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| "Who killed Barack Obama?" (Photo: T. Graham) |
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Obama - "Put Him Up Against Wall & Shoot Him": Ex-Generals Advocate Coup While Militia Group Advocates Assassination
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FRACK-QUAKES: Fracking May be Causing Earthquakes - Massachusetts Considers Preemptive Legislation After Mulitple Fracking-Associated Earthquakes in Texas
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| Haiti Earthquake, photo taken on Jan. 17, 2010: Could the United States face a super-earthquake caused by Fracking? (Photo: RIBI Image Library) |
An environmental committee at Massachusetts Statehouse has approved a bill imposing a 10-year ban on fracking for natural gas. The move comes as a wave of earthquakes in Texas has raised new concerns over the controversial drilling technique.
The Massachusetts fracking moratorium bill is designed to protect the state's drinking water from possible contamination and thus "ensure that the health and prosperity of our communities is maintained," according to one of the legislation's sponsors, Northampton Democratic state Rep. Peter Kocot, cited by AP.
To become law, the temporary ban on fracking has yet to be approved by the lawmakers and signed by the Democratic Governor, Deval Patrick.
The Massachusetts legislative move was taken on Friday, the day after Texas was struck by a 3.6 magnitude earthquake, one in a row of similar episodes during the last three weeks. The finger of blame is being pointed at fracking. The series of small earthquakes caused no casualties, but left local Texas residents fearing worse could be in store.
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Egypt's Military Dictators Tighten Grip On Power: Enact New Law That Criminalizes Protests and Legalizes Crackdown
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| Protesters at Tahrir Square, Feb. 7, 2011: Egypt's military junta would like to make such "unauthorized" protests a thing of the past. (Photo: Ramy Raoof) |
Egypt's new law criminalizes protest, legalizes crackdown (via GlobalPost)Enlarge Egyptian police use a water canon to disperse protesters during a demonstration organized by human rights group 'No Military Trials for Civilians' in front of the Shura Council in downtown Cairo on Nov. 26, 2013. A new law passed by Egypt's…
Africans in Israel Face New Deportation Laws: Perceived as A 'Threat' to Israel's 'Jewish Character'
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| Ethiopian child at an "absorption center" in Israel. (Photo: Vadim Lavrusik) |
New laws include a crackdown on employers of African immigrants, the detainment of illegal migrants for one year without trial, and "grants" of up to $3,500 for illegal immigrants willing to return to their country of origin. Human rights groups say most African migrants in Israel face threats to their lives in their homelands.
Israel adopts new measures against African migrants (via AFP)The Israeli cabinet approved Sunday measures aimed at deporting thousands of Africans who illegally entered the country and who are perceived by it as a threat to its Jewish character. A statement from the prime minister's office said that beyond the…
The Pitiful, Brainwashed American Consumer: Fighting, Shooting, Stabbing Over The 'Right'... To Buy Things
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| While many Americans shop for bargains, many retail workers use the holiday season to remind buyers of low wages and poor working conditions. (Wal-Mart Strike, Oct 2012: Photo - Neon Tommy) |
- In Las Vegas, a shopper is shot in the leg over a television set.
- In Claypool Hill, VA, one man pulls a rifle and gets stabbed over a Wal-Mart parking spot.
- At a Wal-Mart in Clinton, UT a woman was trampled by deal seekers.
- A man was peppered sprayed at a Wal-Mart in Garfield, NJ during an argument with a store a manager.
- In Realto, CA, a police officer was injured and two people arrested after a fight at Wal-Mart.
- A man was stabbed in the stomach at a mall in Carlsbad, CA.
The following videos accurately depict some of the goings on at stores throughout the US and Puerto Rico.
'Stop & Frisk' and Racist Policing: Cops Arrest Man 56 Times for Trespassing - At His OWN Job - Terrorizing Blacks To Inflate Arrest Stats
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| Earl Simpson being arrested at his place of employment for "Trespassing." The store owner installed a camera to document police harassment. |
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NSA Nightmare Scenario Comes True: Agency Planned To Use Spy Technology To Smear 'Radicalizers' - Logged Online 'Sex Activity'
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| Whistleblower Edward Snowden: Revelations from documents leaked by the former NSA contractor continues to shock and amaze. (Illustration: DonkeyHotey) |
NSA Spied On Porn Habits Of 'Radicalizers,' Planned To Use Details To Embarrass Them (via Techdirt)The latest report on leaked Snowden docs from Glenn Greenwald (along with Ryan Gallagher and Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post) shows how the NSA had a plan to use the porn surfing habits of certain people they didn't like to discredit them. If this…
Nuclear Hypocrisy: A-Bomb Maker Pakistan Breaks Ground On New Nuke Plant - Not A Peep From US, Israel or Europe
Pakistan has Atomic weapons, have tested them and is even reportedly willing to supply an A-bomb to Saudi Arabia on demand. And when Pakistan starts construction on another nuclear plant (with China's help), we don't here a peep from the United States, Europe, or Israel. Yet the United States, Europe and Israel work feverishly to control Iran's development of nuclear power.
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| Bomb. (Illustration: _Gavroche_) |
Pakistan launches largest nuclear power project (via AFP)Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday launched the construction of the country's biggest atomic power plant and vowed to pursue further projects to make nuclear the largest energy source. The 2,200-megawatt plant is to be built with Chinese…
US '60 Minutes' Star, Lara Logan, Given Leave Over Benghazi Report
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| Lara Logan was lead correspondent on 60 Minutes' false Benghazi Story. |
US '60 Minutes' star given leave over Benghazi report (via AFP)CBS News on Tuesday put a correspondent for flagship program "60 Minutes" on leave over flaws in a critical report about last year's attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Lara Logan, a South African, also abruptly canceled her scheduled appearance…
The 'Knockout Game' Is A Myth
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| Knock Out (Photo: Daniel Novta) |
The 'Knockout Game' Is A Myth: Excerpts
The "Knockout Game" is a Dream Come True for Racist White Conservatives
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| Adapted from "Day 29: Knockout!" (Photo: Mike Nelson) |
By Chauncey DeVega
I share no sense of linked fate with Marvell Weaver, the hoodlum who was arrested for playing the "knockout game" and then decided to do an interview with the local news about his exploits.
After watching Weaver's pathetic explanation for the logic of his crime, I am left wondering what happened to shame?
Right-wing trolls are doing their best to play up the foolishness called the "knockout game". It is a new moral panic that combines white anxieties about black criminality, fear of black young people, and stereotypes about "African-American violence" which have been cultivated by white supremacists since Reconstruction.
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RELATED VIDEO: The 'Knockout Game' Is A Myth
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The emails, comments, and stories on Right-wing websites about the faux moral panic "knockout game" phenomena are not rooted in a fair concern about crime and youth brigandry. Rather, the "knockout game" meme is rooted in a pathologically white racist obsession with "black crime"--what is alone and unique in its distinction, as white privilege has disallowed any discussion of "white crime" in America's public discourse.
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The 'History' of Thanksgiving - Which 'Truth' Should We Tell?: Sweetness and Light - Or, Savagery and Strife?
The 'Real History' of Thanksgiving
Which 'truth' should we tell?
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One history tells us that the first Thanksgiving was a celebration of the multiple massacres of Native Americans. |
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But then. . .
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Another history tells us that the first Thanksgiving was a celebration of love and unity between Native Americans and the Pilgrims. . . |
Republican Tells Anti-Jewish Joke at Campaign for a GOP Gubernatorial Candidate - Then Runs for Virginia Senate
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| 10th Congressional District Republican Committee Chairman John Whitbeck. (Youtube Capture) |
GOP official runs for Virginia Senate after telling anti-Jewish joke at Cuccinelli event (via Raw Story )A Republican official who called attention to himself earlier this year for telling an anti-Semtic joke at a campaign event for former gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli announced this week that he would be running for Virginia Senate. “So you…
Israel Heads for a Terrifying Split: Government At Odds With American Jews Who Want a Nuclear Deal and Reconciliation With Iran
Israel heads for a terrifying split (via The Economist)APPEARANCES to the contrary, the Israeli government does not have a problem with the terms of the deal that was struck on Iran's nuclear programme on Sunday. Rather, the Israeli government has a problem with the fact that a deal was struck on Iran's…
New Jersey Waitress Who Was Denied Tip Because She Was Gay May Have Forged Receipt: Report
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Shoot Obama, We Now Have the Authority - Says Christian American Patriots Militia Leader
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| Eingemauerte Nazis. (Photo: Max Braun) |
Christian American Patriots Militia leader: We now have authority to shoot Obama (via Raw Story )An apparent threat made against President Barack Obama’s life posted on Facebook has caught the attention of the Secret Service. Agents declined to comment on the post, which has been removed but was preserved in screen captures by Social News Daily…
US Reminds Afghan President Who's In Charge: Tells Him To Sign Troop Deal 'Or Else' - All US Troops Pulled Out Next Year
Before the assembly the Taliban had threatened to target delegates if they backed the bilateral security agreement (BSA) to allow US forces to remain in the country after 2014. The "illegal and insignificant pact of slavery with America will neither benefit the American invaders nor criminal slaves", they said in a statement referring to the jirga members. The jirga members backed the BSA.
US warns Karzai it may leave no troops in Afghanistan (via AFP)US national security advisor Susan Rice told Afghan President Hamid Karzai Monday that a delay in signing a troubled security deal risked the US pulling troops out of the country completely next year. The US said that Karzai had called for "new conditions…
The 16,000 Dow: Recovery or Transfer of Wealth from the Majority of the Population to the Super-Rich?
Side by side with the sweeping growth in social misery and destitution has been the vast expansion in wealth of the super-rich. The world’s billionaires have had their combined net worth double since 2009, according to a report published earlier this month by UBS and Wealth-X. Even though the United States has only 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it has a third of the world’s billionaires, according to Forbes.
Global Research, November 25, 2013
The Dow is up by 24 percent over the past year, having doubled since 2009. The S&P 500 is likewise up by 28 percent.
Far from expressing a genuine and healthy economic recovery, however, the rise in the stock market has paralleled a vast expansion of social misery and an unprecedented expansion of social inequality.
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| Occupy Wall Street: Wall St under "Lockdown" - Near Zuccotti Park, Oct 2011. (Photo: Ronald Jackson) |
The reason for this vast increase in destitution is not hard to find: between 2007 and 2012, the median household income in the United States had plummeted by 8.3 percent. The precipitous fall was due to a combination of a sharp fall in the percentage of the population that is employed, and a fall in wages. The percentage of the US working-age population that has a job has fallen by 4.6 percent since 2008, while manufacturing wages have fallen three percent since May 2009.
A report in October by the National Center for Homeless Education, based on figures provided by the US Department of Education, found that over 1.1 million children enrolled in public schools were homeless at some point in 2011-2012, 72 percent higher than before the onset of the economic crisis.
Side by side with the sweeping growth in social misery and destitution has been the vast expansion in wealth of the super-rich. The world’s billionaires have had their combined net worth double since 2009, according to a report published earlier this month by UBS and Wealth-X. Even though the United States has only 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it has a third of the world’s billionaires, according to Forbes.
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| Occupy Wall Street: Zuccotti Park, Oct 2011. (Photo: Ronald Jackson) |
US income inequality grew four times faster in the first three years of the Obama administration than under Bush, according to figures published Saturday in the New York Times. As the newspaper reports, “From 2001 through 2008, during the George W. Bush administration,” the ratio of mean (average) to median income “grew at 0.28 percentage points per year. From 2009 through 2011, the latest year for which the data is available, the ratio increased 1.14 percentage points annually, or roughly four times faster.”
The vast growth in stock prices is not the result of impersonal and impartial economic laws, but rather definite policies pursued by the Obama Administration. This administration has, during its entire existence, done everything in its power to prop up the financial system asset values of the super-rich.
This has taken the form of a vast transfer of wealth from the population to the financial oligarchy.
The present rally began in March 2009, following a key set of decisions made by the Obama Administration to make it unmistakably clear that it would abide no impingement on the wealth of the financial oligarchy, and offload the burden of the financial crisis onto the working class.
Occupy Wall Street Takes Over Broadway - Time Square:
NYPD: Forming up and awaiting orders.
(Video: Ronald Jackson)
NYPD: Forming up and awaiting orders.
(Video: Ronald Jackson)
Just days before, Obama had made clear that he would oppose any serious attempt to limit the compensation of executives at the bailed-out insurance giant AIG, and the administration moved to block a proposal by congress to block a $165 million bonus payout to AIG executives, to be paid with bailout funds.
Then, on March 30, Obama outlined his proposal for the restructuring of the auto industry, in which the White House made the imposition of sweeping wage and benefit cuts the precondition for the provision of federal funds to bail out the auto industry.
Those three events combined to create the biggest four-week rise in the Dow since 1933.
At the end of 2010, the Administration agreed to extend for two years the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich, while implementing a cut in payroll taxes for both employers and employees that drained funds from the Social Security system.
Occupy Wall Street Takes Over Broadway - Time Square:
Broadway entertainers join the protest.
(Video: Ronald Jackson)
Broadway entertainers join the protest.
(Video: Ronald Jackson)
The crisis over the federal debt ceiling in the summer of 2011 ended with a deal to impose over $1 trillion in spending cuts over the next ten years, along with an agreement that another $1.2 trillion in across-the-board “sequester” cuts would be triggered at the beginning of 2013 if no deficit-cutting deal had been reached between the White House and Congress by then.
In the course of those crisis negotiations, Obama offered unprecedented cuts in Medicare and Social Security as part of a “grand bargain” with the Republicans.
Later in 2012, the so-called “fiscal cliff” crisis resulted in the triggering of the sequester cuts, beginning last March. The current budget and debt limit impasse will likely be used to extend the sequester cuts, compounding the already severe impact of cuts in programs ranging from Head Start to housing subsidies to legal aid for the poor.
Earlier this month, the White House and Congress implemented a 5 percent reduction in food stamp benefits, the first nationwide reduction in benefit payments in the history of the program. By all indications, the political establishment will do nothing to prevent the expiration of federal extended unemployment benefits beyond the 26-week cutoff for most state unemployment assistance programs. The extended unemployment benefits are scheduled to expire in December.
Throughout this entire period, the attack on workers at the federal level has corresponded with a relentless attack on the wages and benefits of state and local workers, coupled with a relentless assault on social programs at state and local levels, including the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of teachers, firefighters and social service workers. This process has found its latest expression in the bankruptcy of the city of Detroit, which is being coordinated with the White House to set a precedent for using bankruptcy to slash the pensions and benefits of city workers.
The ability of the government to impose these draconian attacks was entirely dependent on the suppression of the class struggle by the trade unions and the pseudo-left allies of the Democratic Party. Throughout this period, the working class has sought to resist the sweeping attacks on its living standards, but in every struggle has been betrayed and undermined by the trade unions.
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| Occupy Wall Street: Zuccotti Park, Oct 2011. (Photo: Ronald Jackson) |
What are the central lessons to be drawn from this? First, that the Obama Administration is an instrument of Wall Street, in alliance with the military-intelligence complex, and has focused all of its efforts on transferring social wealth from the majority of the population to the super-rich.
The stock market boom is not an indicator that the crisis has been resolved: far from it. It is an expression of the fact that the government and Federal Reserve have no solutions to the crisis confronting the capitalist system.
The fundamental problem is the capitalist system itself. The working class must end its political subordination to the Democratic Party, and fight to build a new mass political movement, based on a socialist program. Such a movement must demand that the Wall Street casino be shut down, and that the trillions of dollars stolen from the population must be returned, the banks and corporations nationalized, and society reorganized on the basis of meeting social needs, not private profit.
Reprinted with permission from Center for Research in Globalization.
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Copyright © Andre Damon, World Socialist Web Site, 2013
Free Expression, Surveillance, and the Fight Against Impunity
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| Internet Surveillance. (Illustration: Mike Licht) |
Journalists, bloggers and others who speak out against the powerful risk terrible repercussions for their work. Around the world, they face physical intimidation, violent attacks, and even murder for speaking out.
When such crimes are committed against those who exercise their right to free speech, the perpetrators all too often go unpunished. Those who are meant to enforce the law turn a blind eye. The oppressors can act with absolute impunity.
Every November 23rd, free speech organizations around the world draw attention to these travesties of justice in a Day To End Impunity. The number of uninvestigated crimes and unsolved murders of journalists makes for depressing reading—as does the slow but inexorable increase in victims who are targeted for their online work. Since 1993, the Committee to Protect Journalists have recorded the deaths of twenty-nine online reporters who were murdered for their work. Seventeen of those crimes went unsolved and unpunished.
But in a digital world, it's not just crimes of physical violence that can chill speech. The spread of surveillance technology means that crimes against privacy can be used to intimidate or limit the work of free speech, too.
Investigative reporter Khadija Ismayilova has been a constant irritant to the ruling cliques of Azerbaijan, exposing corruption and graft in the very highest levels of government. Shortly after CNBC reported on her investigations into the wealth of the family of President Ilham Aliyev, intimate videos recorded by a surveillance camera hidden in her bedroom were distributed online. It was a clear attempt to discredit her.
Those who planted that camera were never punished. Instead, Ismayilova herself has forced by a local court to sweep the streets of her country, completing a 220 hour community service punishment for attending a peaceful protest in Baku.
In Venezuela and Russia, opposition reporters' private phone conversations are selectively played on the state media. In Russia, lawyer and blogger Alexei Navalny found a surveillance device in his home.
In the United States, PEN American Center has documented the effect of apparently uncontrolled surveillance on reporters and writers in the United States. Elsewhere, agents of the "Five Eyes" governments are apparently spying on the internet traffic of users in other countries, in direct contravention of local laws, and with complete impunity.
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| Surveillance Center: Rouen, France. (Photo: Frédéric BISSON) |
Free speech needs privacy. Unlawful surveillance against writers and speakers must be investigated and punished, and never excused or ignored. We cannot let a culture of impunity grow around crimes of surveillance.
To find out how you can help in the fight against impunity, see the Day Against Impunity website.
'Doomsday Bacteria' Has Arrived: Predicted Emergence of Bug That's 'Immune' To ALL Antibiotics Has Happened - Discovered in New Zealand
The loss of effective antibiotics would mean the following for mankind: Loss of "the ability to treat cancer, and to transplant organs, because doing those successfully relies on suppressing the immune system and willingly making ourselves vulnerable to infection. Any treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream — for instance, kidney dialysis. Any major open-cavity surgery, on the heart, the lungs, the abdomen. Any surgery on a part of the body that already harbors a population of bacteria: the guts, the bladder, the genitals. Implantable devices: new hips, new knees, new heart valves. Cosmetic plastic surgery. Liposuction. Tattoos."
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| Hospital-Associated Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) Bacteria. The bacteria discovered in New Zealand is far more dangerous. (Photo: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) |
This week, health authorities in New Zealand announced that the tightly quarantined island nation — the only place I’ve ever been where you get x-rayed on the way into the country as well as leaving it — has experienced its first case, and first death, from a strain of totally drug-resistant bacteria. From the New Zealand Herald:
In January, while he was teaching English in Vietnam, (Brian) Pool suffered a brain hemorrhage and was operated on in a Vietnamese hospital.
He was flown to Wellington Hospital where tests found he was carrying the strain of bacterium known as KPC-Oxa 48 – an organism that rejects every kind of antibiotic.
Wellington Hospital clinical microbiologist Mark Jones (said): “Nothing would touch it. Absolutely nothing. It’s the first one that we’ve ever seen that is resistant to every single antibiotic known.”
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Was 60 Minutes' Fraudulent Benghazi Story A CBS "Hit" On President Obama?: Husband of Correspondent A Former Propagandist for a PR Firm - Questions On If He 'Assisted' on Benghazi Story
Newsweek contributing editor Jeff Stein is raising questions about whether 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan's husband -- a former employee of a firm that planted "pro-U.S. stories in the Iraqi media in 2005" -- was involved in the show's now-retracted Benghazi report.
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| Lara Logan: lead correspondent on 60 Minutes' discredited Benghazi Story. |
Stein explains that Burkett is "a former Army sergeant and onetime employee of a private intelligence outfit hired by the Pentagon to plant pro-U.S. stories in the Iraqi media in 2005." The Lincoln Group, Burkett's former employer, apparently specialized in producing videos and phony news clips that they would then feed to media outlets, "making them appear as originating from legitimate news organizations."
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Appeals Court Denies New York City’s Motion to Annul Landmark Stop and Frisk Ruling
On Friday (Nov. 22, 2013), an appellate panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denied the City of New York’s request to vacate District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin’s ruling in the class action lawsuit Floyd v. the City of New York. The Center for Constitutional Rights made the following statement in response:
“Following the appellate panel’s shocking decision to remove the district court judge from our case, the City sought to double down and ask that the entirety of the judge’s decision be vacated without further briefing on its merits.
The appellate panel has correctly rejected this request and will allow full briefing on the appeal to move forward as scheduled.
We hope Mayor De Blasio will drop the City’s desperate appeal to undo the district court’s carefully considered ruling and work with plaintiffs and the community to enforce every aspect of the remedial order. He has an extraordinary opportunity to use the expertise of a court monitor and policing experts to end discriminatory policing in NYC."
Read the order here
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| Silent march to end stop and frisk and racial profiling. (Photo: Long Island Wins) |
The appellate panel has correctly rejected this request and will allow full briefing on the appeal to move forward as scheduled.
We hope Mayor De Blasio will drop the City’s desperate appeal to undo the district court’s carefully considered ruling and work with plaintiffs and the community to enforce every aspect of the remedial order. He has an extraordinary opportunity to use the expertise of a court monitor and policing experts to end discriminatory policing in NYC."
Read the order here
Reprinted with permission from the Center for Constitutional Rights
Detroit Police Officer Humiliates Mentally Ill Black Man: Made Him Dance 'Like a Chimp' - Cops Posted Videos and Pics Degrading Black Men
By Nicole Flatow
A suburban Detroit police officer admitted he asked a mentally ill black man to sing and dance and video recorded the incident.
Videos and and photos with degrading portrayals of black men were submitted earlier this month to the blog, Motor City Muckraker, purportedly from officers who disseminated them to friends and colleagues in the upper class, majority-white Michigan suburb of Grosse Pointe Park. One video portrayed a voice alleged to be an officer asking black men to do humiliating tasks, including “dance like a chimp.” In another incident, an officer allegedly texted a photo of a black man in the back of his trailer with the text, “Gotta love the coloreds.” The journalist, Steve Neavling, told the Huffington Post that he has more than a dozen videos shot by officers, but has not shared most of them because of their “humiliating nature.”
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Texas Cop Arrested for Handcuffing and Raping 19-Year-Old at Traffic Stop
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| San Antonio cop Len Neal is accused of raping a woman during a traffic stop. |
Texas cop arrested for handcuffing and raping 19-year-old at traffic stop (via Raw Story )A 40-year-old police officer in San Antonio, Texas is facing charges of felony sexual assault after a 19-year-old woman accused him of handcuffing and raping her during a traffic stop over the weekend. According to an arrested warrant obtained by the…
New Mass Graves in Mexico Dredge Up Plight of Missing: At Least 54 Bodies Found - 'National Emergeny' Compared to Balkan Wars
New mass graves in Mexico dredge up plight of missing (via AFP)Amid Mexico's continuous drug conflict, the recent discovery of dozens of bodies in mass graves has led some to describe the plight of the country's disappeared as a national emergency. At least 54 corpses have been recovered in clandestine pits in…
White Supremacy at CNN: Network Giving A National Platform to White Racists
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| From Left - Frank Taffee, Newt Gingrich, and Mark O'Mara: Their presence on CNN suggests an attempt to attract right-wing viewers at the expense of everyone else. |
By Ronald Jackson
Perhaps we should have been forewarned when CNN "threw African-Americans under the bus" by hiring notorious race baiter Newt Gingrich to be a co-host for the re-incarnation of talk show "Crossfire" which had been shamed off the air by a blistering attack by comedian and social critic John Stewart (you can watch the now famous video here). The dust had barely settled from a bruising 2012 presidential campaign during which Newt Gingrich dog whistled his way through the Republican primaries in a losing bid to be the presidential candidate for the Tea Party-dominated Republicans. Outraged by the hiring of Newt Gingrich at the time, I listed eight reasons why CNN should not have hired Newt Gingrich in an online petition:
1) Newt Gingrich has implied that there was something "inherently wrong" with being African and Kenyan by suggesting that President Obama was informed by a Kenyan heritage. With this statement, Newt Gingrich also pandered to racist so-called "Birthers" who question President Obama's "Americaness." - "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."I concluded by pointing out the following about the signal CNN was sending by the hiring of Newt Gingrich:
2) Newt Gingrich has suggested that the children of poor parents were inherently inferior by implying they were lazy and prone to crime. He was race baiting in this instance, since most Americans think the vast majority of poor Americans are African-American. - “Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash, unless it is illegal.”
3) Newt Gingrich has slandered Palestinians by suggesting there is no such thing as a Palestinian people. - "I think we have had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs."
4) Newt Gingrich supported stripping Hispanic Americans of their voting rights by getting rid of bilingual ballots. - "I would have ballots in English."
5) Newt Gingrich implied that there was something inherently wrong with being Muslim and pandered to bigoted "Birthers" by suggesting it was President Obama's own fault that bigots think he's Muslim. - "You have to ask, why would they believe that? It's not because they're stupid."
6) Newt Gingrich implied that there was something inherently wrong with being Muslim and pandered to bigoted "Birthers" by suggesting that the media was hiding President Obama's "Muslim friends." - “It is just astonishing to me how pro-Obama they are,” he said, “Do you think you are going to see two pages on Obama’s Muslim friends?"
7) Newt Gingrich deliberately catered to racist voters by stereotyping President Obama as "The Food Stamp President." Most Americans believe African-Americans are the primary recipients of Food Stamps, which is false. Gingrich was cynically exploiting this misperception for racist reasons. CNN itself posted an article on Newt Gingrich's "Foodstamp" remark titled "'Food stamp president': Gingrich's poetry of hate"
8) Newt Gingrich signaled his hatred for gays by funding an Anti-Gay hate group. - "The Associated Press revealed that one of the cogs in Newt Gingrich’s vast network of business enterprises and front groups, ReAL Action, provided $125,000 to the American Family Association Action, an anti-gay activist organization that has been officially labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center."
By hiring Newt Gingrich as a host of "Crossfire" CNN endorses, validates, and mainstreams racism, religious intolerance, and homophobia - all in a sleazy attempt to appeal to and attract bigoted viewers. CNN is blowing its own racist 'dog whistle' by hiring Newt Gingrich.CNN ignored the pubic outrage concerning the bigoted Newt Gingrich and hired him anyway, signaling that attracting some of FoxNews' right-wing viewers was more of a priority than respecting the interests and sensitivity of their African-American viewers.
It was a clear sign of what was to come.
The next thing we know, CNN hires lawyer Mark O'Mara as a legal pundit. O'mara was fresh off of his role as defense lawyer for George Zimmerman, who was on trial for murdering an unarmed teenager named Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman was found "not guilty" during that trial, after which one of the jurors came forth and admitted she (and other jurors) thought Zimmerman was guilty but had been swayed by the slanted and straighjacketing instructions from the judge. During the trial, O'Mara defamed the dead teen with a blizzard of boogieman stereotypes: claiming he had video tape of Martin and his "gang friends" roving around attacking people. O'Mara was forced to apologize when it was discovered the video tapes didn't exist.
So with all the legal pundits available, why did CNN hire Mark O'Mara? Clearly CNN was trying to send a signal to all the bigots who were "wowed" by O'Mara's mean-spirited treatment of the deceased teen Trayvon Martin. CNN was dogwhistling to right-wingers: "Come to CNN, we have your backs!"
And now there's the case of Frank Taffee, a so-called "friend" of George Zimmerman. Zimmerman has had numerous run-ins with the law soon after he was acquitted in the murder of Trayvon Martin. In the latest incident, Zimmerman was accused of threatening a girlfriend with a shotgun—the second time after the trial he was accused of threatening a woman with a gun. After Zimmerman was arrested and let out on bail for this latest violent incident, CNN invited Taffee to the airways to defend Zimmerman. Unbeknownst to most of CNN's viewers, Taffee is a convicted criminal and unabashed racist who hosts a white-power podcast. CNN didn't bother to tell its viewers about Taffee's supremacist proclivities.
Here is the video of Frank Taffee, and the welcoming treatment he received at CNN:
Taffe also appeared on another Time Warner media property, cable channel HLN, on the programs "Nancy Grace" (watch it the show: here) and "Dr. Drew On Call" (watch the show: here).
So why does CNN, HLN and Time Warner continue to contaminate the airways with avowed supremacists like Frank Taffee? Perhaps the same reason that big media corporations have provided a national platform for bigots like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh: to keep racism "live and well" in America and to attract the same rabid right-wing viewers that Fox News has been able to attract via an endless stream of racist, anti-women, anti-Muslim, and anti-gay vitriol. This is how networks like CNN prove their "swag" to the white racists of America.
Perhaps the blame for CNN's far-right shift should lay right at the doorstep of CNN's new "head honcho" Jeff Zucker, who was hired to bring CNN out of last place in the cable news ratings war. In an article titled, "The Last Charge of the Master Race: The South’s 'Lost Cause' Addiction," Ishmael Reed points out:
So why does CNN, HLN and Time Warner continue to contaminate the airways with avowed supremacists like Frank Taffee? Perhaps the same reason that big media corporations have provided a national platform for bigots like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh: to keep racism "live and well" in America and to attract the same rabid right-wing viewers that Fox News has been able to attract via an endless stream of racist, anti-women, anti-Muslim, and anti-gay vitriol. This is how networks like CNN prove their "swag" to the white racists of America.
Perhaps the blame for CNN's far-right shift should lay right at the doorstep of CNN's new "head honcho" Jeff Zucker, who was hired to bring CNN out of last place in the cable news ratings war. In an article titled, "The Last Charge of the Master Race: The South’s 'Lost Cause' Addiction," Ishmael Reed points out:
Gingrich, a serial hypocrite called Obama “the food stamps president” and “entertainer-in-chief,” conjuring an image of the president as a white-lipped minstrel adorned with white gloves, which is probably why Gingrich was hired by CNN’s Jeff Zucker, who created an atmosphere at NBC for women described by Ann Curry as “cruel.”
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The Murder of JFK: WHO Did It? - Where New Evidence Points
Media specials are on tap for the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s murder, but none will explore the troubling new evidence that has been declassified in recent years – and that undercuts the Official Story of the Lone Gunman.
This essay examines the new evidence from several different vantage points: Why Oswald, Who was Oswald, the CIA Mystery, the FBI Mystery, Angleton's (CIA Director of Counter-Intelligence) Connection, the Autopsy Mystery, the Treatment of Senator Richard Russell, the Hesitant Investigators, the Medical Evidence, the FBI's Fiddling, and the ultimate Miscarriage of Justice.
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| A frame from the famous Zapruder film clearly shows JFK taking a shot from the front, while corporate media continues to insist the bullet came from be- hind and was fired by 'lone gunman' Lee Harvey Oswald. |
Global Research, November 20, 2013
Consortiumnews 19 November 2013
When the film was finally shown, there was an interesting dichotomy. Whereas most of the film critics liked it, editorials and news stories about the movie attacked it. One critic actually lost her job over a positive review of the film.
But the film did two things relevant to the state of the evidence in the matter of President Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. At the end of his film, Stone had shown a title card saying that the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had been classified until the year 2029.
Embarrassed – and faced with public outrage – Congress held hearings. Many people testified including Stone, and the last chief counsel of the HSCA, Robert Blakey. As a result, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was created, tasked with finding and releasing all documents held by public and private entities in America concerning the murder of President Kennedy. Eventually, two million pages of classified files were open to the public.
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| The former Texas School Book Depository Building in Dealey Plaza, Dallas. Where government conspiracy theorists claim Oswald fired the shots that killed JFK. (Photo: David Jones) |
These new people who were drawn into the case had fresh perspectives to offer and new insights. Between the newly declassified documents and this new generation of writers, the information base about both Kennedy and his murder grew exponentially in a relatively short time.
But this week’s 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination will be marked almost entirely by television specials that will be silent about this new and plentiful information, which alters the calculus of the Kennedy case. That is because, despite the uproar created by Stone’s film, the defenders of the Warren Commission’s narrative circled the wagons and protected the Establishment’s preferred solution to the assassination – that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Why Oswald?
There always was an attractiveness to the Oswald-did-it storyline. It is the simplest explanation, a lone gunman acting out of some personal grievance, ideological fixation or psychological imbalance. No need to explore evidence of a larger conspiracy. No need to integrate Kennedy’s murder into the historic developments that his presidency represented.
Thus, many influential people – from officials involved in the original investigation defending their judgments to a later generation of authors burnishing their reputations for probity – have fought fiercely to defend the Oswald-acted-alone narrative. They have done so despite nagging evidentiary problems, such as the “magic bullet theory,” which attributed the multiple wounds to Kennedy’s neck and Texas Gov. John Connally’s chest, wrist and thigh to a single bullet found almost unscathed on a gurney at Parkland Hospital, and those troubling images from the Zapruder film showing Kennedy’s head being knocked backward by the fatal shot, although Oswald was behind him at the Texas Bookstore Depository.
Most importantly, Gerald Posner’s book, Case Closed, which was published before the ARRB was even set up, was used to close the door on further inquiry by pronouncing Oswald guilty again. Yet, Posner’s book did not include any of the intriguing documents the ARRB declassified. Neither did it include the results of the ARRB special investigation into the medical evidence launched by chief counsel Jeremy Gunn.
After Posner’s book, there seemed to be something of an informal agreement by the gatekeepers in the media. There would be no programs dedicated to airing the discoveries of the ARRB, despite the fact that the ARRB had unprecedented powers to declassify documents and compel testimony. Because of these combination of factors, the American public was given little exposure to the ARRB material and the revolutionary work of new authors on the Kennedy case, the most infamous American homicide of the Twentieth Century.
Besides the Oswald-acted-alone solution, there have been other proposed narratives that accept the idea of conspiracy but don’t directly challenge the institutions of the state. These scenarios acknowledge the likelihood of other conspirators but point the finger at the Mafia or Fidel Castro or some other enemies of America.
But much of the new evidence tends to bolster the narrative advanced by Garrison and by Stone’s movie: that the assassination must have involved elements of the U.S. intelligence community working with right-wing operatives who considered Kennedy soft on communism and that a cover-up was put in place by key government figures to prevent an unraveling of these powerful institutions and the erosion of public trust in the authorities.
Who Was Oswald?
Let us begin with the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald had been portrayed by the Warren Commission as a lonely, communist sociopath. Although there was never any clear motive put forth by the Warren Commission as to why the alleged assassin killed JFK, it was intimated that it was the net result of the frustrations in his life caused by financial problems, ideological intent, and marital troubles. This is still what most current defenders of the Commission say today.
But one of the most surprising things that the ARRB disclosed was the volume of files on Oswald held by both the CIA and FBI – after both agencies had long denied that they had much paper on Oswald. But it was not just the volume of documents, but it was the unexpected direction they pointed.
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| Dealey Plaza: Where the deed was done. (Photo: David Jones) |
But it’s obvious that Oswald stuck with learning Russian because when a friend of his arranged a meeting with Rosaleen Quinn, she commented afterwards that Oswald spoke excellent Russian. And Quinn had been privately tutored in advance of a State Department exam. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 131)
After acquiring fluency in Russian, Oswald then applied for a hardship discharge in order to leave the service early. Even though he had just a few months left to serve, his request was granted – and in only 10 days. The HSCA interviewed a person on the board who granted the discharge. Colonel B. J. Kozak testified that it normally took from three to six months to secure such a release. (HSCA interview of Kozak of Aug. 2, 1978)
After Oswald returned from Russia – receiving surprisingly little trouble despite his defection – he became friendly with the White Russian community in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. He then went to New Orleans in the summer of 1963. Numerous witnesses had testified to seeing him with former FBI agent Guy Banister or at Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street.
But in the files declassified by the ARRB there is even more evidence in this regard. In the declassified files of the Church Committee, there is testimony by two federal immigration agents that they were following David Ferrie in 1963 because of his association with Cubans in the country illegally. Wendell Roache and Ron Smith of the Immigration and Naturalization Service stated that they traced Ferrie to Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street, and Oswald was there. (DiEugenio, p. 113)
Further, at least one of the pro-Castro flyers that Oswald was passing out that summer was stamped with the 544 Camp Street address. According to Banister’s secretary Delphine Roberts, Banister was aware that Oswald had committed this faux pas, and he was upset about it. The rightwing zealot complained that, “How is it going to look for him to have the same address as me!” (HSCA interview with Roberts, July 6, 1978)
The natural question arises: What would an alleged communist like Oswald be doing using the conservative Banister’s office as an address, and also working out of that office? In that regard, one of the most compelling revelations to emerge from the ARRB is that both the FBI and the CIA were running counter-intelligence operations against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in 1963. This included using electronic surveillance, penetration agents, and agents provocateur against the New York-based organization.
CIA Mystery
In one of the CIA’s declassified files on this subject, it was discovered that the men running this counter-intelligence effort at CIA were David Phillips and Jim McCord. (Newman, pgs. 236-41) Phillips’s name in this regard is especially fascinating because of his reported meeting with Oswald in August of 1963 at the Southland Center in Dallas by the militant Cuban exile Antonio Veciana.
At that time, according to the Warren Commission, Oswald was about a month away from leaving for Mexico. In addition to not telling the reader about Phillips, McCord and the CIA counter-intelligence program against the FPCC, the Warren Report also did not reveal a memorandum sent from the CIA to the FBI on Sept. 16, 1963, saying the CIA was “giving some consideration to countering the activities” of the FPCC “in foreign countries. … CIA is also giving some thought to planting deceptive information which might embarrass the Committee in areas where it does have some support.”
Oswald had just embarrassed the FPCC by his tactics in New Orleans. First, by getting into a fight with an anti-Castro activist, being arrested, jailed, and then pleading guilty in court. He then took part in a debate where he was exposed as a former Soviet defector. As author Jim Douglass asks: Did this memo refer to Oswald now going to Mexico? (Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 179)
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| John F Kennedy Statue. (Photo: Martin Belam) |
The report states that the CIA could produce no pictures of Oswald either entering or leaving either place, although the Agency had multiple cameras facing each doorway. Further, there is a table in the report which shows that the surveillance tapes the Agency says it had of Oswald in both places could not be of Oswald because the man the CIA had on the tapes spoke broken Russian and fluent Spanish. (Lopez Report, p. 130) However, witnesses said Oswald spoke fluent Russian and broken Spanish.
When one of the tapes of Oswald was sent to Dallas after Kennedy’s assassination and listened to by the FBI agents interviewing Oswald, the agents said the voice was not Oswald’s. When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was alerted to this, he relayed the information to President Johnson. (FBI Memorandum from Hoover to James Rowley, Nov. 23, 1963)
The FBI Mystery
There are two more declassified connections by the FBI to this important episode. First, a FLASH warning that the FBI had put on Oswald’s file, after his defection to the Soviet Union, was taken off while Oswald was in Mexico. Further, it was removed at about the time the Bureau got information that Oswald was allegedly meeting a KGB agent named Valery Kostikov.
This is important, because as both authors John Newman and Jim Douglass note, if the FLASH notice had been in place, it is probable that Oswald would have been placed on the Security Index. That list would have been turned over to the Secret Service, and Oswald would likely have been picked up or surveilled for Kennedy’s upcoming trip to Dallas.
Secondly, in a declassified memo discovered by Newman, Hoover had scribbled a handwritten note in the marginalia of a memo. In speaking of cooperation between the CIA and the FBI, the Director wrote that he was doubtful about such endeavors because he could not forget “the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico” as an example of their double-dealing. Within six weeks of Kennedy’s murder, Hoover thought that the CIA was, at the very least, not being forthcoming about Oswald’s activities in Mexico City.
Hoover was not alone in this suspicion about a CIA connection to Oswald. At a talk at the Cyril Wecht Symposium in Pittsburgh last month, Dan Hardway, an HSCA investigator who specialized on exploring a possible relationship between Oswald and the CIA, said the House panel prepared two indictments for perjury based on the obstruction of the Mexico City investigation. One was for Phillips; the other was for Anne Goodpasture, who controlled the tape and photo production in Mexico City.
Hardway has revealed that when he and another HSCA investigator were getting very close to exposing the skullduggery in Mexico City and who was responsible for it, the CIA moved a man name George Johannides into position as a liaison man over them.
As journalist Jefferson Morley has revealed, the CIA lied to Robert Blakey about the appointment of Johannides. The Agency told Blakely that his new liaison had no connection to the Kennedy case, when, in 1963, Johannides was the Chief of the Psychological Warfare Branch at JM/WAVE, the CIA’s huge Miami station. One of his specific functions was to monitor and supply the anti-Castro Cuban exile group, Cuban Student Directorate, or DRE, which was in contact with Oswald that summer. Carlos Bringuier, the man who got into a physical altercation with Oswald on a city street in New Orleans, was a member of the local branch of the DRE.
Angleton’s Connection
A similar maneuver occurred during the Warren Commission investigation, when the original CIA liaison to the Warren Commission, John Whitten, was replaced by James Angleton, the CIA’s counter-intelligence chief whose office handled (or mishandled) the original reporting about Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union.
When reports came in about Oswald entering the American embassy in Moscow and asking to renounce his citizenship, the information went to the various intelligence repositories in Washington. The FBI issued a FLASH warning to be placed on Oswald if he tried to reenter the country under a false name. After all, the possibility existed that the KGB could have turned him into a spy.
However, at the CIA, the information about Oswald was not acted on immediately or with the normal protocol. A routine 201 form, which catalogues anyone of interest to the Agency, was not filled out on Oswald at that time. Nor did the information go to the Soviet Russia division. Instead, the Oswald notice was funneled to James Angleton’s super-secret, CI/SIG unit, a protective agency that was supposed to be on guard against penetration agents but has been connected to some of the CIA’s most convoluted deep-cover operations, sometimes called “the wilderness of mirrors.” (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 27)
Besides Angleton’s influence over what CIA files would be made available to the Warren Commission, one of its seven members was former CIA Director Allen Dulles, whom President Kennedy had replaced as director after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961.
So, it is clear today that the idea the CIA had no intelligence interest in Oswald in the months leading up to Kennedy’s murder has been disproven. In fact, Newman uncovered a CIA memo in the Soviet Russia division which reads, “It was partly out of curiosity to learn if Oswald’s wife would actually accompany him to our country, partly out of interest in Oswald’s own experiences in the USSR, that we showed operational intelligence interest in the Harvey [Oswald] Story.”
The Autopsy Mystery
Another one of the myths circulated by the Warren Commission was that they did not have the actual autopsy exhibits because the Kennedy family would not allow them to access the material. This was a pretense exposed by the declassification of the Commission’s Jan. 21, 1964 executive session hearing. In that transcript, Commissioner John McCloy asked Chief Counsel Lee Rankin if they had the raw materials of the autopsy, and Rankin replied that they did.
In a transcript from the next session on Jan. 27, Rankin talked about actually seeing an autopsy picture and wondering how the bullet could exit Kennedy’s throat from an entrance point that low in the back. Rankin’s puzzlement about the back wound segues neatly into one piece of information that the ARRB did manage to get into the mainstream U.S. media, namely that Commissioner Gerald Ford changed the draft of the Warren Report to move the location of this back wound that so puzzled Rankin up into Kennedy’s neck.
This all too revealing alteration was exposed when Rankin’s son donated an earlier draft of the Warren Report to the ARRB. As Commission historian Gerald McKnight notes in his book Breach of Trust, this revision brought the back wound into “line with the Commission’s no-conspiracy conclusion, repositioning it to make it consistent with what came to be called, the single-bullet theory.” (McKnight, pgs. 171-172)
With the knowledge today that the Commission secretly did have the autopsy photos, this act seems even worse. Because, later on, when the photos were finally revealed to the public, it is clear that the wound was in the back, and not in Kennedy’s neck. Ford appears to have done this simply to make the Commission’s official verdict more palatable to the public, because if the shot was fired from over 60 feet up, from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, how could the bullet hit Kennedy in the back and exit at a higher point if it only went through soft tissue?
We now know that this questionable proposition was not even credible inside the Commission itself. The Commission was presented with evidence of three shells being recovered from the so-called sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. So, to make Oswald the lone assassin, only three bullets had to be responsible for all the wounds to all the victims in Dealey Plaza.
The Commission said bystander James Tague, standing on Commerce Street, was hit by a missed shot, and one shot fatally wounded Kennedy by striking him in the head. Which left one shot to do the rest of the damage. And it was quite a lot of damage: seven wounds and two smashed bones in Kennedy and Governor Connally who was sitting in the limousine in front of the President. Those seven wounds with one shot represent the trajectory of what has come to be known as the Magic Bullet.
Rolling Russell
When the Warren Commission verdict was formally announced in the fall of 1964, one of the reasons it appeared authoritative was that it was presented as being unanimous. Seven storied public figures had agreed on each and every aspect of the case against Oswald. Today we know that this was not true.
The best evidence demonstrating its falsity is the Commission’s treatment of Sen. Richard Russell, D-Georgia. For a master’s thesis produced under McKnight’s guidance in 2002, Dani E. Biancolli went through the Russell archive at the University of Georgia.
Almost from the beginning, Russell had problems with the way the Commission was doing business. For instance, Russell was puzzled that the FBI report did not allow for the single-bullet theory. It stated that two separate shots hit Kennedy and one hit Connally. If that is not confusing enough, when the CIA analyzed the Zapruder film, they decided there were two assassins. (McKnight, p. 6)
Russell was not satisfied by the hastily assembled FBI report. He also objected to the fact that Hoover was leaking its findings to the press, making it difficult for the Commission to maintain its independence in the face of public perceptions. Being an experienced trial lawyer, he also began to notice that the Commission was not notifying him when important witnesses would be testifying, e.g. Oswald’s brother, Robert. (Biancolli, p. 46)
Russell also noted that the CIA was giving certain members of the Commission more information than others. Troubled by the overall proceedings, Russell wrote a memo to himself which began with the phrase, “Something strange is happening.” He then noted that the Commission was only going to consider Oswald as the assassin. To lawyer Russell, this was “an untenable position.” (ibid, p. 47) Russell was so disturbed by the way the Commission was progressing that he actually composed a letter of resignation to President Lyndon Johnson.
Russell took the step of drafting an official dissent to the Warren Report. And he wanted the report to contain his reservations about the Magic Bullet. (ibid, p. 63) Aware of this, the more active members of the Commission – Gerald Ford, Allen Dulles, John McCloy and chief counsel Lee Rankin – tricked Russell. They had discontinued their dealings with their stenography service prior to the final meeting where Russell was to present his dissent. But they did have a secretary in the room to create the pretense that a full transcript was being recorded. (ibid, p. 65) No such thing occurred.
Russell was so effective in his presentation at this meeting that he was joined in the effort by Sen. John Sherman Cooper, R-Kentucky, and to a lesser extent by Rep. Hale Boggs, D-Louisiana. But Russell’s eloquent dissent was not recorded in the transcript. In fact, there really is no transcript of this Sept. 18, 1964 meeting. (ibid, pgs. 63-64) With no transcript available, none of Russell’s objections made it into the Warren Report. Thus, the false veneer of a unanimous Commission was maintained.
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| John F. Kennedy Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery. (Photo: Bernt Rostad) |
Further showing how compromised the Warren Commission was, it is clear today that the Commission demanded little respect from the intelligence agencies supplying it with information. For instance, as ARRB employee Doug Horne discovered, Commission counsel Arlen Specter requested the Secret Service produce any tapes of the Nov. 22 press conference by the doctors at Parkland Hospital. Even though they had a recording, the Secret Service failed to turn it over to the Commission. Perhaps because during the interview, Dr. Malcolm Perry said three times that the wound to Kennedy’s throat was one of entrance. If that were true, Oswald could not have caused it.
The CIA also sent the Commission very limited information about Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico City. For instance, the CIA did not send any information to the Commission about any of the phone taps they had at the Cuban or Russian embassies. And there is no evidence that the Commission ever knew who did the translation for the intercepts of incoming phone calls.
Further, the Commission never interviewed Silvia Duran, the receptionist at the Cuban consulate, the person who had the most contact with Oswald. Because of these failings, the information in the Warren Report about Oswald in Mexico City, which many people today see as crucial, is so skimpy as to be almost useless.
Hesitant Investigators
As the Russell incident indicates, it’s clear today that the Warren Commission was a reluctant investigative body from the start. This began with the technique President Johnson used to get Earl Warren to serve as chairman, something Warren did not want to do. LBJ told Warren that because of Oswald’s visits to the Russian and Cuban consulates, there was a danger of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and Cuba and the possible deaths of 40 million Americans in a matter of minutes.
Johnson later said Warren teared up at this suggestion, and Warren mentioned Johnson’s warning at his first staff meeting. The danger of a freewheeling investigation clearly had an impact on many of the investigators who came to see their job as tamping down suspicions of a larger conspiracy, rather than following the facts wherever they might lead. When Wesley Liebeler met with witness Sylvia Odio in Dallas, he told her that they had orders from Warren that if they came across any evidence of conspiracy they were to shove it under the rug. (Odio interview with Church Committee, Jan. 16, 1976)
What makes this so regrettable today is that there is no audio or photographic evidence that Oswald was at either the Russian or Cuban offices in Mexico City. The descriptions of a short, blonde man suggest an imposter. Hoover also felt that the CIA had given him a cover story. This declassified evidence in the Lopez Report leaves the question: Was the specter of a nuclear war used as a pretext to stop any real investigation?
Another crucial piece of evidence that was revived by the ARRB was this: There appears to have been an unsuccessful attempt to kill Kennedy in Chicago just three weeks before the successful one in Dallas. In November 1975, journalist Edwin Black wrote a long and detailed essay on this aborted plot for the Chicago Independent, a paper with a small and local circulation. Soon, this milestone essay was more or less forgotten, but the HSCA secured a copy of it.
Because of its recirculation, other writers have done more work on the subject. One of the most disturbing aspects of the Chicago attempt is that the outline of the plot is eerily similar to what happened in Dallas, down to the apparent fall guy. Three men who appeared to be Cubans were going to kill Kennedy in a rifle ambush as he exited off a freeway ramp in front of a tall building.
The man who was supposed to be accused of the crime was Thomas Vallee. Like Oswald, Valle was a former Marine who was stationed at a U-2 base in Japan. Vallee supposedly was resentful toward Kennedy because of the Bay of Pigs disaster. Curiously, the codename of the FBI informant who tipped off the Secret Service was “Lee.” The existence of a prior assassination plot with parallels to Kennedy’s killing in Dallas would seem to be relevant if one were exploring a wider conspiracy, but there was not one word about this episode in the Warren Report.
Medical Evidence
Some of the most startling new evidence in the JFK case from the declassified files relates to the ARRB’s medical investigation and from new doctors who have entered the JFK field. For instance, Dr. Gary Aguilar has collated the interviews done by HSCA investigators Andy Purdy and Mark Flanagan about the wounds to President Kennedy as seen by the witnesses at Bethesda Medical Center, the hospital where Kennedy’s autopsy was done after his body was returned to Washington.
The HSCA report said there was a discrepancy between what the medical staffers at Parkland Hospital in Dallas saw and what the staffers at Bethesda saw. Witnesses at the former, where Kennedy was rushed after the shooting, said they saw a large, avulsive hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull. This would strongly indicate a shot from the front. Yet the HSCA Report said that the witnesses at Bethesda did not see this wound.
It turns out this was false. When Aguilar went through all the declassified reports from the Bethesda witnesses, they agreed that there was a large avulsive hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull. Aguilar has a table of over 40 witnesses in two locations who are now on the record as saying they saw this wound. The odds of that many trained medical personnel being wrong are, needless to say, very high. Yet, it remains unclear who at the HSCA was responsible for the deception.
As contradictory to the single-gunman theory as the ARRB-revealed medical evidence seems to be, the present state of the ballistics evidence is probably moreso. Broadly speaking, this consists of the ammunition, the rifle, and the crime scene.
Let us begin with new revelations about the so-called Magic Bullet. When Gary Aguilar was going through the declassified FBI files pertaining to the identification of that exhibit – formally called CE 399 – he was puzzled by the lack of actual FBI field reports in the file, so-called “302” reports on witness interviews.
What initially spurred his interest in this matter was the 1967 interview that author Josiah Thompson conducted with O. P. Wright, the security director at Parkland Hospital. When Thompson showed Wright a photo of CE 399, he denied that it was the bullet he gave to the Secret Service. CE 399 is a round-nosed, military jacketed, copper-coated bullet. Wright said he turned over a lead-colored, sharp-nosed, hunting round. (Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas, p. 175)
Yet, in the declassified file, Aguilar could find no 302 where anything like Wright’s definitive response to Thompson was recorded. Or a 302 in which Wright said that CE 399 resembled the bullet he found the day of the assassination. Yet, the FBI was supposed to have shown CE 399 to Wright to confirm the identification of the Magic Bullet as what was turned over at Parkland Hospital. But there was only a summary memorandum confirming that ID.
Though the ARRB told Aguilar that they had exhausted that particular FBI file, there was a clue for further inquiry. In the summary memo, the FBI agent who supposedly showed the exhibit to Wright was identified as Bardwell Odum. In November 2001, Aguilar and Thompson visited the retired agent who told his interviewers that he never took any bullet around to show to any Parkland witnesses – and since he knew Wright well, he would have recalled the interview.
Further, if that event had happened, Odum would have had to file a 302. Aguilar had studied the report file in sequential order and none were missing, indicating that Odum never filed a 302 presumably because he never showed the bullet to Wright.
The FBI’s Fiddling
But why would the FBI have fiddled with the evidence relating to the chain of custody for the Magic Bullet? One obvious answer would be that FBI Director Hoover understood how important it was to remove any doubts that Oswald was the lone gunman.
After the declassification process was complete, researcher John Hunt petitioned the National Archives to examine the FBI’s own data in order to determine if CE 399 actually arrived at FBI headquarters when the Bureau said it did and if it was carried there by agent Elmer Lee Todd as Hoover said it was. As basic to an investigation as trail of evidence is, this was not done by either the Warren Commission or the HSCA.
In a handwritten receipt, Todd noted he got the bullet at the White House from James Rowley of the Secret Service at 8:50 p.m. Hunt then reviewed the work of Robert Frazier who was the technician who booked and analyzed firearms evidence on the JFK case that day. In Frazier’s chronicle, entitled appropriately enough, “History of Evidence,” Frazier wrote that he received the bullet from Todd at 7:30 p.m. In another document entitled “Laboratory Work Sheet,” Frazier wrote this again and described the exhibit as “Bullet from Stretcher.”
The obvious problem was: How could Todd have given CE 399 to Frazier at the FBI lab before he got it from Rowley at the White House? Assuming the contemporaneous documentary record is correct, either the FBI switched the bullet or there was more than one bullet. Either alternative would vitiate the Commission’s conclusion about Oswald as the lone gunman.
In Thompson’s book he writes that both Todd and Frazier marked the bullet with their initials; this was based on a two-page FBI document inside a Justice Department Report. The FBI needed Todd’s initials on the bullet because the initials of the man who gave the bullet to Rowley, Secret Service agent Richard Johnsen, are not on CE 399. And neither are Rowley’s. Todd’s initials had to be there to give the chain of possession any validity at all.
Hunt discovered that Todd’s initials are not on CE 399, which would mean that the forensic value of the Magic Bullet was worthless. (Hunt’s articles can be read herehttp://www.jfklancer.com/hunt/mystery.html, and herehttp://www.jfklancer.com/hunt/phantom.htm).
Miscarriage of Justice
This essay could be twice as long as it is. And it could touch on many other different fields: the efforts of the FBI and CIA to electronically monitor Jim Garrison’s office; the FBI concealment of Guy Banister’s address of 544 Camp Street from the Warren Commission; the witnesses who saw Oswald, Clay Shaw and David Ferrie in the hamlets of Clinton and Jackson; the testimony of Victoria Adams that Oswald was not running down the Depository stairs from the sixth floor after the shooting; the work by Josiah Thompson and Dave Wimp which demonstrates there is no forward movement by Kennedy at frames 312-313 of the Zapruder film, which shows Kennedy going only one way, back and to the left.
These revelations, based largely on the documentary record released by the ARRB, have revolutionized what the evidence tells us about Kennedy’s assassination. Based on these documents and other discoveries, the Warren Commission is revealed as a miscarriage of justice and its report a distortion of history, perhaps justified in the minds of some participants as needed to protect the country from the repercussions of a no-holds-barred investigation.
While President Johnson may have raised the specter of a nuclear conflagration in 1963, the later motives for the continuing cover-up – and the intensity of the attacks on anyone who has questioned the official version – can best be explained by the institutional self-interests of the government agencies that would be implicated in the cover-up or the actual crime.
Along with fierce resistance from the CIA and the FBI, there was the close-minded response to the new evidence from the gatekeepers of the major U.S. news media. Ridiculing authors and investigators who challenged the Warren Commission’s findings became something of a litmus test for measuring a journalist’s fitness to get a good-paying job in the mainstream press.
But this arrogant behavior by these powerful governmental and media institutions – their contempt for an intellectually unconstrained evaluation of the JFK evidence – has proved costly in terms of public trust. Polls reveal that the decline in America’s faith in government began in 1964, the year the Warren Report was issued. As the ARRB’s former counsel Jeremy Gunn said in a speech at Stanford, with what the ARRB discovered, he would much rather be defending Oswald than prosecuting him.
Despite this new evidence, there are many programs being broadcast this month about both President Kennedy and his murder, e.g. Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy. Not a single one will present anywhere near a representative selection of the new evidentiary discoveries made by the ARRB. Yet, this information is crucial to understanding where the United States finds itself today, a country awash in excessive secrecy and growing public distrust.
Another one of the declassified files – the records of the Sec/Def meeting of May 1963 – revealed that Oliver Stone was correct in another facet of his movie. President Kennedy was planning to withdraw from Vietnam, a decision that – if not reversed by President Johnson – might have dramatically changed the course of U.S. history.
In the face of this continuing denial of a full accounting of Kennedy’s assassination on the 50thanniversary, the public should ask two simple questions: What really happened to President Kennedy in Dealey Plaza? And why the unending resistance from the news media to present the new evidence to the American people?
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Jim DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era. His most recent book is Reclaiming Parkland.
Copyright © Jim DiEugenio, Consortiumnews, 2013
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