Showing posts with label MLK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MLK. Show all posts

Friday 22 February 2013

Coup d'etat: John Dean: Dick Cheney is Guilty of Murder



This is why Keith Olbermann is no longer on television.





First Recorded Usage of the Term "Conspiracy Theory"



NYU Media Professor Mark Crispin Miller records that the phrase 'conspiracy theory' only became a popular in journalistic discourse as a label for describing commentators who publicly doubted the findings of the Warren Commission

This CIA internal document, is the first recorded occurrence of the phrase "conspiracy theory in the English lexicon. Note the context under which it was first invoked.


"Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries."

http://www.namebase.org/foia/jfk01.html

Countering Criticism of the Warren Report
1 April 1967


JFK 01, p.1

Chiefs, Certain Stations and Bases
Document Number 1035-960
for FOIA Review on Sep 1976

SUBJECT: Countering Criticism of the Warren Report


For Oswald file:2 copies

This was pulled together by ... in close conjunction with.... We furnished most of the source material, proposed many of the themes, and provided general "expertise" on the case. The Spectator article was written 23 Jan 1967

PSYCH


1. Our Concern. From the day of President Kennedy's assassination on, there has been speculation about the responsibility for his murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report (which appeared at the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the Commission's published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning, and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission's findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren Commission's Report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46% of the American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of those polled thought that the Commission had left some questions unresolved. Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse, results.


2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization. The members of the Warren Commission were naturally chosen for their integrity, experience, and prominence. They represented both major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections of the country. Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination. Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.



3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is active, however, addressees are requested:

CS COPY
9 attachments h/w
DATE 4/1/67
1- Satts
8-Unclassified
DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED



a. To discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.


b. To employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passage to assets. Our play should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (i) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (ii) politically interested, (iii) financially interested, (iv) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (v) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher Knebel article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark Lane's book is much less convincing than Epstein's and comes off badly where contested by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.)


4. In private or media discussion not directed at any particular writer, or in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments should be useful:


a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider. The assassination is sometimes compared (e.g., by Joachim Joesten and Bertrand Russell) with the Dreyfus case; however, unlike that case, the attacks on the Warren Commission have produced no new evidence, no new culprits have been convincingly identified, and there is no agreement among the critics. (A better parallel, though an imperfect one, might be with the Reichstag fire of 1933, which some competent historians (Fritz Tobias, A.J.P. Taylor, D.C. Watt) now believe was set by Van der Lubbe on his own initiative, without acting for either Nazis or Communists; the Nazis tried to pin the blame on the Communists, but the latter have been much more successful in convincing the world that the Nazis were to blame.)


b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual eyewitnesses (which are less reliable and more divergent -- and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism) and less on ballistic, autopsy, and photographic evidence. A close examination of the Commission's records will usually show that the conflicting eyewitness accounts are quoted out of context, or were discarded by the commission for good and sufficient reason.


c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc. Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy's brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy. And as one reviewer pointed out, Congressman Gerald R. Ford would hardly have held his tongue for the sake of the Democratic administration, and Senator Russell would have had every political interest in exposing any misdeeds on the part of Chief Justice Warren. A conspirator moreover would hardly choose a location for a shooting where so much depended on conditions beyond his control: the route, the speed of the cars, the moving target, the risk that the assassin would be discovered. A group of wealthy conspirators could have arranged much more secure conditions.


d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or the other. Actually, the make-up of the Commission and its staff was an excellent safeguard against over-commitment to any one theory; or against the illicit transformation of probabilities into certainties.

e. Oswald would not have been any sensible person's choice for a co-conspirator. He was a "loner," mixed-up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service.


f. As to charges that the Commission's report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was largely due to the pressure of irresponsible speculation already appearing, in some cases coming from the same critics who, refusing to admit their errors, are now putting out new criticisms.


g. Such vague accusations as that "more than ten people have died mysteriously" can always be explained in some more natural way: e.g., the individuals concerned have for the most part died of natural causes; the Commission staff questioned 418 witnesses (the FBI interviewed far more people, conducting 25,000 interviews and reinterviews), and in such a large group, a certain number of deaths are to be expected. (When Penn Jones, one of the originators of the "ten mysterious deaths" line, appeared on television, it emerged that two of the deaths on his list were from heart attacks, one from cancer, one was from a head-on collision on a bridge, and one occurred when a driver drifted into a bridge abutment.)


5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to the Commission's Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still be impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with which the Commission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the Report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics.



Professor Miller suggests that an attempt was orchestrated by the CIA and their friends in the media to soil the phrase 'conspiracy theorist' with connotations of craziness, noting that since 1980 it has taken on an almost exclusively perjorative connotation, as if conspiracies contrary to the official narrative are unlikely in the extreme. As a consequence, while distrust of authority used to be common place, the label 'conspiracy theorist' has become an ad hominem attack used on those with opinions which threaten the powers that be, as if anyone harboring such thoughts can be safely dismissed as a victim of irrational paranoia, possibly even mentally unbalanced or dangerous.

Thursday 21 February 2013

Bush/Reagan/Haig/Hinkley: "Pay no attention to the man crouching on the balcony"



Context:






So, again:









This below is the official blow-by-blow of the even using the Secret Service radio traffic, declassified under FOIA for Del Wilber's book, Rawhide Down.

The decision to go to GW and not to Crown (the White House) or Bethesda (as called for under Standard Operating procedure) saved Reagan's life.

The X-factor here was Gerry Parr -who was not supposed to be there there that day.

He was head of Rawhide's detail, but he had not ridden with the client (i.e. Reagan) since the inaugural, over two months and just decided on  a whim, to personally ride with Reagan that day, as he felt he needed to get to know him better.

It was Parr who got Reagan into the car, it was Parr who was able to deflect the other Secret Service agent in front of him and Reagan to take one of the shots, and it was Parr who made the judgement call forget procedure  breach normal operational security drills and take Reagan to the (civilian) ER at George Washington Hospital - which saved his life.

George Bush, meanwhile, was away from Washington on some prefunctory excuse, but Wilbur's book further notes than upon hearing the news, Bush refused point blank to get back on his plane and return to Washington - again, standard operating procedure (as witnessed with Dick Cheney on 9/11) was for the Secret Service to physically pick up the Vice President and manhandle him aboard Air Force Two, take off immediately, put him inside the White House and secure him inside the Special Operations, In-Extremis Situation Room bunker in the White House basement.

Bush flatly refused to set foot on his, or any other plane and OVERRULED his Head of Detail - which is unthinkable.

Reagan still arrived at the ER AFTER Bill Brady, who had been left on the ground with a brain injury for an additional 10 mins following the departure of the limo before being put into the back of an ambulance.

Someone wasn't running all the red lights they could have that day.

Notice also, the idea that the bullet richoeted into Reagan's left side from hitting the car on his right side and followed a downward path is ridiculous - the bullets hitting the upper windows of the building across the street provide good and clear evidence that Hinkley was shooting straight ahead and then UP (presumably once he was spotted and tackled);

Someone ELSE was shooting DOWN....

Hinkley was not taken to a police station, or even a Secret Service or FBI field office.

He was taken to an Army base for his initial interrogation / debrief, where it seems (in the least) his Miranda rights were waived.





Aftermath:













M-20 (ONE STEP BEYOND 7/17/88)




Presents circumstantial evidence suggesting that then Vice- President George Bush may have been involved with the attempt on the life of former President Reagan. Discussion centers on the close connections between the family of convicted would-be assassin John Hinckley and the Bush family as well as Hinckley's Nazi background.







Revisionism:

Amazingly, this TV Movie dramatisation DOES feature the sniper on the balcony - there is no effort made to suggest that he wasn't there.

The official line being pushed of course here is that this man was one of the Secret Service's own sharp-shooters; deployed to TAKE DOWN shooters in the crowd like Hinkley.

These sharp shooters may or may not exist and they may or may not have been deployed on the day Reagan was shot - the point is moot, in as much as the place where the Secret Service retroactively want to SAY they had one of their guys stationed with a rife is the place where the bullet that hit Reagan clearly can be said to have originated from.


According to official legend, Hinkley fired into Reagan with illegal "Devastator" bullets, soft-nose anti-personnel hollow-point round.

Wouldn't hollow-point or soft-nosed rifle round be just what you would expect a sniper rifle to be loaded with where stopping power is a priority? 



Irrespective of what Secret Service may say now, or how they attempt to rationalise away the apparent rifleman crouched in the hotel balcony along the line of sight to Reagan's injury, it's fairly implausible that a trained and presumably top-rated government sharp-shooter would miss the Presidential assassin and instead pop POTUS in the armpit, right at his heart (but for the grace of God and a well-placed rib), so it defies belief that the shot - if indeed it originated from there - was accidental.

We might note, however, that the fictionalised West Wing assassination attempt, (patterned VERY closely in all respects on the March 31st incident, right down to the actions of Secret Service in the limo and the Virigina location) features multiple shooters, firing downwards, from an elevated position in an adjacent building - who then get taken out by Secret Service sharpshooters.

Dick Cheney - JSOC Targetted Killing of Benzir Bhutto (and un-targeted killing of 157 innocent bystanders)

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."

Seymour Hersh, University of Minnesota , March 10th 2009











KARACHI, Pakistan, Oct. 19 — Looking pale and shaken the day after she survived a suicide bomb attack, the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto said Friday that she had warned the Pakistani government that suicide bomb squads were going to go after her on her return to the country and that it had failed to act on the information.



Ms. Bhutto did not blame the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, for the bomb blasts and said extremist Islamic groups who wanted to take over the country were behind the attacks, which killed 134 people.

But she pointed the finger at government officials who she said were sympathetic to the militants and were abusing their powers to advance their cause. She did not identify them on Friday, but said she had in a letter to the government this Tuesday. It was not clear if she was implicating the officials directly or accusing them of dragging their feet on her warning.

“I am not accusing the government, but I am accusing certain individuals who abuse their positions, who abuse their powers,” she said at a news conference of hundreds of journalists in the garden of her home in Clifton, an upscale neighborhood of the southern port city of Karachi.

“I know in my heart who my enemies are,” she added. “There is a poem that says that even if you hide yourself behind seven veils, I can still see your hand.”



While it was not possible to assess the veracity of Ms. Bhutto’s charges, she has long accused parts of the government, namely Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, of working against her and her party because they oppose her liberal, secular agenda.

Aides close to Ms. Bhutto said that one of those named in the letter was Ijaz Shah, the director general of the Intelligence Bureau, another of the country’s intelligence agencies and a close associate of General Musharraf.

Mr. Shah hung up when asked by telephone for a reaction to the allegations.

Ms. Bhutto seemed careful on Friday not to implicate General Musharraf, taking pains for the time being to preserve the power-sharing arrangement that allowed her to return to Pakistan, and which may make her prime minister for a third time after parliamentary elections in January. She spoke to the president by telephone on Friday.

The ISI has for decades backed militant Islamic groups in Kashmir and in Afghanistan in pursuit of a military strategy established by the former military dictator, Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, in the 1970s. “I know exactly who wants to kill me,” Ms. Bhutto said. “It is dignitaries of the former regime of General Zia who are today behind the extremism and the fanaticism.”



Before her return, she said a “brotherly country,” which she did not identify, warned her that several suicide squads were plotting attacks against her — one from a Taliban group, one from Al Qaeda, one from Pakistani Taliban and one from Karachi.

That friendly government, she said, had also supplied Pakistan’s government with telephone numbers the plotters were using.

“I would hope with so much information in their hands the government would have been able to apprehend them,” she said, “but I can understand the difficulties.”

Aware of the risks she faced, she said she sent General Musharraf the letter two days before her return, naming “three individuals and more” who should be investigated for their sympathies with the militants in case she was assassinated.

She added that there were more plots against her, including one to infiltrate police guarding her homes in Karachi and the rural district of Larkana in order to mount attacks “in the garb of a rival political party.”

Ms. Bhutto said the street lamps had been turned off Thursday night as her cavalcade inched its way through Karachi, amid perhaps as many as 200,000 supporters and party workers who had turned out to celebrate her return after eight years of self-imposed exile to avoid corruption charges.




The darkness made it difficult, she said, for her security officials to scan the crowd for possible bombers. She did not accuse the government of turning off the lights, but demanded an investigation.

A security official said the government was investigating which group was behind the blasts, and said that five groups of militants from Pakistan’s tribal areas, on the Afghan border, had trained and dispatched suicide bombers for her arrival.




The details of the attack remained disputed on Friday. Ms. Bhutto implied that the two blasts were set off by two bombers. Government officials, who updated the toll to 134 killed and about 450 wounded, said the explosions were caused by one bomber on foot who first detonated a grenade and then blew himself up, scattering a lethal mix of screws, pellets and shrapnel into the dense crowd massed around Ms. Bhutto’s armored truck.



“We have no doubt it was a suicide attack,” the home secretary of Sindh province, Ghulam Muhammad Mohtarem, a retired brigadier, said Friday at a news conference, flanked by the Karachi police chief and other high-ranking police officials.

The target, he agreed, was Ms. Bhutto. “It can’t be definitively said which group was involved but it is one of the extremist groups,” he said.

Baitullah Mehsud, a pro-Taliban militant commander from Pakistan’s tribal areas, who has been accused of threatening to send bombers after Ms. Bhutto, denied that he was involved, Reuters reported.






Ms. Bhutto said the attack was more than an assassination attempt on her, and represented the broader aims of Islamist terrorism. “The attack was not on me,” she said, “the attack was on what I represent, it was an attack on democracy, by those who are against the unity and integrity of Pakistan.”

The blasts killed 50 of the security guards from her Pakistan People’s Party who had formed a human chain around her truck to keep potential bombers away, Ms. Bhutto said.

A woman and a small child were among the dead, she said. A number of senior officials on the truck were also wounded. Officials said six police officers were killed and 20 wounded.

Ms. Bhutto said she had been sitting down at the back of the truck to relieve her swollen feet, and to go over a speech with her political assistant, and so had avoided the force of the blast.

She vowed that she would not be deterred by the attack. “They are saying peace-loving people are not safe to gather,” she said of the militants. “A minority wants to hijack the destiny of this great nation. And we will not be intimidated by this minority.”

“I know who the forces are of militancy, and I know they want to kill me because they are cowards,” she added. “They cannot face the people of Pakistan in the political field.”

She said she had thanked people in the government who also have given her warnings of plots. She appealed for them to continue passing her information.

General Musharraf called Ms. Bhutto on Friday, expressed his “shock and profound grief” and prayed for the safety and security of Ms. Bhutto, the government news agency, the Associated Press of Pakistan, reported.

“The president expressed his firm resolve that all possible steps would be taken and a thorough investigation would be carried out to bring the perpetrators to justice,” the news agency said.

It added that the president had ordered law enforcement authorities to track down the mastermind of the bombings within 48 hours, and had offered a force of special services commandos trained by the United States to Ms. Bhutto for her protection.

Karachi was almost deserted Friday in the aftermath of the attack. Almost all shopping malls and business centers closed for fear of more violence. A crowd gathered at the scene of the blasts to offer prayers on the blood-stained median dividing the road. The heavy smell of dead bodies hung in the air.

At a morgue run by the Edhi Foundation, a private relief organization, bodies wrapped in white shrouds were brought in from hospitals around the city. Distraught relatives milled around to inquire about the dead and missing, covering their noses to escape the stench.

Ali Muhammad, 45, a driver, was standing with reddened eyes near the information room on Friday at noon. He said his 18-year-old nephew Zohaib had been missing since last night.

“We searched in every hospital,” he said, close to tears. “We inquired from every police station. It’s only just now that we have located him here. The body is all blood.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/20/world/asia/20Pakistan.html?_r=0




"I received information that I could be attacked by Hamza Bin Laden, the son of Osama Bin Laden..."

"...Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Osama Bin Laden..."




.......














Operation Neptune Spear (aka The Bin Laden Raid) was one of the last and most recent JSOC Operations, one of the few carried out by the current administration, due to the afore mentioned concern and alarm over the vast number of collateral deaths.

Even official accounts of Operation Neptune Spear confirm that Hamza Bin Laden was present and confirmed killed at the Bin Laden compound in Abbattobad on May 2nd 2011.

Subsequent statements by ISI have tried to back-peddle this announcement and state instead that
 his half brother Khalid bin Laden was killed and mistaken for Hamza; the US position continues to be that no-one there got out alive and imply that BOTH Khalid and Hamza were killed in the raid.

A Bin Laden was certainly killed in the raid. Just perhaps, almost certainly not Osama Bin Laden.


Nevertheless:



Tuesday 22 January 2013

YouTube DMCA Censorship: Evidence of Revision - The Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Forces, it seems, have conspired to make this content unavailable and unviewable via Google/YouTube on MLK Day. Apparently, the Smithsonian has a problem with you viewing it. Cuts into their profit margin.

Colour me shocked.




Clearly, that's incorrect.

Good job I have a Vimeo Plus account and a copy of the original.





Enjoy.