Paul Krassner : Ruben Salazar and the 'Kiss of Death'

August 30, 1970 Los Angeles Times headlines death of journalist Ruben Salazar.
Back in the news:
Revisiting the 1970 killing of
Crusading journalist Ruben Salazar

By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / August 21, 2010

Salazar had been working on an exposé... which would reveal secret alliances among the CIA, the Army, the FBI, California's attorney general, and local police authorities.

Ruben Salazar, an award-winning Los Angeles Times columnist and KMEX-TV news director, was killed by a Sheriff's deputy under highly suspicious circumstances in 1970, and his case is in the news again. According to an article in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, a confidential report sent this week to the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors has called for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department to release records of Salazar's slaying.

Robert J. Lopez wrote in the August 26, 1995 Los Angeles Times:

The newsman's forceful columns and television coverage had sharply criticized police actions in Los Angeles' Mexican American neighborhoods. Salazar had called [a] lunch meeting at an Olvera Street restaurant to put it "on the record" that he believed police might do something to discredit his reporting.

Two days later, on the eve of covering a major anti-Vietnam War rally, Salazar cleared his normally messy desk at KMEX and took his treasured hate mail off the wall. His former boss, Danny Villanueva, clearly remembers the response when he told Salazar he would see him later:

"Yeah, if I make it back," Salazar said.

The next day he was dead. On Aug. 29, 1970, while covering the National Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War, the 42-year-old Salazar was killed instantly by a sheriff's tear gas projectile while he sat in an East Los Angeles bar...

Mae Brussell flashes a copy of The Realist during 1987 lecture at UC Santa Cruz.
The LA Times has been publishing articles about the files on Ruben Salazar's death being kept secret. Here's an excerpt from my autobiography (Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture):

No wonder Mae Brussell was so excited. The attempted burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., in June 1972 had suddenly brought her eight and a half years of dedicated conspiracy research to an astounding climax. She recognized names, methodology, patterns of cover-up. She could trace linear connections leading inevitably from the assassination of JFK to the Watergate break-in, and all the killings in between.

There was, for example, the murder of Ruben Salazar, a Los Angeles Times reporter, at the first Chicano-sponsored antiwar protest. Salazar had been working on an exposé of law enforcement, which would reveal secret alliances among the CIA, the Army, the FBI, California's attorney general, and local police authorities.

L.A. District Attorney Robert Meyer received a phone call from L. Patrick Gray -- who had recently become acting head of the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover's death -- telling him to stop the investigation. Meyer did quit, saying it was like the “kiss of death” to work with these people. Mae called Meyer, asking if he would help with her research. She wanted to find out why the Justice Department in Washington was stopping a D.A. in Los Angeles from investigating the killing of a reporter.

A month later, Meyer was found dead in a parking lot in Pasadena. And now L. Patrick Gray was involved in an even bigger cover-up.

A year before the Watergate break-in, E. Howard Hunt, who had worked for the CIA for twenty-one years, proposed a “bag job” -- a surreptitious entry -- into the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who had refused to cooperate with FBI agents investigating one of his patients, Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. It was the function of the White House “plumbers” to plug such leaks.

The burglars, led by G. Gordon Liddy, scattered pills around the office to make it look like a junkie had been responsible. The police assured Dr. Fielding that the break-in was made in search of drugs, even though he found Ellsberg's records removed from their folder. An innocent black man, Elmer Davis, was arrested, convicted, and sent to prison, while Liddy remained silent.

Mae Brussell corresponded with Davis, and after he finished serving Liddy's time behind bars, he ended up living with Mae. It was a romance made in Conspiracy Heaven.

[Paul Krassner, for decades one of the country's foremost social critics, edited The Realist, America's premier journal of cutting edge social and political satire. He was also a founder of the Yippies.]

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Roger Baker : Debunking the Vaccine Scare

Graphic by David Dees / deesillustration.com
Swine flu vaccine:
The facts behind the kerfuffle

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / November 5, 2009

Are the big pharmaceutical companies endangering our health with risky things like swine flu vaccine? Maybe vaccines are risky, but perhaps not in the same ways and for the reasons that a lot of people are thinking, if we are to judge by the Internet chatter.

Is there a risk?

Probably the biggest flu vaccine risk is produced by not providing the influenza vaccine soon enough, because the proper federal government incentives were not there. The big pharmaceutical companies are overcharging the government, sending production offshore, withholding information, and using slow and obsolete production technology.

They may be in effect killing people who can't get the safe and effective vaccines they need in time to prevent disease. We see this with both swine and seasonal flu vaccine shortages. After vaccination, about a two week delay is needed to develop a strong immune response.

From The New York Times:

...So far, the swine flu virus looks no more virulent than a normal seasonal flu. That is bad enough. It has killed roughly 4,000 Americans and sent roughly 40,000 to the hospital. The virus is active in 48 states, and even if it begins to taper off soon, another wave might hit us early next year. Those most at risk would be wise to get vaccinated when they can find a supply...

If you shop at Whole Foods, you might think that leading a healthy natural lifestyle based on their food may be all the medicine you ever need. Stores like this seem to sell a ton of herbal remedies but not much aspirin. This profitable healthy eating culture is no doubt valid, but is not enough by itself. Here is a recent recommendation for a healthy diet from the Harvard School of Public Health

One problem with current trends is that, while an increasing part of the general population might like to eat a healthy diet, more and more average folks can't afford to eat healthy fresh fruits and vegetables to go along with the staple grains, etc. Perhaps they are exhausted by work and grab a quick burger and fries and soda. Or they are conned by TV commercials into feeding their kids cheap sugary drinks and junk food snacks full of fat and sugar. The kinds of food average people eat is increasingly a function of their economic class, and this certainly affects general public health and immunity.

I agree with a lot of the healthy food thinking, but I don't believe there is much truth in the notion that just getting lots of exercise and eating a healthy diet somehow protects against contagious disease -- and that as a result we won't get sick when exposed to the various viruses to which we have no natural or vaccine-induced immunity.

The fact is that a lot of virus immunity (and many late onset chronic health problems) are actually genetic in nature and this natural immunity has often played an important role in history. The Spanish who invaded the Americas had previously suffered enough smallpox deaths to be more resistant than the Aztec Indian civilization they conquered, largely by spreading their smallpox.

Another example of natural immunity largely protected the Black slaves in Haiti where yellow fever was endemic in the early 1800s. This mosquito-spread disease then killed many of the French troops that were sent in to put down a Haitian slave revolt. This in turn helped to convince Napoleon to abandon French American colonies like Haiti, which helped lead to the Louisiana Purchase by Jefferson of a huge piece of the current United States.

However, especially since the 1930s, we have learned how to confer virus immunity using vaccines. As antibiotics lose their effectiveness -- partly through factory farming of animals such as the swine thought to have cultivated the current swine flu, and from antibiotic overuse -- the highly targeted microbe-specific vaccines will, by default, have to play an increasingly important role in medicine. Vaccines can work quite well if used properly and in advance of illness. The swine flu vaccines are thought to be about 75% effective and side effects are rare. Effective HIV and malaria vaccines may be possible in the future.

[A personal case in point: I eat a reasonably good diet at age 66, usually take a daily multivitamin supplement, and got my seasonal flu shot. However, I still got what was probably swine flu and then got a mild secondary infection, subsequently knocked out with the help of a sulfa drug. I had already gotten a pneumococcal vaccine shot to help prevent common strains of bacterial pneumonia.]


Why we dropped the ball on flu vaccine

The following, from the Council on Foreign Relations, clearly reveals that the current vaccine shortages stem from business as usual based on a bunch of fragmented business deals.

Worldwide, drug companies are scrambling to manufacture a vaccine for H1N1, also known as swine flu, which was declared a pandemic in June 2009. David Fedson, an expert in influenza vaccines and a former consultant to the World Health Organization, says the current distribution system is outmoded, and could slow or restrict the delivery of vaccines to some developing countries. "One of the reasons they're getting it late is that thus far, the distributions of vaccines from companies to countries have been handled as a series of business deals," Fedson says...

It is clear that the big international pharmaceutical corporations now have no national identity, or unifying principle other than profit. Unfortunately many conventional vaccines are labor intensive and rather unprofitable to produce. Vaccines are thus natural choices for outsourcing production, according to The New York Times.

...The current problems began years ago, experts said, when vaccine companies started abandoning the American market.

Vaccines, which involve living viruses, are much harder to make than most drugs. Profits are lower and unused flu vaccine expires after a few months. Also, vaccines are primarily intended for children, and Americans frequently sue when a child is injured.

Little was done to lure companies back until bioterrorism fears emerged after the anthrax attacks of 2001 and the H5N1 avian flu virus, which kills about 60 percent of humans infected with it, emerged in 2003, Dr. Fauci said.

In 2004, only two companies were licensed to sell flu vaccine in the United States; now there are five, but only one, Sanofi-Pasteur, has a domestic plant. The others -- GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, CSL Ltd. and Medimmune -- use plants in England, Germany and Australia.

The drawback of relying on foreign plants was made clear recently when the Australian government pressured CSL to keep its vaccine at home instead of fulfilling its contract for 36 million doses of swine flu vaccine for the United States.

A new and better vaccine technology beckons

We are still trying to produce vaccines by the old fashioned but well established way of growing the flu virus in eggs and then killing it and injecting the killed virus in the flu shots. Another way is to induce immunity with a weakened virus. The nasal vaccine has a weak live flu virus. This is similar in principle to traditional smallpox vaccination which used a weak pox virus to make one pox infection lesion on your arm, thus inducing a lifelong immunity.

But both the killed virus and the weakened virus approaches are likely obsolete in our era of sophisticated biotechnology that now allows us to make recombinant vaccines. Here is what Sen. Bob Graham has recently testified with regard to the current status of our vaccine production technology:

...The United States--unlike the European Union and China--continues to use a 60-year old production method, using chicken eggs, to make H1N1 and other important vaccines. U.S. flu vaccines are safe and effective, but manufacturing can take six months, and is vulnerable to delays. The time it takes to make the vaccine is much longer than the time it takes for a flu virus to cause a pandemic. Right now, the H1N1 vaccine is being produced as quickly as possible, but millions of people will not have the chance to be vaccinated before they are exposed to the virus. Part of the slowness is due to the fact that all six US manufacturers of flu vaccine use chicken eggs. A modern and faster method to make a safe flu vaccine uses a process called "cell culture." Cell culture does not require eggs. Vaccines for polio and the modern smallpox vaccine have been produced for decades using this technology...

Here Barbara Ehrenreich weighs in along similar lines:

...There are alternative "cell culture" methods that could produce the vaccine much faster, but in complete defiance of the conventional wisdom that private enterprise is always more innovative and resourceful than government, Big Pharma did not demand that they be made available for this year's swine flu epidemic. Just for the record, those alternative methods have been developed with government funding, which is also the source of almost all our basic knowledge of viruses.

So, thanks to the drug companies, optimism has been about as effective in warding off H1N1 as amulets or fairy dust. Both the government and Big Pharma were indeed overly optimistic about the latter's ability to supply the vaccine, leaving those of us who are involved in the care of small children with little to rely on but hope -- hope that the epidemic will fade out on its own, hope that our loved ones have the luck to survive it...

This describes how the U.S. medical bureaucracy dropped the ball on the swine flu virus by not rapidly employing the recombinant vaccine technology:

...For more than ten years, recombinant flu vaccine has been recognized as a promising means of protection, particularly at the start of a pandemic when a novel strain of influenza appears.1 This method of producing vaccine is fast, and it can be expanded quickly from laboratory to pilot plant to large-scale production in multiple locations. Research on several recombinant vaccines, including vaccines for influenza, has been well supported by the NIH, especially by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Clinical studies have confirmed the safety and effectiveness of a recombinant vaccine for seasonal influenza.

However, the success of this research did not lead quickly, as it should have, to specific plans for industrial scale production of recombinant vaccine in the event of a pandemic. Elsewhere we have described a series of governmental delays and omissions. These seem to reflect, at the very least, a lack of a sense of urgency within DHHS. Specifically, two years ago DHHS solicited proposals for the production of recombinant flu vaccine for use in a pandemic. The Request for Proposals was issued in October 2007 instead of several years earlier -- a significant and damaging delay -- and the process of awarding the contract resulted in further delays. A contract was finally awarded in June 2009...

This new recombinant technology leads to cheap safe vaccines that don't need any adjuvants (non-antigen immune response boosters) to help stretch our limited vaccine supplies. Why? Because what we are really doing is inserting a few genes into a bacterium or yeast. These bits of DNA program the microbe to produce a tiny bit of the structure of the targeted virus.

Since it is far easier to grow these special immunity-conferring microbes than to grow the live virus on living tissue, we can produce vast amounts of the pure vaccine immunizing substance fast, and thus largely avoid the traditional costs of production. This new method is fast and cheap after the up front work, but it is not business as usual for the pharmaceutical industry.

The main bottleneck in the new approach is the lab work to find which parts of the virus structure best confer immunity, followed by inserting these genes into microbes, and then testing their purified product to see if it induces immunity in ferrets, or whatever. Here is a description of the general recombinant approach, thought to be applicable to most viruses and vaccines:

Recombinant DNA technology appears to be on the verge of producing safe and effective protein vaccines for animal and human diseases. The procedure is applicable to most viruses because their isolated surface proteins generally possess immunogenic activity. Strategies used for the preparation and cloning of the appropriate genes depend on the characteristics of the viral genomes: whether DNA or RNA; their size, strandedness, and segmentation; and whether messenger RNA are monocistronic or polycistronic. Cloned surface proteins of foot-and-mouth disease and hepatitis B viruses are being tested for possible use as practical vaccines.

Two doses of the cloned foot-and-mouth disease viral protein have elicited large amounts of neutralizing antibody and have protected cattle and swine against challenge exposure with the virus. Surface proteins have also been cloned for the viruses of fowl plague, influenza, vesicular stomatitis, rabies, and herpes simplex. Cloning is in progress for surface proteins of viruses causing canine parvovirus gastroenteritis, human papillomas, infectious bovine rhinotracheitis, Rift Valley fever, and paramyxovirus diseases. In addition, advances in recombinant DNA and other facilitating technologies have rekindled interest in the chemical synthesis of polypeptide vaccines for viral diseases.

The bioengineering of bacterial vaccines is also under way. Proteinaceous pili of enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli are being produced in E coli K-12 strains for use as vaccines against neonatal diarrheal diseases of livestock.

Meanwhile, biotechnology is headed toward Asia

Although the biotechnology manufacturing industry was mostly invented in the USA, it is now rapidly moving to China for manufacture of the most exotic and sophisticated drugs and bio-research materials. Tomorrow expect the best vaccines to be made in China or wherever cheap highly skilled labor and the sophisticated technology can be established. Here is an amusing link to a biotech discussion site where somebody complains about bad Chinese biochemicals. The message is immediately met with a chorus of derision, probably including many Chinese posters, who point out how much of the biochemicals used for U.S. research are already being made in China.

The new genetically engineered bio-reagents are some of the most expensive substances known. If you want a bio-engineered antibody you could easily pay the equivalent of a million dollars a gram, and there may be only one source, but it might be the only source of the only drug that works. Until somebody makes a bootleg version in India, which has been ignoring the bio-patents lately.

Expect more of these exotic and costly but sometimes very effective drugs as more of the complex genomic basis for health and disease becomes better understood. A friend of mine has an eye problem which requires the injection of a special antibody to inhibit eye blood vessel growth for treatment.

The mouse version of this special antibody costs $300 per dose, but the better human antibody version costs $3000! With this kind of incentive, we can expect a lot of the biotechnology production to keep moving offshore and the U.S. biotechnology companies to become the exclusive brokers.

Increasingly, the important issue posed by these trends is whether the manufacture and distribution of these highly specific new biotechnology drugs and their development should continue to be driven by private profit for the big pharmaceutical corporations. Or should the new drugs be developed and produced more for public benefit, much like the Salk polio vaccine that eliminated the fear of polio in the USA? Much of the basic research underlying the biotechnology was publicly funded, by the NIH, etc. Who will now benefit as we move toward our new health care system?


The mercury scare

One additional issue I’d like to address is the fear, especially voiced in conversation on the internet, of potential danger from mercury content in the flu vaccines. It is true that some vaccines still have traces of mercury. When they do, they have about 25 micrograms of thimerosal per dose, but most vaccines -- like the common childhood disease vaccines -- have none. Go to this link and scroll down and you can see which vaccines still have them and in what amounts.

The fact that only some influenza vaccines have any thimerosal at all indicates that it does not have to be there, but it helps to prevent bacterial contamination -- like in multi-dose containers from which you draw fluid repeatedly. Such contamination is dangerous when compared to any threat posed by a preservative. You can't heat vaccine to sterilize it because that would denature the antigen which is the active ingredient.

Now let’s compare this with the amounts of mercury in servings of fish. Lobster, to choose one example of a food folks often consider a treat, has about .3 parts per million as we see from this link.

Thus if you eat three ounces, or about 100 grams, of lobster, you are getting about 30 micrograms of methyl mercury, said to be a form of mercury more toxic than the ethyl mercury thimerosal in vaccine. So you would get more mercury in a more dangerous form from lobster, as well as other commonly eaten fish. Coal plants also emit lots of mercury into the environment which can end up in fish.

[Roger Baker is an Austin community activist and writer -- and regular contributor to The Rag Blog -- whose scientist parents helped to cultivate his lifelong interest in science. His work has been published in Scientific American, The Microscope, The Review of Scientific Instruments, and The History of Photography Journal. He wrote a science column called "Science Hacker" for the Society for Amateur Scientists Journal. He still likes to build scientific instruments and is currently working on perfecting an instrument useful for the early detection of insect infestation in stored wheat.]

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The Lion Passes: A Different Look at Chappaquiddick

Teddy Kennedy and Chappaquiddick:
The official story doesn't wash

After the airplane crash and the shooting of JFK and RFK, killing Ted Kennedy would not do. Gullible as the public is, too many would think a plot was afoot. Kennedy had to be neutralized by some sort of scandal that would damage any run for the White House.

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / August 26, 2009

Brain cancer has claimed the life of Edward M. Kennedy, most likely the greatest U.S. Senator of recent times. Over the decades, “the Lion of the Senate” courageously stuck by his guns, bucking a national conservative tide, seeking justice and to improve the lives of his fellow citizens.

Some historians will see a parallel between Ted and his two slain brothers and the Gracci brothers of ancient Rome who fought for ordinary citizens in the second century BC. Senator Kennedy was known for a great sense of humor and compassion for the sufferings of others. For example, he often sat by the bedside of Senator Phil Hart and performed many kindnesses for columnist Mary McGrory, when a stroke felled her and made it difficult to speak.

Sen. Edward Kennedy with President Barack Obama.
Yet, it is likely that he will be remembered for the 1969 incident at Chappaquiddick, in which Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, drowned in an accident most blame on Kennedy. Witnesses said she did not drink that night or at other times, yet she had a high blood alcohol level. There was a puncture mark on the back of her neck, and it is possible to inject ethanol that way.

Ms. Kopechne was a self described “novena Catholic,” who did not like bad language or sexual impropriety. She was described as an idealist and serious. She was close to being engaged to a foreign service officer. She was one of the “boiler room girls” who had worked in the Robert F. Kennedy presidential campaign. They were all well-educated and professional people of good character, not mere secretaries looking for a good time. Mary Jo was simply attending a reunion of campaign friends.

The public perception of that incident is based largely on the assumption that Kennedy was a very different man. It could be that we do not have the full story of the event that was to be forever linked with his name.

Conservatives assume heavy drinking and sexual involvement without a shred of evidence about either. Kennedy admits to letting nine hours elapse before reporting the accident, which would place the blame for a death on him. However, very little of that story makes a lot of sense.

A writer named Bob Cutler put together a scenario of what could have happened. Here it is in the words of Richard Sprague.

The Group hired several men and at least one woman to be at Chappaquiddick during the weekend of the yacht race and the planned party on the island. They ambushed Ted and Mary Jo after they left the cottage and knocked Ted out with blows to his head and body. They took the unconscious or semi-conscious Kennedy to Martha's Vineyard and deposited him in his hotel room.

Another group took Mary Jo to the bridge in Ted's car, force fed her with a knock out potion of alcoholic beverage, placed her in the back seat, and caused the car to accelerate off the side of the bridge into the water. They broke the windows on one side of the car to insure the entry of water; then they watched the car until they were sure Mary Jo would not escape.

Mary Jo actually regained consciousness and pushed her way to the top of the car (which was actually the bottom of the car -- it had landed on its roof) and died from asphyxiation. The group with Teddy revived him early in the morning and let him know he had a problem. Possibly they told him that Mary Jo had been kidnapped. They told him his children would be killed if he told anyone what had happened and that he would hear from them.

On Chappaquiddick, the other group made contact with Markham and Gargan, Ted's cousin and lawyer. They told both men that Mary Jo was at the bottom of the river and that Ted would have to make up a story about it, not revealing the existence of the group. One of the men resembled Ted and his voice sounded something like Ted's. Markham and Gargan were instructed to go the the Vineyard on the morning ferry, tell Ted where Mary Jo was, and come back to the island to wait for a phone call at a pay station near the ferry on the Chappaquiddick side.

The two men did as they were told and Ted found out what had happened to Mary Jo that morning. The three men returned to the pay phone and received their instructions to concoct a story about the "accident" and to report it to the police. The threat against Ted's children was repeated at that time.

Ted, Markham and Gargan went right away to police chief Arena's office on the Vineyard where Ted reported the so-called "accident." Almost at the same time scuba diver John Farror was pulling Mary Jo out of the water, since two boys who had gone fishing earlier that morning had spotted the car and reported it.

Ted called together a small coterie of friends and advisors including family lawyer Burke Marshall, Robert MacNamara, Ted Sorenson, and others. They met on Squaw Island near the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport for three days. At the end of that time they had manufactured the story which Ted told on TV, and later at the inquest. Bob Cutler calls the story, "the shroud." Even the most cursory examination of the story shows it was full of holes and an impossible explanation of what happened.

Ted's claim that he made the wrong turn down the dirt road toward the bridge by mistake is an obvious lie. His claim that he swam the channel back to Martha's Vineyard is not believable. His description of how he got out of the car under water and then dove down to try to rescue Mary Jo is impossible. Markham and Gargan's claims that they kept diving after Mary Jo are also unbelievable.

Leaving aside talk of an unidentified “group,” Cutler’s theory still makes a lot more sense than Ted Kennedy’s first statement, which follows:

On July 18, 1969, at approximately 11.15 on Chappaquiddick Island, Martha’s Vineyard, I was driving my car on Main Street on my way to get the ferry back to Edgartown.

I was unfamiliar with the road and turned onto Dyke Road instead of bearing left on Main Street. After proceeding for approximately a half mile on Dyke Road I descended a hill and came upon a narrow bridge. The car went off the side of the bridge.

There was one passenger with me, Miss Kopechne, a former secretary of my brother Robert Kennedy. The car turned over and sank into the water and landed with the roof resting on the bottom. I attempted to open the door and window of the car but have no recollection of how I got out of the car. I came to the surface and then repeatedly dove down to the car in an attempt to see if the passenger was still in the car. I was unsuccessful in the attempt.

I was exhausted and in a state of shock. I recall walking back to where my friends were eating. There was a car parked in front of the cottage and I climbed into the back seat. I then asked for someone to bring me back to Edgartown. I remember walking around for a period of time and then going back to my hotel room. When I fully realized what had happened this morning, I immediately contacted the police.

It took Kennedy and his circle three days to concoct a more complete explanation of what happened. They had to deal with the fact that the young woman died in the back of his car after running out of air. Ted’s pregnant wife Joan was at Martha’s Vineyard, and the girl had been at a party that Kennedy attended.

The brothers: from left, Jack, Bobby and Teddy.
It was better to let people make assumptions about alcohol than illicit sex. Oddly, the Kennedys paid to have tests conducted to see if the car would have come off the dock and into the water in the manner Ted said it did. They should have looked into the likelihood of his getting out of a submerged car. They must not have really known what happened. It is doubtful if anything the Kennedy circle said after the official story came out can be believed. Their comments all supported a very implausible story.

He said he got out of the car, which was underwater and then started diving into Poucha Pond to save Mary Jo. Did he open the car door, exit, and then close it? This might happen in the movies, but not in real life. In The Bridge at Chappaquiddick, Jack Olsen argues that the water pressure would have been too great for Kennedy to open the car door. A window was broken, admitting water, but only Harry Hudini could have gotten out through it.

After eight attempts to rescue her, Kennedy went back to the cottage, got help, and returned to the diving.

The wounds above his ear and the large bump on the top of his head indicate he was probably knocked unconscious. But how and where? Police saw the broken windshield and wondered why Kennedy’s head and face did not reflect the level of damage associated with a wreck of that scale. . His face bore no marks.

Markings on the bridge suggest the car was at rest and then somehow greatly accelerated. It had to have been in the air for a distance before landing in the water. There was a rope attached to a stick that could have been attached to the rear-view mirror, which was askew and hanging only by one screw.

The Kennedy story does not match the testimony of Deputy Sheriff Christopher Look and three others, that two women were with Kennedy that night at 12:45 . Of course, the senator was completely familiar with those roads, but there had to be an explanation for where the car was found.

There are some other odd things about the official story. All the witnesses who knew Mary Jo said she did not drink at all and that she did not drink that night. Yet there was alcohol in her blood stream.

It is just assumed Kennedy was smashed, but no witness said this was the case. His chauffeur John Crimmins was present and could have driven Kennedy. If he wanted sex with Mary Jo, he would have stayed at the Lawrence cottage. Why did he not have Crimmins drive and Mary J to the hotel?
.
Senator Kennedy said he swam a complicated route from Chappaquiddick back to the inn on Martha’s Vineyard. Professional swimmers have not been able to duplicate swimming that route at the same time and against the same tides. People assume he swam it dressed, but if it happened at all, he had to be in his shorts. But Kennedy, exhausted from the night’s exertions, claimed he was able to do this. No one saw an all wet Kennedy when he reached the Edgartown inn.

Even at the time, in 1969, many noted that he did not behave at the hotel the next morning as though he knew that Mary Jo was dead or that anything was wrong. It is pretty clear that he did not know until former U.S. Attorney Paul Markham and Joe Gargan arrived and told him about the tragedy. An elderly couple saw Kennedy coming into the dining room. He was relaxed and completely at ease. When the two men spoke to him he seemed to be completely shocked and upset.

The three men then made the trip over to Chappaquiddick to use the pay phone. This makes no sense unless they went there to receive a call, not make one. There were pay phones at the hotel.

Some wonder about the June, 1964 airplane crash in western Massachusetts in which only Edward Kennedy emerged a survivor. He was laid up for some time with serious injuries. Teddy came out of that alive. If anyone wanted to harm Ted Kennedy it was either to prevent him from running for president or, more likely, to prevent him from using the power of that office to examine the deaths of his brothers.

After the airplane crash and the shooting of JFK and RFK, killing Ted Kennedy would not do. Gullible as the public is, too many would think a plot was afoot. Kennedy had to be neutralized by some sort of scandal that would damage any run for the White House.

E. Howard Hunt, later a Watergate burglar, was at Martha's Vineyard.
One witness has said that James McCord, a CIA agent, and one Albert Peterson followed Kennedy throughout 1969. The witness added that Peterson was an alias for E. Howard Hunt. Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt were on Martha’s Vineyard at the time for a Regatta. Both had CIA connections and would be among the Watergate burglars later. Hunt explained to Watergate investigators that he was there to gather dirt on Kennedy but only admitted to getting there after the accident.

He came to see some unknown person and admitted to having a disguise and a voice alteration device. Charles Colson later obtained the disguise from the CIA and Hunt used them at the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and at the break-in at the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate. Hunt’s son St. John said his father spoke with approval of the murders of JFK and RFK and wanted to finish the job on Ted Kennedy. David Morales, a CIA hit man, was photographed at the Ambassador Hotel.

Richard Milhouse Nixon also had an operative there that day, but the president may not have known about it at the time. Nixon had established Operation Sandwedge to keep track of Kennedy and other enemies. Tony Ulasewicz, a skilled investigator in Nixon’s employ, admits being there the morning after the accident. He said he was sent there to dig up dirt on Kennedy. However, he was seen there that morning before news of the accident was public.

In a conversation between John Dean and President Nixon, Dean refers to him without mentioning him by name, saying that he was there again in 1971, both times posing as a reporter and steering other reporters to look into matters that would damage Kennedy. However, it appears he was poking around there for about two years and may have come up with something that showed Kennedy had been set up. Dean said to Nixon, “If Kennedy knew the bear trap he was walking into…”

It sounds as though they could prove the White House had nothing to do with the accident, but perhaps they knew who did. If Nixon had an even more damaging story about Kennedy and Chappaquiddick, he would have used it. Ulasewicz’s salary was financed with money left over from the 1968 convention. He was controlled by John Caulfield, who first answered to John Ehrlichman and then to John Dean.

The Boston office of the FBI investigated the incident on orders from the White House. The agency had earlier put out stories that Ted Kennedy had cheated on an exam and was a poor student.

Finally, there is the remote possibility that Mary Jo’s death had something to do with dealing with two birds with one stone, or event. Mary Jo shared an apartment with Nancy Carole Tyler, a real looker who worked for Bobby Baker, who owned the building and had parties there while the girls occupied it. . She later expressed frustration that Baker did not leave his wife to marry her. Tyler died in a 1965 plane crash.

At one point she refused to talk to investigators about Bobby Baker but then had changed her mind. She knew a great deal about Baker and corrupt deals in the Senate and could have shared information with Mary J. Kopechne worked for Senator George Smathers, who was close to LBJ and Baker. Smathers claimed to be a Kennedy friend, but he put out the story about the Kennedy brothers’ involvement with Marilyn Monroe. She became RFK’s secretary after the assassination of JFK. These two girls knew about JFK’s efforts to dump LBJ and leaked the story. After RFK’s death. Mary Jo allegedly had the job of packing Bobby’s files and then worked for a Kennedy-connected consulting firm.

It is said that Edward Kennedy does not express an interest in getting behind the official accounts of his brothers’ deaths and that he urges friends not to probe these questions. What happened at Chappaquiddick will never be known. He may have learned something then that convinced him it was best to leave these matters alone. Christian Cafarakis, Jackie’s butler in Athens, wrote in 1972 that Aristotle Onassis hired a New York firm to look into the JFK assassination. It gave Jackie the names of the four assassins and told who was behind it. Jackie was dissuaded from turning over the report to LBJ by threats to the lives of members of her family.

There is no way to know what happened that night at Chappaquiddick. We do know that John Dean said to Nixon in 1973, "If Teddy knew the bear trap he was walking into at Chappaquiddick. . . ." Those who have long disliked Senator Edward Kennedy will assume the worst and think that he somehow got out of that car and went back to the inn without another thought about that young woman.

Others may see the courageous, compassionate man he has proven himself to be and give him the benefit of the doubt or even analyze the evidence more closely and conclude that Bob Cutler was not that far wrong.

[Sherman DeBrosse spent seven years writing an analytical chronicle of what the Republicans have been up to since the 1970s. It discusses elements in the Republican coalition, their ideologies, strategies, informational and financial resources, and election shenanigans. Abuses of power by the Reagan and G. W. Bush administration and the Republican Congresses are detailed. The New Republican Coalition : Its Rise and Impact, The Seventies to Present (Publish America) can be acquired by calling 301-695-1707. On line, go to here.]

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Dick Cheney Isn't the Only One Who Planned Assassinations

When a person repeats precisely the same behaviour over and over again, but expects the result to be different, that is Einstein's definition of insanity.

Americans have been doing the same thing over and over again for 200 years, somehow expecting things to turn out differently. Until we get it through our thick skulls that voting for the establishment will result in the same establishment garbage over and over and over, we will not change America.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

The Democrats' Selective Amnesia on Assassination: Clinton Did It and Obama Does It Too
By Jeremy Scahill / July 15, 2009

While the focus is on Dick Cheney’s role, the U.S. has long had a bi-partisan assassination program.

Members of Congress have expressed outrage over the “secret” CIA assassination program that former vice president Dick Cheney allegedly ordered concealed from Congress. But this program—and the media descriptions of it—sounds a lot like the assassination policy implemented by President Bill Clinton, particularly during his second term in office.

Partisan politics often require selective amnesia. Over the past decade, we have seen this amnesia take hold when it comes to many of President Bush’s most vile policies. And we are now seeing a pretty severe case overtake several leading Democrats. It makes for good speechifying to act as though all criminality began with Bush and—particularly these days—Cheney, but that is extreme intellectual dishonesty. The fact is that many of Bush’s worst policies (now being highlighted by leading Democrats) were based in some form or another in a Clinton-initiated policy or were supported by the Democrats in Congress with their votes. To name a few: the USA PATRIOT Act, the invasion of Iraq, the attack against Afghanistan, the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, the widespread use of mercenaries and other private contractors in US war zones and warrant-less wire-tapping.

Regarding the Bush-era assassination program, there is great reason to be skeptical that the program CIA Director Leon Panetta alleges was concealed from Congress is actually the program the public is currently being led to believe it is. Why would the CIA need to conceal a program that never was implemented and, if it never was implemented, why did Panetta need to shut it down? Moreover, who was running this inactive program from the minute Obama was sworn in until June 24 when Panetta supposedly announced its cancellation? This program—as it is currently being described— should hardly be a major scandal to members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as some are now treating it. As they well know, President Obama has continued the Bush targeted assassination program using weaponized drones and special forces teams hunting “high value targets.” As former CIA Counter-terrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro and others have pointed out, “The CIA runs drones and targets al Qaeda safe houses all the time.” Cannistraro told Talking Points Memo that there is no important difference between those kinds of attacks and “assassinations” with a gun or a knife.

Now, if it turns out that the actual plan Cheney allegedly concealed is something other than what has been publicly described, that will be a different matter. For instance, if the CIA had a secret post-9/11 program planning assassinations on US soil or of US citizens and it was ordered concealed by Cheney. Or, if it was a plan to target in other ways “enemies of the state” within the U.S. as Seymour Hersh has suggested: “The Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state,” Hersh said in March. “Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.”

Let’s look at the program the Democrats claim was kept secret. The Bush administration reportedly authorized the CIA to use small paramilitary teams to hunt down and assassinate “al Qaeda” leaders around the world. It is currently being reported that this plan was never implemented and was born after 9/11. Both of these assertions are very, very doubtful.

The plan, as currently described in the press and by Democrats, is one that continues to exist under the Obama administration right now. In fact, this program has been part of official U.S. policy—under Democratic and Republican administrations—for decades.

By way of background, there is technically a U.S. ban on assassination that dates back to President Ford in 1976. “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination,” states Executive Order 11905. That was then updated by President Carter who dropped the term “political” simply prohibiting “assassination.” The current Executive Order, 12333, was signed by president Reagan in 1981 and has remained on the books through every administration since. What is brutally ironic about Reagan signing this ban was that he authorized repeated assassinations, notably the 1986 attempt on Col. Moammar Gadhafi, which failed to kill Gadhafi but instead killed his infant daughter. But in that brutal apparent contradiction is the truth: the U.S. does not have a ban on assassinations as long as government lawyers can figure out some legal acrobats for the president to use in sidelining the ban. Every president from Reagan to Obama has reserved the right to assassinate kill “terrorists” by claiming it as a military operation or a preemptive strike.

It is pretty clear that when the Bush administration took over, it picked up the Clinton administration’s policy on assassination and ran with it—albeit with more of a missionary zeal for killing and a removal of some of the layers of lawyering. In short, the Bush team expanded and streamlined the longstanding U.S. government assassination program.

Throughout the 1990s, the question of covert assassinations was a source of major discussion within the Clinton White House and it is clear assassinations were attempted with presidential approval. Newsweek magazine reported on how, in 1995, U.S. Special Forces facilitated the assassination of a Libyan “terrorist” in Bosnia, saying, “American authorities justified the assassination under a little-known 1993 ‘lethal finding’ signed by President Bill Clinton that gave permission to target terrorists.” A former senior Clinton official speaking shortly after 9/11 called on the Bush administration not to escalate the U.S. assassination program, saying “We have a war on drugs, too, but we don’t kill drug lords.” But then, with no apparent sense of contradiction, the official added, “we have proxies who do.”

Clinton-era officials’ attempt to hide behind “proxies” is a stunning trampling of the assassination ban as it currently exists. Not only does it ban U.S. government personnel from engaging in or conspiring to engage in “assassination,” it also bans “Indirect Participation,” stating: “No agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order.”

The truth is, under Clinton, it wasn’t just proxies authorized to do the assassinations.

The Clinton White House worked for years with the CIA to craft an assassination policy—specifically relating to “al Qaeda” in general and Osama bin-Laden and his top deputies specifically. CIA operatives like Billy Waugh complained in the early and middle years of the Clinton presidencies that they were lawyered to death by Clinton’s attorneys in their attempts to get the green light to kill bin Laden in Sudan. “[I]n the early 1990s we were forced to adhere to the sanctimonious legal counsel and the do-gooders,” recalled Waugh. Among Waugh’s rejected ideas was an alleged plot to kill bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan and dump his body at the Iranian Eembassy in an effort to pin the blame on Tehran. Eventually, however, Clinton did authorize what amounted to assassination squads to hunt down and kill bin Laden and other “al Qaeda leaders.” That happened officially in 1998 with Clinton’s signing of a Memorandum of Notification authorizing the CIA to carry out covert assassinations. George W Bush was not the president and Dick Cheney was not the vice president. Of course, current CIA Director Leon Panetta was Clinton’s chief of staff from 1994 to 1997 and would have been party to years worth of discussion on this issue when Clinton was president.

Under Clinton, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued secret rulings stating that the Ford/Reagan ban on assassinations did not apply to “military targets or “to attacks carried out in preemptive self-defense,” according to Steve Coll, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Ghost Wars.

Shortly after 9/11, Clinton stated this position publicly, supporting the Bush administration’s “war on terror” targeted assassination policy, saying on NBC News, “The ban that was put in effect under President Ford only applies to heads of state. It doesn’t apply to terrorists.” That is a stunning statement that is a true legal stretch given the explicit language of the ban. Moreover, Clinton did, in fact, try to kill a head of state on April 22, 1999, when he ordered a NATO airstrike on the home of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Clinton and Gen. Wesley Clark also authorized an assassination attempt on Serbian Information Minister, Aleksander Vucic, bombing Radio Television Serbia when Vucic was scheduled to appear via satellite on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” Vucic was not killed, but 16 media workers were.

Clinton also publicly acknowledged his own administration’s attempt to assassinate bin Laden. “I worked hard to try to kill him,” Clinton said. “I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since.” Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger said after Clinton issued his 1998 “lethal finding,” U.S. operatives worked with Afghan rebels for two years in an attempt to kill Bin Laden. “There were a few points when the pulse quickened, when we thought we were close,” Berger later recalled. Among the alleged attempts on bin Laden’s life taken by Clinton was the 1998 bombing of Afghanistan (which was coupled with a massive strike on the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan).

As Coll observed of the Clinton policy: “Clinton had demonstrated his willingness to kill bin Laden, without any pretense of seeking his arrest.”

After 9/11, the CIA, which had been frustrated by some of the hurdles to assassination posed by the Clinton administration’s legal team, now had the conditions and the commander-in-chief it needed to take its assassination program to the next level. The main operations were run out of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) headed by J. Cofer Black, who had served as Clinton’s CIA station chief in Sudan when bin Laden was there in the 1990s. After 9/11, Black’s division at the CIA was authorized by President Bush —with the consent of Congress—to hunt down bin Laden and others alleged to be responsible for 9/11. As I describe in my book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army:

Before the core CIA team, Jawbreaker, deployed [to Afghanistan] on September 27, 2001, Black gave his men direct and macabre directions. “Gentlemen, I want to give you your marching orders, and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed this with the President, and he is in full agreement,” Black told covert CIA operative Gary Schroen. “I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead… . They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President. I promised him I would do that.” Schroen said it was the first time in his thirty-year career he had been ordered to assassinate an adversary rather than attempting a capture. Black asked if he had made himself clear. “Perfectly clear, Cofer,” Schroen told him. “I don’t know where we’ll find dry ice out there in Afghanistan, but I think we can certainly manufacture pikes in the field.” Black later explained why this would be necessary. “You’d need some DNA,” Black said. “There’s a good way to do it. Take a machete, and whack off his head, and you’ll get a bucketful of DNA, so you can see it and test it. It beats lugging the whole body back!”

The actions of the teams run by Cofer Black were certainly known to Congress. In fact, Black himself testified in front of Congress in 2002 about what he called the new “operational flexibility” being employed in the “war on terror.” “This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know: There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11,” Black said. “After 9/11 the gloves come off.” By 2004, Black claimed that “over 70 percent” of Al Qaeda’s leadership had been arrested, detained, or killed, and “more than 3,400 of their operatives and supporters have also been detained and put out of an action.” The existence of this program is not secret. It has been documented in books by former CIA operatives, is discussed in public speeches by former officials and is a reflected extensively in the Congressional record.

Obviously, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees should investigate the assassination policy under the Bush administration. Cheney’s role is central to that. Prosecutors should also be authorized to do the same. If there is a nefarious program that the public is unaware of and was unlawfully concealed, it should be brought out into the light. But, the truth is that a real investigation—one that actually seeks to get to the broader truths of these matters— would require investigating the current assassination program under Obama and the roots of the program that preceded the day when George W Bush took power. That means looking at the Clinton White House and further back. It means looking at both Democratic and Republican assassination teams. The sad fact is that nobody on Capitol Hill has demonstrated in any way that they have the political courage to do that.

Source / Rebel Reports

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Houston : The Unexplained Death of Spook Roland Carnaby

Roland Carnaby, left, in an undated photo with Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt taken at a HPD Policeman's Ball. Photo provided by family / KHOU.com.

Roland Carnaby had claimed to be a CIA agent and showed identification. The CIA quickly put out the word that he was not its employee. The papers and corporate media were filled with stories about how this strange fellow was probably a CIA wannabe. The dead man was trashed and ridiculed.

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / January 1, 2009

The news cycle has moved on, and the shooting death of Roland Vincent “Tony” Carnaby has been forgotten. The Houston police shot him on April 29, 2008, after an automobile chase. There were many strange circumstances about the shooting, and it is unlikely that the full truth will ever surface.

The circumstances surrounding the shooting are still unclear. Before the arrest, he had been stopped for speeding. He showed an officer what he said was CIA identification. The officer questioned his identification. It’s a reasonable guess that something spooked Carnaby. We know now that there is one unexplained hole in the left rear passenger door of his car. Did it come earlier or at that point? He took off and there was a 50 mile chase, with speeds up to 120 mph.

He talked to a friend on the cell phone during the chase and was advised to pull over. His response was “I can’t.” He made calls to the FBI and to someone in the Houston Police Department during the chase. After the chase, he refused to roll down the window. Police broke it with a billy club. The first policeman to approach came to the passenger side of the car, and what he might have been doing was not completely captured on a squad car camera. Police claim Carnaby seemed erratic when he stepped out of the vehicle. He then reached under the seat for a shiny Blackberry PDA and seemed to move toward an officer. That move got him killed. An officer saw something shiny and fired into Carnaby’s back.

They have not released their videos of the shooting. His attorney said that Carnaby must have felt he was being set up. Others say that for some reason or other he wanted the police to kill him. A Houston homicide captain later made a strange comment, saying he was told that Carnaby should be arrested for “something” other than speeding.

The black Jeep SUV he was driving was supposedly owned by the National Security Command Center. At first it seemed that there was no such agency. There is, and it is an appendage of the NSA in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Inside the car were two pistols, a shotgun, more CIA identification, a lapatop, and cell phones. A gag order was placed on autopsy information even though autoposy information in Houston is almost always 100% open. His widow has been unable to recover Carnaby possessions removed from the vehicle. Some of the possessions had been seized by federal agents. There are reports that the police disposed of some of the possessions as well as of some videos of the incident.

He had claimed to be a CIA agent and showed identification. The CIA quickly put out the word that he was not its employee. The papers and corporate media were filled with stories about how this strange fellow was probably a CIA wannabe. The dead man was trashed and ridiculed.

Though his home is filled with CIA memorabilia, the agency flat out insisted that he had never been an employee. There were all sorts of articles that suggested a life found in far-flung places. The agency sent a representative to aid the HPD in its investigation. For some reason, there is a lot of effort being exerted to discredit this man. His former wife said he told tall stories and one man speaking to the media about him is considered an asset of a foreign intelligence service. Some of this effort resembles previous attempts to make Valerie Plame appear to have been a mere desk clerk at the CIA.

It is clear that no one came to his defense after the shooting. One close friend and FBI official had called the HPD during the chase asking that it be stopped. Later, the man distanced himself from Carnaby. The CIA also went out of its way to deny ties with Carnaby.

He is being widely portrayed as a CIA wannabee. We can prove that his uncle Boudi was Army Intelligence in World War II and appears on the Association for Intelligence Officers’ CIA Wall of 83 Stars and OSS Memorial. There is also a notation about Roland being president of the Houston chapter. One would think that a local chapter would not elect someone president if there were doubts about his status, but some say he entered the chapter as an associate member. Members have defended his claim to have been a CIA agent, and some other intelligence professionals think he was assassinated. A Russian web site says Carnaby was a CIA agent called by the KGB “Tuxedo.” Perhaps the question comes down to whether he was an actual agent or a contractor. His family has provided many certificates that indicate he was at least a contractor.

We do know that he operated a successful security firm in Houston and most probably had contracts with the US government. He was an expert in financial information and counter-terrorism. He provided some security services for the Houston airports and port authority. Carnaby was about to retire and leave management of the firm to former CIA agent who may have been connected with the rendition of prisoners. The firm has 248 licensed operatives around the world.

He spoke fluent French and Arabic and had good contacts throughout the Middle East, partly through his family’s shipping business. His father had been Lebanese ambassador to several nations. The Carnaby intelligence firm was running 40 operatives out of Rome who were tracking money flows from the Russian-Israeli mafia and Iserael. It apparently relies heavily upon Panamanian banks and has become a presence here in the United States, even getting involved in gambling casinos. He was also tracking Israeli intelligence financial operations and the activities of Israeli agents within the United States. Houston is an important center for Mossad activities in shipping, aviation, sales and warehousing.

Carnaby's CIA momentos. Photo by Houston Chronicle.
Carnaby had worked for the agency in Beruit and was captured by Hezbollah 1984. After Carnaby’s capture, his boss, William F. Buckley, was captured, tortured, and murdered. Carnaby was returned in an prisoner exchange arranged by the Lebanese government. Recently, Carnaby rejoiced when the man behind his capture died when his car blew up. Mossad had planted as bomb in the seat of the car. But some blamed Carnaby when word was leaked that another seat bomb was earmarked for Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah leader in Lebanon. Carnaby had close ties with the Israeli government, and some thought that an aid to Prime Minister Omert tipped off Carnaby. His fear was that killing Nasrallah would set off a war in Lebanon, which would require US intervention against Hezbollah and Syria, and eventually against Iran. The plot against the Hezbollah leader was to come off four or five days before Carnaby was killed.

In 2008, he was working out of the same office building where the office of George H.W. Bush occupies the whole 9th floor. Carnaby’s job concerned the security of the Port of Houston. He was concerned that Homeland Security was doing too little to protect the port and to prevent illegal arms shipments from passing through it. When the Houston police killed him, they seized his laptop and cell phone. Both could be used to learn more about the CIA’s network of NOC (non-official cover) people who worked on such matters. There is a fear that the intelligence agency of another government could have gotten information off the computer and phone.

In 1994, Carnaby, then working in counter-terrorism, testified before a federal grnd jury ab out the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Both CArnaby and his friend John O’Neill knew how much prior knowledge the federal government had about the bombing as well as its links to Saudi Arabia. Much of that information was suppressed. Carnaby carried in his wallet a laminated funeral mass card with the image of his friend John O’Neill. Both were mavericks and patriots. O’Neill even explored the possibility that two Arabs in a dingy were not responsible for the attack on the USS Cole. He asked too many questions and was quickly sent home. By all accounts, O’Neill was our most talented terrorist hunter, but he was quickly forced to resign. Ironically, he became head of security at the World Trade Center and died trying to help people escape.

Carnaby was a friend of James Baker III and George H.W. Bush, who had been seen recently giving Carnaby a hug in a restaurant. He shared their aversion to more military adventures in the Middle East and was angry that Dick Cheney pushed George W. Bush into Iraq. A conservative Republican, Carnaby was backing Ron Paul. Among the pallbearers at his funeral were former president George H. W. Bush, former KBG General Oleg Kalugin and former Deputy Director for Operations James Pavitt. George Tenet was among a cluster of Washington politicians.

Perhaps his killing had to do with other information he had or something he was doing.

There was speculation that he was trying to move weapons to the Aoun faction—the “generals” -- in Lebanon. Would that have been a sanctioned activity?

He was an expert in tracing Israeli cash flows around the world. It has been said that a Mossad faction in the police department was behind his death, but Israeli intelligence is too experienced and professional to get involved in such a messy hit.

Investigator Wayne Madsen was told that Carnaby had information on the Jack Abraham political/financial network as well as how the prosecution and death of Deborah Jean Palfrey was related to that. She killed herself on May 1, 2008, in a shed on her mother’s property. Her call girl service was involved with Republican corruption in Maryland, and it is likely that she knew a great deal about the sex rings servicing federal officials and mostly Republican politicians in D.C. Palfrey’s ring was supposedly tied to important federal defense contractors and was used my many ranking politicians and the larger part of one Republican state delegation to Congress.

Much of the money Abramoff distributed to Republicans came from Russian oil and gas interests and the Russian mob, which was buying into US casinos. There was already a messy murder connected with an Abramoff casino in Florida that has been pretty well covered-up. The Russian mob's casino activitie4s wre probably partly to blame for the wrongful prosecution of Don Siegelman in Alabama. A great deal of the money Abramoff used as part of the K Street scheme for funding the GOP was skimmed off of US defense and intelligence contracts and rerouted back to the Republican Party.

There have been a few prosecutions, including one of a ranking CIA official, but we will probably never know the full extent of this network. It is very likely that at least two US Attorneys were sacked for looking into these matters.

On the other hand, the shooting could be about cops who became very suspicious and hostile when they saw a prosperous Arab guy and somehow got involved in a bad shoot.

If this were the case, it would be a bad situation. But it would not be as bad as having to wonder if this man died at the hands of foreign intelligence services, the Russian mafia, or people tied to a very corrupt domestic criminal activities that will probably never be brought to light.

[Sherman DeBrosse, the pseudonym for a retired history professor, is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog and also blogs at Sherm Says and on DailyKos.]

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Twitter: Diabolical Terrorist Tool?

Army surveillance photo of Twitter terrorist conspiring with comrades.
Army report: 'Twitter was recently used as a countersurveillance, command and control, and movement tool by activists at the Republican National Convention.'
By William Michael Hanks / The Rag Blog / October 26, 2008

A report by the Army's 304th Military Intelligence Battalion has identified a potential threat to National security in the seemingly innocuous and ubiquitous Twitter application. It's seems this social networking (socnet) site has more disturbing uses than mere microblogging of current personal activities and favorite websites. One of the examples given of the nefarious possibilities that such applications provide is quoted here.

"Twitter was recently used as a countersurveillance, command and control, and movement tool by activists at the Republican National Convention," the report notes."The activists would Tweet each other and their Twitter pages to add information on what was happening with Law Enforcement near real time."

Disturbing as that news may be, there are apparently more frightening uses of Twitter that could even now be posing threats to our homeland security. According to the report, Twitter in combination with cell phone cameras and GPS features could be used for anything from infiltrating our borders (evidently so well-protected that advanced technologies are required) to the planting of a wide range terrorists devices.

Even though the real threat posed by this use of this popular microblogging media is minimal (judging by the ease of identifying all Twitter posts that refer to the 2008 election and displaying them on the Twitter "Election 08" site), I hope we will all take this warning seriously and report any suspicious characters or activity to our local Homeland Security authorities.

I guess the real message we can take from this is that any tool that enhances unfiltered communication among citizens can be viewed with suspicion. This report reminds us how surreal our world has become.

Spy Fears: Twitter Terrorists, Cell Phone Jihadists
By Noah Shachtman / October 24, 2008

Could Twitter become terrorists' newest killer app? A draft Army intelligence report, making its way through spy circles, thinks the miniature messaging software could be used as an effective tool for coordinating militant attacks.

For years, American analysts have been concerned that militants would take advantage of commercial hardware and software to help plan and carry out their strikes. Everything from online games to remote-controlled toys to social network sites to garage door openers has been fingered as possible tools for mayhem.

This recent presentation -- put together on the Army's 304th Military Intelligence Battalion and found on the Federation of the American Scientists website -- focuses on some of the newer applications for mobile phones: digital maps, GPS locators, photo swappers, and Twitter mash-ups of it all.

The report is roughly divided into two halves. The first is based mostly on chatter from Al-Qaeda-affiliated online forums. One Islamic extremist site discusses, for example, the benefits of "using a mobile phone camera to monitor the enemy and its mechanisms." Another focuses on the benefits of the Nokia 6210 Navigator, and how its GPS utilities could be used for "marksmanship, border crossings, and in concealment of supplies." Such software could allow jihadists to pick their way across multiple routes, identifying terrain features as they go. A third extremist forum recommends the installation of voice-modification software to conceal one's identity when making calls. Excerpts from a fourth site show cell phone wallpapers that wannabe jihadists can use to express their affinity for radicalism:

Click on image to enlarge.
Then the presentation launches into an even-more theoretical discussion of how militants might pair some of these mobile applications with Twitter, to magnify their impact. After all, "Twitter was recently used as a countersurveillance, command and control, and movement tool by activists at the Republican National Convention," the report notes."The activists would Tweet each other and their Twitter pages to add information on what was happening with Law Enforcement near real time."

Terrorists haven't done anything similar, the Army report concedes - although it does note that there are "multiple pro and anti Hezbollah Tweets." Instead, the presentation lays out three possible scenarios in which Twitter could become a militant's friend:

Scenario 1: Terrorist operative “A” uses Twitter with… a cell phone camera/video function to send back messages, and to receive messages, from the rest of his [group]... Other members of his [group] receive near real time updates (similar to the movement updates that were sent by activists at the RNC) on how, where, and the number of troops that are moving in order to conduct an ambush.

Scenario 2: Terrorist operative “A” has a mobile phone for Tweet messaging and for taking images. Operative “A” also has a separate mobile phone that is actually an explosive device and/or a suicide vest for remote detonation. Terrorist operative “B” has the detonator and a mobile to view “A’s” Tweets and images. This may allow ”B” to select the precise moment of remote detonation based on near real time movement and imagery that is being sent by “A.”

Scenario 3: Cyber Terrorist operative “A” finds U.S. [soldier] Smith’s Twitter account. Operative “A” joins Smith’s Tweets and begins to elicit information from Smith. This information is then used for… identity theft, hacking, and/or physical [attacks]. This scenario… has already been discussed for other social networking sites, such as My Space and/or Face Book.
Steven Aftergood, a veteran intelligence analyst at the Federation of the American Scientists, doesn't dismiss the Army presentation out of hand. But nor does he think it's tackling a terribly seriously threat. "Red-teaming exercises to anticipate adversary operations are fundamental. But they need to be informed by a sense of what's realistic and important and what's not," he tells Danger Room. "If we have time to worry about 'Twitter threats' then we're in good shape. I mean, it's important to keep some sense of proportion."
Source / Wired

Go here for the presentation produced by the Army's 304th Military Intelligence Battalion and found on the Federation of the American Scientists website.

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Junior's Legacy : As Little As Possible

White House May Have Lost 7 Months of E-mail Since 2003
by Pete Yost / August 21, 2008

WASHINGTON - The White House is missing as many as 225 days of e-mail dating back to 2003, and there is little likelihood that a recovery effort will be completed by the time President Bush leaves office, according to an internal White House draft document obtained by the Associated Press.

The nine-page outline of the White House's e-mail problems invites companies to bid on a project to recover the missing electronic messages.

The work would be carried out through April 19, 2009, according to the Office of Administration request for contractors' proposals dated June 20. The new president will be inaugurated three months before that completion date.

Last week, the White House declined to comment on the document. On Wednesday, the White House refused to discuss internal contracting procedures but said the information was "outdated and seriously inaccurate." It would not elaborate. Nor would it say whether anyone had been hired.

"With an eye on the clock, the White House continues to drag its feet and do everything possible to postpone public access to the records of this presidency," said Anne L. Weismann, chief counsel of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a private watchdog group.

The draft document outlines a process in which private contractors would attempt to retrieve lost e-mail from 35,000 disaster recovery backup tapes dating to October 2003, a period covering such events as growing violence in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the criminal inquiry into the disclosure that Valerie Plame, wife of an administration critic, worked for the CIA.

The recovery project would not use backup tapes going back to March 2003, according to the draft document, even though an earlier White House assessment suggested that e-mail was missing from that period as well.

Industry experts point out that relying on the backup system to ensure accurate retention, preservation and retrieval of all e-mail is problematic because it does not take into account deleted e-mail.

"A backup system isn't designed to be a 100% complete inventory of all e-mails," said William P. Lyons, chairman and chief executive of AXS-One, a provider of records compliance management solutions. "It's designed to make a copy of data at a specific point in time."

The White House draft document says the number of days of missing e-mail ranges from 25 to 225, a range that industry experts say would make it difficult to bid on a recovery project.

"Generally, when the scope of the work is expected to fluctuate by a factor of nearly 10, I can only take you so seriously," said Steven L. Schooner, co-director of the government procurement law program at George Washington University.

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in February, the White House told Congress it was trying to determine how many e-mail messages were missing.

© 2008 Associated Press

Source / Common Dreams

The Rag Blog

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A Twenty-First Century Cancer on the Presidency

Did Dick Cheney Give Bush Plausible Deniability?
by Johanna Neuman

“Cheney’s been very effective in setting up his deniability and always being the failsafe for Bush. Unless they start waterboarding the vice president, which is not too likely, he is the man, the trail ends right there.”

Dick Cheney was an assistant at the White House when Watergate was unfolding. By the time the scandal forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in 1974, the young Wyoming Republican had returned to the private sector. The new president, Gerald Ford, called him back. Cheney became deputy to Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, seen here on right when the two were named on Nov. 7, 1975. And when Rummy left (to run the Pentagon, but that’s another story), Ford promoted Cheney. At 34, Richard Bruce Cheney became the youngest person ever to serve as White House chief of staff.

In his new book “The Way of the World,” author Ron Suskind argues that Cheney concluded from his perch at the White House during those years that Nixon fell not because of his abuse of government — he asked agencies such as the IRS and the FBI to shadow his enemies. Or because of the break-in of the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee by criminals with ties to CREEP (The Committee To Re-Elect the President). Or even because of the cover-up.

Suskind believes Cheney concluded that Nixon had been “overbriefed” and that his aides had failed to give him “plausible deniability.” And so, a la Suskind, that is what Cheney set out to give George W. Bush.

Asked about it last night on Keith Olberman’s “Countdown” on MSNBC, John Dean, White House counsel in the Nixon presidency, said Cheney has been so successful at this that it will prevent impeachment proceedings against Bush.



“Cheney’s been very effective in setting up his deniability and always being the failsafe for Bush. Unless they start waterboarding the vice president, which is not too likely, he is the man, the trail ends right there.”

Dean, the one who told Nixon there was “a cancer on the presidency,” was convicted of obstruction of justice and admitted supervising hush payments to the break-in defendants. The author of a book called “Worse Than Watergate,” Dean argues that the sins of the earlier Nixon era “didn’t kill anyone,” whereas those of the current administration include torture and war.

© 2008 The Los Angeles Times

Source / Los Angeles Times / h/t Common Dreams

The Rag Blog

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Just Another "War on Terror" Conspiracy Theory

Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News
By Glenn Greenwald

The FBI's lead suspect in the September, 2001 anthrax attacks -- Bruce E. Ivins -- died Tuesday night, apparently by suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to charge him with responsibility for the attacks. For the last 18 years, Ivins was a top anthrax researcher at the U.S. Government's biological weapons research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, where he was one of the most elite government anthrax scientists on the research team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID).

The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential. The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters -- with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 -- that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax -- sent directly into the heart of the country's elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets -- that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks. [ ... the letter sent to Brokaw is pictured above]

The letter sent to Leahy contained this message:

We have anthrax.
You die now.
Are you afraid?
Death to America.
Death to Israel.
Allah is great.

By design, those attacks put the American population into a state of intense fear of Islamic terrorism, far more than the 9/11 attacks alone could have accomplished.

Much more important than the general attempt to link the anthrax to Islamic terrorists, there was a specific intent -- indispensably aided by ABC News -- to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. In my view, and I've written about this several times and in great detail to no avail, the role played by ABC News in this episode is the single greatest, unresolved media scandal of this decade. News of Ivins' suicide, which means (presumably) that the anthrax attacks originated from Ft. Detrick, adds critical new facts and heightens how scandalous ABC News' conduct continues to be in this matter.

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."

ABC News' claim -- which they said came at first from "three well-placed but separate sources," followed by "four well-placed and separate sources" -- was completely false from the beginning. There never was any bentonite detected in the anthrax (a fact ABC News acknowledged for the first time in 2007 only as a result of my badgering them about this issue). It's critical to note that it isn't the case that preliminary tests really did detect bentonite and then subsequent tests found there was none. No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.

Read all of it here. / Salon / Posted August 1, 2008

Thanks to Informed Comment / The Rag Blog

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