® ¹ ² ß ¶ º6 [ MCR preface I have been studying, interacting with, and talking to covert operatives for more than 25 years. For that reason, I avoid some questions raised by dilettantes & neophyte journalists who take all threads of Vreeland's stories into wilderness from which no professional journalist could credibly emerge. Yes, I have listened to him talk about so-called "red mercury," baseball-sized atom bombs, and Star Wars weapons systems. Yes, I have heard him talk about a great many things, and I believe that what he told me was truthful according to his knowledge of events and the documents he brought back from Moscow in December 2000. Even by his own statements, Vreeland, now 35, was a relatively low ranking officer and an intelligence field operative. Never in the history of covert operations has any govt entrusted field operatives with total strategic knowledge; knowledge held by those who make the plans is compartmentalized & locked away. Perhaps 80% of all intelligence work is disinformation, and govts know field operatives risk capture, interrogation and torture. Quite often field operatives are themselves fed disinformation so that if they talk, they will still spread lies that serve a larger strategic purpose. Quite often they carry documents that are deliberately inaccurate and their capture is engineered to give those documents credibility ] Oswald 's Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was kept in the garage of the Paines, cousins of John Forbes Kerry [ 2004 Dem. pres. candidate & intelligence wrongdoing Cong. investigation chair Sen. Kerry ]
Because of her son's involvement in the assasination, her Forbes family's involvement with drug dealing in China during the Opium War, and her husband's involvement with the military & defense industry, Ruth Forbes Paine Young started the International Peace Academy, which have fed rumors about her family's politics."
So enmeshed with the lives of Mr. & Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald that she became the Warren Commission's most important witness, Ruth Hyde Paine, b. 9.3.32, was a friend of Marina Oswald who was living with her at the time of the JFK assassination.
In February 1963, Everett Glover, with whom she'd sung madrigals in Dallas, invited her to a get-together at his home. Among his guests, Oswald, for whom she found the job that put him 6 floors above Dealey Plaza .
"Kerry at St Paul's School, Concord NH (enrolled 1958, grad. 1962) In his free time, he enjoyed hockey & lacrosse, which he played on teams captained by a classmate & future FBI director Robert S. Mueller III. JFK was killed 11.22.63 while riding in an open convertible in Dallas TX by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who had close ties with the Carlos Marcello Mafia family in New Orleans, particularly with Charles Murret, a top man in Marcello's Louisiana gambling network. Oswald had also been seen by numerous witnesses meeting with Marcello's personal pilot just days before he murdered the president.
Within 48 hours after the shooting, Oswald, who panicked after the assassination and was captured by police, was killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, who had a long standing relationship with numerous associates of the Chicago Mafia and had worked as an organizer at one time for Paul Dorfman, stepfather of Jimmy Hoffa's associate Allen Dorfman, in the Chicago Wastehandlers Union.
During the days and weeks before the Kennedy killing, Ruby was calling and being called by top aides to Marcello, Florida mobster Santos Trafficante, and Hoffa, all of whom were known to have discussed plans with their associates to murder either JFK or RFK.
A U.S. House select committee investigating the Kennedy assassination later concluded that "Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, and Jimmy Hoffa had the motive, means and opportunity" to murder the president. (Report of the Select Committee on Assassination, 95th Cong. 2nd session, House report no. 95.1828, part 2 pp 169-179)
The official investigation by the Warren Commission that followed never addressed the underworld ties to Oswald and Ruby. Many of those on the panel had been directly involved with the CIA-Mafia plots to murder Fidel Castro, which the Kennedy brothers had no knowledge of until May 1962 at which time they ordered them stopped.
Meanwhile, Lew Wasserman had tried to revive Reagan's failing movie career. |
N E W Rome |
S U P P L E M E N T
|
[ Presume primarily speculative sources' citation on this
page. ]
2000 J.R. Nyquist WorldNetDaily auth. Origins of the Fourth World War
Consider the semi-puppet madman in Baghdad, who sent a powerful armored division made of Russian-built tanks to the Jordanian border. The Iraqis want a way into Israel so they can destroy the hated enemy. It is all very theatrical. Several days ago, Saddam Hussein requested an attack corridor into Israel. But even an elite Iraqi armored division is not very dangerous. What is needed, in the last analysis, is an atomic bomb or a missile carrying weaponized smallpox.
Iran is of special importance in this; Russia has been helping Iran to develop its nuclear capability.
Russians told VP Gore about their program to assist Iran in 1995. On Tuesday Bill Gertz reported Washington
Times obtained classified letter sent by Russia's PM to Gore, instructing the American vice president to withhold
information about the Russia-Iran nuclear program from the U.S. Congress. Russia's motivation for helping
Iranians? Russia is supposedly fighting Islamic terrorists in Chechnya. Why conspire to give Islamics a nuclear
device on another front?
The Kremlin worked closely with Arab & Islamic terrorists for decades. Russia supported & assisted
terrorist states like Libya & Syria. It trained & paid the PLO. Russia always first to give aid to Saddam
Hussein in Iraq. Militant Arabists or Islamic extremists often found within the Russian camp working as virtual
puppets of the Kremlin.
One chief example: In 1970 the Kremlin became interested in an obscure Arab construction engineer &
collector of racecars named Rahman al-Qudwa. Evidence shows, contrary to later claims, that this "construction
engineer" was an Egyptian, born in Cairo during the summer of 1929. Rahman graduated from the University of
Cairo and served as an officer in the Egyptian Army during the 1956 Suez campaign. Later he set up a business in
Kuwait & made a fortune. He then entered politics, founding a hopelessly small terrorist organization.
But this terrorist organization would not remain hopelessly small forever.
According to former head of Romanian intelligence, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, one of highest ranking communist
defectors of all time, Rahman al-Qudwa became an important political ally of the communist bloc following the
death of Egypt's president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, in 1970. Gen. Pacepa's account of Rahman's intimate relations
with the communist bloc is related in a book entitled "Red Horizons".
Rahman al-Qudwa is better known as Yasser Arafat, PLO chairman since 1968 and president of Palestinian
Authority, which is now at war with Israel. According to Gen. Pacepa's account, communist dictator Nicolae
Ceausescu ordered his people to bring Arafat over to Romania. In late 1970 the chief of Romanian intelligence in
Egypt, Gen. Constantine Munteanu, arrived in Bucharest with Arafat in tow. Munteanu had gathered an extensive
file on Arafat, which characterized the PLO leader as "so much cleverness, blood, and filth all together in one
man." Munteanu's "standard definition of Arafat," per Pacepa.
A compact between Arafat & the Soviet Union via communist Romania was not something that
violated any sacred Islamic rule in Arafat's heart. Arafat is no Moslem. His fanaticism is completely secular. But
since he operates within the Islamic world, he must sometimes appear as would-be Muslim liberator.
The KGB & its successor services have files on Arab leaders. Secret sin is rampant, because men, esp.
powerful men, are subject to more than the usual temptations. Sin is also extensive in the Christian world; we have yet to understand the peculiar vulnerabilities of the U.S. in this regard.
But since the Arab world is more corrupt than the U.S., it is even more vulnerable to Moscow. Sexual deviancy is
only one sin. When Russian PM Viktor Chernomyrdin told VP Gore about Russian nuclear assistance to Iran, he
was tempting Gore to compromise himself. Gore had to choose between angering his Russian friends or obeying
U.S. law & informing Congress.
On Tuesday congressional leaders asked for hearings into Gore's
secret relationship with Russia's former prime minister. In a classic move, Chernomyrdin asked Gore to break U.S. laws requiring that he report Russia's nuclear proliferation to Congress. It is typical of KGB agents to ask for these "little favors." After a certain number of such favors the Kremlin owns you. Then you are paralyzed, and cannot act against Russia in any meaningful way.
Suit: Iraq masterminded attack
A class-action lawsuit was filed in district court in Washington, D.C., today alleging that Iraq, "in whole or in part,"
planned and financed the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City nearly 7 years ago.
"Plaintiffs assert that the entire plot was, in whole or in part, orchestrated, assisted technically and/or financially,
and directly aided by agents of the Republic of Iraq," said the suit, filed by public interest law firm Judicial Watch.
Federal officials have said 4.19.95 attack on the Murrah Building was committed by former Army vet Timothy
McVeigh, executed 6.11.01, and accomplice Terry Nichols, now serving a life sentence for his role in the bombing. The FBI said the explosion, which destroyed nearly one-third of the building and killed 168 people, was the result of a huge ammonium nitrate-laden truck bomb parked in front of the building.
But according to the suit, plaintiffs say the OKC bombing "was an illegal continuation of the Persian Gulf War," and that they and their loved ones "are … civilian casualties of [the] Gulf War. …" "Plaintiffs further assert that the
involvement & complicity of Iraq can be proven by both direct & circumstantial evidence," the suit alleges.
Judicial Watch chair & lead counsel Larry Klayman said evidence against Iraq is strong. "It's time that
someone took action against Iraq. Talk is cheap," Klayman said, adding that Judicial Watch would be "developing
more evidence" against Baghdad later. The legal group says the suit was filed under terms enumerated in the
Antiterrorism & Death Penalty Act of 1996, which addresses state-sponsored terrorism and has a specific
provision for retroactive application. "Judicial Watch & its clients contend that other individuals, in addition to
Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, were involved in the preparation for and execution of the attack on the Murrah Building", said a statement issued by the group. "These individuals were operating as agents of the Republic of Iraq. …"
Klayman's organization said reports from Philippine intelligence & law enforcement sources form the
basis for much of the information contained in the lawsuit. Specifically, the suit details meetings between Nichols
& Ramzi Youssef, mastermind of 1993 World Trade Ctr bombing, during Nichols' travel to the Philippines
between 1990 & 1994.
Additional evidence obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveals Interpol's efforts to apprehend 2
additional Oklahoma City bombing suspects and information in the agency's files associating Youssef with the
attack, Judicial Watch said. "It's time the whole story about the Oklahoma City bombing is revealed and that justice is done for the Iraqis' state sponsorship of that brutal attack on American citizens," Klayman said. Local OKC attorney Mike Johnston is also acting as counsel in the suit, as is Jay Adkisson of Irvine, Calif.
"The survivors of the Murrah Building bombing and the people of Oklahoma City have waited a long time for the
whole, unvarnished truth to come out concerning this horrific plot, and they won't rest until that's accomplished,"
Johnston said in a statement released today. In a separate interview, Johnston told WorldNetDaily he hoped the
suit would bring "peace of mind" to the plaintiffs & the nation. "We think there's evidence out that that would be not only relevent to the lawsuit but have definite historical value, not only for public consumption but also for the peace of mind for the survivors," he said. Johnston added that he hadn't heard from the Justice Dept or the FBI regarding the suit. "This is a civil matter, and I think they'll be reluctant to get involved, at least on any official
basis," he said.
The Justice Dept did not return phone calls seeking comment. The suit says that prior to the Gulf War, "Iraq had
developed a covert network in U.S. to acquire materials for weapons of mass destruction." After the war, the suit
alleges, "Iraq converted that network into organized terrorist cells," some of which "were directly involved in" the
OKC bombing. The suit also alleges that Youssef set up a terrorist "base of operations" in the Philippines in 1994.
That may be significant, sources told WorldNetDaily, because of Nichols' trips to the Philippines
prior to the 1995 bombing. "In the Philippines as part of 'Project Bojinka,' Ramzi Youssef, on behalf of Iraq,
recruited conspirators to attempt to simultaneously bomb U.S. 747 aircraft over the Pacific," the suit alleges.
Delayed timers "with many similarities" to the Pam Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 were to be
used, said the suit. "Youssef also conceived of plans to highjack planes bound for the United States in order to dive them, in suicide attacks, into U.S. targets like CIA headquarters … a tactic later adopted by [al-Qaida terrorist group founder] Osama bin Laden," the suit said.
"Plaintiffs assert that at some point … Youssef recruited a willing convert in the person of Terry Nichols, who
witnesses say went to the Philippines seeking technical help in learning to build a bomb," said the suit. "Meetings
between Terry Nichols and Ramzi Youssef were witnessed by a Filipino government informant." Nichols made his last trip to the Philippines Nov. 22, 1994, after marrying a local 17-year-old Filipino girl. Besides the plaintiffs, others believe the OKC bombing may have an Iraqi connection. According to a "Washington Whispers" segment in 10.29.01 issue of U.S. News & World Report, some top Defense Department officials believed McVeigh was an Iraqi agent. "Some dismiss it as being akin to Elvis sightings, but a few top Defense officials think Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh was an Iraqi agent," wrote magazine correspondent Paul Bedard. "The theory stems from a never-before-reported allegation that McVeigh had allegedly collected Iraqi telephone numbers. Why haven't we heard this before about the case of the executed McVeigh? Conspiracy theorists in the Pentagon think it's part of a cover-up," he wrote.
Counsel for the House-led impeachment effort against former President Clinton David Schippers also says he
believes there is a MidEast connection to the bombing. "I am thoroughly convinced that there was a dead-bang
Middle Eastern connection in the OKC City bombing," he told TalkNetDaily host Geoff Metcalf 10.21.01 interview. "I think bin Laden was behind it. I think that there were MidEastern people on the scene running away."
Minister says his father, now dead, killed MLKing
Gainesville, FL Saying he could no longer keep his dead father's secret, a minister is contending that his father, not James Earl Ray, fatally shot the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a Memphis motel in 1968.
The man, the Rev. Ronald Denton Wilson, said in an interview today that his father, Henry Clay Wilson, led a group of 3 conspirators responsible for Dr. King's death. "My father was the main guy," said Mr. Wilson, 61, of Keystone Heights, north of Gainesville. "It wasn't a racist thing. He thought Martin Luther King was connected with
communism, and he wanted to get him out of the way." Mr. Wilson produced no evidence to support his claim.
Mr. Wilson, a pastor at the nondenominational New Covenant Church in Graham, north of Gainesville, said his
father died in 1990 of complications from emphysema. He said his father was in Memphis on 4.4.68 and killed Dr.
King because he thought it was in the nation's best interest. "He kept saying it was the patriotic thing to do," Mr.
Wilson said. "He said he had to save the country."
An FBI spokesman in Jacksonville, FL said today that the authorities had interviewed Mr. Wilson on Tuesday night
and were taking his statements seriously but that the issue had not risen to the level of a full investigation. "When
someone makes a statement like this, you don't just ignore it," said Special Agent Ron Grenier. "This is something very serious." A spokesman for the Memphis office of the F.B.I. said it was not involved. "If credible evidence were developed by the Jacksonville office, substantiating any of the claims by this man that his father was involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King, then we might become involved," said spokesman George Bolds.
Mr. Wilson called a news conference Tue. to provide what he said were the facts about Dr. King's death. He said it was only a coincidence that it fell near the anniversary of the assassination. Since his announcement, he'sbeen
asked for interviews by newspapers & tv pgms across the country. Mr. Wilson said that as a young man he
had attended meetings among his father & 2 men he identified as co-conspirators. "I was invited as a
minister," he said. "My dad wanted me to pray and ask for everything to go right."
Atlanta King Ctr lawyer William Pepper said in a statement that he had been contacted by many people making
claims similar to Mr. Wilson's but had discounted most as having no value. "I have heard from Reverend Wilson
over the last couple of years or more but have never seen any hard evidence to justify the allegations now being
made," Mr. Pepper wrote. Even faced with such skepticism, Mr. Wilson insists that his father was the killer.
"I kept telling him not to do it," he said of his father. "But he kept trying to convince me it was the patriotic thing to
do." As he was about to reveal more about the location, Mr. Wilson's son, Steve, 39, also a pastor, interrupted him, saying the family instead wished to read a statement. It expressed sympathy for the King family and said that "under the advice of counsel the Rev. R. D. Wilson is giving no further public statements." In a follow-up telephone interview about an hour later, Steve Wilson inquired about whether The Times ever pays for exclusive details of news events. It does not. In 1998, the Agency declassified a handful of annual personnel evaluations that revealed Joannides In November 1963, Joannides was serving as the chief of psychological warfare operations in the CIA's Miami station. Joannides had agents in a leading Cuban student exile group, an operation code-named AMSPELL in CIA files.program of CIA support for the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, also known as the Cuban Student Directorate. By 1962, the DRE was perhaps the single biggest and most active organization opposing Fidel Castro's regime. In Miami, Joannides was giving the leaders of the group up to $25,000 a month in cash for what he described as "intelligence collection" and "propaganda."
In August 1963, the DRE's New Orleans chapter had taken a vocal and very public interest in an itinerant ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald because of his blatantly pro-Castro politicking. He wrote letters to left-wing political organizations and drifted from job to job. And then in early August 1963 he attempted to infiltrate the DRE.
Bringuier took an interest in Oswald. He directed a DRE member to go to Oswald's house and pose as a Castro supporter to learn more about his background. Bringuier also debated Oswald on a local radio program, and sent a tape of the debate to DRE's Miami headquarters.
When Congress reopened the JFK probe in 1978, Joannides served as the CIA's liaison to the investigators. His job was to provide files and information to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
He did not disclose his role in the events of 1963, even when asked direct questions about the AMSPELL operation he handled. | ||
The two actual trigger-men were Cuban, both part of an earlier mafia contract on Castro’s head. The mob used some of CIA’s anti-Castro funding to pay them off. Anti-Castro-Cubans, concentrated in the Miami area, hated JFK almost as much as they detested Castro after Kennedy left Cuban troops stranded at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Motive: Old-fashioned revenge mixed with self-preservation.
The mafia helped elect Joe the Bootlegger’s Boy to the White House. They stole Chicago for Kennedy, arranging for a number of long-dead people to vote, edging out Richard Nixon, the genuine winner. Their reward was Robert Kennedy as attorney general on determined crusade to jail or deport top mafia figures.
Perhaps RFK was out to prove his manhood as runt of a highly competitive family, along with trying to erase family connections to the mob. An anti-mafia campaign became RFK’s obsession to chagrin of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who, for his own reasons, refused to even acknowledge the existence of a cosa nostra.
RFK went too far when he orchestrated the deportation of Carlos Marcello to Sicily. Humiliated and outraged, Marcello snuck back into the U.S. and began plotting. At a mob pow-wow, Santo Trafficante proposed that they put a contract on Robert Kennedy.
Marcello would have none of it; only the top enchilada would suffice.
“If you cut off the dog’s tail, the dog will only keep biting,” Marcello told Trafficante. “But if you cut off its head, the dog will die.”
When the deed was done, RFK knew very well what had happened, and this compounded his inconsolable grief. RFK blamed himself, for it was he who personally spearheaded CIA’s attempts to get Castro, cementing an otherwise tenuous agency relationship with the mafia.
Under President Johnson, RFK became a lame attorney general. His spirit for the job was all but snuffed out. LBJ, who referred to JFK in the late 1950s as “that spavined hunchback,” had grown weary of the Kennedy insider sobriquet for him, “Uncle Cornpone".
J. Edgar Hoover loathed the Kennedy brothers, especially Robert. He was relieved to have them off his back. The FBI director maintained good relations with mob bosses; he traded horseracing tips with top New York mobster Frank Costello. FBI investigation evaded every lead that pointed to the mafia.
Lee Harvey Oswald was a fiery young idealist who drifted from one cause to the next, ultimately allowing himself to be strung into the wrong place at the wrong time by the wrong crowd under the wrong set of circumstances.
Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner and mob associate from way back, was chosen to hit Oswald. The deal to break him out of prison and set him up a millionaire in Mexico went unfulfilled. A few years later Ruby was dead from cancer.
The Warren Commission whitewashed the event for reasons of national security, e.g.the Castro connection, and the mafia became alarmed by RFK’s rise to popularity.
|
Newly discovered JFK assassination items revealed
David Tarrant, D.Flick, J.Emily 2.18.08 Dallas Morning News
An old safe in a Dallas courthouse contained files related to the death of President John F. Kennedy. There is an assassin's gun holster, brass knuckles and a transcript of a "smoking gun" conversation to kill the president.
Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins talked about what he discovered locked in a safe on the 10th floor of the Frank Crowley Courts Building.
The first black DA in Dallas history, Watkins said he decided to go public as part of an effort to run an open administration and break from the past.
News that documents related to the Kennedy assassination was first broken by The Dallas Morning News in its Sunday editions. Monday's news conference attracted several dozen members of the news media, both local and national.
One file that immediately generated controversy was the transcript of an alleged conversation between Kennedy's presumed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jack Ruby, the man accused of killing Oswald.
Watkins said he didn't know whether the alleged conversation was real or fake.
Another document certain to draw interest is a purported movie contract showing the signature of Henry Wade, district attorney at the time of the Kennedy assassination. The contract, dated April 1967, "would have made Wade a rich man," said Watkins, who did not divulge the contract's amount. He also said he didn't know why the movie was never made.
Watkins stood by a table stacked with more than a dozen cardboard boxes of files. Another table displayed the brass knuckles and holster believed to have belonged to Ruby.
Not everyone was surprised by Watkins' discovery.
One expert who devoted years of his life researching the Kennedy assassination sounded underwhelmed at the discovery. Vincent Bugliosi, author of last-year's 13-volume book, Reclaiming History, said he was highly skeptical that the courthouse safe contained anything that would significantly alter the known facts of the case.
Bugliosi also said that if prosecutors in Wade's office had evidence that Oswald and Ruby had met, they would have had no motive to keep it quiet.
Bugliosi says the transcript of the alleged Ruby-Oswald conversation was based on a letter to the FBI by Dallas lawyer Carroll Jarnagin, who said he saw the two men conversing at the Carousel Club on Oct. 4, 1963, and then transcribed the conversation more than 2 months later.
Watkins' office hasn't completed scanning the information found in the safe; about 90 percent has been finished.
Watkins said he had another motive for making the information public. The documents also reveal the climate of race relations that existed in the criminal justice system and the country in the early 1960s, he said.
Brandishing a letter written in 1964 from the Hunt County district attorney to Wade, Watkins noted that the letterhead included the slogan: "The blackest land and the whitest people". |
Dallas County DA's office finds cache of JFK
memorabilia
ð 2.16.08 Jennifer Emily Dallas Morning News
The Dallas County district attorney's office has unearthed a treasure trove of memorabilia from the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in an old safe on the 10th floor of the courthouse.
It includes personal letters to and from former District Attorney Henry Wade, a gun holster, official records from the Jack Ruby trial, letters to Ruby and clothing that probably belonged to him and Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, said Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins.
"It will open up the debate again about whether there was a conspiracy," said Watkins, who at 40 was born four Novembers after Kennedy was killed in 1963.
Terri Moore, Mr. Watkins' top assistant, said she believes the transcript is part of a movie that Mr. Wade was working on with producers.
Wade wrote about the movie, Countdown in Dallas, in letters found in the safe. Wade prosecuted Ruby in Oswald's death, although the verdict was overturned and Ruby died of cancer in 1967 before his second trial could begin.
It is unclear if any further work was ever done on the film.
Watkins is expected to formally announce the finding of about a dozen boxes of materials on Monday at a news conference. The vast majority of the documents are authentic records from the 1960s.
The purported Oswald-Ruby conversation took place 10.4.63 at Ruby's Carousel Club on Commerce Street. It reads like every conspiracy theorist's dream of a smoking gun that ties the men to a plot to kill Kennedy.
Ruby: Yes, but it can't be done ... it would get the Feds into everything.
Lee: There is a way to get rid of him without killing him.
Ruby: How's that?
Lee: I can shoot his brother.
Ruby: But that wouldn't be patriotic.
Lee: What's the difference between shooting the Governor and in shooting the President?
Ruby: It would get the FBI into it. Lee: I can still do it, all I need is my rifle and a tall building; but it will take time, maybe six months to find the right place; but I'll have to have some money to live on while I do the planning
Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, laughed when told of the transcript. He has not seen it or any of the other documents found in the safe.
The FBI determined that conversation, again between Oswald and Ruby, but this time about killing the governor, was definitely fake.
Mack suggested that the transcript in the Warren Commission report was probably used as a model for the one found in the district attorney's safe.
"The fact that it's sitting in Henry Wade's file, and he didn't do anything, indicates he thought it wasn't worth anything," Mack said of the newly found transcript. "He probably kept it because it was funny. It's hilarious. It's like a bad B movie".
William J. Alexander, the only surviving prosecutor from Ruby's trial for killing Oswald in the days after Kennedy's assassination, told the district attorney's office he'd never seen the Ruby-Oswald transcript. But it's labeled with a sticker that says, "Plaintiff's Exhibit 27".
While the two-page transcript is most likely fake, Watkins says he's never believed Oswald acted alone. They didn't find the gun, which Mack said is privately owned, but instead found the records and other items. For the past year, they've been trying to determine what they discovered and began scanning some of the documents. The process is not complete. |
No one has yet thoroughly read all of the documents, so it's not known whether they contain information previously unknown to the public or the Warren Commission.
Museum curator Mack said many of the court files and even personal letters to Wade and Ruby have been widely circulated. The museum already has a transcript of Ruby's trial, as well as his medical records.
Still, he said, he would be eager to obtain the documents and authenticate them to see "anything and everything that can help answer lingering questions".
"These records may not have any particular value," he said. "But 100 years from now, who knows what's going to be important?"
The district attorney's office discovered about a dozen boxes of materials in a courthouse safe that included items and documents from the Jack Ruby trial.
Ruby was convicted of killing Lee Harvey Oswald, but the verdict was overturned. He died before a second trial occurred.
Many of the records, including interrogations with Ruby, his family and witnesses, are undated, and it's unclear which agency or people conducted the interviews.
Other documents are signed and dated. A sampling of what was found:
res. consultant, RAND Corp.
Russian Acting Pres. Vladimir Putin's Chechen campaign has rallied Russian citizens and provided, for the first time, a post-Soviet ideological rationale for the Russian state. Russians are feeling proud again. Putin's Chechen war, emerging nationalism and Andropovian rebirth of the nation have all exploited Russian dissatisfaction with the economy and the instability of the state. They give emboldened wings to Putin's dash for the Russian presidency that proceeds unabated. A sixty percent turnout in last month's elections voted for a new Duma that will likely support Putin's anti-criminal, anti-terrorist campaign for the nation and in Chechnya and will continue the war in the Northern Caucasus despite a potentially bloody conclusion.
background: Vladimir Putin, while head of Russia's domestic intelligence service (FSB), was appointed Sec. of the Russian Security Council in March 1999. He chaired both bodies during the Kosovo conflict and in the period before the Chechen incursion into Dagestan. When Yeltsin decided to sack Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin (9 August) for failure to stop the events in Dagestan, he appointed Putin to be prime minister. At the same time, he declared Putin heir apparent to the presidency. It was an unprecedented move in post-Soviet Russia. On 31 December 1999, Yeltsin resigned and Putin became Acting President.
|
Putin has rallied the Russian populace against Chechen defiance by invoking the notion of discipline favored by
former KGB Chief & Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and applied it to the war in the Northern Caucasus. Early on
in his leadership of the FSB, Putin began to cloak himself in the mantle of Andropov, who emphasized
discipline in the work place and cracked down on corruption in Soviet society. Andropov is now one of the most
respected of the former Soviet leaders. By the time he was appointed PM, Putin had created a popular image as an
Andropov-style, no-nonsense enforcer who vowed to "rub out" the Chechen rebels.
Putin is now calling for an Andropovian rebirth to go along with his campaign to glorify the Russian security organs
that are striking at Chechen terrorists. The Kremlin's popular war in Chechnya is portrayed as a battle between
right & wrong, good & evil. Internally, he vows to crack down on
crime, collect taxes, and create effective civil and state institutions with strong authorities. In Putin's words he wants
"to have a strong hand, but not the way it was in 1937." As FSB-head, Putin commemorated the 25th anniversary
of the Alfa anti-terrorist group formed by Andropov and used the event to warn that "terrorists & extremists of
every stripe must know that Russia has people who reliably safeguard constitutional principles." As PM, Putin
asserted that Russia's priority is to fight "international terrorism" in the North Caucasus.
implications: By praising the Russian security services and embracing the memory of Yuri Andropov, Putin
signals future trends for Chechnya and Russia.
'Too Brave': journalist's apparent political murder
Journalists in Russia face a very difficult choice. If true to their profession by reporting the truth, they are increasingly more likely to lose their lives. Russia's most outspoken journalist was silenced on a Saturday afternoon in the elevator of her central Moscow apartment block. She was the 13th journalist killed since President Vladimir Putin came to power 6 years ago.
"She was not just a political journalist," political opposition leader Grigory Yavlinksy said after Politkovskaya's funeral service on Tuesday. "She was a real political opponent [of the Kremlin], and this was a political murder."
"The dangers that had threatened people working in this sphere [of journalism] became more real after her murder," said Moscow lawyer Masha Zaitseva, 22. "It is evident that nothing is changing for the better. This incident
reflects the situation just as it is here. There isn't [freedom of the press in Russia]. There can't be any debate about that," Zaitseva said.
Russian TV media, news source for 85 percent of the population, is almost entirely state owned. Rossiya and Channel One typically begin each newscast with a report on Putin's daily activities kissing children and opening construction sites & churches. 6 years ago, Russians were able to tune into opposition voices on NTV, a privately owned channel. That ended in 2001, when the state gas company, Gazprom, took control of the station, bringing it into line with Putin programming.
There are two small beacons of hope: business newspaper Vedomosti owned by the Wall Street Journal & the Financial Times, and, Novaya Gazeta, Politkovskaya's paper. Their total circulation, along with a few local independents, is less than 500,000, "a drop in the ocean" of Russia's potential 143 million readership, says Glasnost Defense Foundation president Alexei Simonov in Moscow. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a 10 percent shareholder in Politkovskaya's newspaper, called her murder "a blow to the entire democratic, independent press." The paper has offered a reward of nearly $1 million for information leading to the capture of her killers and whoever ordered the murder.
Putin has not publicly addressed the Russian people about the murder, a move that has fueled resentment here. The day after Politkovskaya's murder, hundreds gathered in a central Moscow square to express their outrage at what they said was the govt's lack of response to the killing of one of the country's best-known journalists.
Her followers took offense to his comments.
She said that she had received several death threats. In September 2004, she suddenly fell ill after drinking tea on a plane as she flew to cover the school hostage siege in Beslan. She later said that she had been poisoned to keep her from covering the event. |
Nabob #1 12.13.01 Matt Taibbi The Exile
I have always been fascinated by Wm Safire. In a world so well-peopled with sophisticated literary arch-villains like Michael Wines, Thomas Friedman and even Maureen Dowd, Safire lurks in the background as a sort of
preternatural common ancestor-the zinjanthropus of Evil Columnists.
Whatever you may think about him, Rush Limbaugh has a sense of humor, and can actually be funny; he's a closet queen, after all, but there is no hidden human behind Safire's mask. Safire is his mask-and that what makes him so interesting.
In the Nixon era, he and his chief concentrated on the press, the welfare cheats, and the anti-war crowd, in the
process fostering a following of the "silent majority." As a writer, he's stuck with liberals and whoever the foreign
enemies of the United States happen to be at the time. In recent years his favorite targets have been the Clintons
(he once famously called Hillary Clinton a "congenital liar"), the anti-globalist protesters, and Russians.
To Safire's credit, he was never a Putin booster-never a Wines type who saw yuppie credentials in Putin's KGB
past, or believed him to be a "closet reformer" who would bring shades of Pinochet and de Gaulle style order to
the chaos of the Russian economy.
Safire here sounds like Robert de Niro counselling the young Henry Hill in Goodfellas:
The column is a Safire classic, the kind of thing that made him famous. It has a very simple construction, a first-
person "fantasy" in which he writes from the point of view of a gloating Vladimir Putin, giggling to himself over how
thoroughly he's hoodwinked the unsuspecting American administration.
Safire's attempt at humor here ends with the "cyrillic" byline, which of course is not really funny or evocative at all,
but just establishes that Safire knows how to spell "Moscow" in Russian. From there it goes on
not really a fantasy trip inside Putin's head at all (this could actually be very funny, potentially), but a completely humorless
recitation of Safire's take on Russian policy.
Safire pioneered the art of making a stupid medium even stupider with the help of these silly rhetorical gadgets, which over time began to be identified with the very profession of punditry, so that without them, no piece of text sounded like a newspaper column.
Then there is the substance of Safire's "Putin fantasy". I laughed out loud when I reached this passage:
In that same speech that Safire wrote, Agnew said:
This was all around the same time as the Pentagon Papers case, a case in which Safire sided with the Agnew/Nixon govt, which of course didn't want any "govt censorship."
The speech, which was uncovered in the National Archives a few years ago, is nothing special, typical homage-to-fallen-soldier bullshit. But the finding was a hoot. Among other things, Safire suggested that the first order of
business, should something go wrong on the moon, would be to "close down communications" to the lunar lander module, presumably so that the world couldn't hear the astronauts' cries for help. The doomed astronauts would then be left to "do what they had to do
perform self-deliverance, without an audience."
Then there's this passage:
Then there's "Primakov's friend", Saddam Hussein. Safire conveniently forgets that 2 Republican administrations
in the 1980s armed Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran. ¹ ª Those SAM missiles? An odd thing to get upset about, given that the American version of that same weapon, the Stinger, has been used against Russia in 2 wars in Afghanistan & Chechnya.
This passage almost defies commentary. A full 23% of Russia's budget comes from oil revenues. Can you
imagine Safire arguing that the U.S. should accept a commensurate loss on 23% of its income for Russia's
benefit? And Russia is about a thousand times poorer than the U.S. Its people are starving. I happen to
agree that Russia ought to break OPEC, if only because I think it's in her interests ultimately, but I'm not about to
demand that the whole miserable country tighten its belts to save poor old America from its little recession. That's
just flat-out insane. If I were Putin, I'd wait for this guy to step into a Poconos outhouse and whack him there.
Safire, who wholeheartedly supported the Vietnam war, which caused the deaths of over 2 million Indochinese,
half of them civilians, also whines about Putin's "obliteration" of Grozny. He repeatedly blasts Putin for his bloody
Chechen adventure.
This is the kind of hypocrisy that makes less & less sense to me as I get older. I expect it, but I don't really
understand it. One thing's for sure: it ain't funny, no matter how much sarcasm you add to it. This whole "we can't
trust Russia" thing in the States is getting out of hand. After all the bullshit Russia went through for our sake in the
last ten years or so, we ought to at least have some shame, and tip our hat, when Russia starts acting in her own
interests for a change. We don't have to go along with it, we can even oppose it, but to get angry about it is just
preposterous. Even coming from Wm Safire.
|
At a lavish Red Square military parade in Moscow celebrating World War II's victory, Putin saved the seat closest to him for Bush and risked alienating other world leaders by grandly terming the American his guest of "special importance" above all the others.
Now, for less than 24 hours starting Sunday afternoon, the U.S. president is hosting his Russian counterpart at the Bush family's stone & shingle summer home on the craggy Maine coast. No other leader has received such a rarified invitation.
The Russian leader gets 2 presidents in one visit: Bush's dad, former President George H.W. Bush, owns the home and is playing low-key host to the meetings. Putin also will be feted with spectacular views, sparkling New England summertime weather, lobster at nearly every meal, and possibly a striper fishing excursion on the elder Bush's speedboat.
"You only invite your friends into your house," Bush said in November 2001, when Putin came to Crawford, Texas.
But 6 years of gestures from the extravagant to the odd have not masked or solved the problems that increasingly dog U.S.-Russian relations. Observers say the alliance lately has reached its lowest point in recent memory and they were skeptical that what amounts to 3 meals and a meeting can give it a lift.
"The gulf separating the govt of Russia's official discourse and the United States' concept of what the relationship should be has gotten wider than it has been in a long, long time," said Stephen Sestanovich, an ambassador to former Soviet republics under President Clinton who now is at the Council on Foreign Relations.
For decades, relations between Washington and Moscow have been particularly defined by the personal chemistry between the people at the top, said Sarah Mendelson, Russia policy expert and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Think Reagan and Gorbachev or Clinton and Yeltsin. The relationship between Bush and Putin started with a bang in June 2001 with the president's now-infamous assessment of Putin.
"I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy," Bush said after that first meeting, in Slovenia. "I was able to get a sense of his soul: a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country."
Even at the time, critics said Bush's unconditional praise, intended by most accounts as a tactical attempt to connect with Putin and speak of hope as reality, was nonetheless naive, given a crackdown on civil society groups in Russia that had begun and Moscow's brutal war in Chechnya.
9.11.01 came just three months after the Slovenia meeting. Putin offered bold and immediate terrorism-fighting support that endeared him to Bush. The next May, at a Moscow summit, the leaders signed a landmark nuclear arms reduction treaty and agreed to a broad cooperative agenda.
But problems hovered. Bush's moves to expand missile defense, including withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, rankled Russia. The Kremlin's politically charged campaign against the Yukos oil company and its leaders alarmed Washington.
The acrimonious debate leading up to the Iraq invasion in March 2003 cooled things considerably.
The two sides also sniped about interference in Ukraine's 2004 presidential election. Generally, the Kremlin chafed at what it saw as U.S. meddling in its sphere of influence, through NATO expansion and relations with former Soviet republics.
In 2005, at a meeting in Bratislava, Slovakia, U.S. concerns about democratic backsliding in Russia spilled into the open. In recent months, a string of developments has caused a deeper slide, even amid greater cooperation against Iran's nuclear program and broader weapons proliferation.
Moscow's unrelentingly hostile response to Bush's plan to build a missile defense system in Europe, based in the Czech Republic and Poland, has included threatening to aim missiles at Europe and inflammatory rhetoric denouncing the United States' "hyper use of force" in the world.
Russia is blocking independence for Kosovo, favored by the U.S. Russia also is aiding separatists in Georgia and Moldova and has prevented peaceful demonstrations in Moscow. There are worries about Russia's manipulation of energy resources.
Putin, appealing to nationalist sentiments at home and eager to re-establish Russia's geopolitical stature, bristles at U.S. criticism of human rights in Russia. He says the U.S. missile defense system on Russia's doorstep, in former Soviet satellites, is a security threat.
Said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov: "There is a great need for extra attention, extra attention on the highest level."
The Kennebunkport meeting was suggested by Putin. Bush chose the setting, the oceanfront compound built by his great-grandfather over 100 years ago on a finger of rock jutting into the water.
"They are both now playing for history and legacy, and I really don't think that either of them want, as part of their legacy, a trashed U.S.-Russian relationship," said Andrew Kuchins, a Russia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
But neither side has shown any give on the issues most dividing them, such as missile defense or Kosovo.
"There really are no obvious candidates for a breakthrough issue that would impart a positive momentum to the broader relationship," said Steven Pifer, a deputy assistant secretary of state during Bush's first term.
Aug. 1995-Feb. 1996 James R. Norman Media Bypass
"Was White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster selling US secrets to Israel? The CIA suspects he was."
2 weeks before his 7.20.93 death, White House Deputy Counsel Vincent W. Foster went into a deep funk. The
official cause of death, given by former Independent Counsel Robert Fiske Jr. (later replaced by Kenneth Starr),
was suicide driven by depression over, among other things, several newspaper editorials. But Vince Foster had a
much bigger and darker reason to be seriously burned out. He had just learned he was under investigation for
espionage.
For months, a small cadre of CIA computer hackers known as the Fifth Column, armed with a Cray supercomputer,
had been monitoring Foster's Swiss account. They had located it by tracking money flows from various Israeli govt
accounts after finding Foster's name while secretly snooping through the electronic files of Israel's Mossad. Then
by snooping through the bank files, they gathered all information needed to withdraw the money. Foster was one of
the first of scores of high level U.S. political figures to have their secret Swiss accounts looted of illicit funds,
according to both this veteran CIA source & a separate source in another intelligence agency. Over the past 2
years, they say, more than $2 billion has been swept out of offshore bank accounts belonging to figures connected
to the U.S. govt with nary a peep from the victims or their banks. The claim that Foster and other U.S. figures have
had offshore accounts has been confirmed by a separate high-ranking CIA source and another in Justice Dept.
Various sources, some controversial, contributed other pieces to this puzzle. Whatever their motivations, those
sources have proven remarkably consistent. Their stories jibe well with known facts and offer a most plausible
explanation for Foster's mysterious depression. It would also explain Washington's determined effort to dismiss the
Foster affair as a tragic but simple suicide. Foster, if confirmed by ongoing foreign counterintelligence probe, would
have been an invaluable double agent with potential access to not only high-level political information, but also to
sensitive code, encryption and data transmission secrets, stuff by which modern war is won or lost because for
many years, according to 9 separate current & former U.S. law enforcement or intelligence officials, Foster
had been a behind-the-scenes manager of a key support co. in one of the biggest, most secretive spy efforts on
record, the silent surveillance of banking transactions both here & abroad.
This bank snooping began in earnest soon after Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. Its primary aim was to
track the money behind intl terrorist groups and soon came to be dubbed, "Follow the money", according to
program originator Norman A. Bailey. Now a private Washington consultant on intl banking, Bailey was an
economist and Reagan advisor on the National Security Counsel. It was Bailey's idea to begin using powerful new
computer & electronic eavesdropping technologies then emerging to let the intelligence community monitor
the previously confidential flow of bank wire transfers.
Another part of the problem was to get the world's banks to standardize their data so that it could be easily
analyzed. That brings up to PROMIS,
powerful tracking software developed for U.S. Govt then further enhanced by
a little company called Inslaw Inc.
Why PROMIS? Because it was adaptable. Besides tracking legal cases, it could be easily customized to track
anything from computer chip design to complex monetary transactions. It was especially useful for tracking
criminals or just plain political dissidents. Inslaw claims the software was eventually illegally sold to as many as 50
countries for use by their police, military or intelligence agencies, incl such bloody regimes as Guatemala, South
Africa and Iraq (before the 1990 invasion of Kuwait). Profits on these sales, Inslaw claims, went mainly into the
private pockets of Republican political cronies in the 1980s, including Reagan confidante Barl Brain, former part-
owner of UPI & FNN.
According to a heavily-redacted New Mexico FBI counterintelligence report, Maxwell was apparently allowed to sell
2 copies of PROMIS back to the U.S. weapons labs at Sandia & Los Alamos, for what Inslaw claims was a
hugely inflated price of $87 million. That would have allowed Pollard, if he was using the rigged program, to obtain
U.S. missile targeting data long before Israel had its own satellite capability, thus making it a real nuclear threat to
the Soviet Union. Pollard was convicted of espionage and sentenced in 1986 to life imprisonment. U.S. officials
have vehemently opposed efforts to gain his early release.
It took some effort to install & support PROMIS in the banking industry. That's where Vince Foster came in.
Sources say that since at least the late 1970s, Foster had been a silent, behind-the-scenes overseer on behalf of
the NSA for a small Little Rock, AR bank data processing company. Its name was Systematics Inc., launched in
1967 and funded & controlled for most of its life by Arkansas billionaire Jackson Stephens, 1946 Naval
Academy graduate along with Jimmy Carter. Foster was one of Stephens' trusted deal makers at the Rose Law
Firm, where he was partner with Hillary Rodham Clinton, Webster Hubbell and Wm Kennedy (whose father was a
Systematics director). Hubbell also played an overseer role at Systematics for the NSA for some years according to
intelligence sources.
One man who uncovered the link between Systematics, Foster and covert money movements from arms
& drugs was Bob Bickel, who was an undercover Customs investigator in the 1980s. "We found Systematics
was often a conduit for the funds" in arms & drug transactions, says Bickel, now living in Texas: "They
were the money changers." His story is corroborated by a former CIA employee who says it was well known
within the agency in the late 1970s that Foster was involved with Systematics in covert money management.
According to a lawsuit filed by SEC, Stephens insisted on having then-tiny Systematics brought in to take
over all of FGB's data processing. Representing Systematics in that 1978 SEC case: Hillary Rodham Clinton
& Webster Hubbell. Stephens was blocked in that takeover. But FGB, later renamed First American,
ultimately fell under the alleged domination of BCCI through Robert Altman and former Defense Secretary Clark
Clifford. According to a technician who worked for First American in Atlanta, Systematics became a key computer
contractor there anyway.
Working alongside Systematics in this spooky world of bank computer spying appears to be a cluster of other
curious, loosely-affiliated companies. For instance, there is Boston Systematics, headed by former CIA officer
Harry Wechsler, who controls 2 Israeli companies that also use the name Systematics. Wechsler denies any
connection to the Arkansas company (now named Alltel Information Services) and claims to know nothing of
PROMIS. Odd, then, that Inslaw claims it got 2 inquiries in 1987 from Wechsler's Israeli co. seeking marketing data
on PROMIS.
Another curious co. is Arkansas Systems, founded in 1974 by Systematics employee & formerly U.S. Army
"analyst" John Chamberlain, located just down the road from Systematics. Arkansas Systems specializes in
computer systems for foreign wire transfer centers & central banks. Among its clients: Russia & China,
according to Arkansas Systems president James K. Hendren, physicist formerly involved with the Safeguard anti-
missile system. Arkansas Systems was one of the first companies to receive funding from the Arkansas
Development Finance Authority (ADFA), agency created by Bill Clinton now coming under Congressional
scrutiny.
Why is it then that Hamilton claims sources in 2 separate intelligence agencies say documents relating to
Systematics were among those taken from Foster's office immediately after Foster's death? A private investigator
close to the continuing "Whitewater" probe by Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr says he has learned that
Hubbell has delivered those documents, incl papers related to Systematics, to Starr. Hubbell pleaded guilty last
December to 2 felony counts related to over-billing at the Rose Law Firm and has been sentenced to 21 months in
prison. If Foster knew the U.S. was spying on foreign banks, why would he let himself be caught red-handed with a
Swiss bank account? The answer may be that the Israeli transactions were, in fact, well concealed, according to
the veteran CIA source. Foster would have known that, unless a prober knew exactly what to look for, finding his
payoffs in the torrent of routine wire transfer data would be a hopeless task. |