The assassinations of the 1960s
A recently discovered sound recording of the assassination of Robert Kennedy shows that there was indeed a second shooter in the room. At least 13 shots were fired according to the analysis by Philip Van Praag, an expert in the ‘forensic analysis of magnetic media recordings’. Sirhan Sirhan’s gun could contain only 8 rounds.(1)
The best single article on the assassination of Martin Luther King I know is Jim Douglass, ‘The Martin Luther King conspiracy exposed in Memphis’.(2) This article is based round the successful (but almost entirely unreported) 1999 unlawful death civil suit brought by the King family against Lloyd Jowers and unnamed others. Douglass was one of only two American journalists who attended all the proceedings and his essay has links to a complete account of the trial. Essentially the trial tested Dr William Pepper’s research into the case and found it convincing. The transcripts of the trial’s testimony is now on-line.(3)
Although you wouldn’t know it from reading the major media, both the RFK and MLK cases have been partially solved by citizen researchers. (Earl Jowers has confessed to playing a role in the King shooting, hiding the gun used after the event.)
Black boxing
An anonymous author, claiming to have been a US intelligence officer of some stripe, included this in an article which is entertaining if light on facts. (A book is promised.)(4)
‘A little side note for you: I firmly believe Robert Gates, the current Secretary of Defense and Bush Sr.’s right-hand man in the covert world, used computer cryptography and software security assets to get Bush Jnr. elected both times. I do not have direct knowledge of the operation, but research “Robert Gates”, “Bill Owns”, “electronic voting security”, “HAVE”, “vote here” and “Scientific Applications International Crop”.
The operation went so well that Gates was going to be made the first ever Director of National Intelligence. He turned down the job, but then took the Secretary of Defense position when Rumsfeld was removed from his public position. I don’t think there will ever be solid evidence linking directly to members of the administration; it’s all a tangled web of plausible deniability. But I do think it will eventually be proven that the elections were manipulated to deliver Bush the victory. Many people in the covert world take this for granted, as common sense.’
I duly did as suggested and googled the names and terms above in a single search. This led me to <http://baltimorechronicle.com/2006/110906Harris.shtml>. This is very suggestive and worth a look. But if our anonymous spook is a fake, he simply paraphrased the story in the Baltimore Chronicle (which is a 7,000 circulation radical magazine).
On the same subject former Democratic Governor of Alabama, Don Siegelman, claims that his 2002 defeat was engineered electronically and notes that the major print and TV media have refused to broadcast his claims, let alone examine his evidence, naming names and firms.(5)
For most of the politicians and the media, stealing elections has become one of those untouchable subjects which suggests structural problems with the American political system (which we know is perfect and sacrosanct). Even the Democratic Party, the victims here, are afraid of it. Obama and Clinton appear to believe that the next presidential election will be just another election; it might be fiddled at the margins by what we might call ‘ordinary cheating’ (as the American football slogan has it: if you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’) but fundamentally it will be business as usual. How many presidential election campaigns are they willing to lose before they face reality?
Fabricating a Soviet ‘threat’
The Sunday Times 27 January 2008 had a really interesting piece about a joint US-UK operation to fabricate a Soviet submarine ‘threat’ in Swedish waters in the 1980s. (The Swedes were considered to be insufficiently anti-Soviet.) And the operation worked: Swedish public opinion became markedly more anti-Soviet. The Times report is based on a book, whose author has published a long on-line version of the operation.(6)
The 9/11 conspiracy theorists who see the American state behind the plane bombings of Manhattan are mistaken in my view but they do have historical precedents on their side; and here’s another.
Rejecting the conspiracy theories about 9/11 does not mean that everything is thus kosher. There is a mountain of stinky stuff buried under the official 9-11 investigation which researchers will be piecing together for years, decades. The most striking item to me is the story of the Israelis – presumably Mossad agents – who were closely surveilling some of the al-Qaeda members in the US before 9-11. This came to light because a couple of them were arrested after being seen celebrating as the second plane struck. This is discussed in quite striking detail at <www.christopherketcham.com>.
Who knew? And when?
Reporters for Uncle Sam
Two substantial critical studies of the group Reporters without Frontiers have appeared recently. Ostensibly concerned with press freedom, it is part funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (bit of a clue there!) and is part of the US attempts to destabilise Cuba and Venezuela. See Salim Lamrani, ‘The deceit of Reporters Without Borders’,(7) and Michael Barker’s ‘Media Watchdog as Democracy Manipulator’.(8) PhD student Barker has interesting essays in the National Endowment for Democracy/manipulating-civil-society field on his blog (9)and at the Global Research site. When it appears, his book in this area should be worth investigating.
Over the Moon
An essay by the excellent Robert Parry on the role played in recent US politics by the Moonies’ money begins:
‘The American Right achieved its political dominance in Washington over the past quarter century with the help of more than $3 billion spent by Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon on a daily propaganda organ, The Washington Times, according to a 21-year veteran of the newspaper.’(10)
While visiting Parry’s site, take a look at ‘Gary Webb’s death: American tragedy’,(11) Parry’s admirably succinct summary of the CIA-cocaine-contras story which led to the suicide of the American journalist, Gary Webb, who was the first to break it in the major media.
An even dodgier dossier
The ‘dodgy dossier’ produced by the government of Colombia and the USA against Venezuela in March – terrorists and drugs and nukes – reported straight by most of the major media, has been deconstructed into the crude fraud it always looked like.(12) Reading the original stories you can almost hear the dialogue in some office in Washington: ‘Hey, our media bought it in Iraq, so let’s run it at them again.’
Litvinenko
Two big pieces on the death in London of Alexander Litvinenko have appeared. In the first, Edward J. Epstein – yes, the author of Legend among other things, that Epstein – argues that the evidence suggests that Litvinenko contaminated himself, probably through involvement in an illegal nuclear smuggling operation (polonium 210 being an improbable – expensive, unreliable and dangerous – choice as a murder weapon). Epstein is suspicious of the British authorities’ actions and contrasts them with those of their Russian equivalents who opened their files to him.(13)
In the second,(14)Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, authors of the book on the A. Q. Khan nuclear network reviewed below, trace intelligence gun-for-hire Litvinenko’s activities with the so-called Mitrokhin Commission in Italy, the attempt by Berlusconi to use the Mitrokhin information to fabricate a communist ‘trace’ on his political opponents in time for an Italian general election. (And it seemed to have paid off, too: a communist smear was generated against Romano Prodi; but no-one seems to have believed it and Prodi won the election, though his coalition government fell recently.) Litvinenko also turned his attention to some Ukrainian gangsters and it’s in this direction that the authors think we should be looking to explain his death. Both articles are very interesting indeed.
The mechanisms of an oppressive state
Richard and Katie Bennett, who are AFB Research, have produced a very large and, as far as I can see, accurate piece on the British military-intelligence state structure as it was in 2003.(15)
The British security and intelligence services, plus police forces, local authorities and agencies such as the Serious Fraud Office made 253,500 requests for phone taps, the interception of e-mails or post in the final nine months of 2006.(16) Add this to the information that the state is now bugging lawyers speaking to clients in prisons and searching the personal possessions of visitors to prisons and we need some expression other than ‘Orwellian’ to describe things.(17)
Going round in Cercles
Joël van der Reijden has written a huge essay, nearly half a megabyte long, with over 200 footnotes, on Le Cercle, known in its previous incarnations as the Pinay Circle or Cercle Violet.(18) This group was first mentioned in these pages in Lobster 11 and then discussed at length by David Teacher in Lobster 18. Van Reijden’s essay is worth a look. Some of the sources need care (e.g. La Rouche’s EIR) and he is inclined to make this overlapping, inter-linked world look tidier than it actually is; but even so this an interesting piece of research.
The same author has produced an analysis of the American Pilgrims Society, another of those white-bread, elite groups whose members used to dominate American foreign policy before ‘the cowboys’, fronting for the military, seized control from ‘the yankees’.(19)
American empire
Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback (reviewed in Lobster 41) in which he discusses the American empire and the problem of military Keynesianism in America, is the subject of a filmed interview available on the Net.(20)If you are a skimmer, like me, without the patience to watch talking heads, you can read it there instead. Peter Dale Scott has an interview in the same series, in which he discusses his latest book and related topics.(21)
A hidden hand
We don’t often find out which state employees plant disinformation on the media but we have done with the US Navy-threatened-by-Iranian-speedboats nonsense of January this year.
‘Apparently due to an error by an AP reporter, the source of what was supposed to be off-the-record briefing, was given as deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in charge of media operations, Bryan Whitman.’(22)
CIA and Indonesia
‘Ghosts Of A Genocide: The CIA, Suharto And Terrorist Culture’, a long account of the American (and minor British) involvement in the slaughter in Indonesia in the 1960s, by Dennis Small, originally published in New Zealand’s Peace Researcher, is now on-line.(23)
Notes
- See <www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/feb/22/kennedy.assassination>.
- <www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLKconExp.html> Douglass has a book out soon in the US on JFK which, to judge by a pre-publication review by Jim Di Eugenio, at <http://ctka.net/2008/jfk_unspeakable.html> is going to be very good indeed.
- <www.thekingcenter.org/news/trial.html#Transcript>
- <http://artofmentalwarfare.com/pog/covert-agent-speaks-out/>
- <www.bradblog.com/?p=5889> Video here of Siegelman talking about this in 2002.
- <www.php.isn.ethz.ch/publications/areastudies/documents/subinc/Tunander2.pdf>
- <www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7274>
- <www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=14257>
- <http://michaeljamesbarker.wordpress.com/>
- ‘The GOP’s $3 Billion Propaganda Organ’ is at <www.consortiumnews.com/2006/122706.html>.
- <http://consortiumnews.com/2006/120906.html>
- <http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2008/03/uribes-dodgy-dossier.html>
- Edward Jay Epstein, ‘The Specter That Haunts the Death of Litvinenko’, The New York Sun, 19 March 2008. <www.nysun.com/article/73212> This was discussed by Mary Dejevsky in The Independent on 2 May 2008, ‘The Litvinenko files: Was he really murdered?’
- ‘Why a spy was killed’, The Guardian, 26 January 2008.
- <www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4463.htm> Their Website is <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/alan-turnbull/afi-research.htm>
- Nick McDermott, ‘Big Brother tapping our phones and e-mails 1,000 times a day’, The Daily Mail, 29 January 2008.
- <www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/09/nbug209.xml>
- <http://home.planet.nl/~reijd050/organisations/Le_Cercle.htm>
- <http://home.planet.nl/~reijd050/organisations/Pilgrims_Society.htm>
- <http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people7/CJohnson/cjohnson07-con0.html>
- <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5829118121827327998> Scott’s presentation at one of last year’s COPA (Coalition on Political Assassinations) conferences, ‘JFK & 9/11: insights gained from studying both’, can be seen at <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7404458118476453937>
- Gareth Porter ‘How the Pentagon planted a false story’ <www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JA17Ak03.html>
- <http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/prsp25.htm>