by Jared Israel
[12 March 2006]
In the aftermath of the death of Milosevic, the media is rehashing all the old charges against him - which in effect means, against the Serbian people. Emperor's Clothes has published many articles refuting media misinformation about the Serbs and Yugoslavia. Some of the most important are collected in:
The Break-up of Yugoslavia: Who did what, and to whom?
Regarding the death of Milosevic, here are my immediate comments: Milosevic's death while incarcerated at The Hague - like the deaths of other Serbs before him - is at minimum an outrage. He asked for, and Russia agreed to provide, first rate care for his serious heart condition. The Hague Tribunal demanded special guarantees; the Russian government provided them. Nevertheless, the request was denied, apparently without explanation. Milosevic's lawyer, Mr. Tomanovic, states that Milosevic wrote to the Russian Embassy in The Hague, charging that he was being given dangerous medicines. Even apart from this charge, the denial of medical care constitutes in itself foul play. And The Hague has also denied Milosevic's family's demand that an autopsy be conducted in Russia. Why?
How can a UN organization justify denying medical care to a prisoner, indeed to an elected head of state? Not to mention to the accused in what was billed as the trial of the century? How, even if he had been guilty as charged? But he was not guilty of war crimes. Despite the media hype, Milosevic was not a war criminal. And despite some of his rhetoric at The Hague, he was also not a heroic opponent of NATO. In truth, he was an appeaser who tried to curry favor with the West while sometimes talking tough, to the despair of the ordinary people whom he regularly setup and betrayed. The fact that, despite this, The Hague Tribunal, the proclaimed tool of NATO, seized him without concern for mere legality, put him on trial in its bizarrely biased 'court,' and finally killed him, at the very least through criminal negligence, says much about the character of the leaders of the International Community who sponsored the resurgent Croatian, Moslem and Albanian fascists who wrecked havoc on Yugoslavia, followed by massive NATO bombing.
The last time I was in this room was for the memorial service of a distinguished American author, J. Anthony Lukas, who wrote “Common Ground,” about race and class in Boston. During the course of his career, Tony came into conflict with an institution that I will discuss this evening, “The New York Times.”
“A Farewell To Justice” is about the Kennedy assassination. It opens as a biography of Jim Garrison, district attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, who remains the only public official ever to have brought anyone before the bar of justice for participation in the conspiracy to murder President Kennedy. Garrison assumed that role when he discovered that the person framed for the crime, a low-level intelligence agent named Lee Harvey Oswald, resided in his jurisdiction between April and September of 1963. The Biblical metaphor is inevitable: that great harlot city New Orleans, destroyed by flood, with, among its many sins, incubating the Kennedy assassination.
After his suspect Clay Shaw was acquitted, Shaw the man whom the new evidence reveals was a CIA operative guilty of participating in the implementation of the murder of President Kennedy, Garrison was asked how he imagined that he could convict someone of conspiracy in the murder of President Kennedy in a Louisiana state court. Garrison said: “I guess I thought I was living in the country I was born in.” He wasn't and we aren't.
I would like to suggest that the truth about the Kennedy assassination, far from being a matter of interest only to historians, and not even to most of them, will help us understand how we have arrived at a point where people as respectable as New York attorney Martin Garbus are comparing the current U.S. government with the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth century. It's my belief that the present state of our political culture is a direct result of the fact that those responsible for the murder of President Kennedy have never been brought to justice.
To sum up: “A Farewell To Justice” suggests that the clandestine service of the CIA not only covered up the truth about the Kennedy assassination - that's easy to demonstrate from the four million documents now residing at the National Archives - but organized the event itself. That the CIA escaped without penalty, this extraordinary fact, has been integrated over these forty-two years into the body politic. It has produced a political culture where the unthinkable has become accepted practice. Meaningful freedom of the press has fallen into serious jeopardy.
For a flagrant example of what we have come to, we might revisit the scantily reported exchange on December 1st (2005) between Notre Dame professor Doug Cassel and John Yoo, a former deputy assistant to Attorney General John Ashcroft, a participant in the writing of the Patriot Act, and now a Berkeley law professor.
The subject of the debate was the illegal expansion of presidential powers.
Professor Cassel asks, “If the President deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?” And Yoo answers, “No treaty.”
Cassel follows up: “Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.” And Yoo replies, “I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.”
If Professor Cassel's hypothetical question seems melodramatic, we have Martin Garbus, alarmed by the twin expansion of Presidential and police powers, writing in the “New York Observer”: “This country is approaching a dangerous turning point,” and suggesting that the United States today bears some similarities to Weimar Germany where liberal democracy was not able to contend with the fascist onslaught.
In Miami a few weeks ago I was struck by the omnipresence, on the streets and restaurants, of police officers from a variety of law enforcement agencies. Famously, Benjamin Franklin replied to a question of whether this new land should be a monarchy or a republic with the line, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
What begins as surveillance moves to wiretapping, then COINTELPRO tricks, and finally to murder - a diagram of what happened to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and why the illegal NSA surveillance is so alarming.
We have not been aided in understanding the meaning of the Kennedy assassination by the continued public silence of those closest to President Kennedy. One day I requested of Wilmer Thomas, one of Jim Garrison's law school classmates (Tulane School of Law, Class of 1949) to ask his acquaintance, Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whom he believed was behind the assassination of President Kennedy. Professor Schlesinger observed, quietly, “We were at war with the National Security people.”
That the CIA at its highest levels exacted its revenge on President Kennedy has been an open secret since 1963. A Gallup poll on the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in 2003 found that twice as many people believed that the CIA was implicated in the assassination as there were who accepted the official fiction that Oswald had acted alone.
In 1963, people were already worried abut the CIA's extraordinary use of its powers. In the “New York Times,” Arthur Krock wrote in October 1963 that if ever there would be a coup in the United States, it “would come from the CIA and not the Pentagon.” The CIA, Krock wrote, was a “malignancy” on the body politic. It is difficult to imagine such words being printed in the “Times” today, so profoundly has our freedom of the press eroded since the time of the Kennedy assassination.
After the death of President Kennedy, ex-President Harry S. Truman, under whose watch the CIA was created in 1947, wrote on the front page of the “Washington Post,” that the CIA had been running a “shadow government,” becoming “operational.” Brazenly, Allen Dulles at one point even told a reporter to think of the CIA as “the State Department for unfriendly countries.” The CIA's policy-making also involved interference in the electoral process in Italy and France, funneling money to certain political parties - in Italy it was the Christian Democrats whom the CIA funded in an effort to prevent a coalition of socialists and Communists from taking power. The assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro was connected to that CIA campaign.
At the time of the assassination, Charles de Gaulle remarked that John F. Kennedy, whom he admired, had died as a result of an intra-government conflict, a situation not uncommon in many countries. The documentation available since the passage of the JFK Act in 1992 overwhelmingly supports de Gaulle's view.
The rubber-stamping of the Warren Report by the press in 1964 seems to mark the moment when the mainstream press became “embedded” in official versions of events. Traces of that process have surfaced. In April 1967 the CIA issued a memo (available at the National Archives) instructing friendly reporters on how to reply to challenges to the Warren Report, recommendations that have resurfaced in the past few years in a renewed set of attacks on Jim Garrison, a decade after his death.
So it should come as no surprise that the “New York Times” for a year covered up the National Security Agency domestic surveillance of citizens with rubber-stamped search warrants issued under a “Foreign Intelligence Services Act” (FISA) run by the Pentagon, or with no warrants at all. Only when their own reporter was about to publish a book detailing the evidence did the “Times” run that story. It should be horrifying that the Congressional debate about the Patriot Act has not been over whether there should be such a government capability, but how long it should be extended.
Ponder the “Times'” treatment of Jim Garrison, and later of Oliver Stone, who dared to make a film with Jim Garrison as its central character. When Garrison's first book, “A Heritage of Stone,” appeared in 1969, John Leonard gave it a positive review in the daily “Times.” In his final paragraph, Leonard recounted a few of Garrison's challenges to the Warren Report.
“Something stinks about this whole affair,” Leonard writes. “Why were Kennedy's neck organs not examined at Bethesda for evidence of a frontal shot? Why was his body whisked away to Washington before the legally required Texas inquest? Why?”
By the next edition, Leonard's final paragraph had vanished, a third of a column slid down the memory hole. Leonard's review now closed with these words: “Frankly, I prefer to believe that the Warren Commission did a poor job, rather than a dishonest one. I like to think that Garrison invents monsters to explain incompetence.” It was an extraordinary example of management censorship of a book review. To this day, the “Times” tolerates no factual challenges to the Warren Report.
They appear to be the only people who still believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was responsible for the death of President Kennedy. I spoke in Clinton, Louisiana last month, at the oldest working courthouse in the United States, I believe. The judge who introduced me asked the audience how many believed that Lee Harvey Oswald was guilty. Not a single hand went up. That audience knew the Warren Report was nonsensical because it was in East Feliciana Parish, in the hamlets of Clinton and Jackson, that Oswald appeared in the company of Clay Shaw, and a CIA contract pilot named David Ferrie, in the late summer of 1963, three months before the assassination. In the audience were actual witnesses, including the barber who cut Oswald's hair.
That the Warren Report could so flagrantly lie, and present itself as a homicide investigation, while doing virtually no investigation at all - neither Clay Shaw nor David Ferrie were interviewed, inspiring Jim Garrison's quip, “they didn't call anyone who WAS involved” - has resulted in other Presidential Commissions taking similar liberties with the truth.
I wrote an op-ed piece comparing the deliberate ignoring of crucial information by the 9/11 Commission with a similar failure to investigate a key lead by the Warren Commission. It began with the information released by Lieutenant Colonel in Army intelligence Tony Shaffer that the Able Danger intelligence unit had identified Mohammed Atta and other accused hijackers as part of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States at least a year before 9/11. Colonel Shaffer had wanted this information to go immediately to the FBI only for Defense Department lawyers to forbid Able Danger from contacting the Bureau.
The “New York Times” buried this extraordinary information two-thirds of the way into the paper. The “Washington Post” ran a Pentagon denial.
“Information has to get out, and I think we have to account for why some of these things weren't looked at as part of the overall report,” Colonel Shaffer said on NPR.
Shaffer then revealed something else: he had presented the findings of the Able Danger team to Philip Zelikow, that same executive staff director of the 9/11 Commission who has defended the recent attacks on Jim Garrison as a dupe of the KGB! Zelikow saw to it that the Able Danger information never appeared in the 9/11 Commission Report, and went on to deny that he was given the information. He now works on the staff of Condeleeza Rice.
One might ask: could Zelikow and company have gotten away with denying the reality of a cover-up of vital information about 9/11 if we had demanded the truth from the Warren Commission? I sent my Op Ed piece, “9/11 and 11/22,” to 34 newspapers. Only one would print it, the “Key West Citizen.”
What has all this to do with the Kennedy assassination per se? I'm suggesting that demanding the truth about the Kennedy assassination, even at this late date, is a step toward restoring our basic freedoms. The discourse needs to go even further than point to who planned and implemented the crime. Was the CIA acting alone on its own behalf? Whose interests did the Agency serve in 1963 - because the CIA eviscerated by George W. Bush was a very different institution from the Agency that waged war against President Kennedy?
The discussion of who rules America might begin with President Eisenhower's heroic warning against a military-industrial (and we need, of course, to add national security) complex. “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes,” President Eisenhower added. He cut the military budget as soon as he took office; he didn't believe the U.S. should be a militarized nation. The CIA, the research reveals, sabotaged President Eisenhower's effort to achieve détente with the Soviets in the final year of his presidency through the downing of Francis Gary Powers' U-2 overflight into the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower had a good definition of “National Security.” He said “national security” meant that the country was proceeding in peace and without a deficit.
Jim Garrison often asked during his investigation: Cui Bono? Who benefits? A friend of mine living near “Langley Forks” in Virginia pointed out to me some interesting connections. The Texas School Book Depository, from which some, but not all, of the shots were fired on November 22, 1963, was owned by one D. H. Byrd. Byrd also founded and was the commander of the Southwest post of the Civil Air Patrol, which included Louisiana and the troop led by David Ferrie, among whose cadets was Lee Harvey Oswald.
In November, 1963, one of Byrd's companies, LTV, a major defense contractor, was almost bankrupt. Defense contracts flowing from the Vietnam War changed that, and by 1968 the stock had increased geometrically in value. Meanwhile we know that President Kennedy opposed vehemently a protracted ground war, and that as soon as he was dead, Lyndon Johnson dispatched thousands of troops to Vietnam.
Among Byrd's associates was a man named Neil Mallon, the skull and bones classmate of Prescott Bush. Mallon headed a company called Dresser Industries, and it was Dresser that sent George H. W. Bush, his friend Prescott's son, west to Texas in 1949. It was for Mallon that the first President Bush named one of his sons. Mallon built Byrd's barite plant in Mexico, barite a product involved in oil drilling.
Dresser Industries was bought by Halliburton in 1998, and at that time the Kellogg subsidiary of Dresser became part of Brown and Root. Brown and Root itself had been bought by Halliburton in 1962. It is less well known that Brown and Root profited not only from the war in Iraq, but first from Vietnam. Having recognized the role of Brown and Root, and discovering that George Brown was a CIA asset (as the CIA's own released documents confirm), Jim Garrison hoped to investigate Brown's role.
Was the CIA acting on behalf of President Eisenhower's military-industrial complex? As a matter for further research, the intelligence connections of the Bushes date from before the very founding of the CIA: the Agency's mandate was outlined in 1946 by Robert A. Lovett, who was a partner of Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman.
Not least, as readers of the “Nation” magazine know, after the Kennedy assassination, the FBI was enlisted to brief CIA asset George Bush, THE George Bush, and not a low-level man in the Agency by the same name, as was at first claimed, on the reaction of the Miami anti-Castro community to the event.
To the general observation that the CIA represented the interests of the oil-defense industries, and the Pentagon, must be added another motive for the involvement of the CIA in the assassination. Almost from the moment Kennedy took office, a conflict raged between the President and the CIA. Once Kennedy refused to be blackmailed by the CIA into a full-scale invasion of Cuba at the time of the Bay of Pigs, de Gaulle's “intra-administration war” erupted. The clandestine service of the CIA pushed for an invasion of Cuba. President Kennedy declined, and went on to fire the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, who re-emerges as the central figure at the Warren Commission.
Throughout Kennedy's brief presidency, the CIA treated him as an enemy. They withheld information, which included details about the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Also concealed from President Kennedy were the CIA's continuing assassinations and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.
John F. Kennedy, in turn, sought to reign in the CIA, and to limit the scope of its activities, including reducing the powers of the Director of Central Intelligence. He intended to transfer the overflight U-2 program from the CIA to the Strategic Air Command. He intended to cut the CIA budget. He sent, I discovered, Richard Goodwin down to No-Name Key to ask the Soldiers of Fortune training there to take over Radio Swan, the CIA radio station, on behalf of the President. They declined. Kennedy threatened the existence of the Agency as they knew themselves.
Richard Reeves, in his very honest biography of John F. Kennedy, quotes the President repeating over and over again: “I've got to do something about those CIA bastards,” and “Those CIA bastards. I'm going to get those bastards if it's the last thing I ever do.” It was the persistent refrain of the Kennedy presidency.
The current President has also had his conflicts with the CIA. He, however, has espoused the very policy favored by the CIA under President Kennedy, the relentless pursuit of foreign wars. To achieve his end, that war in Iraq, no matter what lie he had to tell to implement it, George W. Bush had to do what Kennedy knew he had to do as well: eviscerate the CIA. So the disinformation was spread that the CIA had fallen down on the job.
In fact, the CIA had reported accurately about the situation in Iraq, and this before the Iraq War. CIA noted that an invasion of Iraq was likely to lead to civil war; the CIA reported that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Rather than give up his war, the President undercut the CIA.
Then Bush attempted to subvert the CIA further by claiming that the CIA had endorsed what it had not, but which fit his projected policy. He claimed that the CIA had told him first that there WERE weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Then he said CIA had been wrong. Neither claim was true. The outcome was the subordination of the clandestine services, and of the Agency itself, so that the CIA director no longer enjoys a daily briefing with the President, and is subordinate to a new Director of National Intelligence, whom the President can control.
We should not be surprised that the National Security Agency, empowered only to spy on foreign agents abroad, is spying on US instead. Research into the Kennedy assassination reveals that although the CIA was supposedly created to deal with foreign threats, the CIA operated together with the FBI in the cover-up of the Kennedy assassination. Documents reveal that this mutual cooperation dates from the moment of the founding of the CIA. In Louisiana, the sabotage of Garrison's investigation was led by the CIA, operating beyond its mandate, domestically.
Let me return to some details of what Jim Garrison accomplished. As Garrison once quipped about the supposed “lone assassin,” Lee Harvey Oswald, in fact, Oswald was virtually NEVER alone. Moreover, he was not involved with anyone who was NOT connected to the CIA. Oswald was an FBI informant, Garrison learned from Louisiana representative Hale Boggs, a member of the Warren Commission, defying Allen Dulles' demand that everyone be silent about this fact. It was this single piece of information that in 1965 led Jim Garrison to resume his investigation begun in 1963.
I discovered a conversation that Garrison did not know about. At the First District police station, where Oswald was taken after he was arrested for a disturbance when he was handing out his pro-Castro leaflets, he requested of Lieutenant Francis Martello of the New Orleans police that Martello call the FBI field office. “Call the FBI,” Oswald ordered Martello imperiously. “Tell them you have Lee Oswald in custody.” Oswald asked that Special Agent Warren de Brueys come down to see him. Obviously, Oswald was someone the New Orleans field office of the FBI knew well.
The Agent on duty that night, John Quigley, then asked a young clerk named William Walter, the person who took Martello's call, to check all the files, locked and unlocked, for what they had on Oswald. On one file jacket, in the locked filing cabinet of the Special Agent in Charge, where security files were kept, were two names, Lee Oswald and Warren de Brueys. To this day, Mr. de Brueys denies that he ever knew Oswald. I called him just before my book was published on the pretext of spelling his name correctly: was that a capital “d” or not? Mr. de Brueys amazed me by remarking, after forty years you wouldn't be a very intelligent person if you didn't change your mind about things. This statement might not hold up in court, but I accepted it as a confession for history.
Oswald had also been part of the CIA Counter Intelligence false defector program. Oswald, I found new evidence to show, worked also for U.S. Customs in New Orleans, as many CIA people worked for Customs. One Customs officer told the Church Committee, “I've waited ten years for someone to talk to me” regarding what he knew about Oswald.
Garrison began by exploring Oswald's government connections. He indicted Clay Shaw for participating in the conspiracy, without having access to the government records released under that JFK Act, an extraordinary development we're not likely to witness again any time soon, records that establish that Shaw was a CIA operative.
By shepherding Oswald around Louisiana, Shaw was repaying the CIA for considerable favors rendered. Because Shaw was acquitted, Jim Garrison chose as the title of his third book, “A Farewell to Justice.” He never used that title, and so I appropriated it. Lillian Hellman taught a course to writing students at Harvard called “Stealing.” It was bad to imitate, but fine to “steal” from authors you admired, so long as you made their strategies your own. Garrison's ambition was to be an author. He was no stranger to Shakespeare, nor to novelists like Graham Greene, and of course Hemingway.
Part of my book includes how federal agencies worked actively to thwart Garrison's investigation. Garrison was astonished that the FBI refused to cooperate with New Orleans law enforcement in an investigation of the Kennedy assassination. In fact, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover subverted Garrison's effort. Witnesses came forward to the FBI, believing that in providing the FBI with information, they were simultaneously reaching the district attorney.
“Give Garrison nothing!” Hoover wrote to all special agents in charge, adding, in reference to the Special Agent in Charge in New Orleans, Robert Rightmyer: “Tell Rightmyer that I want him and all personnel in New Orleans to keep their mouths shut!” This was February 1967, a week after Jim Garrison's investigation became public.
Bobby Kennedy's right-hand man, Walter Sheridan, had spearheaded the blackmail, bribery and wiretapping that accomplished the conviction of Jimmy Hoffa. The evidence of Walter Sheridan's illegalities in the railroading of Jimmy Hoffa is chronicled in Fred Cook's three part series in the “Nation” magazine. A further irony is that Chief Justice Earl Warren, enlisted by Lyndon Johnson to rubber-stamp the preordained conclusion that Oswald murdered President Kennedy, wrote what seems to me to be a brilliant dissent when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the Hoffa conviction.
Bobby Kennedy then sent Sheridan to New Orleans, as Sheridan freely admitted, to “destroy” Jim Garrison. That same National Security Agency spying on American citizens today spawned Walter Sheridan, who was also cleared for service with the FBI and CIA. Sheridan personally telephoned the governors of several states to ensure that Garrison's subpoenaed witnesses not be extradited back to the state of Louisiana. Not a single witness was returned to New Orleans.
In the recent attacks on Jim Garrison may be found the preposterous notion that the only reason Garrison focused on the CIA was that he was the victim of KGB propaganda flowing from an Italian newspaper, “Paese Sera.” This total falsehood has been defended by Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission. One of the half-dozen anti-Garrison articles appeared, not surprisingly, on the CIA's own web site, “Studies in Intelligence.”
As a biographer, among the questions I asked was: did Jim Garrison take bribes from executives profiting from pinball machine gambling (then illegal in Orleans Parish), for which he was charged by the federal government? Was Jim Garrison dishonest? The new documents reveal that after Shaw's acquittal, after he perjured himself, and suborned perjury, Garrison was ready to continue his investigation, only for that same operative, Walter Sheridan, to return to New Orleans and blackmail Garrison's friend and former chief investigator, Pershing Gervais. Would Gervais not help them to nail Garrison for taking bribes from pinball gambling interests, Gervais would go to jail for eight years (the document is that specific) for income tax fraud. So we see in this story, the mutual cooperation of agencies: the FBI helping the CIA, the IRS enlisted by the National Security Agency and the CIA. Years later, on the occasion of Oliver Stone's film, “JFK,” Anthony Lewis wrote in the “New York Times” that Garrison had taken bribes. In fact, Garrison had been acquitted. The bribes were indeed going to a “big man” at Tulane and Broad, but it was not six foot six inch Jim Garrison, but Chief of Police, Joseph Giarrusso.
Addressing a frequent attempt to discredit Jim Garrison, I also had to ask: was Garrison tied to the Mafia? Did he blame the CIA for the assassination as a way of protecting the Mafia? I learned that Carlos Marcello, the Mafia chieftain of Louisiana and Texas, despised Garrison and wanted him out of office. Garrison was “unreliable,” Marcello complained to Governor John J. McKeithen, whose assistant, John Tarver, relayed this to me. (McKeithen himself did take bribes from Marcello by the way. John R. Rarick ran against McKeithen in 1968 and the Marcello people talked to Rarick's campaign manager, who refused a $50,000 contribution from Marcello. Marcello's man was incredulous. “Big John took his,” he said).
The final chapter of my book, entitled “Rabbi,” reflects my interviews with a person who was involved in setting up the assassination, a man named Thomas Edward Beckham. It describes his CIA training at a facility in Virginia. Beckham presented me with a government document which describes him as a man who would feel no guilt about killing. This phrase matches in language documents released by the Church Committee describing the assassins hired by the CIA in their assassination attempts against foreign leaders: Lumumba, Trujillo, Diem, and, of course, Fidel Castro.
Beckham had been subjected to a polygraph by the New Orleans police in the late 1970s: when Robert Blakey and Gary Cornwell, who headed the House Select Committee on Assassinations, discovered this, the Louisiana investigators were suspended for conducting a polygraph without authorization. The CIA controlled that investigation as it did the Warren Commission. My favorite anecdote concerns the moment when former Justice Arthur Goldberg was asked to head the Committee after Philadelphia prosecutor Richard A. Sprague was fired. Knowing that the CIA held the truth about the assassination, Goldberg telephoned the Director of Central Intelligence, Stansfield Turner, and asked whether, should he take the job, he would be given full CIA cooperation. His question was met by silence.
Goldberg persisted. He posed his question again. Only then did Turner reply, “I thought my silence was my answer.” Goldberg did not take the job.
My final question came at my last interview, in Miami in June of 2005. It was one that also perplexed Jim Garrison: why did Bobby Kennedy try to sabotage his investigation? I interviewed a Cuban close to Robert Kennedy, who revealed that Robert Kennedy had Oswald under surveillance in New Orleans during the summer of 1963.
Like Professor Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy looked first to the CIA for responsibility in the murder of his brother. On the day of the assassination, Bobby confronted John McCone, the Director of Central Intelligence, with this question: “Did the CIA kill my brother?” He told Harry Ruiz Williams, one of the Cubans working for him, confirming his prior awareness of Oswald, “One of your guys did it!” and it was not a question, but a statement.
Wanting to be certain, Bobby sent that same Walter Sheridan to Dallas to find out if the Mafia had planned the crime. They had not. Bobby also asked a Mafia-connected Chicago lawyer, Julius Draznin, who worked for the NLRB, the same question. The answer, as Draznin reported to Walter Sheridan, was that the assassination was not a Mafia hit. Years later, Sheridan would testify under oath that the Mafia was behind the assassination!
It was in the circles of the anti-Castro movement that Bobby Kennedy directed his attention, his aim to protect the life of his brother from some Cuban still furious about the Bay of Pigs. His other aim was to “neutralize” Fidel Castro. Since the Church Committee hearings, newspapers have reported on Operation MONGOOSE, the CIA-Mafia plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Bobby Kennedy's separate efforts have been less widely publicized.
It was in this Miami research that I discovered my parallel between the cover-up by the 9/11 Commission of the Able Danger information and a similar set of facts that faced the Warren Commission in its closing days. It reveals information that bears upon why Robert F. Kennedy was nervous about Jim Garrison's investigation, and about any investigation of his brother's death. This began at the Bethesda autopsy; one of the doctors, Pierre Finck, testified for the defense in New Orleans at State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw that the Kennedy family had requested that the trajectory of the President's wounds not be examined.
“If my brother were killed,” Garrison said, “I would be interested in getting the individuals involved, no matter who they were.” Garrison made this statement on national television, exasperated by the persistent question by news people: if you're on the right track, why isn't Bobby Kennedy helping you?”
Late in its deliberations, the Warren Commission discovered that Lee Harvey Oswald had visited a Cuban exile and former law student named Sylvia Odio in Dallas in late September 1963. During the weekend of the assassination, Mrs. Odio and her sister Annie both at once identified Oswald as the man who had visited her in the presence of two Cubans, whom Sylvia has yet to identify.
Mrs. Odio testified before the Warren Commission. She said that the day after that visit, one of the Cubans had telephoned her and in the course of the conversation remarked that “Leon Oswald” had said, “President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs and some Cubans should have done that…it's so easy to do it,” indicating both foreknowledge of the assassination and that Oswald was being set up. The Warren Commission never adequately investigated this information - they certainly didn't call “Leopoldo,” just as the 9/11 Commission didn't feel obliged to investigate the Able Danger documents.
The Warren Commission's chief counsel, J. Lee Rankin, expressed irritation at the very suggestion that Sylvia Odio's story should be fully investigated, muttering, “we are supposed to be closing doors, not opening them.” Years later, Rankin was bitter that the FBI and CIA had concealed vital information from the Warren Commission. Deposed in the late 1970s by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Rankin admitted that he regretted that he had taken the CIA's word that Oswald “was never a CIA agent.”
Invited to ask if he had anything further to say, Rankin had a question for the lawyers and committee members in the room. Was the HSCA investigating whether the people involved in the CIA cover-up were involved in the assassination as well? He received the identical response Arthur Goldberg had: silence.
The Warren Commission lacked a context in which to evaluate the incident of Oswald visiting Sylvia Odio because the FBI and CIA both, on the instruction of Chief of Counter Intelligence James Angleton concealed the CIA's history of attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, now a matter of public record.
In my pursuit of the question of why Bobby Kennedy tried to sabotage Jim Garrison's investigation - Garrison used the word “torpedo” - I studied the minutes of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and the Church Committee papers (the 25 per cent that are open to the public). I tried to interview Cubans who worked closely with the Attorney General. This is some of what I discovered.
Bobby Kennedy had assembled a team of anti-Castro Cubans. One, Manolo Reboso, is now living in Nicaragua, having married into the wealthy Somoza family. Another, Manuel Artime, is dead. But I did locate a man named Angelo Murgado, a man so devoted to the Kennedys that, at his citizenship hearing, he changed his name from “Murgado” to “Kennedy” in homage to a person whom he admired, Bobby Kennedy.
Angelo told me that Bobby's instructions to his special team were twofold. One aim was to find a means of getting rid of Fidel Castro. Bobby's other aim was to protect his brother. He sent these Cubans to New Orleans. Moving among, as Angelo put it, “Castro's agents, double agents, and Cubans working for the CIA,” they hoped to “neutralize” a future assassin. You can deduce what he meant by “neutralize.”
In New Orleans, Angelo Murgado ran into Lee Harvey Oswald, who was moving among the anti-Castro community. He put Oswald under surveillance. When I mentioned that I had discovered Oswald's acquaintance with an anti-Castro Cuban named Juan Valdes, who worked at Clay Shaw's International Trade Mart, Angelo was dubious. How could that be? He knew everyone Oswald was acquainted with, and he didn't know of this man. That's how close to Oswald they drew.
Scrutinizing Oswald, and reporting back to Bobby, his team discovered that Oswald was an informant for the FBI. Learning this, Bobby reasoned, “If the FBI is controlling him, he's no problem.” Bobby underestimated the role Oswald had been induced to play in the plans to murder of his brother and ceased to make him a major target of his concern. Bobby knew “something was cooking in New Orleans,” Angelo Murgado told me. But Bobby urged “caution.” He was out of his depth.
In September, it was Angelo and a fellow veteran of the Bay of Pigs who traveled from New Orleans to Dallas to visit Sylvia Odio. Angelo believed they were there to marshal help for their anti-Castro efforts, and talked about buying arms to support an anti-Castro movement within Cuba. Mrs. Odio's father, in jail in Cuba, headed a liberal organization called JURE, its position, “Fidelismo sin Fidel.” Angelo believed he could trust his companion, referred to in the Warren Report as “Leopoldo,” because not only was he a fellow veteran of the Bay of Pigs, but his brother was running for Mayor of Miami. He was respectable.
The next day, out of Angelo's hearing, “Leopoldo” phoned Mrs. Odio to tell her how “Leon” Oswald had talked about the need to murder President Kennedy. “Leon is kind of nuts,” Leopoldo stated, setting up Oswald as the patsy. Oswald's mental imbalance forms the conclusion of the Warren Report, and Oswald was called “Leon” a number of times, not least at a gathering at David Ferrie's apartment where Clay Shaw and Ferrie, Garrison's chief suspects, discussed what their alibis would be for November 22nd. At Sylvia Odio's, Angelo used his true given name. “Leopoldo” was an alias.
Placing Oswald in the company of so close an associate of Bobby Kennedy, in an incident that points to foreknowledge of the assassination as well as the framing of Oswald, created the trap that would silence Bobby forever. Bobby asked his aide, Frank Mankiewicz whether “any of our people were involved,” and, Mankiewicz told me, he had asked himself, did you think there might be?
Angelo, meanwhile, had been betrayed by a companion he believed he could trust, a man not so much assigned to the overthrow of Fidel Castro, as Angelo believed, as he was enlisted to arrange for Oswald to be blamed for the murder of the President. “Leopoldo” was a Cuban named Bernardo de Torres. A virtual flood of documents reveals that he was an asset of both the CIA and military intelligence. When he was subpoenaed before the House Select Committee, CIA arrived on the day he was deposed to insist that de Torres be granted immunity. The CIA so totally controlled that Committee that they agreed to the CIA demand that de Torres not be questioned about the period of time leading up to the Kennedy assassination. Both the Warren Commission and the HSCA buried what they knew about Oswald's participation in ANTI-Castro activities, information that would have led directly to the role of the CIA in the assassination. I believe that we are now suffering the consequences of allowing lies about what happened to President Kennedy to remain unchallenged. The consequence of the public not demanding that the murder of the head of state be properly investigated has led directly to the current undermining of the integrity of our democratic institutions, not least the press. An obvious consequence of the obfuscations of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee both has been the ease with which the 9/11 Commission was able to conceal important truths.
I wrote my book to make a small contribution to the need for government accountability and openness because what is at stake, to be a bit grandiose, is democracy itself.
I'll close with a line by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from a sermon a year before his death: “No lie can live forever.”
An interview with Dr. Leonard Horowitz, Dec. 18, 1997 by Wes Thomas, moderator, BIOWAR-L
Dr. Horowitz is author of Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola, a comprehensive, well-documented exposé of the role of tainted vaccines in the creation of genocidal AIDS and Ebola epidemics. He holds a Ph.D. in dental medicine from Tufts University, Master of Public Health from Harvard University, and MA in health education from Beacon College.
WT: There's a lot of paranoia on the Net right now about anthrax vaccine. Should people take it or not?
LH: Well, President Clinton won't take the vaccine because he's no fool. I'm extremely concerned that anthrax vaccine is untrustworthy and that military personnel, when they sign up, turn their lives over to untrustworthy people. You'd have to be a fool, given the information we have in our possession, to take the anthrax vaccine, or any other vaccine that the FDA and/or the Department of Defense approves or tries to push on military personnel or citizens of the United States.
WT: Why?
LH: Numerous reasons. Everything from the most apparently benign vaccine to the tetanus vaccine used to sterilize hundreds of thousands of women during experiments, to Gulf War Syndrome, which is undoubtedly related and linked to vaccines.
We now have evidence that the potential initiator of Gulf War Syndrome was an AIDS vaccine that was being tested on uninformed and unconsenting troops. We have documentation that shows that General Schwartzkopf and General Powell were absolute outrageous liars in the congressional hearing statements and that the entire Gulf War congressional investigating panel, led by Jay Rockefeller, was a complete travesty to truth and justice.
We have this documentation on a new three-hour video called "Gulf War Syndrome: the Spreading Epidemic Cover-up". It shows that during the Gulf War, our troops were exposed to experimental vaccines and experimental drugs, that sustained drug interactions and vaccine damage were the result, and that the federal government still refuses to acknowledge the truth and the facts.
In no uncertain terms would I allow myself to be inoculated, nor would any rational human being, given the evidence. Which is the real intelligent reason why President Clinton has refused to be vaccinated with anthrax vaccine. So as Commander in Chief of the military he would allow his military personnel to be vaccinated when he himself has refused!
WT: USAMRIID [U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases] has stated that "there are insufficient data regarding efficacy against inhalation anthrax in humans, although studies in rhesus monkeys indicate it is protective" and Senate Report 103-97 agreed. So why is the military administering it?
LH: Good question. Anthrax has been a fairly easy-to-reproduce microorganism that lots of people have capability of reproducing and spreading. Why all of a sudden would the Pentagon reverse its long-held position that it should not be administered? Haven't they learned enough from the Gulf War Syndrome?
WT: What evidence do you have that anthrax vaccine is contaminated?
LH: Look at all the vaccines. For example, the Clinton administration has stated that it's mandatory that 12-hour-old infants get hepatitis B vaccine. This is insane. It has no risk/benefit analysis done to it. We don't know if this vaccine is killing and maiming more people than it's helping. Besides the fact that this particular vaccine has carcinogenic enzymes in it, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to give it to infants, because 96 percent plus of the people who get hepatitis B get it through sexual transmission or IV drug use. Plus the fact that those who get it develop life-long immunity and they do not develop major long-term problems.
The issue becomes how many people are being harmed by getting these vaccines. According to the CDC's own data, potentially 25,000 to 35,000 people were injured from that one vaccine. And consider all 18 or so vaccines that the federal government now is allegedly mandating (you still have religious and spiritual exemptions, so it's really against your civil rights to be told you must get a vaccine for school or work). If you use the CDC's own data, your find you have an ongoing holocaust of vaccine-induced injuries to the tune of as many as 800,000 vaccine-induced injuries occurring every year in the United States that you don't hear a word about from the federal government or mainstream media. So isn't that strange?
But today in the newspaper you do hear that the federal government wants to reevaluate nutritional supplements because three college wrestlers died of taking hormones. And yet we have 800,000 people sustaining vaccine-induced injuries, and you don't hear a word about it. If you don't think, given that information, that there's a covert operation here or an alternative agenda here...
WT: What's the agenda?
LH: According to top military personnel that I've interviewed from the Pentagon, the apparent agenda is a new world order where a strong U.S. military represents a liability.
WT: Sounds crazy. Why would they jeopardize their own troops?
LH: Because if you have rah-rah American patriotic military people who are stockpiling weapons and these people are healthy, happy, and prosperous, and you tell them "No, you've got to put down your guns and give up your national sovereignty and take orders from U.N. peacekeeping officials, and NATO Alliance officers," and soldiers are asked whether they'd be willing to shoot on American citizens before they give them a gun .... It may sound like foolish conspiratorial nonsense, until you evaluate you who this information is coming from: the senior Pentagon officials I've interviewed who take this threat seriously.
WT: Richard Preston [author, The Cobra Event] recently said [5] the Russians are actively developing advanced, genetically-engineered bioweapons and working with the Club Mad rogue nations and Jane's Defense Weekly just announced that Russia has developed a highly contagious super black plague. Aren't those realistic external threats?
LH: The Russians had the capabilities for doing this for years, so when you read these press reports, what are they really telling you that's new? They're telling you propaganda. What's the motivation behind the news? It's persuasion. Look at the motive behind the persuasion, and what is it? They're preparing us for biological holocaust and they're going to blame it on the Muslims, Christian patriots, and militia groups. The militia groups are already dysfunctional because they're penetrated by agitators.
Interesting that our good old friend Larry Wayne Harris [6] is again in the center of this controversy. He alleges to be a Christian and patriot, and yet he goes to the Preparedness Expositions and shows the hardware to produce and disperse the bioweapons and tells you and writes [7] how to go out and produce these bioweapons and distribute them. This man acknowledges being a CIA operative, acknowledges having friends from the CIA that feed him, alleges he was involved with the CDC.
American intelligence officials are seeding authors, reporters, and investigative journalists, saying that it's the Christian patriots who are now the ones who are suspected of being the future terrorists in bioweapons attacks. If this isn't an obvious setup, my name isn't Len Horowitz. Harris is setting up the Christian and patriot movements to be the fall guys for the most untrustworthy people who are in charge of these bioweapons.
When you look at the videotape [Gulf War Syndrome: the Spreading Epidemic Cover-up], you see that we -- the U.S. government and our companies -- supplied Saddam Hussein with biological and chemical weapons at least up until two weeks before he invaded Kuwait [8]. And now there's some evidence that Joyce Riley cites that he may have even been getting these during the war.
WT: What do you know about Michigan Biologic Products Labs, the sole supplier of anthrax vaccine to the military?
LH: Look for links to I. G. Farben, George Bush, and the Nazis. It's seldom I don't find that those who are suspected of foul play are not led by the people or their heirs who were intimately involved in the biological weapons industry under Hitler and that we in the U.S. were literally partners with those people. I'm speaking about the well-documented historical partnership between I.G. Farben, Bayer, Merck & Co, and the Rockefellers.
In fact, the president of Merck, George W. Merck, was America's biological weapons industry director, personally appointed by President Roosevelt and Secretary of War Stinson in the early 1940s. And in 1945, when Hitler realized he was going to lose the war, he ordered Martin Bormann, the Third Reich's economic chief, to bury his war chest to assure Germany's economic recovery after WW II, but also to assure a virtual monopoly over the world's pharmaceutical and chemical industries and the "rise of the Fourth Reich." Much of that money went into Merck & Co.
Now this at the exact time that George W. Merck is advising President Roosevelt on America's biological weapons status, as director of the industry. And follow the history of those Nazis, including Erik Traub, Hitler's top bioweapons developer -- who was brought over by Henry Kissinger and General Bolling in Project Paperclip -- and the exportation of 2000 Nazis into the U.S. industrial and intelligence organizations. And Traub went to work for the U.S. Navy biological research lab, which is affiliated with many of the academic institutions in the U.S. that are the premier biological weapons development and testing operations.
You have to begin to see that there is a whole underlying network of extraordinarily wealthy individuals, in fact, who have an ideology for population reduction, and specifically, the Merck company's fund as well as the Rockefeller Foundation, two of the premier American population control funding agencies. And when you see that these people are multinational supporters, and you understand that their ideology for population reduction follows the same reasoning that Hitler followed with racial hygiene: to make it American intelligence's and national security's primary interest for foreign policy.
This policy was funded by Prescott Bush (George Bush's father), General William Draper, and the Rockefellers -- the first people in the congress in 1968 that came out in favor of population reduction in the third world -- and translated into legislation by Henry Kissinger in National Security Memorandum 200, penned in 1971.
So you begin to see that these are the same people with the same agenda and the same money. And far more money because they've invested it all those years. And today's history that is unfolding before our eyes is a repeat.
WT: According to the U.S. Army Medical, Chemical, and Biological Defense Program the Anthrax vaccine licensed to USAMRIID is a killed vaccine tested to be free of mycoplasma incognitus (although the Army admits that "It is a difficult organism to detect under some circumstances") and has been available since the early 70s. So what makes you think it's potentially contaminated?
LH: That's the exact period of time I've been talking about. It doesn't matter of it's dead or alive. The anthrax bacterial protein, when it combines with your own host cell proteins, forms what is called an "antigenic complex": a combination of your own host cell protein with a foreign bacterial protein. The body recognizes the entire complex as foreign, and it mounts an immune response against the entire complex, including against your own host cell protein. And now you have an autoimmune illness developing that results in autoimmune diseases such as lupus, chronic fatigue, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis and doctors say "We don't know what caused this." They're doing it for population reduction.
WT: Of course, unlike bioweapons, vaccines can target specific groups (except perhaps for genetically-engineered bioweapons).
LH: Exactly. For example, the most plausible vaccine that initiated AIDS was the 1976 and 1978 strain of hepatitis B given to retarded children, gay men, and blacks -- the same targets as Hitler. And now they're targeting militia groups.
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Hey, when are we going to stop talking about this and start doing
something about it?
Regards, Pondo
CHEMTRAILS IN THE SKY AND THE NEW MICROBES by Thomas, William
William Thomas is an investigative journalist who comes to us from the Gulf Islands of British Columbia. He has won numerous awards for his feature films and articles. His 30-minute Gulf War documentary "Ecowar" was the U.S. Environmental film festival award for "best documentary short" in 1991. William Thomas is the author of Scorched Earth: The Military's War Against the Environment and Bringing the War Home: The True Story Behind the Gulf War Illness and Biological Warfare in the Gulf. William has lectured extensively on the Gulf War and biological warfare in the '90's, and is a frequent guest on the "Art Bell Radio Show". His latest book is Probing the Chemtrails Conundrum.
BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS TIED TO GULF WAR SYNDROME
I have been an investigative journalist for the past 30 years and as a journalist I base my reports on documented information. During the Gulf War, I served as a member of a three-man volunteer environmental emergency response team in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait, and returned from that experience emotionally scarred, and with my immune system ravaged. After recovering through a program of supplementation, I became very disturbed to find hundreds and hundreds of emails from U.S. and Canadian veterans complaining of something they called Gulf War Syndrome. My investigation into biological weapons has been ongoing since I returned from the Gulf War, and I uncovered the untold story of the biological war in the Gulf in my book Bringing the War Home. In a previous book, Scorched Earth, I examined biological warfare experimentation, particularly in the United States.
In January, 1999, I was contacted by the managing editor of the Environment News Service, an international wire service which I had worked for in the Gulf. I was asked to check out a story by William Wallace about very unusual aerial activity over the state of Washington that was apparently changing the skies overhead. Wallace and his wife lived in a remote mountainous area, and he claimed that large unmarked jet aircraft were flying back and forth over his property, spraying something in the air. Unlike normal contrails behind commercial jets which dissipate quickly, these lingered for hours, came together and obscured the sky. Mr. Wallace said that he and his wife were very ill, their dogs were dying, and their plants were dying. I began to investigate this story and after looking at a videotape made by Mr. Wallace, realized as a former pilot and former member of the military myself, that this was very unusual aerial activity. He gave me some of his contacts across the United States, and as I followed up on those contacts, I developed a huge story. As of today we have over 1,000 eyewitness reports on the so-called chemtrail phenomena. We have documented evidence that chemtrail spraying is taking place over cities throughout Canada, the United States, England, Australia, Holland, Italy, Germany, and New Zealand. And I have uncovered direct ties between biological warfare experimentation and the spraying of pathogenic material and chemicals over our cities.
I have found in my research over the past 15 months that in every instance of heavy spraying over cities across Canada and the United States, there has been an epidemic of acute upper respiratory ailments and gastrointestinal ailments that have overfilled hospital emergency rooms across North America. After researching biological warfare, I found two U.S. Congressional investigations documenting decades of biological warfare experimentation carried out over hundreds of cities in the United States and Canada, including Winnipeg. While these biowarfare simulants were said to be "harmless", some of the new genetically-engineered pathogens - particularly mycoplasma and other fungi - are now loose among the general population. This has occurred through vaccinations of Texas prisoners, and inoculations of Gulf War soldiers - many of whom never left the United States.
Many autoimmune diseases have been seen in the wake of the chemtrail spraying - such as chronic fatigue, multiple sclerosis, lupus, once very rare transverse myelitis and meningitis. My researchers and I are also finding that there appears to be a mental-emotional component to this spray that is a disorienting factor. It is a factor that makes people lethargic and mentally confused, with an inability to concentrate and short-term memory loss.
CHEMICAL CONTRAILS IN THE SKY
TWO SPRAYING PROGRAMS: HIGH AND LOW
(a) THE HIGH-FLYING SPRAY PROGRAM Chemtrails are not contrails from commercial airplane traffic. Contrails are condensation trails formed when moisture from hot engine exhaust momentarily condenses into ice crystals, usually above 35,000 feet. Chemtrails occur around 22,000 feet, and they do not dissipate within 45 seconds as contrails usually do, according to Air Transport authorities. (However, genuine contrails over heavily trafficked areas do sometimes linger and nitrogen oxide and other jet engine pollutants can form extensive cloud cover over time.) Unlike normal contrails, chemtrail plumes are laid in parallel lines in grid patterns and telltale X's over towns, cities and remote rural areas. They spread out, and over hours coagulate into a dense droopy overcast. This is not a normal overcast. Often you will even see this being woven between regular cumulus clouds, and it drips and it weeps. Within 24 to 48 hours, people on the ground often flood emergency rooms with acute upper respiratory ailments, gastrointestinal problems, gushing nose bleeds, joint pain, and a dry, hacking cough that unlike flu, lasts for four or five weeks, and then often returns. These symptoms are characteristic of the mycoplasma infections found in some blood-tested chemtrail observers. We have positively identified many of these aircraft as unmarked KC-135 and KC-10 Airforce tankers. In early March, hundreds of KC-135 aircraft were grounded for a part to be replaced in the tail-section of the airplane, and spray activity decreased from 24, to just two locations across the United States. Spray activity climbed right back to previous levels as the planes returned to service the following week.
(b) THE LOW FLYING SPRAY PROGRAM These contrails are sprayed by low flying C-130 Turboprop aircraft. I witnessed this myself in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, last summer. I was stunned to see a C-130 gliding low over this little resort town in the mountains, engines throttled back, dead quiet, spray coming out of the wings of the aircraft as it pulled away. I was standing in the middle of the intersection with my mouth hanging open! I went into the stores in that town, and everybody was coughing like crazy. We also took samples from aluminum-sided buildings in Michigan and Pennsylvania that were not contaminated by background bacteria. We found Pseudomonas fluorescens, streptomyces and a bacillus. In a similar sample taken a year previously on the other side of the United States, we found the same things, as well as other very pathogenic moulds. Rainwater samples taken after heavy spraying over Espanola, Ontario, were found to contain aluminum seven times higher than permissible safe levels. Chemtrail fallout also included carbon black - this is used by the United States Air Force for weather modification. It absorbs sunlight and heats the atmosphere. Carbon black can be hit with HAARP or similar ionispheric heaters and artificially heated to change the weather. They also found chaff (a fine cobwebby filament used to jam radars) in the fallout, and this very fine filament stays aloft for up to a day. So if you put it in your spray mix, you can track the distribution of your spray on radar for a full day. We have very clean lab samples of the material being sprayed and it all contains very pathogenic moulds and fungi. I discovered an article in the Portland Free Press, written by John Titus, in March 1997, describing how dozens of these spray-equipped aircraft, C-130s, were taken away from the U.S. Forest Service, from forest fire-fighting duties, and taken over by the CIA for "missions undisclosed."
CHEMTRAILS IN CANADA In March 1999, people in Espanola, Ontario began to see large unmarked multi-engine aircraft, white in colour, laying X's in the sky over Espanola. When they called friends in Sudbury about 50 miles away, those same X's were being laid at the very same time. These were grid patterns like tic-tac-toe laid in the skies overhead, parallel patterns like jets furrowing a farm field with plumes that at first-sight looked like condensation trails. But instead of evaporating and dissipating quickly, they lingered, spread out and dripped a kind of a mist onto the good residents of Espanola. A reddish powder was also dropped on patios and a nearby lake from AC-130s flying at rooftop level. Everyone, and I mean everyone, became very ill with severe muscle and joint pain, headaches, upper respiratory ailments and more recently, gastrointestinal ailments. One of my researchers, Erminia Cassani came up from the States, and went to Espanola to see what was going on. She saw a C-130 Turboprop spray that community at very low level, rooftop level, with a red powder. She collected the sample, and took it to the same government lab that had been doing sample tests for us earlier in the year. They found a cocktail of pathogenic moulds and fungi. The Ontario Ministry of Environment became involved and tested the rainwater in Espanola, and they found carbon black and chaff in this fallout. Near North labs found aluminum in the rainwater at .53 ppm (parts per million), seven times the safe threshold in Canada, enough they said, to kill fish. The U.S. Airforce claimed that it wasn't their planes. The Canadian Air Force said, "We do not know what is going on in our own skies." Finally, last summer, the residents of Espanola signed a petition and took it to Parliament in Ottawa and demanded an investigation. They said, "We want some answers and we want this stopped." The Ministry of Defense promised to get back to them. They haven't heard yet.
In Kitchener, Ontario, recently, there was a sudden outbreak of people complaining of earaches, blocked sinuses, sore throats and acute attacks of asthma. Everyone was sick at the same time. This is not how flu operates. There has been heavy spraying over Kitchener. In the wake of the spraying, we have seen 1-800 numbers posted which ask you to call in to become part of medical studies, and the qualification is that you have contracting specific symptoms within a certain area within a specific time frame. That sounds like biological warfare tracking to me.
CHEMTRAILS IN USA Erminia Cassani also found some samples of this gel-like material that had splattered a house in the central United States. According to neighbours who witnessed it, it had been dropped from an airplane. We have photographs of the substance. She interviewed the owner, but the owner had been stricken by endocarditis within a month, had a heart attack and was admitted to hospital. We took this to a government-licensed lab. Many samples from this fallout have landed on the ground, or porches, and could have been contaminated by bacteria and the surrounding environment. These samples came from aluminum-sided buildings, taken immediately; they were clean, good samples. Erminia Cassani is a health researcher and knows how to collect samples. The lab said, "Where did you get this biohazard material? We have never seen anything grow out so quickly and overflow our culture dishes within 48 hours." They found three things: Pseudomonas fluorescens, streptomyces, and a very toxic bacillus, as well as a chemical dye marker taken from a coral reef and a restrictor enzyme used to restrict or cut DNA used in research laboratories. Why is this substance being dropped from an airplane! Then we became aware of a similar incident in Pennsylvania last year. Neighbours had witnessed the X-patterns, the weird sky designs as they called it, and an airplane overflying the house so low they thought it would hit the roof. The sample was sent to Erminia, and she took it to the same lab. We did not expect much in terms of this sample because it was a year old and dried out. However the same thing happened. It overgrew the dish; it amazed the head lab technician. They found streptomyces, the same bacillus, and a cocktail of other toxic moulds. Within a few months, Erminia was admitted to hospital with a black yeast mould found in that sample on her left lung, and she became one of the first documented human links between the aerial spray and human illness.
PROJECT CLOVERLEAF In addition to military aircraft, some insiders allege that commercial airlines are being equipped to release "special undisclosed chemicals" under the government's "Project Cloverleaf" (begun around 1998). Using airliners to spray aluminum powder in an effort to avert global warming is also called for in the Welsbach patent. This information has not been released to the public.
CREDIBILITY FOR THE CHEMTRAIL PHENOMENA Just this year my original story for the Environment News Service was chosen by Project Censored as one of the censored stories of 1999, by a panel of peer-reviewed highly professional journalists who looked at this story and concluded that it is real. So the chemtrails story has real journalistic credibility.
FLU EPIDEMICS
For the past two winters over towns and cities throughout England and North American, strange X's were appearing in the skies. In these same cities, there have been outbreaks of "flu" epidemics that have filled hospital emergency rooms across the country. We have also had a dramatic onslaught of degenerative autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, all apparently originating from viral, bacterial, or fungal infections. During this time most of us have been ill with something that doesn't quite act like the flu because it holds on for weeks and months at a time, seems to get better, and then returns. It is very hard to shake. In fact, during the height of this year's 33-week epidemic of fatalities from pneumonia and "flu-like" illness, the Centers for Disease Control blood-tested acutely ill patients - and found that between 67% and 85% did not have the flu. (The CDC now says, "An unknown pathogen" may be responsible for these illnesses and deaths.) This epidemic is particularly hard on children and the elderly.
We have found Streptococcus in our samples of low-level air-dropped material. Streptococcus A and fatalities were up about 200 to 300% across North America. Meningitis, another rare inflammation of the brain and spinal cord has occurred in epidemic proportions in certain areas across North America. In certain areas of the country, there are epidemic levels of multiple sclerosis, which used to be a fairly rare ailment. Transverse myelitis, perhaps the rarest of all, used to be almost unheard of, but we are getting increased reports of this disease across North America this year.
Prof. Colman Salloway, an epidemiologist at the University of New Hampshire, was investigating the Sydney A variant of influenza that was shutting down universities across the United States, but he found out that no cultures were being taken, and in fact, this is usually the case with flu. Doctors prescribe on symptomology, and rarely do blood work. Whereas flu usually gives you a bad cough and other symptoms for five to seven days, this ailment gives people a very dry hacking cough for four to five weeks and often returns. Prof. Salloway concluded that the only thing that does that is mycoplasma.
Another disturbing thing is that these illnesses are driving people toward experimental vaccination programs. There is a push for vaccines for flu, pneumonia and migraines, and migraines are also a common symptom of spraying. We know that vaccines are loaded with formaldehyde, formalin, little parts of recombinant genes, cancer causing material and monkey viruses. There is not only a campaign to push us toward vaccines, but to vaccinate infants soon after birth.
THE MYCOPLASMA BEHIND THE EPIDEMICS
The probable origin of these unknown pathogens is a biological warfare program (see The Brucellosis Triangle, and the Consumer Health Newsletter, Jun.00 by Don Scott). Don Scott explains how the bioweaponeers extracted the active agent of brucellosis from the brucellosis bacteria. Although the active agent, the mycoplasma is still there, the bacteria has been discarded, and your blood tests will be negative even though you are infected with the brucellosis mycoplasma. Don Scott's conclusions are further corroborated by the work of Dr. Len Horowitz in Emerging Viruses: Aids and Ebola. This mycoplasma is behind the sudden epidemic of autoimmune diseases, a mycoplasma developed by the bioweaponeers as a stealth weapon that provokes no anti-inflammatory or antibody response. Mycoplasma is the infectious agent of Gulf War illness, and has long been a favourite of the bioweaponeers because of its stealth characteristics. (Stealth means that these organisms do not trigger an anti-inflammatory response or an antibody response that can be detected through normal testing. You need specialized equipment and processes to find mycoplasma or genetically-engineered brucellosis.)
Chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia are caused by brucellosis without doubt. In my book Bringing the War Home, order numbers and dates of shipment of pathogens originating in the United States and shipped to Sadam Hussein's forces in Iraq are documented, including, brucellosis.
Dr. Garth Nicolson, a world-renowned microbiologist, and his wife Nancy became ill when their daughter returned from service in Iraq during the Gulf War. After their pets died of the same illness, they managed to isolate the microbe that was making them ill. The Nicolsons discovered that the germ underlying Gulf War illness is sexually transmittable, and is in fact, Mycoplasma fermentans. They cured themselves with repeated courses of Doxycycline. Dr. Garth Nicolson now believes that brucellosis and mycoplasma together underlie much of the systemic illness we find in North America, and in fact, throughout the world. He has found more than 60% of patients with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis test positive for the mycoplasma.
Dr. Nicolson and his wife continued their research and isolated the carrier for Gulf War illness in a squalene adjuvant that has been used since the 1970's to induce rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis in experiments. This adjuvant was put into the anthrax vaccine given to Canadian, American, British and Australian soldiers in hopes that it would boost the immune reaction far quicker than the normal course of anthrax vaccine because the U.S. military command was terrified of the biological weapons in the hands of Sadam Hussein. They had sold these same weapons to him for the war in Iran. They were afraid that they had no effective antidote, so they put the adjuvant in the anthrax vaccine to increase the speed of its effectiveness and they wrapped this mycoplasma in a 40% HIV protein coat, not to give people AIDS, but to evade the normal immune system response and get it into the blood stream and into the immune system. But they needed a carrier for this. And what did they choose? Mycoplasma fermentans, because, again, it could outwit the immune system; it could carry this adjuvant into the immune system and it was supposed to be an attenuated, or killed form of mycoplasma. But obviously, it wasn't sufficiently attenuated (we find the same problem in other live vaccines today). Approximately 200,000 American soldiers became very ill. The mycoplasma, of course, spread to their spouses and their children.
THE HISTORY BEHIND THE EPIDEMICS: BIOWARFARE EXPERIMENTS HAVE LET LOOSE NEW PATHOGENS AMONG US
The United States is not the only country interested in mycoplasma. The mycoplasma research project of the University of Baghdad was directed by a Dr. Jawad al-Aubaidi, who did his graduate research at Cornell University (which should be renamed Biological Warfare University because of its ties to the Pentagon and its experimentation). He also worked at Plum Island research laboratory engineering animal pathogens to become more infectious and contagious and to jump the species barrier to humans. In 1975, you will recall that Plum Island, a secret biowarfare laboratory 12 miles off the U.S. coast, was working on a project to infect ticks from the active brucella toxin. Perhaps it's coincidence that the first Lyme disease occurred in Lyme, Connecticut at that time, just 12 miles away.
Last year, I suggested to the Environment News Service that somebody ought to look into Plum Island's experiments because the so-called West Nile fever that caused deaths on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. last year and has now re-emerged there and in upstate N.Y., was in fact, a form of Japanese encephalitis. My story about this wasn't published and got me in a lot of trouble. My research team and I had discovered that Japanese encephalitis was being researched at Plum Island where dead birds were discovered outside their research lab. Birds spread West Nile virus. Plum Island lies less than 22 miles from New York. What is going on? These appear to be a new breed of stealth viruses, and they certainly do not appear to be of natural origin.
Dr. Martin from the Center of Complex Infectious Diseases examined a chronic fatigue patient and discovered a new life form that is now recognized by American medical authorities called a viteria. A viteria is part virus, part bacteria and part fungus in terms of its gene sequences, something that looks very much genetically engineered and actually morphs or transforms itself from one to the other. We noted earlier that these autoimmune diseases that are afflicting more and more North Americans seem to have a viral bacterial and/or fungal origin. Dr. Martin stated that the cytomegalovirus which results in severe headaches and joint pain among other symptoms is found in monkey cell cultures used to culture live polio vaccine. We are well aware of the illness and fatalities resulting from that vaccine. Where else have we seen live monkey viruses contaminating vaccines? The Hepatitis B vaccine introduced into the gay population in seven U.S. cities by the CDC, including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, preceded the outbreak of AIDS in those seven cities and only those seven cities. And I thought, "Well, let's follow the monkey business further to Litton Bionetics. Litton Bionetics supplies the monkeys, the monkey cultures, the monkey viruses, and administers all of Fort Detrick's bioweapons programs. Its president, Roy Ash was National Security Advisor to President Nixon along with Henry Kissinger, who wrote the infamous Memorandum 200 calling for a population reduction across the planet.
Litton Bionetics has also been exploring kuru's use as a weapon for a number of years. Kuru was the disease among the cannibals of New Guinea investigated by the Japanese biowarfare researchers during World War II. We now know kuru is mad cow disease caused by prions which appear to be crystal capacitators that store energy and - perhaps on receiving certain frequencies - emit strobe-like bursts of actual physical light (it can be measured) leaving a spongiform or perforated brain that has baffled medical researchers because there is no disease element to find, only these spongiform brains from these abnormal proteins called prions. These are now loose among us. Litton Bionetics has been researching these prions and trying to make these into weapons for a number of years.
Finally, I think we are all familiar with the 1969 closed-door Defense Appropriation Hearings in the U.S. Senate. Dr. MacArthur stood up at that time and said "We can take 24 years of biological warfare research, use our 76 biowarfare labs in operation, add ten million dollars on top of the 31 million dollars going into this nefarious warfare research this year, and come up with the ultimate stealth weapon, a synthetic bioagent for which no natural immunity could have been acquired." And in fact, Appropriation 1509 did develop these incapacitating agents: air delivered aerosols meant to infect people by breathing them. They were intended not to be contagious and were tested on students at the Tahoe-Truckee High School in California. Seven out of eight of those victims developed chronic fatigue.
So in this quick overview, we can see that these epidemics of flu and flu-related ailments have quite a bit of history behind them. As a journalist of some 30 years standing, it is my contention that this biowarfare experimentation has gotten out of control and is now loose among the population. And really the only outstanding question (and we can include the spread of HIV) is whether this has been intentional or accidental. A very compelling case could be made for the first supposition.
In September, 1993 a patent was issued to Dr. Shyh-Ching Lo, who worked for the biological warfare division of the Defense Department in the United States, for his invention of a pathogenic or disease-causing mycoplasma responsible for pneumonia, chronic fatigue, lupus, and respiratory distress, precisely the symptoms we were seeing among Gulf War veterans, precisely the symptoms we are seeing among people in heavily sprayed areas, subjected to what I have come to call the "chemtrail spraying".
WEATHER AND ATMOSPHERE MODIFICATION
Researchers, investigators and a task force recently formed in the United States have uncovered documentation from Lawrence Livermore and other labs for U.S. government studies to spray chemicals in the upper atmosphere to repair the ozone layer and/or cool the atmosphere by one degree and head off the worst of global warming.
a) WEATHER MODIFICATION
There has been a massive effort of intense spraying across this continent at least for the past two years. What in the world is going on? Let's look at some clues. In a United States Air Force research paper, Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, they state that "Weather Force Specialists" are going to own the weather. Jet tankers flown by Weather Force Specialists are now in the process of creating aerial obscuration by spraying chemicals to create an overcast (or cirrus shield) in a clear blue sky to hide aerial activity from observers on the ground.
HAARP (High Altitude Auroral Research Project) is a joint US Air Force and Navy project which has for the past several years been using antennas situated near Gakona, Alaska to steer powerful beams of radio waves to heat selected parts of the upper atmosphere (ionosphere) to cause weather change. Weather is all about heat distribution and differentials, and if you can heat a part of the atmosphere, you can change the weather. According to Bernard Eastlund, the inventor of this technology, they are trying to disrupt regions of the ionosphere at a range of 1200 miles or more. These rays can interrupt brain function and cause emotional difficulties, because this will entrain with (modify) your brain patterns. "But don't worry", he said, "because we are using very low power levels." A U.S. Air Force document, Technical Memorandum #195, issued October 1991, page 185, Phillips Laboratory states: "Our intention is to have HAARP transmitting at 100 billion watts effective energy. We have never seen anything like this on earth, and God help us all if they ever come near this power level.
HAARP works on the ionosphere, way up there. HAARP does not work on the lower atmosphere where weather forms unless you put a matrix like carbon black in the air that you can heat with these intensely focused radio beams. We also found iron oxide particles in some of our spray samples.
A high ranking Air Force officer involved in these weather projects told me that they were using atmospheric folding, and by spraying in front of the moving demarcations between the upper and the lower atmosphere where weather forms, they could cause fronts and shear patterns. One effect is to bring the jet stream down to ground level on a day of otherwise normal weather. We are seeing trailer parks and small communities devastated by sudden blasts of extremely powerful winds that dissipate almost immediately after doing this damage. It is the effect of atmospheric folding, an unnatural effect.
I am seeing violent weather changes, not always, but often in conjunction with heavy spraying, particularly at the front of approaching fronts. We have videotapes of chemtrail spraying which occurred in Tennessee last winter, and the next day 90 tornadoes formed over a three-state area around the sprayed area in wintertime (winter of 98/99) when tornadoes do not form. Disruptive tornadoes have also occurred across the United States this winter (99/00). This is in the wake of heavy spraying. There have been record rains, record droughts, violent weather, very warm temperatures, particularly in Chicago and Milwaukee.
As we know global warming is real. The Arctic ice cap to the north of us is melting so rapidly that that flood of cold water is changing the temperature of the Atlantic conveyor that brings warm nutrient rich water up from the tropics along the coast of England and Europe. It is slowing that conveyor down; the warning now is that we are going to see increasingly violent weather in Europe as occurred in France and nearby countries this winter. The Antarctic ice shelf is also caving off it is melting so rapidly.
b) ATMOSPHERIC MODIFICATION
Very recently I became aware, through Mike Castle, an environmental consultant in the United States who does work for the U.S. government and other corporations, that there could be something more going on, perhaps atmospheric modification. Global warming is an extreme emergency but even more so is the rapid depletion of the radiation shield in the atmosphere. There is a high incidence of cataracts and skin cancers in Australia and in North America. What to do about this? In 1979 the physicist Freeman Dyson suggested, "Let's insert sunlight-reflecting particles in the upper atmosphere to deflect the sunlight back into space. We will use jets to do this and we will spray it." In August, 1998, at the International Seminar for Planetary Emergencies, Dr. Edward Teller proposed a sunscreen for planet earth. He said, "Let's commence a program of aerial spraying and try to lower the temperature one degree. This would take a lot of airplanes, but the U.S. Airforce has about 700 aerial tankers in its active inventory. They estimated the cost at Lawrence Livermore - $1 billion a year, a bargain price, because, they said, "if we reduce fossil fuel usage and reduce emissions of carbon to 1990 levels it will cost us $100 billion a year. So it's a bargain!
In March, 1991, Hughes Aircraft was granted Patent #1990000513145 for a process to reduce global warming by reflecting infrared energy back into space. An actual patent, presumably tested to work. The Hughes patent calls for adding tiny particles into jet fuel so that it can be sprayed throughout the world at high altitudes. They just put these particles in the jet fuel and it comes out the exhaust. It remains suspended for up to one year. We can cool the planet. The ingredients used in this Welsbach process are oxides of metal: aluminum oxide and thorium oxide. Thorium oxide is carcinogenic. Thorium oxide destroys the ozone layer. Hughes Aircraft proposed to spray it in the greenhouse gas layer, 7 to 13 km above the surface (22,000 ft). In the 10-100 micron range it's as fine as talcum powder and will not harm jet engines, according to a former engineer for Alcoa Aluminum.
There has been a lot of controversy about a lab test by Aquatech Environmental Labs which found very tiny, almost unmeasurable levels of ethylene dibromide in a sample of jet fuel, taken from a commercial aircraft in California. It is not from a chemtrail; it is from the jet fuel. EDB is a banned carcinogen, banned under emergency order by the EPA back in the 1980's because it is so carcinogenic. But it was put into the new JP8 jet formulation in the early '90's. When ultraviolet light hits EDB it forms bromides. At those altitudes and in our latitudes it can be 10 to 100 times more destructive of ozone than chlorine. So we have jet aircraft perhaps attempting to shield the planet from solar radiation, destroying the ozone layer in the process.
DEMAND AN ANSWER For whatever reason, people refuse to look up at what's happening in the skies directly over their heads, but when they do, they know instinctively that the trails criss-crossing overhead are not normal aircraft activity, and they're very concerned. This has been going on now very intensively for over two years. More and more people are becoming aware of it and we're very close now to a concerted public outcry that is going to motivate, first of all mainstream media who have interviewed me extensively and never gone to air with the story. They're going to be pushed into breaking the story. We're going to take it to the next step. Specifically for people of Ontario, the residents of Espanola, who have been heavily sprayed since last March of 1999, and who have contracted all of these ailments, I am urging people in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada to go to your MPPs and demand an answer to the people of Espanola.
