A glorious opportunity was squandered on Sunday night when politics as usual proved too much for democracy as required.  Who knows if the nation is better off with a dozen or so candidates for president vying in what ways they can to be on a stage with their confreres trying desparately to keep being there as polls and primaries come and go.  But when at last we are left with two, at that moment the country has a chance to find out who in fact these contestants are and what they are made of. But instead on Sunday we were presented with a most watered-down, sanitized, and moderated version of what might have been.

If the candidates agreed on the format that was produced, that is their failing, but even in the face of such an agreement, one of the candidates needs to have the guts or the presumption to short-circuit what was planned and demand what was called for, two hours of mutual cross-examination.  I suggest that Bernie Sanders should have said this:

Moderator: “ Sen. Sanders, let’s begin with you,” etc

Bernie:  “Let me say, with a certain apology, that I did not come here tonight to answer your questions, Jake, though that is a good one that Joe and I may choose to address.  I came here to ask questions of Joe Biden and for him to ask questions of me. I would like us to be involved in a probing conversation that is mutual, honest, and fair in all respects.  I would ask you moderators to keep time but otherwise stay out of it, except perhaps to express an opinion as to whether one or the other of us is not answering some question that was asked and maybe in the second hour, to suggest a topic which you believe is more important than those we have chosen up until then.  I will further suggest as a guide post, that answers should begin with a “yes” or a “no” unless the format of the question dictates otherwise and then an explanation if it is required. I think 10 minute segments directed by one of us and then the other makes sense, but if Joe has a different idea, I am amenable to it.  We should proceed in that manner until we run out of time. I appreciate that I am not adhering to the rules we agreed upon; but in my opinion a vibrant democracy is more important. I will begin right now if it is okay with Joe, but maybe we should first address my duplicity in agreeing to one format and then reneging on that understanding.  Do you not agree, Joe, that the candidates should choose what they want to press their opponent about and address those issues that they as leaders think are the most important?”

What is good about cross-examination is that it puts the respondent in the position of having to answer the question and paying the rhetorical price when they do not.  The mutual nature of this proposed system gives each debater the ability to frame premises in exactly the words they choose, being assured that a yes or no, with explanation as necessary, was on its way.

It might have gone like this:

Joe, we represent two wings or tendencies within the democratic party, the progressive and the more moderate.  Do you agree with that characterization?

Can you tell us which parts of the goals of my platform you disagree with?

For example do you believe health care should be a matter of right in this country as you said on television last week?  

How is that view consistent with leaving 10 million Americans uninsured as your program makes explicit on your website?

Would it be fair to say that you would like to have tuition free college for all Americans who want it?  And universal free child care?

Do you agree that your support for the Green New Deal translates into to a far less aggressive economic program than what I have proposed?  In essence the difference between $1.9 trillion and $16 trillion?

Can you explain why your program is so mild in comparison?  What do we disagree about? 

And that last question is the heart and soul of the benefit of a mutual cross-examination debate; it should be, and, better than any other format known to man, is designed to delineate agreement and disagreement, as one classic form of question employed in cross-examination is: “you agree that…”

Sorry if this is longer or more involved than it should be. I have been a supporter of yours for 25 plus years. Your reporting on the mendacity of the United States Government surrounding the alleged use of sarin gas by the Assad government in Syria is only the most recent example of what has impelled that support. I am not willing to use the term “single-handed” to describe your responsibility for the aversion of war with Syria; the reporting by Mintpress in the US and by local journalists on the ground in Syria about the possible involvement of Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, not to mention Putin, obviously deserve credit, as well as others probably, of whom I am unaware.
What you have done, however, serves to enhance and exacerbate the disappointment, and admittedly the anger I am afraid, at the path you have chosen to take with regard to the rather much larger homegrown atrocity of 9/11. I hope the presence of these words in this public way will lead you to keep reading, a course of action you might not take in another forum of a more private nature.

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The only way that there can exist even the hope of justice, not just as regards that one day in our lives, but of justice in this country as an enduring and uniting, driving force, is if someone with power decides on a course of redemption. I don’t mean to overblow your position as a journalist; I think I understand the distance you stand from the ball, but the first step by that individual to whom I refer will come after their mind has been changed, by an event, by a fact, by an essay, or by the smile on a granddaughter’s face when that person imagines that child’s life with, and then without, action on their part.

The world needs you to conceive of the critical analysis that you have brought to the Syria sarin gas story and its theoretical effect in the case of 9/11. What are you going to say to your granddaughter when she has what it takes to ask you why Norman Mineta’s testimony concerning what Cheney was doing and saying at the time of the crime, at the place of the crime, and concerning an instrumentality of the crime, was left out of the 9/11 Commission Report?

What are you going to say when she inquires about over 2000 architects and engineers visibly and publicly asserting that the 3 buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition, a possibility never even suggested in the 9/11 Commission Report?

What are you going to say when she asks about the peer-reviewed scientific paper which establishes the use of nanothermite in those buildings’ destruction?  How much further along in the Syria story would you be if the UN findings concerning the non-existence of sarin had been peer-reviewed? Peer-review is in fact the essence of a National Intelligence Estimate, is it not?

To be quite honest, I do not criticize you in the slightest for any sort of inability you may have possessed, even for a number of years, to conceive of US government agents reeking the kind of havoc, physical, psychological, or political, that they did on 9/11. But the case has grown in every way. The suspicions have turned into proof. The strength of that proof at this point can only be denied to oneself, or in the presence of others whose conclusions are a known quantity. So much so that I have, for quite a long time now, given up trying to provoke a debate, the depth of the returning silence, so profound and so complete.

The only reason I bother to write these words is because of my belief in your essential integrity; the contrast with the work today so stark and jarring; and because I acknowledge the ability in all of us to be better.

Phil Shenon was a reporter for the New York Times. He wrote “The Commission, The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission.” That was a helpful bit of writing that missed the rather enormously much larger historical reality that Cheney and Rumsfeld were complicit in the 9/11 attacks and responsible for their success. Shenon’s most recent work on the JFK assassination performs an almost identical function. In this case, the point missed has to do with the becoming-unmistakable fact that Lyndon Johnson’s fingerprints are all over the crime.

Given Shenon’s praise for DeLillo’s “Libra”, we can’t say he still thinks Oswald acted alone as, presumably based on the content found there, his former confreres at the NYT do, but he leaves out so many important pieces of information, also relegating his DeLillo reference to the “acknowledgments” section of the book, that he almost allows the reader to come to whatever conclusion they are predisposed toward. But with all of the scholarship that has passed over the dam or under the bridge at this point, his book seems subversive to accepted history, the NYT to the contrary notwithstanding.

I will mention just a few of the matters that Shenon finds unworthy.

1. Oswald’s words, “I’m a patsy,” cannot be found anywhere in the work, which is important because the Warren Commission, if we are to believe Shenon’s history, did not assume their truth for any purpose. Had they done so, the work of trying to fit the round peg of the “single bullet” theory, into the square hole of “everything else known” would not have consumed so much time and intellectual effort. The idea that criminal suspects categorically lie unless they are confessing has no place in the search for truth.
2. Dr. Charles Crenshaw was one of the surgeons who attended JFK, but he is not alone in declaring the wound in the front of the neck an entrance wound, thereby establishing the fact of a conspiracy. Medical records recording conclusions by emergency room doctors and nurses alike, say precisely the same thing. In connection with this information it is helpful to know that distinguishing between an entrance and an exit wound is one of the simpler determinations that medical examiners make in the bulk of instances where there is a question. An entrance wound is small and clean with the margins relatively precise. An exit wound is a mess. Had the wound in the front of the neck been an exit wound, likely no further cutting would have been necessary in order to complete the tracheotomy except exposing the windpipe, if that was necessary.
3. Mary Moormon took a polaroid picture of the presidential limousine with the grassy knoll in the background right as the shots are being fired. The naked eye is pretty much useless for the pertinent purposes, but there was the expenditure of considerable sums of money, and conclusions as a result of those efforts, that made their way onto television to the effect that behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll in the photograph is something consistent with the head of a man and an elongated object, none of which appear in other subsequent photographs of the same spot. That is important corroboration of another piece of evidence establishing a second shooter on the grassy knoll, in this case an eye and ear witness to the shot and extremely important information about what took place, and who was at the grassy knoll just before bullets flew.
Visible with the naked eye in the same Moormon picture is Gordon Arnold, a young military man on leave who described a rifle shot and bullet whizzing past his ear from behind him. Moreover, when asked about what he saw in 1977 or so, he described an encounter near the spot where his observations were made with a man claiming to be, and showing the identification of, a secret service agent. The problem with the “Oswald as lone gunman” theory is that the Warren Commission established without question that there were no real secret service agents on the grassy knoll at the time. Now I am sure, if I repesented someone at the trial of this case, I would think up something to say in an attempt to discredit what is contained in these paragraphs, but Mr. Shenon is not in that position. He can’t just leave out vital pieces of evidence that get in the way of what he is trying to do. Not honestly, anyway.
4. There have now been many books written about why it should be believed that LBJ was a prime mover in the conspiracy. I will boil it down in what follows. Billy Sol Estes was a Johnson man who made a very big name in the early 60’s as the subject of scandal connected to LBJ having to do with cotton futures and the like. There was very much money involved, and he was being investigated by Henry Marshall of the Texas Department of Agriculture. All of the evidence demands the conclusion that Marshall was murdered by Malcolm Wallace, another Johnson man, but the local Medical Examiner decided it was suicide in spite of the multiple blunt trauma and gunshot wounds. That’s the way things were in Texas back then, and no one would know that better than LBJ and Mac Wallace as their relationship flourished after Wallace was convicted of first degree murder in 1947 and got probation.
Estes was prosecuted for various corrupt criminal acts, but he kept his mouth shut about LBJ until 1984 when he was released from prison, and the former president was dead. At that point, he was taken before the Robertson County Grand Jury and testified that LBJ had ordered the murder of not just Henry Marshall, but also John F. Kennedy. All kinds of things can be said about how much faith one should put in the word, under oath or not, of Billy Sol Estes, but there is corroboration for his testimony that simply cannot be overlooked, honestly, at least.
In 1998 one of the fingerprints found on one of the boxes that comprised the sniper’s nest on the 6th floor of the School Book Depository was examined by a fingerprint examiner who has as much experience in the field as it is possible to have. He identified the print as belonging to …Malcolm Wallace, long since dead himself in the event anyone is interested.
Lastly, there has always been the testimony of police motorcycle riders attached to the motorcade and driving next to LBJ’s car, who said that Johnson was ducking down before any shooting took place, but now an analysis has been done of a photograph taken by a man named Altgens at the time of the first shot, looking back into Dealey Plaza from the Stemmons Freeway overpass. It very clearly depicts the limousine’s driver and Secret Service Agent Youngblood in the front seat, and Senator Ralph Yarborough and Lady Bird Johnson in the back seat. LBJ is nowhere to be seen, entirely consistent with the motorcycle policemen’s statements and a frightening foreknowledge of the grizzly shooting on the part of one of history’s most complex, ambitious, power-driven, sick political figures to have ever carved his name into the consciousness of a nation.
One simply cannot claim to write some sort of definitive book about the Kennedy Assassination while leaving out what appears in the paragraphs above, honestly, at least.

I hadn’t intended to include a review of Anthony Summers’ work, “Not in Your Lifetime”, but now, having read it, I can’t think of a good reason to lay off. Mr. Summers and Mr. Shenon happen to have something in common. They have both had occasion to take up the events of 9/11 in a serious way, Summers, along with his wife Robbyn Swan, in “The Eleventh Day”. The ways in which all of these accomplished writers failed the world with regard to 9/11, I will detail elsewhere. For the purposes before me now, it should simply be kept in mind that while they have all made a substantial contribution to understanding the attacks of 9/11, the evidence which establishes the complicity of the likes of Cheney and Rumsfeld is mostly not mentioned, or if it is, the references shy away from the horrifying verity of their guilt.

Summers did most of his work about the JFK assassination in the late 70’s reporting on the Assassinations Committee’s work and it’s failures. The book was called “Conspiracy” when it came out then. He says it has been updated recently, which means that all of the scholarship which produced the knowledge set out above concerning LBJ’s involvement and Shenon’s failure to mention it, was available to Summers. The same words at the end written about Shenon apply equally to Summers.

Summers is described as a Pulitzer Prize finalist so I guess he didn’t win. Shenon’s book on 9/11 was a best-seller. These are two big names in the field of journalism. The quantity of material on JFK’s murder is vast, but many of the books currently available have the notion of LBJ’s complicity in their titles. Even though I think the case is very strong indeed at this point, I suppose it is permissable to see things another way and, given the uncertainties that some may perceive, give LBJ some sort of pass. What I cannot understand, except in association with surmises of the very darkest nature, is the absence of even a word of mention concerning the oh-so-troublesome evidence.

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Interview with Dan Rather

It was at Wheeler Auditorium at UC Berkeley on Tuesday, April 25, 2006.

I was invited to attend a lecture by a friend, but the world, should it have been reported on at all, was offered a confession of such poignancy and such significance, that it should inspire a generation to revisit all that has been taken for granted in its lifetime.  Dan Rather had a conversation with the dean of the UC School of Journalism, Orville Schell, and was able to keep from crying, but from the second row, it appeared to be a monumental battle that he waged. Continue reading →

New York Times Editorial Board

What must it be like, to sit on the Editorial Board of the New York Times?  That is to know power, is it not?  But what of fear?  Is it to be acquainted with fear as well?  Surely in the beginning some unease must accompany the newcomer into the room.  In the early days there may be very little in the way of volunteered insights. Then, presumably, one adopts a way of thinking, an acceptable way of thinking that provides protection against the anxiety of a wayward vision.  Should there be an off-track moment, an innocent expression of unleashed intellect, it would probably occasion some mildly nervous laughter and some embarrassment.  A second similar moment might be overlooked, but it’s hard to imagine anyone sitting still for more than that.  Or maybe all of the training, so to speak, goes on before such appointments are even considered.  Either you are someone who knows how to think, or the editorial board is simply not a place for you. Continue reading →

Action or Inaction

The question must certainly arise: what can I, what should I do? I have difficulty thinking of a more interesting or arresting topic. It is here posed as a consideration of the issues surrounding theoretical government complicity in the crimes of 9/11. With sufficient study, the doubts about the government’s role are erased. Not everyone, however, has the ability or inclination to do the amount of studying required. Some people employ more stringent standards of proof than others. And some are burdened by beliefs that make the notion fundamentally untenable, to the point where facts are irrelevant. Continue reading →