Letter Re: Being Prepared to Homeschool
SurvivalBlog.com
As a home-educated graduate and home school parent who happens to be a prepper, I have given a great deal of thought to homeschooling after a collapse as my children are not grown. There are those who are already home schoolers and those who have not and will not consider homeschooling unless there is a SHTF scenario. This article is written for the latter : those who would like to set aside educational materials for their children and their progeny in the care of a true SHTF scenario.
While it would certainly be possible to buy a few workbooks at Costco and consider it done, I recommend that you sit down and discuss your thoughts on education as a family. If you have a son or daughter who aspires to be a medical doctor or who is a history buff you will need to take your families ideals and natural gifts into consideration. Deciding whether you are interested in faith based or secular materials would then be the next place to start. Consider the many different methods of home education and choose a few to research whether or not they are well suited to your personality and educational philosophy. There are classical, Charlotte Mason, Unit Study, Self Directed and even Unschooling methods to name just a few. If you are interested in faith based materials look for publishers which line up with your religious beliefs such as Abeka.com and Setonhome.org would be a good start for Catholics while Chinuch.org carries materials of interest to Jewish families. Pearsonhomeschool.com is a popular secular publisher as is Homeschool.calvertschool.org. Relatively new to the home school communities are virtual academies and discs from SOS (Switched on Schoolhouse) from Alpha Omega Publishers. This is not by any means a complete list. Christianbook.com and Rainbowresource.com sell materials from most of the aforementioned publishers and much more. CathyDuffyReviews.com and Homeschoolreviews.com are excellent in depth review sites.
While you are discovering your ideas and ideals on education invest in good books and reference books for your family. A good hardbound dictionary is a must and an older set of encyclopedias from Craigslist or a local thrift store would be a great beginning. While I prefer workbooks for daily ease of use, Saxon math materials such as Saxon 54 are reusable for multiple students which will save space and money in your preps. Rod and Staff publishers have excellent materials such as their second to grade ten English materials which are hard bound and non perishable. McGuffy Readers while used by earlier generations such as our great grandparents are still being used in many home schools today as are their math and grammar counterparts. All seven McGuffy readers which would be usable from grades K-8+ cost around $120. An eight volume set of Ray’s Arithmetic would cost around $100 while Harvey’s Grammar books can be purchased with keys for around $50. Some of these items are for sale on both eBay and Amazon. These would at the very least make excellent reference materials and while not flashy would enable you to give your children a solid old fashioned education for a good price...
Read the rest here:
http://www.survivalblog.com/2013/11/letter-re-being-prepared-to-homeschool.html
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
A peace plan or a war plan???
Nuclear Deal With Iran Prelude to War, Not “Breakthrough”
Tony Cartalucci
“…any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context—both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it. The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal.”
-Brookings Institution’s 2009 “Which Path to Persia?” report, page 52.
Which Path to Persia? .pdf
Written years ago, as the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel were already plotting to overrun Iran’s neighbor and ally Syria with Al Qaeda to weaken the Islamic Republic before inevitable war, this quote exposes fully the current charade that is the “Iran nuclear deal.”
The West has no intention of striking any lasting deal with Iran, as nuclear capabilities, even the acquirement of nuclear weapons by Iran was never truly an existential threat to Western nations or their regional partners. The West’s issue with Iran is its sovereignty and its ability to project its interests into spheres traditionally monopolized by the US and UK across the Middle East. Unless Iran plans on turning over its sovereignty and regional influence along with its right to develop and use nuclear technology, betrayal of any “nuclear deal” is all but inevitable, as is the war that is to shortly follow.
Exposing the duplicity that accompanies Western “efforts” to strike a deal will severely undermine their attempt to then use the deal as leverage to justify military operations against Iran. For Iran and its allies, they must be prepared for war, more so when the West feigns interest in peace. Libya serves as a perfect example of the fate that awaits nations reproached by the West who let down their guard – it literally is a matter of life and death both for leaders, and for nations as a whole.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/nuclear-deal-with-iran-prelude-to-war-not-breakthrough.html
Tony Cartalucci
“…any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context—both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it. The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal.”
-Brookings Institution’s 2009 “Which Path to Persia?” report, page 52.
Which Path to Persia? .pdf
Written years ago, as the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel were already plotting to overrun Iran’s neighbor and ally Syria with Al Qaeda to weaken the Islamic Republic before inevitable war, this quote exposes fully the current charade that is the “Iran nuclear deal.”
The West has no intention of striking any lasting deal with Iran, as nuclear capabilities, even the acquirement of nuclear weapons by Iran was never truly an existential threat to Western nations or their regional partners. The West’s issue with Iran is its sovereignty and its ability to project its interests into spheres traditionally monopolized by the US and UK across the Middle East. Unless Iran plans on turning over its sovereignty and regional influence along with its right to develop and use nuclear technology, betrayal of any “nuclear deal” is all but inevitable, as is the war that is to shortly follow.
Exposing the duplicity that accompanies Western “efforts” to strike a deal will severely undermine their attempt to then use the deal as leverage to justify military operations against Iran. For Iran and its allies, they must be prepared for war, more so when the West feigns interest in peace. Libya serves as a perfect example of the fate that awaits nations reproached by the West who let down their guard – it literally is a matter of life and death both for leaders, and for nations as a whole.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/nuclear-deal-with-iran-prelude-to-war-not-breakthrough.html
"Stripped down to its essentials, Obamacare is not an “insurance” plan at all. It is rather a naked redistributionist scheme to coerce the young and the healthy into paying for the healthcare bills of the elderly and the sickly. This means that some agency had to be enlisted to penalize the young and healthy who refused to willingly participate in their own fleecing. What agency is better equipped to do this than the IRS?"
The Hidden Role of the IRS in Obamacare
By Joseph Salerno
The highly publicized glitches and failures associated with the launch of the Affordable Health Care Act have obscured the central role of the IRS in carrying out the law’s mandate. Stripped down to its essentials, Obamacare is not an “insurance” plan at all. It is rather a naked redistributionist scheme to coerce the young and the healthy into paying for the healthcare bills of the elderly and the sickly. This means that some agency had to be enlisted to penalize the young and healthy who refused to willingly participate in their own fleecing. What agency is better equipped to do this than the IRS? In an article in the Washington Post, Tom Hamburger and Sarah Kliff point out,
. . . the IRS also has a huge role in carrying out the law, including helping to distribute trillions of dollars in insurance subsidies and penalizing people who do not comply.
The fine is intended to encourage healthy people to enroll even if they do not have an immediate need for care. If the elderly and the sick dominate the ranks of those who sign up, it could lead to what health economists call an “ insurance death spiral” of rapidly escalating costs, premium hikes and declining enrollment.
This means a massive increase in the scope and operations of the IRS, which is
. . . charged under the act with carrying out nearly four dozen new tasks in what represents the biggest increase in its responsibilities in decades. None is more crucial than enforcing the requirement that all citizens secure health insurance or pay a penalty.
Fortunately for the American public, because the IRS has lately become so universally reviled, it has been “hamstrung” by Congress in carrying out its mandate: it is legally precluded from employing its full fascist panoply of liens, foreclosures, and criminal prosecution. It can only garnish tax refunds due to those uninsured who have overpaid their taxes. (The penalty is $95 or 1% of income, whichever is greater).
Meanwhile some are beginning to express doubts about whether the law can be made to work given the present structure of incentives and penalties. Jon Gruber, the MIT economist who helped design the mandate in the Massachusetts insurance plan says, “We should be absolutely clear we don’t know how this will work.” And Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates opines, “I now think there is little hope we are going to get enough younger healthy people to sign up, and that means that this law is in grave danger of financial collapse.”
Another thought about Obamacare: it is a redistribution scheme that egalitarians contemplate only in their most fevered dreams. It actually redistributes health itself from those endowed with it to those who are not, because real income is directly correlated with health, and by financially penalizing the healthy, whether though formal penalties if they do not enroll or over-priced premiums if they do, it deprives them of part of the means by which they can maintain their health.
Link:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/11/the-hidden-role-of-irs-in-obamacare.html
By Joseph Salerno
The highly publicized glitches and failures associated with the launch of the Affordable Health Care Act have obscured the central role of the IRS in carrying out the law’s mandate. Stripped down to its essentials, Obamacare is not an “insurance” plan at all. It is rather a naked redistributionist scheme to coerce the young and the healthy into paying for the healthcare bills of the elderly and the sickly. This means that some agency had to be enlisted to penalize the young and healthy who refused to willingly participate in their own fleecing. What agency is better equipped to do this than the IRS? In an article in the Washington Post, Tom Hamburger and Sarah Kliff point out,
. . . the IRS also has a huge role in carrying out the law, including helping to distribute trillions of dollars in insurance subsidies and penalizing people who do not comply.
The fine is intended to encourage healthy people to enroll even if they do not have an immediate need for care. If the elderly and the sick dominate the ranks of those who sign up, it could lead to what health economists call an “ insurance death spiral” of rapidly escalating costs, premium hikes and declining enrollment.
This means a massive increase in the scope and operations of the IRS, which is
. . . charged under the act with carrying out nearly four dozen new tasks in what represents the biggest increase in its responsibilities in decades. None is more crucial than enforcing the requirement that all citizens secure health insurance or pay a penalty.
Fortunately for the American public, because the IRS has lately become so universally reviled, it has been “hamstrung” by Congress in carrying out its mandate: it is legally precluded from employing its full fascist panoply of liens, foreclosures, and criminal prosecution. It can only garnish tax refunds due to those uninsured who have overpaid their taxes. (The penalty is $95 or 1% of income, whichever is greater).
Meanwhile some are beginning to express doubts about whether the law can be made to work given the present structure of incentives and penalties. Jon Gruber, the MIT economist who helped design the mandate in the Massachusetts insurance plan says, “We should be absolutely clear we don’t know how this will work.” And Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates opines, “I now think there is little hope we are going to get enough younger healthy people to sign up, and that means that this law is in grave danger of financial collapse.”
Another thought about Obamacare: it is a redistribution scheme that egalitarians contemplate only in their most fevered dreams. It actually redistributes health itself from those endowed with it to those who are not, because real income is directly correlated with health, and by financially penalizing the healthy, whether though formal penalties if they do not enroll or over-priced premiums if they do, it deprives them of part of the means by which they can maintain their health.
Link:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/11/the-hidden-role-of-irs-in-obamacare.html
"The bottom line is that the federal government is completely and utterly incompetent. This has been demonstrated once again in recent months by the launch of Obamacare. What a train wreck that has been."
There Already Is A Government Health Care System In America And It Is The Medical Version Of Hell
By Michael Snyder
What would happen if the entire health care system in the United States was run by the federal government? Would such a system be better or worse than what we have today? To get an answer to these questions, all we have to do is take a look at what is already happening. The truth is that there already is a government health care system in America and it is the medical version of hell. You are about to read about the horrifying state of health care being provided by the federal government at VA hospitals and on Indian reservations around the country. Injured military veterans and those that live on Indian reservations are some of the most vulnerable members of our society, and the government is doing an absolutely nightmarish job of taking care of them.
Theoretically, the government should be able to provide at least a basic level of care for these people, but as you will see this is simply not happening.
Why?
The bottom line is that the federal government is completely and utterly incompetent. This has been demonstrated once again in recent months by the launch of Obamacare. What a train wreck that has been.
But we shouldn’t be surprised. When it comes to health care, the U.S. government can’t seem to get anything right.
Most Americans don’t realize this, but government-run health care for our military veterans is a complete and total joke. In some instances, it can take critically injured military veterans more than a year to see a doctor…
CJ Jackson, a Purple Heart recipient and 101st Airborne medic, was severely wounded during a battle in Afghanistan when an enemy rocket-propelled grenade hit a wall a couple of feet from him, sending debris into his arm and leg. He said he waited over a year to see a doctor at the Jackson VA despite being considered critically injured.
And once a vet is finally able to see a doctor and have surgery scheduled, those surgeries are often conducted in facilities that are beyond disgusting. The following is what one orthopedic surgeon recently told CNBC…
“Occasionally we’d find pieces of bone” on equipment, he told CNBC. “What it really shows is that no one is really taking the time or care to clean the instruments.”
His story was backed up by Dr. Phyllis Hollenbeck, who still works at the hospital. She testified on Sept. 9 about problems at the Jackson center. “Essentially everything that happens in primary care at the Jackson VA can be included under the umbrella of being unethical, illegal, heartbreaking, and life threatening for the veterans, and everything in the care of the veterans starts in primary care.”
Of course this is not the first investigation that discovered these kinds of conditions at VA hospitals. A few years ago, ABC News also conducted an investigation of conditions at VA facilities across the United States. What ABC News discovered was absolutely staggering. The following are just a few of the things that they found during the course of their investigation…
*Bathrooms filthy with what appeared to be human excrement
*Dirty linens from some patients mixed in with clean supplies
*Examining tables that had dried blood and medications still on them
*Equipment used to sterilize surgical instruments that had broken down
*Some patients that were begging for food and water
*Vets neglected so badly that they had developed horrific bedsores and dangerous infections
Is this how the federal government should be treating the men and women that have shed blood fighting for our country?
Unfortunately, it appears that the mistreatment of our military veterans has gotten even worse since Barack Obama took power. For much more on all of this, please see my previous article entitled “25 Signs That Military Veterans Are Being Treated Like Absolute Trash Under The Obama Administration“.
The funny thing is that many of the people that run these VA facilities are greatly rewarded for their “hard work”. For example, CNBC discovered that those running the VA facility in Jackson, Mississippi described above are receiving huge bonuses…
The director of the Jackson VA, Joe Battle, received a $6,500 bonus last year on top of his $165,000 salary, and Rica Lewis-Payton, the network director of the South Central Health Care Network, which includes Jackson, got almost $36,000 in bonuses last year, on top of her $180,000 salary.
Are you disgusted yet?
You should be.
And we see the exact same thing happening in government-run health care facilities on Indian reservations.
By treaty, the U.S. government is required to provide health care on Indian reservations. But the level of health care being provided is of extremely low quality and the programs are very underfunded.
In fact, things are so bad that the following expression is very commonly heard on Indian reservations across America…
“Don’t get sick after June”.
Why would they say that?
Well, because in the fall and winter the waits to see a doctor and the rationing of care get particularly bad. If you get seriously ill, you might end up dying before you ever get the care that you need.
Posted below is a video news report featuring Judge Andrew Napolitano about the horrific state of government-run health care on Indian reservations…
In light of all of this, should we have more government interference in the health care system or less?
Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…
Link:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/there-already-is-a-government-health-care-system-in-america-and-it-is-the-medical-version-of-hell
By Michael Snyder
What would happen if the entire health care system in the United States was run by the federal government? Would such a system be better or worse than what we have today? To get an answer to these questions, all we have to do is take a look at what is already happening. The truth is that there already is a government health care system in America and it is the medical version of hell. You are about to read about the horrifying state of health care being provided by the federal government at VA hospitals and on Indian reservations around the country. Injured military veterans and those that live on Indian reservations are some of the most vulnerable members of our society, and the government is doing an absolutely nightmarish job of taking care of them.
Theoretically, the government should be able to provide at least a basic level of care for these people, but as you will see this is simply not happening.
Why?
The bottom line is that the federal government is completely and utterly incompetent. This has been demonstrated once again in recent months by the launch of Obamacare. What a train wreck that has been.
But we shouldn’t be surprised. When it comes to health care, the U.S. government can’t seem to get anything right.
Most Americans don’t realize this, but government-run health care for our military veterans is a complete and total joke. In some instances, it can take critically injured military veterans more than a year to see a doctor…
CJ Jackson, a Purple Heart recipient and 101st Airborne medic, was severely wounded during a battle in Afghanistan when an enemy rocket-propelled grenade hit a wall a couple of feet from him, sending debris into his arm and leg. He said he waited over a year to see a doctor at the Jackson VA despite being considered critically injured.
And once a vet is finally able to see a doctor and have surgery scheduled, those surgeries are often conducted in facilities that are beyond disgusting. The following is what one orthopedic surgeon recently told CNBC…
“Occasionally we’d find pieces of bone” on equipment, he told CNBC. “What it really shows is that no one is really taking the time or care to clean the instruments.”
His story was backed up by Dr. Phyllis Hollenbeck, who still works at the hospital. She testified on Sept. 9 about problems at the Jackson center. “Essentially everything that happens in primary care at the Jackson VA can be included under the umbrella of being unethical, illegal, heartbreaking, and life threatening for the veterans, and everything in the care of the veterans starts in primary care.”
Of course this is not the first investigation that discovered these kinds of conditions at VA hospitals. A few years ago, ABC News also conducted an investigation of conditions at VA facilities across the United States. What ABC News discovered was absolutely staggering. The following are just a few of the things that they found during the course of their investigation…
*Bathrooms filthy with what appeared to be human excrement
*Dirty linens from some patients mixed in with clean supplies
*Examining tables that had dried blood and medications still on them
*Equipment used to sterilize surgical instruments that had broken down
*Some patients that were begging for food and water
*Vets neglected so badly that they had developed horrific bedsores and dangerous infections
Is this how the federal government should be treating the men and women that have shed blood fighting for our country?
Unfortunately, it appears that the mistreatment of our military veterans has gotten even worse since Barack Obama took power. For much more on all of this, please see my previous article entitled “25 Signs That Military Veterans Are Being Treated Like Absolute Trash Under The Obama Administration“.
The funny thing is that many of the people that run these VA facilities are greatly rewarded for their “hard work”. For example, CNBC discovered that those running the VA facility in Jackson, Mississippi described above are receiving huge bonuses…
The director of the Jackson VA, Joe Battle, received a $6,500 bonus last year on top of his $165,000 salary, and Rica Lewis-Payton, the network director of the South Central Health Care Network, which includes Jackson, got almost $36,000 in bonuses last year, on top of her $180,000 salary.
Are you disgusted yet?
You should be.
And we see the exact same thing happening in government-run health care facilities on Indian reservations.
By treaty, the U.S. government is required to provide health care on Indian reservations. But the level of health care being provided is of extremely low quality and the programs are very underfunded.
In fact, things are so bad that the following expression is very commonly heard on Indian reservations across America…
“Don’t get sick after June”.
Why would they say that?
Well, because in the fall and winter the waits to see a doctor and the rationing of care get particularly bad. If you get seriously ill, you might end up dying before you ever get the care that you need.
Posted below is a video news report featuring Judge Andrew Napolitano about the horrific state of government-run health care on Indian reservations…
In light of all of this, should we have more government interference in the health care system or less?
Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…
Link:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/there-already-is-a-government-health-care-system-in-america-and-it-is-the-medical-version-of-hell
"Even cell phone manufacturers suggest that users keep their cell phone at least one-half inch or more away from any body part. But these recommendations, lost in the small print in user manuals, are not heeded."
Cell phone radiation breast cancer link - New study raises grave concerns
by: Lloyd Burrell
A new study raises concerns of a possible association between cell phone radiation exposure and breast cancer in young women.
The research team, led by Dr. Lisa Bailey, a former president of the American Cancer Society's California Division and one of California's top breast surgeons, studied four young women - aged from 21 to 39 years old - with multifocal invasive breast cancer.
The researchers observed that all the patients developed tumors in areas of their breasts next to where they carried their cell phones, often for up to 10 hours per day, for several years. None of the patients had a family history of breast cancer. They all tested negative for BRCA1 and BRCA2 - breast cancer genes linked to about one-half of breast cancer cases - and they had no other known breast cancer risks.
Imaging of the young girls' breasts revealed a clustering of multiple tumor foci in the part of the breast directly under where their cell phones touched their body.
Tiffany Frantz, one of the young girls involved in the study, said that she had no idea of the risks involved. "I put my cellphone right in my bra," said Miss Frantz in a TV interview that also won an Emmy. However, her mother Traci Frantz immediately made the connection right after Tiffany developed breast cancer at age 21. "We never took it seriously until after she was diagnosed." Her tumors were exactly where her cellphone had been kept in her bra for about six years. No one ever told us that this was a very bad idea." said Traci Frantz. Surgeons had to remove Tiffany's left breast. Her family had no genetic or other risk factors.
Dangers of other EMF exposures
Cell phones emit a form of electromagnetic field (EMF) called radio frequency radiation. This radiation exposure has previously been linked to brain tumors, cancer, cardiovascular disease, depression and other serious illnesses.
Studies show that other EMF exposures from similar, supposedly harmless, everyday appliances and devices can also be dangerous. The recently published "BioInitiative Report 2012" concluded, "there is sufficient evidence from in vitro and animal studies, from human biomarker studies, from occupational and light-at-night studies, and a single longitudinal study with appropriate collection of urine samples to conclude that high MF (magnetic field) exposure may be a risk factor for breast cancer." The report's authors went on to say that "there is rather strong evidence from case-control studies that longterm, high occupational exposure (over 10 milliGauss) to ELF (Extremely low frequency) magnetic fields is a risk factor for breast cancer."
EMF safety standards outdated
Currently, the main international guidance comes from the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection. These guidelines offered no protection for Traci Frantz and others who unknowingly put their health at risk by carrying their cell phone in close proximity to their body.
Nor do these guidelines protect individuals from high magnetic field exposures in the home and workplace. The existing exposure limit for magnetic fields is 904 mG in the US - some 90 times higher than the levels at which independent studies have observed adverse biological effects!
Even cell phone manufacturers suggest that users keep their cell phone at least one-half inch or more away from any body part. But these recommendations, lost in the small print in user manuals, are not heeded.
Current safety limits can no longer be said to be protective of public health, and they should be replaced.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/043070_cell_phone_radiation_breast_cancer_electromagnetic_fields.html#ixzz2lqWSClYn
by: Lloyd Burrell
A new study raises concerns of a possible association between cell phone radiation exposure and breast cancer in young women.
The research team, led by Dr. Lisa Bailey, a former president of the American Cancer Society's California Division and one of California's top breast surgeons, studied four young women - aged from 21 to 39 years old - with multifocal invasive breast cancer.
The researchers observed that all the patients developed tumors in areas of their breasts next to where they carried their cell phones, often for up to 10 hours per day, for several years. None of the patients had a family history of breast cancer. They all tested negative for BRCA1 and BRCA2 - breast cancer genes linked to about one-half of breast cancer cases - and they had no other known breast cancer risks.
Imaging of the young girls' breasts revealed a clustering of multiple tumor foci in the part of the breast directly under where their cell phones touched their body.
Tiffany Frantz, one of the young girls involved in the study, said that she had no idea of the risks involved. "I put my cellphone right in my bra," said Miss Frantz in a TV interview that also won an Emmy. However, her mother Traci Frantz immediately made the connection right after Tiffany developed breast cancer at age 21. "We never took it seriously until after she was diagnosed." Her tumors were exactly where her cellphone had been kept in her bra for about six years. No one ever told us that this was a very bad idea." said Traci Frantz. Surgeons had to remove Tiffany's left breast. Her family had no genetic or other risk factors.
Dangers of other EMF exposures
Cell phones emit a form of electromagnetic field (EMF) called radio frequency radiation. This radiation exposure has previously been linked to brain tumors, cancer, cardiovascular disease, depression and other serious illnesses.
Studies show that other EMF exposures from similar, supposedly harmless, everyday appliances and devices can also be dangerous. The recently published "BioInitiative Report 2012" concluded, "there is sufficient evidence from in vitro and animal studies, from human biomarker studies, from occupational and light-at-night studies, and a single longitudinal study with appropriate collection of urine samples to conclude that high MF (magnetic field) exposure may be a risk factor for breast cancer." The report's authors went on to say that "there is rather strong evidence from case-control studies that longterm, high occupational exposure (over 10 milliGauss) to ELF (Extremely low frequency) magnetic fields is a risk factor for breast cancer."
EMF safety standards outdated
Currently, the main international guidance comes from the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection. These guidelines offered no protection for Traci Frantz and others who unknowingly put their health at risk by carrying their cell phone in close proximity to their body.
Nor do these guidelines protect individuals from high magnetic field exposures in the home and workplace. The existing exposure limit for magnetic fields is 904 mG in the US - some 90 times higher than the levels at which independent studies have observed adverse biological effects!
Even cell phone manufacturers suggest that users keep their cell phone at least one-half inch or more away from any body part. But these recommendations, lost in the small print in user manuals, are not heeded.
Current safety limits can no longer be said to be protective of public health, and they should be replaced.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/043070_cell_phone_radiation_breast_cancer_electromagnetic_fields.html#ixzz2lqWSClYn
You can't make this stuff up...
Portland public schools now consider peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to be 'racist'
Jonathan Benson
A Portland public school principal is on a crusade to eradicate what she sees as racism and "white privilege" lurking around every corner, and in the process has come to the deranged conclusion that peanut butter and jelly sandwiches somehow fall into these categories. Verenice Gutierrez, principal of Harvey Scott K-8 School in Northeast Portland's Cully neighborhood, told her students that PB&J is a racist concept hatched by privileged whites, as are any references to the food, which could be perceived as discriminatory, because it is not necessarily eaten in other countries.
"What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?" Gutierrez is reported as saying to her students as part of an indoctrination program known as "Courageous Conversations." "Another way would be to say: 'Americans eat peanut butter and jelly, do you have anything like that?' Let them tell you. Maybe they eat torta. Or pita."
A native of El Paso, Texas, Gutierrez clearly has an obsession with racism and says that she is doing whatever she can to stamp it out of her students, at least those who are white. Blind to her own unabashed racism, which is the real irony in this story, Gutierrez has decided to accomplish this goal by nitpicking and dissecting every aspect of American culture that she finds offensive and teaching her students to think and speak in the ways that she finds acceptable.
"Through intensive staff trainings, frequent staff meetings, classroom observations and other initiatives, the premise is that if educators can understand their own 'white privilege,' then they can change their teaching practices to boost minority students' performance," explains the Portland Tribune about Gutierrez's "Courageous Conversations" program, which has been implemented throughout Portland.
In Gutierrez's mind, racism against whites means fighting racism
In other words, anyone of European descent, no matter what country they come from or to what socioeconomic class they belong, is considered to possess this unique mystery privilege, based on their particular skin color. Such nonsense has no basis in reality, of course, but is rather a product of Gutierrez's own mind, which is evidently consumed by thoughts of animosity towards all things "white," whatever that even means.
But Gutierrez' racist agenda against people with white skin has not been welcomed by everyone, including many parents who expressed outrage about a drum corps she helped start at the Scott School for "boys of color." The program was designed specifically for black and Latino boys only and deliberately excluded all white boys, as well as girls of all colors.
One parent decried the shamelessly racist class, which is offered once a week during lunchtime, as "blatant discrimination," noting that it is equally discriminative of "women, Asians, whites and Native Americans."
"This 'club' was approved by the administration, and any girls who complained were brushed off and it was not addressed," wrote the parent anonymously.
But Gutierrez disagrees. And thanks to her "minority privilege," which is uniquely protected by America's new cultural acceptance of political correctness at the expense of whites, she continues to get away with instilling racism into her students on the taxpayer dime, so long as this racism is directed against whites.
"Gutierrez is an evil, duplicitous woman," wrote one Portland Tribune commenter. "Excluding whites from the drum corps is racist. Talking about torta and pita while excluding PB&J is racist ... She needs to check her Mestizo privilege at being able to say these stupid, evil things without being terminated from her job."
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/043066_racism_public_schools_peanut_butter_and_jelly.html#ixzz2lqW4Ise0
Jonathan Benson
A Portland public school principal is on a crusade to eradicate what she sees as racism and "white privilege" lurking around every corner, and in the process has come to the deranged conclusion that peanut butter and jelly sandwiches somehow fall into these categories. Verenice Gutierrez, principal of Harvey Scott K-8 School in Northeast Portland's Cully neighborhood, told her students that PB&J is a racist concept hatched by privileged whites, as are any references to the food, which could be perceived as discriminatory, because it is not necessarily eaten in other countries.
"What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?" Gutierrez is reported as saying to her students as part of an indoctrination program known as "Courageous Conversations." "Another way would be to say: 'Americans eat peanut butter and jelly, do you have anything like that?' Let them tell you. Maybe they eat torta. Or pita."
A native of El Paso, Texas, Gutierrez clearly has an obsession with racism and says that she is doing whatever she can to stamp it out of her students, at least those who are white. Blind to her own unabashed racism, which is the real irony in this story, Gutierrez has decided to accomplish this goal by nitpicking and dissecting every aspect of American culture that she finds offensive and teaching her students to think and speak in the ways that she finds acceptable.
"Through intensive staff trainings, frequent staff meetings, classroom observations and other initiatives, the premise is that if educators can understand their own 'white privilege,' then they can change their teaching practices to boost minority students' performance," explains the Portland Tribune about Gutierrez's "Courageous Conversations" program, which has been implemented throughout Portland.
In Gutierrez's mind, racism against whites means fighting racism
In other words, anyone of European descent, no matter what country they come from or to what socioeconomic class they belong, is considered to possess this unique mystery privilege, based on their particular skin color. Such nonsense has no basis in reality, of course, but is rather a product of Gutierrez's own mind, which is evidently consumed by thoughts of animosity towards all things "white," whatever that even means.
But Gutierrez' racist agenda against people with white skin has not been welcomed by everyone, including many parents who expressed outrage about a drum corps she helped start at the Scott School for "boys of color." The program was designed specifically for black and Latino boys only and deliberately excluded all white boys, as well as girls of all colors.
One parent decried the shamelessly racist class, which is offered once a week during lunchtime, as "blatant discrimination," noting that it is equally discriminative of "women, Asians, whites and Native Americans."
"This 'club' was approved by the administration, and any girls who complained were brushed off and it was not addressed," wrote the parent anonymously.
But Gutierrez disagrees. And thanks to her "minority privilege," which is uniquely protected by America's new cultural acceptance of political correctness at the expense of whites, she continues to get away with instilling racism into her students on the taxpayer dime, so long as this racism is directed against whites.
"Gutierrez is an evil, duplicitous woman," wrote one Portland Tribune commenter. "Excluding whites from the drum corps is racist. Talking about torta and pita while excluding PB&J is racist ... She needs to check her Mestizo privilege at being able to say these stupid, evil things without being terminated from her job."
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/043066_racism_public_schools_peanut_butter_and_jelly.html#ixzz2lqW4Ise0
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
"What really happened to President Kennedy in Dealey Plaza? And why the unending resistance from the news media to present the new evidence to the American people?"
Where New JFK Evidence Points
By Jim DiEugenio
Media specials are on tap for the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s murder, but none will explore the troubling new evidence that has been declassified in recent years – and that undercuts the Official Story of the Lone Gunman.
In late 1991, film director Oliver Stone released JFK, his film about the investigation of the murder of President John F. Kennedy by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. To say the film was controversial does not begin to describe the furor which surrounded its reception. Six months before the film was in theaters, stories began to appear in large newspapers criticizing a film no one had seen yet.
When the film was finally shown, there was an interesting dichotomy. Whereas most of the film critics liked it, editorials and news stories about the movie attacked it. One critic actually lost her job over a positive review of the film.
But the film did two things relevant to the state of the evidence in the matter of President Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. At the end of his film, Stone had shown a title card saying that the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had been classified until the year 2029.
Embarrassed – and faced with public outrage – Congress held hearings. Many people testified including Stone, and the last chief counsel of the HSCA, Robert Blakey. As a result, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was created, tasked with finding and releasing all documents held by public and private entities in America concerning the murder of President Kennedy. Eventually, two million pages of classified files were open to the public.
The second thing the film did was arouse the curiosity of many people who were not aware of the evidentiary problems that had haunted the Kennedy case for nearly 30 years. Stone’s film was the first time in over a decade that millions of Americans had been exposed to things like the Zapruder film, Oswald’s odd relationships with the FBI and CIA, his associations with right-wingers in Dallas and New Orleans, the investigative failings of the Warren Commission, the problems with the autopsy of President Kennedy, and much, much more.
These new people who were drawn into the case had fresh perspectives to offer and new insights. Between the newly declassified documents and this new generation of writers, the information base about both Kennedy and his murder grew exponentially in a relatively short time.
But this week’s 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination will be marked almost entirely by television specials that will be silent about this new and plentiful information, which alters the calculus of the Kennedy case. That is because, despite the uproar created by Stone’s film, the defenders of the Warren Commission’s narrative circled the wagons and protected the Establishment’s preferred solution to the assassination – that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Why Oswald?
There always was an attractiveness to the Oswald-did-it storyline. It is the simplest explanation, a lone gunman acting out of some personal grievance, ideological fixation or psychological imbalance. No need to explore evidence of a larger conspiracy. No need to integrate Kennedy’s murder into the historic developments that his presidency represented.
Thus, many influential people – from officials involved in the original investigation defending their judgments to a later generation of authors burnishing their reputations for probity – have fought fiercely to defend the Oswald-acted-alone narrative. They have done so despite nagging evidentiary problems, such as the “magic bullet theory,” which attributed the multiple wounds to Kennedy’s neck and Texas Gov. John Connally’s chest, wrist and thigh to a single bullet found almost unscathed on a gurney at Parkland Hospital, and those troubling images from the Zapruder film showing Kennedy’s head being knocked backward by the fatal shot, although Oswald was behind him at the Texas Bookstore Depository.
Most importantly, Gerald Posner’s book, Case Closed, which was published before the ARRB was even set up, was used to close the door on further inquiry by pronouncing Oswald guilty again. Yet, Posner’s book did not include any of the intriguing documents the ARRB declassified. Neither did it include the results of the ARRB special investigation into the medical evidence launched by chief counsel Jeremy Gunn.
After Posner’s book, there seemed to be something of an informal agreement by the gatekeepers in the media. There would be no programs dedicated to airing the discoveries of the ARRB, despite the fact that the ARRB had unprecedented powers to declassify documents and compel testimony. Because of these combination of factors, the American public was given little exposure to the ARRB material and the revolutionary work of new authors on the Kennedy case, the most infamous American homicide of the Twentieth Century.
Besides the Oswald-acted-alone solution, there have been other proposed narratives that accept the idea of conspiracy but don’t directly challenge the institutions of the state. These scenarios acknowledge the likelihood of other conspirators but point the finger at the Mafia or Fidel Castro or some other enemies of America.
But much of the new evidence tends to bolster the narrative advanced by Garrison and by Stone’s movie: that the assassination must have involved elements of the U.S. intelligence community working with right-wing operatives who considered Kennedy soft on communism and that a cover-up was put in place by key government figures to prevent an unraveling of these powerful institutions and the erosion of public trust in the authorities.
Who Was Oswald?
Let us begin with the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald had been portrayed by the Warren Commission as a lonely, communist sociopath. Although there was never any clear motive put forth by the Warren Commission as to why the alleged assassin killed JFK, it was intimated that it was the net result of the frustrations in his life caused by financial problems, ideological intent, and marital troubles. This is still what most current defenders of the Commission say today.
But one of the most surprising things that the ARRB disclosed was the volume of files on Oswald held by both the CIA and FBI – after both agencies had long denied that they had much paper on Oswald. But it was not just the volume of documents, but it was the unexpected direction they pointed.
One of the most curious aspects of Oswald’s strange and contradictory life was his military service. One of the things that shocked New Orleans DA Jim Garrison was the fact that, while in the Marines, Oswald took a Russian test. As Garrison writes in his book, the Commission tried to explain this away by stating that he got more questions wrong than right.
But it’s obvious that Oswald stuck with learning Russian because when a friend of his arranged a meeting with Rosaleen Quinn, she commented afterwards that Oswald spoke excellent Russian. And Quinn had been privately tutored in advance of a State Department exam. (James DiEugenio,Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 131)
After acquiring fluency in Russian, Oswald then applied for a hardship discharge in order to leave the service early. Even though he had just a few months left to serve, his request was granted – and in only 10 days. The HSCA interviewed a person on the board who granted the discharge. Colonel B. J. Kozak testified that it normally took from three to six months to secure such a release. (HSCA interview of Kozak of Aug. 2, 1978)
After Oswald returned from Russia – receiving surprisingly little trouble despite his defection – he became friendly with the White Russian community in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. He then went to New Orleans in the summer of 1963. Numerous witnesses had testified to seeing him with former FBI agent Guy Banister or at Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street.
But in the files declassified by the ARRB there is even more evidence in this regard. In the declassified files of the Church Committee, there is testimony by two federal immigration agents that they were following David Ferrie in 1963 because of his association with Cubans in the country illegally. Wendell Roache and Ron Smith of the Immigration and Naturalization Service stated that they traced Ferrie to Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street, and Oswald was there. (DiEugenio, p. 113)
Further, at least one of the pro-Castro flyers that Oswald was passing out that summer was stamped with the 544 Camp Street address. According to Banister’s secretary Delphine Roberts, Banister was aware that Oswald had committed this faux pas, and he was upset about it. The rightwing zealot complained that, “How is it going to look for him to have the same address as me!” (HSCA interview with Roberts, July 6, 1978)
The natural question arises: What would an alleged communist like Oswald be doing using the conservative Banister’s office as an address, and also working out of that office? In that regard, one of the most compelling revelations to emerge from the ARRB is that both the FBI and the CIA were running counter-intelligence operations against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in 1963. This included using electronic surveillance, penetration agents, and agents provocateur against the New York-based organization.
CIA Mystery
In one of the CIA’s declassified files on this subject, it was discovered that the men running this counter-intelligence effort at CIA were David Phillips and Jim McCord. (Newman, pgs. 236-41) Phillips’s name in this regard is especially fascinating because of his reported meeting with Oswald in August of 1963 at the Southland Center in Dallas by the militant Cuban exile Antonio Veciana.
At that time, according to the Warren Commission, Oswald was about a month away from leaving for Mexico. In addition to not telling the reader about Phillips, McCord and the CIA counter-intelligence program against the FPCC, the Warren Report also did not reveal a memorandum sent from the CIA to the FBI on Sept. 16, 1963, saying the CIA was “giving some consideration to countering the activities” of the FPCC “in foreign countries. … CIA is also giving some thought to planting deceptive information which might embarrass the Committee in areas where it does have some support.”
Oswald had just embarrassed the FPCC by his tactics in New Orleans. First, by getting into a fight with an anti-Castro activist, being arrested, jailed, and then pleading guilty in court. He then took part in a debate where he was exposed as a former Soviet defector. As author Jim Douglass asks: Did this memo refer to Oswald now going to Mexico? (Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 179)
One of the notable achievements of the ARRB was the fact that it declassified the HSCA’s Mexico City Report, which clearly suggests that there was an imposter masquerading as Oswald at both the Cuban consulate and Russian embassy, the places where Oswald was supposed to have visited while he was supposed to be there.
The report states that the CIA could produce no pictures of Oswald either entering or leaving either place, although the Agency had multiple cameras facing each doorway. Further, there is a table in the report which shows that the surveillance tapes the Agency says it had of Oswald in both places could not be of Oswald because the man the CIA had on the tapes spoke broken Russian and fluent Spanish. (Lopez Report, p. 130) However, witnesses said Oswald spoke fluent Russian and broken Spanish.
When one of the tapes of Oswald was sent to Dallas after Kennedy’s assassination and listened to by the FBI agents interviewing Oswald, the agents said the voice was not Oswald’s. When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was alerted to this, he relayed the information to President Johnson. (FBI Memorandum from Hoover to James Rowley, Nov. 23, 1963)
The FBI Mystery
There are two more declassified connections by the FBI to this important episode. First, a FLASH warning that the FBI had put on Oswald’s file, after his defection to the Soviet Union, was taken off while Oswald was in Mexico. Further, it was removed at about the time the Bureau got information that Oswald was allegedly meeting a KGB agent named Valery Kostikov.
This is important, because as both authors John Newman and Jim Douglass note, if the FLASH notice had been in place, it is probable that Oswald would have been placed on the Security Index. That list would have been turned over to the Secret Service, and Oswald would likely have been picked up or surveilled for Kennedy’s upcoming trip to Dallas.
Secondly, in a declassified memo discovered by Newman, Hoover had scribbled a handwritten note in the marginalia of a memo. In speaking of cooperation between the CIA and the FBI, the Director wrote that he was doubtful about such endeavors because he could not forget “the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico” as an example of their double-dealing. Within six weeks of Kennedy’s murder, Hoover thought that the CIA was, at the very least, not being forthcoming about Oswald’s activities in Mexico City.
Hoover was not alone in this suspicion about a CIA connection to Oswald. At a talk at the Cyril Wecht Symposium in Pittsburgh last month, Dan Hardway, an HSCA investigator who specialized on exploring a possible relationship between Oswald and the CIA, said the House panel prepared two indictments for perjury based on the obstruction of the Mexico City investigation. One was for Phillips; the other was for Anne Goodpasture, who controlled the tape and photo production in Mexico City.
Hardway has revealed that when he and another HSCA investigator were getting very close to exposing the skullduggery in Mexico City and who was responsible for it, the CIA moved a man name George Johannides into position as a liaison man over them.
As journalist Jefferson Morley has revealed, the CIA lied to Robert Blakey about the appointment of Johannides. The Agency told Blakely that his new liaison had no connection to the Kennedy case, when, in 1963, Johannides was the Chief of the Psychological Warfare Branch at JM/WAVE, the CIA’s huge Miami station. One of his specific functions was to monitor and supply the anti-Castro Cuban exile group, Cuban Student Directorate, or DRE, which was in contact with Oswald that summer. Carlos Bringuier, the man who got into a physical altercation with Oswald on a city street in New Orleans, was a member of the local branch of the DRE.
Angleton’s Connection
A similar maneuver occurred during the Warren Commission investigation, when the original CIA liaison to the Warren Commission, John Whitten, was replaced by James Angleton, the CIA’s counter-intelligence chief whose office handled (or mishandled) the original reporting about Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union.
When reports came in about Oswald entering the American embassy in Moscow and asking to renounce his citizenship, the information went to the various intelligence repositories in Washington. The FBI issued a FLASH warning to be placed on Oswald if he tried to reenter the country under a false name. After all, the possibility existed that the KGB could have turned him into a spy.
However, at the CIA, the information about Oswald was not acted on immediately or with the normal protocol. A routine 201 form, which catalogues anyone of interest to the Agency, was not filled out on Oswald at that time. Nor did the information go to the Soviet Russia division. Instead, the Oswald notice was funneled to James Angleton’s super-secret, CI/SIG unit, a protective agency that was supposed to be on guard against penetration agents but has been connected to some of the CIA’s most convoluted deep-cover operations, sometimes called “the wilderness of mirrors.” (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 27)
Besides Angleton’s influence over what CIA files would be made available to the Warren Commission, one of its seven members was former CIA Director Allen Dulles, whom President Kennedy had replaced as director after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961.
So, it is clear today that the idea the CIA had no intelligence interest in Oswald in the months leading up to Kennedy’s murder has been disproven. In fact, Newman uncovered a CIA memo in the Soviet Russia division which reads, “It was partly out of curiosity to learn if Oswald’s wife would actually accompany him to our country, partly out of interest in Oswald’s own experiences in the USSR, that we showed operational intelligence interest in the Harvey [Oswald] Story.”
The Autopsy Mystery
Another one of the myths circulated by the Warren Commission was that they did not have the actual autopsy exhibits because the Kennedy family would not allow them to access the material. This was a pretense exposed by the declassification of the Commission’s Jan. 21, 1964 executive session hearing. In that transcript, Commissioner John McCloy asked Chief Counsel Lee Rankin if they had the raw materials of the autopsy, and Rankin replied that they did.
In a transcript from the next session on Jan. 27, Rankin talked about actually seeing an autopsy picture and wondering how the bullet could exit Kennedy’s throat from an entrance point that low in the back. Rankin’s puzzlement about the back wound segues neatly into one piece of information that the ARRB did manage to get into the mainstream U.S. media, namely that Commissioner Gerald Ford changed the draft of the Warren Report to move the location of this back wound that so puzzled Rankin up into Kennedy’s neck.
This all too revealing alteration was exposed when Rankin’s son donated an earlier draft of the Warren Report to the ARRB. As Commission historian Gerald McKnight notes in his book Breach of Trust, this revision brought the back wound into “line with the Commission’s no-conspiracy conclusion, repositioning it to make it consistent with what came to be called, the single-bullet theory.” (McKnight, pgs. 171-172)
With the knowledge today that the Commission secretly did have the autopsy photos, this act seems even worse. Because, later on, when the photos were finally revealed to the public, it is clear that the wound was in the back, and not in Kennedy’s neck. Ford appears to have done this simply to make the Commission’s official verdict more palatable to the public, because if the shot was fired from over 60 feet up, from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, how could the bullet hit Kennedy in the back and exit at a higher point if it only went through soft tissue?
We now know that this questionable proposition was not even credible inside the Commission itself. The Commission was presented with evidence of three shells being recovered from the so-called sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. So, to make Oswald the lone assassin, only three bullets had to be responsible for all the wounds to all the victims in Dealey Plaza.
The Commission said bystander James Tague, standing on Commerce Street, was hit by a missed shot, and one shot fatally wounded Kennedy by striking him in the head. Which left one shot to do the rest of the damage. And it was quite a lot of damage: seven wounds and two smashed bones in Kennedy and Governor Connally who was sitting in the limousine in front of the President. Those seven wounds with one shot represent the trajectory of what has come to be known as the Magic Bullet.
Rolling Russell
When the Warren Commission verdict was formally announced in the fall of 1964, one of the reasons it appeared authoritative was that it was presented as being unanimous. Seven storied public figures had agreed on each and every aspect of the case against Oswald. Today we know that this was not true.
The best evidence demonstrating its falsity is the Commission’s treatment of Sen. Richard Russell, D-Georgia. For a master’s thesis produced under McKnight’s guidance in 2002, Dani E. Biancolli went through the Russell archive at the University of Georgia.
Almost from the beginning, Russell had problems with the way the Commission was doing business. For instance, Russell was puzzled that the FBI report did not allow for the single-bullet theory. It stated that two separate shots hit Kennedy and one hit Connally. If that is not confusing enough, when the CIA analyzed the Zapruder film, they decided there were two assassins. (McKnight, p. 6)
Russell was not satisfied by the hastily assembled FBI report. He also objected to the fact that Hoover was leaking its findings to the press, making it difficult for the Commission to maintain its independence in the face of public perceptions. Being an experienced trial lawyer, he also began to notice that the Commission was not notifying him when important witnesses would be testifying, e.g. Oswald’s brother, Robert. (Biancolli, p. 46)
Russell also noted that the CIA was giving certain members of the Commission more information than others. Troubled by the overall proceedings, Russell wrote a memo to himself which began with the phrase, “Something strange is happening.” He then noted that the Commission was only going to consider Oswald as the assassin. To lawyer Russell, this was “an untenable position.” (ibid, p. 47) Russell was so disturbed by the way the Commission was progressing that he actually composed a letter of resignation to President Lyndon Johnson.
Russell took the step of drafting an official dissent to the Warren Report. And he wanted the report to contain his reservations about the Magic Bullet. (ibid, p. 63) Aware of this, the more active members of the Commission – Gerald Ford, Allen Dulles, John McCloy and chief counsel Lee Rankin – tricked Russell. They had discontinued their dealings with their stenography service prior to the final meeting where Russell was to present his dissent. But they did have a secretary in the room to create the pretense that a full transcript was being recorded. (ibid, p. 65) No such thing occurred.
Russell was so effective in his presentation at this meeting that he was joined in the effort by Sen. John Sherman Cooper, R-Kentucky, and to a lesser extent by Rep. Hale Boggs, D-Louisiana. But Russell’s eloquent dissent was not recorded in the transcript. In fact, there really is no transcript of this Sept. 18, 1964 meeting. (ibid, pgs. 63-64) With no transcript available, none of Russell’s objections made it into the Warren Report. Thus, the false veneer of a unanimous Commission was maintained.
Further showing how compromised the Warren Commission was, it is clear today that the Commission demanded little respect from the intelligence agencies supplying it with information. For instance, as ARRB employee Doug Horne discovered, Commission counsel Arlen Specter requested the Secret Service produce any tapes of the Nov. 22 press conference by the doctors at Parkland Hospital. Even though they had a recording, the Secret Service failed to turn it over to the Commission. Perhaps because during the interview, Dr. Malcolm Perry said three times that the wound to Kennedy’s throat was one of entrance. If that were true, Oswald could not have caused it.
The CIA also sent the Commission very limited information about Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico City. For instance, the CIA did not send any information to the Commission about any of the phone taps they had at the Cuban or Russian embassies. And there is no evidence that the Commission ever knew who did the translation for the intercepts of incoming phone calls.
Further, the Commission never interviewed Silvia Duran, the receptionist at the Cuban consulate, the person who had the most contact with Oswald. Because of these failings, the information in the Warren Report about Oswald in Mexico City, which many people today see as crucial, is so skimpy as to be almost useless.
Hesitant Investigators
As the Russell incident indicates, it’s clear today that the Warren Commission was a reluctant investigative body from the start. This began with the technique President Johnson used to get Earl Warren to serve as chairman, something Warren did not want to do. LBJ told Warren that because of Oswald’s visits to the Russian and Cuban consulates, there was a danger of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and Cuba and the possible deaths of 40 million Americans in a matter of minutes.
Johnson later said Warren teared up at this suggestion, and Warren mentioned Johnson’s warning at his first staff meeting. The danger of a freewheeling investigation clearly had an impact on many of the investigators who came to see their job as tamping down suspicions of a larger conspiracy, rather than following the facts wherever they might lead. When Wesley Liebeler met with witness Sylvia Odio in Dallas, he told her that they had orders from Warren that if they came across any evidence of conspiracy they were to shove it under the rug. (Odio interview with Church Committee, Jan. 16, 1976)
What makes this so regrettable today is that there is no audio or photographic evidence that Oswald was at either the Russian or Cuban offices in Mexico City. The descriptions of a short, blonde man suggest an imposter. Hoover also felt that the CIA had given him a cover story. This declassified evidence in the Lopez Report leaves the question: Was the specter of a nuclear war used as a pretext to stop any real investigation?
Another crucial piece of evidence that was revived by the ARRB was this: There appears to have been an unsuccessful attempt to kill Kennedy in Chicago just three weeks before the successful one in Dallas. In November 1975, journalist Edwin Black wrote a long and detailed essay on this aborted plot for the Chicago Independent, a paper with a small and local circulation. Soon, this milestone essay was more or less forgotten, but the HSCA secured a copy of it.
Because of its recirculation, other writers have done more work on the subject. One of the most disturbing aspects of the Chicago attempt is that the outline of the plot is eerily similar to what happened in Dallas, down to the apparent fall guy. Three men who appeared to be Cubans were going to kill Kennedy in a rifle ambush as he exited off a freeway ramp in front of a tall building.
The man who was supposed to be accused of the crime was Thomas Vallee. Like Oswald, Valle was a former Marine who was stationed at a U-2 base in Japan. Vallee supposedly was resentful toward Kennedy because of the Bay of Pigs disaster. Curiously, the codename of the FBI informant who tipped off the Secret Service was “Lee.” The existence of a prior assassination plot with parallels to Kennedy’s killing in Dallas would seem to be relevant if one were exploring a wider conspiracy, but there was not one word about this episode in the Warren Report.
Medical Evidence
Some of the most startling new evidence in the JFK case from the declassified files relates to the ARRB’s medical investigation and from new doctors who have entered the JFK field. For instance, Dr. Gary Aguilar has collated the interviews done by HSCA investigators Andy Purdy and Mark Flanagan about the wounds to President Kennedy as seen by the witnesses at Bethesda Medical Center, the hospital where Kennedy’s autopsy was done after his body was returned to Washington.
The HSCA report said there was a discrepancy between what the medical staffers at Parkland Hospital in Dallas saw and what the staffers at Bethesda saw. Witnesses at the former, where Kennedy was rushed after the shooting, said they saw a large, avulsive hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull. This would strongly indicate a shot from the front. Yet the HSCA Report said that the witnesses at Bethesda did not see this wound.
It turns out this was false. When Aguilar went through all the declassified reports from the Bethesda witnesses, they agreed that there was a large avulsive hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull. Aguilar has a table of over 40 witnesses in two locations who are now on the record as saying they saw this wound. The odds of that many trained medical personnel being wrong are, needless to say, very high. Yet, it remains unclear who at the HSCA was responsible for the deception.
As contradictory to the single-gunman theory as the ARRB-revealed medical evidence seems to be, the present state of the ballistics evidence is probably moreso. Broadly speaking, this consists of the ammunition, the rifle, and the crime scene.
Let us begin with new revelations about the so-called Magic Bullet. When Gary Aguilar was going through the declassified FBI files pertaining to the identification of that exhibit – formally called CE 399 – he was puzzled by the lack of actual FBI field reports in the file, so-called “302” reports on witness interviews.
What initially spurred his interest in this matter was the 1967 interview that author Josiah Thompson conducted with O. P. Wright, the security director at Parkland Hospital. When Thompson showed Wright a photo of CE 399, he denied that it was the bullet he gave to the Secret Service. CE 399 is a round-nosed, military jacketed, copper-coated bullet. Wright said he turned over a lead-colored, sharp-nosed, hunting round. (Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas, p. 175)
Yet, in the declassified file, Aguilar could find no 302 where anything like Wright’s definitive response to Thompson was recorded. Or a 302 in which Wright said that CE 399 resembled the bullet he found the day of the assassination. Yet, the FBI was supposed to have shown CE 399 to Wright to confirm the identification of the Magic Bullet as what was turned over at Parkland Hospital. But there was only a summary memorandum confirming that ID.
Though the ARRB told Aguilar that they had exhausted that particular FBI file, there was a clue for further inquiry. In the summary memo, the FBI agent who supposedly showed the exhibit to Wright was identified as Bardwell Odum. In November 2001, Aguilar and Thompson visited the retired agent who told his interviewers that he never took any bullet around to show to any Parkland witnesses – and since he knew Wright well, he would have recalled the interview.
Further, if that event had happened, Odum would have had to file a 302. Aguilar had studied the report file in sequential order and none were missing, indicating that Odum never filed a 302 presumably because he never showed the bullet to Wright.
The FBI’s Fiddling
But why would the FBI have fiddled with the evidence relating to the chain of custody for the Magic Bullet? One obvious answer would be that FBI Director Hoover understood how important it was to remove any doubts that Oswald was the lone gunman.
After the declassification process was complete, researcher John Hunt petitioned the National Archives to examine the FBI’s own data in order to determine if CE 399 actually arrived at FBI headquarters when the Bureau said it did and if it was carried there by agent Elmer Lee Todd as Hoover said it was. As basic to an investigation as trail of evidence is, this was not done by either the Warren Commission or the HSCA.
In a handwritten receipt, Todd noted he got the bullet at the White House from James Rowley of the Secret Service at 8:50 p.m. Hunt then reviewed the work of Robert Frazier who was the technician who booked and analyzed firearms evidence on the JFK case that day. In Frazier’s chronicle, entitled appropriately enough, “History of Evidence,” Frazier wrote that he received the bullet from Todd at 7:30 p.m. In another document entitled “Laboratory Work Sheet,” Frazier wrote this again and described the exhibit as “Bullet from Stretcher.”
The obvious problem was: How could Todd have given CE 399 to Frazier at the FBI lab before he got it from Rowley at the White House? Assuming the contemporaneous documentary record is correct, either the FBI switched the bullet or there was more than one bullet. Either alternative would vitiate the Commission’s conclusion about Oswald as the lone gunman.
In Thompson’s book he writes that both Todd and Frazier marked the bullet with their initials; this was based on a two-page FBI document inside a Justice Department Report. The FBI needed Todd’s initials on the bullet because the initials of the man who gave the bullet to Rowley, Secret Service agent Richard Johnsen, are not on CE 399. And neither are Rowley’s. Todd’s initials had to be there to give the chain of possession any validity at all.
Hunt discovered that Todd’s initials are not on CE 399, which would mean that the forensic value of the Magic Bullet was worthless. (Hunt’s articles can be read herehttp://www.jfklancer.com/hunt/mystery.html, and herehttp://www.jfklancer.com/hunt/phantom.htm).
Miscarriage of Justice
This essay could be twice as long as it is. And it could touch on many other different fields: the efforts of the FBI and CIA to electronically monitor Jim Garrison’s office; the FBI concealment of Guy Banister’s address of 544 Camp Street from the Warren Commission; the witnesses who saw Oswald, Clay Shaw and David Ferrie in the hamlets of Clinton and Jackson; the testimony of Victoria Adams that Oswald was not running down the Depository stairs from the sixth floor after the shooting; the work by Josiah Thompson and Dave Wimp which demonstrates there is no forward movement by Kennedy at frames 312-313 of the Zapruder film, which shows Kennedy going only one way, back and to the left.
These revelations, based largely on the documentary record released by the ARRB, have revolutionized what the evidence tells us about Kennedy’s assassination. Based on these documents and other discoveries, the Warren Commission is revealed as a miscarriage of justice and its report a distortion of history, perhaps justified in the minds of some participants as needed to protect the country from the repercussions of a no-holds-barred investigation.
While President Johnson may have raised the specter of a nuclear conflagration in 1963, the later motives for the continuing cover-up – and the intensity of the attacks on anyone who has questioned the official version – can best be explained by the institutional self-interests of the government agencies that would be implicated in the cover-up or the actual crime.
Along with fierce resistance from the CIA and the FBI, there was the close-minded response to the new evidence from the gatekeepers of the major U.S. news media. Ridiculing authors and investigators who challenged the Warren Commission’s findings became something of a litmus test for measuring a journalist’s fitness to get a good-paying job in the mainstream press.
But this arrogant behavior by these powerful governmental and media institutions – their contempt for an intellectually unconstrained evaluation of the JFK evidence – has proved costly in terms of public trust. Polls reveal that the decline in America’s faith in government began in 1964, the year the Warren Report was issued. As the ARRB’s former counsel Jeremy Gunn said in a speech at Stanford, with what the ARRB discovered, he would much rather be defending Oswald than prosecuting him.
Despite this new evidence, there are many programs being broadcast this month about both President Kennedy and his murder, e.g. Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy. Not a single one will present anywhere near a representative selection of the new evidentiary discoveries made by the ARRB. Yet, this information is crucial to understanding where the United States finds itself today, a country awash in excessive secrecy and growing public distrust.
Another one of the declassified files – the records of the Sec/Def meeting of May 1963 – revealed that Oliver Stone was correct in another facet of his movie. President Kennedy was planning to withdraw from Vietnam, a decision that – if not reversed by President Johnson – might have dramatically changed the course of U.S. history.
In the face of this continuing denial of a full accounting of Kennedy’s assassination on the 50thanniversary, the public should ask two simple questions: What really happened to President Kennedy in Dealey Plaza? And why the unending resistance from the news media to present the new evidence to the American people?
Link:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/where-new-jfk-evidence-points/5358810
By Jim DiEugenio
Media specials are on tap for the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s murder, but none will explore the troubling new evidence that has been declassified in recent years – and that undercuts the Official Story of the Lone Gunman.
In late 1991, film director Oliver Stone released JFK, his film about the investigation of the murder of President John F. Kennedy by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. To say the film was controversial does not begin to describe the furor which surrounded its reception. Six months before the film was in theaters, stories began to appear in large newspapers criticizing a film no one had seen yet.
When the film was finally shown, there was an interesting dichotomy. Whereas most of the film critics liked it, editorials and news stories about the movie attacked it. One critic actually lost her job over a positive review of the film.
But the film did two things relevant to the state of the evidence in the matter of President Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. At the end of his film, Stone had shown a title card saying that the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had been classified until the year 2029.
Embarrassed – and faced with public outrage – Congress held hearings. Many people testified including Stone, and the last chief counsel of the HSCA, Robert Blakey. As a result, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was created, tasked with finding and releasing all documents held by public and private entities in America concerning the murder of President Kennedy. Eventually, two million pages of classified files were open to the public.
The second thing the film did was arouse the curiosity of many people who were not aware of the evidentiary problems that had haunted the Kennedy case for nearly 30 years. Stone’s film was the first time in over a decade that millions of Americans had been exposed to things like the Zapruder film, Oswald’s odd relationships with the FBI and CIA, his associations with right-wingers in Dallas and New Orleans, the investigative failings of the Warren Commission, the problems with the autopsy of President Kennedy, and much, much more.
These new people who were drawn into the case had fresh perspectives to offer and new insights. Between the newly declassified documents and this new generation of writers, the information base about both Kennedy and his murder grew exponentially in a relatively short time.
But this week’s 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination will be marked almost entirely by television specials that will be silent about this new and plentiful information, which alters the calculus of the Kennedy case. That is because, despite the uproar created by Stone’s film, the defenders of the Warren Commission’s narrative circled the wagons and protected the Establishment’s preferred solution to the assassination – that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Why Oswald?
There always was an attractiveness to the Oswald-did-it storyline. It is the simplest explanation, a lone gunman acting out of some personal grievance, ideological fixation or psychological imbalance. No need to explore evidence of a larger conspiracy. No need to integrate Kennedy’s murder into the historic developments that his presidency represented.
Thus, many influential people – from officials involved in the original investigation defending their judgments to a later generation of authors burnishing their reputations for probity – have fought fiercely to defend the Oswald-acted-alone narrative. They have done so despite nagging evidentiary problems, such as the “magic bullet theory,” which attributed the multiple wounds to Kennedy’s neck and Texas Gov. John Connally’s chest, wrist and thigh to a single bullet found almost unscathed on a gurney at Parkland Hospital, and those troubling images from the Zapruder film showing Kennedy’s head being knocked backward by the fatal shot, although Oswald was behind him at the Texas Bookstore Depository.
Most importantly, Gerald Posner’s book, Case Closed, which was published before the ARRB was even set up, was used to close the door on further inquiry by pronouncing Oswald guilty again. Yet, Posner’s book did not include any of the intriguing documents the ARRB declassified. Neither did it include the results of the ARRB special investigation into the medical evidence launched by chief counsel Jeremy Gunn.
After Posner’s book, there seemed to be something of an informal agreement by the gatekeepers in the media. There would be no programs dedicated to airing the discoveries of the ARRB, despite the fact that the ARRB had unprecedented powers to declassify documents and compel testimony. Because of these combination of factors, the American public was given little exposure to the ARRB material and the revolutionary work of new authors on the Kennedy case, the most infamous American homicide of the Twentieth Century.
Besides the Oswald-acted-alone solution, there have been other proposed narratives that accept the idea of conspiracy but don’t directly challenge the institutions of the state. These scenarios acknowledge the likelihood of other conspirators but point the finger at the Mafia or Fidel Castro or some other enemies of America.
But much of the new evidence tends to bolster the narrative advanced by Garrison and by Stone’s movie: that the assassination must have involved elements of the U.S. intelligence community working with right-wing operatives who considered Kennedy soft on communism and that a cover-up was put in place by key government figures to prevent an unraveling of these powerful institutions and the erosion of public trust in the authorities.
Who Was Oswald?
Let us begin with the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald had been portrayed by the Warren Commission as a lonely, communist sociopath. Although there was never any clear motive put forth by the Warren Commission as to why the alleged assassin killed JFK, it was intimated that it was the net result of the frustrations in his life caused by financial problems, ideological intent, and marital troubles. This is still what most current defenders of the Commission say today.
But one of the most surprising things that the ARRB disclosed was the volume of files on Oswald held by both the CIA and FBI – after both agencies had long denied that they had much paper on Oswald. But it was not just the volume of documents, but it was the unexpected direction they pointed.
One of the most curious aspects of Oswald’s strange and contradictory life was his military service. One of the things that shocked New Orleans DA Jim Garrison was the fact that, while in the Marines, Oswald took a Russian test. As Garrison writes in his book, the Commission tried to explain this away by stating that he got more questions wrong than right.
But it’s obvious that Oswald stuck with learning Russian because when a friend of his arranged a meeting with Rosaleen Quinn, she commented afterwards that Oswald spoke excellent Russian. And Quinn had been privately tutored in advance of a State Department exam. (James DiEugenio,Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 131)
After acquiring fluency in Russian, Oswald then applied for a hardship discharge in order to leave the service early. Even though he had just a few months left to serve, his request was granted – and in only 10 days. The HSCA interviewed a person on the board who granted the discharge. Colonel B. J. Kozak testified that it normally took from three to six months to secure such a release. (HSCA interview of Kozak of Aug. 2, 1978)
After Oswald returned from Russia – receiving surprisingly little trouble despite his defection – he became friendly with the White Russian community in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. He then went to New Orleans in the summer of 1963. Numerous witnesses had testified to seeing him with former FBI agent Guy Banister or at Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street.
But in the files declassified by the ARRB there is even more evidence in this regard. In the declassified files of the Church Committee, there is testimony by two federal immigration agents that they were following David Ferrie in 1963 because of his association with Cubans in the country illegally. Wendell Roache and Ron Smith of the Immigration and Naturalization Service stated that they traced Ferrie to Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street, and Oswald was there. (DiEugenio, p. 113)
Further, at least one of the pro-Castro flyers that Oswald was passing out that summer was stamped with the 544 Camp Street address. According to Banister’s secretary Delphine Roberts, Banister was aware that Oswald had committed this faux pas, and he was upset about it. The rightwing zealot complained that, “How is it going to look for him to have the same address as me!” (HSCA interview with Roberts, July 6, 1978)
The natural question arises: What would an alleged communist like Oswald be doing using the conservative Banister’s office as an address, and also working out of that office? In that regard, one of the most compelling revelations to emerge from the ARRB is that both the FBI and the CIA were running counter-intelligence operations against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in 1963. This included using electronic surveillance, penetration agents, and agents provocateur against the New York-based organization.
CIA Mystery
In one of the CIA’s declassified files on this subject, it was discovered that the men running this counter-intelligence effort at CIA were David Phillips and Jim McCord. (Newman, pgs. 236-41) Phillips’s name in this regard is especially fascinating because of his reported meeting with Oswald in August of 1963 at the Southland Center in Dallas by the militant Cuban exile Antonio Veciana.
At that time, according to the Warren Commission, Oswald was about a month away from leaving for Mexico. In addition to not telling the reader about Phillips, McCord and the CIA counter-intelligence program against the FPCC, the Warren Report also did not reveal a memorandum sent from the CIA to the FBI on Sept. 16, 1963, saying the CIA was “giving some consideration to countering the activities” of the FPCC “in foreign countries. … CIA is also giving some thought to planting deceptive information which might embarrass the Committee in areas where it does have some support.”
Oswald had just embarrassed the FPCC by his tactics in New Orleans. First, by getting into a fight with an anti-Castro activist, being arrested, jailed, and then pleading guilty in court. He then took part in a debate where he was exposed as a former Soviet defector. As author Jim Douglass asks: Did this memo refer to Oswald now going to Mexico? (Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 179)
One of the notable achievements of the ARRB was the fact that it declassified the HSCA’s Mexico City Report, which clearly suggests that there was an imposter masquerading as Oswald at both the Cuban consulate and Russian embassy, the places where Oswald was supposed to have visited while he was supposed to be there.
The report states that the CIA could produce no pictures of Oswald either entering or leaving either place, although the Agency had multiple cameras facing each doorway. Further, there is a table in the report which shows that the surveillance tapes the Agency says it had of Oswald in both places could not be of Oswald because the man the CIA had on the tapes spoke broken Russian and fluent Spanish. (Lopez Report, p. 130) However, witnesses said Oswald spoke fluent Russian and broken Spanish.
When one of the tapes of Oswald was sent to Dallas after Kennedy’s assassination and listened to by the FBI agents interviewing Oswald, the agents said the voice was not Oswald’s. When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was alerted to this, he relayed the information to President Johnson. (FBI Memorandum from Hoover to James Rowley, Nov. 23, 1963)
The FBI Mystery
There are two more declassified connections by the FBI to this important episode. First, a FLASH warning that the FBI had put on Oswald’s file, after his defection to the Soviet Union, was taken off while Oswald was in Mexico. Further, it was removed at about the time the Bureau got information that Oswald was allegedly meeting a KGB agent named Valery Kostikov.
This is important, because as both authors John Newman and Jim Douglass note, if the FLASH notice had been in place, it is probable that Oswald would have been placed on the Security Index. That list would have been turned over to the Secret Service, and Oswald would likely have been picked up or surveilled for Kennedy’s upcoming trip to Dallas.
Secondly, in a declassified memo discovered by Newman, Hoover had scribbled a handwritten note in the marginalia of a memo. In speaking of cooperation between the CIA and the FBI, the Director wrote that he was doubtful about such endeavors because he could not forget “the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico” as an example of their double-dealing. Within six weeks of Kennedy’s murder, Hoover thought that the CIA was, at the very least, not being forthcoming about Oswald’s activities in Mexico City.
Hoover was not alone in this suspicion about a CIA connection to Oswald. At a talk at the Cyril Wecht Symposium in Pittsburgh last month, Dan Hardway, an HSCA investigator who specialized on exploring a possible relationship between Oswald and the CIA, said the House panel prepared two indictments for perjury based on the obstruction of the Mexico City investigation. One was for Phillips; the other was for Anne Goodpasture, who controlled the tape and photo production in Mexico City.
Hardway has revealed that when he and another HSCA investigator were getting very close to exposing the skullduggery in Mexico City and who was responsible for it, the CIA moved a man name George Johannides into position as a liaison man over them.
As journalist Jefferson Morley has revealed, the CIA lied to Robert Blakey about the appointment of Johannides. The Agency told Blakely that his new liaison had no connection to the Kennedy case, when, in 1963, Johannides was the Chief of the Psychological Warfare Branch at JM/WAVE, the CIA’s huge Miami station. One of his specific functions was to monitor and supply the anti-Castro Cuban exile group, Cuban Student Directorate, or DRE, which was in contact with Oswald that summer. Carlos Bringuier, the man who got into a physical altercation with Oswald on a city street in New Orleans, was a member of the local branch of the DRE.
Angleton’s Connection
A similar maneuver occurred during the Warren Commission investigation, when the original CIA liaison to the Warren Commission, John Whitten, was replaced by James Angleton, the CIA’s counter-intelligence chief whose office handled (or mishandled) the original reporting about Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union.
When reports came in about Oswald entering the American embassy in Moscow and asking to renounce his citizenship, the information went to the various intelligence repositories in Washington. The FBI issued a FLASH warning to be placed on Oswald if he tried to reenter the country under a false name. After all, the possibility existed that the KGB could have turned him into a spy.
However, at the CIA, the information about Oswald was not acted on immediately or with the normal protocol. A routine 201 form, which catalogues anyone of interest to the Agency, was not filled out on Oswald at that time. Nor did the information go to the Soviet Russia division. Instead, the Oswald notice was funneled to James Angleton’s super-secret, CI/SIG unit, a protective agency that was supposed to be on guard against penetration agents but has been connected to some of the CIA’s most convoluted deep-cover operations, sometimes called “the wilderness of mirrors.” (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 27)
Besides Angleton’s influence over what CIA files would be made available to the Warren Commission, one of its seven members was former CIA Director Allen Dulles, whom President Kennedy had replaced as director after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961.
So, it is clear today that the idea the CIA had no intelligence interest in Oswald in the months leading up to Kennedy’s murder has been disproven. In fact, Newman uncovered a CIA memo in the Soviet Russia division which reads, “It was partly out of curiosity to learn if Oswald’s wife would actually accompany him to our country, partly out of interest in Oswald’s own experiences in the USSR, that we showed operational intelligence interest in the Harvey [Oswald] Story.”
The Autopsy Mystery
Another one of the myths circulated by the Warren Commission was that they did not have the actual autopsy exhibits because the Kennedy family would not allow them to access the material. This was a pretense exposed by the declassification of the Commission’s Jan. 21, 1964 executive session hearing. In that transcript, Commissioner John McCloy asked Chief Counsel Lee Rankin if they had the raw materials of the autopsy, and Rankin replied that they did.
In a transcript from the next session on Jan. 27, Rankin talked about actually seeing an autopsy picture and wondering how the bullet could exit Kennedy’s throat from an entrance point that low in the back. Rankin’s puzzlement about the back wound segues neatly into one piece of information that the ARRB did manage to get into the mainstream U.S. media, namely that Commissioner Gerald Ford changed the draft of the Warren Report to move the location of this back wound that so puzzled Rankin up into Kennedy’s neck.
This all too revealing alteration was exposed when Rankin’s son donated an earlier draft of the Warren Report to the ARRB. As Commission historian Gerald McKnight notes in his book Breach of Trust, this revision brought the back wound into “line with the Commission’s no-conspiracy conclusion, repositioning it to make it consistent with what came to be called, the single-bullet theory.” (McKnight, pgs. 171-172)
With the knowledge today that the Commission secretly did have the autopsy photos, this act seems even worse. Because, later on, when the photos were finally revealed to the public, it is clear that the wound was in the back, and not in Kennedy’s neck. Ford appears to have done this simply to make the Commission’s official verdict more palatable to the public, because if the shot was fired from over 60 feet up, from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, how could the bullet hit Kennedy in the back and exit at a higher point if it only went through soft tissue?
We now know that this questionable proposition was not even credible inside the Commission itself. The Commission was presented with evidence of three shells being recovered from the so-called sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. So, to make Oswald the lone assassin, only three bullets had to be responsible for all the wounds to all the victims in Dealey Plaza.
The Commission said bystander James Tague, standing on Commerce Street, was hit by a missed shot, and one shot fatally wounded Kennedy by striking him in the head. Which left one shot to do the rest of the damage. And it was quite a lot of damage: seven wounds and two smashed bones in Kennedy and Governor Connally who was sitting in the limousine in front of the President. Those seven wounds with one shot represent the trajectory of what has come to be known as the Magic Bullet.
Rolling Russell
When the Warren Commission verdict was formally announced in the fall of 1964, one of the reasons it appeared authoritative was that it was presented as being unanimous. Seven storied public figures had agreed on each and every aspect of the case against Oswald. Today we know that this was not true.
The best evidence demonstrating its falsity is the Commission’s treatment of Sen. Richard Russell, D-Georgia. For a master’s thesis produced under McKnight’s guidance in 2002, Dani E. Biancolli went through the Russell archive at the University of Georgia.
Almost from the beginning, Russell had problems with the way the Commission was doing business. For instance, Russell was puzzled that the FBI report did not allow for the single-bullet theory. It stated that two separate shots hit Kennedy and one hit Connally. If that is not confusing enough, when the CIA analyzed the Zapruder film, they decided there were two assassins. (McKnight, p. 6)
Russell was not satisfied by the hastily assembled FBI report. He also objected to the fact that Hoover was leaking its findings to the press, making it difficult for the Commission to maintain its independence in the face of public perceptions. Being an experienced trial lawyer, he also began to notice that the Commission was not notifying him when important witnesses would be testifying, e.g. Oswald’s brother, Robert. (Biancolli, p. 46)
Russell also noted that the CIA was giving certain members of the Commission more information than others. Troubled by the overall proceedings, Russell wrote a memo to himself which began with the phrase, “Something strange is happening.” He then noted that the Commission was only going to consider Oswald as the assassin. To lawyer Russell, this was “an untenable position.” (ibid, p. 47) Russell was so disturbed by the way the Commission was progressing that he actually composed a letter of resignation to President Lyndon Johnson.
Russell took the step of drafting an official dissent to the Warren Report. And he wanted the report to contain his reservations about the Magic Bullet. (ibid, p. 63) Aware of this, the more active members of the Commission – Gerald Ford, Allen Dulles, John McCloy and chief counsel Lee Rankin – tricked Russell. They had discontinued their dealings with their stenography service prior to the final meeting where Russell was to present his dissent. But they did have a secretary in the room to create the pretense that a full transcript was being recorded. (ibid, p. 65) No such thing occurred.
Russell was so effective in his presentation at this meeting that he was joined in the effort by Sen. John Sherman Cooper, R-Kentucky, and to a lesser extent by Rep. Hale Boggs, D-Louisiana. But Russell’s eloquent dissent was not recorded in the transcript. In fact, there really is no transcript of this Sept. 18, 1964 meeting. (ibid, pgs. 63-64) With no transcript available, none of Russell’s objections made it into the Warren Report. Thus, the false veneer of a unanimous Commission was maintained.
Further showing how compromised the Warren Commission was, it is clear today that the Commission demanded little respect from the intelligence agencies supplying it with information. For instance, as ARRB employee Doug Horne discovered, Commission counsel Arlen Specter requested the Secret Service produce any tapes of the Nov. 22 press conference by the doctors at Parkland Hospital. Even though they had a recording, the Secret Service failed to turn it over to the Commission. Perhaps because during the interview, Dr. Malcolm Perry said three times that the wound to Kennedy’s throat was one of entrance. If that were true, Oswald could not have caused it.
The CIA also sent the Commission very limited information about Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico City. For instance, the CIA did not send any information to the Commission about any of the phone taps they had at the Cuban or Russian embassies. And there is no evidence that the Commission ever knew who did the translation for the intercepts of incoming phone calls.
Further, the Commission never interviewed Silvia Duran, the receptionist at the Cuban consulate, the person who had the most contact with Oswald. Because of these failings, the information in the Warren Report about Oswald in Mexico City, which many people today see as crucial, is so skimpy as to be almost useless.
Hesitant Investigators
As the Russell incident indicates, it’s clear today that the Warren Commission was a reluctant investigative body from the start. This began with the technique President Johnson used to get Earl Warren to serve as chairman, something Warren did not want to do. LBJ told Warren that because of Oswald’s visits to the Russian and Cuban consulates, there was a danger of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and Cuba and the possible deaths of 40 million Americans in a matter of minutes.
Johnson later said Warren teared up at this suggestion, and Warren mentioned Johnson’s warning at his first staff meeting. The danger of a freewheeling investigation clearly had an impact on many of the investigators who came to see their job as tamping down suspicions of a larger conspiracy, rather than following the facts wherever they might lead. When Wesley Liebeler met with witness Sylvia Odio in Dallas, he told her that they had orders from Warren that if they came across any evidence of conspiracy they were to shove it under the rug. (Odio interview with Church Committee, Jan. 16, 1976)
What makes this so regrettable today is that there is no audio or photographic evidence that Oswald was at either the Russian or Cuban offices in Mexico City. The descriptions of a short, blonde man suggest an imposter. Hoover also felt that the CIA had given him a cover story. This declassified evidence in the Lopez Report leaves the question: Was the specter of a nuclear war used as a pretext to stop any real investigation?
Another crucial piece of evidence that was revived by the ARRB was this: There appears to have been an unsuccessful attempt to kill Kennedy in Chicago just three weeks before the successful one in Dallas. In November 1975, journalist Edwin Black wrote a long and detailed essay on this aborted plot for the Chicago Independent, a paper with a small and local circulation. Soon, this milestone essay was more or less forgotten, but the HSCA secured a copy of it.
Because of its recirculation, other writers have done more work on the subject. One of the most disturbing aspects of the Chicago attempt is that the outline of the plot is eerily similar to what happened in Dallas, down to the apparent fall guy. Three men who appeared to be Cubans were going to kill Kennedy in a rifle ambush as he exited off a freeway ramp in front of a tall building.
The man who was supposed to be accused of the crime was Thomas Vallee. Like Oswald, Valle was a former Marine who was stationed at a U-2 base in Japan. Vallee supposedly was resentful toward Kennedy because of the Bay of Pigs disaster. Curiously, the codename of the FBI informant who tipped off the Secret Service was “Lee.” The existence of a prior assassination plot with parallels to Kennedy’s killing in Dallas would seem to be relevant if one were exploring a wider conspiracy, but there was not one word about this episode in the Warren Report.
Medical Evidence
Some of the most startling new evidence in the JFK case from the declassified files relates to the ARRB’s medical investigation and from new doctors who have entered the JFK field. For instance, Dr. Gary Aguilar has collated the interviews done by HSCA investigators Andy Purdy and Mark Flanagan about the wounds to President Kennedy as seen by the witnesses at Bethesda Medical Center, the hospital where Kennedy’s autopsy was done after his body was returned to Washington.
The HSCA report said there was a discrepancy between what the medical staffers at Parkland Hospital in Dallas saw and what the staffers at Bethesda saw. Witnesses at the former, where Kennedy was rushed after the shooting, said they saw a large, avulsive hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull. This would strongly indicate a shot from the front. Yet the HSCA Report said that the witnesses at Bethesda did not see this wound.
It turns out this was false. When Aguilar went through all the declassified reports from the Bethesda witnesses, they agreed that there was a large avulsive hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull. Aguilar has a table of over 40 witnesses in two locations who are now on the record as saying they saw this wound. The odds of that many trained medical personnel being wrong are, needless to say, very high. Yet, it remains unclear who at the HSCA was responsible for the deception.
As contradictory to the single-gunman theory as the ARRB-revealed medical evidence seems to be, the present state of the ballistics evidence is probably moreso. Broadly speaking, this consists of the ammunition, the rifle, and the crime scene.
Let us begin with new revelations about the so-called Magic Bullet. When Gary Aguilar was going through the declassified FBI files pertaining to the identification of that exhibit – formally called CE 399 – he was puzzled by the lack of actual FBI field reports in the file, so-called “302” reports on witness interviews.
What initially spurred his interest in this matter was the 1967 interview that author Josiah Thompson conducted with O. P. Wright, the security director at Parkland Hospital. When Thompson showed Wright a photo of CE 399, he denied that it was the bullet he gave to the Secret Service. CE 399 is a round-nosed, military jacketed, copper-coated bullet. Wright said he turned over a lead-colored, sharp-nosed, hunting round. (Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas, p. 175)
Yet, in the declassified file, Aguilar could find no 302 where anything like Wright’s definitive response to Thompson was recorded. Or a 302 in which Wright said that CE 399 resembled the bullet he found the day of the assassination. Yet, the FBI was supposed to have shown CE 399 to Wright to confirm the identification of the Magic Bullet as what was turned over at Parkland Hospital. But there was only a summary memorandum confirming that ID.
Though the ARRB told Aguilar that they had exhausted that particular FBI file, there was a clue for further inquiry. In the summary memo, the FBI agent who supposedly showed the exhibit to Wright was identified as Bardwell Odum. In November 2001, Aguilar and Thompson visited the retired agent who told his interviewers that he never took any bullet around to show to any Parkland witnesses – and since he knew Wright well, he would have recalled the interview.
Further, if that event had happened, Odum would have had to file a 302. Aguilar had studied the report file in sequential order and none were missing, indicating that Odum never filed a 302 presumably because he never showed the bullet to Wright.
The FBI’s Fiddling
But why would the FBI have fiddled with the evidence relating to the chain of custody for the Magic Bullet? One obvious answer would be that FBI Director Hoover understood how important it was to remove any doubts that Oswald was the lone gunman.
After the declassification process was complete, researcher John Hunt petitioned the National Archives to examine the FBI’s own data in order to determine if CE 399 actually arrived at FBI headquarters when the Bureau said it did and if it was carried there by agent Elmer Lee Todd as Hoover said it was. As basic to an investigation as trail of evidence is, this was not done by either the Warren Commission or the HSCA.
In a handwritten receipt, Todd noted he got the bullet at the White House from James Rowley of the Secret Service at 8:50 p.m. Hunt then reviewed the work of Robert Frazier who was the technician who booked and analyzed firearms evidence on the JFK case that day. In Frazier’s chronicle, entitled appropriately enough, “History of Evidence,” Frazier wrote that he received the bullet from Todd at 7:30 p.m. In another document entitled “Laboratory Work Sheet,” Frazier wrote this again and described the exhibit as “Bullet from Stretcher.”
The obvious problem was: How could Todd have given CE 399 to Frazier at the FBI lab before he got it from Rowley at the White House? Assuming the contemporaneous documentary record is correct, either the FBI switched the bullet or there was more than one bullet. Either alternative would vitiate the Commission’s conclusion about Oswald as the lone gunman.
In Thompson’s book he writes that both Todd and Frazier marked the bullet with their initials; this was based on a two-page FBI document inside a Justice Department Report. The FBI needed Todd’s initials on the bullet because the initials of the man who gave the bullet to Rowley, Secret Service agent Richard Johnsen, are not on CE 399. And neither are Rowley’s. Todd’s initials had to be there to give the chain of possession any validity at all.
Hunt discovered that Todd’s initials are not on CE 399, which would mean that the forensic value of the Magic Bullet was worthless. (Hunt’s articles can be read herehttp://www.jfklancer.com/hunt/mystery.html, and herehttp://www.jfklancer.com/hunt/phantom.htm).
Miscarriage of Justice
This essay could be twice as long as it is. And it could touch on many other different fields: the efforts of the FBI and CIA to electronically monitor Jim Garrison’s office; the FBI concealment of Guy Banister’s address of 544 Camp Street from the Warren Commission; the witnesses who saw Oswald, Clay Shaw and David Ferrie in the hamlets of Clinton and Jackson; the testimony of Victoria Adams that Oswald was not running down the Depository stairs from the sixth floor after the shooting; the work by Josiah Thompson and Dave Wimp which demonstrates there is no forward movement by Kennedy at frames 312-313 of the Zapruder film, which shows Kennedy going only one way, back and to the left.
These revelations, based largely on the documentary record released by the ARRB, have revolutionized what the evidence tells us about Kennedy’s assassination. Based on these documents and other discoveries, the Warren Commission is revealed as a miscarriage of justice and its report a distortion of history, perhaps justified in the minds of some participants as needed to protect the country from the repercussions of a no-holds-barred investigation.
While President Johnson may have raised the specter of a nuclear conflagration in 1963, the later motives for the continuing cover-up – and the intensity of the attacks on anyone who has questioned the official version – can best be explained by the institutional self-interests of the government agencies that would be implicated in the cover-up or the actual crime.
Along with fierce resistance from the CIA and the FBI, there was the close-minded response to the new evidence from the gatekeepers of the major U.S. news media. Ridiculing authors and investigators who challenged the Warren Commission’s findings became something of a litmus test for measuring a journalist’s fitness to get a good-paying job in the mainstream press.
But this arrogant behavior by these powerful governmental and media institutions – their contempt for an intellectually unconstrained evaluation of the JFK evidence – has proved costly in terms of public trust. Polls reveal that the decline in America’s faith in government began in 1964, the year the Warren Report was issued. As the ARRB’s former counsel Jeremy Gunn said in a speech at Stanford, with what the ARRB discovered, he would much rather be defending Oswald than prosecuting him.
Despite this new evidence, there are many programs being broadcast this month about both President Kennedy and his murder, e.g. Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy. Not a single one will present anywhere near a representative selection of the new evidentiary discoveries made by the ARRB. Yet, this information is crucial to understanding where the United States finds itself today, a country awash in excessive secrecy and growing public distrust.
Another one of the declassified files – the records of the Sec/Def meeting of May 1963 – revealed that Oliver Stone was correct in another facet of his movie. President Kennedy was planning to withdraw from Vietnam, a decision that – if not reversed by President Johnson – might have dramatically changed the course of U.S. history.
In the face of this continuing denial of a full accounting of Kennedy’s assassination on the 50thanniversary, the public should ask two simple questions: What really happened to President Kennedy in Dealey Plaza? And why the unending resistance from the news media to present the new evidence to the American people?
Link:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/where-new-jfk-evidence-points/5358810
"The Association of American Medical Colleges warns that the nation will face a shortage of 91,500 physicians by 2020."
When Will The Government Start Forcing Doctors To See Obamacare Patients?
Merrill Matthews
Patient access to doctors is approaching a perfect storm of decreased physician supply, more demand for medical care—especially after Obamacare kicks in—and doctors increasingly refusing to see low-paying Medicare or Medicaid patients. If the “promise” of Obamacare’s access to health care is to be kept, government will eventually have to force doctors to accept Obamacare-covered patients. Because such a step would represent such a radical departure from physician autonomy, you might call it the “medical nuclear option.”
To begin with, the U.S. is already facing a doctor shortage. The Association of American Medical Colleges warns that the nation will face a shortage of 91,500 physicians by 2020. With respect to family physicians, a study published in the Annals of Family Medicine predicted a primary care physician shortage of 52,000 by 2025...
Read the rest:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2013/11/25/when-will-the-government-start-forcing-doctors-to-see-obamacare-patients/
Merrill Matthews
Patient access to doctors is approaching a perfect storm of decreased physician supply, more demand for medical care—especially after Obamacare kicks in—and doctors increasingly refusing to see low-paying Medicare or Medicaid patients. If the “promise” of Obamacare’s access to health care is to be kept, government will eventually have to force doctors to accept Obamacare-covered patients. Because such a step would represent such a radical departure from physician autonomy, you might call it the “medical nuclear option.”
To begin with, the U.S. is already facing a doctor shortage. The Association of American Medical Colleges warns that the nation will face a shortage of 91,500 physicians by 2020. With respect to family physicians, a study published in the Annals of Family Medicine predicted a primary care physician shortage of 52,000 by 2025...
Read the rest:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2013/11/25/when-will-the-government-start-forcing-doctors-to-see-obamacare-patients/
Hey, Obamacare supporters, be careful what you wish for, you just might get it...
By Jim Angle
Almost 80 million people with employer health plans could find their coverage canceled because they are not compliant with ObamaCare, several experts predicted.
Their losses would be in addition to the millions who found their individual coverage cancelled for the same reason.
Stan Veuger of the American Enterprise Institute said that in addition to the individual cancellations, "at least half the people on employer plans would by 2014 start losing plans as well." There are approximately 157 million employer health care policy holders.
Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute added, "the administration estimated that approximately 78 million Americans with employer sponsored insurance would lose their existing coverage due to the Affordable Care Act."
Last week, an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, showed the administration anticipates half to two-thirds of small businesses would have policies canceled or be compelled to send workers onto the ObamaCare exchanges. They predicted up to 100 million small and large business policies could be canceled next year.
According to projections the administration itself issued back in July 2010, it was clear officials knew the impact of ObamaCare three years ago.
In fact, according to the Federal Register, its mid-range estimate was that by the end of 2014, 76 percent of small group plans would be cancelled, along with 55 percent of large employer plans.
The reason behind the losses is that current plans don't meet the requirements of ObamaCare, which dictate that each plan must cover a list of essential benefits, whether people want them or not.
"Things like maternity care or acupuncture or extensive drug coverage," said Veuger. "And so now the law is going to force them to buy policies that they could have gotten in the past if they wanted to but they chose not to."
Some plans already have been canceled and employers are getting sticker shock at the new, higher prices under ObamaCare.
One of them is David Allen, president of a company bearing his name in Boulder, Colorado. He told a Congressional hearing recently that his carrier discontinued his company policy because it wasn't compliant with ObamaCare.
"It does not meet the minimum standards as stipulated under the law. Due to this one change," he said, "our premiums are now scheduled to increase by 52.3 percent in January 2014."
Roy said that is not unusual. "The old plans that are being cancelled are meaningfully cheaper than the new plans that are ObamaCare compliant."
A new wave of cancellations and sticker shock will emerge just before next year's elections.
"They're going to start doing that in the summer or early fall but certainly before the midterm elections," said Veuger.
Link:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/11/26/evidence-shows-obama-administration-predicted-tens-millions-would-lose-plans/
Doubts still remain...
History Still Casts Doubts on the Warren Commission Report
Written by Jack Kenny
In September of 1964, the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, published its findings in a 469-page report, accompanied by 410 pages appendices. Two months later, approximately a full year after its creation, the Commission brought forth 26 volumes of supporting documents including the testimony or depositions of 552 witnesses along with 3,100 exhibits.
Given all that, one might suppose that if there had been a conspiracy to assassinate the president, the commissioners would have come upon it somewhere. But then one might have supposed a year earlier that a prisoner as important and heavily guarded as Lee Harvey Oswald could not have been bumped off by a lone gunman in the basement of the Dallas Police Department, of all places. By shooting the alleged assassin at point-blank range in front of police, reporters, and television cameras, Jack Ruby gave Dallas police their one moment of glory in that bizarre weekend of November 22-24, 1963. They apprehended Oswald's killer in no time at all.
Warren Commission critic Sylvia Meagher in her 1966 book, Accessories After the Fact, noted that Dallas officials seemed to believe they had solved the president's assassination and the murder of police officer J.D. Tippitt almost as quickly. Oswald's body was hardly cold before a police spokesman announced the case was closed. The conclusions published by the Warren Commission 10 months later were virtually identical to the verdict announced in Dallas a mere 48 hours after President Kennedy was shot. Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin, who also killed Tippitt. Jack Ruby acted solely on his own in killing Oswald. No sign of conspiracy anywhere.
Given the speed with which they solved those crimes, Meagher offered the following mock tribute to the Dallas police:
They are brilliant. In some 48 hours they solved three murders of unparalleled complexity and mystery with the same conclusions reached a year later by the Chief Justice and his six eminent colleagues, the stable of bright young lawyers, the legion of investigators and the regiment of criminology experts. The Dallas police achieved in a matter of three days what the Commission achieved after an investigation said to be unprecedented in scope, depth, duration and dare we say, expense.
Meagher's rhetorical arrows were aimed not at the Dallas police, but at the Warren Commission. The obvious implication is that the Commission, for all its hundreds of witnesses and thousands of pages and exhibits, reached a pre-ordained conclusion: the same "case-closed" verdict announced in Dallas 10 months earlier. That has been a frequent charge made by Commission critics over the years and was the theme of one of the first books on the subject, Inquest by Edward Jay Epstein. A pattern is discernible throughout the report, Epstein noted: Any evidence or testimony pointing to Oswald's guilt as the lone assassin was deemed to be of "probative value." Anything pointing away from that verdict was dismissed, with little to no consideration to any troubling questions it may have raised.
There are, to be sure, many on the political left with an ideological motive for second-guessing the official verdict of the Dallas police, the FBI, and the Warren Commission. In the brief interval between the shooting and the identification of Oswald as the suspect apprehended in the manhunt for the president's assassin, there was much discussion of a right-wing "climate of hate" in Dallas, with specific reference to an anti-UN demonstration in the city a month earlier, in which UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had reportedly been struck with a placard and spat upon by by two of the demonstrators.
That explanation had obvious appeal to not only liberals and left-wingers in the United States, but also the Soviet press in Moscow, which was quick to denounce Dallas as a "hotbed of reaction." To this day, there are those in the media who manage to drag The John Birch Society (which runs this website) into any account of the assassination. "The John Birch Society designated Dallas a regional headquarters and opened a bookstore here," noted Scott Parks in The Dallas Morning News. Assassins have been known to read books, so perhaps that's the connection. Opening a bookstore could be a subversive activity, one that might be the occasion today for a bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security.
Some seemed actually disappointed to learn the accused assassin was not a Southern racist motivated by violent opposition to the president's civil rights bill, but was instead a self-proclaimed Marxist, who had defected to the Soviet Union and boasted of membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Even the president's widow expressed her dismay upon learning of Oswald's background and ideological bent. "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights," Jacqueline Kennedy said of her slain husband, according to William Manchester in his 1967 book, Death of a President. "It's — it had to be some silly little communist."
That a communist might be more dangerous than "silly" apparently had not previously occurred to Mrs. Kennedy. But whether Oswald was, in fact, a lone gunman, part of a conspiracy, and/or the fall guy or "patsy" he claimed to be, there remain, half a century later a number of unanswered questions that the Warren Commission either ignored or glossed over.
They remain unanswered in History Will Prove Us Right by Howard P. Willens, published in time for the 50th anniversary of the assassination. Anyone looking for a point-by-point refutation of the most familiar charges made by critics of the Commission's report are sure to be disappointed. Willens, a Justice Department lawyer at the time, was one of three members of the Commission's supervisory staff that coordinated various aspects of the investigation. The book's title, he tells us in the introduction, is a direct quotation from Chief Justice Warren, who told a lawyer on the Commission not to worry about the report's critics, because "history will prove us right."
Yet the Willens book offers no real vindication of the committee's findings, but is mainly a month-by-month journal of the internal workings of the Commission. It does take note of the withholding of relevant information by the FBI and the CIA, concerning, for example, the CIA's covert plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, for which the Cuban dictator had vowed revenge. But the narrative by Willens simply ignores the troubling questions that still linger half a century later. They include matters as fundamental as:
Oswald's Presence at the Sixth Floor Window
The Commission's star witness on this point was Howard Brennan, a construction worker who reported seeing a man with a rifle firing from the southeast corner window on the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository building — the source, according to the Warren Commission, of all three shots fired at the presidential motorcade. Brennan was standing on the ground opposite the building at the time, but apparently possessed such remarkable powers of observation that he was able to describe the gunman kneeling in the window six floor above him as a slender man, about five feet ten inches tall and in his early thirties. After Oswald's picture had appeared on television, Brennan said that was the man he had seen with the gun in the window. But on the evening of November 22, he declined to make a positive identification when viewing Oswald in a police lineup. In his testimony before the commission, he offered the following explanation:
I could have picked out Oswald without any question. That was the man I saw in the sixth-floor window. But I was afraid for my own life, because I thought there might be others involved in a plot to kill the president. I was the only one that could finger the shooter, and that they might come after me as a result.
Others claimed to have seen one or more persons at the same window moments before the shooting, but Brennan was the only who claimed to have seen Oswald there. His identification of the suspect probably would not have held up under cross-examination had Oswald lived to stand trial, but it was conclusive enough for the Warren Commission.
The Commission is satisfied that, at the least, Brennan saw a man in the window who closely resembled Lee Harvey Oswald, and that Brennan believes the man he saw was in fact Lee Harvey Oswald.
Why Oswald Was Wanted
The Commission identified Brennan as "most probably" the source of the description of the suspect that was called in by Inspector J. Herbert Sawyer and broadcast over the police radio at 12:45 p.m., approximately 15 minutes after the shooting. Yet Brennan testified that he gave the description to Secret Service Agent Forrest Sorrels, the head of the Dallas office of the Secret Service. Sorrels, who was in the motorcade's lead car, did not return from Parkland Hospital until sometime between 12:50 and 12:55, after the bulletin had gone out. Sawyer did not recall speaking to Brennan or to anyone wearing, as Brennan was, a construction worker's hardhat. Whoever was the source for the description of the shooter in the window, Sawyer seemed doubtful of it, telling the dispatcher a moment or two later that "it's unknown if he is still in the building or if he was in there in the first place." (Emphasis added.)
The Mysterious "Mauser"
The Warren Commission was hard pressed to explain how the rifle found on the sixth floor was initially identified as a German Mauser, but later turned out to be the Italian-made Mannilicher-Carcano mailed to "A.J. Hiddel," which police said was an alias used by Oswald. The rifle was discovered by Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman and Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone at approximately 1:15, some 45 minutes after the shooting. Both men described the weapon as a 7.65 mm. Mauser; Weitzman in an affidavit he signed the next day, and Boone in two written reports to his superior, Sheriff J.E. Decker. Ignoring Boone's reports, the Commission explained Weitzman's mistake this way:
Weitzman did not handle the rifle and did not examine it at close range. He had little more than a glimpse of it and thought it was a Mauser, a German bolt-action rifle similar in appearance to the Mannlicher-Carcano. Police laboratory technician subsequently arrived and correctly identified the weapon as a 6.5 Italian rifle.
On the following day, November 23, Weitzman signed an affidavit for the Dallas police, describing in unequivocal terms the weapon he had found: "This rifle was a 7.65 Mauser bolt-action equipped with a 4/18 scope, a thick leather brownish-black sling on it." That appears to be a lot of detail to be gained from "little more than just a glimpse," and it came from law enforcement official who described himself to the commission as "fairly familiar" with rifles "because I was in the sporting goods business awhile. Attorney Mark Lane, whose book Rush to Judgment was one of the early and best-selling attacks on the Warren Report, testified to the Commission about the conflicting reports of the alleged murder weapon.
Although I am personally not a rifle expert, I was able to determine it was an Italian carbine because printed indelibly upon it are the words "Made Italy" and "caliber 6.5." I suggest it is very difficult for a police officer to pick up a weapon which has printed upon it clearly in English "Made Italy, Cal 6.5" and then the next day draft an affidavit stating that it was in fact a German Mauser, 7.65 millimeters.
Weitzman testified that he did not pick up the weapon, but he apparently had a long enough look at it to describe in some detail what he swore in an affidavit was a German Mauser.
The Source and Direction of the Shots
Much has been made of the fact that many of the people in Dealey Plaza that day believed the shots came from behind the stockade fence atop the grassy knoll that was to the front and right of the president when the shots rang out, while the Texas Schoolbook Depository was behind him. A number of both policemen and civilians went rushing up the knoll, presumably in search of the shooter or shooters. It may be, as some have explained, that confusion was caused by an "echo effect" in the plaza. The sight, captured on the now famous Zapruder film, of the president's body falling violently backward and the left when the bullet struck, suggesting a shot from the right front, may have been due to a neuromuscular response, as some ballistics experts have claimed.
But some of the witnesses on the grassy knoll were quite certain shots came from behind them. One of them, Gordon L. Arnold, was a 22-year-old soldier in uniform at the time, recalled standing near the top of the knoll as the motorcade approached. Jim Marrs, author of Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, interviewed Arnold in 1985 and quoted him as follows:
Just after the car turned onto Elm Street and started toward me, a shot went off from over my left shoulder. I felt the bullet rather than heard it, and it went right past my left ear.... You don't really hear the whiz of a bullet; you feel it. You feel something go by and then you hear a report just behind it.
The Bogus "Secret Service" Agents
Arnold also said that he was in the area behind the stockade fence before the motorcade arrived and was ordered to leave by someone who claimed to be with the Secret Service. Other witnesses told of encounters with men claiming to be Secret Service officials in the same area immediately following the shooting. Deputy Constable Weitzman was one. Dallas Police Officer Joe Marshall Smith was another. Smith told the Warren Commission that he encountered someone in the parking lot behind the fence who produced "credentials from his hip pocket which showed him to be Secret Service. I have seen those credentials before and they satisfied me and the deputy sheriff."
The Commission acknowledged Smith's testimony in its report, while pointing out that none of the Secret Service agents was in the area at the time, since all were in the motorcade that sped off to Parkland Hospital. Sorrels was the first to return some 20 to 25 minutes after the shooting. That, however, leaves open the question the Commission did not address: If there were no conspiracy, why were people impersonating Secret Service agents in the vicinity of Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination? Or were Smith, Weitzman, Arnold, and others all mistaken — or lying — about what they saw and heard?
The above are just a few of the inconsistencies and omissions in the Warren Report that Willens never mentions in a book purportedly written to show that the commission got the whole thing right. His narrative suggests, rather, that the commission began with a heavy presumption that foreshadowed and all but dictated its final conclusion: that Oswald was the assassin and that he pulled off the crime of the century with no assistance whatsoever.
There remains any number of possible motivations for the commission to, in Lane's words, "Rush to Judgment" in favor of the "verdict" reached by the Dallas police within 48 hours of the president's assassination. The seven members of the committee, including the chief justice and four members of Congress, had competing duties, making heavy demands on their time. The same was true of the lawyers on the staff, including Arlen Specter, then a district attorney in Philadelphia, and David Belin with a busy private practice in Iowa.
There was also the danger that the discovery of a conspiracy in high places could throw the nation into turmoil. The mere speculation about a plot originating in a foreign country, such as the Soviet Union or Cuba, could, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the commission, "create a very dangerous situation." There was pressure from the press and public get the answers to questions about the assassination sooner rather than later, and political pressure to get the report written and out of the way before the presidential campaign in the fall of 2004. Willens even notes there was an effort, ultimately unsuccessful, to get it done before that year's Democratic National Convention in August. Surely as the new president stood for election, it would be reassuring for the nation to be told authoritatively that the only man responsible for the murder of his predecessor was safely dead and buried.
The order in which the witnesses were called and the manner in which they were interrogated also says something about the political considerations surrounding the commission's investigation. Marina Oswald, widow of the accused assassin, was the first witness and she was called back three more times. Despite what Willens described as the commission's need "to hear from all those in the presidential vehicle," Mrs. Kennedy, seated next to her husband at the time of the shooting, was not called until June, when she was questioned for all of nine minutes. Her appearance and the nature of the questions were negotiated with her brother-in-law, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Neither President Johnson nor his wife Lady Bird, riding two cars behind the president in the motorcade, was called upon to testify.
No reasonable person would suggest that the task give the Warren Commission was easy. But neither is it easy to believe what Willens claims to have been the commission's guiding principle: "Truth is our only client."
Link:
http://thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/17030-history-still-casts-doubts-on-the-warren-commission-report
Written by Jack Kenny
In September of 1964, the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, published its findings in a 469-page report, accompanied by 410 pages appendices. Two months later, approximately a full year after its creation, the Commission brought forth 26 volumes of supporting documents including the testimony or depositions of 552 witnesses along with 3,100 exhibits.
Given all that, one might suppose that if there had been a conspiracy to assassinate the president, the commissioners would have come upon it somewhere. But then one might have supposed a year earlier that a prisoner as important and heavily guarded as Lee Harvey Oswald could not have been bumped off by a lone gunman in the basement of the Dallas Police Department, of all places. By shooting the alleged assassin at point-blank range in front of police, reporters, and television cameras, Jack Ruby gave Dallas police their one moment of glory in that bizarre weekend of November 22-24, 1963. They apprehended Oswald's killer in no time at all.
Warren Commission critic Sylvia Meagher in her 1966 book, Accessories After the Fact, noted that Dallas officials seemed to believe they had solved the president's assassination and the murder of police officer J.D. Tippitt almost as quickly. Oswald's body was hardly cold before a police spokesman announced the case was closed. The conclusions published by the Warren Commission 10 months later were virtually identical to the verdict announced in Dallas a mere 48 hours after President Kennedy was shot. Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin, who also killed Tippitt. Jack Ruby acted solely on his own in killing Oswald. No sign of conspiracy anywhere.
Given the speed with which they solved those crimes, Meagher offered the following mock tribute to the Dallas police:
They are brilliant. In some 48 hours they solved three murders of unparalleled complexity and mystery with the same conclusions reached a year later by the Chief Justice and his six eminent colleagues, the stable of bright young lawyers, the legion of investigators and the regiment of criminology experts. The Dallas police achieved in a matter of three days what the Commission achieved after an investigation said to be unprecedented in scope, depth, duration and dare we say, expense.
Meagher's rhetorical arrows were aimed not at the Dallas police, but at the Warren Commission. The obvious implication is that the Commission, for all its hundreds of witnesses and thousands of pages and exhibits, reached a pre-ordained conclusion: the same "case-closed" verdict announced in Dallas 10 months earlier. That has been a frequent charge made by Commission critics over the years and was the theme of one of the first books on the subject, Inquest by Edward Jay Epstein. A pattern is discernible throughout the report, Epstein noted: Any evidence or testimony pointing to Oswald's guilt as the lone assassin was deemed to be of "probative value." Anything pointing away from that verdict was dismissed, with little to no consideration to any troubling questions it may have raised.
There are, to be sure, many on the political left with an ideological motive for second-guessing the official verdict of the Dallas police, the FBI, and the Warren Commission. In the brief interval between the shooting and the identification of Oswald as the suspect apprehended in the manhunt for the president's assassin, there was much discussion of a right-wing "climate of hate" in Dallas, with specific reference to an anti-UN demonstration in the city a month earlier, in which UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had reportedly been struck with a placard and spat upon by by two of the demonstrators.
That explanation had obvious appeal to not only liberals and left-wingers in the United States, but also the Soviet press in Moscow, which was quick to denounce Dallas as a "hotbed of reaction." To this day, there are those in the media who manage to drag The John Birch Society (which runs this website) into any account of the assassination. "The John Birch Society designated Dallas a regional headquarters and opened a bookstore here," noted Scott Parks in The Dallas Morning News. Assassins have been known to read books, so perhaps that's the connection. Opening a bookstore could be a subversive activity, one that might be the occasion today for a bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security.
Some seemed actually disappointed to learn the accused assassin was not a Southern racist motivated by violent opposition to the president's civil rights bill, but was instead a self-proclaimed Marxist, who had defected to the Soviet Union and boasted of membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Even the president's widow expressed her dismay upon learning of Oswald's background and ideological bent. "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights," Jacqueline Kennedy said of her slain husband, according to William Manchester in his 1967 book, Death of a President. "It's — it had to be some silly little communist."
That a communist might be more dangerous than "silly" apparently had not previously occurred to Mrs. Kennedy. But whether Oswald was, in fact, a lone gunman, part of a conspiracy, and/or the fall guy or "patsy" he claimed to be, there remain, half a century later a number of unanswered questions that the Warren Commission either ignored or glossed over.
They remain unanswered in History Will Prove Us Right by Howard P. Willens, published in time for the 50th anniversary of the assassination. Anyone looking for a point-by-point refutation of the most familiar charges made by critics of the Commission's report are sure to be disappointed. Willens, a Justice Department lawyer at the time, was one of three members of the Commission's supervisory staff that coordinated various aspects of the investigation. The book's title, he tells us in the introduction, is a direct quotation from Chief Justice Warren, who told a lawyer on the Commission not to worry about the report's critics, because "history will prove us right."
Yet the Willens book offers no real vindication of the committee's findings, but is mainly a month-by-month journal of the internal workings of the Commission. It does take note of the withholding of relevant information by the FBI and the CIA, concerning, for example, the CIA's covert plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, for which the Cuban dictator had vowed revenge. But the narrative by Willens simply ignores the troubling questions that still linger half a century later. They include matters as fundamental as:
Oswald's Presence at the Sixth Floor Window
The Commission's star witness on this point was Howard Brennan, a construction worker who reported seeing a man with a rifle firing from the southeast corner window on the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository building — the source, according to the Warren Commission, of all three shots fired at the presidential motorcade. Brennan was standing on the ground opposite the building at the time, but apparently possessed such remarkable powers of observation that he was able to describe the gunman kneeling in the window six floor above him as a slender man, about five feet ten inches tall and in his early thirties. After Oswald's picture had appeared on television, Brennan said that was the man he had seen with the gun in the window. But on the evening of November 22, he declined to make a positive identification when viewing Oswald in a police lineup. In his testimony before the commission, he offered the following explanation:
I could have picked out Oswald without any question. That was the man I saw in the sixth-floor window. But I was afraid for my own life, because I thought there might be others involved in a plot to kill the president. I was the only one that could finger the shooter, and that they might come after me as a result.
Others claimed to have seen one or more persons at the same window moments before the shooting, but Brennan was the only who claimed to have seen Oswald there. His identification of the suspect probably would not have held up under cross-examination had Oswald lived to stand trial, but it was conclusive enough for the Warren Commission.
The Commission is satisfied that, at the least, Brennan saw a man in the window who closely resembled Lee Harvey Oswald, and that Brennan believes the man he saw was in fact Lee Harvey Oswald.
Why Oswald Was Wanted
The Commission identified Brennan as "most probably" the source of the description of the suspect that was called in by Inspector J. Herbert Sawyer and broadcast over the police radio at 12:45 p.m., approximately 15 minutes after the shooting. Yet Brennan testified that he gave the description to Secret Service Agent Forrest Sorrels, the head of the Dallas office of the Secret Service. Sorrels, who was in the motorcade's lead car, did not return from Parkland Hospital until sometime between 12:50 and 12:55, after the bulletin had gone out. Sawyer did not recall speaking to Brennan or to anyone wearing, as Brennan was, a construction worker's hardhat. Whoever was the source for the description of the shooter in the window, Sawyer seemed doubtful of it, telling the dispatcher a moment or two later that "it's unknown if he is still in the building or if he was in there in the first place." (Emphasis added.)
The Mysterious "Mauser"
The Warren Commission was hard pressed to explain how the rifle found on the sixth floor was initially identified as a German Mauser, but later turned out to be the Italian-made Mannilicher-Carcano mailed to "A.J. Hiddel," which police said was an alias used by Oswald. The rifle was discovered by Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman and Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone at approximately 1:15, some 45 minutes after the shooting. Both men described the weapon as a 7.65 mm. Mauser; Weitzman in an affidavit he signed the next day, and Boone in two written reports to his superior, Sheriff J.E. Decker. Ignoring Boone's reports, the Commission explained Weitzman's mistake this way:
Weitzman did not handle the rifle and did not examine it at close range. He had little more than a glimpse of it and thought it was a Mauser, a German bolt-action rifle similar in appearance to the Mannlicher-Carcano. Police laboratory technician subsequently arrived and correctly identified the weapon as a 6.5 Italian rifle.
On the following day, November 23, Weitzman signed an affidavit for the Dallas police, describing in unequivocal terms the weapon he had found: "This rifle was a 7.65 Mauser bolt-action equipped with a 4/18 scope, a thick leather brownish-black sling on it." That appears to be a lot of detail to be gained from "little more than just a glimpse," and it came from law enforcement official who described himself to the commission as "fairly familiar" with rifles "because I was in the sporting goods business awhile. Attorney Mark Lane, whose book Rush to Judgment was one of the early and best-selling attacks on the Warren Report, testified to the Commission about the conflicting reports of the alleged murder weapon.
Although I am personally not a rifle expert, I was able to determine it was an Italian carbine because printed indelibly upon it are the words "Made Italy" and "caliber 6.5." I suggest it is very difficult for a police officer to pick up a weapon which has printed upon it clearly in English "Made Italy, Cal 6.5" and then the next day draft an affidavit stating that it was in fact a German Mauser, 7.65 millimeters.
Weitzman testified that he did not pick up the weapon, but he apparently had a long enough look at it to describe in some detail what he swore in an affidavit was a German Mauser.
The Source and Direction of the Shots
Much has been made of the fact that many of the people in Dealey Plaza that day believed the shots came from behind the stockade fence atop the grassy knoll that was to the front and right of the president when the shots rang out, while the Texas Schoolbook Depository was behind him. A number of both policemen and civilians went rushing up the knoll, presumably in search of the shooter or shooters. It may be, as some have explained, that confusion was caused by an "echo effect" in the plaza. The sight, captured on the now famous Zapruder film, of the president's body falling violently backward and the left when the bullet struck, suggesting a shot from the right front, may have been due to a neuromuscular response, as some ballistics experts have claimed.
But some of the witnesses on the grassy knoll were quite certain shots came from behind them. One of them, Gordon L. Arnold, was a 22-year-old soldier in uniform at the time, recalled standing near the top of the knoll as the motorcade approached. Jim Marrs, author of Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, interviewed Arnold in 1985 and quoted him as follows:
Just after the car turned onto Elm Street and started toward me, a shot went off from over my left shoulder. I felt the bullet rather than heard it, and it went right past my left ear.... You don't really hear the whiz of a bullet; you feel it. You feel something go by and then you hear a report just behind it.
The Bogus "Secret Service" Agents
Arnold also said that he was in the area behind the stockade fence before the motorcade arrived and was ordered to leave by someone who claimed to be with the Secret Service. Other witnesses told of encounters with men claiming to be Secret Service officials in the same area immediately following the shooting. Deputy Constable Weitzman was one. Dallas Police Officer Joe Marshall Smith was another. Smith told the Warren Commission that he encountered someone in the parking lot behind the fence who produced "credentials from his hip pocket which showed him to be Secret Service. I have seen those credentials before and they satisfied me and the deputy sheriff."
The Commission acknowledged Smith's testimony in its report, while pointing out that none of the Secret Service agents was in the area at the time, since all were in the motorcade that sped off to Parkland Hospital. Sorrels was the first to return some 20 to 25 minutes after the shooting. That, however, leaves open the question the Commission did not address: If there were no conspiracy, why were people impersonating Secret Service agents in the vicinity of Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination? Or were Smith, Weitzman, Arnold, and others all mistaken — or lying — about what they saw and heard?
The above are just a few of the inconsistencies and omissions in the Warren Report that Willens never mentions in a book purportedly written to show that the commission got the whole thing right. His narrative suggests, rather, that the commission began with a heavy presumption that foreshadowed and all but dictated its final conclusion: that Oswald was the assassin and that he pulled off the crime of the century with no assistance whatsoever.
There remains any number of possible motivations for the commission to, in Lane's words, "Rush to Judgment" in favor of the "verdict" reached by the Dallas police within 48 hours of the president's assassination. The seven members of the committee, including the chief justice and four members of Congress, had competing duties, making heavy demands on their time. The same was true of the lawyers on the staff, including Arlen Specter, then a district attorney in Philadelphia, and David Belin with a busy private practice in Iowa.
There was also the danger that the discovery of a conspiracy in high places could throw the nation into turmoil. The mere speculation about a plot originating in a foreign country, such as the Soviet Union or Cuba, could, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the commission, "create a very dangerous situation." There was pressure from the press and public get the answers to questions about the assassination sooner rather than later, and political pressure to get the report written and out of the way before the presidential campaign in the fall of 2004. Willens even notes there was an effort, ultimately unsuccessful, to get it done before that year's Democratic National Convention in August. Surely as the new president stood for election, it would be reassuring for the nation to be told authoritatively that the only man responsible for the murder of his predecessor was safely dead and buried.
The order in which the witnesses were called and the manner in which they were interrogated also says something about the political considerations surrounding the commission's investigation. Marina Oswald, widow of the accused assassin, was the first witness and she was called back three more times. Despite what Willens described as the commission's need "to hear from all those in the presidential vehicle," Mrs. Kennedy, seated next to her husband at the time of the shooting, was not called until June, when she was questioned for all of nine minutes. Her appearance and the nature of the questions were negotiated with her brother-in-law, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Neither President Johnson nor his wife Lady Bird, riding two cars behind the president in the motorcade, was called upon to testify.
No reasonable person would suggest that the task give the Warren Commission was easy. But neither is it easy to believe what Willens claims to have been the commission's guiding principle: "Truth is our only client."
Link:
http://thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/17030-history-still-casts-doubts-on-the-warren-commission-report
OOPS!!! I told you these guys are not giving up without a fight...
UN Climate Summit Reaches Deal for Radical Treaty by 2015
Alex Newman
Following two weeks of theatrical United Nations “climate-change” negotiations in Warsaw, Poland, almost 200 governments and dictators purporting to speak for humanity eventually inked a deal at the last moment.Vowing to adopt a planetary treaty set to be finalized in 2015, the “climate dignitaries” pledged to give themselves and the UN more power and more money, all at humanity’s expense, to supposedly fight alleged global warming. They all dutifully celebrated their purported accomplishments, too.
Critics of the climate hysteria and the UN summit, though, were left confused — especially considering the spectacular implosion of the UN’s global-warming theories, which is still accelerating as some experts even predict an upcoming cooling period. Despite the fact that “global warming” actually stopped more than 16 years ago — in the process obliterating the credibility of every single one of the 73 debunked “climate” models used by the UN — the assembled government representatives claimed their deal was needed to save the world from alleged “man-made climate change.”
Top scientists, meanwhile, continued to ridicule the tax-funded climate alarmists throughout the spectacle. Still, negotiators in Warsaw worked in their bubble, seemingly detached from reality and the outside world where 50,000 protesters gathered in opposition to the machinations, to wage more war on freedom and sovereignty — all of it under the guise of fighting against the essential-to-life gas carbon dioxide.
Despite being outlandishly referred to as “pollution” by the UN and its allies, CO2 is exhaled by humans and necessary for plant life. On top of that, human emissions of CO2 account for a mere fraction of one percent of all “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere — though there is no question that the ringleaders of the climate-alarmism machine have an outsized “carbon footprint” when compared with everyday people.
In the end, participants at the UN global-warming summit — power-hungry UN bureaucrats, bloated Western powers desperate for carbon taxes, and ruthless Third World dictators hoping for more “climate” loot — agreed to the basic “principles” that will guide their 2015 “climate” treaty. Among the key components of the UN scheme will be the transfer of huge sums of wealth from Western taxpayers to Third World despots under the guise of “loss and damage,” one of the myriad largely meaningless terms tossed out at the UN summit to justify the extortion.
Hoping to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol with an even more radical global-warming regime, climate negotiators also agreed that the national governments and dictators they represent — all under UN guidance, of course — would have to accelerate their assaults on economic freedom and prosperity to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. Western governments will have to crack down the hardest, negotiators agreed, but even poor countries impoverished largely by corrupt and autocratic rulers will have to perpetuate the poverty as well. If the UN gets its way, CO2 emissions will eventually be rationed as part of a “carbon budget” for humanity.
On Saturday, the last day of the global-warming confab, a spokesman for UN boss Ban Ki-moon celebrated the outcome. “The decisions adopted in Warsaw serve as an important stepping stone toward a universal legal agreement in 2015,” the spokesman said, referring to the date when the UN hopes to have its “climate” regime approved at a summit in Paris. “The Secretary-General welcomes the decision by Parties to intensify immediate actions to fight climate change and to come forward with their national contributions to the agreement well before its finalization in 2015.”
If the alarmists at the UN and its member governments get their way, the draconian “global-warming” treaty replacing Kyoto would go into effect by 2020. All of the “commitments” on CO2 reductions are supposed to be announced ahead of the Paris conference. Citing the UN’s debunked theories, however, Ban’s spokesman claimed “much more” must be done over the next two years to achieve “the ambitious agreement” that he claims is “necessary” to keep global temperatures from rising more than two degrees.
“To further increase global ambition and advance concrete climate action, the Secretary-General looks forward to hosting a Climate Summit in September 2014,” said the tax-funded mouthpiece for the planetary entity’s chief. According to the statement, the UN boss is also calling on “world leaders” — as well as business, finance, local government, and “civil society” bosses — to bring “bold announcements and actions” to the next global-warming summit.
The supposed goal, the statement continued, is to have “significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions” and stepped-up efforts at “adaption and resilience” to global warming. Apparently the UN boss never got the memo, or he may have ignored it, but even temperature data gathered from the world’s premier alarmist institutions show that “global warming” stopped more than a decade and a half ago. Whether it will begin rising again remains unclear. For now, alarmists mostly cite what critics call the “Theory of ‘The Ocean Ate My Global Warming’” to explain the fact that temperatures have not risen in accordance with UN theories and models.
However, the UN’s climate czar, Christiana Figueres, explained last year that the real goal of the global-warming agreement was actually the “complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.” Individual liberty, free markets, national sovereignty, and more will all have to go, the UN has admitted on numerous occasions, using everything from poverty to now-discredited global warming theories to justify the assaults on humanity.
Surrounded by largely tax-funded “activists” with “non-governmental” outfits screaming for “climate justice” and other nonsensical demands, the delegates in Warsaw were seemingly able to ignore the imploding of the “science” underpinning the theories. Instead of the real issue of crumbling “science,” for example, one of the staged “controversies” that received the most press throughout the UN summit was the laughable demands of Third World dictators for trillions of dollars’ worth of climate reparations.
In essence, when their regimes’ demand for $100 billion annually from Western taxpayers to start with was not immediately accepted, negotiators representing more than 130 tin-horn autocrats and governments ruling poorer nations walked out in a made-for-the-media charade. In the end, representatives purporting to speak for wealthier, freer nations capitulated, promising to hand over “increasing levels” of the climate loot being demanded on the road to securing a global treaty.
The establishment media, of course, continued to cover for participants in the spectacle. For example, the press, as usual, deceptively referred to participants throughout the UN summit as “countries” — as if Zimbabwe’s Marxist regime of Robert Mugabe or the cruel self-styled god-man enslaving the people of North Korea or the mass-murdering genocidal maniac ruling Sudan or any number of ruthless autocrats whose minions attended the UN meeting could be characterized as “nations.”
Another key deception parroted by the media was the notion that human CO2 emissions contributed to the typhoon that recently struck the Philippines — an unscientific fraud that even the UN’s own discredited science rejected. Critics of the UN summit, though, lambasted the deception and hysteria, making a mockery of what more than a few experts have called the “fraud” being perpetrated by governments and international bureaucrats.
“There’s a level of deep exploitation going on, and the UN is allowing this and media is feeding this, as if a UN treaty is going to prevent future super-typhoons from hitting,” noted prominent climate skeptic Marc Morano, who runs Climate Depot and has been among the key players exposing the UN’s imploding theories. “This is supposed to be the modern age,” he continued during a press conference at the summit, ridiculing the notion that policy measures could change the climate as being akin to “medieval witchcraft.”
Still, even the wildly alarmist UN “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” acknowledged in its latest error-packed global warming report — promptly ridiculed by top scientists and experts worldwide — that human CO2 emissions are almost certainly not responsible for cyclones. Top UN bosses apparently never bothered to read the entity’s own report, perhaps aware of its unscientific silliness. Instead, all of them harped on the latest typhoon as an allegedly compelling reason to further centralize power at the UN while accelerating the assault on prosperity worldwide.
Morano also slammed the discredited UN IPCC — which has been rejected as a “laughingstock” and “hilarious” even by many of its own scientists who have resigned in disgust over the years — as a “front” for international bureaucrats. “They don’t want you to know that these are political statements issued by a small group of scientists and designed to create the illusion of consensus,” he said, echoing concerns expressed by countless experts — including many who have served on the UN body.
Praising the new Australian government’s rejection of carbon taxes and what authorities called UN “socialism masquerading as environmentalism,” Morano also reportedly said the U.S. government would follow Australia’s lead once the climate alarmist in chief, Obama, was safely away from the levers of power. Credible polls consistently show that the majority of Americans reject the UN’s global-warming theories and put alleged climate change close to the bottom in terms of issues of concern.
With the UN’s climate theories increasingly becoming punch lines of jokes, however, analysts say that the extremist establishment behind the global-warming treaty machinations has no plans to give up on its plot to foist a new agreement on the world. While experts say the U.S. Senate is unlikely to adopt any economy-destroying treaties at the moment, critics of the UN alarmism say the broader fight against bogus science being used to implement tyranny must be stepped up if liberty and sanity are to prevail.
Link:
http://thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/17026-un-climate-summit-reaches-deal-for-radical-treaty-by-2015
Alex Newman
Following two weeks of theatrical United Nations “climate-change” negotiations in Warsaw, Poland, almost 200 governments and dictators purporting to speak for humanity eventually inked a deal at the last moment.Vowing to adopt a planetary treaty set to be finalized in 2015, the “climate dignitaries” pledged to give themselves and the UN more power and more money, all at humanity’s expense, to supposedly fight alleged global warming. They all dutifully celebrated their purported accomplishments, too.
Critics of the climate hysteria and the UN summit, though, were left confused — especially considering the spectacular implosion of the UN’s global-warming theories, which is still accelerating as some experts even predict an upcoming cooling period. Despite the fact that “global warming” actually stopped more than 16 years ago — in the process obliterating the credibility of every single one of the 73 debunked “climate” models used by the UN — the assembled government representatives claimed their deal was needed to save the world from alleged “man-made climate change.”
Top scientists, meanwhile, continued to ridicule the tax-funded climate alarmists throughout the spectacle. Still, negotiators in Warsaw worked in their bubble, seemingly detached from reality and the outside world where 50,000 protesters gathered in opposition to the machinations, to wage more war on freedom and sovereignty — all of it under the guise of fighting against the essential-to-life gas carbon dioxide.
Despite being outlandishly referred to as “pollution” by the UN and its allies, CO2 is exhaled by humans and necessary for plant life. On top of that, human emissions of CO2 account for a mere fraction of one percent of all “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere — though there is no question that the ringleaders of the climate-alarmism machine have an outsized “carbon footprint” when compared with everyday people.
In the end, participants at the UN global-warming summit — power-hungry UN bureaucrats, bloated Western powers desperate for carbon taxes, and ruthless Third World dictators hoping for more “climate” loot — agreed to the basic “principles” that will guide their 2015 “climate” treaty. Among the key components of the UN scheme will be the transfer of huge sums of wealth from Western taxpayers to Third World despots under the guise of “loss and damage,” one of the myriad largely meaningless terms tossed out at the UN summit to justify the extortion.
Hoping to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol with an even more radical global-warming regime, climate negotiators also agreed that the national governments and dictators they represent — all under UN guidance, of course — would have to accelerate their assaults on economic freedom and prosperity to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. Western governments will have to crack down the hardest, negotiators agreed, but even poor countries impoverished largely by corrupt and autocratic rulers will have to perpetuate the poverty as well. If the UN gets its way, CO2 emissions will eventually be rationed as part of a “carbon budget” for humanity.
On Saturday, the last day of the global-warming confab, a spokesman for UN boss Ban Ki-moon celebrated the outcome. “The decisions adopted in Warsaw serve as an important stepping stone toward a universal legal agreement in 2015,” the spokesman said, referring to the date when the UN hopes to have its “climate” regime approved at a summit in Paris. “The Secretary-General welcomes the decision by Parties to intensify immediate actions to fight climate change and to come forward with their national contributions to the agreement well before its finalization in 2015.”
If the alarmists at the UN and its member governments get their way, the draconian “global-warming” treaty replacing Kyoto would go into effect by 2020. All of the “commitments” on CO2 reductions are supposed to be announced ahead of the Paris conference. Citing the UN’s debunked theories, however, Ban’s spokesman claimed “much more” must be done over the next two years to achieve “the ambitious agreement” that he claims is “necessary” to keep global temperatures from rising more than two degrees.
“To further increase global ambition and advance concrete climate action, the Secretary-General looks forward to hosting a Climate Summit in September 2014,” said the tax-funded mouthpiece for the planetary entity’s chief. According to the statement, the UN boss is also calling on “world leaders” — as well as business, finance, local government, and “civil society” bosses — to bring “bold announcements and actions” to the next global-warming summit.
The supposed goal, the statement continued, is to have “significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions” and stepped-up efforts at “adaption and resilience” to global warming. Apparently the UN boss never got the memo, or he may have ignored it, but even temperature data gathered from the world’s premier alarmist institutions show that “global warming” stopped more than a decade and a half ago. Whether it will begin rising again remains unclear. For now, alarmists mostly cite what critics call the “Theory of ‘The Ocean Ate My Global Warming’” to explain the fact that temperatures have not risen in accordance with UN theories and models.
However, the UN’s climate czar, Christiana Figueres, explained last year that the real goal of the global-warming agreement was actually the “complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.” Individual liberty, free markets, national sovereignty, and more will all have to go, the UN has admitted on numerous occasions, using everything from poverty to now-discredited global warming theories to justify the assaults on humanity.
Surrounded by largely tax-funded “activists” with “non-governmental” outfits screaming for “climate justice” and other nonsensical demands, the delegates in Warsaw were seemingly able to ignore the imploding of the “science” underpinning the theories. Instead of the real issue of crumbling “science,” for example, one of the staged “controversies” that received the most press throughout the UN summit was the laughable demands of Third World dictators for trillions of dollars’ worth of climate reparations.
In essence, when their regimes’ demand for $100 billion annually from Western taxpayers to start with was not immediately accepted, negotiators representing more than 130 tin-horn autocrats and governments ruling poorer nations walked out in a made-for-the-media charade. In the end, representatives purporting to speak for wealthier, freer nations capitulated, promising to hand over “increasing levels” of the climate loot being demanded on the road to securing a global treaty.
The establishment media, of course, continued to cover for participants in the spectacle. For example, the press, as usual, deceptively referred to participants throughout the UN summit as “countries” — as if Zimbabwe’s Marxist regime of Robert Mugabe or the cruel self-styled god-man enslaving the people of North Korea or the mass-murdering genocidal maniac ruling Sudan or any number of ruthless autocrats whose minions attended the UN meeting could be characterized as “nations.”
Another key deception parroted by the media was the notion that human CO2 emissions contributed to the typhoon that recently struck the Philippines — an unscientific fraud that even the UN’s own discredited science rejected. Critics of the UN summit, though, lambasted the deception and hysteria, making a mockery of what more than a few experts have called the “fraud” being perpetrated by governments and international bureaucrats.
“There’s a level of deep exploitation going on, and the UN is allowing this and media is feeding this, as if a UN treaty is going to prevent future super-typhoons from hitting,” noted prominent climate skeptic Marc Morano, who runs Climate Depot and has been among the key players exposing the UN’s imploding theories. “This is supposed to be the modern age,” he continued during a press conference at the summit, ridiculing the notion that policy measures could change the climate as being akin to “medieval witchcraft.”
Still, even the wildly alarmist UN “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” acknowledged in its latest error-packed global warming report — promptly ridiculed by top scientists and experts worldwide — that human CO2 emissions are almost certainly not responsible for cyclones. Top UN bosses apparently never bothered to read the entity’s own report, perhaps aware of its unscientific silliness. Instead, all of them harped on the latest typhoon as an allegedly compelling reason to further centralize power at the UN while accelerating the assault on prosperity worldwide.
Morano also slammed the discredited UN IPCC — which has been rejected as a “laughingstock” and “hilarious” even by many of its own scientists who have resigned in disgust over the years — as a “front” for international bureaucrats. “They don’t want you to know that these are political statements issued by a small group of scientists and designed to create the illusion of consensus,” he said, echoing concerns expressed by countless experts — including many who have served on the UN body.
Praising the new Australian government’s rejection of carbon taxes and what authorities called UN “socialism masquerading as environmentalism,” Morano also reportedly said the U.S. government would follow Australia’s lead once the climate alarmist in chief, Obama, was safely away from the levers of power. Credible polls consistently show that the majority of Americans reject the UN’s global-warming theories and put alleged climate change close to the bottom in terms of issues of concern.
With the UN’s climate theories increasingly becoming punch lines of jokes, however, analysts say that the extremist establishment behind the global-warming treaty machinations has no plans to give up on its plot to foist a new agreement on the world. While experts say the U.S. Senate is unlikely to adopt any economy-destroying treaties at the moment, critics of the UN alarmism say the broader fight against bogus science being used to implement tyranny must be stepped up if liberty and sanity are to prevail.
Link:
http://thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/17026-un-climate-summit-reaches-deal-for-radical-treaty-by-2015
Did you think they were reading Rothbard or Hayek???
Patrick Howley
Socialist, Communist, and McCarthy-era blacklisted writers appear on the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) new “Books That Shaped Work in America” list celebrating the department’s 100th anniversary.
A Socialist leader, two Stalin apologists, two blacklisted ’50s screenwriters, and a suspected Marxist are included on the list, which DOL compiled based on recommendations from various figures in the community. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez described the program as an “online book club.”
Better not invite Tailgunner Joe McCarthy.
The first two reds on the list are Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who made it for their 1897 work “Industrial Democracy,” recommended by Carter administration Labor Secretary Ray Marshall. The Webbs were supporters of the Communist economic experiment and are known in academia as apologists for Josef Stalin, whose regime they wrote about from firsthand observation in their 1935 book “Soviet Communism: A New Civilization.”
Read the rest here:
http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/25/socialist-communist-authors-make-obama-administration-reading-list/
"Transforming the schools into quasi-prisons and teaching young people that they have no rights. Zero tolerance policies which criminalize childish behavior continue to destroy the lives of young people such as the 14-year-old arrested for texting in class and the 6-year-olds suspended for using their fingers as imaginary guns in a schoolyard game of cops and robbers."
What We Should Not Be Thankful for This Thanksgiving
By John W. Whitehead
I will be the first to acknowledge that there is much to be thankful for about life in America, especially when compared to those beyond our borders whose daily lives are marked by war, hunger and disease. Despite our kvetching, grumbling and complaining, most Americans have it pretty good compared to less fortunates the world over.
Still, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that all of our so-called blessings will amount to little more than gilding on a cage if we don’t safeguard the freedoms on which this nation was founded. And if there is one freedom in particular need of protecting right now, it is the Fourth Amendment, which has been on life support for quite some time.
It used to be that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was considered the most critical of the amendments in the Bill of Rights. Since writing my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, however, I have come to believe that the Fourth Amendment, which demands that we be “secure” in our persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government and, consequently, stands as a bulwark against the police state, is, in fact, the most critical.
In the true spirit of Thanksgiving, then, here is a list of things about this emerging police state that I am not thankful for and will never remain silent about as long as the government remains the greatest threat to our freedoms.
Police shootings of unarmed citizens. No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. This trend originates from a police preoccupation with ensuring their own safety at all costs, with tragic consequences for the innocent civilians unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
SWAT team raids. On an average day in America, at least 100 Americans have their homes raided by SWAT teams (although I’ve seen estimates as high as 300 a day), which are increasingly used to deal with routine police matters: angry dogs, domestic disputes, search warrants, etc. Unfortunately, general incompetence (officers misread the address on the warrant), collateral damage (fatalities, property damage, etc.) and botched raids (officers barge into the wrong house or even the wrong building) tend to go hand in hand with this overuse of SWAT teams, with tragic consequences for the homeowner who mistakes a SWAT raid for a home invasion.
Arresting Americans for altogether legal activities such as picking their kids up from school, holding Bible studies at home, and selling goat cheese. Unfortunately, our government’s tendency towards militarization and overcriminalization, in which routine, everyday behaviors become targets of regulation and prohibition, have resulted in Americans getting arrested for making and selling unpasteurized goat cheese, cultivating certain types of orchids, feeding a whale, holding Bible studies in their homes, and picking their kids up from school.
Jailing Americans for profit. At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, as states attempt to save money by outsourcing prisons to private corporations, imprisoning Americans in private prisons run by mega-corporations has turned into a cash cow for big business. And how do you keep the prisons full? By passing laws aimed at increasing the prison population, including the imposition of life sentences on people who commit minor or nonviolent crimes such as siphoning gasoline.
Transforming the schools into quasi-prisons and teaching young people that they have no rights. Zero tolerance policies which criminalize childish behavior continue to destroy the lives of young people such as the 14-year-old arrested for texting in class and the 6-year-olds suspended for using their fingers as imaginary guns in a schoolyard game of cops and robbers.
Surveillance drones taking to the skies domestically. With at least 30,000 drones expected to occupy U.S. airspace by 2020, ushering in a $30 billion per year industry, police departments are already queuing up for their drones. Indeed, the drones coming to a neighborhood near you will be small, capable of flying through city streets and buildings almost undetected, while hovering over cityscapes and public events for long periods of time, providing a means of 24/7 surveillance.
TSA searches that accustom citizens to life in a police state. Under the direction of the Transportation Security Administration, American travelers have been subjected to all manner of searches ranging from whole-body scanners and enhanced patdowns at airports to bag searches in train stations and sports arenas. Mind you, this is the same agency that is now installing detention pods in airports, requiring passengers to submit to searches and screenings before they can exit the airport.
Illegal, invasive spying on Americans. There is no form of digital communication that the government cannot and does not monitor—phone calls, emails, text messages, tweets, Facebook posts, internet video chats, etc., are all accessible, trackable and downloadable by federal agents. In other words, there is nothing private from the government, which has used a variety of covert, unconstitutional tactics to gain access to Americans’ personal data, online purchases and banking, medical records, and online communications.
Thus, while there’s much to be thankful for—the blessings of family, security, food, opportunity, etc.—it’s the things I’mnot thankful for that have me greatly concerned about the emerging American police state. So do me a favor. Before you get distracted by the gathering of family and friends and the feasting and the football and the fleeting sense of goodwill and the traditional counting of blessings, take a moment to remind yourself and those around you of the things we should NOT be thankful for this year—the things that no American should tolerate from its government—the things that don’t belong in the “city on a hill” envisioned by John F. Kennedy as the standard for a government “constructed and inhabited by men aware of their grave trust and their great responsibilities.”
Mind you, if we do not push back against the growing menace of the police state now, future Thanksgivings may find us giving thanks for creature comforts that serve only to lessen the pain of having lost our most basic freedoms.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/11/john-w-whitehead/dont-be-thankful-for-tyranny/
By John W. Whitehead
I will be the first to acknowledge that there is much to be thankful for about life in America, especially when compared to those beyond our borders whose daily lives are marked by war, hunger and disease. Despite our kvetching, grumbling and complaining, most Americans have it pretty good compared to less fortunates the world over.
Still, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that all of our so-called blessings will amount to little more than gilding on a cage if we don’t safeguard the freedoms on which this nation was founded. And if there is one freedom in particular need of protecting right now, it is the Fourth Amendment, which has been on life support for quite some time.
It used to be that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was considered the most critical of the amendments in the Bill of Rights. Since writing my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, however, I have come to believe that the Fourth Amendment, which demands that we be “secure” in our persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government and, consequently, stands as a bulwark against the police state, is, in fact, the most critical.
In the true spirit of Thanksgiving, then, here is a list of things about this emerging police state that I am not thankful for and will never remain silent about as long as the government remains the greatest threat to our freedoms.
Police shootings of unarmed citizens. No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. This trend originates from a police preoccupation with ensuring their own safety at all costs, with tragic consequences for the innocent civilians unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
SWAT team raids. On an average day in America, at least 100 Americans have their homes raided by SWAT teams (although I’ve seen estimates as high as 300 a day), which are increasingly used to deal with routine police matters: angry dogs, domestic disputes, search warrants, etc. Unfortunately, general incompetence (officers misread the address on the warrant), collateral damage (fatalities, property damage, etc.) and botched raids (officers barge into the wrong house or even the wrong building) tend to go hand in hand with this overuse of SWAT teams, with tragic consequences for the homeowner who mistakes a SWAT raid for a home invasion.
Arresting Americans for altogether legal activities such as picking their kids up from school, holding Bible studies at home, and selling goat cheese. Unfortunately, our government’s tendency towards militarization and overcriminalization, in which routine, everyday behaviors become targets of regulation and prohibition, have resulted in Americans getting arrested for making and selling unpasteurized goat cheese, cultivating certain types of orchids, feeding a whale, holding Bible studies in their homes, and picking their kids up from school.
Jailing Americans for profit. At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, as states attempt to save money by outsourcing prisons to private corporations, imprisoning Americans in private prisons run by mega-corporations has turned into a cash cow for big business. And how do you keep the prisons full? By passing laws aimed at increasing the prison population, including the imposition of life sentences on people who commit minor or nonviolent crimes such as siphoning gasoline.
Transforming the schools into quasi-prisons and teaching young people that they have no rights. Zero tolerance policies which criminalize childish behavior continue to destroy the lives of young people such as the 14-year-old arrested for texting in class and the 6-year-olds suspended for using their fingers as imaginary guns in a schoolyard game of cops and robbers.
Surveillance drones taking to the skies domestically. With at least 30,000 drones expected to occupy U.S. airspace by 2020, ushering in a $30 billion per year industry, police departments are already queuing up for their drones. Indeed, the drones coming to a neighborhood near you will be small, capable of flying through city streets and buildings almost undetected, while hovering over cityscapes and public events for long periods of time, providing a means of 24/7 surveillance.
TSA searches that accustom citizens to life in a police state. Under the direction of the Transportation Security Administration, American travelers have been subjected to all manner of searches ranging from whole-body scanners and enhanced patdowns at airports to bag searches in train stations and sports arenas. Mind you, this is the same agency that is now installing detention pods in airports, requiring passengers to submit to searches and screenings before they can exit the airport.
Illegal, invasive spying on Americans. There is no form of digital communication that the government cannot and does not monitor—phone calls, emails, text messages, tweets, Facebook posts, internet video chats, etc., are all accessible, trackable and downloadable by federal agents. In other words, there is nothing private from the government, which has used a variety of covert, unconstitutional tactics to gain access to Americans’ personal data, online purchases and banking, medical records, and online communications.
Thus, while there’s much to be thankful for—the blessings of family, security, food, opportunity, etc.—it’s the things I’mnot thankful for that have me greatly concerned about the emerging American police state. So do me a favor. Before you get distracted by the gathering of family and friends and the feasting and the football and the fleeting sense of goodwill and the traditional counting of blessings, take a moment to remind yourself and those around you of the things we should NOT be thankful for this year—the things that no American should tolerate from its government—the things that don’t belong in the “city on a hill” envisioned by John F. Kennedy as the standard for a government “constructed and inhabited by men aware of their grave trust and their great responsibilities.”
Mind you, if we do not push back against the growing menace of the police state now, future Thanksgivings may find us giving thanks for creature comforts that serve only to lessen the pain of having lost our most basic freedoms.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/11/john-w-whitehead/dont-be-thankful-for-tyranny/
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