Ron Paul - USA Is Setting Up For A Military Dictatorship
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Tomorrow, we take one more step toward becoming Nazi Germany...
Senate moves to limit debate on unconstitutional legislation
Paul Joseph Watson
The Senate has cleared the way for a final vote tomorrow on the National Defense Authorization Act, a provision of which would empower the U.S. military to operate on American soil, arrest American citizens and cart them off to detention centers anywhere in the world.
After the failure yesterday of an amendment that would have weakened Section 1031 of the NDAA bill, which would turn the entire “homeland” into a battlefield and allow the military to arrest individuals accused of being terrorists and detain them indefinitely without trial, the Senate voted 88-12 today to limit debate on the legislation, clearing it for passage tomorrow.
“A final vote on the bill could come as early as Thursday,” reports the Associated Press.
The provision was hashed out in secret by Senators Carl Levin and John McCain. Lindsay Graham, a supporter of the bill, explained that it would, “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield” and people can be imprisoned without charge or trial “American citizen or not.”
Republican Congressman Justin Amash called the provision of the bill, “one of the most anti-liberty pieces of legislation of our lifetime,” adding that the language had been “carefully crafted to mislead the public” in that the proposed law “does not preclude U.S. citizens from being detained indefinitely, without charge or trial, it simply makes such detention discretionary.”
Amash has been joined in his opposition to the bill by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who has introduced an amendment to strike Section 1031 from the legislation altogether. When Paul confronted McCain on the provision earlier this week, McCain confirmed that it would apply to American citizens accused of being terrorists.
Paul warned yesterday that the passage of the bill could see U.S. citizens arrested on American soil and sent to Guantanamo Bay.
Although the Obama administration has threatened to veto the bill, some observers believe Obama would rather avoid a political hot potato and sign it into law anyway.
“He has said he will. Whether he will is a difficult question because, politically, it’s difficult to veto a defense spending bill that 680 pages long and includes authorization to spend on a whole range of military programs,” Daphne Eviatar, Senior Associate, Human Rights First’s Law and Security Program, told Democracy Now.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/indefinite-detention-bill-set-for-final-vote-thursday.html
"The real purpose of the Levin-McCain provisions is entirely unrelated to “terrorism,” either by al-Qaeda or any known domestic outfit. It was put in there to codify a number of important “legal” precedents, which make it possible for the President to declare an American citizen an “enemy combatant” and hold him or her indefinitely without charges. This is the final step in a process that will enable the President to establish a de facto military dictatorship: it’s the “unitary presidency” meets the global economic crisis."
Setting the Trap
Levin-McCain bill would create a presidential dictatorship. Where is the outrage?
by Justin Raimondo
Buried in the annual defense appropriations bill is a provision that would give the President the power to use the military to intern anyone – including American citizens – indefinitely, and hold them without charges or trial, anywhere in the world, including on American soil. The provision essentially repeals the longstanding Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the military from engaging in law enforcement on US territory – the greatest fear of the Founders. Approved by a Senate subcommittee in secret hearings, the provisions open the road to a military dictatorship in this country – and for that we can thank Senators Carl Levin and John McCain, who introduced the measure. Both the FBI and the Pentagon came out against the Levin-McCain monstrosity, and Senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado) introduced an amendment striking the provision: the amendment was defeated in the Senate, 37-61.
The mind reels. As the ACLU’s Chris Anders puts it:
“I know it sounds incredible. New powers to use the military worldwide, even within the United States? Hasn’t anyone told the Senate that Osama bin Laden is dead, that the president is pulling all of the combat troops out of Iraq and trying to figure out how to get combat troops out of Afghanistan too? And American citizens and people picked up on American or Canadian or British streets being sent to military prisons indefinitely without even being charged with a crime. Really? Does anyone think this is a good idea? And why now?”
Why now, indeed – and the answer is not hard to fathom. With the US banking system making very loud creaking noises as the eurozone descends into the economic abyss, and a total meltdown staring us in the face, the Powers That Be want to make sure they have their hands on the reins of power – and on the whip they won’t hesitate to use.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) exults that the bill will “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield” and anyone can be imprisoned without charge or trial “American citizen or not.” Graham doesn’t care about any of that sissy constitutional stuff, and never did – throw ‘em in the brig! Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican from the “Live Free or Die” state, doesn’t care that she’s destroying the American republic and our constitutional liberties by voting for this draconian measure because, she says, “America is part of the battlefield.”
Nothing illustrates the longstanding warning from antiwar advocates that “war is the health of the state” than this ominous development. The principle that war leads inevitably to the erosion and eventual destruction of our constitutional form of government is being dramatized on the floor of Congress even as I write these words. At the Republican foreign policy debate held recently, Professor Gingrich lectured us on “the difference between national security requirements and criminal law requirements,” and, drawing on this spurious distinction, averred:
“All of us will be in danger for the rest of our lives. This is not going to end in the short run. And we need to be prepared to protect ourselves from those who, if they could, would not just kill us individually, but would take out entire cities.”
For the rest of our lives we’ll be in thrall to Gingrich, Graham, Levin, and the rest of them, on the pretext that we’re about to be nuked by a bunch of marginal fanatics hiding in a cave somewhere. It’s a thin rationale indeed for setting the stage for martial law in the United States, but it couldn’t have come at a more convenient time for our rulers, as they face the prospect of civil disorder in the face of economic collapse.
That the authoritarian strain in American politics is coming to the fore in this time of crisis should come as no surprise. Backed up against a wall, the ruling elite is baring its teeth, and the Constitution – which has long been a mere piece of moldering parchment rather than the law of the land – is easily disposed of. Our cowardly Congress, which lives only to advance special interests and line its own pockets, is hardly a bulwark against this onslaught: indeed, they are the source of it.
So where are the Tea Partiers, who warn against “Big Government” and denounce “RINOs” like Sen. Graham who don’t share their aversion to centralized authority? They’re busy campaigning for Gingrich, the “true conservative” and $1.6 million Fannie Mae “consultant,” who preaches the virtues of endless war. Besides, the Levin-McCain provisions will only be used against them damned Mooslims – right?
Wrong – but by the time these “patriots” realize how wrong they are, it’ll be too late. As Rep. Justin Amash, one of the few congressmen elected on the Tea Party wave who has a conscience (and a brain), put it, this bill, which is “carefully crafted to mislead the public,” is one of the most “anti-liberty pieces of legislation in our lifetime.”
As the economy collapses – say, around next week sometime – and as people line up at the banks to get their money out, and discover the till is empty, as the food distribution system breaks down, and the mobs gather and swell, they’ll call the army out into the streets to keep order. And it will all be perfectly “legal.”
Don’t tell me our sainted solons are cringing in fear of al-Qaeda, which is by now a mere shadow of a shadow: the real object of their fear is the American people – and they have every reason to be afraid.
The “debate” in Congress over the Levin-McCain provisions is not really what it appears to be, as Marcy Wheeler points out in some depth. On the Senate floor, opponents of the provision, such as Dianne Feinstein, mentioned the dangers of the army patrolling the streets of American cities only in passing, if at all: their real objection is that the provisions impede the really existing “war on terrorism.” Wheeler argues that the Obama administration would be constrained from utilizing its network of informants if detainees were handled by the military. As she puts it:
“Again, I suspect that’s the Administration objection. It allows them to do these things. But requires they do them with a paper trail Congress can audit. In short, it’s a future Fast and Furious scandal, the guaranteed exposure of all of their harebrained undercover operations, waiting to happen.”
The administration’s veto threat has nothing to do with protecting civil liberties: indeed, quite the opposite. As Sen. Levin noted in his remarks, a bit of politicking went on at the secret Senate hearing:
“The initial bill reported by the committee included language expressly precluding ‘the detention of citizens or lawful resident aliens of the United States on the basis of conduct taking place within the United States, except to the extent permitted by the Constitution of the United States.’ The Administration asked that this language be removed from the bill.”
The real purpose of the Levin-McCain provisions is entirely unrelated to “terrorism,” either by al-Qaeda or any known domestic outfit. It was put in there to codify a number of important “legal” precedents, which make it possible for the President to declare an American citizen an “enemy combatant” and hold him or her indefinitely without charges. This is the final step in a process that will enable the President to establish a de facto military dictatorship: it’s the “unitary presidency” meets the global economic crisis.
“America is part of the battlefield,” says Sen. Ayotte, quite accurately – and Americans are the target. Resistance is “terrorism”: dissent is a crime, and you’d better shut up and take it if you know what’s good for you. That’s the message they’re sending – and how, one wonders, will Americans respond?
Tryptophaned into a submissive lethargy by large doses of turkey and stuffing, and living in constant fear of imminent destitution, they hardly notice this historic betrayal. The trap is set, baited, and ready to spring: one has to wonder, however, if this passivity will hold once those steel jaws bite. I bet they’re wondering in Washington, too.
Link:
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/11/29/setting-the-trap/
Levin-McCain bill would create a presidential dictatorship. Where is the outrage?
by Justin Raimondo
Buried in the annual defense appropriations bill is a provision that would give the President the power to use the military to intern anyone – including American citizens – indefinitely, and hold them without charges or trial, anywhere in the world, including on American soil. The provision essentially repeals the longstanding Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the military from engaging in law enforcement on US territory – the greatest fear of the Founders. Approved by a Senate subcommittee in secret hearings, the provisions open the road to a military dictatorship in this country – and for that we can thank Senators Carl Levin and John McCain, who introduced the measure. Both the FBI and the Pentagon came out against the Levin-McCain monstrosity, and Senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado) introduced an amendment striking the provision: the amendment was defeated in the Senate, 37-61.
The mind reels. As the ACLU’s Chris Anders puts it:
“I know it sounds incredible. New powers to use the military worldwide, even within the United States? Hasn’t anyone told the Senate that Osama bin Laden is dead, that the president is pulling all of the combat troops out of Iraq and trying to figure out how to get combat troops out of Afghanistan too? And American citizens and people picked up on American or Canadian or British streets being sent to military prisons indefinitely without even being charged with a crime. Really? Does anyone think this is a good idea? And why now?”
Why now, indeed – and the answer is not hard to fathom. With the US banking system making very loud creaking noises as the eurozone descends into the economic abyss, and a total meltdown staring us in the face, the Powers That Be want to make sure they have their hands on the reins of power – and on the whip they won’t hesitate to use.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) exults that the bill will “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield” and anyone can be imprisoned without charge or trial “American citizen or not.” Graham doesn’t care about any of that sissy constitutional stuff, and never did – throw ‘em in the brig! Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican from the “Live Free or Die” state, doesn’t care that she’s destroying the American republic and our constitutional liberties by voting for this draconian measure because, she says, “America is part of the battlefield.”
Nothing illustrates the longstanding warning from antiwar advocates that “war is the health of the state” than this ominous development. The principle that war leads inevitably to the erosion and eventual destruction of our constitutional form of government is being dramatized on the floor of Congress even as I write these words. At the Republican foreign policy debate held recently, Professor Gingrich lectured us on “the difference between national security requirements and criminal law requirements,” and, drawing on this spurious distinction, averred:
“All of us will be in danger for the rest of our lives. This is not going to end in the short run. And we need to be prepared to protect ourselves from those who, if they could, would not just kill us individually, but would take out entire cities.”
For the rest of our lives we’ll be in thrall to Gingrich, Graham, Levin, and the rest of them, on the pretext that we’re about to be nuked by a bunch of marginal fanatics hiding in a cave somewhere. It’s a thin rationale indeed for setting the stage for martial law in the United States, but it couldn’t have come at a more convenient time for our rulers, as they face the prospect of civil disorder in the face of economic collapse.
That the authoritarian strain in American politics is coming to the fore in this time of crisis should come as no surprise. Backed up against a wall, the ruling elite is baring its teeth, and the Constitution – which has long been a mere piece of moldering parchment rather than the law of the land – is easily disposed of. Our cowardly Congress, which lives only to advance special interests and line its own pockets, is hardly a bulwark against this onslaught: indeed, they are the source of it.
So where are the Tea Partiers, who warn against “Big Government” and denounce “RINOs” like Sen. Graham who don’t share their aversion to centralized authority? They’re busy campaigning for Gingrich, the “true conservative” and $1.6 million Fannie Mae “consultant,” who preaches the virtues of endless war. Besides, the Levin-McCain provisions will only be used against them damned Mooslims – right?
Wrong – but by the time these “patriots” realize how wrong they are, it’ll be too late. As Rep. Justin Amash, one of the few congressmen elected on the Tea Party wave who has a conscience (and a brain), put it, this bill, which is “carefully crafted to mislead the public,” is one of the most “anti-liberty pieces of legislation in our lifetime.”
As the economy collapses – say, around next week sometime – and as people line up at the banks to get their money out, and discover the till is empty, as the food distribution system breaks down, and the mobs gather and swell, they’ll call the army out into the streets to keep order. And it will all be perfectly “legal.”
Don’t tell me our sainted solons are cringing in fear of al-Qaeda, which is by now a mere shadow of a shadow: the real object of their fear is the American people – and they have every reason to be afraid.
The “debate” in Congress over the Levin-McCain provisions is not really what it appears to be, as Marcy Wheeler points out in some depth. On the Senate floor, opponents of the provision, such as Dianne Feinstein, mentioned the dangers of the army patrolling the streets of American cities only in passing, if at all: their real objection is that the provisions impede the really existing “war on terrorism.” Wheeler argues that the Obama administration would be constrained from utilizing its network of informants if detainees were handled by the military. As she puts it:
“Again, I suspect that’s the Administration objection. It allows them to do these things. But requires they do them with a paper trail Congress can audit. In short, it’s a future Fast and Furious scandal, the guaranteed exposure of all of their harebrained undercover operations, waiting to happen.”
The administration’s veto threat has nothing to do with protecting civil liberties: indeed, quite the opposite. As Sen. Levin noted in his remarks, a bit of politicking went on at the secret Senate hearing:
“The initial bill reported by the committee included language expressly precluding ‘the detention of citizens or lawful resident aliens of the United States on the basis of conduct taking place within the United States, except to the extent permitted by the Constitution of the United States.’ The Administration asked that this language be removed from the bill.”
The real purpose of the Levin-McCain provisions is entirely unrelated to “terrorism,” either by al-Qaeda or any known domestic outfit. It was put in there to codify a number of important “legal” precedents, which make it possible for the President to declare an American citizen an “enemy combatant” and hold him or her indefinitely without charges. This is the final step in a process that will enable the President to establish a de facto military dictatorship: it’s the “unitary presidency” meets the global economic crisis.
“America is part of the battlefield,” says Sen. Ayotte, quite accurately – and Americans are the target. Resistance is “terrorism”: dissent is a crime, and you’d better shut up and take it if you know what’s good for you. That’s the message they’re sending – and how, one wonders, will Americans respond?
Tryptophaned into a submissive lethargy by large doses of turkey and stuffing, and living in constant fear of imminent destitution, they hardly notice this historic betrayal. The trap is set, baited, and ready to spring: one has to wonder, however, if this passivity will hold once those steel jaws bite. I bet they’re wondering in Washington, too.
Link:
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/11/29/setting-the-trap/
"What Levin and McCain are doing is precisely what Mubarak’s legislature did and what the Reichstag did — delegate such dictatorial powers to the president, the military, and the CIA by legislative enactment."
by Jacob G. Hornberger
A Washington Post op-ed by Democratic Senator Carl Levin and Republic Senator John McCain shows, once again, that the threat to the freedom and well-being of the American people comes from both liberals and conservatives, especially those within the government.
The op-ed was written in support of the 2012 defense [sic] authorization bill, which effectively authorizes the president to treat suspected terrorists either as illegal enemy combatants or as criminal defendants under the U.S. Code, at the option of the government. That, of course, entails the power of the president, through his military and CIA forces, to label people as terrorists, torture them, incarcerate them forever without trial, and even execute them after some sort of kangaroo military tribunal, such as those at Guantanamo Bay.
I probably should note that such power will not be limited to foreigners labeled as terrorists. It also encompasses Americans.
The bill has produced a ruckus in liberal, conservative, and libertarian circles. Critics are pointing out that such power is an inherent part of dictatorial regimes.
Consider, for example, the Egyptian military dictatorship. It possesses the same power over people as the power delegated to the president, the Pentagon, and the CIA in the defense authorization bill. The power delegated to the president, the military, and the CIA in the 2012 defense authorization bill is the same power that the Egyptian demonstrators have been demanding, without success, that the Egyptian military relinquish.
Or consider the Chinese communist dictatorship. Same power there too.
For that matter, consider the Nazi dictatorship. The Enabling Act, a temporary measure that was enacted as part of Hitler’s war on terrorism after the terrorist fire-bomb attack on the Reichstag building, enabled Hitler, his military, and the Gestapo to round people up, send them into concentration camps, torture them, and execute them.
There is one important thing, however, that we should keep in mind about the 2012 defense authorization bill, something that Levin and McCain point out in their op-ed: We’re already living in a country where the president, the military, and the CIA possess the omnipotent, dictatorial power that is granted to them in the bill. As Levin and McCain point out, the bill is simply codifying a legal situation that already exists.
That is what we have been pointing out here at The Future of Freedom Foundation ever since 9/11. When President Bush decreed that the 9/11 attacks gave him, the military, and the CIA the power to round up foreigners, torture them, detain them indefinitely, and even execute them, we opposed the assumption of such omnipotent powers not only because we believed it was wrong to exercise such powers against foreigners, but also because, we repeatedly emphasized, the power could also be wielded against Americans.
That was the logical outcome of the government’s reasoning, as we repeatedly emphasized. The United States is now involved in a “war on terrorism,” the president decreed. The war was a global one and, therefore, one in which the United States was part of the battlefield. The war would be perpetual. To keep Americans safe, the president, the military, and the CIA would have the task of finding terrorists anywhere in the world, including suspected American terrorists on American soil, and the power to treat them as illegal enemy combatants. It was a cleverly successful way to circumvent almost 250 years of Bill of Rights protection against dictatorial power.
That’s what the Jose Padilla case was all about. It confirmed the president’s dictatorial power to seize Americans, torture them with impunity, detain them forever, and even execute them as part of the “war on terrorism.” Padilla was an American. Once the federal court of appeals upheld the government power to do all that to Padilla, the government acquired the power to do it to all Americans.
It has been a wholesale legal revolution, one bigger and more ominous than even the New Deal’s revolutionary transformation of America’s economic system from free market to socialism.
Prior to 9/11, the Bill of Rights prohibited the government from depriving any person, including foreigners, of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. After 9/11, the Bill of Rights remained the same, but the president assumed, by decree, the power to ignore the Bill of Rights with respect to people labeled as terrorists, just as he chose to ignore the constitutional provision relating to a declaration of war from Congress.
What the members of Congress should be doing is enacting a law that removes such tyrannical powers from the president, the Pentagon, and the CIA rather than further entrenching them with codification.
What Levin and McCain are doing is precisely what Mubarak’s legislature did and what the Reichstag did — delegate such dictatorial powers to the president, the military, and the CIA by legislative enactment. Their attempt to codify and enshrine such dictatorial powers into law ten years after 9/11, rather than expressly prohibit them by legislative enactment, demonstrates, once again, that the major threat to the freedom and well-being of the American people comes not from terrorists, communists, drug dealers, or illegal aliens. It comes from the federal government, including the president, the military, the CIA, and statist members of Congress.
Link:
http://www.fff.org/blog/index.asp
"We just keep doing exactly what we've been doing for the 40 years. Spending excessively, running up debt, printing up money, and manipulating interest rates. And we're up against the wall now, it doesn't work anymore."
Ron Paul: "Republican Candidates Just Represent The Status Quo"
Republican candidate for president Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) appeared on CNBC to discuss the Federal Reserve and a worldwide quantitative easing, the 2012 field and an independent run for office.
"That doesn't mean a whole lot. That's what they're in the business of doing, and that is to inflate the currency to tide people over and to provide liquidity. And providing liquidity in a situation like this just means they're buying up bad debt that nobody else wants and they do this by creating credit. But I think it's sort of a reflection of a panicky type of reaction to get everybody doing this. Including China. They must really be worried to get together like this," Ron Paul said about the Fed's decision, 9 to 1, to not change the monetary policy, which means more printing.
Opining on the Republican field, Ron Paul says they all "just represent the status quo."
"Yeah, I think it's because it's more of the status quo. I think all the other Republican candidates just represent the status quo," Paul told CNBC. "More of the same. No change in the foreign policy. No change in the federal reserve. No cut in spending. I'm the one that's offering a trillion dollars in cuts because I believe the government is so big and so out of control that you have to have real cuts. But all this other talk about cuts, whether it's Romney or anybody else, the cuts in proposed increases, that's why the American people don't believe that they have a solution."
"We just keep doing exactly what we've been doing for the 40 years. Spending excessively, running up debt, printing up money, and manipulating interest rates. And we're up against the wall now, it doesn't work anymore. Lowering interest rates is essentially impossible. That's what they're desperately trying to do today. But, you know, when our interest rates to the banks are down to zero, What are they going to do? Used to be that Congress would just spend more money and that would help. How can they spend more money when there's no more money in the Treasury. So, no, Romney and the rest aren't offering anything new," he said.
Ron Paul also warns the Federal Reserve in the interview. He says the Fed shouldn't bailout Europe on the backs of the American taxpayers.
Paul once again wouldn't rule out a third party run if he does not get the Republican nomination. However, Paul said it was very unlikely, describing the chances as 1 in 20 million.
Link:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/11/30/ron_paul_republican_candidates_just_represent_the_status_quo.html
Republican candidate for president Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) appeared on CNBC to discuss the Federal Reserve and a worldwide quantitative easing, the 2012 field and an independent run for office.
"That doesn't mean a whole lot. That's what they're in the business of doing, and that is to inflate the currency to tide people over and to provide liquidity. And providing liquidity in a situation like this just means they're buying up bad debt that nobody else wants and they do this by creating credit. But I think it's sort of a reflection of a panicky type of reaction to get everybody doing this. Including China. They must really be worried to get together like this," Ron Paul said about the Fed's decision, 9 to 1, to not change the monetary policy, which means more printing.
Opining on the Republican field, Ron Paul says they all "just represent the status quo."
"Yeah, I think it's because it's more of the status quo. I think all the other Republican candidates just represent the status quo," Paul told CNBC. "More of the same. No change in the foreign policy. No change in the federal reserve. No cut in spending. I'm the one that's offering a trillion dollars in cuts because I believe the government is so big and so out of control that you have to have real cuts. But all this other talk about cuts, whether it's Romney or anybody else, the cuts in proposed increases, that's why the American people don't believe that they have a solution."
"We just keep doing exactly what we've been doing for the 40 years. Spending excessively, running up debt, printing up money, and manipulating interest rates. And we're up against the wall now, it doesn't work anymore. Lowering interest rates is essentially impossible. That's what they're desperately trying to do today. But, you know, when our interest rates to the banks are down to zero, What are they going to do? Used to be that Congress would just spend more money and that would help. How can they spend more money when there's no more money in the Treasury. So, no, Romney and the rest aren't offering anything new," he said.
Ron Paul also warns the Federal Reserve in the interview. He says the Fed shouldn't bailout Europe on the backs of the American taxpayers.
Paul once again wouldn't rule out a third party run if he does not get the Republican nomination. However, Paul said it was very unlikely, describing the chances as 1 in 20 million.
Link:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/11/30/ron_paul_republican_candidates_just_represent_the_status_quo.html
The establishment steps up its' attacks on Ron Paul...
Establishment Media Poll: Republicans Hold Negative View of Ron Paul
Kurt Nimmo
According to the establishment media, most American favor Mitt Romney or New Gingrich over Ron Paul. “Compared with his main rivals for the GOP nod, Paul’s favorable numbers are far weaker among the general public and Republicans in particular,” reports the Washington Post today.
A poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC claims most Republicans hold an unfavorable view of Paul and his libertarian philosophy of smaller government and adherence to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Republicans instead prefer the globalist insider and insane warmonger Newt Gingrich and the flip-flopper Mitt Romney who is indistinguishable from a Democrat, according to the establishment press.
“Fewer than four in 10 Republicans hold a favorable view of Paul. That compares with about six in 10 favorable ratings for former House speaker Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney,” the newspaper reports.
The Washington Post-ABC poll is obviously designed to counter a Bloomberg News poll conducted in mid-November that showed Paul coming in second at 19 percent. Paul was in a statistic dead heat with Herman Cain, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. In New Hampshire, Paul was at 17 percent, bested only by Romney.
It may also be intended to sideline the results of a poll conducted in Iowa on November 22. The Revolution PAC poll showed Paul leading with 25-percent support from Republicans, independents and disaffected Democrats. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich scored at 21 percent and businessman Herman Cain at 20 percent.
Many Democrats view Paul as the only anti-war candidate with a shot at the White House.
On November 28, a NewsMax/Insider Advantage poll showed Paul in second place in the state of Iowa, solidifying his position at the top of the field and remaining a serious threat to take the Iowa Caucuses in January, according to a Paul campaign press release.
“The latest poll results clearly prove Ron Paul’s status as a top contender, and confirms that our campaign is continuing to surge in early states,” said Ron Paul 2012 Presidential Campaign Chairman Jesse Benton. “The American people are ready for real change in Washington and Dr. Paul is the only candidate, who has a plan to cut $1 trillion in spending, balance the budget, and restore prosperity to the American people.”
The establishment, however, is not ready for change and will do whatever is required to make sure one of their hand-picked candidates gets on the ballot next year.
Guardian Memory Holes Article on Ron Paul Video
Earlier this week, a new video showing how Romney and Gingrich have flip-flopped on key issues was posted on YouTube. It was briefly mentioned by The Guardian but then was predictably pulled today without explanation.
“As Paul’s team look at the field, they want to hit two targets. First, go for Romney to establish Paul as the alternative candidate to His Mittness. Second, slam the guy currently sitting in that spot: His Newtness. Other candidates – Bachmann, Perry and Cain – are clearly seen as having wasted their moment in the sun,” Paul Harris wrote before The Guardian sent his article to the memory hole.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/establishment-media-poll-republicans-hold-negative-view-of-ron-paul.html
Kurt Nimmo
According to the establishment media, most American favor Mitt Romney or New Gingrich over Ron Paul. “Compared with his main rivals for the GOP nod, Paul’s favorable numbers are far weaker among the general public and Republicans in particular,” reports the Washington Post today.
A poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC claims most Republicans hold an unfavorable view of Paul and his libertarian philosophy of smaller government and adherence to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Republicans instead prefer the globalist insider and insane warmonger Newt Gingrich and the flip-flopper Mitt Romney who is indistinguishable from a Democrat, according to the establishment press.
“Fewer than four in 10 Republicans hold a favorable view of Paul. That compares with about six in 10 favorable ratings for former House speaker Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney,” the newspaper reports.
The Washington Post-ABC poll is obviously designed to counter a Bloomberg News poll conducted in mid-November that showed Paul coming in second at 19 percent. Paul was in a statistic dead heat with Herman Cain, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. In New Hampshire, Paul was at 17 percent, bested only by Romney.
It may also be intended to sideline the results of a poll conducted in Iowa on November 22. The Revolution PAC poll showed Paul leading with 25-percent support from Republicans, independents and disaffected Democrats. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich scored at 21 percent and businessman Herman Cain at 20 percent.
Many Democrats view Paul as the only anti-war candidate with a shot at the White House.
On November 28, a NewsMax/Insider Advantage poll showed Paul in second place in the state of Iowa, solidifying his position at the top of the field and remaining a serious threat to take the Iowa Caucuses in January, according to a Paul campaign press release.
“The latest poll results clearly prove Ron Paul’s status as a top contender, and confirms that our campaign is continuing to surge in early states,” said Ron Paul 2012 Presidential Campaign Chairman Jesse Benton. “The American people are ready for real change in Washington and Dr. Paul is the only candidate, who has a plan to cut $1 trillion in spending, balance the budget, and restore prosperity to the American people.”
The establishment, however, is not ready for change and will do whatever is required to make sure one of their hand-picked candidates gets on the ballot next year.
Guardian Memory Holes Article on Ron Paul Video
Earlier this week, a new video showing how Romney and Gingrich have flip-flopped on key issues was posted on YouTube. It was briefly mentioned by The Guardian but then was predictably pulled today without explanation.
“As Paul’s team look at the field, they want to hit two targets. First, go for Romney to establish Paul as the alternative candidate to His Mittness. Second, slam the guy currently sitting in that spot: His Newtness. Other candidates – Bachmann, Perry and Cain – are clearly seen as having wasted their moment in the sun,” Paul Harris wrote before The Guardian sent his article to the memory hole.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/establishment-media-poll-republicans-hold-negative-view-of-ron-paul.html
"The imminent passage of this bill containing the provision, which appears VERY likely at this point, would put our civil rights on par with countries like Saudi Arabia and China."
The New National Defense Authorization Act Is Ridiculously Scary
David Seaman
Fellow entrepreneurs, Americans, anyone who still cares about this country at all — this is a must read: By the end of this week, the US government very likely will have the power to lock up US citizens for life at Guantanamo Bay or other military prisons — without charge and without trial. This means that, in the near future, a controversial Twitter post, attending a peaceful protest, or publishing an anti-Congress critique or anti-TSA rant on Google+ could land you “indefinite detention” for life, in the wording of the bill. No access to a lawyer, no access to trial.
Yes, you read that right. This would target American citizens, on American soil. Military personnel would be able to come into your house like something out of a Tom Clancy novel and chopper your innocent self down to Guantanamo Bay for life.
Details: There is a scary provision in the National Defense Authorization Act (fiscal year 2012) which is typically passed by Congress each and every year to continue funding our military operations around the world.
This provision is not a mistake or error; it has vocal backing from some of the most powerful Senators in Washington, including Sen. John McCain and Sen. Carl Levin.
The imminent passage of this bill containing the provision, which appears VERY likely at this point, would put our civil rights on par with countries like Saudi Arabia and China.
This is actually happening folks. Do a search on Google News for “National Defense Authorization Act” if you don’t believe me. Please spread word of this — quickly. Our last remaining rights as AMERICAN CITIZENS are being stripped from us. And as HuffPo recently reported, an effort to amend the bill and remove the scary provision targeting Americans has FAILED.
Even top-level law enforcement officials such as FBI Director Robert Mueller are reportedly against this wacko provision, as it would limit and confuse the FBI’s ability to legitimately investigate those who actually are engaged in terroristic activities on American soil.
But unless the public voices opposition — very soon, as in within days — this will become reality. When I asked friends and family members about this, they hadn’t heard anything about the National Defense Authorization Act controversy. The mainstream media is not covering this travesty at all. Instead, they are focused on whether Cyber Monday beat expectations, and if Michael Jackson doctor Conrad Murray’s sentencing yesterday was “fair.” Unbelievable.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-new-national-defense-authorization-act-is-ridiculously-scary.html
David Seaman
Fellow entrepreneurs, Americans, anyone who still cares about this country at all — this is a must read: By the end of this week, the US government very likely will have the power to lock up US citizens for life at Guantanamo Bay or other military prisons — without charge and without trial. This means that, in the near future, a controversial Twitter post, attending a peaceful protest, or publishing an anti-Congress critique or anti-TSA rant on Google+ could land you “indefinite detention” for life, in the wording of the bill. No access to a lawyer, no access to trial.
Yes, you read that right. This would target American citizens, on American soil. Military personnel would be able to come into your house like something out of a Tom Clancy novel and chopper your innocent self down to Guantanamo Bay for life.
Details: There is a scary provision in the National Defense Authorization Act (fiscal year 2012) which is typically passed by Congress each and every year to continue funding our military operations around the world.
This provision is not a mistake or error; it has vocal backing from some of the most powerful Senators in Washington, including Sen. John McCain and Sen. Carl Levin.
The imminent passage of this bill containing the provision, which appears VERY likely at this point, would put our civil rights on par with countries like Saudi Arabia and China.
This is actually happening folks. Do a search on Google News for “National Defense Authorization Act” if you don’t believe me. Please spread word of this — quickly. Our last remaining rights as AMERICAN CITIZENS are being stripped from us. And as HuffPo recently reported, an effort to amend the bill and remove the scary provision targeting Americans has FAILED.
Even top-level law enforcement officials such as FBI Director Robert Mueller are reportedly against this wacko provision, as it would limit and confuse the FBI’s ability to legitimately investigate those who actually are engaged in terroristic activities on American soil.
But unless the public voices opposition — very soon, as in within days — this will become reality. When I asked friends and family members about this, they hadn’t heard anything about the National Defense Authorization Act controversy. The mainstream media is not covering this travesty at all. Instead, they are focused on whether Cyber Monday beat expectations, and if Michael Jackson doctor Conrad Murray’s sentencing yesterday was “fair.” Unbelievable.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-new-national-defense-authorization-act-is-ridiculously-scary.html
JFK, the CIA and the New York Times...
JFK, the CIA and The New York Times
Jim Fetzer
“The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” — William Colby, former CIA Director
In 1977, Carl Bernstein, who would subsequently co-author All the President’s Men (1994) with Bob Woodward, one of the most celebrated books in American political history, published “The CIA and the Media”, Rolling Stone (October 20, 1977), reporting that, with respect to its infiltration of the American media, “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.” Those who lent their cooperation to the agency were Williarn Paley of the CBS, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of The New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA included ABC, NBC, the AP, the UPI, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune. It was therefore fascinating to discover that The New York Times, which has a history of suppressing research on the assassination of JFK, was publishing “The Umbrella Man: A video interview with the author of SIX SECONDS IN DALLAS (1967)”, widely regarded as a classic of conspiracy research on the assassination of JFK.
Its author, Josiah Thompson (whose nickname is “Tink”), was at one time a professor of philosophy at Haverford College and, when I returned from 13 months in the Far East with the 1st Battalion, 12th Marines, 3rd Marine Division, where we had been anchored out in Kauschung Harbor in Formosa (now Taichung Harbor, Taiwan), where I had been awakened at 3:30 AM by the officer of the deck who told me that JFK had been shot and, then again, an hour later that they had caught the guy who had done it, who was a communist, which I thought at the time was “pretty fast work”, I obtained a copy of his book while stationed at the USMC Recruit Depot in San Diego as a series commander, supervising 15 DIs and 300 recruits going through the training cycle, which I read with great interest, especially because I had earned my A.B. at Princeton in philosophy and, like myself, Tink had served in the Navy (in the UDT rather than the Marine Corps) and was doing research on JFK, which was attracting my interest as well.
SIX SECONDS IN DALLAS
At the time, I thought it was an admirable study, which payed special attention to the Zapruder film, to which the author had had access in conducting research with LIFE magazine, ostensibly for an article about the film. Apparently, Tink took a copy of the film without authorization and there was a falling out. LIFE rescinded permission it had granted for him to use frames from the film, which were replaced by very high-quality charcoal sketches–not as good as the actual frames, but still valuable. Among the most important features of his book was an analysis of the “double-hit”, according to which, in frame 312, JFK’s head moves forward under the impact of a shot fired from behind, while in frames 313-316, his head moves violently back and to the left, which is indicative of a shot fired from in front–to the right/front, actually, which many have assumed to have meant from the grassy knoll or even the picket fence. The book created quite a sensation at the time and lead to Thompson’s story being feature on the front page of The Saturday Evening Post (2 December 1967).
According to the analysis published there, three assassins had fired four shots, all of which hit. The first, fired from the Texas School Book Depository, hit JFK in the back. The second, fired from the roof of the County Records Building, hit Gov. John Connally in the back. The third, again from the Book Depository, hit JFK in the back of the head, moving it forward, while the fourth was fried from the picket fence and struck him in the right forehead, killing him. For its time, this was excellent work, which offered a stunning contrast to the “official account” of the assassination, which featured three shots with one miss, where one hit JFK at the base of the back of his neck, passed through without hitting any bony structures, and entered John Connally’s back, while the other hit him in the back of the head, killing him. We know today that the “magic bullet” scenario is not only provably false but not even anatomically possible, where no bullet could have taken the alleged trajectory, because cervical vertebrae intervene. I even presented a lecture about it at Cambridge during an international conference, which would be published in an international, peer-reviewed journal under the title, “Reasoning about Assassinations”.
While Tink’s book was very good for its time, his analysis of the shot sequence was superseded by the far more extensive study by Richard Sprague, COMPUTERS AND AUTOMATION (May 1970), which demonstrated that there had been more shooters and more shots, which I have refined based upon our studies of the medical evidence and the ballistics published in three books, Assassination Science (1998), Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), and The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003). The issue over which we have repeatedly clashed, however, concerns the authenticity of the film that was the foundation for his book. I suppose it would be only natural that he would resist evidence that the film has been faked (edited, altered, revised, fabricated), when it pulls the rug out from under his classic study. The proof is abundant and compelling, as anyone who has followed my columns about JFK here can verify for themselves by reading “JFK: Who’s telling the truth: Clint Hill or the Zapruder film?”, right here at Veterans Today. If you read the comments on Six Seconds in Dallas (1967), moreover, you will find those who are adamant that Tink got it right and the rest of us got it wrong. The first “reader’s review”, for example, makes these claims:
5.0 out of 5 stars Best book ever about the Kennedy assassination – bar none, January 22, 2005
By Michael K. Beusch (San Mateo, California United States) - See all my reviews
As an American who believes in his heart that President Kennedy was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy, it pains me to see so many half-baked and flat-out irresponsible studies of the assassination. These run the gamut from the ridiculous defenses of the Warren Report (Gerald Posner, in particular) to the most outlandish conspiracy books hawking absolutely ridiculous theories (James Fetzer’s books claiming that the Zapruder film is a fake is the latest). Both the Warren Commission’s defenders and the way-out conspiracy theorists do the search for the truth a great disservice. Both groups pick and choose whatever evidence suits their needs. . . .
Indeed, Josiah has been attacking me for doing research on Zapruder film authenticity since 1996, when I organized the first symposium devoted to this issue at the JFK Lancer Conference. I conducted a 10.5 hour preliminary discussion the day before with a dozen or more students of the film, which led to the 4.5 hour presentation the following day with the best half-dozen, including Jack White, Noel Twyman, David Lifton, David Mantik and Chuck Marler, which can be obtained as a 2-disc DVD from Lancer to this day. Our encounters have been relentless since then, numbering in the hundreds. By now, there may have been as many as a thousand, where he has referred to my first book as “Assassinated Science”, even though it published the studies of the autopsy X-rays by David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., which revealed that the X-rays had been altered to conceal the true causes of death of JFK, and by Robert Livingston, M.D., a world authority on the human brain and an expert on wound ballistics, who concluded that, given the consistent and multiple reports from experienced and highly qualified Parkland physicians, who described cerebellar as well as cerebral tissue extruding from fist-sized wound at the back of his head, that the brain shown in the diagrams and photographs at the National Archives could not possibly be of the brain of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Since it also included multiple studies of Zapruder film alteration, perhaps that was Tink’s overriding concern.
THE UMBRELLA MAN
His credibility was not enhanced when he attacked Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), which many regard as the best published on the death of JFK, claiming that a study by Gary Aguilar, M.D., showing the consistency of descriptions of that fist-sized blow out to the back of the head had been highly consistent across witnesses in Dealey Plaza, others at Parkland Hospital, and even those who observed the body at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the autopsy would be performed. While we now know that James Humes, who was performing the autopsy, actually took a cranial saw to the head and enlarged the head wound to make it look more like the effect of a shot fired from behind (but inexplicably allowed to witnesses to watch him do this, as Doug Horne, Inside the ARRB (2009), has documented in detail, which means that Aguilar’s study is not quite as accurate as I initially supposed), the case for that massive defect–or one that was even larger–is amply established by this study. When Tink said that Gary’s chapter was the only good one in the book, therefore, I knew he had committed a blunder, since if Gary was right, then the film–which does not show this defect–had to have been faked. Indeed, since I had found a late frame, 374, in which the blow out is visible, while it has been blacked out in frames 313-317, for example, the film is not even self-consistent, which means that it cannot, in its totality, possibly be authentic.
When I discovered that the estimable Errol Morris, described as “an Academy Award-winning filmmaker (‘The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara’) and a recent New York Times best-selling author (‘Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography’), whose first film, ‘Gates of Heaven’, is even on Roger Ebert’s list of the 10 best movies ever made, and his latest, ‘Tabloid’, has just been released on DVD”, was conducting a series of interviews with Tink, I was fairly incredulous. It was striking to me that he had used “Believing as Seeing” as the title of his study about photography, since we had shown that “Seeing is not Believing” in relation to the Zapruder film. In agreement with most students of JFK, I had formed the opinion that the Umbrella man was complicit in the assassination, not only because of his association with the Cuban, but because he had been pumping his umbrella up and down in what we took to be a signal to the assassins that their target was still alive and to continue shooting. The video interview in The New York Times, however, portrayed the Umbrella man as having been completely innocent and present with an umbrella to protest policies, not of JFK, but of his father in relation to an earlier era:
OP-DOCS
‘The Umbrella Man’: A video interview with the author of SIX SECONDS IN DALLAS (1967)
The Umbrella Man: On the 48th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Errol Morris explores the story behind the one man seen standing under an open black umbrella at the site.
By ERROL MORRIS
Published: November 21, 2011
COMMENTS (254)
For years, I’ve wanted to make a movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Not because I thought I could prove that it was a conspiracy, or that I could prove it was a lone gunman, but because I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?
Years ago, Josiah Thompson, known as Tink, a young, Yale-educated Kierkegaard scholar wrote the definitive book on the Zapruder film — “Six Seconds in Dallas.” Thompson eventually quit his day job as a professor of philosophy at Haverford College to become a private detective and came to work with many of the same private investigators I had also worked with in the 1980s. We had so much in common — philosophy, P.I. work and an obsessive interest in the complexities of reality. But we had never met.
Last year, I finally got to meet and interview Tink Thompson. I hope his interview can become the first part of an extended series on the Kennedy assassination. This film is but a small segment of my six-hour interview with Tink.
where this reader’s comment (and there were more than 250 at that point in time) spoke volumes to me about Tink’s interview and the impression it was conveying to the public:
23. HIGHLIGHT (What’s this?)
Mark M
New York, NY
November 22nd, 2011
6:16 am
This was wonderful. The best – and most convincing – debunking of any and all conspiracy theories I have ever seen, and in just 6 minutes too.
I submitted a comment of my own after listening to what Tink had to say, which was a fascinating effort to undermine not just conspiracy research related to the Umbrella man but, it turned out, with respect to JFK conspiracy research generally. With The Times running performance art like this from Josiah, I regarded it as as most likely that they would publish my comment, even though I was exposing a false assumption at the foundation of his presentation:
Your Submitted Comment
Display Name
James H. Fetzer
Location
Oregon, WI
Comment
How can Josiah Thompson have written “the definitive book” on the Zapruder film when its fabrication has been proven beyond reasonable doubt? The limo stop was removed, the wounds were changed, and, having reduced the time frame, Clint Hill’s activities–about which he has been consistent for more than 47 years–contradict what we see in the extant film. See, for example, “JFK: Who’s telling the truth: Clint Hill or the Zapruder film?” For more on how it was done, see “US Government Official: JFK Cover-Up, Film Fabrication”. For a tutorial on some of the ways we know the film we have is not the original, see John Costella, “The JFK Assassination Film Hoax”, http://assassination…ella/jfk/intro/ I dismembered Josiah’s feeble defense of the authenticity of the film in THE GREAT ZAPRUDER FILM HOAX (2003). Check it out. The American people are entitled to the truth about the assassination of our 35th president. It isn’t a close call.
THE UMBRELLA MAN DEBATE
At this point, I was rather incensed that Tink was playing fast and loose with one of the most interesting figures whose image was recorded in the Zapruder film and by others with cameras in Dealey Plaza at the time. I therefore initiated a thread on The Education Forum to discuss it, entitled “Tink’s performance in The New York Times: Josiah Thompson shows his true colors”. Among my earliest posts was one laying out arguments that Tink had shaded the evidence in a number of important respects, where I would later add photographs to support my points. When David S. Lifton, the author of Best Evidence (1980), asked for “credible evidence” that Witt was not the person he claimed to be to the HSCA, I posted three images that supported my objections to their identification:
(1) As I have previously observed, the Umbrella Man and the Cuban were obviously together, where any explanation of the presence of the Umbrella Man must account for their association:
(2) While everyone else in Dealey Plaza was dumbfounded, the Umbrella man and the Cuban did not act surprised by the assassination–and their faces have been obscured in certain photos, which is highly suspicious by itself:
(3) Moreover, they hang around together, sitting on the curb, as though nothing especially unusual had taken place, where I had supposed virtually everyone would agree that their behavior is abnormal under these circumstances:
When Jim DiEugenio, the author of Destiny Betrayed (1992), posted this summary of Witt’s testimony, I thought the case against Witt was cinched:
Posted 25 November 2011 – 07:36 PM
Has anyone read Witt’s testimony of late? I don’t think so.These are some of the things he said.
1.) He never planned on doing what he did until that morning.
2.) He did not know the exact parade route.
3.) He just happened to wander around for a walk and guessed where it would be.
4.) Contrary to what Cliff says, he did what he did with no relation to JFK’s policies, only Joe Sr.
5.) What did the Cuban looking guy say? Words to the effect, They shot those people. (Oh really Louie?)
6.) Admits he sat there for up to three minutes and that he never even looked behind him at the picket fence! (Truly surprising.)
7.) He never did anything like this before or since, and he was not a member of any conservative group or organization.
8.) He placed the umbrella on the sidewalk and then picked it up. He wavers on whether this is definitely the umbrella he had that day.
9.) He often uses the conditional, like I think that is me, or that may be the guy I sat next to.
At this point in time, I felt very confident that Jim and I were right in debunking Tink’s suggestion that the Umbrella man was Louie Steven Witt, including that Tink was assuming that identification, when it is instead a conclusion that requires its own substantiation evidence. In logic, this is called “begging the question” by assuming what requires independent proof. He was ignoring that more reasonable identifications would be of the Cuban as Felipe Vidal Santiago, a committed anti-Castro Cuban, and of Roy Hargraves, who fit the photos and the scenario to a “t”. The very idea that Witt would offer this fantastic story about Joe Kennedy, which is preposterous on its face, as though it was “so extraordinary and unbelievable it must be true”, according to Tink, was clearly absurd.
It seemed far more likely that, by pumping his umbrella, Witt was signaling to the assassins that JFK was still alive, which makes sense, rather than an obscure historical allusion that no one, including Jack, would have grasped. By remarking that there are always alternative explanations that might be true, when you isolate one element of a complex picture, Tink was employing the technique known as “divide and conquer”. If all you knew were what Tink had presented in this little clip, then you could rather easily be taken in; but once you consider the other evidence we have available, his scenario is not remotely plausible. But I thought it would be appropriate to review what others have thought, so I turned to Jim Marrs’ classic study, Crossfire (1989), pp. 29-32, for such light as it might shed on the subject.
JIM MARRS IN CROSSFIRE (1989)
About the time that Kennedy was first hit by a bullet, two men standing near each other on the north sidewalk of Elm Street acted most strangely—one began pumping a black umbrella while the other waved his right arm high in the air.
These and subsequent actions by this pair aroused the suspicions of researchers over the years, yet the initial federal investigation ignored both men. Their activities are known only through analysis of assassination photographs.
As Kennedy’s limousine began the gentle descent into Dealey Plaza, a man can be seen standing near the street-side edge of the Stemmons Freeway sign holding an open umbrella. He holds the umbrella in a normal fashion and the top of the umbrella almost reaches the bottom of the sign.
In photos taken minutes before Kennedy’s arrival, the umbrella is closed and, immediately after the shooting, pictures show the umbrella was closed again. The man’s umbrella was only open during the shooting sequence. Furthermore, as seen in the Zapruder film, once Kennedy is exactly opposite the man with the umbrella, it was pumped almost two feet into the air and then lowered.
At the same time, the second man—in photos he appears to be of a dark complexion, perhaps a black man or Hispanic—raised his right hand into the air possibly making a fist. This man was located on the outer edge of the Elm Street sidewalk opposite the umbrella man, who was on the inner edge.
The man with the open umbrella was the only person in Dealey Plaza with an open umbrella. Under the warm Texas sun, there was no reason to carry an open umbrella at that time.
Two main theories have emerged concerning the “umbrella man” and his activities that day. Assassination researcher Robert Cutler has long maintained that the umbrella may have been a sophisticated weapon that fired a dart or “flechette” filled with a paralyzing agent. Cutler’s theory has been the object of dirision over the years but it is supported by the 1975 testimony of a CIA weapons developer who told the Senate Intelligence Committee that just such an umbrella weapon was in the hands of the spy agency in 1963.
Charles Senseney, who developed weaponry for the CIA at Fort Detrick, Maryland, described a dart-firing weapon he developed as looking like an umbrella. He said the dart gun was silent in operation and fired through the webbing when the umbrella was open. Senseney said the CIA had ordered about fifty such dart weapons and that they were operational in 1963.
Cutler theorized that the umbrella was used to fire a paralyzing dart into Kennedy immobilizing him for marksmen with rifles. He claims this theory accounts for the small puncture wound in Kennedy’s throat described by Dallas doctors, but which was altered by the time of the Bethesda autopsy. According to Cutler, this dart explains Kennedy’s lack of motion during the shooting sequence. Since such a weapon existed and since both the actions of Kennedy and the “umbrella man” were consistent with the operation of such a weapon, Cutler’s theory cannot be completely dismissed.
However, most assassination researchers prefer the alternative theory that both of these suspicious men may have been providing visual signals to hidden gunmen. This theory suggests that Kennedy was killed by a crossfire coordinated by radiomen. The two men, who were among the closest bystanders to the President when he was first struck, gave signals indicating that he was not fatally hit and therefore more shots were needed.
A fascinating twist on this latter theory came from researcher Gary Shaw, who said the two men may have been providing Kennedy with a last-second sign of who was responsible for his death. Shaw recalled that throughout the planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion, CIA officers had promised an “umbrella” of air protection of the Cuban invaders. This “umbrella” failed to materialize because Kennedy refused to authorize U.S. military support for the invasion. According to Shaw’s theory, the man with the open umbrella symbolized the promise of an air-support “umbrella” while the dark-complected man may have been one of the anti-Castro Cuban leaders known to Kennedy. Thus, in the last seconds of his life, Kennedy may have seen the open umbrella and the face of a Cuban he knew was involved in the Bay of Pigs and realized who was participating in his death.
But this is all speculation. The existence of the “umbrella man” and the dark-complexion man is fact. Their activities after the assassination especially bear study. While virtually everyone in Dealey Plaza was moved to action by the assassination—either falling to the ground for cover or moving toward The Grassy Knoll—these two men sat down beside each other on the north sidewalk of Elm Street.
Here the dark-complexion man appears to put a walkie-talkie to his mouth. In a photograph taken by Jim Towner, what seems to be an antenna can be seen jutting out from behind the man’s head while his right hand holds some object to his face.
Several photos taken in the seconds following the assassination show both of these men sitting together on the Elm Street sidewalk. Moments later, the man with the umbrella gets up, takes one last look toward the motorcade still passing under the Triple Underpass, and begins walking east in the direction of the Depository. The dark-complexion man saunters toward the Triple Underpass passing people rushing up The Grassy Knoll. He can be seen stuffing some object—the walkie-talkie?—into the back of his pants.
Despite the suspicious actions of these two men, there is no evidence that the FBI or the Warren Commission made any effort to identify or locate them. Officially they did not exist. Yet over the years, this pair became the focal point of criticism by private researchers. Researchers claimed the lack of investigation of these men was indicative of the shallowness of the government’s handling of the assassination.
Once the House Select Committee on Assassinations was formed in 1976, researchers urged an investigation of both men. The Committee finally released a photograph of the “umbrella man” to the news media and urged anyone with knowledge of the man to come forward.
Coincidentally—if it was a coincidence—the “umbrella man” suddenly was identified in Dallas a few weeks after this national appeal. In August 1978, a telephone caller told researcher Penn Jones, Jr., that the man with the umbrella was a former Dallas insurance salesman named Louis Steven Witt. Jones contacted some local newsmen (Jim Marrs being one of them) and together they confronted Witt, who then was working as a warehouse manager. Witt refused to talk with newsmen but acknowledged that he was in Dealey Plaza on the day Kennedy was killed.
Jones later wrote: “I felt the man had been coached. He would answer no questions and pointedly invited us to leave. His only positive statement, which seemed to come very quickly, was that he was willing to appear before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in Washington.”
Witt indeed appeared before the Committee during its public testimony. His story was comic relief compared to the intense scrutiny of witnesses like Marina Oswald and Warren Commission critics. His story was facile and improbable and when the umbrella that Witt claimed was the same one he had had in Dealey Plaza in 1963 was displayed, it suddenly turned wrong-side out, prompting one Committee member to quip: “I hope that’s not a weapon.”
Witt told the Committee that on the spur of the moment, he grabbed a large black umbrella and went to Dealey Plaza to heckle Kennedy. He claimed that someone had told him that an open umbrella would rile Kennedy. While Witt offered no further explanation of how his umbrella could heckle the president, Committee members – not Witt — theorized that the umbrella in some way referred to the pro-German sympathies of Kennedy’s father while serving as U.S. ambassador to Britain just prior to World War II. They said the umbrella may have symbolized the appeasement policies of Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who always carried an umbrella.
According to Witt:
I think I went sort of maybe halfway up the grassy area [on the north side of Elm Street], somewhere in that vicinity. I am pretty sure I sat down. . . . [when the motorcade approached] I think I got up and started fiddling with that umbrella trying to get it open, and at the same time I was walking forward, walking toward the street. . . . Whereas other people I understand saw the President shot and his movements; I did not see this because of this thing [the umbrella] in front of me . . . My view of the car during that length of time was blocked by the umbrella’s being open.
Based on the available photographs made that day, none of Witt’s statements were an accurate account of the actions of the “umbrella man” who stood waiting for the motorcade with his umbrella in the normal over-the-head position and then pumped it in the air as Kennedy passed.
Witt’s bizarre story—unsubstantiated and totally at variance with the actions of the man in the photographs—resulted in few, if any, researchers accepting Louis Steven Witt as the “umbrella man.”
And there continues to be no official accounting for the dark-complexion man who appears to have been talking on a radio moments after the assassination. The House Committee failed to identify or locate this man and Witt claimed he had no recollection of such a person, despite photographs that seem to show the “umbrella man” talking with the dark man.
Witt claimed only to recall that a “Negro man” sat down near him and kept repeating: “They done shot them folks.”
Interestingly, one of the Committee attorneys asked Witt specifically if he recalled seeing the man with a walkie-talkie, although officially no one has ever admitted the possibility of radios in use in Dealey Plaza.
NEW EVIDENCE APPEARS
No one could have been more surprised than I when another student of the assassination, Bernice Moore, sent me a comment that had been posted in response to The New York Times, which included an extract of Witt’s actual testimony to the HSCA:
228.Christopher Marlow
San Diego, CA
November 22nd, 2011
6:08 pm
After watching this video, I looked up the interview of the “Umbrella Man” for the House Committee on Assassinations. It was very enlightening. The man’s name was Louis Steven Witt, a former Dallas insurance salesman. He was questioned by counsel for the committee, Mr. Genzman….
Mr. WITT. Yes. As I moved toward the street, still walking on the grass, I heard the shots that I eventually learned were shots. At the time somehow it didn’t register as shots because they were so close together, and it was like hearing a string of firecrackers, or something like that. It didn’t at that moment register on me as being shots.
…
Mr. GENZMAN. What do you next recall happening?Mr. WITT. Let me go back a minute. As I was moving forward I apparently had this umbrella in front of me for some few steps. Whereas other people I understand saw the President shot and his movements; I did not see this because of this thing in front of me, The next thing I saw after I saw the car coming down the street, down the hill to my left, the car was just about at a position like this [indicating] at this angle here. At this time there was the car stopping, the screeching of tires, the jamming on of brakes, [!!!] motorcycle patrolman right there beside one of the cars. One car ran upon the President’s car and a man jumped off and jumped on the back. These were the scenes that unfolded as I reached the point to where I was seeing things.
…
—> If you look at the Zapruder film, you will see that the car does not stop. But the Umbrella man and literally dozens of witnesses testified that the presidential limo came to a stop during the assassination. The Zapruder film has been altered to conceal this and other facts. Any careful examination of the Z film will lead you to this conclusion.
This new evidence, moreover, makes an enormous difference to the evaluation of Witt’s testimony. Based upon other evidence we have accumulated about the Zapruder film, which is contradicted by witness reports about the limo having been brought to a halt–which we believe was in response to the Cuban’s raised fist–for which there are many witnesses, whose reports have been collated by John Costella in “What happened on Elm Street? The Eyewitnesses Speak”,“New Proof of Zapruder Film Fakery” and “Who’s telling the truth: Clint Hill or the Zapruder film?”, what Witt is saying closely corresponds to those other witnesses and to the reports of others who have seen “the other film”, which appears to be the original Zapruder before it was subjected to reconstuction, as Doug Horne has explained in his five-volume study, which I summarized in “US Government Official: JFK Cover-Up, Film Fabrication”. As I then explained in post #160 on The Education Forum,
Well, I’m only beginning to sort this out, but his description of what happened is very close to what happened as we have reconstructed it. The limo stop, of course, is at the heart of the matter. It was such a blatant example of Secret Service complicity that it had to be taken out. When you study Clint Hill’s report of the sequence of acts he took–running forward, boarding the vehicle, pushing Jackie down, lying over their bodies and peering into a fist-sized hole in the back of JFK’s head while giving a “thumbs down” BEFORE THE LIMO REACHED the TUP–which he has been saying and reporting consistently for (then) 47 years–this is hardly the first time we’ve had a witness who supported the limo stop. I have given several references to studies that document their reports.
The point is that THIS DESCRIPTION, which was NOT in DiEugenio’s summary, POWERFULLY SUGGESTS HE ACTUALLY WAS THERE. Some of it is rather fascinating, including about the breaks and all that, because it has not come up before. But when you have a motorcade that is proceeding quite uneventually AND THE LEAD CAR SLAMS ON ITS BREAKS, it would not be surprising if the car following should run up against it or if other drivers had to react by slamming on their breaks. So you are making too quick an inferences from the sound of breaks to assuming the sound came from the limo! What he is saying needs to be sorted out but, given this stunning and dramatic report (which he cannot have acquired from viewing the Zapruder film), he probably WAS there.
It’s like finding a fingerprint or the DNA of someone who was not previously a suspect at a crime scene. This guy could not possibly have known some of what he is reporting UNLESS HE HAD BEEN THERE. Even the limo stop is not widely known, even though there are dozens and dozens of witnesses who reported it. Too many play on the “slowed dramatically” versus “came to a halt” difference, which is splitting hairs, since (1) it had to slow dramatically to come to a halt and (2) the Zapruder film shows NEITHER dramatic slowing NOR coming to a halt. So this is really quite remarkable, because, as in the case of Gary Aguilar’s chapter in MURDER, Tink has endorsed Witt, but he turns out to have witnessed the limo stop, which is further proof that the film is a fake.
WHAT THEN ABOUT THE UMBRELLA MAN?
I have now done what I should have done originally, namely, check his testimony for myself. Here is what I have found:
While there is massive evidence of the limo stop (links to some of which I have cited above), I do not find Witt credible simply because he observed the limo stop but because he is reporting information that only someone who was actually there could possibly have known. The Zapruder film was shown for the first time on the Geraldo Rivera TV program in 1975, but it does not show any of these very specific details that Witt is reporting. Even most students of the assassination would be hard pressed to say what they think actually happened at that place and time. The screeching of tires, with one car running up onto the other (the Secret Service Cadillac evidently butting up against the Lincoln limousine) and one man jumping off and climbing onto the back of the other (Clint Hill rushing from the Cadillac to the back steps of the Lincoln) not only fits the scenario to a “t” but adds details that offer more data to consider, including especially the acoustical aspects of this event, which have been under-explored previous to this belated discovery.
This also means that Robert Morrow, another contributor to the forum, was closer to the truth than I was in relation to the Umbrella Man. A fundamental principle of scientific reasoning is that the search for truth must be based upon all the available relevant evidence. Witt’s remarks about the shots and their sound are also telling. We know many said that the first shot (or “the first shots”) sounded like firecrackers. Jim Lewis has found that, when high velocity bullets are fired through windshields, they make the sound of a firecracker. But the fact is we have new evidence to consider in assessing this. When his testimony was vague and ambiguous, my other arguments carried greater weight. But this very detailed and specific testimony outweighs the vagueness of the rest. At the very least, we have found a remarkable additional witness to the limo stop from an expected source–and thanks to Tink! And that underlines a mistake in Jim Marrs’ discounting of Witt’s story:
According to Witt:
I think I went sort of maybe halfway up the grassy area [on the north side of Elm Street], somewhere in that vicinity. I am pretty sure I sat down. . . . [when the motorcade approached] I think I got up and started fiddling with that umbrella trying to get it open, and at the same time I was walking forward, walking toward the street. . . . Whereas other people I understand saw the President shot and his movements; I did not see this because of this thing [the umbrella] in front of me . . . My view of the car during that length of time was blocked by the umbrella’s being open.
Based on the available photographs made that day, none of Witt’s statements were an accurate account of the actions of the “umbrella man” who stood waiting for the motorcade with his umbrella in the normal over-the-head position and then pumped it in the air as Kennedy passed.
But that is to overlook that the film has been massively revised to conceal the true causes of the death of JFK. One of the first and most obvious oddities of the extant film is that so many figures in Dealey Plaza, including the bystanders on the north side of Elm Street, are virtually motionless and unresponsive, even when the president is immediately before them. This has long since appeared to be a result of taking earlier footage as the foreground and making adjustments to later footage, including the introduction of special effects, such as adding the “blob” and blood spray to make it look as though the head shot in frame 313 was fired from behind and blackening out the actual wound at the back of his head. In order to achieve consistency between the various films, they had to change them to conform to the revised Zapruder, where removing activities like those that Witt reported would have made that task immeasurably simpler. If he is moving around, the effects of deleting frames would have been conspicuous because of “jumps” in his actions. It was simpler to keep him frozen, more or less as was done with Mary Moorman and Jean Hill on the opposite side of the street.
There are multiple indications that Tink’s purpose here and throughout the entire series–which, given there are 1o six-minute segments in an hour and Errol Morris has reported he has six hours of interviews, which may mean as many as 59 more six-minute reports–is to attempt to debunk belief in conspiracy in the assassination of JFK. His remarks about a “wing-nut” who suggested that the umbrella may have concealed a device to fire a flacehette is particularly revealing, since such a device is actually discussed in the HSCA transcript of the testimony of Louis Steven Witt. Richard Sprague and Robert Cutler were among those who took the idea seriously, where it turned out that the CIA actually had devices of this kind in 1963. So Tink was either faking it (because he was not familiar with the Umbrella man’s testimony) or deliberately distorting an odd aspect of the investigation of the assassination (which was conducted by investigators that no one else familiar with their work would describe as “wing-nuts”).
It was not irresponsible for Sprague and Cutler to endorse the flechette hypothesis when, to the best of my knowledge, (i) they did not have access to the Parkland Press Conference transcript (which was not even provided to the Warren Commission), (ii) they did not know there was a through-and-through hole in the windshield, (iii) they were apparently unaware of the tiny shrapnel wounds in JFK’s face, and (iv) they did not know that, unless the tentorium had been previously ruptured, even the near simultaneous impact of the shot to the back of his head and the frangible hit around his right temple would not have been sufficient to cause cerebellum to extrude from the world. So this appears to be a classic case of acquiring new information and new hypotheses that make a difference to understanding what took place, where, in this case, hypotheses that were previously accepted should be rejected and hypotheses that were previously rejected should be accepted. Another serious student of the assassination, Alan J. Salerian, M.D., moreover, has taken this hypothesis seriously in studies he has presented as recently as 2008.
Anyone with any lingering doubt about Tink’s betrayal of JFK research should pay close attention to what he say, where, in particular, he is suggesting there are arbitrarily many innocuous explanations for any evidence that has ever been viewed as “sinister” in the sassassination of JFK. As Cliff Varnell has remarked, “Check out the sarcasm dripping from Tink’s [use of the phrases] “really sinister” and “sinister underpinning”:
Here’s a transcript: (laughing) What it means it that, if you have any fact which you think is really sinister — it’s really obviously a fact which can only point to some sinister underpinning — hey, FORGET IT, MAN, because you can never, on your own, think up all the non-sinister perfectly valid explanations for that fact. A cautionary tale.
And that, of course, is why Mark M., commented, “This was wonderful. The best – and most convincing – debunking of any and all conspiracy theories I have ever seen, and in just 6 minutes too.”
I hate to say “I told you so”, but I nailed Tink as working the opposite side of the street a long time ago and was attacked for doing so. I also observed earlier that, in disavowing the “double-hit” theory, he was setting himself up to proclaim that there was no conspiracy in the assassination, after all, just in time for the 50th observance. Since I think Robert Morrow may have been closer than I to sorting out the Umbrella man, I want to give him the last word for this round of what may well turn out to be the most elaborate CIA disinformation campaign in history:
I have “fallen into traps” before on the JFK assassination. Then when I see the error of my ways I try to get out of that hole as quick as possible. That means I change my mind when the weight of evidence changes direction.
As for this this NY Times – Josiah Thompson – Umbrella Man thing … it looks like it is yet more generalized lone nutter propaganda given an NY Times platform. Really, instead of debunking one probable fallacy – that Umbrella Man was part of the assassination – they could have used that valuable air space/print space to document a THOUSAND things that point to a coup d’etat.
So we have yet another pathetic performance by the NY Times. Perhaps not an error of commission, but a thousand errors of omission. How about an article on Fletcher Prouty and Victor Krulak’s identification of Maj. Gen. Edward Lansdale at the TSBD and what that probably means? Spend a little time on that photo and the backgrounds of Lansdale and what Prouty has to offer.
That is but one mere example.
As for Josiah Thompson – count me extremely unimpressed with his smug attitude and *performance* – and that is exactly what he was doing , *performing* – as the JFK expert for the NY Times, playing along with their lone-nutter agenda, much in the way [that] “conspiracy theorist” Gary Mack [who is the official archivist for The 6th Floor Museum] constantly does.
Link:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/11/29/jfk-the-cia-and-the-new-york-times-2/
Jim Fetzer
“The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” — William Colby, former CIA Director
In 1977, Carl Bernstein, who would subsequently co-author All the President’s Men (1994) with Bob Woodward, one of the most celebrated books in American political history, published “The CIA and the Media”, Rolling Stone (October 20, 1977), reporting that, with respect to its infiltration of the American media, “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.” Those who lent their cooperation to the agency were Williarn Paley of the CBS, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of The New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA included ABC, NBC, the AP, the UPI, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune. It was therefore fascinating to discover that The New York Times, which has a history of suppressing research on the assassination of JFK, was publishing “The Umbrella Man: A video interview with the author of SIX SECONDS IN DALLAS (1967)”, widely regarded as a classic of conspiracy research on the assassination of JFK.
Its author, Josiah Thompson (whose nickname is “Tink”), was at one time a professor of philosophy at Haverford College and, when I returned from 13 months in the Far East with the 1st Battalion, 12th Marines, 3rd Marine Division, where we had been anchored out in Kauschung Harbor in Formosa (now Taichung Harbor, Taiwan), where I had been awakened at 3:30 AM by the officer of the deck who told me that JFK had been shot and, then again, an hour later that they had caught the guy who had done it, who was a communist, which I thought at the time was “pretty fast work”, I obtained a copy of his book while stationed at the USMC Recruit Depot in San Diego as a series commander, supervising 15 DIs and 300 recruits going through the training cycle, which I read with great interest, especially because I had earned my A.B. at Princeton in philosophy and, like myself, Tink had served in the Navy (in the UDT rather than the Marine Corps) and was doing research on JFK, which was attracting my interest as well.
SIX SECONDS IN DALLAS
At the time, I thought it was an admirable study, which payed special attention to the Zapruder film, to which the author had had access in conducting research with LIFE magazine, ostensibly for an article about the film. Apparently, Tink took a copy of the film without authorization and there was a falling out. LIFE rescinded permission it had granted for him to use frames from the film, which were replaced by very high-quality charcoal sketches–not as good as the actual frames, but still valuable. Among the most important features of his book was an analysis of the “double-hit”, according to which, in frame 312, JFK’s head moves forward under the impact of a shot fired from behind, while in frames 313-316, his head moves violently back and to the left, which is indicative of a shot fired from in front–to the right/front, actually, which many have assumed to have meant from the grassy knoll or even the picket fence. The book created quite a sensation at the time and lead to Thompson’s story being feature on the front page of The Saturday Evening Post (2 December 1967).
According to the analysis published there, three assassins had fired four shots, all of which hit. The first, fired from the Texas School Book Depository, hit JFK in the back. The second, fired from the roof of the County Records Building, hit Gov. John Connally in the back. The third, again from the Book Depository, hit JFK in the back of the head, moving it forward, while the fourth was fried from the picket fence and struck him in the right forehead, killing him. For its time, this was excellent work, which offered a stunning contrast to the “official account” of the assassination, which featured three shots with one miss, where one hit JFK at the base of the back of his neck, passed through without hitting any bony structures, and entered John Connally’s back, while the other hit him in the back of the head, killing him. We know today that the “magic bullet” scenario is not only provably false but not even anatomically possible, where no bullet could have taken the alleged trajectory, because cervical vertebrae intervene. I even presented a lecture about it at Cambridge during an international conference, which would be published in an international, peer-reviewed journal under the title, “Reasoning about Assassinations”.
While Tink’s book was very good for its time, his analysis of the shot sequence was superseded by the far more extensive study by Richard Sprague, COMPUTERS AND AUTOMATION (May 1970), which demonstrated that there had been more shooters and more shots, which I have refined based upon our studies of the medical evidence and the ballistics published in three books, Assassination Science (1998), Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), and The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003). The issue over which we have repeatedly clashed, however, concerns the authenticity of the film that was the foundation for his book. I suppose it would be only natural that he would resist evidence that the film has been faked (edited, altered, revised, fabricated), when it pulls the rug out from under his classic study. The proof is abundant and compelling, as anyone who has followed my columns about JFK here can verify for themselves by reading “JFK: Who’s telling the truth: Clint Hill or the Zapruder film?”, right here at Veterans Today. If you read the comments on Six Seconds in Dallas (1967), moreover, you will find those who are adamant that Tink got it right and the rest of us got it wrong. The first “reader’s review”, for example, makes these claims:
5.0 out of 5 stars Best book ever about the Kennedy assassination – bar none, January 22, 2005
By Michael K. Beusch (San Mateo, California United States) - See all my reviews
As an American who believes in his heart that President Kennedy was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy, it pains me to see so many half-baked and flat-out irresponsible studies of the assassination. These run the gamut from the ridiculous defenses of the Warren Report (Gerald Posner, in particular) to the most outlandish conspiracy books hawking absolutely ridiculous theories (James Fetzer’s books claiming that the Zapruder film is a fake is the latest). Both the Warren Commission’s defenders and the way-out conspiracy theorists do the search for the truth a great disservice. Both groups pick and choose whatever evidence suits their needs. . . .
Indeed, Josiah has been attacking me for doing research on Zapruder film authenticity since 1996, when I organized the first symposium devoted to this issue at the JFK Lancer Conference. I conducted a 10.5 hour preliminary discussion the day before with a dozen or more students of the film, which led to the 4.5 hour presentation the following day with the best half-dozen, including Jack White, Noel Twyman, David Lifton, David Mantik and Chuck Marler, which can be obtained as a 2-disc DVD from Lancer to this day. Our encounters have been relentless since then, numbering in the hundreds. By now, there may have been as many as a thousand, where he has referred to my first book as “Assassinated Science”, even though it published the studies of the autopsy X-rays by David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., which revealed that the X-rays had been altered to conceal the true causes of death of JFK, and by Robert Livingston, M.D., a world authority on the human brain and an expert on wound ballistics, who concluded that, given the consistent and multiple reports from experienced and highly qualified Parkland physicians, who described cerebellar as well as cerebral tissue extruding from fist-sized wound at the back of his head, that the brain shown in the diagrams and photographs at the National Archives could not possibly be of the brain of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Since it also included multiple studies of Zapruder film alteration, perhaps that was Tink’s overriding concern.
THE UMBRELLA MAN
His credibility was not enhanced when he attacked Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), which many regard as the best published on the death of JFK, claiming that a study by Gary Aguilar, M.D., showing the consistency of descriptions of that fist-sized blow out to the back of the head had been highly consistent across witnesses in Dealey Plaza, others at Parkland Hospital, and even those who observed the body at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the autopsy would be performed. While we now know that James Humes, who was performing the autopsy, actually took a cranial saw to the head and enlarged the head wound to make it look more like the effect of a shot fired from behind (but inexplicably allowed to witnesses to watch him do this, as Doug Horne, Inside the ARRB (2009), has documented in detail, which means that Aguilar’s study is not quite as accurate as I initially supposed), the case for that massive defect–or one that was even larger–is amply established by this study. When Tink said that Gary’s chapter was the only good one in the book, therefore, I knew he had committed a blunder, since if Gary was right, then the film–which does not show this defect–had to have been faked. Indeed, since I had found a late frame, 374, in which the blow out is visible, while it has been blacked out in frames 313-317, for example, the film is not even self-consistent, which means that it cannot, in its totality, possibly be authentic.
When I discovered that the estimable Errol Morris, described as “an Academy Award-winning filmmaker (‘The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara’) and a recent New York Times best-selling author (‘Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography’), whose first film, ‘Gates of Heaven’, is even on Roger Ebert’s list of the 10 best movies ever made, and his latest, ‘Tabloid’, has just been released on DVD”, was conducting a series of interviews with Tink, I was fairly incredulous. It was striking to me that he had used “Believing as Seeing” as the title of his study about photography, since we had shown that “Seeing is not Believing” in relation to the Zapruder film. In agreement with most students of JFK, I had formed the opinion that the Umbrella man was complicit in the assassination, not only because of his association with the Cuban, but because he had been pumping his umbrella up and down in what we took to be a signal to the assassins that their target was still alive and to continue shooting. The video interview in The New York Times, however, portrayed the Umbrella man as having been completely innocent and present with an umbrella to protest policies, not of JFK, but of his father in relation to an earlier era:
OP-DOCS
‘The Umbrella Man’: A video interview with the author of SIX SECONDS IN DALLAS (1967)
The Umbrella Man: On the 48th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Errol Morris explores the story behind the one man seen standing under an open black umbrella at the site.
By ERROL MORRIS
Published: November 21, 2011
COMMENTS (254)
For years, I’ve wanted to make a movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Not because I thought I could prove that it was a conspiracy, or that I could prove it was a lone gunman, but because I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?
Years ago, Josiah Thompson, known as Tink, a young, Yale-educated Kierkegaard scholar wrote the definitive book on the Zapruder film — “Six Seconds in Dallas.” Thompson eventually quit his day job as a professor of philosophy at Haverford College to become a private detective and came to work with many of the same private investigators I had also worked with in the 1980s. We had so much in common — philosophy, P.I. work and an obsessive interest in the complexities of reality. But we had never met.
Last year, I finally got to meet and interview Tink Thompson. I hope his interview can become the first part of an extended series on the Kennedy assassination. This film is but a small segment of my six-hour interview with Tink.
where this reader’s comment (and there were more than 250 at that point in time) spoke volumes to me about Tink’s interview and the impression it was conveying to the public:
23. HIGHLIGHT (What’s this?)
Mark M
New York, NY
November 22nd, 2011
6:16 am
This was wonderful. The best – and most convincing – debunking of any and all conspiracy theories I have ever seen, and in just 6 minutes too.
I submitted a comment of my own after listening to what Tink had to say, which was a fascinating effort to undermine not just conspiracy research related to the Umbrella man but, it turned out, with respect to JFK conspiracy research generally. With The Times running performance art like this from Josiah, I regarded it as as most likely that they would publish my comment, even though I was exposing a false assumption at the foundation of his presentation:
Your Submitted Comment
Display Name
James H. Fetzer
Location
Oregon, WI
Comment
How can Josiah Thompson have written “the definitive book” on the Zapruder film when its fabrication has been proven beyond reasonable doubt? The limo stop was removed, the wounds were changed, and, having reduced the time frame, Clint Hill’s activities–about which he has been consistent for more than 47 years–contradict what we see in the extant film. See, for example, “JFK: Who’s telling the truth: Clint Hill or the Zapruder film?” For more on how it was done, see “US Government Official: JFK Cover-Up, Film Fabrication”. For a tutorial on some of the ways we know the film we have is not the original, see John Costella, “The JFK Assassination Film Hoax”, http://assassination…ella/jfk/intro/ I dismembered Josiah’s feeble defense of the authenticity of the film in THE GREAT ZAPRUDER FILM HOAX (2003). Check it out. The American people are entitled to the truth about the assassination of our 35th president. It isn’t a close call.
THE UMBRELLA MAN DEBATE
At this point, I was rather incensed that Tink was playing fast and loose with one of the most interesting figures whose image was recorded in the Zapruder film and by others with cameras in Dealey Plaza at the time. I therefore initiated a thread on The Education Forum to discuss it, entitled “Tink’s performance in The New York Times: Josiah Thompson shows his true colors”. Among my earliest posts was one laying out arguments that Tink had shaded the evidence in a number of important respects, where I would later add photographs to support my points. When David S. Lifton, the author of Best Evidence (1980), asked for “credible evidence” that Witt was not the person he claimed to be to the HSCA, I posted three images that supported my objections to their identification:
(1) As I have previously observed, the Umbrella Man and the Cuban were obviously together, where any explanation of the presence of the Umbrella Man must account for their association:
(2) While everyone else in Dealey Plaza was dumbfounded, the Umbrella man and the Cuban did not act surprised by the assassination–and their faces have been obscured in certain photos, which is highly suspicious by itself:
(3) Moreover, they hang around together, sitting on the curb, as though nothing especially unusual had taken place, where I had supposed virtually everyone would agree that their behavior is abnormal under these circumstances:
When Jim DiEugenio, the author of Destiny Betrayed (1992), posted this summary of Witt’s testimony, I thought the case against Witt was cinched:
Posted 25 November 2011 – 07:36 PM
Has anyone read Witt’s testimony of late? I don’t think so.These are some of the things he said.
1.) He never planned on doing what he did until that morning.
2.) He did not know the exact parade route.
3.) He just happened to wander around for a walk and guessed where it would be.
4.) Contrary to what Cliff says, he did what he did with no relation to JFK’s policies, only Joe Sr.
5.) What did the Cuban looking guy say? Words to the effect, They shot those people. (Oh really Louie?)
6.) Admits he sat there for up to three minutes and that he never even looked behind him at the picket fence! (Truly surprising.)
7.) He never did anything like this before or since, and he was not a member of any conservative group or organization.
8.) He placed the umbrella on the sidewalk and then picked it up. He wavers on whether this is definitely the umbrella he had that day.
9.) He often uses the conditional, like I think that is me, or that may be the guy I sat next to.
At this point in time, I felt very confident that Jim and I were right in debunking Tink’s suggestion that the Umbrella man was Louie Steven Witt, including that Tink was assuming that identification, when it is instead a conclusion that requires its own substantiation evidence. In logic, this is called “begging the question” by assuming what requires independent proof. He was ignoring that more reasonable identifications would be of the Cuban as Felipe Vidal Santiago, a committed anti-Castro Cuban, and of Roy Hargraves, who fit the photos and the scenario to a “t”. The very idea that Witt would offer this fantastic story about Joe Kennedy, which is preposterous on its face, as though it was “so extraordinary and unbelievable it must be true”, according to Tink, was clearly absurd.
It seemed far more likely that, by pumping his umbrella, Witt was signaling to the assassins that JFK was still alive, which makes sense, rather than an obscure historical allusion that no one, including Jack, would have grasped. By remarking that there are always alternative explanations that might be true, when you isolate one element of a complex picture, Tink was employing the technique known as “divide and conquer”. If all you knew were what Tink had presented in this little clip, then you could rather easily be taken in; but once you consider the other evidence we have available, his scenario is not remotely plausible. But I thought it would be appropriate to review what others have thought, so I turned to Jim Marrs’ classic study, Crossfire (1989), pp. 29-32, for such light as it might shed on the subject.
JIM MARRS IN CROSSFIRE (1989)
About the time that Kennedy was first hit by a bullet, two men standing near each other on the north sidewalk of Elm Street acted most strangely—one began pumping a black umbrella while the other waved his right arm high in the air.
These and subsequent actions by this pair aroused the suspicions of researchers over the years, yet the initial federal investigation ignored both men. Their activities are known only through analysis of assassination photographs.
As Kennedy’s limousine began the gentle descent into Dealey Plaza, a man can be seen standing near the street-side edge of the Stemmons Freeway sign holding an open umbrella. He holds the umbrella in a normal fashion and the top of the umbrella almost reaches the bottom of the sign.
In photos taken minutes before Kennedy’s arrival, the umbrella is closed and, immediately after the shooting, pictures show the umbrella was closed again. The man’s umbrella was only open during the shooting sequence. Furthermore, as seen in the Zapruder film, once Kennedy is exactly opposite the man with the umbrella, it was pumped almost two feet into the air and then lowered.
At the same time, the second man—in photos he appears to be of a dark complexion, perhaps a black man or Hispanic—raised his right hand into the air possibly making a fist. This man was located on the outer edge of the Elm Street sidewalk opposite the umbrella man, who was on the inner edge.
The man with the open umbrella was the only person in Dealey Plaza with an open umbrella. Under the warm Texas sun, there was no reason to carry an open umbrella at that time.
Two main theories have emerged concerning the “umbrella man” and his activities that day. Assassination researcher Robert Cutler has long maintained that the umbrella may have been a sophisticated weapon that fired a dart or “flechette” filled with a paralyzing agent. Cutler’s theory has been the object of dirision over the years but it is supported by the 1975 testimony of a CIA weapons developer who told the Senate Intelligence Committee that just such an umbrella weapon was in the hands of the spy agency in 1963.
Charles Senseney, who developed weaponry for the CIA at Fort Detrick, Maryland, described a dart-firing weapon he developed as looking like an umbrella. He said the dart gun was silent in operation and fired through the webbing when the umbrella was open. Senseney said the CIA had ordered about fifty such dart weapons and that they were operational in 1963.
Cutler theorized that the umbrella was used to fire a paralyzing dart into Kennedy immobilizing him for marksmen with rifles. He claims this theory accounts for the small puncture wound in Kennedy’s throat described by Dallas doctors, but which was altered by the time of the Bethesda autopsy. According to Cutler, this dart explains Kennedy’s lack of motion during the shooting sequence. Since such a weapon existed and since both the actions of Kennedy and the “umbrella man” were consistent with the operation of such a weapon, Cutler’s theory cannot be completely dismissed.
However, most assassination researchers prefer the alternative theory that both of these suspicious men may have been providing visual signals to hidden gunmen. This theory suggests that Kennedy was killed by a crossfire coordinated by radiomen. The two men, who were among the closest bystanders to the President when he was first struck, gave signals indicating that he was not fatally hit and therefore more shots were needed.
A fascinating twist on this latter theory came from researcher Gary Shaw, who said the two men may have been providing Kennedy with a last-second sign of who was responsible for his death. Shaw recalled that throughout the planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion, CIA officers had promised an “umbrella” of air protection of the Cuban invaders. This “umbrella” failed to materialize because Kennedy refused to authorize U.S. military support for the invasion. According to Shaw’s theory, the man with the open umbrella symbolized the promise of an air-support “umbrella” while the dark-complected man may have been one of the anti-Castro Cuban leaders known to Kennedy. Thus, in the last seconds of his life, Kennedy may have seen the open umbrella and the face of a Cuban he knew was involved in the Bay of Pigs and realized who was participating in his death.
But this is all speculation. The existence of the “umbrella man” and the dark-complexion man is fact. Their activities after the assassination especially bear study. While virtually everyone in Dealey Plaza was moved to action by the assassination—either falling to the ground for cover or moving toward The Grassy Knoll—these two men sat down beside each other on the north sidewalk of Elm Street.
Here the dark-complexion man appears to put a walkie-talkie to his mouth. In a photograph taken by Jim Towner, what seems to be an antenna can be seen jutting out from behind the man’s head while his right hand holds some object to his face.
Several photos taken in the seconds following the assassination show both of these men sitting together on the Elm Street sidewalk. Moments later, the man with the umbrella gets up, takes one last look toward the motorcade still passing under the Triple Underpass, and begins walking east in the direction of the Depository. The dark-complexion man saunters toward the Triple Underpass passing people rushing up The Grassy Knoll. He can be seen stuffing some object—the walkie-talkie?—into the back of his pants.
Despite the suspicious actions of these two men, there is no evidence that the FBI or the Warren Commission made any effort to identify or locate them. Officially they did not exist. Yet over the years, this pair became the focal point of criticism by private researchers. Researchers claimed the lack of investigation of these men was indicative of the shallowness of the government’s handling of the assassination.
Once the House Select Committee on Assassinations was formed in 1976, researchers urged an investigation of both men. The Committee finally released a photograph of the “umbrella man” to the news media and urged anyone with knowledge of the man to come forward.
Coincidentally—if it was a coincidence—the “umbrella man” suddenly was identified in Dallas a few weeks after this national appeal. In August 1978, a telephone caller told researcher Penn Jones, Jr., that the man with the umbrella was a former Dallas insurance salesman named Louis Steven Witt. Jones contacted some local newsmen (Jim Marrs being one of them) and together they confronted Witt, who then was working as a warehouse manager. Witt refused to talk with newsmen but acknowledged that he was in Dealey Plaza on the day Kennedy was killed.
Jones later wrote: “I felt the man had been coached. He would answer no questions and pointedly invited us to leave. His only positive statement, which seemed to come very quickly, was that he was willing to appear before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in Washington.”
Witt indeed appeared before the Committee during its public testimony. His story was comic relief compared to the intense scrutiny of witnesses like Marina Oswald and Warren Commission critics. His story was facile and improbable and when the umbrella that Witt claimed was the same one he had had in Dealey Plaza in 1963 was displayed, it suddenly turned wrong-side out, prompting one Committee member to quip: “I hope that’s not a weapon.”
Witt told the Committee that on the spur of the moment, he grabbed a large black umbrella and went to Dealey Plaza to heckle Kennedy. He claimed that someone had told him that an open umbrella would rile Kennedy. While Witt offered no further explanation of how his umbrella could heckle the president, Committee members – not Witt — theorized that the umbrella in some way referred to the pro-German sympathies of Kennedy’s father while serving as U.S. ambassador to Britain just prior to World War II. They said the umbrella may have symbolized the appeasement policies of Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who always carried an umbrella.
According to Witt:
I think I went sort of maybe halfway up the grassy area [on the north side of Elm Street], somewhere in that vicinity. I am pretty sure I sat down. . . . [when the motorcade approached] I think I got up and started fiddling with that umbrella trying to get it open, and at the same time I was walking forward, walking toward the street. . . . Whereas other people I understand saw the President shot and his movements; I did not see this because of this thing [the umbrella] in front of me . . . My view of the car during that length of time was blocked by the umbrella’s being open.
Based on the available photographs made that day, none of Witt’s statements were an accurate account of the actions of the “umbrella man” who stood waiting for the motorcade with his umbrella in the normal over-the-head position and then pumped it in the air as Kennedy passed.
Witt’s bizarre story—unsubstantiated and totally at variance with the actions of the man in the photographs—resulted in few, if any, researchers accepting Louis Steven Witt as the “umbrella man.”
And there continues to be no official accounting for the dark-complexion man who appears to have been talking on a radio moments after the assassination. The House Committee failed to identify or locate this man and Witt claimed he had no recollection of such a person, despite photographs that seem to show the “umbrella man” talking with the dark man.
Witt claimed only to recall that a “Negro man” sat down near him and kept repeating: “They done shot them folks.”
Interestingly, one of the Committee attorneys asked Witt specifically if he recalled seeing the man with a walkie-talkie, although officially no one has ever admitted the possibility of radios in use in Dealey Plaza.
NEW EVIDENCE APPEARS
No one could have been more surprised than I when another student of the assassination, Bernice Moore, sent me a comment that had been posted in response to The New York Times, which included an extract of Witt’s actual testimony to the HSCA:
228.Christopher Marlow
San Diego, CA
November 22nd, 2011
6:08 pm
After watching this video, I looked up the interview of the “Umbrella Man” for the House Committee on Assassinations. It was very enlightening. The man’s name was Louis Steven Witt, a former Dallas insurance salesman. He was questioned by counsel for the committee, Mr. Genzman….
Mr. WITT. Yes. As I moved toward the street, still walking on the grass, I heard the shots that I eventually learned were shots. At the time somehow it didn’t register as shots because they were so close together, and it was like hearing a string of firecrackers, or something like that. It didn’t at that moment register on me as being shots.
…
Mr. GENZMAN. What do you next recall happening?Mr. WITT. Let me go back a minute. As I was moving forward I apparently had this umbrella in front of me for some few steps. Whereas other people I understand saw the President shot and his movements; I did not see this because of this thing in front of me, The next thing I saw after I saw the car coming down the street, down the hill to my left, the car was just about at a position like this [indicating] at this angle here. At this time there was the car stopping, the screeching of tires, the jamming on of brakes, [!!!] motorcycle patrolman right there beside one of the cars. One car ran upon the President’s car and a man jumped off and jumped on the back. These were the scenes that unfolded as I reached the point to where I was seeing things.
…
—> If you look at the Zapruder film, you will see that the car does not stop. But the Umbrella man and literally dozens of witnesses testified that the presidential limo came to a stop during the assassination. The Zapruder film has been altered to conceal this and other facts. Any careful examination of the Z film will lead you to this conclusion.
This new evidence, moreover, makes an enormous difference to the evaluation of Witt’s testimony. Based upon other evidence we have accumulated about the Zapruder film, which is contradicted by witness reports about the limo having been brought to a halt–which we believe was in response to the Cuban’s raised fist–for which there are many witnesses, whose reports have been collated by John Costella in “What happened on Elm Street? The Eyewitnesses Speak”,“New Proof of Zapruder Film Fakery” and “Who’s telling the truth: Clint Hill or the Zapruder film?”, what Witt is saying closely corresponds to those other witnesses and to the reports of others who have seen “the other film”, which appears to be the original Zapruder before it was subjected to reconstuction, as Doug Horne has explained in his five-volume study, which I summarized in “US Government Official: JFK Cover-Up, Film Fabrication”. As I then explained in post #160 on The Education Forum,
Well, I’m only beginning to sort this out, but his description of what happened is very close to what happened as we have reconstructed it. The limo stop, of course, is at the heart of the matter. It was such a blatant example of Secret Service complicity that it had to be taken out. When you study Clint Hill’s report of the sequence of acts he took–running forward, boarding the vehicle, pushing Jackie down, lying over their bodies and peering into a fist-sized hole in the back of JFK’s head while giving a “thumbs down” BEFORE THE LIMO REACHED the TUP–which he has been saying and reporting consistently for (then) 47 years–this is hardly the first time we’ve had a witness who supported the limo stop. I have given several references to studies that document their reports.
The point is that THIS DESCRIPTION, which was NOT in DiEugenio’s summary, POWERFULLY SUGGESTS HE ACTUALLY WAS THERE. Some of it is rather fascinating, including about the breaks and all that, because it has not come up before. But when you have a motorcade that is proceeding quite uneventually AND THE LEAD CAR SLAMS ON ITS BREAKS, it would not be surprising if the car following should run up against it or if other drivers had to react by slamming on their breaks. So you are making too quick an inferences from the sound of breaks to assuming the sound came from the limo! What he is saying needs to be sorted out but, given this stunning and dramatic report (which he cannot have acquired from viewing the Zapruder film), he probably WAS there.
It’s like finding a fingerprint or the DNA of someone who was not previously a suspect at a crime scene. This guy could not possibly have known some of what he is reporting UNLESS HE HAD BEEN THERE. Even the limo stop is not widely known, even though there are dozens and dozens of witnesses who reported it. Too many play on the “slowed dramatically” versus “came to a halt” difference, which is splitting hairs, since (1) it had to slow dramatically to come to a halt and (2) the Zapruder film shows NEITHER dramatic slowing NOR coming to a halt. So this is really quite remarkable, because, as in the case of Gary Aguilar’s chapter in MURDER, Tink has endorsed Witt, but he turns out to have witnessed the limo stop, which is further proof that the film is a fake.
WHAT THEN ABOUT THE UMBRELLA MAN?
I have now done what I should have done originally, namely, check his testimony for myself. Here is what I have found:
While there is massive evidence of the limo stop (links to some of which I have cited above), I do not find Witt credible simply because he observed the limo stop but because he is reporting information that only someone who was actually there could possibly have known. The Zapruder film was shown for the first time on the Geraldo Rivera TV program in 1975, but it does not show any of these very specific details that Witt is reporting. Even most students of the assassination would be hard pressed to say what they think actually happened at that place and time. The screeching of tires, with one car running up onto the other (the Secret Service Cadillac evidently butting up against the Lincoln limousine) and one man jumping off and climbing onto the back of the other (Clint Hill rushing from the Cadillac to the back steps of the Lincoln) not only fits the scenario to a “t” but adds details that offer more data to consider, including especially the acoustical aspects of this event, which have been under-explored previous to this belated discovery.
This also means that Robert Morrow, another contributor to the forum, was closer to the truth than I was in relation to the Umbrella Man. A fundamental principle of scientific reasoning is that the search for truth must be based upon all the available relevant evidence. Witt’s remarks about the shots and their sound are also telling. We know many said that the first shot (or “the first shots”) sounded like firecrackers. Jim Lewis has found that, when high velocity bullets are fired through windshields, they make the sound of a firecracker. But the fact is we have new evidence to consider in assessing this. When his testimony was vague and ambiguous, my other arguments carried greater weight. But this very detailed and specific testimony outweighs the vagueness of the rest. At the very least, we have found a remarkable additional witness to the limo stop from an expected source–and thanks to Tink! And that underlines a mistake in Jim Marrs’ discounting of Witt’s story:
According to Witt:
I think I went sort of maybe halfway up the grassy area [on the north side of Elm Street], somewhere in that vicinity. I am pretty sure I sat down. . . . [when the motorcade approached] I think I got up and started fiddling with that umbrella trying to get it open, and at the same time I was walking forward, walking toward the street. . . . Whereas other people I understand saw the President shot and his movements; I did not see this because of this thing [the umbrella] in front of me . . . My view of the car during that length of time was blocked by the umbrella’s being open.
Based on the available photographs made that day, none of Witt’s statements were an accurate account of the actions of the “umbrella man” who stood waiting for the motorcade with his umbrella in the normal over-the-head position and then pumped it in the air as Kennedy passed.
But that is to overlook that the film has been massively revised to conceal the true causes of the death of JFK. One of the first and most obvious oddities of the extant film is that so many figures in Dealey Plaza, including the bystanders on the north side of Elm Street, are virtually motionless and unresponsive, even when the president is immediately before them. This has long since appeared to be a result of taking earlier footage as the foreground and making adjustments to later footage, including the introduction of special effects, such as adding the “blob” and blood spray to make it look as though the head shot in frame 313 was fired from behind and blackening out the actual wound at the back of his head. In order to achieve consistency between the various films, they had to change them to conform to the revised Zapruder, where removing activities like those that Witt reported would have made that task immeasurably simpler. If he is moving around, the effects of deleting frames would have been conspicuous because of “jumps” in his actions. It was simpler to keep him frozen, more or less as was done with Mary Moorman and Jean Hill on the opposite side of the street.
There are multiple indications that Tink’s purpose here and throughout the entire series–which, given there are 1o six-minute segments in an hour and Errol Morris has reported he has six hours of interviews, which may mean as many as 59 more six-minute reports–is to attempt to debunk belief in conspiracy in the assassination of JFK. His remarks about a “wing-nut” who suggested that the umbrella may have concealed a device to fire a flacehette is particularly revealing, since such a device is actually discussed in the HSCA transcript of the testimony of Louis Steven Witt. Richard Sprague and Robert Cutler were among those who took the idea seriously, where it turned out that the CIA actually had devices of this kind in 1963. So Tink was either faking it (because he was not familiar with the Umbrella man’s testimony) or deliberately distorting an odd aspect of the investigation of the assassination (which was conducted by investigators that no one else familiar with their work would describe as “wing-nuts”).
It was not irresponsible for Sprague and Cutler to endorse the flechette hypothesis when, to the best of my knowledge, (i) they did not have access to the Parkland Press Conference transcript (which was not even provided to the Warren Commission), (ii) they did not know there was a through-and-through hole in the windshield, (iii) they were apparently unaware of the tiny shrapnel wounds in JFK’s face, and (iv) they did not know that, unless the tentorium had been previously ruptured, even the near simultaneous impact of the shot to the back of his head and the frangible hit around his right temple would not have been sufficient to cause cerebellum to extrude from the world. So this appears to be a classic case of acquiring new information and new hypotheses that make a difference to understanding what took place, where, in this case, hypotheses that were previously accepted should be rejected and hypotheses that were previously rejected should be accepted. Another serious student of the assassination, Alan J. Salerian, M.D., moreover, has taken this hypothesis seriously in studies he has presented as recently as 2008.
Anyone with any lingering doubt about Tink’s betrayal of JFK research should pay close attention to what he say, where, in particular, he is suggesting there are arbitrarily many innocuous explanations for any evidence that has ever been viewed as “sinister” in the sassassination of JFK. As Cliff Varnell has remarked, “Check out the sarcasm dripping from Tink’s [use of the phrases] “really sinister” and “sinister underpinning”:
Here’s a transcript: (laughing) What it means it that, if you have any fact which you think is really sinister — it’s really obviously a fact which can only point to some sinister underpinning — hey, FORGET IT, MAN, because you can never, on your own, think up all the non-sinister perfectly valid explanations for that fact. A cautionary tale.
And that, of course, is why Mark M., commented, “This was wonderful. The best – and most convincing – debunking of any and all conspiracy theories I have ever seen, and in just 6 minutes too.”
I hate to say “I told you so”, but I nailed Tink as working the opposite side of the street a long time ago and was attacked for doing so. I also observed earlier that, in disavowing the “double-hit” theory, he was setting himself up to proclaim that there was no conspiracy in the assassination, after all, just in time for the 50th observance. Since I think Robert Morrow may have been closer than I to sorting out the Umbrella man, I want to give him the last word for this round of what may well turn out to be the most elaborate CIA disinformation campaign in history:
I have “fallen into traps” before on the JFK assassination. Then when I see the error of my ways I try to get out of that hole as quick as possible. That means I change my mind when the weight of evidence changes direction.
As for this this NY Times – Josiah Thompson – Umbrella Man thing … it looks like it is yet more generalized lone nutter propaganda given an NY Times platform. Really, instead of debunking one probable fallacy – that Umbrella Man was part of the assassination – they could have used that valuable air space/print space to document a THOUSAND things that point to a coup d’etat.
So we have yet another pathetic performance by the NY Times. Perhaps not an error of commission, but a thousand errors of omission. How about an article on Fletcher Prouty and Victor Krulak’s identification of Maj. Gen. Edward Lansdale at the TSBD and what that probably means? Spend a little time on that photo and the backgrounds of Lansdale and what Prouty has to offer.
That is but one mere example.
As for Josiah Thompson – count me extremely unimpressed with his smug attitude and *performance* – and that is exactly what he was doing , *performing* – as the JFK expert for the NY Times, playing along with their lone-nutter agenda, much in the way [that] “conspiracy theorist” Gary Mack [who is the official archivist for The 6th Floor Museum] constantly does.
Link:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/11/29/jfk-the-cia-and-the-new-york-times-2/
Ten things you might not know about Newt Gingrich...
10 Things Newt Gingrich Doesn’t Want You To Know About Him
By Zaid Jilani
1. DESPITE BATTLING THE “SECULAR SOCIALIST” AGENDA, GINGRICH CHEATED ON HIS WIVES SEVERAL TIMES: One of Gingrich’s main themes in his columns and speeches over the past few years has been the need to stop the “secular socialist” takeover of America, which he blames for the demise of the family. Yet he had several of these affairs while attacking President Bill Clinton for his own. He justified his hypocrisy to his second wife once, telling her, “It doesn’t matter what I do.”
2. WHILE DEMONIZING GOVERNMENT LARGESS, GINGRICH POURED MORE FEDERAL MONEY INTO HIS DISTRICT THAN ALMOST ANY OTHER: The politics of the mid-1990′s was marked by the right’s attempt to decimate the social safety net. As Gingrich waged his campaign to destroy unemployment insurance and aid for needy families, he made his own district the recipient of huge amounts of federal aid. Under Gingrich, his district in Cobb County, GA received more “federal subsidies than any suburban county in the country, with two exceptions: Arlington Virginia, effectively part of the Federal Government, and Brevard County Florida, the home of the Kennedy Space Center.”
3. IN 2007, GINGRICH BACKED CAP-AND-TRADE, THEN FLIP-FLOPPED TWO YEARS LATER: Talking to PBS just four years ago, Gingrich said, “I think if you have mandatory caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, then there’s a package that’s very, very good. And frankly, it’s something I would strongly support.” He even cut an ad with House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) warning of the dangers of climate change. Just two years later, Gingrich ended all of his green advocacy in favor pandering to far-right views on the environment. “Imposing stunningly high taxes on an economy in the middle of a recession is fundamentally wrong. … [A]rtificially capping their economy is the wrong approach,” he said in testimony before Congress.
4. GINGRICH BLAMED THE MASSACRES AT COLUMBINE AND VIRGINIA TECH ON “LIBERALISM”: Showing that his cynicism knows no bounds, Gingrich blamed “the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite” for the Columbine shootings in Littleton, CO. He followed the same script after the massacre at Virginia Tech, saying liberalism is responsible for the “dehumanization” that led to the killings.
5. GINGRICH WANTED THE RICH TO DECIDE WHEN THEIR OWN TAX CUTS WOULD END: During last winter’s debate over extending the Bush tax cuts, Gingrich said that we should “have the business leadership of the country describe the number” of months that the cuts for the wealthiest should last.
6. DESPITE RAILING AGAINST THE “PARTY OF FOOD STAMPS,” GINGRICH PROPOSED EXPANDING THEM: One of the memes Gingrich has pushed over the past year is that Democrats are the “party of food stamps” because they believe in federal food assistance for the indigent. Yet in 2002, when President George W. Bush proposed expanding some food stamp programs, Gingrich backed him, saying that the “welfare reform” law he helped author in the 1990s went too far in cutting food assistance.
7. FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS, GINGRICH HAS FRONTED FOR THE HEALTH INDUSTRY: Gingrich helped found a number of major businesses, including a for-profit health care firm called the “Center for Health Transformation” (CHT) and a communications firm called the “Gingrich Group.” CHT serves approximately 94 health industry corporations and lobby groups. Despite many meetings with Republican lawmakers to shape health care legislation, Gingrich refuses to register as a lobbyist.
8. GINGRICH REFERRED TO JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR AS A “LATINA WOMAN RACIST”: During the debate over the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor, Gingrich took to his Twitter account to say that Sotomayor, who is a “latina woman racist” should withdraw from the nomination.
9. GINGRICH FLIP-FLOPPED ON THE INDIVIDUAL MANDATE: In 2008, Gingrich suggested “insurance mandates for people who earn more than $75,000 a year.” Yet by 2010, he was blasting the mandate as unconstitutional.
10. GINGRICH SAID WE SHOULD ALLOW SOME TERRORIST ATTACKS TO REMIND US OF THE DANGER: During a book tour, Gingrich told an audience in a speech that was televised on C-SPAN that the Bush administration had been very successful at intercepting terrorists, but had not gotten credit for it, explaining that maybe we should’ve “allowed an attack to get through to remind” Americans about the danger of terrorism.
Throughout his career, Gingrich has devoted himself to constantly changing his views on a whim and trying to position himself relative to the political climate of the moment . While he claims to have changed, the facts haven’t, and ThinkProgress will keep you informed about his latest flip flops and turnarounds in the coming months.
Link:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/03/03/147466/newt-gingrich-10-things/
By Zaid Jilani
1. DESPITE BATTLING THE “SECULAR SOCIALIST” AGENDA, GINGRICH CHEATED ON HIS WIVES SEVERAL TIMES: One of Gingrich’s main themes in his columns and speeches over the past few years has been the need to stop the “secular socialist” takeover of America, which he blames for the demise of the family. Yet he had several of these affairs while attacking President Bill Clinton for his own. He justified his hypocrisy to his second wife once, telling her, “It doesn’t matter what I do.”
2. WHILE DEMONIZING GOVERNMENT LARGESS, GINGRICH POURED MORE FEDERAL MONEY INTO HIS DISTRICT THAN ALMOST ANY OTHER: The politics of the mid-1990′s was marked by the right’s attempt to decimate the social safety net. As Gingrich waged his campaign to destroy unemployment insurance and aid for needy families, he made his own district the recipient of huge amounts of federal aid. Under Gingrich, his district in Cobb County, GA received more “federal subsidies than any suburban county in the country, with two exceptions: Arlington Virginia, effectively part of the Federal Government, and Brevard County Florida, the home of the Kennedy Space Center.”
3. IN 2007, GINGRICH BACKED CAP-AND-TRADE, THEN FLIP-FLOPPED TWO YEARS LATER: Talking to PBS just four years ago, Gingrich said, “I think if you have mandatory caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, then there’s a package that’s very, very good. And frankly, it’s something I would strongly support.” He even cut an ad with House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) warning of the dangers of climate change. Just two years later, Gingrich ended all of his green advocacy in favor pandering to far-right views on the environment. “Imposing stunningly high taxes on an economy in the middle of a recession is fundamentally wrong. … [A]rtificially capping their economy is the wrong approach,” he said in testimony before Congress.
4. GINGRICH BLAMED THE MASSACRES AT COLUMBINE AND VIRGINIA TECH ON “LIBERALISM”: Showing that his cynicism knows no bounds, Gingrich blamed “the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite” for the Columbine shootings in Littleton, CO. He followed the same script after the massacre at Virginia Tech, saying liberalism is responsible for the “dehumanization” that led to the killings.
5. GINGRICH WANTED THE RICH TO DECIDE WHEN THEIR OWN TAX CUTS WOULD END: During last winter’s debate over extending the Bush tax cuts, Gingrich said that we should “have the business leadership of the country describe the number” of months that the cuts for the wealthiest should last.
6. DESPITE RAILING AGAINST THE “PARTY OF FOOD STAMPS,” GINGRICH PROPOSED EXPANDING THEM: One of the memes Gingrich has pushed over the past year is that Democrats are the “party of food stamps” because they believe in federal food assistance for the indigent. Yet in 2002, when President George W. Bush proposed expanding some food stamp programs, Gingrich backed him, saying that the “welfare reform” law he helped author in the 1990s went too far in cutting food assistance.
7. FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS, GINGRICH HAS FRONTED FOR THE HEALTH INDUSTRY: Gingrich helped found a number of major businesses, including a for-profit health care firm called the “Center for Health Transformation” (CHT) and a communications firm called the “Gingrich Group.” CHT serves approximately 94 health industry corporations and lobby groups. Despite many meetings with Republican lawmakers to shape health care legislation, Gingrich refuses to register as a lobbyist.
8. GINGRICH REFERRED TO JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR AS A “LATINA WOMAN RACIST”: During the debate over the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor, Gingrich took to his Twitter account to say that Sotomayor, who is a “latina woman racist” should withdraw from the nomination.
9. GINGRICH FLIP-FLOPPED ON THE INDIVIDUAL MANDATE: In 2008, Gingrich suggested “insurance mandates for people who earn more than $75,000 a year.” Yet by 2010, he was blasting the mandate as unconstitutional.
10. GINGRICH SAID WE SHOULD ALLOW SOME TERRORIST ATTACKS TO REMIND US OF THE DANGER: During a book tour, Gingrich told an audience in a speech that was televised on C-SPAN that the Bush administration had been very successful at intercepting terrorists, but had not gotten credit for it, explaining that maybe we should’ve “allowed an attack to get through to remind” Americans about the danger of terrorism.
Throughout his career, Gingrich has devoted himself to constantly changing his views on a whim and trying to position himself relative to the political climate of the moment . While he claims to have changed, the facts haven’t, and ThinkProgress will keep you informed about his latest flip flops and turnarounds in the coming months.
Link:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/03/03/147466/newt-gingrich-10-things/
MK ULTRA?
by Beth Stebner
Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted for the assassination of Senator and presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, is appealing his sentence of life in prison, claiming that he is innocent.
He has repeatedly protested his innocence and requested parole, with his most recent request denied in March.
Sirhan’s lawyers, William Pepper and Laurie Dusek, are using a defence that is eerily familiar to another Kennedy murder – that there was more than one shooter.
They say the 67-year-old Christian Palestinian born in Jerusalem was hypno-programmed to divert attention from a shooter who actually killed Mr Kennedy in 1968. They also allege he was an easy scapegoat because he is Arab.
The attorneys cite an expert analysis of ‘new evidence’ that shows two guns were fired on the night Mr Kennedy was assassinated in the former Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
According to court papers, Sirhan has stronger eyewitness evidence, along with ‘scientific, forensic evidence which cannot be credibly refuted’ that was not available during his 1969 trial.
The attorneys allege that fraud was committed during the trial when the court counted an ancillary bullet as evidence for a bullet that was retrieved from Mr Kennedy’s neck.
Mr Pepper says the substitute bullet had been matched to others from Sirhan’s weapon.
Mind control and hypno-programming are serious and real and have been used for decades by the CIA, U.S. military and other covert operations, Mr Pepper and Mrs Dusek say in the federal court papers, which were filed earlier this week.
‘The public has been shielded from the darker side of the practice. The average person is unaware that hypnosis can and is used to induct antisocial conduct in humans,’ the court papers say.
They attest to Sirhan’s innocence, saying: ‘[Sirhan] was an involuntary participant in the crimes being committed because he was subjected to sophisticated hypno-programing and memory implantation techniques which rendered him unable to consciously control his thoughts and actions at the time the crimes were being committed.’
Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2066883/Robert-F-Kennedy-assassin-Sirhan-Sirhan-claims-victim-mind-control.html
The time is right...
The Tipping Paul
by David Klein
“The tipping point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” ~ Malcolm Gladwell
Ronald Ernest Paul started his career off in the late 1960s as an OB-GYN in Texas where he ran a successful private practice and delivered 4,000 babies. He was strongly influenced by the writings of Friedrich Hayek in his book, The Road to Serfdom, which later lead to Paul’s discovery of the Austrian School of Economics through the works published by economists Ludwig Von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
A pivotal moment in his life came when Richard M. Nixon closed the gold window in August 15th, 1971. Effectively severing the last link the dollar had to gold and claiming “we are all Keynesians now”, officially turning money into a political tool as opposed to something with intrinsic value.
Driven by his belief in real sound money and the deterioration of the economy via a “guns and butter” policy wrought on by the Vietnam War and the “Great Society” programs of Lyndon B. Johnson which has now become a welfare boondoggle, Paul decided to enter into politics.
He became the modest and upstanding congressman from Texas representing the 14th district, who stands for fiscal conservatism, sound money, a foreign policy of friendship and zero entanglements and a proponent of the free market. In the 2008 presidential campaign, we saw the emergence of Ron Paul into the limelight. While being severely marginalized by the mainstream media and labeled as a “kook” by many talking heads and Republicans, something intangible and unprecedented was taking place. The ideas propagated by Ron Paul’s campaign seemed to have created an almost uncontrollable force causing many hitherto apathetic voters to rise to the occasion and canvass for him.
This mystical force that is responsible for so many important moments in history is labeled by Malcolm Gladwell as the Tipping Point, which so happens to be the name of his national bestselling book that was first published in the year 2000. Composed of three main characteristics, he ascertains that the tipping point is structured in the following manner: “one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment.” Appropriately, the name given to this dramatic moment in an epidemic which causes everything to change is “the tipping point”.
Not long after the 2008 campaign ended, Ron Paul continued on with what he believed was a much more powerful strategy, spreading his message. In approximately thirty years it has never changed. A succinct summary of his views and beliefs can be found in his 2007 book entitled A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship, a collection of his speeches given on the house floor throughout his career. This placed him in a category of being consistent, one that is veritably nonexistent in the political sphere.
He has continued to spread his message by attending several conferences, giving many speeches throughout the country and authoring three books: The Revolution: A Manifesto in 2008, End the Fed in 2009 and most recently in 2011, Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom. His popularity with the youth of this nation is electrifying. The support he receives from the military, unprecedented. The donations to his campaign from the military exceeds all other Republican candidates combined as well as Obama, a clear signal that Paul knows what these men and women in uniform want from their commander-in-chief.
Much like a virus, his message of freedom and individual liberty started to spread in 2008. If the internet alone decided the outcome of elections, he would have been the virtual winner then, no pun intended. A true grassroots effort took place which propelled him to the forefront. His popularity started to dramatically increase as the economic situation began to deteriorate, further cementing his predictions.
Unfortunately, due to the limitations he alone had to deal with along with a media blackout, he did not win enough votes to take the reigns in 2008. As detrimental as this may have been to our immediate future, it might have been a strategic blessing in disguise.
During these non-election years he has been able to garner even more support through many media appearances and speeches. As a matter of fact, Ron Paul eventually decided to give this circus act one more chance due to his supporters being so fervent about a 2012 presidential bid. At 76, he is still the favorite among young voters, drawing thousands at local college campuses during appearances. His message has truly spread like wildfire, one of a limited government that operates within the bounds of that seemingly forgotten document that was ratified by each respective sovereign state of this voluntary union, the Constitution.
Who would have thought that freedom was such an important topic to individuals? Who would have thought that liberty would provoke a renaissance of ideas in the 21st century that is toppling conventional wisdom? In this era of increasing police statism, the tipping point is here. This is Paul’s biggest chance.
The consensus was that he had one of his heretofore best performances in the most recent debate on the subject of National Defense at the American Enterprise Institute this November (2011). Along with winning first and second places in several straw polls, his name is becoming more mainstream and more popular not only amongst conservatives and libertarians, but also liberals and independents. In Ron Paul’s case Malcom Gladwell’s tipping point theory may very well prove to be clairvoyant in the coming months as the election heats up. Only time will tell.
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/orig10/klein-d5.1.1.html
by David Klein
“The tipping point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” ~ Malcolm Gladwell
Ronald Ernest Paul started his career off in the late 1960s as an OB-GYN in Texas where he ran a successful private practice and delivered 4,000 babies. He was strongly influenced by the writings of Friedrich Hayek in his book, The Road to Serfdom, which later lead to Paul’s discovery of the Austrian School of Economics through the works published by economists Ludwig Von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
A pivotal moment in his life came when Richard M. Nixon closed the gold window in August 15th, 1971. Effectively severing the last link the dollar had to gold and claiming “we are all Keynesians now”, officially turning money into a political tool as opposed to something with intrinsic value.
Driven by his belief in real sound money and the deterioration of the economy via a “guns and butter” policy wrought on by the Vietnam War and the “Great Society” programs of Lyndon B. Johnson which has now become a welfare boondoggle, Paul decided to enter into politics.
He became the modest and upstanding congressman from Texas representing the 14th district, who stands for fiscal conservatism, sound money, a foreign policy of friendship and zero entanglements and a proponent of the free market. In the 2008 presidential campaign, we saw the emergence of Ron Paul into the limelight. While being severely marginalized by the mainstream media and labeled as a “kook” by many talking heads and Republicans, something intangible and unprecedented was taking place. The ideas propagated by Ron Paul’s campaign seemed to have created an almost uncontrollable force causing many hitherto apathetic voters to rise to the occasion and canvass for him.
This mystical force that is responsible for so many important moments in history is labeled by Malcolm Gladwell as the Tipping Point, which so happens to be the name of his national bestselling book that was first published in the year 2000. Composed of three main characteristics, he ascertains that the tipping point is structured in the following manner: “one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment.” Appropriately, the name given to this dramatic moment in an epidemic which causes everything to change is “the tipping point”.
Not long after the 2008 campaign ended, Ron Paul continued on with what he believed was a much more powerful strategy, spreading his message. In approximately thirty years it has never changed. A succinct summary of his views and beliefs can be found in his 2007 book entitled A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship, a collection of his speeches given on the house floor throughout his career. This placed him in a category of being consistent, one that is veritably nonexistent in the political sphere.
He has continued to spread his message by attending several conferences, giving many speeches throughout the country and authoring three books: The Revolution: A Manifesto in 2008, End the Fed in 2009 and most recently in 2011, Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom. His popularity with the youth of this nation is electrifying. The support he receives from the military, unprecedented. The donations to his campaign from the military exceeds all other Republican candidates combined as well as Obama, a clear signal that Paul knows what these men and women in uniform want from their commander-in-chief.
Much like a virus, his message of freedom and individual liberty started to spread in 2008. If the internet alone decided the outcome of elections, he would have been the virtual winner then, no pun intended. A true grassroots effort took place which propelled him to the forefront. His popularity started to dramatically increase as the economic situation began to deteriorate, further cementing his predictions.
Unfortunately, due to the limitations he alone had to deal with along with a media blackout, he did not win enough votes to take the reigns in 2008. As detrimental as this may have been to our immediate future, it might have been a strategic blessing in disguise.
During these non-election years he has been able to garner even more support through many media appearances and speeches. As a matter of fact, Ron Paul eventually decided to give this circus act one more chance due to his supporters being so fervent about a 2012 presidential bid. At 76, he is still the favorite among young voters, drawing thousands at local college campuses during appearances. His message has truly spread like wildfire, one of a limited government that operates within the bounds of that seemingly forgotten document that was ratified by each respective sovereign state of this voluntary union, the Constitution.
Who would have thought that freedom was such an important topic to individuals? Who would have thought that liberty would provoke a renaissance of ideas in the 21st century that is toppling conventional wisdom? In this era of increasing police statism, the tipping point is here. This is Paul’s biggest chance.
The consensus was that he had one of his heretofore best performances in the most recent debate on the subject of National Defense at the American Enterprise Institute this November (2011). Along with winning first and second places in several straw polls, his name is becoming more mainstream and more popular not only amongst conservatives and libertarians, but also liberals and independents. In Ron Paul’s case Malcom Gladwell’s tipping point theory may very well prove to be clairvoyant in the coming months as the election heats up. Only time will tell.
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/orig10/klein-d5.1.1.html
CFR attacks Ron Paul. He's not enough of a warmonger for their tastes...
by Robert Wenzel
Yes, the elitists think Ron Paul isn't warmonger enough to win. In a "2012 Campaign Roundup", the CFR states under the headline "Is Foreign Policy a Problem for Ron Paul?":
A common trope so far in campaign 2012 is the argument that Republicans have turned isolationist. Someone apparently forgot to tell voters in Iowa. Polls currently have Ron Paul running fourth there. Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that what’s hurting him with many Iowa Republicans is his non-interventionist foreign policies...
The reservations that Iowans have about Paul’s foreign policy views are striking. Why? Because the Midwest has historically been a stronghold of isolationist sentiment in America, and Iowa is the most Midwestern of states. (Indeed, Hollywood delights in movies in which Iowans are reluctant to go to war.) So perhaps “isolationism” doesn’t quite capture the complexity of the debate within the Republican Party on foreign policy...
The reservations that Iowans have about Paul’s foreign policy views are striking. Why? Because the Midwest has historically been a stronghold of isolationist sentiment in America, and Iowa is the most Midwestern of states. (Indeed, Hollywood delights in movies in which Iowans are reluctant to go to war.) So perhaps “isolationism” doesn’t quite capture the complexity of the debate within the Republican Party on foreign policy.
But by the end of their report, they hedge their bets and quote a CFR president emeritus, who thinks Ron Paul is one of the few who knows what actually is going on in the world:
Les Gelb, CFR’s president emeritus, worries that Republican presidential candidates are looking backward to a “bygone world of dire military threats” rather than forward toward the new truth of world politics – economics matters. Looking back at the CNN presidential debate last week, Gelb observes:
The real shocker was how all those candidates, save for [Ron] Paul and [Jon] Huntsman, almost totally neglected the now-central economic dimension of international affairs. Only those two noted the new reality of world politics – that economic strength now matters more than military might.
The gathering eurozone crisis may force the GOP presidential hopefuls to address the topic of international economics, regardless of whether they are ready to or not.
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/wenzel/wenzel149.html
"What if the government could write any law, regulate any behavior and tax any event, the Constitution be damned? What if the government was the reason we don't have a Constitution anymore? What if you could love your country but hate what the government has done to it? What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government?"
What if the Constitution No Longer Applied?
by Andrew P. Napolitano
What if the whole purpose of the Constitution was to limit the government? What if Congress' enumerated powers in the Constitution no longer limited Congress, but were actually used as justification to extend Congress' authority over every realm of human life? What if the president, meant to be an equal to Congress, has become a democratically elected, term-limited monarch? What if the president assumed everything he did was legal, just because he's the president? What if he could interrupt your regularly scheduled radio and TV programming for a special message from him? What if he could declare war on his own? What if he could read your emails and texts without a search warrant? What if he could kill you without warning?
What if the rights and principles guaranteed in the Constitution have been so distorted in the past 200 years as to be unrecognizable by the Founders? What if the states were mere provinces of a totally nationalized and fully centralized government? What if the Constitution was amended stealthily, not by constitutional amendments duly passed by the states, but by the constant and persistent expansion of the federal government's role in our lives? What if the federal government decided whether its own powers were proper and constitutional?
What if you needed a license from the government to speak, to assemble or to protest the government? What if the right to keep and bear arms only applied to the government? What if posse comitatus – the law that prohibits our military from our streets – were no longer in effect? What if the government considered the military an adequate dispenser of domestic law enforcement? What if cops looked and acted like troops and you couldn't distinguish the military from the police? What if federal agents could write their own search warrants in defiance of the Constitution? What if the government could decide when you weren't entitled to a jury trial?
What if the government could take your property whenever it wanted it? What if the government could continue prosecuting you until it got the verdict it wanted? What if the government could force you to testify against yourself simply by labeling you a domestic terrorist? What if the government could torture you until you said what the government wanted to hear? What if people running for president actually supported torture? What if the government tortured your children to get to you? What if the government could send you to your death and your innocence meant nothing so long as the government's procedures were followed? What if America's prison population, the largest in the world, was the result of a cruel and unusual way for a country to be free? What if half the prison population never harmed anyone but themselves?
What if the people had no rights except those the government chose to let them have? What if the states had no rights except to do as the federal government commanded? What if our elected officials didn't really live among us, but all instead had their hearts and their homes in Washington, D.C.? What if the government could strip you of your rights because of where your mother was when you were born? What if the income tax was unconstitutional? What if the states were convinced to give up their representation in Congress? What if the government tried to ban you from using a substance older than the government itself? What if voting didn't mean anything anymore because both political parties stand for Big Government?
What if the government could write any law, regulate any behavior and tax any event, the Constitution be damned? What if the government was the reason we don't have a Constitution anymore? What if you could love your country but hate what the government has done to it? What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government? What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs least? What if I'm right? What if the government is wrong? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/napolitano/napolitano30.1.html
by Andrew P. Napolitano
What if the whole purpose of the Constitution was to limit the government? What if Congress' enumerated powers in the Constitution no longer limited Congress, but were actually used as justification to extend Congress' authority over every realm of human life? What if the president, meant to be an equal to Congress, has become a democratically elected, term-limited monarch? What if the president assumed everything he did was legal, just because he's the president? What if he could interrupt your regularly scheduled radio and TV programming for a special message from him? What if he could declare war on his own? What if he could read your emails and texts without a search warrant? What if he could kill you without warning?
What if the rights and principles guaranteed in the Constitution have been so distorted in the past 200 years as to be unrecognizable by the Founders? What if the states were mere provinces of a totally nationalized and fully centralized government? What if the Constitution was amended stealthily, not by constitutional amendments duly passed by the states, but by the constant and persistent expansion of the federal government's role in our lives? What if the federal government decided whether its own powers were proper and constitutional?
What if you needed a license from the government to speak, to assemble or to protest the government? What if the right to keep and bear arms only applied to the government? What if posse comitatus – the law that prohibits our military from our streets – were no longer in effect? What if the government considered the military an adequate dispenser of domestic law enforcement? What if cops looked and acted like troops and you couldn't distinguish the military from the police? What if federal agents could write their own search warrants in defiance of the Constitution? What if the government could decide when you weren't entitled to a jury trial?
What if the government could take your property whenever it wanted it? What if the government could continue prosecuting you until it got the verdict it wanted? What if the government could force you to testify against yourself simply by labeling you a domestic terrorist? What if the government could torture you until you said what the government wanted to hear? What if people running for president actually supported torture? What if the government tortured your children to get to you? What if the government could send you to your death and your innocence meant nothing so long as the government's procedures were followed? What if America's prison population, the largest in the world, was the result of a cruel and unusual way for a country to be free? What if half the prison population never harmed anyone but themselves?
What if the people had no rights except those the government chose to let them have? What if the states had no rights except to do as the federal government commanded? What if our elected officials didn't really live among us, but all instead had their hearts and their homes in Washington, D.C.? What if the government could strip you of your rights because of where your mother was when you were born? What if the income tax was unconstitutional? What if the states were convinced to give up their representation in Congress? What if the government tried to ban you from using a substance older than the government itself? What if voting didn't mean anything anymore because both political parties stand for Big Government?
What if the government could write any law, regulate any behavior and tax any event, the Constitution be damned? What if the government was the reason we don't have a Constitution anymore? What if you could love your country but hate what the government has done to it? What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government? What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs least? What if I'm right? What if the government is wrong? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/napolitano/napolitano30.1.html
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