Howard Hunt says he was just a “benchwarmer” in CIA murder of JFK

Ed Note: The original bit of Conversation posted here in mid 2007 after a quick reading of Hunt’s new memoir is currently undergoing renovation, and is somewhat in pieces, like Frankenstein’s monster on the surgery table.  (I’m trying to incorporate a few other recent books containing useful bits … )

A much enhanced draft will appear before Hell freezes on the main newcombat.net page.

E. Howard Hunt, prolific pulp novelist and career CIA agent, political and psychological operations his metier, and a leader of the Watergate break-in gang (which consisted entirely of CIA officers or assets with the exception of goofy pawn G. Gordon Liddy), had a book published earlier this year, shortly after his death.

American Spy updates his 1975 autobiography Undercover — and offers for the first time Hunt’s dubious offerings as to who killed President John F. Kennedy.

Hunt’s chapter on the murder proceeds like a drunk in the dark along familiar pot-holed streets. Readers new to the neighborhood trying to follow will likely stumble.

Without protest Hunt entertains the notion that the murder was managed by CIA brethren, working freelance, as oft was their wont. But precisely which ones he professes to remain unable to say certainly.

Nevertheless, the weight of his discussion falls foremost on wild Bill Harvey, and then on Cord Meyer, as the likely top conspirators within the Company.

He also rehearses, without endorsement, increasingly public suspicions of David Morales, “rumored,” Hunt intones, “to be a cold-blooded killer, the go-to guy in black ops situations where the government needed to have someone neutralized.”

And some people say, Hunt reports with a shrug, that maybe his old Psy Ops confrere Dave Phillips was involved.

But when he turns to Frank Sturgis, a well known mob and CIA goon with whom he shared a bunk in prison for deeds done at the Watergate, things seems clear:

He was a congenial guy who would follow orders but had a room-temperature IQ. He was also very discretionally challenged …. I don’t think Sturgis was part of a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy simply because nobody who was intelligent enough to concoct such a wide-ranging plot would have trusted him.

At this point a reader begins to feel memoir morphing to pulp fiction.

Fortunately, however, American Spy is not the only account of the murder that Howard Hunt left behind.

Zap some popcorn ….

Part One

(a) Cord Meyer , born to an eastern blue-blood family, lost an eye and his twin brother in the second war. He came home in 1944 transformed, and soon was an activist peacenik and celebrity.

In 1946 he won the prestigious O. Henry Short Story Prize, and the Jaycees named him one of the top ten most promising young Americans. (Richard Nixon was also on the list.) See David Talbot’s Brothers.

A year later Meyer was elected president of the United World Federalists, and would go on to draft with Robert Maynard Hutchins a constitution for world government.

Young Cord Meyer, then, was a genuine pheenom, a crusading phoenix of youthful idealism rising from the ashes of the war, whose poster came to commonly adorn the walls of co-ed dormitory rooms.

Then, somehow, in 1951, he was recruited by CIA Director Allen Dulles to organize Operation Mockingbird, under which hundreds of national journalists were put on the CIA payroll in exchange for cooperation on national security matters.

He also seems to have become LSD guru Timothy Leary’s contact at CIA, where the drug was manufactured and curiously tested.

But then in 1954 Meyer left the Company, or so it seemed, disenchanted. A critic of the nuclear arms race, a preacher of pacifism during the Korean war, a proponent of world government, member of the National Council on the Arts …

Little wonder Senator Joe McCarthy accused him of being a communist. Despite cover from CIA chiefs, Hoover’s FBI was soon on Cord’s case.

Across months he successfully defended himself against the charge, but in the process seems to have lost all his picnic spirit. After going through some public motions of quitting the Company, he went looking for publishing work in New York.

Spiritually speaking, Cord Meyer so far seems an unlikely candidate for JFK’s murderer.

But Hunt runs his name up the flag pole nevertheless because in 1961 Meyer’s first wife (divorced in 1958), a lovely Age of Aquarius dreamer named Mary Pinchot, began a serious affair with JFK that lasted until his death.

In 1945 Cord Meyer, newly wed, met journalist and fellow veteran John F. Kennedy at the San Francisco conference where the United Nations were born. Reports are that the two disagreed about the limits of internationalism (Kennedy the more conservative) — and that Cord was dismayed to discover that Mary and Kennedy had first met many years before as prep students.
White House logs show their last meeting there was November 1, 1963, the day President Diem of Vietnam was murdered in a CIA-backed coup.

The plan had been to merely remove Diem and his brother. Instead at the last moment they fled the CIA plane that would have taken them to Paris, returned to the presidential palace, where they found the coup in progress, and were shot by the local rivals whom Washington had endorsed. Or so writes Fletcher Prouty.

Kennedy was distraught, called Mary, and she visited the White House for several hours that afternoon. Three weeks later he was dead.

Jealousy, then, is the motive that Hunt repeats and endorses as to why Cord Meyer might have led the plot.

Days after Kennedy’s murder, Mary told friend Timothy Leary (so he writes in Flashbacks), “They couldn’t control him any more. He was changing too fast. He was learning too much. … They’ll cover everything up. I gotta come see you. I’m scared. I’m afraid. Be careful.”

She was murdered eleven months later. October 1964. Two shots, to the head and chest, the weapon never recovered.

A black man found hiding nearby was tried but not convicted. The case remains cold to this day.

Mary had a sister, Toni, who happened to be married to Ben Bradlee, the future famous editor of The Washington Post.

Bradlee and JFK had been friends since 1957, when they each bought houses on the same block in Georgetown. Bradlee was the local Newsweek man. Senator Kennedy was eyeing the White House. Mary, Toni and Jacqueline Kennedy became friends.

Bradlee writes that the morning after Mary’s murder he found James Jesus Angleton — the legendary and some say cracked-pot chief of CIA counterintelligence — inside Mary’s locked house, looking, he told Bradlee plainly, for her diary.

Together they searched and found nothing.

That afternoon, Bradlee and Toni thought to look through Mary’s studio, where she had painted large canvases with fading colors in the manner of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler.

They came upon Angleton picking the lock of the studio door.

“He would have been red-faced,” Bradlee writes, “if his face could have gotten red, and he left almost without a word.”

Mary’s prime biographer Nina Burleigh, writes that Cord Meyer “wept uncontrollably” at her funeral — and that Angleton and Richard Helms (“his two closest friends in the CIA”) sat directly beside him in the pew.

It also happens that Angleton was married to one of Mary’s closest friends, Cicely D’Autremont.

It’s perhaps, then, understandable that after Toni found Mary’s diary, and with husband Bradlee read it — finding to their shock (Bradlee says) that it detailed a deep affair with the dead President — they gave the book to Angleton, asking him to burn it.

In the CIA book-burning machine.

“It was naive of us,” Bradlee writes, “but we figured they were state of the art …”

Instead Angleton held the diary for three years, then returned it to Toni, who finally sent it up in flames.

It’s a curious story, but perhaps without public interest.

Then again: Years later, having been bounced in some disgrace from CIA, Angleton told reporters that he had bugged Mary’s house and studio early on — and thus followed her daring affair as it unfolded.

The most startling product of this operation was the revelation that Mary, with the help of Leary, tried to Give Peace a Chance by turning the President on during their trysts with marijuana and LSD. (The latter just once, Angleton reports.)

Indeed, Mary — no less a crusader than her ex-husband once had been — had organized a cell in D.C. of “eight intelligent women” (she told Leary), each involved with a power player whose consciousness she tried to raise with flower-power chemicals.

A friend of Mary’s told biographer Burleigh that once, after Jack and she had smoked three joints, he wondered aloud, “Suppose the Russians did something now?”

It’s not yet clear (in my reading) if Angleton was listening.

Toni (left), Mary, and their mom, a stern Goldwater girl

Note that journalist Joseph Trento, as late as 2001, published The Secret History of the CIA, which relates an account of Mary’s diary much more flattering to Angleton than Bradlee’s. Time has told that Angleton and Trento had a long standing relationship — source and mouthpiece — that for the most part seems to have mutually beneficial.
Hunt, for his part, seems in 2007 to go out of his way to tell Mary’s tale, and then, with a nod to the LSD tryst, concludes that her murder “was probably a professional hit by someone trying to protect the Kennedy legacy.”
Yet when he rehearses Bradlee’s version of the diary story, labelling the “interesting fact” of Angleton’s appearance “mysterious” — he follows up immediately, in an apparent non-sequitur, with “I don’t think that Cord Meyer killed his ex-wife, and I don’t think it was Angleton either.”

The comment may startle less when taken with the fact that in 1975 — the year across which Angleton was painfully pried out of CIA by new director William Colby — Hunt in a rare moment of public candor told reporter Seymour Hersh (a well established mouthpiece of the NS apparat) about “a small assassination team” within CIA, headed by a certain Colonel Boris Pash, that dealt with “suspected double-agents and low-ranking officials.”

Three years later, in 1978, journalist Trento reported, based on CIA sources, that the manager of Colonel Pash’s team was Angleton, his golden goose source.

Trento’s famous story (as we shall see) also reported the existence of an inhouse CIA memo from 1966, in which Angleton as housekeeper warns new director Helms that the Company has a problem: Hunt was in Dallas the day Kennedy was shot.
Throughout the history we are reading, threads almost hidden connect Angleton and Hunt. Best, perhaps, to begin looking for them now.

In the late 50s, after his divorce from Mary, Cord Meyer began working with the CIA again, probably having never really left, but overseas this time, in the clandestine service, and became (it is said) a hardliner on communism.

This would seem more the man whom Hunt has now proffered as a Kennedy killer.

Stateside again, Meyer rose to Deputy Director of Plans (covert ops), and resumed his close friendship Angleton.

But it seems he had indeed lost his picnic spirit:

Meyer fell increasingly under the spell of the gloomy, Byzantine views of his his CIA mentor Angleton. “Cord entered the agency as a fresh idealist and left a wizened tool of Angleton,” observed Tom Braden, Meyer’s boss early in his intelligence career. “Angleton was a master of the black arts. He bugged everything in town, including me. Whatever Angleton thought, Cord thought.

He ran the London station for a while, then seems to have quit for good, in 1977, as the investigations of the House Select Committee on Assassinations were heating up and the old guard were put out to pasture. He wrote a syndicated column thereafter for many years.

Shortly before death, in 2001, Meyer was asked by writer C. David Heymann whom he thought had murdered Mary. Heymann reports that Meyer replied:

“The same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy.”

Mary and Cord on their wedding day, April 1945

(b) WILLIAM KING HARVEY, Wild Bill, receives Hunt’s harshest treatment in 2007.
Hunt’s tipsy peripatetic rhetoric in American Spy is Aristotelian two fold, in that he rigorously prefaces each topic with “Some people say …” or similar. And rarely retracts it.

The result, when boiled down to bare logic, is little more than a review of the bad things people have been saying about the CIA since the first strong challenge of the Warren Commission Report — Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment — was published in 1966, soon to be followed by the first and only criminal case in the matter, brought in New Orleans in 1967 by District Attorney Jim Garrison (whose On the Trail of the Assassins is wonderfully written and remains a must read).

Of the five CIAists Hunt discusses as candidates, only with Harvey does he step out from behind the “Some people say” to assert
[("vaguely possible," "possible", "the most likely suspect"),

Harvey worked in West Berlin in the 50s -- Cold War Central -- where he famously dug a tunnel beneath the Soviet embassy to plant bugs. All for naught, however: the Reds were wise thanks to Brit turncoat George Blake and fed the tunnel barium meals for many years.

HUNT's VIEW

Harvey had once worked for the FBI and brought streetwise manners to CIA which Hunt, who fancied himself a gentleman, was known to have found vile. Even from the distance of 2007 he recalls Harvey as
a drunk who had been kicked out of the FBI. Balding, with loose jowls and rolls of fat jiggling under his chin and bulging out of a tight collar, he sported a short pencil-thin moustache, trying to give his face some aspect of personality.

Harvey had found an easy spot in which to nest under the CIA's counterintelligence director, James Angleton, a very odd couple, I thought. While I never had any reason to deal with him, I thought he was a strange man who should not be representing the CIA, much less the United States. His supply chief worked for me for a time in Washington....

"The guy is awful," he complained. "You should see what he's up to [in Rome]. Havery’s wife is a WAC officer who looks more masculine than a lot of men I know. ” He implied that there was some kind of strange sex going on.

A reader feels the pulp artist protests too much.
Violent and a vocal Kennedy-hater, Harvey has often been floated as a party to the murder, and has always seemed a decent guess.

ANGLETON AND HARVEY

Stateside again after Berlin, Harvey became Angleton’s deputy and the two seem to have been rather inseparable. Many sources echo Hunt’s remark on this curious friendship — Angleton the ascetic orchid-breeding poet, Harvey the brash and blubbery foul-mouthed roughneck. Alcoholism they shared, but that was unremarkable at Langley prior to Watergate.
Harvey is CI Deputy, each asked to write a brief on the question of Kim Philby — was he or was he not working for the Russians, as Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean and Anthony Blunt were. Harvey said yes, with a tightly argued paper. Angleton said no with little more than reports of dinner table chat.

Peter Wright, of Britain’s MI5 writes in Spycatcher (must read) of several wild meetings with Angleton and Harvey at large in Washington — and that during one, in 1961, the duo pressed him for help in assembling an assassination team.

QUOTE WRIGHT

Around the same time, the King came to the CIA’s Miami station — a nexus of the JFK murder mystery — where he headed for a time the loony Castro hit squad managed by mobster Johnny Rosselli. Exploding conch shells, poisoned scuba suits and cigars …

(During the mid 70s, between the Senate’s Church hearings on CIA misdeeds and the investigation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, sawed off pieces of the flamboyant Rosselli, who had testified to the Church committee, were found in a 55-gallon drum floating in Miami’s Dumfounding Bay.)

most broadly and recently: The two people Hunt now fingers most emphatically for the JFK job — Harvey and Meyer — were two of Angleton’s closest CIA confreres outside his hermetically sealed counterintel staff.
MOVE TO CODA: Both Lane and Garrison fingered the CIA, rejecting the notion (as does Hunt) that the Mob had the capacity to do all the things that had to be done to successfully complete the mission in Dallas.

===

(c) As to the CIAists’ principal(s), Hunt in his book surmises — offering little argument and no evidence — that the motive force behind the murder was Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson: the hayseed New Dealer from Texas back country who rose to command the Senate during the Eisenhower years, then swallowed a Kennedy gambit by accepting the surprise offer of the vice presidency in 1960.

It seems Hunt intended, in so writing, to support recent underdetermined theories about LBJ that rely chiefly on a palm print supposedly found on the Book Depository rifle and discovered decades later to belong to an LBJ hatchetman named Max Wallace.

The LBJ idea got a big boost in 2003 from a book by Barr McClellan, a lawyer who says that during years of working for Johnson he sniffed out his complicity.

These arguments, putting Johnson atop a narrow and rather homespun conspiracy, have not yet struck home here persuasively.

But it seems possible he may have been a witting and willing affiliate of a professional project managed by people we train to do such things. See, for one, Noel Twyman’s Bloody Treason (1997).

The middle ground re LBJ’s possible involvement has long been staked out by one of his Dallas girlfriends, who across the decades wrote and told cameras that the Vice President was told (warned?) of the plot the evening before, at a dinner party at the ranch of Texas billionaire Clint Murchinson, owner of the Dallas Cowboys among other big things.

The woman says that Johnson emerged from behind a closed door that evening and told her with a growl that his days of taking guff from them Kennedys was over.

But of course there are debunkers who say the woman is crazy — some who claim to prove she invented the Murchinson dinner from whole cloth.

No opinion here. But the woman seems slightly more credible than her detractors. That she may have confused a dozen details across the years, even the date, don’t seem to signify one way or the other.

Both Kennedy and Johnson recorded White House conversations. (Nixon inherited LBJ’s equipment.) On extant tapes we hear LBJ in the days after the murder intently asking investigators if the assassins had been shooting at him as well. Some argue this proves his innocence. From here it don’t seem to help either way.

Max Wallace does seem to have been an LBJ Man Friday, and a murderer, and good with a rifle. If the palm print story is true, one may imagine that he was invited to the hunting party without LBJ’s knowledge. Wallace would thereby preserve the boss’s deniability, while the professionals would plant an inconvenient truth by which the new president might on occasion be persuaded of reason.

It is clear from Captain John Newman’s ground-breaking book — JFK and Vietnam (1992) — that Johnson was working a back channel in the years before the murder with generals and their friends who were demanding intervention first in Laos and then Vietnam, as a means of provoking China back into the war that Eisenhower had stalled with an armistice in Korea.

These generals — Air Force’s LeMay (model for Colonel Jack D. Ripper in Doctor Strangelove), Navy’s Burke and Army’s Lemnitzer (JFK’s first chairman of the Joint Chiefs and sponsor of the now notorious Operation Northwoods program) — were damn sure war with China was in the cards and intended to nuke’m on their own timetable, and sooner than later.

They plied Kennedy with memos arguing same from day one. Soon he called them “nuts” and stopped inviting them for tea. Thereafter their man in the White House was Johnson.

LBJ changed Vietnam policy within days of taking office, turning back JFK’s first instructions for withdrawal of the advisors then in country. (1,000 before Christmas, of 16,000 total, all of whom were under CIA auspices.) Johnson then pushed forward with Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, the prime invasion coming in 1965, shortly after his stunning defeat of Barry Goldwater in the ’64 election.

So LBJ was affiliated with the war camp, and did their bidding in southeast Asia. And the war camp, almost certainly, is where high pay-grade coupsters resided.

Yet, from this armchair, it seems odd that professionals would taint the prime figurehead of the world that they intended to create with the murder.

What, practically speaking, might LBJ have contributed to the plot’s execution? And if nothing (as it seems here), what need to know would have prompted the professionals to involve him?

Why compromise the new president? He was already in camp, and would prove malleable. Several times in the Oval Office he spoke of the gunshots of Dallas, echoing between his ears.

As did Nixon.

Note that Captain Bradley E. Ayers, an Army Ranger who trained anti-Castro cubans for the CIA in the early 60s to aid their hapless attacks on their homeland, spent fifteen years investigating the JFK murder, and has just this year published his thoughts.

The Zenith Secret is not an “update” of Ayers’ The War that Never Was (1976). That book, to begin, was a fictionalized account — phony names and places — of the CIA Miami station in the early 60s.

Further: it was edited by none other than CIA cowboy Wild Bill Harvey (Hunt’s prime suspect), whom Ayers knew from Miami, but who had retired (unbeknownst) and gone to work for publisher Bobbs-Merrill.

Even funnier: Harvey’s boss at Bobbs-Merrill, Managing Editor Tom Gervasi, confessed late in life that he was an Operation Mockingbird team player and as such had sanitized many a manuscript.

Poor Bradley Ayers knew none of this when he submitted to Bobbs-Merrill what he thought a rather clever roman a clef. Nor did he soon understand how and why the text had been reworked so badly in-house as to render it useless as history.

The Zenith Secret now tells all as Ayers saw it in Miami, using real names. Then moves on with the entirely new account of his investigation of the murder.

Ayers claims with some power to have uncovered complicity of David Morales (also on Hunt’s list). Morales was hired by the CIA in the late 40s to be trained as an assassin and was head of covert ops at the Miami station when Harvey and Rosselli were there trying to kill Castro and Ayers was teaching Cubans how to launch rubber dinghies and kill with their hands. Ayers and Morales knew each other fairly well.

Ayers also presents evidence of complicity in the murder plot of Morales’s patron and mentor. The man who rescued him from poverty and put him through college. The leading militarist in the Senate of the day. The hero of today’s so-called Neo-conservatives. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. The Republican front-runner for 1964.

Morales is now a person of interest in both Kennedy murders, and Ayers is his primary biographer, whom other writers have relied upon for years. The Zenith Secret brings this and other source material for the first time to light.

Unfortunately it is printed in seven-point type.

Nevertheless it must be read.

No one said this would be easy.

Part Two

Howard Hunt died in January 2007. Soon thereafter his eldest son, St John Hunt, came forward with some memos and cassette tapes that his father had given him circa 2005, as followups to conversations about his hidden life.

See Rolling Stone’s piece about all this.

St John says that Hunt’s second wife (his first had died in a mysterious plane crash during the early months of Watergate) soon broke off the forbidden conversations and banished him from his father’s Miami house.

Sometime soon after Hunt began writing American Spy — during which he asked his son to return the confessional memos and tapes. St John did so, after making copies.

These memos and tapes importantly contradict the book that Hunt wrote during his last year.

In the book, for example, Hunt casts heaviest aspersions on Harvey and Meyer, discusses theories about Phillips and Morales without endorsing them, and goes out of his way to nix the notion that his pal Frank Sturgis was involved in the murder.

In life, however, Hunt wrote for his son a two-page memo that explicitly implicates goons Sturgis and Morales along with the high-ranking Harvey, Meyer and Phillips:

Cord Meyer discusses a plot with Phillips who brings in Wm. Harvey and Antonio Veciana. He meets with Oswald in Mexico City. . . . Then Veciana meets w/ Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ changes itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons.

Hunt in his book repeatedly denies any personal involvement in the plot or finite knowledge of it, and insists he never met Sturgis until they were introduced in 1972 by mutual cubano friend Bernard Barker as the Watergate break-ins were being planned.But the memo Hunt gave his son tells of a day in 1963 when pal Sturgis had tried to recruit him to the JFK hit team. Hunt writes that he refused the invitation, because he distrusted Harvey as a lunatic drunk.

Furthermore, and even more to the contrary: On tape, Hunt tells his son he was merely “a benchwarmer” on the hit team.

The tape can be heard at the son’s website: www.saintjohnhunt.com.

And here is a Black Op Radio interview with the son, talking about all this.

Note that Black Op Radio is run by Len Osanic, who is the great curator of Colonel Fletcher Prouty‘s writings and interviews, which probe these matters with much first-hand experience.

Bradley Ayers seems to have much in common with Fletch. More about him later, perhaps.

So then.

Given Hunt’s hedged admission of complicity — “benchwarmer” — it seems a good guess that two now-obscure items out of the past linking him to the JFK murder are indeed what they have always seemed, and that a third rather famous speculation perhaps had basis:

(A) J.J. Angleton, as CIA housekeeper, wrote a famous memorandum to career CIA spook Richard Helms as the latter assumed control of the CIA in 1966.

The Memo informed incoming Director Helms that CIA had a problem: Howard Hunt was in Dallas the day Kennedy was shot.

The Memo was obtained by the investigating staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, precisely how still a mystery (unless I’ve missed something recent). Thoughts across the years have been that Angleton — who had recently been bounced with extreme prejudice from the agency by the then new director William Colby — may have been the leaker.

Or maybe it was old-timer Cleveland Cram, who was heading an internal CIA hunt for moles and assassins in the agency. The fallen Angleton was apparently a suspect on each count.

In any case, former CIA analyst Victor Marchetti , author of a landmark insider book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, quickly caught wind of the Memo, and wrote about it in a magazine article that stated that the CIA leadership was about to throw Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and perhaps others to the HSCA wolves, in a “limited hangout” confession, painting the former agents as rogues who participated in the murder as freelancers.

The Memo was also leaked — by Angleton for sure — to journalist Joseph Trento, who wrote a newspaper story about it and other aspects of the assassination.

The two articles, published within days of each other by minor organs, were ignored by the mainstream media and the law, while, shortly after, the avid HSCA staff was fired by the Congressmen who had convened the Committee, under pressure from their FBI and CIA liaisons, and replaced with duds who promptly produced a toothless report and closed up shop. See The Last Investigation by staff investigator Gaeton Fonzi.

However. Marchetti’s article provoked a legal action that produced noteworthy results.

(B) CIA contract agent and Fidel Castro lover Marita Lorenz implicated Howard Hunt in JFK’s murder twenty years ago, first in a deposition and then on the witness stand during the Hunt vs Liberty Lobby trial of 1985, in which Hunt sued the publishers of Marchetti’s article about the Memo for libel.

Attorney Mark Lane used Lorenz’s testimony to successfully defend the publisher in the trial. Jury members afterward told the press that the defense had demonstrated to their satisfaction CIA complicity in Kennedy’s murder. See Lane’s important book about all this: Plausible Denial. Must reading.

Lorenz testified that she drove from Miami to Dallas with mob and CIA goon Frank Sturgis (also on Hunt’s verbal JFK list, and his Watergate team) , CIA drug-runner and contract assassin Gerald Patrick Hemming and a bunch of anti-Castro cubans, and delivered, the night before JFK’s murder, two trunkloads of guns to a Dallas motel — where, Lorenz testified, benchwarmer Howard Hunt paid for the guns with cash.

Note that Bradley Ayers presents evidence in The Zenith Secret that a senior member of Senator Goldwater’s staff delivered, on the Senator’s instruction, two suitcases of cash to New Orleans and Dallas the day before the murder.

According to Ayers’ source — the daughter of the Goldwater staffer — the suitcases came to Goldwater as contributions to his 1964 presidential campaign. The donors: intel octopus mystery man Robert Maheu (then Howard Hughes’s top exec) and mobster Joe Bananno.

The staffer received the cash in Las Vegas, then drove to Texas and gave one suitcase to a man in a Dallas motel using the name Gordon. Then drove on to New Orleans, where he gave the second case to David Morales, whom he knew from meetings in Goldwater’s Senate office.

(C) The famous bit of speculation involving Hunt and JFK’s murder was found in the diaries of Nixon’s right-hand H.R. Haldeman, which were published posthumously.

The scene: June 1972. Two days after the Watergate arrests. Haldeman, working with John Ehrlichman, proposes to Nixon that they ask the CIA to use to shut down the FBI’s investigation of the break-in on grounds it might compromise national security.

The heat was on because a Nixon campaign contribution check had already been traced to a burglar’s bank account by FBI Miami.

But to ask CIA for a favor was difficult. Vice President Nixon had been Eisenhower’s point man on the CIA, and in 1958 had made an enemy of the Company by cashiering legendary spook Frank Wisner after the botched CIA invasion of Indonesia (one of the great blackouts in the history of the US media — see Prouty interviews).

But upon returning to the White House eleven years later, Nixon had tried to bury the hatchet by allowing Richard Helms (a Wisner loyalist) to remain on as CIA Director. Nevertheless they loathed each other.

So. Woodward and Bernstein are burning shoe leather. Sturgis, James McCord (a senior CIA “internal affairs” officer) and three of Hunt’s Bay of Pigs Cubanos are cooling heels in the hoosegow. Hunt and Liddy ( not yet nabbed) are hitting up Haldeman, Ehrlichman & Dean for bail money. And Director of Central Intelligence Helms is waiting in the West Wing to speak with the President’s men.

Nixon doesn’t want to speak with Helms directly, however, and so is coaching Haldeman on what to say and how to say it. From the tape transcript:

PRESIDENT: How do you call him in, I mean you just, well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things.

HALDEMAN: That’s what Ehrlichman says.

PRESIDENT: Of course, this is a, this is a Hunt, you will — that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves. …

When you get in these people when you … get these people in, say Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that ah, without going into the details… don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. And, ah because these people are plugging for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period!

Haldeman wrote that he delivered the message as instructed. And that at the mention of Bay of Pigs the urbane, highly disciplined Helms blew his top, shouting that the Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with Watergate.

Haldeman then wrote, in his diary, that he believed Nixon intended “the Bay of Pigs” as a code phrase for JFK’s murder.

(To better understand what seems a stretched inference, see this passage in Haldeman’s memoirs, which were published during his life.)

Gerry Hemming (the assassin fellow Marita Lorenz says drove with her and Sturgis to Dallas with the guns) happens to have been Lee Harvey Oswald’s commanding Marine sergeant when they were stationed at the CIA’s U-2 base in Japan. And he has talked at some length about these matters.

He said (see Plausible Denial) that his assassination firm was approached regarding the JFK job, but declined it. (Rather like Hunt telling his son that he refused Sturgis’s offer to join the team.)

And while being prosecuted on drug charges in the 70s, Hemming this to say:

All of a sudden they’re accusing me of conspiracy to import marijuana and cocaine. Hey, what about all the other things I’ve been into for the last 15 years, lets talk about them. Let’s talk about the Martin Luther King thing, let’s talk about Don Freed, Le Coubre, nigger-killers in bed with the Mafia, the Mafia in bed with the FBI, and the goddamn CIA in bed with all of them. Let’s talk about all the people I dirtied up for them over the years. Spartacus U.K.

HUNT rejects Mob hit theory.

BRADLEE reprise The Washington Post was home base for Operation Mockingbird. It’s flamboyant socialite publisher, Phillip Graham, was a CIA confidante throughout his career, until one day he began to spill some beans and was quickly institutionalized by his wife, and soon after, the story goes, blew his brains out.

WP continued with Lardner etc. Talbot’s question re why didn’t BB pursue the story. BB: too young there in the 60s, came to WP in 65. Acks lack of courage. Follow up queestion never asked. Why not in 1975, with Rock Comm and Church and as most powerful and celebrated journalist in the country? Friendship? Mockingbird? Co-opted and in no position to throw stones in the wilderness of mirrors.

HUnt said sturgis couldn’t keep his mouth shut — he didn’t. Lorenz account of them in NY, threats, etc
David Atlee Phillips was recruited into the CIA by Hunt in the early 50s. Together they were Political Action (Hunt) and Psy Ops (Phillips) chiefs for the CIA overthrow of the Arbenz government of Guatemala in 1954. Then again for the Bay of Pigs fiasco seven years later, during which Phillips was known in Miami as Maurice Bishop.

Phillips was head of the CIA station in Mexico City during the latter half of 1963, and has been at the center of the JFK murder mystery ever since he confessed at a public forum in 1977 (see Plausible Denial) that evidence CIA had supplied to the FBI and the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald had visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City was false, and that there was no reason to think he had.

Worries that Oswald was a Soviet assassin (That would mean war!) were used to throttle the investigations by the Warren Commission, the FBI and the CIA’s impressive portfolio of Mockingbird press assets. Today no evidence remains standing that Oswald was ever in Mexico during 1963.

Hunt says now of Harvey: “Never had any reason to deal with him …” Not in Dallas?
In 1975, as the revelations of the Church hearings were thundering, Hunt, in the hoosegow for Watergate, told the New York Times that he knew of a “small” CIA assassination team headed by a certain Colonel Boris Pash.

Three years later Joseph Trento (in his story about the Memo placing Hunt in Dallas) reported that CIA sources had confirmed Hunt’s claim — and furthermore that Angleton was the controller of Colonel Pash’s team. See Plausible Denial.

Trento in subsequent years published a major defense of Angleton (whom he had served as a mouthpiece for so many years). In The Secret History of the CIA (2001) Trento writes that it was Director Allen Dulles, not Angleton and Harvey, who introduced assassination to CIA practice. That Angleton was right about the Golitsyn/Nosenko controversy within CIA. And that the KGB killed JFK.

Angleton was undermined and finally cashiered by CIA Director William Colby in an Augean Stables operation that began on Christmas Eve 1974 with a leak to Seymour Hersh of the NY Times of Angleton’s domestic spying activities.

Around the same time Angleton gave the Times an interview, and when asked about theories linking the Agency to JFK’s murder, replied that the CIA was “a mansion of many rooms” and “I’m not privy to who struck John.”

Reader now ready to pick a way through this discussion, in which Joseph Trento and Gerry Hemming participate among others. Fare thee well.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3375

Well then. What is one to think?

New Book: THE ZENITH SECRET by Captain Bradley E. Ayers / Rebuttals to BBC piece re CIA goons at RFK murder

1. Lisa Pease, a respected JFK researcher, responds negatively to Shane O’Sullivan’s recently unveiled alleged video evidence that CIA goons David Morales, Gordon Campbell and George Joannides were at the Ambassador Hotel in California the evening RFK was murdered. See her blog.

(Navigation note: The blog link actually takes you to the Comments to Pease’s “review” of O’Sullivan, rather than her review itself. For the latter, click the “Show Original Post” link you’ll see atop the Comments page.)

Also note that the Comments include a reply by O’Sullivan.

On its face Pease’s rebuttal lacks substance, in that she doesn’t engage the substance of O’Sullivan’s report.

Rather, she says in rather a priori fashion that she cannot believe the CIA would be dumb enough to send men involved in JFK’s murder to kill his brother. The premises underlying this statement seem to me likely false. She would do better to directly address O’Sullivan’s evidence.

She also implies guardedly that O’Sullivan’s thesis doesn’t congrue with new evidence re RFK’s death currently in her hands but unpublished. One senses this is the gist of her negative reaction.

Nevertheless, she is someone to consider seriously in these matters. Also see her journalistic website — Real History Archives.

And see the earlier, excellent, site about the JFK murder primarily — Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination, or CTKA — which came out of PROBE magazine, which Pease produced with Jim DiEugenio.

2. A stronger rebuttal has been published by Jefferson Morley (journalist well acquainted with these matters — see his article, posted as the second Comment here) and David Talbot (founder of Salon.com and author of this year’s very good book, focused on Robert Kennedy’s experience post JFK murder, entitled Brothers).

Then again, if you follow up to a great resource page you will find that O’Sullivan’s own rebuttal to Morley/Talbot also has merit.

For now I tend to agree with Sullivan that the Morley/Talbot piece is off-center of its supposedly intended target.

The O’Sullivan BBC video (12 minutes) is also linked at the resource page.

3. O’Sullivan’s video relies heavily on the career and investigations of Bradley E. Ayers — a former Army Ranger captain who was dealt by the Pentagon into the cesspool of the early 60s CIA to train the anti-Castro cubans the CIA was still organizing post Bay of Pigs to harass Cuba.

Ayers has just this year published a book — THE ZENITH SECRET. Which I have just completed reading cover to cover. Despite the microscopic type in which it was set.

ZENITH SECRET is uneven but full of important things. Must be read.

It was published by Vox Pop, a Brooklyn bookstore run by Sander Hicks, the founder of Soft Skull Press and publisher of J.H. Hatfield’s FORTUNATE SON, the must-read biography of baby Bush.)

Having just read ZENITH SECRET and the rebuttals of O’Sullivan’s BBC piece by Morley, Talbot and Pease, I’m in a bit of a Barbaric Bog, sans solid opinion. So for the moment will cease trying to have one.

Instead, a few observations:

(a) Ayers writes in his Epilogue that after

multiple viewings of the Ambassador Hotel ballroom videotapes … my initial identifications [from photos] of Morales and Campbell were confirmed for the record. (p262).

Ayers never mentions Joannides in his book, and I guess he never met him. But he was well acquainted with Morales and Campbell.

(b) Morley/Talbot write, in their short piece:

Gordon Campbell, it turns out, was not the deputy station chief in the CIA’s Miami operation, as O’Sullivan reported. He was a yachtsman and Army colonel who served as a contract agent helping the agency ferry anti-Castro guerrillas across the straits of Florida, according to Rudy Enders, a retired CIA officer, and two other people who knew him.

This contradicts a ton of detail in Ayers’ memoir.

Ayers does identify Gordon Campbell as deputy station chief at JM/Wave (the CIA Miami station), second in command to Ted Shackley, and relates many detailed encounters with both Shackley and Campbell, as superiors to whom he had to report and clear actions.

I don’t grasp why Morley/Talbot find the point worthy of such attention. Even if they are correct re Campbell’s job description, it hardly touches on the core controversy re the identities of the three men in the Ambassador footage.

And that they cite Rudy Enders as authority seems a bit ludicrous.

(c) Morley/Talbot then report, perhaps gloating, that Enders told them that Gordon Campbell died in September 1962. So he could not have been in Los Angeles in 1968, as O’Sullivan suggests. They provide a photostat death certificate.

But again — the “Gordon Campbell” who Anders says died in 1962 cannot be the deputy chief of station using that name that Bradley Ayers worked with in Miami beginning summer 1963. And this man is the one Ayers has identified in the Ambassador footage.

It seems either Ayers is spewing insane fiction, or Morley/Talbot have been fed the wrong Gordon Campbell, or similarly confused, by their CIA sources.

Nevertheless, Mr Morley in particular is somone whose views in these matters I respect.

4. Another GORDON CAMPBELL Curiosity: His adjutant KARL

(a) Karl in High Company

Ayers reports at length on Gordon Campbell’s Man Friday at JM Wave — a francophone (native french or belgian, he seemed) named Karl.

Ayers had several close encounters with Karl. And reports once seeing him having lunch, at a remote roadhouse between Miami and the Keys, with David Morales, David Atlee Phillips (senior CIA Psy Ops dude, protege of E. Howard Hunt) and Johnny Roselli (mobster hired by high CIAist Bill Harvey to get ihis lame-brained Castro assassination program off the ground).

Recall: Morales, Roselli, Harvey and Phillips are already all near the center of the JFK murder mystery.

At the time Morales was covert ops chief at the Miami station.

Phillips, much senior, had supposedly stepped down to be chief of the Mexico City station, where, he confessed publicly in 1977, he had something to do with the falsification of evidence putting Oswald at the Soviet embassy in October 1963. See Lane’s Plausible Denial.

Harvey had come back from Europe a few years before to be Deputy to Angleton at counterintelligence HQ in Langley, where inter alia they solicited help from MI5′s Peter Wright in assembling an assasination team, mentioning Castro by name. See Wright’s Spycatcher. Harvey was then dispatched to Miami, where Ayers encountered him several times from summer ’63 on, often accompanied by Roselli.

Ayers writes that he wondered immediately how it was that Karl ranked to be found in such elevated Company company. He did not see Karl’s superior, deputy station chief Campbell, at the lunch.

(b) Karl Murdered by, it seems, CIA

A few months later — Ayers was compelled to be in attendance at Karl’s murder.

?!!?

Ayers writes that he and Karl were taken in a helicopter to reconnoiter the Florida coast, looking for new training grounds for the angry and teeming cubanos.

But then the unknown (to Ayers) leader of the flight pulled a pistol — and forced Karl out the copter door, sans parachute, to his death. Over the wide empty spaces of Eglin Air Force base.

Ayers speculated at the time that he was chosen to witness the execution because his superiors were beginning to worry abou his (Ayers’) attitude: a caution to shut his mouth and get back to work. Since he did not go to the police about the murder, he became, technically, an accessory to it, which he felt left him open to blackmail thenceforth.

(c) Karl a Doppelganger for Lee Oswald

Shortly after Karl’s murder Ayers had his mind blown when he saw replays of the press conference and murder of Lee Harvey Oswald on TV — and realized that Karl was a doppelganger for Oswald. (Recall that an Oswald imposter seems to have been central to the creation of the CIA cover story.)

5. It was only years later, when Ayers read the Warren Commsision Report and realized it was a pack of lies, that he began a career as an investigor of JFK’s murder. The second half of ZENITH SECRET is about this.

His evidence and conclusions, such as they are, in a nutshell:

– Morales was a protege of right-wing Senator Barry Goldwater, the leading militarist in the Senate of the day and GOP presidential candidate in 1964.

Morales grew up dirt poor in Arizona. But found work as a teenager in the Goldwater family empire, and came to Barry’s notice. Goldwater then paid to put Morales through college in Arizona and California.

– In 1963, Morales was a flamboyant visitor to Goldwater’s senate offices. Bursting in without appointment. Embracing the staid Senator …

– Goldwater participated in JFK’s murder by ordering the transport of two suitcases of campaign contribution cash from Las Vegas (given to the courier by Robert Maheu (ie Howard Hughes) and mobster Joe Bannano), one suitcase to a man using the name Gordon in a Dallas motel and the other to David Morales in a New Orleans motel.

(a) MORALES BIOGRAPHY

Note that Ayers is the primary researcher of Morales’s life and career, upon whom the likes of Noel Twyman (Bloody Treason), Pease and now Shane O’Sullivan have all relied.

Morales was Director of Operations (dirty work) in the Miami CIA station during the 18 months or so Ayers was there as director of combat training for cubano insurgents. Morales was the infamous leader on the ground of the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala and of Bay of Pigs martyrs on the beach in 1961.

Ayers reports that Morales was also one of the first six men hired, in 1948, as black ops operatives by the fledgling CIA. And that he was a fearsome figure in Miami 14 years later — that even Shackley, chief of station, often withered in his presence.

Morales was subpoenaed to appear before the House of Representatives Select Committe on Assassinations in 1978. Instead he died, at age 53.

Ayers gently doubts this story, noting that Morales’s gravesite in Arizona seems to have been fiddled with.

Possible, perhaps, then, that Morales’s death was faked in 1978 to avoid the HSCA subpoena and to ease his transit into retirement and another identity.

Which brings to mind Rudy Enders telling Talbot/Morley that “Gordon Campbell” died in 1962, and waving a piece of paper in their faces to prove it.

(b) BARRY GOLDWATER?

Ayers produces a source — a smart and circumspect Phoenix woman named Pearl, daughter of a man on Goldwater’s business staff for nearly 30 years — who at length details the alleged involvement of Goldwater in the JFK murder.

She says that her father — Pepe — told her, shortly before his death, that he was asked by Goldwater in November 1963 to drive up to Nevada to collect a large cash campaign contribution. (Goldwater was running for Pres in 1964.)

Pepe did so — collecting two suitcases of cash from Robert Maheu (infamous mysterious US intelligence agent then serving as chief exec of Howard Hughes’s business empire in Las Vegas) and Las Vegas mobster Joe Bananno.

Pepe then drove to Dallas, called a phone number, and delivered one suitcase to a man in a Dallas motel going by the name of Gordon, the day before JFK’s murder.

(Recall: Morita Lorenz, the woman at the heart of attorney Mark Lane’s PLAUSIBLE DENIAL case — in which Howard Hunt sued a magazine for libel (without success) for running a story that placed him in Dallas during the JFK murder …

Recall, I say, that Lorenz testified in court that she drove from Florida with CIA assassin Gerry Hemming, CIA and mob goon Frank Sturgis, and several cubans, with two trunk-loads of guns, and that they were paid by E. Howard Hunt for those guns with lots of cash in a Dallas motel the night before the murder.

(The obvious tasty speculation, of course, is that the cash Pearl’s father delivered to Gordon [Campbell? Or Hunt using that name?] in a Dallas motel the day before the murder was the cash that Hunt gave Hemming, Lorenz & co for their guns in a Dallas motel the evening before the murder.)

Pepe then drove to New Orleans and delivered the second suitcase to David Morales in a motel there early on November 22, 1963.

======

Curious.

Too tired however to try to make more of this at the moment.

One has to read Ayers’ book to develop confidence in his reportage. It does seem however that to dismiss him in toto — as Lisa Pease does — would be to conclude he is a raving maniac writing whole-cloth fiction.

And that is certainly not my impression.

Rather, he reminds me of Col. Fletcher Prouty, whom I admire and whose writings have not only withstood the test of time, but become more and more apt to our increasingly unhinged sociopolitical landscape.

JFK secret servicemen called off limo as it enters Dealey Plaza

I’ve never seen this footage before. Clearly showing the Secret Service men who ride or trot at the rear of the presidential limo being ordered off their station as the car turns into (apparently) Dealey Plaza.

It seems to be the right hand turn onto Houston Street, which was shortly followed by a sharp left turn onto Elm Street, where the murder occurred.

NIST investigating “blast events” as cause of WTC collapse

http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2007/7/emw537622.htm

NIST Exploring 9/11 “Blast Events” for WTC-7; New Witness Confirms Scholars Previous Findings

The National Institute for Standards and Technology appears to be moving in the direction of a conspiracy theory about the destruction of WTC-7. This comes as a new witness reports explosions inside the building early that morning, long before the building would be destroyed at 5:20 PM. This reinforces Scholars for 9/11 Truth previous finding that WTC-7 was a controlled demolition, which they believe the government is trying to conceal.

Madison, WI (PRWEB) July 5, 2007 — The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) appears to be moving in the direction of a “conspiracy theory” about the destruction of WTC-7 on 9/11 just as a new witness has emerged reporting extensive destruction inside the building many hours before it would be demolished. According to James Fetzer, the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, these turns of events provide further confirmation for the conclusion that WTC-7 was brought down by a controlled demolition at 5:20 PM/ET. “Anyone who googles WTC-7 will see an event that looks exactly like a controlled demolition, just as Peter Jennings and Dan Rather reported at the time. That is why this event makes NIST so uncomfortable.” Controlled demolitions require elaborate preparation.

WTC-7, a 47-story building also known as the Soloman Brothers Building, collapsed about 7 hours after the Twin Towers were demolished. It was hit by no jet aircraft and had no jet-fuel based fires. “It did have a few modest fires, which could have been easily contained but were allowed to burn,” Fetzer said. “Remarkably, the fire alarm system in WTC-7 was turned off at 6:47 AM/ET and placed on ‘TEST’ status for a period of eight hours.” In its latest press release (29 June 2007), NIST acknowledges that NIST is “considering whether hypothetical blast events could have played a role in initiating the collapse . . . (and) led to (WTC-7′s) structural failure” (http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/wtc_062907.html). Blast events would be consistent with a controlled demolition.

A new eyewitness inside WTC-7 on the morning of 9/11 heard explosions before either of the Twin Towers collapsed. He was summoned to the Office of Emergency Management Operating Center (OEMOC), also known as “Rudy’s Bunker,” on the 23rd floor of the building. The center had been especially prepared for the Mayor and other officials to gather in case of a terrorist attack or other emergency. Some have wondered why Giuliani did not go to the OEMOC but instead remained some distance from the World Trade Center. This witness, who testified at official hearings and whose identity will be revealed in the general-theater-release version of “Loose Change,” has information that sheds light on this and other questions about WTC-7.

Rolf Lindgren, former Vice-Chair of the Libertarian Party of Wisconsin and independent scholar of the events of 9/11, transcribed the testimony and edited it for clarity of English. The complete transcript is below. The witness went to WTC-7 after the first plane struck the North Tower and before the second hit the South Tower. When he arrived at the 23rd floor, he found half-eaten sandwiches and still-steaming coffee. He made some phone calls and was told to leave “right away.” Someone ran into the Center and led him to a stairwell. “When we reached the 6th floor, the landing that we were standing on gave way; there was an explosion and the landing gave way.” He had to climb back up to the 8th floor to find a way out. When he got to the lobby, “the lobby was totally destroyed. It looked like King Kong had come through and stepped on it.. And it was so destroyed I didn’t know where I was . . . (and) they had to take me out through a hole in the wall, . . . a hole that I believe the fire department made to get me out.”

WTC-7 has been widely regarded within the 9/11 research community as the most blatant of all “smoking guns” that disprove the official account. According to David Ray Griffin, a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth and the movement’s leading representative, the building showed all the characteristics of a controlled demolition: an abrupt, complete, and total collapse at freefall speed, which was perfectly symmetrical and into its own foundation, as he has explained in his latest book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking (2007). “NIST has yet to explain it,” Fetzer observed. “The ‘blast events’ this witness is describing are not ‘hypothetical’ but actual. Only actual events can bring about effects. So it’s a bit labored for NIST to say it’s considering whether ‘hypothetical’ blast events could have played a role in initiating the collapse. They could not. That requires real blast events.”

The witness, who was interviewed by Dylan Avery (with audio clips played on Alex Jones’ and on Dylan’s shows), has expressed his puzzlement over the destruction of the building. “Well, I’m just confused about one thing and one thing only,” he said, “why World Trade Center 7 went down in the first place? I’m very confused about that. I know what I heard; I heard explosions. The explanation I got was it was the fuel oil tank. I’m an old boiler guy. If it was the fuel oil tank, it would have been one side of the building.” But the collapse was symmetrical. “There was a large tank of diesel in the building,” Fetzer said, “but diesel burns at a low temperature and diesel is not explosive. It cannot have brought about this collapse.”

In his opinion, anyone who has watched the building come down can appreciate that it has all of the characteristics of a controlled demolition. Even James Glanz, a reporter for The New York Times, admitted in an early story (29 November 2001) that the collapse of WTC-7 is even more perplexing than is the destruction of the Twin Towers, because no reinforced, steel structure high-rise building had ever collapsed due to fire in the history of structural engineering. “Indeed, no steel structure high-rise collapsed due to fire before 9/11 nor after 9/11 – nor, if our research is correct, on 9/11,” Fetzer said. “None of these fires burned long enough or hot enough to cause steel to weaken, much less melt. It must be embarrassing for the scientists at the NIST to defend these ridiculous theories.”

Lindgren, who has extensive experience with press releases, added, “Friday afternoon is the best time of the week for the government to bury unpleasant news. Since NIST insists it has found ‘no evidence’ of a controlled demolition, it must not consider the videos of WCT-7′s collapse as ‘evidence,’ because they leave no room for doubt. The fires in Building 7 provide a good cover story to hide the fact that powerful explosives brought it down.” He is also not impressed with Giuliani’s excuse for not going to his command center, which is that another plane could have been headed for it. “But if another plane was headed toward the World Trade Center, then he should have directed that the firemen be removed from all the buildings, which he did not do.” (See http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=rudolf_(_rudy_)_giuliani ).

There were other oddities related to WTC-7, including Larry Silverstein reporting (during a PBS interview) that he had suggested to the fire commander that the best thing to do might be to “pull it” (where, he said, “They made the decision to pull, and we watched the building come down”) and the BBC broadcast of a report of the collapse of “the Solomon Brothers Building” at least 23 minutes before the event would actually occur. “This was stunning,” Fetzer said, “because you could see WTC-7 in the background over her left shoulder as she reported its collapse. It is hard to imagine a more revealing demonstration of the entanglement of the intelligence agencies, the administration, and the mass media. And a ‘terrorism drill’ was scheduled for the next day.” The PBS interview and the BBC report are archived on the Scholars site at http://911scholars.org

“If Rosie O’Donnell had talked about ‘blast events initiating the collapse of WTC-7,” Fetzer said, “she would have been labeled a ‘conspiracy theorist.’ But then the official government account of 19 Islamic fundamentalists hijacking four commercial airlines, outfoxing the most sophisticated air defense system in the world to perpetrate these atrocities under the control of a guy in a cave in Afghanistan is only the most ‘outrageous’ conspiracy theory of them all. I guess we should be grateful that NIST is moving inch by inch toward a more adequate explanation of what actually happened on 9/11, which bears no relationship at all to what we have been told. Given the cumulative evidence, we are not ‘conspiracy theorists’ but ‘conspiracy realists.’”

WTC 7 Eyewitness Testimony Transcribed by Rolf Lindgren (edited for clarity with notes): Go to http://911scholars.org and click on “Press Releases” at the top.

French gov’t minister wonders if Bush & co. fixed 9/11

Bush Behind 9/11: French Minister
by IslamOnline.net & News Agencies

http://www.just-international.org/article.cfm?newsid=20002386

A high-profile French politician, now a minister in President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government, has suggested that US President George W. Bush might have been behind the terrorist 9/11 attacks.

“I think it is possible. I think it is possible,” Christine Boutin, now a Housing Minister, said in a video interview that started to seep into the mainstream media and was highlighted by Reuters Saturday, July 07.

Almost 3,000 people were killed when hijackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington in 2001.

The attacks were claimed by Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

Some conspiracy theories argue that the collapse of the World Trade Center was the result of a controlled demolition.

Foreign activists and intellectuals did not buy that the massive terrorist operation was the work of Al-Qaeda, arguing that the attacks were orchestrated by the Bush administration to enforce into dominance drive on the world by force.

Some theorists also contend that a commercial airliner did not crash into the Pentagon and that the airline was shot down.

A recent Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll said that more than one-third of Americans believe US officials helped in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop them.

In 2002, a book claiming that no plane hit the Pentagon in the 9/11 attacks topped the French bestseller lists.

The White House revealed a security memo in 2004 under the Freedom of Information Act that warned of possible terrorist acts in the US one month before the 9/11 attacks.

The memo was received by Bush on August 6, 2001, and warned that Al-Qaeda network of Osama Bin Laden had penetrated the United States and could resort to plane hijackings.

Voice of the Masses

Boutin said that the websites that challenge Al-Qaeda role on the attack are drawing the largest numbers of visitors.

“I know that the websites that speak of this problem are websites that have the highest number of visits …,” Boutin said in the interview posted on the website www.ReOpen911.info which promotes the 9/11 conspiracy theories.

“I tell myself that this expression of the masses and of the people cannot be without any truth.”

Boutin’s remarks have immediately drawn attention of the French media.

“Christine Boutin snared by her controversial suggestions about Sept. 11,” Le Monde newspaper said in a headline.

Boutin’s office sought to play down her remarks about Bush’s role in the attacks.

Spokesman Christian Dupont was quoted by Liberation newspaper as saying that Boutin had not wanted to appear pro or anti-Bush at a time when Sarkozy was being branded a “US poodle” after meeting the president in Washington.

“And then she is not the foreign minister,” Dupont added.

Boutin’s office said that she said later in the interview that “I’m not telling you that I adhere to that position.”

But this comment does not appear on the video clip on the website.

Airline Pilots re 9/11 truth

Below is a recent press release from an airline pilots’ 9/11-truth organization. I found it at Axis of Logic:

http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_24288.shtml

but you can go the pilots’ site as well:

www.pilotsfor911truth.org

The pilots say they recently got hold of the NTSB study (2002) of American Airlines Flight 77 (supposed to have hit the Pentagon) thru FOIA, and that the analysis therein seems to clearly say that the large plane that passed that way that day was too high:

(a) to have knocked down the 5 or 6 light poles,

(b) to have appeared in the Pentagon security camera footage, and

(c) to have hit the Pentagon. (See press release)

I do remember seeing reports of at least one eyewitness who supposedly said that the large plane that day actually flew OVER the Pentagon as the attack occurred and landed at Dulles shortly after. These reports fed speculation that what hit the Pentagon was a military drone or missile launched by and/or controlled by the larger plane.

The 9/11 commish report acknowledges that an air force electronic surveillance/command plane was over the Pentagon when it was hit. A bit of the pilot’s testimony is in the report; his name is public.

He was also in the air earlier that morning (same plane) over Shanksville, Pa when whatever happened there happened. I’ve never seen any satisfactory account of this fellow, esp as to how, in a lumbering plane, he was able to be so on-the-spot — twice — while the fighter jets it seems were not.

I don’t mean that the picture is now clear. Just that it continues to make too little sense to be credible.

PRESS RELEASE
03/26/07

PILOTS FOR 9/11 TRUTH
www.pilotsfor911truth.org

Contact: Robert Balsamo
e-mail: pilots@pilotsfor911truth.org

OFFICIAL ACCOUNT OF 9/11 FLIGHT CONTRADICTED BY GOVERNMENT’S OWN DATA

Pilots for 9/11 Truth, an international organization of pilots and aviation professionals, petitioned the National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) via the Freedom of Information Act to obtain their 2002 report, “Flight Path Study-American Airlines Flight 77″, consisting of a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file and Flight Path Animation, allegedly derived from Flight 77′s Flight Data Recorder (FDR).

The data provided by the NTSB contradict the 9/11 Commission Report in several significant ways:

1. The NTSB Flight Path Animation approach path and altitude does not support official events.

2. All Altitude data shows the aircraft at least 300 feet too high to have struck the light poles.

3. The rate of descent data is in direct conflict with the aircraft being able to impact the light poles and be captured in the Dept of Defense “5 Frames” video of an object traveling nearly parallel with the Pentagon lawn.

4. The record of data stops at least one second prior to official impact time.

5. If data trends are continued, the aircraft altitude would have been at least 100 feet too high to have hit the Pentagon.

In August, 2006, members of Pilots for 9/11 Truth received these documents from the NTSB and began a close analysis of the data they contain. After expert review and cross check, Pilots for 9/11 Truth has concluded that the information in these NTSB documents does not support, and in some instances factually contradicts, the official government position that American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001.

According to the 9/11 Commission Report, which relied heavily upon the NTSB Flight Path Study, American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon at 9:37:46 AM on the morning of September 11, 2001. However, the reported impact time according to the NTSB Flight Path Study is 09:37:45. Also according to reports, American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon and by doing so, struck down 5 light poles on Highway 27 in its path to the west wall.

The information provided by the NTSB does not support the 9/11 Commission Report of American Airlines Flight 77 impact with the Pentagon.

Pilots for 9/11 Truth is committed to discovering the truth surrounding the events of September 11, 2001. We have contacted both the NTSB and the FBI regarding these and other inconsistencies. To date, they have refused to comment on, correct, refute, retract or offer side-letters that might explain the discrepancies between what they claim are the data extracted from the FDR of AA Flight 77 and the official story alleging its crash into the Pentagon.

As concerned citizens and professionals in the aviation industry, Pilots for 9/11 Truth asks, why have these discrepancies not been addressed by agencies within the United States Government? Why have they falsely represented their own data to the American people? Pilots for 9/11 Truth takes the position that an official government inquiry into these discrepancies is warranted and long overdue. We call upon our fellow citizens to write to their Congressional representatives to inform them of these discrepancies and call for an immediate investigation into this matter. For more information please visit www.pilotsfor911truth.org

Signed:

Robert Balsamo
4000+ Total Flight Time
Former: Independence Air/Atlantic Coast Airlines

Glen Stanish
15,000+ Total Flight Time
American Airlines, ATA, TWA, Continental

Captain Russ Wittenberg (ret)
30,000+ Total Flight Time
Former Pan Am, United
United States Air Force (ret)
Over 100 Combat Missions Flown

John Lear
Son of Bill Lear
Founder, creator of the Lear Jet Corporation
More than 40 years of Flying
19,000+ Total Flight Time

Captain Jeff Latas
USAF (ret)
Captain – JetBlue Airways

Ted Muga
Naval Aviator – Retired Commander, USNR

Col Robert Bowman USAF (ret)
Directed all the “Star Wars” programs under Presidents Ford and Carter – 101 combat missions

Alfons Olszewski
Founder Veterans For Truth
US Army (ret), Aircraft Maintenance Crew Chief

Robin Hordon
Former Boston Center Controller
Commercial Pilot

John Panarelli
Friend and fellow aviator of John Ogonowski
Capt. AA #11
11,000+ Total Flight Time

Eastern Metro, Braniff, Ryan International, Emery
Worldwide, Polar Air Cargo

Lt. Colonel Shelton F. Lankford
United States Marine Corps (ret) – 10,000+ Total Flight Time 303 Combat Missions

Captain Dan Govatos
10,000+ Total Flight Time
Former Chief Pilot of Casino Express airlines, Director of Operations Training at Polar Air

George Nelson, Colonel USAF (Ret.) Licensed Commercial Pilot and Aircraft Mechanic

Dennis Spear
Army Aviator (ret)
7000+ Total Flight Time Operations Officer, Aviation Safety Officer

Captain Joe H. Ferguson
30,000+ Total Flight Time (ret) USAF (ret)

END PRESS RELEASE

Guardian joins chorus contra 9/11 truth nuts

A while back The Nation broke its silence with Roots of Paranoia, dismissing with  a conceptually empty paternal piece people who find the official story of 9/11 unbelievable. Yesterday The Guardian (a bit below) contributed its guffaw. The substance and rhetoric in these things are so weak, one wonders why they bother. Pressure to say something, I suppose. Pressure from above or below?

A 9/11 conspiracy virus is sweeping the world, but it has no basis in fact

George Monbiot
Tuesday February 6, 2007
The Guardian

There is a virus sweeping the world. It infects opponents of the Bush government, sucks their brains out through their eyes and turns them into gibbering idiots. First cultivated in a laboratory in the US, the strain reached these shores a few months ago. In the past fortnight, it has become an epidemic. Scarcely a day now passes without someone possessed by this sickness, eyes rolling, lips flecked with foam, trying to infect me.

The disease is called Loose Change. It is a film made by three young men that airs most of the standard conspiracy theories about the attacks of September 11 2001. Unlike the other 9/11 conspiracy films, Loose Change is sharp and swift, with a thumping soundtrack, slick graphics and a calm and authoritative voiceover. Its makers claim that it has now been watched by 100 million people.

Wm Rodriguez still talking re WTC explosions

Story below re Wm Rodriguez, who worked in the WTC and has spoken at length re hearing and experiencing explosions in the building well before the collapses.

Here he says the first occurred circa 830 am and 22 other people in a basement office with him heard and felt them. Who are the 22 people?

I didn’t realize that his testimony to the 9/11 commish was closed session — and that Zelikow then blacked him out of the 911 Commish Report entirely. Another black mark re the Report.

Nor did I know (but am happy to see) that Hillary has dared pose with him.

May come back to haunt her.

Key 9/11 survivor in Lancaster
THE last man to leave the World Trade Center building alive is coming to Lancaster on Thursday, February 8, to speak on his experiences during and since 9/11

WILLIAM Rodriguez was working as a janitor in the World Trade Center on the ninth of September 2001 when he heard explosions – from below.

But William didn’t just try to save his own skin; as the only key holder for the North Tower stairwell where he was working, he unlocked doors and helped firefighters to rescue hundreds of people.

William was also the last survivor to leave the building. He spent the rest of 9/11 helping out as a volunteer in the rescue efforts, and at dawn the following morning, was back at Ground Zero continuing his efforts.

After 9/11 William lost his job and has worked ever since to help others who were affected by the atrocities.

In February William is coming to Lancaster to tell his side of the story; a story the US Government would not let him tell in full.

William, a native of Puerto Rico, a citizen of the United States and a resident of the State of New Jersey, was employed as a maintenance worker at the 110-storey World Trade Center building for 19 years.

William with Hillary Clinton.

Arriving at 8.30am on the morning of 9/11, he went to the maintenance office located on the first sub-level, one of six sub-basements beneath ground level.

Fourteen people were in the office at that time. As he was talking with others, he says there was an incredibly loud and powerful explosion which seemed to emanate from between sub-basement B2 and B3. There were 22 people on B2 sub-basement who also felt and heard that first explosion.

At first William thought it was a generator that had exploded, but the cement walls in the office cracked from the explosion.

“When I heard the sound of the explosion, the floor beneath my feet vibrated, the walls started cracking and everything started shaking,” said William, who was crowded together in the office with 14 other people, including Anthony Saltamachia, supervisor for the American Maintenance Company.

Just seconds later he says there was another explosion high above which made the building oscillate momentarily. This, he was later told, was a plane hitting the 90th floor.

Then he says there were other explosions just above B1 and individuals started heading for the loading dock to escape the fires caused by the blasts.

Unlocking doors for the firefighters as he went, William got to the 39th floor before he was turned back by the firefighters. As he began his descent he heard a plane hit the south tower.

Down at ground level he saw the mangled and bloodied bodies of people who had jumped. William says he will never forget the anguish that hit him, or the sight of the senseless carnage.

The Twin Towers were the only known steel frame buildings in history claimed to have failed because of fire. Other steel frame buildings have been known to burn for hours and hours and not collapse. The cause of the Twin Towers’ failure is not known because the evidence was rendered unavailable for investigation.

Independent investigators said both towers suspiciously fell “like a house of cards,” claiming that William probably heard pre-arranged detonated bomb blasts, strategically placed and timed to make it appear that the plane was the cause of the collapse.

After the trauma of losing many of his close friends and the sheer horror of the events of 9/11, William looked forward to his appearance at a closed-door hearing of the 9/11 Commission.

But he started changing his opinion as he saw how the commission worked, and also when the American media edited out his testimonies about hearing bomb blasts in the buildings, whilst the Spanish media reported his claims unedited.

William was one of the last people to testify to the commission and spoke behind closed doors, unlike other witnesses. His testimony was not included in the final report

He said the commission didn’t answer his questions and avoided the issues he was presenting. When the administration started to link the 9/11 attacks with the preparations of the 2003 Iraq war, he said he felt “manipulated and used”.

He also sought out the National Institutes of Technology, which was investigating the collapse of the WTC, but was sent packing.

And the FBI was not interested in his claim that he’d met one of the hijackers ‘casing’ the buildings several months before 9/11.

In October 2004, William filed a civil lawsuit directed against George W Bush, Richard B Cheney, Donald H Rumsfeld and others, including a total of 100 defendants, together with Ellen Mariani and lawyer Phil Berg. The RICO Act is normally used by the US government to nail organised crime as a conspiracy, but this time it was used against the government itself, claiming a conspiracy on its part.

The government filed a motion to dismiss, or at least transfer, the case on grounds of national security. Berg answered by filing an affidavit that alleged the defendants “had knowledge that the attacks were impending… but they failed to (take countermeasures), not by reason of mere negligence, confusion, or ineptitude, but because they affirmatively desired such attacks to occur.”

William said: “I have tried to tell my story to everybody, but nobody wants to listen. It is very strange what is going on here in supposedly the most democratic country in the world. In my home country of Puerto Rico and all the other Latin American countries, I have been allowed to tell my story uncensored. But here, I can’t even say a word.”

WTC cop dies of lung disease

This is from the NY Times

By Sewell Chan

January 24, 2007

A former New York City police officer died of a lung disease last night, hours before his son attended the State of the Union address to draw attention to the plight of 9/11 rescue workers like him who became ill after they were exposed to toxic dust at ground zero.

The police officer, Cesar A. Borja, 52, died around 6:15 p.m. at  Mount Sinai Medical Center, where he was enrolled in a monitoring and treatment program for ground zero workers, said Lauren Woods, a hospital spokeswoman.

Officer Borja died of pulmonary fibrosis, a type of chronic lung disorder that involves scarring of the tissue between the air sacs.

Officer Borja had been in intensive care and had been accepted as a potential candidate for a lung transplant, but his critical condition, complicated by infection, precluded him being listed to receive a lung, said his physician, Dr. Maria L. Padilla.

A Congressional official briefed on the officer’s case, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of federal health privacy rules, said that federal officials had approved government financing for virtually all of Officer Borja’s care — an acknowledgment that his condition was linked to work at ground zero.

Officer Borja’s 21-year-old son, Ceasar, had been invited to attend President Bush’s address as a guest of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. On Monday at ground zero and again yesterday in Washington, the young man stood next to Mrs. Clinton and discussed the need for federal financing for treatment of 9/11 workers.

“It is really painful for me to be here, so close to where my father contracted this disease,” Ceasar Borja said in New York on Monday, wearing a dark blue coat and speaking slowly and softly. He said he was trying to stay strong for his mother and two younger siblings and added, “9/11 did not end that day.”

Last night, the son was at a dinner at Bullfeathers, a Capitol Hill restaurant, when he received a phone call notifying him of his father’s death, according to an official briefed on the situation.

Four Congressional aides were at the dinner, along with several other guests invited to attend the presidential address in order to draw attention to 9/11 responders. Those at the dinner tried to comfort Ceasar Borja, the official said, and he decided to go through with his plan to attend the address.

Officials warned last month that money for two major monitoring and treatment programs — one run by Mount Sinai and the other by the city’s Fire Department — would run out in a matter of months.

Representative Vito J. Fossella, the only Republican House member from New York City, has urged White House officials to support the workers, but so far he has evidently not met with success. President Bush did not mention the 9/11 workers in his address last night

9/11 victim’s Mom re forgiveness, justice, public policy

Excerpts from a piece in the Guardian:

by Hannah Pool

Phyllis Rodriguez’s son Greg was one of the 2,759 people who died in the World Trade Centre in 2001. The following year she and other relatives of victims of the New York attacks met Aicha el-Wafi, whose son Zacarias Moussaoui received a life sentence for his role in the hijackings. Rodriguez is involved in the Forgiveness project, a non-religious, non-political group that catalogues stories of forgiveness.

How did you first meet Aicha el-Wafi?

The meeting was arranged through two human-rights groups. Aicha had requested a meeting with any family members of victims who were interested. We agreed – on condition that it would be very private.

What happened at the meeting?

When she arrived, we embraced each other and we cried, and then we all sat and she told her story.

What was the first thing she said to you?

She expressed her sympathy for our losses and apologised. She said: “I don’t know if my son is guilty or innocent, but I’m sorry for what happened to you.”

Was it what you wanted to hear?

I didn’t expect her to apologise. I didn’t hold her responsible. The people who I would love to hear that from are the ones who died in the attacks, who sacrificed themselves. I don’t know that I would even insist on their apologising. I really wish I could have a dialogue with them, to understand what made them act that way.

Have people been angry at your willingness to forgive?

Yes, some people have been. I’ve been accused of being a bleeding heart liberal. I’ve been accused of not thinking seriously about what I am doing because it violates the memory of my son and those who were killed.

Many people hold Aicha indirectly responsible and I feel that she’s not responsible. First of all, I do not believe that her son had anything to do with it — there was no evidence, even though he pleaded guilty. But even if he were, she’s a mother, she did her best. I have never known a person well who was so abused in her marriage and in life and who fought and survived and kept her positive, generous nature.

Why forgive?

I think that, on a very intimate level, it helps me.

Is there a danger you are letting off those responsible?

No, I would not let them off. I would want them to pay, I would want them to have a fair trial, I would want them to have appropriate punishment, I would want society protected from dangerous people.

Do people confuse forgiveness with lack of punishment?

Yes, they do.

Are you more political now?

No, I don’t think I am more political, but I question a lot of stuff.

If you had five minutes with President Bush, what would you say?

What I would say to Bush is this:

“The military actions that you have taken, the Patriot Act that you have pushed through, those were not in the name of my son. I do not support this. You didn’t ask me. I wish you had asked me what I would have suggested in the name of my son. I do not feel that what you have done has made us safer — on the contrary, I feel less safe now. History has shown us, and international experience has shown us, that violence and repression do not make the world a better place.”

Must see new 9/11 demolitions documentary

New this past September (five years since) is the best documentary yet on the demolition of the Twin Towers and 7WTC: “9/11 Mysteries, Part 1: The Demolitions.”

This is a mature, rounded and well-founded argument.  Brought to you by the good folks at 911weknow.com.

Pop some corn. Invite some friends.

Britain airs new photo evidence of CIA goons at RFK murder

Thank god for the free press: The Guardian and Brit television last week — on the 43rd anniversary of JFK’s murder — aired new photo evidence of three CIA agents present at the Ambassador Hotel in LA when Robert Kennedy was shot there in 1968. (See the Guardian story posted as comment below.)

The three spooks are notorious and already part of the JFK literature:

– Dave Morales, a well known covert ops goon and kennedy-hater among the anti-castro cubanos in the CIA’s Miami station post Bay of Pigs. He was a protege of Barry Goldwater. Led the CIA ground troops in the overthrow of the Guatemala government in 1954. Led Bay of Pigs invaders on the beach in April 1961. And was then director of Operations (ie dirty work) in the CIA Miami station during Operation Mongoose (the harassment of Cuba post Bay of Pigs).

– George Joannides, head of the Miami station’s Psychological Operations (propaganda and similar in support of covert ops) in the early 60s, and, as such, something of a protege of E. Howard Hunt. (Hunt himself was, e.g, Psy Ops chief for the CIA overthow of the Arbenz government in Guatamala in 1954.)

– Gordon Campbell, who was deputy chief of station (to Ted Shackley) in the Miami CIA station circa 1962-63.

A. Captain Bradley E. Ayers, an Army Ranger detailed to train anti-Castro cubans working for the CIA in the early 60s, has much to say about all this — and says it clearly in his newly published book, The Zenith Secret.

Read all about it here.

Then proceed to:

B. There are a number of things to say about Joannides and the Miami station Psy Ops team of the Bay of Pigs era:

1. Hunt’s other well known underling in Psy Ops was David Atlee Phillips, who told a public hearing in the late 70s (audio tape is extant) that the CIA evidence placing Oswald at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City weeks before the JFK murder was bogus and there was no reason to think Oswald was in Mexico.

In the weeks after the murder, this supposed connection to the Soviet Union was primary to the argument (threaded from CIA to FBI to LBJ, Congress et al.) to squash the murder investigation, for fear that Oswald ties to Soviet Union might trigger popular cry for war.

2. When Richard Helms took over the CIA in 1966 he was handed a memo by James Jesus Angleton (CIA’s housekeeping/counterintel chief) reporting that the Company had a problem: Howard Hunt was in Dallas the day JFK was shot. This fact became public when the memo was unearthed during the House Select Committe on Assassinations (“HSCA”) investigation in the late 70s. (Read Mark Lane’s Plausible Denial. A real page-turner.)

3. Joannides in the early 60s was the case officer of the “DRE” anti-castro cubano student organization that Oswald hung around with, fought with once in the streets and, it seems, was trying to infiltrate as an FBI contract agent. (That Oswald was working for FBI during his last months was a fact the Warren Commission carefully investigated and repressed, as Gerald Ford relates in Portrait of the Assassin, his memoir of service on the Warren Commission.) DRE people are often cited in the literature as foot-soldiers in the JFK murder plot.

4. In the late 70s Joannides was attached to the staff of the HSCA (which was investigating the murders of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King) as CIA liaison. As such his job was to help the HSCA research and communicate with CIA in support of the investigations.

But in 2003 the CIA was sued re Joannides under the Freedom of Information Act by a group (including the final lead counsel of the HSCA) angry that CIA had never told the HSCA that Joannides was directly and deeply involved in the Miami station world — including as case officer to DRE cubans suspected of involvement in JFK’s murder. (See article re this 2003 FOIA suit posted as a comment below.)

So. Strange no one has ever noticed Morales or Joannides in these films from the RFK murder before. But from the Guardian account, at least, the picture seems clear. Thank goodness old English liberties are still alive across the pond.

NORAD Officer: Cheney took over months before 9/11

Interesting testimony from, of course, radio.

Le silence eternel de
ces espaces infinis m’effraye

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. Where in Sam Hill is the editor?

Pascal, Pensees