One Year of Covert History

It is difficult to believe that it was one year ago today that I launched this blog with this post about JFK assassination suspect David Atlee Phillips. (It was this post in fact which led to this blog being referenced in Joan Mellen's A Farewell to Justice.) At that time I did not have a home computer and so I blogged mostly on my lunch break. Joseph Cannon was the first blogger to link to this site, followed by Professor Hex, and then others. At that time I did not have Sitemeter, and so did not know how few people were actually reading this. Since February, when I added Sitemeter I have had 11,391 visitors, including a guy who was apparently googling for rectal thermometer porn.

Originally my focus was primarily on the Kennedy assassination and other covert operations, some of the material from my own research and some that of others. Over time I have ventured more into the current situation in this country, as never more than now do the lessons of the past need to be applied to the present. The "official story" of our history, I am afraid, is largely as much a fairy tale as the pronouncements of the current administration. George Orwell said, "Telling the truth in a time of universal deceit is a revolutionary act," and that is where we find ourselves today. It is not so much a matter of Republican versus Democrat as Republic versus Empire, and Democracy itself is at stake, as it always is.

A few years after the assassination of President Kennedy, District Attorney Jim Garrison of New Orleans received a mysterious manuscript titled The Plot. A man of keen literary sensibilities he gave it a more apt title: Farewell America, for he knew better than most what was at stake. Garrison's investigation was flawed, like the man himself, but he battled powerful forces, and he sought the truth about our history. He took as his motto an old Roman maxim, fiat justitia, ruat coelum: "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall."

I am still struggling to find my own voice in this blog and I have given some thought to what I want to do in the year ahead. There are so many blogs that follow the news of the day and comment on it, and do it better, like Born at the Crest of the Empire. Nonetheless, I expect that I will continue to excerpt news stories that catch my eye, and there's no point in having a blog if you're not going to put your two cents in. Nor do I plan to get all serious--you can expect to continue to find the occassional scantily clad woman, as in my "dead strippers" series, and cheap shots at the President are always fun. I do plan more posts on the Kennedy assassination, a long-time interest of mine. I know I risk being dismissed as a "conspiracy blogger," but that is a risk I am willing to take. Even in my JFK assassination work I have always been willing to risk not being taken seriously, as I have investigated fringe areas, such as the Gemstone File, and the McCone-Rowley document, which I was the first to foist upon the world. (See my links under Research Projects.) Nonetheless, I feel I have made a few small contributions to the field, although nothing on the scale of some of the people I have corresponded with over the years, including Dick Russell, George Michael Evica, and Joan Mellen.

So, more of the same, but hopefully better.

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CBS News, ABC News and the Lone Assassin Theory

---A Flash Essay by Roger Bruce Feinman, J.D.

This runs about 50 minutes and I haven't had a chance to watch the whole thing yet.

Overview

Background on the Presentation

In that presentation I detailed, among other things, how a conflict among CBS News executives in 1966 over whether to present a balanced debate or to editorialize on the case resulted in a defense brief for the Warren Commission, aided in secret by a former member of the commission, John J. McCloy; how CBS suppressed an explosive discovery about the Kennedy autopsy, corroborated years later by several witnesses, that went to the very heart of the JFK assassination controversy during its peak in the Sixties and may have forced the U.S. Government to reopen the investigation at an early point; and how CBS skewered the results of pseudo-scientific tests to make the lone assassin conclusion seem more plausible.

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Rich DellaRosa posted this on the JFK Research Forum

John Judge has told me the same story, in less detail, by private email. A while back I contacted the Don Norton who some believe to be the real Lee Harvey Oswald. He reacted much as you or I would if put in the same position.

Updated: from my email correspondence with Don Norton:

Mr. Norton, Several people on several different internet forums relating to the JFK assassination have made claims that you are the "real" Lee Harvey Oswald or have made claims to be such in the past. You are alleged years ago to have contacted a conspiracy researcher Mae Brussell and claimed this. Do you have any comment?---

Don Norton :Yeah. Are you crazy?????

Followed up a few minutes later by:You know, some idiot called me about 10 years ago with the same ridiculous idea. Where do you nuts come from?

After I explained that I was not the one saying that he was Oswald:

"Gary. Sorry for being so rude, but you've got to imagine what it feels like to have someone accuse you of being Oswald. The utter rediculousness (if that's even a word) of it is almost funny. Kind of like me accusing you of being some infamous figure from the past.Years ago I had some nutcase call me on my cell phone and ask me to takea couple of tests to prove I wasn't Oswald. I suggested that he do the same and I never heard back from him.

I don't know how many people in this country have the same name as me, but it has to be a fairly common name. In fact there's a couple of Don Norton's in the small area I live in. I wonder if they are getting the same kind of calls. I can assure you I am not Oswald. I was in the 8th grade when Kennedy was shot and I still remember walking home with mybuddies and talking about it with them.

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LONG LIVE IRAQ AND THE IRAQI PEPOLE

Did you know the Iraqi government had a website. Neither did I until I read about it in Cosmic Iguana

The Prime Minister announces the National Reconciliation Project before the Parliament

- The Government of National Unity program doesn't differentiate among Iraqis except in serving the public and country.

- We lend the hand for whom build the country.

- No reconciliation with, involved in killing the innocent Iraqis.

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Photo of the Day - Our Fearless Leader and Friend

(Words fail me, once again. Perhaps we should have a Caption Contest. Anyone? Thanks to The Omega Man from the Rigorous Intuition Discussion Board for sending this to me.)

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American Soldier Trains His Killers

A few weeks before he died, a depressed Spc. Patrick Ryan McCaffrey called his father from Iraq and told him that he had just been fired upon by the Iraqi troops he was helping to train.

"They were on night patrol, and they had been fired upon by what they thought were 12 insurgents. They killed several of them, and three surrendered," said Bob McCaffrey on Tuesday in a phone interview with The Chronicle. "Some of the dead ones were part of the group that they had been training for a week, and the survivors were also part of that group."

McCaffrey said that his 34-year-old son notified his commanding officer but "was told to keep his mouth shut." A month later, on June 22, 2004, his son was dead. The Army said his unit was ambushed by enemy forces on a patrol near Balad, Iraq.

On Tuesday, a Pentagon spokesman said that the Army's Criminal Investigation Command has concluded that McCaffrey, from Tracy, and 2nd Lt. Andre Demetrius Tyson, 33, of Riverside, were killed by Iraqi soldiers who were patrolling alongside the U.S. soldiers.

"It's god-awful," said Bob McCaffrey, a Redding rancher and Army veteran. "It underlies the lie of this whole situation in Iraq. It's all to me a pack of lies."

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Let freedom ring. So, by one vote the United States Senate decided that the freedoms the flag represents are more important than the symbol. (No American flags were burned in the making of this blog post.)

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Don't know what it is--but it's circling Saturn. With thanks to Professor Hex.

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Losing the Afghan War?

"There is an awful feeling that everything is lurching downward," the Western diplomat told the Washington Post.

"Nearly five years on, there is no rule of law. ... The Afghans know it is all a charade, and they see us as not only complicit, but actively involved. You cannot fight a terror war and build a weak state at the same time, and it was a terrible mistake to think we could." What that disconsolate diplomat is saying is that America is losing the Afghan war.

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Did the US Sabotage the Iraqi Peace Plan?

Yes, but it seems to have escaped the attention of the mass media.

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From American Samizdat

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Larry Johnson worked previously with the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, and is a recognized expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security, crisis and risk management. His opinion on the future in Iraq?

The US will be leaving Iraq and leaving it in a mess that we can't fix. It is now inevitable.

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Sunday Religion Corner

"We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction." --- H.P. Lovecraft (found At the Mountains of Madness)

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Extreme right-wing blogger Atlas Shrugs said on Friday:

I understand Michael Ledeen spoke at a small lunch in DC today. The situation with Condi/Iran reminded him of Churchill's observation about Chamberlain going to Munich to negotiate with Hitler: "He had a choice between dishonor and war. He chose dishonor and got war." Cheney and Rumsfeld are all we have left. That's why the CIA weasels and the Traitor Media will now focus all their guns on them.

She is dismayed that Condi may carry the day. She reports that Bush's private nickname for Condi is "44" indicating that he wants her to be the next President. She speculates that Cheney was going to step down before the 2006 election, to be replaced by Condi. Apparently, though, Cheney does not like her soft positions on Iran.

The bottom line is that Cheney is so infuriated at Condi that he may now balk at stepping down and giving her the vice-presidency. “I think you better give her a new nickname,” he reportedly told GW. “I’m going to stick around a while.”

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Without a draft or a substantial increase in coalition forces on the ground in Iraq, we do not have the resources to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign. If we decided to go this route we must be ready to accept that the process will endure several years and that casualty rates for coalition forces would, at least over the short run, increase dramatically. Talking about this is pure fantasy. No political leader in the United States has the stomach or courage go down this road.

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BBC on Iraqi Plan for Peace

Other parts of the plan are an insistence that democracy has arrived in Iraq and must be supported, a refusal to set any date or timetable for a total withdrawal of US troops (presented as a weakness), yet with a suggestion that a reduction might start soon as the effort to transfer responsibility to Iraqi forces gathers pace.

Yesterday we were told by The Times, which said that it had seen the plan, that it would include a timetable for withdrawal of all foreign troops. MSNBC/Newsweek had also seen the plan and had reported:

June 24, 2006 - A timetable for withdrawal of occupation troops from Iraq. Amnesty for all insurgents who attacked U.S. and Iraqi military targets. Release of all security detainees from U.S. and Iraqi prisons. Compensation for victims of coalition military operations.

Those sound like the demands of some of the insurgents themselves, and in fact they are. But they're also key clauses of a national reconciliation plan drafted by new Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who will unveil it Sunday. The provisions will spark sharp debate in Iraq—but the fiercest opposition is likely to come from Washington, which has opposed any talk of timetables, or of amnesty for insurgents who have attacked American soldiers.

NEWSWEEK has obtained a draft copy of the national reconciliation plan, and verified its contents with two Iraqi officials involved in the reconciliation process who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the plan's contents.
The provision for amnesty for insurgents has also been watered down, and does not now seem to include those who have attacked American troops. Apparently, the Iraqi government is still not strong enough to stand up to the Bush administration--and the Bush administration has no plans to ever withdraw all our troops from Iraq.

Update: Apparently the insurgents have already rejected the plan.

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WMDs Found in Iraq

I opened the folded off-white paper form and noticed several interesting things right away. The bombs had been purchased in the United States in 1988 from what appeared to be a government contractor called The Carlyle Group. I am almost embarrassed now to say that I had not heard of The Carlyle Group at that time so the name meant nothing to me. The only reason I remember it at all is that I was amazed that the bill was in English and I was stunned to see that a bomb that was used by Iraq in delivering chemical WMD – the only WMD found during the entire Iraq war – was in fact supplied to Saddam Hussein by the United States.

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There has been a lot in the news about the possibility of an "amnesty" to local Iraqi insurgents who only have American blood on their hands. The Bush Administration may not like this but may well accept it as part of an Iraqi plan for peace. The Times has this story about negotiations that just might put an end to this war. The 28 point package may also call for a timetable for an American withdrawal.

The Government will promise a finite, UN-approved timeline for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq; a halt to US operations against insurgent strongholds; an end to human rights violations, including those by coalition troops; and compensation for victims of attacks by terrorists or Iraqi and coalition forces.

The deal, which has been seen by The Times, aims to divide Iraqi insurgents from foreign fighters linked to al-Qaeda. It builds on months of secret talks involving Jalal al-Talabani, the Iraqi President, Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador, and seven Sunni insurgent groups.

As American forces battle insurgents in Baghdad, and the Iraqi goernment declares a state if emergency this may be our last chance for an honorable withdrawal from Iraq.

The Government intends to form a committee to distinguish between groups that can be considered legitimate resistance and those that are beyond the pale. “For those that defended their country against foreign troops, we need to open a new page . . . They did not mean to destabilise Iraq. They were defending Iraqi soil,” said Adnan Ali, a senior member of the Dawa party of Nouri alMaliki, the Prime Minister.

Talk on an amnesty for insurgents and language like "legitimate resistance" and insurgents "defending Iraqi soil" will not go over well with Conservatives in this country. We should keep in mind the friendly advice of formerIsraeli Prime Minister nearly two years ago:

"There's no way to win an occupation. It's just a matter of choosing the size of your humiliation."

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Greg Palast on Caging Lists and Why the GOP Does Not Want the Voting Rights Act Renewed

In the 2004 Presidential race, the GOP ran a massive multi-state, multi-million-dollar operation to challenge the legitimacy of Black, Hispanic and Native-American voters. The methods used broke the law — the Voting Rights Act. And while the Bush Administration’s Civil Rights Division grinned and looked the other way, civil rights lawyers are circling, preparing to sue to stop the violations of the Act before the 2008 race.

Therefore, Republicans have promised to no longer break the law — not by going legit… but by eliminating the law.

In the 2004 election, over THREE MILLION voters were challenged at the polls. No one had seen anything like it since the era of Jim Crow and burning crosses. In 2004, voters were told their registrations had been purged or that their addresses were “suspect.”

Denied the right to the regular voting booths, these challenged voters were given “provisional” ballots. Over a million of these provisional ballots (1,090,729 of them) were tossed in the electoral dumpster uncounted.

Funny thing about those ballots. About 88% were cast by minority voters.

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Senator Rick Santorum

"We now have found stockpiles," Santorum asserted.

But intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitive nature, said the weapons were produced before the 1991 Gulf War and there is no evidence to date of chemical munitions manufactured since then. They said an assessment of the weapons concluded they are so degraded that they couldn't now be used as designed.

They probably would have been intended for chemical attacks during the Iran-Iraq War, said David Kay, who headed the U.S. weapons-hunting team in Iraq from 2003 until early 2004. He said experts on Iraq's chemical weapons are in "almost 100 percent agreement" that sarin nerve agent produced from the 1980s would no longer be dangerous.

"It is less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point," Kay said. And any of Iraq's 1980s-era mustard would produce burns, but it is unlikely to be lethal, Kay said.

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I knew it!

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Conservative Columnist calls Democrats Traitors

I have noticed a disturbing trend in recent years of personalities on the Right using the language of treason to describe people on the other side. The vile Ann Coulter is one example. Hal Lindsey, the bestselling author of several nutball religious books, including The Late Great Planet Earth, has a regular column on WorldNutDaily. Today he describes 39 Senators as Quislings because of a vote they cast on Iraq.

Yesterday, the U.S. Senate rehabilitated Vikdun Quisling's historical legacy somewhat, with at least a third of the Senate suggesting by their own vote that Quisling was really a patriot.

After all, all he did was betray the best interests of his nation, his military and his countrymen to further his own personal political ambitions.

I believe this is what 39 senators did when they voted in favor of the Feingold-Levy amendment demanding a withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Iraqi battlefield.

It is more than disingenuous; it is deliberately dishonest to say that such an action does not give aid and comfort to the enemy. Indeed, the practice of granting aid and comfort to the enemy in order to disgrace the sitting administration is so prevalent that it even has an acronym – ACE.

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William Arkin on Korean Missile Non-Crisis

North Korea, starved for attention and with its own fish to fry domestically and in its own region, may or may not be preparing some rocket for launch, and it may or may not be attempting to use its missile as a bargaining chip or a PR stunt, and it may just be attempting to put its own satellite into space. What should crystal clear though in a world of risks and balances is that North Korea's missile, even if it exists, is hardly a threat to us.

Many in Seoul are dismissing the reports of fueling and the military dimensions of a launch, stressing that all evidence appears to point to another attempt to launch a North Korean satellite. They point to the above ground obvious preparations and their own intelligence that indicates no warhead.

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US acknowledges torture at Guantanamo; in Iraq, Afghanistan

GENEVA (AFX) - Washington has, for the first time, acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.

Torture, Cover-Up At Gitmo?

The FBI does its own questioning of prisoners at Guantanamo, and those agents have been writing emails, classified secret, to FBI headquarters. They detail abuse by military interrogators. The agents wrote of finding prisoners “chained hand and foot in a fetal position” for up to 24 hours at a time, and of prisoners who had “urinated or defecated on themselves."

Another FBI document says an interrogator grabbed a detainee’s thumbs and “bent them backwards” and “grabbed his genitals.” One FBI agent reported that he saw a detainee had been “gagged with duct tape that covered much of his head.” The interrogator explained that the prisoner had been “chanting the Koran and would not stop.”

Red Cross: Guantanamo Tactics 'Tantamount to Torture'

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

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Xymphora predicts!

At the end of the day on November 7, there will still be no indictments against either Rove or Cheney, and no Democrat control of either the House or the Senate.

Look for my update on November 8.

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National Enquirer calls Ann Coulter "the most hated woman in America."

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Welcome Sploid and Professor Hex visitors - I've been getting a lot of visitors from these two sites due to the Illuminati card game post. Perhaps you would be interested in some of my favorite past items.

From the popular "dead strippers" series: Candy Barr in a tree

JFK assassination research:

David Atlee Phillips: Family Secrets

Is Jack Ruby Alive?

Is Jack Ruby Alive: Part Two

Clay Shaw: "highly paid contract source"

Reasons of State: Part One

Reasons of State: Part Two

Ned Touchstone, David Ferrie and Jim Garrison

Ned Touchstone's Assassination Investigation

Also, for all my readers, I would like to put in a plug for my other websites, which only get a handful of visitors a week. They can be found in the Research Projects section of my links.

First, the McCone-Rowley document Is it proof that Oswald was CIA or a clever hoax?

Second, I have two sites devoted to the Gemstone File. Perhaps you've seen the Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File, a well-known dubious document. But have you seen the massive 350 page Gemstone document that the Key is a key to? It can be found here. For more Gemstone info see my Gemstone blog , which I will be adding more info to soon.

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Fraud in Ohio in 2004 Election (with thanks to Professor Hex)

On July 29, 2005, Richard Hayes Phillips, PhD testified at an Election Assessment Hearing in Houston, Texas and said, "I have investigated the Ohio election results, precinct by precinct, and have found three categories of problems: voter suppression, ballots cast but not counted, and alteration of the vote count."

In another move directly calculated increase traffic jams at the polls, on election day, the GOP sent out 3,600 operatives to challenge voters in 31 counties in mostly predominantly black and urban areas. For instance, in Hamilton County, 14% of new voters in white areas were confronted at the polls, compared to 97% percent of new voters in black areas, according to the November 2, 2004 Columbus Dispatch.

Inner-city black voters who stuck it out waited 3 hours in the rain, on average but some waited up to seven hours, according to election officials and sworn testimony by local voters, while nearby white Republican voters had virtually no delays. The waiting time at liberal Kenyon College, in Knox County, reached eleven hours, while voters at a nearby conservative Bible school got to vote in 5 minutes.

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"Three years after 'Mission Accomplished,' the U.S. still does not control one inch of territory beyond the Green Zone."

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Luis Angel Castillo: Hypno-programmed assassin?

William Kelly has posted this interesting nine page document. I have a Castillo document giving more info on his interrogation under hypnosis which I will dig out.

5. Cable, dated 19, 1967, from [Redacted] to Headquarters. Paragraph one of the cable reads as follows: “During first two weeks of April, subject underwent consecutively truth serum, truth serum-hypnotism, and hypnotism during interrogations at [Redacted].* {footnote #1- [Redacted] appears to stand for the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation. While confirming some earlier points in his sworn statement, subject consistently maintained he among 14 other Cuban intel agents who deployed along street in Dallas on day President Kennedy was assassinated. He stated that after assassination accomplished by people other than Oswald, he and a companion flew to Chicago. He said pilot and operation were directed by Russian looking women named Jean Dole of Two Chipawa Court, Madison, Wisconsin.

6. Cable dated April 21, 1967, from Headquarters to [Redacted]. (signed by William E. Colby, Chief, Far-East Division) Paragraph one reads: “Para 1 [Redacted] 9456 [cable referred to in paragraph five above] has created a strong reaction here. Although inclined agree [redacted] evaluation Castillo aka Eloriaga Reyes case, there are disturbing verifications of story and lines to other individuals.

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Mission Accomplished

On Thursday, May 1, 2003, President Bush landed on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. Forgetting to undo the parachute clips around his gonads, our President walked bowlegged on the ship's deck in a green jumpsuit looking astonishingly like Ham, first chimp in space. The scene was so exciting that the media failed to notice that the War on Terror had ended on the previous Tuesday.

On that day, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quietly acknowledged that he was withdrawing America's armed forces from Saudi Arabia.

I'm always surprised at the debate over "What drives Osama? What does Al-Qaeda want?" There should be no confusion: Al-Qaeda states its mission, like most enterprises, on its Web site. Osama had it written out in English, in capital letters, so it wouldn't be difficult to miss the point.

DECLARATION OF WAR AGAINST THE AMERICANS OCCUPYING THE LAND OF THE TWO HOLY PLACES—EXPEL THE INFIDELS FROM THE ARAB PENINSULA The "two holy places" are Mecca and Medina, and their "land" is Saudi Arabia. That's what Osama wanted: U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia.

Bin Laden issued his demand on August 23, 1996; and on April 29, 2003, the Tuesday before the President was chauffeured by fighter jet onto the deck of the Abe Lincoln, Mr. Bush gave bin Laden exactly what he wanted: U.S. troops sent packing from the Land of the Holy Places.

That's astonishing. Until George W. Bush, the United States of America has never, ever, removed all our military bases from a foreign land no matter how much locals bitched or moaned. We even keep troops in Okinawa over the island's strong objections, and World War II ended sixty years ago.

Am I accusing George Bush Jr. of being the first President of the United States to cravenly accede to the demands of terrorists? No, Reagan got there first, in 1984, when he gave in to Hizbollah's demand and ordered our Marines to retreat from Lebanon.

No matter, President Bush was correct in announcing, "Mission Accomplished." However, it was not America's mission that was accomplished. It was Osama's.

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1995 Card Game "Illuminati" Accurately Foretold 9/11 and Other World Events

First of all, let me say that I believe this is all coincidence, and not evidence of an Illuminati plot, and this is presented for entertainment purposes only. Having said that, this is spooky.

Just coincidence, really. Stranger things have happened.

OK, we're fucked.

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Peter Levenda on Jack Martin, David Ferrie, and the American Orthodox Catholic Church

The Bishop and the Boys

The Bishop and the Boys-Part 2

Part 3: Jack Martin and the Camp Street Cathedral

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Shortly after Valerie Plame was outed, Joe Wilson received a long handwritten letter from the first President Bush expressing his "outrage at what had happened and his understanding of the seriousness of it," according to Wilson.The elder Bush, a former CIA Director himself, is known to have said in 1999, that "those who betray the trust by exposing the names of our sources" are "the most insidious of traitors."

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Former Department of Homeland Security press aide Brian Doyle (recently arrested for soliciting sex with a 14 year old girl) on George W. Bush:

"nice guy but not a good president ... he is not very bright and it is evident ... bush is a liar ... there were NO weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. total lie to go to war."

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Professor Alfred McCoy, noted historian and expert on the CIA, on the Guantanamo suicides:

Guantanamo is not a conventional military prison. It's an ad hoc laboratory for the perfection of the CIA psychological torture. Guantanamo is a complete construction. It's a system of total psychological torture, designed to break down every detainee contained therein, designed to produce a state of hopelessness and despair that leads, tragically, sadly in this case to suicide.

Torture is a very reliable means of destroying a prisoner psychological. It is, however, a very poor means of obtaining information. Friedrich Spee wrote in 1631, "If all of us have not confessed ourself witches, that is only because we have not all been tortured." And if all of us have not confessed to being terrorists it is for the same reason.

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I am not one to think that Zarqawi is entirely the creations of U.S. Intelligence but cleary to a great extent his "myth" was. On April 10 the Washington Post ran a widely quoted story showing just to what extent, and how successfully, the military played up Zarqawi as the face of the Iraqi insurgency. As one document obtained by the Post stated, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."

Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo interviewed several Arab analysts. Khalaf Al-Oliyan of the Iraqi Accord Front -- the main Sunni bloc in the National Assembly -- stated that Zarqawi was "a US-made myth to plant the seeds of sectarianism." Iraqi academic Sawsan Assaf, in the same article, stated:

Zarqawi was only a pawn.Violence is not likely to go away so long as the US-led occupation persists and continues its atrocities against civilians. Iraq's problem is and remains a brutal occupation. Zarqawi, who was not a very important man, is only a by-product of that occupation."

Iraqi commentator Dhafer Al-Ani asks:

"Who financed his activities and secured the money, the weapons and the recruits; who provided him with protection and what role did those forces that are said to have penetrated his ranks play in pushing him to carry out the atrocities he did or to undermine the Iraqi nationalist resistance?"

According to Al-Ani, "Perhaps the greatest mystery about Zarqawi was the fact that the bulk of his victims were Iraqis, not Americans." Al-Ani concludes: "None of these questions are likely to be investigated by the Americans nor the Iraqi government. It is such a strange coincidence that his agenda to divide Iraq has been similar to that of the invaders."

One wonders why the decision was made not to try to take Zarqawi alive. Apparently U.S. military forces had him surrounded. Surely Zarqawi as a humiliated captive would have been preferable to Zaraqawi as a martyr. Also he would obviously have been a high-value subject for interrogation.

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Questions About Zarqawi

Christian Eric Ford in the San Francisco Chronicle is asking questions.

The facts released surrounding Zarqawi's death should raise red flags. The media have consistently reported that Zarqawi was killed by two direct hits from 500-pound aerial bombs while he occupied a single, rural dwelling. While the amount and type of explosives used in different aerial munitions varies substantially, an approximate kill radius for such a large high-order detonation -- that is, the radius in which a person would have virtually no chance of surviving -- is well over 50 meters.

The temperature of an aerial munition blast can reach as high as a few thousand degrees. Zarqawi apparently defied physics and logic. A government-released photo showed Zarqawi's face to be completely intact. U.S. Gen. William Caldwell denied that the photographs had been altered in any way. According to autopsy results released by the U.S. military, Zarqawi was allegedly conscious for nearly an hour after the monstrous blasts. In one last dramatic act of defiance, he turned his head away when an American soldier reached toward him as he lay on a stretcher.

Do the questionable facts surrounding Zarqawi's death point to a conspiracy? At the very least, it is worth entertaining reasonable alternative hypothetical situations . . .

Two 500 pound bombs were dropped on the house where Zarqawi was staying. Apparently there was not much left but Zarqawi was somehow not blown to pieces or incinerated.

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David Letterman's Top 10 George W. Bush Moments

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June is Torture Awareness Month

June 26th is the date that the United Nations has marked as the International Day in Support of Survivors and Victims of Torture. This year a coalition of human rights, civil liberties and faith organizations have joined TASSC International, a leading survivors organization, in declaring June “Torture Awareness Month." This awareness raising month is an effort to respond to the growing evidence that the United States government is engaging systematically in the use of torture and inhuman treatment as part of the “war on terror.”

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Blogger Musclemouth turned me on to this video clip of Bill Moyer's "Secret Government" program from 1987.

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Karl Rove and unidentified hot babe.

My Karl Rove Post

Typical Karl Rove Not Being Indicted Story (New York Times)

As everyone knows by now, Karl Rove's lawyer has announced that the Special Prosecutor has informed them that he does "not anticipate" that Rove will be indicted. Truthout's Jason Leopold stands by his story that Rove was secretly indicted. (Yeah, right.) Some are seeing wiggle room in the phrasing of the statement. Others are speculating that Rove may have made a deal and that Cheney may be the next target of the investigation. Me, I am through reading the tea leaves. Rove apparently has been sucessful in "walking back" incorrect statements he made to the FBI and the grand jury. In the process, it does appear to me, that he has admitted that he did leak Valerie Plame's identity, and I am disappointed that Fitzgerald did not charge him with that underlying offense. Fitzgerald has shown himself to be a man of integrity, however, (unlike, say, Karl Rove) and I accept that he is exercising his best professional judgement.

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Looking through the 2005 archives of Black Op Radio I came across this document as part of a collection of Documents accompanying Interview #239 ofresearcher Anita Langley. According to Langely the document is dated March 22, 1988 and the offense charged ocurred October 20, 1987. The document says, in part:

General Court-Martial of SR Kevin NMN Razzolli, 136680942, USN.

CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUNDING THE OFFENSE

On the night before the offense RAZZOLI and his civilian co-conspirator JORDAN were offered $5,000 by the brother of AD2 George BUSH to kill the victim, Airman Apprentice MARTIN. MARTIN was going to be a government witnessw against BUSH at a court-martial.

According to Langley, the Bush in this document is George M. Bush, who she describes as perhaps a cousin to George W. Bush, and as being related to a Ross Bush.

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A book by Judyth Baker, alleged lover of Lee Harvey Oswald, is available here. A bit expensive but I have ordered it, and will try to post a review later.

Judyth Vary Baker was born in Florida and was a "whiz kid" who came to the attention of Senator Smathers and some leading doctors and scientists, who soon used the young girl to research cancer. While doing this work in New Orleans, she met Lee Harvey Oswald and they both came to work at the Riley Coffee Company. Baker soon learned that her cancer research was to create a bio-weapon to kill Fidel Castro.

Baker was featured on Nigel Turner's The Men Who Killed Kennedy in a one-hour internationally shown segment, "The Love Affair". In addition, CBS's Sixty Minutes worked extensively with Ms. Baker.

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Edward Haslam, the author of Mary, Ferrie and the Monkey Virus , has a new book scheduled to come out in November titled Dr. Mary's Monkey. A video interview with Haslam can be found here.

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Wim Dankbaar posted this document on his site www.jfkmurdersolved.com

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The X Spot plugs my Gemstone File research

Gary Buell, a somewhat historic figure in conspiracy circles, has posted a complete transcription of the legendary Gemstone Files. For the preservation of this document alone, many of us owe him a debt of gratitude.

“What the #@$! are the Gemstone Files?” you ask.

If that is what you are asking check out my two Gemstone File links in my Research Projects section to the right.

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AS part of my dead strippers series: Jada--one of Jack Ruby's best

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Ann Coulter Smoking Crack?

I would like evolution to join the roster of other discredited religions, like the Cargo Cult of the South Pacific. Practitioners of Cargo Cult believed that manufactured products were created by ancestral spirits, and if they imitated what they had seen the white man do, they could cause airplanes to appear out of the sky, bringing valuable cargo like radios and TVs. So they constructed “airport towers” out of bamboo and “headphones” out of coconuts and waited for the airplanes to come with the cargo. It may sound silly, but in defense of the Cargo Cult, they did not wait as long for evidence supporting their theory as the Darwinists have waited for evidence supporting theirs.

I have my doubts that Coulter actually believes any of this but obviously there are many who do. Many in this country seem to have religion and science confused: they believe that the biblical account of Creation in Genesis is science, and that evolution is a religion. Some of them believe the Earth is only 6000 years old; hell, human beings have been brewing beer longer than that.

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"A Classic Psy-Ops Campaign"

For more than two years it has been widely reported that the U.S. invaded Iraq because of intelligence failures. But in fact it is far more likely that the Iraq war started because of an extraordinary intelligence success—specifically, an astoundingly effective campaign of disinformation, or black propaganda, which led the White House, the Pentagon, Britain's M.I.6 intelligence service, and thousands of outlets in the American media to promote the falsehood that Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program posed a grave risk to the United States.

To trace the path of the documents from their fabrication to their inclusion in Bush's infamous speech, Vanity Fair has interviewed a number of former intelligence and military analysts who have served in the C.I.A., the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.), and the Pentagon. Some of them refer to the Niger documents as "a disinformation operation," others as "black propaganda," "black ops," or "a classic psy-ops [psychological-operations] campaign." But whatever term they use, at least nine of these officials believe that the Niger documents were part of a covert operation to deliberately mislead the American public.

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June 5, 1968

Not much time to blog today but I had to mark the anniversary of the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.” --Robert Kennedy

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Army Manual to Skip Geneva Detainee Rule

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.

The decision could culminate a lengthy debate within the Defense Department but will not become final until the Pentagon makes new guidelines public, a step that has been delayed. However, the State Department fiercely opposes the military's decision to exclude Geneva Convention protections and has been pushing for the Pentagon and White House to reconsider, the Defense Department officials acknowledged.

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Candy Barr

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Our Fearless Leader

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." -Albert Einstein

"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"—George W. Bush

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Sibel Edmonds Interview:

"SE: ...But we decided never to go after the middle levels, let alone the top levels…

It's like this with the so-called war on terror. We go for the Attas and Hamdis – but never touch the guys on the top.

CD: You think they [the government] know who they are, the top guys, and where?

SE: Oh yeah, they know.

CD: So why don't they get them?

SE: It's like I told you before – this would upset "certain foreign relations." But it would also expose certain of our elected officials, who have significant connections with high-level drugs- and weapons-smuggling – and thus with the criminal underground, even with the terrorists themselves."

Read the whole interview here

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"We're all in Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office now."

So says Mike at Born at the Crest of the Empire and I couldn't have put it better (or as well.)

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RFK Jr. Rolling Stone Election Fraud Story

Why should I be the only liberal blogger in the country not to link to this?

Also here is an interesting graphic someone posted on Democratic Underground, comparing the exit polls to the actual election results (click to enlarge):

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