Syrian army general assassinated in Damascus
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h56tmG1AzTrmRqFYQMz5p3x1rAEg?docId=9fd5188af14841499daaff0edce0a46b
By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press
BEIRUT (AP) — Gunmen assassinated an army general in Damascus Saturday in the first killing of a high ranking military officer in the Syrian capital since the uprising against President Bashar Assad's regime began in March, the state-run news agency said.
The attack could be a sign that armed members of the opposition, who have carried out attacks on the military elsewhere in the country, are trying to step up action in the tightly controlled capital, which has been relatively quiet compared to other cities.
SANA news agency reported that three gunmen opened fire at Brig. Gen. Issa al-Khouli Saturday morning as he left his home in the Damascus neighborhood of Rukn-Eddine. Al-Khouli was a doctor and the chief of a military hospital in the capital.
Capt. Ammar al-Wawi of the Free Syrian Army, a rebel group that wants to bring down the regime by force, denied involvement in the assassination, which came a day after two suicide car bombers struck security compounds in Aleppo.
Such assassinations are not uncommon outside Damascus and army officers have been killed in the past, mostly in the restive provinces of Homs and Idlib.
Assad's regime says terrorists acting out a foreign conspiracy to destabilize the country are behind the uprising, not people seeking to transform the authoritarian regime. The Syrian government says more than 2,000 soldiers and police officers have been killed since March.
Violence in other parts of the country left at least 17 people dead as regime troops pushed into rebel-held neighborhoods in the central city of Homs and seized parts of the mountain town of Zabadani, north of Damascus.
The U.N. estimates that 5,400 people have been killed in Syria since the uprising began in March. But that figure is from January, when the world body stopped counting because the chaos in the country has made it all but impossible to check the figures. Hundreds are reported to have been killed since.
Syria's turmoil began with peaceful protests against Assad's rule, sparking the fierce regime crackdown. But it has since grown more militarized as army defectors and armed protesters formed the Free Syrian Army.
After Russia and China last weekend vetoed a Western and Arab attempt at the U.N. to pressure Assad to step down, the FSA's commander said armed force was the only way to oust the president. Western and Arab countries are considering forming a coalition to help Syria's opposition, though so far there is no sign they intend to give direct aid to the FSA.
Arab foreign ministers were to meet in Cairo on Sunday to decide their next step. An Arab League official said the ministers were likely to consider calling for a joint Arab-U.N. team of observers to be sent to Syria to investigate Assad's adherence to past promises to halt the violence.
Damascus allowed in Arab League observers in December, but the mission was halted amid the accelerating bloodshed. The Syrians would be unlikely to accept a new observer team.
The ministers in Cairo also may discuss formally recognizing the main opposition Syrian National Council in a show of support, but such a step does not yet have full agreement among the ministers, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one of Assad's top allies, warned Arab countries on Saturday not to give aid to the opposition.
Speaking to tens of thousands of supporters in Tehran on the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ahmadinejad said countries in the region that have never held free elections are trying to write a "prescription for freedom and elections for others" with the help of the United States.
"This is the most bitter and ridiculous joke of history," Ahmadinejad said.
On Saturday, Damascus gave Tunisian and Libyan diplomats 72 hours to leave the country, Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi told reporters. The move was in retaliation to the north African Arab nations' eviction of Syrian ambassadors earlier this month.
For the past week, Syrian forces have been bombarding rebel-held neighborhoods in Homs, aiming to regain control of one of the main cities involved in the uprising. Activists say more than 400 people have been killed in the campaign.
On Saturday, Syrian troops shelled the Baba Amr district in Homs, killing at least nine people, and another in the Bab Sbaa area, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Another activist group, the Local Coordination Committees said 15 people were killed in Baba Amr on Saturday.
The Observatory also reported that regime troops moved into parts of Zabadani, north of Damascus, after intense shelling and after rebel soldiers pulled back to spare residents' property from further damage. Three people were killed in the bombardment, the group said.
Troops and rebel soldiers battled in Douma, a suburb of Damascus, said Mohammed Doumany, an activist there. The Observatory said troops stormed the Grand Mosque in Douma and detained a number of people who were inside.
The Observatory also reported a rare clash between troops and defectors late Friday in the northern Damascus neighborhood of Qaboun but had no details. It said troops shot dead an activist in the area.
In Idlib, where rebels control some areas, army defectors detonated roadside bombs and hand grenades against military vehicles near the village of Kfar Oweida Friday night, killing at least 10 soldiers, the Observatory said.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
John Hinkley & Company
“Minds are malleable, but not self-malleable, a condition politicians and PR men use to sinister advantage.”
-William S. Burroughs.
After John Hinkley shot President Reagan, he said, “The movie isn’t over yet!”
And indeed it isn’t. Political assassinations and coup d’etats are the most frequently used methods of changing governments and controlling power, and we shouldn’t expect that to change.
Now we hear from Hinkley every few years or so when he exercises his right to seek release from St. Elizabeth’s hospital, where he is incarcerated. Hinkley is in a hospital, rather than a prison, because of a quirk in our judicial system that says he is not responsible for his actions. If that is the case, then who is responsible for Hinckley’s actions?
After the assassination of President Kennedy the murder of a president was made a Federal, rather than a local crime, so a Federal investigation would take precedence over local police, courts and authorities. Unlike the Hinkley-Reagan affair, the assassination of President Kennedy was successful and the government changed hands, minds and policy, while Hinkley’s attempt on Reagan failed and the constitutional powers did not change.
Because we still haven’t determined exactly who was responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy, or the attack on Reagan, we certainly haven’t seen the last of political assassinations in our society. We haven’t heard the last of John Hinckley, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan B. Sirhan or Mark David Chapman, the seemingly unimportant people who unexpectedly rise from the masses to take a monumental action that makes a mark on history and changes the course of our times.
As Hinkley said, the movie isn’t over yet. Hinkley failed in his mission, but created an important case study that helps us understand the ongoing implications of assassination in our society.
War dawns slowly as a political hot spot becomes unmanageable and a limited conventional war gets out of hand, though we know the crisis is coming, but assassination, as a political incident, happens suddenly and often unexpectedly, except to those who intend it to happen. Since Hinkley shot Reagan, Sadat of Egypt, Aquillo of the Philippines, Ghandi of Inida, and dozens of other world leaders have become victim of assassins. Of all political avenues, assassination is the most likely, but least expected to happen.
“Well, it seems, you know, that there was this…there was this thing I had to do, the moment I had been heading for all my life, like going through that door, as I say, the door to someplace.” – Taxi Driver
John Hinkley came crashing through that door on a lazy springtime afternoon in March, 1981, just outside a side door of the Washington Hilton Hotel. It’s now nicknamed the Hinkley Hilton since Hinkley jumped out of a crowd of newsmen to shoot President Reagan, his press secretary James Brady, a secret service agent and a security guard.
Hinkley’s alleged motive, a psychological, rather than political one, is that he shot the President to impress movie actress Jody Foster. Hinkley had repeatedly seen the movie, “Taxi Driver” in which Foster plays the role of a prostitute protected by a crazed taxi driver who stalks a politician with the intent to kill him, but then kills a pimp and a drug pusher. Rather than being sent to prison, he is declared a hero.
While the facts of Hinkley’s life were being investigated and disseminated by the news media shortly after the attack, John Wright of Lansing, Michigan was arrested and charged with threatening the life of then Vice President George Bush. Wright had bragged, “that he could be more famous than Siran Siran or Lee Harvey Oswald.”
As news of Hinkley’s actions spread through the media, Edward Michael Richardson, Michael Vandewehe and possibly other “copy cat” assassins, as they came to be called, went through the Taxi Driver door on the heels of Hinkley. And like Hinkley and Wright, they found themselves in jail, charged with threatening the life of or attempting to assassinate the President of the United States.
On April 9, 1981, less than two weeks after the shooting at the Hinkley Hilton, Edward Michael Richardson was charged with two counts of threatening the life of the President. The first count stemmed from a letter Richardson wrote and delivered to Jody Foster Yale dormitory, while the second charge related to a letter found in Richardson’s hotel room in which he stated that he was going to Washington D.C. “to bring completion to Hinkley’s reality.” Richardson was arrested in New York City with a loaded pistol while getting on a D.C. bound bus.
From Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb, Richardson had spent some time in the military and was once a student of the Reverend Carl MacIntire’s Shelton College, a fundamentalist religious school with campuses located in Cape Canaveral, Florida and Cape May, New Jersey.
Within days of Richardson’s arrest, the Secret Service charged Michael VandeWehe of Wildwood, New Jersey, with threatening the life of the President. VandeWehe was considered a threat even though he was then incarcerated in the Cape May County jail at the time. The Secret Service said that he wrote and mailed a letter from the jail that made a “direct threat against the life of the President.”
Before Reagan was shot, the Secret Service had commissioned a study by a panel of 27 experts to prepare a report on the methods of predicting violent acts. The Secret Service also compiles files on thousands of citizens that are potential threats to the President, and some 400 individuals are considered a serious enough threat to be kept under periodic surveillance. Neither Hinkley, Wright nor VandeWehe were considered to be a threat to the President before March, 1981.
Hinkley’s case also made its mark in the legal journals as a precedent to be cited because of Hinkley’s insanity plea, and attempts by the victim’s attorneys to make Hinkley’s psychologists responsible for his actions if he was not.
If Hinkley and the copy-cats were acting on psychological impulses, rather than on political, ideological or mercenary motives, then someone else could be held responsible for their behavior if it can be shown that they were conditioned or acting as an agent of others.
Rather than acting as a deranged lone-nuts on primitive instincts, perhaps one or even some of these assassins were psychologically conditioned or brainwashed by scientists with a more sophisticated motive – and fit the archtypical Manchurian Candidate model.
If Hinkley was conditioned by the film “Taxi Driver,” it might not have been just be environmental and social circumstances, but rather by design. Using drugs, hypnosis and multimedia programming techniques, individual subjects have been programmed to kill with a high degree of predictable response, so it is a possibility that deserves further investigation.
THE ANCIENT ORDER OF THE ASSASSINS
The U.S. Government, the military in particular, conducted psychological experiments on human subjects years, decades ago, and today, anyone with the knowledge and the tools could be in the business of privately programming and training assassins and terrorists.
We know coup d’etats and political assassinations occur routinely in third world countries and so-called “Bananna Republics,” but our own system of government is equally vulnerable and more likely targeted for such manipulation. Until President Reagan, who survived the attempt on his life in the first weeks of his presidency, none of the previous five presidents actually served out their full two terms, eight years of office, since President Kennedy was assassinated.
Men with pistols, rifles, bombs and even samurai swords have been arrested at the White House gates, where guards have been on the lookout for suicide bomb trucks and remote control kamikaze airplanes.
The Secret Service, a branch of the Treasury Department, is responsible for the security of the president and thus keeps the files on thousands of people who are potential threats. Some are violent prone suspects, others religious fanatics, ideological demagogs, professional hit men, espionage agents and trained terrorists. Others are just plain nuts.
Their common name – assassins, comes from the Arabic word Hashshishin, which means, “users of hashish,” the euphoric drug, but their legend stems from a secret society that began in the 11th century Persia as a religious order. Their leader, it is said, “carries the death of kings in his hand.”
Most of Western civilization first learned the tales of the Assassins from Marco Polo, who passed through Persia in 1273 enroute to China. Polo reported that the Shek of the Assassins lived in a fortified valley between two mountains, which is probably the fabled, impenetrable fortress at Alamut. There the Sheik had a beautiful fruit bearing garden “watered with streams of wine, milk and honey.” Drugged and taken to the hidden garden, young impressionable recruits were courted by dancers, musicians, magicians and beautiful women. They were inebriated in ecstasy, then drugged again and brought before the Sheik. Having experienced paradise, they became slaves to its pleasures, and the Sheik’s whim. “Away they went,” Polo said, “and did all that they were commanded. Thus it happened that no man escaped when the Sheik of the mountains desired his death.”
The role of the order of the Assassins, while they have passed into mythology, is still relevant, not only linguistically, but in regards to a contemporary understanding of assassination as a political weapon in our own society. In the 1000 years the term assassins has been used, assassins are still programmed and conditioned in ways similar to their ancient counterparts, but by much more sophisticated and predictable ways.
As the victim of an assassin President Lincoln became the last casualty of the Civil War. In 1900 Theodore Roosevelt assumed power when President McKinley was shot and killed by a “glassy-eyed anarchist.” Assassins sparked Word War I by killing Archduke Ferdinand as he rode in a motorcade, and the Reichstag fire that herald Hilter’s rise to power was allegedly started by a “lone-nut.” French Admiral Darlin was assassinated by a British trained assassin in North Africa, while Hitler was the target of a failed assassination-coup attempt in 1944. After the war Leon Trotsky was targeted, stalked and eventually assassinated in Mexico City by Soviet agents.
The assassination of President Kennedy precipitated two decades of political unrest that included the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy and the wounding of Presidential candidate George Wallace, all by assassins who fit the archtypical assassin prototype – James Earl Ray, Siran Siran and Arthur Bremmer. Richard Nixon’s handpicked successor, Michigan congressman Gerald Ford, served on the Warren Commission inquiry into President Kennedy’s assassination before assuming that office himself. As President he dodged bullets from two attacks, one from Sara Jane Moore, and FBI informant, and the other from Squeaky Frome, one of Charles Manson’s disciples.
Assassins in the United States have not confined themselves to presidents and presidential contenders, but have also killed Union officials, foreign diplomats, journalists and cultural figures. United Mine Workers union president Tony Boyle was convicted of ordering the murder of his union rival Jock Yablonski, Chilean secret police agent Michael Townley turned states’ evidence in admitting his participation with renegade Cubans in the Dupont Circle bombing assassination of former Chilean ambassador Leitter in downtown Washington D.C., and one-time fan, Mark David Chapman shot and killed former Beatle John Lennon.
By March, 1981 America and the world had been numbed by the accustomed ring of the assassin’s gun when Hinkley opened fire on the President’s entourage. Had he been successful, Hinkley would have made George Bush president of the United States with the flick of his finger and altering the course of history. The possibility that Hinkley was programmed or conditioned to shoot the President may have been privately evaluated, but has not been analyzed in a public forum.
STATE-OF-THE-ART ASSASSINS
The U.S. government has learned much about the psychological makeup of assassins, not by studying the profiles of subjects, but by attempting to create them. The state-of-the-art of conditioning assassins has advanced considerably sincethe days of the Hashshishin and the garden fortress at Alamut.
From 1949 until 1974 the U.S. CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense conducted sophisticated mind and behavior control research, using students, agents, soldiers and prisoners as human guinea pigs in a number of experiments that used drugs, hypnosis, audio-visional and electronic programming techniques.
One such project, called ARTICHOKE, began using drugs for investigating interrogation techniques, which stemmed from attempts to understand brainwashing procedures used on American prisoners of war by the Chinese in North Korea. Eventually the program became directed towards finding “whether a person could be secretly induced to commit an assassination against his will.”
One CIA contract agent, Jessica Wilcox (aka Candy Jones), a model and radio personality, was programmed to commit suicide by her CIA psychiatrist (See: “Candy Jones,” by Donald Bain, Playboy Press).
Although both the CIA and the military claim that their research ended in 1974, there are indications that the mind control programs merely became “operational” when the “experimental” stage ended, and techniques for programming assassins were secretly blended in with the normal routine of clandestine and military affairs.
The discovery of a CIA handbook in Central America that gave guidelines on developing criminals as agents to eliminate selected government officials is evidence of this, along with the fact that it was used in Vietnam, supports the contention that the U.S. government uses assassination as a tool of foreign policy.
OSLO NATO CONFERENCE & THE NAVY NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL LAB
In the summer of 1975, a year after the government claimed it halted such research, Dr. Irwin Sarason organized a conference in Oslo, Norway for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which addressed the topic of “The Dimensions of Stress and Anxiety.”
Dr. Sarason had produced a film which showed the success of school students who asked questions, and presented the film to a group of juvenile delinquents, who learned how to ask questions and showed marked improvement in their studies.
The U.S. Office of Naval Research offered to fund Sarason’s work, provided it was classified, so it could be used by the Navy psychiatric lab in San Diego, California, where “spys were being trained to resist interrogation.”
Peter Watson, a former psychologist and a reporter for the London Sunday Times attended the Oslo conference and participated in a seminar conducted by U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Thomas Narut, a psychologist then assigned to the U.S. Navy Regional Medical Center in Naples, Italy.
Lt. Commander Narut gave a talk on “The Use of Symbolic Models and Verbal Intervention in Inducing and Reducing Stress.” He claimed his work involved teaching “combat readiness units” to cope with the stress of killing.
After his general discourse, Watson talked privately with Narut, who told the London Times correspondent that he had done his doctoral dissertation on whether certain films provoke anxiety. Narut said that he studied whether forcing men to do irrelevant tasks while watching violent films made them cope better with anxiety associated with violence.
Narut also told Watson that the U.S. Navy programmed assassins on an assembly line basis, and that he personally worked with men whom he referred to as “hit men and assassins,” who were involved in commando type operations and placed in U.S. embassies abroad. These men, Narut told Watson, were on call to kill selected victims when necessary. The U.S. Marine Corps, which is in charge of protecting embassies abroad, comes under the Department of Navy, and much of the advanced training for the Marines takes place at its bases in San Diego, California.
Narut said that drugs and hypnosis were no longer necessary, and that such conditioning was accomplished by a standardized behavior modification process called audio-visual desensitation. Subjects were desensitized to mayhem and carnage by viewing films of people being injured and killed in different ways, with mild bloodshed being succeeded by progressively violent scenes. They became acclimated to the brutality and eventually dissociated their feelings from the violence.
Narut was quoted as saying the best killers were classified as having “passive-aggressive” personalities, or men “with strong drives that were usually kept under tight control.” These types he said, “were usually calm, but from time to time would exhibit outbursts of temper during which they could literally kill without remorse.” Men with these “qualities” could be identified through psychological testing, using the Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory test, which is used in schools, businesses and corporations, as well as the military, and can measure hostility, depression and psychopathy.
After subjects with the right psychological qualities were selected and recruited they were sent either to the Naples Medical Center or the Navy Neuropsychological Lab in San Diego, California, where according to Narut, they were audio-visually desensitized by being strapped into a chair with their head clamped in such a way that they couldn’t look away from the screen and their eyelids prevented from closing.
After Watson’s story about the conversation with Narut was published in the London Sunday Times, Narut called a press conference to say that he had been talking only in “theoretical” and not “practical” terms.
HINKLEY’S MOVIE
“You see, I had this plan to make myself somebody at last, a celebrity. To go down in history. Had this plan I was working on, though, in the meantime, I needed to stay as real with myself as I could. Because when you think of all those other guys, Oswald, Booth and Arty Bremer, the lot, if it’s one thing about them marks them out as real losers is they got a little unreal sometimes…” – Taxi Driver
There has been much discussion on the effects the media has on people and whether it can instigate action, but the question shouldn’t be whether or not the film “Taxi Driver” had a mental impact on John Hinkley, but whether the conditioning was coincidental or deliberate. Are Hinkley, Richardson and VandeWehe really “lone-nuts” acting on their own perverted psychological motives, or were they deliberately programmed by the government, military, the CIA or some sinister psychologists who specializes in such behavior modification?
John Hinkley’s father was a wealthy oil man from Dallas, Texas, where Hinkley grew up and went to school. Hinkley bought his gun at a shop on Elm Street, not far from the Dealey Plaza intersection where President Kennedy was ambushed.
Hinkley’s family moved to Evergreen, Colorado, where they were living in March, 1981. John W. Hinkley Sr. owned Vanderbilt Oil Company, and was active in a number of religious and charitable organizations, although he has more recently been devoting his time to promoting a foundation for mental health research.
Although Hinkley’s main problem seemed to simplyl be finding direction in his life, his parents recognized some mental disturbance in him, and Hinkley saw no less than three doctors about his mental condition in the year before the shooting. In Lubock, Texas, Hinkley saw a Dr. Rosen, who prescribed an anti-depressant called Serentil, and valium, a tranquilizer.
Hinkley also saw Dr. John Hooper, who gave him biofeedback treatments. His father is also quoted as saying, “I made arrangements with a psychologist by the name of Durrell Benjamin, our company psychologist, to see John.”
This doctor told Hinkley’s father that, “John was immature and that we needed to work out a long-range plan to make John self sufficient.” Hinkley wanted to attend a writer’s school at Yale, and Benjamin recommended that he do so. Yale is where Jody Foster was attending school at the time.
They had Hinkley draw up a written agreement – contract that read: “I will receive the sum of $3,000 in checks, taken from my stock,…to last from September 17 to February 1st…and I do pledge to try to make the coming weeks and months as productive as possible. It is now or never. Thanks for the money and one more chance. John Hinkley, Jr.” The next day he left for New Haven, Connecticut and Yale, but he never enrolled in the writer’s school.
“I worked so hard for it. Swallowed pill after pill, wrote all night long,…making calculations and learned to make myself comfortable to the feel of these guns.” – Taxi Driver
Hinkley had seen a number of films with Jody Foster in them, some repeatedly, and in the month of August that year, he saw some on television. According to one report, “It was his feeling that the movies had been put no TV to excite him into action.”
Returning to his parent’s home in Colorado briefly, Hinkley went back to Lubbock, Texas where he purchased some weapons, the same caliber pistols bought by “Travis,” the hero of “Taxi Driver,” who he emulated. From Texas Hinkley went to Washington, D.C., Columbus, Ohio, and then to Dayton, Ohio, where he stalked then President Carter, who was making a campaign stop. Hinkley then went back to New Haven to see Jody Foster, then went to New York city where he sought out young prostitutes.
Traveling to Lincoln, Nebraska, Hinkley contacted one of the leading activists in the American Nazi party, and fraternized with rightwing military types, before going to Nashville, Tenn., where Carter was campaigning. Picked up at the Nashville airport where his guns had registered on a metal detector, Hinkley was arrested with unregistered weapons in a city where the President was visiting, yet he was never considered a threat to the President and placed on the “watch” list, as thousands of other Americans routinely are “red flagged.”
After paying a fine Hinkley went back to New Haven where he checked into the Colony Inn Hotel before moving to the Sheraton Park Plaza, never in need of money. Returing to Texas, Hinkley purchased two more handguns and then traveled to New Haven, Washington and Colorado, where he saw Evergreen psychologist Dr. John Hooper.
In an effort to make Hinkley relax, Hooper prescribed a series of biofeedback treatments. According to an account in Rolling Stone Magazine, “He was given earphones similar to those he wore in the nearby pistol range when he was practicing shooting at human silhouettes. An electrode was attached to his forehead. But while he was supposed to be relaxing, he was actually fantasizing about assassination and Jody Foster.” Dr. Hooper however, said at the time he had never even heard of Jody Foster.
Towards the end of 1980 Hinkley went to Washington D.C. where he was on December 8, when Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon. Hinkley then began stalking Ronald Reagan, and posed for pictures in front of the Ford Theater, where Lincoln was assassinated.
After seeing Dr. Hooper again in January, 1981, Hinkley went to New Hampshire in February, then to D.C. where he got a room at the Capitol Hill Quality Inn and visited the offices of Sen. Edward Kennedy, but Kennedy wasn’t in. He then visited the White House before going to New York where he planned to commit suicide at the Dakota, where Lennon was killed.
Returning to Colorado once again, on February 19th he left his parents a note saying, “Dear Mom and Dad; Your prodigal son has left again to exorcise some more demons.”
In New Haven, Conn. Hinkley stalked Jody Foster, delivered her a note, and then traveled to New York, from where he called home at 4:30 a.m. on March 6th. Hinkley’s father contacted Dr. Hooper, who advised him to give his son $100 and say goodbye. A friend of Hinkley’s father gave him the money to fly home, and on Saturday, March 7, Hinkley’s father picked him up at the Denver airport.
Staying at the Golden Hours Motel in Lakewood for a week, Hinkley moved to the Motel 6 in Lakewood rather than stay at home. He registered under the name of “Travis,” like his “Taxi Driver” hero. On March 25th his mother drove him to the airport and put him on a plane to Hollywood, California, where he stayed for less than a day. After four days on a bus, Hinkley arrived in New Haven, via D.C., then went back to D.C. and got a room at the Park Central Hotel, less than two blocks from the White House. There he watched TV, ate fast foods and read a Washington Star newspaper that contained the President’s itinerary.
After writing a letter Hinkley picked up a John Lennon button, which he put into his left coat pocket, then put his .22 in his right pocket and proceeded to the Hilton Hotel where the President was making an appearance.
As Hinkley was shooting the president, quite by coincidence, his brother Scott Hinkley was at the White House with his good friend, the son of Vice President George Bush. Bush’s daughter reportedly arranged dates for Scott Hinkley, and Ms. Maureen Bush, a niece of George Bush, is said to have been photographed at a Nazi rally with John Hinkley. The ironies were compounded however, when Michael Richardson was arrested in New York.
In the two weeks after Hinkley’s attack on Reagan, the Secret Service investigated over 300 threats against the life of the President, and Richardson was the most interesting of the copy-cat assassins.
MICHAEL RICHARDSON
From Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, Richardson was arrested on April 7, 1981 at the New York City bus terminal with a loaded .32 cal. Pistonl. He had been in New Haven, where he left a note in his hotel room saying he was leaving for Washington “to bring completion to Hinkley’s reality.”
“Our duel realities merged into a single vision,” wrote Richardson, and indeed their trails had previously crossed. Unlike Hinkley, Richardson had briefly served in the military. He was trained at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, from January 4 to March 31, 1977, and received an early honorable discharge after three months of basic training, but the reasons for his discharge were not disclosed. At his arrangement in New York however, U.S. Attorney John Martin said Richardson stabbed someone during his brief military stint.
After attending Delaware Community College in Pennsylvania in 1979, Richardson started school at the Rev. Carl MacIntire’s fundamentalist bible school, Shelton College, near Coca Beach, Florida. He also reportedly went to Cape May, New Jersey, where he spent the summer at MacIntire’s school there, earning extra money by helping to paint Macintire’s Christian Admiral Hotel on the beach. After two semesters, Richardson left Shelton and moved to Lakewood, Colorado, where he move in with his two sisters in December1980.
Hinkley’s parents lived in Evergreen, Colorado, near Lakewood, and Hinkley had stayed at the Golden Hours motel in Lakewood in March 1981.
Richardson left Colorado in mid-March, Hinkley on March 25. In a letter mailed from Grand Junction, Colorado on March 25, and received by the Evangelist Magazine the day Reagan was shot, someone warned, or mysteriously predicted that Reagan would be shot and the country “turned to the left.”
Richardson’s family attorney, Joseph F. Moore, Jr. said that the connections were only “cosmic,” and not evidence of conspiracy. No one however, inquired as to whether Richardson underwent any psychiatric treatment while in Colorado, or looked into whether or not Hinkley’s doctors, particularly Dr. Hooper, also treated Richardson.
Besides their joint fixation with Jody Foster and guns, and their “cosmic” Lakewood, Colorado connections, Hinkley and Richardson were both affiliated with evangelical ministries. Richardson, a student of the Rev. Carl MacIntire, pastor of the Bible Presbyterian Church in Collingswood, N.J. and Cape May, and president of Shelton College, was the founder of the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC).
MacIntire was also a close, personal friend of J. Edgar Hover, who shared MacIntire’s fanatic anti-communist fervor. MacIntire has frequently condemned the competing World Council of Christian Churches (WCCC), which includes parishes from Communist countries. MacIntire’s radio show, the 20th Century Reformation Hour, was broadcast behind the Iron Curtain and called for a Christian crusade against communism.
John Hinkley’s father, who sponsored a philanthropic foundation that ran a Denver soup kitchen for the poor and homeless, and where his son sometimes dined, was also on the board of directors of World Vision, and ran the World Vision center in Denver.
Both MacIntire’s ICCC and Hinkley’s World Vision are members of the ecumenical federation called the Evangelical Foreign Missions Assocation (EFMA) of Evanston, Illinois. One of the main functions of both ICCC and World Vision, which has its headquarters in Redwood Valley, California, is to operate refugee camps, especially refugee camps that attend to those who have fled communist countries.
According to John Judge, in the June-July issue of The Continuing Inquiry magazine, “World Vision is an evangelical, anti-communist missionary operation that works around the globe…and administers refugee camps in Ghana (where the Jonestown massacre occurred), and at Sabra and Shatilla camps in Lebanon where the Isralie massacre occurred.” Judge says that World Vision also operated along the Honduran border where CIA mercenaries fought Nicaraguan Sandinistas and El Salvadorian revolutionaries and that Alpha 66 and Omega 7 anti-Castro Cubans terrorists were hired to run some of the camps. One such camp also employed Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman, who worked at the Haitian refugee camp at Ft. Chaffee, Arkansas.
The CIA first began interviewing refugees from communist countries in East Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s as part of Reinhard Gehlen’s Operation Wriger, and the practice continued through the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and religious organizations like the ICCC and World Vision. Providing food and shelter in exchange for intelligence information is only the basis for the cooperation, and CIA evaluation of the refugee intelligence indicated that children were the most reliable of sources. Some of the foreign missionaries not only accepted money and assistance in exchange for intelligence information, but provided access to select refugees so they could be recruited and trained as assets, operatives and agents.
It is purely speculative whether or not Chapman, Hinkley or Richardson were targeted, recruited, trained or conditioned because of their association with these ministries, but the possibility is there.
Besides these associations, there is Hinkley’s bizarre association with the Islamic Guerilla Army (IGA). On December 16, 1981, Jack Anderson reported, “…Hinkley is widely believed to have acted out a crazy desire to impress actress Jody Foster. It’s an explanation that has gained credence by its very absurdity…But there is a possibility that Hinkley became associated with some Iranian terrorists who call themselves the Islamic Guerrilla Army (IGA)…In January 1981 an informant told the FBI and Secret Service that the IGA planned to assassinate Reagan sometime between Mid-March and early April, and that one of the assassination teams had the code name of ‘Hicks’ – a student who had been arrested in Nashville in October for illegal possession of firearms…Another informant, a government undercover agent, identified Hinkley as theman he saw at the Denver airport in 1979 with leaders of the Earth Liberation Movement (ELM), a communist backed group with ties to the IGA.”
John Hinkley’s father said that, “(Conspiracy) is one of the first things we looked at. The government looked into it and didn’t find anything. There’s absolutely no truth, no substance to conspiracy. John is very ill; he is a sick person. He did this for a vary pathetic reason.”
MICHALE VANDEWEHE
Like Richardson, Michael VandeWehe also served in the military, where something strange happened to him. VandeWehe was charged with threatening the life of the president after Hinkley’s attack on Reagan even though he was already incarcerated in the Cape May County jail at Cape May Court House, New Jersey.
Born in Cooperstown, New York, VandeWehe grew up in the Chelsea section of Atlantic City. His brother Richard died in a motorcycle accident in 1975 while stationed in Okinawa as a Marine. Michael joined the Marines in 1978. His father noted, “He felt he had to take his brother’s place.”
After basic training Michael was transferred to Iceland, where he was stationed for two years. But something happened there that forced him to be sent to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington, where he was treated in the psychiatric wing in May, 1980.
As for his stay in Iceland, his father said, “Something happened there, but we’re not sure what.” Released from the hospital in June of 1980, VandeWehe was discharged from the Service and returned to his parents home in Wildwood, New Jersey. Not permitted to move in with his parents, who stayed at the Sandman Towers senior citizen complex, named after former Congressman Charles Sandman, Michael got a room at a local boarding house.
When he missed a rent payment, he was locked out of his room and his belongings confiscated by his landlord. Arrested for burglary, theft and criminal mischief for taking merchandise from a burnt out Wildwood bar, VandeWehe was released and then rearrested and charged with aggravated assault for striking his landlord, who attempted to prevent him from removing his clothes from his room.
“You can’t take a young boy like this right from the hospital and put him out on the street,” his father said at the time. A week after Hinkley shot Reagan, VandeWehe wrote a letter from the Crest Haven jail that the Secret Service said, “made a direct threat against the life of the President.”
Although VandeWehe’s home inWildwood is only a few miles from the Rev. Carl MacIntire’s Christian Admiral Hotel and Shelton College in Cape May, there does not appear to be any known association between VandeWehe and MacIntire or Richardson and their proximity seems only a coincidence. Much like the Lakewood, Colorado proximity between Hinkley and Richardson.
What is interesting however, is the last chapter of the book “The Parallax View,” a novel about a reporter who investigates and penetrates a private network of programmed assassins for hire. Although the screenplay of the movie based on the book, which stars Warren Beaty, was altered to provide for a different ending, the suspense novel ends on the two mile long coastal road that runs between VandeWehe’s Wildwood and Cape May, where MacInire and Richardson were at the Christian Admiral.
Also unlike the movie, in which a commission concludes there was no conspiracy in a political assassination, the book ends with a suspicious local policeman investigating an automobile accident, and concluding it is a murder.
“The movie isn’t over yet” – John Hinkley, Jr.
-William S. Burroughs.
After John Hinkley shot President Reagan, he said, “The movie isn’t over yet!”
And indeed it isn’t. Political assassinations and coup d’etats are the most frequently used methods of changing governments and controlling power, and we shouldn’t expect that to change.
Now we hear from Hinkley every few years or so when he exercises his right to seek release from St. Elizabeth’s hospital, where he is incarcerated. Hinkley is in a hospital, rather than a prison, because of a quirk in our judicial system that says he is not responsible for his actions. If that is the case, then who is responsible for Hinckley’s actions?
After the assassination of President Kennedy the murder of a president was made a Federal, rather than a local crime, so a Federal investigation would take precedence over local police, courts and authorities. Unlike the Hinkley-Reagan affair, the assassination of President Kennedy was successful and the government changed hands, minds and policy, while Hinkley’s attempt on Reagan failed and the constitutional powers did not change.
Because we still haven’t determined exactly who was responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy, or the attack on Reagan, we certainly haven’t seen the last of political assassinations in our society. We haven’t heard the last of John Hinckley, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan B. Sirhan or Mark David Chapman, the seemingly unimportant people who unexpectedly rise from the masses to take a monumental action that makes a mark on history and changes the course of our times.
As Hinkley said, the movie isn’t over yet. Hinkley failed in his mission, but created an important case study that helps us understand the ongoing implications of assassination in our society.
War dawns slowly as a political hot spot becomes unmanageable and a limited conventional war gets out of hand, though we know the crisis is coming, but assassination, as a political incident, happens suddenly and often unexpectedly, except to those who intend it to happen. Since Hinkley shot Reagan, Sadat of Egypt, Aquillo of the Philippines, Ghandi of Inida, and dozens of other world leaders have become victim of assassins. Of all political avenues, assassination is the most likely, but least expected to happen.
“Well, it seems, you know, that there was this…there was this thing I had to do, the moment I had been heading for all my life, like going through that door, as I say, the door to someplace.” – Taxi Driver
John Hinkley came crashing through that door on a lazy springtime afternoon in March, 1981, just outside a side door of the Washington Hilton Hotel. It’s now nicknamed the Hinkley Hilton since Hinkley jumped out of a crowd of newsmen to shoot President Reagan, his press secretary James Brady, a secret service agent and a security guard.
Hinkley’s alleged motive, a psychological, rather than political one, is that he shot the President to impress movie actress Jody Foster. Hinkley had repeatedly seen the movie, “Taxi Driver” in which Foster plays the role of a prostitute protected by a crazed taxi driver who stalks a politician with the intent to kill him, but then kills a pimp and a drug pusher. Rather than being sent to prison, he is declared a hero.
While the facts of Hinkley’s life were being investigated and disseminated by the news media shortly after the attack, John Wright of Lansing, Michigan was arrested and charged with threatening the life of then Vice President George Bush. Wright had bragged, “that he could be more famous than Siran Siran or Lee Harvey Oswald.”
As news of Hinkley’s actions spread through the media, Edward Michael Richardson, Michael Vandewehe and possibly other “copy cat” assassins, as they came to be called, went through the Taxi Driver door on the heels of Hinkley. And like Hinkley and Wright, they found themselves in jail, charged with threatening the life of or attempting to assassinate the President of the United States.
On April 9, 1981, less than two weeks after the shooting at the Hinkley Hilton, Edward Michael Richardson was charged with two counts of threatening the life of the President. The first count stemmed from a letter Richardson wrote and delivered to Jody Foster Yale dormitory, while the second charge related to a letter found in Richardson’s hotel room in which he stated that he was going to Washington D.C. “to bring completion to Hinkley’s reality.” Richardson was arrested in New York City with a loaded pistol while getting on a D.C. bound bus.
From Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb, Richardson had spent some time in the military and was once a student of the Reverend Carl MacIntire’s Shelton College, a fundamentalist religious school with campuses located in Cape Canaveral, Florida and Cape May, New Jersey.
Within days of Richardson’s arrest, the Secret Service charged Michael VandeWehe of Wildwood, New Jersey, with threatening the life of the President. VandeWehe was considered a threat even though he was then incarcerated in the Cape May County jail at the time. The Secret Service said that he wrote and mailed a letter from the jail that made a “direct threat against the life of the President.”
Before Reagan was shot, the Secret Service had commissioned a study by a panel of 27 experts to prepare a report on the methods of predicting violent acts. The Secret Service also compiles files on thousands of citizens that are potential threats to the President, and some 400 individuals are considered a serious enough threat to be kept under periodic surveillance. Neither Hinkley, Wright nor VandeWehe were considered to be a threat to the President before March, 1981.
Hinkley’s case also made its mark in the legal journals as a precedent to be cited because of Hinkley’s insanity plea, and attempts by the victim’s attorneys to make Hinkley’s psychologists responsible for his actions if he was not.
If Hinkley and the copy-cats were acting on psychological impulses, rather than on political, ideological or mercenary motives, then someone else could be held responsible for their behavior if it can be shown that they were conditioned or acting as an agent of others.
Rather than acting as a deranged lone-nuts on primitive instincts, perhaps one or even some of these assassins were psychologically conditioned or brainwashed by scientists with a more sophisticated motive – and fit the archtypical Manchurian Candidate model.
If Hinkley was conditioned by the film “Taxi Driver,” it might not have been just be environmental and social circumstances, but rather by design. Using drugs, hypnosis and multimedia programming techniques, individual subjects have been programmed to kill with a high degree of predictable response, so it is a possibility that deserves further investigation.
THE ANCIENT ORDER OF THE ASSASSINS
The U.S. Government, the military in particular, conducted psychological experiments on human subjects years, decades ago, and today, anyone with the knowledge and the tools could be in the business of privately programming and training assassins and terrorists.
We know coup d’etats and political assassinations occur routinely in third world countries and so-called “Bananna Republics,” but our own system of government is equally vulnerable and more likely targeted for such manipulation. Until President Reagan, who survived the attempt on his life in the first weeks of his presidency, none of the previous five presidents actually served out their full two terms, eight years of office, since President Kennedy was assassinated.
Men with pistols, rifles, bombs and even samurai swords have been arrested at the White House gates, where guards have been on the lookout for suicide bomb trucks and remote control kamikaze airplanes.
The Secret Service, a branch of the Treasury Department, is responsible for the security of the president and thus keeps the files on thousands of people who are potential threats. Some are violent prone suspects, others religious fanatics, ideological demagogs, professional hit men, espionage agents and trained terrorists. Others are just plain nuts.
Their common name – assassins, comes from the Arabic word Hashshishin, which means, “users of hashish,” the euphoric drug, but their legend stems from a secret society that began in the 11th century Persia as a religious order. Their leader, it is said, “carries the death of kings in his hand.”
Most of Western civilization first learned the tales of the Assassins from Marco Polo, who passed through Persia in 1273 enroute to China. Polo reported that the Shek of the Assassins lived in a fortified valley between two mountains, which is probably the fabled, impenetrable fortress at Alamut. There the Sheik had a beautiful fruit bearing garden “watered with streams of wine, milk and honey.” Drugged and taken to the hidden garden, young impressionable recruits were courted by dancers, musicians, magicians and beautiful women. They were inebriated in ecstasy, then drugged again and brought before the Sheik. Having experienced paradise, they became slaves to its pleasures, and the Sheik’s whim. “Away they went,” Polo said, “and did all that they were commanded. Thus it happened that no man escaped when the Sheik of the mountains desired his death.”
The role of the order of the Assassins, while they have passed into mythology, is still relevant, not only linguistically, but in regards to a contemporary understanding of assassination as a political weapon in our own society. In the 1000 years the term assassins has been used, assassins are still programmed and conditioned in ways similar to their ancient counterparts, but by much more sophisticated and predictable ways.
As the victim of an assassin President Lincoln became the last casualty of the Civil War. In 1900 Theodore Roosevelt assumed power when President McKinley was shot and killed by a “glassy-eyed anarchist.” Assassins sparked Word War I by killing Archduke Ferdinand as he rode in a motorcade, and the Reichstag fire that herald Hilter’s rise to power was allegedly started by a “lone-nut.” French Admiral Darlin was assassinated by a British trained assassin in North Africa, while Hitler was the target of a failed assassination-coup attempt in 1944. After the war Leon Trotsky was targeted, stalked and eventually assassinated in Mexico City by Soviet agents.
The assassination of President Kennedy precipitated two decades of political unrest that included the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy and the wounding of Presidential candidate George Wallace, all by assassins who fit the archtypical assassin prototype – James Earl Ray, Siran Siran and Arthur Bremmer. Richard Nixon’s handpicked successor, Michigan congressman Gerald Ford, served on the Warren Commission inquiry into President Kennedy’s assassination before assuming that office himself. As President he dodged bullets from two attacks, one from Sara Jane Moore, and FBI informant, and the other from Squeaky Frome, one of Charles Manson’s disciples.
Assassins in the United States have not confined themselves to presidents and presidential contenders, but have also killed Union officials, foreign diplomats, journalists and cultural figures. United Mine Workers union president Tony Boyle was convicted of ordering the murder of his union rival Jock Yablonski, Chilean secret police agent Michael Townley turned states’ evidence in admitting his participation with renegade Cubans in the Dupont Circle bombing assassination of former Chilean ambassador Leitter in downtown Washington D.C., and one-time fan, Mark David Chapman shot and killed former Beatle John Lennon.
By March, 1981 America and the world had been numbed by the accustomed ring of the assassin’s gun when Hinkley opened fire on the President’s entourage. Had he been successful, Hinkley would have made George Bush president of the United States with the flick of his finger and altering the course of history. The possibility that Hinkley was programmed or conditioned to shoot the President may have been privately evaluated, but has not been analyzed in a public forum.
STATE-OF-THE-ART ASSASSINS
The U.S. government has learned much about the psychological makeup of assassins, not by studying the profiles of subjects, but by attempting to create them. The state-of-the-art of conditioning assassins has advanced considerably sincethe days of the Hashshishin and the garden fortress at Alamut.
From 1949 until 1974 the U.S. CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense conducted sophisticated mind and behavior control research, using students, agents, soldiers and prisoners as human guinea pigs in a number of experiments that used drugs, hypnosis, audio-visional and electronic programming techniques.
One such project, called ARTICHOKE, began using drugs for investigating interrogation techniques, which stemmed from attempts to understand brainwashing procedures used on American prisoners of war by the Chinese in North Korea. Eventually the program became directed towards finding “whether a person could be secretly induced to commit an assassination against his will.”
One CIA contract agent, Jessica Wilcox (aka Candy Jones), a model and radio personality, was programmed to commit suicide by her CIA psychiatrist (See: “Candy Jones,” by Donald Bain, Playboy Press).
Although both the CIA and the military claim that their research ended in 1974, there are indications that the mind control programs merely became “operational” when the “experimental” stage ended, and techniques for programming assassins were secretly blended in with the normal routine of clandestine and military affairs.
The discovery of a CIA handbook in Central America that gave guidelines on developing criminals as agents to eliminate selected government officials is evidence of this, along with the fact that it was used in Vietnam, supports the contention that the U.S. government uses assassination as a tool of foreign policy.
OSLO NATO CONFERENCE & THE NAVY NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL LAB
In the summer of 1975, a year after the government claimed it halted such research, Dr. Irwin Sarason organized a conference in Oslo, Norway for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which addressed the topic of “The Dimensions of Stress and Anxiety.”
Dr. Sarason had produced a film which showed the success of school students who asked questions, and presented the film to a group of juvenile delinquents, who learned how to ask questions and showed marked improvement in their studies.
The U.S. Office of Naval Research offered to fund Sarason’s work, provided it was classified, so it could be used by the Navy psychiatric lab in San Diego, California, where “spys were being trained to resist interrogation.”
Peter Watson, a former psychologist and a reporter for the London Sunday Times attended the Oslo conference and participated in a seminar conducted by U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Thomas Narut, a psychologist then assigned to the U.S. Navy Regional Medical Center in Naples, Italy.
Lt. Commander Narut gave a talk on “The Use of Symbolic Models and Verbal Intervention in Inducing and Reducing Stress.” He claimed his work involved teaching “combat readiness units” to cope with the stress of killing.
After his general discourse, Watson talked privately with Narut, who told the London Times correspondent that he had done his doctoral dissertation on whether certain films provoke anxiety. Narut said that he studied whether forcing men to do irrelevant tasks while watching violent films made them cope better with anxiety associated with violence.
Narut also told Watson that the U.S. Navy programmed assassins on an assembly line basis, and that he personally worked with men whom he referred to as “hit men and assassins,” who were involved in commando type operations and placed in U.S. embassies abroad. These men, Narut told Watson, were on call to kill selected victims when necessary. The U.S. Marine Corps, which is in charge of protecting embassies abroad, comes under the Department of Navy, and much of the advanced training for the Marines takes place at its bases in San Diego, California.
Narut said that drugs and hypnosis were no longer necessary, and that such conditioning was accomplished by a standardized behavior modification process called audio-visual desensitation. Subjects were desensitized to mayhem and carnage by viewing films of people being injured and killed in different ways, with mild bloodshed being succeeded by progressively violent scenes. They became acclimated to the brutality and eventually dissociated their feelings from the violence.
Narut was quoted as saying the best killers were classified as having “passive-aggressive” personalities, or men “with strong drives that were usually kept under tight control.” These types he said, “were usually calm, but from time to time would exhibit outbursts of temper during which they could literally kill without remorse.” Men with these “qualities” could be identified through psychological testing, using the Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory test, which is used in schools, businesses and corporations, as well as the military, and can measure hostility, depression and psychopathy.
After subjects with the right psychological qualities were selected and recruited they were sent either to the Naples Medical Center or the Navy Neuropsychological Lab in San Diego, California, where according to Narut, they were audio-visually desensitized by being strapped into a chair with their head clamped in such a way that they couldn’t look away from the screen and their eyelids prevented from closing.
After Watson’s story about the conversation with Narut was published in the London Sunday Times, Narut called a press conference to say that he had been talking only in “theoretical” and not “practical” terms.
HINKLEY’S MOVIE
“You see, I had this plan to make myself somebody at last, a celebrity. To go down in history. Had this plan I was working on, though, in the meantime, I needed to stay as real with myself as I could. Because when you think of all those other guys, Oswald, Booth and Arty Bremer, the lot, if it’s one thing about them marks them out as real losers is they got a little unreal sometimes…” – Taxi Driver
There has been much discussion on the effects the media has on people and whether it can instigate action, but the question shouldn’t be whether or not the film “Taxi Driver” had a mental impact on John Hinkley, but whether the conditioning was coincidental or deliberate. Are Hinkley, Richardson and VandeWehe really “lone-nuts” acting on their own perverted psychological motives, or were they deliberately programmed by the government, military, the CIA or some sinister psychologists who specializes in such behavior modification?
John Hinkley’s father was a wealthy oil man from Dallas, Texas, where Hinkley grew up and went to school. Hinkley bought his gun at a shop on Elm Street, not far from the Dealey Plaza intersection where President Kennedy was ambushed.
Hinkley’s family moved to Evergreen, Colorado, where they were living in March, 1981. John W. Hinkley Sr. owned Vanderbilt Oil Company, and was active in a number of religious and charitable organizations, although he has more recently been devoting his time to promoting a foundation for mental health research.
Although Hinkley’s main problem seemed to simplyl be finding direction in his life, his parents recognized some mental disturbance in him, and Hinkley saw no less than three doctors about his mental condition in the year before the shooting. In Lubock, Texas, Hinkley saw a Dr. Rosen, who prescribed an anti-depressant called Serentil, and valium, a tranquilizer.
Hinkley also saw Dr. John Hooper, who gave him biofeedback treatments. His father is also quoted as saying, “I made arrangements with a psychologist by the name of Durrell Benjamin, our company psychologist, to see John.”
This doctor told Hinkley’s father that, “John was immature and that we needed to work out a long-range plan to make John self sufficient.” Hinkley wanted to attend a writer’s school at Yale, and Benjamin recommended that he do so. Yale is where Jody Foster was attending school at the time.
They had Hinkley draw up a written agreement – contract that read: “I will receive the sum of $3,000 in checks, taken from my stock,…to last from September 17 to February 1st…and I do pledge to try to make the coming weeks and months as productive as possible. It is now or never. Thanks for the money and one more chance. John Hinkley, Jr.” The next day he left for New Haven, Connecticut and Yale, but he never enrolled in the writer’s school.
“I worked so hard for it. Swallowed pill after pill, wrote all night long,…making calculations and learned to make myself comfortable to the feel of these guns.” – Taxi Driver
Hinkley had seen a number of films with Jody Foster in them, some repeatedly, and in the month of August that year, he saw some on television. According to one report, “It was his feeling that the movies had been put no TV to excite him into action.”
Returning to his parent’s home in Colorado briefly, Hinkley went back to Lubbock, Texas where he purchased some weapons, the same caliber pistols bought by “Travis,” the hero of “Taxi Driver,” who he emulated. From Texas Hinkley went to Washington, D.C., Columbus, Ohio, and then to Dayton, Ohio, where he stalked then President Carter, who was making a campaign stop. Hinkley then went back to New Haven to see Jody Foster, then went to New York city where he sought out young prostitutes.
Traveling to Lincoln, Nebraska, Hinkley contacted one of the leading activists in the American Nazi party, and fraternized with rightwing military types, before going to Nashville, Tenn., where Carter was campaigning. Picked up at the Nashville airport where his guns had registered on a metal detector, Hinkley was arrested with unregistered weapons in a city where the President was visiting, yet he was never considered a threat to the President and placed on the “watch” list, as thousands of other Americans routinely are “red flagged.”
After paying a fine Hinkley went back to New Haven where he checked into the Colony Inn Hotel before moving to the Sheraton Park Plaza, never in need of money. Returing to Texas, Hinkley purchased two more handguns and then traveled to New Haven, Washington and Colorado, where he saw Evergreen psychologist Dr. John Hooper.
In an effort to make Hinkley relax, Hooper prescribed a series of biofeedback treatments. According to an account in Rolling Stone Magazine, “He was given earphones similar to those he wore in the nearby pistol range when he was practicing shooting at human silhouettes. An electrode was attached to his forehead. But while he was supposed to be relaxing, he was actually fantasizing about assassination and Jody Foster.” Dr. Hooper however, said at the time he had never even heard of Jody Foster.
Towards the end of 1980 Hinkley went to Washington D.C. where he was on December 8, when Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon. Hinkley then began stalking Ronald Reagan, and posed for pictures in front of the Ford Theater, where Lincoln was assassinated.
After seeing Dr. Hooper again in January, 1981, Hinkley went to New Hampshire in February, then to D.C. where he got a room at the Capitol Hill Quality Inn and visited the offices of Sen. Edward Kennedy, but Kennedy wasn’t in. He then visited the White House before going to New York where he planned to commit suicide at the Dakota, where Lennon was killed.
Returning to Colorado once again, on February 19th he left his parents a note saying, “Dear Mom and Dad; Your prodigal son has left again to exorcise some more demons.”
In New Haven, Conn. Hinkley stalked Jody Foster, delivered her a note, and then traveled to New York, from where he called home at 4:30 a.m. on March 6th. Hinkley’s father contacted Dr. Hooper, who advised him to give his son $100 and say goodbye. A friend of Hinkley’s father gave him the money to fly home, and on Saturday, March 7, Hinkley’s father picked him up at the Denver airport.
Staying at the Golden Hours Motel in Lakewood for a week, Hinkley moved to the Motel 6 in Lakewood rather than stay at home. He registered under the name of “Travis,” like his “Taxi Driver” hero. On March 25th his mother drove him to the airport and put him on a plane to Hollywood, California, where he stayed for less than a day. After four days on a bus, Hinkley arrived in New Haven, via D.C., then went back to D.C. and got a room at the Park Central Hotel, less than two blocks from the White House. There he watched TV, ate fast foods and read a Washington Star newspaper that contained the President’s itinerary.
After writing a letter Hinkley picked up a John Lennon button, which he put into his left coat pocket, then put his .22 in his right pocket and proceeded to the Hilton Hotel where the President was making an appearance.
As Hinkley was shooting the president, quite by coincidence, his brother Scott Hinkley was at the White House with his good friend, the son of Vice President George Bush. Bush’s daughter reportedly arranged dates for Scott Hinkley, and Ms. Maureen Bush, a niece of George Bush, is said to have been photographed at a Nazi rally with John Hinkley. The ironies were compounded however, when Michael Richardson was arrested in New York.
In the two weeks after Hinkley’s attack on Reagan, the Secret Service investigated over 300 threats against the life of the President, and Richardson was the most interesting of the copy-cat assassins.
MICHAEL RICHARDSON
From Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, Richardson was arrested on April 7, 1981 at the New York City bus terminal with a loaded .32 cal. Pistonl. He had been in New Haven, where he left a note in his hotel room saying he was leaving for Washington “to bring completion to Hinkley’s reality.”
“Our duel realities merged into a single vision,” wrote Richardson, and indeed their trails had previously crossed. Unlike Hinkley, Richardson had briefly served in the military. He was trained at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, from January 4 to March 31, 1977, and received an early honorable discharge after three months of basic training, but the reasons for his discharge were not disclosed. At his arrangement in New York however, U.S. Attorney John Martin said Richardson stabbed someone during his brief military stint.
After attending Delaware Community College in Pennsylvania in 1979, Richardson started school at the Rev. Carl MacIntire’s fundamentalist bible school, Shelton College, near Coca Beach, Florida. He also reportedly went to Cape May, New Jersey, where he spent the summer at MacIntire’s school there, earning extra money by helping to paint Macintire’s Christian Admiral Hotel on the beach. After two semesters, Richardson left Shelton and moved to Lakewood, Colorado, where he move in with his two sisters in December1980.
Hinkley’s parents lived in Evergreen, Colorado, near Lakewood, and Hinkley had stayed at the Golden Hours motel in Lakewood in March 1981.
Richardson left Colorado in mid-March, Hinkley on March 25. In a letter mailed from Grand Junction, Colorado on March 25, and received by the Evangelist Magazine the day Reagan was shot, someone warned, or mysteriously predicted that Reagan would be shot and the country “turned to the left.”
Richardson’s family attorney, Joseph F. Moore, Jr. said that the connections were only “cosmic,” and not evidence of conspiracy. No one however, inquired as to whether Richardson underwent any psychiatric treatment while in Colorado, or looked into whether or not Hinkley’s doctors, particularly Dr. Hooper, also treated Richardson.
Besides their joint fixation with Jody Foster and guns, and their “cosmic” Lakewood, Colorado connections, Hinkley and Richardson were both affiliated with evangelical ministries. Richardson, a student of the Rev. Carl MacIntire, pastor of the Bible Presbyterian Church in Collingswood, N.J. and Cape May, and president of Shelton College, was the founder of the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC).
MacIntire was also a close, personal friend of J. Edgar Hover, who shared MacIntire’s fanatic anti-communist fervor. MacIntire has frequently condemned the competing World Council of Christian Churches (WCCC), which includes parishes from Communist countries. MacIntire’s radio show, the 20th Century Reformation Hour, was broadcast behind the Iron Curtain and called for a Christian crusade against communism.
John Hinkley’s father, who sponsored a philanthropic foundation that ran a Denver soup kitchen for the poor and homeless, and where his son sometimes dined, was also on the board of directors of World Vision, and ran the World Vision center in Denver.
Both MacIntire’s ICCC and Hinkley’s World Vision are members of the ecumenical federation called the Evangelical Foreign Missions Assocation (EFMA) of Evanston, Illinois. One of the main functions of both ICCC and World Vision, which has its headquarters in Redwood Valley, California, is to operate refugee camps, especially refugee camps that attend to those who have fled communist countries.
According to John Judge, in the June-July issue of The Continuing Inquiry magazine, “World Vision is an evangelical, anti-communist missionary operation that works around the globe…and administers refugee camps in Ghana (where the Jonestown massacre occurred), and at Sabra and Shatilla camps in Lebanon where the Isralie massacre occurred.” Judge says that World Vision also operated along the Honduran border where CIA mercenaries fought Nicaraguan Sandinistas and El Salvadorian revolutionaries and that Alpha 66 and Omega 7 anti-Castro Cubans terrorists were hired to run some of the camps. One such camp also employed Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman, who worked at the Haitian refugee camp at Ft. Chaffee, Arkansas.
The CIA first began interviewing refugees from communist countries in East Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s as part of Reinhard Gehlen’s Operation Wriger, and the practice continued through the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and religious organizations like the ICCC and World Vision. Providing food and shelter in exchange for intelligence information is only the basis for the cooperation, and CIA evaluation of the refugee intelligence indicated that children were the most reliable of sources. Some of the foreign missionaries not only accepted money and assistance in exchange for intelligence information, but provided access to select refugees so they could be recruited and trained as assets, operatives and agents.
It is purely speculative whether or not Chapman, Hinkley or Richardson were targeted, recruited, trained or conditioned because of their association with these ministries, but the possibility is there.
Besides these associations, there is Hinkley’s bizarre association with the Islamic Guerilla Army (IGA). On December 16, 1981, Jack Anderson reported, “…Hinkley is widely believed to have acted out a crazy desire to impress actress Jody Foster. It’s an explanation that has gained credence by its very absurdity…But there is a possibility that Hinkley became associated with some Iranian terrorists who call themselves the Islamic Guerrilla Army (IGA)…In January 1981 an informant told the FBI and Secret Service that the IGA planned to assassinate Reagan sometime between Mid-March and early April, and that one of the assassination teams had the code name of ‘Hicks’ – a student who had been arrested in Nashville in October for illegal possession of firearms…Another informant, a government undercover agent, identified Hinkley as theman he saw at the Denver airport in 1979 with leaders of the Earth Liberation Movement (ELM), a communist backed group with ties to the IGA.”
John Hinkley’s father said that, “(Conspiracy) is one of the first things we looked at. The government looked into it and didn’t find anything. There’s absolutely no truth, no substance to conspiracy. John is very ill; he is a sick person. He did this for a vary pathetic reason.”
MICHALE VANDEWEHE
Like Richardson, Michael VandeWehe also served in the military, where something strange happened to him. VandeWehe was charged with threatening the life of the president after Hinkley’s attack on Reagan even though he was already incarcerated in the Cape May County jail at Cape May Court House, New Jersey.
Born in Cooperstown, New York, VandeWehe grew up in the Chelsea section of Atlantic City. His brother Richard died in a motorcycle accident in 1975 while stationed in Okinawa as a Marine. Michael joined the Marines in 1978. His father noted, “He felt he had to take his brother’s place.”
After basic training Michael was transferred to Iceland, where he was stationed for two years. But something happened there that forced him to be sent to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington, where he was treated in the psychiatric wing in May, 1980.
As for his stay in Iceland, his father said, “Something happened there, but we’re not sure what.” Released from the hospital in June of 1980, VandeWehe was discharged from the Service and returned to his parents home in Wildwood, New Jersey. Not permitted to move in with his parents, who stayed at the Sandman Towers senior citizen complex, named after former Congressman Charles Sandman, Michael got a room at a local boarding house.
When he missed a rent payment, he was locked out of his room and his belongings confiscated by his landlord. Arrested for burglary, theft and criminal mischief for taking merchandise from a burnt out Wildwood bar, VandeWehe was released and then rearrested and charged with aggravated assault for striking his landlord, who attempted to prevent him from removing his clothes from his room.
“You can’t take a young boy like this right from the hospital and put him out on the street,” his father said at the time. A week after Hinkley shot Reagan, VandeWehe wrote a letter from the Crest Haven jail that the Secret Service said, “made a direct threat against the life of the President.”
Although VandeWehe’s home inWildwood is only a few miles from the Rev. Carl MacIntire’s Christian Admiral Hotel and Shelton College in Cape May, there does not appear to be any known association between VandeWehe and MacIntire or Richardson and their proximity seems only a coincidence. Much like the Lakewood, Colorado proximity between Hinkley and Richardson.
What is interesting however, is the last chapter of the book “The Parallax View,” a novel about a reporter who investigates and penetrates a private network of programmed assassins for hire. Although the screenplay of the movie based on the book, which stars Warren Beaty, was altered to provide for a different ending, the suspense novel ends on the two mile long coastal road that runs between VandeWehe’s Wildwood and Cape May, where MacInire and Richardson were at the Christian Admiral.
Also unlike the movie, in which a commission concludes there was no conspiracy in a political assassination, the book ends with a suspicious local policeman investigating an automobile accident, and concluding it is a murder.
“The movie isn’t over yet” – John Hinkley, Jr.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Give Conspiracy Theories A Rest?
Can We Give Those Conspiracy Theories a Rest?
Posted: 01/24/2012
David Macaray
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-macaray/can-we-give-those-conspiracy-theories_b_1208944.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false
Some people still believe the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was a political "inside job," planned and orchestrated by George W. Bush and company to provide the U.S. with grounds for launching a full-scale invasion of Iraq. Our reasons for wanting to invade were (1) to introduce democracy to the Middle East, (2) to provide additional security for Israel, (3) to gain control of Iraqi oil, and (4) to pay back Saddam Hussein for trying to kill Bush's dad.
When you challenge that theory -- when you say it's ludicrous to believe the White House would stage such a thing -- they remind you that political conspiracies have been around since well before the House of Medici. Grow up, they say. But it's not a matter of growing up. The problem with conspiracy theories, especially the big, ambitious ones like this caper, is that they tend to raise more questions than they answer. They ignore the reasonable and plausible, and go straight for the sensational.
One example: If the goal was to get American approval for the invasion of Iraq, why didn't these masterminds at least supply the perpetrators with Iraqi identities? Believe me, if my friends and I had planned something like this, the first thing we would've done is make sure the terrorists carried Iraqi IDs. And as we all know, the perps who brought down the towers were Saudis. It seems minor, but it speaks volumes.
Polls show the majority of Americans still believe the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy. They believe the Warren Report was badly flawed (if not a cover-up) and that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. But when people insist it was impossible for someone like Oswald -- a confused and emotionally unstable 24-year old ex-marine -- to pull off something as complicated as the assassination of a U.S. president, I direct their attention to John Hinckley.
On March 30, 1981 (seventeen years after the Kennedy assassination, with presidential security much improved), Hinckley, a timid, 25-year old former mental patient, casually walked up to Ronald Reagan in broad daylight on a busy Washington D.C. street (surrounded by Secret Service agents) and fired six shots at point-blank range, one hitting Reagan in the chest, missing his heart by an inch. So much for the theory that presidential assassinations have to be "complicated."
Consider what would have happened if Hinckley had then turned the gun on himself, leaving us with no clue as to why he did it (remember his obsession with actress Jodie Foster?). We can only imagine the conspiracy theories that would've proliferated as a result. Indeed, Geraldo Rivera would still be on TV today. And pity the fool bold enough to have suggested that this Hinckley dude was just some nutcase who had acted alone, because that explanation would've been dismissed out of hand.
Hard as it is to beat a murder rap by pleading non compos mentis, Hinckley did it. The jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. Think about that. Even though it's been proven to us that a clinically insane man is capable of walking up to a U.S. president on a city street and shooting him, we still can't bring ourselves to accept the notion that Lee Oswald acted alone.
Despite overwhelming evidence implicating Oswald, we still cling to the belief that Kennedy's murder can only be explained by appealing to a shadowy, wildly bizarre conspiracy that involved everyone from the Cubans, to the CIA, to the Mafia, to shady New Orleans businessmen to Lyndon Johnson himself. No wonder Oliver Stone saw the opportunity for a lurid movie.
I'm not suggesting I know more than the average person. Far from it. All I'm saying is that it's clear we don't always need a proportionately grandiose theory to explain a grandiose act. Sometimes momentous things get done by dreary, ordinary people.
If Timothy McVeigh hadn't been caught, we'd still be looking for the guys who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. And it's safe to say that those guys' profile would be "radical Arab Jihadist," and not "white, 26-year old, homegrown ex-Army."
David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright and author ('It's Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor') was a former union rep. He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net.
Posted: 01/24/2012
David Macaray
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-macaray/can-we-give-those-conspiracy-theories_b_1208944.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false
Some people still believe the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was a political "inside job," planned and orchestrated by George W. Bush and company to provide the U.S. with grounds for launching a full-scale invasion of Iraq. Our reasons for wanting to invade were (1) to introduce democracy to the Middle East, (2) to provide additional security for Israel, (3) to gain control of Iraqi oil, and (4) to pay back Saddam Hussein for trying to kill Bush's dad.
When you challenge that theory -- when you say it's ludicrous to believe the White House would stage such a thing -- they remind you that political conspiracies have been around since well before the House of Medici. Grow up, they say. But it's not a matter of growing up. The problem with conspiracy theories, especially the big, ambitious ones like this caper, is that they tend to raise more questions than they answer. They ignore the reasonable and plausible, and go straight for the sensational.
One example: If the goal was to get American approval for the invasion of Iraq, why didn't these masterminds at least supply the perpetrators with Iraqi identities? Believe me, if my friends and I had planned something like this, the first thing we would've done is make sure the terrorists carried Iraqi IDs. And as we all know, the perps who brought down the towers were Saudis. It seems minor, but it speaks volumes.
Polls show the majority of Americans still believe the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy. They believe the Warren Report was badly flawed (if not a cover-up) and that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. But when people insist it was impossible for someone like Oswald -- a confused and emotionally unstable 24-year old ex-marine -- to pull off something as complicated as the assassination of a U.S. president, I direct their attention to John Hinckley.
On March 30, 1981 (seventeen years after the Kennedy assassination, with presidential security much improved), Hinckley, a timid, 25-year old former mental patient, casually walked up to Ronald Reagan in broad daylight on a busy Washington D.C. street (surrounded by Secret Service agents) and fired six shots at point-blank range, one hitting Reagan in the chest, missing his heart by an inch. So much for the theory that presidential assassinations have to be "complicated."
Consider what would have happened if Hinckley had then turned the gun on himself, leaving us with no clue as to why he did it (remember his obsession with actress Jodie Foster?). We can only imagine the conspiracy theories that would've proliferated as a result. Indeed, Geraldo Rivera would still be on TV today. And pity the fool bold enough to have suggested that this Hinckley dude was just some nutcase who had acted alone, because that explanation would've been dismissed out of hand.
Hard as it is to beat a murder rap by pleading non compos mentis, Hinckley did it. The jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. Think about that. Even though it's been proven to us that a clinically insane man is capable of walking up to a U.S. president on a city street and shooting him, we still can't bring ourselves to accept the notion that Lee Oswald acted alone.
Despite overwhelming evidence implicating Oswald, we still cling to the belief that Kennedy's murder can only be explained by appealing to a shadowy, wildly bizarre conspiracy that involved everyone from the Cubans, to the CIA, to the Mafia, to shady New Orleans businessmen to Lyndon Johnson himself. No wonder Oliver Stone saw the opportunity for a lurid movie.
I'm not suggesting I know more than the average person. Far from it. All I'm saying is that it's clear we don't always need a proportionately grandiose theory to explain a grandiose act. Sometimes momentous things get done by dreary, ordinary people.
If Timothy McVeigh hadn't been caught, we'd still be looking for the guys who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. And it's safe to say that those guys' profile would be "radical Arab Jihadist," and not "white, 26-year old, homegrown ex-Army."
David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright and author ('It's Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor') was a former union rep. He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net.
Assassinate Obama?
Newspaper Editor: Israel Should Consider Assassinating Obama.
http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=144479
Andrew Adler, the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, a weekly newspaper serving Atlanta's Jewish community, devoted his January 13, 2012 column to the thorny problem of the U.S. and Israel's diverging views on the threat posed by Iran. Basically Israel has three options, he wrote: Strike Hezbollah and Hamas, strike Iran, or "order a hit" on Barack Obama. Either way, problem solved!
Here's how Adler laid out "option three" in his list of scenarios facing Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu (the column, which was forwarded to us by a tipster, isn't online, but you can read a copy here):
Three, give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States' policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.
Yes, you read "three" correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel's existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don't you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel's most inner circles?
Another way of putting "three" in perspective goes something like this: How far would you go to save a nation comprised of seven million lives...Jews, Christians and Arabs alike?
You have got to believe, like I do, that all options are on the table.
It's hard to tell whether or not Adler is just some crank. But the Atlanta Jewish Times, which he purchased in 2009, appears to be a real community newspaper. It was founded in 1925 and,according to Wikipedia, claims a circulation of 3,500 and staff of five. To judge from its web site, it's a going concern.
A nervous Adler told me over the phone that he wasn't advocating Obama's assassination by Mossad agents. "Of course not," he said.
But do you think Israel should consider it an option? "No."
But do you believe that Israel is in fact considering the option in its most inner circles? "No. Actually, no. I was hoping to make clear that it's unspeakable—god forbid this would ever happen. I take it you're quoting me?"
Yes. "Oh, boy."
When I asked Adler why, if he didn't advocate assassination and didn't believe Israel was actually considering it, he wrote a column saying he believed that the option was "on the table," he asked for a minute to compose himself and call me back. He did a few moments later, and said, "I wrote it to see what kind of reaction I was going to get from readers."
And what was the reaction? "We've gotten a lot of calls and emails."
Nothing from the Secret Service, though. Yet.
Adler has told JTA that he "regrets" the column and plans to publish an apology. Oh, and the Secret Service says it will "make all appropriate, investigative follow-up in regard to this matter," according to ABC News.
http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=144479
Andrew Adler, the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, a weekly newspaper serving Atlanta's Jewish community, devoted his January 13, 2012 column to the thorny problem of the U.S. and Israel's diverging views on the threat posed by Iran. Basically Israel has three options, he wrote: Strike Hezbollah and Hamas, strike Iran, or "order a hit" on Barack Obama. Either way, problem solved!
Here's how Adler laid out "option three" in his list of scenarios facing Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu (the column, which was forwarded to us by a tipster, isn't online, but you can read a copy here):
Three, give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States' policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.
Yes, you read "three" correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel's existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don't you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel's most inner circles?
Another way of putting "three" in perspective goes something like this: How far would you go to save a nation comprised of seven million lives...Jews, Christians and Arabs alike?
You have got to believe, like I do, that all options are on the table.
It's hard to tell whether or not Adler is just some crank. But the Atlanta Jewish Times, which he purchased in 2009, appears to be a real community newspaper. It was founded in 1925 and,according to Wikipedia, claims a circulation of 3,500 and staff of five. To judge from its web site, it's a going concern.
A nervous Adler told me over the phone that he wasn't advocating Obama's assassination by Mossad agents. "Of course not," he said.
But do you think Israel should consider it an option? "No."
But do you believe that Israel is in fact considering the option in its most inner circles? "No. Actually, no. I was hoping to make clear that it's unspeakable—god forbid this would ever happen. I take it you're quoting me?"
Yes. "Oh, boy."
When I asked Adler why, if he didn't advocate assassination and didn't believe Israel was actually considering it, he wrote a column saying he believed that the option was "on the table," he asked for a minute to compose himself and call me back. He did a few moments later, and said, "I wrote it to see what kind of reaction I was going to get from readers."
And what was the reaction? "We've gotten a lot of calls and emails."
Nothing from the Secret Service, though. Yet.
Adler has told JTA that he "regrets" the column and plans to publish an apology. Oh, and the Secret Service says it will "make all appropriate, investigative follow-up in regard to this matter," according to ABC News.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
The Two Sides of Roger Stone
Stone has spent some time at the Jersey Shore, usually spent downbeach in Margate, and he did some private research into the political strategies of Atlantic City mob boss Nucky Johnson before the HBO TV series made him a household name.
The Two Sides of Roger Stone
On a Education Forum JFK Assassination Thread Robert Morrow wrote:
I recently emailed Roger Stone, Nixon confidant and longtime and notorious GOP operative, my essay 'LBJ-CIA Assassination of JFK." Or rather, I tweeted it to him.
My essay: http://lyndonjohnson...fk-updated.html
Here is Roger Stone's "tweet" back to me on January 9, 2012:
"LBJ had it done. Mob, CIA, Hoover, all in on it. RFK knew. So did Nixon."
This comes from a man who was very, very, very close to Richard Nixon. Obviously, I need to follow up on this but I thought I would share it with you first.
You can google "Roger Stone Richard Nixon" and learn more about Stone.
Roger Stone was very close to Nixon. I would not be surprised if he had personal, private talks with Nixon about the JFK assassination.
Stone even has a tattoo of Nixon on his upper back; that is how vested he is in Nixon.
Nixon knew the truth about what LBJ and CIA had done. In fact, that was his firewall defense in Watergate – don’t investigate me or the “whole Bay of Pigs thing” is going to come out.
Nixon used to tell his operatives never, ever take any money from H.L. Hunt. I think one big reason for that was he knew that Hunt would then think he owned Nixon, and also Nixon was aware of Hunt’s role in the JFK assassination.
There is another longtime GOP operative named Jack Wheeler – his web site is “To The Point News.” Wheeler is a longtime GOP insider. Wheeler is also close friends with Jeb Bush. I once corresponded with Wheeler on this matter; he told me he had always suspected Lyndon Johnson in the JFK assassination.
Here is a brief bio of Roger Stone: http://biggovernment.../author/rstone/
Roger Stone:
Roger Stone is a legendary American Republican political consultant who has played a key role in the election of Republican presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush.
Stone is credited with the public relations rehabilitation of President Richard M. Nixon after his resignation in 1974. Stone first worked for Nixon as Chairman of Connecticut Youth for Nixon/Agnew in 1968 and graduating to a position in Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign which won 49 out of 50 states.
In 1976 Stone was named National Director of Youth for Reagan, a division of Governor Ronald Reagan's 1976 Presidential campaign. In 1978, Stone co-founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee [NCPAC] where he is credited with developing the negative campaign into an art form and pioneering the use of negative campaign advertising which Mr. Stone calls "comparative, not negative."
Starting in 1979, Stone served as Regional Political Director for Governor Reagan's 1980 campaign for President handling New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, his native State. Stone became known for his expertise and strategies for motivating and winning ethnic and Catholic voters.
Stone went on to serve in the same capacity in Reagan's 1984 reelection campaign adding responsibility for Pennsylvania and Ohio to the states Stone managed in 1980. He went on to serve as a Senior Consultant for California for President George H. W. Bush's campaign.
In 2000 Stone is credited with the hard-ball tactics which resulted in closing down the Miami-Dade Presidential recount. Stone is credited in HBO's recent movie, "Recount 2000" with fomenting the so-called "Brooks Brothers Riot" in which a Republican mob swarmed the recount demanding a shutdown while thousands of Cuban-Americans marched outside the Courthouse demanding the same thing.
Stone has worked for numerous Republican US Senators like Senator Arlen Specter as well as pro-American political parties in Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. He is consulted regularly on communications and corporate and public relations strategy by fortune 500 ECO's and pro-democracy foreign leaders.
Stone has been profiled in the Weekly Standard, The New Yorker, and the Miami Herald in 2007 and 2008. Mr. Stone has written for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, The New York Times Op Ed page and for Newsmax.com. He has appeared frequently on FOX News, NBC Nightly News, CNN, MSNBC, and the Today Show. Stone is the editor and publisher of STONEzone.com.
This post has been edited by Robert Morrow: 15 January 2012 - 08:05
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Iranian Nuke Scientist Assassinated
msnbc.com news services
updated 52 minutes ago
TEHRAN — An Iranian nuclear scientist was killed by a bomb placed on his car by a motorcyclist in Tehran on Wednesday, and a city official blamed Israel for the attack, similar to previous attacks on nuclear scientists.
Fars news agency described the explosion as a "terrorist attack" targeting Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 32, a graduate of the prestigious Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. Fars said he had supervised a department at Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility.
Iran's atomic energy organization said it would issue a statement shortly.
"The bomb was a magnetic one and the same as the ones previously used for the assassination of the scientists, and the work of the Zionists (Israelis)," Fars quoted Deputy Tehran Governor Safarali Baratloo as saying.
Witnesses told Reuters they had seen two people on the motorbike fix the bomb to the car. As well as the person killed in the car, a pedestrian was also killed. Another person in the car was gravely injured, they said.
Video: War of words with Iran escalates (on this page)
Two daylight bomb attacks on the same day in Tehran in November 2010 killed one nuclear scientist and wounded another.
Iran then blamed Israeli, British and U.S. intelligence for the attacks, which it said were aimed at assassinating key people working on Iran's nuclear program.
And in July 2011, motorcycle-riding gunmen killed Darioush Rezaeinejad, an electronics student. Other reports identified him as a scientist involved in suspected Iranian attempts to make nuclear weapons.
Peaceful nukes?
Iran denies Western suspicions that its nuclear program has military goals, saying it is for purely peaceful purposes.
Iran sentences US man to death for spying
There was no immediate word from Israeli officials. Israel has always declined comment on previous such bombings in Iran.
On Tuesday, Israel's military chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz, was quoted as saying that Iran should expect more "unnatural" events in 2012.
His comments, to a closed-door parliamentary panel in Jerusalem, were widely interpreted as alluding to previous acts of sabotage.
"For Iran, 2012 is a critical year in combining the continuation of its nuclearization, internal changes in the Iranian leadership, continuing and growing pressure from the international community and things which take place in an unnatural manner," Gantz was quoted as saying.
updated 52 minutes ago
TEHRAN — An Iranian nuclear scientist was killed by a bomb placed on his car by a motorcyclist in Tehran on Wednesday, and a city official blamed Israel for the attack, similar to previous attacks on nuclear scientists.
Fars news agency described the explosion as a "terrorist attack" targeting Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 32, a graduate of the prestigious Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. Fars said he had supervised a department at Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility.
Iran's atomic energy organization said it would issue a statement shortly.
"The bomb was a magnetic one and the same as the ones previously used for the assassination of the scientists, and the work of the Zionists (Israelis)," Fars quoted Deputy Tehran Governor Safarali Baratloo as saying.
Witnesses told Reuters they had seen two people on the motorbike fix the bomb to the car. As well as the person killed in the car, a pedestrian was also killed. Another person in the car was gravely injured, they said.
Video: War of words with Iran escalates (on this page)
Two daylight bomb attacks on the same day in Tehran in November 2010 killed one nuclear scientist and wounded another.
Iran then blamed Israeli, British and U.S. intelligence for the attacks, which it said were aimed at assassinating key people working on Iran's nuclear program.
And in July 2011, motorcycle-riding gunmen killed Darioush Rezaeinejad, an electronics student. Other reports identified him as a scientist involved in suspected Iranian attempts to make nuclear weapons.
Peaceful nukes?
Iran denies Western suspicions that its nuclear program has military goals, saying it is for purely peaceful purposes.
Iran sentences US man to death for spying
There was no immediate word from Israeli officials. Israel has always declined comment on previous such bombings in Iran.
On Tuesday, Israel's military chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz, was quoted as saying that Iran should expect more "unnatural" events in 2012.
His comments, to a closed-door parliamentary panel in Jerusalem, were widely interpreted as alluding to previous acts of sabotage.
"For Iran, 2012 is a critical year in combining the continuation of its nuclearization, internal changes in the Iranian leadership, continuing and growing pressure from the international community and things which take place in an unnatural manner," Gantz was quoted as saying.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Lone Nuts In a Tux
AUSSIE FAUX PAUX & LONE NUTS IN TUX
By Russ Baker
http://whowhatwhy.com/
Small, bad things seem to (almost) happen to Obama; they get little sustained attention from reporters or the public. But there’s something odd about them, and they’re worrisome for the White House. Of course, the corporate media will dismiss it as nothing at all. Yet there’s a disturbing military/security thread running through it all—and as we approach the 50th anniversary of JFK’s demise, we’d be smart to err on the side of caution.
Here’s a crazy story that has gotten little attention in the United States: During Barack Obama’s recent visit to Canberra, the Australian capital, a reporter happened upon a classified booklet containing security information about the presidential trip.
The highly sensitive booklet was…lying in a gutter.
What in the world can that be about?
We’ll come back to that in a bit, but first, let’s consider how a political leader such as Obama would react to such an incident, which was reported in an Australian newspaper.
In all probability, he would assume it was the result of spectacular carelessness. These cases surface from time to time, as when a scientist leaves top secret papers in the back seat of a taxi cab. But, knowing the complex machinations of the political and spook worlds, it would be understandable if, for a brief second, Obama might at least contemplate the possibility that such a “blunder” could be deliberate.
And he would realize that if it were deliberate, someone would either be trying to cause him harm, or to send a message of some sort.
***
A host of ill-fated leaders—from the early 20th century Mexican President Venustiano Carranza to Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat—learned too late that their own security forces were fully capable of betraying their masters. Indeed, history is replete with examples of treachery.
When it comes to the safety of US presidents, the line between reckless accidents and deliberate acts is not so clear. In the case of John F. Kennedy, the stunning inadequacy of Secret Service protective measures on November 22, 1963 have been the subject of broad speculation and debate for half a century.
Apparently, this was not the result of a one-day lapse. In his book, The Echo From Dealey Plaza, former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden reveals not only the reckless behavior of his fellow agents charged with protecting Kennedy—but also their personal animosity toward the president and the policies he implemented.
LONE NUTS GALORE
When it comes to Obama, he’s got other reasons to feel nervous. American tradition has it that lone nuts are always lurking, ready to go to great lengths to make a name for themselves. While Obama was away in Australia, bullets struck the White House near the residential quarters. A man was arrested and charged with attempting to assassinate the president. He was, of course, characterized as yet another lone nut. But not so obviously disturbed that people had previously noticed. As the New York Times reported: People here say that the only thing that could have motivated Mr. Ortega was mental illness — but that they did not realize the severity of it until it was too late.
The defendant, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, is described by The Times as having started acting very, very strange only recently: The family reported Mr. Ortega missing on Oct. 31, eight days after he left on what he said was a vacation to Utah; instead, it was a trip to the East Coast. His family never heard from him, and still has not.
Family members and others said that while Mr. Ortega was behaving increasingly strangely — he read a 45-minute speech at his 21st birthday party in October that veered from supporting marijuana legalization to detailing the threat of secret societies to expressing frustration with American foreign policy in oil-producing countries — he never seemed violent.
A bit later, The Times quotes an expert on Ortega’s new ailment: Mr. Ortega’s behavior and the age at which it appears to have begun to suggest that he has “a textbook case” of schizophrenia, said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who researches the disease and is the founder of theTreatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va.
Dr. Torrey recalled working at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, a psychiatric treatment center, in the 1970s and 1980s.
“These folks often end up in Washington as what we used to call ‘White House cases,’ ” he said. “A White House case classically is someone who comes to the guard at the White House and says they have a special message for the president, or they try to go over the wall. We’ve seen dozens. They almost always have paranoid schizophrenia, and they almost always respond to medication.” Among the patients being treated there is John W. Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Hinckley, it should be noted, was the son of close friends of Vice President George H.W. Bush, who would have become president if Reagan had died. When one considers that Bush and Reagan had just been rivals for the Republican nomination the previous year, the Hinckley-Bush connection was just too weird to even contemplate. So, the media by and large did not mention it, and certainly did not explore it.
Another person who suddenly became mentally ill was a fellow named George de Mohrenschildt. I devote a chapter to him in my book, Family of Secrets. Like Hinckley, he was a longtime friend of the Bush family. De Mohrenschildt had, coincidentally, been a close friend of the former marine, Lee Harvey Oswald, another “deranged loner.” In 1976, de Mohrenschildt had written a letter to then CIA director George Bush, saying that he believed that some unknown parties, possibly FBI, were following him and tapping his phone, perhaps because of some things he was trying to write about Oswald. Bush wrote back that he had nothing to worry about. Shortly thereafter, de Mohrenschildt was forcibly treated for a period in a psychiatric institution—and within a year, he was dead, from what police said was a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.
Coincidentally, 1976 was in the period in which Congress was holding hearings on terrifying covert CIA experiments, including using LSD on unsuspecting citizens as part of tests on mind control—the so-called MKULTRA program. (For more on mind control experiments on unwitting and unwilling subjects, see ourarticle on MKULTRA.)
It would be revealed that the CIA had effectively partnered with various hospitals in the research.
Now back to Dr. Torrey, the psychiatrist who told The Times that the recent White House shooter was likely schizophrenic. The following is from a Wikipedia entry on him:
He has been criticized by a range of people, including federal researchers and others for some of his attacks on de-institutionalization and his support for forced medication as a method of treatment. He has also been described as having a black-and-white view of mental illness and as being iconoclastic,dogmatic, single-minded and a renegade.
It’s worth taking a look at St Elizabeth’s where Dr. Torrey once worked, and where Hinckley is being treated. It came under criticism in an investigation by the Justice Department for a wide variety of practices.
St Elizabeth’s is especially interesting for its strong connections to the military, intelligence agencies, and historical association with mind control experiments. Its director in the 1940s, Winfred Overholser, headed a “Truth Drug Committee” and oversaw extensive testing of mind-altering substances in association with the intelligence services. One goal was to see if false personalities could be imposed on victims to make them susceptible to commands. Such cooperation between St. Elizabeth’s and the government continued over the years. Currently, the Department of Homeland Security is converting much of St Elizabeth’s “campus”— which is only now partially used by the hospital—as its new headquarters. (For more on St. Elizabeth’s and its role in mind control and “personality profiling,” see the book Search for the Manchurian Candidate, by John Marks.)
It is therefore interesting to note that the person the New York Times quoted identifying the White House shooter as a lone nut, Dr. Torrey, was himself associated for nine years with a hospital historically involved with experiments on the ability to make people do things they might not otherwise do. Dr. Torrey is an advocate of involuntary treatment and critics have contended for years that he exaggerates the threat that mentally unstable people represent for the rest of us.
The fact that Dr. Torrey’s own privately funded institute is in Arlington, near the Pentagon, brings to mind another fellow who seemed fine and then became increasingly deranged in recent years: Jared Lee Loughner, the young man who opened fire at a political event in Tucson earlier this year, killing several, including a federal judge, and badly wounding Rep Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). Loughner, like Ortega, is described as having listened to “conspiracy” type radio shows. Loughner had apparently tried to enlist in the military but been rejected. We never did see any releases of military files on the exact nature of his interactions with the Army that resulted in his rejection—or whether those grounds would have drawn interest of the authorities. Such disclosure is of course crucial in public assessment of the particulars behind such seemingly demented people involved in politically destabilizing events.
UNINVITED GUESTS
The military angle brings to mind yet another event that shook up Obama and gave him a reason to worry about his safety and the quality of the protection he’s given.
In a well-known incident in 2009, shortly after he took office, a couple managed to get into a White House state dinner without an invitation, and got so close to Obama they were able to get their picture taken with him. Michaele and Tareq Salahi were characterized as essentially harmless publicity hounds, but Obama took the breach seriously.
As the Washington Post reported at the time: On the eve of the president’s major speech on Afghanistan policy, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on Monday was inundated by reporters’ questions about the Salahis and the security breach at the state dinner.
“Look, the reason there’s an investigation is the president and the White House has asked for that to happen,” Gibbs told reporters…. “So I think, suffice to say, the president is rightly concerned about what happened last week.”
So were others. Here’s ABC News’s website, at the time: “What concerns me the most is that someone was able to walk in off the street to a White House event, without the proper credentials, without the proper vetting, and get next to the president,” said Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.
The Secret Service, red-faced, later apologized for sloppy procedures that enabled the couple to pass through two checkpoints.
Curiously, there were again military connections—two of them. For one thing, the Salahis had been encouraged via e-mails to believe they might gain access to the White House by Michele S. Jones, special assistant to then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates—and Pentagon liaison to the White House
As reported by the Washington Post: The e-mails apparently do not contradict that version of events, but are described as having given the Salahis the confidence to get dressed up, mingle with some of the most powerful Washington players and post snapshots of their presence at the party on their Facebook page
The e-mail exchange is said to include assurances from Jones that she was trying to score an official invitation, complete with seats at the dinner, for the couple. By the time they arrived in line, the couple believed that Jones had succeeded in getting them approved only for the cocktail reception and a handshake with the president, sources said.
Jones presumably had pull with the White House. A high-ranking African-American military backer of Obama, she’d delivered a speech on his behalf at the 2008 Democratic convention. How she came to be hired as Gates’s special assistant is not clear. It’s an intriguing issue—as is the very fact that Obama had asked Gates, who served as George W. Bush’s defense secretary, to stay on as his. Gates had a long track record as a Bush family retainer, serving as CIA director under George HW Bush and then as chief of the elder Bush’s presidential library in College Station, Texas; he also served on corporate boards with Bush connections.
Why did Gates’s assistant even know the Salahis? She declined to say. As the Post reported: …Asked how she knows the Salahis and why she would have tried to get them into the White House, she said: “I am not going to say anything at this point at all. In fact, I am going to terminate the call right now because I am not sure what in the world is going on here.”
As for the Salahis, they too have clammed up. Appearing before the Committee on Homeland Security, Tareq Salahi read a statement: “We reiterate that, on advice of counsel, we respectfully invoke our right to remain silent and will decline to answer any questions surrounding the circumstances around the events of November 24, 2009.”
Yet another curious military element must be mentioned, for it surely crossed Obama’s mind when he learned that the security breach had been enabled via the Pentagon. At the time of the state dinner, Obama had been embroiled in a vicious secret battle with the military over Afghanistan policy. I wrote about the battle, which was characterized in part by leaks to the Pentagon’s favorite journalist Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, here and here and here. Obama was in the process of a review of Afghan policy that the military feared would result in a withdrawal from that country. (Eventually, Obama’s hand would be forced, and not only would he not remove troops—he would actually approve a substantial increase in the boots on the ground.)
As the Post reported in October, 2009:The Obama administration’s plan to conduct a strategic review of the war in December has touched off maneuvering between U.S. military leaders seeking support for extending the American troop buildup and skeptics looking for arguments to wind down the nation’s role.
What was at stake in Afghanistan? Besides the publicly argued issues about the Taliban’s brutality and tolerance of Al Qaeda, Afghanistan has become a crucial profit center for military contracting industries in the United States. As interesting, however, is the revelation that Afghanistan harbors nearly a trillion dollarsin untapped mineral deposits. The New York Times reported that estimate in a 2010 article claiming the Pentagon had just discovered this information.
The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.
[Snip]
“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”
The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion….
[Snip]
..American officials…recognize that the mineral discoveries will almost certainly have a double-edged impact. Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country….
[Snip]
At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth…The mineral deposits are scattered throughout the country, including in the southern and eastern regions along the border with Pakistan that have had some of the most intense combat in the American-led war against the Taliban insurgency…..
So let’s review what happened here. Just as the president was under severe pressure not to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, an aide to Gates [perhaps inadvertently] creates a security scare for Obama. This all may be coincidental, and probably is, but the facts stand. Obviously, if Obama was “rightly concerned” and personally asked for an investigation that means he thought there was more going on than just a screw-up on an invitation.
It’s important to note that it was only after Obama folded to the military pressure, in other words, after the die was cast in Afghanistan, that the military leaked a story about the tremendous mineral wealth lying underneath that country. Suddenly, although public support for keeping American troops in Afghanistan was declining, there was a new “realistic” reason to retain a U.S. presence. ,. Again, all this was perhaps only coincidental, but leaks are carefully calculated for intended purposes—and as students of the so-called “Deep State” know, not even the participants in a leak may fully understand deeper intents behind acts in which they are asked to participate.
Creepily, the Salahis’ uninvited entry into the White House was not their first effort to get close to Obama. Four weeks before crashing the state dinner, they crashed a Congressional Black Caucus event at which Obama appeared. Surely not lost on Obama was the poetic touch that Tareq Salahi, a Palestinian, entered the event through the kitchen, as the lone nut Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan also did prior to purportedly shooting Robert Kennedy. (Sirhan’s guilt, like that of Lee Harvey Oswald, is the subject of intense ongoing controversy—and his attorneys have recently presented a federal court with reports from experts contending that Sirhan was programmed by hypnosis to create diversionary gunfire to mask the actual killer.)
The Salahis, it must be emphasized, are not just some goofy types. They were long on people’s radar as folks who would go for any cozying gambit –and a couple with powerful friends. One was the person who played some kind of role in encouraging the idea that they might hope to attend a White House gathering: Michele S. Jones.
It’s hard to figure out why Defense Secretary Gates gave Jones the job of special assistant and Pentagon liaison to the White House.What we do know is that Gates was perhaps the military-industrial-oil complex’s chief person keeping an eye on Obama. Gates had been CIA director under George HW Bush and later was in charge of the elder Bush’s library and papers, before becoming Defense Secretary to both George W. Bush and Democrat Obama. That Gates’s special assistant had some kind of hand in introducing this security risk to the president deserves scrutiny.
Jones, who was public in her support of Obama’s candidacy (and even made a speech for him at the 2008 convention), is African American, as is the Salahis’ lawyer, Paul W. Gardner II. Gardner has donated several times to Hillary Clinton—but, notably, not to Obama. Jones was a Facebook friend of Gardner’s, though it is not clear how she knew him, or exactly how or why he served as a link to her.
A few months before the scandal, Jones was guest of honor at a DC event the Salahis hosted called America’s Polo Cup. In her remarks to the crowd, she declared, somewhat obscurely, “This game is a true reflection of the relationship we have around the world.”
What exactly did Jones do to make the Salahis imagine they could get into the White House?
In relating their email exchanges on the day of the state dinner, ABC reported:
In the last email from Jones, sent at 8:46 a.m., Nov. 24, she said she still had not gotten them tickets.
“The arrival ceremony (was scheduled to be outdoors) was canceled due to inclement weather,” Jones’ email said. “They are having a very small one inside the WH, very limited space. I am still working on tickets for tonight’s dinner. I will call or e-mail as soon as I get word one way or another.”
So, was their gate-crashing a simple misunderstanding, easily explained? As noted above, the Salahis, who might be able to clarify matters, refused, “on advice of counsel, …to answer any questions surrounding the circumstances around the events of November 24, 2009.”
Meanwhile, we can find no further mention of the grand jury investigation that was once said to be underway. . As for Pentagon official Jones, a story asserted that she had padded her resume prior to joining Gates’s staff by claiming employment with a non-existent entity. That story got little attention, though it raised a host of interesting questions.
A year after the Salahi incident, the Pentagon quietly reassigned Jones, moving her from Gates’s office to a lower-ranked post.
It is against this murky, suggestive backdrop that we must consider both the recent shooting into the White House—and the fact that someone dumped confidential documents relating to Obama’s security into a Canberra gutter.
As reported by the Australian newspaper The Age, A CLASSIFIED booklet containing President Barack Obama’s Australian schedule down to the minute, as well as details of his security convoy and the mobile phone numbers of dozens of senior US and Australian officials, was found by The Age on a Canberra street yesterday morning. The booklet, Overall Program and Orders of Arrangements, for Mr Obama’s visit, was found by this reporter in a gutter about 100 metres from the front entrance to Parliament.
I asked Bolden, the ex-presidential security man turned critic and author, about these events and his former employer, the Secret Service. He replied: “It shows a pattern that they haven’t changed much since 1961—there’s still laxity and carelessness. I see a pattern of…disturbing negligence within the organization that needs to be looked into. They have much more training now, a much larger organization now than in 1961, so you would think they would become more professional. I see them relying more on the armoring [of vehicles], but I don’t any more sophistication in the protection or the attitude since the assassination of President Kennedy.”
As noted earlier, ties between security services and either overt participation or willful ignorance of mortal threats to politicians is not unheard-of. A recent example is the 2007 assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Even in modernized Western democracies like Sweden and France, elements in the military or intelligence services have been widely suspected of, at minimum, covering up the true sponsorship of assassination plots.
In the United States, key institutions, in particular academia and the media, rigorously maintain the position that it could not happen here. A search of the Nexis-Lexis database of articles from principally American media sources turns up more than 3000 articles that include the term “assassination” and “conspiracy theory” (or some variation.) Deaths of politicians, witnesses and whistleblowers in small airplane crashes, suicides and other conflagrations are automatically toted up to the “accident” category.
Few politicians, however, believe that. And as I documented extensively in my book Family of Secrets,presidents either play ball with the national security state or bad things happen to them (see specifics on the downing, physically or otherwise, of Kennedy, Nixon, and Carter, and warnings from Ike and Truman that the security complex was badly out of control.)
At a minimum, American presidents’ very real awareness of their fragile position and safety risks probably explain in part the lack of bold, dramatic action against perceived power centers, be it the military, the intelligence establishment, or the financial, industrial and resource extraction interests that ultimately shape American policy.
This is scary stuff. The easy, and default position for the establishment—from the media to academia—is to pooh-pooh such concerns and to paint those who raise them as fantasists or worse. But then, that’s why they call it the establishment. It has no incentive to dig into these matters. And plenty of disincentives.
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By Russ Baker
http://whowhatwhy.com/
Small, bad things seem to (almost) happen to Obama; they get little sustained attention from reporters or the public. But there’s something odd about them, and they’re worrisome for the White House. Of course, the corporate media will dismiss it as nothing at all. Yet there’s a disturbing military/security thread running through it all—and as we approach the 50th anniversary of JFK’s demise, we’d be smart to err on the side of caution.
Here’s a crazy story that has gotten little attention in the United States: During Barack Obama’s recent visit to Canberra, the Australian capital, a reporter happened upon a classified booklet containing security information about the presidential trip.
The highly sensitive booklet was…lying in a gutter.
What in the world can that be about?
We’ll come back to that in a bit, but first, let’s consider how a political leader such as Obama would react to such an incident, which was reported in an Australian newspaper.
In all probability, he would assume it was the result of spectacular carelessness. These cases surface from time to time, as when a scientist leaves top secret papers in the back seat of a taxi cab. But, knowing the complex machinations of the political and spook worlds, it would be understandable if, for a brief second, Obama might at least contemplate the possibility that such a “blunder” could be deliberate.
And he would realize that if it were deliberate, someone would either be trying to cause him harm, or to send a message of some sort.
***
A host of ill-fated leaders—from the early 20th century Mexican President Venustiano Carranza to Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat—learned too late that their own security forces were fully capable of betraying their masters. Indeed, history is replete with examples of treachery.
When it comes to the safety of US presidents, the line between reckless accidents and deliberate acts is not so clear. In the case of John F. Kennedy, the stunning inadequacy of Secret Service protective measures on November 22, 1963 have been the subject of broad speculation and debate for half a century.
Apparently, this was not the result of a one-day lapse. In his book, The Echo From Dealey Plaza, former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden reveals not only the reckless behavior of his fellow agents charged with protecting Kennedy—but also their personal animosity toward the president and the policies he implemented.
LONE NUTS GALORE
When it comes to Obama, he’s got other reasons to feel nervous. American tradition has it that lone nuts are always lurking, ready to go to great lengths to make a name for themselves. While Obama was away in Australia, bullets struck the White House near the residential quarters. A man was arrested and charged with attempting to assassinate the president. He was, of course, characterized as yet another lone nut. But not so obviously disturbed that people had previously noticed. As the New York Times reported: People here say that the only thing that could have motivated Mr. Ortega was mental illness — but that they did not realize the severity of it until it was too late.
The defendant, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, is described by The Times as having started acting very, very strange only recently: The family reported Mr. Ortega missing on Oct. 31, eight days after he left on what he said was a vacation to Utah; instead, it was a trip to the East Coast. His family never heard from him, and still has not.
Family members and others said that while Mr. Ortega was behaving increasingly strangely — he read a 45-minute speech at his 21st birthday party in October that veered from supporting marijuana legalization to detailing the threat of secret societies to expressing frustration with American foreign policy in oil-producing countries — he never seemed violent.
A bit later, The Times quotes an expert on Ortega’s new ailment: Mr. Ortega’s behavior and the age at which it appears to have begun to suggest that he has “a textbook case” of schizophrenia, said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who researches the disease and is the founder of theTreatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va.
Dr. Torrey recalled working at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, a psychiatric treatment center, in the 1970s and 1980s.
“These folks often end up in Washington as what we used to call ‘White House cases,’ ” he said. “A White House case classically is someone who comes to the guard at the White House and says they have a special message for the president, or they try to go over the wall. We’ve seen dozens. They almost always have paranoid schizophrenia, and they almost always respond to medication.” Among the patients being treated there is John W. Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Hinckley, it should be noted, was the son of close friends of Vice President George H.W. Bush, who would have become president if Reagan had died. When one considers that Bush and Reagan had just been rivals for the Republican nomination the previous year, the Hinckley-Bush connection was just too weird to even contemplate. So, the media by and large did not mention it, and certainly did not explore it.
Another person who suddenly became mentally ill was a fellow named George de Mohrenschildt. I devote a chapter to him in my book, Family of Secrets. Like Hinckley, he was a longtime friend of the Bush family. De Mohrenschildt had, coincidentally, been a close friend of the former marine, Lee Harvey Oswald, another “deranged loner.” In 1976, de Mohrenschildt had written a letter to then CIA director George Bush, saying that he believed that some unknown parties, possibly FBI, were following him and tapping his phone, perhaps because of some things he was trying to write about Oswald. Bush wrote back that he had nothing to worry about. Shortly thereafter, de Mohrenschildt was forcibly treated for a period in a psychiatric institution—and within a year, he was dead, from what police said was a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.
Coincidentally, 1976 was in the period in which Congress was holding hearings on terrifying covert CIA experiments, including using LSD on unsuspecting citizens as part of tests on mind control—the so-called MKULTRA program. (For more on mind control experiments on unwitting and unwilling subjects, see ourarticle on MKULTRA.)
It would be revealed that the CIA had effectively partnered with various hospitals in the research.
Now back to Dr. Torrey, the psychiatrist who told The Times that the recent White House shooter was likely schizophrenic. The following is from a Wikipedia entry on him:
He has been criticized by a range of people, including federal researchers and others for some of his attacks on de-institutionalization and his support for forced medication as a method of treatment. He has also been described as having a black-and-white view of mental illness and as being iconoclastic,dogmatic, single-minded and a renegade.
It’s worth taking a look at St Elizabeth’s where Dr. Torrey once worked, and where Hinckley is being treated. It came under criticism in an investigation by the Justice Department for a wide variety of practices.
St Elizabeth’s is especially interesting for its strong connections to the military, intelligence agencies, and historical association with mind control experiments. Its director in the 1940s, Winfred Overholser, headed a “Truth Drug Committee” and oversaw extensive testing of mind-altering substances in association with the intelligence services. One goal was to see if false personalities could be imposed on victims to make them susceptible to commands. Such cooperation between St. Elizabeth’s and the government continued over the years. Currently, the Department of Homeland Security is converting much of St Elizabeth’s “campus”— which is only now partially used by the hospital—as its new headquarters. (For more on St. Elizabeth’s and its role in mind control and “personality profiling,” see the book Search for the Manchurian Candidate, by John Marks.)
It is therefore interesting to note that the person the New York Times quoted identifying the White House shooter as a lone nut, Dr. Torrey, was himself associated for nine years with a hospital historically involved with experiments on the ability to make people do things they might not otherwise do. Dr. Torrey is an advocate of involuntary treatment and critics have contended for years that he exaggerates the threat that mentally unstable people represent for the rest of us.
The fact that Dr. Torrey’s own privately funded institute is in Arlington, near the Pentagon, brings to mind another fellow who seemed fine and then became increasingly deranged in recent years: Jared Lee Loughner, the young man who opened fire at a political event in Tucson earlier this year, killing several, including a federal judge, and badly wounding Rep Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). Loughner, like Ortega, is described as having listened to “conspiracy” type radio shows. Loughner had apparently tried to enlist in the military but been rejected. We never did see any releases of military files on the exact nature of his interactions with the Army that resulted in his rejection—or whether those grounds would have drawn interest of the authorities. Such disclosure is of course crucial in public assessment of the particulars behind such seemingly demented people involved in politically destabilizing events.
UNINVITED GUESTS
The military angle brings to mind yet another event that shook up Obama and gave him a reason to worry about his safety and the quality of the protection he’s given.
In a well-known incident in 2009, shortly after he took office, a couple managed to get into a White House state dinner without an invitation, and got so close to Obama they were able to get their picture taken with him. Michaele and Tareq Salahi were characterized as essentially harmless publicity hounds, but Obama took the breach seriously.
As the Washington Post reported at the time: On the eve of the president’s major speech on Afghanistan policy, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on Monday was inundated by reporters’ questions about the Salahis and the security breach at the state dinner.
“Look, the reason there’s an investigation is the president and the White House has asked for that to happen,” Gibbs told reporters…. “So I think, suffice to say, the president is rightly concerned about what happened last week.”
So were others. Here’s ABC News’s website, at the time: “What concerns me the most is that someone was able to walk in off the street to a White House event, without the proper credentials, without the proper vetting, and get next to the president,” said Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.
The Secret Service, red-faced, later apologized for sloppy procedures that enabled the couple to pass through two checkpoints.
Curiously, there were again military connections—two of them. For one thing, the Salahis had been encouraged via e-mails to believe they might gain access to the White House by Michele S. Jones, special assistant to then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates—and Pentagon liaison to the White House
As reported by the Washington Post: The e-mails apparently do not contradict that version of events, but are described as having given the Salahis the confidence to get dressed up, mingle with some of the most powerful Washington players and post snapshots of their presence at the party on their Facebook page
The e-mail exchange is said to include assurances from Jones that she was trying to score an official invitation, complete with seats at the dinner, for the couple. By the time they arrived in line, the couple believed that Jones had succeeded in getting them approved only for the cocktail reception and a handshake with the president, sources said.
Jones presumably had pull with the White House. A high-ranking African-American military backer of Obama, she’d delivered a speech on his behalf at the 2008 Democratic convention. How she came to be hired as Gates’s special assistant is not clear. It’s an intriguing issue—as is the very fact that Obama had asked Gates, who served as George W. Bush’s defense secretary, to stay on as his. Gates had a long track record as a Bush family retainer, serving as CIA director under George HW Bush and then as chief of the elder Bush’s presidential library in College Station, Texas; he also served on corporate boards with Bush connections.
Why did Gates’s assistant even know the Salahis? She declined to say. As the Post reported: …Asked how she knows the Salahis and why she would have tried to get them into the White House, she said: “I am not going to say anything at this point at all. In fact, I am going to terminate the call right now because I am not sure what in the world is going on here.”
As for the Salahis, they too have clammed up. Appearing before the Committee on Homeland Security, Tareq Salahi read a statement: “We reiterate that, on advice of counsel, we respectfully invoke our right to remain silent and will decline to answer any questions surrounding the circumstances around the events of November 24, 2009.”
Yet another curious military element must be mentioned, for it surely crossed Obama’s mind when he learned that the security breach had been enabled via the Pentagon. At the time of the state dinner, Obama had been embroiled in a vicious secret battle with the military over Afghanistan policy. I wrote about the battle, which was characterized in part by leaks to the Pentagon’s favorite journalist Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, here and here and here. Obama was in the process of a review of Afghan policy that the military feared would result in a withdrawal from that country. (Eventually, Obama’s hand would be forced, and not only would he not remove troops—he would actually approve a substantial increase in the boots on the ground.)
As the Post reported in October, 2009:The Obama administration’s plan to conduct a strategic review of the war in December has touched off maneuvering between U.S. military leaders seeking support for extending the American troop buildup and skeptics looking for arguments to wind down the nation’s role.
What was at stake in Afghanistan? Besides the publicly argued issues about the Taliban’s brutality and tolerance of Al Qaeda, Afghanistan has become a crucial profit center for military contracting industries in the United States. As interesting, however, is the revelation that Afghanistan harbors nearly a trillion dollarsin untapped mineral deposits. The New York Times reported that estimate in a 2010 article claiming the Pentagon had just discovered this information.
The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.
[Snip]
“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”
The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion….
[Snip]
..American officials…recognize that the mineral discoveries will almost certainly have a double-edged impact. Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country….
[Snip]
At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth…The mineral deposits are scattered throughout the country, including in the southern and eastern regions along the border with Pakistan that have had some of the most intense combat in the American-led war against the Taliban insurgency…..
So let’s review what happened here. Just as the president was under severe pressure not to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, an aide to Gates [perhaps inadvertently] creates a security scare for Obama. This all may be coincidental, and probably is, but the facts stand. Obviously, if Obama was “rightly concerned” and personally asked for an investigation that means he thought there was more going on than just a screw-up on an invitation.
It’s important to note that it was only after Obama folded to the military pressure, in other words, after the die was cast in Afghanistan, that the military leaked a story about the tremendous mineral wealth lying underneath that country. Suddenly, although public support for keeping American troops in Afghanistan was declining, there was a new “realistic” reason to retain a U.S. presence. ,. Again, all this was perhaps only coincidental, but leaks are carefully calculated for intended purposes—and as students of the so-called “Deep State” know, not even the participants in a leak may fully understand deeper intents behind acts in which they are asked to participate.
Creepily, the Salahis’ uninvited entry into the White House was not their first effort to get close to Obama. Four weeks before crashing the state dinner, they crashed a Congressional Black Caucus event at which Obama appeared. Surely not lost on Obama was the poetic touch that Tareq Salahi, a Palestinian, entered the event through the kitchen, as the lone nut Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan also did prior to purportedly shooting Robert Kennedy. (Sirhan’s guilt, like that of Lee Harvey Oswald, is the subject of intense ongoing controversy—and his attorneys have recently presented a federal court with reports from experts contending that Sirhan was programmed by hypnosis to create diversionary gunfire to mask the actual killer.)
The Salahis, it must be emphasized, are not just some goofy types. They were long on people’s radar as folks who would go for any cozying gambit –and a couple with powerful friends. One was the person who played some kind of role in encouraging the idea that they might hope to attend a White House gathering: Michele S. Jones.
It’s hard to figure out why Defense Secretary Gates gave Jones the job of special assistant and Pentagon liaison to the White House.What we do know is that Gates was perhaps the military-industrial-oil complex’s chief person keeping an eye on Obama. Gates had been CIA director under George HW Bush and later was in charge of the elder Bush’s library and papers, before becoming Defense Secretary to both George W. Bush and Democrat Obama. That Gates’s special assistant had some kind of hand in introducing this security risk to the president deserves scrutiny.
Jones, who was public in her support of Obama’s candidacy (and even made a speech for him at the 2008 convention), is African American, as is the Salahis’ lawyer, Paul W. Gardner II. Gardner has donated several times to Hillary Clinton—but, notably, not to Obama. Jones was a Facebook friend of Gardner’s, though it is not clear how she knew him, or exactly how or why he served as a link to her.
A few months before the scandal, Jones was guest of honor at a DC event the Salahis hosted called America’s Polo Cup. In her remarks to the crowd, she declared, somewhat obscurely, “This game is a true reflection of the relationship we have around the world.”
What exactly did Jones do to make the Salahis imagine they could get into the White House?
In relating their email exchanges on the day of the state dinner, ABC reported:
In the last email from Jones, sent at 8:46 a.m., Nov. 24, she said she still had not gotten them tickets.
“The arrival ceremony (was scheduled to be outdoors) was canceled due to inclement weather,” Jones’ email said. “They are having a very small one inside the WH, very limited space. I am still working on tickets for tonight’s dinner. I will call or e-mail as soon as I get word one way or another.”
So, was their gate-crashing a simple misunderstanding, easily explained? As noted above, the Salahis, who might be able to clarify matters, refused, “on advice of counsel, …to answer any questions surrounding the circumstances around the events of November 24, 2009.”
Meanwhile, we can find no further mention of the grand jury investigation that was once said to be underway. . As for Pentagon official Jones, a story asserted that she had padded her resume prior to joining Gates’s staff by claiming employment with a non-existent entity. That story got little attention, though it raised a host of interesting questions.
A year after the Salahi incident, the Pentagon quietly reassigned Jones, moving her from Gates’s office to a lower-ranked post.
It is against this murky, suggestive backdrop that we must consider both the recent shooting into the White House—and the fact that someone dumped confidential documents relating to Obama’s security into a Canberra gutter.
As reported by the Australian newspaper The Age, A CLASSIFIED booklet containing President Barack Obama’s Australian schedule down to the minute, as well as details of his security convoy and the mobile phone numbers of dozens of senior US and Australian officials, was found by The Age on a Canberra street yesterday morning. The booklet, Overall Program and Orders of Arrangements, for Mr Obama’s visit, was found by this reporter in a gutter about 100 metres from the front entrance to Parliament.
I asked Bolden, the ex-presidential security man turned critic and author, about these events and his former employer, the Secret Service. He replied: “It shows a pattern that they haven’t changed much since 1961—there’s still laxity and carelessness. I see a pattern of…disturbing negligence within the organization that needs to be looked into. They have much more training now, a much larger organization now than in 1961, so you would think they would become more professional. I see them relying more on the armoring [of vehicles], but I don’t any more sophistication in the protection or the attitude since the assassination of President Kennedy.”
As noted earlier, ties between security services and either overt participation or willful ignorance of mortal threats to politicians is not unheard-of. A recent example is the 2007 assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Even in modernized Western democracies like Sweden and France, elements in the military or intelligence services have been widely suspected of, at minimum, covering up the true sponsorship of assassination plots.
In the United States, key institutions, in particular academia and the media, rigorously maintain the position that it could not happen here. A search of the Nexis-Lexis database of articles from principally American media sources turns up more than 3000 articles that include the term “assassination” and “conspiracy theory” (or some variation.) Deaths of politicians, witnesses and whistleblowers in small airplane crashes, suicides and other conflagrations are automatically toted up to the “accident” category.
Few politicians, however, believe that. And as I documented extensively in my book Family of Secrets,presidents either play ball with the national security state or bad things happen to them (see specifics on the downing, physically or otherwise, of Kennedy, Nixon, and Carter, and warnings from Ike and Truman that the security complex was badly out of control.)
At a minimum, American presidents’ very real awareness of their fragile position and safety risks probably explain in part the lack of bold, dramatic action against perceived power centers, be it the military, the intelligence establishment, or the financial, industrial and resource extraction interests that ultimately shape American policy.
This is scary stuff. The easy, and default position for the establishment—from the media to academia—is to pooh-pooh such concerns and to paint those who raise them as fantasists or worse. But then, that’s why they call it the establishment. It has no incentive to dig into these matters. And plenty of disincentives.
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