Decades After JFK’s Death – Extremism Lives On
By Mark Warren Letter from Dallas
http://www.esquire.com/features/kennedy-anniversary-112009
A couple of years ago, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada told me something that shocked me, and that I will never forget. When Reid was a young man, he had worked his way through law school at George Washington University in Washington D.C. as a fulltime Capitol Hill cop, a patronage job accorded him by Nevada's lone member of the House at the time, a boozy old reactionary named Walter Baring. In the evenings, it was Reid's habit to take his break in the Congressman's office, as Baring held forth over his customary cocktail.
On the evening of November 22, 1963, as the nation and world began to absorb the murder that day in Dallas of President Kennedy, Reid sought solace with his congressman. Baring, Reid said, was "one of those guys for whom there was a Communist behind every bush. Fluoride was a Communist plot. And Kennedy, too, had been leading us down the path to Communism, Baring told me. It was probably a good thing that he was murdered."
Reid was stunned into silence, astonished that anyone, much less a sitting member of the United States Congress, would hold such a hideous position as to sanction the murder of anyone, much less the president.
Sunday, it will have been forty-six years since that day.
And lately, as the paranoid strain in the American polity has reasserted itself — that strain which ascribes the worst possible motives to one's political opponents, and where lies abound and violence becomes possible, I thought of the story that Senator Reid told me and wondered if a fool such as Baring now held office in the congress. As I am from Texas, home over the years to some of the most wonderful and ridiculous members of congress, sometimes situated in the same person, I thought of my home delegation, and in my mind formed the image of the skinhead reprobate from Tyler, Louie Gohmert.
Characterized chiefly by the blankness behind his eyes, Gohmert has the face of a hooligan and the politesse to match. Stinking of contempt, no greater reactionary is to be found in the Congress today. And certainly it is people like him who have abetted the toxic atmosphere that holds in our current politics. He has screamed that the president is a "socialist!" perhaps louder and longer than anyone else in his caucus (which is quite a distinction), he is a birther who believes that Obama is an alien Muslim, and he has said that the president’s health care plan will "absolutely kill senior citizens. They'll put them on lists and force them to die early."
So as I thought about Congressman Gohmert, I decided that he is either a demagogue, a fool, or both. Of course, and to be clear, it would be indecent to ascribe to him the insanity of Congressman Baring's position. But here I suppose I am addressing the law of unintended consequences. If you with abandon promulgate such outlandish distortions of the truth, and feel it your duty to stoke the fires of our baser instincts to the point of hysteria over the utter destruction of the American system, do you bear responsibility when someone who ingests your bile responds violently?
As I thought about this, I came upon a coincidence.
In Austin, doing some research at the LBJ Library, I found buried deep in the stacks a letter written to President Johnson by a woman who lived in the district now represented by Louie Gohmert (incidentally the same general area once represented by the great Sam Rayburn).
The letter, simply and beautifully written by a woman named Charlotte Essman, is dated November 24, 1963, two days after Kennedy's assassination. Were I to have come upon the letter ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, I would have read it as an interesting artifact from a troubled time, long since past.
Today as I read it, I cannot but think of it as a warning.
The Letter:
Tyler, Texas
November 24, 1963
President Lyndon B Johnson
The White House
Washington D.C.
Dear Mr. President:
In this time of mourning and appreciating how very busy you are, I still must write about existing conditions here in East Texas, even if you are too busy to read this, because I feel it is my duty to do so. I wanted to write President Kennedy's staff and try to get them to persuade him not to go to Dallas but unfortunately didn't do it for fear of being that crank or busy–body. This time I will risk that appellation. I am frightened at conditions that prevail in East Texas.
Mr. President, the easy thing and what is desperately trying to be done [is] to convince a stunned nation and world that Mr. Kennedy's murder was the work of some deranged crackpot, and while the trigger was pulled by such a one, perhaps the atmosphere that made it inevitable was the hatred of the people (I don't mean every one of them but a big majority) who wanted Mr. Kennedy and any one connected with him out of the White House. A week ago this might have sounded ridiculous but subsequent events lend it credence, I believe. There is a virus of disrespect and hate spreading here very rapidly. And unless one lives right here with it, day in and day out, it is unbelievable how quickly and subtly it infects reasonably intelligent persons. This is not too hard to understand only if one recognizes the unremitting, deep, bitter religious and racial prejudice existing today in this section of our land — I don’t know if any of them are similarly infected in other sections, but I knowpersonally of what I speak as regards East Texas. In fact, although nearly every one indignantly denies having any racial or religious prejudice to the point where he deceives even himself in this matter, after listening seriously to protestations of horror and shock one can almost hear a collective sigh in essence, "Too bad he had to die but after all a Catholic is no longer in the White House and this ought to set the 'niggers' back on their heels for awhile!"
It is painful to some of us I know to give credence to such a condition so we blind ourselves and blame a mentally confused person — forgetting in our desire to remove the blame from ourselves that where religious and racial prejudice prevails, not just the killer but all are mentally confused. When this prejudice is played upon adroitly and exploited actively (as in our locality) by such groups as The American Fact-Finding Committee and many more [of] that ilk, for instance the John Birchers, etc., it soon fans into a situation as exists here, many, many citizens ridden by a vicious hate which inevitably erupts and expresses itself in violence — as in the case of Mr. Kennedy's murder in Dallas.
A strong evidence of this was the recent demonstration of violence against Ambassador Stevenson in Dallas, and even more clearly by an article carried in the Dallas News (a 100% anti-Kennedy sheet) stating that Mr. Bruce Alger [then-congressman from Dallas, and the only Republican in the Texas delegation] advised the citizens of Dallas there was absolutely no need to feel apologetic about this incident — everyone being free to express his opinion. He neglected to specify the degree of violence of such expression. And the citizens vote for Bruce Alger! So what can one expect? I just heard the flash about Oswald being shot and also the theory that is was caused by mass hysteria. That is here, all night, but I think rather there are certain groups and individuals who wish to insure Oswald's complete and continuing silence because, knowing the 'temper' of Dallas, I can’t believe a known police character of Ruby's caliber would risk his neck through any feeling of patriotism or love for Mr. Kennedy — can you?
I don’t know if anything can be done about the festering sore of prejudice and hatred on our social structure here, but I doubt if you can know its deadliness unless you are in constant, daily touch, and I thought it my duty to mention it, in that case, even though you may consider I am an alarmist and am exaggerating. I only wish I were.
Respectfully,
Charlotte Essman
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Journalists and JFK-Real Dizinfo Agents at Dealey Plaza
Seth Kantor - SHNS Reporter in Dallas 11/22/63
http://www.ctka.net/2011/Journalists_&_JFK_1.html
Journalists and JFK:
Real Dizinfo Agents At Dealey Plaza
By Bill Kelly (bkjfk3@yahoo.com) , May 2011
Seith Kantor, a local Dallas reporter who was in the Press Bus in the motorcade, knew something was wrong as they rode through Dealey Plaza, but the bus driver refused to follow the rest of the motorcade to Parkland Hospital and instead drove to their original destination, the Dallas Trade Mart. [1–Kantor] Once there however, Kantor got a ride to Parkand Hospital, where he interviewed a number of local Dallas officials and had a brief conversation with Jack Ruby, who had frequently fed Kantor interesting leads he developed into feature articles. [2–WCT]. While the Warren Commission rejected Kantor’s sworn testimony that Ruby was at Parkland, Kantor did make some phone calls, including one to his editor at the Scripps-Howard News Service (SHNS), and there are records of these calls. [3–Records]
Years later, in 1975, Kantor learned that the records of one of the phone calls on that day was classified for reasons of national security, so he filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and obtained them to find out the big secret. He discovered that after taking to his editor, he was told to call another SHNS correspondent in Florida, Harold "Hal" Hendrix. [4-Classified Records] From Florida, Hendrix supplied Kantor with detailed background information on Lee Harvey Oswald, who had just been arrested and named as the chief suspect in the assassination. Hendrix had more information in Florida than Kantor did at the scene of the crime, and we later learn why Kantor’s call to Hendrix was considered worthy of being classified for reasons of national security. [5-Hendrix]
Continued at: www.ctka.net
www.ctka.net/2011/Journalists_&_JFK_1.html
www.ctka.net
Friday, May 20, 2011
Hunter Thompson's Thoughts 11/22/63
The Origin Of "Fear And Loathing"
(In a letter to his friend, William Kennedy, Thompson uses the term, "Fear and Loathing", perhaps for the first time, written on the Day John Kennedy was assasinated in Dallas)
http://thedirtysouth.blogspot.com/2005/02/origin-of-fear-and-loathing.html
November, 22, 1963
Woody Creek
I am tired enough to sleep here in this chair, but I have to be in town at 8:30 when Western Union opens so what the hell. Besides, I am afraid to sleep for fear of what I might learn when I wake up. There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything - much less the fear and loathin that is on me after today's murder. God knows I might go mad for lack of talk. I have become like a psychotic Sphinx - I want to kill because I can't talk.
I suppose you will say the rotten murder has no meaning for a true writer of fiction, and that the "real artist" in the "little magazines" are above such temporal things. I wish I could agree, but in fact I think what happened today is far more meaningful than the entire contents of the "little magazines" for the past 20 years. And the next 20, if we get that far.
We now enter the era of the shitrain, President Johnson and the hardening of the arteries. Neither your children nor mine will ever be able to grasp what Gatsby was after. No more of that. You misunderstand it of course, peeling back the first and most obvious layer. Take your "realism" to the garbage dump. Or the "little magazines." They are like a man who goes into a phone booth to pull his pod. Nada, nada.
The killing has put me in a state of shock. The rage is trebled. I was not prepared at this time for the death of hope, but here it is. Ignore it at your peril. I have written Semonin, that cheap book-store Marxist, that he had better tell his boys to buy bullets. And forget the dialectic. This is the end of reason, the dirtiest hour in our time. I mean to come down from the hills and enter the fray. Tomorrow a cabled job request to "The Reporter." Failing that, the "Observer." Beyond that, God knows, but it will have to be something. From now until the 1964 elections every man with balls should be on the firing line. The vote will be the most critical in the history of man. No matter what, today is the end of an era. No more fair play. From now on it is dirty pool and judo in the clinches. The savage nuts have shattered the great myth of American decency. They can count me in - I feel ready for a dirty game.
Fiction is dead. Mailer is an antique curiosity. The stakes are now too high and the time too short. What, O what, does Eudora Welty have to say? Fuck that crowd. The only hope now is to swing hard with the right hand, while hanging on to sanity with the left. Politics will become a cockfight and reason will go by theboards. There will have to be somebody to carry the flag.
My concept of the new novel would have fit this situation, but now I see no hope for getting it done, if indeed, any publishing houses survive the Nazis scramble that is sure to come. How could we have known, or even guessed? I think we have come to that point.
Send word if you still exist - HST
(From "The Proud Highway: Saga Of A Desperate Southern Gentlemen")
Thanks to Robert Packer, also see: a video of Charlie Rose reading that letter on his show when he interviewed Thompson. The letter is at the end of this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVxKjwJwUZ8&feature=related
http://www.urbandictionary.com/products.php?term=shitrain&defid=1314152
Urban Dictionary:
1. shitrain
1.The era of modern American global policy, drug policy and financial ruin succeding the administrations of Nixon, Regan, Bush.
2.The result of Republican polocies as described by Hunter S. Thompson actually orginating with Richard M. Nixon's destructive administration, the father of the The War on Drugs.
"The fatbellies have taken control again hurling us all into the age of the shitrain."
by Word Dr. Jun 11, 2005 share this
Also see:
http://www.youtube.com/user/shitrain
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Obama Gets Secret Award for Open Government
On March 30, several hours before addressing the nation on TV about Libya, President Obama received a prestigious open-records award presented by five freedom-of-information advocate organizations for running a commendably "transparent," accessible administration.
However, news about this award came about only because the presenters leaked it to the press. As noted by the Washington Post the next day, there was no White House notice to the press; the presentation was not on the president's calendar; no photos or transcript were available; and the award was not mentioned on the White House website.
Now we have Donald Trump saying, "I have done a great service" by forcing the President to hand over his birth certificate.
Maybe Trump will become a champion of open records, and not only seek Obama's college transcripts, but also get the CIA, DOD, NSA and other government agencies to open their records on the assassination of President Kennedy.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Jesse Ventura's New Book 63 Docs
ABCNews
Digging Deeper: Jesse Ventura's Alternative Take on American History
Get a Different Perspective, Jesse Ventura's Take on American History
1 COMMENT April 4, 2011
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/excerpt-63-documents-government-read-jesse-ventura-dick/story?id=13290200&page=1
In his new book, "63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read," former wrestler turned governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura takes a close and at times disturbing look at major historical events. Ventura draws on public but often overlooked information about such events as John F. Kennedy's assassination and the 9/11 attacks, offering fresh, often intriguing insights.
Here is an excerpt from "63 Docrments the Goverment Doesn't Want You to Read":
There is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment." – John F. Kennedy
This book is titled "63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read," lest we forget that 1963 was the year that claimed the life of our 35th President. The conspiracy that killed JFK, and the cover-up that followed, is the forerunner for a lot of what you're going to read about in these pages. In fact, the idea behind this book came out of writing my last one, American Conspiracies. There I presented a close look at whether or not our historical record reflects what really went on, based on facts that most of the media have chosen to ignore – from the Kennedy assassination through the tragedy of September 11th and the debacle on Wall Street. In poring through numerous documents, many of them available through the Freedom-of-Information Act (FOIA), I came to realize the importance of the public's right to know. And I decided to see what new picture might be revealed if you laid out certain documents that the powers-that-be would just as soon stay buried.
Everything in this book is in the public domain and, for the most part, downloadable from the Internet. I'm not breaking any laws by putting these documents in book form, although some of them were classified "Secret" until WikiLeaks published them. I'll get to my view on WikiLeaks in a moment, but let me begin by saying how concerned I am that we're moving rapidly in the direction President Kennedy tried to warn us about.
According to a recent article in the Washington Post, there are now 854,000 American citizens with Top Secret clearances. The number of new secrets rose 75 percent between 1996 and 2009, and the number of documents using those secrets went from 5.6 million in 1996 to 54.6 million last year. There are an astounding 16 million documents being classified Top Secret by our government every year! Today, pretty much everything the government does is presumed secret. Isn't it time we asked ourselves whether this is really necessary for the conduct of foreign affairs or the internal operation of governments? Doesn't secrecy actually protect the favored classes and allow them to continue to help themselves at the expense of the rest of us? Isn't this a cancer growing on democracy?
After Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, I was heartened to see him issue an Open Government Initiative on his first full day in office. "I firmly believe what Justice Louis Brandeis once said, that sunlight is the best disinfectant," Obama said, "and I know that restoring transparency is not only the surest way to achieve results, but also to earn back the trust in government without which we cannot deliver changes the American people sent us here to make." After eight years of Bush and Cheney's secretive and deceitful ways, that sounded like a welcome relief. Obama ordered all federal agencies to "adopt a presumption in favor" of FOIA requests and so laid the groundwork to eventually release reams of previously-withheld government information on the Internet.
Well, so far it hasn't turned out the way Obama sketched it out. An audit released in March 2010 by the non-profit National Security Archive found that less than one-third of 90 federal agencies that process FOIA requests had changed their practices in any significant way. A few departments – Agriculture, Justice, Office of Management and Budget, and the Small Business Administration – got high marks for progress. But the State Department, Treasury, Transportation, and NASA had fulfilled fewer requests and denied more in the same time period. "Most agencies had yet to walk the walk," said the Archive's director Tom Blanton.
Things went downhill from there. In June 2010, the New York Times carried a Page One story detailing how Obama's administration was even more aggressive than Bush's in looking to punish people who leaked information to the media. In the course of his first 17 months as president, Obama had already surpassed every previous president in going after prosecutions of leakers. Thomas A. Drake, a National Security Agency employee who'd gone to the Baltimore Sun as a last resort because he knew that government eavesdroppers were squandering hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on failed programs, is today facing years in prison on ten felony charges including mishandling of classified information. An FBI translator received a 20-month sentence for turning over some classified documents to a blogger. And the Pentagon arrested Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst, who for openers had passed along to WikiLeaks the shocking video footage of a U.S. military chopper gunning down Baghdad civilians.
Then, in September 2010, the Obama Justice Department cited the so-called "state secrets doctrine" in successfully getting a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit on "extraordinary rendition" (a phrase that really means we send suspected terrorists to other countries to get held and tortured). In fact, Attorney General Eric Holder was hell-bent on upholding the Bush administration's claims in two major cases involving illegal detention and torture. Also in September, the Pentagon spent $47,300 of taxpayer dollars to buy up and destroy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of Operation Dark Heart, a memoir about Afghanistan by ex-Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer Anthony A. Shaffer. We first interviewed Lt. Colonel Shaffer for American Conspiracies, because his outfit (Able Danger) had identified Mohammed Atta as a terrorist threat long before he became the supposed lead hijacker on 9/11.
With Operation Dark Heart, publishing executives and intel outfits couldn't remember another instance where a government agency set out to get rid of a book that was already printed. Some months earlier, the Army reviewers who'd asked for and received some changes and redactions said they had "no objection on legal or operational security grounds" to the final version. But when the DIA saw the manuscript and showed it around to some other spy operations, they came up with 200-plus passages that might cause "serious damage to national security." By that time, several dozen copies of the book had already gone out to reviewers and online booksellers. (Those went on sale on eBay for between $1,995 and $4,995.)
So Operation Dark Heart was hastily reprinted with a number of paragraphs blanked out and, guess what?, it became a best-seller. Here are a few of the things that got canned, which the New York Times first pointed out. Everybody's known for years that the nickname for the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade is "the Fort." Censor that one! Another big secret - the CIA training facility is located at Camp Peary, Virginia. You can find that on Wikipedia but not anymore in this book! And did you know that Sigint stands for "Signals Intelligence?" You don't see that anymore in Operation Dark Heart. (I can't wait for the censors to pull my book from the shelves for revealing all this). Oh, and they removed a blurb from a former DIA director who called Shaffer's "one terrific book." Shaffer has now gone to court looking to have the book's complete text restored when the paperback comes out.
To Obama's credit, early in November 2010 he issued an Executive Order establishing a program to manage unclassified information that rescinded a Bush-era order designed to keep still more documents away from public scrutiny by putting new labels on them ("For Official Use Only" and "Sensitive But Unclassified.")
But soon thereafter came WikiLeaks' release of 250,000 secret State Department cables. This followed the group's disclosures earlier last year of 390,136 classified documents about the Iraq War and 76,607 documents about Afghanistan. As everybody knows, the politicians and the media commentators went ballistic over the cables being in the public domain – even though the New York Times, among others, was running front-page stories every day about their contents.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was for a moment our biggest bogeyman since Osama. Sarah Palin says he's "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" who should be pursued "with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders." She stopped short of saying he should be hunted down like the caribou she shoots in Alaska. Hillary Clinton calls what he's done "an attack on the international community." (I've never known Palin and Clinton to be this cozy in the same bed, so to speak). Mike Huckabee called for the execution of whoever leaked the cables to WikiLeaks. Newt Gingrich referred to Assange as an "enemy combatant." Joe Biden described him as "closer to being a hi-tech terrorist" than a whistleblower, and some liberal democrats would like to see Assange sent to prison for life. He's also been labeled an old-fashioned anarchist, mastermind of a criminal enterprise and, at best, a control freak and a megalomaniac.
This smacks of worse than McCarthyism – we're in a lynch mob moment, folks. Didn't Thomas Jefferson say that "information is the currency of democracy" and that, if he had to choose between government and a free press, he'd take the latter? Ron Paul is one of the only folks to have spoken up on Assange's behalf. Paul made quite a statement on the floor of the House, when he asked his colleagues what had caused more deaths – "lying us into war or the release of the WikiLeaks papers?" He added, "What we need is more WikiLeaks….In a free society, we're supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it."
Paul's point is important. Nobody has died as a result of Wikileaks' disclosures, but maybe we've forgotten that the whole Iraq war was based on fake evidence manufactured by the Bush-Cheney White House and the Brits, resulting in 4,430 American troops dead and about 32,000 wounded as of early December 2010. In Afghanistan, the toll is climbing fast – close to 1,500 Americans dead and almost 10,000 wounded. This doesn't take into account, of course, the hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. Do you think it's possible, as one Internet columnist has written, that Julian Assange is the scapegoat for arrogant American officials who'd rather point the finger at someone else than admit the blood on their own hands?
Personally, I think Julian Assange is a hero. It's a classic case of going after the messenger. Our diplomats get caught writing derogatory remarks and descriptions of foreign leaders, then turn around and accuse WikiLeaks of putting our country in danger. WikiLeaks is exposing our government officials for the frauds that they are. They also show us how governments work together to lie to their citizens when they are waging war.
Here are a few things we've learned from WikiLeaks' document releases that we didn't know before: The CIA has a secret army of 3,000 in Afghanistan, where the U.S. Ambassador in Kabul says there's no way to fix corruption because our ally is the one that's corrupt (one Afghan minister was caught carrying $52 million out of the country). In Iraq, there are another 15,000 civilian casualties that haven't been brought into the light, and our troops were instructed not to look into torture tactics that our Iraqi allies were using. U.S. Special Operations forces are in Pakistan without any public knowledge, and our Pakistani "allies" are the main protectors of the Taliban in Afghanistan!
I mean, let's face it: WikiLeaks exists because the mainstream media haven't done their job. Instead of holding government accountable as the "fourth branch" the founders intended, I guess the corporate media's role today is to protect the government from embassassment. Assange has pioneered "scientific journalism" (his term) – a news story is accompanied by the document it's based upon and the reader can make up his own mind. WikiLeaks' small team of reporters has unveiled more suppressed information than the rest of the world press combined! Assange is the publisher, not the one who revealed the "classified information." That's apparently Private Bradley Manning, who somehow found a security loophole and now is being held in solitary confinement at our Quantico, Virginia base facing up to 52 years in prison. Are we surprised that the United Nations' special investigator on torture is looking into whether Manning has been mistreated in custody? As for Assange, how our government wants to try him under the Espionage Act of 1917 is beyond me. Come on, he's an Australian citizen and his Internet domain is in Switzerland. (By the way, he also received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in 2010, and the Amnesty International Media Award in 2009).
And what about these cyberspace sabotage attacks against WikiLeaks that are being carried out across national borders by our government? As far as I can determine, these are illegal under both U.S. law and international treaties. Meantime, it blows my mind that students at Columbia and Boston University and probably other institutions of "higher learning" are being warned not to read any of these documents if they want to get a government job in the future. The Office of Management and Budget sent out a memo that forbids unauthorized federal employees and contractors from accessing WikiLeaks. The Library of Congress has blocked visitors to its computer system from doing the same. The Air Force started blocking its personnel from using work computers to look at the websites of the New York Times and other publications that had posted the cables. Instead, a page came up that said: "ACCESS DENIED. Internet Usage is Logged & Monitored." Over in Iraq, our troops who'd like to even read articles about all this get a "redirect" notice on their government network telling them they're on the verge of breaking the law. And a lot of these same soldiers have security clearances that would have allowed them to see the cables before they were leaked.
Given the close ties between the government and large corporations, I can't say I'm surprised that Amazon, PayPal, Mastercard, Visa and Bank of America took action to make sure that WikiLeaks could no longer receive any money through their channels. And I can't say I'm upset that a group of young "hacktavists" calling themselves Anonymous have taken retaliatory action against some of those same companies. They call it Operation Payback. "Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets," a fellow named Coldblood posted. "As an organization we have always taken a strong stance on censorship and freedom of expression on the internet and come out against those who seek to destroy it by any means. We feel that WikiLeaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs. the government."
More than 500 "mirror sites" now possess all the cables, and Assange has said we ain't seen nothin' yet if he meets an untimely demise. As I write this a couple of weeks before the New Year in 2011, he's living in a friend's mansion in England and fighting extradition charges. I'm sure a whole lot more will have developed by the time this book is published. I say let the chips fall where they may as WikiLeaks puts the truth out there. If our State Department is asking diplomats to steal personal information from U.N. officials and human rights groups, in violation of international laws, then shouldn't the world know about it and demand corrective action? Maybe if they know they're potentially going to be exposed, the powers-that-hide behind a cloak of secrecy will think twice before they plot the next Big Lie.
I agree with Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. He faced charges, too, back in 1971, but they were thrown out by a judge. He'S called Private Manning a "brother" who committed "a very admirable act" if he's the one who provided the documents to WikiLeaks. "To call them terrorists is not only mistaken, it's absurd," Ellsberg said.
The book you're about to read is undertaken in the same spirit. I've divided the book into five parts, starting out first to show links between deeds our government perpetrated in the past and what's going on today. If you don't know your own history, you're doomed to repeat it. You'll come across documents on some pretty scandalous behavior, including:
• The CIA's secret assassination manual and experiments to control human behavior with hypnosis, drugs, and other methods.
• The military's Operation Northwoods, a chilling attempt by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage a terror attack on our own citizens and make it look like Cuba was behind it – using a hijacked airliner, no less!
• After President Kennedy was trying to get our troops out of Vietnam, the military faked the Gulf of Tonkin attacks in order to expand the war.
• Our chemical and biological warfare capability back in 1969, leading you to wonder about the real origin of things like AIDS and lyme disease.
Part two delves into a series of government, military and corporate secrets, opening with excerpts from two recent reports on how our military and intelligence outfits put Nazi war criminals to work after World War Two. From there, you'll see some eye-opening documents including:
• The CIA's "Propaganda Notes" designed to shore up the Warren Commission's lone-gunman conclusion.
• How Oliver North collaborated with Panama's drug-running dictator Manuel Noriega.
•What America knew, and ignored, about the genocide happening in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.
• How we still turn a blind eye to Gulf War Illness and our veterans.
• The frightening background for our military to intervene in domestic affairs, set up "emergency relocation facilities" for our citizens, and establish a Civilian Inmate Labor Program.
• How failed inspections and ignored science are impacting our food supply and our bees, while we push to promote Monsanto's biotech agenda.
• What our military really knows about the dangers of climate change.
• How companies like CitiGroup and Koch Industries promote their "plutocracies" at the expense of the rest of us. Part Three I've called Shady White Houses, starting with "Tricky Dick" Nixon and his astounding plan to bring peace to Vietnam by pretending to nuke the Soviet Union! You'll also learn about:
• How the Bush White House stole the presidential elections in 2000 and again in 2004.
• The Obama State Department's call for our own diplomats to spy on the United Nations.
• Whether "cybersecurity" could mean the end of the Internet as we know it.
Part four focuses in on a subject I've explored a great deal in recent years, and that's whether we've been told the truth about the terrible events of September 11, 2001.
• A think tank called the Project for a New American Century anticipating "a new Pearl Harbor" to promote its agenda for "Rebuilding America's Defenses."
• Clear warnings the Bush Administration ignored that something was coming.
• The "Stand Down" order that kept our military from responding on 9/11.
• Evidence that Building 7 was taken down by a controlled demolition.
• The role of insider stock trading in advance of 9/11.
And finally, part five examines the so-called "war on terror" and the terrible price we're paying in terms of our liberties and the lives being lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. You'll first read excerpts from a long memo by Bush's Justice Department that subverts the Constitution by shredding a number of civil rights, followed by Bush's justification for America's torture of "unlawful combatants." * The "Media Ground Rules" that keep the truth hidden at Guantanamo.
The torture techniques, and medical experiments, being conducted there and the paper trail on the CIA's destruction of 92 torture videos.
• Decapitation of a detainee in Iraq, by our own troops!
• How the CIA "spins" the war in Afghanistan, and the fact that drugs are fueling that country's economy.
• The State Department's revelation that Saudi Arabia is actually "a critical source of terrorist funding."
•A report by the Rand Corporation showing that military force has never worked in combating terrorism.
Following the 63 documents, you'll find an Epilogue of Internet resources to use in your own pursuit of the truth about what's going on behind-the-scenes.
Here's what should concern us all: if you look back at the US Patriot Act that Congress passed almost unanimously in the wake of 9/11, the Bill of Rights was already in peril. Let me offer a brief outline of how things changed:
The First Amendment is about freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble. The Patriot Act says that the government is free to monitor religious and political institutions without any suspicion of criminal activity. The government can also prosecute librarians or the keepers of any other records (including journalists) related to a "terror investigation."
The Fourth Amendment speaks to our right to be secure "against unreasonable searches and seizures." The Patriot Act says the government can search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause.
The Sixth Amendment entitles anyone accused of a crime to "a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury." The Patriot Act says the government can jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.
The Sixth Amendment says an accused person has "compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense." The Patriot Act says the government can monitor conversations between attorneys and clients in federal prisons and even deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.
The Sixth Amendment also says an accused criminal must "be confronted with the witnesses against him." The Patriot Act says Americans can be jailed without even being charged, let alone face any witnesses. What troubles me more than anything is how Congress can simply vote to supersede the Constitution. They're not allowed to do that, to vote in new rules arbitrarily. Changing the Constitution requires you to go through many hoops. How can we allow this kind of unprecedented change to happen?
At the same time, it's recently been reported that our government is building up a huge domestic spying network to collect information on us all, involving local police, state and military authorities feeding information into a database on people who've never been accused of wrongdoing. Homeland Security has given billions of dollars in grants to state governments since 9/11, and there are now more than 4,000 organizations in the domestic apparatus. The FBI keeps the ultimate file, with profiles on tens of thousands of Americans reported to be "acting suspiciously." (I'm sure I'm one of them.) Also the technologies we've developed for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are now being used by law enforcement agencies at home – hand-held fingerprint scanners, biometric data devices, unmanned aircraft monitoring our borders with Mexico and Canada.
In other words, we the taxpayers are funding our own government to keep tabs on what we do! This is outrageous, but it's been a long time coming. Our tax dollars have paid for mind control experiments and assassination attempts and fake attacks to draw us into war. Our tax dollars have funded drug runners and "extraordinary rendition" of detainees. And they've not been used in places where they should be going – like to help our veterans cope with Gulf War Syndrome and to keep the nation of Rwanda from mass genocide. What right does the government have to abuse our money like that? This is diabolical!
I've put together this book because it's become crystal-clear that our democracy has been undermined from within and it's been going on for a long time. We the people have got to wake up and start demanding accountability! Let's never forget the words of Patrick Henry: "The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them."
PART ONE: OUR SCANDALOUS POST-WAR HISTORY 1. THE CIA'S SECRET ASSASSINATION MANUAL
What follows are excerpts from a 19-page CIA document that was prepared as part of a coup against the Guatemalan government in 1954 and declassified in 1997. Maybe they should change the name to the CIA's "secret first degree murder manual." How is that we are allowed to kill other people if we're not in a declared war with them? Clearly this is a premeditated conspiracy involving more than one person. My big question is, who makes the call on this? To arbitrarily go out in the world and kill someone without their being charged with a crime! The thought of taking out another country's leadership is so despicable, it makes me ashamed that I'm an American. But it later was revealed that, during the Cold War, the CIA is known to have plotted against eight foreign leaders, and five of them died violent deaths. The CIA's "Executive Action" arm was involved for years in plotting with the Mob and others to murder Fidel Castro.
Are we all to believe this is simply James Bond, where agents can arbitrarily knock off people and walk away? They actually had a manual that promotes throwing people from high buildings, with "plausible denial"!
One paragraph in particular gives me pause, when I think back to what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963. "Public figures or guarded officials may be killed with great reliability and some safety if a firing point can be established prior to an official occasion," the manual instructed.
Digging Deeper: Jesse Ventura's Alternative Take on American History
Get a Different Perspective, Jesse Ventura's Take on American History
1 COMMENT April 4, 2011
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/excerpt-63-documents-government-read-jesse-ventura-dick/story?id=13290200&page=1
In his new book, "63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read," former wrestler turned governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura takes a close and at times disturbing look at major historical events. Ventura draws on public but often overlooked information about such events as John F. Kennedy's assassination and the 9/11 attacks, offering fresh, often intriguing insights.
Here is an excerpt from "63 Docrments the Goverment Doesn't Want You to Read":
There is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment." – John F. Kennedy
This book is titled "63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read," lest we forget that 1963 was the year that claimed the life of our 35th President. The conspiracy that killed JFK, and the cover-up that followed, is the forerunner for a lot of what you're going to read about in these pages. In fact, the idea behind this book came out of writing my last one, American Conspiracies. There I presented a close look at whether or not our historical record reflects what really went on, based on facts that most of the media have chosen to ignore – from the Kennedy assassination through the tragedy of September 11th and the debacle on Wall Street. In poring through numerous documents, many of them available through the Freedom-of-Information Act (FOIA), I came to realize the importance of the public's right to know. And I decided to see what new picture might be revealed if you laid out certain documents that the powers-that-be would just as soon stay buried.
Everything in this book is in the public domain and, for the most part, downloadable from the Internet. I'm not breaking any laws by putting these documents in book form, although some of them were classified "Secret" until WikiLeaks published them. I'll get to my view on WikiLeaks in a moment, but let me begin by saying how concerned I am that we're moving rapidly in the direction President Kennedy tried to warn us about.
According to a recent article in the Washington Post, there are now 854,000 American citizens with Top Secret clearances. The number of new secrets rose 75 percent between 1996 and 2009, and the number of documents using those secrets went from 5.6 million in 1996 to 54.6 million last year. There are an astounding 16 million documents being classified Top Secret by our government every year! Today, pretty much everything the government does is presumed secret. Isn't it time we asked ourselves whether this is really necessary for the conduct of foreign affairs or the internal operation of governments? Doesn't secrecy actually protect the favored classes and allow them to continue to help themselves at the expense of the rest of us? Isn't this a cancer growing on democracy?
After Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, I was heartened to see him issue an Open Government Initiative on his first full day in office. "I firmly believe what Justice Louis Brandeis once said, that sunlight is the best disinfectant," Obama said, "and I know that restoring transparency is not only the surest way to achieve results, but also to earn back the trust in government without which we cannot deliver changes the American people sent us here to make." After eight years of Bush and Cheney's secretive and deceitful ways, that sounded like a welcome relief. Obama ordered all federal agencies to "adopt a presumption in favor" of FOIA requests and so laid the groundwork to eventually release reams of previously-withheld government information on the Internet.
Well, so far it hasn't turned out the way Obama sketched it out. An audit released in March 2010 by the non-profit National Security Archive found that less than one-third of 90 federal agencies that process FOIA requests had changed their practices in any significant way. A few departments – Agriculture, Justice, Office of Management and Budget, and the Small Business Administration – got high marks for progress. But the State Department, Treasury, Transportation, and NASA had fulfilled fewer requests and denied more in the same time period. "Most agencies had yet to walk the walk," said the Archive's director Tom Blanton.
Things went downhill from there. In June 2010, the New York Times carried a Page One story detailing how Obama's administration was even more aggressive than Bush's in looking to punish people who leaked information to the media. In the course of his first 17 months as president, Obama had already surpassed every previous president in going after prosecutions of leakers. Thomas A. Drake, a National Security Agency employee who'd gone to the Baltimore Sun as a last resort because he knew that government eavesdroppers were squandering hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on failed programs, is today facing years in prison on ten felony charges including mishandling of classified information. An FBI translator received a 20-month sentence for turning over some classified documents to a blogger. And the Pentagon arrested Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst, who for openers had passed along to WikiLeaks the shocking video footage of a U.S. military chopper gunning down Baghdad civilians.
Then, in September 2010, the Obama Justice Department cited the so-called "state secrets doctrine" in successfully getting a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit on "extraordinary rendition" (a phrase that really means we send suspected terrorists to other countries to get held and tortured). In fact, Attorney General Eric Holder was hell-bent on upholding the Bush administration's claims in two major cases involving illegal detention and torture. Also in September, the Pentagon spent $47,300 of taxpayer dollars to buy up and destroy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of Operation Dark Heart, a memoir about Afghanistan by ex-Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer Anthony A. Shaffer. We first interviewed Lt. Colonel Shaffer for American Conspiracies, because his outfit (Able Danger) had identified Mohammed Atta as a terrorist threat long before he became the supposed lead hijacker on 9/11.
With Operation Dark Heart, publishing executives and intel outfits couldn't remember another instance where a government agency set out to get rid of a book that was already printed. Some months earlier, the Army reviewers who'd asked for and received some changes and redactions said they had "no objection on legal or operational security grounds" to the final version. But when the DIA saw the manuscript and showed it around to some other spy operations, they came up with 200-plus passages that might cause "serious damage to national security." By that time, several dozen copies of the book had already gone out to reviewers and online booksellers. (Those went on sale on eBay for between $1,995 and $4,995.)
So Operation Dark Heart was hastily reprinted with a number of paragraphs blanked out and, guess what?, it became a best-seller. Here are a few of the things that got canned, which the New York Times first pointed out. Everybody's known for years that the nickname for the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade is "the Fort." Censor that one! Another big secret - the CIA training facility is located at Camp Peary, Virginia. You can find that on Wikipedia but not anymore in this book! And did you know that Sigint stands for "Signals Intelligence?" You don't see that anymore in Operation Dark Heart. (I can't wait for the censors to pull my book from the shelves for revealing all this). Oh, and they removed a blurb from a former DIA director who called Shaffer's "one terrific book." Shaffer has now gone to court looking to have the book's complete text restored when the paperback comes out.
To Obama's credit, early in November 2010 he issued an Executive Order establishing a program to manage unclassified information that rescinded a Bush-era order designed to keep still more documents away from public scrutiny by putting new labels on them ("For Official Use Only" and "Sensitive But Unclassified.")
But soon thereafter came WikiLeaks' release of 250,000 secret State Department cables. This followed the group's disclosures earlier last year of 390,136 classified documents about the Iraq War and 76,607 documents about Afghanistan. As everybody knows, the politicians and the media commentators went ballistic over the cables being in the public domain – even though the New York Times, among others, was running front-page stories every day about their contents.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was for a moment our biggest bogeyman since Osama. Sarah Palin says he's "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" who should be pursued "with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders." She stopped short of saying he should be hunted down like the caribou she shoots in Alaska. Hillary Clinton calls what he's done "an attack on the international community." (I've never known Palin and Clinton to be this cozy in the same bed, so to speak). Mike Huckabee called for the execution of whoever leaked the cables to WikiLeaks. Newt Gingrich referred to Assange as an "enemy combatant." Joe Biden described him as "closer to being a hi-tech terrorist" than a whistleblower, and some liberal democrats would like to see Assange sent to prison for life. He's also been labeled an old-fashioned anarchist, mastermind of a criminal enterprise and, at best, a control freak and a megalomaniac.
This smacks of worse than McCarthyism – we're in a lynch mob moment, folks. Didn't Thomas Jefferson say that "information is the currency of democracy" and that, if he had to choose between government and a free press, he'd take the latter? Ron Paul is one of the only folks to have spoken up on Assange's behalf. Paul made quite a statement on the floor of the House, when he asked his colleagues what had caused more deaths – "lying us into war or the release of the WikiLeaks papers?" He added, "What we need is more WikiLeaks….In a free society, we're supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it."
Paul's point is important. Nobody has died as a result of Wikileaks' disclosures, but maybe we've forgotten that the whole Iraq war was based on fake evidence manufactured by the Bush-Cheney White House and the Brits, resulting in 4,430 American troops dead and about 32,000 wounded as of early December 2010. In Afghanistan, the toll is climbing fast – close to 1,500 Americans dead and almost 10,000 wounded. This doesn't take into account, of course, the hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. Do you think it's possible, as one Internet columnist has written, that Julian Assange is the scapegoat for arrogant American officials who'd rather point the finger at someone else than admit the blood on their own hands?
Personally, I think Julian Assange is a hero. It's a classic case of going after the messenger. Our diplomats get caught writing derogatory remarks and descriptions of foreign leaders, then turn around and accuse WikiLeaks of putting our country in danger. WikiLeaks is exposing our government officials for the frauds that they are. They also show us how governments work together to lie to their citizens when they are waging war.
Here are a few things we've learned from WikiLeaks' document releases that we didn't know before: The CIA has a secret army of 3,000 in Afghanistan, where the U.S. Ambassador in Kabul says there's no way to fix corruption because our ally is the one that's corrupt (one Afghan minister was caught carrying $52 million out of the country). In Iraq, there are another 15,000 civilian casualties that haven't been brought into the light, and our troops were instructed not to look into torture tactics that our Iraqi allies were using. U.S. Special Operations forces are in Pakistan without any public knowledge, and our Pakistani "allies" are the main protectors of the Taliban in Afghanistan!
I mean, let's face it: WikiLeaks exists because the mainstream media haven't done their job. Instead of holding government accountable as the "fourth branch" the founders intended, I guess the corporate media's role today is to protect the government from embassassment. Assange has pioneered "scientific journalism" (his term) – a news story is accompanied by the document it's based upon and the reader can make up his own mind. WikiLeaks' small team of reporters has unveiled more suppressed information than the rest of the world press combined! Assange is the publisher, not the one who revealed the "classified information." That's apparently Private Bradley Manning, who somehow found a security loophole and now is being held in solitary confinement at our Quantico, Virginia base facing up to 52 years in prison. Are we surprised that the United Nations' special investigator on torture is looking into whether Manning has been mistreated in custody? As for Assange, how our government wants to try him under the Espionage Act of 1917 is beyond me. Come on, he's an Australian citizen and his Internet domain is in Switzerland. (By the way, he also received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in 2010, and the Amnesty International Media Award in 2009).
And what about these cyberspace sabotage attacks against WikiLeaks that are being carried out across national borders by our government? As far as I can determine, these are illegal under both U.S. law and international treaties. Meantime, it blows my mind that students at Columbia and Boston University and probably other institutions of "higher learning" are being warned not to read any of these documents if they want to get a government job in the future. The Office of Management and Budget sent out a memo that forbids unauthorized federal employees and contractors from accessing WikiLeaks. The Library of Congress has blocked visitors to its computer system from doing the same. The Air Force started blocking its personnel from using work computers to look at the websites of the New York Times and other publications that had posted the cables. Instead, a page came up that said: "ACCESS DENIED. Internet Usage is Logged & Monitored." Over in Iraq, our troops who'd like to even read articles about all this get a "redirect" notice on their government network telling them they're on the verge of breaking the law. And a lot of these same soldiers have security clearances that would have allowed them to see the cables before they were leaked.
Given the close ties between the government and large corporations, I can't say I'm surprised that Amazon, PayPal, Mastercard, Visa and Bank of America took action to make sure that WikiLeaks could no longer receive any money through their channels. And I can't say I'm upset that a group of young "hacktavists" calling themselves Anonymous have taken retaliatory action against some of those same companies. They call it Operation Payback. "Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets," a fellow named Coldblood posted. "As an organization we have always taken a strong stance on censorship and freedom of expression on the internet and come out against those who seek to destroy it by any means. We feel that WikiLeaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs. the government."
More than 500 "mirror sites" now possess all the cables, and Assange has said we ain't seen nothin' yet if he meets an untimely demise. As I write this a couple of weeks before the New Year in 2011, he's living in a friend's mansion in England and fighting extradition charges. I'm sure a whole lot more will have developed by the time this book is published. I say let the chips fall where they may as WikiLeaks puts the truth out there. If our State Department is asking diplomats to steal personal information from U.N. officials and human rights groups, in violation of international laws, then shouldn't the world know about it and demand corrective action? Maybe if they know they're potentially going to be exposed, the powers-that-hide behind a cloak of secrecy will think twice before they plot the next Big Lie.
I agree with Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. He faced charges, too, back in 1971, but they were thrown out by a judge. He'S called Private Manning a "brother" who committed "a very admirable act" if he's the one who provided the documents to WikiLeaks. "To call them terrorists is not only mistaken, it's absurd," Ellsberg said.
The book you're about to read is undertaken in the same spirit. I've divided the book into five parts, starting out first to show links between deeds our government perpetrated in the past and what's going on today. If you don't know your own history, you're doomed to repeat it. You'll come across documents on some pretty scandalous behavior, including:
• The CIA's secret assassination manual and experiments to control human behavior with hypnosis, drugs, and other methods.
• The military's Operation Northwoods, a chilling attempt by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage a terror attack on our own citizens and make it look like Cuba was behind it – using a hijacked airliner, no less!
• After President Kennedy was trying to get our troops out of Vietnam, the military faked the Gulf of Tonkin attacks in order to expand the war.
• Our chemical and biological warfare capability back in 1969, leading you to wonder about the real origin of things like AIDS and lyme disease.
Part two delves into a series of government, military and corporate secrets, opening with excerpts from two recent reports on how our military and intelligence outfits put Nazi war criminals to work after World War Two. From there, you'll see some eye-opening documents including:
• The CIA's "Propaganda Notes" designed to shore up the Warren Commission's lone-gunman conclusion.
• How Oliver North collaborated with Panama's drug-running dictator Manuel Noriega.
•What America knew, and ignored, about the genocide happening in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.
• How we still turn a blind eye to Gulf War Illness and our veterans.
• The frightening background for our military to intervene in domestic affairs, set up "emergency relocation facilities" for our citizens, and establish a Civilian Inmate Labor Program.
• How failed inspections and ignored science are impacting our food supply and our bees, while we push to promote Monsanto's biotech agenda.
• What our military really knows about the dangers of climate change.
• How companies like CitiGroup and Koch Industries promote their "plutocracies" at the expense of the rest of us. Part Three I've called Shady White Houses, starting with "Tricky Dick" Nixon and his astounding plan to bring peace to Vietnam by pretending to nuke the Soviet Union! You'll also learn about:
• How the Bush White House stole the presidential elections in 2000 and again in 2004.
• The Obama State Department's call for our own diplomats to spy on the United Nations.
• Whether "cybersecurity" could mean the end of the Internet as we know it.
Part four focuses in on a subject I've explored a great deal in recent years, and that's whether we've been told the truth about the terrible events of September 11, 2001.
• A think tank called the Project for a New American Century anticipating "a new Pearl Harbor" to promote its agenda for "Rebuilding America's Defenses."
• Clear warnings the Bush Administration ignored that something was coming.
• The "Stand Down" order that kept our military from responding on 9/11.
• Evidence that Building 7 was taken down by a controlled demolition.
• The role of insider stock trading in advance of 9/11.
And finally, part five examines the so-called "war on terror" and the terrible price we're paying in terms of our liberties and the lives being lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. You'll first read excerpts from a long memo by Bush's Justice Department that subverts the Constitution by shredding a number of civil rights, followed by Bush's justification for America's torture of "unlawful combatants." * The "Media Ground Rules" that keep the truth hidden at Guantanamo.
The torture techniques, and medical experiments, being conducted there and the paper trail on the CIA's destruction of 92 torture videos.
• Decapitation of a detainee in Iraq, by our own troops!
• How the CIA "spins" the war in Afghanistan, and the fact that drugs are fueling that country's economy.
• The State Department's revelation that Saudi Arabia is actually "a critical source of terrorist funding."
•A report by the Rand Corporation showing that military force has never worked in combating terrorism.
Following the 63 documents, you'll find an Epilogue of Internet resources to use in your own pursuit of the truth about what's going on behind-the-scenes.
Here's what should concern us all: if you look back at the US Patriot Act that Congress passed almost unanimously in the wake of 9/11, the Bill of Rights was already in peril. Let me offer a brief outline of how things changed:
The First Amendment is about freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble. The Patriot Act says that the government is free to monitor religious and political institutions without any suspicion of criminal activity. The government can also prosecute librarians or the keepers of any other records (including journalists) related to a "terror investigation."
The Fourth Amendment speaks to our right to be secure "against unreasonable searches and seizures." The Patriot Act says the government can search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause.
The Sixth Amendment entitles anyone accused of a crime to "a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury." The Patriot Act says the government can jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.
The Sixth Amendment says an accused person has "compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense." The Patriot Act says the government can monitor conversations between attorneys and clients in federal prisons and even deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.
The Sixth Amendment also says an accused criminal must "be confronted with the witnesses against him." The Patriot Act says Americans can be jailed without even being charged, let alone face any witnesses. What troubles me more than anything is how Congress can simply vote to supersede the Constitution. They're not allowed to do that, to vote in new rules arbitrarily. Changing the Constitution requires you to go through many hoops. How can we allow this kind of unprecedented change to happen?
At the same time, it's recently been reported that our government is building up a huge domestic spying network to collect information on us all, involving local police, state and military authorities feeding information into a database on people who've never been accused of wrongdoing. Homeland Security has given billions of dollars in grants to state governments since 9/11, and there are now more than 4,000 organizations in the domestic apparatus. The FBI keeps the ultimate file, with profiles on tens of thousands of Americans reported to be "acting suspiciously." (I'm sure I'm one of them.) Also the technologies we've developed for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are now being used by law enforcement agencies at home – hand-held fingerprint scanners, biometric data devices, unmanned aircraft monitoring our borders with Mexico and Canada.
In other words, we the taxpayers are funding our own government to keep tabs on what we do! This is outrageous, but it's been a long time coming. Our tax dollars have paid for mind control experiments and assassination attempts and fake attacks to draw us into war. Our tax dollars have funded drug runners and "extraordinary rendition" of detainees. And they've not been used in places where they should be going – like to help our veterans cope with Gulf War Syndrome and to keep the nation of Rwanda from mass genocide. What right does the government have to abuse our money like that? This is diabolical!
I've put together this book because it's become crystal-clear that our democracy has been undermined from within and it's been going on for a long time. We the people have got to wake up and start demanding accountability! Let's never forget the words of Patrick Henry: "The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them."
PART ONE: OUR SCANDALOUS POST-WAR HISTORY 1. THE CIA'S SECRET ASSASSINATION MANUAL
What follows are excerpts from a 19-page CIA document that was prepared as part of a coup against the Guatemalan government in 1954 and declassified in 1997. Maybe they should change the name to the CIA's "secret first degree murder manual." How is that we are allowed to kill other people if we're not in a declared war with them? Clearly this is a premeditated conspiracy involving more than one person. My big question is, who makes the call on this? To arbitrarily go out in the world and kill someone without their being charged with a crime! The thought of taking out another country's leadership is so despicable, it makes me ashamed that I'm an American. But it later was revealed that, during the Cold War, the CIA is known to have plotted against eight foreign leaders, and five of them died violent deaths. The CIA's "Executive Action" arm was involved for years in plotting with the Mob and others to murder Fidel Castro.
Are we all to believe this is simply James Bond, where agents can arbitrarily knock off people and walk away? They actually had a manual that promotes throwing people from high buildings, with "plausible denial"!
One paragraph in particular gives me pause, when I think back to what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963. "Public figures or guarded officials may be killed with great reliability and some safety if a firing point can be established prior to an official occasion," the manual instructed.
Friday, April 1, 2011
David Talbot on Hollywood
The coverup continues: The Kennedys in Hollywood
The "Kennedys" miniseries is the latest proof tinseltown just can't handle the truth. I should know
By David Talbot http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2011/04/01/kennedys_in_hollywood/
Although it lasted a mere 1,000 days, the Kennedy presidency has been entombed under 1,000 layers of junk history. Now -- with the 50th anniversary of JFK's brief reign upon us, and the half-century mark coming up on his 1963 assassination -- we will soon be neck deep in Kennedy sludge. A flurry of Kennedy projects are in various stages of production in Hollywood, which has long been dazzled by the family's glamour. But none of them promises to go beneath the surface and capture the deeper essence of their tragic story. When it comes to the Kennedys, Hollywood still can't handle the truth.
The first Camelot drama out of the chute is "The Kennedys," the controversial miniseries that was canceled by the History Channel under pressure from Carolyn Kennedy and historians, who argued that the channel should at least make some effort to root the story in, well, history. This was a quaint argument, since the History Channel abandoned history long ago in favor of ice-road truckers, gator wrestlers and other reality sideshows. But the network owners were sufficiently embarrassed by the ruckus to dump the series. "The Kennedys" then took a long, downward trip through television's alimentary canal, ending up in some dark cavity called the Reelz Channel. The six-episode series begins plopping out on Sunday.
"The Kennedys" is a hatchet job pure and simple. The saga is produced by Joel Surnow, which is sort of like Mel Gibson making "The Anne Frank Story." Surnow is the right-wing, Dick Cheney fluff boy who brought us "24," the show that told America not to adjust its dials, that the Constitution was now obsolete. The Camelot noir miniseries, which wallows in mobsters, mistresses and self-medication, is basically the Kennedys as Sopranos, minus the good writing and direction. The early reviews have not been kind, even in the normally charitable Hollywood trade press. "The whole thing," Variety gagged, "plays like a bad telenovela filtered through a 'History for Dummies' text."
All right, I admit, I'm a little bitter. I had a dog in this fight, a rival Hollywood project. I'm the author of a 2007 bestseller about the Kennedy brothers that tells the story of Robert Kennedy's secret quest to solve JFK's murder. My book, "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years," focuses on the brothers' heroic struggle with the national security state to ease America away from the nuclear brink and end the Cold War. I show that Bobby Kennedy became the country's first conspiracy theorist after his brother's assassination, immediately suspecting that the same CIA and Pentagon officials with whom they had bitterly dueled were behind JFK's murder. Bobby realized that he couldn't bring President Kennedy's killers to justice unless he fought his way back to the White House. RFK's presidential campaign in 1968 was not only a fight for the soul of America -- a country poisoned by war and racial strife -- it was a breathtakingly bold, and ultimately fatal, confrontation with his brother's assassins.
This, to me, is the most dramatic story to tell about the Kennedys. They tried to save America, and they were killed by the Saurons who have kept our country in a permanent state of fear and war for the past half-century -- virtually my entire life. It's a grand epic, as old as ancient Rome, as beautiful and horrible as Shakespeare.
The executives at Lionsgate, one of the bigger independent studios in Hollywood, saw it the same way and they optioned my book for a TV miniseries in 2008. They treated "Brothers" as a hot property, the ultimate political thriller. Joining forces with a high-profile producer -- Sid Ganis, then president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- and an A-list TV writer, the studio began aggressively pitching "Brothers" to TV networks. Jon Hamm -- the star of Lionsgate's hit series "Mad Men" -- was chatted up as the perfect JFK. No wardrobe changes necessary.
The traveling "Brothers" road show roamed all over the entertainment capital. Because of the industry names attached to the project, we got high-level meetings at HBO, Showtime, ABC and Starz, among other stations of the Hollywood cross. At one point, Todd Haynes was interested in directing, before peeling away to do "Mildred Pierce."
There was buzz, there was excitement, there was love in the room. And then nothing. Chris Albrecht -- the programming wizard who had made HBO not just television ("The Sopranos," "Six Feet Under," etc.) and then resurfaced at Starz -- talked about making "Brothers" the centerpiece of his first season at his new network home. Albrecht was all Roy Cohn, hooded-eye intensity, and fuck-'em-let's-do-this swagger. And then, he had a sudden change of heart. The fearless TV mogul didn't want to compete with the Joel Surnow miniseries, or at least that was the explanation. In Hollywood there are always murky back stories.
Yes, I know -- "It's Chinatown, Jake" -- get over it. There are a million sad stories in Naked Hollywood. But something seemed rigged here, as one network after the next turned down "Brothers" -- something political under the surface. Oliver Stone, whom I met somewhere along the way, told me in a matter-of-fact tone, "'Brothers' will never get made in this town." Stone knew something about the subject. His "JFK," released back in 1991, was the last movie to offer a deep and brave interpretation of the Kennedy tragedy. For his efforts, Stone was so savagely pilloried, he still hasn't fully recovered his reputation or -- it seems to me -- his political self-confidence.
Apparently, Stone knew what he was talking about. Now, three years after Lionsgate bought the rights to "Brothers," my book is an orphan in Hollywood, owned by nobody but me. Meanwhile, a slew of other Kennedy projects have rushed forward. A low point in my Hollywood tragicomedy came when the screenwriter of the widely reviled Surnow miniseries, a man named Stephen Kronish, tried to defend himself against the rising chorus of criticism by citing "Brothers" as one of his sources. This is the very definition of adding insult to injury.
Now, in addition to Surnow's "The Kennedys," Matt Damon is preparing to play Bobby in yet another bland biopic; Leonardo DiCaprio is working on a Kennedy conspiracy movie based on Lamar Waldron's books -- heavy tomes that propose such a convoluted explanation for the JFK assassination that they make "Inception" look linear in comparison; and, worst of all, Tom Hanks' Playtone company is preparing an assassination miniseries for HBO based on celebrity prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's massive phone book, "Reclaiming History," which took a whopping 1,648 pages to argue that Lee Harvey Oswald did it all by himself, and was still unconvincing.
For the past 50 years, every Kennedy drama except Oliver Stone's has fallen into the same predictable categories. They are either safe -- i.e., weepy valentines to the suffering, stoic family -- or sleazy (see Surnow above). When filmmakers do screw up their courage to dig a little deeper, they invariably end up blaming the Mafia for killing Jack and changing American history. Yes, the mob played a role in Dallas. But the crime lords never participated in anything this epic without their overlords -- the CIA, their longtime partners in crime.
Here's my advice to the viewing public as the Kennedy mudslide begins. Run, and don't look back. There is nothing you need in these movies and TV "events" to understand the true Kennedy story.
This is all you need to know. The Kennedys died for a reason. They died because they told America that our enemies were human, like us, and loved their children too. They died because they vowed to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces, and because they told the generals who wanted to launch a nuclear war over Cuba that they were mad. While Barack Obama outsources his presidency to Wall Street, the Pentagon and the CIA, John Kennedy tried to tell his fellow citizens that we must no longer dominate the world.
This is what you need to know. The Kennedys died for America's sins.
David Talbot is the founder of Salon and the author, most recently, of "Devil Dog: The Amazing True Story of the Man Who Saved America" (Simon & Schuster) and "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years." More: David Talbot
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
JFK Act Congressional Overisght Hearings
Sunshine Week is Underway and the Congressional Oversight Committee will be holding a full committee hearing from 9am-11am on St. Patrick's Day - Thursday, March 17, 2011 on the subject of “The Freedom of Information Act: Crowd-Sourcing Government Oversight.”
Those scheduled to testify include: Miriam Nisbet - NARA; Daniel Metcalfe – Collaboration on Government Secrecy; Tom Fitton – Judicial Watch; Rick Blum – Sunshine in Government; Angela Canterbury – Project on Open Government Oversight.
This hearing may be televised in the USA on CSPAN live or delayed at another time.
It will be a good time to view the committee at work and see how such hearings are conducted, so when they finally get around to holding a hearing on the JFK Act we know what to expect.
The two on-line petitions we have going requesting the committee hold hearings - include the original petition to the Democrats (with over 350 signatures JFK ACT Oversight Hearings - Signatures) and the more recent one (with nearly 200 JFK Act Oversight Hearings - Signatures), which will be presented to the Committee chairman and subcommittee chairmen and other members of the committee this week.
Thanks to all who have signed on. If you have yet to sign the petition you can do now or within the next week JFK Act Oversight Hearings Petition, and send the link to those friends you know who would like to sign it.
www.petitiononline.com/112263/petition.html.
We also are requesting that people privately fax a letter to the Chairman of the Committee (Issa) requesting to be notified when a JFK Act Oversight Hearing is scheduled so arrangements can be made to attend or review the proceedings on CSPAN.
Here's my one-page letter that will give you an idea of what to day. If the committee gets 100 such faxes or letters mailed to them, they will hold a hearing, and you can be one who makes a difference. While some people may be shy about signing a public petition, your confidentially will be maintained and you can still have an impact by sending a one-page, polite fax and mailed letter to the Committee, as I have done.
Open Letter to the Chairman of the House Oversight Committeeof the USCongress Rep. Darrell Issa (R. Calf
Rep. Darrell Issa (R. Calf.)
2157 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-5074 /Fax: (202) 225-3974
Dear Rep. Issa,
As chairman of the House Oversight Committee, you are responsible for holding public hearings that oversee the laws of the United States, including the JFK Act of 1992 and the work of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), that has yet to be given any oversight since the Review Board was dissolved over fifteen years ago.
The last time the Republicans controlled the Committee they didn’t conduct any oversight at all for over a decade, and the few years that the Democrats were in control they appeared sympathetic but “didn’t want torock the boat.” Well now you are in the driver’s seat, and are threatening to hold oversight hearings every week, and if you do, then oversight of the JFKAct should be given a top priority.
It is an important subject that many Americans are concerned about, and there will be an increase in interest with the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy administration. There are many questions that deserve to be addressed, including why Secret Service records were intentionally destroyed after they were requested by the ARRB, why other important assassination records were destroyed, how national security records could go missing without any investigation of their disposition, and why significant numbers of records are still wrongfully and illegally being withheld.
This is a non-partisan issue supported by both Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, conspiracy and non-conspiracy advocates alike, and is of serious concern to the majority of Americas who have lost their confidence in the government.
I believe you will take this issue seriously and request to be notified, if and when you decide to schedule an oversight hearing on the JFK Act, so I can make arrangements to attend and review the proceedings that will be of interest to all Americans.
Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter,
William Kelly Billkelly3@gmail.com
For those who are serious about utilizing and applying the Congressional Oversight powers to the JFK Act, you should get a copy and read this pamplet, The Art of Congressional Oversight: A User’s Guide To Doing It Right (2009, POGO – Project On Government Oversight) with Chapter One available on line here: http://pogoarchives....k/chapter-1.pdf
http://www.pogo.org/cots/
http://pogoarchives....ok/contents.pdf
Contents
Introduction 5
Chapter 1:
Recognizing Responsibility and Power 7
The legal basis for congressional oversight 8
Key principles of congressional oversight 8
Measure you Congressional IQ 11
Additional Reading12
Chapter 2:
Beginning Your Investigation 15
Deciding what type of oversight investigation you want topursue 16
Checking your committee’s rules 16
Studying what is already available 17
Narrowing your search 18
Using case studies to exemplify systematic failures 18
Finding the instances of wrongdoing (waste, fraud, or abuse)19
Getting a hold of the documentation 19
Cultivating contacts within the agencies and companies youcover 20
Listening to insiders and whistleblowers 20
Getting out of the office 20
Utilizing the media 21
An Investigative Case Study: Not Sweeping it Under the Rug22
Chapter 3:
Utilizing Resources 25
Tapping into other investigator’s reports 25
Working with insiders and whistleblowers 26
Reaching out to other experts 29
Finding publicly available information 31
Additional Reading 31
Chapter 4
Conducing the Investigation and Prepping for thehearing 33
Keeping your boss engaged 34
Being mindful of potential procedural objections to yourinvestigation 35
Deciding on your media strategy ahead of time 36
Considering legislative fixes before and after the hearing36
Consulting with House or Senate Legal Counsel 37
Establishing Process 37
Being Patient 38
Knowing your issue 38
Interviewing your subject ahead of time 39
Giving the witnesses or agencies zero excuse for notcooperating 39
Not being fooled by pseudo-classifications 41
Exerting Congress’s right to information 41
Using Congress’s oversight arsenal 43
Additional Reading47
Chapter 5:
The Hearing and Beyond 49
Engaging the media 49
Scripting the hearing 51
Not letting the hearing be the end 58
Additional Reading 60
Endnotes 61
Additional Resources 65
http://pogoarchives....k/chapter-1.pdf
A. The Right Balance of Power: The Responsibility of CongressionalOversight 65
B. Federal Contracting: Investigative Tips 72
C. Contracting Resources and Publicly Available Information75 c
D. Congressional Tip Sheet on Access to ClassifiedInformation 81
Members of the Subcommittee on Information/NARA and Technology
The Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and Procurement Reform.
• Republicans
Chair: Rep. James Lankford (OK-5)
Vice Chair: Rep. Mike Kelly (PA-3)
Jason Chaffetz (UT-3)
Tim Walberg (MI-7)
Raul Labrador (ID-1)
Pat Meehan (PA-7)
Blake Farenthold (TX-27)
• Democrats
Gerald Connolly, Virginia, Ranking Member
Christopher Murphy, Connecticut
Stephen Lynch, Massachusetts
The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has legislative jurisdiction over the District of Columbia, the government procurement process, federal personnel systems, the Postal Service and other matters. Our primary responsibility, however, is oversight of virtually everything government does – from national security to homeland security grants, from federal workforce policies to regulatory reform and reorganization authority, from information technology procurements at individual agencies to government-wide data security standards.
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