TBR News June 2. 2020

The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. June 2, 2020: Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the
election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not
the place to discuss it.

Comment for June 2, 2020:”President Trump vows to deploy the US military to quell the civil disorder on America’s streets
Earlier, he told state governors they must “dominate” protests and calls on law enforcement to get “much tougher”
George Floyd’s death has been declared a homicide following an official post-mortem examination
Several cities, including Minneapolis, Washington DC and New York, are under curfew on Monday night
The fired police officer who has been charged with murdering Floyd will face a court next week
Governor of Kentucky announces investigation after a man was killed when protesters and police exchanged gunfire in Louisville

The Table of Contents
• More than 50 Secret Service agents are injured in clashes outside the White House
• Additional National Guard troops sent to Washington
• Coming Apart at the Seams
• Trump has reached the ‘mad emperor’ stage, and it’s terrifying to behold
• Bishop ‘outraged’ over Trump’s church photo op during George Floyd protests
• Five police officers shot, wounded in U.S. protests
• George Floyd: Mapping US National Guard deployments
• Deadly police raid fuels call to end ‘no knock’ warrants
• The Defense Intelligence Agency Report of April 20, 1978
• The Encyclopedia of American Loons

More than 50 Secret Service agents are injured in clashes outside the White House
Rioters throw Molotov cocktails in DC while looters trash Gucci and Chanel stores in NYC on a sixth night of violence in cities across the US
June 1, 2020
Daily Mail/UK
Demonstrations from Washington DC to Los Angeles have swelled from peaceful protests – sparked by the death of a black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis police custody last Monday – into scenes of violence
National Guard troops have been deployed in at least 15 states and Washington DC
More than 4,100 people were arrested this weekend alone as the violence continued to escalate and cities enacted strict curfews
Protesters on Sunday set fires just mere feet from the White House, crowds raided high-end stores in New York and San Francisco and hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at police in Philadelphia
Police fired tear gas and stun grenades outside the White House late Sunday as fires were set in the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church and Lafayette Park in front of the White House
Protests have unfolded in at least 145 cities across the country over the past week as people gather in outrage over the horrifying death of George Floyd who was killed in police custody last week
The demonstrations have marked unparalleled civil unrest in the US that hasn’t been seen since the 1968 assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
Donald Trump spent Sunday berating his enemies on Twitter and demanding ‘law and order’ in Democratic-run cities but did not appear in public and opted against making a televised address to calm tensions
It has since emerged that Trump was rushed by Secret Service agents to a White House bunker on Friday night as hundreds of protesters gathered outside

Additional National Guard troops sent to Washington
June 1, 2020
BBC News
Hundreds of additional National Guard troops from five states are to be deployed to Washington DC to help authorities deal with civil unrest.
Around 800 more National Guard members have been requested to ensure there are “sufficient forces for protecting the city and maintaining peace this evening”, a defence official said.
The official said some of the forces may be equipped with lethal weapons “should the president decide to arm them”.
The forces would be tasked with safeguarding “monuments, the White House, property and generally helping the DC police and DC law enforcement respond to any threats on life”, the official added.
Washington’s entire National Guard, around 1,200 personnel, have already been activated.

Coming Apart at the Seams
It doesn’t have to be this way
June 1, 2020
by Scott Horton
AntiWar
America is burning. Quite literally. The most destructive riots in America in a very long time have hit more than two dozen cities, as opportunistic thieves and arsonists hijack massive peaceful protests and acts of peaceful civil disobedience sparked by the senseless murder of a man named George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25. The riots are a tragedy not just for those who have lost or been hurt – a few were even shot during a protest in Louisville, Kentucky on Friday – but for the protesters’ cause which is their righteous anger at unaccountable police violence running rampant through our society. The enemy is the state, but the rioters only make others feel grateful for the enemy’s protection. What is the sense in destroying the property and endangering the lives of innocent people? There is no sense in it, it’s mob-action stupidity and will almost certainly guarantee that the “great silent majority” of Americans continue to side with the “thin blue line” against them.
Even worse it provides the excuse for the further use of emergency tactics by police and could end up being cited to put the U.S. military on American streets. Already at least eight cities have declared curfews and almost one-third of American states have called out the national guard. The president has threatened to send in U.S. army forces as well. So much for limiting abusive police power.
And such limits are long overdue. Please go sign up for the afternoon email alert from the Free Thought Project site. You will see that every single day – virtually with no exceptions ever – Americans are killed by police. In a major proportion if not majority of these cases, the cops’ violence is obviously completely unwarranted. For example, Austin police murdered an innocent man just the other day. Note, as always, the local media spin on behalf of the cops against an innocent dead citizen, “officer-involved,” “shoot at.” There are thousands more.
Take the case of Breonna Taylor, a young, heroic EMT, slain in her own home by Louisville police on a paramilitary SWAT Team night raid on the wrong home, looking for evidence of supposed contraband violations by a man who had already been taken into custody in another location. For weeks the cops, in conspiracy with the compliant local news, smeared the innocent dead young woman as a “suspect” and her boyfriend as an attempted murderer of the heroic police. In fact, the boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, was the brave hero as well as innocent victim in the situation. These cops, pretending to be Navy SEAL Team 6 at war, did not announce their identities as police as they smashed down the door with a battering ram. Walker shot one officer in the leg. The cops then all opened fire, hitting Ms. Taylor 8 times, killing her.
Listen to the 911 call. After the cops apparently temporarily withdrew, Walker called the police for help, still unaware that it was the police who had committed the murder. Weeks later, after the story finally achieved wide publicity, the charges against Walker were dropped. Just another case of collateral damage in the tragedy-farce of the war on drugs.
It isn’t just the drug wars. America’s militarized war on guns is the same way. Even when not killed in paramilitary night raids like what happened to a young man named Duncan Lemp in Maryland last month, tens of thousands of Americans, maybe more, mostly poor and racial minorities, have been captured and locked in cages like animals not for using a firearm in any criminal way, but simply for having one when the state had commanded otherwise. Of course the alleged possible presence of firearms at a suspect’s location is the primary excuse for the use of deadly paramilitary teams in “no-knock” raids in the first place.
Another major problem beyond prohibition is the doctrine of “qualified immunity” for all law-enforcement officers, which after having been invented out of whole cloth by activist judges, has now evolved into an almost-blanket protection for murderous cops, serving as a license to kill and an always-get-out-of-jail-free card. For you to kill there must be no choice. For them it must only be “reasonable.” And reasonable means whatever they say. The suspect made a “furtive” movement! Blast him! He reached to pull up his sagging pants – “waistband!” Dead man. Two weeks paid vacation. Cops can even outright steal money from innocent people and the judges serve only as their accomplices. When they murder their own loved ones while off the clock, their partners only cover for them.
The same right-leaning patriots who are railing against police enforcement of the Covid lockdowns have got to ask themselves how they would feel if a cop did this to their father.
And what if it was almost certain they would all get away with it too?
In this case the cop who had his knee on Floyd’s neck, Derek Chauvin, has actually been fired and arrested, but only after the massive outcry, and almost certainly because of it. Even then, Chauvin, the cop seemingly most-responsible out of the three who were holding Floyd down, was only charged with little-old third-degree murder which carries a light sentence even if he’s convicted, which is unlikely anyway. The prosecutors had every incentive to “do something” like arrest him now to calm people down, but they also have every incentive to botch the case and let the killers all go free later on. In the charging documents the accusers themselves open up reasonable doubt in the form of autopsy results that say it was not damage to Floyd’s neck that killed him, indicating that it was the prone position of the victim as well as pressure to his back that made the difference instead. While far less than reasonable doubt, with the other men not charged, it’s almost certainly enough wiggle room for a cop to squeeze through.
The rest of America should try look past the stupidity and destruction of the riots in response to police violence and demand a serious change now. We need an end to all drug and gun prohibition, a permanent ban on all SWAT Team night raids, to shutdown the military’s 1033 and Homeland Security’s militarization of local police programs and federal militarized Joint-Task Forces, and most of all we need a massive new consensus to force the Supreme Court to overturn their made-up, Old World-style, qualified immunity doctrine. If government is above the law, then it is not law at all, only edicts of tyrannical men.
This is an emergency. These changes must be made immediately.
In the midst of all the virus, lockdown, police state and economic crises, take note, this society is in no position whatsoever to impose its “benevolent empire” on the rest of the world. We’re still a million miles from perfecting our own union. If it is to hold together at all, factions will need to do a better job learning to see things from others’ point of view. If no one can agree on what is to be done, let us then at least agree on what to stop. Roll back this government and let freedom reign instead. There’s no need to fight over our differences if we can be free to maintain them.

Trump has reached the ‘mad emperor’ stage, and it’s terrifying to behold
He incites violence from the safety of a bunker, then orders peaceful people tear-gassed for the sake of a surreal photo op
June 2, 2020
by Richard Wolffe
The Guardian
Writing from a Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King Jr famously told his anxious fellow clergymen that his non-violent protests would force those in power to negotiate for racial justice. “The time is always ripe to do right,” he wrote.
On an early summer evening, two generations later, Donald Trump walked out of the White House, where he’d been hiding in a bunker. Military police had just fired teargas and flash grenades at peaceful protesters to clear his path, so that he could wave a bible in front of a boarded church.
For Trump, the time is always ripe to throw kerosene on his own dumpster fire.
In the week since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers, Trump has watched and tweeted helplessly as the nation he pretends to lead has reached its breaking point. After decades of supposedly legal police beatings and murders, the protests have swept America’s cities more quickly than even coronavirus.
This is no coincidence of timing. In other crises, in other eras, there have been presidents who understood their most basic duty: to calm the violence and protect the people. In this crisis, however, we have a president who built his entire political career as a gold-painted tower to incite violence.
We were told, by Trump’s supporters four years ago, that we should have taken him seriously but not literally. As it happened, it was entirely appropriate to take him literally, as a serious threat to the rule of law.
During his 2016 campaign, he encouraged his supporters to assault protesters. “Knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, OK,” he said on the day of the Iowa caucuses. “I promise you I will pay for the legal fees.” Later in Las Vegas, he said the security guards were too gentle with another protester. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” he said.
Sure enough, a protester was sucker-punched on his way out of a rally the following month.
No wonder Trump was sued for incitement to riot by three protesters who were assaulted as they left one of his rallies in Kentucky. The case ultimately failed, but only after a judge ruled that Trump recklessly incited violence against an African-American woman by a crowd that included known members of hate groups.
So when he stood, as president, and told a crowd of police officers to be violent with arrested citizens, it wasn’t some weird joke or misstatement, no matter what his aides claimed afterwards. “When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see ’em thrown in, rough, I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’
“I have to tell you, you know, the laws are so horrendously stacked against us, because for years and years, they’ve been made to protect the criminal,” he added. “Totally made to protect the criminal. Not the officers. You do something wrong, you’re in more jeopardy than they are.”
Trump was happily inciting police violence a year after charges were dropped against several Baltimore officers who somehow allowed Freddie Gray to die of severe neck injuries in the back of their paddy wagon.
Then again, Trump took out a full-page ad calling for the death penalty for the five boys and young men wrongfully arrested as the Central Park Five in 1989. Just last year he refused to apologise for his racist incitement in that case.
Trump can no more end today’s violence than he can manage a pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 Americans, or create the jobs that will rescue more than 40 million unemployed.
Faced with a three-fold crisis of racial, health and economic disasters, we have a three-year-old in the Oval Office.
Our get-tough president started his day by telling the nation’s governors that the world was laughing at them – a recurring nightmare that he loves to project onto everyone else.
“You have to dominate or you’ll look like a bunch of jerks,” he declared, speaking as something of a world-class jerk. “You have to arrest and try people,” he said of the protesters that he called “terrorists”.
One of the Democratic governor-jerks decided to draw the line at Trump’s rhetoric. “I need to say that people are feeling real pain out there and we’ve got to have national leadership in calling for calm and making sure that we’re addressing the concerns of the legitimate peaceful protesters,” said JB Pritzker of Illinois, during a conference call between the president and state governors. “That will help us to bring order.”
“OK well thank you very much, JB,” our infant-in-chief reportedly responded. “I don’t like your rhetoric much either because I watched it with respect to the coronavirus, and I don’t like your rhetoric much either. I think you could’ve done a much better job, frankly.”
Yeah. And he probably smells too.
Later in the day, Trump demonstrated to the world that he had learned precisely nothing in his three and a half years in charge of the world’s most diverse nation.
“I am your president of law and order,” he said in the Rose Garden, as thousands of Americans protested against the nation’s agents of law and order. Trump said he would mobilise “all available federal resources, civilian and military, to stop the rioting and looting” to protect “your Second Amendment rights”.
If you’ve missed all the protesters seizing weapons from NRA members, you’re not alone. That last bit was a call to arms for every vigilante to escalate the violence. We have somehow devolved from dog whistle to foghorn politics.
There is no end of Republican arsonists who have happily torched their lifelong support for states’ rights and their diehard opposition to an all-powerful central government.
Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas tweeted that the protesters – he prefers to call them terrorists – should face combat troops on American streets. “Let’s see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st Airborne Division,” he wrote of the Screaming Eagles, who actually killed real fascists in the D-Day landings.
Never mind the actual law of the land that expressly prohibits the US military from domestic law enforcement, unless a state governor requests it.
This is a president that cannot decide if he’s serious about shooting looters and protesters or just warning that they might get accidentally shot. “It was spoken as a fact, not as a statement,” Trump helpfully explained on Friday, before spending the weekend threatening them with “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons”.
That was a day before he said his administration “will always stand against violence, mayhem and disorder”.
Confused? That’s the point of this endlessly corrupted story where the aggressor is a peace-loving victim, and the victim is a hateful aggressor.
When he wrote his legendary letter, King was sitting in jail after marching in defiance of a ban against anti-segregation protests. The man who is now a national icon was jailed just one month before the city’s police chief set fire hoses and dogs on children who were also defying the ban.
“More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will,” King wrote. “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
Trump has used his time in the White House far more effectively than anyone could have imagined. He ignored the dead and dying in Puerto Rico and brutalised the children at the border. He ignored the dead and dying in the pandemic and wants to brutalise the protesters in our cities.
In five months, the good people can end both his hateful words and their own appalling silence.

Bishop ‘outraged’ over Trump’s church photo op during George Floyd protests
The Rev Mariann Budde says the institution aligns itself with those seeking justice for Floyd’s death
June 2, 2020
by Mario Koran and Helen Sullivan
The Guardian
The Episcopal bishop of Washington DC has said she is “outraged” after officers used teargas to clear a crowd of peaceful protesters from near the White House to make way for Donald Trump.
Minutes after speaking in the Rose Garden about the importance of “law and order” to quell the unrest over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Trump walked across the street to St John’s Episcopal church, where every American president since James Madison has worshipped.
But not before police used teargas and force to clear the streets for Trump’s photo opportunity.
Once he arrived at St John’s, Trump held up a Bible that read “God is love”, while posing in front of the church’s sign.
The Right Rev Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, told the Washington Post: “I am the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and was not given even a courtesy call, that they would be clearing [the area] with tear gas so they could use one of our churches as a prop.”
Trump’s message is at odds with the values of love and tolerance espoused by the church, Budde said, before describing the president’s visit as an opportunity to use the church, and a Bible, as a “backdrop”.
“Let me be clear, the President just used a Bible, the most sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and one of the churches of my diocese, without permission, as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus,” she told CNN.
“We align ourselves with those seeking justice for the death of George Floyd and countless others. And I just can’t believe what my eyes have seen,” she added.
“I don’t want President Trump speaking for St John’s. We so dissociate ourselves from the messages of this president,” she told the Washington Post. “We hold the teachings of our sacred texts to be so, so grounding to our lives and everything we do, and it is about love of neighbor and sacrificial love and justice.”
Other religious leaders echoed her comments.
Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, Primate of the Episcopal church, accused the president of using the church and Bible for “partisan political purposes”. He added: “For the sake of George Floyd, for all who have wrongly suffered, and for the sake of us all, we need leaders to help us to be “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.”
Father Edward Beck, a Catholic priest, tweeted: ‘“Has the Bible ever been used in a more disingenuous and exploitative way?”
Trump’s televised walk to St Johns comes after the president was criticized for rushing to an underground bunker as protesters gathered outside the White House on Friday night. Trump spent nearly an hour in the bunker, which is typically reserved for wartime or terrorist attacks, according to accounts by unnamed officials.
Protests have rocked the capital for days, with regular demonstrations taking place outside the White House. While largely peaceful, there have been multiple clashes between police and demonstrators, and on Sunday night several fires broke out.

Five police officers shot, wounded in U.S. protests
June 2, 2020
by Jonathan Ernst and Brendan O’Brien
Reuters
WASHINGTON/MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) – At least five U.S. police officers were shot and wounded during violent protests over the death of a black man in police custody, police and media said, hours after President Donald Trump vowed to deploy the military if unrest did not stop.
Trump deepened outrage on Monday by posing at a church across from the White House clutching a Bible after law enforcement officers used teargas and rubber bullets to clear protesters.
The U.S. Secret Service, charged with protecting the president, on Tuesday closed down until further notice the streets around the White House, media reports said.
Demonstrators set fire to a strip mall in Los Angeles, looted stores in New York City and clashed with police in St Louis, Missouri, where four officers were taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
An emotional St. Louis police commissioner, John Hayden, said about 200 protesters were looting and hurling fireworks and rocks at officers.
“They had officers with gas poured on them. What is going on? How can this be? Mr Floyd was killed somewhere else and they are tearing up cities all across the country,” he told reporters.
A police officer was shot during protests in Las Vegas, police there said in a statement. Another officer was “involved in a shooting” in the same area, the police said. Officers were injured in clashes elsewhere, including one who was in critical condition after being hit by a car in the Bronx, police said.
Trump, a Republican, has condemned the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American who died after a white policeman pinned his neck under a knee for nearly nine minutes in Minneapolis on May 25, and has promised justice.
But, with marches and rallies for racial equality and against police brutality having turned violent late each day in the last week, he said rightful protests could not be drowned out by an “angry mob.”
“If a city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” Trump said.
Floyd’s death has reignited simmering racial tensions in a politically divided country that has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, with African Americans accounting for a disproportionately high number of cases.
Democratic Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker on Tuesday urged patience, saying Americans could work through these tough issues. He pledged to take legal action if Trump carried out his military threat.
“We can bring down the temperature, but not when the president … is standing up calling for troops, and law and order, and domination,” he told MSNBC. “We will fight him, and we will take it to federal court.”
Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, in a separate MSNBC interview on Tuesday, said there were no signs of active duty U.S. military in the city overnight.
CRITICISM OF CHURCH VISIT
After his address, Trump posed for pictures with his daughter, Ivanka, and U.S. Attorney General William Barr at St. John’s Episcopal Church near the White House.
The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church diocese in Washington D. C., Michael Curry, was among those who criticized Trump’s use of the historic church for a photo opportunity.
“In so doing, he used a church building and the Holy Bible for partisan political purposes,” he said on Twitter. The church suffered minor fire damage during protests on Sunday night.
On Tuesday, Trump was scheduled to visit the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington.
In New York, television images showed crowds smashing windows and looting luxury stores along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan before the city’s 11 p.m. curfew. Mayor Bill de Blasio said the curfew would be moved to 8 p.m. on Tuesday.
In Hollywood, dozens of people were shown in television images looting a drug store. Windows were shattered at a nearby Starbucks and two restaurants.
AUTOPSIES
A second autopsy ordered by Floyd’s family and released on Monday found his death was homicide by “mechanical asphyxiation,” meaning physical force interfered with his oxygen supply. The report said three officers contributed to his death.
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner later released autopsy findings that also called Floyd’s death homicide by asphyxiation. The county report said Floyd suffered cardiopulmonary arrest while being restrained by police and that he had arteriosclerotic and hypertensive heart disease, fentanyl intoxication and recent methamphetamine use.
Derek Chauvin, the 44-year-old Minneapolis police officer who planted his knee on Floyd’s neck, has been charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Three other officers involved have not been charged.
Dozens of cities are under curfews not seen since riots after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The National Guard deployed in 23 states and Washington, D.C.
Reporting by Lisa Lambert, Andy Sullivan, Maria Caspani, Peter Szekely, Lucy Nicholson, David Shepardson, Michael Martina, Brendan O’Brien, Sharon Bernstein, Lisa Richwine, Dan Whitcomb, Aakriti Bhalla, Subrat Patnaik and Radhika Anilkumar; Writing by Dan Whitcomb and Nick Macfie; Editing by Timothy Heritage and Howard Goller

George Floyd: Mapping US National Guard deployments
Nearly 62,000 American reserve soldiers activated in two dozen states to potentially confront violent protests.
June 1, 2020
AlJazzera
Tensions spiked outside the White House on Sunday, the scene of days of demonstrations amid unrest across the United States against police killings of black people.
The entire Washington, DC National Guard – roughly 1,700 soldiers – was called in to help control the protests. The city of Boston also deployed troops on its streets.
Tens of thousands of reserve soldiers have been put at the ready across the United States.
“As of Sunday, National Guard Soldiers and Airmen were activated in 24 states and the District of Columbia in response to civil disturbances, bringing the total number of Guard members on duty in support of their governors to nearly 62,000,” the guard announced in a statement.
“State and local law enforcement agencies remain responsible for security. The National Guard personnel assigned to these missions are trained, equipped and prepared to assist law enforcement authorities with protecting lives and property of citizens in their state.”
Shattered storefronts
With cities wounded by days of violent unrest, the United States headed into a new week with neighbourhoods in shambles, urban streets on lockdown and shaken confidence about when leaders would find the answers to control the mayhem amid unrelenting raw emotion over police killings of black people.
Sunday capped a tumultuous weekend and month that saw city and state officials deploy thousands of National Guard soldiers, enact strict curfews and shut down mass transit systems. Even with those efforts, many demonstrations erupted into violence as protesters hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at police in Philadelphia, set a fire near the White House and were hit with tear gas and pepper spray in Austin and several other cities. Seven Boston police officers were hospitalised.
Sunday capped a tumultuous weekend and month that saw city and state officials deploy thousands of National Guard soldiers, enact strict curfews and shut down mass transit systems. Even with those efforts, many demonstrations erupted into violence as protesters hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at police in Philadelphia, set a fire near the White House and were hit with tear gas and pepper spray in Austin and several other cities. Seven Boston police officers were hospitalised.
In some cities, thieves smashed their way into stores and ran off with as much as they could carry, leaving shop owners – many of them just ramping up their business again after coronavirus pandemic lockdowns – to clean up their shattered storefronts.
In others, police tried to calm tensions by kneeling in solidarity with demonstrators, while still maintaining a strong presence for security.
At least 4,400 people have been arrested over days of protests, according to a tally compiled by The Associated Press. Arrests ranged from stealing and blocking highways to breaking curfew.

Time To Stop Messing Around and Strike at the Root of Police Violence
June 2, 2020
by Thomas Knapp
AntiWar
Protests quickly broke out nationwide following the May 25 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, which was caught on video and quickly went viral.
Yes, Chauvin has been arrested and charged with murder.
Yes, the usual “voices of reason” are issuing a new round of calls for “police reform,” just as they do after every police murder of an unarmed, nonviolent civilian.
No, murder charges and “police reform” aren’t going to fix the problem. Long hot summer, here we come.
It’s tempting to believe that protest marches, violent confrontations, looting, burning, and riots can change police behavior, or perhaps that they COULD change that behavior if applied frequently and vigorously enough.
That kind of widespread delusion is, as Thoreau put it, “a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root,” with predictable results.
If protest marches, violent confrontations, looting, burning, and riots followed every police murder of an unarmed, nonviolent civilian, we wouldn’t see fewer police murders of unarmed, nonviolent civilians. We’d just see bigger police overtime budgets.
The root of police violence isn’t racism, nor is it the presence of “a few bad apples” on police forces, nor is it the absence of sufficient safeguards such as body cameras and civilian review boards.
The root of police violence is the modern conception of policing itself: The creation of “police forces” as state institutions separate from the populace and dedicated to suppressing that populace on command.
“Police departments” as we know them were just coming into existence in England at the time the United States declared itself independent. They didn’t establish themselves in major American cities until the mid-19th century, or in smaller cities and towns until the 20th.
At one time, a handful of state and federal agencies, a sheriff in each county, and an ad hoc system of volunteer posses and local watchmen handled “law enforcement” in America.
Now more than 18,000 “law enforcement” organizations lord it over the American public, stealing their salaries from that public’s earnings, padding their budgets with literal highway robbery (“asset forfeiture” and so forth), and usually protected by “qualified immunity” when they kill.
If the goal is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” police as we know them are at best a failed experiment.
How do we wind that experiment down?
Step one would be ending qualified immunity and holding law enforcement personnel as responsible for their actions and as liable for the consequences of those actions as regular Americans are.
Steps two and three would be, respectively, standing down “police departments” entirely in favor of unpaid volunteers for most “law enforcement” duties, and ultimately abolishing the state itself.
Steps two and three, while inevitable in the long term, don’t seem very likely in the short term.
Step one, on the other hand, could be accomplished by Independence Day if the right incentives were applied.
Let’s give the politicians a choice: End qualified immunity or burn, baby, burn.

Deadly police raid fuels call to end ‘no knock’ warrants
June 1, 2020
by Dylan Lovan, Michael Kunzelman and Adrian Sainz
Associated Press
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — It’s the stuff of nightmares: Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend were in bed when a trio of armed men smashed through the front door. Gunfire erupted, killing the 26-year-old black woman.
The three men turned out to be plainclothes police detectives, one of whom was wounded in the chaos and violence that March night. Taylor’s death led to protests and a review of how Louisville police use “no knock” search warrants, which allow officers to enter a home without announcing their presence, often in drug cases to prevent suspects from getting rid of a stash.
Taylor’s name is one of those being chanted during nationwide protests decrying police killings of black people. The unrest began after the death of George Floyd, a black man who pleaded that he couldn’t breathe as a white Minneapolis police officer pinned him to the ground with a knee.
More than two months after Taylor’s death, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer announced last week that the police department’s use of no-knock warrants has been suspended indefinitely. Civil rights advocates are calling for a permanent ban, though Oregon and Florida are the only states that have outlawed such warrants.
Fischer changed the policy after an outcry from Taylor’s family and they sued the department and the three officers who served the warrant. The new policy requires Louisville’s police chief to sign off on all no-knock warrants before they go to a judge.
“These changes, and more to come … should signal that I hear the community and we will continue to make improvements anywhere that we can,” Fischer said.
The three narcotics detectives had a no-knock warrant when they busted down the door of Taylor’s apartment after midnight on March 13. They were investigating a drug dealer named Jamarcus Glover, who was arrested elsewhere the same day. Police said Glover was using Taylor’s address to receive packages they believed could be drugs. No drugs were found at her apartment.
Tom Wine, the city’s top criminal prosecutor, said he believes police knocked and announced their presence.
“Simply because the police get a no-knock warrant does not mean they can’t knock and announce,” Wine said last week.
But the lawsuit filed on behalf of Taylor’s mother says neighbors didn’t hear the plainclothes detectives knock or identify themselves as officers before they crashed into the apartment.
Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, told investigators that he thought he was being robbed or that it might be an ex-boyfriend of Taylor’s trying to get in. Walker told police he heard knocking but didn’t know who it was. He said he and Taylor were moving toward the door when it was knocked down, so he fired a shot that hit an officer.
Authorities had charged Walker with attempted murder but dropped the case last week. Wine said he wanted to let state and federal authorities complete their review of the shooting.
Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky has urged city leaders to ban no-knock warrants, saying they lead to the deaths of innocent people.
A 2014 ACLU report on police militarization detailed several botched SWAT team raids as no-knock warrants were served, including one that year in Georgia that ended with a toddler in a medically induced coma.
More recently, police in Montgomery County, Maryland, shot and killed 21-year-old Duncan Lemp in his family’s home while serving a no-knock search warrant. An eyewitness said Lemp was asleep in his bedroom when police opened fire from outside his house, according to an attorney for his family. Police said Lemp, who was white, was armed with a rifle and ignored commands.
Lemp family attorney Rene Sandler said police began using no-knock warrants decades ago as a tool in the nation’s war on drugs. They have become the “norm” for many kinds of criminal cases, including non-violent offenses, she said.
“It’s an abuse of authority across the board,” said Sandler, a former county prosecutor.
Law enforcement consultant Melvin Tucker, who’s been a police chief in four cities in the U.S. South, said the element of surprise afforded by no-knock warrants isn’t always justified.
“If you’re going in on a drug case where the quantity is so small that they could dispose of it by flushing it down the toilet, you probably shouldn’t be there with a search warrant in the first place. It’s not worthwhile,” said Tucker, who has been an expert witness in dozens of court cases.
The number of no-knock warrants served during SWAT team deployments has grown from approximately 1,500 annually in the early 1980s to about 45,000 in 2010, according to Eastern Kentucky University professor Peter Kraska, an expert in police militarization. He said police are adept at working around restrictions and tailoring paperwork to suit the standards of judges issuing search warrants.
“Banning no-knock warrants, if any jurisdiction can pull that off, is an important step,” Kraska said. “At the end of the day, banning them probably won’t accomplish much in the real world. But getting them off the books on one level is important.”
Kentucky has a “stand your ground” law that gives residents the right to use deadly force against an intruder. Those laws generally haven’t protected people who unwittingly shoot at officers entering their homes, but Walker’s dropped charges suggests the circumstances of Taylor’s death could be an “ideologically compatible situation for the left and right,” Kraska said.
“These different groups that normally would be at odds with one another all agree on the inappropriateness of no-knock warrants,” he added. “There’s been a lot more political agreement that this is problematic.”
___
Kunzelman reported from Silver Spring, Maryland. Sainz reported from Memphis, Tennessee.

The Defense Intelligence Agency Report of April 20, 1978
Note: The following report comes from the files of the late Robert T. Crowley, formerly Deputy Director of Clandestine Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Defense Intelligence Agency
Washington, DC 20301
20 APRIL 1978
SUBJECT: Soviet Intelligence Report on Assassination of President KENNEDY
TO: DIRECTOR
The following report has been prepared at your request in response to a Soviet report on the assassination of President John F. KENNEDY on 22 NOV 1963. The Soviet document (see Enclosure a) has been obtained from a fully reliable source and duly authenticated.
This report is an analysis of the Soviet document and is done on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis.
Material in this analysis has been taken from a number of sources indicated in the Appendix and is to be considered classified at the highest level. Nothing contained in this report may be disseminated to any individual or agency without prior written permission of the Director or his appointed deputy.
This agency does not assume, and cannot verify, the correctness of the material contained herein, although every reasonable effort has been made to do so. Any use of information contained in this report must be paraphrased and sources, either individual or agency, must not be credited.
/s/
VEDDER B. DRISCOLL Colonel, USA
1 Enclosure Chief, Soviet/Warsaw Pact Division 11 1 Appendix Directorate for Intelligence Research
Note: The Russian language file is not attached to this report and exists in official translation only
Enclosure A
The Soviet Intelligence Study (translation)
1. On 22 November, 1963, American President John Kennedy was shot and killed during a political motor trip through the Texas city of Dallas. The President was riding at the head of the procession in his official state car, seated in the right rear with his wife on his left side. Seated in front of him was the Governor of Texas and his wife, also on his left side. The vehicle was an open car without side or top protection of any kind. There was a pilot car in front, about a hundred feet, and the President’s car was flanked by motorcycle outriders located two to a side roughly parallel with the rear wheels of the State car.
2. The President and his party were driving at a speed of about 20 kilometers per hour through the built-up area of Dallas and greeted the many people lining the streets along his route. Security was supplied by the Secret Service supplemented by local police. There were two Secret Service agents in the front of the car. One was driving the car. Other agents were in cars following the Presidential vehicle and Dallas police on motorbikes were on both sides of the Presidential car but at the rear of it. There was a pilot car in front of the President’s car but it was at some distance away.
3. The course of the journey was almost past all the occupied area. The cars then turned sharply to the right and then again to the left to go to the motorway leading to a meeting hall where the President was to speak at a dinner. It is considered very bad security for such an official drive to decrease its speed or to make unnecessary turnings or stops. (Historical note: It was just this problem that led directly to positioning the Austrian Heir in front of waiting assassins at Sarajevo in 1914.) The route was set by agents of the Secret Service and published in the Dallas newspapers before the arrival of the President and his party.
4. After the last turning to the left, the cars passed a tall building on the right side of the street that was used as a warehouse for the storage of school books. This building was six stories tall and had a number of workers assigned to it. There were no official security people in this building, either on the roof or at the windows. Also, there were no security agents along the roadway on either side. All security agents were riding either in the Presidential car (two in the front) and in the following vehicles.
5. As the President’s state car passed this building, some shots were heard. The exact source and number of these shots was never entirely determined. Some observers thought that the shots came from above and behind while many more observers in the area stated that the shots came from the front and to the right of the car. There was a small area with a decorative building and some trees and bushes there and many saw unidentified people in this area. Many people standing in front of this area to watch the cars stated that shots came from behind them.
6. When the first shots were fired, the President was seen to lean forward and clutch at his throat with both hands. Immediately when this happened, the Secret Service driver of the President’s state car slowed down the vehicle until it was almost stopped. This was a direct breach of their training which stated that in such events where firing occurred, the driver of the President’s car would immediately drive away as quickly as possible.
7. At the same time as the first shot, there was a second one, this one from behind and above. This bullet struck the Governor, sitting in front of the President and slightly to his right, in the right upper shoulder. The bullet went downwards into the chest cavity, breaking ribs, struck his wrist and lodged in his left upper thigh. There were then two shots fired at the President’s car. The first shot initiated the action and this one appears to have hit the President in the throat. If so, it must have been fired from in front of the car, not behind it.
8. Right at that moment, there was one other shot. The shell obviously struck the President on the upper rear of the right side of his head, throwing him back and to the left. Also, at this time, blood, pieces of skull and brains could be seen flying to the left where the motorbike police guard was struck with this material on his right side and on the right side of his motorbike.
9. Immediately after this final shot, the driver then began to increase his speed and the cars all went at increasing speed down under the tunnel.
10. The fatally injured President and the seriously injured Governor were very quickly taken to a nearby hospital for treatment. The President was declared as dead and his body was removed, by force, to an aircraft and flown to Washington. The badly wounded Governor was treated at the hospital for his wounds and survived.
11. Within moments of the shots fired at the President, a Dallas motorcycle police officer ran into the book building and up to the second floor in the company of the manager of the establishment. Here, the policeman encountered a man later positively identified as one Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the book storage company. Oswald was drinking a Coca-Cola and appeared to be entirely calm and collected. (Later it was said that he had rushed down four flights of steps past other employees in a few moments after allegedly shooting the President. It is noted from the records that none of the other employees on the staircase ever saw Oswald passing them.) The elevator which moved freight and personnel between the floors was halted at the sixth floor and turned off so that it could not be recalled to persons below wishing to use it.
12. After meeting the police officer and apparently finishing his drink, Oswald went down to the main floor and left the building, unnoticed.
13. Oswald then went to his apartment by a public bus and on foot, dressed in new clothes and left the building. His apartment manager observed that a police car stopped in front of the building and blew its horn several times. She was unaware of the reason for this.
14. Oswald was then stated to have been halted by a local police officer whom he then was alleged to have shot dead. The only witness who positively identified Oswald as the shooter was considered to be unstable and unreliable.
15. Oswald then entered a motion picture house and was later arrested there by the police. He was beaten in the face by the police and taken into their custody.
16. When the captured Oswald was photographed by the reporters, he claimed that he was not guilty of shooting anyone and this was a position he maintained throughout his interrogations.
17. All records of his interrogation, carried out by the Dallas police and the Secret Service, were subsequently destroyed without a trace.
18. During the course of the interrogations, Oswald was repeatedly led up and down very crowded corridors of the police headquarters with no thought of security. This is an obvious breach of elementary security that was noted at the time by reporters. It now appears that Oswald’s killer was seen and photographed in the crowds in the building.
19. The American Marine defector, Lee Harvey Oswald, entered the Soviet Union in October of 1959. Initially, Oswald, who indicated he wanted to “defect” and reside in the Soviet Union, was the object of some suspicion by Soviet intelligence authorities. He was at first denied entrance, attempted a “suicide” attempt and only when he was more extensively interrogated by competent agents was it discovered that he was in possession of material that potentially had a great intelligence value.
20. Oswald, who as a U.S. Marine, was stationed at the Atsugi air field in Japan, had been connected with the Central Intelligence Agency’s U-2 intelligence-gathering aircraft program and was in possession of technical manuals and papers concerning these aircraft and their use in overflights of the Soviet Union.
21. The subject proved to be most cooperative and a technical analysis of his documentation indicated that he was certainly being truthful with Soviet authorities. In addition to the manuals, Oswald was able to supply Soviet authorities with a wealth of material, much of which was unknown and relatively current. As a direct result of analysis of the Oswald material, it became possible to intercept and shoot down a U2 aircraft flown by CIA employee Gary Powers.
22. On the basis of the quality of this material, Oswald was granted asylum in the Soviet Union and permitted to settle in Minsk under the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior. This was partially to reward him for his cooperation and also to remove him from the possible influence of American authorities at the Embassy in Moscow.
23. Oswald worked in a radio factory, was given a subsidized apartment in Minsk and kept under constant surveillance. He was very pro-Russian, learned to speak and read the language, albeit not with native fluency, and behaved himself well in his new surroundings.
24. Although Oswald was a known homosexual, he nevertheless expressed an interest in women as well and his several casual romantic affairs with both men and women were duly noted.
25. Oswald became involved with Marina Nikolaevna Prusakova, the niece of a Minsk-based intelligence official. He wished to marry this woman who was attractive but cold and ambitious. She wished to leave the Soviet Union and emigrate to the United States for purely economic reasons. Since his marrying a Soviet citizen under his circumstances was often most difficult, Oswald began to speak more and more confidentially with his intelligence contacts in Minsk. He finally revealed that he was an agent for the United States Office of Naval Intelligence and had been recruited by them to act as a conduit between their office and Soviet intelligence.
26. The official material on the CIA operations was entirely authentic and had been supplied to Oswald by his controllers at the ONI. It was apparent, and Oswald repeatedly stated, that the CIA was completely unaware of the removal of sensitive documents from their offices. This removal, Oswald stated, was effected by the ONI personnel stationed at Atsugi air field. Oswald was unaware of the reasons for this operation but had been repeatedly assured that the mission was considered of great national importance and that if he proved to be successful, he would be afforded additional and profitable future employment. It appears that Oswald was considered to be a one time operative and was expendable. His purpose was to establish a reputation as a pro-Russian individual who would then “defect” to the Soviet Union and pass over the U2 material. He did not seem to realize at the time he “defected” that once he had been permitted to live in the Soviet Union, on an official governmental subsidy, returning to America would be very difficult, if not impossible.
27. Now, with his romantic, and very impractical, attachment to Prusakova, he was being pressured by her to marry and then take her with him back to the United States. Oswald was informed that this was not a possible option for him. He became very emotional and difficult to deal with but finally made the suggestion that if he were allowed to marry and return to the United States, he would agree to work in reality for the Soviet Union.
28. After referring this matter to higher authority, it was decided to accede to Oswald’s requests, especially since he was of no further use to Soviet intelligence and might well be of some service while resident in America.
29. Marriage was permitted and his return was expedited both by the Soviet authorities and the Americans who were informed, via a letter from Oswald, that he was in possession of intelligence material of value to them. This valuable information was duly given to him, a reversal to be noted on his original mission!
30. Oswald was given prepared information of such a nature as to impress American intelligence and permitted to contact intelligence officials in the American Embassy in Moscow. He was then permitted by the Americans to return to the United States with his new wife.
31. In America, Oswald no longer worked with the ONI because he was not able to further assist them. Besides, he was viewed as dangerous because he had knowledge of the ONI theft and use of CIA documents.
32. While in America, Oswald then worked as a paid informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had contacted him when he returned and requested his assistance with domestic surveillance against pro-Soviet groups. He was assigned, in New Orleans, the task of infiltrating the anti-Castro groups which were nominally under the control of the CIA.
33. It is noted that there exists a very strong rivalry between the FBI and the CIA. The former is nominally in charge of domestic counterintelligence and the latter in charge of foreign intelligence. They have been fighting for power ever since the CIA was first formed in 1947. Oswald has stated that the FBI was aware of this ONI-sponsored defection with stolen CIA U2 documents but this is not a proven matter.
34. Later, Oswald was transferred to Dallas, Texas, by the FBI and he then secured a position at a firm which dealt in very secret photographic matters. Here, he was able to supply both the FBI and Soviet intelligence with identical data.
35. FBI reports, kept secret, show clearly that Oswald was paid by the FBI as an informant.
36. In New Orleans, a center of Cuban insurgent activity, Oswald was in direct contact with FBI officials and worked for a Guy Bannister, former FBI agent. Oswald infiltrated the ranks of Cuban insurgents and reported his findings to the FBI .
37. At that time, the FBI was involved, at the request of the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, in watching the clandestine activities of the CIA and its Alpha and Omega special commando groups, some of whom were in training in the New Orleans area.
38. The American President was greatly concerned that continued and fully unauthorized para-military action against Cuba might upset the balance he had achieved in seeking peace with the Soviet Union.
39. It is knows from informants inside the CIA and also from Cuban double agents that the CIA was, in conjunction with the highest American military leadership, to force an American invasion of Cuba.
40. These joint plans, which consisted of acts of extreme provocation by American units against American property and citizens, were unknown to Kennedy.
41. When the American President discovered that Cuban insurgents, under the control of the CIA and with the support of the highest military leadership, were embarked on a course of launching military action against American naval bases under the cover of being Cuban regular troops, he at once ordered a halt.
42. Kennedy also informed Premier Khruschev directly of these planned actions and assured him that he had prevented them from being executed. The Premier expressed his gratitude and hoped that Kennedy would be successful in enforcing his will and preventing any other such adventures.
43. The American President, unsure of the depth of his influence with the leadership of the American military and the CIA, ordered the FBI to investigate these matters and ordered the Director, Hoover, to report directly to him on his findings.
44. Oswald was a part of the FBI surveillance of the Cuban insurgents in the New Orleans area.
45. Oswald made a number of public appearances passing out pro-Castro leaflets in order to ingratiate himself with the insurgents.
46. At the FBI request, a local television station filmed Oswald passing out these leaflets and had this film shown on local stations in order to enhance Oswald’s image. When his mission was finished, Oswald was then sent to Dallas to observe and penetrate the Russian colony there.
47. Two days after the shooting of the American President, the alleged assassin, Oswald was shot to death in the basement of the Dallas Police Department while he was being transferred to another jail. On the day of the assassination, November 22, FBI Chief Hoover notified the authorities in Dallas that Oswald should be given special security.
48. This killing was done in the presence of many armed police officers by a known criminal and associate of the American Mafia named Jack Rubenstein, or “Ruby” as he was also known. “Ruby” had a long past of criminal association with the Mafia in Chicago, Illinois, a major area of gangster control in America. “Ruby” had once worked for the famous Al Capone and then for Sam Giancana. This man was head of the Chicago mob at the time of the assassination.
49. “Ruby” was the owner of a drinking establishment in Dallas that specialized in dancing by naked women and was also a close friend of many police officers in Dallas. “Ruby” had been seen and photographed in the Dallas police department while Oswald was being interrogated. It should be noted here that suspect Oswald was very often taken by Dallas police out into the completely unguarded hallways of the building and in the presence of many persons unknown to the police. This is viewed as either an attempt to have Oswald killed or a very incompetent and stupid breach of basic security.
50. The timing by “Ruby” of his entrance into the guarded basement was far too convenient to be accidental. Also, the method of his shooting of Oswald showed a completely professional approach. “Ruby” stepped out from between two policeman holding a revolver down along his leg to avoid detection. As he stepped towards the suspect, “Ruby” raised his right hand with the revolver and fired upwards into Oswald’s body. The bullet severed major arteries and guaranteed Oswald’s death.
51. Although “Ruby” subsequently pretended to be mentally disturbed, his actions showed professional calculation to a degree. This play-acting was continued into his trial and afterwards. “Ruby” was convicted of the murder of Oswald and sentenced to death. He died in prison of cancer in January of 1967 after an appeal from his sentence had been granted by the court judge. Information indicates that he was given a fatal injection.
52. “Ruby’s” statements should not be confused with his actions. He was a professional criminal, had excellent connections with the Dallas police, had been involved with activities in Cuba and gun running into that country and some evidence has been produced to show that he and Oswald had knowledge of each other.
53. Like Oswald, “Ruby” too had homosexual activities and one public witness firmly placed Oswald in “Ruby’s” club prior to the assassination.
54. In view of later developments and disclosures, the use of a Chicago killer with local Mafia connections to kill Oswald is not surprising. Stories of “Ruby’s” eccentricity were highlighted by American authorities to make it appear that he, like suspect Oswald, was an eccentric, single individual who acted out of emotion and not under orders.
55. As in the case of Oswald, there was never a proven motive for “Ruby’s” acts. Oswald had no reason whatsoever to shoot the President, had never committed any proven acts of violence. Although he was purported to have shot at a fascist General, it was badly presented and in all probability was a “red herring” to “prove” Oswald’s desire to shoot people. “Ruby”, a professional criminal with a long record of violence, claimed he shot Oswald to “protect” the President’s wife from testifying. This statement appears to be an obvious part of “Ruby’s” attempt to defend himself by claiming to be mad.
56. It is obvious that “Ruby” killed Oswald to silence him. Since Oswald was not involved in the killing of the President, continued interrogation of him leading to a court trial would have very strongly exposed the weakness of the American government’s attempt to blame him for the crime.
57. Silencing Oswald promptly was a matter of serious importance for the actual killers.
59. Rubenstein was not a man of intelligence but was a devoted member of the American criminal network.
60. Just prior to the assassination, Rubenstein was in a meeting with representatives of the criminal network and was told that he was to be held in readiness to kill someone who might be in Dallas police custody.
61. It was felt that Rubenstein was a well-connected man with the Dallas police department and that he might have access to the building without a challenge. He was also informed that he could be considered a “great hero” in the eyes of the American public. Rubenstein was a man of little self-worth and this approach strongly influenced him in his future actions.
62. A very large number of published books about the assassination have appeared since the year 1963. Most of these books are worthless from a historical point of view. They represent the views of obsessed people and twist information only to suit the author’s beliefs.
63. There are three main ideas written about:
a. The American gangsters killed the President because his brother, the American Attorney General, was persecuting them;
b. Cuban refugees felt that Mr. Kennedy had deserted their cause of ousting Cuban chief of state Castro;
c. Various American power groups such as the capitalist business owners, fascist political groups, racists, internal and external intelligence organization either singly or in combination are identified.
64. American officials have not only made no effort to silence these writers but in many cases have encouraged them. The government feels, as numerous confidential reports indicate, that the more lunatic books appear, the better. This way, the real truth is so concealed as to be impenetrable.
65. It was initially of great concern to our government that individuals inside the American government were utilizing Oswald’s “Communist/Marxist” appearance to suggest that the assassination was of a Soviet origin.
66. In order to neutralize this very dangerous theme, immediately after the assassination, the Soviet Union fully cooperated with American investigating bodies and supplied material to them showing very clearly that Oswald was not carrying out any Soviet designs.
67. Also, false defectors were used to convince the Americans that Oswald was considered a lunatic by the Soviet Union, and had not been connected with the Soviet intelligence apparatus in any way. He was, of course, connected but it was imperative to disassociate the Soviet Union with the theory that Oswald, an American intelligence operative, had been in collusion with them concerning the assassination.
68. The false defector Nosenko, a provable member of Soviet intelligence, was given a scenario that matched so closely the personal attitudes of Mr. Hoover of the FBI that this scenario was then officially supported by Mr. Hoover and his bureau.
69. Angleton of the CIA at once suspected Nosenko’s real mission and subjected him to intense interrogation but finally, Nosenko has been accepted as a legitimate defector with valuable information on Oswald.
70. Because of this business, Angleton was forced to resign his post as chief of counter intelligence. This has been considered a most fortunate byproduct of the controversy.
71. The FBI has accepted the legitimacy of Nosenko and his material precisely because it suited them to do so. It was also later the official position of the CIA because the issue dealt specifically with the involvement, or non-involvement, between Oswald, a private party, and the organs of Soviet intelligence. Since there was no mention of Oswald’s connection with American intelligence, this was of great importance to both agencies.
72. It is known now that the American gangsters had very close relations with the Central Intelligence Agency. This relationship began during the war when the American OSS made connections with the Sicilian members of the American gangs in order to assist them against the fascists. The man who performed this liaison was Angleton, later head of counter intelligence for the CIA. These gangster contacts were later utilized by the CIA for its own ends.
73. American foreign policy was, and still is, firmly in the hands of the CIA. It alone makes determinations as to which nation is to be favored and which is to be punished. No nation is permitted to be a neutral; all have to be either in the US camp or are its enemies. Most often, the wishes of American business are paramount in the determination as to which nation will receive US support and which will not only be denied this support but attacked. It is the American CIA and not the Soviet Union, that had divided the world into two warring camps.
74. American, and most especially the CIA, attempts to destabilize a Communist state i.e., Cuba, could not be permitted by the Soviet leadership. Castro was a most valuable client in that he provided an excellent base of intelligence and political operations in the American hemisphere. As the CIA had been setting up its own ring of hostile states surrounding the Soviet Union, Cuba was viewed officially as a completely legitimate area of political expansion. Threats of invasion and physical actions against Cuba were viewed by the Chairman as threats against the Soviet Union itself.” “It is an absolute fact that both the American President, Kennedy, and his brother, the American Attorney General, were especially active in a sexual sense. A number of sexually explicit pictures of the President engaging in sexual acts are in the official files as are several pictures of the Attorney General, taken while on a visit to Moscow in 1961.
75. The President was aware that a number of these pictures were in Soviet hands and acted accordingly. In addition to a regular parade of whores into the White House, it was also reliably reported from several sources that the President was a heavy user of various kinds of illegal narcotics. It is also known from medical reports that the President suffered from a chronic venereal disease for which he was receiving medical treatment.
76. In order to better cooperate with the Soviet Union, President Kennedy used to regularly keep in close, private communication with the Chairman. These contacts were kept private to prevent negative influences from the State Department and most certainly from the Central Intelligence Agency. The President said several times that he did not trust this agency who was bent on stirring up a war between the two nations. Through this personal contact, many matters that might have escalated due to the interference of others were peacefully settled.77. The pseudo-defector, Oswald, became then important to the furtherance of the plan to kill the American president. He had strong connections with the Soviet Union; he had married a Soviet citizen; he had been noticed in public advocating support of Fidel Castro. His position in a tall building overlooking the parade route was a stroke of great good fortune to the plotters.
78. Oswald was then reported by the CIA to have gone to Mexico City on 26 September, 1963 and while there, drew considerable attention to his presence in both the Soviet and Cuban embassies. What Oswald might have done in the Cuban embassy is not known for certain but there is no record of his ever having visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico at that time. CIA physical descriptions as well as photographs show that Oswald was not the man depicted. This appears strongly to be a poor attempt on the part of the CIA to embroil both the Soviet Union and Cuba in their affairs.” “It is understood that the actual assassins were subsequently removed in a wet action but that one apparently escaped and has been the object of intense searches in France and Italy by elements of the CIA.
79 From this brief study, it may be seen that the American President was certainly killed by orders of high officials in the CIA, working in close conjunction with very high American military leaders. It was the CIA belief that Kennedy was not only circumventing their own mapped-out destruction of Fidel Castro by assassination and invasion but actively engaged in contacts with the Soviet Union to betray the CIA actions.
80. The American military leaders (known as the Joint Chiefs of Staff) were also determined upon the same goals, hence both of them worked together to ensure the removal of a President who acted against their best interests and to have him replaced with a weaker man whom they believed they could better control.
81. President Johnson, Kennedy’s successor, was very much under the control of the military and CIA during his term in office and permitted an enormous escalation in Southeast Asia. The destruction of the Communist movement in that area was of paramount importance to both groups.

The Defense Intelligence Agency Report
1. The Soviet analysis of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy contains material gleaned from American sources both official and unofficial i.e., media coverage, etc. Some of this material obviously stems from sources located inside various agencies. To date, none of these have been identified.
2. It has long been a concern of the leadership and intelligence organs of the Soviet Union that blame has been attached to them for this assassination.
3. The Soviets felt in the days immediately following the assassination that a plot was being developed, or had been developed prior to the act, that would serve to blame either the Cuban government or themselves for this action.
4. It was felt that the identification of Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole assassin was intended to implicate the Soviet Union in the act because Oswald had been a very vocal supporter of the Marxist theory; had defected to the Soviet Union and had married a Soviet woman with intelligence connections.
5. The strongly stated official policy of putting Oswald forward as the sole assassin greatly alarmed the Soviet Union which had already weathered the very serious Cuban Missile Crisis, a situation that came perilously close to an atomic war between the two powers.
6. The Soviet leadership had established a strong , albeit secret, connection between themselves and the American President but with his death, this clandestine communications channel was closed.
7. The Soviets promptly dispatched a number of senior intelligence personnel and files to Washington in order to reassure President Johnson and his top aides that the Soviet Union had no hand in the assassination.
8. Johnson himself was a badly frightened man who, having witnessed the murder of his predecessor, lived in constant dread of a similar attack on himself. He also had no stomach for the kind of international brinkmanship as practiced by Kennedy and immediately assured the Soviets that he did not believe they had anything to do with the killing.
9. The Soviets had learned of the plans formulated by the JCS to create a reason for military intervention in Cuba in 1962-63. They believed then, and still believe, that the killing of Kennedy was done partially to create a causus belli insofar as the Soviet Union itself was concerned.
10. Their information indicated that while Kennedy had not permitted these provocations to influence his policy, such could not be said for Johnson. He was viewed as an untried individual and best reassured.
11. One of the strongest supporters of the Soviet point of view was FBI Director Hoover.
12. Because of the involvement of his agency with Oswald, it was in Hoover’s best interests to absolve the Soviets of any complicity and maintain the accepted fiction of Oswald as a deranged person working without assistance of any kind and certainly without any connection to any U.S. agency.
13. It has been alleged that Oswald had also worked for the CIA. This has not been proven although it should be noted that Oswald was in direct contact with CIA agents, associated with the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, while in Russia and had been debriefed by that agency after his return from Russia.
14. Oswald also was intimately connected with de Mohrenschildt who was certainly known to be a CIA operative. Oswald’s connections with this man were such as to guarantee that the CIA was aware of Oswald’s movements throughout his residence in the Dallas area.
15. When Oswald secured employment at the Texas Book Depository, de Mohrenschildt, according to an FBI report, reported this to the CIA.
16. The existence and location of Oswald’s mail order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle in the garage of his wife’s friend, Ruth Paine, was also known to de Mohrenschildt at least one week prior to the assassination.
17. The background and development of the Presidential trip as hereinafter set forth is in parallel with the Soviet report.
18. The Dallas trip had been in train since late July of 1963. Texas was considered to be a key state in the upcoming 1964 Presidential elections. It was the disqualification of over 100,000 Texas votes, in conjunction with the known fraudulent voting in Chicago in 1960 that gave President Kennedy and his associates a slim margin of victory.
19. The actual route of Kennedy’s drive through downtown Dallas was made known to the local press on Tuesday, November 19. The sharp right turn from Main St. onto Houston and then the equally sharp left turn onto Elm was the only way to get to the on ramp to the Stemmons Freeway. A traffic divider on Main St. precluded the motorcade from taking the direct route, from Main St. across Houston and thence right to the Stemmons Freeway exit.
20. Just after the President’s car passed the Texas Book Depository, a number of shots were fired. There were a total of three shots fired at the President. The first shot came from the right front, hitting him in the neck. This projectile did not exit the body. The immediate reaction by the President was to clutch at his neck and say, “I have been hit!” He was unable to move himself into any kind of a defensive posture because he was wearing a restrictive body brace.
21. The second shot came from above and behind the Presidential car, the bullet striking Texas Governor Connally in the upper right shoulder, passing through his chest and exiting sharply downwards into his left thigh.
22. The third, and fatal shot, was also fired at the President from the right front and from a position slightly above the car. This bullet, which was fired from a .223 weapon, struck the President above the right ear, passed through the right rear quadrant of his head and exited towards the left. Pieces of the President’s skull and a large quantity of brain matter was blasted out and to the left of the car. Much of this matter struck a Dallas police motorcycle outrider positioned to the left rear of the Presidential car.
23. Photographic evidence indicates that the driver, SA Greer, slowed down the vehicle when shots were heard, in direct contravention of standing Secret Service regulations.
24. Reports that the initial hit on the President came from above and behind are false and misleading. Given the position of the vehicle at the time of impact and the altitude of the alleged shooter, a bullet striking the back of the President’s neck would have exited sharply downward as did the projectile fired at Governor Connally purportedly from the same shooter located in the same area of the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository.
25. The projectile that killed the President was filled with mercury. When such a projectile enters a body, the sudden decrease in velocity causes the mercury to literally explode the shell. This type of projectile is designed to practically guarantee the death of the target and is a method in extensive use by European assassination teams.
26. The disappearance of Kennedy’s brain and related post mortem material from the U.S. National Archives was motivated by an official desire not to permit further testing which would certainly show the presence of mercury in the brain matter.
27. Official statements that the fatal shot was fired from above and behind are totally incorrect and intended to mislead. Such a shot would have blasted the brain and blood matter forward and not to the left rear. Also, photographic evidence indicates that after the fatal shot, the President was hurled towards his left, against his wife who was seated to his immediate left.
28. The so-called “magic bullet” theory, i.e., a relatively pristine, fired, Western Cartridge 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano projectile produced in evidence, is obviously an official attempt to justify its own thesis. This theory, that a projectile from above and behind struck the President in the upper back, swung up, exited his throat, gained altitude and then angled downwards through the body of Governor Connally, striking bone and passing through muscle mass and emerging in almost undamaged condition is a complete impossibility. The bullet in question was obtained by firing the alleged assassination weapon into a container of water.
29. Three other such projectiles were recovered in similar undamaged condition. One of these was produced for official inspection and was claimed to have been found on Governor Connally’s stretcher at Parkland Hospital. As a goodly portion of the projectile was still in the Governor’s body (where much of it remained until his death some years later), this piece of purported evidence should be considered as nothing more than an official “plant.”
30. Soviet commentary on Oswald is basically verified from both KGB and CIA sources. Oswald, however, was not being run by the ONI (note here that the USMC is under the control of the USN and that ONI would be the appropriate agency of initial contact) but instead by the CIA. Their personnel files indicate that Oswald was initially recruited by ONI for possible penetration of the very pervasive Japanese communist intelligence organization. Atsugi base was a very important target for these spies.
31. Because of a shift in their policy, the CIA found it expedient to exploit their U2 surveillance of the Soviet Union as a political rather than an intelligence operation.
32. The Eisenhower administration’s interest in the possibility of achieving a rapprochement with the Soviet Government created a situation that might have proven disastrous to the CIA continued functions.
33. Internal CIA documents show very clearly that as their very existence was dependent on a continuation of the Cold War, any diminution of East-West hostility could easily lead to their down-sizing and, more important, to their loss of influence over the office of the President and also of U.S. foreign policy.
34. It was proposed, according to top level CIA reports, to somehow use their own U2 flights to create an increase in tension that could lead to a frustration of any detente that might result from a lessening of international tensions.
35. It was initially thought that certain compromising documents could be prepared, sent to the CIA base at Atsugi, Japan, and then somehow leaked to the aggressive Japanese communists. However, it was subsequently decided that there was a strong possibility that the documents might not be forwarded to Soviet Russia and kept in Japan for use in the anti-West/anti-war domestic campaigns.
36. CIA personnel stationed at Atsugi conceived a plan to then arrange for select documents to be given directly to the Soviets via an American defector. It was at this point that Oswald’s name was brought up by an ONI man. A CIA evaluation of Oswald convinced them that he would be the perfect defector. Psychological profiles of Oswald convinced them that he was clever, pro-Marxist, a person of low self-esteem as manifested in his chronic anti-social attitudes coupled with homosexual behavior.
37. As Oswald had developed a strong friendship with his ONI control, it was decided to allow him to think that he was working for the U.S. Navy rather than the CIA. (Note: This has always been a hallmark of CIA clandestine operations. Source agents are always considered expendable by that agency and their record of abandonment of these non-CIA agents if felt necessary is well-known to the intelligence community.)
38. Oswald was told that he was performing a “special, vitally important” mission for the ONI and would be given a very good paying official position when he “successfully returned” from the Soviet Union. CIA and ONI reports indicate that he was never expected to return to the United States after he had fulfilled his function of passing the desired documentation to the Soviet intelligence community.
39. The subsequent interception and shooting down by the Soviets of a U2 piloted by CIA agent Gary F. Powers using the leaked CIA material was sufficient to wreck the projected Eisenhower/Khrushchev meetings and harden the Soviet leader’s attitude towards the West.
40. It should be noted that the Powers U2 was equipped with a delayed action self-destruct device, designed to be activated by the pilot upon bailing out. This device was intended to destroy any classified surveillance material on the aircraft. In the Powers aircraft, the device was later disclosed to have been altered to explode the moment the pilot activated it. This would have resulted in the destruction of both the pilot and his aircraft.
41. After his return to the United States, Oswald was a marked man. He was a potential danger to the CIA, whose unredacted personnel reports indicate that Oswald was considered to be unstable, hostile, intelligent and very frustrated. He was, in short, a loose cannon.
42. While resident in Dallas, Oswald became acquainted with George S. DeMohrenschildt, a CIA operative. DeMohrenschildt, a Balt, had family connections both in Poland and Russia, had worked for the German Ausland Abwehr and later the SD during the Second World War. He “befriended” Oswald and eventually an intimate physical relationship developed between the two men. This infuriated Marina Oswald and their already strained relationship grew even worse. She had come to America expecting great financial rewards and instead found poverty, two children and a sexually cold husband.
43. It was De Mohrenschildt’s responsibility to watch Oswald, to establish a strong inter-personal relationship with him and to learn what information, if any, Oswald might possess that could damage the CIA if it became known.
44. The CIAs subsequent use of Oswald as a pawn in the assassination was a direct result of this concern.
45. The connections of Angleton, Chief of Counter Intelligence for the CIA with elements of the mob are well known in intelligence circles. Angleton worked closely with the Sicilian and Naples mobs in 1944 onwards as part of his duties for the OSS.
46. The connections of Robert Crowley, another senior CIA official, with elements of the Chicago mob are also well known in intelligence circles.
47. The attempts of the CIA and the JCS to remove Castro by assassination are also part of the official record. These assassination plots, called RIFLE show the connections between the CIA and the Chicago branch of the Mafia.
48. This Mafia organization was paid nearly a quarter million dollars to effect the killing of Castro but apparently kept the money and did nothing.
49. Subsequent to the assassination, the CIA put out the cover story that Castro had planned the act in retaliation for the attempts on his life. This is not substantiated either from US or Soviet sources.
50. While the American Mafia had numerous reasons for wishing the removal of the President and, especially, his brother the Attorney General, it does not appear that they were participants in the assassination.
51. It is evident that contact was made between the Chicago Mafia and its counterpart in Sicily in an effort to locate putative assassins.
52. French intelligence sources have indicated that a recruitment was made among members of the Corsican Mafia in Marseilles in mid-1963.
53. French intelligence sources have also indicated that they informed U.S. authorities in the American Embassy on two occasions about the recruitment of French underworld operatives for a political assassination in the United States.
54. It is not known if these reports were accepted at the Embassy or passed to Washington.
55. In the event, the Corsicans were sent to Canada where they blended in more easily with the French-speaking Quebec population.
56. Although the Chicago Mafia did not supply the actual assassins, they did provide the services of one of their lesser members, Jack “Ruby” Rubinstein, a small-time mob enforcer, in the event that Oswald was taken alive.
57. The use of Jack Ruby to kill Oswald has been explained by the official reports as an aberrant act on the part of an emotional man under the influence of drugs. The Warren Commission carefully overlooked Ruby’s well-known ties to the Chicago mob as well as his connections with mob elements in Cuba.
58. Ruby’s early Chicago connections with the mob are certainly well documented in Chicago police files. This material was not used nor referred to in the Warren Report.
59. Ruby’s close connection with many members of the Dallas police infrastructure coupled with a very strong motivation to remove Oswald prior to any appointment of an attorney to represent him or any possible revelations Oswald might make about his probably knowledge of the actual assassins made Ruby an excellent agent of choice. If Oswald had gained the relative security of the County Jail and lawyers has been appointed for him, it would have proven much more difficult to remove him.
60. The Warren Commission was most particularly alarmed by attempts on the part of New York attorney Mark Lane, to present a defense for the dead Oswald before the Commission. Lane was refused this request. A written comment by Chief Justice Earl Warren to CIA Director Allan Dulles was that “people like Lane should never be permitted to air their radical views…at least not before this Commission…”
61. Ruby had been advised by his Chicago mob connections, as well as by others involved in the assassination, that his killing of Oswald would “make him a great hero” in the eyes of the American public and that he “could never be tried or convicted” in any American court of law.
62. Ruby, who had personal identity problems, accepted and strongly embraced this concept and was shocked to find that he was to be tried on a capital charge. Never very stable, Ruby began to disintegrate while in custody and mixed fact and fiction in a way as to convince possible assassins that he was not only incompetent but would not reveal his small knowledge of the motives behind the removal of Oswald.
63. In the presence of Chief Justice Warren, Ruby strongly intimated that he had additional information to disclose and wanted to go to the safety of Washington but Warren abruptly declared that he was not interested in hearing any of it.
64. A polygraph given to Ruby concerning his denial of knowing Oswald and only attempting to kill him as a last minute impulse proved to be completely unsatisfactory and could not be used to support the Commission’s thesis.
65. During his final illness, while in Parkland Hospital, Ruby was under heavy sedation and kept well supervised to prevent any death bed confessions or inopportune chance remarks to hospital attendants. An unconfirmed report from a usually reliable source states that Ruby was given an injection of air with a syringe which produced an embolism that killed him. The official cause of Ruby’s death was a blood clot.
66. It was later alleged that Ruby had metastatic cancer of the brain and lungs which somehow had escaped any detection during his incarceration in Dallas. It was further alleged that this terminal cancer situation had existed for over a year without manifesting any serious symptoms to the Dallas medical authorities. This is viewed by non-governmental oncologists as highly unbelievable and it appears that Ruby’s fatal blood clot was the result of outside assistance.
67. Following the assassination, a number of persons died under what can only be termed mysterious circumstances. Also, the FBI seized a number of films and pictures taken by witnesses that were considered to be too sensitive to leave in private hands.
68. Statements by Dallas law enforcement personnel as well as similar statements by witnesses that there had been “several” men in the area of the railroad yard adjacent to the freeway and that these men had “Secret Service” identification created considerable confusion.
69. According to Secret Service records, the only Secret Service agents at the scene were in the motorcade itself and they had no agents in the railroad yard.
70. Witnesses and witness statements introduced before the Warren Commission were carefully vetted prior to introduction as evidence. The home movie of the assault was turned over to the FBI and a spliced version of it was released to the public. This doctored version showed Kennedy reacting in a way that was diametrically opposed to his actual reactions.
71. The concern of Soviet intelligence and government agencies about any possible connection between defector Oswald and themselves is entirely understandable. It was never seriously believed by any competent agency in the United States that the Soviet Union had any part in the assassination of Kennedy and also known that Oswald was a government agent, working for various agencies in his lifetime.
72. Because of the emotional attitudes in official Washington and indeed, throughout the entire nation immediately following the assassination, there was created a potentially dangerous international situation for the Soviets. Oswald was an identified defector with Marxist leanings. He was also believed to be a pro-Castro activist . That both his Marxist attitudes and his sympathies and actions on behalf of the Cuban dictator were simulations was not known to the Warren Commission at the time of their activities.
73. To bolster their eager efforts to convince the American authorities that their government had nothing to do with the assassination, men like Nosenko were utilized to further support this contention. It is not known whether Nosenko was acting on orders or whether he was permitted access to created documentation and given other deliberate disinformation by the KGB and allowed to defect. A great deal of internal concern was expressed upon the Nosenko’s purported defection by Soviet officials but this is viewed at merely an attempt, and a successful one, to lend substance to his importance.
74. James Angleton’s attitude towards Nosenko is a commentary on the duality of his nature. On one hand, Angleton was performing as Chief of Counter Intelligence and openly showed his zeal in searching for infiltrators and “moles” inside his agency while on the other hand, Angleton had very specific personal knowledge that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination.
75. The senior Kennedy, it is known, was heavily involved with rum running during the Prohibition era and had extensive mob connections. He had been closely associated with Al Capone, mob boss in Chicago and had a falling out with him over an allegedly hijacked liquor shipment. Capone, Chicago police records indicate, had threatened Kennedy’s life over this and Kennedy had to pay off the mob to nullify a murder contract.” “Anti-Castro Cuban militants viewed Kennedy’s abandonment of their cause with great anger and many members of these CIA-trained and led groups made calls for revenge on the President for his abandonment of their cause.” “Soviet attempts to gain a strategic foothold in close proximity to the United States and certainly well within missile range, was intolerable and had to be countered with equal force. At that time, the threat of major war was not only imminent but anticipated. In retrospect, all out nuclear warfare between the United States and the Soviet Union was only barely averted and only at the last minute.
76. The President’s highly unorthodox form of personal diplomacy vis a vis the Soviets created far more problems that it ever solved. When it came to light, both the DOS and the CIA were extremely concerned that sensitive intelligence matters might have been inadvertently passed to the Soviets.
77. Reports from the CIA concerning Oswald’s September/October visit to Mexico City are totally unreliable and were rejected by the FBI as being ‘in serious error.’ The reasons for Oswald’s visit to Mexico are completely obscure at this writing but the individual allegedly photographed by CIA surveillance in Mexico is to a certainty not Lee Oswald. As the CIA had pictures of the real Oswald, their reasons for producing such an obvious falsity are not easy to ascertain at this remove.” “The hit team was flown away in an aircraft piloted by a CIA contract pilot named David Ferrie from New Orleans. They subsequently vanished without a trace. Rumors of the survival of one of the team are persistent but not proven.
78. A study of the Soviet report indicates very clearly that the Russians have significant and very high level sources within both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Their possession of material relating to certain highly classified American military papers has been referred to the CIC for investigation and action

The Encyclopedia of American Loons

Sara Thyr

Sara Thyr, ND, is a naturopath who describes herself as a naturopathic midwife, and is also (at least a one-time) president of the American College of Naturopathic Obstetrics and a founding member of the American Association of Naturopathic Midwives (the former is the organization issuing credentials for the latter, of course). Naturopathy is, of course, bullshit, and the idea of naturopathic midwifery and naturopathic obstetrics downright scary. Looking at Thyr’s article “Pre-Conception Testing: A Naturopathic Perspective” is not conducive to allaying one’s fears and worries.
To Thyr and many likeminded deranged lunatics, what is wrong with the science-based recommendations seems to be primarily that they are boring. Since really, there is, for most normal women, not really that much to worry about. According to Thyr, however, science- and evidence-based practitioners don’t look at “all the factors”; in particular, they don’t look at the imaginary and not-science-based factors that Thyr and other naturopaths conveniently offer expensive tests and treatment regimes – pure woo – to treat you for. For instance, the first thing Thyr will look at when meeting women looking to become pregnant is “food allergies”, since, according entirely to her imagination, “undiscovered food allergies are the most common cause of unexplained infertility,” and naturopaths are really good at finding out that you are really allergic to common foods you haven’t noticed that you are allergic to and that real, legitimate tests show that you are, in fact, not allergic to. She also says that “[f]ood allergies are a very misunderstood topic,” which is pretty undeniable given the falsehoods and nonsense about food allergies she will go on to convey.
Next up on her list, of course, are toxins, in particular environmental toxins, understood the way woomeisters and hucksters usually understand them, and showing that Thyr’s understanding of chemistry and biochemistry (or biology – there is, predictably, some pseudoscientific handwaving about epigenetics included here) is as lacking as her understanding of immunology. (She learned – or didn’t – both at a naturopathy school, of course.) Thyr, unsurprisingly, offers a detoxification program to pretend to help remedy the situation. She also recommends adrenal testing; now adrenal dysfunction can indeed cause infertility and pregnancy loss, but Thyr is of course looking at “more subtle” adrenal problems that ordinary doctors wouldn’t find. Indeed, if you come to her you presumably suffer adrenal problems and should purchase a test. It’s an integral part of the grift.
Diagnosis: We’re sure she’s a true believer, but in these cases the moral difference between callous grifting and doing the exact same thing but believing that you help, is slim, and the latter might arguably be worse since people who are aware that they are grifting tend at least to be a bit more careful. The recommendations are pure, delusional bullshit no matter what.

Ted Kaptchuk

Ted Kaptchuk is a Professor of Medicine and Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, which has become notorious for its efforts to legitimize quackery, and most famous for his research on the placebo effect. He has also been an expert panelist for the FDA, served on numerous NIH panels, worked as a medical writer for the BBC, and is quite a big deal in certain quarters. He is accordingly one of the most influential woo apologists alive. Despite his current position, Kaptchuk lacks formal training in modern medicine or biomedical science. Instead, he has a “degree” from the Macau Institute of Chinese Medicine.
Kaptchuk rose to fame in the 80s with his book The Web That Has No Answer: Understanding Chinese Medicine (Andrew Weil himself wrote the foreword for the second edition), discussed here, which is an ambitious attempt to defend traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) through appeal to tradition, special pleading and handwaving. Kaptchuk claims that TCM is very successful, but admits that “studies generally demonstrate that traditional Chinese medicine does work best when left in the context of Chinese logic;” that is, it doesn’t seem to work so well when you use ordinary standards of evidence and you should therefore apply different standards (apparently this is because Western medicine is terribly reductionistic whereas TCM treats the whole person, which one would think would be rather irrelevant when evaluating health outcomes); TCM, you see, is according to Kaptchuk “internally consistent” (it really isn’t, if Kaptchuk’s claims are taken as a guide), and that is apparently evidence enough. As you’d expect, the book contains some interesting contradictions that Kaptchuk tries to brush over with New Age fluff (e.g. that TCM “has standards of measurement that allow practitioners systematically to describe, diagnose, and treat illness,” but “[i]ts measurements, however, are not the linear yardsticks of weight, number, time, and volume used by modern science but rather images of the macrocosm;” perhaps this is an example of the aforementioned “Chinese logic;” Kaptchuk’s book is crammed with offensive orientalism), and the fact that TCM gets the function of most of our organs wrong just means that it has an alternative anatomical theory (that should apparently not be taken entirely literally because it is pretty obviously false and Kaptchuk is working under the presupposition that the theory is correct), just like prescientific Western medicine applied an “alternative anatomical theory” until practitioners began to study how the body actually works a couple of centuries ago. Kaptchuk does assert, though, that “Western clinical studies (done in China) of traditional Chinese medicine, by proving its practical efficacy, have helped it win its battle for survival in the twentieth century, and promise it a place in the future of medicine,” but admits in a footnote (that most readers won’t see) that the studies in question weren’t really studies – they weren’t controlled and used “imprecise assessment methods. They would most properly be called clinical observations.” He doesn’t even seem to try to back up claims like “Chinese remedies are often more effective than Western ones, and they are always gentler and safer[;] Chinese prescriptions, for example, do not produce side effects because they are balanced to reflect a patient’s entire state of being” or “Chinese medicine, because it emphasizes balance and relationship more than measurable quantity, can also frequently discover and treat a disorder before it is perceptible by the most sophisticated Western diagnostic techniques[;] Chinese medicine is capable of touching those places that evade the microscope;” oh yes, he is referring to subtle energies, no less. In the book, he does not discuss how traditional Chinese medicine came to the fore in modern China, which you’d think would be rather important framework information.
After his breakthrough (and influential) book Kaptchuk spent several years championonig various forms of alternative medicine (he seems to be still shilling for TCM), including follow-ups like the Chinese Herbal Medicine: Materia Medica (with Dan Bensky and Andrew Gamble). Currently, he is most famous for his research and “research” on the placebo effect, but his background matters (though he seems, in fairness, to have shied away from defending the most egregious forms of quackery). Kaptchuk still doesn’t seem to mean by “placebo effect” what real researchers mean; rather, placebo is to Kaptchuk powerful, mystic medicine and the power that ultimately legitimizes the altmed practices that he has already convinced himself are efficacious – appealing to “placebo” is a matter of finding a framework of promoting them that might look palatable to those who care for evidence and experiment if they don’t look too closely. He has even suggested that various “CAM” treatments may have “enhanced placebo effects,” effects that are even stronger than specific biomedical treatments. I assume most people realize that “enhanced placebo effects” is a contradiction in terms if “placebo effects” is used to mean what it in fact means, but apparently some of Kaptchuk’s fans don’t. Indeed, for Kaptchuk, “placebo effect” is understood as a postmodern deconstruction of the current authoritative role of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), that reliance on evidence obtained through rigorous testing is really just a cultural contingency, and our predilection for evidence and testing an imperialistic scheme used to dismiss the types of alternative practices Kaptchuk has convinced himself work by not relying on evidence and testing. In his 1998 article “Powerful Placebo: the dark side of the randomised controlled trial,” for instance, Kaptchuk characterizes RCTs as “self-authenticating”: “In a self-authenticating manner, the double-blind RCT became the instrument to prove its own self-created value system.” As you’d expect, the article uses legitimate shortcomings with RCT to imply that altmed that show no effect in RCTs is just as good as real medicine, just like flaws in airplane design is evidence that flying carpets exist (hat-tip: Ben Goldacre). Not that Kaptchuk seems to have a particularly firm grasp of how confirmation works in any case.
When reporting his research on the placebo effect, Kaptchuk has defended active use of placebo in patient treatment for conditions like asthma: “placebo treatment is just as effective as active medication in improving patient-centered outcomes.” Of course, placebo treatments for asthma have no effect on objective measures of lung function – only on subjective measures – so Kaptchuk’s position requires quite a redefinition “patient-centered outcomes”, but such redefinition often seems to be what Kaptchuk is trying to promote. (Apparently he is partly influenced in the effort by anthropologist Daniel Moerman, whom Kaptchuk has worked with and who seems to think that healing responses are cultural constructs – Moerman is a seriously dangerous nutter.) Contrary to Kaptchuk’s claims, “harnessing the power of placebo” is of little clinical value, at least if one is clear about what the placebo effect is. For Kaptchuk, though, promoting the powers of the placebo effect still seems to be primarily a ploy to legitimize a variety of non-efficacious altmed treatments, and rebranding CAM as “medicine harnessing the power of the placebo” has actually become quite athing.
Now, not all of the actual studies Kaptchuk has been involved with have been bad – far from it – but he obviously has an agenda, and is not afraid to put a dizzying spin on even the meagrest result if it serves said agenda.
Kaptchuk has even (in an article coauthored with Michelle L. Dossett, Roger B. Davis and Gloria Y. Yeh), promoted homeopathy as a means to achieve “reductions in unnecessary antibiotic use, reductions in costs to treat certain respiratory diseases, improvements in peri-menopausal depression, [and] improved health outcomes in chronically ill individuals.” It should be needless to say that the evidence supports no such claim. The article refers to the article “A critical overview of homeopathy,” which Kaptchuk coauthored with Wayne Jonas in the Annals of Internal Medicine, suggesting that “Homeopathy deserves an open-minded opportunity to demonstrate its value by using evidence-based principles.” Well, evidence-based approaches have been used to investigate homeopathy; it’s been refuted, but somehow Dossett et al. selectively chose to miss that part, as promoters of homeopathy are wont to do.
Diagnosis: Kaptchuk has, in fact, done quite a bit of serious work. But he is also spinning that work in a manner that support an agenda of legitimizing quackery. As a result, he has managed to become one of the most important and influential apologists for woo in the US; he is currently very influential, and very dangerous.

Raymond Kam

Raymond Kam is a Boston-based former psychiatrist who lost his license in 2013. When a 16-year old girl suffering from “several serious psychiatric symptoms and/or conditions” reported parental neglect and abuse to him, Kam decided that, instead of reporting the abuse (as required by law), the girl was demon-possessed. Upon deciding that the girl’s diagnosis was “spiritual” rather than psychiatric, he officially took himself off her case and appointed himself her “spiritual mentor” instead, apparently giving her a cross to wear (in exchange for an undisclosed other religious symbol) and bringing her to his church. At least the Board of Registration in Medicine voted to suspend his license indefinitely, saying his conduct called into question his “competence to practice medicine,” though they also allowed the suspension to be lifted as early as 2014 if Kam completed a psychiatric evaluation and other assessments, and entered into a five-year probation agreement – we haven’t seen any updates. Apparently Kam was supported in his assessments by another psychiatrist, Enrico Mezzacappa, who was reprimanded but didn’t lose his license – in other words, Mezzacappa is still out there preying on unsuspecting victims.
Diagnosis: It’s astonishing that Kam could get through his education being so abjectly incompetent at what he was doing, but he did. At least Mezzacappa is still at large, and even Kam himself might have returned to practice; watch out.