TBR News April 3, 2018

The Voice of the White House 

Washington, D.C. April 3, 2018:”Having lived and worked in Washington I can say with accuracy that the national capitol is a seething mass of rumor and gossip.

I was there very recently, visiting old friends, and the talk amongst those who could be considered connected dealt with only one topie: the eccentricities of the president.

There are many stories about this subject, some of which are obvious inventions by erratic bloggers but many more from reputable sources.

These show a clear pattern of dysfunctional behavior that is very easily classified as ore-Alzheimer’s in nature.

One day the President makes a firm policy statement and the next day, makes an opposite statement.

He will hire competent people for his staff and one day, because they do not agree with a strange idea of his, fire them.

It is quite true that the President lives in fear of being poisoned and regularly goes out with a retinue of Secret Service agents to a random MacDonald’s fast food restaurant for his food.

It is also true that he had locked the Secret Service agents out of his bedroom and watches three large television sets throughout the night.

Aware of his persona, the CIA caters to it. For example, the CIA feels that Russia is a convenient enemy because of its vast untapped natural resources.

These, the CIA believes, ought to be developed by their corporate friends, not the Russians.

Because there is a growing movement in Europe for Germany and France to develop working business methods with Russia, the CIA is desperate to stop this and feeds the paranoid president with suggestive stories to bolster their plans to disrupt any Russian legitimate business endeavors.

The CIA is notoriously short-sighted and their meddling in European business affairs will eventually cost the American public a great deal of money and reputation.”

 

Table of Contents

• Is Something Neurologically Wrong With Donald Trump?
• Trump reportedly loves McDonald’s because he has a ‘longtime fear’ of being poisoned (MCD)
• Donald and Melania Trump’s bizarre nightly routine – pair have ‘separate bedrooms and he LOCKS his door to eat cheeseburgers in bed’
• A New Study Shows How American Polarization Is Driven by a Team Sport Mentality, Not by Disagreement on Issues
• Laura Ingraham is a victim of a totalitarian campaign from the left, apparently
• Underwater melting of Antarctic ice far greater than thought, study finds
• Secrecy News
• Netanyahu scraps deal on residency for African migrants
• UK military research boss says can’t prove nerve agent was made in Russia: Sky News
• Martin Luther King: Assassination and Background

 

Is Something Neurologically Wrong With Donald Trump?

It is best not to diagnose the president from afar, which is why the federal government needs a system to evaluate him up close.

January 3, 2018

by James Hamblin

The Atlantic

President Donald Trump’s decision to brag in a tweet about the size of his “nuclear button” compared with North Korea’s was widely condemned as bellicose and reckless. The comments are also part of a larger pattern of odd and often alarming behavior for a person in the nation’s highest office.

Trump’s grandiosity and impulsivity has made him a constant subject of speculation among those concerned with his mental health. But after more than a year of talking to doctors and researchers about whether and how the cognitive sciences could offer a lens to explain Trump’s behavior, I’ve come to believe there should be a role for professional evaluation beyond speculating from afar.

I’m not alone. Viewers of Trump’s recent speeches have begun noticing minor abnormalities in his movements. In November, he used his free hand to steady a small Fiji bottle as he brought it to his mouth. Onlookers described the movement as “awkward” and made jokes about hand size. Some called out Trump for doing the exact thing he had mocked Senator Marco Rubio for during the presidential primary—conspicuously drinking water during a speech.

By comparison, Rubio’s movement was smooth, effortless. The Senator noticed that Trump had stared at the Fiji bottle as he slowly brought it to his lips, jokingly chiding that Trump “needs work on his form. Has to be done in one single motion, and eyes should never leave the camera.”

Then in December, speaking about his national-security plan in Washington, D.C., Trump reached under his podium and grabbed a glass with both hands. This time he kept them on the glass the entire time he drank, and as he put the glass down. This drew even more attention. The gesture was like that of an extremely cold person cradling a mug of cocoa. Some viewers likened him to a child just learning to handle a cup.

Then there was an incident of slurred speech. Announcing the relocation of the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—a dramatic foreign-policy move—Trump became difficult to understand at a phonetic level, which did little to reassure many observers of the soundness of his decision.

Experts compelled to offer opinions on the nature of the episode were vague: The neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta described it as “clearly some abnormalities of his speech.” This sort of slurring could result from anything from a dry mouth to a displaced denture to an acute stroke.

Though these moments could be inconsequential, they call attention to the alarming absence of a system to evaluate elected officials’ fitness for office—to reassure concerned citizens that the “leader of the free world” is not cognitively impaired, and on a path of continuous decline.

Proposals for such a system have been made in the past, but never implemented. The job of the presidency is not what it used to be. For most of America’s history, it was not possible for the commander in chief to unilaterally destroy a continent, or the entire planet, with one quick decision. Today, even the country’s missileers—whose job is to sit in bunkers and await a signal—are tested three times per month on their ability to execute protocols. They are required to score at least 90 percent. Testing is not required for their commander in chief to be able to execute a protocol, much less testing to execute the sort of high-level decision that would set this process in motion.

The lack of a system to evaluate presidential fitness only stands to become more consequential as the average age of leaders increases. The Constitution sets finite lower limits on age but gives no hint of an upper limit. At the time of its writing, septuagenarians were relatively rare, and having survived so long was a sign of hardiness and cautiousness. Now it is the norm. In 2016 the top three presidential candidates turned 69, 70, and 75. By the time of the 2021 inauguration, a President Joe Biden would be 78.

After age 40, the brain decreases in volume by about 5 percent every decade. The most noticeable loss is in the frontal lobes. These control motor functioning of the sort that would direct a hand to a cup and a cup to the mouth in one fluid motion—in most cases without even looking at the cup.

These lobes also control much more important processes, from language to judgment to impulsivity. Everyone experiences at least some degree of cognitive and motor decline over time, and some 8.8 percent of Americans over 65 now have dementia. An annual presidential physical exam at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center is customary, and Trump’s is set for January 12. But the utility of a standard physical exam—knowing a president’s blood pressure and weight and the like—is meager compared with the value of comprehensive neurologic, psychological, and psychiatric evaluation. These are not part of a standard physical.

Even if they were voluntarily undertaken, there would be no requirement to disclose the results. A president could be actively hallucinating, threatening to launch a nuclear attack based on intelligence he had just obtained from David Bowie, and the medical community could be relegated to speculation from afar.

Even if the country’s psychiatrists were to make a unanimous statement regarding the president’s mental health, their words may be written off as partisan in today’s political environment. With declining support for fact-based discourse and trust in expert assessments, would there be any way of convincing Americans that these doctors weren’t simply lying, treasonous “liberals”—globalist snowflakes who got triggered?

The downplaying of a president’s compromised neurologic status would not be without precedent. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously disguised his paralysis from polio to avoid appearing “weak or helpless.” He staged public appearances to give the impression that he could walk, leaning on aides and concealing a crutch. Instead of a traditional wheelchair, he used an inconspicuous dining chair with wheels attached. According to the FDR Presidential Library, “The Secret Service was assigned to purposely interfere with anyone who tried to snap a photo of FDR in a ‘disabled or weak’ state.”

Documenting the reality of Roosevelt’s health status fell to journalists, who had been reporting on his polio before his first term. A 1931 analysis in Liberty magazine asked “Is Franklin D. Roosevelt Physically Fit to Be President?” and reported on his paralysis: “It is an amazing possibility that the next president of the United States may be a cripple.” Once he was elected, Time described the preparation of the White House: “Because of the president-elect’s lameness, short ramps will replace steps at the side door of the executive offices leading to the White House.”

Today much more can be known about a person’s neurological status, though little of it is as observable as paraplegia. Unfortunately, the public medical record available to assuage global concerns about the current president’s neurologic status is the attestation of Harold Bornstein, America’s most famous Upper Manhattan gastroenterologist, whose initial doctor’s note described the 71-year-old Trump as “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

The phrasing was so peculiar for a medical record that some suggested that Trump had written or dictated the letter himself. Indeed, as a key indicator of neurologic status, Trump’s distinctive diction has not gone without scrutiny. Trump was once a more articulate person who sometimes told stories that had beginnings, middles, and ends, whereas he now leaps from thought to thought. He has come to rely on a small stable of adjectives, often involving superlatives. An improbably high proportion of what he describes is either the greatest or the worst he’s ever seen; absolutely terrible or the best; tiny or huge.

The frontal lobes also control speech, and over the years, Donald Trump’s fluency has regressed and his vocabulary contracted. In May of last year, the journalist Sharon Begley at Stat analyzed changes in his speech patterns during interviews over the years. She noted that in the 1980s and 1990s, Trump used phrases like “a certain innate intelligence” and “These are the only casinos in the United States that are so rated.” I would add, “I think Jesse Jackson has done himself very proud.”

He also more frequently finished sentences and thoughts. Here he is with Larry King on CNN in 1987:

King: Should the mayor of the city be someone who knows business?

Trump: Well, what we need is competence. We don’t have that. We have a one-line artist. That’s all he is …

Or on Oprah in 1988:

Winfrey: What do you think of this year’s presidential race, the way it’s shaping up?

Trump: Well, I think it’s going to be very interesting. I think that probably George Bush has an advantage, in terms of the election. I think that probably people would say he’s got, like, that little edge in terms of the incumbency, etcetera, etcetera. But I think Jesse Jackson has done himself very proud. I think Michael Dukakis has done a hell of a job. And George Bush has done a hell of a job. They all went in there sort of as semi-underdogs—including George Bush—and they’ve all come out. I think people that are around all three of those candidates can be very proud of the jobs they’ve done.

Compare that with the meandering, staccato bursts of today. From an interview with the Associated Press:

“People want the border wall. My base definitely wants the border wall, my base really wants it—you’ve been to many of the rallies. Okay, the thing they want more than anything is the wall. My base, which is a big base; I think my base is 45 percent. You know, it’s funny. The Democrats, they have a big advantage in the Electoral College. Big, big, big advantage … The Electoral College is very difficult for a Republican to win, and I will tell you, the people want to see it. They want to see the wall.”

Ben Michaelis, a psychologist who analyzes speech as part of cognitive assessments in court cases, told Begley that although some decline in cognitive functioning would be expected, Trump has exhibited a “clear reduction in linguistic sophistication over time” with “simpler word choices and sentence structure.”

This is evident even off camera, as in last week’s post-golf sit-down with The New York Times at his resort in Florida:

“The tax cut will be, the tax bill, prediction, will be far bigger than anyone imagines. Expensing will be perhaps the greatest of all provisions. Where you can do something, you can buy something … Piece of equipment … You can do lots of different things, and you can write it off and expense it in one year. That will be one of the great stimuli in history. You watch. That’ll be one of the big … People don’t even talk about expensing, what’s the word “expensing.” [Inaudible.] One-year expensing. Watch the money coming back into the country, it’ll be more money than people anticipate. But Michael, I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest CPA. I know the details of health care better than most, better than most. And if I didn’t, I couldn’t have talked all these people into doing ultimately only to be rejected. Now here’s the good news. We’ve created associations, millions of people are joining associations. Millions. That were formerly in Obamacare or didn’t have insurance. Or didn’t have health care. Millions of people. That’s gonna be a big bill, you watch. It could be as high as 50 percent of the people. You watch. So that’s a big thing …”

The paper said that the transcript was “lightly edited for content and clarity.”

If Trump’s limited and hyperbolic speech were simply a calculated political move—he repeated the phrase “no collusion” 16 times in the Times interview, which some pundits deemed an advertising technique—then we would also expect an occasional glimpse behind the curtain. In addition to repeating simplistic phrases to inundate the collective subconscious with narratives like “no collusion,” Trump would give at least a few interviews in which he strung together complex sentences, for example to make a case for why Americans should rest assured that there was no collusion.

Though it is not possible to diagnose a person with dementia based on speech patterns alone, these are the sorts of changes that appear in early stages of Alzheimer’s. Trump has likened himself to Ronald Reagan, and the changes in Trump’s speech evoke those seen in the late president. Reagan announced his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 1994, but there was evidence of linguistic change over the course of his presidency that experts have argued was indicative of early decline. His grammar worsened, and his sentences were more often incomplete. He came to rely ever more on vague and simple words: indefinite nouns and “low imageability” verbs like have, go, and get.

After Reagan’s diagnosis, former President Jimmy Carter sounded an alarm over the lack of a system to detect this sort of cognitive impairment earlier on. “Many people have called to my attention the continuing danger to our nation from the possibility of a U.S. president becoming disabled, particularly by a neurologic illness,” Carter wrote in 1994 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “The great weakness of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is its provision for determining disability in the event that the president is unable or unwilling to certify to impairment or disability.”

Indeed, the 1967 amendment laid out a process for transferring power to the vice president in the event that the president is unable to carry out the duties of the office due to illness. But it generally assumed that the president would be willing to undergo diagnostic testing and be forthcoming about any limitations.

This may not happen with a person who has come to be known for denying any hint of weakness or inability. Nor would it happen if a president had a psychiatric disorder that impaired judgment—especially if it was one defined by grandiosity, obsession with status, and intense aversion to being perceived as weak.

Nor would it happen if the only person to examine the president was someone like Harold Bornstein—whose sense of objective reality is one in which Donald Trump is healthier than the 42-year-old Theodore Roosevelt (who took office after commanding a volunteer cavalry division called the Rough Riders, and who invited people to the White House for sparring sessions, and who after his presidency would sometimes spend months traversing the Brazilian wilderness).

It was for these reasons that in 1994, Carter called for a system that could independently evaluate a president’s health and capacity to serve. At many companies, even where no missiles are involved, entry-level jobs require a physical exam. A president, it would follow, should be more rigorously cleared. Carter called on “the medical community” to take leadership in creating an objective, minimally biased process—to “awaken the public and political leaders of our nation to the importance of this problem.”

More than two decades later, that has not happened. But questions and concern around Trump’s psychiatric status have spurred proposals anew. In December, also in the Journal of the American Medical Association, mental-health professionals proposed a seven-member expert panel “to evaluate presidential fitness.” Last April, representative Jamie Raskin introduced a bill that would create an 11-member “presidential capacity” commission.

The real-world application of one of these systems is complicated by the fact that the frontal lobes also control things like judgment, problem-solving, and impulse control. These metrics, which fall under the purview of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, can be dismissed as opinion. In a hospital or doctor’s office, a neurologist may describe a patient with Parkinson’s disease as having “impaired impulse control.” The National Institute on Aging lists among the symptoms of Alzheimer’s “poor judgment leading to bad decisions.”

These are phrases that can and do appear in a person’s medical record. In the public sphere, however, they’re easily dismissed as value judgments motivated by politics. The Harvard law professor Noah Feldman recently accused mental-health professionals who attempt to comment on Trump’s cognition of “leveraging their professional knowledge and status to ‘assess’ his mental health for purposes of political criticism.”

Indeed thousands of mental-health professionals have mobilized and signed petitions attesting to Trump’s unfitness to hold office. Some believe Trump should carry a label of narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, or both. The largest such petition has more than 68,000 signatures—though there is no vetting of the signatories’ credentials. Its author, psychologist John Gartner, told me last year that in his 35 years of practicing and teaching, “This is absolutely the worst case of malignant narcissism I’ve ever seen.”

Many other mental-health professionals are insistent that Trump not be diagnosed from afar by anyone, ever—that the goal of mental-health care is to help people who are suffering themselves from disabling and debilitating illnesses. A personality disorder is “only a disorder when it causes extreme distress, suffering, and impairment,” argues Allen Frances, the Duke University psychiatrist who was a leading author of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which was the first to include personality disorders.

This is consistent with the long-standing, widely misunderstood rule in the profession that no one should ever be diagnosed outside of the confines of a one-on-one patient-doctor relationship. The mandate is based on a legal dispute that gave rise to the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) “Goldwater Rule,” which was implemented after the politician Barry Goldwater sued Fact magazine for libel because a group of mental-health professionals speculated about Goldwater’s thought processes in its pages.

The rule has protected psychiatrists both from lawsuits and from claims of subjectivity that threaten trust in the entire enterprise.

After more than a year of considering Trump’s behavior through the lens of the cognitive sciences, I don’t think that labeling him with a mental illness from afar is wise. A diagnosis like narcissistic personality disorder is too easily played off as a value judgment by an administration that is pushing the narrative that scientists are enemies of the state. Labeling is also counterproductive to the field in that it presents risks to all the people who deal with the stigma of psychiatric diagnoses. To attribute Trump’s behavior to mental illness risks devaluing mental illness.

Judiciousness in public statements is only more necessary as the Trump administration plays up the idea of partisan bias in its campaign against “the media.” The consistent message is that if someone is saying something about the president that depicts or reflects upon him unfavorably, the statement must be motivated by an allegiance to a party. It must be, in a word, “fake”—coming from a place of spite, or vengeance, or allegiance to some team, creed, or party. Expertise is simply a guise to further a hidden political cause. Senator Lindsey Graham recently told CNN that the media’s portrayal of President Donald Trump is “an endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook not fit to be president.”

Of course, Graham himself has called Trump a “kook” who is “not fit to be president.” That was in 2016, though, during the Republican presidential primary, when the two were not yet allies.)

That sort of breathless indictment—followed by a reversal and condemnation of others for making the same statement—may not be rare among politicians, but it is a leap to assume that doctors and scientists would similarly lie and abandon their professional ethics out of allegiance to a political party. When judgment is compromised with bias, it tends to be more subtle, often unconscious. Bias will color any assessment to some degree, but it needn’t render science useless in assessing presidential capacity.

The idea that the president should not be diagnosed from afar only underscores the point that the president needs to be evaluated up close.

A presidential-fitness committee—of the sort that Carter and others propose, consisting of nonpartisan medical and psychological experts—could exist in a capacity similar to the Congressional Budget Office. It could regularly assess the president’s neurologic status and give a battery of cognitive tests to assess judgment, recall, decision-making, attention—the sorts of tests that might help a school system assess whether a child is suited to a particular grade level or classroom—and make the results available.

Such a panel need not have the power to unseat a president, to undo a democratic election, no matter the severity of illness. Even if every member deemed a president so impaired as to be unfit to execute the duties of the office, the role of the committee would end with the issuing of that statement. Acting on that information—or ignoring or disparaging it—would be up to the people and their elected officials.

Of course, the calculations of the Congressional Budget Office can be politicized and ignored—and they recently have been. Almost every Republican legislator voted for health-care bills this year that would have increased the number of uninsured Americans by 20-some million, and they passed a tax bill that will add $1.4 trillion to the federal deficit. A majority of Americans did not support the bill—in part because a nonpartisan source of information like the CBO exists to conduct such analyses.

That math and polling can be ignored or disputed, or the CBO can be attacked as a secretly subversive entity, but at least some attempt at a transparent analysis is made. The same cannot be said of the president’s cognitive processes. We are left only with the shouts of experts from the sidelines, demeaning the profession and the presidency.

 

Trump reportedly loves McDonald’s because he has a ‘longtime fear’ of being poisoned (MCD)

January 3, 2018

by Kate Taylor

The Chron

President Trump’s McDonald’s obsession is linked to his “longtime fear of being poisoned,” reports Michael Wolff in his book on the Trump White House.

Trump’s love for fast food is well-documented, with his go-to order being two Big Macs, two Filet-o-Fish sandwiches, and a large chocolate shake.

The president also reportedly believes that McDonald’s is cleaner than many other restaurants.

A detail about President Donald Trump’s McDonald’s obsession has been revealed.

Trump’s love for fast food is tied to fear of being poisoned, according to an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s ‘Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House’ published in New York Magazine

Trump “had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s — nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade,” Wolff reports.

Trump’s adoration for fast food, especially McDonald’s, is well known. The president’s go-to McDonald’s order was two Big Macs, two Filet-o-Fish sandwiches, and a large chocolate shake, according to former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and top Trump campaign aide David Bossie.

“Like an amazing professional athlete who has a routine that they do all the time when they’re ready for a big game,” Trump “would consistently do the same things,” Lewandowski told Business Insider’s Allan Smith.

Trump has previously applauded fast-food chains for their cleanliness.

“One bad hamburger, you can destroy McDonald’s. One bad hamburger and you take Wendy’s and all these other places and they’re out of business,” Trump said at a 2016 town hall. “I like cleanliness, and I think you’re better off going there than maybe someplace that you have no idea where the food is coming from.”

 

 

Donald and Melania Trump’s bizarre nightly routine – pair have ‘separate bedrooms and he LOCKS his door to eat cheeseburgers in bed‘

Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House reveals juicy details about the POTUS and his wife’s nightly routine

Juicy details about Donald and wife Melania Trump’s nightly routine have emerged in an explosive book about the President of the United States.

January 4, 2018

Mirror.co.uk,

Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, already dubbed as “a work of fiction” by Trump, details the billionaire’s chaotic rise to power and alleges he never wanted to win the US election.

Author Wolff delves into Trump’s dizzying political victory, his allies and enemies as well as his marriage to third wife Melania.

The explosive book hints that Donald and former model Melania, 47, have separate bedrooms – the first first couple to do so since John and Jackie Kennedy.

Insinuating a bizarre night time ritual, Wolff said Trump demanded a key to his bedroom, locking his wife and the secret service out so he could binge on cheeseburgers while watching not one but THREE televisions.

Wolff also alleges Trump likes to head beneath the duvet at 6.30pm.

It is believed the President prefers McDonalds and other fast food joints because he lives in fear of being poisoned. Because fast food is already prepared he suspects it is a safer food source than other choices.

“The book is clearly going to be sold in the bargain fiction section,” fumed the first lady’s Communications Director Stephanie Grisham.

“Mrs. Trump supported her husband’s decision to run for president and in fact, encouraged him to do so,’ Grisham said in a statement put out Wednesday. She was confident he would win and was very happy when he did.”

Wolff claims that no one – not Trump nor anyone involved in his campaign – believed he would win the election.

Wolff writes: “As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. His ultimate goal, after all, had never been to win. “I can be the most famous man in the world,” he had told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race…

“…Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump , who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn’t become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.”

However, as the votes came in on the night of November 8, 2016, and the election seemed to be turning in Trump’s favour, disbelief turned into horror.

Wolff writes: “Shortly after 8pm on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears—and not of joy.”

 

A New Study Shows How American Polarization Is Driven by a Team Sport Mentality, Not by Disagreement on Issues

April 3 2018

by Zaid Jilani

The Intercept

In 2004, then-Senator Barack Obama wowed the country with an address at the Democratic National Convention designed to unite the country and tear down partisan divides.

“Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes,” he said. “Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.”

He talked about how in so-called blue states they “worship an awesome God” and about how people have gay friends in red states. “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” he said to thunderous applause.

The years since then have softened the national debate over marriage equality, but the question of how we fall into color-coded political patterns has gotten even more resonant. While support for same-sex marriage has increased, for instance, support for “interpolitical marriage” — specifically, Gallup asked adults about the prospect of their son or daughter marrying someone of a different political background — has actually gone down.

But what if the source of this polarization has little do with where people actually fall on the issues, or what people actually believe in? What if people are simply polarized by political labels like “liberal” and “conservative” and what they imagine their opponents to be like more than they are by disagreements over issues like taxes, abortion, and immigration?

That news wouldn’t surprise anybody who’s spent time battling it out in a news outlet’s comment section, and it’s the firm conclusion of new research by Lilliana Mason, a professor at the University of Maryland.

Her paper, “Ideologues Without Issues: the Polarizing Consequences of Ideological Identities,” published in late March by Public Opinion Quarterly, uses 2016 data from Survey Sampling International and American National Election Studies to study how and why Americans are politically polarized.

She used measures that identify both where people stand on issues and how they identify their political clan. For issues, she took six major ones from the survey: “immigration, the Affordable Care Act, abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control, and the relative importance of reducing the deficit or unemployment.” Additionally, she used their measurements of social identity on a range from liberal to conservative.

She then sought to correlate these answers with questions where respondents answered whether they would prefer to live next door to, marry, be friends with, or spend social time with someone who differs from them politically.

She found that the political identity people adopt was far more predictive of their preferences for social interaction.

For instance, “moving from the least identified to the most identified with an ideological label increases preference for marrying inside the ideological group by 30 percentage points.” In other words, if you are a committed liberal, you’re much more likely to want to live next to other committed liberals. But if you just disagree strongly with them about a specific issue like abortion, not so much.

She writes, “The effect of issue-based ideology is less than half the size of identity-based ideology in each element of social distance. … These are sizable and significant effects, robust to controls for issue-based ideology, and they demonstrate that Americans are dividing themselves socially on the basis of whether they call themselves liberal or conservative, independent of their actual policy differences.”

“There’s been a debate within political science for a long time about whether or not the American public is polarized,” Mason said in an interview with The Intercept. “I’m sort of making this argument that as you have multiple social identities that line up together, people hate their out groups more regardless of their policy positions.”

She noted, for instance, that Americans who identify most strongly as conservative, whether they hold more left-leaning or right-leaning positions on major issues, dislike liberals more than people who more weakly identify as conservatives but may hold very right-leaning issue positions.

The loose connection some voters have with policy preferences has become apparent in recent years. Donald Trump managed to flip a party from support of free trade to opposition to it by merely taking the opposite side of the issue. Democrats, meanwhile, mocked Mitt Romney in 2012 for calling Russia the greatest geopolitical adversary of the United States, but now have flipped and see Russia as exactly that. Regarding health care, the structure of the Affordable Care Act was initially devised by the conservative Heritage Foundation and implemented in Massachusetts as “Romneycare.” Once it became Obamacare, the Republican team leaders deemed it bad, and thus it became bad.

Mason believes the implications of such shallow divisions between people could make the work of democracy harder. If your goal in politics is not based around policy but just defeating your perceived enemies, what exactly are you working toward? (Is it any surprise there is an entire genre of campus activism dedicated to simply upsetting your perceived political opponents?)

“The fact that even this thing’s that supposed to be about reason and thoughtfulness and what we want the government to do, the fact that even that is largely identity-powered, that’s a problem for debate and compromise and the basic functioning of democratic government. Because even if our policy attitudes are not actually about what we want the government to do but instead about who wins, then nobody cares what actually happens in the government,” Mason said. “We just care about who’s winning in a given day. And that’s a really dangerous thing for trying to run a democratic government.”

She suggested a solution: Spend some time talking to your neighbors, friends, and loved ones about things besides politics.

“The problem is not a policy-based problem, because on average we’re relatively moderate in these policy attitudes. Talking to each other about political stuff is sort of the worst solution ever, because all that’s going to do is activate our political identities, which cause us to dislike each other. The better thing to do is if your next door neighbor is of a different political orientation than you, to talk about their dog, or what’s going on in their family,” Mason said. “In general, the best way to get through this polarization is to start thinking of each other as human beings.”

 

 

Laura Ingraham is a victim of a totalitarian campaign from the left, apparently

The American right have revealed a vision of free speech that is very expansive for conservatives, but far less accommodating for those who disagree with them

April 2, 2018

by Jason Wilson

The Guardian

In the past week, the American right has rallied around a number of their own who have spoken unwisely. In doing so, they have revealed a vision of free speech that is very expansive for conservatives, but far less accommodating for those who disagree with them.

The biggest fight has been centered on Laura Ingraham, Fox News star, talk radio host, bestselling author and founder of conservative website, Lifezette.

Last Wednesday, Ingraham mocked Parkland survivor and prominent anti-gun activist, David Hogg, for his grades and his failure to gain admission to several colleges. Hogg responded by encouraging his hundreds of thousands of followers to contact Ingraham’s advertisers. This pressure led to quick results: within a day Ingraham had apologized “in the spirit of Holy Week”, and on Friday night announced she would be taking a week away from her show.

Fellow conservatives have spent the intervening days arguing that Ingraham is the victim of a more or less totalitarian campaign by the left.

Bill O’Reilly, who lost his own Fox show after a similar advertising campaign, wrote on Monday that the campaign was being “directed by powerful, shadowy radical groups who want Laura Ingraham off the air. Same thing happened to me.”

Jeffrey Lord, a widely published conservative pundit who, like Ingraham, worked in the Reagan administration, claimed that it had fulfilled an earlier prophecy he had made. “This is the strategy of the Left,” he wrote for Newsbusters last October. “Since they can’t make the arguments for their side, the answer is to take out the stars of conservative media.”

On Sunday he assimilated the fight to a broader culture war, writing that “this is a mammoth battle – some might even call it a war”, he added, – between the elites … and the rest of us.”

As part of Breitbart’s exhaustive coverage of the tiff, space was given to their media writer, John Nolte, to opine that the pursuit of Ingraham was “un-American McCarthyism, a partisan witch-hunt in which the establishment media is an active participant and cheerleader”. Like many on the right, he is attracted to the idea that Hogg himself is being manipulated by shadowy, offstage figures, and “has been so poisoned that he cannot see how obscene his own behavior is”.

Elsewhere, various outlets folded Ingraham’s woes into ongoing efforts to demonize Hogg. Gateway Pundit tried to push some buttons by bringing up Hogg’s atheism. In a later article, their writer, Cristina Laila, called him a “crazed liberal” and “Power Hogg”.

Here, it’s worth pointing out that conservative discussion of Ingraham’s woes has been completely detached from its context – a relentless campaign of character assassination by the right against Parkland survivors. Even rightwing writers who concede the meanness of Ingraham’s behaviour – like Joey Wulfsohn in the Federalist – end up concluding that Hogg’s response to conservative attacks is somehow worse.

Rightwing commentators also ignore the fact that conservatives use similar tactics when it suits them. Tom Nicholls set out this little piece of absurdity quite succinctly in USA Today. “It’s especially comical to see conservatives complaining about boycotts,” he wrote, “especially after viewers of Ingraham’s colleague Sean Hannity started smashing Keurig coffee pod machines and the Republican state government of Georgia decided to punish Delta Air Lines for defying the National Rifle Association.”

Indeed, one of the immediate responses in recent days has been an attempt to organize a counter-boycott of advertisers abandoning Ingraham.

Implicit in the conservative reaction to this issue seems to be the belief that the free speech rights of their stars include not just the freedom to speak as they wish, but access to prominent, advertiser-supported platforms.

Which brings us to a second bunfight, which began with the news last that the National Review writer Kevin Williamson had been hired by liberal flagship the Atlantic.

Many on the left were quick to point to Williamson’s previously stated views on race and abortion, including his repeated call for women who had abortions to be hanged. In summarizing them, Sarah Jones at the New Republic called Williamson an “extremist” and “gratuitously cruel”.

Williamson’s confreres on the right, recognizing the importance of one of their own being promoted to a mainstream publication, leapt to his defense.

At RedState, Carl Arbogast asked: “Why are liberals so afraid of ideas that are outside of their comfort zone?” At National Review, Williamson’s former colleague described the replaying of Williamson’s stated views as a “sliming”, and castigated progressives for “attempting to define Kevin entirely through a few paragraphs, a sentence here or there, or an ill-considered tweet or two”. And predictably, viral attack site Twitchy took the fight straight to Jones and the New Republic.

At the Daily Caller, Angers Hagstrom tied the Williamson fracas to the broader conservative narrative on free speech, saying the case illustrated why “conservatives are feeling less and less welcome in public discourse on the internet, on campuses, and on TV”.

Again, it seems that the demand is not only that conservatives are given such platforms, but that they are made to “feel welcome”. And apparently all that is needed for them to feel unwelcome is for them to be criticized, or for others to quote their own publicly stated beliefs.

Meanwhile, on TV stations owned by conservative-friendly Sinclair broadcasting, news anchors last Friday were forced to read out a prepared script that hit Trumpist talking points about “fake news”.

A video showing the script read out side by side on affiliates went viral over the weekend. The president responded with a tweet on Monday criticising “Fake News Networks”, and saying that Sinclair was “far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke”. Many on Twitter reminded their followers that the Trump campaign had struck a deal with the network for access.

By Monday morning, some of the usual suspects were defending Sinclair’s bizarre move, which has apparently caused anguish among its un-unionised, and precarious employees. Ben Shapiro called the message “utterly anodyne”, and characteristically turned the issue back on the left, saying that “leftist media’s universal rush to condemn Sinclair for the message is actually more lockstep political than Sinclair’s message, which is lockstep but not political”.

The logic of these positions seems to be that while the right is free to make unrestrained use of the platforms it controls, any criticism of this by progressives is an unacceptable constraint on free speech. Go figure.

 

 

Underwater melting of Antarctic ice far greater than thought, study finds

The base of the ice around the South Pole shrank by 1,463 square kilometres between 2010 and 2016

April 2, 2018

by Jonathan Watts

The Guardian

Hidden underwater melt-off in the Antarctic is doubling every 20 years and could soon overtake Greenland to become the biggest source of sea-level rise, according to the first complete underwater map of the world’s largest body of ice.

Warming waters have caused the base of ice near the ocean floor around the South Pole to shrink by 1,463 square kilometres – an area the size of Greater London – between 2010 and 2016, according to the new study published in Nature Geoscience.

The research by the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds suggests climate change is affecting the Antarctic more than previously believed and is likely to prompt global projections of sea-level rise to be revised upward.

Until recently, the Antarctic was seen as relatively stable. Viewed from above, the extent of land and sea ice in the far south has not changed as dramatically as in the far north.

But the new study found even a small increase in temperature has been enough to cause a loss of five metres every year from the bottom edge of the ice sheet, some of which is more than 2km underwater.

“What’s happening is that Antarctica is being melted away at its base. We can’t see it, because it’s happening below the sea surface,” said Professor Andrew Shepherd, one of the authors of the paper. “The changes mean that very soon the sea-level contribution from Antarctica could outstrip that from Greenland.”

The study measures the Antarctic’s “grounding line” – the bottommost edge of the ice sheet across 16,000km of coastline. This is done by using elevation data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 and applying Archimedes’s principle of buoyancy, which relates the thickness of floating ice to the height of its surface.

The greatest declines were seen in west Antarctica. At eight of the ice sheet’s 65 biggest glaciers, the speed of retreat was more than five times the rate of deglaciation since the last ice age. Even in east Antarctica, where some scientists – and many climate deniers – had previously believed ice might be increasing based on surface area, glaciers were at best stable and at worst in retreat when underwater ice was taken into account.

“It should give people more cause for concern,” said Shepherd. “Now that we have mapped the whole edge of the ice sheet, it rules out any chance that parts of Antarctica are advancing. We see retreat in more places and stasis elsewhere. The net effect is that the ice sheet overall is retreating. People can’t say ‘you’ve left a stone unturned’. We’ve looked everywhere now.”

The results could prompt an upward revision of sea-level rise projections. 10 years ago, the main driver was Greenland. More recently, the Antarctic’s estimated contribution has been raised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But its forecasts were based on measurements from the two main west Antarctic glaciers – Thwaites and Pine Island – a sample that provides an overly narrow and conservative view of what is happening when compared with the new research.

The study’s lead author, Hannes Konrad, said there was now clear evidence that the underwater glacial retreat is happening across the ice sheet.

“This retreat has had a huge impact on inland glaciers,” he said, “because releasing them from the sea bed removes friction, causing them to speed up and contribute to global sea level rise.”

 

Secrecy News

From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Volume 2018, Issue No. 22

April 3, 2018

DNI SAYS BUILD TRUST IN INTELLIGENCE THROUGH TRANSPARENCY

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats recently revised a 2012 Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) on “Civil Liberties and Privacy” to address transparency policy, and reissued it as “Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Transparency.”

The revised directive ICD 107 states that “the DNI is committed to protecting civil liberties and privacy and promoting greater public transparency, consistent with United States values and founding principles as a democratic society.”

ICD 107 now mandates “external engagements” with the public; it calls for use of “new technologies to make intelligence information. . . accessible to the public. . . with sufficient clarity and context so that it is readily understandable”; and it directs that IC agencies shall describe to the public “why certain information can and cannot be released.”

In a March 22 memorandum to agencies announcing the revised directive, DNI Coats said that “With the reissuance of ICD 107, we have firmly established transparency as a foundational element of securing public trust in our endeavors, alongside the protection of civil liberties and privacy.”

As indicators of recent progress in transparency, the DNI cited the relaunch of the Intelligence.gov website that provides information about IC agencies; a new historical declassification program that will review records concerning the 1968 Tet Offensive; and new details regarding oversight and use of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

But while these are all commendable steps, they do not seem well calculated to achieve the goal of “securing public trust.”

Building trust requires more than public relations or even declassification of historical documents. Remarkably, dozens of breakthroughs in transparency during the Obama Administration did little to generate trust and were largely ignored and unappreciated.

Trust building depends on a willingness to be held accountable, and on responsiveness (not just unilateral gestures) to overseers and the public.

Transparency for trust-building should therefore stress what lawyers call “admissions against interest,” or disclosures that could risk placing the agency in an unfavorable light, at least initially, but that would build credibility over time. Such disclosures might include regular release of compliance reports regarding suspected deviations from law or policy, investigative reports or summaries from intelligence agency Inspectors General, and the like.

Public trust could also be strengthened positively by responsively adding value to public discourse. The intelligence community could help foster a constructive relationship with the public by routine publication of open source intelligence products, and by setting up an orderly process for responding to substantial public interest in topics of current intelligence importance or controversy (beyond Section 702).

A panel discussion on “Building and Sustaining Democratic Legitimacy” in intelligence was held last week as part of a symposium organized by the Intelligence Studies Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

USA V. TERRY ALBURY: THE SECOND TRUMP-ERA LEAK CASE

FBI agent Terry J. Albury was charged last week with two violations of the Espionage Act statutes for disclosing classified information to a reporter for the Intercept. The charges, including unauthorized disclosure and unauthorized retention of national defense information, were formally presented by the Justice Department in a March 27 “Information.”

See also “Minneapolis FBI agent charged with leaking classified information to reporter” by Mukhtar M. Ibrahim, MPR News, March 28.

The Albury case is the second criminal prosecution in the Trump Administration arising from a leak of classified information to the news media. The first was the pending case of Reality Winner.

DECLINING USE OF PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION, & MORE FROM CRS

Public transportation systems across the United States are losing riders. Excluding gains in New York City, national ridership decreased by 7% over the past decade. A new report from the Congressional Research Service examines the causes and consequences of this decline. See Trends in Public Transportation Ridership: Implications for Federal Policy, March 26, 2018.

Other new and updated CRS reports issued last week include the following.

U.S.-Mexico Economic Relations: Trends, Issues, and Implications, updated March 27, 2018

Guatemala: Political and Socioeconomic Conditions and U.S. Relations, updated March 27, 2018

House Committee Markups: Manual of Procedures and Procedural Strategies, updated March 27, 2018

Whose Line is it Anyway: Could Congress Give the President a Line-Item Veto?, CRS Legal Sidebar, March 27, 2018

 

Netanyahu scraps deal on residency for African migrants

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has canceled a deal that could have seen thousands of African migrants relocated to Europe and Canada. Under the agreement, thousands more migrants would stay in Israel.

April 3, 2018

DW

Netanyahu said on Tuesday that he had met with Israeli residents in Tel Aviv and decided to cancel the agreement.

The Israeli prime minister, who suspended the deal on Monday, spoke to disgruntled Israelis living in and near “Little Africa” – the part of Tel Aviv that has attracted the largest migrant community in Israel.

The decision followed complaints from nationalist members of Netanyahu’s government, who had said the deal was “bad for Israel.”

“I have listened carefully to the many comments on the agreement. As a result, and after I again weighed the advantages and disadvantages, I decided to cancel the deal,” a statement from the prime minister’s office quoted Netanyahu as saying at the session.

The fate of some 37,000 Africans in Israel has presented a moral dilemma for Israel, a state that was founded to provide a haven for Jews after the Second World War. Israel’s right-wing government has found itself under pressure from the right to expel the migrants.

Short-lived agreement

The deal struck with United Nations’ refugee agency UNHCR would have seen about half of the migrants — mostly from Eritrea and Sudan — be relocated to countries in the West. The rest would have stayed in Israel, to be granted residency. Among the countries mentioned as possible locations by Israel were Germany, Italy and Canada.

Officials in both Germany and Italy said they had been taken by surprise by Netanyahu’s announcement. Similarly, UNHCR spokesman William Spindler told DW TV that his organization had not received advanced notification from Israel.

“No, we have just learned about this decision a few minutes ago. But we are still hopeful that a solution will be found for these asylum seekers, who are in a very precarious situation in Israel,” Spindler told DW. “It’s estimated that there’s about 39,000 of them, most of them from Eritrea and Sudan, and they are not able to return to these countries, because they fear persecution.”

Netanyahu put the deal on hold shortly after its agreement had been announced on Monday.

Naftali Bennett, who is the leader of the nationalist Jewish Home party, tweeted shortly before Netanyahu’s statement to say that the agreement as it stood was “bad for Israel.”

“Its approval would cause generations of crying and determine a precedent in Israel granting residency for illegal infiltrators,” Bennetatnt said.

 

 

UK military research boss says can’t prove nerve agent was made in Russia: Sky News

April 3, 2018

Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) – The head of Britain’s military research center said on Tuesday it was unable to prove the military-grade nerve agent that poisoned a Russian double-agent last month had been produced in Russia.

“We were able to identify it as Novichok, to identify that it was military-grade nerve agent,” Gary Aitkenhead, chief executive of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down in England, told Sky News.

“We have not identified the precise source, but we have provided the scientific info to government who have then used a number of other sources to piece together the conclusions you have come to.”

Moscow has denied being behind the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the southern English city of Salisbury on March 4.

Reporting by Andy Bruce; editing by Stephen Addison

 

Martin Luther King: Assassination and Background

At 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, national civil rights advocate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been standing on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, TN, was shot in the neck and he had a gaping wound which covered a large portion of his jaw and neck.

King, who had spent thirteen years of his life dedicating himself to nonviolent protest had been felled by a sniper’s bullet.

Predictable immediate activist violence and the controversy followed.

Outraged at the murder, many blacks rioted across the country. The FBI duly investigated the crime, but it was widely believed that in one sense their agency and its director, J. Edgar Hoover were probably culpable.

And in due time a suspected was arrested in England and extradited to the United States, tried and, on his plea bargain before the court, was sentence to life in prison and no death penalty , but many people, including some of Martin Luther King Jr.’s own family, believed that the convicted man was innocent.

Let us examine this issue in some detail

Striking Sanitation Workers in Memphis

On February 12, thirteen hundred African-American sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. After a long history of grievances, the strike started as response to a January 31 incident in which 22 black sanitation workers were sent home without pay during bad weather while all the white workers remained on the job.

When the City of Memphis subsequently refused to negotiate with the 1,300 striking workers, King and other civil rights leaders were asked to visit Memphis in support.

On Monday, March 18, King arrived with his staff in Memphis, where he spoke to over 15,000 who had gathered at the Mason Temple. Ten days later, King arrived in Memphis to lead a march in support of the striking workers. Unfortunately, as King led the crowd, some of the protestors engaged in violence, in one case smashing the windows of a storefront. The violence spread and soon countless others broke moore windows and then commenced to loot stores.

When police moved in to disperse the crowd, some of the marchers threw stones at the police. The police responded with tear gas and nightsticks.

At least one of the marchers was shot and killed.

King was extremely distressed at the violence that had erupted in his own march and became determined not to let violence prevail. He scheduled another march in Memphis for April 8.

On April 3, King arrived in Memphis a little later than planned because there had been a bomb threat to his flight prior to takeoff. That evening, King delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech to a relatively small crowd that had braved the bad weather to hear King speak.

King’s thoughts were obviously on his mortality, for he discussed the plane threat as well as the time he had been stabbed. He concluded the speech with…

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life – longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the Promised Land. And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

After the speech, King went back to the Lorraine Motel to rest.

It is interesting here to note that when he first arrived in Memphis, Dr. King and his staff were staying at an upscale Memphis hotel until one of his staff suggested that perhaps it might look more appropriate if Dr. King moved to a less expensive hotel. The Lorraine Motel, owned by a black family, was suggested. The fact that the motel was situated directly below the apartment house where the purported shooter had taken a unit and that Dr. King’s room was on the side facing the shooter’s window is of some passing interest.

After the shooting, the alleged perpetrator vanished from the area but, according to the FBI, not before dropping the murder weapon, with his fingerprints, and a small portable radio with his prison ID engraved on it!

To a competent criminologist, it is highly improbable that James Earl Ray, the alleged perpetrator, a high-school dropout, Army reject and a man whose criminal record consisted of many petty thefts, could be responsible for the charges and the press coverage aimed at him subsequent to his arrest.

Ray was said to have broken out of a Missouri prison, travelled to California, bought a new car, took expensive dancing lessons, had cosmetic plastic surgery to modify his jutting ears and later drove in another car to Canada, posed as a Canadian police officer to obtain a false passport and went to hide in Europe.

Ray was not capable of such sophisticated actions unless he was a patsy, set up by higher and more competent authority.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson claimed that the entire business was a high-level plot to remove someone in power felt was dangerous to them. “I have always believed.” Jackson wrote, ” that the government was part of a conspiracy, either directly or indirectly, to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,”

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young believed the government was responsible for King’s death, as well. “I’ve always thought the FBI might be involved in some way,” he said. “You have to remember this was a time when the politics of assassination was acceptable in this country. It was during the period just before Allende’s murder. I think it’s naïve to assume these institutions were not capable of doing the same thing at home or to say each of these deaths (King and the two Kennedys) was an isolated incident by ‘a single assassin.’ It was government policy.”

Even Dr. King’s family believed that King was killed as the result of a conspiracy involving government officials. Dexter King met with the man convicted of killing his father and later said he believed Ray was not the shooter.

There are two issues here that need to be examined.

Firstly, did James Earl Ray kill Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, and secondly, was the assassination the culmination of a conspiracy to silence the leader of America’s non-violent civil rights and anti-war movement?

In comparison to the earlier assassination of President Kennedy, the questions surrounding the murder of Dr. King are much more clear cut. Witnesses (for the most part) do not argue about the number of shots fired, or from their area of origin.

On the other hand, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Johnson Administration were clearly on the record in opposing King’s resistance to the Vietnam War and J. Edgar Hoover wanted King disgraced or rendered impotent by any means necessary.

It should be noted that Director Hoover had personal issues involved with the King matter. His family had, as is said, passed the color line. His family was of mixed race. And Hoover was a practicing homosexual and hated the heterosexual, and active, Dr. King.

As history has shown, with J. Edgar Hoover, the end always justified the means.

James Earl Ray was born March 10, 1928, Alton, Ill., U.S. and died April 23, 1998, Nashville, Tenn.

Ray was a petty criminal who had been sentenced to prison several times; he escaped from the Missouri state prison in 1967. In Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, he shot King from the window of a rooming house as King emerged from his motel room across the street. Ray fled to Toronto, London, Lisbon, and back to London,.

A little more than two months after King’s death, on June 8, 1968, Ray was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the United Kingdom on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd, a Montreal police officer.

In Memphis he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Months later, he recanted his confession, without effect.

Later, his unsuccessful pleas to have his case reopened were supported by some civil rights leaders, notably the King family. . Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with King’s murder, confessing to the assassination on March 10, 1969, (though he recanted this confession three days later) and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. On the advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray took a guilty plea to avoid a trial conviction and therefore the possibility of receiving the death penalty

Ray’s first taste of prison life came after joining the U.S. Army. Ray, who liked to drink, was arrested by the MPs on a drunk and disorderly charge and sentenced to 90 days hard labor in the stockade. When he got out of the service, he began drifting and spent a few nights in jail for vagrancy.

His first serious arrest came in 1949 and he served eight months in a California jail for burglary.

In 1952, he did two years for an armed robbery of a taxi driver in Illinois.

In 1955, Ray broke his first federal law, stealing and forging postal money orders. He was caught and sent to Leavenworth, Kansas.

By 1956, society in general had already given up on James Earl Ray. A parole officer wrote about him: “He apparently lacks foresight, or is afraid of the future, as he absolutely refuses to look forward. He claims that he can do his time better if he doesn’t think. (He) apparently is enjoying his present situation.”

On October 10, 1959, James Earl Ray robbed a Kroger grocery store using a gun and was arrested twenty minutes later. He was subsequently sentenced as a habitual offender and given 20 years in the Missouri State Prison at Jefferson City.

On April 23, 1967 James Earl Ray escaped from Missouri State Prison.

1. Edgar Hoover hated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

King first came under scrutiny in 1961 when Hoover asked a subordinate for the department’s file on the civil rights leader. In a memo to supervisor, Special Agent G.H. Scatterday Hoover mentions King briefly: “King thanked Socialist Workers Party for support of bus boycott.” Scatterday’s report goes on to say King “was not investigated by the FBI” to which J. Edgar Hoover is reported to have asked “why not?”

When Hoover asked why not, his subordinates got the point and a file was opened on King.

An unclassified memorandum sent up the chain of command and now available in the FBI’s Freedom of Information Act reading room shows someone has highlighted King’s name on Scatterday’s memo and written “Do we have more details?”

Under the direction of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the FBI stepped up its observation of King in 1962 and 1963. Kennedy at one time asked the FBI to develop a plan for covert bugging and electronic surveillance, but later backed down and told the FBI to stop its activities toward King.

At the time, Kennedy was concerned about King’s ties to the communists and socialists who were actively trying to recruit the American under classes. King himself reportedly attended a Communist Party education program and gave the closing address at one seminar in the 1950s

Without Kennedy’s knowledge, the FBI began an illegal counterintelligence program regarding King and the SCLC. “The program was intended to discredit and neutralize the civil rights leader,” the FBI post-assassination report said. Hoover was greatly afraid of communists and was convinced that they were attempting to “infiltrate” black society to woo them to the communist side.

Having watched Castro – who exhibited no communist leanings while he led his revolution – Hoover was determined not be fooled again when his advisors reported that communist attempts to win support among blacks were to be met with failure

FBI agents increased their activities regarding King and the SCLC.

Hoover himself never wavered in his belief that King was a communist, but he refused to allow his agency to act solely on his belief. At first, his subordinates told him that communists did not control the civil rights movement and Hoover said they were wrong. The aides quickly reversed course and said that Hoover was right; King was a communist.

But Hoover dismissed the claim because no one had provided proof. The only alternative, the deputy directors felt, was to increase surveillance of King to find the evidence Hoover believed to be there.

In 1963, Hoover requested, for a second time, permission to electronically invade King’s residence and offices. This time, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy agreed, with the caveat that the bugs would be removed by the end of the year if no concrete evidence of communist infiltration was found.

With the assassination of his brother, Bobby forgot all about the bugs and Hoover declined to remind Kennedy, whom Hoover strongly disliked. The bugs remained in place and King was kept under official FBI under observation.

A month before John Kennedy’s murder, the report based on this increased surveillance was presented to J. Edgar Hoover.

“The attached analysis of Communism and the Negro Movement is highly explosive,” wrote Assistant to the Director A.H. Belmont. “It can be regarded as a personal attack on Martin Luther King. There is no doubt it will have a heavy impact on the Attorney General and anyone else to whom we disseminate it. It is labeled TOP SECRET.”

On his personal copy of the memorandum, Hoover wrote: “I am glad that at last you recognize that there exists such influence.”

Personal animosity between Hoover and King erupted 1962. Interestingly, it was King who threw the first punch by publicly questioning the FBI’s handling of a racial incident in Albany, Georgia. Hoover promptly responded by testifying before a Congressional committee on his belief that communists had infiltrated and were directing the civil rights movement.

King responded to this allegation by accusing Hoover of fanning the flames of racism and placating right-wing reactionaries.

Later, Hoover told a group of reporters that King was “the most notorious liar in the country.” King and Hoover reached a fragile truce in late 1964 after they met face-to-face in an attempt to iron out differences.

About this meeting, Hoover told sibprdinates “he had taken the ball away from King at the beginning.”

For his part, King apologized for remarks he had made and thanked Hoover for the work the FBI was doing to investigate civil rights violations. This cease-fire lasted just two weeks. On December 14, 1964, the Southern Christian Educational Fund repeated King’s criticisms of Hoover and called upon supporters to write President Johnson to have the president fire Hoover.

These attacks continued over the years, including one episode where Hoover met with an Atlanta official in Washington for President Johnson’s inauguration. Hoover leaked unflattering details of King’s personal life obtained through wiretaps to this official, who returned to Atlanta and passed them on to the father, Dr. Martin Luther King Sr., who then confronted his son with the innuendo.

At 6 p.m., King and Abernathy emerged from their second-story room onto the balcony of the Lorraine. King initiated a conversation with his driver, Solomon Jones, about the weather and Jones advised King to grab a coat, as the weather was turning chilly. King acknowledged Jones’ comment and started to turn toward his room. At that instant, Jones later told authorities that he heard a sound he assumed to be a firecracker and noticed King falling to the floor of the balcony. Jones called for help and King’s aides, who were all nearby, rushed to the stricken civil rights leader.

The bullet struck King near his jaw, fracturing his lower mandible, severing the jugular vein, vertebral and subclavian arteries and shattering several vertebrae in his neck and back. There was nothing that could be done and Dr. Martin Luther King was pronounced dead at St. Joseph Hospital at 7:05 p.m.

“Death was the result of a gunshot wound to the chin and neck with a fatal transection of the lower cervical and upper thoracic spinal cord and other structures in the neck,” wrote Dr. J.T. Francisco, the county medical examiner, in his official autopsy report. “The direction of the wound was front to back, above downward (from right to left).”

Police security around Dr. King had been tight for the two days he was in Memphis in April. He had been under constant surveillance by at least two plainclothes officers who did not travel with King’s party; instead, they maintained a surreptitious watch over King’s activities. During most of this surveillance, two of the four officers who held the 24-hour vigil around King’s group were black: Detective Edward E. Redditt and Patrolman Willie B. Richmond.

At the time of the shooting, Redditt had been removed from duty because an anonymous caller to the Memphis Police Department had made a threat against Redditt and his family because of the detective’s perceived actions as part of the “establishment.”

At 4 p.m. April 4, Redditt left the scene of the surveillance – Memphis Fire Station No. 2, which provided a secure and covert place from which to observe King’s party. When the shots were fired, Richmond was still on duty at Fire Station No. 2, and reported hearing the shots. Richmond observed King fall to the floor of the balcony, and alerted both a tactical police unit nearby and Memphis Police headquarters.

He was ordered to remain at the fire station while other officers responded to the Lorraine Motel. Shortly afterward, Richmond was ordered to police headquarters to make a detailed report of his observations.

Patrolman Morris, alerted by King’s staff that the shot had come from the rear of a boarding house across the street from the hotel, ran around the block to the front of the motel, where he met another officer from the tactical squad unit, whose identity today remains in dispute. A search by two other officers found fresh footprints in the mud in an alley between the building from which the shot was believed to have originated and another building. One officer remained at that scene until crime scene technicians were able to make casts of the footprints. A second officer, Patrolman Dollahite, ran around the front of the building from which the assassin fired the bullet and ended up on Main Street in front of a rundown boarding house. Continuing down the block, Dollahite came upon a green blanket lying in front of Canipe’s Amusement Company, next door to the flophouse. The blanket covered a blue suitcase and a box containing a high-powered rifle equipped with a scope. For some reason, Dollahite, who observed Tac 10 commander Gormley approaching, ran past the blanket and took up a guard position at the end of the block. Gormley, coming toward Dollahite, also spied the blanket and gun and was told by the owner of Canipe’s Amusement Company that a white man had run past and dropped the bundle. Canipe told Gormley that the man fled the scene in a late model white Mustang. Gormley communicated this information to Memphis Police headquarters.

The FBI became involved after Director J. Edgar Hoover and U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark ordered the department to investigate the possibility of a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made it a federal crime to use race as a motive to murder or conspire to murder.

Of course, the Memphis police continued to investigate because of the murder itself that had been committed in its jurisdiction. Special Agent Robert G. Jensen, the agent in charge of the FBI’s Memphis field office took charge of the federal probe.

The early investigation centered on Bessie Brewer’s Rooming House where the shots originated. Brewer told authorities that a ‘John Willard’ had registered with her at sometime between 3:30 and 4 p.m. on April 4, and was assigned to room 5B, which overlooked the Lorraine Motel.

Willard had originally been assigned to room 8, which did not provide such a view, but asked for a change.

Willard was described as a well-dressed white man, about 5 feet 11 inches tall, about 35 year’s old weighing around 180 pounds. Charles A. Stephens, a resident of the rooming house, told investigators that he heard a gunshot coming from the bathroom at the rear of the building (overlooking the Lorraine Motel) and, running to his door after hearing the shot, he saw a man fitting Willard’s description fleeing toward the front of the building and down the stairs.

Another resident, William Anchutz, reported hearing the shot and seeing a man fitting Willard’s description running away. Anchutz said to the man “I thought I heard a shot,” to which the man replied, “Yeah, it was a shot.”

Next to the rooming house, two patrons in the Canipe Amusements Company heard a “thud” and saw a man, about 6 feet tall, around 30 years old and neatly dressed, running past the entry to the store. It appeared the man had dropped a package in the doorway of the store as he fled. Moments later, they saw a white Mustang drive away with the man inside. The package was a blanket containing a Remington Gamester Model 760 .30-06 caliber rifle with a scope, a radio, some clothes in a blue zippered bag, a pair of binoculars, a couple of beer cans and an ad for the York Arms Company with an accompanying receipt.

Shortly after, the rifle and scope were traced to a Birmingham, Alabama sporting goods store, the Aeromarine Supply Company.

Employees there told agents that a Harvey Lowmeyer purchased the items on March 30, 1968.

The salesman who sold the rifle to Lowmeyer described him as a neat, 30-something white male about 6 feet tall and 165 pounds.

The binoculars were traced to the York Arms Company in Memphis, and had been purchased two hours before King had been shot.

The beer cans were purchased in Mississippi.

Five days after King was shot, police found a Memphis hotel reservation on April 3 for Eric Starvo Galt, who listed a Birmingham, Alabama address and drove a white Mustang.

Galt stayed at the Rebel Motel in Memphis for one night: April 3.

Through driver’s license records, police found that Galt was 36 years old, 5-feet 11-inches tall and he weighed 175 pounds. Galt had blond hair and blue eyes.

Almost a week after the shooting, Galt’s white Mustang turned up in Atlanta, Georgia.

A search of the vehicle showed Galt had the car tuned up twice in Los Angeles, California.

Galt had lived in Birmingham for some time, and talking to neighbors, investigators found Galt had an extreme interest in dancing and took dancing lessons on a regular basis. Since clues pointed to the fact that Galt had spent a period in Los Angeles, dance studios there were canvassed and an important clue was found: a photograph of Eric Starvo Galt.

The investigation slowed down after the discovery of Galt’s car in Atlanta, and the FBI turned to its extensive records division for assistance.

Using fingerprints found on the rifle and Galt’s possessions, the FBI ran a crosscheck against known fugitives. The decision to test against only fugitives was, in the FBI’s words “speculative.” There was no reason to believe Galt was a fugitive except for the assumption that it was a strong likelihood that King’s assassination was not Galt’s first crime. This postulation paid off when Galt’s fingerprints were found to match an escaped convict named James Earl Ray.

In a short period of time, authorities were easily able to piece together Ray’s travels since his escape, including lengthy trips to Los Angeles, New Orleans, Birmingham, Memphis, and eventually to Atlanta, where once again the trail grew cold.

Ray’s family was of little help to authorities, claiming not to have heard from Ray for some time.

Armed with this information, the search headed north. “Though the search went through a staggering number of applications, and was based on the comparison of Ray’s photographs to those submitted with applications, it proved to be the necessary break in picking up Ray’s trail,” the official FBI report of the Martin Luther King assassination reveals.

After looking over 175,000 applications, on June 1, 1968, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police contacted the FBI to report that George Ramon Sneyd, who bore a striking resemblance to Ray, had been issued a Canadian Passport on April 24, 1968.

“Sneyd” purchased a roundtrip airfare from Toronto to London and left for the United Kingdom on May 6.

In England,FBI agents and Scotland Yard police began their search.

The British police learned “Sneyd” had turned in the return ticket in exchange for a ticket to Lisbon, Portugal.

“Sneyd” arrived in Portugal on May 7, but returned to London on May 17.

On June 8, 1968, British immigration authorities stopped James Earl Ray as he attempted to board a plane bound for Brussels, Belgium.

The suspected assassin of Martin Luther King Jr. was in custody.

With Ray/Galt/Sneyd in custody in Great Britain, the United States government requested his extradition. Ray protested the extradition and in what would be the closest thing to a trial James Earl Ray would ever receive, the British courts were presented with the evidence against him.