Merry Christmas!I will be back January...
Ned Touchstone's Investigation of the AssassinationOur first real break in the case came as the result of a tip to the Dallas District Attorney's office to the effect that Oswald in applying for a job in New Orleans once gave Jack Ruby as a reference. A Mississippian, Elmore Greaves, had heard this in a casual conversation and passed it on.Someone--I don't know who--told the Dallas DA that Ned Touchstone was studying the assassination and would be a good man to run down the rumor. An assistant district attorney phoned me, and twenty minutes later...
Ned Touchstone, David Ferrie, and Jim GarrisonAs everyone who saw Oliver Stone's JFK knows, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, acting on a tip that David Ferrie might have been involved in some way in the assassination of the President on November 22, 1963, had him picked up and held for questioning by the FBI--who promptly let him go. Garrison assumed that they knew what they were doing and and didn't give the matter another thought until he had a conversation with Senator Russell Long, in late 1966, if memory serves. In his book On the...
Since the National Security Agency is in the news today I thought I would post some material relating to the NSA and the Kennedy assassination. The NSA is so secret that its very existence was classified for years, and thus NSA is said to stand for No Such Agency. The first reference to the NSA in print, although not by name, may have been by Captain...
Oliver North is a fixture on Fox News and host of the program War Stories. He has always come across to me as a self-righteous, self-aggrandizing character. To really illustrate what is wrong with the state of our country, one need only note the fact that Gary Webb, a real reporter who documented the Contra/cocaine connection, was professionally ruined,...
Iraq and 911 - Bush clears it upI mean, there was a serious international effort to say to Saddam Hussein, you're a threat. And the 9/11 attacks extenuated that threat, as far as I'm concerned.Now "extenuate" means, of course, "to lessen the extent or seriousness of" which is probably not at all what the Moron-in Chief meant. Some newspapers apparently changed the transcript to "accentuate...
From Joseph Trento's blog at Stories That Matter (see links):CLASSIFIED AND INTERNAL STUDIES CALL US WAR A VICTORY FOR IRANA number of contracted studies, including a new study conducted by the Army War College by outside experts, are calling the U.S. invasion of Iraq a failure that has essentially given Iran the victory it sought over Iraq in the stalemated Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s. A Pentagon source who has seen the studies tells NSNS that “a number of experts who are respected in the military have concluded that the result of the war in Iraq...
From the December 12 issue of Time:U.S. officials in Baghdad confirm to TIME that they have stepped up their efforts to negotiate with nationalist insurgents and the Sunnis they represent. "We want to deal with their legitimate concerns," U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.""Insurgency and terror are two different things," says Khalilzad."This insurgency has got roots, it's got money, and it's got motivation," says a U.S. intelligence official, in an assessment echoed by military officers and insurgent leaders alike. "And the life span of this insurgency...
SECRET BASES BEING BUILT IN IRAQThe National Security News Service has learned from intelligence sources that the United States government is secretly negotiating construction contracts for two permanent bases near the Iranian border and another base on the Syrian border.Sources tell NSNS that the bases are to be “heavily fortified and large enough to preposition large amounts of equipment and supplies in the event that hostilities with Iran or Syria break out.” Secret Bases in I...
Regular readers of this blog know that one of my main interests is the Kennedy assassination. We will never know the full story of the Kennedy assassination. People still debate whether it was the Mafia or the CIA. (It was both, in my opinion, but the tail doesn't wag the dog.) A handful of people still maintain that it was Lee Harvey Oswald, acting...
After Iraq, Syria and Iran are next in line for regime change by the neo-con madmen. Israel, being a little closer to the scene, is not so sure this is a good idea:Israel: We prefer AssadIsrael told the United States it fears the outcome of regime change in Syria.At a strategic-dialogue meeting this week among senior officials, Israel laid out for the United States three scenarios if Bashar Assad is toppled: chaos, an Islamist regime or another strongman from Assad’s minority Alawite sect. Israel fears all those options, saying Assad provides a...
Bits from the Blogs:From Ratbang Diary:For five years, the White House practice has been to call failure by another name: Success.From Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005:Why did we go down the "suicidal" road of seeking to bring our long term enemies to power as a satellite government of Iran?From No Quarter:We are the midwife of a new Shia sta...
U.N.: Iran 'Months' From Having Nuke(oh, really?)Iran could be months away from a nuclear weapon, warned Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency.ElBaradei told the British newspaper The Independent that Iran's nuclear capabilities depend upon whether it begins enriching uranium."I know they are trying to acquire the full fuel cycle," he said. "I know that acquiring the full fuel cycle means that a country is months away from nuclear weapons, and that applies to Iran and everybody else."www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/12/5/123007.shtmlBut...
How Bush Compromised the war on TerrorFormer Senator Bob Graham:In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq -- a war more than a year away. Even at this early date, the White House was signaling that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was of such urgency that it had priority over the crushing of al Qaeda. From my advantaged position,...
So, let's see. First we have news reports that the Pentagon is considering "the Salvador option"—that is, death squads.Jan. 14, 2005-NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and...
CIA Veterans Condemn TortureSpeaking at a College of William and Mary forum last year, for example, Burton L. Gerber, a decorated Moscow station chief who retired in 1995 after 39 years with the CIA, surprised some in the audience when he said he opposes torture "because it corrupts the society that tolerates it." This is a view, he confirmed in an interview with National Journal last week, that is rooted in Albert Camus's assertion in Preface to Algerian Reports that torture, "even when accepted in the interest of realism and efficacy," represents...
British-trained police in Iraq 'killed prisoners with drills'By Francis Elliott, Raymond Whitaker and Kim SenguptaPublished: 20 November 2005Britain has been dragged into the growing scandal of officially condoned killings in Iraq. British-trained police operating in Basra have tortured at least two civilians to death with electric drills, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.John Reid, the Secretary of State for Defence, admits that he knows of "alleged deaths in custody" and other "serious prisoner abuse" at al-Jamiyat police station, which was...
Torture Frontline has posted an interview with Spc.Tony Lagouranis (Ret.), a U.S. Army interrogator from 2001 to 2005.When we were trained in the schoolhouse about what we could and couldn't do, it was very strict and it came from the Geneva Conventions, the law of land warfare based on enemy prisoners of war. And we never expected that we would interrogate anybody who wasn't an enemy prisoner of war.And it's still unclear to me what the status of the Iraqis that we had were. Well, I know that they weren't being afforded the legal status of enemy...
Ann Coulter calls Democrats traitorsIn her latest column titled "New Idea for Abortion Party: Aid the Enemy" Ann Coulter once again shows just how vile she really is.The Democrats are giving aid and comfort to the enemy for no purpose other than giving aid and comfort to the enemy. There is no plausible explanation for the Democrats' behavior other than that they long to see U.S. troops shot, humiliated, and driven from the field of battle.They fill the airwaves with treason, but when called to vote on withdrawing troops, disavow their own public...
A very interesting article by Robert Dreyfuss in the November issue of The American Prospect. There is a definite pro-CIA bias, not surprising since most of his sources were former or current CIA officials. Here are a few excerpts:Since Goss took over, between 30 and 90 senior CIA officials have made their exit, according to various sources, some fleeing into retirement, others taking refuge as consultants.The agency's vaunted Near East Division, in particular, which served as the "pointy end of the spear," as one CIA veteran put it, in simultaneous...
If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal." - John F. Kenn...
Albert Camus on Terrorism and TortureReprisals against civilian populations and the use of torture are crimes in which we are all involved. The fact that such things could take place among us is a humiliation we must henceforth face. Meanwhile, we must at least refuse to justify such methods, even on the score of efficacy. The moment they are justified, even indirectly, there are no more rules or values; all causes are equally good, and war without aims or laws sanctions the triumph of nihilism. Torture has perhaps saved some, at the expense of...
“Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951” - Federal DocumentsBy John Buchanan and Stacey MichaelfromThe New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 3, November 7, 2003After the seizures in late 1942 of five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, failed to divest...
Blakey Loses Confidence in the CIAThe committee's chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, whose main suspect remains the late New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, explained his loss of confidence in the CIA in a talk Saturday night. The committee had relied on the late George Joannides, a CIA officer called out of retirement, to help it find and review CIA documents during its investigation. But the agency never told the committee that Joannides had been the case officer for a CIA-funded anti-Castro exile group that had contacts with Oswald and an...
WARS AND RUMORS OF WARSGingrich sees Iran threat to U.S. like Nazi GermanyEx-speaker latest official to raise alarm on threat of nuclear EMP attack by Tehranwww.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47501WASHINGTON – The threat posed to the national security of the United States by Iran was likened only to the one posed by Nazi Germany in the 1930s, by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who suggested Tehran could be planning for a pre-emptive nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack on America that would turn a third or more of the country...
The Strange Death of Dr. Mary ShermanOn July 21, 1964 the body of Dr. Mary Sherman was found in her apartment after Juan Valdes, a Cuban customs house broker, phoned the police. According to Joan Mellen in A Farewell to Justice:Mary Sherman's body was found with unspeakable wounds: on the right side of her body, flesh and bone had evaporated so that her right rib cage and all of her right arm had disintegrated. The massive conflagration necessary to cause her bones to evaporate would have converted the entire apartment complex to ashes had her...
From The Wayne Madsen Report:U.S. intelligence sources: Sexually-explicit photos at Abu Ghraib special ordered by a homosexual and pedophile ring inside the BushWhite HouseThere is good reason for the embarrassment of the Pentagon in the affair. The orders to take the sexually-oriented photos and videos, some of which involve teenage Iraqi boys and...
Bush Breakdown! What every American needs to know. President Bush is drinking heavily again as he's overwhelmed by crisis after crisis, GLOBE has learned exclusively. "Bush is breaking down. He's boozing and that's a dangerous personal situation, " a source tells us. "It's an open secret in the Inner circle, no one is happy about it. He's fallen...
Oswald and U.S. CustomsJoan Mellen, in her new book A Farewell to Justice, reveals that Lee Harvey Oswald was not only an FBI informant, and an employee of CIA contract agent Guy Banister, but also had an affiliation with U.S. Customs. Bar owner and FBI informant Orestes Pena testified under oath that he saw Oswald with Customs officials on a regular basis. His handler at Customs was a man named David Smith. In the morning, Pena revealed, Oswald frequented a Greek restaurant on Decatur and Iberville with "other federal agents from the Customs House...
From a man who knows:From a post today on John Simkins JFK forum (see links) from legendary retired soldier-of-fortune Gerry Patrick Hemming:Most of what is in print, including what is at NARA is "Legend" and "backstop" files !! CYA flows through the blood of the Intel Community -- when it clots, we get 9/11s !!NARA is the National Archives and Records Adminstrati...
Ex-KGB Colonel: Leaders of the USA and Israel Were Victims of Conspiracywww.axisglobe.com/article.asp?article=474The link above is to a rather poorly written article which attempts to give the impression that the KGB was behind the JFK assassination, with references to the long-discredited theories of Michael Eddowes the author of Khrushchev killed Kennedy, and the man whose theories led to the exhumation of the body of Lee Harvey Oswald.What is of interest in this article is that it gives the views of a high-ranking former KGB officer, Dmitry...
War Crimes in IraqUS forces 'used chemical weapons' during assault on city of FallujahBy Peter Popham Published: 08 November 2005http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article325560.eceStories that the United States military used napalm and white phosphorus in the attack on Fallujah have been circulating for a year. Initial reports were from...
Thanks to Larry C. Johnson of No Quarter (see links) for clearing this up. Mr. Johnson is a counter-terrorism expert who has worked previously with the CIA.For starters, why can’t conservative talkers and bloggers accept the fact that Valerie Plame was undercover until exposed in Bob Novak’s column? Patrick Fitzgerald spoke in English and did not stutter when he said very clearly at the start of his press conference last Friday, “Valerie Wilson’s cover was blown”. You can only blow a cover if a cover exists. Then there is the claim that the law...
QKENCHANT From A Farewell To Justice, by Joan Mellen, p.132, quoting from CIA documents:In 1952, Shaw had been cleared for project QKENCHANT, along with E. Howard Hunt and Monroe Sullivan, his San Francisco host during the weekend of the assassination. QKENCHANT authorized trusted CIA personnel for clearance to recruit or enlist "civilians," people not officially with the Agency, to discuss "projects, activities and possible relationships." It supported "an array of CIA activities.: An author named Hugh Chisholm McDonald was cleared under QKENCHANT...
The Louisiana Psychoanalytic AssociationThomas H. Purvis today posted this document along with this commentary:The "Intelligence Agency" was nothing more than a "Front" which has at time becomes known in NO, among those aware of it, as the "Garrison Detective Agency".As you can see, Garrison was smart enough to file the Corporation as a "Non-Profit"...
The Garrison Intelligence AgencyThomas H. Purvis has been posting on John Simkin's JFK forum (see links) for several months now. His posts have consisted of scattered bits of information that has been difficult to put together. Yesterday he posted this document which caught my eye. Thomas Baumler is an extreme rightwinger who worked for Guy Banister....
A Prescient Warning in 1961Concerning the Future of the JFK PresidencyThe Presidential Motorcade In Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963Report from Federal Bureau of InvestigationDated December 9th, 1963_____ H. Garrick, 3150 Old ___ Road, Bridgeport, Connecticut, employed as a cost accountant at the H.B. Ives Company of New Haven, Connecticut, furnished the following information:Garrick advised that as a shareholder in the Rutland Railway Corporation ______ Vermont, he attended a stockholders meeting of that corporation at Rutland, Vermont, in April of 1961....
Essential ReadingJoan Mellen's long-awaited book on former New Orlean's District Attorney Jim Garrison's investigation into the Kennedy assassination is now available. I have not received my copy yet, but researchers who have had a look at her manuscript have said that it is a block-buster.Available from AmazonLast Hurrah BookshopAmazon may be more...
Syria: The Next War?Everyone should read JFK assassination researcher Lisa Pease's article on Syria, excerpts of which I quote below:Syria: Falsely Accused as Pretext for War?I talked to an intelligence analyst not long ago who told me to keep an eye on Syria. He said we couldn't get to Iran until we first secured Iraq, and the only way to do that would be to secure the borders, i.e. Syria, through which aid flows to insurgents in Iraq.Combine this with my long experience with government cover-ups, and you can imagine how skeptical I am of the...
Is Karl Rove Gay?Karl Rove: Known in Gay Circles as 'Miss Piggy'In Washington's more 'discreet' gay bars Karl Rove is well-known as a frequent visitor. Witty gays have given him the nickname 'Miss Piggy, after the character on 'The Muppets'. Whether this refers to his appearance ['the doughboy'] or his sexual preferences is open to speculation. Read the whole article--I think you'll enjoy it as much as I d...
From AmericaBlog:CIA: Plame leak damaged US national securityby John in DC - 10/25/2005 05:5 8:00 PMI just watched this on CNN this afternoon:Wolf Blitzer: Does the CIA believe that there was damage done to US national security as a result of Valerie Plame Wilson's name being leaked?David Ensor, CNN National Security Correspondent: I'm told that in the day that it was leaked there was a quick look done, as there routinely would be, at whether there was damage. Officials simply won't go into the details, but I did speak to one official who did say...
The Strategy1. Shift the BlameNewsmax reported the story as:NY Times: CIA Leaked Plame's NameThe ultimate source of information identifying Leakgate accuser Valerie Plame as a CIA employee my turn out to be the CIA itself, the New York Times reported Tuesday. The New York Times itself had the story as:Cheney drawn into CIA spy leak investigationEven Fox News phrased the story as:Plame Leak Said to Come From CheneyAnd if George Tenet gave the information about Plame to Cheney, so what? Cheney is cleared for classified information--just not to give...
Watergate and the Secret Army OrganizationAs we wait for what may be another Watergate-level event to unfold, it might be a good idea to look back at the time of Watergate, and some of the covert history that did not become part of the official record.The Secret Army Organization, in many ways a sucessor to the Minutemen, was founded in February 1970 by Jerry Lynn Davis and Howard Barry Godfrey. Godfrey had been an FBI informant since 1967. The SAO stockpiled weapons and explosives and used them. In 1972 they bombed the Guild Theatre, a venue for...
Torture-One Victim's Story (from the Sunday Herald) - Excerpts belowwww.sundayherald.com/52304ON each stage of his journey, as he descended further and further into the gulags and torture chambers of the war on terror, Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi was shadowed by British intelligence. The British were there in Karachi when Americans interrogated him...
Ted Callaway: Dallas native saw Oswald shortly after JFK's slaying09:33 PM CST on Wednesday, March 16, 2005By CHRISTY A. ROBINSON / The Dallas Morning NewsOn Nov. 22, 1963, Ted Callaway was standing on the front porch of Harris Bros. Auto Sales when he heard five gunshots.His subsequent experience with Lee Harvey Oswald soon after Dallas police Officer...
