TBR News May 25, 2019
The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. May 25, 2019: “Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
His latest business is to re-institute a universal draft in America.
He wants to do this to remove tens of thousands of unemployed young Americans from the streets so they won’t come together and fight him.
Commentary for May 25;” Because of their highly questionable financial dealings, the German State Attorney’s office conducted an extensive investigation into the activities of the Deutsche Bank. Part of this investigation unearthed extensive, and highly negative, information on Trump, his organizations and his family members. One of the staffers here had a copy of this and somehow a clandestine Xerox copy was made.I predict this will be sent to several entities whom I know will publish it. I feel that if all of this is true, Trump and his crew will not only be cast into outer darkness, a number of them will end up in Leavenworth federal prison for extensive money laundering frauds and, in at least two cases, treason.”
The Table of Contents
- Judge bars Trump from building border wall sections with emergency funds
- ‘Queen of shade’: five times Nancy Pelosi got the better of Trump
- The Pathology of John Bolton
- Iran can sink US ships with ‘new secret weapons’, senior military official warns
- New York Votes to Release Trump’s Tax Returns, Blow Up His Web of Lies
- Encyclopedia of American Loons
- The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
- Encyclopedia of American Loons
- The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
Judge bars Trump from building border wall sections with emergency funds
Ruling immediately halts administration’s efforts to use money secured with declaration of national emergency
May 24, 2019
The Guardian
A federal judge has blocked Donald Trump from building sections of his long-sought border wall with money secured under his declaration of a national emergency.
On Friday, the US district judge Haywood Gilliam Jr put an immediate halt to the administration’s efforts to redirect military-designated funds for wall construction. His order applies to two projects, scheduled to begin as early as Saturday, to replace 51 miles of fence in two areas on the Mexican border.
The order blocks the use of $1bn from the Department of Defense in Arizona and Texas, out of $6.7bn the Trump administration said it planned to direct toward building the wall.
Gilliam issued the ruling after hearing arguments last week in two cases. California and 19 other states brought one lawsuit; the Sierra Club and a coalition of communities along the border brought the other. His ruling was the first of several lawsuits against Trump’s controversial decision to bypass the normal appropriations process to pay for his long-sought wall.
“The position that when Congress declines the executive’s request to appropriate funds, the executive nonetheless may simply find a way to spend those funds ‘without Congress’ does not square with fundamental separation of powers principles dating back to the earliest days of our Republic,” the judge wrote in granting a temporary injunction to stop construction.
At stake is funding that would allow Trump to make progress in a signature campaign promise heading into his campaign for a second term.
Trump declared a national emergency in February after losing a fight with the Democratic-led House over fully paying for the wall that led to a 35-day government shutdown. As a compromise on border and immigration enforcement, Congress set aside $1.375bn to extend or replace existing barriers in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for illegal crossings.
Trump grudgingly accepted the money, but he declared the emergency to siphon money from other government accounts because he wanted to spend $8bn on wall construction. The funds include $3.6bn from military construction funds, $2.5bn from defense department counterdrug activities and $600m from the treasury department’s asset forfeiture fund.
The president’s adversaries say the emergency declaration was an illegal attempt to ignore Congress, which authorized far less wall spending than Trump wanted.
“We welcome the court’s decision to block Trump’s attempts to sidestep Congress to build deadly walls that would hurt communities living at the border, endanger wildlife, and have damaging impacts on the environment,” said Andrea Guerrero, a member of the Southern Border Communities Coalition.
The administration said Trump was protecting national security as unprecedented numbers of Central American asylum-seeking families arrive at the US border.
The courtroom showdowns come amid a flurry of activity to accelerate wall construction.
Kenneth Rapuano, an assistant secretary of defense, said in a court filing last month that work on the highest-priority, Pentagon-funded projects could begin as soon as Saturday. The defense department has transferred $2.5bn to border wall coffers. Patrick Shanahan, the acting defense secretary, is expected to decide soon whether to transfer an additional $3.6bn.
Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report
‘Queen of shade’: five times Nancy Pelosi got the better of Trump
The Democrat has mastered the art of setting off a Trumper tantrum. Here’s a roundup of her most recent jabs
May 25, 2019
by Arwa Mahdawi
The Guardian
Nancy Pelosi is adept at getting under Donald Trump’s thin skin. The House speaker has recently traded insults with the president, who this week stooped to calling her “crazy Nancy” and re-tweeting a doctored video intended to make her look inebriated.
It’s easy to see why Pelosi drives Trump up the wall. (The proverbial wall, that is, not the one that Mexico is going to pay for.) She’s a smart woman who makes no attempt to hide her low opinion of him. As the Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio recently told CNN: “She’s Mommy and she’s not treating him well. She’s a powerful woman, a bit older than him, got authority. I don’t think he likes it when women aren’t taking care of him.” You don’t say?
Pelosi is also a master of the art of quiet condescension. Should you need any more evidence of her signature snark, here are five occasions which demonstrate that, while Trump may be president of the US, she’s the queen of shade.
- The time she got Trump to own the government shutdown
Last December, Pelosi helped to goad Trump into not just taking responsibility for a potential government shutdown, but announcing he would be “proud to shut down the government for border security”. In a televised meeting with Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, Trump attempted to taunt Pelosi, who hadn’t yet been elected speaker, announcing: “Nancy’s in a situation where it’s not easy to talk right now.” Pelosi didn’t take the bait, responding: “Please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting.” Eventually Trump snapped and handed Democrats a gem of a soundbite, announcing: “I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut [the government] down.” Pelosi then exited the White House in sunglasses and a red coat, looking the very picture of triumph.
- The time she mocked his inherited wealth
During the government shutdown in January, Pelosi told reporters that Trump didn’t understand the financial pressure government employees were facing. “Many federal workers will not be receiving their paychecks, and what that means in their lives is tragic … the president seems to be insensitive to that,” Pelosi said. “He thinks maybe they could just ask their father for more money. But they can’t.” It was a not-so-subtle reminder that Trump’s fortune isn’t the result of his self-proclaimed business genius, but rather stems from daddy’s bank account.
- The time she called a meeting with Trump a ‘tinkle contest’
After the December meeting, in which Trump threatened to shut down the government, Pelosi reportedly said that the wall is “like a manhood thing for him – as if manhood could ever be associated with him”.
According to a Democratic aide, Pelosi also compared talking to Trump to a tinkle contest with a skunk. “You get into a tinkle contest with a skunk, you get tinkle all over you.”
- The time she turned clapping into a viral meme
Pelosi memorably managed to upstage Trump’s State of the Union address in February without saying a word. Pelosi punctuated Trump’s rambling with well-placed eye rolls and undercut his loud blustering with silent disdain. Then, when Trump called on Washington to “reject the politics of revenge, resistance and retribution and embrace the boundless potential of cooperation”, she stood up and applauded so sarcastically that the #PelosiClap instantly went viral.
- The time she was very concerned about Trump’s confidence
On Wednesday, Trump abruptly terminated a meeting about infrastructure with Democratic leaders and started yelling about cover-ups. “Instead of walking in happily into a meeting, I walk in to look at people that have just said that I was doing a cover-up,” Trump fumed to the press. “I don’t do cover-ups,” he added.
Pelosi responded to Trump’s outburst by hypothesizing that it may have been down to a “lack of confidence on his part – he couldn’t match the greatness of the challenge that we have … In any event, I pray for the president of the United States and I pray for the United States of America.” She also urged that “his family or his administration and staff would have an intervention for the good of the country”. You know what a good intervention might be? Calling for impeachment.
The Pathology of John Bolton
John Bolton has been saying for years he wants the Iranian government overthrown, and now he’s made his move. But this time he may have gone too far, writes Joe Lauria.
May 23, 2019
by Joe Lauria
Consortium News
I knew John Bolton and interacted with him on a nearly daily basis with my colleagues in the press corps at United Nations headquarters in New York when Bolton was the United States ambassador there from August 2005 to December 2006.
Most diplomats, officials, and journalists were shocked that Bolton (evading confirmation with a recess appointment) had actually become the U.S. representative, given his long, public disdain for the UN. But that turned out to be the point. It’s been the strategy of Republican administrations to appoint the fiercest critic to head an agency or institution in order to weaken it, perhaps even fatally.
Bolton’s most infamous quote about the UN followed him into the building. In 1994 he had said: “The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”
But a more telling comment in that same 1994 conference was when he said that no matter what the UN decides the U.S. will do whatever it wants:
Bolton sees such frank admissions as signs of strength, not alarm.
He is a humorless man, who at the UN at least, seemed to always think he was the smartest person in the room. He once gave a lecture in 2006 at the U.S. mission to UN correspondents, replete with a chalk board, on how nuclear enrichment worked. His aim, of course, was to convince us that Iran was close to a bomb, even though a 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate being prepared at the time said Tehran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
I thought I’d challenge him one day at the press stakeout outside the Security Council chamber, where Bolton often stopped to lecture journalists on what they should write. “If the United States and Britain had not overthrown a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953 would the United States be today faced with a revolutionary government enriching uranium?’ I asked him.
“That’s an interesting question,” he told me, “but for another time and another place.” It was a time and a place, of course, that never came.
More Than an Ideology
Bolton possesses an abiding self-righteousness rooted in what seems a sincere belief in the myth of American greatness, mixed with deep personal failings hidden from public view.
He seemed perpetually angry and it wasn’t clear whether it was over some personal or diplomatic feud. He seems to take personally nations standing up to America, binding his sense of personal power with that of the United States.
It is more than an ideology. It’s fanaticism. Bolton believes America is exceptional and indispensible and superior to all other nations and isn’t afraid to say so. He’d have been better off perhaps in the McKinley administration, before the days of PR-sugarcoating of imperial aggression. He’s not your typical passive-aggressive government official. He’s aggressive-aggressive.
And now Bolton is ordering 120,000 troops to get ready and an aircraft carrier to steam towards Iran.
Bolton’s all too willing to make his bullying personal on behalf of the state. He implicitly threatened the children of José Bustani, who Vice President Dick Cheney wanted out of his job as head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons because Bustani had gotten Iraq to agree to join the chemical weapons protocol, thereby making it harder for the U.S. to invade Iraq.
After Bolton’s failed 2005 confirmation hearings, Tony Blinken, the then staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told The New Yorker‘s Dexter Filkins:
“We saw a pattern of Mr. Bolton trying to manipulate intelligence to justify his views. If it had happened once, maybe. But it came up multiple times, and always it was the same underlying issue: he would stake out a position, and then, if the intelligence didn’t support it, he would try to exaggerate the intelligence and marginalize the officials who had produced it.”
Bolton is no fan of democracy if things don’t go his way. He is a vociferous instigator of the so-far failed U.S. coup in Venezuela and of course Bolton organized the “Brooks Brothers riot” that disrupted the recounting of votes in Florida in the disputed 2000 presidential election.
What is alarming about the above video is not so much that he justifies lying, but the example he gives: lying to cover up military plans like the invasion of Normandy. This is a common ruling class tactic in the U.S. to portray disobedient leaders ripe for overthrow as Hitler. Saddam was Hitler, Milosevic was Hitler, Noriega was Hitler and Hillary Clinton called Putin Hitler. It is a false revival of U.S. glory from World War II to paint foreign adventures as moral crusades, rather than naked aggression in pursuit of profits and power.
Bolton is the distillation of the pathology of American power. He is unique only in the purity of this pathology.
Regime Change for Iran
The U.S. national security adviser has been saying for years he wants the Iranian government overthrown, and now he’s made his move. But this time John Bolton may have flown too high.
He was chosen for his post by a president with limited understanding of international affairs—if real estate is not involved—and one who loves to be sucked up to. Trump is Bolton’s perfect cover.
But hubris may have finally bested Bolton. He had never before maneuvered himself into such a position of power, though he’d left a trail of chaos at lower levels of government. Sitting opposite the Resolute desk on a daily basis has presented a chance to implement his plans.
At the top of that agenda has been Bolton’s stated aim for years: to bomb and topple the Iranian government.
Thus Bolton was the driving force to get a carrier strike force sent to the Persian Gulf and, according to The New York Times, on May 14, it was he who “ordered” a Pentagon plan to prepare 120,000 U.S. troops for the Gulf. These were to be deployed “if Iran attacked American forces or accelerated its work on nuclear weapons.”
Two months after Bolton was appointed national security adviser, in June 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the six-nation deal that has seen Tehran curtail its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for relaxation of U.S. and international sanctions.
At the time of Bolton’s appointment in April 2018, Tom Countryman, who had been undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, as had Bolton, predicted to The Intercept that if Iran resumed enrichment after the U.S. left the deal, it “would be the kind of excuse that a person like Bolton would look to to create a military provocation or direct attack on Iran.”
In response to ever tightening sanctions, Iran said on May 5 (May 6 in Tehran) that it would indeed restart partial nuclear enrichment. On the same day, Bolton announced the carrier strike group was headed to the Gulf.
Bolton Faces Resistance
If this were a normally functioning White House, in which imperial moves are normally made, a president would order military action, and not a national security adviser. “I don’t think Trump is smart enough to realize what Bolton and [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo are doing to him,” former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel told RT’s Afshin Rattansi this week. “They have manipulated him. When you get the national security adviser who claims that he ordered an aircraft carrier flotilla to go into the Persian Gulf, we’ve never seen that. In the days of Henry Kissinger, who really brought sway, he never ordered this, and if it was ordered it was done behind closed doors.”
Bolton claimed he acted on intelligence that Iran was poised to attack U.S. interests close to Iran.
Both Israel and Saudi Arabia, lacking the military firepower of the United States, have long tried to get the U.S. to fight its wars, and one no more important than against its common enemy. An editorial on May 16 in the Saudi English-language news outlet, Arab News, called for a U.S. “surgical strike” on Iran. But The New York Times reported on the same day that though Israel was behind Bolton’s “intelligence” about an Iranian threat, Israel does not want the U.S. to attack Iran causing a full-scale war.
The intelligence alleged Iran was fitting missiles on fishing boats in the Gulf. Imagine a government targeted by the most powerful military force in history wanting to defend itself in its own waters.
Bolton also said Iran was threatening Western interests in Iraq, which led eventually to non-essential U.S. diplomatic staff leaving Baghdad and Erbil.
It is the typical provocation of a bully: threaten someone with a cruise missile and the moment they pick up a knife in self-defense you attack, conveniently leaving the initial threat out of the story. It then becomes: “Iran picked up a knife. We have to blow them away with cruise missiles.”
But this time the bully is being challenged. Federica Mogherini, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, resisted the U.S. on Iran when she met Pompeo in Brussels on May 13.
“It’s always better to talk, rather than not to, and especially when tensions arise… Mike Pompeo heard that very clearly today from us,” said Mogherini. “We are living in a crucial, delicate moment where the most relevant attitude to take – the most responsible attitude to take – is and we believe should be, that of maximum restraint and avoiding any escalation on the military side.”
The New York Times that day reported: “Privately, several European officials described Mr. Bolton and Mr. Pompeo as pushing an unsuspecting Mr. Trump through a series of steps that could put the United States on a course to war before the president realizes it.”
Ghia: No new threat from Iran. (YouTube)
British Maj. Gen. Chris Ghika then said on May 14: “There has been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq or Syria.” Ghika was rebuked by U.S. Central Command, whose spokesman said, “Recent comments from OIR’s Deputy Commander run counter to the identified credible threats available to intelligence from U.S. and allies regarding Iranian-backed forces in the region.”
A day later it was Trump himself, however, who was said to be resisting Bolton. On May 15 The Washington Post reported:
“President Trump is frustrated with some of his top advisers, who he thinks could rush the United States into a military confrontation with Iran and shatter his long-standing pledge to withdraw from costly foreign wars, according to several U.S. officials. Trump prefers a diplomatic approach to resolving tensions and wants to speak directly with Iran’s leaders.”
The Times reported the next day:
“President Trump has told his acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, that he does not want to go to war with Iran, according to several administration officials, in a message to his hawkish aides that an intensifying American pressure campaign against the clerical-led government in Tehran must not escalate into open conflict.”
Then it was the Democrats who stood up to Bolton. On Tuesday Pompeo and Shanahan briefed senators and representatives behind closed doors on Capitol Hill regarding the administration’s case for confronting Iran.
“Are they (Iran) reacting to us, or are we doing these things in reaction to them? That is a major question I have, that I still have,” Sen. Angus King told reporters after the briefing. “What we view as defensive, they view as provocative. Or vice versa.”
Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego told reporters after the briefing: “I believe there is a certain level of escalation of both sides that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The feedback loop tells us they’re escalating for war, but they could just be escalating because we’re escalating.”
Pompeo told a radio interviewer after the briefing that the U.S. had still not determined who attacked two Saudi, a Norwegian and an Emirati oil tanker in the Gulf last week, which bore the hallmarks of a provocation. Pompeo said “it seems like it’s quite possible that Iran was behind” the attacks.
Bolton was conspicuously absent from the closed-door briefing.
It’s Up to Trump
Trump has pinballed all over the place on Iran. He called the Times and Post stories about him resisting Bolton “fake news.”
“The Fake News Media is hurting our Country with its fraudulent and highly inaccurate coverage of Iran. It is scattershot, poorly sourced (made up), and DANGEROUS. At least Iran doesn’t know what to think, which at this point may very well be a good thing!” Trump tweeted on May 17.
Then he threatened what could be construed as genocide against Iran. “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!” he tweeted on Sunday.
But also last Sunday he told Fox News that the “military-industrial complex” is real and “they do like war” and they “went nuts” when he said he wanted to withdraw troops from Syria. Trump said he didn’t want war with Iran, here possibly reflecting Israel’s views.
On Monday he implied that the crisis has been drummed up to get Iran to negotiate.
“The Fake News put out a typically false statement, without any knowledge that the United States was trying to set up a negotiation with Iran. This is a false report….”
John Bolton must be stopped before he gets his war. It is beyond troubling that the man we have to count on to do it is Donald Trump.
Iran can sink US ships with ‘new secret weapons’, senior military official warns
May 25, 2019
RT
Iran is prepared to deploy ‘secret weapons’ against American warships, a military official in Tehran said, after the Pentagon sent three destroyers to the Persian Gulf amid a wave of increased tensions between the two states.
Without mincing words, General Morteza Qorbani, an adviser to Iran’s military command, cautioned that should Washington “commit the slightest stupidity, we will send these ships to the bottom of the sea along with their crew and planes.”
Iran, he promised, would do so “using two missiles or two new secret weapons.” He did not specify what type of “secret weapons” he was referring to.
The US earlier deployed three guided-missile destroyers, the USS McFaul, USS Gonzalez, USS Mason, to the Persian Gulf, with the last warship crossing the Strait of Hormuz this week. They joined the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, which has been cruising off the coast of Oman, near the Gulf, since early May.
The military buildup near Iranian waters coincided with the Pentagon announcing plans to send around 1,500 additional troops to Iraq, which borders Iran.
Although General Qorbani did not provide details of the weapons he mentioned, in recent months the nation has been showcasing its newest ships and submarines, as well as its naval firepower. In February, Tehran unveiled and successfully tested its new Hoveizeh long-range cruise missile, which is said to have a range of over 1,350 kilometers.
In the same month, Tehran launched the massive Velayat 97 naval drill, with maneuvers spanning from the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman to the northern Indian Ocean. During the drill, a midget Ghadir-class submarine fired an anti-ship cruise missile for the first time.
Relations between the US and Iran deteriorated dramatically after President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the Iran nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, and re-imposed sanctions on Tehran. The move was condemned by a number of nations, including Washington’s allies in Europe.
Meanwhile, in the US, dozens of retired top military brass and diplomats wrote an open letter to Trump, urging him to ditch the ‘stick’ approach and begin real talks with Iran. They warned that by failing to do so, the US risks not only making the situation in the Middle East worse, but also entering into “armed conflict at immense financial, human, and geopolitical cost
New York Votes to Release Trump’s Tax Returns, Blow Up His Web of Lies
A treasure trove of information could be released, including corporation taxes, personal income taxes, and real-estate transfer taxes.
May 8, 2019
by Bess Levin
Vanity Fair
Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin informed Democrats that he would not be turning over Donald Trump’s tax returns, despite a law that requires him to do so. Given that Mnuchin is possibly risking jail time to keep the president’s financial information secret, there’s presumably stuff in there that the former real-estate developer really, really doesn’t want anyone to see. Which makes the news that New York lawmakers have passed a bill to release Trump’s state filings to congressional Dems probably pretty unwelcome in the White House, even more so than the report that the “VERY successful” businessman lost a cool $1.17 billion over a period of 10 years.
On Wednesday, the New York State Senate passed a bill by 39-21 that allows the commissioner of the New York Department of Taxation and Finance to release any state tax return requested by the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee, or the Joint Committee on Taxation for any “specified and legitimate legislative purpose.” Given that it’s the president’s home state and the headquarters of the Trump Organization, the Times notes that a tax return from New York could “contain much of the same financial information as a federal return,” which Trump‘s allies have indicated will never see the light of day. On Tuesday, State Senator Brad Hoylman said the State Senate had enough votes to pass the bill, adding that in light of Mnuchin’s slobbering loyalty, “New York’s role [is] even more crucial [in] assisting Congress in its oversight.” The bill would allow a treasure trove of information to be released, including corporation taxes, personal income taxes, and real-estate transfer taxes.
While John Flanagan, the Republican minority leader in the State Senate, claimed the tax-return bill is a “blatantly political act” that takes time away from “worrying about what we can do for New Yorkers,” Hoylman pointed out that New Yorkers actually believe unearthing Trump’s tax returns constitutes a good use of their representatives’ time. “What’s at stake here is the prerogative of legislative oversight,” he said. “And the desire of New Yorkers and the American people to seek the truth behind Trump’s taxes.”
Incidentally…
Many moons ago, when Trump was running for president, his opponent, Hillary Clinton, mentioned that the real-estate developer had likely paid no income tax in the decades following 1995, when he declared a $916 million loss to the I.R.S. At the time, Trump argued that he was “entitled” to such a sweet deal because “of the laws that people like [Clinton] passed to take massive amounts of depreciation on other charges,” claiming that “Hillary . . . should have changed the law when [she] was a United States senator.” On Wednesday, he again tried to claim that he was able to avoid paying income taxes for eight of the 10 years between 1985 and 1994 not because he was such a terrible businessman that he managed to lose $1.17 billion, but because he was such a great businessman that he knew how to avoid paying taxes. And while that argument might’ve landed when he was running for president and bullshitting voters about how he was totally going to close all the loopholes from which he benefited, it’s a little less convincing now that he’s president and has already passed a massive tax “reform” law that wait, what’s that? Expanded them.
Encyclopedia of American Loons
Ron Riffe
Cutting Edge Ministries (CEM) is a South-Carolina-based fundamentalist group of deranged conspiracy theorists, famous (to some limited extent) for instance for various 9/11 truther conspiracy theories based on pareidolia and numerology: 9/11 was, according to the website’s contributors, a ploy orchestrated by the Illuminati, and this is shown by the appearance of the Illuminati “signature” in connection to the event, as CEM has demonstrated in “a series of articles detailing this use of the number ‘11’, proving that the Illuminati was the planning, active agent behind these attacks”. For instance, the number eleven occurs in the date of the attack, the number of the first aeroplane to hit the World Trade Center, the number of the plane which hit the Pentagon (77, which gives 11 if you divide it by 7), the number of floors in the towers, the fact that the buildings resembled an 11, that one of the planes had a crew of 11, etc. They are apparently dead serious. The group is perhaps even better known, however, for their collection of “Harry Potter is of Satan” articles. It is, shall we say, unclear whether any of the article writers actually read any the books.
Though David Bay is (or used to be) the director of CEM, Pastor Ron Riffe used to be perhaps been the main contributor to CEM’s online rantings (it is not entirely clear), and has made his mark in particular on their promotion of one of the most inane pieces of conspiracy theorizing on the entire Internet: Six school shootings committed over a space of two years in the US, when marked on a map, form two rough lines, which shows that “they were planned events, not isolated, sporadic horrors:” Riffe then suggests that the lines are actually part of a hexagram, which he promptly drew onto a map of the world to go hunting for other disasters that occur in the vicinity of any of the lines, like Venezuelan floods, the Waco incident, the murder of Jonbenet Ramsey and the crashing of John F. Kennedy Jr’s plane (“While his plane apparently did not go down right on the line, it went down close enough to it to raise one’s eyebrows”). And at the center of the hexagram? The Galapagos Islands, “at which Darwin conceived his Satanic idea we now call Evolution.”
“[I]t is highly conceivable [interesting choice of words] that the Illuminati would create such a symbol, believing it would reverberate with Satanic power to aid them in achieving their global objectives.” The author does understandably not go into details about the magic properties by which it is supposed to aid them. Things are prone to get a bit murky at this level of conspiracy theorizing, but it involves the UN, the Clintons and “the exercise of powerful Black Magick Witchcraft” by the government in attempts to confiscate your guns.
Somewhat refreshingly, Riffe is a fierce critic of the King James Bible; all English Bibles, in fact: “The fact of the matter is that 100% of all English Bibles bear the imprint of Rosicrucian/Freemason tampering! … The tampering took place primarily in the chapter and verse divisions, artwork, etc. of the early English translations as signs to ‘those in the know’ that the publications were done under Rosicrucian supervision.” It seems like disagreement over the inerrancy of the King James Bible made Riffe and CEM part ways at some point around 2006.
Riffe is also a fierce critic of anti-semitism … though “we need to understand there is a trait among the Jews as a race of people that contributes greatly to anti-Semitism. For reasons known only unto God He continues to give many of them an uncanny ability to make money and prosper […] And over time they have become some of the most powerful and wealthy individuals among the world’s bankers and financiers. But that tremendous wealth is being misused by some extremely wicked individuals among them – in some cases involving entire families that go back for generations – as they operate financial empires having no national allegiance or recognizing any borders. Their insatiable lust for power has played a major role in most (if not all) of the wars that have been fought over the last two hundred years.” It’s not all of them, though. Some are nice.
Cutting Edge Ministries has produced a number of books and DVDs, mostly on how the hidden Powers That Be are covertly working to bring about the End Times.
Diagnosis: As unhinged as they come: dimwitted, bigoted, angry and evil. Probably relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things, however.
Judith Reisman
Judith Ann Reisman is a wingnut activist most famous for her deranged crusade against sexologist Alfred Kinsey and insane hatred of homosexuality, which she believes was the cause for the rise of Nazism. Her thoughts are often published by the WND, RenewAmerica and The New American, the magazine of the John Birch Society. Reisman is also visiting professor of Law at Liberty University (her education is not in law; the important thing is that she is an ideological fit), and Liberty Counsel’s favorite expert when it comes issues pertaining to sexuality. Reisman’s advice was endorsed by Rick Santorum, who also supported a ban on pornography (Reisman claims that pornography is ultimately the source of all evil.)
Reisman on Kinsey
Reisman’s attacks on Kinsey are unconstrained by truth, reality or reason. She has, for instance, falsely accused Kinsey of being a fraud who employed and relied on pedophiles for his research, and even that he himself sexually abused children, based on the fact that she doesn’t like the results of his work. Indeed, Reisman views Kinsey as some kind of Satan who is personally responsible for what she perceives to be the cultural decay of America. In 1991 she sued the Kinsey Institute, its then director, and Indiana University for defamation and intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress regarding alleged attempts to censor her book Kinsey, Sex and Fraud (they criticized it, for its remarkable falsehoods and misunderstandings), a case ultimately dismissed with prejudice in 1994. Her follow-up book Sexual Sabotage: How One Mad Scientist Unleashed a Plague of Corruption and Contagion on America was, shall we say, not better, and according to one critic “takes the unseemly shape of a paranoid sermon on American decency held together by acerbic ad hominems, a tapestry of slippery slope arguments, a string of unwholesome linkages (“Nazi serial pedophiles”), and a litany of medieval, Victorian, and McCarthyian diagnostics.” In the book, published in 2010 by the wingnut conspiracy theorist press WND Books, Reisman calls Kinsey a “traitor” to America because in her mind, he and his researchers deliberately set out to defame the Greatest Generation and destroy the world. Even Kinsey’s death is a conspiracy: Reisman claims that he died of “brutal, repetitive self-abuse” (i.e. masturbation) when in fact he died of heart problems and pneumonia.
Prior to the release of the 2004 film Kinsey, Reisman and wingnut extremist Laura Schlessinger attempted to place an advertisement alleging that Kinsey was a pervert and a pedophile, or, as she put it elsewhere, “a scientific and moral fraud, a certifiable sexual psychopath as well as a sadomasochistic pornography addict and a sexually harassing bully” (“certifiable” in this context does not mean what ordinary people ordinarily think it means) and that “Dr. Kinsey’s most egregious fraud is that he wasn’t a scientist. He was an ideologue who was most importantly a sex offender at best, and, beyond being a sex offender, he was certainly a child sexual abuser and/or solicitor and guide in the perpetration of that abuse.” At least we can pretty firmly establish that Reisman is unable to see the distinction between a scientist and an ideologue. Ultimately, Reisman wishes to discredit not only Kinsey but the entire field of sexology, “the sexindustrial complex” that has grown out of his work: “One doesn’t measure American sexual habits,” she said. “That’s not a science.” At least what she is doing certainly isn’t.
In 2012, Reisman predictably blamed Kinsey for the child abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church, pointing out that it is no coincidence that the abuse “problem in the Church” began just when Kinsey published his work, which is technically true given that there is not even remotely any correlation in the timelines here that could even be said to be coincidental.
Erototoxins
Pornography, according to Reisman, is dangerous, and not only for spiritual reasons. According to Reisman there is a genuinely physiological mechanism that makes pornography dangerous: If you view pornography, an addictive chemical mixture floods the brain and harms it. Reisman has dubbed this mixture “erototoxins”. Of course, she has not actually provided any evidence for the existence of erototoxins, nor described any plausible mechanism, or even attempted to define “harm” as in “harms the brain”. She has, however, expressed an impressive degree of confidence that MRI studies will prove the existence of porn-induced physical brain damage. And such proof will be followed by a mass of lawsuits against distributors of pornography. Reisman is ready. Yes, it is a little bit sad, but remember that Reisman is really evil, too.
More importantly, insofar as pornography can “subvert cognition”, then it stands to reason that “these toxic media should be legally outlawed, as is all other toxic waste, and eliminated from our societal structure.” Indeed, as she sees it, there cannot really be any substantial arguments against her position, since individuals who have suffered brain damage from “pornography are no longer expressing ‘free speech’ and, for their own good, shouldn’t be protected under the First Amendment.” (This really, really isn’t how the First Amendment works.)
The 2002-2011 Proceedings of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences state, concerning Reisman’s public statements about erototoxins, that “facts stood in the way of her opinion and testimony.” As of October 2018, PubMed still contains no results either for “erototoxin” or for “erotoxin.”
When Rick Santorum claimed that “a wealth of research is now available demonstrating that pornography causes profound brain changes in both children and adults, resulting in widespread negative consequences,” he was referring largely to Reisman. “Research” and “demonstrating” are not really the correct word choices. Similarly, at a 2004 congressional hearing convened by Sam Brownback, Reisman, apparently billed as an expert on addiction, testified that “pornography triggers myriad kinds of internal, natural drugs that mimic the ‘high’ from a street drug. Addiction to pornography is addiction to what I dub erototoxins,” proposing a ban on all sexually explicit images as mind-altering drugs because they cause the release of opioids. We will grudgingly admit that it takes some effort to really comprehend the abysmal depth of the idiocy expressed here.
Erototoxins emitted from pornography are also to blame for homosexuality, and apparently sex-ed rewires the brain and consequently promotes homosexuality. To back up the claims, Reisman has pointed to a case where pheromones were used to confuse male gypsy moths in order to prevent them from mating with females, which is evidence that pornography is similarly confusing men by emitting erotoxins and thereby make them less attracted to women (or something like that); according to Reisman: “Pornography is a visual pheromone, a powerful 100-billion-dollar per year brain drug that is changing sexuality even more rapidly through the cyber-acceleration of the Internet. It is ‘inhibiting orientation’ and ‘disrupting pre-mating communication between the sexes by permeating the atmosphere’ and Internet.” Apparently this passes as “science” at the creationist institution Liberty University.
But sex-ed is of the devil, of course; sex ed turns children into prostitutes and “little sexual deviants,” says Reisman, and sex ed classes are designed to brainwash children into thinking they might be gay, transgender or “all kinds of other things”, making “these kids become fodder for adult predators.” Accordingly, she has argued that public schools should face class action lawsuits from parents for illegally “grooming” children for sex (an idea taken up by Michigan state representative Gary Glenn). In 2013, Reisman engaged herself in the fight against sex-education in Croatia. According to Reisman, George Soros has “brought in pedophiles from around the world” to the country as part of the effort to set up the system and make kids gay. Yes, Soros is turning kids gay. And to repeat ourselves: Reisman, with no education in law (or psychology), is a visiting professor of law at Liberty University, an institution that pretends to be a university.
Anti-pornography campaigning
Her anti-porn campaigns have been going on for a while, but really took a turn with a 1983 talk on CNN’s Crossfire about “connections between sex education, sex educators, and the pornography industry,” a talk that really made for an interesting study in delusional imagination and the ability to make up conspiratorial connections from nothing. She was subsequently invited by the US DOJ to apply for a grant to conduct a “study at American University to determine whether Playboy, Hustler, and other more explicit materials are linked to violence by juveniles” for the amount of $734,371, which was approved without competition. Reisman subsequently spent three years reading porn (Pamela Swain, director of research, evaluation and program claimed that the study could be accomplished for $60,000), and produced the report “Images of Children, Crime and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler”, which was, perhaps needless to say, void of anything resembling quality, rigor, accountability or accuracy. In the report, Reisman claimed that she had found “2,016 cartoons that included children apparently under the age of 17 and 3,988 other pictures, photographs, and drawings that depict infants or youths.” Sex crime researcher Avedon Carol commented that the report was a “scientific disaster, riddled with researcher bias and baseless assumptions”, partially since (in the words of expert reviewers) “the term ‘child’ used in the aggregate sense in this report is so inclusive and general as to be meaningless.” American University refused to publish the completed work. Despite its shoddiness, the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography concurred with the report, with the result that several stores stopped selling Playboy and Penthouse.
When Playboy and Penthouse printed nude photos of Madonna in 1985, Reisman warned that because of the entertainer’s idolization by youth, their publication would destigmatize and “encourage voluntary display by youngsters,” leading to an increase in child pornography. This is not remotely how this works
Not that Reisman understands how anything works.
Expert testimony at the Mapplethorpe exhibition obscenity trial
During the 1990 obscenity trial of Dennis Barrie, director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, for displaying controversial photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, Reisman was called as (the only) expert witness for the prosecution, after having had, the previous year, written an editorial in The Moonie Times with the title “Promoting Child Abuse as Art” accusing “Mapplethorpe of being both a Nazi and a child molester”. (The defense argued that she was not qualified as an art expert, but the judge allowed her to testify as a rebuttal witness.) During her testimony, Reisman did not discuss the explicit content of Mapplethorpe’s work, but argued rather that the five photographs were not works of art because they either did not display a human face, or, in the case of Self-Portrait, just a face that “… displayed no discernible emotion,” and that without emotion, the placement of the photographs in a museum implied that the activities displayed were appropriate. She also testified that “anal sodomy is traumatically dysfunctional and is definitely associated with AIDS” and claimed that the pictures of nude children legitimized pedophilia. One really, really wonder what the prosecution thought of her defense. Barrie and the Center were acquitted of all charges by the jury.
Reisman is apparently still being called as expert witness by various deranged and bigoted conspiracy theorists, both in the US and abroad.
The Gays
Reisman is a fan of Scott Lively’s The Pink Swastika and apparently believes that the homosexual movement in Germany gave rise to the Nazi Party and the Holocaust. Thanks to Alfred Kinsey, warns Reisman, the American homosexual movement is poised to repeat those crimes: “Idealistic ‘gay youth’ groups are being formed and staffed in classrooms nationwide by recruiters too similar to those who formed the original ‘Hitler youth.’” Accordingly, she has enthusiastically endorsed criminalization of homosexuality.
According to Reisman, homosexuals employ recruitment techniques that rival those of the United States Marine Corps to transform innocent children into raving homosexuals: homosexual “recruitment is loud; it is clear; it is everywhere.” People like Judith Reisman tend to think things are everywhere.
And the ultimate goal of gay people is not what they say it is. According to Reisman, “the whole point of the objective” of GLSEN’s (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network – a “modern version of the Hitler Youth,” according to Reisman) anti-bullying efforts is to promote pedophilia; indeed “the aim of homosexual males and now increasingly females is not to have sex with other old guys and get married but to obtain sex with as many boys as possible.”
Not happy with the decision to allow gays to join the Boy Scouts, Reisman claimed that it is a result of a debate going back to Alfred Kinsey: “The Boy Scouts are up for grabs at this point in time, and I mean that in many ways,” Reisman said. And what will happen is, as Reisman sees it, that gay Boy Scouts will “train” and sexually assault other scouts and then trick them to “believe they are naturally ‘that way.’” In fact, it is a step in a strategy to implement … communism. That’s right: gay rights is ultimately about communist tyranny. How is that going to work, you may ask. Well, “the drive for homosexual, bisexual, bisexualization of the children” is meant to make people become “controlled by their sexual lust.” At that point, they will become a “slave population” who will lose their sense of right and wrong (homosexuals “aim to wipe out all morality – whatever legal mechanisms that have protected the weak from the strong for thousands of years,” says Reisman) and “buy into the tyranny.” You probably shouldn’t ask.
In 2015 Mat Staver, on behalf of Reisman, submitted one of the most bizarre legal briefs in the history of legal briefs submitted in the context of same-sex marriage cases.
Miscellaneous
In 2018 Reisman said that pizzagate is “worthy of FBI investigation”.
Diagnosis: We probably shouldn’t, but it is hard not to speculate whether much of what Reisman says about gay people tell us more about Reisman than she wants to reveal (and certainly more than it tells us about gay people). A raving lunatic monster in any case, and her influence is greater than I think most reasonable people (whose paths she rarely crosses) realize.
The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
May 25, 2019
by Dr. Peter Janney
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.
Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.
After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.
The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.
When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..
A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.
The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.
Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks. ”
Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.
Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publication.
Conversation No. 58
Date: Thursday, January 9, 1997
Commenced: 9:47 AM CST
Concluded: 10:28 AM CST
RTC: Ah, good morning, Gregory. Did you talk to Bill yesterday?
GD: Yes, he actually called me. He was discussing Kronthal with me mostly, but I think he was on a fishing trip. Was asking me about the new Mueller book…what was in it and such like.
RTC: Did you tell him anything?
GD: No, not in specific. I find him entertaining and sometimes truthful, but I don’t trust him. And I don’t trust Kimmel, either.
RTC: Probably a good idea. I rarely hear from Kimmel these days.
GD: I wonder why?
RTC: I think you’re the reason. Bill was cautioning me against talking too much to you because it might hurt my reputation.
GD: I think it must be the fact that I’m a practicing vampire. You know, Robert, it’ll be tough sledding this winter.
RTC: Why is that?
GD: No snow.
RTC: I walked right into that one, didn’t I? Has anyone discussed the Kennedy business with you?
GD: Corson did, once. Said he had the real story in his safe deposit box, and Plato or Aristotle would get it when he was called to Jesus.
RTC: Plato. That’s the fix lawyer around here. Little favors for this person or that one, little jobs for the Company and so on.
GD: They probably deserve each other.
RTC: Probably. And how is the Mueller book doing?
GD: Well enough. I’m starting to block out the Kennedy book and, yes, I know not to talk about it…
RTC: Or even write something up about it. If Tom thought you were into this, he’d have his boys do a black bag job on you and get into your hard drive.
GD: I could put a bomb in it… When they turned it on, somebody later would be carrying a white cane and being nice to his German Shepherd guide dog.
RTC: Now, now, Gregory, not to make jokes about things like that.
GD: If people don’t want me to punt them in their fat ass, they shouldn’t bend over. On the other hand, it might be an invite for something more romantic.
RTC: I can see you’re in a good mood today.
GD: Foul mouthed as ever.
RTC: Sometimes, but always entertaining.
GD: I know Kimmel doesn’t find me entertaining. I make fun of the establishment and he is so obviously a dedicated and vocal part of it.
RTC: Everyone has to have something to cling to.
GD: What a waste of time. People are so predictable and so pathetic. You know, Robert, it’s like visiting your ant farm every morning and watching the ants leading their programmed lives.
RTC: Isn’t that a bit arrogant, Gregory?
GD: It’s not that I’m so smart, Robert, although I am, but it’s because so many are so stupid. Anyway, enough Weltschmertz.
RTC: Pardon?
GD: Pain with the world. Burned out. Bored. Frustrated.
RTC: I see. When you get to my age, that’s the whole thing.
GD: Well, if youth knew and age could, Robert. I think that’s from Mary Baker Eddy, the woman who invented aspirin. You know, God is Love, there is no pain. They ought to put that up in the terminal cancer wards. It would be such a comfort. I understand Mary was buried with a telephone in her coffin. High hopes and impossibilities sums it up, and have an aspirin.
RTC: That’s Christian Science, isn’t it? You heard about the Christian Scientist? He had a very bad cold and pretty soon, the cold was gone and so was the Christian Scientist.
GD: That’s how it goes, I guess. Now let me get serious about this ZIPPER business. If you want me to do a treatment on this that will be to your benefit, I need to get from you, on the phone is fine, some kind of a rationale for what happened. I mean, that’s what you want, isn’t it? To let those who come after you fully understand the reasons for your actions.
RTC: Yes, that’s it exactly. If that ever got out, though by now, it probably won’t, I don’t want my son and my grandchildren thinking I was just a common or garden variety assassin. They should know the reasons for why we acted as we did.
GD: Fine. Go ahead.
RTC: You must understand that we took our duties very seriously. Angleton was a first class counter intelligence man and very dedicated. And he discovers that the most important intelligence reports, the President’s daily briefings from the CIA, are ending up in Moscow. Within a week of them being given to the President. A week. And this was not a one-time incident but had been going on for some time. We then tried to find out how this was happening. A major intelligence disaster, Gregory, major. Now there were several copies of this report disseminated, never mind to whom, so in each one, a little spice was put in. An identifier as you will. Nothing that changed the thrust of the report but a little bit of spice, as Jim used to say. Jim’s contact in Moscow was a diplomat, never mind which country, because we don’t need to make trouble for him. So from him, we got copies of what Nikita was getting. So can you imagine how stunned we all were to learn that it was the President’s copy that was being leaked? My God! So we couldn’t just walk up to him and ask him how come Khrushchev was reading his briefings a week after we gave them to him. Jim couldn’t find a way how this was done, but then we had a report that Bobby, his brother, was known to be friendly with a prominent KGB fellow, Bolshakov. No question of who he was. The TASS man here. Top level. Bobby was known to have had at least one meeting with him. Hoover was having Bobby watched day and night because Hoover hated him and wanted to catch him doing something bad so he could leak it to the Post and get him sacked. Anyway, they found out that Bobby was talking to the Commie on the phone from his home so we, and Hoover, tapped his phone. Hoover didn’t know we were doing it, too, but that’s Washington politics for you. And we heard, for sure, that Bobby was sending thermofax copies of this report to him. I mean, there was no question. And, we learned, too, that Kennedy was keeping in direct contact with Khrushchev by Bobby and the Russian. I mean they were subverting the entire diplomatic system and God alone knows what Kennedy was talking about. We had to make sure of this, and really sure. It was explosive, believe me. Jim and a few of us sat down, listened to tapes and agent reports and tried to decide what to do. I mean, Gregory, here we had our President giving, actually giving, the most secret documents to our worst enemy, a man who swore in public he would destroy us. So, what to do? Make it public? Who would dare to do this? Of course we had strong media contacts but we all decided this was just too mind-boggling and negative to let outside that room. And that is where the decision was made to simply get rid of Kennedy. He was too independent, he had sacked Dulles and Bissel over the Cuban thing and threatened to Mansfield to break the Agency up. And here he was giving our worse enemy top secret inside information. I mean it really wasn’t open to discussion. You can see this all, can’t you?
GD: I can see your point of view very clearly.
RTC: What would you have done?
GD: I’m not an important person like those people, so what difference does my opinion make in all this? I’m just trying to find the rationale.
RTC: Well, do you have it?
GD: Yes, very clearly.
RTC: Well, the rest was lining up the players. Jim did his part, McCone did his part and he talked to Hoover to get his cooperation. We never went directly to him, but we used Bill Sullivan, his right hand trouble-shooter. That’s how it was done. Hoover hated the Kennedys, especially Bobby, and we had to have him on our side because it was his people that would investigate any killing that had to be done. It took about a week of back and forth but finally it was agreed on. Johnson was no problem. He was a real rat; a wheeler-dealer whom you couldn’t trust to the corner for a pound of soft soap. The Kennedy bunch were treating him like shit and planned to dump him as VP, so of course he went for the wink and the nod. Fortas was his bagman, just like Sullivan was Hoover’s. These are people who know the value of silence from long experience. And it went on from there. I have a phone conference record which I will dig out, when the time comes, and send to you. At this point are you clear on the motivations? I mean, this was not just some spur of the moment thing, Gregory. We felt it had to be done to stop what we could only call high treason. Hoover and Johnson both went along on those grounds. A matter of treason. And it had to be stopped. I don’t see this as heroic but a vital necessity. For the country.
GD: I remember reading somewhere that treason doth never prosper for if it prospers, none dare call it treason.
RTC: Something like that.
GD: Very like.
RTC: But if you look at it carefully, and I hope you will, Gregory, you will see that Kennedy was committing the treason, not us. It was he and his vile brother who were passing our most sensitive and secret documents to our enemies. What were we to do? Confront him? We’d all be fired, or worse. What choice was there? Tell me that.
GD: From that point of view, none.
RTC: We are making progress. One thing…Jim was thinking about blowing up Kennedy’s yacht while and was sailing around off Cape Cod but since there certainly would be children on board, I put a stop to that. Kennedy is one thing but not the children.
GD: And the wife? Our American saint.
RTC: Oh that one. Don’t be fooled, Gregory. Jackie claims descent from French nobility but in fact, her French ancestor wasn’t a nobleman, but an immigrant cabinetmaker. And crap about her being related to Robert E. Lee is more crap. That part of her family were lace curtain micks from the old sod. The woman is a fraud. She married Kennedy for his father’s money, that’s all. Wonderful backgrounds here, Gregory. Old Joe was as crooked as they come. He was an associate of Al Capone, a bootlegger, and worse, and in 1960, he and the mob rigged the election so Jack could get in. Yes, I know all about that. They did their work in Chicago with the Daley machine and the local mob. That’s right, vote early and vote often. They even voted the cemeteries. I never really liked Nixon but they connived and stole the election from him slicker than snot off a glass-handled door knob.
GD: Ain’t it nice living in a democracy? So Kennedy wasn’t a saint by any stretch.
RTC:We can overlook all the women and the wild drug and sex orgies in the White House, but, Gregory, passing our top secrets to the enemy was too damned much. I would like you to show that very clearly if and when you get into this.
GD: Well, from a pragmatic view, Robert, it is the very best and clearest reason for the killing. A question here.
RTC: Certainly.
GD: A plot. Good, but then how do you keep it quiet? Someone might talk.
RTC: Remove them, Gregory.
GD: But what about those who remove those who know too much? Then they know too much.
RTC: Oswald knew a little too much, just a little but enough. And he could prove he never shot Kennedy. So he had to go before he started to talk. Oswald knew some of our people and he worked directly for ONI, so there were dangers there. On the other hand, the man who shot King, Ray, knew nothing so he got to live and end up in jail until he died. He knew there was something wrong, but, and this is important to note, Gregory, he had no proof.
GD: You did King?
RTC: No Hoover did King. He hated him with a visceral passion. Hoover was a nut, Gregory, but a very powerful and very dangerous nut. There is a long-standing rumor here that Hoover had passed the color line and that he was part black. Hoover was a homosexual and there we have two reasons to hate yourself. King was black and he was a womanizer. And Bobby was AG and loathed Hoover. He used to go into Hoover’s office while he was taking his after-lunch nap and wake him up. And he laughed at him and called him a faggot behind his back. Not to do that to Hoover. He stayed in absolute power because he had enough real dirt on Congress to put most of them away in the cooler or the loonie bin. No, Bobby signed his death warrant when he did those things. No, Hoover did King and Hoover did Bobby. Not himself, but he got Bill Sullivan to do it. Sullivan was his hatchet man and we worked directly with Bill. But then Bill got old and was starting to babble like old people do, and he was hinting about Hoover, who had sacked him after he had used him. No, that doesn’t make it, so some kid shot Bill right through the head. He thought he was a deer. My, my.
GD: And Bobby?
RTC: That was Hoover too. It was an agreement. We did John and Edgar did the others. We had one of our men there when they did Bobby, just to observe. We got George the Greek to keep an eye open. They got one of Kennedy’s people to steer him into the kitchen after a speech and the raghead was waiting. One of the Kennedy bodyguards did him from behind while all the shooting and screaming was going on. Much better than John. They had a real shooter in front of real people. None of the questions like we had in Dallas. No loose ends, so to speak. And King was another clean job. Sullivan was very good.
GD: And that’s why he turned into a deer.
RTC: Yes, he turned into a very dead deer.
GD: And you got Cord’s wife on top of it.
RTC: Jim said she was hanging around with hippies and arty-farty people and running her mouth.
GD: Did she know anything?
RTC: No, but she was well-connected and some people might believe her. She’d been humping Kennedy and they apparently really go along with each other. She was a lot more of a woman than Jackie and she never nagged Jack or acted so superior like Jackie loved to do. Her brother in law worked for us and we all agonized over this but in the end, Jim had his way. Of course Cord thought it was peachy-keen. He hated her, but then Cord hated everybody. The vicious Cyclops!
GD: One eye.
RTC: Yes. Oh, and like Jim, he, too, was a profound poet. God, spare me from the poets of the world. You don’t write poetry, do you, Gregory.
GD: No, but really filthy limericks, Robert. Would you like to hear some?
RTC: Oh, not now. Maybe later.
GD: Probably just as well. Once I get started on those, I’ll be going strong an hour later. But let me tell you just one. Not a dirty one, but after about an hour of limericks, I love to end the night with this one. Can I proceed?
RTC: Just one?
GD: Yes, just one.
RTC: Go on.
GD: ‘There was an old man of St. Bees,
Who was stung on the arm by a wasp.
When asked if it hurt,
He replied ‘No, it didn’t,
‘I’m so glad that it wasn’t a hornet.’
(Concluded at 10:28 AM CST)