Observations Outside the Box

Sausage making at ABC's Nightline

2010-03-09T16:15:00.000-08:00

In the building business the construction process is a little like making sausage- a little messy, not pretty, sometimes even noisy- but the end result is a beautiful, (hopefully!), work of art- someone's idea of beauty form and function.
Last weekend I was at a convention in Valley Forge, Pa. and got to watch news being made. I saw the sausage making process as ABC's Chris Bury and his producer and camera crew interviewed researchers, filmmakers, FBI whistleblowers, and a housewife who attended a symposium on the tragedy we call simply "911". Their piece of work is here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/betsymetz#p/a/f/2/JqQHHYaBsGg If you take the time to view it you will see that this is, like the finished house, neat, tidy, shiny, polished, fresh and serene and pretty,too.
Also, as a "news" piece, it carefully makes the point that if you think 911 was an inside job, you are clearly out of step with the rest of us! Such outrageous ideas!
Well, it so happens the sausage making was recorded as well, and there is quite a different view one might have after watching most of the building materials left out of this so-called "news" finished product. This is in two parts:
http://www.youtube.com/user/betsymetz#p/a/f/0/rsxtcqGiU2o
and the second part:
http://www.youtube.com/user/betsymetz#p/a/f/1/Rmg8kGFM-Mg If you have taken the time to watch all this, you will realize that two young mens' attempts to find out what happened on 911- Kory Rowe an Iraqi war vet and Dylan Avery a film director, both 26, have been succinctly reduced to sound bites. Dylan and Kory, the Director and Producer of the films "Loose Change" and "American Coup", http://www.loosechange911.com/ even predicted that ABC would do just that. And, as you can see, they did- linking these two serious young men seeking truth with someone who apparently was deranged- the Pentagon shooter, as John Patrick Bedell has come to be known.
Since I was there, youtube camera in hand, http://www.youtube.com/user/dlnnc I also filmed some of these ABC sausage making exercises- with FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley and Journalist Sander Hicks. ABC reduced their serious ideas and questions to vapid soundbites. Such is the state of American mass media. Looks good, sounds good, but hollow as a Hollywood set.

Excellent article on choosing to go to war, or not.

2010-03-05T15:35:00.001-08:00

Consortiumnews.com

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Sibel Edmonds:Whistleblower

2010-02-26T14:13:00.001-08:00

SIBEL EDMONDS: THE TRAITORS AMONG US
SIBEL EDMONDS HAS NAMED NAMES. WHY ISN’T THE MEDIA REPORTING THE STORY?

by Brad Friedman
for HUSTLER MAGAZINE – March 2010

SIBEL EDMONDS, a former FBI translator, claims that the following government officials have committed what amount to acts of treason. They are lawmakers Dennis Hastert, Bob Livingston, Dan Burton, Roy Blunt, Stephen Solarz and Tom Lantos, as well as at least three members of George W. Bush’s inner circle: Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Marc Grossman. But is Sibel Edmonds credible?

“Absolutely, she’s credible,” Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told CBS’s 60 Minutes when he was asked about her in 2002. “The reason I feel she’s very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story.” Edmonds’s remarkable allegations of bribery, blackmail, infiltration of the U.S. government and the theft of nuclear secrets by foreign allies and enemies alike rocked the Bush Administration. In fact, Bush and company actually prevented Edmonds from telling the American people what she knew—up until now.

John M. Cole, an 18-year veteran of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Counterespionage departments, revealed the panic of upper-echelon officials when Edmonds originally started talking back in 2002. “Well, the Bureau is gonna have to try to work something out with Sibel,” Cole said an FBI executive assistant told him at the time, “because they don’t want this to go out and become public.”

But they couldn’t “work something out with Sibel” because, it seems, she wasn’t looking to make a deal. Edmonds says she was looking to expose what she believed to be the ugly truth about the infiltration of the U.S. government by foreign spies. They were enabled, Edmonds claimed, by high-ranking U.S. officials and insider moles planted at nuclear weapons facilities around the nation.

“Everybody at headquarters level at the Bureau knew what she was saying was extremely accurate,” Cole said recently. “They were trying to figure out ways of keeping this whole thing quiet because they didn’t want Sibel to come out.”

Her under-oath testimony for the Ohio Election Commission, given in a recent videotaped deposition, is both shocking and horrifying. (Edmonds was the star witness for Congressional candidate David Krikorian in connection with a formal complaint initiated by Representative Jean Schmidt [R-Ohio]. Challenging her in 2008, a Krikorian flyer had accused Schmidt of accepting “blood money” from Turkish interests to help block a House bill recognizing Turkey’s genocide of Armenians in 1915.) The deposition was allowed to proceed by the Obama Administration, which chose not to invoke the draconian and little-known “State Secrets Privilege” to gag her, as the previous administration had done, twice.

Edmonds testified that Congressman Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois), a former Speaker of the House, was involved in “several categories” of corruption on behalf of Turkish agents, according to information she claims to have heard while translating and analyzing FBI counterintelligence wiretaps recorded from 1996 through 2002. She mentioned his “acceptance of large sums of bribery in forms of cash or laundered cash” coupled with the ability “to do certain favors…make certain things happen for… [the] Turkish government’s interest.”

Edmonds also alleged, on the public record, Hastert’s use of a “townhouse that was not his residence for certain not very morally accepted activities” and said that “foreign entities knew about this. In fact, they sometimes participated in some of those…activities in that particular townhouse.”

The allegations against Hastert include accepting some half-million dollars in bribes. While several FBI sources have corroborated Edmonds’s account, the best Hastert’s attorneys could do was offer a nondenial denial to the charges. But the proof, as they say, may be in the post-Congressional pudding. As Edmonds had predicted years earlier, Hastert—who left Congress in 2007—now makes $35,000 a month lobbying his old colleagues as a registered foreign agent for the Turkish government.

Former Congressman Bob Livingston (RLouisiana), who was set to become Speaker prior to Hastert until evidence of a sexual affair was revealed by Larry Flynt, was described in Edmonds’s deposition as having participated in “not very legal activities on behalf of foreign interests” before leaving office in 1999. Afterward, she said, Livingston acted “as a conduit to…further foreign interests, both overtly and covertly,” and also became both a lobbyist and “an operative” representing Turkish interests.

According to Edmonds, Representative Roy Blunt (R-Missouri)—likely to run for a U.S. Senate seat in 2010—was “the recipient of both legally and illegally raised…campaign donations from…Turkish entities.” Edmonds also claimed that hard-right Representative Dan Burton (R-Indiana), who was instrumental in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, carried out “extremely illegal activities” and covert operations that were “against the United States citizens” and “against the United States’ interests.”

Edmonds named allegedly traitorous Democrats too. She said that former New York Congressman Stephen Solarz, now also a lobbyist, “acted as conduit to deliver or launder contributions and other bribe[s, including blackmail] to certain members of Congress.” And, according to Edmonds, the late Congressman Tom Lantos (D-California) was said to have been involved in “not only…bribe[ry], but also…disclosing [the] highest level protected U.S. intelligence and weapons technology information both to Israel and to Turkey [and] other very serious criminal conduct.”

The most overtly salacious of the allegations involved Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois), who is “married with…grown children, but she is bisexual,” according to Edmonds. The FBI whistleblower described how Schakowsky was “hooked” by Turkish agents into having a lesbian “sexual relationship with one of their spies,” and “the entire episodes of their sexual conduct was being filmed because the entire house…was bugged…to be used for certain things that they wanted to request.”

Edmonds noted, however, that she didn’t “know if she [Schakowsky] did anything illegal afterwards” since Edmonds was fired by the FBI before learning what came of that particular setup. The Turks, she said, intended to get at Schakowsky’s husband, lobbyist Robert Creamer, who in April 2006 began serving five months in prison (and 11 months of house arrest) for check-kiting and failing to collect withholding tax.

Schakowsky’s office has vehemently denied the allegations. As head of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, Schakowsky might be expected to hold hearings on any of the former FBI employee’s revelations but she has not. She has also refused Edmonds’s challenge to take a polygraph test and has not yet sued her for libel, as the whistleblower has challenged her to do.

Edmonds’s most disturbing allegations, however, may be against high-ranking appointed officials in the Bush Administration. Elaborating on testimony she laid out in her sworn deposition, Edmonds told American Conservative magazine’s Phil Giraldi—a 17-year CIA counterterrorism officer—very specific details of alleged traitorous schemes perpetrated by top State and Defense Department officials. As already noted, these included Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and, perhaps most notably, former Deputy Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, the third-highest-ranking official in the Bush State Department.

Edmonds said that Feith and Wolfowitz were involved in plans to break Iraq into U.S. and British protectorates months prior to 9/11. She also claimed that the duo shared information with Grossman on how to blackmail various officials and that Grossman had accepted cash to help procure and sell nuclear weapons technology to Israel and Turkey—and, from there, on to the foreign black market. There the technology would be purchased by the highest bidder, such as Pakistan, Iran, Libya, North Korea or possibly even al-Qaeda.

Additionally, Edmonds claimed that Grossman, the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey before taking his State Department post, had tipped off Turkish diplomats to the true identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson’s front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, a full three years prior to their being publicly outed by columnist Robert Novak. That in itself, according to George H.W. Bush, would be an act of treason carried out by “the most insidious of traitors.”

Former CIA counterterrorism officer Giraldi summed up Edmonds’s disclosures to me in blunt terms: “This was a massive coordinated espionage effort directed against United States nuclear secrets engineered by foreign agents who successfully corrupted senior government officials and legislators in our Congress. It’s that simple.”

According to a declassified version of a 2005 Department of Justice Inspector General’s report, Sibel Edmonds’s allegations are “credible,” “serious” and “warrant a thorough and careful review by the FBI.”
Perhaps more damningly, the FBI’s John Cole recently confirmed a key element of Edmonds’s claims when he revealed the existence of “the FBI’s decade-long investigation” of the State Department’s Grossman. Edmonds claimed that Grossman was perhaps the top U.S. ringleader for the entire foreign espionage scheme. The probe, Cole added, “ultimately was buried and covered up.”

Cole, who now works as an intelligence contractor for the Air Force, not only finds Edmonds “very credible,” but also confirms the “ongoing and detailed effort by Turkey to develop influence in the United States” through a number of illegal means.

“Turkish individuals would ask for favors—ya know, ‘You help me out, and I’ll help you out’—and basically what would happen is the elected official would either receive money or some kind of gift,” Cole explained. “Or, if it was a government employee, I’ve seen it where after they retired, they get these very lucrative positions with a Turkish company, or whatever the country may be.”

As noted, Hastert now works for Turkey, and Grossman now works for a Turkish company and as a lobbyist—no doubt raking in a pretty penny from both. Hastert and Grossman repeatedly ignored requests to comment on these charges.

The mainstream U.S. media, however, apparently remain uninterested in investigating any of it. Not even after Cole himself called for a “Special Counsel” to investigate and prosecute. So what the hell is going on here?
Giraldi believes that, as with companies such as AIG and GM becoming “too big to fail,” the size and success of this massive national security espionage scandal has simply become too big to bust.

He told me, “You have to look at Marc Grossman being part of a much bigger operation in terms of the Israelis and the Turks obtaining influence over our legislators and over a number of senior government officials at the Pentagon and State Department. Because this thing was so big, and it affected both Democrats and Republicans, I think the U.S. government is terrified of opening up this Pandora’s box.”

Giraldi added, “The people in Congress and in the Justice Department who should be investigating this…and also in the media—because the media is tied hand and foot to government—this is all part of one big, you know, conspiracy, if you want to look at it this way. And, essentially, this is a story that they don’t want to get out.”

So why, exactly, isn’t the media covering Sibel Edmonds, whom the ACLU once described as “the most gagged person in the history of the U.S.,” now that she is finally able to tell her story? It’s a story, after all, that the legendary 1970s whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has deemed “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers.”

“If we had an effective mainstream media that was going after this story, that would make it come out,” Giraldi noted. “But we don’t have an effective media.” He then pointed out one more reason for the media’s reluctance to dig into this story: “According to Sibel, Grossman actually bragged that he would get from the Turks the information that they wanted to appear in an article. He would write it up, and he would fax it over to the New York Times, and they would print it just as he had written it under somebody else’s byline.”

Guess we won’t expect any coverage of this scandal from the New York Times, “the paper of record,” any time soon. And if a story isn’t covered by the Times, and thereafter picked up by everybody else, did it really happen? Given the complicity of the media with regard to Sibel Edmonds, it would appear the government never even needed to invoke the “State Secrets Privilege” in the first place.

As of this writing, HUSTLER stands to be the largest, most “corporate” U.S. outlet in which these startling, now-public, on-the-record disclosures have been reported. The moral: Pull off a large enough crime, and it becomes too big to do anything about.

My Amazon review of the UNSPEAKABLE

2010-02-07T13:33:00.000-08:00

(Originally written for Amazon in 2008)
Review of James Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable
Published by Orbis Books, Maryknoll New York Press 2008

We are all jurors in an ongoing trial to find the truth of John Kennedy's murder. Most of us have fallen asleep; some left the chamber, and others don't even care anymore. But a few, a very small few, have been paying attention for the last 45 years as arguments for the prosecution of Lee Harvey Oswald, headed up by government lawyers and their lackeys have been constantly countered by a volunteer and unpaid defense team for the truth made up of laymen, clergymen, historians, teachers, researchers, republicans, democrats, non-affiliates of all ages shapes and sizes.

It has been a bewildering experience to have been patted on the head and told to go to sleep by the Warren Commission only to be rudely awakened by a garrulous DA from Louisiana, followed then by a government report which said, well, there might have been two, but go on back to sleep. Dazed and confused we began to leave the room but were called back in by Oliver Stone who told us to take a look at his evidence of Oswald's innocence. We were intrigued, but an impish Gerald Posner convinced Dick Cavett and other icons of American mainstream media that Stone's myth was just that and the case was indeed closed: Oswald did it. But Stone had garnered enough interest to cause Congress to form the ARRB- under George Bush Sr, no less.

It took Bill Clinton half his presidency to get the thing going, but we watched with bated breath as the Assassinations Records Review Board began pulling from the FBI, CIA, and the rest of the alphabet bits and pieces of information that left gaping holes in the official story. Most of us didn't believe it anyway, but a few, a small few did notice that there seemed to have been two brains pulled from John Kennedy's head during the so-called autopsy. In fact so many moles began popping up it was difficult for the gatekeepers to bop them in the head fast enough.

Distracted as we were by 911 and the war on terror, and the revelation that our government has the capacity to pull off an Operation Northwoods, as the ARRB found out, we continued to keep half an eyeball on the story, those of us who were paying attention. But then just as we were ready to reach a verdict of no true bill, Peter Jennings pops in to save the day for the prosecution. Disregarding all prior logic, evidence and common sense he lulled us back to comfortable numbness as he proved through computer generation, laser beams and some small degree of witch-craft that yes, indeed that was some magic bullet. Nevertheless, while almost dozing off again we heard rumblings of another defense witness about to enter the courtroom. He was David Talbot, an almost Main stream media type who was arguing that John and Robert Kennedy were possibly victims of powerful forces in our own government who wanted and needed them gone.

But before he could present his full case a boisterous and bellicose advocate of Governmental Righteousness threw on to the floor, almost breaking it, an objection, claiming his stake in the case with a tome of such immense size and weight that no one, at first, dared to read it or question its obvious Bugliosian authority. When it was finally opened, the muse of Arlen Spector saundered forth speaking in only a language that he could understand. Talk shows raved about Vince's masterpiece; gatekeepers swooned, and the prosecution let out a huge and foul-smelling sigh of relief as they said, There! That ought to finally put this damn thing to rest!

Everyone began to pack up and leave, most never having read briefs by Scott, Gerald McKnight, Larry Hancock, etc., defense advocates who had built their arguments on the works of Vince Salandria, Marrs, Howard Roffman, Sheim, Weisberg, etc., and the thousands of pages of released and obscure documents. But just as the courtroom almost emptied, looking like an empty Senate Chamber with a wobbling old man named Robert Byrd trying to make a point, in comes a little man who looked like a Jesuit monk. I'm no Catholic, I thought, as I was getting up to leave with the two or three other jurors who had sat through the whole case so far, trying to pay attention, but this guy seems to know his stuff. He's talking about everything we have already heard but putting it all into context. His summation is actually making sense- reason, logic, truth, honesty, footnotes, primary source interviews, follow-up questions, giving the benefit of the doubt to all sides. I sat back down. As James Douglass presented his case, scales fell from my eyes. Oswald was innocent. I look around. Is anybody there?
David Neal Kitty Hawk, NC

Garry Wills new book: Bomb Power, Penquin Press 2010

2010-02-07T10:03:00.000-08:00

Garry Wills' new book Bomb Power brings American history a step forward out of the dark ages. He begins to discuss the elephant in the room from a main stream historian's perspective. Author of books on Lincoln and Jefferson, he castigates all modern Presidents since the creation of the "bomb", the game changer for modern times, as they easily slide onto the throne of King. Truman turns out to be a hot head, Eisenhower a murderer, Kennedy naive, Nixon, Ford, Bush, and Clinton not much better, and then Bush Jr., the worst, as they all played the ace in the hole to foster American policy of secrecy and war. Endless war.

That may be a little unfair on my part, but essentially he is saying the power to use the bomb, in the hands of one man, has caused Congress to abrogate its Constitutional powers, the Executive to grab more power, never give it up, and all of us to nod in agreement as anything and everything is OK as long as the Commander in Chief, with the bomb under his arm, says it is. George Bush 43 pushed this to the extreme with Cheney/Addington writing "signings" that allowed the President to ignore and nullify the actual laws Congress sent up to him to sign. Even McCain's attempt to reinstate the Geneva rules caused Bush/Cheney/Addington to fight tooth and nail to keep the power to torture in the President's hands.

Wills explains how this is all illegal, unconstitutional, and a source of disregard for rules of due process and traditional Executive /Legislative interaction. Congress makes the rules, and the President executes them. That's how it's supposed to be, not the other way around. He shows how the original drafters, our founding fathers, went out of their way to make the Legislative branch the final arbiter of the direction the country should take, in war, in foreign policy, and in dealing with the individual rights of citizens. His main point is that the "bomb", nuclear weapons, changed all that when one man was given the power of the "football". He thinks we should get back to obeying the Constitution, but he doesn't see an easy way to do that.
His subtext though is the elephant in the room. And that is secrecy in a democratic society.

Because of the power of the "bomb" a National Security State has arisen since WWII in the form of a host of bureaucracies all vying for funding and power. Power to classify and protect the "family jewels". Power to keep from the people the often uncomfortable, sometimes illegal, often damaging acts that agencies have done behind closed doors. Even Ike authorized assassinations.

There are a couple heroes in the book that come to mind. William Colby, CIA Director during the Church Committee hearings, and John Kennedy. The bad guys are the usual suspects: Henry Kissinger, Richard Helms, William Casey, the Dulles brothers, Addington/Cheney and many others. I call them "bad guys" because they believe in secrecy, assassination as a President's right, and disregard for the Constitution. In this sense one of the apparatchiks of the bad guys is of course John Woo, the hack government lawyer upon whose "writings" so much damage has been done to the Constitution since 911. But one has to blame the bosses above him, really, since there are always plenty of hacks to choose from when you're looking for illegal justification.

Wills' point is that "bomb power" trumps all rationality and jurisprudence. He also makes the point, though, that much of the subversion of the Constitution by illegal and secret acts, for example, the over throwing, usually violently, of sovereign governments- at least 114 that we know of, such as the 1953 Iranian coup, Patrice Lumamba's murder, Jacob Arbenz Guzman's overthrow all came back to haunt us in one way or another. The chickens came home to roost in some cases. Wills says crime does not pay, and history bears him out, it seems. But '"bad guys" and "heroes" are my terms. Kissinger used a different terminology as he castigated those who would obey the Constitution, or at least believed in the people's right to know what the old white men thought was best for the rest of us all. He thought William Colby was a traitor and "despicable" because Colby tried to answer Congressional questions honestly. Kissinger used the terms "strategists" and "romantics". (p.208) He thought of himself as a "strategist", apparently.

One could argue the strategists have a lot of blood on their hands. They would argue that they have saved the world from annihilation by using the trump card to subdue potential threats. Using that trump card means using subterfuge and assassination as they see fit. The romantics, like Kennedy and Colby, can't defend themselves, yet their records hold up well, viz a viz, for example, the Cuban Missile Crisis turned out pretty well with a "romantic" holding off the Generals who would gladly have used the "bomb", and who thought he was a traitor for not using it.

Though Wills has brought the discussion of the problems of a National Security State and its incompatibility with democracy, into the main stream, he failed to make a larger point. Our modern history is filled with controversial deaths of American leaders, well-known and not so well known. Ex CIA Director William Colby died mysteriously. Ex Assistant FBI Director William Sullivan died mysteriously. Senator Hale Boggs died mysteriously. The assassinations of the 60s, JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK have not been addressed in the context of how these "coincidences" occur in the National Security State. I think it was FDR who said there are no coincidences in politics. That might apply here.

Wills never mentions Colby's death, and of course he never discusses the assassination of JFK. But he does bring to the main stream historical discussion that elephant in the room- assassination and secrecy. A recent book by Douglas Horne, a member of the ARRB, (the Assassination Records Review Board set up by George H W Bush), called, Inside The ARRB,

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Assassination-Records-Review-Board/dp/0984314407/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265576426&sr=1-1

does address this elephant in the room- assassination and secrecy. With Horne's and Wills' books we are beginning to emerge belatedly from the dark ages of American history. William Colby thought by turning the light on the "family jewels" which the "bad guys" wanted so desperately to keep hidden, he could save his beloved agency. Coming clean was a good thing. Wonder if it will save the country?

Bush legacy from Juan Cole's Informed Comment:

2009-12-24T08:58:00.000-08:00

The great $12 trillion Bank Robbery, in which unscrupulous bankers and financiers were deregulated and given free rein to create worthless derivatives, sell impossible mortgages to uninformed marks who could not understand their complicated terms, and then to roll this garbage up into securities re-sold like the Cheshire cat, with a big visible smile of asserted value hanging in the air even as their actual worth disappeared into thin air. Having allowed the one-percent oligarchs to capture most of the increase of the country's wealth in recent decades, Bush and Paulsen now initiated the surrender to them of nearly a further entire year's gross domestic product of the US, stealing it from the rest of us by deficit budget financing that will have the effect of deflating our savings and property values and relative value of our currency against other world currencies. That is, we are to be further beggared for sake of the super-rich. And while the banks and bankers are held harmless, the hardworking Americans who have lost and will lose their homes are extended virtually no help. While 500,000 American children will go hungry at least some of the time this year, the Oligarchs at Goldman, Sachs, will get millions in bonuses, on the backs of the ordinary taxpayers. It seems likely to me that the creation of a pool of vast excess liquidity for the super-rich by the Reagan-Cheney tax cuts was what impelled them to develop the derivatives, since they had too much capital for ordinary investment purposes and were restlessly seeking new gaming tables. The conclusion is that until we get our gini coefficient back into some sort of synch, we are likely at risk for further such meltdowns.

http://www.sustainablemiddleclass.com/Gini-Coefficient.html

Padilla and American justice

2009-12-20T12:39:00.000-08:00

Jose Padilla
Here’s the problem: Many important issues are dropped from the news or commentary because there is a lack of public outcry. In other words, if an issue does not interest the public enough to get them to respond with letters to the editors,( in enough volume to convince an editor it is important), or phone calls, or some other type of response to an issue, then the people who make the decisions to air or print news about that subject will disregard it. Its intrinisic value as critical to , say, American freedoms, policy, constitutional issues, even life and death are secondary to whether or not a “pubic outcry” exists large enough to justify continuing the story, or even disclosing it in the first place. A case in point is the Jose Padilla arrest, detention and trial. No legal experts, constitutional scholars, or historians would deny the importance of this case to not just the “war on terror”, but to the very basic and fundamental bedrock concepts that make America what it claims to be: a nation unique in its love and respect for human individuality, human rights, human privacy, human dignity and the law. These basic concepts are stated quite clearly and bluntly in America’s constitution, the final say, the highest law of the land. The founders stated, and history and Supreme Courts have agreed through the years that no one can be deprived of life or liberty without due process. That if you are accused of a crime you must be presented the evidence against you and be confronted by your accusers; that there can be no cruel or unusual punishment; and that you can not be thrown in a dungeon until the authorities decide, if ever, that you may receive a hearing, or a trial, or even a lawyer. These seminal and well thought out tenets did not appear in black and white in the Constitution as mere after thoughts, or simple panderings to the left- they evolved out of the minds of men who knew history, understood the abuses of the power of a state, a king, or a cabal, and from their experience and awareness of how easy the power of the state can override the rights of individuals and what evils that can produce, they decided to enumerate and spell out the specific rights so that there would be no grey area, no misinterpretation of intent, no confusion about what rights American citizens would enjoy. Hence the Bill of Rights.
No one would doubt or question the importance of these issues, but we find, in the main stream media- the national newspapers, the networks, the major cable stations- no coverage of this important issue. Jose Padilla, possibly a criminal intent on doing harm to his fellow citizens, is nevertheless an American citizen. He deserves, as you and I do, to be treated with the fairness that even the lowest common criminal in all of American history has received- to wit: no cruel and unusual punishment, no deprivation of representation, not being thrown into a dungeon and disappeared. Yet this is exactly what happened. I won’t recite all the details of his cruel and unusual punishment other than to remind us all that solitary confinement for years with no human contact except an infrequent government interrogator, being housed in a 24-7 lights on 9by 7 cell in a brig on a military base with a metal cot might qualify as torture. What is torture? There are legal definitions, but I suggest that anything done to others that we would not want done to ourselves might be a benchmark. If you are innocent until proven guilty of a crime, not suspected, then under what authority can you be mistreated to try and make you appear guilty?
Jose Padilla, according to the Christian Science Monitor, one of the few papers to cover this story, was a street kid in Chicago who found Islam while incarcerated and began a study of the religion which led him to travel to Afghanistan and other countries. In another time and circumstance this might be construed as a gangbanger turning his life around and trying to make something of himself. But now it appears he was joining the radical fundalmentalists who aimed to fight America. But if that was the case why would he hestitate to go to Afghanistan and fight for the Taliban when we invaded that country? Instead he came up with an idea to try and get out of that part of the world and go home. He suggested, according to the Monitor, that a dirty bomb be used and that he would go back home and work on it. How do we know this? According to the Monitor, KSM, Khalled Sheik Mohammed told his interrogators about this. He also said that it was doubted at the time that Padilla had the knowledge or ability to accomplish this. Many problems arise from both Padilla’s alleged plot and KSM’s information. Since KSM was affiliated with Pakistan’s ISI, the security agency with close connections to our CIA, and which had sent 100,000 dollars to Mohammned Atta, one of the alleged hijackers, and since KSM was subjected to the same if not worse treatment as Padilla, how reliable is his story? At the least, Padilla should have been afforded legal representation to counter any charges arising from this allegation. But instead he was held for 43 months, mostly in isolation, until, as psychiatrists have stated, he was damaged mentally. What a travesty of justice to us all.

Malcolm Perry, the surgeon who tried to save JFK

2009-12-09T19:32:00.000-08:00

http://insidethearrb.livejournal.com/#post-insidethearrb-2370
The link above is to an article by Doug Horne, a member of the Assassinations Records Review Board set up By George H. Bush and Bill Clinton to study and release as much of the documetation and information about the assassination in 1963 of President John F. Kennedy as they could. Millions of pages were released.

Malcolm Perry recently passed away at age 80. For many years he maintained the Warren Commission was correct in alleging Oswald killed Kennedy, despite his comments and answers to questions within an hour of Kennedy's death in Nov. 1963 that the shot to Kennedy's throat, through which Dr. Perry had performed a careful tracheostomy in an attempt to help Kennedy breathe, was an entrance wound. Secret Service and FBI personnel have admitted in recent years to putting a lot of pressure on him to accept the official story that the wound was an exit wound.

2009-10-30T08:29:00.000-07:00

Health Care Debate:
Though I lean toward the progressives in wanting universal health care, no precondition exclusions, and even a Single Payer system, I recognize the complexities in funding, administrating, organizing and executing such a system. It seems to me that most western countries handle this with a simple concept: all people should have access to essentially "free" health care. No one misunderstands that this is paid for by taxes. We rank 37th, according to a 2000 survey, maybe lower now, in quality and availability of health care, but we have excellent medical services. But, of course, we avail ourselves of this fine service only if we can pay for it. So health care in America is not free, and there is no sentiment to make it a "right", vs a commodity. Consequently the horror stories abound of people being denied insurance coverage, bankruptcies, and sometimes death- deaths and tragedies that could have been avoided with universal coverage.
My understanding is that the AMA backs reform, maybe even Single Payer, but not "government run" health care. This is based on the assumption and conventional wisdom that the government will be wasteful, inefficient, unresponsive and insensitive to patients true needs- maybe even usurping a doctor's advice in order to fit some pre-etermined method of treatment. Well, for most of us, that is the system we now have, except we have no recourse but through appeal letters and I suppose litigation, if we are still alive and can afford it, in the event of a dispute.
It seems logical to me, to cut to the chase so to speak, that we use the entire population as a base and insure everyone. It would be interesting to see how the arithmetic works out. If health care is costing $12,000 a year now for most individuals, (I'm assuming no deductibles here), what would it cost if everyone was in the pool? The basic actuarial insurance tables ,I suspect, with everyone in the risk pool, would spread the costs considerably. Of course this is how western countries do it: a tax (or premium) on everyone to cover those that really need it- a true insurance model, since we are all at risk.
Even though western countries struggle with their own budgetary problems in meeting the needs of their citizens under their "free" health care programs, those systems do in fact work. Poor economic conditions as we are experiencing now exacerbate the problem of lack of tax dollars, but this is a temporary situation. Things will get better, funds for health care will be more available. But the bottom line is they are able to fund their universal health care systems through a tax system, similar to the way we fund Medicare, and most tax systems are not anymore burdensome than our own.
Here's the difference: no western countries, eastern, northern or southern ones, either, have taxpayers bearing the burden of the largest Defense budget the world has ever seen. This extra trillion dollars or so, ( including all defense and security related expenditures), is the money we could put toward "free" health care. Of course no one is going to get rid of the Defense Department. But without addressing this elephant in the room, we can not fund any kind of meaningful health care reform. During the 90s we were beginning to get a handle on military spending: Donald Rumsfeld was addressing the problem on September 10th, 2001. We have been sidetracked from this discussion since then and have waged wars, maybe unnecessarily. A reevaluation of our military spending, ten times larger than the next largest spender in the world, is in order. I think only by letting the air out of the bloated elephant in the room will we ever be able to discuss meaningful improvement in health care. There is simply no money to do it otherwise.

Israel Palestine

2009-01-01T06:28:00.000-08:00

Well
It's a mess and I have to defer to someone who knows what he's talking about and who is Jewish. Philip Weiss, a journalist I know who speaks truth to lies and keeps his head on straight notes that the American press can't seem to criticize Israel in the headlines, but at least prints articles questioning the logic, morality, and good sense of using violence to fight violence here:
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2008/12/if-the-article-says-the-war-is-wrong-6-times-why-is-the-headline-darkness-in-qassamland.html
Some things seem clearer than others, but I am constantly nonplussed by my ex-Bush friends who see the deaths of so many innocents as just a neccessary part of some kind of process.

Trip to Dallas

2008-12-06T21:38:00.000-08:00

This is a contemporary photo of the south side of the overpass from where some think JFK's first wound, in the throat, or maybe even the fatal head wound came.

The lower picture is a screen frame from a recent Discovery Channel program. It shows what a shooter may have seen from the south side of the overpass through the scope of a weapon.

Went to Dallas last weekend and a friend asked me what are the prevailing theories on the JFK Assassination ? I replied:
Thanks for asking.
Prevailing theories is an interesting way to think of the JFK assassination!
Briefly, my interest started back in the eighties when I read a couple books about the assassination and there seemed to be areas that were not clearly answered in my mind.
One of the chief points seemed to be the shot that hit Kennedy in the throat. It is generally assumed by every official theory and every Oswald-did -it book that Kennedy was wounded in the back with a bullet that exited his throat. This so-called magic bullet passed through Kennedy went on to wound Gov Connally, sitting in front of Kennedy, wounded him twice, so the theory goes, and ended up on a stretcher in the hospital to later be identified as the bullet from Oswald's Mannlicher Carcano, rifle.
Anyway, no serious researchers, historians, or lawyers believe this. I am discounting the well-known authors who have perpetuated this impossibility such as Gerald Posner http://www.posner.com/ , Vincent Bugliosi, http://reclaiminghistory.com/?page_id=7 or webmasters like John McAdams. http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.htm As you know, hundreds of books have been written about the assassination, so it is easy to be totally confused, if one has not kept all these writings in context, as a few nuts like me have tried to do.
Before I go further, let me just say that there are excellent books out there- to name a few: Breach of Trust, by History professor Gerald McKnight of Hood College, Pa. Another is The Unspeakable by James Douglass, a Jesuit cleric, I guess you'd call him. Another is Larry Hancock's, Someone Would Have Talked.
Now back to the point: if Kennedy was hit in the throat, while facing forward, by a shot from in front of him, what does this tell us? Well, to me, it says the whole Conspiracy of One that the Warren Commission put over on us is a pipe dream. I won't get into why they did this, or who was the driving force, or forces, behind having a Blue Ribbon Commission sell us a completely bogus story about the wounds to Kennedy, but it is important to address that wound to understand who didn't kill Kennedy.
The throat wound Kennedy had when observed in Dallas at Parkland Hospital was a small, 3 to 5 mm "penetrating" hole, as described by doctors at the time. that is approximately 1/4 inch round. James Carrico, the first doctor to observe this wrote this. The doctor who then operated on his neck to insert a breathing apparatus, Dr. Malcolm Perry also described, at the time, (or actually within an hour or so after Kennedy was pronounced dead) at a news conference that it was a wound of entry. The throat wound was also observed by Nurse Henchcliffe before it was opened up wider to allow the trach tube apparatus to be inserted in his throat. She called it an entry wound. Perry was young, but an experienced hunter and had seen many gunshot wounds.
How that wound came to be known as an exit wound is the stuff for volumes of contemporary American History. But, in a nutshell, the Warren Commission was charged with showing Oswald did it with three shots. And so they did. One member of that Commission a young Philadelphia lawyer named Arlen Specter, now a US Senator form Pa, along with another attorney, David Belin, conceived the idea that since there were only three shots, something only hypothesized since there was not time for Oswald to have gotten off any more!, that since one was known to have missed, and one obviously blew Kennedy's head apart, then the third had to be the one that did all the other damage- two wounds to Kennedy, one in his back, and one in his throat- AND three wounds to Connally- one, in back, one in front, one in his wrist, and even a sliver in his thigh- so actually four to Connally!
I won't bore you with any more, but I am convinced after all this time, and especially after finding original testimony and studying the very inept autopsy, and learning from the disclosures which came from the Assassination Record Review Board ARRB, that Kennedy was hit in the throat with apparently a small calibre bullet from the front. The official autopsy never probed this back to front wound to see if it was what it was claimed to be. Instead, it was simply assumed by the militarily controlled Drs at Bethesda, Drs. Humes and Boswell and Finck, that the bullet went through from the back and out the front. If you reread that sentence you should question my sanity, veracity, and grasp of reality. But, I am not kidding.
Some of the esoteric aspects are , was the shot that hit him in the front of his throat from behind the fence to his right, or from his left on the south side of the overpass, train trestle. Both sites are good for getaway and hidden, or relatively hidden, shooters.
One last point, having gone down that rabbit hole with an open mind and looking for facts and not pre-drawn conclusions, I am quite jaded about information that comes from our government and purports to be either official or accurate. This is especially true about some major events in our time, to wit: RFK's and MLK's murders, the carnage at Waco in 1993, the crash of Flight800 off Long Island in 1996, and the 911 Commission's report.
Thanks for listening.
I can give you citations for all I have said above, if you are interested. I have a theory on why he was killed, and it jives pretty much with James Douglass's, as drawn out in his book, The Unspeakable.

Steal the Bacon Play from 1967

2008-09-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

Here is a clip of the Steal The Bacon play we ressurrected from archives!
It's hard to see, but #42 ,(that's me) breaks all the rules and slips between defenders to snatch the football after the punt almost rolls to the goal line. He then runs like hell as fellow teammates realized what happened and threw several key blocks that saved his bacon! We thought this funny play was lost to history until we dug it up at the Principia College archives! Some say it was 97 yds, but, I don't know- might have been 99!
Here it is at Youtube as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1zuoAHUK-0&feature=user

2008-08-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

Principia College, 1968
That's me #42 following Alex Smith and Buz Brewster. Principia College is a little Division 3 liberal arts school across the river from St Louis, Mo. Its beautiful campus was almost bought by the US gov't for the Air Force Academy but Colorado Springs was chosen instead. One of the advantages of little schools like this is that guys like me, 165 lbs back then, could play college ball. It was a highlight of my youth and remains a great memory! I hope to put a video up of my famous "steal the bacon" play against Southwestern, Memphis, Tenn in 1967. They are digging it out of archives and I have offered whatever it takes to get it digitized!

2008-07-15T09:07:00.000-07:00

Review of James Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable
Published by Orbis Books, Maryknoll New York Press 2008

We are all jurors in an ongoing trial to find the truth of John Kennedy's murder. Most of us have fallen asleep; some left the chamber, and others don't even care anymore. But a few, a very small few, have been paying attention for the last 45 years as arguments for the prosecution of Lee Harvey Oswald, headed up by government lawyers and their lackeys have been constantly countered by a volunteer and unpaid defense team for the truth made up of laymen, clergymen, historians, teachers, researchers, republicans, democrats, non-affiliates of all ages shapes and sizes. It has been a bewildering experience to have been patted on the head and told to go to sleep by the Warren Commission only to be rudely awakened by a garrulous DA from Louisiana, followed then by a government report which said, well, there might have been two, but go on back to sleep. Dazed and confused we began to leave the room but were called back in by Oliver Stone who told us to take a look at his evidence of Oswald's innocence. We were intrigued, but an impish Gerald Posner convinced Dick Cavett and other icons of American mainstream media that Stone's myth was just that and the case was indeed closed: Oswald did it. But Stone had garnered enough interest to cause Congress to form the ARRB- under George Bush Sr, no less. It took Bill Clinton half his presidency to get the thing going, but we watched with bated breath as the Assassinations Records Review Board began pulling from the FBI, CIA, and the rest of the alphabet bits and pieces of information that left gaping holes in the official story. Most of us didn't believe it anyway, but a few, a small few did notice that there seemed to have been two brains pulled from John Kennedy's head during the so-called autopsy. In fact so many moles began popping up it was difficult for the gatekeepers to bop them in the head fast enough. Distracted as we were by 911 and the war on terror, and the revelation that our government has the capacity to pull off an Operation Northwoods, as the ARRB found out, we continued to keep half an eyeball on the story, those of us who were paying attention. But then just as we were ready to reach a verdict of no true bill, Peter Jennings pops in to save the day for the prosecution. Disregarding all prior logic, evidence and common sense he lulled us back to comfortable numbness as he proved through computer generation, laser beams and some small degree of witch-craft that yes, indeed that was some magic bullet. Nevertheless, while almost dozing off again we heard rumblings of another defense witness about to enter the courtroom. He was David Talbot, an almost Main stream media type who was arguing that John and Robert Kennedy were possibly victims of powerful forces in our own government who wanted and needed them gone. But before he could present his full case a boisterous and bellicose advocate of Governmental Righteousness threw on to the floor, almost breaking it, an objection, claiming his stake in the case with a tome of such immense size and weight that no one, at first, dared to read it or question its obvious Bugliosian authority. When it was finally opened, the muse of Arlen Spector saundered forth speaking in only a language that he could understand. Talk shows raved about Vince's masterpiece; gatekeepers swooned, and the prosecution let out a huge and foul-smelling sigh of relief as they said, There! That ought to put this damn thing to rest finally! Everyone began to pack up and leave, most never having read briefs by Scott, Gerald McKnight, Larry Hancock, etc., defense advocates who had built their arguments on the works of Vince Salandria, Marrs, Howard Roffman, Sheim, Weisberg, etc., and the thousands of pages of released and obscure documents. But just as the courtroom almost emptied, looking like a Senate Chamber with a wobbling old man named Byrd trying to make a point, in comes a Jesuit priest. I'm no Catholic, I thought, as I was getting up to leave with the two or three other jurors who had sat through the whole case so far, trying to pay attention, but this guy seems to know his stuff. He's talking about everything we have already heard but putting it all into context. His summation is actually making sense- reason, logic, truth, honesty, footnotes, primary source interviews, follow-up questions, giving the benefit of the doubt to all sides. I sat back down. As James Douglass presented his case, scales fell from my eyes. Oswald was innocent. I look around. Is anybody there?
David Neal Kitty Hawk, NC

I Dreamed I Saw Toby Keith

2008-07-02T13:20:00.000-07:00

By David Neal (c) 2008
(This is a song that came to me while I was thinking about the way we have become so divided since 9/11. Toby Keith's and Natalie Maines' public dispute about our policy in Iraq seems to be representative of the country in general.)

This is me singing the song- (Yes, I am keeping my day job!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLYKylOtLkU

I dreamed I saw Toby Keith
Singing with the Dixie Chicks
They harmonized so beautifully,
it made me feel good for a change.
And the crowd was up on its feet
as the music rose to the roof
And I saw the smile on my brother's face
And it made me feel good for a change
And Tobe he looked down at the girls,
He said,"Hey you all sound pretty good."
And they looked back at him with those big ole grins
And said,"Hey you're not so bad yourself.
But there was a guy in the back of the hall
Trying his best to start a fight,
When another guy came up in a cowboy hat,
And put his hand on his arm-
He said, "Hey what's goin on here?
Where's your love for Tobe and the girls?
Don't you know that after all this time,
We're all in this together?"
So bring on your Red White and Blue-
Bring on the truth that sets you free,
And bring on the hope of all the world,
And make me feel good for a change.
Yes I dreamed I saw Toby Keith,
Singing with the Dixie Chicks
And they harmonized so beautifully,
That it made me feel good for a change.

McCain and Iraq

2008-02-05T09:03:00.000-08:00

Somebody made the comment that we should clean house with Congress, kick them all out and grab 535 people off the street to replace them. I thought this was a silly idea until I heard McCain say we need more troops in Iraq, and for an indefinite time.
My point is that the man in the street has got more sense about Iraq than a powerful and important senior Senator.
McCain said if we don’t fight Al Quaeda and Bin Laden over there, then we got to fight them here. Although Fox news and Murdoch may think we re fighting some slippery fanatics like Bin Laden and his recruits around Baghdad, the guy in the street knows his son is actually dodging bullets from the nationalistic factions of a civil war. .He also knows those bullets are stolen from arsenals not protected by us and that the shooters, possibly sympathetic to radical islamofascists like Bin Laden are actually Sunni and Shiite Iraqis who want us the hell out of their country.
But McCain is running for President and his base thinks the demon leaders of Iran and Pakistan are Khruschev or Hitler incarnated and that their only goal in life is to blow us up or have their kids do it after they are fully brainwashed that America is the devil.
McCain and Charlie Rangel may be playing a macabre game of chicken where they plan to run their ideas into each other until one realizes the other is serious. Rangel wants a draft- McCain says we need more troops .The Pentagon has quantified that need- hundreds and hundreds of thousands more- and McCain says maybe for a hundred years! Rangel says you can’t have more troops without a draft- so he is daring McCain to agree with him. Well, here is the problem: he just might do it.
Will Rangel and the Democrats then have to go along because they will look silly or ignorant for pushing for the draft and then saying, “ Hey, we were only trying to make a point!”
This is dangerous stuff and the folks in the street, as well as those in the suburbs and suvs know better than these false sages.
Maybe there should be a school for senators where they are actually taught history and diplomacy instead of jingoism and soundbites. Of course McCain knows better than to repeat blather put out by the white house in 2003,4,5, and 6 that if we don’t fight them there, we got to fight them here. Of course he knows that Iran is not Iraq, that Iran has never attacked anybody, that we encouraged and sold weapons to Saddam so he would attack Iran. And you know he has to know that sending more troops to Iraq will only fan the hate flames even more.
Then , is he being coy or silly? McCain is one of the shrewdest politicians on the block- not the best, since Bush/ Rove beat him in 2000, but still not a dim light. He may be serious that we need a draft and that hundreds of thousands of American kids need to be in the Middle east staving off the inevitable attack of the head choppers. I don’t want to do the math, but that might take a lot more than hundreds of thousands, and it might take a very long time since it is clear that by adding troops to the mix we are increasing the enemy. This is like the sorry carpenter who said, “ I’ve cut this dam piece of wood three times, and it’s still too short!”, repeating his mistakes thinking he’ll get it right eventually.
The fundamental misunderstanding of the Middle East, may not be driven by the simplistic logic that we are just protecting Israel’s hide, is one of ideology. Maybe the senior Senator and many others who think like him believe the stuff we see on Fox tv or the pseudo documentaries on the internet showing what appears to be the entire middle east chanting death to America every day at 5 pm. The blurring of cultures, countries and clans in the minds of Americans is understandable with our limited attention span, but not in the minds of Congressmen who send our kids to war. Sunnis, Shiites, Iranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians, Pakistanis, Saudis, Yeminis are not all one common enemy simply because most of them happen to be Muslim. But then I haven’t read the Koran! Maybe I forgot to read the Bible, too, where Joshua was told by Jehovah to slaughter all the people, women and children- leave not one standing. I’m not disparaging anybody’s faith here, but there is a reason intelligent people kept it out of politics a long time ago. It divides us, demonizes an enemy quicker and cuts off all rational debate faster than you can say my God is better than yours.
Unfortunately McCain’s base and too many of the rest of us with limited time and attention span are guilty of confusing faith with facts. The facts are that we invaded a sovereign country, falsely justifying it, killed thousands and thousands of innocent civilians, lost too many of our brave soldiers, some who were supposed to be helping out here after our natural disasters, and now are trying to attain some kind of Nixonian peace with dignity while leaving Iraq burning and bleeding.
Maybe 535 people off the street would be as short-sighted as our powerful Senators and Congressmen, but at least they wouldn’t have to be pandering to a base for a presidential run and thus irresponsibly calling for a continuation and escalation of such costly ideological fantasy.
McCain and Rangel and all the rest should be supporting the inevitable, in deed. What is it? It is a coalition of middle eastern countries with our help, hopefully, joining together to bring law and order to Iraq. That means international troops with a time table to police the streets and villages of Iraq until the violence is contained. It means Maliki, Sadr and Bathists included in this. It means bringing cool heads to the table who represent more than one side. It means a discussion of partitioning which allows for the even sharing of the oil resources. It may mean a reevaluation of our need for huge bases and 110 acre compounds in the middle of Baghdad. It means grownups coming to the table with advisors who are experts on the middle east and the cultures that live there. It means curtailing the rhetoric that blurs and confuses. I say this is the inevitable, because even if we go in another direction toward more war, it will still be the only eventual solution.

2007-09-17T10:23:00.000-07:00

I went up to Washington on Saturday, September 15, 2007, and strolled down Pennsylvania Ave to the Capitol along with several thousand other folks. It was peaceful except for a couple incidents where people on both sides of the war reacted to the signs of the other side. Here is the bus the Veterans of Iraq had put together for the event.

Cowboy Bush

2006-02-15T05:52:00.000-08:00

The cowboy Bush.
Bush thinks he is protecting the old west from the Indians. He is chasing down the renegades. He retells atrocity stories of Indians raping and scalping settlers.

Terrorist is the term used to describe a broad array of individuals,
groups, peoples, religions, nations who disagree with us. It is a vague
categorization of anyone who we want to target. It is Zarqawi, Bin Laden, and a plethora of other Middle Eastern names of individuals that we can't pronounce- but it is also a label for nations- Iran, for example. It is a confusion of facts and lumping together of many differing factions and political arguments, national interests and fundamentally, religious beliefs. Terrorism, in this old west, cowboy and Indian contest is synonymous with Islam. As simple as it was to caricature the Indians as non-Christian pagans who had to be either saved or destroyed, converted or corralled, that same oversimplification applies today in Bush's and by extension, America's, attitude toward Islam.
When Americans, or at least the ones who spoke mostly English, thought all Indians were hateful and evil terrorists, it was relatively easy to send the troops after them, relatively easy to exhibit blindness and dumbness to the tragedies of Wounded Knee and the thousands of other slaughters and desecrations that we visited on an entire people who we had so easily demonized. Indeed, it was not so hard to do. There were so few of them compared to the Europeans who felt a divine right to their land.
The cowboy Indian war this President has unleashed has much larger
ramifications. There are a lot of Indians out there. Today as we look back and see the cruelties we brought on those tribes, out of Manifest Destiny, greed, or political popularity, the injustice of it all is apparent. But nevertheless at the time they were no better than the terrorists of today.
In fact the word Terrorist is just as applicable in the old saying the only good Injun is a dead Injun. The Indians of America were identifiable, spoke strangely and unintelligibly, looked and sounded and acted very different from regular Americans. And so, the images we have of terrorists are also different from us, or at least the guys in the suits at the microphones.
This is a dangerous time. We have demagogues who proclaim freedom as the goal, and believe it sometimes, while we are trying to establish a military presence in the Middle East. We have demagogues who gloss over the real differences in those grievances against us to smear them all with the label terrorist- evil and hateful destroyers of freedom. It is a kind of religious fanaticism in itself to take the attitude that God has blessed us, and the hell with the rest of you. But that is what comes across from the superficial analysis of the world situation through the eyes of the cowboy Bush.
Iran, the next target of our righteous zeal, is daily caricatured in the most extreme and harshest colors. They deny the holocaust; they want to destroy Israel; they are building nuclear weapons to attack America. In fact there are those in Iran who would definitely fit in this abstract painting, but it is not the summation of the nation. There are arguments in Iran itself about these very issues. Ahmadinejad, the president, has called for a historical review of the Holocaust. He has asked why the Europeans, who burned the Jews, sent them to Palestine instead of giving them land in Europe? Interesting questions, and it would be enlightening to hear the historical analysis by thoughtful and objective students of history. I don't believe it was practical to send the Jews to places in Europe, and it was easy to fulfill their desire to go back to their ancient home, and a lot less contentious to send them to the desert where there was not an organized and militarily strong opposition nor an organized media to thwart or hinder such a move. But that is my take. Let us hear all sides and at least clear the air. Perhaps settlements could be made by paying for the land expropriated. But I digress.
It is frightening to contemplate the Iranians having a nuclear weapon. It is frightening to think that the Israelis have one, too. The Mutually assured destruction that kept the Cold War alive and kept it from being a hot war seems not to apply in the middle east because we assume that since many fanatical, fooled, duped, or crazy individuals are willing to blow themselves up, then maybe entire governments would be willing to do the same. This conclusion, which I believe to be false, is a result of the demonization and loose use of words like terrorism.
If we applied the golden rule- and looked at the world as if we were
walking through it in others' shoes, we might conclude that the only way Iran can keep either the Western powers, namely the US, or Israel from attacking it is to have some kind of deterrence. In fact, all the nations we have branded as evil or terrorist might be thinking the same thing- and obviously based on the pre-emptive attack on Iraq these fears are totally justified. Would we sit back and wait for the turn of events while a war-like nation with the hugest arsenal the world has ever seen is threatening our destruction?
The Indians didn't have a choice. And we won that war with the evil savages who did not recognize our God. Now it's different. Iran can't turn off the spigot of oil to us because it doesn't sell us any oil. But it can leverage that power with Russia and China. We are playing a dangerous game with a small-minded man at the helm who sees the world in blacks and whites, good and evil, us vs. them, freedom vs. terrorism, Cowboys vs. Jets. It is a game to be won, and we will not stop till we win it. And then he can stand mano a mano up to his Dad, and say -see, I can do something right! as the ashes around him smolder and the children and mothers soft weeping become only a forgotten memory as the KBR bulldozers are off-loaded from the C17s.

2006-02-14T19:44:00.000-08:00

Sailing on the Outer Banks of NC

November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001

2005-11-02T14:31:00.000-08:00

November 22 comes once a year, every year.
By David Neal

People disagree about who killed JFK. Many think there was a conspiracy, and some don’t. I can’t say who killed JFK, but I suspect the government did it. Why would I give credence to such a thing? So much research has gone into the death of JFK that it is tiresome at this stage to rehearse and regurgitate the scenarios that negate Oswald’s guilt. Could he have done it? Probably. Did he do it? No. That is not to say he wasn’t in the Book Depository, nor is it to say a shot from the depository could not have hit the President. The arguments against conspiracy involve minute calculations with laser and computer technology stressing where and how the President was hit from behind by a shot from the sixth floor, now a museum, with a "magic bullet". Once the debate centers on that bullet, unfortunately, forensic and logical discussion take a hike. I’ll explain in a second.

It seems to me the assassinations of the sixties, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy are the starting points of a pattern of control by the government that has become more sophisticated, subtle and obviously dangerous as time goes on. I know these are outrageous things to hear in some corners. Bear with me. Although I’m not going to convince you that John Kennedy was killed by the government anymore than I can convince you that you were wrong in voting for George Bush, I think I can show you that forensics and logic indicate not only that Oswald was probably a patsy, but that all the machinations of the government investigation worked to cover-up truth and perpetuate a lie, as well.

For one thing, John Kennedy was hit in the throat from the front. Drs Malcolm Perry, and Carrico and Nurse Henchliffe, all who saw the wound in the throat before Dr. Perry opened it wider for a tracheotomy, described it as an entry wound. But that wasn’t all. They gave measurements. Dr. Perry said, in writing, the hole was about a quarter inch in size. (3-6mm) No one disputes this. That was smaller than the Specter-created magic bullet, a 6.5 mm missile that was supposed to have gone in Kennedy’s back and come out his throat. But this simply didn’t happen. An autopsy of Kennedy’s body was performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital on Friday night and Saturday morning after the assassination and it was determined that no missile went through Kennedy’s back, nor was there evidence of a bullet going out of the throat, except for the appearance of the the surgical wound caused by the Dallas doctors trying to save his life the day before.

Warren Report apologists such as Gerald Posner have implied all the Dallas doctors said Kennedy was hit from the back. This is not true. They all said there was a large hole in the back of Kennedy's head. The facts are there for anyone to see. Dr. Perry described several times in public and in private, to Harold Weisberg, for one, that the throat wound was an entry wound. I don’t know Malcolm Perry and I will not attempt to explain his later hedging about the nature of the wound. It is not relevant because one would have to explain the Secret Service’s intentions in trying to convince him with a controversial autopsy report from Bethesda that disputed his own eyes that a bullet did not enter Kennedy’s throat from the front. I can’t do that. I will stick with his original statements, as Gerald Posner so correctly recommends, ironically.

If all of this begins to sound like all the other conspiracy theory arguments you ever heard about every conspiracy theory you ever heard, it’s not surprising. The discrepancies between official stories and what actually happened in the sixties’ assassinations and even later controversies like Waco or the crash of TWA 800 in 1996 are enough to write books and make movies. Few of us have time or patience to wade through evidence, if we can get it from the government, as in the TWA800 case in particular, so the best we can do is try to listen to those who have done a lot of searching for the truth and give them the benefit of the doubt when they disagree with official pronouncements. Unfortunately the History Channel will not help here. It tends to echo the official line. But I digress.

The point here is a bullet entered Kennedy’s throat from the front. Whether or not the infamous head shot depicted so graphically in the Zapruder film came from the front or back only reinforces your predetermined persuasion: from the front- a conspiracy; from the back- Oswald. Since a front shot in the throat, with a little investigation of the forensics and the Dallas doctor’s original statements, is relatively easy to prove, I’m going to leave it on the table as true for now and expand upon the government’s ability to control information and public thought right up to our times. After small basic truths are manipulated in or out of the public mind the official stories are fairly easy to sell.

For example, let’s look a little closer at how this has been accomplished since the sixties with just a few of the so-called conspiracy-type events with which I am familiar. John Kennedy’s assassination: a front throat shot, proving a conspiracy of some kind, lost early on and covered up by the Warren Commission. King’s assassination: a shooter in the bushes, and Army snipers on nearby rooftops, still being argued about, but suggesting a major conspiracy; Robert Kennedy’s assassination: gunshots to the back and within an inch or so behind his right ear- proving Sirhan didn’t do it, and thus a major conspiracy.

Jump forward and leave out Malcolm X’s assassination, 1965, George Wallace’s wounding, 1972, Reagan’s wounding, 1981 and many others that I have not studied in great detail and move to Vince Foster’s death, 1993: forensics and an independent investigation by Attorney John Clarke suggest Foster was shot in the side of the neck and was pushing a gun away with both hands at the time, which establishes a homicide and not a suicide. Did Hillary do it, the Mossad, CIA, ISI? Who knows? But Vince didn’t kill himself.

Now look at TWA800, 1996. 100 eyewitnesses saw missiles going up from the surface to the plane and blowing it up. It was important to keep the eyewitnesses from ever telling their stories in public, and that is exactly what the government did, even arresting a journalist who tried to find out the truth. Waco, Oklahoma City, the blind sheik and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing? All fraught with conspiracy. If you like your debunking neat and tidy you can find it on the networks or in the official explanations by either John Danforth or Kenneth Starr. Discrepancies suggest rather that Waco was an urban warfare exercise gone bad. The first WTC bombing? A case involving an FBI informant warning his handlers that terrorists under his control were building a bomb, only to be ignored or worse. And Oklahoma City, a possible inside job.

Now let’s take a deep breath and look at the Mother of all conspiracies: 911. What bits of fact have been shoved out of reach or off the table in this one? Just about all of them. And it’s too fresh and too real to us now to engage in rational debate about it, but it is odd that the President would not testify under oath about his actions on that day despite the rather glaring misstatements about the events he made in public. He was not warned? He saw a plane hit the building before he went into the classroom? He acted quickly? He made our defenses act quickly? One does not have to be a Michael Moore fan to see some serious problems here. And Moore, I don’t think, even takes on the big questions addressed in books by David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor, and others that the WTC buildings appear to have been taken down by demolition, especially building 7, and that a plane made some amazing acrobatic loops to hit the under-populated and under-construction side of the Pentagon while being flown by an incompetent pilot.

But the victors write the history, and have been writing it since 1963. This is the pattern I see. We should have a healthy respect for the truth. But we don’t. We are a country basically dominated by marketing ideas. Marketing is not truth, of course, but a perception perpetuated to make us think and act a predetermined way. It works. Maybe we are happy with just being consumers. I can live with a lie as long as I don’t know what the truth is. This is a fact that the government a long time ago realized and is exactly why you can’t find the truth in their official debunkings, including the 911 Commission’s recent report.

Truth died with Kennedy it seems. In 1962 the generals presented Kennedy with a plan to fabricate reasons to invade Cuba. They genuinely thought Cuba had to be invaded and the only way to get the American people to go along with it was to fool them. It was called Operation Northwoods and was signed off by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kennedy and McNamara, Secretary of Defense at the time, patted them on the head and said nice work boys, now go sit in the corner, as the two of them must have been howling incredulously in private at the crazy plan to shoot down our own airliners and blame it on Castro, blame John Glenn’s possible disaster, if it happened, on Cuba and a host of other insane ideas that would have been impossible to sell to the public at large. Anyway, this attitude toward the guys with guns may have been what precipitated Kennedy’s removal. Just a thought.

Today it seems those guys who would have been sent to the corner by a Kennedy are being promoted by a Bush. We don’t know enough at this time to go into the details, because Bush has gone out of his way with Executive orders to stifle and actually stop the flow of information back to the public. (Try and look into his father’s presidential papers, especially relating to Iran-Contra. They will only be released if either Bush, or their relatives says they can.)

Nevertheless we can look clear-headedly at what we do know: the Government went to war after scaring us to death. Why has no one investigated properly the anthrax attacks right after 911? Why did Congress get fed all that bogus intelligence about Iraq? Why did the American people come to think Iraq was responsible for 911, and therefore should be invaded? Good Marketing. Marketing is not the actual competition of ideas; it is the successful campaign to convince. If you can control the information and channel the direction of the public mind, then you can sell almost anything. Right now we don’t have much real competition in this marketplace of the truth. But I am being obtuse.

It all boils down to this: Kennedy was killed and the military essentially took over. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were serious threats to the military and the intelligence communities agendas in Vietnam. They had to be removed. Those are pretty much facts, but to continue on you have to let your mind open up a bit. When I say the military, I mean not only the military industrial complex, which by the way pays a lot of salaries and mortgage payments, but also the larger institutions of government. It is not lost on future leaders, if they are circumspect, that this government will not tolerate too much monkeying with its military budgets or foreign policy agendas. Think about how vital to business the Cold War was. Think about the amount of government defense spending, (almost $700 billion for this budget year), that would not be needed without War. You see where I’m going. We need a reason to prepare for war, and if we don’t have one we may have to create a new one. Actually we already have. The War on Terrorism to me is sort of the Mother of all Marketing ideas. Getting to this point in history started on November 22, 1963.
A Few Interesting links:
The Zapruder Film: http://www.assassinationresearch.com/zfilm/?NF=1
Wikipedia Overview of JFK Assassination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFK_assassination
JFK Forum: http://jfklancer.com/index.html This site is abundant with research and info.
Vince Foster: http://www.fbicover-up.com/proof/index.php

David Neal is a free-lance writer
and a founding member of Flight 800 Independent Research Organization, http://www.flight800.org/

2005-10-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Able Danger and Arlen Specter

D.L.Neal 10-25-05

As Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter approaches his 76th year, having beaten cancer, as well as conservatives and liberals during a long career of politics, one epitaph will always be attached to whatever good he may have done. He orchestrated and manipulated the Warren Commission into unequivocally concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald, apparently a lone nut, killed John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Even though the demographics of the country push 42-year-old history farther and farther off the radar screen, the murder of JFK still looms as a seminal event in American History. Trust in government is often seen beginning to slip with Nixon and Watergate, crimes of the seventies, but many will point to The Warren Report as the beginning of the end for the “America” as Hollywood knew it. Like the bad dream in the 1946 Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, where Jimmy Stewart saw his town turned into a Potter’s Field of crass commercialism, indecency, and loss of self-respect by the greed and evil of the owner of the local bank, Mr. Potter, many saw America slide into a nightmare of nihilism and self-doubt as the official report sanctioned by Lyndon Johnson tried to tell us that all was well: just go back to work and don’t worry about what your gut is telling you- that something was horribly wrong with this picture of one crazy nut wiping out Camelot with a twelve dollar gun.
Arlen Specter’s job, as a young Philadelphia lawyer, was to manage the evidence, as a prosecutor would, to convince the American people that Oswald acted alone. As staff counsel to the Presidential Blue Ribbon Commission headed by a reluctant Chief Justice, Earl Warren, Specter was the hands-on guy in charge of what would be put in, and what would not be included in the official report. It has taken forty years of wandering in the wilderness of obfuscation, many books, even a couple of movies to realize that we had all been had by Specter’s work.
In 1964 it was imperative that the American people not be told the truth that men who viewed him as a threat to our national security killed Kennedy. Who those men were and how they did it has been an obvious fact since 1963, rather like the proverbial elephant in the room, but publicly admitting it was, (and may still be,) impossible. Many feared it would cause most Americans to question every truth, ideal, creed, or conviction that they ever held. Not to mention that the possibility of either civil war, or worse, martial law, might be the result of telling the people the truth.
All those, like Specter, who assisted in the duping of the American people have probably convinced themselves they were involved in a higher purpose of protecting the people from a truth, which indeed might lead to anarchy. But this is doubtful. More realistically they were just doing their jobs. How could the public understand the complexities of Kennedy’s foreign policy, meant to bring the world together in peace, yet denigrated by realists who had been brought face to face with annihilation and conquered it in World War II and The Korean War. These were military men who could only see appeasement, diplomacy, and compromise as tools of fools in a cruel and dangerous world run in some quarters by not people like us, but “them”? How could the public digest the consequences of not building fortress America strong enough to withstand any threat, real or potential? How could the normal political system of adversarial argument and majority rule possibly react to an enemy who could annihilate us in a moment? In this atmosphere, could even the most idealistic, honest and intelligent young lawyer in the world attempt to educate America about the Potter’s Field that the military industrial complex, (that bugaboo which Eisenhower had seen looming), had in store for us? Specter couldn’t.
In his defense you could say he saw the big picture and was working to save America from itself. He controlled most of the testimony of witnesses before the Warren Commission. His efforts to cut them short, withhold important evidence, structure sentences so ridiculous that only the desired answer would be possible, were, in the best sense, only serving to put the tragedy behind us, to get on with the tasks at hand, to pacify us into a dreamland of copasetic ignorance. But with an incredible dearth of integrity and honesty among that group authorizing and producing The Warren Report, and with the complicity of the very institutions which should have checked the imbalance of bias, prejudice and partiality, it is probably too much to ask that Specter would have done anything more or less than he did. He was just doing his job, what he was told to do.
Who told him? Does it matter that it came down from a chain of command starting with who ever told Lyndon Johnson what to do, (probably the Joint Chiefs), down through Assistant Attorney General Katzenbach, to Specter’s boss Lee Rankin and then to Specter himself? Not all of these people were involved in the assassination, obviously, but all worked toward keeping a lid on the truth for reasons which can only be explained by those individuals themselves. There were those on the Commission and staff who should have resigned in protest, but like today there will always be those to fill the gap and do the job, no matter how contrary to their principles and convictions. Maybe Specter instinctively realized this.
That John F. Kennedy was removed by forces that saw him as a threat to national security, that saw him as a hindrance to plans in place to counter the perceived dangers of the ism of the day is not in doubt by anyone who has decided to look into the assassination with any degree of inquisition or honesty. One would find: an entrance throat wound turned into an exit wound thereby creating a cottage industry of theories that still manage to produce speakers and books which amuse and entertain us; a manipulation of people and evidence to make a government agent appear to be nothing more than a psycho loner; an autopsy botched so incredibly that it took the Joint Chiefs’ orders to make sure it could never be objectively researched. And the end result: A massive build up of military industrial complexities which like today not only made millionaires of those in the right places but furthered the game plan of those who could not argue their case openly and successfully in public, because they did not trust the public to side with them.
More specifically John Kennedy had begun to view the military men around him with not only suspicion but also disdain. Heroes of World War II, like Lyman Lemnitzer and Curtis Lemay, were not listened to in peacetime and were often overruled and ignored by young bright ex-ceos, Ivey leaguers, upstarts. Their plans to confront the Ism which they knew, unconfronted, would lead to America’s demise were not being taken seriously. Operation Northwoods, a plan Kennedy shelved, would have saved us from a nuclear face-off that almost started World War III, or so the Joint Chiefs thought. And as the end of Kennedy’s first term approached it even appeared he might be backing out on what seemed the logical approach to confronting the Soviet Union and Communist China in their own back yard.
It is doubtful Arlen Specter was party to these grand schemes, which eventually removed Kennedy. Instead, he was probably just the young opportunist that he appeared to be. But it would be impossible to imagine with hindsight that he has not been able to see the damage done by allowing the perpetuation of a lie that opened doors to a war in Viet Nam, a loss of trust in Government, a forty year misdirection of American treasure which has finally culminated in the obscene situation which we now find ourselves: a military budget that is nine or ten times larger then any rival and which saps our infrastructure, our schools, our institutions of life-blood instead feeding the largest war machine in world history. Again, all in order to fight an ism, a battle that cannot be successfully argued in public, but must be waged through fear and propaganda.
Now we are faced with a difficult choice, again. Amazingly Arlen Specter has a second chance in the crosshairs of history. We have learned that the esteemed 911 Commissioners may have pulled one over on us much like the Warren Report. It seems information they should have received, and which lowly operatives claim they delivered, did not make it into the final report. Namely that people who were identified as high-jackers had been known to and have been watched by agencies of the government. The fact that the program, Able Danger, which tracked them was shut down in February of 2001 smacks of conspiracy theory so heavily that only a Specter of the 1964 mold might be able to spin it into some kind of innocent incompetence which at least some portion of America might be able to swallow. But not the family members of victims of 911. Not those who are paying attention. Not those who will not accept another lie in their lifetimes.
It is beyond the imagination of mainstream America, what ever that really is, that our government, or at least highly placed people in it were able to violently remove a sitting President and get away with it, or to somehow facilitate a new Pearl Harbor. Put that thought over in the trash file because we simply don’t want to go there. And since we haven’t, we are unprepared and ill-equipped to question authority when it dissembles, distorts, denigrates or ignores truths that are begging to be known. It is no doubt not common knowledge that the commission put together by Bill Clinton to review the Assassination Records of the 1963 murder concluded that there were apparently two brains claiming to be Kennedy’s at his autopsy. It is even farther out on the branch of known history that President Kennedy’s personal doctor, Admiral George Burkley offered through his attorney to give information to the 1977 HSCA Committee that there had to be others involved in Kennedy’s murder. But when he finally testified, in 1978, he kept basically to the official line, not elaborating on his apparent earlier doubts. (In 1997, the AARB was unable to get his family to release access to his papers, and by then his attorney had also died. http://www.jfklancer.com/Dr_Burkley.html)
No one will know what Dr. Burkley had to say about others involved, but it is not his fault. We somehow allowed George Bush to be casually interviewed in the White House with no notes taken and obviously not under oath regarding his knowledge, activities, motivations, thoughts and dreams on 9-11. The incredible fact that we allowed this with Dick Cheney sitting beside him is testament to our comatose and stupefying self-denial. As others have noted, (see Harper’s Magazine article about the whitewash of the
911 commission : http://www.harpers.org/WhitewashAsPublicService.html) Bush simply played innocent to the charge that he was forewarned of plans and impending dangers- that his administration’s incompetence and dereliction was simply a result of ignorance and being caught by surprise. At least under oath he could have been legally liable as Condeleeza Rice recited the title to the August PDB which was practically an indictment itself: Osama Bin Laden plans to attack America. No lesson needs to be hammered home here, other than without the spirit of skepticism, distrust of official pronouncements, and serious questioning of the Pentagon and its programs like Able Danger, and God knows what else, we will not only fail at George Santayana’s test of not learning from history but continue to experience a repetition of knowable, predictable and deadly events, only to have their causes white washed by unchallenged official reports.
Arlen Specter has a chance to redeem himself. But it will be costly. Suggesting the Pentagon is obstructing Congress by withholding information, keeping witnesses from testifying, those are serious charges he has made. But to follow this investigation to the truth might suggest that indeed people who think they know what’s best for the rest of us were able to get the Pearl Harbor they needed to galvanize America into becoming the war machine they always wanted. And they were able to accomplish this without proper public debate or discussion in our institutions either in Congress or the fourth estate.
Specter’s committee could demand honesty and truth. He could get us to a point where the American people could handle truth. We could with Arlen Specter’s help learn that leaders are only human, that sometimes they forsake the people’s right to know for a narrow vision which they think the people can not understand, and consequently would not pay for. We could with Arlen Specter’s searching for truth clear the air, indeed learn from our mistakes and maybe even wake up from this forty year old nightmare, like Jimmy Stewart did in a 1946 movie where redemption, salvation, and unselfishness actually won the day. Jimmy Stewart was given a second chance, in a movie at least, to make things right. Arlen Specter has been given a second chance as well. What will history do with him? More importantly, what will history do with us?

Notes:
There are good websites for every persuasion concerning the JFK assassination. Books by Harold Weisberg, John Newman, Vincent Salandria; recent works by Larry Hancock, William Law, Joan Mellen, Gerald McKnight and many others produce a general outline of the elephant in the room. Go to Amazon.com and enter any of these names for descriptions of their works. The apparent murder of people like Navy audio-visual specialist William Pitzer in 1966 remains an interesting footnote. The strange killings of several organized crime figures in the seventies, just before they were to testify, as well as an exhausting list of other strange deaths, some possibly not related to the assassination, but so many coincidentally important to the investigation, that it has made it harder to successfully debunk the conspiracy theories than to realize that there may be something to them after all. The journalist and TV star Dorothy Kilgallen stands out particularly; she had announced she had broken the case after her exclusive jailhouse interview with Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer. She died shortly thereafter, as well as her best friend, before she was able to tell her story.
The wounds to Kennedy’s body were not examined properly. Evidence from the autopsy, such as the brain, and important photographs, are missing. The military control of the handling of the body and the manipulation of the autopsy stands out today as the clearest indication of an institutional command of the situation, starting from people in the highest offices and the military.
Kennedy’s throat wound, a small entrance wound about 3-5 mm, approximately ¼ inch in diameter, was seen by doctors and nurses at Parkland Hospital where he was first taken. Controversy has risen ever since because of the large gaping wound that was seen later after doctors performed a tracheotomy through the original small entrance wound. Dr. Malcolm Perry first called it an entrance wound and then after being shown the so-called official autopsy by the secret service, which contradicted what he saw, changed his mind. He later discussed this with Harold Weisberg and suggested it again appeared to be an entrance wound. He was a hunter, familiar with weapons, and had extensive experience with gunshot wounds. Fortunately others saw the wound as well before it was cut larger. Nurse Margaret Henchcliffe and others called it an entrance wound. No one disputes the small original size of the wound. More importantly, the whole single bullet theory rests on the assumption that a bullet went through Kennedy’s back and out his throat. There was no such back to front wound. It was never properly probed; in fact the back wound did not go deeper than about an inch. When the doctors at the Navy hospital in Bethesda tried to probe it, military officers in the autopsy room told them not to at the time. It is interesting that Curtis Lemay, Air Force General and one of the Joint Chiefs, with his lit cigar, was in the gallery during at least part of the autopsy, according to Paul O’Connor, a young Navy man who assisted with the autopsy. A few helpful links:
New Pearl Harbor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Pearl_Harbor
Operation Northwoods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
Able Danger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Danger
Arlen Specter’s bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlen_Specter
Senate takes on Pentagon over Able Danger
http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/37074-1.html
Articles on Able Danger: http://www.homestead.com/prosites-prs/abledanger.html
Able Danger to get second hearing: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,170267,00.html