The Undying Evil of the Last Bush Administration

[Octafish]

By Charles Pierce
Esquire, 04 October 15

There are generous rewards for justifying torture.

Today, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals out in California cut the NCAA a big break in its decision regarding the lower court's ruling in O'Bannon v. NCAA, the landmark case that seemed to open the door to a just form of compensation for the people in college athletics who do the actual work. It upheld the ruling, but it also eviscerated the process designed by the lower court to put its decision into actual practice, adopting instead the hilariously insane argument promulgated by the NCAA that the image of its athletic programs will suffer if the athletes are compensated to the point where the market value of college sports will be diminished.

However, what interested us here at this shebeen was the identity of the appeals court judge who wrote the decision. That would be Jay S. Bybee who, during his days as an assistant attorney general during the late Avignon Presidency, wrote the famous memo justifying the use of waterboarding as a technique of "enhanced interrogation." As a reward for being such a very good German, Bybee got a lifetime sinecure on the bench, where his sweet-tooth for authoritarian inhumanity can be regularly indulged.

This is how a federal appellate judge, who once wrote memos which justified the torture of terror detainees and the need to immunize officials who engaged in the torture, came to conclude as a matter of law that a man shacked at his wrists and shackled by his ankles to his bed, without a mattress, in a cell lit continuously for seven days, who was forced to eat his food like a dog because of his shackles, did not have a constitutional right to present the evidence of this confinement to a jury.

The evil of that administration is positively undying. It will poison this country for centuries. Ed O'Bannon's lucky he's not hanging by his thumbs from a dungeon wall.

SOURCE w/links: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/32754-the-undying-evil-of-the-last-bush-administration

[Octafish]

1. Lot of Undying Evil in First Bush Administration, too.

And the Reagan Administration. For instance, Judge Laurence Silberman, who recently wrote people who say "Bush lied America into war on Iraq" are like NAZIs.

The Dangerous Lie That ‘Bush Lied’

Some journalists still peddle this canard as if it were fact. This is defamatory and could end up hurting the country.

By LAURENCE H. SILBERMAN
Wall Street Journal, Opinion, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2015

In recent weeks, I have heard former Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier on Fox News twice asserting, quite offhandedly, that President George W. Bush “lied us into war in Iraq.”

I found this shocking....

SNIP…

The charge is dangerous because it can take on the air of historical fact—with potentially dire consequences. I am reminded of a similarly baseless accusation that helped the Nazis come to power in Germany: that the German army had not really lost World War I, that the soldiers instead had been “stabbed in the back” by politicians.

Sometime in the future, perhaps long after most of us are gone, an American president may need to rely publicly on intelligence reports to support military action. It would be tragic if, at such a critical moment, the president’s credibility were undermined by memories of a false charge peddled by the likes of Ron Fournier.

Mr. Silberman, a senior federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, was co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/laurence-h-silberman-the-dangerous-lie-that-bush-lied-1423437950

Appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan in 1985, Judge Silberman also helped foist Ronald Reagan on America via the October Surprise of 1980: sabotaging the release of American hostages held by Iran, although you wouldn't know that reading Corporate McPravda or watching CIABCNNBCBSFoxNoiseNutworks. That's some REAL NAZI shit.

[MinM]

2. Charles Pierce is en fuego...

I'm sure you've seen this Octafish. Just in case you have not here's another great piece by Pierce...

Posted 07 October 2015 - 09:56 PM

The CIA Keeps (Accidentally) Legitimizing JFK Conspiracy Theories
B y Charles P. Pierce
October 7, 2015-10-07
www.esquire .com

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=22318

[Octafish]

3. Wow! What Douglas Caddy found from John M. Newman!!!

John Newman wrote on Facebook today:

Shenon’s latest piece in Politico (“Yes the CIA Director was Part of the JFK Assassination Coverup”) is a continuation of the newest stage—begun in 2013—of the propaganda campaign to convince Americans that Robert Kennedy got his brother John killed and then worked to cover it up. The genesis of this new stage was a call from a Warren Commission lawyer to Shenon, who then fed Shenon and used him as the mouthpiece for this outrageous scheme. The Castro-did-it propaganda was part of the true coverup of the plot to kill JFK, and it was in play even before the shots were fired in Dallas. But I knew when I read Shenon’s 2015 paper edition of his book, A Cruel and Shocking Act, that we would be facing a newer, carefully orchestrated campaign to stick it to the Kennedys right at the time when the battle lines are being drawn to force the release—as required by the JFK Records Act—of the remaining JFK records by October 2017. Now, Shenon takes a recently released internal CIA analysis (which also dates to 2013) about DCI McCone blocking the CIA’s anti-Castro plots from the Warren Commission, and uses it to bolster his (Shenon’s) baleful version of history. I will comment on that (David Robarge’s) analysis after thoroughly reading it. Shenon’s Politico piece ends by restating a myth he hopes to make stick: that President Johnson appointed former DCI Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission “at the recommendation of then Attorney General Robert Kennedy.” I will hold back here on commenting about this fabrication because David Talbot’s new book, The Devil’s Chessboard, (to be released next week) so thoroughly (pp. 572-574) demolishes it

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=22318

ETA Most Important Part: Thank you, MinM! The dam is breaking. Let's see the good people get to safety. Dig what Jim Di Eugenio wrote.

[MinM]

4. Yes indeed.

Speaking of DiEugenio he and a few others provide some excellent insight in another current thread at the Education Forum:

David Talbot: Allen Dulles, CIA and Rise of America's Secret Government

[Octafish]

7. Shenon is one of the nice guys who keep making out the Kennedys hired the Mafia for the Castro job.

From the Water is Wet as all Wetwork Department:

If things had gone according to plan, Nixon would've been president during the Bay of Pigs and would've sent in the Marines, along with the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard, making Allen Dulles and Meyer Lansky and all their rich and corrupt friends very, very happy.

AUG 1960: Richard Bissell meets with Colonel Sheffield Edwards, director of the CIA's Office of Security, and discusses with him ways to eliminate or assassinate Fidel Castro. Edwards proposes that the job be done by assassins hand-picked by the American underworld, specifically syndicate interests who have been driven out of their Havana gambling casinos by the Castro regime. Bissell gives Edwards the go-ahead to proceed. Between August 1960, and April 1961, the CIA with the help of the Mafia pursues a series of plots to poison or shot Castro. The CIA’s own internal report on these efforts states that these plots "were viewed by at least some of the participants as being merely one aspect of the over-all active effort to overthrow the regime that culminated in the Bay of Pigs." (CIA, Inspector General's Report on Efforts to Assassinate Fidel Castro, p. 3, 14)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/bayofpigs/chron.html

Details on the actual sit-down, which to an amateur democratic detective interested in justice would seem like a lead worth pursuing:

Ever wonder about the sanity of America's leaders? Take a close look at perhaps the most bizarre plot in U.S. intelligence history

By Bryan Smith
Chicago Magazine
November 2007
(page 4 of 6)

EXCERPT...

By September 1960, the project was proceeding apace. Roselli would report directly to Maheu. The first step was a meeting in New York. There, at the Plaza Hotel, Maheu introduced Roselli to O'Connell. The agent wanted to cover up the participation of the CIA, so he pretended to be a man named Jim Olds who represented a group of wealthy industrialists eager to get rid of Castro so they could get back in business.

"We may know some people," Roselli said. Several weeks later, they all met at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. For years, the luxurious facility had served as the unofficial headquarters for Mafioso leaders seeking a base close to their gambling interests in Cuba. Now, it would be the staging area for the assassination plots.

At a meeting in one of the suites, Roselli introduced Maheu to two men: Sam Gold and a man Roselli referred to as Joe, who could serve as a courier to Cuba. By this time, Roselli was on to O'Connell. "I'm not kidding," Roselli told the agent one day. "I know who you work for. But I'm not going to ask you to confirm it."

Roselli may have figured out that he was dealing with the CIA, but neither Maheu nor O'Connell realized the rank of mobsters with whom they were dealing. That changed when Maheu picked up a copy of the Sunday newspaper supplement Parade, which carried an article laying out the FBI's ten most wanted criminals. Leading the list was Sam Giancana, a.k.a. "Mooney," a.k.a. "Momo," a.k.a. "Sam the Cigar," a Chicago godfather who was one of the most feared dons in the country—and the man who called himself Sam Gold. "Joe" was also on the list. His real name, however, was Santos Trafficante—the outfit's Florida and Cuba chieftain.

Maheu alerted O'Connell. "My God, look what we're involved with," Maheu said. O'Connell told his superiors. Questioned later before the 1975 U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (later nicknamed the Church Committee after its chairman, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho), O'Connell was asked whether there had ever been any discussion about asking two men on the FBI's most wanted list to carry out a hit on a foreign leader.

"Not with me there wasn't," O'Connell answered.

"And obviously no one said stop—and you went ahead."

"Yes."

"Did it bother you at all?"

"No," O'Connell answered, "it didn't."

CONTINUED...

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/November-2007/How-the-CIA-Enlisted-the-Chicago-Mob-to-Put-a-Hit-on-Castro/index.php?cparticle=4&siarticle=3

Yet, for some reason, the CIA continues to the present day to imply that it was Kennedy who did that.

Spies: Ex-CIA Agent In Raleigh Says Castro Knew About JFK Assassination Ahead Of Time

Former CIA agent and author Brian Latell in Raleigh

By The Raleigh Telegram

RALEIGH – A noted former Central Intelligence Agency officer, author, and scholar who is intimately knowledgeable about Cuba and Fidel Castro, says he believes there is evidence that Castro’s government knew about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 ahead of time.

SNIP...

Robert Kennedy, as the Attorney General of the United States, was in charge of the operation, said Latell. Despite the United States’ best efforts, the operation was nonetheless penetrated by Cuban intelligence agents, said Latell.

Latell said there were two serious assassination attempts by the United States against Castro that even used members of the mafia to help, but both of them were obviously unsuccessful.

He also said that there was a plot by the United States to have Castro jabbed with a pen containing a syringe filled with a very effective poison. Latell said that he believes the experienced assassin who worked for Castro who originally agreed to the plan may have been a double agent. After meeting with a personal representative of Robert Kennedy in Paris, the man knew that the plan to assassinate Castro came from the highest levels of the government, including John F. and Robert Kennedy.

The plan was never carried out, as the man later defected to the United States, but with so many double agents working for Castro also pledging allegiance to the CIA, Latell said it was likely that the information got back to Havana that the Kennedy brothers endorsed that plot with the pen.

CONTINUED...

http://raleightelegram.com/201209123311

Yet, the Mighty Wurlitzer cough Shenon plays the false tune that Kennedy was the guy who wanted Castro dead.

What the Warren Commission Didn’t Know

A member of the panel that investigated JFK’s death now worries he was a victim of a “massive cover-up.”

By PHILIP SHENON
February 02, 2015

EXCERPT...

Slawson feels betrayed by several senior government officials, especially at the CIA, whom he says he trusted in 1964 to tell the truth. He is most angry with one man—then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who assured the commission during the investigation that he knew of no evidence of a conspiracy in his brother’s death. It is now clear, as I and others have reported, that Robert Kennedy withheld vital information from the investigation: While he publicly supported the commission’s findings, Kennedy’s family and friends have confirmed in recent years that he was in fact harshly critical of the commission and believed that the investigation had missed evidence that might have pointed to a conspiracy.

“What a bastard,” Slawson says today of Robert Kennedy. “This is a man I once had admiration for.”

Slawson theorizes that that attorney general and the CIA worked together to hide information about Oswald’s Mexico trip from the commission because they feared that the investigation might stumble onto the fact that JFK’s administration had been trying, for years, sometimes with the help of the Mafia, to assassinate Castro. Mexico had been a staging area for the Castro plots. Public disclosure of the plots, Slawson says, could have derailed, if not destroyed, Robert Kennedy’s political career; he had led his brother’s secret war against Castro and, as declassified documents would later show, was well aware of the Mafia’s involvement in the CIA’s often harebrained schemes to murder the Cuban dictator. “You can’t distinguish between Bobby and the CIA on this,” Slawson says. “They were working hand in glove to hide information from us.”

Although there is nothing in the public record to show that Robert Kennedy had specific evidence of a foreign conspiracy in his brother’s death, I agree with Slawson that RFK and senior CIA officials threw the commission off the trail of witnesses and evidence that might have pointed to a conspiracy, especially in Mexico. Slawson also now suspects—but admits again that he cannot prove—that Chief Justice Earl Warren, who led the commission that bore his name, was an unwitting participant in the cover-up, agreeing with the CIA or RFK to make sure that the commission did not pursue certain evidence. Warren, he suspects, was given few details about why the commission’s investigation had to be limited. “He was probably just told that vital national interests” were at stake—that certain lines of investigation in Mexico had to be curtained because they might inadvertently reveal sensitive U.S. spy operations.

That might explain what Slawson saw as Warren’s most baffling decision during the investigation—his refusal to allow Slawson to interview a young Mexican woman who worked in the Cuban consulate in Mexico and who dealt face-to-face with Oswald on his visa application; declassified CIA records would later suggest that Oswald had a brief affair with the woman, who was herself a committed Socialist, and that she had introduced him to a network of other Castro supporters in Mexico. “It was a different time,” Slawson says. “We were more naïve. Warren would have believed what he was told.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/warren-commission-jfk-investigators-114812_Page2.html#.VN982vnF-UV

Why would CIA not want the Warren Commission, and the American public to which it reported, know the truth about its illegal assassination program?

Old news to you, MinM. Completely unknown by most Americans -- and for too many who do know, considered political thriller or science fiction.

[MinM]

5. One more...

Checkmate on ‘The Devil’s Chessboard’
October 27, 2015

Exclusive: Since the end of World War II, what some call the “deep state” has taken hold of the American Republic, stripping the citizens of meaningful control over national security issues, with CIA Director Allen Dulles playing a key early role, according to David Talbot’s new biography reviewed by Lisa Pease...

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/10/27/checkmate-on-the-devils-chessboard/

[Octafish]

6. These guys were sending some interesting orders hoping for some interesting results...

Heroic USAF Captain Defied Orders and Stopped America From Starting World War III in 1962...

...during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Captain William Bassett stopped to think before pressing The Button. Thank goodness, otherwise most of the planet would be celebrating Dia de Los Muertos from the Other Side.

The Okinawa missiles of October

Aaron Tovish
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Oct. 25, 2015

John Bordne, a resident of Blakeslee, Penn., had to keep a personal history to himself for more than five decades. Only recently has the US Air Force given him permission to tell the tale, which, if borne out as true, would constitute a terrifying addition to the lengthy and already frightening list of mistakes and malfunctions that have nearly plunged the world into nuclear war.

The story begins just after midnight, in the wee hours of October 28, 1962, at the very height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then-Air Force airman John Bordne says he began his shift full of apprehension. At the time, in response to the developing crisis over secret Soviet missile deployments in Cuba, all US strategic forces had been raised to Defense Readiness Condition 2, or DEFCON2; that is, they were prepared to move to DEFCON1 status within a matter of minutes. Once at DEFCON1, a missile could be launched within a minute of a crew being instructed to do so.

Bordne, now 74, appeared in an introductory video, and then answered questions via Skype from his home in Pennsylvania. Recounting the atmosphere on the base that week, Bordne described all his fellow airmen crowding around a television to watch President John F. Kennedy discuss the standoff with the Soviet Union: “There was standing room only. There was dead silence during … and there was dead silence after. It was then that we really got the impression we would have to do what we were paid to do.”

SNIP...

According to Bordne, as Bassett attempted to determine whether the orders were legitimate, a lieutenant decided that Bassett did not have the authority to stop the launch, and ordered his section of the overall crew to proceed to fire its four missiles. Bassett, says Bordne, threatened to have the lieutenant shot.

SNIP...

As of today there’s no way to know for certain whether events transpired 53 years ago as Bordne describes them. Bassett died in 2011, and Bordne remains the only participant willing to describe them on the record. However, a Japanese news outlet spoke last year to another U.S. veteran who was willing to anonymously confirm Bordne’s account. There was general agreement among the other participants in the U.N. discussion, including Princeton nuclear security expert Bruce Blair, that Bordne’s account was credible.

CONTINUED...

http://thebulletin.org/okinawa-missiles-october8826

Former Airman John Bordne appeared via Skype to discuss the incident with the United Nations yesterday.

As you know, MinM, these guys left the trail of bread crumbs from the TBSD to the Kremlin. Now we're finding out what else they were willing to do for the big showdown at the end of the cowboy film. Like GEICO commercial says: "If you're in the band 'Europe,' you play 'The Final Countdown.' It's what you do."

...Then Gen. Le May said, 'Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started.'

"I think that was just a loose comment for his staff guys, because Gen. Tommy Power, his hatchet man in those days, chuckled and he never laughed very much. So I always figured that was a joke between them. But we thought maybe that was serious. To our knowledge we were the only U.S. Air Force crew that had flown an overflight at that point."...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1994/07/03/stranger-than-strangelove-a-generals-forays-into-the-nuclear-zone/4dc9a919-8d2f-47cb-82ee-e74d9ecc436a/