Bush White House Maintains Waterboarding Was Legal When Used

The Justice Department has opened an internal investigation into whether its top officials improperly authorized or reviewed the CIA’s use of waterboarding when interrogating terror suspects, according to documents released Friday.

The investigation was revealed at the request of Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. A Justice Department spokesman, however, said the inquiry has been ongoing for several years. Questions about waterboarding are part of a larger Justice probe of the so-called Bybee memo, wrote Marshall Jarrett, head of the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, in a Feb. 18 letter to the two senators. “Among other issues, we are examining whether the legal advice contained in those memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys,” Jarrett wrote. Asked for details, Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said, “This is not a new investigation, but rather has been ongoing for some time.” Waterboarding involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his or her cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years, to the Spanish Inquisition, and is condemned by nations around the world. Critics call it a form of torture. The memo at the heart of the internal Justice inquiry was dated Aug. 1, 2002, and written by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee for then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. It defined torture as recognized by U.S. law as covering “only extreme acts” causing pain similar in intensity to that caused by death or organ failure. The Bush administration maintains waterboarding was legal when it was used by CIA interrogators in 2002 and 2003 on top al-Qaida detainees Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Earlier this month, CIA Director Michael Hayden said waterboarding was used, in part, because of widespread belief among U.S. intelligence officials that more catastrophic attacks were imminent. The CIA banned its personnel from using waterboarding in 2006. Attorney General Michael Mukasey has refused to publicly discuss whether waterboarding is currently legal since it is no longer used by CIA interrogators. Durbin called the internal Justice inquiry “long overdue” and noted that the U.S. government has previously prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime. “Within the question how America could come to use interrogation techniques of the Inquisition is the question how the Department of Justice could have overlooked its own precedents to authorize waterboarding,” added Whitehouse, a former federal prosecutor. He suggested “the answer was preordained and the department was driven by politics and obedience, not law and independence.” Mukasey told Congress earlier this month that he would not pursue criminal charges against CIA officials who used waterboarding after relying on Justice Department guidance that the interrogation tactic was legal. He said Friday he did not believe the Bybee memo was politically motivated. “I have no reason to believe that politics was involved in that or any other analysis,” Mukasey said.

Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press.

By LAURENCE ZUCKERMAN
New York Times

Many people remember reading George Orwell’s ”Animal Farm” in high school or college, with its chilling finale in which the farm animals looked back and forth at the tyrannical pigs and the exploitative human farmers but found it ”impossible to say which was which.”

That ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs. Another example of Hollywood butchering great literature? Yes, but in this case the film’s secret producer was the Central Intelligence Agency.

The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell’s pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to ”Animal Farm” from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist.

Rewriting the end of ”Animal Farm” is just one example of the often absurd lengths to which the C.I.A. went, as recounted in a new book, ”The Cultural Cold War: The C.I.A. and the World of Arts and Letters” (The New Press) by Frances Stonor Saunders, a British journalist. Published in Britain last summer, the book will appear here next month.

Much of what Ms. Stonor Saunders writes about, including the C.I.A.’s covert sponsorship of the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom and the British opinion magazine Encounter, was exposed in the late 1960’s, generating a wave of indignation. But by combing through archives and unpublished manuscripts and interviewing several of the principal actors, Ms. Stonor Saunders has uncovered many new details and gives the most comprehensive account yet of the agency’s activities between 1947 and 1967.

This picture of the C.I.A.’s secret war of ideas has cameo appearances by scores of intellectual celebrities like the critics Dwight Macdonald and Lionel Trilling, the poets Ted Hughes and Derek Walcott and the novelists James Michener and Mary McCarthy, all of whom directly or indirectly benefited from the C.I.A.’s largesse. There are also bundles of cash that were funneled through C.I.A. fronts and several hilarious schemes that resemble a ”Spy vs. Spy” cartoon more than a serious defense against Communism. Traveling first class all the way, the C.I.A. and its counterparts in other Western European nations sponsored art exhibitions, intellectual conferences, concerts and magazines to press their larger anti-Soviet agenda. Ms. Stonor Saunders provides ample evidence, for example, that the editors at Encounter and other agency-sponsored magazines were ordered not to publish articles directly critical of Washington’s foreign policy. She also shows how the C.I.A. bankrolled some of the earliest exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist painting outside of the United States to counter the Socialist Realism being advanced by Moscow.

In one memorable episode, the British Foreign Office subsidized the distribution of 50,000 copies of ”Darkness at Noon,” Arthur Koestler’s anti-Communist classic. But at the same time, the French Communist Party ordered its operatives to buy up every copy of the book. Koestler received a windfall in royalties courtesy of his Communist adversaries.

As it turns out, ”Animal Farm” was not the only instance of the C.I.A.’s dabbling in Hollywood. Ms. Stonor Saunders reports that one operative who was a producer and talent agent slipped affluent-looking African-Americans into several films as extras to try to counter Soviet criticism of the American race problem.

The agency also changed the ending of the movie version of ”1984,” disregarding Orwell’s specific instructions that the story not be altered. In the book, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is entirely defeated by the nightmarish totalitarian regime. In the very last line, Orwell writes of Winston, ”He loved Big Brother.” In the movie, Winston and his lover, Julia, are gunned down after Winston defiantly shouts: ”Down with Big Brother!”

Such changes came from the agency’s obsession with snuffing out a notion then popular among many European intellectuals: that East and West were morally equivalent. But instead of illustrating the differences between the two competing systems by taking the high road, the agency justified its covert activities by referring to the unethical tactics of the Soviets.

”If the other side can use ideas that are camouflaged as being local rather than Soviet-supported or -stimulated, then we ought to be able to use ideas camouflaged as local ideas,” Tom Braden, who ran the C.I.A.’s covert cultural division in the early 1950’s, explained years later. (In one of the book’s many amusing codas, Mr. Braden goes on in the 1980’s to become the leftist foil to Patrick Buchanan on the CNN program ”Crossfire.”)

The cultural cold war began in postwar Europe, with the fraying of the wartime alliance between Washington and Moscow. Officials in the West believed they had to counter Soviet propaganda and undermine the wide sympathy for Communism in France and Italy.

An odd alliance was struck between the C.I.A. leaders, most of them wealthy Ivy League veterans of the wartime Office of Strategic Services and a corps of largely Jewish ex-Communists who had broken with Moscow to become virulently anti-Communist. Acting as intermediaries between the agency and the intellectual community were three colorful agents who included Vladimir Nabokov’s much less talented cousin, Nicholas, a composer.

The C.I.A. recognized from the beginning that it could not openly sponsor artists and intellectuals in Europe because there was so much anti-American feeling there. Instead, it decided to woo intellectuals out of the Soviet orbit by secretly promoting a non-Communist left of democratic socialists disillusioned with Moscow.

Ms. Stonor Saunders describes how the C.I.A. cleverly skimmed hundreds of millions of dollars from the Marshall Plan to finance its activities, funneling the money through fake philanthropies it created or real ones like the Ford Foundation.

”We couldn’t spend it all,” Gilbert Greenway, a former C.I.A. agent, recalled. ”There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it. It was amazing.”

When some of the C.I.A.’s activities were exposed in the late 1960’s, many artists and intellectuals claimed ignorance. But Ms. Stonor Saunders makes a strong case that several people, including the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the poet Stephen Spender, who was co-editor of Encounter, knew about the C.I.A.’s role.

”She has made it very difficult now to deny that some of these things happened,” said Norman Birnbaum, a professor at the Georgetown University Law School who was a university professor in Europe in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. ”And she has placed a lot of people living and dead in embarrassing situations.”

Still unresolved is what impact the campaign had and whether it was worth it. Some of the participants, like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who was in the O.S.S. and knew about some of the C.I.A.’s cultural activities, argue that the agency’s role was benign, even necessary. Compared with the coups the C.I.A. sponsored in Guatemala, Iran and elsewhere, he said, its support of the arts was some of its best work. ”It enabled people to publish what they already believed,” he added. ”It didn’t change anyone’s course of action or thought.”

But Diana Josselson, whose husband, Michael, ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom, told Ms. Stonor Saunders that there were real human costs among those around the world who innocently cooperated with the agency’s front organizations only to be tarred with a C.I.A. affiliation when the truth came out. The author and other critics argue that by using government money covertly to promote such American ideals as democracy and freedom of expression, the agency ultimately stepped on its own message.

”Obviously it was an error, and a rather serious error, to allow intellectuals to be subsidized by the government,” said Alan Brinkley, a history professor at Columbia University. ”And when it was revealed, it did undermine their credibility seriously.”

BBC

A US judge has dismissed a case alleging that a subsidiary of Boeing illegally helped the CIA fly terror suspects abroad on rendition flights.

The American Civil Liberties Union brought the case against Jeppesen Dataplan, saying it “falsified flight plans… to avoid public scrutiny”.

But a San Francisco judge halted the case, as the CIA director had urged.

“The very subject matter of this case is a state secret,” Judge James Ware wrote in a ruling.

CIA director Michael Hayden had earlier urged the judge to dismiss the case because he said that covert operations overseas could be exposed.

CIA flights

ACLU brought the case on behalf of five men who alleged the CIA had flown them to foreign prisons, where they were interrogated and tortured.

The plaintiffs were an Ethiopian living in the UK, an Italian working in Pakistan, an Egyptian citizen living in Sweden, a Yemeni, and an Iraqi who was a British resident.

The lawsuit against Jeppesen had claimed the services they provided were crucial to the flights.

However, Jeppesen had said it could not confirm if it was involved with the flights.

A report approved by a European Parliament committee last year said more than 1,000 covert CIA flights had crossed European airspace or stopped at European airports in the four years after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Jeppesen’s participation allegedly included securing necessary landing and overflight permits for the flights between the US, Pakistan, Ireland, Cyprus, Morocco, and Afghanistan.

CIA And Britain Admit U.S. Rendition Flights Used British Territory In 2002

Reversing an earlier claim, the CIA has acknowledged that two U.S. rendition flights carrying two alleged terrorists refueled on a U.S. base in British territory in 2002. CIA Director Michael Hayden told agency employees in a message on Thursday that information previously provided to Britain that no such flights used British airspace or soil since the 9/11 attacks turned out to be wrong.Britain has confirmed the acknowledgement, as British Foreign Secretary David Miliband made a similar statement in the parliament on Thursday.

“Contrary to earlier explicit assurances that Diego Garcia had not been used for rendition flights, recent U.S. investigations have now revealed that this had in fact occurred on two occasions, both in 2002,” Miliband told the House of Lords.

“In both cases a U.S. plane with a single detainee on board refueled at the U.S. facility in Diego Garcia,” he added.

Hayden said a review of the rendition records late last year found that the refueling, conducted more than five years ago, lasted just a short time.

“We found this mistake ourselves, and that we brought it to the attention of the British government. An important part of intelligence work, inherently urgent, complex, and uncertain, is to take responsibility for errors and to learn from them,” the AP quoted Hayden as saying.

One of the prisoners was ultimately jailed at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and the other was released to his home country, Hayden revealed in the message. He insisted that neither of them was tortured and denied there has ever been a holding facility for CIA prisoners on Diego Garcia, a British island territory in the Indian Ocean.

Source

Too many secrets: Family wants answers to CIA agent’s mysterious 1982 death
By KIM BRIGGEMAN of the Missoulian

Kent (Dan) Daniels holds a photograph of his brother Jerry Daniels at the gravesite in the Missoula Cemetery where a casket said to hold the remains of Jerry is buried. “It would be great to see inside that coffin,” says Daniels, hoping that an exhumation would answer some of the questions surrounding his brother’s death. Photo by KURT WILSON/Missoulian

Jerry Daniels sightings pop up all around the globe. He’s been seen in London and Spain, in a bar in Whitefish and in Akron, Ohio.Most often he’s spotted in Southeast Asia, where the man known as “Hog” and “Mr. Jerry” worked for the Central Intelligence Agency during and after the Vietnam War.

His love for and allegiance to the Hmong of northern Laos is woven like golden thread throughout that people’s history of the past five decades.

“Basically, wherever Hmong are living, someone will say, ‘So-and-so saw Jerry,’ ” said Gayle Morrison, a California author who’s writing a book on Daniels’ life. “But no one I’ve talked to actually saw him.”That could be because Daniels has been officially dead and buried in the Missoula Cemetery for more than 25 years now.

According to records, he died on April 28, 1982, of carbon monoxide poisoning from a leaky propane water heater at his apartment in Bangkok, Thailand, where he worked as an ethnic affairs officer for the U.S. State Department.

The body wasn’t found for three days, which sets off the first alarm for Jerry’s brothers.

“He doesn’t show up for work for three days and no one comes looking for him?” wonders Kent (Dan) Daniels of Florence.

Because of decomposition issues, Daniels’ casket was ordered sealed after transport home to Missoula for burial.

Speculation about his “accidental” death has whirled ever since the chilly Saturday in May of 1982 when the plane carrying his casket taxied into the Missoula airport.

“Inside the terminal, Hmong eyes watched the proceedings on the tarmac,” wrote Jane Hamilton-Merritt in her 1993 book “Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992.” “Many did not want to believe Jerry Daniels was dead. They wanted to believe he was needed on another intelligence assignment and his ‘death’ in Bangkok was only a cover.”

The Hmong whispered among themselves that the coffin was too small to hold Daniels, Hamilton-Merritt reported. “Maybe he was not dead after all.”

The Hmong, most of whom had been approved by Daniels to resettle in Montana from Thai refugee camps, weren’t the only ones with suspicions.

State Department officials accompanied the body off the plane, and later the CIA helped guard the coffin.

“They stayed with it, under orders, until it was placed in the ground, so we never saw the body,” recalled Ted Lympus, a close friend of Daniels since high school. “There was some real question.”

Lympus, now a district judge in Kalispell, said he and others still doubt the official version of Daniels’ death.

“We were never satisfied that we’d been told the real cause, because no one was ever allowed to look at the remains,” he said.

This much is certain: Jerry Daniels lives on as a hero to many who knew him or know his story. In the eyes of his Hmong friends, he toes the line between legend and deity. But there were plenty of people in Southeast Asia in 1982 who would have just as soon seen Daniels dead.

And so the questions surrounding his death buzz on, among friends, family, old smokejumper colleagues and Hmong.

“I look at things scientifically,” his brother Jack Daniels said on the phone last week from Flagstaff, Ariz. “There’s either a body in that casket or there isn’t. If there’s a body, it’s his or it’s not. If it’s his, how did he die? Is there a bullet hole in the skull?”

Like Jack, Dan Daniels is ready for some answers.

“It would be great to see inside that coffin,” he said at his home in Florence recently.

A long-haul truck driver, state champion skeet shooter, and former high school wrestler for Jug Beck’s Missoula Spartans in the 1950s, Dan was two years older and at least 50 pounds heavier than Jerry, who went on “health kicks” when he edged up close to 160 pounds.

That’s why Dan’s radar went up when he heard the description of his little brother’s body.

“Jerry was supposed to look like a 300-pound black gentleman,” he said. “Jerry was only about 5-8, or something.”

Jack Daniels said the faulty water heater that caused Jerry’s demise was in the bathroom, which separated Jerry’s bedroom from another.

The American embassy official who described the circumstances to Jack said Jerry was found dead on his bed, his blood either

93 percent or 97 percent saturated with carbon monoxide.

“That’s really high,” said Jack, 74, a University of Montana graduate who is recognized as one of the world’s top distance running coaches. “My Ph.D. is in physiology, and I’ve done some work in lung function, and gases and things like that. I tell you what, if you get carbon monoxide in your system, you’re not in good shape.”

So he finds it strange, he said, that an unidentified male who was found in the other bedroom was unconscious but still breathing. When he was taken to the hospital, Jack said, the man bolted and was never found.

“To this day, I have a real bad time dealing with that,” he said.

Jack visited Jerry in Bangkok a couple of years before his death, and his mother, Louise, was there just a couple of months prior. Lympus, who was the Flathead County attorney at the time, said he had them describe the layout of the apartment to the state medical examiner.

“There was something about the apartments of Bangkok that there was a space under the door that was open four or five inches,” Lympus said. “Jerry was found dead on the bed, on the second floor, and from where the water heater was, (the examiner) said there’s no way the gas would have got that high in the room. It would have gone under the door and down the stairs, because it’s heavier than air.”

The idea of taking a look inside Jerry Daniels’ casket has been kicked around for years, by family, friends and former colleagues who knew what Daniels had gotten himself into in Laos.

He was the CIA’s personal case officer for Gen. Vang Pao, and the two of them helped direct Hmong troops in their resistance against communist forces both inside the country and from neighboring North Vietnam.

The “secret war” ended disastrously for the Hmong, many of whom fled the country after it fell in May of 1975, weeks after Saigon collapsed in South Vietnam.

Daniels orchestrated the evacuation of 2,500 people from Long Cheng, their base of operations in the hills of northern Laos. Once the refugees were in Thailand, it fell upon Daniels to screen them for resettlement to the United States, based in part on their loyalty to Vang Pao’s anti-communist cause.

Many of the Hmong, including Vang Pao for a time, wound up in the Missoula area, and to this day the region has a vibrant Hmong community.

Vang Pao subsequently moved to Southern California, where he was arrested last June and charged in federal court with plotting to overthrow the Laotian government. The 78-year-old general is currently under relaxed house arrest while awaiting trial in Sacramento.

Any number of alternate scenarios have been posed to explain Daniels’ death. They range from suicide to murder (by an array of suspects) to death by yellow rain to no death at all.

Hamilton-Merritt wrote in “Tragic Mountain” that when Daniels and friend Toby Scott were in their 20s, they made a pact to jump from the Higgins Avenue Bridge in Missoula when they reached 40.

It was not a suicide pact, she explained, “but rather a ‘marker’ on the lives and achievements of two young men determined to live life to the fullest.”

Ten years or so later, Daniels wrote to Scott and recommended they move the jump date to age 50. He was six weeks from his 41st birthday when he died in Thailand, but few who knew Daniels give credence to the suicide theory.

There’s no doubt he was in danger from those who took control of governments in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, to whom the Hmong and the U.S. were the enemy.

“I know VP and Jerry both had $10,000 rewards on their melons from the communists,” brother Dan said.

His fluency in the Hmong language and intimate knowledge of the people and their loyalties made Daniels uniquely qualified for his post-war job in Thailand. He spent his last seven years deciding who qualified for resettlement and who didn’t.

On occasional trips home, and in frequent letters to Louise and Jack, Daniels characterized the job as rewarding and challenging. It was also extremely dangerous.

“I remember him saying, ‘I’m pissing off about 1,000 people a day or a week, I don’t know which, making these decisions,’ ” Lympus said.

Meanwhile, the explosive issue of the United States’ use of chemical agents in Southeast Asia was becoming front-page news.

“Jerry was a well-known disbeliever of ‘yellow rain’ and was outspoken about it, according to several jumpers,” wrote Fred Donner, a retired Defense Intelligence Agency officer who knew Daniels when both were young smokejumpers based out of Missoula in the late 1950s.

Perhaps, some speculate, that got him into trouble with his own government.

Mary Ellen Stubb, sextant at the Missoula Cemetery, rustled through the files to find the Jerry Daniels folder a couple of weeks ago.

She produced one piece of paper. Under the letterhead of the now defunct Mountain View Cemetery, 3035 Russell St., are scribbled heavily underlined words: “Sealed casket - hermetically sealed - sealed Forever - not to be opened.”

An accompanying fax from the American Embassy in Bangkok notes, “Thai mortuary officials have informed us that the embalmment of the remains are (sic) not expected to be completely satisfactory. Remains are in an advanced state of decomposition. Container seals should be carefully examined.”

It was not uncommon for caskets in the Vietnam area to be accompanied by a “sealed forever” command due to decomposition issues. Sealed “order” or not, the next of kin have a legal right to open the lid.

Louise Daniels, who died in 1996, worked with the Hmong in Montana for years as part of the International Rescue Committee. She was not interested in an exhumation, her sons say.

Out of respect for her wishes, the idea wasn’t seriously discussed while she was alive.

Even today, the youngest of her three surviving sons doesn’t like the idea.

“I don’t believe in doing it, no,” said Alan Daniels, a military veteran and custodian at the University of Montana. “My mother wouldn’t want it done, so that’s my deal. I’m one of these people who abide by his mother’s wishes.”

Stubb said there is perhaps one exhumation a year at the Missoula Cemetery. It requires a $5 to $10 permit from the health department and another $1,260 cemetery fee.

A more prohibitive expense, however, is the forensics testing, DNA or otherwise. Though the state crime lab is less than a mile from the Missoula Cemetery, it can’t conduct forensics testing unless submitted by law enforcement.

Lympus looked into hiring a private lab a few years back. He was told the cost of disinterment and DNA testing could climb as high as $10,000.

“That’s not cheap,” Jack Daniels said. “That’s kind of been the one thing that’s prevented us from really getting serious about it in the past.”

At one time, both Jack and Louise were in touch with H. Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire and former presidential candidate.

“He called my mother two or three times, and I ended up talking to him for a half-hour about this one time,” Jack said. “We thought maybe he’d pay for the whole thing. But Louise was still alive at that time, and we just kind of dropped it.”

Not long ago, Dan looked into selling a conservation easement on the 160 acres he owns in the mountains near Ovando. Though he could have reaped $80,000, he said, he shied away after seeing the pages of restrictions he would face.

So the casket of Jerry Daniels will remain underground for now. The questions still buzz above.

“It would be fun to put some closure on this thing,” said Jack. “If there were a way to exhume the body, get it tested and prove that it’s Jerry, and prove he died of carbon monoxide poisoning, there’s nothing more I can do. That would kind of end it as far as I’m concerned.

“The older I get, the more I worry about it getting done.”

Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com

Hmong allies considered Jerry Daniels a hero

The image smacks of Montana: Jerry Daniels is astride a leaping bull in the hot summer sun. Cheering onlookers are dwarfed by jagged mountains.

But this is December and those spectators wear battle gear. The bull is a Lao buffalo, and the mountains look down on a military stronghold in northern Laos.

As the story goes, it wasn’t Daniels’ finest moment. The man who came of age in Helmville and Missoula was unseated in a buck or two at the impromptu rodeo in the early 1970s.

Another American named Shep, who like Daniels had done some rodeoing back in the States, stayed on for three or four jumps. Daniels was devastated he’d been bettered.

Jerry Daniels was nuts. He made irreverence into an artform. He was a hard drinker who delighted in showing his Hmong friends how to have a good time.

Daniels, say those who knew him, was also as honest as the Vietnam War was long, unbelievably dedicated to his mother Louise and the Hmong he fought alongside, and perfect for the CIA.

“I would say he was a hero. He accomplished a whole lot more than I ever did,” said his brother, Jack, who has been called the world’s top distance running coach.

Jack Daniels won medals at both the 1956 and 1960 Olympic Games in the modern pentathlon.

“But that’s nothing compared to what Jerry did, I don’t think,” he said. “And he did it for such a long time. He was so committed to it.”

They called it Sky, the American base of operations for the secret war in Laos in the 1960s and 1970s.

“You ask what is Sky? Well, Jerry Daniels was Sky,” a Hmong officer says in the opening lines of the book, “Sky Is Falling.”

“He was raised in Montana, ‘Big Sky Country.’ Jerry was the adviser for the secret operation based in Long Cheng, Laos. So he named the American headquarters the Sky compound,” Nhia Vang (code name “Judy”) told author Gayle Morrison.

Daniels, who died mysteriously in Thailand in 1982 while working for the U.S. State Department, worked hand in hand with Gen. Vang Pao and his guerrilla army of Hmong against the Viet Cong and Pathet Lao.

Morrison, who published “Sky Is Falling” in 1999 and dedicated it to the memory of Jerry “Hog” Daniels, has since been working on a biography of Daniels.

“I’m now marching into year 11 on it. I have 41 chapters that I’m looking at scattered across the floor,” Morrison sighed last week from her home in Santa Ana, Calif.

“Sky Is Falling” told the stories of dozens of people who were in Laos the two weeks before it fell to the communists in May of 1975. Daniels and Vang Pao orchestrated the air evacuations of some 2,500 Hmong officers and their families from Long Cheng.

“Long Cheng,” wrote Morrison, “is a secluded, impossibly distant, wild and beautiful valley cut deeply into the rugged karst mountains of northern Laos.”

It was in that setting, as well as refugee camps in Thailand, that the man from Montana helped shape history.

It’s a story Montana should know.

After Jerry Daniels died, his family was beckoned to CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C. There they accepted three of the four top medals the CIA has to give.

Jack Daniels, Jerry’s oldest brother, has a photo of the family and CIA director William Casey, who has an arm hooked in Jack’s.

He said it was the only recognition that Jerry ever existed, let alone worked for the U.S. government for more than half his life. The date on one of the awards, Jack said, was “quite a few years before Jerry died. I don’t even think he knew about it.”

The family left with the request not to display the plaques for “a certain number of years. I can’t remember how many,” Jack said.

“Jerry Daniels has never been given the credit he deserves,” said Mary Ellen Stubb of Missoula. “He saved hundreds of lives and, because of the situation, he was shoved under the carpet. It was a story not to be spoken of. I think he needs some recognition for his accomplishments.”

As sextant of the Missoula Cemetery, Stubb first heard of Daniels’ heroics in 2004. One of his former smokejumper colleagues visited Daniels’ grave and talked about his life. Stubb coordinates the cemetery’s annual Stories and Stones tour, when live folks tell tales of dead ones at Halloween time. She wanted to learn more.

She located Todd Brandoff, a Vietnam veteran from Lolo who has forged friendships with some of the Hmong elders in Missoula and became acquainted with Daniels’ work through them. Brandoff and Lue Yang of Missoula, the interpretative liaison between Vang Pao and Daniels in Laos, presented the story at the cemetery in 2006.

Daniels, said Brandoff, “was there when history was made - a very, very important player in a war. Then he was a very important player in saving probably over a thousand lives after the evacuation by helping people establish their identities and flee from (Southeast Asia).”

Jerry Daniels was born in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1941, the fourth son of Bob and Louise Daniels. He was about 10 when the family moved from California to Helmville, where his parents ran a restaurant for a time and Bob had the Blackfoot telephone exchange.

The family moved to Missoula in the mid-1950s, though they’ve always maintained connections with the upper Blackfoot Valley, where Louise inherited a piece of land at Tupper Lake near Ovando.

Jerry embraced the outdoors, spending hours tromping the hills and fishing the rivers of his home state with his brothers and pals. At barely 17, he fudged his age on an application and became one of the youngest smokejumpers on record in Missoula.

Daniels graduated from Missoula County High School in 1959, and within a year was launched on his spectacular career, starting out as a “cargo kicker” for the CIA in Southeast Asia.

Bob Daniels died in 1971 and his oldest son, Ron (known as Dan), was killed in a car wreck a few years later near Missoula. Louise visited Jerry several times in Southeast Asia. She became involved locally with the refugee settlement program and was a warm friend to the displaced Hmong whom Jerry helped relocate here in the 1970s and 1980s.

Louise passed away in 1996, leaving three surviving sons - Jack, Kent (Dan) and Alan. Jack heads the running program at the Center for High Altitude Training at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Kent and Alan both live in the Missoula area.

“Jerry just did weird, funny things. He’d come up with oddball names,” Kent recalled.

A cat in Helmville, for no discernible reason, was instantly “Roseliff.” A bad odor smelled “like karap.” Anything big was “elephant.”

As boys, Kent and Jerry were in a crawlspace under their military strip home in Kennewick, Wash., when Kent picked up something that turned out to be a light switch for an automobile.

“Give me that truckgutt,” Jerry demanded.

“I’m like, ‘Where’d that come from?’ ” Kent said, chuckling at the memory.

At Missoula County High School in the 1950s, you didn’t curse, he said. But Jerry had a way around that. He changed a pet nickname, Farthog, to Farretthoag. The abbreviated form, Hoag, turned back into Hog when Jerry got to Laos. “Hog” was his code name at Sky.

Jack Daniels and his wife visited his brother in Thailand a few years before Jerry’s death.

Jerry took them into a holding camp, where there were hundreds of Hmong who had already been cleared to immigrate to the United States.

“The moment we sat foot inside that place, he was just mobbed,” Daniels said. “They thought so highly of him and assumed there was nothing he couldn’t do for them.”

Alas, that wasn’t true. Potential refugees to America had to be screened for health reasons and for political reasons, Jack said. “He was the guy who took care of them in the political arena.”

The Hmong’s complex family structure recognized children when the United States government didn’t.

“When we went into that holding camp,” said Jack, “the main concern of the Hmong who came up to him was, ‘I’ve got children out there, please get them. They’re out there. I’m already in the camp.’ ”

Jerry was offered chickens and trinkets and money.

“He was constantly being confronted with requests to get relatives into the United States with them,” said Jack.

Though Daniels was born in California, “he was an exemplary Montanan,” Morrison said. “The unique set of skills that he had learned as a smokejumper and as an avid woodsman were exactly what the CIA was looking for so they could send him and others into a really ugly, hostile terrain and environment and know they were going to survive.”

He was, said Morrison, “the right guy in the right place at the right time - and he recognized it. He was a unique guy, really dedicated to what he was doing. He felt it was right.”

Daniels had planned to retire to Montana any number of times before his death.

“But he was just continually tapped on the shoulder to stay another six months, stay another year,” said Morrison.

He had less than a year to go when he died.

“I know he was very, very, very much looking forward to it,” Morrison said. “He was so close to retiring and coming back home to Missoula. To end up coming home in a box, that’s the saddest thing of all.”

Congress must remedy its abysmal record of investigating the Bush administration on prisoner abuse and torture.

By Anthony D. Romero

It’s now a matter of public record: the Central Intelligence Agency has tortured detainees held in U.S. custody.

In the past week, the Bush administration announced that it is seeking the death penalty for six men allegedly involved with the 9/11 terrorist attacks; evidence against them was gathered through coercive, brutal interrogation tactics — including waterboarding. Only days earlier, CIA director Michael Hayden publicly defended the government’s use of this abhorrent practice, while both the White House and the director of national intelligence agreed that further use of waterboarding is acceptable if the president and attorney general approve.

It has been known for months that the CIA destroyed videotapes depicting its so-called enhanced interrogations of two al-Qaida suspects. With the government’s latest disclosures, we now know that those two detainees were waterboarded, as the tapes might have revealed. The tapes’ destruction potentially constitutes the crime of obstruction. By destroying them the CIA also disregarded a request from the 9/11 Commission for documentation that could provide information about the 9/11 attacks, and it appears to have flouted court orders — one of which was issued in response to the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit demanding information about the United States’ treatment of detainees overseas. The ACLU has asked that the CIA be held in contempt for violating the judge’s order by destroying the tapes.

Both Congress and the Justice Department have taken on the necessary task of investigating the tapes’ destruction. Unfortunately, Congress’ oversight record concerning the Bush administration’s abuses of power has been abysmal. The Justice Department’s investigation is also problematic. It is neither independent nor objective, and its scope, which fails to include the potential criminality of the underlying acts depicted on the tapes, is too narrow. A special counsel is urgently needed, now more than ever.

Not just activists and pundits feel that way. According to a recent Mellman Group survey commissioned by the ACLU, Americans of all political stripes overwhelmingly support the appointment of an independent prosecutor to investigate both the destruction of the CIA’s interrogation tapes and the possible use of torture by the agency. Every segment of the electorate — including clear majorities of Democrats (82 percent), independents (62 percent), and Republicans (51 percent) — want to hold this administration accountable for its role in the destruction of the torture tapes. It seems that human rights is still, thankfully, a nonpartisan concern.

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey’s choice to head up the investigation of the tape destruction is a veteran federal prosecutor from Connecticut, John H. Durham. By all accounts, Durham has a respectable reputation. Nevertheless, he ultimately reports to Mukasey, who to this day refuses to acknowledge that waterboarding is torture and has told Congress that the use of waterboarding by CIA interrogators “cannot possibly be the subject of a criminal” investigation.

What is needed is a special counsel who is granted the same authority as the attorney general in matters pertaining to the investigation — like Patrick J. Fitzgerald on the disclosure of a CIA officer’s identity. Considering what we already know of the Bush administration’s record on torture and prisoner abuse, investigative independence is essential.

The special counsel must also focus on the core issue of whether or not the interrogation techniques depicted on the tapes were illegal. What can’t get lost in the controversy surrounding the tapes’ destruction is the underlying issue of our government’s use of abusive and unlawful interrogation techniques — including waterboarding. The tapes are gone forever, but what must not disappear along with them is accountability for what they most surely would have revealed.

The widespread international belief that the United States government is systematically and willfully breaking the law, violating international treaties, and ignoring American values by engaging in torture is a deep stain on our country’s reputation. Americans want to know the facts and the extent to which their government acted with brazen disregard for basic human rights. Naming a special counsel would be a good and necessary start.

By Kerry Sheridan in Washington

US President George W. Bush plans to veto legislation passed by the Senate to bar the CIA from using harsh interrogation methods including waterboarding.

“The President will veto that Bill,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

“The United States needs the ability to interrogate effectively, within the law, captured al-Qaeda terrorists.”

“Bush doesn’t favour torture”

The Democratic-led Senate yesterday voted 51-45 in favor of a Bill calling for the Central Intelligence Agency to adopt the US Army Field Manual, which forbids waterboarding and other types of coercive interrogation methods.

However, the vote fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to overcome a presidential veto. The House of Representatives passed similar legislation in December.

Democratic New York Senator Charles Schumer said that if Bush “vetoes intelligence authorisation, he will be voting in favour of waterboarding.”

Future techniques not ruled out

Asked by a reporter if President Bush, who leaves office in 2009, would be labelled as the first US president who favored torture, Ms Perino rejected the assertion and dismissed Senator Schumer’s argument as simplistic.

“Across the board people will see, over time, that this was a president who put in place tools to protect the country against terrorists,” Ms Perino said.

“The president does not favour torture. The president favours making sure we do all these programs within the law,” she said, adding that “all the interrogations that have taken place in this country have been done in a legal way”.

Ms Perino said the United States does not currently use waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique denounced by rights groups as torture, even though the CIA has admitted using the technique in the past.

She reiterated the administration’s assertion last week that it would not rule out the use of such techniques in the future.

“Currently under the law it is not (allowed),” she said.

“As we said last week as well, we are not going to talk about what may or may not be lawful in the future.”

Manual too weak

The Senate Bill would limit the CIA and other intelligence agencies to the 19 interrogation techniques outlined in the military’s manual. Waterboarding is not among them.

Ms Perino said the intelligence community’s view is that the Army Field Manual sets an inappropriate standard for seasoned CIA interrogators who are working to extract information from sophisticated militant operatives.

“Today with this Bill that they are sending to us they would basically repeal the terrorist interrogation program in favor of something that will definitely weaken our ability to protect the country,” Ms Perino said.

McCain votes against Bill

Rival Democratic White House hopefuls Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were on the road campaigning and did not take part in the vote Wednesday.

The likely Republican nominee, Arizona Senator John McCain, voted against the Bill. The former prisoner of war however said that his vote was consistent with his anti-torture stance.

“We always supported allowing the CIA to use extra measures,” he said.

“I believe waterboarding is illegal and should be banned,” Senator McCain said.

BBC

A US judge has dismissed a case alleging that a subsidiary of Boeing illegally helped the CIA fly terror suspects abroad on rendition flights.

The American Civil Liberties Union brought the case against Jeppesen Dataplan, saying it “falsified flight plans… to avoid public scrutiny”.

But a San Francisco judge halted the case, as the CIA director had urged.

“The very subject matter of this case is a state secret,” Judge James Ware wrote in a ruling.

CIA director Michael Hayden had earlier urged the judge to dismiss the case because he said that covert operations overseas could be exposed.

CIA flights

ACLU brought the case on behalf of five men who alleged the CIA had flown them to foreign prisons, where they were interrogated and tortured.

The plaintiffs were an Ethiopian living in the UK, an Italian working in Pakistan, an Egyptian citizen living in Sweden, a Yemeni, and an Iraqi who was a British resident.

The lawsuit against Jeppesen had claimed the services they provided were crucial to the flights.

However, Jeppesen had said it could not confirm if it was involved with the flights.

A report approved by a European Parliament committee last year said more than 1,000 covert CIA flights had crossed European airspace or stopped at European airports in the four years after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Jeppesen’s participation allegedly included securing necessary landing and overflight permits for the flights between the US, Pakistan, Ireland, Cyprus, Morocco, and Afghanistan.

Irish Sun

The US Senate has voted to prevent the CIA from using torture-like waterboarding and other forms of coercion on prisoners, completing work on a bill already passed by the other chamber in December.

The bill, passed in a 51 to 45 vote Wednesday, will now be sent to the White House, the Washington Post reported online. US President George W. Bush has threatened to veto the measure.

The bill requires the CIA and other intelligence agencies to follow the US army regulations in questioning prisoners, the Washington Post reported online.

In intense debate over the past two weeks, the White House has refused to rule out the possibility of using waterboarding, which simulates drowning.

CIA director Michael Hayden has admitted to Congress that the agency used the technique to get information from three top Al Qaeda operatives, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sep 11, 2001 terrorist attacks who was captured in Pakistan in 2003.

Congress previously banned waterboarding and other harsh tactics, but the Bush administration said the law did not apply to intelligence agencies.

The top US law enforcement official, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, has also refused to tell the Senate whether he believed waterboarding is legal or not.

‘If this were an easy question, I would not be reluctant to offer my views on this subject,’ Mukasey said.

Lawmakers have based the contents of the bill on the contents of the US Army’s handbook for interrogation techniques, which expressly prohibits mock drowning. The House version of the bill banned sexual humiliation, mock executions, the use of attack dogs and the withholding of food and medical care, the report said.

WRH 

“You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month.” - CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. “Katherine The Great,” by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991)

As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press in known to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage of knowing the bias is present, and to adjust for it. In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself.  

The Alex Constantine Article
  Tales from the Crypt

The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA’s Operation MOCKINGBIRD

by Alex Constantine

Who Controls the Media?

Soulless corporations do, of course. Corporations with grinning,
  double-breasted executives, interlocking directorates, labor squabbles
  and flying capital. Dow. General Electric. Coca-Cola. Disney.
  Newspapers should have mastheads that mirror the world: The
  Westinghouse Evening Scimitar, The Atlantic-Richfield Intelligentser .
  It is beginning to dawn on a growing number of armchair ombudsmen that
  the public print reports news from a parallel universe - one that has
  never heard of politically-motivated assassinations, CIA-Mafia banking
  thefts, mind control, death squads or even federal agencies with
  secret budgets fattened by cocaine sales - a place overrun by lone
  gunmen, where the CIA and Mafia are usually on their best behavior. In
  this idyllic land, the most serious infraction an official can commit
  __is a the employment of a domestic servant with (shudder) no
  residency status.

This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of MOCKINGBIRD.

It was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid period of the cold
  war, when the CIA began a systematic infiltration of the corporate
  media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news
  outlets.

In this period, the American intelligence services competed with
  communist activists abroad to influence European labor unions. With or
  without the cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner, an
  undercover State Department official assigned to the Foreign Service,
  rounded up students abroad to enter the cold war underground of covert
  operations on behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination. Philip
  Graham, __a graduate of the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg,
  PA, then publisher of the Washington Post., was taken under Wisner’s
  wing to direct the program code-named Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

“By the early 1950s,” writes formerVillage Voice reporter Deborah
  Davis in Katharine the Great, “Wisner ‘owned’ respected members of the
  New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus
  stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA
  analyst.” The network was overseen by Allen Dulles, a templar for
  German and American corporations who wanted their points of view
  represented in the public print. Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25
  newspapers and wire agencies consenting to act as organs of CIA
  propaganda. Many of these were already run by men with reactionary
  views, among them William Paley (CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry
  Luce (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).

Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been
  appalled to f__ind in FOIA documents that agents boasting in CIA
  office memos of their pride in having placed “important assets” inside
  every major news publication in the country. It was not until 1982
  that the Agency openly admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have
  acted as case officers to agents in the field.

“World War III has begun,” Henry’s Luce’s Life declared in March,
  1947. “It is in the opening skirmish stage already.” The issue
  featured an excerpt of a book by James Burnham, who called for the
  creation of an “American Empire,” “world-dominating in political
  power, set up at least in part through coercion (probably including
  war, but certainly the threat of war) and in which one group of people
  … would hold more than its equal share of power.”

George Seldes, the famed anti-fascist media critic, drew down on Luce
  in 1947, explaining tha__t “although avoiding typical Hitlerian
  phrases, the same doctrine of a superior people taking over the world
  and ruling it, began to appear in the press, whereas the organs of
  Wall Street were much more honest in favoring a doctrine inevitably
  leading to war if it brought greater commercial markets under the
  American flag.”

On the domestic front, an abiding relationship was struck between the
  CIA and William Paley, a wartime colonel and the founder of CBS. A
  firm believer in “all forms of propaganda” to foster loyalty to the
  Pentagon, Paley hired CIA agents to work undercover at the behest of
  his close friend, the busy grey eminence of the nation’s media, Allen
  Dulles. Paley’s designated go-between in his dealings with the CIA was
  Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961.

The CIA’s assimilation of old guard fascists was overseen by the
  Operations Coordination Board, directed by C.D. Jackson, formerly an
  executive of Time magazine and Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Cold
  War Strategy. In 1954 he was succeeded by Nelson Rockefeller, who quit
  a year later, disgusted at the administration’s political infighting.
  Vice President Nixon succeeded Rockefeller as the key cold war
  strategist.

“Nixon,” writes John Loftus, a former attorney for the Justice
  Department’s Office of Special Investigations, took “a small boy’s
  delight in the arcane tools of the intelligence craft - the hidden
  microphones, the ‘black’ propaganda.” Nixon especially enjoyed his
  visit to a Virginia training camp to observe Nazis in the “special
  forces” drilling at covert operations.

One of the fugitives recruited by the American intelligence
  underground was heroin smuggler Hubert von Blücher, the son of A
  German ambassador. Hubert often bragged that that he was trained by
  the Abwehr, the German military intelligence division, while still a
  civilian in his twenties. He served in a recon unit of the German Army
  until forced out for medical reasons in 1944, according to his wartime
  records. He worked briefly as an assistant director for Berlin-Film on
  a movie entitled One Day …, and finished out the war flying with the
  Luftwaffe, but not to engage the enemy - his mission was the smuggling
  of Nazi loot out of the country. His exploits were, in part, the
  subject of Sayer and Botting’s Nazi Gold, an account of the knockover
  of the Reichsbank at the end of the war.

In 1948 he flew the coop to Argentina. Posing as a photographer named
  Huberto von Bleucher Corell, he immediately paid court to Eva Peron,
  presenting her with an invaluable Gobelin tapestry (a selection from
  the wealth of artifacts confiscated by the SS from Europe’s Jews?).
  Hubert then met with Martin Bormann at the Hotel Plaza to deliver
  German marks worth $80 million. The loot financed the birth of the
  National Socialist Party in Argentina, among other forms of Nazi
  revival.

In 1951, Hubert migrated northward and took a job at the Color
  Corporation of America in Hollywood. He eked out a living writing
  scripts for the booming movie industry. His voice can be heard on a
  film set in the Amazon, produced by Walt Disney. Nine years later he
  returned to Buenos Aires, then Düsseldorf, West Germany, and
  established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical
  warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Düsseldorf
  in 1982, von Blücher boasted to journalists, “I am chief shareholder
  of Pan American Airways. I am the best friend of Howard Hughes. The
  Beach Hotel in Las Vegas is 45 percent financed by me. I am thus the
  biggest financier ever to appear in the Arabian Nights tales dreamed
  up by these people over their second bottle of brandy.”

Not really. Two the biggest financiers to stumble from the drunken
  dreams of world-moving affluence were, in their time, Moses Annenberg,
  publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and his son Walter , the
  CIA/mob-anchored publisher of the TV Guide. Like most American
  high-rollers, Annenberg lived a double life. Moses, his father, was a
  scion of the Capone mob. Both Moses and Walter were indicted in 1939
  for tax evasions totalling many millions of dollars - the biggest case
  in the history of the Justice Department. Moses pled guilty and agreed
  to pay the government $8 million and settle $9 million in assorted tax
  claims, penalties and interest debts. Moses received a three-year
  sentence. He died in Lewisburg Penitentiary.

Walter Annenbeg, the TV Guide magnate, was a lofty Republican. On the
  campaign trail in April, 1988, George Bush flew into Los Angeles to
  woo Reagan’s kitchen cabinet. “This is the topping on the cake,”
  Bush’s regional campaign director told the Los Angeles Times. The Bush
  team met at Annenberg’s plush Rancho Mirage estate at Sunnylands,
  California. It was at the Annenberg mansion that Nixon’s cabinet was
  chosen, and the state’s social and contributor registers built over a
  quarter-century of state political dominance by Ronald Reagan, whose
  acting career was launched by Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

The commercialization of television, coinciding with Reagan’s
  recruitment by the Crusade for Freedom, a CIA front, presented the
  intelligence world with unprecedented potential for sowing propaganda
  and even prying in the age of Big Brother. George Orwell glimpsed the
  possibilities when he installed omniscient video surveillance
  technology in 1948, a novel rechristened 1984 for the first edition
  published in the U.S. by Harcourt, Brace. Operation Octopus, according
  to federal files, was in full swing by 1948, a surveillance program
  that turned any television set with tubes into a broadcast
  transmitter. Agents of Octopus could pick up audio and visual images
  with the equipment as far as 25 miles away.

Hale Boggs was investigating Operation Octopus at the time of his
  disappearance in the midst of the Watergate probe.

In 1952, at MCA, Actors’ Guild president Ronald Reagan - a screen idol
  recruited by MOCKINGBIRD’s Crusade for Freedom to raise funds for the
  resettlement of Nazis in the U.S., according to Loftus - signed a
  secret waiver of the conflict-of-interest rule with the mob-controlled
  studio, in effect granting it a labor monopoly on early television
  programming. In exchange, MCA made Reagan a part owner. Furthermore,
  historian C. Vann Woodward, writing in the New York Times, in 1987,
  reported that Reagan had “fed the names of suspect people in his
  organization to the FBI secretly and regularly enough to be assigned
  ‘an informer’s code number, T-10.’ His FBI file indicates intense
  collaboration with producers to ‘purge’ the industry of subversives.”

No one ever turned a suspicious eye on Walter Cronkite, a former
  intelligence officer and in the immediate postwar period UPI’s Moscow
  correspondent. Cronkite was lured to CBS by Operation MOCKINGBIRD’s
  Phil Graham, according to Deborah Davis.

Another television conglomerate, Cap Cities, rose like a horror-film
  simian from CIA and Mafia heroin operations. Among other
  organized-crime Republicans, Thomas Dewey and his neighbor Lowell
  Thomas threw in to launch the infamous Resorts International, the
  corporate front for Lansky’s branch of the federally-sponsored mob
  family and the corporate precursor to Cap Cities. Another of the
  investors was James Crosby, a Cap Cities executive who donated
  $100,000 to Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. This was the year that
  Resorts bought into Atlantic City casino interests. Police in New
  jersey attempted, with no success, to spike the issuance of a gambling
  license to the company, citing Mafia ties.

In 1954, this same circle of investors, all Catholics, founded the
  broadcasting company notorious for overt propagandizing and general
  spookiness. The company’s chief counsel was OSS veteran William Casey,
  who clung to his shares by concealing them in a blind trust even after
  he was appointed CIA director by Ronald Reagan in 1981.

“Black radio” was the phrase CIA critic David Wise coined in The
  Invisible Government to describe the agency’s intertwining interests
  in the emergence of the transistor radio with the entrepreneurs who
  took to the airwaves. “Daily, East and West beam hundreds of
  propaganda broadcasts at each other in an unrelenting babble of
  competition for the minds of their listeners. The low-price transistor
  has given the hidden war a new importance,” enthused one foreign
  correspondent.

A Hydra of private foundations sprang up to finance the propaganda
  push. One of them, Operations and Policy Research, Inc. (OPR),
  received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CIA through private
  foundations and trusts. OPR research was the basis of a television
  series that aired in New York and Washington, D.C. in 1964, Of People
  and Politics, a “study” of the American political system in 21 weekly
  installments.

In Hollywood, the visual cortex of The Beast, the same CIA/Mafia
  combination that formed Cap Cities sank its claws into the film
  studios and labor unions. Johnny Rosselli was pulled out of the Army
  during the war by a criminal investigation of Chicago mobsters in the
  film industry. Rosselli, a CIA asset probably assassinated by the CIA,
  played sidekick to Harry Cohn, the Columbia Pictures mogul who visited
  Italy’s Benito Mussolini in 1933, and upon his return to Hollywood
  remodeled his office after the dictator’s. The only honest job
  Rosselli ever had was assistant purchasing agent (and a secret
  investor) at Eagle Lion productions, run by Bryan Foy, a former
  producer for 20th Century Fox. Rosselli, Capone’s representative on
  the West Coast, passed a small fortune in mafia investments to Cohn.
  Bugsy Seigel pooled gambling investments with Billy Wilkerson,
  publisher of the Hollywood Reporter.

In the 1950s, outlays for global propaganda climbed to a full third of
  the CIA’s covert operations budget. Some 3, 000 salaried and contract
  CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. The cost
  of disinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265
  million a year by 1978, a budget larger than the combined expenditures
  of Reuters, UPI and the AP news syndicates.

In 1977, the Copely News Service admitted that it worked closely with
  the intelligence services - in fact, 23 employees were full-time
  employees of the Agency.

Most consumers of the corporate media were - and are - unaware of the
  effect that the salting of public opinion has on their own beliefs. A
  network anchorman in time of national crisis is an instrument of
  psychological warfare in the MOCKINGBIRD media. He is a creature from
  the national security sector’s chamber of horrors. For this reason
  consumers of the corporate press have reason to examine their basic
  beliefs about government and life in the parallel universe of these
  United States.

How the Washington Post Censors the News
[Note the highlighted paragraph]

How the Washington Post Censors the News

A Letter to the Washington Post
by Julian C. Holmes
_________________________________________________________________

April 25, 1992
Richard Harwood, Ombudsman
The Washington Post
1150 15th Street NW
Washington, DC 20071

Dear Mr. Harwood,

Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit
of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government
“conspiracy”, and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused
from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various
other political and social sports events, editors and reporters
scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest
single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government
stability — the dreaded “CONSPIRACY THEORY”!!

It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted
by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to
Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs
spun by the wacko “CONSPIRACY THEORISTS”.

Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra.

Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule
the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had
conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack
Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the
Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring
the Anderson column before printing it (*2).

But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra
conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for
law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S.
arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the
CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets
(*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work
on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post
contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of
conspiracy and by publishing false information about the
drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on
Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman
Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only
a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from
Rangel (*5).

Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry’s Subcommittee on Terrorism,
Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government
complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug
conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and
retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat
to domestic tranquility, the “October Surprise” conspiracy (*7). But
close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and
then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with
the same title, “October Surprise” (*8). Honegger was a member of the
Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick,
professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the
staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter,
and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published
their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to
Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages
until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was
to quash the possibility of a pre-election release(an October
surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for
President Carter.

Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In
October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose “An Election Held
Hostage”; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a
conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former
hostages, challenged the Congress to “make a full, impartial
investigation” of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported
the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself
which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10).
On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives
begrudgingly authorized an “October Surprise” investigation by a task
force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN). who had chaired
the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named
as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI
when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11).

Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing
the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver
North’s lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he
derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to
answer questions about Contra support activities of government
officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John

Hull (from Hamilton’s home state). was charged in Costa Rica with
“international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation’s
security”, Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to
intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling
Hull’s case “in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican
relations” (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the
Costa Rican response that declared Hull’s case to be “in as good hands
as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all
citizens” (*15).

Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy
theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves
government or corporate conspiracies:

In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery,
surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass
U.S.citizens in the 60’s (*16).

The CIA’s Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by “destroying
crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and
conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other
leaders” (*17).

“Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of
the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben…of
Germany. …By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the
United States was effectively prevented from developing or
producing [fo rWorld War-II] any substantial amount of
synthetic rubber,” said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin
(*18).

U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about
dosages of radiation “almost certain to produce thyroid
abnormalities or cancer” that contaminated people residing near
the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19).

Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in
getting around to cleaning up the Nation’s dangerous nuclear
weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the
nuclear industry’s secret public relations strategy (*21).

“The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some
twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused
the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning
the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has
continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates
which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat,
while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable
eposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and
the workplace.” (*22).

The Bush Administration coverup of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq
“is yet another example of the President’s people conspiring to
keep both Congress and the American people in the dark” (*23).

If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of
doing business in this country.

Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf
War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24).

Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend
$100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated
history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the
Smithsonian Institution’s “fusion of the two worlds”, (*26).
rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish
invasion, like “anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death” (*27).

Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from
the INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer
software which “now point to a widespread conspiracy
implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of
INSLAW’s technology”, says former U.S. Attorney General Elliot
Richardson (*28).

Or Watergate.

Or the “largest bank fraud in world financial history” (*29), where
the White House knew of the criminal activities at “the Bank of
Crooks and Criminals International” (BCCI) (*30), where U.S.
intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where
bribery of prominent American public officials “was a way of
doing business” (*32).

Or the 1949 conviction of “GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of
California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for
criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with
gas- and diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of
buses and related products to transportation companies
throughout the country” [in, among others, the cities of New
York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake
City, and Los Angeles] (*33).

Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT).
and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety
defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by
General Motors in the early 60’s (*34).

Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield
intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings
of the Shield’s hazards and which “stonewalled, deceived,
covered up, and

covered up the coverups…[thus inflicting] on women a
worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections.” (*35).

Or that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company and
the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding
the unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all
364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974
(*36).

Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug
Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who
ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who
acted “in concert with each other in the testing and marketing
of DES for miscarriage purposes” (*37).

Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the
cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of
their savings. This “arrogant disregard from the White House,
Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of
the American people” will cost U.S. tapayers many hundreds of
billions of dollars (*38).

Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers,Federal Pacific, and General
Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to
fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial
equipment (*39).

Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT).
officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs
(*40).

Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of
medical problemsrelating to asbestos (*41).

Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies “agreed
not to engage in any effective price competition” (*42).

Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to
cover up the nature of our decades-old war against the people
of Nicaragua

a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government
applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into
a more repressive force (*43).

Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in
the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions,
and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of
the legitimately elected government and the assassination of
President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44).

Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance
terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola’s
plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about
these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA
Director George Bush’s subsequent cover up of this
U.S.-sponsored terrorism (*46).

Or President George Bush’s consorting with the Pentagon to invade
Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the
United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the
Panama Canal Treaties (*47).

Or the “gross antitrust violations” (*48) and the conspiracy of
American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to
strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the
British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the
subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime
Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49).

Or the CIA-planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice
Lumumba (*50).

Or the deliberate and wilful efforts of President George Bush,
Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S.
Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress
to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the
presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51).

Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to
head the CIA, in the face of “unmistakable evidence that Gates
lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal” (*52).

Or “How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland’s Solidarity
Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism” (*53).

Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban
the use of USAID funds by any country “for the promotion of
birth control or abortion” (*54).

Or “the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common
purpose in Central America” (*55).

Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer
Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design “programs to build
civilian-military cooperation” at the U.S. Army School of the
Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine
soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are
graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel
(*56).

Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration
to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter
who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility
(*57).

Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nxion and the Government of
South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the
1968 U.S. presidential election (*58).

Or the pandemic coverups of police violence (*59).

Or the always safe-to-cite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60).

Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish The
Satanic Verses in paperback (*61).

Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post
offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a
really important conspiracy that, let’s say, benefits big business or big
government.

Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA’s 1953 overthrow of
the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our
illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the
Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates
corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62). When the
camouflage of such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in
the conspiring officials can erode — depending on how seriously the
citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust.
Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to
see as a real threat to its corporate security.

Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on
Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK”, which reexamines the U.S. Government’s
official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting
alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story
of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s unsuccessful
prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection
with the assassination. And the movie proposes that the Kennedy
assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not
be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us
from our war against Vietnam.

The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along
lines suggested by “JFK”. Senior Post journalists like Charles
Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil McCombs, and Michael
Isikoff, have been called up to man the bulwarks against public
sentiment which has never supported the government’s
non-conspiratorial assassination thesis. In spite of the facts that
the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that “both
the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission” (*63)
and that the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on
Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed “as a
result of a conspiracy” (*64), a truly astounding number of Post
stories have been used as vehicles to discredit “JFK” as just another
conspiracy (*65).

Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen
Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George
Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had
second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that
there is no historical justification for this idea. Seasoned
journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L.
Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have
each authored defense of the “JFK” thesis that Kennedy was not
enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just
continues ranting against the possibility of a high-level
assassination conspiracy while offering little justification for its
arguments.

An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable
behavior is George Lardner Jr’s contribution to the Post’s campaign
against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie
was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months
before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first draft
of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the
Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this
article, (*69). Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with hostile
statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner
does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a
U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government
witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted
under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television
reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government’s case
against Garrison was a fraud (*70). The Post’s 1973 account of the
Garrison acquittal mentions this controversy, but when I recently
asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered
it (*71).

Two weeks after his first “JFK” article, Lardner blustered his way
through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early
draft ofthe movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing
Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer “of gothic fiction”.

When the movie was released in December, Lardner “reviewed” it (*73).
He again ridiculed the film’s thesis that following the Kennedy
assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy’s plans to
de-escalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by
Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was
written before the assassination, and that it “was a continuation of
Kennedy’s policy”. In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before
the assassination by McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy’s Assistant for National
Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it.
Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version
provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) — facts that
Lardner avoided.

The Post’s crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest:

The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for
the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post
(*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful
discussion of the Warren Commission’s secret doubts about both the FBI
and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing
co-conspirators at field stations to counteract the “new wave of books
and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission’s findings…[and]
conspiracy theories …[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our
organization” and to “discuss the publicity problem with liaison and
friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors “and to
“employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the
critics. …Book reviews and feature articles are particularly
appropriate for this purpose. …The aim of this dispatch is to
provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the
conspiracy theorists…” (*77).

In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great,
the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper’s close ties
with Washington’s powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA.

Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim
that Bradlee had “produced CIA material” (*78). Understandably
sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis’ publisher
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ,”Miss Davis is lying …I never produced
CIA material …what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to
put your company in that special little group of publishers who don’t
give a shit for the truth”. The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the
book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of
contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis
published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated
Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing cold-war/CIA
propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his
association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently
taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by
Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80).

And it’s not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work.

Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham “believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice: the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA” (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, “It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from” (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by “refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictment was announced …for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica” (*83).

Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the
availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA
man recalls, “You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call
girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month” (*84). One may wish to
consider Philip Graham’s philosophy along with a more recent statement
from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the
Washington Post. In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs.
Graham said: “A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent
terrorists from using the media as a platform fortheir views. … The
point is that we generally know when we are being manipulated, and
we’ve learned better how and where to draw the line, though the
decisions are often difficult” (*85).

Today, the Post and its world of big business are apparently terrified
that our elite and our high-level public officials may be exposed as
conspirators behind Contra drug-smuggling, October Surprise, or the
assassination of President Kennedy. This fear is truly remarkable in
that, like most of us and like most institutions, the Post runs its
business as a conspiracy of like-minded entrepreneurs — a conspiracy
“to act or work together toward the same result or goal” (*86). But
where the Post really parts company from just plain people is when it
pretends that conspiracies associated with big business or government
are “coincidence”. Post reporter Lardner vents the frustration
inherent in having to maintain this dichotomy. He lashes out at Oliver
Stone and suggests that Stone may actually believe that the Post’s
opposition to Stone’s movie is a “conspiracy”. Lardner assures us that
Stone’s complaints are “groundless and paranoid and smack of
McCarthyism” (*87).

So how does the Post justify devoting so much energy to ridiculing those who
investigate conspiracies?

The Post has answers: people revert to conspiracy theories because
they need something “neat and tidy” (*88) that “plugs a gap no other
generally accepted theory fills’, (*89. and “coincidence …is always
the safest and most likely explanation for any conjunction of curious
circumstances …” (*90).

And what does this response mean? It means that “coincidence theory”
is what the Post espouses when it would prefer not to admit to a
conspiracy. In other words, some things just “happen”. And, besides,
conspiracy to do certain things would be a crime; “coincidence” is a
safer bet.

Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, who, it is rumored, serves as
Executive Director of the Benevolent Protective Order of Coincidence
Theorists, (*91) recently issued a warning about presidential
candidates “who have begun to mutter about a press conspiracy”.
Ordinarily, Harwood would simply dismiss these charges as “symptoms of
the media paranoia that quadrennially engulfs members of the American
political class” (*92). But a fatal mistake was made by the mutterers;
they used the “C” word against the PRESS! And Harwood exploded his
off-the-cuff comment into an entire column — ending it with:”We are
the new journalists, immersed too long, perhaps, in the cleansing
waters of political conformity. But conspirators we ain’t”.

Distinguished investigative journalist Morton Mintz, a 29-year veteran
of the Washington Post, now chairs the Fund for Investigative
Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote “A
Reporter Looks Back in Anger — Why the Media Cover Up Corporate
Crime”. Therein he discussed the difficulties in convincing editors to
accept important news stories. He illustrated the article with his own
experiences at the Post, where he says he was known as “the biggest
pain in the ass in the office” (*93).

Would Harwood argue that grief endured by journalists at the hands of editors
is a matter of random coincidence?

And that such policy as Mintz described is made independently by
editors without influence from fellow editors or from management?
Would Harwood have us believe that at the countless office “meetings”
in which news people are ever in attendance, there is no discussion of
which stories will run and which ones will find inadequate space? That
there is no advanced planning for stories or that there are no
cooperative efforts among the staff? Or that in the face of our
news-media “grayout” of presidential candidate Larry Agran, (*94) a
Post journalist would be free to give news space to candidate Agran
equal to that the Post lavishes on candidate Clinton? Let’s face it:
these possibilities are about as likely as Barbara Bush entertaining
guests at a soup kitchen.

Would Harwood have us believe that media critic and former Post
Ombudsman Ben Bagdikian is telling less than the truth in his account
of wire-service control over news: “The largely anonymous men who
control the syndicate and wire service copy desks and the central wire
photo machines determine at a single decision what millions will see
and hear. …there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers
preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press
agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches
untouched out the front door as ‘news’” (*95).

When he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge
Clarence Thomas violated U.S. law when he failed to remove himself
from a case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million
judgment against the Ralston Purina Company (*96). Ralston Purina, the
animal feed empire, is the family fortune of Thomas’ mentor, Senator
John Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance
to 56 words buried in the middle of a 1200-word article (*97). Would
Harwood have us believe that the almost complete blackout on this
matter by the major news media and the U.S. Senate was a matter of
coincidence? Could a Post reporter have written a story about Ralston
Purina if she had wanted to? Can a brick swim?

Or take the fine report produced last September by Ralph Nader’s
Public Citizen. Titled All the Vice President’s Men, it documents “How
the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health,
Safety, and Environmental Programs”. Three months later, Post
journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward published “The President’s
Understudy”, a seven-part series on Vice President Quayle. Although
this series does address Quayle’s role with the Competitiveness
Council, its handling of the Council’s disastrous impact on America is
inadequate. It is 40,000 words of mostly aimless chatter about Quayle
memorabilia: youth, family, college record, Christianity, political
aspirations, intellectual aspirations, wealthy friends, government
associates, golf, travels, wife Marilyn, and net worth — revealing
little about Quayle’s abilities, his understanding of society’s
problems, or his thoughts about justice and freedom, and never
mentioning the comprehensive Nader study of Quayle’s record in the
Bush Administration (*98).

Now, did Broder or did Woodward forget about the Nader study? Or did
both of them forget? Or did one, or the other, or both decide not to
mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever
discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to
publish such a barren set of articles because it would enhance their
reputations? How did management feel about the use of precious news
space for such frivolity? Is it possible that so many pages were
dedicated to this twaddle without people “acting or working together
toward the same result or goal”? (*99) Do crocodiles fly?

On March 20, front-page headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New
York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post read respectively:

TSONGAS DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE CLEARING CLINTON’S PATH

TSONGAS ABANDONS CAMPAIGN LEAVING CLINTON CLEAR PATH TOWARD SHOWDOWN
WITH BUSH

TSONGAS CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON

TSONGAS EXIT CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON

This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions
of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from
that of any other cartel — like oil, diamond, energy, (*100) or
manufacturing cartels, a cartel being “a combination of independent
commercial enterprises designed to limit competition” (*101).

The Washington Post editorial page carries the heading:

AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER

Is it? Of course not. There probably is no such thing. Does the Post
“conspire” to keep its staff and its newspaper from wandering too far
from the safety of mediocrity? The Post would respond that the
question is absurd. In that I am not privy to the Post’s telephone
conversations, I can only speculate on how closely the media elite
must monitor the staff. But we all know how few micro-seconds it takes
a new reporter to learn what subjects are taboo and what are “safe”,
and that experienced reporters don’t have to ask.

What is more important, however, than speculating about how the Post
communicates within its own corporate structure and with other members
of the cartel, is to document and publicize what the Post does in
public, namely, how it shapes and censors the news.

Sincerely,

Julian C. Holmes

Copies to: Public-spirited citizens, both inside and outside the news
media, And - maybe a few others.

Notes to Letter of April 25, 1992:

1. Mark Hosenball, “The Ultimate Conspiracy”, Washington Post,
September 11, 1988, p.C1

2a. Julian Holmes, Letter to Washington Post Ombudsman Richard
Harwood, June 4,1991. Notes that the Post censored, from the
Anderson/Van Atta column, references to the Christic Institute and to
Robert Gates.

2b. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, “Iran-Contra Figure Dodges
Extradition”, Washington Merry-Go-Round, United Feature Syndicate, May
26, 1991. This is the column submitted to the Post (see note 2a)..

2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, “The Man Washington Doesn’t Want
to Extradite”, Washington Post, May 26, 1991. The column (see note
2b). as it appeared in the Post (see note 2a)..

3a. Case No. 86-1146-CIV-KING, Amended Complaint for RICO Conspiracy,
etc., United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Tony
Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull et al., October 3, 1986.

3b. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, “Reports: Contras Send Drugs
to U.S.”, Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 1986.

3c. Neal Matthews, “I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam” (based on interviews
with Robert Plumlee, contra resupply pilot)., San Diego Reader, April
5, 1990.

4. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press,
1987.

5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics,
University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179-181.

5b. David S. Hilzenrath, “Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras
to Drug Smuggling”, Washington Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07.

5c. Partial correction to the Washington Post of July 22, Washington
Post, July 24,1987, p.A3.

5d. The Washington Post declined to publish SubCommittee Chairman
Rangel’s Letter- to-the-Editor of July 22, 1987. It was printed in the
Congressional Record on August 6, 1987, p.E3296-7.

6a. Michael Kranish, “Kerry Says US Turned Blind Eye to Contra-Drug
Trail”, Boston Globe, April 10, 1988.

6b. Mary McGrory, “The Contra-Drug Stink”, Washington Post, April 10,
1988, p.B1. 6c. Robert Parry with Rod Nordland, “Guns for Drugs?
Senate Probers Trace an Old Contra Connection to George Bush’s
Office”, Newsweek, May 23, 1988, p.22.

6d. Dennis Bernstein, “Iran-Contra — The Coverup Continues”, The
Progressive, November 1988, p.24.

6e. “Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy”, A Report Prepared by
the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations
of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December
1988.

7a. Mark Hosenball, “If It’s October … Then It’s Time for an Iranian
Conspiracy Theory”, Washington Post, October 9, 1988, p.D1.

7b. Mark Hosenball, “October Surprise! Redux! The Latest Version of
the 1980 ‘Hostage- Deal’ Story Is Still Full of Holes”, Washington
Post, April 21, 1991,p.B2.

8a. Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, New York: Tudor, 1989.

8b. Gary Sick, October Surprise, New York: Times Books, Random House,
1991.

9a. Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, “An Election Held Hostage”,
Playboy, October 1988, p.73.

9b. Robert Parry and Robert Ross, “The Election Held Hostage”,
FRONTLINE, WGBH-TV,April 16, 1991.

10a. Reuter, “Ex-Hostages Seek Probe By Congress”, Washington Post,
June 14,1991,p.A4.

10b. “An Election Held Hostage?”, Conference, Dirksen Senate Office
Building Auditorium, Washington DC, June 13, 1991; Sponsored by The
Fund For New Priorities in America, 171 Madison Avenue, New York, NY,
10016.

11a. David Brown and Guy Gugliotta, “House Approves Inquiry Into
‘OctoberSurprise’”, Washington Post, February 6, 1992, p.A11.

11b. Jack Colhoun, “Lawmakers Lose Nerve on October Surprise”, The
Guardian, December 11, 1991, p.7.

11c. Jack Colhoun, “October Surprise Probe Taps BCCI Lawyer”, The
Guardian, February 26, 1992, p.3.

12. See note 5a, p.180-1.

13a. See note 4, p.229, 240-1.

13b. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the
Iran-Contra Affair, Senate Report No. 100-216, House Report No.
100-433, November 1987, p.139-141.

14a. Letter to His Excellency Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of the
Republic of Costa Rica; from Members of the U.S. Congress David
Dreier, Lee Hamilton, Dave McCurdy, Dan Burton, Mary Rose Oakar, Jim
Bunning, Frank McCloskey, Cass Ballenger, Peter Kostmayer, Jim Bates,
Douglas Bosco, James Inhofe, Thomas Foglietta, Rod Chandler, Ike
Skelton, Howard Wolpe, Gary Ackerman, Robert Lagomarsino, and Bob
McEwen; January 26, 1989.

14b. Peter Brennan, “Costa Rica Considers Seeking Contra Backer in
U.S. — Indiana Native Wanted on Murder Charge in 1984 Bomb Attack in
Nicaragua”, WashingtonPost, February 1, 1990.

14c. “Costa Rica Seeks Extradition of Indiana Farmer”, Scripps-Howard
News Service,April 25, 1991.

15. Press Release from the Costa Rican Embassy, Washington DC, On the
Case of the Imprisonment of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull”, February
6, 1989.

16. Brian Glick, War at Home, Boston: South End Press, 1989.

17. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard– The U.S. Role in the New
World Order, Boston: South End Press, 1991, p.121.

18. Hearings Before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate,
77th Cong., 2nd Session (1942)., part I, as cited in Joseph Borkin,
The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York: The Free Press,
Macmillan, 1978, p.93.

19. R. Jeffrey Smith, “Study of A-Plant Neighbors’ Health Urged”,
Washington Post, July 13, 1990, p.A6.

20. Tom Horton, “A Cost Higher Than the Peace Dividend — Price Tag
Mounts to Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Sites”, Baltimore Sun, February 23,
1992, p.1K.

21. “The Nuclear Industry’s Secret PR Strategy”, EXTRA!, March 1992,
p.15.

22a. Samuel S. Epstein, MD et al, Losing the War Against Cancer: Need
for PublicPolicy Reform”, Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,
p.E947-9.

22b. Samuel S. Epstein, “The Cancer Establishment”, Washington Post,
March 10, 1992.

23a. Hon. Henry B. Gonzalez, “Efforts to Thwart Investigation of the
BNL Scandal”, Congressional Record, March 30, 1992, p.H2005-2014.

23b. Hon. David E. Skaggs (CO)., White House Spin Control on Pre-War
Iraq Policy”, Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.H2285.

23c. Nicholas Rostow, Special Assistant to the President and Legal
Adviser, Memorandum to Jeanne S. Archibald et al, “Meeting on
congressional requests for information and documents”, April 8, 1991;
Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,p.H2285.

24a. Michio Kaku, “Operation Desert Lie: Pentagon Confesses”, The

Guardian, March11, 1992, p.4.

24b. J. Max Robins, “NBC’s Unaired Iraq Tapes Not a Black and White
Case”, Variety Magazine, March 4, 1991, p.25.

25. Emory R. Searcy Jr., Clergy and Laity Concerned, Spring 1991
Letter to”Friends”, p.1.

26. Jean Dimeo, “Selling Hispanics on Columbus — Luis Vasquez-Ajmac
Is Hired to Promote Smithsonian Project”, Washington Post, November
18, 1991, p.Bus.8.

27. Hans Koning, “Teach the Truth About Columbus”, Washington Post,
September 3,1991, p.A19.

28a. James Kilpatrick, “Software-Piracy Case Emitting Big Stench”, St.
Louis Post/Dispatch, March 18, 1991, p.3B. Elliot L. Richardson, “A
High-Tech Watergate”, New York Times, October 21,1991.

29. “BCCI — NBC Sunday Today”, February 23, 1992, p.12; transcript
prepared by Burrelle’s Information Services. The quote is from New
York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who is running his own
independent investigation of BCCI.

30. Norman Bailey, former Reagan White House intelligence analyst;
from an interview with Mark Rosenthal of NBC News. See note 29, p.5.

31. Jack Colhoun, “BCCI Skeletons Haunting Bush’s Closet”, The
Guardian, September 18, 1991, p.9.

32. Robert Morgenthau. See note 29, p.10.

33. Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime and Violence, San Francisco:
Sierra ClubBooks, 1989 paperback edition, p.227.

34. See note 33, p.136-7.

35. Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon
Shield, NewYork: Pantheon, 1985. As cited in Mokhiber, see note 33,
p.157.

36. See note 33, p.164-171.

37. See note 33, p.172-180.

38. Michael Waldman, Who Robbed America?, New York: Random House,
1990. The quote is from Ralph Nader’s Introduction, p.iii.

39. See note 33, p.217.

40. See note 33, p.235.

41. See note 33, p.277-288.

42. See note 33, p.323.

43. Katherine Hoyt Gonzalez, Nicaragua Network Education Fund
Newsletter, March1992, p.1.

44. William Blum, The CIA — A Forgotten History, London: Zed Books
Ltd., 1986,p.232-243.

45a. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, New York: Norton, 1978.

45b. See note 44, p.284-291.

46. See note 17, p.18.

47a. Letter to President George Bush from The Ad Hoc Committee for
Panama (James Abourezk et al)., January 10, 1990; published in The
Nation, February 5, 1990, p.163.

47b. Philip E. Wheaton, Panama, Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992,
p.145-7.

48a. Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, Power, Inc., New York: Bantam
Books, 1977,p.521.

48b. “The International Oil Cartel”, Federal Trade Commission,
December 2, 1949. Cited in 48a, p.521.

49a. See note 44, p.67-76.

49b. See note 48a, p.530-1.

50. Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits, New York: Sheridan Square
Publications, 1983,p.60.

51. HR-3385, “An Act to Provide Assistance for Free and Fair Elections
in Nicaragua”. Passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 4,
1989 by avote of 263 to 136, and the Senate on October 17 by a vote of
64 to 35.

52. Jack Colhoun, “Gates Oozing Trail of Lies, Gets Top CIA Post”, The
Guardian,November 20, 1991, p.6.

53. Carl Bernstein, Time, February 24, 1992, Cover Story p.28-35.

54. “The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control”, Time, February 24,
1992, p.35.

55. “Time’s Missing Link: Poland to Latin America”, National Catholic
Reporter,February 28, 1992, p.24.

56a. Jim Lynn, “School of Americas Commander Hopes to Expand Mission”,
Benning Patriot, February 21, 1992, p.12.

56b. Vicky Imerman, “U.S. Army School of the Americas Plans
Expansion”, News Release from S.O.A. Watch, P.O. Bo 3330, Columbus,
Georgia 31903.

57. 60 MINUTES, CBS, March 8, 1992.

58. Jack Colhoun, “Tricky Dick’s Quick Election Fix”, The Guardian,
January 29,1992, p.18.

59a. Sean P. Murphy, “Several Probes May Have Ignored Evidence Against
Police”, Boston Globe, July 28, 1991, p.1.

59b. Christopher B. Daly, “Pattern of Police Abuses Reported in Boston
Case”, Washington Post, July 12, 1991, p.A3.

59c. Associated Press, “Dayton Police Probing Erasure of Arrest
Video”, WashingtonPost, May 26, 1991, p.A20.

59d. Gabriel Escobar, “Deaf Man’s Death In Police Scuffle Called
Homicide”, Washington Post, May 18, 1991, p.B1.

59e. Jay Mathews, “L.A. Police Laughed at Beating”, Washington Post,
March 19, 1991, p.A1.

59f. David Maraniss, “One Cop’s View of Police Violence”, Washington
Post, April 12,1991, p.A1.

59g. From News Services, “Police Abuse Detailed”, Washington Post,
February 8, 1992,p.A8.

60. Michael Dobbs, “Panhandling the Kremlin: How Gus Hall Got
Millions”, Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.A1.

61. David Streitfeld, “Secret Consortium To Publish Rushdie In
Paperback”, Washington Post, March 14, 1992, p.D1.

62a. See notes 48 and 49.

62b. See note 47b, p.63-76.

62c. “Fairness In Broadcasting Act of 1987″, U.S. Senate Bill S742.

62d. “Now Let That ‘Fairness’ Bill Die”, Editorial, Washington Post,

June 24, 1987. The Post opposed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act.

63. David E. Scheim, Contract on America — The Mafia Murder of
President John F.Kennedy, New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988,
p.viii.

64. See note 63, p.28.

65a. Chuck Conconi, “Out and About”, Washington Post, February 26,
1991, p.B3.

65b. George Lardner Jr., “On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland”,
Washington Post, May19, 1991, p.D1.

65c. George Lardner, “…Or Just a Sloppy Mess”, Washington Post, June
2, 1991,p.D3.

65d. Charles Krauthammer, “A Rash of Conspiracy Theories — When Do We
Dig Up BillCasey?”, Washington Post, July 5, 1991, p.A19.

65e. Eric Brace, “Personalities”, Washington Post, October 31, 1991,
p.C3.

65f. Associated Press, “‘JFK’ Director Condemned — Warren Commission
Attorney Calls Stone Film ‘A Big Lie’”, Washington Post, December 16,
1991, p.D14.

65g. Gerald R. Ford and David W. Belin, “Kennedy Assassination: How
About the Truth?”, Washington Post, December 17, 1991, p.A21.

65h. Rita Kemply, “‘JFK’: History Through A Prism”, Washington Post,
December 20,1991, p.D1.

65i. George Lardner Jr., “The Way it Wasn’t — In ‘JFK’, Stone
Assassinates the Truth”, Washington Post, December 20, 1991, p.D2.

65j. Desson Howe, “Dallas Mystery: Who Shot JFK?”, Washington Post,
December 20,1991, p.55.

65k. Phil McCombs, “Oliver Stone, Returning the Fire — In Defending
His ‘JFK’ Conspiracy Film, the Director Reveals His Rage and
Reasoning”, Washington Post, December 21, 1991, p.F1.

65l. George F. Will, “‘JFK’: Paranoid History”, Washington Post,
December 26, 1991,p.A23.

65m. “On Screen”, ‘JFK’ movie review, Washington Post, Weekend,
December 27, 1991.

65n. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, “Shadow Play”, Washington Post, December
27, 1991, p.A21.

65o. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Paranoid Style”, Washington Post,
December 29,1991, p.C7.

65p. Michael Isikoff, “H-e-e-e-e-r-e’s Conspiracy! — Why Did Oliver
Stone Omit (Or Suppress!). the Role of Johnny Carson?”, Washington
Post, December 29, 1991,p.C2.

65q. Robert O’Harrow Jr., “Conspiracy Theory Wins Converts –
Moviegoers Say ‘JFK’ Nourishes Doubts That Oswald Acted Alone”,
Washington Post, January 2, 1992, p.B1.

65r. Michael R. Beschloss, “Assassination and Obsession”, Washington
Post, January 5, 1992, p.C1.

65s. Charles Krauthammer, “‘JFK’: A Lie, But Harmless”, Washington
Post, January 10,1992, p.A19.

65t. Art Buchwald, “Bugged: The Flu Conspiracy”, Washington Post,
January 14, 1992,p.E1.

65u. Ken Ringle, “The Fallacy of Conspiracy Theories — Good on Film,
But the Motivation Is All Wrong”, Washington Post, January 19, 1992,
p.G1.

65v. Charles Paul Freund, “If History Is a Lie — America’s Resort to
Conspiracy Thinking”, Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.C1.

65w. Richard Cohen, “Oliver’s Twist”, Washington Post Magazine,
January 19, 1992, p.5.

65. Michael Isikoff, “Seeking JFK’s Missing Brain”, Washington Post,
January 21,1992, p.A17.

65y. Don Oldenburg, “The Plots Thicken — Conspiracy Theorists Are
Everywhere”, Washington Post, January 28, 1992, p.E5.

65z. Joel Achenbach, “JFK Conspiracy: Myth vs. the Facts”, Washington
Post, February 28, 1992, p.C5.

65A. List of books on the best-seller list: On the Trail of the
Assassins is characterized as “conspiracy plot theories”, Washington
Post, March 8, 1992,Bookworld, p.12

66. See notes 65n, 65w, 65l, 65b, 65c, and 65i.

67a. Peter Dale Scott, “Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon
Papers”. Published in The Senator Gravel Edition of The Pentagon
Papers, Volume V,p.211-247.

67b. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy — The Secret Road to the
Second Indochina War, Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, p.
215-224.

67c. L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, Copyright 1973. New
printing, Costa Mesa CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1990,
p.402-416.

67d. See note 63, p.58, 183, 187, 194, 273-4.

67e. John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, New York: Warner Books, 1992.

67f. Peter Dale Scott, Letter to the Editor, The Nation, March 9,
1992, p.290.

68a. See note 65b.

68b. Oliver Stone, “The Post, George Lardner, and My Version of the
JFK Assassination”, Washington Post, June 2, 1991, p.D3.

69. See note 65b.

70. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of The Assassins, New York: Warner
Books, 1988, 315/318.

71. Associated Press, “Garrison, 2 Others, Found Not Guilty Of Bribery
Charge”, Washington Post, September 28, 1973, p.A3.

72. See note 65c.

73. See note 65i.

74. See note 67e, p.438-450.

75. John G. Leyden, “Historians, Buffs, and Crackpots”, Washington
Post, Bookworld, January 26, 1992, p.8.

76a. Tad Szulc, “New Doubts, Fears in JFK Assassination Probe”,
Washington Star,September 19, 1975, p.A1.

76b. Tad Szulc, “Warren Commission’s Self-Doubts Grew Day by Day –
‘This Bullet Business Leaves Me Confused’”, Washington Star, September

20, 1975, p.A1.

76c. Tad Szulc, “Urgent and Secret Meeting of the Warren Commission –
Dulles Proposed that the Minutes be Destroyed”, Washington Star,
September 21, 1975,p.A1.

77. “Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report”, New York
Times, December 26, 1977, p.A37.

78. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1979,p.141-2.

79a. Eve Pell, “Private Censorship — Killing ‘Katharine The Great’”,
The Nation, November 12, 1983.

79b. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, Bethesda MD: National Press,
1987. Davis says, “…corporate documents that became available during
my subsequent lawsuit against him [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich chairman,
William Jovanovich] showed that 20,000 copies [of Katharine the Great]
had been “processed and converted into waste paper”".

79c. Daniel Brandt, “All the Publisher’s Men — A Suppressed Book
About Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again”
National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60.

79d. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Sheridan Square
Press, 1991. “…publishers who don’t give a shit”, p.iv-v; bullying
HBJ into recalling the book, p.iv-vi; lawsuit and settlement, p..

80. Benjamin C. Bradlee, Letter to Deborah Davis, April 1, 1987. See
note 79d, p.304.

81. See note 79d, p.119-132.

82. Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media — How America’s Most
Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence
Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up”, Rolling Stone,
October 20, 1977, p.63.

83a. Daniel Brandt, Letter to Richard L. Harwood of The Washington
Post, September 15, 1988. The letter asks for the Post’s rationale for
its policy of protecting government covert actions, and whether this
policy is still in effect.

83b. Daniel Brandt, “Little Magazines May Come and Go”, The National
Reporter, Fall 1988, p.4. Notes the Post’s protection of the identity
of CIA agent Joseph F.Fernandez. Brandt says, “America needs to
confront its own recent history as well as protect the interests of
its citizens, and both can be accomplished by outlawing peacetime
covert activity. This would contribute more to thesecurity of
Americans than all the counterterrorist proposals and elite strike
forces that ever found their way onto Pentagon wish-lists.”

83c. Richard L. Harwood, Letter to Daniel Brandt, September 28, 1988.
Harwood’s two- sentence letter reads, “We have a long-standing policy
of not naming covert agents of the C.I.A., except in unusual
circumstances. We applied that policy to Fernandez.”

84. See note 79d, p.131.

85. Katharine Graham, “Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist
Acts”, Washington Post, April 20, 1986, p.C1.

86. “conspire”, ß4ßRandom House Dictionary of the English Language,
Second Edition Unabridged, 1987.

87. Howard Kurtz, “Media Notes”, Washington Post, June 18, 1991, p.D1.

88. See note 65y.

89. See note 65n.

90. See note 65d.

91. William Casey, Private Communications with JCH, March 1992.

Richard Harwood, “What Conspiracy?”, Washington Post, March 1, 1992,
p.C6.

93. p. 29-32.

94a. Washington Post Electronic Data Base, Dialog Information Services
Inc., April 25, 1992. In 1991 and 1992, the name Bill Clinton appeared
in 878 Washington Post stories, columns, letters, or editorials;
“Jerry” Brown in 485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry Agran in 28. In
those 28, Agran’s name appeared 76 times, Clinton’s 151, and Brown
105. In only 1 of those 28 did Agran’s name appear in a headline.

94b. Colman McCarthy, “What’s ‘Minor’ About This Candidate?”,
Washington Post, February 1, 1992. Washington Post columnist McCarthy
tells how television and party officials have kept presidential
candidate Larry Agran out of sight. The Post’s own daily news-blackout
of Agran is not discussed.

94c. Scot Lehigh, “Larry Agran: ‘Winner’ in Debate With Little Chance
For the Big Prize”, Boston Globe, February 25, 1992.

94d. Joshua Meyrowitz, “The Press Rejects a Candidate”, Columbia
Journalism Review,March/April, 1992.

95. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Effete Conspiracy And Other Crimes By The
Press, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972, p.36-7.

96a. 28 USC Section 455. “Any justice, judge, or magistrate of the
United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his
impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” [emphasis added]

96b. Alpo Petfoods, Inc. v. Ralston Purina Co., 913 F2d 958 (CA DC
1990)..

96c. Monroe Freedman, “Thomas’ Ethics and the Court — Nominee ‘Unfit
to Sit’ For Failing to Recuse In Ralston Purina Case”, Legal Times,
August 26, 1991.

96d. Paul D. Wilcher, “Opposition to the Confirmation of Judge
Clarence Thomas to become a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on the
grounds of his JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT”, Letter to U.S. Senator Joseph R.
Biden, October 15, 1991.

97. Al Kamen and Michael Isikoff, “‘A Distressing Turn’, Activists

Decry What Process Has Become”, Washington Post, October 12, 1991,
p.A1.

98. January 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 1992, p.A1 each day.

99. See note 86.

100. Thomas W. Lippman, “Energy Lobby Fights Unseen ‘Killers’”,
Washington Post,April 1, 1992, p.A21. This article explains that
“representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National
Association of Manufacturers and the coal, oil, natural gas, offshore
drilling and nuclear power industries, whose interests often conflict,
pledged to work together to oppose amendments limiting offshore oil
drilling, nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions soon to be
offered by key House members”.

101. “cartel”, Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977.

——————————————————————————–

NOTES
A good source on the Washington Post and Katharine Graham’s attempt to suppress the Davis book,”Katherine The Great,”, which was largely successful, is Carol Felsenthal’s, “Power and Privilege at the Post, the Katharine Graham Story.”

For more information on Johnny Rosselli and Moses and Walter Annenberg, an excellent source is “All American Mafioso, the Johnny Rosselli Story,” by Ed Becker and Charles Rappelye.

An additional good short reference is “The CIA’s Greatest Hits” by Mark Zepezauer. There you will find the reference to Carl Bernstein’s classic “The CIA and the Media” which appeared in Rolling Stone on Oct. 20, 1977.

Still another recent example of the CIA’s control of the media is the spiking of Sally Denton’s & Roger Morris’ story,”THE CRIMES OF MENA” by Washington Post managing editor Bob Kaiser even though the story had been legally vetted and cleared for publication. Indeed the story, which details the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficing, was already typeset and ready to go when it was killed withouty explanation.

An example of media lies can be found in this example of a faked newspaper photograph.

PETER URBAN

Connecticut federal prosecutor John Durham can clear at least one task off his full plate. His criminal investigation into the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes won’t touch waterboarding.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey told the House Judiciary Committee last week that his lawyers concluded that the CIA’s use of waterboarding in 2002 and 2003 was legal. So the department cannot investigate whether a crime occurred.

Two months ago, Mukasey called on Durham to lead an investigation into the destruction of videotapes that showed CIA officers using tough interrogation methods while questioning two al-Qaida suspects.

Mukasey suggested at the time that Durham would follow the investigation wherever it took him.

The waterboarding question came up after the Bush administration revealed earlier in the week that the CIA had indeed used the technique on a few occasions.

CIA Director Michael Hayden confirmed Tuesday that the CIA waterboarded al-Qaida prisoners Khalid Sheik Mohammed; Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husseing and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri at a secret detention site. He defended the use of waterboarding as necessary to obtain information about potential terrorist attacks.

Vice President Dick Cheney also hit the Republican speakers’ circuit last week to defend the practice.

“It’s a tougher program for a very few tougher customers,” Cheney told the Conservative Political Action Convention and the Pennsylvania State Victory Committee. “The program is run by highly trained professionals who understand their obligations under the law.

“And the program has uncovered a wealth of information that has foiled attacks against the United States.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers asked Mukasey straight up about the program during an oversight hearing last week.

“Are you ready to start a criminal investigation into whether this confirmed use of waterboarding by United States agents was illegal?” asked Conyers, D-Mich.

“That’s a direct question, and I will give a direct answer. No, I am not,” Mukasey said.

Here’s his torturous reasoning.

At the time of the waterboarding, it was done “as part of a CIA program” that had been cleared as “permissible under the law as it existed then” by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel.

To launch a criminal investigation of a technique used by someone who relied on a Justice Department opinion as legal would put in question not only that opinion “but also any other opinion from the Justice Department,” Mukasey said.

“Essentially, it would tell people: ‘You rely on a Justice Department opinion as part of a program, then you will be subject to criminal investigation when and if the tenure of the person who wrote the position changes or, indeed, the political winds change.’ And that’s not something that I think would be appropriate and it’s not something I will do,” he said.

Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., a former state attorney general, seemed skeptical of that logic, noting that the “law is the law” and that relying on bad legal opinions to shield oneself from prosecution would be a new legal doctrine.

“You know, this is brand-new legal theory, at least in terms of my own legal scholarship,” he said.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., wasn’t satisfied with Mukasey’s answer either.

“If we don’t establish a bright line, in this country, that we don’t torture, then it makes it very hard for us to argue to other countries that they shouldn’t torture our people, period,” he said.

Mukasey countered that there is a bright line: “We bar the torture.”

Simple? Well, then he adds the legal footnote: “The evaluation of whether a particular practice constitutes torture could be presented to me only in a particular situation, namely, whether it was defined, part of a proposed program, in which case I would pronounce on it one way or the other.”

“That’s a bright line that we can hold up to the rest of the world?” Schiff asked.

“We have and do defend our position before the rest of the world. We have people in the State Department who do a superb job at that. And we will continue to do that,” Mukasey explained.

Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd issued a statement urging a brighter line than Mukasey’s.

“There is no such thing as ’simulated’ drowning. When a person is strapped to a board and water is poured into their mouth and nose with no way to get air, that is drowning; that is torture,” he said.

Dodd said that President Bush should make clear that “all forms of torture — including waterboarding — are always wrong and always illegal.”

l

Speaking of torture

Sen. Joe Lieberman offered some insights into hostilities that afflict moderates from both ends of the political spectrum. Lieberman gets the brunt from liberal Democrats while his conjoined twin John McCain takes it from conservative Republicans.

“I do see some similarities. It is part of what is wrong in American politics today,” Lieberman said. “At the margins of either party there is a significant group of people who seem to really want to be more in a fight than to get things done.”

Lieberman says the majority is in the middle looking for Democrats and Republicans to find common ground for the good of the nation.

“John McCain is a conservative Republican but it is important to say that he is his own man and he will do what he thinks is right. As devoted a Republican as he is, if party interest conflicts with what he thinks is in the national interest he will always go with the national interest.”

(Yes, it seems Lieberman can’t make the connection between getting things done and getting out of Iraq — something two-thirds of Americans have consistently said they believe is in the nation’s interest.)

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Ray McGovern says there is enough evidence to impeach Bush, Cheney over torture, Iraq and Iran

Chris Gelken

After 27 years as an analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency, Ray McGovern is now one of the most vocal critics of the government he once served. A founder member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, McGovern is highly critical of the way the Bush administration manipulated or fabricated intelligence to justify its war on Iraq.

McGovern spoke to PressTV on a range of issues, including the recent scandal over waterboarding.

You are on record as saying you had no desire to be associated, however remotely, with an organization that engaged in torture. You say the agency bowed to political pressure, who was responsible in the administration and the agency for giving the go-ahead for torture?

Ray McGovern: Well that’s really no secret. If you look at Richard Clarke for example, the head of the counter terrorism operation at the White House. He wrote that on the very evening of 9/11 the President convened his top national security advisers in the bunker under the White House and said to them, “We’re at war. There are no restrictions. We will need to do what we have to do, and there will be nothing in the way here.”

And when someone objected and said there is international law that applies to attacking a country, for example like Iraq, the president turned on him and shouted, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we’re going to kick some ass.”

That set the tone and the torture followed very quickly after. Actually the first person tortured was an American citizen, John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan and was subjected to very harsh treatment.

You have called for the impeachment of George Bush — on what grounds exactly, and what prospects to you see for impeachment in the final eleven months of his presidency?

We are strong devotees of the Constitution of the United States. The people who drafted that document had a very foresighted view, given that human nature was at work here.

I think they would be surprised that it took 240 years before a President started acting like a King.

You see, they were used to the King experience in England, and they were hell-bent and determined that this would not happen here in this country. So they made a provision in this basic document that were a President to start acting like a King, were he to accrue powers that were not due him, were he to diss the Congress, then there would be an orderly process to remove that President and it’s called impeachment.

The clause that pertains here says that the President or the Vice President shall be removed from office upon impeachment for and conviction of high crimes and misdemeanors.

It would be hard for me in five minutes to detail all the high crimes and misdemeanors, but let’s just take one, one that I feel very close to, and that is the deliberate falsification, the deliberate forgery, the deliberate manufacture of intelligence to “justify” an unjustifiable war of aggression.

That’s what we had with respect to Iraq, and it’s very clear in retrospect that the President knew exactly what he was doing.

If you add to that the torture, the warrantless eavesdropping, and a whole string of other abuses you have quite enough to impeach the President and the Vice President.

The problem is there is a political season here and the opposition party, the Democrats, are reluctant to cause any waves. The President’s polling numbers are very low, the Vice President’s are even lower, and their political advisers are telling them don’t make any waves now, just hang on there, don’t do anything for eleven months now, and we’ll have a sweeping victory in November, then we can do what we want.

That is not what the Constitution says, that is not what will get our troops out of Iraq, it is really a cave in to political maneuvering rather than doing the proper thing in conscience. They should impeach the President, and they could easily do it.

They say there’s not enough time, but you don’t need a lot of time when you have the evidence that we have against President Bush and Vice President Cheney. It’s a matter of political will and the people in charge now don’t have that political will. They are more cowardly than determined to protect the Constitution.

You have accused the Bush administration of manipulating or fabricating intelligence before the War in Iraq. Why didn’t more people in the agency “come out” if you will and publicly denounce the administration for going to war — as you have said for oil, Israel and logistics — that is permanent bases in the Middle East?

It is very difficult to do that, and the tone set by the Director, George Tenet, was very mischievous. He was the worst example of an intelligence officer that I can imagine. He saw it as his duty to help the President do whatever the President wanted. And when you set that tone at the highest level it’s very difficult for people at lower levels to speak out and say “this isn’t right, we shouldn’t be doing it.”

There still should be some who do that, but it didn’t happen.

Now, the good news is, there have been at least four National Intelligence Estimates that have told the truth. They have been rather courageous in telling the truth. For example the most recent one which said that according to our analysts Iran stopped its nuclear weapons related program four years ago and as far as we can tell, has not restarted it.

Why is that courageous? Because Dick Cheney and George Bush himself were saying just the opposite in the months prior to the release of that estimate.

So there is a lot of hope that there are good people left in the intelligence community, and that not only are they inclined to tell the truth, but some of their superiors are making sure that the truth does get out.

You’ve said Israel should not be considered an ally of the United States — and critical discussion of Israel comes with the risk of being tagged an anti-Semite. Just how strong is the Israeli lobby in the United States — and who is doing whose bidding?

Well, it is very difficult to sort it all out, but it is very clear that the state of Israel has inordinate influence over our body politic. There is nothing that can happen in our country that is not conditioned by the worry about the reaction of the Israel lobby. This is just a fact of life here. It is a matter of courage to speak out and say that this doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense for Israeli interests over the long term.

Last August I believe you published an article that asked the pertinent question: Do we have the courage to stop a war with Iran? Well, does the American public and military have the courage?

I think the National Intelligence Estimate that says that Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program helps, but I count on the senior military, Admiral Fallon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who have been responsible, so far, in my view in preventing the President and the Vice President from doing what they want to do, and actually what they have promised the state of Israeli they would do, and that is deal with the Iranian nuclear problem.

Is George Bush losing control of the military, are they acting in a way to protect the best interests of the United States and not the Commander in Chief?

I think this time they have insisted on sitting down with the President and saying we can do this, but look what will happen on week one. Look what will happen on month two, look what we can expect in terms of retaliation three months down the road. That is very scary because it is not like the situation in Iraq. And I think the President is chastened by his experience in Iraq and has had to listen to the senior military on this one and I hope he continues to listen.

The above interview was conducted by the author and first broadcast on PressTV News on Feb. 9, 2008.

By Thomas Claburn

In keeping with its mandate to gather intelligence, the CIA is watching YouTube.

U.S. spies, now under the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), are looking increasingly online for intelligence; they have become major consumers of social media.

“We’re looking at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence,” said Doug Naquin, director of the remarks to the Central Intelligence Retirees’ Association last October. “We’re looking at chat rooms and things that didn’t exist five years ago, and trying to stay ahead. We have groups looking at what they call ‘Citizens Media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the Internet.”

In November 2005, the OSC subsumed the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which housed the agency’s foreign media analysts. The OSC is responsible for collecting and analyzing public information, including Internet content.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists project on government secrey, posted transcript of Naquin’s remarks on his blog. “I found the speech interesting and thoughtful,” he said in an e-mail. “I would not have thought of YouTube as an obvious source of intelligence, but I think it’s a good sign that the Open Source Center is looking at it, and at other new media.”

Not everyone in the intelligence community sees the value in open source intelligence. “[W]e still have an education problem on both ends, both with the folks who are proponents of open source but perhaps don’t know exactly why, and folks internally who are still wondering why I am sitting at the same table they are,” said Naquin.

But further acceptance of open source intelligence, of the Internet and social media, seems inevitable in the intelligence community if only because traditional media is becoming less relevant. “What we’re seeing [in] actuality is a decline, a relatively rapid decline, in the impact of the printed press — traditional media,” said Naquin. “A lot more is digital, and a lot more is online. It’s also a lot more social. Interaction is a much bigger part of media and news than it used to be.”

Despite its name the Open Source Center hasn’t proven to be particularly open with its findings. “One area where Mr. Naquin’s Center falls short, in my opinion, is in public access to its products, which is very limited,” said Aftergood. “I know that there are some copyright barriers to open publication of foreign media items. But there shouldn’t be any such barriers to release of the Center’s own analytical products. And yet they are hard to come by. I hope this is one aspect of the Center’s activities that will be reconsidered.”

By HOWARD MINTZ

SAN JOSE — Faced with the Bush administration’s argument that a lawsuit over alleged CIA torture flights could expose state secrets, a federal judge Tuesday appeared reluctant to allow the case to proceed against a San Jose-linked company accused of carrying out the trips on the government’s behalf.

U.S. District Judge James Ware said he would rule soon on the government’s attempt to block the lawsuit on national security grounds, but indicated that the state secret privilege could derail the American Civil Liberties Union’s lawsuit against Jeppesen International Trip Planning, a San Jose-based subsidiary of Boeing.

The ACLU brought the case last year on behalf of five alleged victims of the CIA’s so-called “extraordinary rendition” program, which civil rights lawyers say involves kidnapping terrorism suspects and secretly flying them to U.S.-run or foreign prisons for interrogation and torture.

The lawsuit alleges that Jeppesen knowingly participated in the CIA program for profit, and provided the flight planning and crew support for the flights. A former Jeppesen employee has submitted a declaration in the case saying that top Jeppesen officials openly discussed “torture flights” and their profitability.

The Bush administration intervened in the case several months ago, asserting that allowing the suit to proceed would reveal information that could jeopardize national security. The government has raised similar arguments in lawsuits against telecommunication companies accused of participating in domestic spying programs.

ACLU attorney Ben Wizner said after the hearing that it is crucial for the courts to address the legality of the CIA flight program.

“This is another attempt by the CIA to ensure that no judge, no place, at no time has a chance to rule on the legality of its interrogation and torture program,” he said.

Justice Department lawyers left the hearing without comment. But in court papers and in arguments before Ware, they warned the case “attempts to probe the most sensitive details of intelligence operations.”

The Bush administration has invoked the state secrets privilege with more regularity than past administrations, and it is difficult for federal judges to interfere when it is asserted. Ware, while conceding the privilege is strong, did express concern about preventing a case to proceed that involves civil liberties.

“It does seem to me that the duty I have is to walk the line between those interests,” the judge said during the hearing.

Ware’s ruling is expected to be appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which already is considering a similar issue in a lawsuit pending against AT&T over the government’s domestic surveillance program.