. Nor have most of us been "singularly focused on the crimes of Putin." To be logically consistent, we should be appropriately critical of the crimes of both the U.S. military industrial complex, and the crimes of Putin and his totalitarian police state. The puzzling thing is that some people in the West still seem to view the homicidal dictator, Vlad Putin, as some sort of enlightened autocrat-- "a great leader." The truth is that Putin has turned the Russian Federation's fledgling democracy into a neo-Soviet police state, where the media is, once again, an organ of state propaganda, and dissenters are sent to the Gulag. And Putin has also been using his propaganda machinery to foment discord and division in liberal Western democracies, in accord with the Dugin playbook for "the Geopolitical Future of Russia" -- isolating the U.K. from the EU, and fracturing the U.S. along racial and cultural fault lines.

Paul, Jared Polis has done a great job as Colorado's governor. We're fortunate to have him during these troubled times in the U.S., and I hope he isn't attacked by a MAGA bomber. As for RFK, Jr., I agree with de-funding our vastly bloated military industrial complex. No argument there. I have been a critic of the bogus Bush/Cheney "War on Terror" for the past 20 years. Biden deserves some criticism for his military industrial bs-- although, at least, we're finally out of Afghanistan. Countering Putin's expansionist, militant police state is another matter. I, too, wondered why Zelensky, Blinken, et.al., didn't agree to forego NATO membership before the invasion of Ukraine, but I also believe that Putin would have probably created some other pretext to eventually annex Ukraine-- as he did in the case of Crimea in 2014.

Why am I not surprised to hear that Trump may have "sold" classified U.S. secrets to foreigners with big bucks? As for Middle Eastern nukes, my guess is that the Saudis are chiefly concerned about Iranian capabilities. Everyone already knows that Israel could nuke the entire planet.

Great point. Why should we worry about silly, old, antiquarian concepts of "evil" -- i.e., the murders of journalists, opposition politicians, and Ukrainian civilians, etc.-- if we're not willing to strap on helmets and slog through the mud outside of Bakhmut in our late 60s? It's just Realpolitik. Kissinger proved in Cambodia that Realpolitik is simply the way things work.

Paul, I would be interested to hear people's ideas about specific foreign and domestic RFK, Jr. policy differences from those of the "failing," "senile" Biden administration. So far, people have mentioned; 1) releasing the JFK records, (Hooray!!! 🤪) and 2) ending/cutting support for Ukraine-- not "poking the highly successful, persecuted Russian Bear," etc. Presumably, RFK, Jr. would also take a more aggressive approach to opposing the use of deadly vaccines in the U.S. Anything else that comes to mind? Breaking the CIA into a thousand pieces? (Hooray!!! 🤪) Ending U.S. "full spectrum dominance" vis-a-vis the enlightened dictatorships of Russia and China-- facilitating the ideal John Cotter/Paul Rigby New Xi-Putin-Yuan World Order? 🤓 Locking up oil industry CEOs? (Hooray!!! 🤪)

Hogwash, John. You completely ducked the facts I posted about Putin's systematic murders of Russian journalists during the past 20 years, his transformation of the Russian media-- once again-- into a Soviet-style organ of state propaganda, and his transformation of Russia's fledgling post-Soviet democracy into a brutal totalitarian police state. He has his critics thrown out of windows or sentenced to the Gulag. Are you really blaming the United States for Putin's re-establishment of an FSB-backed dictatorship in the former Soviet Union? Get a clue. Putin is the KGB anti-Gorbachev-- the Yuri Andropov Institute graduate who has systematically rolled back perestroika and glasnost, and implemented the Dugin agenda of re-establishing the Soviet empire, as a totalitarian police state. Have you studied the history of that process during the past quarter century? It didn't have to happen that way. It's true that the Russian people have had no meaningful experience with functional democracy, but Putin has taken them down a very dysfunctional road during the past quarter century -- rather than working constructively with the prosperous democracies of Western Europe and the U.S. to achieve constructive conviviality. Your bizarre concepts of Eastern European attitudes toward Soviet and neo-Soviet imperialism need some serious reality-testing. You continue to blather about the egregious threat of so-called "U.S. full spectrum dominance," while ducking my old question-- i.e., "Would you have preferred to live in East or West Germany in the post-WWII era?" Study the history of the Marshall Plan, in comparison with the impoverished, oppressive Soviet Bloc dictatorships in post-WWII Eastern Europe.

Sandy, If John Cotter had been around in 1939, he would have said, "Poland shouldn't have poked the Wolf." And, interestingly, just as Hitler had previously described his agenda of annexing Slavic territory in Eastern Europe for "lebensraum," Putin's brain, Aleksander Dugin, had described Putin's agenda of annexing Ukraine, in his 1997 text, The Geopolitical Future of Russia. Yet, oddly, the John Cotters in the West are still blaming Ukraine for Putin's bloody imperialist agenda.

Jim & John, Any thoughts about Putin's poisoning and current incarceration of opposition politician Alexei Navalny? (Trump said it was none of our business-- after German physicians confirmed that Navalny had been poisoned in Russia.) How about Putin's recent 25-year Gulag prison sentence for the Russian journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza? How is Putin's persecution of Russian journalists and political opponents formally different than what Hitler did in Germany after 1932? (Hitler immediately shut down the opposition press and incarcerated political opponents at Dachau after coming to power in 1932.) For that matter, how is Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine formally different than Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939? Recall that Hitler claimed that ethnic Germans were being persecuted by the Poles, in the same way that Putin has claimed that his ethnic Russian insurgents have been persecuted by the Ukrainians. And, unfortunately, Hitler, (like Putin today) had misguided fans in Western Europe and the U.S. in the 1930s. BTW, has Oliver Stone ever mentioned Navalny in his paeans to Putin?