Perhaps the best articles that have been published in The Nation are from Naomi Klein (author of "The Shock Doctrine") and from Michael Klare. Klein's book talks about the paradigm of "disaster capitalism," how the elites profit from misery and manipulate collapse. Unfortunately, her book avoided the issues of Peak Oil and overshoot, and how elites have chosen to avoid decentralized approaches to mitigating the crises. Klare's work about the global contest to control oil supplies is more focused on how Peak Oil underlies the resource wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere -- but his otherwise excellent analysis avoids mention of how the trigger event for the Peak Oil wars (9/11) was deliberately allowed to happen.
This is a particularly excellent synopisis:
www.thenation.com/doc/20080519/klare
The New Geopolitics of Energy
by MICHAEL T. KLARE
This article appeared in the May 19, 2008 edition of The Nation.
May 1, 2008
Corn was one of the earliest and most vocal critics of Michael Ruppert
and the 9/11 truth movement. His behavior on 9/11 is consistent with The
Nation's attack on Oliver Stone's film JFK, his defense of the CIA in
1996 when Gary Webb published an expose of CIA cocaine dealing in the
inner cities, and his criticism in late 2002 that the peace rallies were
too leftist.
After spearheading the attacks on Ruppert, Corn was "dispatched"
(his term) to Trinidad, an oil exporter to the US, by the US State Department
at taxpayer expense to teach journalism. Authentic journalists generally
don't get free junkets to influence media in foreign lands.
Most of our critics, notably David Corn of The Nation and self-anointed
media critic Norman Solomon, have gone silent as both our reporting
and predictions have been completely validated by events. And both Corn
and Solomon have also revealed themselves to be agents of the U.S. State
Department run by Colin Powell and career covert operative and criminal
Richard Armitage. Last November [2002] in a story published on Alternet
Corn wrote, "I had been dispatched
to Trinidad by the U.S. State Department to conduct
a two-day seminar on investigative reporting for local journalists (your
tax dollars at work!)..." And just recently Norman
Solomon of the Institute for Public Accuracy traveled with sitting congressman
Nick Rahall and others on what CNN described as an official delegation
to meet with officials of the Iraqi government. -- This is the lead essay from the Oct. 1, 2002 issue of Mike
Ruppert's newsletter From
The Wilderness [emphasis added]
The Nation
defended Bush at his most vulnerable moment
In early 2002, The Nation ran several articles by David Corn, their Washington
Editor, attacking journalist and whistleblower Michael Ruppert, for daring
to piece together a mountain of evidence that 9/11 was not a surprise
attack. Corn is a long time defender of the Warren Commission (which covered
up the coup against JFK), wrote a biography of CIA dirty trickster Ted
Shackley that ignored evidence of drug complicity, attacked journalist
Gary Webb for writing his series in the San Jose Mercury News about the
CIA and the cocaine trade, and attacked the peace movement before the
Iraq war for being too leftist (but didn't do anything to organize less
leftist peace rallies). After Corn attacked Ruppert, the Colin Powell
/ Richard Armitage State Department sent Corn on a government paid trip
to influence media in Trinidad (a major oil / gas exporter to the United
States). Corn's article on Alternet even stated that he had been "dispatched"
to go there, and that it was your "tax dollars at work." Real
journalists who investigate government scandals usually don't get that
sort of treatment -- most get harassed, not feted on taxpayer funded junkets
to infiltrate media elites in tropical destinations that export fossil
fuels to the US market.
The Nation has clearly allied itself with the CIA by publishing this
article, and has announced in no uncertain terms that it is not interested
in journalism on this subject that attempts to examine factual evidence.
This is far different that merely ignoring the issue (which much of the
Left has chosen to do).
The Nation has been perhaps the strongest supporter of the Warren Commission
on what's left of "The Left" for four decades -- it is not a
surprise that they are providing such critical support (whether witting
or unwitting is ultimately irrelevant) to the Cheney re-election effort
by urging nervous liberals to shut up about Cheney's complicity in 9/11,
just as they defended Bush against accusations of foreknowledge after
9/11, when the allegations had the potential to thwart the political momentum
for the US invasion of Iraq. And then they wonder why "The Left"
has so little political influence ...
None of the pundits, CIA agents, media "experts," political
consultants, candidates, elected officials and other fixtures of the media
dare talk about the multiple war games that
were being coordinated on 9/11 that paralyzed the Air Force defense of
New York and Washington, the multiple warnings
from allied intelligence services that specifically identified what, when
and where the "attacks" would be, the warnings to selected elites
not to fly or otherwise get out of the way (the most famous is the caution
given to San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown not to fly to NYC on 9/11),
or the stock trades placed a few days before on Wall Street and other
financial markets betting the values of United, American and other impacted
companies would drop. These are topics that cannot be reconciled with
the official story, and therefore must be put into George Orwell's "memory
hole."
A Zogby poll of New York City residents released during the Republican
National Convention found that 49% of those surveyed think that the Bush
administration had foreknowledge of 9/11. It is likely that if the media
-- whether corporate establishment or liberal "alternative"
-- had covered the anomalies in the official story, the 49% statistic
would probably be at least 79% or 89%.
In any military coup d'etat, one of the first places that is seized
is the television and/or radio station (depending on the technological
sophistication of the country being changed). The US coup d'etat has been
more subtle, but more widespread -- encompassing the so-called "alternative"
publications like The Nation in addition to the more obvious suspects
like the major television networks. The best disinformation is mostly
correct -- and The Nation has done a tremendous favor for the Bush-Cheney
re-election effort by publishing a CIA agent's critique of "The New
Pearl Harbor." Of course, this critique ignored the CIA
exercise underway the morning of 9/11 at the nearby headquarters of
the National Reconnaissance Office, which controls US spy satellites,
which simulated a plane-into-buildingn scenario at the exact same time
that 9/11 was underway. It's hard to know what defenders of the official
story think about this amazing coincidence, since they don't dare discuss
it. (Mike Ruppert's book "Crossing the Rubicon" explores the
wargames of 9/11 in considerable detail, and concludes that they were
in fact the means used to paralyze the Air Force defense of New York and
Washington -- and that they were being coordinated by Cheney in the White
House. What does "The Nation" have to say about this? Do they
really want four more years of Bush and Cheney, and decades more of the
"military industrial complex," which President Eisenhower warned
us about as his final statement to the nation?)
It is fascinating that the "book review" in The Nation did
not actually deal with any of the evidence presented by Dr. David Ray
Griffin in his book, which is a summary of much of the best information
unearthed by a variety of investigations into the 9/11 attacks. Dr. Griffin
did state very clearly in the introduction that not all of the material
needs to be proven true in order for there to be overwhelming evidence
for some level of complicity -- yet Mr. Baer's review did not attempt
to debunk a single claim with any level of specificity. While it is likely
that a couple claims for complicity will not hold up under scrutiny (for
example, the claim that a plane didn't hit the Pentagon is incorrect -
see www.oilempire.us/pentagon.html ), the
cumulative nature of the evidence that the official story is riddled with
lies is overwhelming.
Reading "Crossing the Rubicon" and "The Terror Timeline"
should be mandatory reading for every citizen before voting in the National
Election. It is unlikely that The Nation will dare to review these books,
since the amount of evidence they provide is far too much to be dismissed
with a simple "nyaah" by a CIA agent who spent many years manipulating
politics in the Middle East.
Discrediting the fiction surrounding 9/11 should be of prime importance
for a publication like The Nation, which claims to want lower military
budgets, a less belligerent foreign policy, human rights abroad and domestically,
energy efficiency and renewable energy, etc. Numerous commentators have
charged since 9/11 that The Nation and similar publications funded by
the Ford Foundation and other conservative, establishment interests are
compromised -- and cannot cover the "deep politics" of 9/11,
Peak Oil, and the empire's invasion of the Middle East oil fields due
to their dependence upon philanthropic gestures from institutions heavily
invested in petroleum interests (ie. Ford).
Please support independent journalists by buying copies of Crossing
the Rubicon and The Terror Timeline. If you subscribe to The Nation, you
could ask for a pro-rated refund on the rest of your subscription.
David Corn complains about Mike Ruppert:
One thing I do want to respond to is Michael Ruppert telling the good
listeners of [missed on tape] Independent Media Center up in Portland
Oregon, he said, even more explicitly, and this is a quote from the
transcript available on the web. If I'm asked honestly, and I will say
that I have an opinion, that David Corn is one of the Establishment
CIA/FBI operatives who has long been planted within so-called progressive
circles. And the primary argument that I use for that is that he was
chosen by one of the most venal characters in American history, Ted
Shackley, to be his chosen biographer.
Michael Ruppert on David Corn:
My dear friend, colleague and mentor, Peter Dale Scott at U.C. Berkeley,
has a great quote, that: disinformation in order to be effective
has to be 95% accurate. And that is always the case. I debated
David Corn.I met him first at Sara McLendon's(?) group at the National
Press Club when "The Blond Ghost" first came out. I've read
it twice, and the book completely omits the entire, extremely well-documented
history of Shackley's involvement in the drug trade, and that is a glaring
omission. www.leftgatekeepers.com/
articles/TranscriptOfKPFK%27sSonaliInterviewRuppert&Corn61302.htm
The Nation
hires CIA agent to attack "New Pearl Harbor" book
The Nation got a genuine, admitted CIA agent to write this hatchet job
(Baer's review of "New Pearl Harbor" in the September
27, 2004) issue that supports Cheney's innocence by ignoring
the evidentiary record).
The Nation issue is September 27, 2004 www.thenation.com/issue.mhtml?i=20040927 Dangerous Liaisons
David Ray Griffin: The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About
the Bush Administration and 9/11
[book review] by Robert Baer
The Baer piece is not available to non subscribers.
From Jamey Hecht, assistant managing editor, From the Wilderness (www.fromthewilderness.com)
The September 27, 2004 issue of The Nation has a review of David Ray
Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor... written by Robert Baer, celebrated
CIA agent (whose career involvement with the agency is acknowledged
on the review's lead page). Griffin's book has a foreword by Richard
Falk, who sits on The Nation's advisory board. But that hasn't inhibited
the editors from frying the book in lard.
Baer's review is a heavy load of condescension, flustered contempt,
false dichotomies, and a few undisputed facts, borne along by that old
workhorse: the claim that elites can't possibly conspire in something
horrible (like the murder of an American President in 1963, or three
thousand people in NYC in 2001) and then execute it, because (1) too
many people would need to know in advance, and (2) once done, it wouldn't
remain a secret.
Well, FBI field agents like Robert Wright and Colleen Rowley who desperately
tried to prevent 9/11 were stopped by one man, Special Supervisory Agent
David Frasca --- not by the entire FBI. All that's required are a few
well-placed, key people. As for keeping it a secret, of course the big
crimes can't be kept secret. That's where The Nation comes in.
The best way to cope with the emergence of uncomfortable truths is
to declare that they can't possibly be true, since if they were, they
would have emerged by now -- ahem. Let's go to a commercial.
The facts have come out. Read Michael C. Ruppert's new book, Crossing
The Rubicon (New Society Publishers) and Paul Thompson's The
Terror Timeline (Harper Collins). Both are built entirely from mainstream
news sources and direct testimony. Then ask yourself whether Dick Cheney
and elements in the Pentagon would have foregone trillions of dollars
and decades of oil out of concern that the facts might come out. They're
out! But if they're not in The Nation, they're not facts.
The usually-recommended response to a review like Baer's is a Letter
to the Editor. Since The Nation prints this sort of CIA-driven disinfo
quite often, there are ample opportunities to find out what happens
to such Letters to the Editor at that particular publication. They go
into a pretty trashcan with a peace sign on it.
Fortunately, it is still possible to find analysis that transcends the
marshmallow-bellyache of this Babyboomer Flagship Publication --- in
the peace-trashcan and in some other places:
And here, Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed offers a major treatment of left-gatekeeping
targeted at Z-Net in particular (especially David Corn and Michael Albert):
"9/11 'Conspiracies' and the Defactualisation of Analysis: How
Ideologues on the Left and Right Theorise Vacuously to Support Baseless
Supposition --- A Reply To Z-Net's 'Conspiracy Theory' Section" www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq37.html
Here, I take a shot at The Nation for its embrace of a disingenuous
book by Mark Riebling that alleges a tragic "wedge" (Jamie
Gorelick, who learned so much from this book, called it a "wall")
between the CIA and FBI: "Failure and Crime Are Not The Same"
9-11's Limited Hangouts": www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/112203_failure_crime.html
[David Corn has frequently served as a Neo-Con Lite version of someone
who dismisses those who have investigated the crimes of the U.S. government.
Corn's attacks against Greg Palast for his coverage of the very real and
demonstrably criminal vote fraud in Ohio in 2004 and Florida in 2000 is
a case in point. Palast relied on good old pavement-pounding to discover
the fraud. The same cannot be said for Corn and his dismissal of the Palast's
story. The same situation occured with Corn's attacks on the book Forbidden
Truth, published by his Nation magazine's very own publisher. Never mind
the fact that the United States had been negotiating with the Taliban
just prior to 9/11 as highlighted in the book. Corn's unforgivable attack
against the late investigative journalist Gary Webb was an all time low
for someone who seems to relish launching broadsides against those who
may represent some perceived competition.
Corn's contributor status with Fox News Channel and his almost constant
use of that tag line is also problematic. It's certainly not in Rupert
Murdoch's interest to have independent journalists running around throwing
stones at his man in the White House. -WM]
A Mole in the Progressive Movement?
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
By Andres Kargar
http://mparent7777.blog-city.com/read/989074.htm
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving
the included information for research and educational purposes.
I've been pondering this piece since I heard the news of the death
of Gary Webb. I had been following Gary Webb's
Dark Alliance series with great interest, not because the US government's
involvement in drugs was anything new to me, but simply because I was
wondering how long it would be before the corporate media would descend
upon Gary like a bunch of vultures and kill his story and his livelihood.
And it happened as I had expected. We are all aware how the corporate
press isolated and dismembered Gary. By publishing the results of his
painstaking research, Gary had sealed his fate and guaranteed that no
mainstream outfit would ever allow him to do anything significant on
their behalf. Despite the fact that the US corporate media can deceive and
tame large sectors of the population, there are many from the left,
the right, and just plain old Americans who distrust them. Gary's final
emaciation, however, had to come from someone with progressive credentials,
and that honor was bestowed upon David Corn of The Nation magazine
who stepped in to strike the final blow. Corn, who had not spent a single
hour of research on the subject, attacked Gary's report and claimed
that Gary Webb "had overstated the case and had not proven his
more cinematic allegations." Imagine this: a scandal of this magnitude
is unfolding that exposes how American citizens are falling victims
to the CIA's drug-running operations, and David Corn sees his patriotic
duty to pinpoint how "the case is being overstated." Personally,
if I ran across such an "overstated" and "flawed"
report, I would hold the CIA and Los Angeles authorities responsible
and demand real investigations, rather than wasting my time, pinpointing
unspecified flaws and immeasurable overstatements.
Having been a reader of his material, I knew this was not the first
time Corn had been stepping in to attack any serious challenge to the
status quo, but I had to search around a little to refresh my memory.
Just recently, in an article in The Nation, David Corn had tried to
discredit Greg Palast's (the award-winning investigative reporter -
http://www.GregPalast.com) claims of fraud in the 2004 presidential
elections.
Greg Palast was accused of being a conspiracy-theory nut, and people
like him were discredited as making accusations based on supposition
("Those who say yes - at this point - are relying more on supposition
than evidence. They cite the exit polls to claim the vote count was
falsified to benefit Bush"). And of course, Mr. Corn's interpretation
of the facts presented by Greg Palast and others must be the only acceptable
one to declare the elections not fraudulent, but fraught with glitches
here and there.
In November 2002, at the height of the Bush administration's intrigues
against Iraq and the popular antiwar demonstrations, David Corn steps
in to attack and discredit the organizers of these demonstrations (in
practice lining up with the Bush regime). In an article in the LA Weekly,
Corn accuses the International ANSWER organization (Act Now to Stop
War & Racism) of being a front for the Worker's World Party.
"Many local offices for ANSWER's protest were housed in WWP offices.
Earlier this year, when ANSWER conducted a press briefing, at least
five of the 13 speakers were WWP activists." David Corn presumably
understands enough math to calculate that the rest could have been members
of church groups, union representatives, Palestinians, Iranians, etc.
However, since in today's world, populations in their millions here
and there are accused of being "terrorists," obviously David
Corn should have the right to call only a few million antiwar demonstrators
dupes of the Workers World Party.
That's not all. In 2001, David Corn and Marc Cooper (another Nation
"liberal") sided with Pacifica Radio Network's rogue management
in their attempts to clean the member radio stations of progressives,
sell some stations, and basically dismantle the progressive network.
Later in 2002, David Corn steps in to discredit a fellow by the name
of Michael Ruppert who claimed that the Bush
administration had been warned in advance of 9/11 attacks. Despite the
fact that I always marvel at the vastness of David Corn's areas of expertise
(and intervention), I have to say Michael Ruppert's basic claims are
common knowledge today and were also made in other ways by FBI whistleblowers
and others.
David Corn's response to all these accusations: conspiracy theory-it's
simpler than thinking.
Reviewing all this material might make one think of a mole in the progressive
population, but unfortunately, the problem of conformism goes
beyond the David Corns, Marc Coopers, and Christopher Hitchens (see
http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/) as individuals. From the positions
these people are, as liberals or "progressives", they can
influence others and lead them down the path of conformism, passivity,
or complacency.
Such complacency today is encouraging a section of America's so-called
progressives to accept the Empire's brutal war against the Third World
and the destruction and re-colonization of these countries. Fear and
ignorance forces them to buy into this fabricated "war on terror"
and the militarization of the society, our minds and consciousness.
For when we buy into this crusade, we have accepted the Empire.
www.truthout.org/docs_03/112503B.shtml
The 9/11 Cover-up
By David Corn
Los Angeles Weekly
Friday 21 November 2003
A reasonably good article from Corn that hints of Bush foreknowledge.
It's far from comprehensive, but it raises the question why Corn
did not dare write something like this two years ago, when public
awareness of the coverup would have been more helpful in shaping the immediate
psychological aftermath, and lending more support to the efforts to stop
the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.
Corn appears to be deeply offended that anyone could suggest "that
the US government had foreknowledge of the specific attacks and either
did not do enough to prevent them or, much worse, permitted them to
occur for some foul reason."
Corn's decision to establish himself as the defender of the government
against "conspiracy theories" places The Nation in the absurd
position of quoting the most reactionary responses to McKinney, not
presenting arguments, but literarally calling her names. Corn attempts
to bolster his own position by quoting Senator Zell Miller (a Georgia
Democrat who always votes with the Republicans) calling Congresswoman
McKinney "loony"; Ari Fleischer "quip[ping]" that
"The congresswoman must be running for the Hall of Fame of the
Grassy Knoll Society"; and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution calling
her a "nut." A very embarrassing state of affairs for The
Nation. ....
The Nation supported the conclusions of the Warren Commission
against Mark Lane's conspiracy thinking. They remain part of the established
and consequently compromised left. While it may seem unusual
for a left leaning journal to support a right leaning administration,
in matters which would attack the center, from which the real power
operates, left & right can always circle the wagons.
David Corn, of the Nation, went on a personal crusade to attack
anyone who suggested that the Bush administration might have had prior
knowledge or -- God forbid -- actually had a hand in the attacks. His
attacks skirted around the obligation to disprove the idea, and instead
just mounted an attack upon the character of anyone who would dare suggest
such an outrageous thing.
Mike Ruppert, who operates the From the Wilderness site and is one of
the foremost authorities on 911, was just an ex-cop who got hurt by
a woman and went a little crazy, Corn said. That's what caused him to
say all those stupid things. Without bothering to explain why the stupid
things were really stupid, Corn made it very simple: no president would
do such a thing.
"I expressed doubt that the Bush Administration would kill or allow
the murder of thousands of American citizens to achieve a political
or economic aim," Corn said. (For more on Corn and the attack of
"the left" on "the left", see"What is Crazy?",
"The Corn Crusade", "Failure of Imagination" and
the World Socialist Web Site's "'Left' apologists for US imperialism
red-bait the anti-war movement".
By Corn's logic, being in a position of power -- even if you achieved
your position through corrupt means -- somehow makes you incapable of
acting in a corrupt manner. The idea that "no president" would
act in such a manner is a blatant absurdity, and a very dangerous frame
of mind that would render one incapable of defending oneself against
the threat of a Hitler, for example, one who shattered precedent.
Corn's position was not to disprove the case that the Bush administration
was complicit in 911, but to ridicule or discredit those who proposed
the idea, not to seek the truth, but to stifle debate.
The emergence of a broad-based movement of opposition to the Bush
administration’s war against Iraq caught the American political
and media establishment unawares. In the response of the various factions
of the ruling elite there has been one common theme: the need to purge
the anti-war movement of its left-wing elements and render it politically
harmless. ...
These efforts are aided and abetted by another group—ex-radicals
and former anti-war liberals centered around the Nation magazine. Three
articles in particular, appearing at about the time of the first significant
US protests, held last October, marked the beginning of this group’s
intervention. The articles are: “A Smart Peace Movement is MIA,”
by Marc Cooper, which appeared in the Los Angeles Timesof September
29, 2002; “Who Will Lead?” by Todd Gitlin (Mother Jones
magazine, October 14, 2002); and “Behind the Placards: The odd
and troubling origins of today’s anti-war movement,” by
David Corn (LA Weekly, November 1, 2002).
Cooper, a contributing editor of the Nation, went to Chile in 1971 to
volunteer his services to the Salvador Allende Popular Front regime
and was serving as Allende’s translator at the time of the military
coup. Gitlin was the president of Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) in 1963-64. After 16 years at the University of California at
Berkeley, he now is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia
University in New York. Corn, the Washington editor of the Nation, formerly
worked for Ralph Nader’s Center for Study of Responsive Law. The three pieces in question constitute a type of “left”
gutter journalism. Their authors are unable to muster serious arguments,
resorting instead to distortions, amalgams and ad hominem attacks.
In their attacks on left-wing elements, they echo the professional red-baiters.
One telling episode speaks volumes about the political and moral character
of this political layer. On November 19, David Corn appeared on the
“O’Reilly Factor”—a talk-show on Fox News hosted
by the extreme-right demagogue Bill O’Reilly. Corn carried out
his assignment for O’Reilly, witch-hunting the Workers World group
and smearing the anti-war movement.
O’Reilly introduced Corn by saying, “And you say that the
Workers World Party, a hardcore communist organization in the USA, is
putting together these peace rallies, is that true?” Corn replied,
“To call them an organization is perhaps giving them too much
credit. I doubt they have enough people to fill a telephone booth. They’re
a very small sectarian political outfit based in New York City.”
O’Reilly, a figure in the tradition of Joseph McCarthy, aptly
characterized Corn’s appearance, saying, “[Y]ou finger a
guy who is on the board of ANSWER ... you finger him as being really
the driver behind all this, right?”
Gitlin and Cooper belong to the generation of former anti-war protesters
and radicals who have undergone a dramatic transformation over the past
two decades, shifting further and further to the right. They long ago
made their peace with the existing social order and seek at every critical
moment to demonstrate their loyalty to the powers that be. ....
Now, however, Cooper, Gitlin and Corn claim to be opponents of a war
against Iraq. Why they choose to oppose this particular war, while defending
its precursors, they do not explain. In fact, as we shall see, they
do not really oppose war against Iraq.
On the contrary, they accept uncritically all of the basic premises
of the American establishment, echoing the line of the New York Times,
which has criticized Bush’s anti-Iraq war drive on purely tactical,
rather than principled, grounds.
The hallmark of all three is a lack of any serious analysis—historical,
political or social. In their haste to smear socialist and anti-imperialist
critics of Bush’s war policy, they cannot be bothered with such
matters as the driving forces of the coming war, the history of US intervention
in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, the policies and political
character of the Bush administration, the social situation in the US,
or the economic context within which the war drive is unfolding. Significantly, the word “oil” does not appear in
any of these articles. All three writers presume to speak as political authorities
offering the benefit of their insight to “save” the anti-war
movement from self-destruction. But even apart from the reactionary
content of their politics, the dearth of substantive analysis brands
them as charlatans and imposters.
....Cooper speaks for a section of the ruling elite that seeks a more
prudent and deliberate buildup to war, fearing that Bush’s recklessness
might have politically disastrous consequences. His argument that “The
fight against Bin Laden’s gang is necessary, and going to war
against Iraq can only detract from it,” is the line of a section
of the Congressional Democrats, some of whom voted to give Bush the
authority to attack Iraq.
May 12, 2003
Bad Faith Again: An Open Letter to The Nation Magazine
by Jamey Hecht
... Most 9-11 coverage eerily evokes the reams of utterly forgettable
journalism produced in the wake of 11-22-63, that taboo subject whose
cultural radioactivity has kept one otherwise excellent journal semi-toothless
for decades [2]. Back then, writers in your pages spoke of "discrepancies,
inconsistencies, gaps" and "minor flaws" in the Warren
Report (editorial, 12-28-63); they praised the Report, calling it "admirable"
and "an at times brilliant job" (Herbert Packer,11-2-64).
Another Nation editorial of that era laments that "the American
public was gradually coming to the conclusion that the CIA was a self-perpetuating,
ever-growing, tax-eating organization of spies, schemers and bunglers,
with a few murderers thrown in."
We now know that the pre-assassination "intelligence failures"
described by the post-assassination press were absolutely deliberate
falsifications and planted, false leads pointing in directions agreeable
to Langley and Washington. ....
So: the failure to pursue compromising leads is not always some passive
hiccough in the system. When Mr. Corn says that FBI "didn't pursue
leads"; that CIA "failed" to notify FBI about Al Quaeda
affiliated US residents; when he affects the alarmingly naive understatement
that the Agency's "problems are probably worse than described,"
he risks the same kind of semi-passive complicity that we have learned
to associate with the worst of national crimes (the ones that make us
say, "this happened because good people did nothing"). In
the final five paragraphs of that article from 23 September 2002, Corn
wonders aloud whether and how the intelligence community will ever reform
itself and overcome its "flaws." He ought to know ---surely
he does know--- the reason why CIA and FBI remain hidebound and bizarrely
unresponsive despite the decades separating us from the deaths of J.
Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles. Those men drew their colleagues and protgs
into a dark well of official lies and legally actionable perjuries so
deep that no agent can climb out and live long. Several CIA agents and
their contacts, along with six high ranking FBI agents, you recall,
were murdered in 1977, just prior to the House Select Committee's first
hearings. "Reforming" the unaccountable secret police services
(whose worst official fear remains mere "embarrassment") is
nearly impossible because the Agency and The Bureau are still lying
about so many domestic political murders and their grim international
consequences. Until those lies are openly acknowledged (not just decisively
refuted by critics, who remain largely invisible in the corporate media),
don't expect Congress, Justice, or anyone else to blow the lid off the
cesspool.
Was it mere negligence that caused the FBI to rebuff the August 2001
request from a Minnesota agent, that Moussaoui should be investigated
"to make sure he doesn't take control of a plane and fly it into
the World Trade Center" (see the Daily News, 9-25-02)? When massive
military escalation and appropriations swiftly followed the JFK murder,
many of us asked, "who benefited?" As David Corn points out
to his credit, there have recently been "several billion dollars
added post 9-11 to the classified $30 billion-plus intelligence budget."
This line of reasoning leads to some horrific conclusions, of course.
If it seems to you like inconclusive speculation, I hope you're right.
Still, I invite the Nation and others to do what is so rarely done:
read the new information as it trickles out, and remain interested long
enough to perceive the entailments of these awful revelations before
they fade from public memory. Mike Ruppert of From the Wilderness has
done just that on his website, www.copvcia.com, from a position of nearly
unique expertise. Though Rupperts evidence is multi-sourced and compelling,
David Corn has recently seen fit to dismiss it with something approaching
contempt. Rupperts response is posted on www.copvcia.com .
"But the real danger posed by the Truth Movement isn't paranoia.
Rather, the danger is that it will discredit and deform the salutary
skepticism Americans increasingly show toward their leaders."
"Still, the persistent appeal of paranoid theories reflects a cynicism
that the credulous media have failed to address, because they posit
a world of good intentions and face-value pronouncements, one in which
the suggestion that a government would mislead or abuse its citizens
for its own gains or the gains of its benefactors is on its face absurd.
The danger is that the more this government's cynicism and deception
are laid bare, the more people--on the left in particular and among
the public in general--will be drawn down the rabbit hole of delusion
of the 9/11 Truth Movement."
The
Nation publishes anti-impeachment polemic
The February 12, 2007 issue included an article by Sanford Levinson that
Bush should not, cannot be impeached for mere incompetence, which ignores
the fact that evidence for criminality is extensive. To be fair, The Nation
published a companion article from former Representative Elizabeth Holzman
arguing for impeachment -- but The Nation's strong stance for the alleged
incompetence theories (as opposed to investigation of deliberate criminality
in election frauds, 9/11, the Iraq war and Katrina) show where their loyalties
really lie. And they are a lie.
.... Investigations should also be conducted into Vice President Cheney's
meetings with oil company executives at the outset of the Administration.
If divvying up oil contracts in Iraq were discussed, as some suggest,
this would help prove that the Iraq War had been contemplated well before
9/11, and that a key motivation was oil. Inquiries into Halliburton's
multibillion-dollar no-bid contracts should also be conducted, particularly
given Cheney's ties to the company. ...
Failure to impeach Bush would condone his actions. It would allow him
to assume he can simply continue to violate the laws on wiretapping
and torture and violate other laws as well without fear of punishment.
He could keep the Iraq War going or expand it even further than he just
has on the basis of more lies, deceptions and exaggerations. Remember,
as recently as October 26, Bush said, "Absolutely, we are winning"
the war in Iraq--a blatant falsehood. Worse still, if Congress fails
to act, Bush might be emboldened to believe he may start another war,
perhaps against Iran, again on the basis of lies, deceptions and exaggerations.
There is no remedy short of impeachment to protect us from this President,
whose ability to cause damage in the next two years is enormous. If
we do not act against Bush, we send a terrible message of impunity to
him and to future Presidents and mark a clear path to despotism and
tyranny.
article | posted January 25, 2007 (February 12, 2007 issue)
Impeachment: The Case Against
Sanford Levinson
.... Thanks to the Founders, we were given a Constitution that perversely
makes us "better off" with a criminal in the White House instead
of someone who is "merely" grotesquely incompetent. The reason
is that the Constitution provides us with a language to get rid of a
criminal President, but it provides us no language, or process, for
terminating the tenure of an incompetent one. Unfortunately, this was
a deliberate decision by the Framers, who rejected an altogether sensible
proposal to make "maladministration" an impeachable offense
for fear that this would give Congress too much power.
Only because of the Constitution are serious progressives engaging in
an entirely fruitless campaign to impeach Bush by describing him as
a criminal. It is fruitless for two quite different reasons. The first,
and more practical, is that there is simply no possibility that Bush
will actually be removed from office in the twenty-four months that
unfortunately remain to him. One might well contemplate impeachment
if there were a possibility of its being successful. But the House Democratic
leadership has rejected the idea, not least because there is no possibility
that the constitutionally required two-thirds of a nearly evenly divided
Senate would vote to convict an impeached George W. Bush. Thus, advocates
of impeachment are in effect supporting a strategy doomed not only to
fail but also to be perceived by most of the country as a dangerous
distraction from the pressing problems facing the country. ....
Consider the charge that Bush lied to the country during the run-up
to the war, which may well be true. If lying to the
public about matters of grave importance were an impeachable offense,
however, almost no President--including, for starters, Franklin Roosevelt
and his deceptions regarding lend-lease--would survive. It is
even more difficult to construct criminality out of Bush's reckless
disregard of the consequences of Katrina. It is not, however, at all
difficult to accuse him of maladministration and disqualifying incompetence. American politics would be infinitely better if we could avoid
legalistic mumbo-jumbo and accusations of criminality and cut to what
is surely the central reality: The American people have exhibited a
fundamental loss of confidence in a wartime President/Commander in Chief.
In most political systems around the world, the response to such a stinging
rebuke would be resignation or removal. But we are trapped in a constitutional
iron cage devised by eighteenth-century Framers who, however wise, had
no conception of the role the presidency would come to play in American
(and world) politics. The US President should be treated as what Ross
Perot aptly called an "employee" of the American people, vulnerable
to being fired for gross incompetence in office. Instead, he is given
the prerogatives of a feudal lord of the manor who owns the White House
as his personal property until the end of the presidential term, with
almost dictatorial power over decisions of foreign and military policy.
[emphases added]
The
Nation: key supporter of the Warren Commission
3-14-06
JFK Assassination Brouhaha
By Rodney Huff
Mr. Huff is an HNN intern.
An article in the Nation by Max Holland has reignited debate over the
CIA’s involvement in the 1963 assassination of President John F.
Kennedy. In the article entitled “The JFK Lawyers’ Conspiracy,”
Holland contends that a group of lawyers, namely Mark Lane, Jim Garrison,
Gary Hart, and G. Robert Blakey, have conspired to overturn the findings
of the Warren Commission, which concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald
acted alone in assassinating JFK. In a letter to the editor of the magazine,
Lane accuses Holland of libel, rejecting as groundless Holland’s
depiction of him and Garrison as unwitting agents of the KGB.
Holland accuses Lane of receiving funds from the KGB while doing research
for his book, Rush to Judgment, in which he challenged the Warren Commission’s
findings. The KGB, Holland argues, attempted to implicate the CIA in the
president’s murder for ideological purposes. According to Holland,
both Lane and Garrison, however unwittingly, served the KGB by promoting
conspiracy theories about the CIA’s involvement.
Joan Mellen, an English professor at Temple University, also comes under
attack for writing what Holland refers to as a “hagiography”
of Garrison.
Holland also criticizes former Senator Gary Hart, a member of the Select
Committee on Intelligence in the mid- to late 70s. According to Holland
Hart challenged the Warren Commission’s findings by "twisting
unpalatable truths into the logical equivalent of pretzels.” Holland
also criticizes G. Robert Blakey, who served as chief counsel and staff
director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the
1970s. In 1979, the HSCA concluded that JFK “was probably assassinated
as a result of a conspiracy.” Holland lambastes Blakey for basing
such a conclusion on “uncorroborated acoustic vidence” thought
to be “unbelievable” by three dissenting members of the HSCA.
Mellen, in her letter complaining about the article, rejects Holland’s
characterization of her book about Garrison as “hagiography.”
Even Garrison’s family, Mellen notes, seemed disappointed by her
refusal to idealize Garrison in favor of a realistic, warts-and-all portrayal
of the New Orleans district attorney. Mellen also points out that, in
1967, the CIA circulated a document, "Countering Criticism of the
Warren Report.” According to this document, critics of the Warren
Report were to be branded as “Communist propagandists.” Mellen
accuses Holland of merely following the CIA’s injunction to thwart
further investigations of the Warren Commission by vilifying its critics.
Lane, in his letter, vigorously denies receiving funds from the KGB, claiming
that Holland’s accusation is consistent with the CIA’s strategy
of defaming critics of the Warren Commission. Echoing Mellen, Lane argues
that Holland merely advances the CIA line that various people, many of
them lawyers, adopted the KGB's approach to the assassination. Lane says
that before writing his book he had never met his purported “coconspirators.”
How, Lane wonders, could he possibly have been involved in a conspiracy
with people whom he had not met?
Holland in response has come out swinging. He accuses English Professor
Mellen of misspelling names and repeating lies in her book about Garrison.
He insists the contents of the CIA document to which Lane and Mellen refer
should not surprise anyone, since the CIA apparently intended to preserve
the reputation of the U.S. government. He qualifies the statement he made
about Lane receiving money from the KGB, suggesting that Lane may have
been unaware of the source of his funds and had not received all of the
money in one lump sum. For Holland, it is telling evidence that Lane has
not sued for libel the authors who initially implicated him in the KGB
plot.
Holland insists that the acoustical evidence cited by Lane and others
does not support the claims made by the conspiracy theorists, citing a
website for details.
2-06-06
The JFK Lawyers' Conspiracy
By Max Holland
Mr. Holland is the author of The Kennedy Assassination Tapes.
During forty-two years of controversy over the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy, the legal profession has played an instrumental role.
All seven members of the Warren Commission, which investigated the 1963
assassination, were lawyers. There were twenty-seven people on the commission's
staff (including Norman Redlich, a Nation
contributor since 1951), twenty-two of whom were aspiring
or practicing attorneys. The combined efforts of these lawyers produced
an imperfect report in September 1964, although its fundamental findings
have never been seriously impeached.
But what the legal profession giveth, less scrupulous members of the bar
taketh away. Since 1964 four other lawyers have been chiefly responsible
for putting the Warren Report into undeserved disrepute. During a conference
in November sponsored primarily by the Washington-based Assassination
Archives and Research Center (AARC)--headed, not coincidentally, by a
lawyer--three of these four lawyers made rare public appearances or were
otherwise represented in spirit.
The paterfamilias of disingenuousness, Mark Lane, was noticeably absent.
An obscure New York attorney at the time of the assassination, Lane single-handedly
set the standard for dishonest criticism. In 1964 he spread innuendo about
an ostensibly sinister delay in the Warren Commission's investigation
as he went barnstorming around the country giving what was then known
as The Speech. Two years later Lane published a book titled Rush to Judgment,
having conveniently forgotten his earlier accusation. Carey McWilliams,
editor of The Nation during those years, steadfastly refused, to his everlasting
credit, to propagate Lane's basic allegation that the government was indifferent
to the truth. Little did McWilliams (or anyone else) know then that the
KGB was finding Lane's work so useful that it was secretly underwriting
his "research" and travel in the amount of $12,500 (in 2005
dollars).
The Soviet intelligence service was engaged in a scheme to implicate the
CIA, the FBI and the far right in the assassination and the subsequent
murder of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, but had little to show
for its efforts until New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison inserted
himself into the case in 1967. Owing to a clever piece of disinformation
implanted in a left-wing Roman newspaper, Paese Sera, in March 1967, Garrison
became consumed by the notion that Clay Shaw, a prominent businessman
he had charged with participating in an alleged conspiracy that killed
JFK, was actually "an employee of the CIA...an agency man in Rome
trying to bring Fascism back to Italy," as he put it in his 1988
memoir. Within a matter of months Garrison had succeeded in making the
KGB's wildest fantasy come true: An elected public official in America
was propagating Moscow's line. Not even Lane had dared suggest that official
Washington was complicit in the assassination itself.
Garrison, having died in 1992, did not attend the AARC conference, but
he was represented in spirit by Joan Mellen, a Temple University English
professor who has just published a hagiography of the DA, whom Oliver
Stone tried to rehabilitate in his 1991 film JFK. Mellen's reception was
decidedly tepid, for Garrison, like Joe McCarthy, has always represented
a fault line. Just as McCarthy was disavowed by many anticommunists because
of his beyond-the-pale tactics, conspiracy "buffs," as Calvin
Trillin memorably labeled them in a 1967 New Yorker article, have always
been hopelessly divided over Garrison. Even buffs inclined to believe
the DA's grand theory of a military-industrial-intelligence complex find
it hard to square that with his persecution of Clay Shaw. The most vociferous
critics among the buffs have never forgiven Garrison for setting back
the movement almost irreparably. A jury declared Shaw not guilty in 1969
after a mere fifty-four minutes of deliberation, and if Shaw hadn't died
prematurely in 1974 at the age of 62, Garrison would likely have found
himself at the wrong end of an impressive civil judgment for misuse and
abuse of his prosecutorial powers.
The fallow years following the collapse of Garrison's legal farce ended
once Watergate proved that conspiracies and cover-ups could exist in high
places. During Washington's season of inquiry in the mid-1970s, unresolved
questions about the 1963 assassination resurfaced. Some of them richly
deserved to be asked, and answered--such as the nature of the cooperation
(or lack thereof) between the Warren Commission and the two agencies critical
to its inquiry, namely, the FBI and the CIA. Led by Senator Frank Church,
Democrats on the Select Committee on Intelligence dived into this issue
with a vengeance--until the answers they started coming up with contradicted
the still- prevalent view that once there had been a Camelot.
Then-Senator Gary Hart was more responsible than most of his committee
colleagues for twisting unpalatable truths into the logical equivalent
of pretzels and milking the tragedy for political gain. The only genuine
conspiracy Hart and his colleagues established was the Kennedy Administration's
attempts to kill Fidel Castro, and the subsequent efforts to keep that
secret from one and all, including the Warren Commission. These days Hart--a
lawyer before he entered politics--seldom talks about the Church Committee.
Nonetheless, he made a rare appearance at the AARC conference to speak
about the "still unanswered questions" raised by his three-and-a-half-month
inquiry.
Listening to Hart was an exercise in time travel. The perspective gained
after thirty years, not to mention information available from tens of
thousands of recently declassified documents, was airbrushed out of existence.
Hart forthrightly admitted that he has "not followed the research"
but acted as if his conclusions were as fresh and relevant as when first
issued in 1976. He remains a "total agnostic" on who killed
Kennedy, and overly proud of his role in revealing that two groups were
ostensibly motivated to kill the President: anti-Castro exiles and the
Mafia. Those who testified before Hart have a somewhat different recollection
of the former senator's probity. He was "only interested in [testimony]
proving what he wanted proven," James Hosty, a retired FBI agent
who testified before Hart in 1975, recently recalled.
When one young man in the audience had the temerity to ask why the Church
Committee had not endeavored to answer questions instead of just raising
them, Hart became testy, if not bitter. Had he been elected President
in the 1980s, Hart averred, he would have reopened the federal investigation
into the assassination (for the third time). The clear implication was
that the American people will never know because Hart's bid for the presidency
was unfortunately aborted.
Notwithstanding Hart's rare discussion--which included his hilarious impression
of William Harvey, the CIA officer who negotiated the Mafia's participation
in the plots to kill Castro--the centerpiece of the AARC conference was
a banquet address by G. Robert Blakey, who was a professor at Cornell
Law School when he became chief counsel and staff director of the House
Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1977. It is due to Blakey
that the federal government speaks (at least superficially) with a forked
tongue about the assassination. In 1964 the Warren Commission unanimously
found that "on the basis of the evidence before [it]...Oswald acted
alone." In 1979 the HSCA infamously concluded that JFK "was
probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy," but the committee
was "unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy."
The pregnant construction of the HSCA's hedged conclusion hinged entirely
on so-called acoustic evidence rammed through the committee at the eleventh
hour by Blakey. Now a law professor at Notre Dame and a nationally recognized
expert on the RICO statute, Blakey invariably fails to mention that three
HSCA members dissented in 1979 because they found the uncorroborated acoustic
evidence unbelievable. And their reservations soon proved correct: A National
Research Council panel (aided by an Ohio rock drummer named Steve Barber)
established in 1982 that the "shots" allegedly recorded on a
police Dictabelt began approximately one minute after the President was
mortally wounded and en route to Parkland Hospital (a finding that is
reaffirmed in the current issue of Science & Justice, a British forensic
journal). In point of fact, 99.99 percent of HSCA's report improved upon
or underscored the accuracy of the Warren Report's key findings. But one
would be hard-pressed to know that after listening to Blakey. The exploitation
of the assassination by the likes of Mark Lane, Jim Garrison and Gary
Hart, for whatever reasons, was bad enough. But someday a historian looking
back will likely declare Blakey the most irresponsible of them all. Blakey
was given a position of great responsibility in the mistaken belief that
he would seek the truth.
Writing about the prominent role of lawyers in American society, Alexis
de Tocqueville once opined that legal training imparted "a kind of
instinctive regard for the regular connection of ideas," which tended
to make lawyers informed, detached and trustworthy. It is hard to square
that assessment with the overall performance of the bar since that day
in November.
http://hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=82319&bheaders=1#82319
Joan Mellen's published letter to the editor of The Nation (#82319)
by Gary L. Aguilar on March 10, 2006 at 3:08 PM
November 22, 1963: You Are There
by OUR READERS & MAX HOLLAND
[from the March 20, 2006 issue]
Pennington, NJ
I'm the author of A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination
and the Case That Should Have Changed History, my seventeenth book, whose
credibility is attacked by Max Holland. Nation readers might give pause
to Holland's five-year campaign of outright falsehoods about the investigation
into the Kennedy assassination by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison
that have appeared in a range of publications from The Wilson Quarterly,
The Atlantic, New Orleans and the Washington Post to, now, The Nation.
Garrison focused on the clandestine service of the CIA as sponsor of the
Kennedy assassination as a result of facts he discovered about Lee Harvey
Oswald, specifically Oswald's role as an FBI informant and low-level CIA
agent sent to the Soviet Union by the CIA's Chief of Counterintelligence,
James Angleton, as part of a false defector program. What Garrison had
not yet discovered was that Oswald also worked for the US Customs Service
in New Orleans.
Contrary to Holland's assertions of the innocence of Clay Shaw, the man
Garrison indicted for participation in the murder of President Kennedy
was indeed part of the implementation of the murder and was guilty of
conspiracy. That Shaw was acquitted does not exonerate him for history.
New documents indicate overwhelmingly that Shaw did favors for the CIA.
On his deathbed he admitted as much. Shaw's repeated appearances in Louisiana
in the company of Oswald demonstrate that Shaw was part of the framing
of Oswald for Kennedy's murder. Shaw took Oswald to the East Louisiana
State Hospital in an attempt to secure him a job there, one event among
many never investigated by the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee
on Assassinations (HSCA).
Holland's assertion that Garrison based his conclusion that the CIA sponsored
the assassination on a series of articles in an Italian newspaper is also
incorrect. Garrison had focused on the CIA long before he learned that
Shaw was on the board of directors of a CIA-funded phony trade front called
Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), based in Rome. Indeed, the newspaper
Paese Sera broke the story of Shaw's involvement after a six-month investigation
into CIA interference in European electoral politics, only to discover
that Garrison had indicted Shaw a few days before the first article was
to appear. Moreover, the new documents reveal that CMC and its parent
outfit, Permindex, were indeed CIA fronts.
The 1992 Assassinations Records and Review Act has disgorged dozens of
documents showing that Shaw was a CIA operative. This is directly contrary
to what Holland suggests--that Garrison was a willing victim of "the
KGB's wildest fantasy." To cite one example, Shaw was cleared for
a project dubbed QKENCHANT, which permitted him to recruit outsiders for
CIA projects. Shaw was no mere businessman debriefed by the CIA. One document
reveals that among those Shaw recruited in New Orleans was Guy Banister,
former FBI Chicago Special Agent in Charge running an ersatz New Orleans
detective agency whose side-door address (544 Camp Street) Oswald used
on a set of his pro-Castro leaflets, until Banister stopped him.
The former editors of the now-defunct Paese Sera, whom I interviewed,
from Jean-Franco Corsini to Edo Parpalione, insisted adamantly that neither
the Italian Communist Party, nor the Soviet Communist Party, nor the KGB
had any influence on the paper's editorial policy. Outraged by Holland's
accusations, Corsini said that he despised the KGB and the CIA equally.
The roots of Holland's charge that Garrison was a dupe of KGB propaganda
may be traced to an April 4, 1967, CIA document titled "Countering
Criticism of the Warren Report." In it the CIA suggests to its media
assets that they accuse critics of the Warren Report of "Communist
sympathies." In April 1967 Garrison was at the height of his investigation:
He is clearly the critic the CIA had in mind.
In 1961 Richard Helms had already developed the charge that Paese Sera
was an outlet for the KGB and for Soviet propaganda. Helms was indignant,
but the truth had appeared in Paese Sera: The attempted putsch against
Charles de Gaulle by four Algerian-based generals had indeed been supported
by the CIA. Holland has merely picked up where Helms, later to become
a convicted perjurer, left off--repeating a scenario developed for him
by Helms, with the addition of making the accusation of Soviet influence
on Garrison.
My book is hardly a "hagiography of the DA," as Holland states.
I present a flawed man who exhibited great courage in facing down both
the FBI and the CIA in his attempt to investigate the murder of the President.
Indeed, Garrison family members were dismayed that I did not present him
in a more idealized form. I depicted him as an ordinary man who rose to
distinction because of his single-minded commitment to the investigation.
Among the many errors in Holland's latest diatribe is that Shaw died "prematurely,"
as if somehow Garrison's prosecution hastened his end. In fact, Shaw was
a lifelong chain smoker and died of lung cancer. Holland attacks Robert
Blakey, chief counsel for the HSCA, for using acoustic evidence to suggest
that there was a conspiracy in the Kennedy murder. In fact, the acoustic
evidence of at least four shots being fired has been established scientifically
by Donald Thomas in the British forensic journal Science and Justice (see
also Thomas's well-documented paper, available online, "Hear No Evil:
The Acoustical Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination," delivered
November 17, 2001).
Blakey certainly can be criticized for his close relationship with the
CIA throughout his HSCA investigation. His letters of agreement with the
CIA are at the National Archives. The CIA decided how key witnesses were
to be deposed, and Blakey acquiesced in all CIA demands and intrusions
upon the investigation.
Before Blakey was hired, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg
considered accepting the job as counsel. Knowing that the CIA had at the
least covered up the facts of the assassination and at worst been involved,
Goldberg telephoned CIA director Stansfield Turner and asked him whether,
should he take the job, he would have full CIA cooperation. Silence emanated
over the wires. Goldberg, naïve perhaps, asked Turner if he had heard
the question. "I thought my silence was my answer," Turner said.
Goldberg declined the job. Blakey took it. It is no surprise that Holland,
who has consistently defended the CIA, does not raise the issue of Blakey's
cooperation with the CIA during his HSCA tenure but focuses instead on
Blakey's conclusion, forced by the irrefutable acoustic evidence, that
there was a conspiracy.
It is one thing for Holland to spread his disinformation in the CIA's
Studies in Intelligence. It is quite another for The Nation to allow him
continued access without debate to its pages to obfuscate, slander authors
like myself and deny evidence fully established--in particular about Jim
Garrison and how the new documents establish his credibility and reveal
how close he came to the truth, and in general about the Kennedy assassination's
sponsors and accessories.
JOAN MELLEN
President of the AARC, Jim Lesar's, published letter to The Nation (#82321)
by Gary L. Aguilar on March 10, 2006 at 3:24 PM
Washington, DC
While many thought the 1979 report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations
was the final word on President Kennedy's murder, it wasn't. In 1992 Congress
passed the JFK Act. As a result, a huge volume of new materials are available
for study.
One significant revelation is the extent to which the CIA was a focus
of the committee's probe. Another is the discovery by Jefferson Morley,
a columnist for WashingtonPost.com, that the CIA corrupted the committee's
probe. The CIA brought former case officer George Joannides out of retirement
to handle the committee's inquiries about the relationship between Lee
Harvey Oswald and DRE, a CIA-funded Cuban exile organization. The CIA
never told the committee that Joannides was DRE's case officer when Oswald
and DRE were in contact. Joannides then thwarted committee efforts to
obtain CIA records about the DRE-Oswald relationship. Thus, the last official
word on the assassination is that of a Congressional committee that was
subverted by an agency that itself was a focus of the investigation.
These facts raise serious issues. The CIA's conduct undermined democratic
accountability and compromised the integrity of Congressional oversight
on a matter of national security. Shouldn't Congress now investigate to
determine why the CIA sabotaged the probe? Was it because, as some former
committee staffers have said, an element of the CIA was involved in the
plot? Or is there some other explanation?
In 2004 and 2005 the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC)
held conferences to discuss the JFK assassination. On the issue of conspiracy,
two scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory discredited
the last remaining basis for the single bullet theory (SBT), which theorized
that both Kennedy and John Connally were hit by the same bullet, fired
from Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano rifle--the sine qua non for the lone
assassin theory. These eminent scientists said that due to scientific
advances not only can the SBT not be substantiated but the fragments tested
could have come from one--or as many as five--bullets, including a Remington
or some other rifle. Holland mentions none of this.
Holland denounces the acoustics evidence proving there was a conspiracy.
He misrepresents acoustics as being the only evidence the committee had
of a conspiracy and mistakenly says that it is uncorroborated. In fact,
the first acoustics panel was corroborated by the second. Both were further
corroborated and strengthened by Donald Thomas's study. Holland doesn't
mention Thomas, but does obliquely refer to the work of Richard Garwin.Thomas
debated Garwin at the AARC conference. But as Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter
George Lardner reported, Thomas "upstaged" Garwin, showing "how
the noises coincided precisely with frames from the Zapruder film and
echoes off buildings in Dealey Plaza reflecting the gunfire." Lardner
also noted that Garwin said he "had not studied the echoes."
Again, none of this is in Holland's account.
Holland, winner of a CIA award for Studies in Intelligence, has been working
on a book since 1993 defending the Warren Commission. In applying for
an Anthony Lukas work-in-progress award in 2001, he said that as a result
of his study "the Commission can emerge in a new light: battered
somewhat but with its probity and the accuracy of its findings intact."
He also stressed that he had spent a full year researching "the remarkable
effort of KGB disinformation on Garrison's probe." Holland debated
this thesis with Gary Aguilar at the 2004 AARC conference. In my view,
Holland lost hands down (a DVD of the conference is available through
aarclibrary.org). In advancing his thesis, Holland relies on dubious materials,
including the word of former CIA director Richard Helms, who was charged
with perjury but copped a plea of withholding information from Congress.
Holland now uses the AARC's 2005 conference to theorize that a vast conspiracy
of lawyers "less scrupulous" than those at the Warren Commission
spread KGB disinformation and convinced Congress and the American people
that the Warren Report was wrong. This is a McCarthyite tactic for discrediting
the AARC conferences and Warren Commission critics generally. It seems
no one ever saw the Zapruder film showing JFK thrown violently to the
left rear, no one ever looked at the Magic Bullet and concluded it was
so undeformed it could not have done all the damage alleged. No, it was
them bloody KGB disinformation lawyers that brainwashed them.
In 1967 the CIA directed its stations to tamp growing criticism of the
Warren Report by discussing it with "liaison and friendly elite contacts
(especially politicians and editors)" and "point out that parts
of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist
propagandists." The dispatch further instructs that stations "employ
propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics,"
saying that "book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate
for this purpose."
Holland's piece on our conference looks as if it were written to specification.
While I had not expected favorable coverage from Holland when I overrode
the advice of friends and associates and honored The Nation's request
that he be given journalistic privileges and courtesies, I hadn't expected
an attack of this character. The general opinion of attendees, repeatedly
expressed to me personally, was that the 2005 conference was the best
ever on the subject. Max Holland echoed this in an e-mail to me: "Having
Garwin, Hart and Blakey give presentations made the conference superior
to any I've attended. I'll do my best to get an article in."
JIM LESAR, president, AARC
Ralph Schoenman's published letter to the editor of The Nation (#82322)
by Gary L. Aguilar on March 10, 2006 at 3:25 PM
Vallejo, Calif.
Max Holland has engaged for years in propagating disinformation on behalf
of the CIA concerning the investigation of its role in the official execution
of John F. Kennedy. Holland's Nation article expatiates upon his fabricated
thesis that Jim Garrison's evidence of the CIA's role in the Kennedy murder
derived from a series of articles in Paese Sera in 1967.
I sent those articles to Jim Garrison in my capacity as director of the
Who Killed Kennedy? committee in London, whose members and supporters
included Bertrand Russell, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Arnold Toynbee, Field Marshall
Sir Claude Auchinleck and Lord Boyd Orr. The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation,
of which I was then executive director, had conducted an extended investigation
of the role of the CIA in fomenting and coordinating brutal repression,
disappearances and assassinations, which culminated in a military putsch
in Greece. Our Save Greece Now Committee unearthed concrete data regarding
the role of the CIA and the Greek colonels that helped mobilize the movement
for which Deputy Grigoris Lambrakis paid with his life. In the aftermath,
our committee and its Greek leader, Michael Peristerakis, led a demonstration
of more than 1 million that brought down the regime.
CIA activity across Europe led Paese Sera to undertake a six-month investigation
into the role in Italy of the CIA, with its plans for a military coup.
The CIA colonels' coup in Greece unfolded shortly after Paese Sera's prescient
series. Prominent writers and intellectuals, including Rossana Rossanda,
K.S. Karol, Lelio Basso, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone
de Beauvoir, supported Paese Sera.
This investigation was entirely unrelated to events in the United States
or the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was fortuitous that the CIA
front organizations in Italy that emerged from CIA plans to overthrow
the Italian government included Centro Mondiale Commerciale and Permindex,
of which Clay Shaw was a director in New Orleans.
Jim Garrison was well on the trail of Shaw and his role as a CIA handler
of Lee Harvey Oswald before Paese Sera published its series of articles.
When I sent them to Garrison, he had already charged Shaw in relation
to the murder of Kennedy. Jim found the Paese Sera series confirmatory
and important, but the articles were not admissible as evidence in court.
Holland has written repeatedly that Paese Sera was a "communist"
paper and a conduit for KGB disinformation. In fact, Paese Sera was not
unlike The Nation before Holland's infiltration of it as a contributing
editor (except Paese Sera was less inclined to defend the leaders of the
Soviet Union than was The Nation during the decades since the 1930s).
The Paese Sera fiction is real intelligence disinformation arising not
from the KGB but from an April 7, 1967, directive by Helms to CIA media
assets, "How To Respond to Critics of the Warren Report."
What emerged from the investigative work of the Bertrand Russell Peace
Foundation and Paese Sera was the full evidence of the forty-year campaign
of the CIA in Italy, now known as Operation Gladio, a campaign of terror
that included the kidnapping and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro and
the bombing of the Bologna railway station.
I worked with Jim Garrison for twenty years and sent him many documents,
e.g., Secret Service Report 767, which cites the disclosure by Alan Sweat,
chief of the criminal division of the Dallas Sheriff's Office, of Lee
Harvey Oswald's FBI Informant Number S172 and Dallas District Attorney
Henry Wade's citation of Oswald's CIA number 110669.
Finally, Philip Zelikow, national security adviser to both Bush administrations
and appointed by George W. Bush to his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
immediately after the 9/11 attacks, has endorsed Holland's specious charges
in Foreign Affairs, even as he and Holland were colleagues at the Miller
Institute. Zelikow, as head of the 9/11 Commission, has been a point man
in covering up the role of US intelligence in the planning and implementation
of the events of September 11.
It is fitting that the very individuals who protect the treason at the
top that defines the official assassination of President Kennedy are performing
that role in relation to the events of 9/11--a precise correlative to
Operation Gladio, first exposed by the investigative work of Paese Sera,
which linked the CIA murder apparatus in Italy to the one that murdered
the head of state in America.
Holland seeks to present the investigators into official murder in America
not as people of principle and daring but as disinformation tools of an
intelligence service. When it comes to being a pimp for the imperium,
Mr. Holland, Physician, heal thyself!
RALPH SCHOENMAN
http://hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=82817&bheaders=1#82817
Letter to "The Nation" Re: Max Holland article (#82817)
by Mitchell Ryan Warriner on March 16, 2006 at 11:54 AM
I was very much troubled by the Max Holland article entitled "The
JFK Lawyers' Conspiracy" featured in the February 20th edition of
"The Nation." First and foremost, I have studied the assassination
of President Kennedy for many years, and my main area of expertise includes
the investigation of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, whom
of course is the only public official to have charged someone in a plot
to kill President Kennedy. In this article, Holland attacked authors Mark
Lane and Joan Mellen, both of whom have written impeccable accounts on
the assassination. I find it odd for Holland to say that the Warren Commission's
"fundamental findings have never been seriously impeached."
What planet did he come from? After decades of research by numerous individuals,
I believe (and much of the American public will agree with me) that the
Warren Report has been literally ripped apart, and most of all, by its
own evidence published in the twenty-six volumes printed by the U.S. Government.
Needless to say, Holland stated Mark Lane "single-handedly set the
standard for dishonest criticism." What about Harold Weisberg, Edward
Jay Epstein, Sylvia Meagher? All of these authors wrote early accounts
critical of the assassination printed the same year as Lane's masterpiece
"Rush to Judgment." And again, I don't understand Max's obsession
with the KGB. I am not sure, but I think he might have lost his mind,
or else he is working on a disinformation front for the federal government.
I am really not quite sure where Holland came to believe that Jim Garrison
believed Clay Shaw was an employee of the CIA just because of an article
in Paese Sera. The papers of Jim Garrison at the National Archives proves
otherwise. Do you your research Mr. Holland. And how dare you compare
Garrison to Joe McCarthy of all people. Where did you get an idea like
that? Garrison was a patriot, a man who served his country in both the
US Army and the FBI. And now we find ourselves indulging in what Holland
calls "the persecution of Clay Shaw." Since that 1969 trial,
much evidence has come to light by the federal agencies own documents
proving that Shaw had lied under oath, specifically his denial that he
worked for the CIA. People who are interested in this area should read
Bill Davy's "Let Justice Be Done," and Joan Mellen's new book
"A Farewell to Justice." these books do a very good job at proving
that Shaw was linked to the assassination and in fact had been employed
with the Central Intelligence Agency. In the final analysis, your right
Mr. Holland, there has been a lawyers' conspiracy, and it comes from the
many attorneys that served on the Warren Commission with honorable men
or "sacred cows" (Garrison's phrase) heading off the panel.
I think it might be useful to do your homework before you begin attacking
excellent researchers such as Mark Lane, Joan Mellen, and most of all,
Jim Garrison.
