Q&A About the Assassination of President Kennedy

[Michael Schweitzer]

[Len Colby]

LOL thanks Mike each time you post that you prove my point and demonstrate how asinine you are. And considering your inability to find my bio link for MONTHS even after being told repeatedly (by Kathy and me) exactly where to look and even being provided a photo with it circled in red and yellow your choice of imagery is quite ironic.

[Steven Kossor]

I so appreciate Michael's and all of the others' observations about the Imperialism that has been a driving force in America for the past 50-100 years. I wonder what the consensus is that Obama will do anything to thwart that force in the next four years.

[Michael Schweitzer]

Obama has joined the force, Steven. He is defending the constitutionality of the NDAA (prison without trial). He has done an about-face on his 2009-12-29 Executive Order 13526 that expedited the JFK Records Act release deadline to December 31, 2013, and now supports the CIA's refusal to release thousands of 49-year-old documents irrelevant to national security. And he quietly issued two Executive Orders this year that grant the president greater totalitarian power than Stalin had: E.O. 13603 issued 2012-3-16 (peacetime martial law) and E.O. 13618 issued 2012-7-6 (Internet seizure and cell-phone shut down). The peacetime-martial-law order empowers the president to set up a series of committes within the Executive Branch - a regime within an Administration - to seize and control all natural resources, raw materials for industrial production, transportation systems, indeed the nation's entire infrastructure. All he need do to activate the machine is declare a national emergency, real or fictionalized. I consider Obama a peril and the CIA's withholding of evidence both an admission of guilt in the assassination of President Kennedy and an impediment to the research community and purpose of this Forum.

Edited November 18, 2012 by Michael Schweitzer

[Steven Kossor]

Frightening implications of the re-election of our President. I wonder what the prospects would have looked like with Romney elected. I can't shake the feeling that we haven't had a true 2-party system in the US for decades; Phyllis Schlafly wrote a book called A Choice Not an Echo about 45 years ago that describes the Bilderbergers, CFR, etc and the threats she perceived in their "shaddow government" plotting. She's the darling of the Right, but they've had their hands behind the curtain manipulating things too -- Reagan created the Department of Education, for God's sake. Any thoughts on the Road Not Taken with Romney?

[Len Colby]

Frightening implications of the re-election of our President. I wonder what the prospects would have looked like with Romney elected. I can't shake the feeling that we haven't had a true 2-party system in the US for decades; Phyllis Schlafly wrote a book called A Choice Not an Echo about 45 years ago that describes the Bilderbergers, CFR, etc and the threats she perceived in their "shaddow government" plotting. She's the darling of the Right, but they've had their hands behind the curtain manipulating things too -- Reagan created the Department of Education, for God's sake. Any thoughts on the Road Not Taken with Romney?

Your post confused me. Do think creating the Department of Education was a bad thing? And it was created by Carter* not Raygun

As for Schlafly, she was and still is a fanatical loon

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Education

[Len Colby]

Obama has joined the force, Steven. He is defending the constitutionality of the NDAA (prison without trial). He has done an about-face on his 2009-12-29 Executive Order 13526 that expedited the JFK Records Act release deadline to December 31, 2013, and now supports the CIA's refusal to release thousands of 49-year-old documents irrelevant to national security. And he quietly issued two Executive Orders this year that grant the president greater totalitarian power than Stalin had: E.O. 13603 issued 2012-3-16 (peacetime martial law) and E.O. 13618 issued 2012-7-6 (Internet seizure and cell-phone shut down). The peacetime-martial-law order empowers the president to set up a series of committes within the Executive Branch - a regime within an Administration - to seize and control all natural resources, raw materials for industrial production, transportation systems, indeed the nation's entire infrastructure. All he need do to activate the machine is declare a national emergency, real or fictionalized. I consider Obama a peril and the CIA's withholding of evidence both an admission of guilt in the assassination of President Kennedy and an impediment to the research community and purpose of this Forum.

VS.

JUST THE FACTS: As an attorney with 30 years' experience researching law and evaluating evidence, I reject speculation. I report my findings and, when necessary (as in a case like this), my deductions with the highest probability of necessarily following from my findings.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/ndrp.asp

[Michael Schweitzer]

Steven, I don't know what Romney might have done, or even what Obama might do. I can only describe the text of the two executive orders he issued this year. E.O. 13603 (peacetime martial law) is very a lengthy document and sets forth in detail an elaborate system of infrastructure control.

[Steven Kossor]

The US Department of Education made it possible for behavioral training, treatment and assessment experiments to be conducted on children without notifying their parents or admitting that experimental procedures are being used. Faculty and administrators in Public Education facilities can do all kinds of things to eight year-olds that legally can't be done to convicted felons, courtesy of the US Department of Education. I have no time to devote to "the truth about Public Education in America" issues anymore, having published a newsletter documenting my discoveries in that world for five years. I refer interested parties to John Taylor Gatto's tremendous collection of information, especially his An Underground History of American Education. Suffice it to say that younger people have largely become incapable of performing cost-benefit analyses and engaging in thoughtful persuasive discourse courteously as a result of the deliberate dumbing-down of their education. The proof is all around us.

[Len Colby]

The US Department of Education made it possible for behavioral training, treatment and assessment experiments to be conducted on children without notifying their parents or admitting that experimental procedures are being used. Faculty and administrators in Public Education facilities can do all kinds of things to eight year-olds that legally can't be done to convicted felons, courtesy of the US Department of Education. I have no time to devote to "the truth about Public Education in America" issues anymore, having published a newsletter documenting my discoveries in that world for five years. I refer interested parties to John Taylor Gatto's tremendous collection of information, especially his An Underground History of American Education. Suffice it to say that younger people have largely become incapable of performing cost-benefit analyses and engaging in thoughtful persuasive discourse courteously as a result of the deliberate dumbing-down of their education. The proof is all around us.

You claimed the department began under Reagan when in fact it began under Carter and seem to be unaware that there had been a department of Health, EDUCATION and Welfare since 1953. Are you saying all this evil stuff would have NOT been possible under HEW? It's kind of hard to take your claims seriously when you demonstrate basic ignorance about the subject. And based on the Amazon reviews of the book Gatto, though very critical of the educational system did NOT allege what you do.

[Guest Tom Scully]

I so appreciate Michael's and all of the others' observations about the Imperialism that has been a driving force in America for the past 50-100 years. I wonder what the consensus is that Obama will do anything to thwart that force in the next four years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/karzai-orders-full-afghanization-of-us-run-bagram-prison/2012/11/19/39da5080-326e-11e2-92f0-496af208bf23_story.html

Karzai orders ‘full Afghanization’ of U.S.-run Bagram prison

By Pamela Constable, Published: November 19

....Afghan and U.S. officials have also disagreed on the issue of detention without trial. Washington wants the Afghan government to continue holding certain prisoners it views as dangerous, even if there is not enough evidence to try them.

Aimal Faizi, the chief spokesman for Karzai, told reporters Monday that detention without trial is illegal in Afghanistan and that more than 50 Afghans are still being held in U.S. custody at Bagram, 35 miles northeast of Kabul, even though they have been ordered released by Afghan courts. ....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/20/iraq-afghanistan-daqduq-indefinite-detention

US battles Iraq and Afghanistan over detention without charges

The Obama administration fights to spread its own values on the core, fundamental right of due process

Glenn Greenwald

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 November 2012

....

The US has long been demanding that the Afghan government continue the American practice of indefinite detention without charges, and still presses this demand even after the top Afghan court in September ruled that such detentions violate Afghan law. Human rights workers in Afghanistan have long pointed out that America's practice of imprisoning Afghans without charges is a major source of anti-American sentiment in the country. In a 2009 interview, Jonathan Horowitz of the Open Society Institute told me: "The majority of the people who I have spoken to cite the way that the US captures and detains people as their main complaint against the US, second only to civilian casualties."

This US-Afghan battle over basic due process has extended beyond detention policies. In 2009, the Obama administration's plan to assassinate certain Afghan citizens it suspected of being "drug kingpins" - with no charges, trial or any other due process - sparked intense objections from Afghan officials. Those officials tried to teach Obama officials such precepts as: "There is a constitutional problem here. A person is innocent unless proven guilty," and: "if you go off to kill or capture them, how do you prove that they are really guilty in terms of legal process?", and: "[The Americans] should respect our law, our constitution and our legal codes. We have a commitment to arrest these people on our own."

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the government's release last week of Ali Musa Daqduq, a Hezbollah operative accused of killing five US troops in 2007, has infuriated Americans from across the ideological spectrum, including conservative senators and progressive writers. Let's leave aside the bizarre spectacle of Americans, of all people, righteously demanding that other people be held accountable for violence committed in Iraq when not a single American political or military official has been (i.e, those who initiated one of the worst aggressive wars of this generation), and when even private contractors from Blackwater were fully immunized for their wanton acts of violence against Iraqi civilians. Let's further leave aside the equally warped American belief that those who kill US soldiers who are part of an invading and occupying army are "terrorists". Consider the reason that Daqduq was released:....

....It is ironic indeed that the US is demanding that the practice of due-process-free indefinite detention be continued in Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries it invaded and then occupied while claiming it wanted to bring freedom and democracy there. But on one level, this is the only outcome that makes sense, as a denial of basic due process is now a core, defining US policy in general.

The Obama administration not only continues to imprison people without charges of any kind, but intended from the start to do so even if their plan to relocate Guantanamo onto US soil had not been thwarted by Congress. At the end of 2011, President Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act which codifies the power of indefinite detention even for US citizens, and - after an Obama-appointed federal judge struck it down as unconstitutional - continues vigorously to fight for that law. And, of course, the power to assassinate even its own citizens without a whiff of due process or transparency - the policy that so upset Afghan officials when it was proposed for their country - is a crowning achievement of the Obama legacy.

It's hardly unusual, of course, for the US government self-righteously to impose principles on the world which it so flamboyantly violates. Indeed, such behavior is so common as to barely be worth noting.

Just this week, President Obama managed with a straight face to defend Israel's attacks on Gaza with this decree: "there's no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders." As Liliana Segura, Jemima Khan and Reason's Mike Riggs all quickly noted, this pronouncement came from the same man who has continuously rained down missiles on the citizens of Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other countries. Meanwhile, UN Ambassador Susan Rice took to Twitter last night to denounce changes to a draft UN resolution that condemns "extrajudicial killing" - even as her own nation and its closest Middle East ally continue as the global leaders of this practice.

Still, there's something particularly revealing about the US demanding that the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq abandon any commitment they are attempting to develop (albeit quite selectively) to basic due process rights and instead imprison anyone the US wants imprisoned - even in the absence of evidence of their guilt and even in the face of judicial findings that their detention is without evidence and unlawful. As it turns out after all, the US is indeed spreading its core values to those two nations, though those values have nothing to do with freedom and democracy except to the extent that they are the primary impediments to achieving it.