TBR News June 10, 2012
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. June 10, 2012: “We are living in interesting times. Romney has bought the Republican nomination. He is a mean, sadistic man who, if elected, would make Caligula look like Walt Disney. Growing unemployment, both in this country and Europe, is causing severe political upheaval. The general public no longer trusts their leaders nor the media who report slavishly on what they are told to write. There are growing numbers of young Americans who cannot find any kind of work but we hear nothing about this in the controlled press. The once-vaunted euro is heading for certain collapse and there is brewing in Europe, growing hatred aimed at a flood of unassimilated foreigners which we like to call ‘urine colored people.’ At this point in time, the growingly angry and frustrated public is waiting silently to hear the hoofbeats of the Man on the White Horse who is surely approaching.”
Race Riots
1829 Cincinnati, Ohio
1863 New York: Draft Riots: 2,000 killed and 8,000 wounded
1866 Memphis, Tennessee
1868 New Orleans
9 Dec 1873 Clunes, Australia
14 Sep 1874 New Orleans: The Battle of Liberty Place (38 killed, 79 wounded).
1878 Grant Paris, Louisiana: Colfax Massacre (600+ dead)
10 Nov 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina: (8 killed, 30 wounded)
1900 New Orleans
1904 Springfield, Ohio
1906 Springfield, Ohio
13 Aug 1906 Brownsville, Texas
22 Sep 1906 Atlanta
14 Aug 1908 Springfield, Illinois
2 Jul 1917 East St. Louis, Illinois: (200 killed)
23 Aug 1917 Houston, Texas: 19 dead. Later, 13 members of the 24th Infantry Regiment are hanged.
25 Jul 1918 Chester, Pennsylvania: (5 killed)
26 Jul 1918 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: (4 killed, 60 wounded)
5 Jun 1919 Liverpool.
6 Jun 1919 Newport, England.
11 Jun 1919 Cardiff, Wales.
11 Jun 1919 Barry, England.
11 Jun 1919 Chicago: A riot erupts at the white-only 29th Street Beach.
14 Jun 1919 London.
Jul 1919 Gregg County, Texas
19 Jul 1919 Washington, DC: (40 killed, 150 wounded)
27 Jul 1919 Chicago: At the whites-only 29th Street bridge, a white man tosses rocks at a group of black boys floating in a raft. He manages to bean Eugene Williams in the forehead, who panics and drowns. Five days of rioting ensue. (38 killed, 291 wounded)
27 Jul 1919 Cardiff, Wales
Aug 1919 Knoxville, Tennessee: (7 killed)
31 May 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma: After a white woman claims that a black man had grabbed her arm in an elevator, the largest race riot in U.S. history breaks out. Marauding whites set fire to the exclusively-negro Greenwood district, leveling its 35 city blocks of black-owned businesses. Somebody even dropped explosives onto the buildings from an airplane. The official death toll is reported as 36, but later historians estimate it was more like 300.
1923 Rosewood, Florida: (8 killed, dozens wounded)
Feb 1942 Detroit, Michigan
1943 Beaumont, Texas
1943 Harlem, New York
1 Jun 1943 Los Angeles: Zootsuit riots, between zoot suiters and sailors. Time Magazine called it “the ugliest brand of mob action since the coolie race riot of the 1870’s.”
20 Jun 1943 Detroit, Michigan: Belle Island Riots (34 killed, 700 wounded)
1946 Columbia, Tennessee: (2 killed, 10 wounded)
1946 Athens, Alabama: (100 wounded)
1946 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
1960 Chattanooga, Tennessee
1960 Biloxi, Mississippi
1960 Jacksonville, Florida
1 Oct 1962 Mississippi
1964 Harlem, New York: (1 killed, 100+ wounded)
1964 Rochester, New York: (4 killed, 350 wounded)
1964 Paterson, New Jersey: (100+ wounded)
1964 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
11 Aug 1965 Los Angeles: Watts Riots. (35 killed, 1000 wounded)
1966 Los Angeles: Watts again
Jul 1967 Newark, New Jersey: (23 killed)
23 Jul 1967 Detroit, Michigan: (43 killed)
Jul 1969 York, Pennsylvania: (2 deaths)
4 Jul 1970 Asbury Park, New Jersey: (100 wounded)
17 May 1980 A three-day race riot breaks out after an all-white jury acquits four white Miami police officers of killing Arthur McDuffie, a black insurance salesman. The cops had beaten him with their flashlights and billyclubs, and he died in the hospital. 18 fatalities and more than $100 million in property damage are the final result.
16 Jan 1989 Three days of race riots begin in Overtown, Miami when a black man fleeing on motorcycle is killed by a hispanic police officer. 125 blocks are sealed off during the riots.
29 Apr 1992 Los Angeles: Rodney King Riot: (52 killed, 3000 wounded)
1995 Bradford, England
9 Apr 2001 Cincinnati, Ohio
26 May 2001 Three days of rioting begin in Oldham, England.
Jun 2001 London
7 Jul 2001 Bradford, England.
6 Nov 2002 Antwerp, Belgium
16 Feb 2004 Redfern, Australia (suburb of Sydney)
6 Aug 2011 race rioting broke out in north London and flared for four nights across the capital and other English cities as black street gangs and looters trashed shops and vehicles.
Woodward and Bernstein: 40 years after Watergate, Nixon was far worse than we thought
June 8, 2012
by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
The Washington Post
As Sen. Sam Ervin completed his 20-year Senate career in 1974 and issued his final report as chairman of the Senate Watergate committee, he posed the question: “What was Watergate?”
Countless answers have been offered in the 40 years since June 17, 1972, when a team of burglars wearing business suits and rubber gloves was arrested at 2:30 a.m. at the headquarters of the Democratic Party in the Watergate office building in Washington. Four days afterward, the Nixon White House offered its answer: “Certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it was,” press secretary Ronald Ziegler scoffed, dismissing the incident as a “third-rate burglary.”
History proved that it was anything but. Two years later, Richard Nixon would become the first and only U.S. president to resign, his role in the criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice — the Watergate coverup — definitively established.
Another answer has since persisted, often unchallenged: the notion that the coverup was worse than the crime. This idea minimizes the scale and reach of Nixon’s criminal actions.
Ervin’s answer to his own question hints at the magnitude of Watergate: “To destroy, insofar as the presidential election of 1972 was concerned, the integrity of the process by which the President of the United States is nominated and elected.” Yet Watergate was far more than that. At its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law.
Today, much more than when we first covered this story as young Washington Post reporters, an abundant record provides unambiguous answers and evidence about Watergate and its meaning. This record has expanded continuously over the decades with the transcription of hundreds of hours of Nixon’s secret tapes, adding detail and context to the hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives; the trials and guilty pleas of some 40 Nixon aides and associates who went to jail; and the memoirs of Nixon and his deputies. Such documentation makes it possible to trace the president’s personal dominance over a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and other illegal activities against his real or perceived opponents.
In the course of his five-and-a-half-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars — against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself. All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon’s: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency.
Long before the Watergate break-in, gumshoeing, burglary, wiretapping and political sabotage had become a way of life in the Nixon White House.
What was Watergate? It was Nixon’s five wars.
1. The war against the antiwar movement
Nixon’s first war was against the anti-Vietnam War movement. The president considered it subversive and thought it constrained his ability to prosecute the war in Southeast Asia on his terms. In 1970, he approved the top-secret Huston Plan, authorizing the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of individuals identified as “domestic security threats.” The plan called for, among other things, intercepting mail and lifting restrictions on “surreptitious entry” — that is, break-ins or “black bag jobs.”
Thomas Charles Huston, the White House aide who devised the plan, informed Nixon that it was illegal, but the president approved it regardless. It was not formally rescinded until FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover objected — not on principle, but because he considered those types of activities the FBI’s turf. Undeterred, Nixon remained fixated on such operations.
In a memorandum dated March 3, 1970, presidential aide Patrick Buchanan wrote to Nixon about what he called the “institutionalized power of the left concentrated in the foundations that succor the Democratic Party.” Of particular concern was the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank with liberal leanings.
On June 17, 1971 — exactly one year before the Watergate break-in — Nixon met in the Oval Office with his chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, and national security adviser Henry Kissinger. At issue was a file about former president Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the 1968 bombing halt in Vietnam.
“You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing,” Haldeman said, according to the tape of the meeting.
“Yeah,” Kissinger said, “but Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together for three years.” They wanted the complete story of Johnson’s actions.
“Huston swears to God there’s a file on it at Brookings,” Haldeman said.
“Bob,” Nixon said, “now you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it. . . . I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. God damn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”
Nixon would not let the matter drop. Thirteen days later, according to another taped discussion with Haldeman and Kissinger, the president said: “Break in and take it out. You understand?”
The next morning, Nixon said: “Bob, get on the Brookings thing right away. I’ve got to get that safe cracked over there.” And later that morning, he persisted, “Who’s gonna break in the Brookings Institution?”
For reasons that have never been made clear, the break-in apparently was not carried out.
2. The war on the news media
Nixon’s second war was waged ceaselessly against the press, which was reporting more insistently on the faltering Vietnam War and the effectiveness of the antiwar movement. Although Hoover thought he had shut down the Huston Plan, it was in fact implemented by high-level Nixon deputies. A “Plumbers” unit and burglary team were set up under the direction of White House counsel John Ehrlichman and an assistant, Egil Krogh, and led by the operational chiefs of the future Watergate burglary, ex-CIA operative Howard Hunt and former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy. Hunt was hired as a consultant by Nixon political aide Charles Colson, whose take-no-prisoners sensibility matched the president’s.
An early assignment was to destroy the reputation of Daniel Ellsberg, who had provided the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam War, to the news media in 1971. Publication of the documents in the New York Times, the Washington Post and eventually other newspapers had sent Nixon into rants and rages, recorded on his tapes, about Ellsberg, the antiwar movement, the press, Jews, the American left and liberals in Congress — all of whom he conflated. Though Ellsberg was already under indictment and charged with espionage, the team headed by Hunt and Liddy broke into the office of his psychiatrist, seeking information that might smear Ellsberg and undermine his credibility in the antiwar movement.
“You can’t drop it, Bob,” Nixon told Haldeman on June 29, 1971. “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it. You understand?”
He went on: “People don’t trust these Eastern establishment people. He’s Harvard. He’s a Jew. You know, and he’s an arrogant intellectual.”
Nixon’s anti-Semitic rages were well-known to those who worked most closely with him, including some aides who were Jewish. As we reported in our 1976 book, “The Final Days,” he would tell his deputies, including Kissinger, that “the Jewish cabal is out to get me.” In a July 3, 1971, conversation with Haldeman, he said: “The government is full of Jews. Second, most Jews are disloyal. You know what I mean? You have a Garment [White House counsel Leonard Garment] and a Kissinger and, frankly, a Safire [presidential speechwriter William Safire], and, by God, they’re exceptions. But Bob, generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.”
Ellsberg’s leak seemed to feed his prejudice and paranoia.
In response to suspected leaks to the press about Vietnam, Kissinger had ordered FBI wiretaps in 1969 on the telephones of 17 journalists and White House aides, without court approval. Many news stories based on the purported leaks questioned progress in the American war effort, further fueling the antiwar movement. In a tape from the Oval Office on Feb. 22, 1971, Nixon said, “In the short run, it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, to run this war in a dictatorial way, kill all the reporters and carry on the war.”
“The press is your enemy,” Nixon explained five days later in a meeting with Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to another tape. “Enemies. Understand that? …. Now, never act that way …. give them a drink, you know, treat them nice, you just love it, you’re trying to be helpful. But don’t help the bastards. Ever. Because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.”
3. The war against the Democrats
In Nixon’s third war, he took the weapons in place — the Plumbers, wiretapping and burglary — and deployed them against the Democrats challenging his reelection.
John N. Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager and confidante, met with Liddy at the Justice Department in early 1972, when Mitchell was attorney general. Liddy presented a $1 million plan, code-named “Gemstone,” for spying and sabotage during the upcoming presidential campaign.
According to the Senate Watergate report and Liddy’s 1980 autobiography, he used multicolored charts prepared by the CIA to describe elements of the plan. Operation Diamond would neutralize antiwar protesters with mugging squads and kidnapping teams; Operation Coal would funnel cash to Rep. Shirley Chisholm, a black congresswoman from Brooklyn seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, in an effort to sow racial and gender discord in the party; Operation Opal would use electronic surveillance against various targets, including the headquarters of Democratic presidential candidates Edmund Muskie and George McGovern; Operation Sapphire would station prostitutes on a yacht, wired for sound, off Miami Beach during the Democratic National Convention.
Mitchell rejected the plans and told Liddy to burn the charts. At a second meeting, less than three weeks later, Liddy presented a scaled-back, $500,000 version of the plan; Mitchell turned it down again. But soon after, Mitchell approved a $250,000 version, according to Jeb Magruder, the deputy campaign manager. It included intelligence-gathering on the Democrats through wiretaps and burglaries.
Under oath, Mitchell later denied approving the plan. He testified that he told Magruder: “We don’t need this. I’m tired of hearing it.” By his own account, he did not object on the grounds that the plan was illegal.
On Oct. 10, 1972, we wrote a story in The Post outlining the extensive sabotage and spying operations of the Nixon campaign and White House, particularly against Muskie, and stating that the Watergate burglary was not an isolated event. The story said that at least 50 operatives had been involved in the espionage and sabotage, many of them under the direction of a young California lawyer named Donald Segretti; several days later, we reported that Segretti had been hired by Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary. (The Senate Watergate committee later found more than 50 saboteurs, including 22 who were paid by Segretti.) Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal attorney, paid Segretti more than $43,000 from leftover campaign funds for these activities. Throughout the operation, Segretti was contacted regularly by Howard Hunt.
The Senate investigation provided more detail about the effectiveness of the covert efforts against Muskie, who in 1971 and early 1972 was considered by the White House to be the Democrat most capable of beating Nixon. The president’s campaign paid Muskie’s chauffeur, a campaign volunteer named Elmer Wyatt, $1,000 a month to photograph internal memos, position papers, schedules and strategy documents, and deliver copies to Mitchell and Nixon’s campaign staff.
Other sabotage directed at Muskie included bogus news releases and allegations of sexual improprieties against other Democratic candidates — produced on counterfeit Muskie stationery. A favored dirty trick that caused havoc at campaign stops involved sweeping up the shoes that Muskie aides left in hotel hallways to be polished, and then depositing them in a dumpster.
Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, advised Nixon of the Chapin-Segretti sabotage plan in May 1971, according to one of the president’s tapes. In a memo to Haldeman and Mitchell dated April 12, 1972, Patrick Buchanan and another Nixon aide wrote: “Our primary objective, to prevent Senator Muskie from sweeping the early primaries, locking up the convention in April, and uniting the Democratic Party behind him for the fall, has been achieved.”
The tapes also reveal Nixon’s obsession with another Democrat: Sen. Edward Kennedy. One of Hunt’s earliest undertakings for the White House was to dig up dirt on Kennedy’s sex life, building on a 1969 auto accident at Chappaquiddick, Mass., that resulted in the death of a young Kennedy aide, Mary Jo Kopechne. Though Kennedy had vowed not to seek the presidency in 1972, he was certain to play a big role in the campaign and had not ruled out a 1976 run.
“I’d really like to get Kennedy taped,” Nixon told Haldeman in April 1971. According to Haldeman’s 1994 book, “The Haldeman Diaries,” the president also wanted to have Kennedy photographed in compromising situations and leak the images to the press.
And when Kennedy received Secret Service protection as he campaigned for McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee, Nixon and Haldeman discussed a novel plan to keep him under surveillance: They would insert a retired Secret Service agent, Robert Newbrand, who had been part of Nixon’s protection detail when he was vice president, into the team protecting Kennedy.
“I’ll talk to Newbrand and tell him how to approach it,” Haldeman said, “because Newbrand will do anything that I tell him.”
“We just might get lucky and catch this son of a bitch and ruin him for ’76,” replied the president, adding, “That’s going to be fun.”
On Sept. 8, 1971, Nixon ordered Ehrlichman to direct the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the tax returns of all the likely Democratic presidential candidates, as well as Kennedy. “Are we going after their tax returns?” Nixon asked. “You know what I mean? There’s a lot of gold in them thar hills.”
4. The war on justice
The arrest of the Watergate burglars set in motion Nixon’s fourth war, against the American system of justice. It was a war of lies and hush money, a conspiracy that became necessary to conceal the roles of top officials and to hide the president’s campaign of illegal espionage and political sabotage, including the covert operations that Mitchell described as “the White House horrors” during the Watergate hearings: the Huston Plan, the Plumbers, the Ellsberg break-in, Liddy’s Gemstone plan and the proposed break-in at Brookings.
In a June 23, 1972, tape recording, six days after the arrests at the Watergate, Haldeman warned Nixon that “on the investigation, you know, the Democratic break-in thing, we’re back in the problem area, because the FBI is not under control . . . their investigation is now leading into some productive areas, because they’ve been able to trace the money.”
Haldeman said Mitchell had come up with a plan for the CIA to claim that national security secrets would be compromised if the FBI did not halt its Watergate investigation.
Nixon approved the scheme and ordered Haldeman to call in CIA Director Richard Helms and his deputy Vernon Walters. “Play it tough,” the president directed. “That’s the way they play it, and that’s the way we are going to play it.”
The contents of the tape were made public on Aug. 5, 1974. Four days later, Nixon resigned.
Another tape captured discussions in the Oval Office on Aug. 1, 1972, six weeks after the burglars’ arrest, and the day on which The Post published our first story showing that Nixon campaign funds had gone into the bank account of one of the burglars.
Nixon and Haldeman discussed paying off the burglars and their leaders to keep them from talking to federal investigators. “They have to be paid,” Nixon said. “That’s all there is to that.”
On March 21, 1973, in one of the most memorable Watergate exchanges caught on tape, Nixon met with his counsel, John W. Dean, who since the break-in had been tasked with coordinating the coverup.
“We’re being blackmailed” by Hunt and the burglars, Dean reported, and more people “are going to start perjuring themselves.”
“How much money do you need?” Nixon asked.
“I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years,” Dean replied.
“And you could get it in cash,” the president said. “I, I know where it could be gotten. I mean, it’s not easy, but it could be done.”
Hunt was demanding $120,000 immediately. They discussed executive clemency for him and the burglars.
“I am not sure that you will ever be able to deliver on the clemency,” Dean said. “It may just be too hot.”
“You can’t do it till after the ’74 election, that’s for sure,” Nixon declared.
Haldeman then entered the room, and Nixon led the search for ways “to take care of the jackasses who are in jail.”
They discussed a secret $350,000 stash of cash kept in the White House, the possibility of using priests to help hide payments to the burglars, “washing” the money though Las Vegas or New York bookmakers, and empaneling a new grand jury so everyone could plead the Fifth Amendment or claim memory failure. Finally, they decided to send Mitchell on an emergency fundraising mission.
The president praised Dean’s efforts. “You handled it just right. You contained it. Now after the election, we’ve got to have another plan.”
5. The war on history
Nixon’s final war, waged even to this day by some former aides and historical revisionists, aims to play down the significance of Watergate and present it as a blip on the president’s record. Nixon lived for 20 years after his resignation and worked tirelessly to minimize the scandal.
Though he accepted a full pardon from President Gerald Ford, Nixon insisted that he had not participated in any crimes. In his 1977 television interviews with British journalist David Frost, he said that he had “let the American people down” but that he had not obstructed justice. “I didn’t think of it as a coverup. I didn’t intend a coverup. Let me say, if I intended the coverup, believe me, I would have done it.”
In his 1978 memoir “RN,” Nixon addressed his role in Watergate: “My actions and omissions, while regrettable and possibly indefensible, were not impeachable.” Twelve years later, in his book “In the Arena,” he decried a dozen “myths” about Watergate and claimed that he was innocent of many of the charges made against him. One myth, he said, was that he ordered the payment of hush money to Hunt and others. Yet, the March 21, 1973, tape shows that he ordered Dean to get the money 12 times.
Even now, there are old Nixon hands and defenders who dismiss the importance of Watergate or claim that key questions remain unanswered. This year, Thomas Mallon, director of the creative writing program at George Washington University, published a novel called “Watergate,” a sometimes witty and entirely fictional story featuring many of the real players. Frank Gannon, a former Nixon White House aide who now works for the Nixon Foundation, reviewed the book for the Wall Street Journal.
“What emerges from ‘Watergate’ is an acute sense of how much we still don’t know about the events of June 17, 1972,” Gannon wrote. “Who ordered the break-in? . . . What was its real purpose? Was it purposely botched? How much was the CIA involved? . . . And how did a politician as tough and canny as Richard Nixon allow himself to be brought down by a ‘third rate burglary?’
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
Of course, Gannon is correct in noting that there are some unanswered questions — but not the big ones. By focusing on the supposed paucity of details concerning the burglary of June 17, 1972, he would divert us from the larger story.
And about that story, there is no need to guess.
In the summer of 1974, it was neither the press nor the Democrats who rose up against Nixon, but the president’s own Republican Party.
On July 24, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 0 that Nixon would have to turn over the secret tapes demanded by the Watergate special prosecutor. Three of the president’s appointees to the court — Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, Justice Harry Blackmun and Justice Lewis Powell — joined that opinion. The other Nixon appointee, Justice William Rehnquist, recused himself.
Three days later, six Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee joined the Democrats in voting, 27 to 11, to recommend Nixon’s impeachment for nine acts of obstruction of justice in the Watergate coverup.
By August, Nixon’s impending impeachment in the House was a certainty, and a group of Republicans led by Sen. Barry Goldwater banded together to declare his presidency over. “Too many lies, too many crimes,” Goldwater said.
On Aug. 7, the group visited Nixon at the White House.
How many votes would he have in a Senate trial? the president asked.
“I took kind of a nose count today,” Goldwater replied, “and I couldn’t find more than four very firm votes, and those would be from older Southerners. Some are very worried about what’s been going on, and are undecided, and I’m one of them.”
The next day, Nixon went on national television and announced that he would resign.
In his last remarks about Watergate as a senator, 77-year-old Sam Ervin, a revered constitutionalist respected by both parties, posed a final question: “Why was Watergate?”
The president and his aides, Ervin answered, had “a lust for political power.” That lust, he explained, “blinded them to ethical considerations and legal requirements; to Aristotle’s aphorism that the good of man must be the end of politics.”
Nixon had lost his moral authority as president. His secret tapes — and what they reveal — will probably be his most lasting legacy. On them, he is heard talking almost endlessly about what would be good for him, his place in history and, above all, his grudges, animosities and schemes for revenge. The dog that never seems to bark is any discussion of what is good and necessary for the well-being of the nation.
The Watergate that we wrote about in The Washington Post from 1972 to 1974 is not Watergate as we know it today. It was only a glimpse into something far worse. By the time he was forced to resign, Nixon had turned his White House, to a remarkable extent, into a criminal enterprise.
On the day he left, Aug. 9, 1974, Nixon gave an emotional farewell speech in the East Room to his staff, his friends and his Cabinet. His family stood with him. Near the end of his remarks, he waved his arm, as if to highlight the most important thing he had to say.
“Always remember,” he said, “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
His hatred had brought about his downfall. Nixon apparently grasped this insight, but it was too late. He had already destroyed himself.
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward are the co-authors of two Watergate books, “All the President’s Men,” published in 1974, and “The Final Days,” published in 1976. This is their first joint byline in 36 years.
Israel Defense Forces’ Liberty Attack Story in a Nutshell
K. J. Halliwell (April 4, 2010 — Revised November17, 2010)
Several years ago, I stumbled upon James Ennes’ USS Liberty memorial web site: http://ussliberty.org. It immediately piqued my interest because of my previous time (1968 to 1974) with the U.S. Naval Security Group (NSG) as a Communications Technician — a U.S. Navy occupational specialty now known as Cryptographic Technician.
While reviewing the information on Mr. Ennes’ web site, I discovered that one of my former commanding officers, David Lewis, is an attack survivor. This brought back a flood of memories of my time on Oahu, Hawaii where I was stationed with Mr. Lewis, at the Naval Communications Station near Wahiawa. This personal connection served to deepen my interest in the attack.
Additionally, I was astounded by the fact that, during my time with the Naval Security Group, I had never heard or read anything about the attack. Yet, similarly devasting incidents like the USS Pueblo capture (1968) and the Kamiseya fire (1965) were virtually common knowledge. Now, I felt compelled to learn more about this little-known and apparently well-suppressed incident.
As I studied available information about the attack and communicated with several attack survivors, it quickly became clear that there are two different versions of the June 8, 1967 attack: the survivors’ intentional attack version, and the attacker’s mistaken attack version. I was befuddled. Which version should I believe?
In an effort to find the truth, I began researching the attack in earnest by reading the official reports of both the American and Israeli post-attack investigations. While reading and comparing documents, I found myself constantly vacillating between believing the attacker’s claim of an unfortunate attack due to target identification and communication errors, and the survivors’ claim of a well-planned attack against a known target that was subsequently covered-up by the U.S. government.
Not making much headway with the official reports, I turned to attack-damage photographs, to see whether or not they provided any clues. After collecting and studying as many photographs as I could find, from various sources, I soon realized that the damage shown does not match the attack profile claimed by the attacker.
The attacker claimed that two aircraft performed several strafing runs on only the front of the ship, with only 30-mm automatic cannons, followed by two aircraft dropping several Napalm bombs, and finally three Motor Torpedo Boats (MTBs) firing 20-mm and 40-mm cannons shortly before launching their torpedoes from 1000 to 2000 yards distance. Thus, implying a relatively moderate degree of attack damage, with the exception of the torpedo hit, in relatively limited parts of the ship.
To the contrary, attack-damage photographs revealed that the ship suffered massive shelling and fire damage. There were many hundreds of holes with typical sizes varying between about 0.5 inch (armor-piercing 0.50 caliber machine gun bullets) to 8 inch diameter (821 shell-sized holes were counted for the Court of Inquiry). There were bullet and shell holes in the bow’s hull and deck area (both sides); starboard-side hull; stack and stack platform; and the forward-side, starboard-side, aft-side and deck-plating (i.e., vertical and horizontal surfaces) of her superstructure and deck houses. Additionally, there were clear signs of large fires and blast damage (e.g., an interdeck steel ladder bent and twisted off its mounting) on both sides of her superstructure.
The great degree and variation of bullet and shell damage simply did not jibe with the attacker’s claim. The photos told a story of an intense and prolonged air assault involving aircraft attacking from various directions, firing cannons, rockets and dropping Napalm bombs, and then a close-in shelling and machine gun attack by the MTBs after a torpedo hit — essentially the same finding stated within U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry finding numbers 19, 20, 24 and 50:
“19. … In five or six attacks from various angles, two or more jet aircraft at a time conducted strafing, rocket and incendiary attacks.”
“20. … MTBs strafed the ship with machine gun fire as, at least, one MTB passed down the starboard side.”
“24. From the time of first air attack onward, attackers were well coordinated, accurate and determined. Criss-crossing rocket and machine gun runs from both bows, both beams, and quarters effectively chewed up entire topside including ship control and internal communications (sound powered) network. Well directed initial air attacks had wiped out the ability of the four 50 cal. machine guns to be effective.”
“50. … Topside damage resulting from aircraft strafing and rocket attacks and from MTB strafing (ship was hit by more than 821 shells and rockets, many of them incendiary) summarized as follows: Pilot house and signal bridge forward deck house, all gun tubs, many antennas including radar antenna, numerous bulkheads and decks holed by explosive rockets. Whale boat destroyed in davits by incendiary rockets and many life rafts holed or burned in their storage. Flag bags burned and numerous fires resulting from incendiary munitions. …”
In addition to attack-damage photographs, I studied gun-camera images in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) History Report about the attack. A careful visual inspection and comparison with true images of USS Liberty revealed that they are fake. The ship shown in the purported gun-camera images does not appear like USS Liberty. It lacks many of Liberty’s key features and, instead, has features not found on Liberty. Overall, the ship does not even appear like a Victory Ship — the type of ship used for USS Liberty’s construction. The rational behind this deception is unknown; but considering that the ship in the image shows no markings to identify it as being USS Liberty or an American naval ship of any type, I can only assume it was created to wrongfully convince readers that Liberty was not easy to identify. Whatever the rational, an innocent party should not need to produce and present fraudulent evidence.
The above findings, combined with related research based solely on direct evidence, raised serious doubts about the overall veracity of the attacker’s version of events. Additionally, the discovery of six erroneous U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry findings — all due to demonstrably unreliable testimony, by Captain McGonagle, about events during the attack — raised serious doubts about the probative competence of the Court of Inquiry.
So, does all of this mean that the survivors’ claims about the attack being well-planned and against a known target, and a subsequent U.S. government cover-up are true? Available evidence and my research findings tend to support this conclusion, but it is not for certain.
At most, current direct evidence and my findings well-support that the IDF’s claims about the attack’s profile are false, that certain findings by the Naval Court of Inquiry are erroneous, and that the IDF History Department used fake gun-camera photos in its history report; but beyond this, the evidence is circumstantial and open to reasonable doubt.
In other words, while my findings do not bode well for the IDF or the U.S. Navy’s Court of Inquiry, they do not prove beyond reasonable doubt that the attack was planned and performed with absolute knowledge of the ship’s true nationality, or that there was an intentional cover-up by the U.S. government. As unlikely it may seem, it remains possible that the ones who ordered the air attack firmly believed that the ship was an enemy ship — for whatever reason. If so, this would explain the pilots being told to pursue the attack, whether they reported seeing an American flag (as some witnesses say) or not, or otherwise expressed doubts about the ship being an enemy vessel. And the appearance of a U.S. government cover-up could have been simply an effort to keep secret the equipment and methods by which it collected signals intelligence, weaknesses in the U.S. military’s communication network, and generally avoid making a bad situation worse; i.e., close the matter as quickly as possible for the sake of national security.
Thus, I remain open to alternate possibilities. The “obvious conclusion” many not be the correct conclusion, at least for the direct evidence that now exists. Regardless, my research findings have led me to believe that the totality of direct and circumstantial evidence shows beyond reasonable doubt that the attackers were, at a minimum, grossly negligent and used deadly force that grossly exceeded military necessity. An opinion similar to the one expressed in Clark Clifford’s Report of July 1967 (emphasis added):
“The unprovoked attack on the Liberty constitutes a flagrant act of gross negligence for which the Israeli Government should be held completely responsible, and the Israeli military personnel involved should be punished.”
Perhaps it is only this level of wrongdoing, and an effort to avoid self-incrimination thereof, that explains the attacker’s presentation of fake evidence and distorted facts, as opposed to the more serious misdeed of knowingly attacking USS Liberty.
Finally, I encourage anybody with a serious and open-minded interest in the USS Liberty attack to carefully read and consider all of my essays and research findings at http://ussliberty-inquiry.us. They are my best attempt to present findings and commentary for objective research based primarily on available direct evidence. I believe you will find the material both interesting and revealing, on both a technical analysis and informational level.
In a nutshell, below is the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF’s) sequence of events during its attack on USS Liberty, as presented in its 1982 History Report and prior investigative reports about the attack — supplemented and chronologically correlated with available direct evidence:
Early morning hours of June 8, 1967 (fourth day of the Six Day War, and final day of war in the Sinai), U.S. Navy signals intelligence and technical research ship USS Liberty approaches her patrol area, north of the northern coast of Egypt’s Sinai peninsula. During this time, an IDF Air Force long-range reconnaissance aircraft crew sees Liberty and reports her as appearing like a gray-painted cargo ship, with the identification marking GTR5 on her bow. By mid-morning an IDF naval liaison officer, at IDF Air Force headquarters, identifies the ship as USS Liberty. This information is passed to IDF Navy headquarters.
Morning and early afternoon hours, USS Liberty is steaming peacefully and slowly (5 knots speed) westward, in international waters about 14 nautical miles (16 statute miles) from the northern coast of Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, with a few of her off-duty crew members sunbathing on top of her forward deck house. Throughout this time period several different types of IDF aircraft fly very near or directly over the ship.
Late morning, at near noon-time, IDF Army reports shelling of the north Sinai shoreline near El Arish, Egypt, by an unidentified ship. At this time, Liberty is directly north of El Arish, about 14 nautical miles from shore — a distance at which only her superstructure and masts would appear above the visual horizon for anybody standing on the highest ground (about 30 meters or 100 feet above sea-level) in El Arish.
IDF Navy sends three high-speed motor torpedo boats (MTBs) to investigate reported shelling, with simultaneous agreement from the IDF Air Force that fighter aircraft will be dispatched when the MTBs locate the ship.
Navy MTB radar detects, at a self-admitted exceptional range of 22 nautical miles (i.e., Liberty was completely below the MTBs’ theoretical radar horizon), an unidentified ship in international waters, on a slightly northwest and oblique heading relative to the MTBs slightly southwest heading, at a manually computed speed between 30 to 28 knots — almost exactly the MTBs’ speed. (Data for speed computations were obtained from MTB radar display screen measurements taken, throughout an approximate ten minute period, at two different distances from the target: first at an undefined distance less than 22 nautical miles, and second at 17 nautical miles.)
Navy MTBs’ captains assume the unidentified ship is an enemy (Egyptian) combat ship due to its computed high-speed and westward heading, in the general direction of Port Said, Egypt — about 60 nautical miles west of Liberty’s location.
Navy MTBs’ Division Commander calls for air support due to the unidentified ship’s speed being close to the speed of the MTBs — rendering it virtually impossible to close the distance between the MTBs and the unidentified ship.
Fully armed IDF Air Force jet fighters arrive quickly and their pilots cannot identify the ship. The ship does not perform evasive maneuvers and it does not shoot at the fighter aircraft. The pilots believe the ship appears like some type of non-Israeli combat ship — perhaps a destroyer .
No attempt is made, by any component of the IDF, to communicate with the unidentified ship via International Calling and Distress radio frequencies that ships customarily monitor.
Air Force repeatedly attacks the unidentified ship with rapid-fire cannons, rockets, and napalm bombs — attack begins at about 1400 (2:00 P.M.) local time.
The unidentified ship changes course quickly from westward to northward (toward the open sea) and increases speed soon after the air attack begins. The fighter pilots report that the ship is not defending itself with return fire.
Air Force eventually realizes the unidentified ship may not be an enemy combat ship after one of the attacking pilots reports seeing Latin (i.e., not Arabic) letters painted on its bow. The air attack stops.
Communication foul-up results in stand-down message not being received by MTBs’ Division Commander.
Navy MTBs arrive and their captains realize the unidentifed ship is not a high-speed combat ship; instead the extensively damaged ship, partially obscured by smoke from upper-superstructure deck fires, is identified by all three MTB captains as an Egyptian ship named El Quseir, a slow-speed cargo ship almost one-half the length and width of USS Liberty, and differently configured.
Navy MTBs chase and attack the ship — as it continues heading northward toward the open sea — with cannons, machine guns and torpedoes after failing to establish signal light communication and seeing a few machine gun rounds fired from the ship.
One torpedo hits the ship about 35 minutes after the air attack began. The ship does not sink, but it stops and lists toward its starboard side.
IDF Air Force helicopters are dispatched to the attack-damaged ship to conduct rescue operations.
Navy MTB captains eventually realize the ship is not El Quseir and stop attacking.
Air Force helicopters arrive about one hour after the attack began. According to American intercepted radio communications between the IDF helicopter pilots, ground control and the MTBs, the helicopter pilots see an American flag on the ship and the ship’s large identification marking, GTR5. One helicopter pilot asks the MTB Division Commander the meaning of GTR5. The response is: “It doesn’t mean anything.” A search for survivors or bodies in the water is conducted. Nobody is found. The helicopters leave.
Government of Israel communicates to United States Government, about two hours after the attack began, that its armed forces mistakenly attacked a US Navy ship, and requests information about any other US Navy ships in the area.
Navy MTB Division Commander’s boat closely approaches the ship, establishes her name by reading the ship’s name, Liberty, painted on the stern, and then issues an offer of assistance — about two hours after the torpedo hit. The offer is declined.
Government of Israel officially declares the attack was due to mistaken identity and apologizes. (The IDF acknowledges that it knew USS Liberty was in the area during morning hours, understood that she was a signals intelligence type ship, but stopped tracking her position on the assumption that she had departed the area — in spite of the fact that IDF Air Force aircraft flew very near or directly over the ship many times throughout the day.)
Notice how an unidentified ship, presumed to be an enemy ship capable of and responsible for medium-range shelling the northern Sinai shoreline (i.e., a ship with large guns on its decks), changed suddenly from a high-speed combat ship into a low-speed cargo ship (i.e., a ship without large guns on its decks), with little to no hesitation in the MTBs’ high-speed pursuit due to consternation by the MTB captains.
This incredible (some say unbelievable) story is not about an attack due to mistaken identity; instead, it is a story about a willful, reckless and prolonged surprise attack on an unidentified ship, in international waters — an attack that far exceeded reasonable military necessity, grievously harmed the ship and the majority of its crew, and killed 34 crew members.
Eight Hundred Years of Glory: A short history of Christianity, or What Would Jesus Do?
by Darrell W. Conder
When Pope Innocent III was anointed as the Vicar of Christ in 1198, one problem that faced him was heresy — a heretic being someone who asked questions about the Bible. Good old Innocent decided the best way to deal with this annoyance was a bit of Jehovah-style bloodletting. So his holiness cast an eye on Beziers, France to put the fear of God into his subjects. It is recorded that the last savage Christian persecution under a pagan Roman Emperor Diocletian, killed some 2,000 Christians. In Beziers, Pope Innocent killed at least six times that number — 12,000 — in one afternoon! For this day’s holy work, his holiness pronounced a special blessing for his soldiers and promised an indulgence from purgatory. Where was Jesus when Christian soldiers murdered Christian men, women and children in his name? In the same place when his soldiers sliced open pregnant Midianite girls back when he was calling himself Jehovah.
At least the victims of Christ’s love died somewhat quickly in Beziers. Those who fell into the hands of the Holy Inquisition, which was a Christian office set up to seek out and punish heretics and witches, had it a bit more rough. One eye witness wrote: “feet wrenched off legs, eyes torn from their sockets, and the prisoner burned with brimstone and basted with oil.” This is no exaggeration.
First of all, let’s understand that torturing non-believers has a precedent in God’s holy word. In 2 Samuel 12:31 we can read about David, a man after God’s own heart, taking the men, women and children of Rabbah and all the other Ammonite cities by putting man, woman and child “under saws, and under harrows [toothed plows] of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln [i.e., roasted them alive].” So the Holy Inquisition had its authority to torture and murder in God’s name by simply imitating the work of a man “after God’s own heart,” the details of which were found in scripture.
When the Church arrested heretics they were taken to a torture chamber, stripped naked (in case the Devil had applied some secret mark to their body), and were made ready for the holy work of the ministers of Christ. Typically a victim was hoisted into the air by their hands, which were tied behind their back, effectively dislocating shoulders with horrific pain. While hanging in this agony, a priest might apply flaming balls of sulfur to the genitals, or feet, or breasts, or under the arms, or on the back. If the victim was a woman, there was a special device for spreading the vagina (called the vaginal pear), which allowed for the ripping of the cervix and also for placing flaming sulfur directly inside the vagina. In fact, genitalia were a special target for the Holy Inquisition, as historian Barbara Walker notes: “. . . [priests] liked to attack women’s breasts and genitals with pincers, pliers, and red-hot irons.” Even more terrible to contemplate is that in some cases there were no breasts to mutilate because under the rules of the Holy Inquisition, girls as young as nine years could be tortured in the name of Jesus. (Walker, Barbara G. The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths & Secrets. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983, p. 445.)
Dr. Paul Carus, in his famous book The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil (Avenel, New Jersey: Gramercy Books, 1996: originally published in Chicago in 1900 as The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil From the Earliest Times to the Present Day) provides us with an example of what it was like to be arrested for heresy: “The hangman binds the woman, who was pregnant, and places her on the rack. Then he racked her till her heart would fain break, but had no compassion. When she did not confess, the torture was repeated, the hangman tied her hands, cut off her hair, poured brandy over her head and burned it. He placed sulphur in her armpits and burned it. Her hands were tied behind her, and she was hauled up to the ceiling and suddenly dropped down. This hauling up and dropping down was repeated for some hours, until the hangman and his helpers went to dinner. When they returned, the master-hangman tied her feet and hands upon her back; brandy was poured on her back and burned. Then heavy weights were placed on her back and she was pulled up. After this she was again stretched on the rack. A spiked board is placed on her back, and she is again hauled up to the ceiling. The master again ties her feet and hangs on them a block of fifty pounds, which makes her think that her heart will burst. This proved insufficient; therefore the master unties her feet and fixes her legs in a vise, tightening the jaws until the blood oozes out at the toes. Nor was this sufficient; therefore she was stretched and pinched again in various ways. Now the hangman of Dreissigacker began the third grade of torture. When he placed her on the bench he said: ‘I do not take you for one, two, three, not for eight days, nor for a few weeks, but for half a year or a year, for your whole life, until you confess: and if you will not confess, I shall torture you to death, and you shall be burned after all. The hangman’s son-in-law hauled her up to the ceiling by her hands. The hangman of Dreissigacker whipped her with a horsewhip. She was placed in a vise where she remained for six hours. After that she was again mercilessly horsewhipped. This was all that was done on the first day.”
In 1599 in Bavaria, Germany, a convicted witch by the name of Anna Pappenheimer, after already being mercilessly tortured in prison, was taken into the public square where her flesh was peeled off with red-hot pincers, after which her breasts sawed off. But her tormentors were not through. The bloody severed breasts were forced into the mouths of her two sons, in a perverse parody by her Christian torturers of breast feeding the boys, who were later burned alive along with their mother. In the crowd, Anna’s ten year old son was made to watch all this horror. The next day, he too was burned alive beneath the cross of the Lord Jesus.
The Church had special horrors for males, whose testicles and penis were targeted, and special devices were invented solely for this purpose such as a hollow, hinged devise that was heated glowing hot into which the victim’s penis was placed — this pain on top of seared flesh, smashed bones, fingernails that had been smashed or pulled out, and any other horror dreamed up in the minds of good God-loving priests.
Another special torture instrument invented solely for use during the Inquisition, include the brodequin, a device which was used to crush the legs by tightening, or by using a mallet for knocking in wedges to smash the bones until the bone marrow spurted out. This device was handy because when the victim inevitably passed out from the pain, it was proof of their guilt because losing consciousness was a trick of the Devil to spare his children pain.
Other tortures included applying oil to various parts of the body and slowly roasting them over an open fire. Sometimes an oversized boot was fitted on the victim and boiling water or sizzling hot grease was poured inside. (Imagine the pain we all have felt when we inadvertently burn our fingers on a hot pan; now consider the pain these helpless victims suffered, and the pain they endured afterwards from the horrific lingering pain of massive burns over the most delicate parts of their body.) And then there was the torture of squassation, which entailed strapping hundred-pound weights to a suspended victim’s arms and legs, and then hoisting the weights up above the victim, and then releasing the ropes, which dislocated virtually every bone in the victim’s body. It was said that several applications were often sufficient to kill even the strongest man.
The wheel was perhaps the worst torture device. A naked victim, who often had already been subjected to the tortures described above, was stretched spread-eagle on a large wheel. Wooden cross pieces were placed under the wrists, elbows, ankles, knees and hips. The inquisitor then used a wooden mallet to smash the victim’s bones and joints in dozens of places, although taking special care not to kill his victim. According to the observations of a seventeenth-century German chronicler, the victim was transformed “into a sort of huge screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster, of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh (rohw, schleymig und formlos Fleisch wie di Schleuch eines Tündenfischs) mixed up with splinters of smashed bones”. In this indescribably horrid state, the victim’s smashed noodle-like arms and legs were braided into the spokes of the wheel; then the wheeled victim was hoisted up on a pole and left to the elements to suffer a slow death. Eyewitnesses tell how crows would often feast on the helpless, screaming victims as they begged God for the mercy of death.
The water torture began with a naked victim strapped to a table. A funnel was inserted down their throat and gallons of water were poured in until the victim’s stomach was literally ready to burst. The inquisitor would then beat the victim’s stomach with mallets rupturing internal organs. Or, in another variation, a length of knotted cord was forced down the victim’s throat with the water, and then yanked from the mouth, effectively resulting in disemboweling.
Cleansing the soul was accomplished by forcing a victim to swallow scalding water, grease or glowing coals. We can add to this list, the cat’s paw, the breast ripper, the testicle ripper, the rectal pear, the shin vice, the head crusher, Saint Elmo’s belt, the rack, ducking the witch, the heretic’s fork and numerous other ways to “discover” the mark of Satan.
During all of this sanctimonious horror God’s ministers practiced the ultimate absurdity by blessing the instruments of torture with “holy water” and invoking God’s blessing: “Lord God we pray thee manifest thy truth on this thy servant [the instrument of torture]. Thou, O god, who hast, in former times, done great signs and wonders among thy people by fire . . . If this thy servant, who is about to undergo this trial, is guilty, let his hand be seared and burnt by the fire: but, on the other hand, if he is innocent, suffer not the fire to affect him. Lord God, thou to whom all secrets are known, fulfill, by thy goodness, the hope of our confidence and faith, while we undertake this examination; that the innocent may be set free, but the guilty detected and punished.” von Bracht writes: “When the priest had finished this prayer, he sprinkled the red hot iron with holy water, and pronounced upon it the benediction; The blessing of God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, fall upon this iron, that we may by it form a righteous judgment.” (von Bracht,The Bloody Theatre or Martyrs’ Mirror of the Defenseless Christians, p. 241.)
When all the torture was through, and if the victim had not died, he or she was returned to their prison cell awaiting their next “examination.”
Speaking of the “examination,” the rules of the Inquisition stated that a person could only be subjected to one torture session. Although the initial examination could go on for an entire day, even perverts get tired of torturing and raping, so they must take a break. To get around the inconvenience of the one session rule, the inquisitors simply declared a recess in the session, which could last for hours, days, weeks or months, meaning that a victim could be “examined” endlessly — unless they died. Not only this, there was an inducement for the “examination” to last because the Church charged the victim’s family for their torture services. That’s right! The ministers of Christ charged a family for burning and ripping their daughter’s breasts, wrenching off her fingers or toes, pulling out her fingernails, applying burning sulfur to her genitals and raping her. The longer the sessions, the more money extracted for the work of Christ. On top of this, there was a charge for the victim’s upkeep in prison: the family had to pay for their mother, father, son or daughter’s filthy rotten food and lodging in a filthy, disease-ridden overcrowded, rat-infested cell.
The medieval prison defies description. The places used for the ordinary prisoners were deplorable hell-holes, but the cells to which heretics were consigned were even worse. When a man or woman was thrown into a cell, it wasn’t unusual to find rotting corpses lying about covered with maggots. Food was often non-existent, and when it was given, was foul and rotten — tossed on a floor swarming with rats and roaches and covered with excrement, urine, maggots, pus and blood. If this wasn’t bad enough, the stronger prisoners, driven mad with hunger, often took the food from the weak, who were left to die in this filth.
Ten or fifteen people crowded together in one cell without sanitation brought predictable results — disease. Very often mass death occurred from an epidemic inside the prison, which the Church declared was God’s “divine retribution” because it proved the guilt of the prisoner.
There was no such thing as medical attention in prison, meaning that ill half-conscience prisoners were left to be eaten alive by the armies of rats swarming the prison cells. Rats in fact, were a useful tool to the Inquisitor, who would, on occasion, order that a prisoner be closely chained to the floor of his or her cell. The rats, accustomed to feeding on human flesh, would then feed on this living meal throughout the night — or days. In fact, the victim, in keeping with the priest’s perverse desires, might have fish oil, or other food smeared on their genitals or breasts in order to provide the rats with a target in their feast. It was all yet another tactic used by the inquisitors to induce the “heretic” to confess their “sin” against the Lamb of God, the “God of love and mercy” who was sitting up in heaven just waiting for the repentant sinner to come to him, as Billy Graham’s theme song proclaims: “Just as I am, without one plea but that thy blood was shed for me and that thou bids me come to thee Oh, Lamb of God, I come I come.”
In time, it became a custom to allow “zealous Christian” men to visit the cells of women prisoners, after they paid a few coins, so that they could, themselves, personally “examine” the accused women. (Walker, op. cit., p. 446.) At this point the condemned women, who usually had been gang-raped and tortured by their inquisitors, were subjected to brutal men who not only raped them, but thought it their God-given duty to inflict further pain and suffering.
That the arrests and tortures often were for sexual gratification can be seen in the case of a priest/inquisitor named Foulques de St. George of Toulouse. The people of Toulouse, thoroughly disgusted with his atrocities, gathered evidence that he arrested women only to rape and torture them. Indeed, the chronicler of Trier, Germany recorded that all the females in two nearby villages were killed by inquisitors in 1586. However, these actions were rare exceptions because to question the Inquisition was a one-way ticket to be arrested, tortured and killed by the Inquisition, which means that almost nothing was done to stem the perverse appetites of the Holy Inquisition.
In time, the charge of heresy was joined with another charge, which provided a very large number of female victims for Christ’s ministers. It was the charge of witchcraft. Karen Armstrong writes: “The old pagan belief in witchcraft received its Christian baptism in 1484, when Pope Innocent VIII brought out an astonishing Bull, Summa Desiderantes . . .” (Armstrong, The Gospel According to Woman, p. 103.) Innocent officially began the witchcraft hysteria, which was to plague Christendom for centuries to come. The pope empowered two Dominicans, Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, to investigate the practice of witchcraft, and the result was a book called Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), which was a handbook to help the Inquisitors uncover witches. Released in 1486, The Hammer of Witches essentially placed full blame for witchcraft on women, while painting men as their victims. For a priesthood that enjoyed arresting, raping, torturing and burning women, this book was a God-send.
Among other perversions, Malleus Maleficarum taught that witchcraft was due to women’s “insatiable sexuality” and that owing to her “inferior humanity” a woman, was more susceptible than a man to the devil through sex. (ibid, p. 104.) Moreover, the more beautiful the women, the more likely a suspect she was because her beauty was used by Satan to entice innocent young men into his grasp! Armstrong writes: “Indeed, the Malleus is quite clear that part of a woman’s danger is her beauty.” (ibid., p. 112.)
Malleus Maleficarum was “filled with a pathological hatred of women,” as historian Walter Nigg writes, which was an attitude fostered by countless centuries of Christian teaching, via the woman-hating pen of St. Paul himself. Thanks to Paul, Christians taught that women were inferior “because, being formed from a man’s rib, they are ‘only imperfect animals’ and ‘crooked’ whereas man belongs to a privileged sex from whose midst Christ emerged.” (Nigg, The Heretics, p. 277.)
What a grand arrangement for a perverse priesthood! Beautiful women were in league with the Devil, and needed to be arrested, taken to a private cell, stripped naked, tortured and burned to death. Even more ludicrous, if the inquisitor became sexually aroused during the torture of these naked beautiful women, he claimed it was sure evidence that the Devil was working through the victim to entice him. And when this sexually aroused man of God raped his victim, she received full blame and her torture was even more savage.
On December 5, 1484, Pope Innocent VIII declared that Germany was particularly infested with witches. For the next one hundred years Germany endured human bonfires — almost all being fueled with German women. (Lea, A History of the Inquisitions, Volume III, p. 540.) For example, in the spring of 1586 the summer was late in coming to Trier, Germany. The unseasonable cold, said the archbishop, was due to witches! A woman was arrested, tortured and made to confess that a coven of witches was going to cause the entire summer to be cold in order to ruin crops and thus the economy of the town. The archbishop arrested, tortured and burned 118 women and 2 men. For his part, the archbishop was praised by the Vatican for his quick action, while the victims of God’s love smoldered in the ashes. (Lea, op.cit., Volume III, p. 549.)
In the Gospel of Mark (10:14) Jesus once said: “Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God.” Well, “suffer the little children” is a fitting way to relate what Christ’s Holy Inquisition did when it arrested, tortured and murdered untold thousands of children. In mid-seventeenth-century Neisse, Silesia more than two thousand babies, girls and women were roasted alive in ovens during a nine-year period for suspected witchcraft. In 1629 the chancellor of Würzburg, Germany wrote that three hundred children of three or four years of age were accused by of having had intercourse with the Devil, all of whom were tortured and burned to rid the Church of their evil threat. Actually, it does not take much imagination to wonder why children were included in the priestly pursuit of burning heretics, especially in light of the mountain of recent charges about pedophile ministers and priests.
Being arrested for witchcraft by God’s church was a no-win situation for the victim. An arrest for witchcraft was a death sentence. First, a suspected witch was brought before an inquisitor and asked a trick question. Asked if they believed in witches, most said “no.” This was an incriminating answer because His Holiness, the Vicar of Christ, had said Europe was infested with witches, and one didn’t dispute papal authority. So, the answer was enough to convict — and no witch, even if he/she freely confessed, would be spared death the penalty because the bible expressly stated that no witch should live (Exodus 22:18). So, unlike the heretic, who on some occasions after torture, public humiliation, and confiscation of all his/her property, might be allowed to die in prison, the witch was doomed from the beginning to death — if he or she didn’t die during the “examination.”
Of course, if victims survived the torture of repeated examinations and their lodging in the prison cell, they still had to endure their punishment.
In the early days of the Inquisition, the judges often allow the victim to escape the death penalty by being punished in other ways. For instance, a victim could be locked in public stocks, which was a hellish predicament. Completely helpless, the victim was left to the tender mercies of the assembled mob: slapped, kicked, poked with sharpened sticks, urine and feces dumped on his or her head, or forced into the mouth, poked out eyes, torn-out tongues, stoned, ears cut off, castrated, fingernails and toenails ripped out, fingers and toes sawed off, whipped, etc. But this was in the days when the Church showed a victim mercy. Eventually death was the standard punishment.
When a heretic was sentenced to death, it was by fire because the Church reasoned that it was wrong to shed blood, and burning didn’t shed blood. Besides, the Lamb of God had paved the way for these holy, purifying fires in John 15:6 “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” (Also, the bible itself teaches that burning was a godly form of execution: Joshua 7:15, which prescribes burning as a form of execution and Leviticus 21:9, which teaches that a profaning woman should be burned with fire.)
The burning of heretics dates all the way back to a papal statute of 1231, which demanded death by fire, adding that it was to be used universally. (Nigg, The Heretic, p. 220, Reinach, Orpheus, p. 328.) In fact, in the Inquisition’s heyday the pope promised indulgences (remission for punishment) in hell or purgatory for those who provided fuel for these cleansing fires. (Reinach, op.cit., p. 328.) This offer by the papacy wasn’t for any religious concern, it was because providing firewood was expensive and the Church was looking for ways to cut costs since the number of victims was increasing according to the Church’s perverse appetite.
There was one technicality to be carried out before someone was actually burned: the Church, in its sanctimonious piety, handed its victims over to the local governments so that God’s ministers could claim that the Church had never killed anyone. The victim’s trial ended with these words: “We [the ministers of Christ] cast you forth from this our ecclesiastical court and leave you to be delivered to the secular arm. But we earnestly pray that the said secular court may temper its justice with mercy that there be no bloodshed or danger of death.” (Coulton, Inquisition and Liberty, pp. 168-69.) But, no secular court dared contradict the findings of the Inquisition. No secular court dared let a victim go free — if any judge had dared do so, he would likely find himself before the very men whose judgment he had overturned, faced with a charge of witchcraft or heresy.
When the victim was led to a public place for his/her burning, they were often horribly abused by the assembled superstitious crowd, which often had been whipped up to a state of bloodlust by the ranting of their local priest. But this last abuse was nothing compared to what the victim had already suffered. If the victim was a woman, she usually had had her tongue cut out, or bored through with a glowing hot poker to keep her from telling bystanders that she had been raped by God’s ministers — the official excuse for this practice being that it kept the guilty from blaspheming God during their burning.
One of the most horrible recorded cases of burning is that of an unnamed Jersey woman, who was murdered in a public square in 1562. Being in the last weeks of pregnancy, the morning of her execution brought on labor. As the fire started to crackle beneath her feet, the wretched woman gave birth, after which a godly onlooker scarfed up the unoffending baby and tossed it into the flames beneath its screaming mother’s feet — all this happening while Jesus sat up in heaven on the right hand of his father watching the spectacle!
With that last comment, let us keep in mind as we read these accounts that the victims here were God-fearing, Jesus-loving Christians who undoubtedly cried out in their misery to those gods for mercy and deliverance. Where was this loving deity, Jesus we all hear preached? Well, either he sat in heaven and looked on approvingly, or, like Kenneth Taylor’s translation of 1 Kings 18:27 in the Living Bible, was doing what Elijah said about the god Baal: he couldn’t hear prayers because he was perhaps “sitting on the toilet”! Or, say I, perchance Jesus didn’t hear them because he is but a myth!
Mark Twain once wrote: “During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. . . . There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them still remains.”
One of the great tragedies resulting from the wholesale murders of “witches” was the almost total elimination of those who treated illness with natural remedies, which had been passed down through a thousand generations. Essentially the Church taught that the only remedy for illness was touching a holy relic (which the Church sold), or being anointed by a priest with holy oil. Anything else was regarded with suspicion — especially if the ill person recovered from the application of natural medicines. Hence, natural practitioners, most of whom were women, were the first to be arrested and charged with witchcraft. And so, in the cleansing fires of the holy mother Church died thousands of years of cures or treatments for every medical problem known to man. That loss was so great that even today humanity suffers the effect by paying absurdly high prices for chemical remedies, the side effects of which often outweigh the benefits. Oh, we all have so much to thank the Lord for, do we not?
Okay, so far I’ve covered God’s love for heretics and witches inside the Christian torture chambers and dungeons, but all of this was somewhat mild when compared to the Church’s remedy for a problem called the Protestant Reformation. People — hordes of them — countries full of them — were finally reading the bible and thinking for themselves, and something had to be done because people thinking for themselves are dangerous to any organization, be it churches or governments. In other words, the Holy Inquisition had to be taken to the streets on a massive scale. Good Christians everywhere had to be whipped up into a blood frenzy if the Church was to survive.
It is going way beyond the scope of this article to present a detailed history of the whole Reformation, nevertheless it is vital to offer a few significant horrible examples, such as when Pope Pius IV sent his armies into Orange (in the Netherlands) in 1562 to massacre Protestant heretics — the Holy Inquisition having already pronounced a sentence of death for heresy on the whole population. Hordes of merciless Catholic Christian soldiers were sent into the Netherlands with the promise of plunder, rape and torture, AND the promise of an indulgence from his holiness the pope! During the endless months of horror women were raped en masse, hung by their breasts and tortured with fire, knives and a host of improvised devices; men were hung by their genitalia until the helpless organs were ripped from their bodies, all the while being subjected to the love of God with fire, knives and glowing-hot pokers. Men, women and children were dragged behind horses until they died in their agony, or were tied spread-eagle between four horses and ripped apart; children were tortured to death and then hung up as decorations in the city streets — all the while with a priest watching and sprinkling “holy water” on the devices of torture.
On the occasion of their marriage, King Henry II of France gave his wife an unusual gift. King Henry “. . . celebrated the coronation of his wife Catherine de Medici with a bonfire of heretics.” (A Brief History of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Peoples, p. 450.) Queen Catherine was obviously delighted with the spectacle, which is borne by her later obsession for punishing heretics, and because it was she who loosed Catholic mobs into the streets of Paris to hunt down their fellow Protestant Christians on St. Bartholomew’s Day (August 24) in 1572. As in the Netherlands, the scenes of mobs publicly raping, torturing, murdering and plundering filled the streets. By the end of the day it is estimated that 70,000 Huguenot men, women, children and babies lay raped, mutilated and dead in the streets. When the Vicar of Christ, Pope Gregory XIII, got word of this great massacre, he held an elaborate celebration, said High Mass, gave special blessings to the murderers, gave great honors to the one who plotted the deed, Queen Mother Catherine, and then ordered a medallion to be struck commemorating the event. (DeRosa, Vicars of Christ, p. 145)
St. Bartholomew’s Day was only a fraction of the murderous terror against the Protestants of France. Reinach records that at Caen, and many other towns, “. . . parents might be seen following the hurdles on which the bodies of their children were being drawn, to be hacked in pieces by the pupils of the Jesuits.” (Reinach, Orpheus, p. 366.) No wonder that Voltaire wrote about the Inquisitions: “You follow these scenes of absurdity and horror with pity; you find nothing like them among the Romans, the Greeks, or the old barbarians. They were the fruit of the most infamous superstitions which has ever degraded man… but you know that we have not long emerged from such darkness, and that not even yet is the light complete.” (Reinach, op.cit., p. 326.)
Perhaps one of the saddest of tragedies was the case of Lutheran Church founder, Martin Luther. When this Catholic priest successfully rebelled against the papacy, many Germans were encouraged to begin thinking for themselves in matters of religion. This freedom was encouraged by Luther until it included questioning his doctrines. During the Peasant’s War, Luther urged the nobility to have no mercy, and to track down heretics: “track them like dogs and kill these children of the devil” was Luther’s orders. Taking him at his word, the nobles and their armies butchered over one hundred thousand God-fearing men, women and children. Luther later boasted that “I, Martin Luther, slew all the peasants in the rebellion, for I said that they should be slain; all their blood is upon my head. But I cast it on the Lord God . .” (O’Brien, The Faith of Millions: the Credentials of the Catholic Religion, p. 29.) Right on Martin Luther! The impetus for religious murder can always be rightly laid on the head of God and his holy word!
And then there was Ireland.
In a letter from Rome, dated May, 1538, the following instructions were received: “His Holiness Paul III, now pope, and the council of the fathers, have lately found, in Rome a prophecy of one St. Lacerianus, an Irish bishop of Cashel, in which he saith that the Mother Church of Rome falleth, when in Ireland, the Catholic faith is overcome. Therefore, for the glory of the Mother Church, the honor of St. Peter, and your own security, suppress heresy, and his holiness’ enemies.” (Fox’s Book of Martyrs, pp. 300-301.) This letter began the great bloody murders of Protestant Christians in that most Catholic Christian of nations, Ireland.
The massacre had been secretly planned by the Catholic clergy for months prior to its unleashing on 23 October 1641, the date of the feast of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order. Throughout all Ireland “. . . every Protestant who fell in their [the Catholic’s] way was immediately murdered. No age, no sex, no condition, was spared.”
Countless Protestant children from one area were rounded up and attacked by a crowd, who hacked, stoned, and beat them to death. Their parents were hanged by their feet or hands from trees and tortured, or burned alive. In other towns, women and children were tied to trees, and vicious dogs were set loose on them, while cheering crowds watched. Some were tied to the tails of horses and dragged to death. Women were, of course, raped by the thousands, after which they were sexually mutilated. In one place Protestant women were stripped naked, and having their breasts cut off, were allowed to slowly bleed to death to the taunts of the Catholic crowds. Whole families were buried alive, while over their graves, others were skinned alive — while the Christian mobs who performed these deeds were granted a special indulgence by his holiness, the pope, which meant, according to Catholic doctrine, sending a group of murderers directly to heaven for killing their fellow Christians.
One Catholic priest a certain Father Mahoney, told his congregation “You have already killed 150,000 enemies . . . as your enemies confess in their writings. I think more heretics have been killed; would they had all been. It remains for you to slay all other heretics and expel them from the bounds of Ireland.” (Campbell, The Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse, p. 19.) With the murder of little unborn babies, cut from wombs and fed alive to dogs and pigs, while their mothers, still barely alive, were forced to watch, the pope was able to “sleep better, knowing the enemies of Christ” had been put down in Ireland! Of course, this horror was recompensed in kind when the rabid Protestant Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell, came to Ireland with his armies and killed untold thousands of Catholics, including burning terrified Catholic women and children alive inside their church during the siege of Drogheda.
Early seventeenth century Bohemia had a population of 4,000,000, eighty percent of which were Protestant. During the Thirty Years War, after the Hapsburg emperor Ferdinand II and his armies and the holy order of the Jesuits had done the work of Christ, only 800,000 people were left in all Bohemia and Hungary, all of whom were Catholic. Even worse, the war, which had started as a religious war in Bohemia, eventually drew in all the German states, and then Sweden and France, and in the end as many as twenty million men, women, children and suckling babes lay dead in the bosom of Christ!
And on and on and on it went. But hold on! God’s “love,” the kind about which we have been reading, is still alive!
When electronic voting machines re-elected George W. Bush for another term as president — not that I have any particular problem with computers running the country (they couldn’t be any worse than a politician) — they re-elected the same man who claims that God tells him what to do. You read right: President Bush talks to God, and God tells him what to do!
Jewish Expulsions
June 8, 2012
by Garry Marhsall
garry.marshall@t-online.de
There are 109 Locations whence Jews have been Expelled since AD 250
The records are out there in the history books. It just out of fashion to notice these things. If you do take notice you are liable to get abused for your pains. From some people it is a compliment. Here are two sources on the reasons:
YEAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PLACE
250 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –Carthage
415 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –Alexandria
554 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –Diocese of Clement (France)
561 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –Diocese of Uzzes (France)
612 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –Visigoth Spain
642 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –Visigoth Empire
855 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –Italy
876 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – — Sens
1012 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Mainz
1182 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – France
1182 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Germany
1276 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Upper Bavaria
1290 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – England
1306 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – France
1322 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – France (again)
1348 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Switzerland
1349 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Hielbronn (Germany)
1349 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Saxony
1349 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Hungary
1360 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Hungary
1370 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Belgium
1380 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Slovakia
1388 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Strasbourg
1394 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Germany
1394 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – France
1420 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Lyons
1421 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Austria
1424 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Fribourg
1424 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Zurich
1424 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Cologne
1432 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Savoy
1438 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Mainz
1439 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Augsburg
1442 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Netherlands
1444 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Netherlands
1446 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Bavaria
1453 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – France
1453 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Breslau
1454 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Wurzburg
1462 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Mainz
1483 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Mainz
1484 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Warsaw
1485 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Vincenza (Italy)
1492 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Spain
1492 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Italy
1495 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Lithuania
1496 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Naples
1496 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Portugal
1498 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Nuremberg
1498 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Navarre
1510 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Brandenberg
1510 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Prussia
1514 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Strasbourg
1515 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Genoa
1519 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Regensburg
1533 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Naples
1541 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Naples
1542 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Prague & Bohemia
1550 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Genoa
1551 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Bavaria
1555 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Pesaro
1557 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Prague
1559 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Austria
1561 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Prague
1567 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Wurzburg
1569 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Papal States
1571 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Brandenburg
1582 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Netherlands
1582 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Hungary
1593 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Brandenburg, Austria
1597 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Cremona, Pavia & Lodi
1614 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Frankfort
1615 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Worms
1619 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Kiev
1648 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Ukraine
1648 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Poland
1649 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Hamburg
1654 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Little Russia (Beylorus)
1656 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Lithuania
1669 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Oran (North Africa)
1669 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Vienna
1670 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Vienna
1712 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Sandomir
1727 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Russia
1738 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Wurtemburg
1740 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Little Russia (Beylorus)
1744 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Prague, Bohemia
1744 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Slovakia
1744 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Livonia
1745 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Moravia
1753 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Kovad (Lithuania)
1761 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Bordeaux
1772 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Deported to the Pale of Settlement (Poland/Russia)
1775 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Warsaw
1789 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Alsace
1804 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Villages in Russia
1808 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Villages & Countrysides (Russia)
1815 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – L™beck & Bremen
1815 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Franconia, Swabia & Bavaria
1820 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Bremen
1843 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Russian Border Austria & Prussia
1862 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Areas in the U.S. under General Grant’s Jurisdiction[1]
1866 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Galatz, Romania
1880s – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Russia
1891 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Moscow
1919 — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Bavaria (foreign born Jews)
1938-45 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Nazi Controlled Areas
1948 — – – – – – – – – – – – -Arab Countries