Octafish
Octafish's JournalEveryone who cares about Democracy should be interested in this.
FWIW: Using a loaded term like "conspiracy theorists" tends to sidetrack discussion.
Gaeton Fonzi's 'The Last Investigation'
Mr. Fonzi was an investigator for the HSCA, working on the Cuban-CIA connections:Gaeton Fonzi's The Last Investigation, now republished by the Mary Ferrell Foundation, is an insider's account of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, where "reality" became irrelevant compared to the need to produce a report. In this book, Fonzi tells of the several leads he developed in anti-Castro and anti-Kennedy milieu of South Florida's Cuban exiles and disgruntled CIA officers.
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/The_Last_Investigation
The CBS report on LeMay's whereabouts have given me a sense of vertigo...
At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, LeMay called JFK an "appeaser" to his face.
LeMay was one of the guys, along with JCS Chief Lyman Lemnitzer and CIA director Allen Dulles, who proposed a nuclear sneak-attack on the USSR for "late in 1963."
JFK's assassination would make a perfect pretext for war. Gee. What an odd coincidence.
Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?
Recently declassified information shows that the military presented President Kennedy with a plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.
James K. Galbraith and Heather A. Purcell | September 21, 1994
During the early 1960s the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) introduced the world to the possibility of instant total war. Thirty years later, no nation has yet fired any nuclear missile at a real target. Orthodox history holds that a succession of defensive nuclear doctrines and strategies -- from "massive retaliation" to "mutual assured destruction" -- worked, almost seamlessly, to deter Soviet aggression against the United States and to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.
The possibility of U.S. aggression in nuclear conflict is seldom considered. And why should it be? Virtually nothing in the public record suggests that high U.S. authorities ever contemplated a first strike against the Soviet Union, except in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, or that they doubted the deterrent power of Soviet nuclear forces. The main documented exception was the Air Force Chief of Staff in the early 1960s, Curtis LeMay, a seemingly idiosyncratic case.
But beginning in 1957 the U.S. military did prepare plans for a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S.S.R., based on our growing lead in land-based missiles. And top military and intelligence leaders presented an assessment of those plans to President John F. Kennedy in July of 1961. At that time, some high Air Force and CIA leaders apparently believed that a window of outright ballistic missile superiority, perhaps sufficient for a successful first strike, would be open in late 1963.
The document reproduced opposite is published here for the first time. It describes a meeting of the National Security Council on July 20, 1961. At that meeting, the document shows, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, and others presented plans for a surprise attack. They answered some questions from Kennedy about timing and effects, and promised further information. The meeting recessed under a presidential injunction of secrecy that has not been broken until now.
CONTINUED...
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_the_us_military_plan_a_nuclear_first_strike_for_1963
The fact LeMay never revealed where he was on Nov. 22, 1963 is news to me. The fact the USAF couldn't find him is suspicious. The unedited AF One tape may be a watershed moment in United States history.
Thank you for the heads-up, Lint Head!
I'm getting the ear goggles on.
In the meantime, background for those new to the subject:
Kennedy Military Aide: LBJ Hid in Bathroom, Cried After JFK Assassination.
Steven M. Gillon
Resident historian of the History Channel
Huffington Post
This month will mark the 46th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A recently declassified oral history by Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, President Kennedy's military aide on the Dallas trip, sheds new light on the critical hours after the shooting. McHugh makes startling claims about Lyndon Johnson's behavior in the wake of the assassination.
The interview with McHugh, originally conducted for the John F. Kennedy Library in 1978, remained closed for 31 years. It was finally declassified in the spring of 2009. I just happened to be working at the Kennedy Library on the day the interview was opened to the public and have used it for the first time in my new book, The Kennedy Assassination -- 24 Hours After.
After being informed at Parkland Hospital that Kennedy was dead, Johnson raced back to Air Force One, where he waited for Mrs. Kennedy and the body of the slain president, and made preparations to take the Oath of Office. Back at the hospital, the Kennedy group loaded the body into a coffin, forced their way past a local justice of the peace, and hurried back to Love Field for the long ride back to Washington.
It was standard practice for the plane to take off as soon as the commander-in-chief was onboard. Even after McHugh had ordered the pilot to take off, however, "nothing happened." According to the newly declassified transcript, Mrs. Kennedy was becoming desperate to leave. "Mrs. Kennedy was getting very warm, she had blood all over her hat, her coat...his brains were sticking on her hat. It was dreadful," McHugh said. She pleaded with him to get the plane off the ground. "Please, let's leave," she said. McHugh jumped up and used the phone near the rear compartment to call Captain James Swindal. "Let's leave," he said. Swindal responded: "I can't do it. I have orders to wait." Not wanting to make a scene in front of Mrs. Kennedy, McHugh rushed to the front of the plane. "Swindal, what on earth is going on?" The pilot told him that "the President wants to remain in this area."
CONTINUED...
Those who remember that day know the fall-out continues to the present moment.
Panetta: Decision to Kill Americans Suspected of Terrorism Is Obama's
MotherJones wonders: Whatever happened to that Bill of Rights thing, anyway?
Panetta: Decision to Kill Americans Suspected of Terrorism Is Obama's
—By Adam Serwer
MotherJones
Mon Jan. 30, 2012 12:13 PM PS
In an interview with CBS 60 Minutes' Scott Pelley, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta revealed more about the secret process the Obama administration uses to kill American citizens suspected of terrorism without trial. According to Panetta, the president himself approves the decision based on recommendations from top national security officials.
"[The] President of the United States, obviously reviews these cases, reviews the legal justification and in the end says, go or no go," Panetta said.
SNIP...
Panetta's explanation isn't much more complex than "when we say someone is a terrorist, then we can kill them, because they're a terrorist." The entire point of due process, however, is to determine whether or not someone is actually guilty. The defense secretary's metaphor—that you can fire back when someone "holds a gun to your head"—might justify killing an American citizen who is fighting on an actual battlefield, like Afghanistan. But it suggests violence as an appropriate response to an imminent threat, rather than the actual circumstances under which say, radical cleric and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki appears to have been killed.
President Obama just signed a bill that, if not for its many administrative loopholes, would "mandate" military detention for non-citizen terror suspects apprehended on American soil, so it's not accurate for Panetta to state that "any" suspected terrorist apprehended by the US receives due process. The vast majority of the nearly two hundred detainees at Gitmo have never been charged with anything, let alone tried and convicted. Osama bin Laden was the admitted leader of a group engaged in an armed conflict against US troops in Afghanistan; concrete evidence that al-Awlaki was more than a font for extremist propaganda has never been aired.
CONTINUED...
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/panetta-obama-signs-killings-americans-suspected-terrorism
Am I terrorist for pointing this out? Should I wear a super-size flag pin to avoid suspicion?
Astroturf in service of Wall Street
http://activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm/o/489-center-for-responsible-lendingEXCERPT...
Herb and Marion Sandler are the billionaire founders of the Center for Responsible Lending. The Sandlers made a fortune in the subprime mortgage industry, thanks to the success of their bank, Golden West Financial.
The Change They Believe In
Speech for Harlem Tenants Association, November 14, 2008By Robert Fitch
EXCERPT...
If we examine more carefully the interests that Obama represents; if we look at his core financial supporters; as well as his inmost circle of advisors, we’ll see that they represent the primary activists in the demolition movement and the primary real estate beneficiaries of this transformation of public housing projects into condo’s and townhouses: the profitable creep of the Central Business District and elite residential neighborhoods southward; and the shifting of the pile of human misery about three miles further into the South Side and the south suburbs.
Obama’s political base comes primarily from Chicago FIRE—the finance, insurance and real estate industry. And the wealthiest families—the Pritzkers, the Crowns and the Levins. But it’s more than just Chicago FIRE. Also within Obama’s inner core of support are allies from the non-profit sector: the liberal foundations, the elite universities, the non-profit community developers and the real estate reverends who produce market rate housing with tax breaks from the city and who have been known to shout from the pulpit “give us this day our Daley, Richard Daley bread.”3
Aggregate them and what emerges is a constellation of interests around Obama that I call “Friendly FIRE.” Fire power disguised by the camouflage of community uplift; augmented by the authority of academia; greased by billions in foundation grants; and wired to conventional FIRE by the terms of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1995.
And yet friendly FIRE is just as deadly as the conventional FIRE that comes from bankers and developers that we’re used to ducking from. It’s the whole condominium of interests whose advancement depends on the elimination of poor blacks from the community and their replacement by white people and—at least temporarily—by the black middle class—who’ve gotten subprime mortgages—in a kind of redlining in reverse.
CONTINUED...
The late Mr. Fitch may be related to a commie third-cousin of my old college roommate's first girlfriend. It still doesn't change the facts behind this speech.
The reality.
Thank you for putting it into words.
President Obama is great at making speeches. Unfortunately, whether it's by choice or circumstances, he has not been so good at implementing policies that make life better for anyone other than the millionaire and above classes.
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