http://www.liveleak.com/browse?q=harvey Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:41:34 -0400 Liveleak http://edge.liveleak.com/80281E/u/u/ll2/logo.gif http://www.liveleak.com/browse?q=harvey Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:37:18 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=eaa_1371565782 theeDarkhorse American Military Police execute spies and Lee Harvey Oswald http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=eaa_1371565782 theeDarkhorse Spy Executions execution, british pathe, lee harvey oswald Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:50:55 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e2e_1371080938 USMC_SRT Satoru Kuba spends parts of most days - and many nights - peering through a telephoto lens atop a three-story building overlooking Kadena Air Base on Okinawa. The goal of his sometimes-lonely vigil, through weather fair and foul? A photograph of an aircraft - any aircraft - that he has yet to capture on film. He spends so much time there that his young son thinks it's his profession. Kuba insists he's not a spy. He's a plane spotter, a tail watcher - nicknames for aviation enthusiasts who post up outside Air Force bases around the world to shoot photos and record tail numbers. Usually there are just a couple hanging around each base. But they show up by the dozens for special events or missions that draw unusual planes, pushing their lenses up to the gaps in chain-link fences topped by barbed wire or climbing stepladders for unobstructed views. While U.S. Pacific Air Forces won't even discuss them, citing unspecified operational security issues, U.S. Forces Europe has embraced them as a source to spot something else - potential spies and saboteurs. It's not difficult to see why spotters could be perceived as a concern. They publish their information online, tracking planes from base to base, country to country, continent to continent. Many spotter groups typically have at least one member who owns a frequency scanner that can pick up the base control tower chatter. Such information became problematic in the U.K. during the Libya campaign in 2011 when British Tornado fighter planes were embarking on bombing sorties from their home bases, said Ben Vogel, an editor at Jane's Defence Weekly. "The worry was that any Libyan intelligence officer could read these postings and know exactly how many Tornados were coming and pretty much exactly when they would arrive," Vogel told Stars and Stripes in an email. Information posted by plane spotters also inadvertently exposed the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, according to a series of stories in London's The Guardian newspaper. The stories appeared in 2005-06, when the secret interrogation program became public. There's a certain irony that, in an effort to be as open to host-nation residents as possible, flightlines often aren't blocked by barriers or lines of trees. Plane spotters can snap photos from outside the base fences that base residents are banned from shooting inside the gates. PACAF won't talk about the discrepancy. "For operational security reasons, we simply cannot discuss the procedures we have in place," Maj. Alysia Harvey, PACAF spokeswoman, told Stars and Stripes by email. "However, what I can tell you is that operational security is a priority in the U.S. Air Force," she said. "And military officials work very closely with their counterparts and local authorities to protect the assets, airmen and families at their locations." Still, plane spotters stick out like sore thumbs to Americans who are inundated with "Eagle Eyes" messages from the Air Force imploring them to report suspicious behavior such as people hanging around outside the wire. No matter how strange it might seem to others, it's just a hobby for most tail watchers. "The vast majority of plane spotters are simply flight enthusiasts who enjoy seeing military aircraft not typically seen at commercial airfields," USAFE spokesman Capt. William Russell told Stars and Stripes in an email. "Military officials have a great relationship with liaison officers and security personnel throughout" Europe, Russell said. "This relationship allows us to mitigate threats to DOD personnel and installations." USAFE was eager to highlight a program it recently developed in England. It brings tail watchers into the op-sec fold at RAF Lakenheath, a U.S. fighter base outside Cambridge that is home to the 48th Fighter Wing and scores of F-15s. The "Spotter Watch" program is a joint effort between the Air Force and the local civilian police, who do background checks on the plane spotters. A clean report, and the base issues them registration cards. "This is an opportunity to build up our op-sec program and involve in it," Lakenheath spokesman Capt. James Nichols said. The program encourages plane spotters - typically very tight-knit groups - to report dubious characters to the Suffolk Constabulary, which can investigate and inform the base if necessary, Nichols said. Roughly 50 plane spotters have been vetted for Spotter Watch, which gives them VIP tours of the base and a chance to "pet the jets," Nichols said. "It's better to co-opt into our program," Nichols said. "It's mutually beneficial; they get to see the things they love, and we get them to help us." Jeremy Gunner, a former plane spotter who now works at Air Forces Monthly, a U.K.-based aviation magazine, says the symbiotic relationship is long overdue and should be copied across the Air Force, particularly in England and Japan, were the hobby is prolific. "Most of us know each other," said Gunner, a retired Scotland Yard detective. "You notice someone who doesn't really fit in." While sitting in a van outside RAF Alconbury - home to the U.S. 423rd Air Base Group - waiting to get a shot of a U-2 spy plane, Gunner and another tail watcher noticed a group of anti-base demonstrators cutting holes in the fence, ostensibly trying to break into the base to protest. It was Easter Sunday about 20 years ago, Gunner said, and the demonstrators were in costume. "We were sitting there having a cup of tea when all of sudden we see pink bunnies trying to cut through the fence," Gunner said. He and his cohort called the police "just like most other plane spotters would." Maintaining the rights of plane spotters - who in many countries where the U.S. Air Force operates are legally permitted to congregate outside the bases and take photos - and the security concerns of the Air Force is a delicate balance, Gunner said. "A lot of us have been accused of being terrorists," Gunner said. He was been arrested once - by Air Force Security Forces at Pope Air Force Base, S.C. - and has been "questioned lots of times," he said. "But I know my rights," Gunner said. However, "you should just keep your nose clean and not be a nuisance." Climbing or cutting holes in the fence, for example, not only is poor form but also will attract the authorities, he said. Still, Gunner said, the information plane spotters use and collect is all public. The UHF frequencies used by Air Force control towers and pilots are published by the U.S. Defense Department and broadcast openly. "If they didn't want you to hear it, then you wouldn't," Gunner said. In Japan, not all plane spotters are watching for fun. Yoichi Endo for years has observed and photographed aircraft coming and going from Yokota Air Base, the suburban Tokyo installation that's home to U.S. Forces Japan and the only U.S. airlift hub in the Pacific. Endo started in the 1970s while protesting the Vietnam War as a student in Fussa, one of the cities that surrounds the base. He and others participated in demonstrations outside Yokota and even flew kites near the flightline to interfere with the planes. In 1996 Endo, who by then had been elected to Fussa's city assembly, founded an organization in conjunction with elected officials from other Japanese cities that host U.S. bases. They formed Rimpeace to inform the public about American military activities in their country, he said. "We provide land and facilities to the U.S. forces and pay a sympathy budget , which uses our taxes," said Endo, who was on the city council from 1979 to 2002. "We the taxpayers have the right to know" what's going on. That has included watching controversial Osprey aircraft carrying out their first test flights recently at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, said Rimpeace co-founder Jungen Tamura, who serves on the city assembly in Iwakuni. While U.S. officials insist it's not slated to receive the Osprey despite Japanese media reports to the contrary, Naval Air Facility Atsugi near the country's capital is a popular destination for spotters. Dozens gathered there on a sunny but cold November day for the return of the fighter jets from the USS George Washington, which have been deployed for months, last screeching over the skies near Atsugi in August, several spotters told Stars and Stripes. The base "welcomes those with an interest in naval aviation," Atsugi spokesman Greg Kuntz said. The Navy has no overarching policy on tail watchers, Naval Air Forces spokesman Cmdr. Kevin Stephens told Stars and Stripes in an email. "We appreciate and share these individuals' love and enthusiasm for Naval aviation," Stephens said. "So long as tail spotter activities are conducted in accordance with all applicable local laws and ordinances, and with the safety of themselves, the public and our air crews in mind, we are unconcerned with their activities." Meanwhile, Endo and Tamura insist their group is not aimed at stoking the undercurrent of anti-U.S. military sentiment in Japan nor are they aimed at divulging U.S. military secrets. Rimpeace sources its posts on direct observations, U.S. military publications and media reports, all of which are public. "Revealing secrets is something that other people can do," Endo said. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e2e_1371080938 USMC_SRT Spies? Saboteurs? Or just tailwatchers? Air, Force, Fighters, Jets, Planes Mon, 27 May 2013 11:19:48 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c9e_1369667398 Detroit Iron The whitewashing of the Weather Underground JUN 3, 2013, VOL. 18, NO. 36 o BY PETER COLLIER At one point in The Company You Keep, Robert Redford's new film about the residue of the Weather Underground, a character named Sharon Solarz is captured by the FBI after living under a series of aliases since her involvement in a Michigan bank robbery decades earlier in which a security guard was killed. Ruminating in her cell, she describes for a young journalist the moral dilemma people like her faced back then. They could either sit by and watch as America destroyed the innocent peasant culture of Vietnam or take arms against atrocity. She says decisively of her group's decision to go all-in against the war in Vietnam, "We made mistakes, but we were right," and then, after a beat, "I'd do it again." SOMEDAY, THEY'LL ALL BE HANGING OUT IN FACULTY LOUNGES. At about the same time that The Company You Keep was being previewed, New York University announced that it was appointing Kathy Boudin, real-life model for the Solarz character, as a 2013 scholar-in-residence at the law school. It might have been called a harmonic convergence back when the Weatherpeople first made news with their Days of Rage, but since then the college campus has been well established as a rehab center for members of the sect looking to reenter the mainstream. Before Boudin (who, in addition to the NYU gig, has an assistant professorship at the Columbia University School of Social Work), Mark Rudd, Howie Machtingter, and, of course, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, Weatherman's Bonnie and Clyde, all used university jobs to regain their footing as they resumed their pursuit of the revolution they once thought would be created by propaganda of the deed but concluded, after a few years of paranoid anonymity in the underground, might better be pursued through propaganda of the word. Kathy Boudin was the hardest case. Still underground after the others had come up, she'd been the getaway driver in the notorious 1981 Brink's robbery in which one guard was murdered. After her getaway vehicle was stopped, she lured four Nyack policemen who arrived on the scene into an ambush where they were cut down by the other gang members' automatic weapons; two policemen were killed (including Waverly Brown, first black officer on the force). When she resurfaced after serving part of her murder sentence, she couldn't very well use the defense of other Weather Underground members that they had, after all, engaged only in victimless crime, or that they were just antiwar protesters, America having fled in ignominy from the Saigon embassy six years before Brink's. But the universities that brought her aboard not only offered respectability and a paycheck, but also, as writer Michael Moynihan has noted, purged her curriculum vitae of all its pungent factuality. NYU's press release announcing her appointment merely certifies that Boudin has been "dedicated to community involvement in social change since the 1960's." Social change, in fact, is also what Weatherman is all about in The Company You Keep . Redford's character, Jim Grant, a former member of Solarz's cell who has long since said goodbye to all that and made a new life (under a false identity) as a public interest lawyer and single father to his 11-year-old daughter, is outed by her capture. He then goes on a quest to find Mimi Lurie (Julie Christie), his lover from the underground days who also was part of the Michigan bank job and has been hiding out ever since. She is the only person who can prove that he wasn't even there on the day the crime went down and thus help him keep the FBI from separating him from his child. Grant's quest takes him into the gauzy world inhabited by comrades from 40 years ago-one of them a lumber yard owner still guarding the secrets of the old gang with the fierce loyalty that the film sees as a sign of the group's moral character; another is now a professor Grant finds in an Ann Arbor lecture hall discussing Marx ( quelle surprise !) and then assigning Frantz Fanon for the next class session. With their help, Grant finally meets with Mimi in a cabin in Upper Michigan, a love shack from their past. She is still committed to the cause and has no sympathy for his timorous second thoughts. They bicker about the way they were and the way they ought to be, and then, in a climactic scene, Mimi fiercely rebukes Grant's bourgeois obsession about what will befall his daughter if he is arrested. She ends her little tirade by saying, as if she has stumbled on something profound, "I still believe in change!" So when it comes right down to it, Weatherman didn't really have anything to do with bomb factories, bruising criticism/self-criticism sessions (Maoist "gut checks"), draconian intercourse assignments to break down the bourgeois possessiveness of monogamy, wool gathering sessions about which cop to kill or politician to kidnap, or fantasies about imprisoning capitalists in vast political reeducation centers in the Southwest when America was finally conquered and liquidating them if they refused to recant. No, it was about change-premature Obamaism. In a promo for the film with the New York Times 's David Carr, Redford says that he was "sympathetic" to the Weather Underground at the time, and understood its reasons for doing what it did, although he adds densely that he was also against their "turn to violence"-as if this group's ends and means were ever divisible. He says that like them he too had paid a price for his beliefs. No wonder then that he portrays them as Weather-beaten martyrs in this film. No wonder that he sees them as idealists who might have been driven temporarily insane by an obscene war but have managed somehow to recover their ideals during the gray ambiguity that has enshrouded them ever since. Weatherman was always radical, but how did it become chic? How did this group-proudly totalitarian in its day-get mainstreamed without ever having to undergo denazification? Why has it been allowed a rehabilitation without evincing at least a token of remorse? The group has profited greatly from the time-lapse atonement our culture offers free of charge to those who simply hang on. Weatherman has no doubt also benefited from the leftward drift of our political world over the last 40 years, especially the etymological waterboarding of the term "liberal" to make it describe the radicals who killed authentic liberalism in the '60s and then inhabited its corpse and claimed that it had always been them anyhow. But it is also true that this sect, which was about nothing if not the triumph of the will, has created its own redemptive myth. Forty years ago, it might have been expected that the central architect of Weather revisionism would have been Bernardine Dohrn, the sensual face of the group from the moment it became news; the queen bee who maintained internal power by adroitly dispensing her royal jelly among all the jostling males of the group; the group's sayer of the unsayable, as in her infamous reaction to the Manson murders: "Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate their dinner in the same room with them, then they even stuck a fork into the pig Tate's stomach. Wild!" But today, while Bernardine is the lawyer, it's her husband Bill Ayers who has successfully constructed, over time, the brief accepted by Redford and others that argues, all facts to the contrary, that Weatherman was not a terror group at all, but the last of the just. Ayers was the first to understand that the universities, dominated in the 1980s by those who had failed to burn them down in the 1960s, could provide a rat line back to the real world. Weatherman had already pioneered the ideology about race, class, gender, and national evil that was finally taking over the academy, and when he surfaced in 1980 (unprosecuted because of irregularities in federal surveillance), he saw that someone like him could use that ideology as protective coloration when resuming the long march. Briefly a teacher in a Summerhill-like school in his early radical years, Ayers enrolled at Columbia University's Teachers College in 1984 and embraced the "critical pedagogy" that was just then taking over the formation of teachers. This movement, as Sol Stern has pointed out in City Journal , charges that public schools reinforce the "oppressive hegemony" of the capitalist order, creating a sinister ideological tape loop that can only be destroyed by a "transformative" curriculum of "social justice." With gurus such as Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire urging on a radicalism that "does not conceal but proclaims its own political character," critical pedagogy slowly infiltrated leftist ideas into every aspect of classroom teaching, including science and math, and created a prime hitchhiking opportunity for someone like Ayers, who already spoke the lingo. He got his Ed.D., peewee version of the Ph.D., which led to a teaching job at the University of Illinois, where he began to pursue his old ideas by other means. He began writing and became general editor of a series of teaching-for-social-justice texts (a couple of them bestsellers) that were regarded as cutting edge by his new colleagues. By the mid-1990s he had established himself as an "education reformer" whose academic credibility, combined with his family connections, helped root him in the rich political humus of Chicago's bien-pensant left. But all this was just prologue for Ayers's Big Project-constructing a counter-narrative about Weatherman that provided the script Sharon Solarz is reading from when she says in The Company You Keep that her cell of criminal revolutionaries was right, whatever mistakes it might have made. Having spent years practicing on his students, Ayers makes the case with hyperthyroid fervor in his 2001 memoir Fugitive Days . He dramatizes himself as born in the U.S.A., a resident of white-bread America whose father was CEO of Commonwealth Edison in Chicago. He was a jock and a girl chaser and a frat boy in the making. But like others of his generation, he also had existential appetites and sensed the allure of alienation. Like them, he heard a beguiling voice in films such as The Wild One (where Marlon Brando, leader of a motorcycle gang terrorizing a small California city, announces the advent of the '60s when a girl asks him what he's rebelling against and he answers, "Whaddaya got?"). Finding authenticity in the civil rights and antiwar movements, Ayers tells how "Become who you are" was his credo and "Never let your life become a mockery of your values" his commitment. Fugitive Days has other such moments of self-dramatization. Assuming his new occupation of activist, Ayers enthuses: "I bounced out of bed most mornings wondering how I could . . . embody justice and enact democracy." And in anticipation of one of the early street actions where violence was in the air: "I was about to personally disrupt this war, and I tingled all over." He also expresses, in moist prose, a generation's narcissistic certainty of its own world historical "specialness, the exceptional good luck at being young and eager to take on the waiting world. . . . So much was in such desperate need of repair, after all, and here we were, expectant, intent, hot with a desire to know and to do. To live." He and his comrades were ready to begin the reconstruction project, but the politicians continued on their murderous course in Vietnam, which left the radicals no alternative but to go from The Wild One to The Wild Bunch . In 1969, a small core committed to the idea of "doing it" formed Weatherman, which both epitomized and euthanized the New Left, and resolved not to draw back from the brink of revolutionary violence where the rest of the Movement had halted. They went to war against Amerikkka without a second thought: "I was already a rebel and I would now become a freedom fighter." Embracing the identity of "vandals in the mother country," Weatherman intended to slough off "white skin privilege" and open up "a front behind enemy lines and fight side by side with Black people." But only a handful of black criminals joined them, and in any case, their plans ran afoul of the Greenwich Village Townhouse Explosion in the spring of 1970, in which three Weatherpeople died while building a nail bomb meant for a dance at Fort Dix for 18-year-old draftees headed ultimately to Vietnam. Among the dead was Ayers's then-girlfriend Diana Oughton, identified by the fingertip that was all that was left of her; one of the two survivors was Kathy Boudin, who fled naked from the blast, never looking back on the journey that would lead her to solidarity with the mad dog Black Liberation Army a decade later and a murder rap for the Brink's job that her father, Leonard Boudin, Communist consigliere to the old and new left for four decades, got his attorney friend Leonard Weinglass to whittle down to second-degree and 20 years. The Townhouse established their street cred as people whose acts were consequential. (In Fugitive Days , Ayers visits the haunting void where the building once stood and allows it to summon up for him the hallowed dead, a Weather version of Arlington.) But it also was a cautionary tale. The group's internal dynamics had always been based on the gut check, but in the explosion they had gut checked themselves. Without the emotional impediment of the Townhouse, they might have taken the course of their continental cousins-the Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany. But instead, they decided that the prudent course was to stay put in the toy department of terrorism. Although Ayers ostentatiously mourns his loss, the tragedy provided him an important arguing point: The group only killed its own. He also threw the dead martyrs under the bus by implying that the bomb-makers were a faction; them, not us. Following the Townhouse was the Underground-years of bombing runs, minimum wage jobs, cheesy disguises, and shabby apartments filled with the sour odor of fermented Vietnamese fish sauce which Ayers romanticizes as the time they learned to love their country again by discovering the real America of John Brown, Crazy Horse, and Denmark Vesey: "We disappeared then not from the world, but into a world, a world of invention and improvisation, a romance of space and distance and time, an outpost on the horizon of our imagination." Brent Staples was one of the few reviewers not to fall for it. Writing in the New York Times , which otherwise has been a megaphone for Ayers and Dohrn over the years (most egregiously in a 1993 article showing Bernardine as just another harried soccer mom, making healthy snacks and ferrying the kids Zayd Osceola-named for the Black Liberation Army soldier Zayd Shakur and the Seminole insurgent-and Malik Cochise-named for Malcolm X and the Apache guerrilla fighter-to all their events in a battered used car while also keeping up the fight against sexism), Staples nailed Fugitive Days as "partial telling reaches fraudulence." Yet he misses the point. While Ayers is a mythomaniac in love with his own story, his intention is never to see his life steadily and see it whole. (He states puckishly in the text that his memory is fuzzy on how and where they set their bombs and certain other matters.) The book's real purpose is to establish the talking points that would provide a second coming for Weatherman. First, however "excessive" some of the things they did might have been, the body count in Southeast Asia made their actions penny ante by comparison. Six thousand Vietnamese died every week, Ayers repeats over and over in the book and in all the public statements since. In his chop logic, Weatherman could have had a body count of 5,999 and still been morally ahead. (That more people were killed in Southeast Asia in the first 3 years of the Communist peace than in all 13 years of the anti-Communist war goes unmentioned.) Vietnam is for him as God is to Voltaire: If it hadn't existed he would have had to invent it, because in comparison to the napalmed villages, the families destroyed, and the bodies mutilated, what he and his comrades did was child's play. Second, in their days in the Underground, they behaved with restraint, destroying only property, not people. ("Even with justifiable rage we simply didn't have it in us to harm others, especially innocents, no matter how tough we talked.") But it was not for lack of trying that there was no body count. As Emory professor Harvey Klehr has said, this argument makes a virtue of incompetence. Third, and contingent on the other two, they were never terrorists but rather activists engaged in symbolic acts. ("Terrorists destroy randomly, while our actions bore, we hoped, the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate while we only hoped to educate.") This would be education by any means necessary . Finally and most audaciously, they were no different from everyone else in the New Left, wanting only "to create a society more equal, more fair, more just, more caring"; if they were guilty of anything, it was a "grandiose innocence" in their delusive hope that they might actually help this heaven on earth come to be. But in fact, the rest of the '60s left was deeply suspicious or outright hostile to Weatherman, which is why it remained a cult instead of becoming a movement. Yet Ayers always wants to give free rein to his imp of the perverse, even if it means undermining the truth he is trying to manufacture. (Not long after emerging from the underground, he said to me and my friend David Horowitz, when asked how he felt about escaping prosecution, "Guilty as hell, free as a bird, America's a great country.") And so, at the end of Fugitive Days , after writing his brief, he dedicates it to H. Rap Brown, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, etc. Different in their wickedness, these individuals were all cop killers. And Ayers himself had tendencies in this direction back in the bad old days, if we are to believe Bringing Down America , a little-noticed book written in 1976 (and recently reissued) by Larry Grathwohl, who infiltrated Weatherman for the FBI. (He was eagerly accepted at first because he was a Vietnam vet and from a working-class family and therefore the authentic "other.") Assigned to one of its "affinity groups," he saw action in the streets and met many members of the Weather Bureau, Weatherman's ruling junta, notably Ayers himself. In this unpolished book, Grathwohl describes the brain-dwarfing regimen-karate workouts, struggle sessions, bad meals, and sweaty spycraft to combat presumed surveillance. His cell aspired to be in the mold of the Uruguayan Tupamaros and used The Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla as its guide. Other hard-edged parts of the Movement might romanticize the example of Nguyen Van Troi, the Viet Cong cadre who tried to assassinate Robert McNamara in 1963 (Tom Hayden named his son Troy after him), but Weatherman, always willing to step further into the abyss, fixated on the obscure Marion Delgado, a 5-year-old Italian with an Alfred E. Newman smile who set a concrete block on railroad ties in the 1940s and derailed a freight train. Their war whoop was "Marion Delgado: Live like him!" Writing about Ayers before he became a public figure, Grathwohl portrays him as one part twerp and one part thug, a mephitic presence who blew through town every once in a while to browbeat the cadre into becoming sharper tools of necessity. Grathwohl says that Ayers himself conceived the idea of blowing up the Detroit Police Affairs Association building the week before the Townhouse because this group was defending the three cops involved in the "Algiers Motel incident." He quotes Ayers: "We'll blast that f-ing building to hell and we do it when the place is crowded." When a couple dozen sticks of dynamite had been gathered, Grathwohl points out timorously that the patrons of the restaurant next to the building, many of whom were black, might be collateral damage. Ayers replies contemptuously, "We can't protect all the innocent people in the world. Some will get killed." (The bomb failed to go off.) Ayers was always urging them to break on through to the other side: "Anybody can firebomb a police car, but we have to go beyond that stage." These were the heady months before the Townhouse, when they were still ready to go all the way. At one point, according to Grathwohl, Ayers reproaches members of the cell for their lack of initiative: "It's a shame when someone like Bernardine has to make all the plans, make the bomb and then place it herself." This may refer to the February 1970 bombing of the Park Police station in San Francisco, where one cop was killed and another injured by an especially vicious bomb filled with nails and construction staples. It is still an open case. According to a detailed investigative report by the San Francisco Weekly , Ayers and Dohrn were targets of a secret 2003 federal grand jury investigation of the bombing, and in 2009 the San Francisco Police Officers union formally accused them of being involved in the attack. Grathwohl's book unravels in advance the account Ayers wove in Fugitive Days 25 years later. Ayers's argument that the sect never killed anyone (except its own) is shown to hinge on accident, not intention, and has a rancid odor. While Fugitive Days was celebrated, Bringing Down America quickly disappeared down the memory hole. Today Grathwohl speaks to small gatherings of ultra-right groups. Ayers speaks to the New York Times . It was exceptionally bad timing, it seemed, when Bill Ayers, on the promotion tour for his memoir, was quoted in the paper's early edition on 9/11 as saying, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Apparently worried that Ayers would appear louche, the paper sent another reporter for a follow-up five days later. The growing acceptance of Ayers's apologia for Weatherman was indicated by a 2002 PBS documentary on the Weather Underground that featured and flattered him and the others. He and his comrades had first had a starring role back in 1976, when Emile de Antonio made a documentary that didn't show them but recorded their self-obsessed voiceovers from an undisclosed location. The producers of the PBS show didn't have to bother with such huggermugger and showed a more mature version of Ayers and the others, while also noting on the program's website that they viewed this group as "filled with righteous anger" and driven by "the idealist passions that transformed them from college activists into the FBI's Most Wanted." The rehabilitation project got a huge boost a year later from Neil Gordon, author of the surprisingly well-received novel on which the Redford film is based. Gordon used a cloud of witnesses to present a revisionist view of the Weather Underground and in his author's note thanks Ayers, whose intellectual fingerprints are all over the book. One character says, for instance, that the Weathermen were "some of the biggest hearts and best minds of the times put everything they believed into it" but were confronted by such illicit government power that it is natural they became "impatient." Others utter exculpating vacuities such as, "She might have believed in the wrong thing, but at least she believed," apparently unaware that the same might be said of Pol Pot. The Bank of Michigan job, where a guard was killed (by a mysterious Weather member, who, suspiciously like Larry Grathwohl, had been in Vietnam before joining the group and never fit in), is described as not one of the "normal" Weather actions in which "only property was destroyed." Although Weather Bureau members Billy and Bernardine and Jeff Jones had made it clear in their 1974 underground manifesto Prairie Fire , dedicated to assassin Sirhan Sirhan and others, that the group was for "the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie and establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat," Gordon portrays them as the moral equivalent of Minutemen. His protagonist says, "In the '70s, for the second time since 1776, white Americans defending the ideals of democracy took up arms against our government." Another character associates the group with the country's most fundamental identity: "We came to partake of the American myth of the maverick, the last wild horses roaming free along a western frontier." Barack Obama, who left Ayers twisting slowly in the wind along with Jeremiah Wright in 2008, also offered him a unique opportunity to complete his mission. Initially, the revelations about their relationship raised questions about Ayers's status as a mover and shaker in Chicagoland politics, although Mayor Richard Daley Jr. (whose father a younger Billy wanted to kill) let him off the hook by saying, "You judge a person by his whole life." Even so, having the media harrowing the old ground of bombs and bloodthirsty rhetoric that Ayers thought he had put behind him was not a good thing. But Obama sidestepped his relationship with Ayers. The two had worked together in the Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund-in the first, Ayers helped Obama get the job of giving away $50 million for education in Chicago, and in the second, he sat with Obama on a blue-ribbon board making large and telegenic grants to the downtrodden-and Bill and Bernardine had staged one of Obama's first fundraisers when he made a serious bid for power. When the president-to-be dismissed Ayers during the presidential campaign, despite all these links, as just "a guy in the neighborhood," probably an anodyne Alinskyite at this stage of the game, but in any case someone whose walk on the wild side had occurred when Obama himself was 8 years old, it created a new opening for Bill. If the true nature of Ayers's activities during the 1960s was seen as an academic question by the man about to be president, why should it matter to anyone else? If the future leader of the free world regarded him as worth knowing, why shouldn't Ayers's arguments about the true meaning of things be taken seriously? The association with Obama gave him a platform to make his case again-at a time of his choosing-to an audience that was now paying attention. Soon after the votes were counted, Ayers was invited to write an op-ed for the Times in which his talking points, purged of worrisome details, are compressed into a form as canonical as the Nicene Creed: I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. . . . In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after the accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village . . . took responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices-the ones at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol were the most notorious-as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation. . . . It was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately. . . . We-the broad "we"-wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers, surrounded the Pentagon and lay down in front of troop trains. Yet we were inadequate to end the killing of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war. It was a more serious tone than he had taken in the 9/11 interview, where, when asked if he'd do it all again, he said he didn't want to "discount the possibility." In this final version he makes himself a Where's Waldo somewhere among "the broad 'we.' " He and the other members of the Weather Underground were merely fish swimming in the sea of these people. Ayers felt confident enough that he even ended the piece with a little lecture on the dangers McCarthyism posed to the democratic process: "Demonization, guilt by association and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let's hope they never will again." The Times approached Ayers again for a Q&amp;A in 2009, in which the interviewer (who identifies herself as the daughter of a couple who were part of Weatherman) refers to him as someone who has engaged in a "long struggle against racism and social injustice." He jocularly accepts the compliment and says that indeed he remains a radical in the sense that he is always inclined "to go to the root of things." After badinage about the unpalatable Sarah Palin and what his children are doing, he tells the interviewer that he continues to be "a work in progress . . . living in a dynamic history that's still in the making." Giving flip and witty answers to the questions, he is, for the Times interviewer, quite a character. And then came The Company You Keep , cherry on the whipped cream. The Daily Beast celebrated the opening by doing an interview with Ayers, as if he were part of the movie, noting the "parallels" between him and the character played by Redford. Bill is allowed to blithely distance himself from some of the things he and his comrades did when they were "stupid, na"ive and young," and then to go on the attack against the Obama administration for its overreaction to North Korea. Having delivered his opinions on the continuing sickness of U.S. foreign and domestic policy, Ayers looks back with satisfaction at the past he has worked so hard to reconfigure: "People want me to say I really regret being in extreme opposition to the war, and I don't regret that. I'm happy for every cringing politician, every restrained bombing mission, and every piece of destroyed military property. I think it's all worthwhile." The Redford film and this je ne regrette rien comprise his victory lap. Largely because of Bill Ayers, Weatherman, having had its cake, now forces the rest of us to eat it. Like Sharon Solarz in Redford's movie, Bill would do it all again, even though he and his comrades, in his own version, never did it in the first place. Thanks to his perseverance, his little cult of violence has been reimagined as citizen activism in a legendary time when it was bliss to be alive and very heaven to be locked and loaded; veterans of a foreign war in which they functioned as a postmodern version of the Lincoln Brigade; lone survivors of a brave Thermopylae that sought to stop American imperialism in its tracks. Having finally come home in the age of Obama, the Weatherpeople, it now turns out, were never really revolutionary criminals like Che, Huey, Ho, and all the other political riffraff they still heroize and name their children after, but merely progressives in a hurry. Peter Collier works at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is coauthor, with David Horowitz, of Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties . http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/progressives-bombs_729026.html?page=1 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c9e_1369667398 Detroit Iron Progressives with Bombs Robert Redford, Weather Underground Mon, 27 May 2013 10:38:33 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=2e9_1369665148 Fine_Just_Fine Memorial day tribute to the brave men and women who gave their lives for America in all of America's wars. Part of a Vietnam war documentary (1987) featuring live and raw footage with partially re-dubbed sound and voices. Features the celebrity voice narrations of Harvey Keitel, Randy Quaid, Robert Deniro, Martin Sheen and others. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=2e9_1369665148 Fine_Just_Fine Memorial Day Tribute: &quot;Dear America Letters Home from Vietnam&quot; Part 5/8 memorial day, vietnam, war, documentary Wed, 08 May 2013 08:04:19 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ae4_1368013654 bigdick Harvey Wince, the 22-year-old Superior Township man sentenced to serve up to 65 years in prison for torturing a child, had an emotional outburst in the Washtenaw County Trial Court April 29. This is the full sentencing video. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ae4_1368013654 bigdick <span class="highlight">Harvey</span> Wince (child abuser) - Full Court Video Harvey Wince, child abuse, jail Tue, 14 May 2013 08:07:53 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=984_1368533125 Detroit Iron ELSPETH REEVE MAY 13, 2013 President Obama told donors like Jessica Biel, Justin Timberlake (who was wearing hipster glasses), and Tommy Hilfiger that Washington gridlock is pretty much Rush Limbaugh's fault on Monday evening at a fundraiser at Harvey Weinstein's house in New York's Greenwich Village. Obama admitted that his theory - that after the 2012 election, the Republican "fever" would break, and they'd decide to co-sign some of his agenda - was wrong. "My thinking was when we beat them in 2012 that might break the fever, and it's not quite broken yet," Obama said, according to the White House pool report. This is because of a certain corpulent radio host. "I genuinely believe there are Republicans out there who would like to work with us but they're fearful of their base and they're concerned about what Rush Limbaugh might say about them. And as a consequence we get the kind of gridlock that makes people cynical about government." In June 2012, Obama had predicted that being a lame duck would actually be a perk. He told donors : "I believe that if we're successful in this election, when we're successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that,... My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn't make much sense because I'm not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again." And if Republicans refuse to cooperate? Well, unlike the president, they do face reelection. Obama suggested he would crush them in the midterms. "If there are folks who are more interested in winning elections than they are thinking about the next generation then I want to make sure there are consequences to that." Obama left Weinstein's home for another DNC fundraiser at the home of Alexandra Stanton in Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood, before a DCCC/DSCC event at the Waldorf Astoria, capping a busy day in which he addressed the dueling scandals about the IRS and Benghazi - and maybe even cried . http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/05/obama-tells-harvey-weinstein-justin-timberlake-blame-rush-limbaugh/65187/ http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=984_1368533125 Detroit Iron Obama Tells <span class="highlight">Harvey</span> Weinstein, Justin Timberlake to Blame Rush Limbaugh obama Tue, 07 May 2013 17:50:56 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=599_1367963117 JustinTime Harvey Wince, the 22-year-old Superior Township man sentenced to serve up to 65 years in prison for torturing a child, had an emotional outburst in the Washtenaw County Trial Court April 29. Apparently he can do the crime, but he doesn't want to do the time. http://annarbor.com/news/ypsilanti/man-to-serve-up-to-65-years-for-torturing-3-year-old-boy/ http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=599_1367963117 JustinTime Man Convicted Of Torturing Child Has Emotional Courtroom Outburst Convicted, Crime, Torturing, Child, Outburst, Courtroom, Harvey, Wince Sat, 11 May 2013 21:44:50 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b2c_1368322074 Tama7866 Former Nixon aide claims he has evidence Lyndon B. Johnson arranged John F. Kennedy's assassination in new bookRoger Stone claims Johnson 'micro-managed' Kennedy's Dallas motorcade, demanding it pass through Dealy Plaza on the afternoon he was shot He also says that Johnson, instructed Richard Nixon to hire Jack Ruby several years before he shot Lee Harvey Oswald The revelations are made in is book 'The man who killed Kennedy - the case against LBJ' out later this year A renowned Republican strategist and lobbyist has claimed that former president Lyndon B. Johnson set up John F. Kennedy's assassination, which occurred on November 22, 1963. Roger Stone, 61, makes the claim in his upcoming book 'The Man who killed Kennedy - the case against LBJ' which is set to be published in October. He also writes that Richard Nixon and Johnson had a documented relationship with Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald's killer, years before he shot Oswald in the basement of Dallas police headquarters in 1963 Stone worked for Richard Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President in 1972 and later served in the Nixon administration. He claims that Johnson, a congressman at the time, instructed Richard Nixon, also a congressman at the time, to hire Ruby onto the House of Representatives payroll in 1947. Stone claims Johnson 'micro-managed' Kennedy's Dallas motorcade, demanding it pass through Dealy Plaza on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, the infamous day when Oswald shot Kennedy from the overlooking book depository building. 'Nixon knew Jack Ruby, hired him on House payroll in 1947 at request of ... Lyndon Johnson. Newly released documents prove it. in my upcoming book "The Man who killed Kennedy- the case against LBJ" Out Oct 1-order yours today,' Stone wrote on his Facebook page on Thursday 'LBJ and Gov. John Connally micro-managed Dalla JFK's schedule and demanded the route thru Dealy Plaza where the motorcade came to a full stop and LBJ had JFK killed,' he added. 'They had no interest in JFK stops in Austin or Houston!' Stone, now a member of the Libertarian Party, co-wrote his book with Libertarian writer Mike Colapietro. Ruby, whose real name was Jacob Leon Rubenstein, moved from Chicago to Dallas in 1947, the same year Stone alleges that Nixon put him on the House payroll at Johnson's request. Ruby died of a pulmonary embolism on January 3, 1967, a little more than three years after killing Oswald. Johnson died of a massive heart attack on January 22, 1973. Nixon died of a severe stroke on April 18, 1994. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b2c_1368322074 Tama7866 Evidence Lyndon B. Johnson arranged JFK's assassination in new book JFK,Assingnation,conspiracy,Kennedy,Oswald,Ruby,Johnson,Nixon Sat, 11 May 2013 17:44:27 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=459_1368308526 Detroit Iron By ALLEN G. BREED On the very day John F. Kennedy died, a cottage industry was born. Fifty years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, it's still thriving. Its product? The "truth" about the president's assassination. "By the evening of November 22, 1963, I found myself being drawn into the case," Los Angeles businessman Ray Marcus wrote in "Addendum B," one of several self-published monographs he produced on the assassination. For him, authorities were just too quick and too pat with their conclusion. "The government was saying there was only one assassin; that there was no conspiracy. It was obvious that even if this subsequently turned out to be true, it could not have been known to be true at that time." Most skeptics, including Marcus, didn't get rich by publishing their doubts and theories - and some have even bankrupted themselves chasing theirs. But for a select few, there's been good money in keeping the controversy alive. Best-selling books and blockbuster movies have raked in massive profits since 1963. And now, with the 50th anniversary of that horrible day in Dallas looming, a new generation is set to cash in. Of course, the Warren Commission officially concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone - and issued 26 volumes of documents to support that determination. But rather than closing the book on JFK's death, the report merely served as fuel for an already kindled fire of doubt and suspicion. Since then, even government investigators have stepped away from the lone assassin theory. In 1978, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations ended its own lengthy inquiry by finding that JFK "was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy." That panel acknowledged it was "unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy." But armed with mountains of subsequently released documents, there has been no shortage of people willing to offer their own conclusions. Among the leading suspects: Cuban exiles angry about the Bay of Pigs fiasco; Mafiosi enraged by Attorney General Robert Kennedy's attacks on organized crime; the "military-industrial complex," worried about JFK's review of war policy in Vietnam. One theorist even floated the notion that Kennedy's limousine driver shot the president - as part of an effort to cover up proof of an alien invasion. Anything but that Oswald, a hapless former Marine, was in the right place at the right time, with motive and opportunity to pull off one of the most audacious crimes in American history. "As they say, nature abhors a vacuum, and the mind abhors chance," says Michael Shermer, executive director of the Skeptics Society and author of "The Believing Brain," a book on how humans seem hardwired to find patterns in disparate facts and unconnected, often innocent coincidences. Polls underscore the point. About 6 in 10 Americans say they believe multiple people were involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, while only one-fourth think Oswald acted alone, according to an AP-GfK survey done in mid-April. Belief in a conspiracy, though strong, has declined since a 2003 Gallup poll found 75 percent said they thought Oswald was part of a wider plot. The case has riveted the public from the start. When the Warren Commission report was released in book form, it debuted at No. 7 on The New York Times Best Sellers List. Two years later, attorney Mark Lane's "Rush to Judgment" dominated the list. The Warren Commission, he argued, "frequently chose to rely on evidence that was no stronger and sometimes demonstrably weaker than contrary evidence which it rejected." The book has since sold millions of copies in hardcover and paperback, says Lane. Since then, dozens of books with titles like "Best Evidence," ''Reasonable Doubt," ''High Treason" and "Coup D'Etat in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy" have sought to lay responsibility for JFK's death at the highest levels of the U.S. government - and beyond. British journalist Anthony Summers, whose BBC documentary became the 1980 book "Conspiracy," says many conspiracy buffs "are fine scholars and students, and some are mad as hatters who think it was done by men from Mars using catapults." Unlike the later coverage of Watergate, there were no reporters like The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who were told by their editors, "Get on this and don't get off it," says Summers, whose works focused on people and events largely ignored or treated cursorily by the official investigations. "Nobody went down there and really did the shoe leather work and the phone calls that we're all supposed to do," he says. For many, the Kennedy assassination has become "a board game: 'Who killed JFK?' So you feel free to sit around and say, 'Oh! It's the mob. Oh! It's the KGB' ... and have no shame," scoffs Gerald Posner, whose 1993 book "Case Closed" declared that the Warren Commission essentially got it right. The Oswald-as-patsy community has vilified Posner. But the lawyer says he didn't set out to write a defense of the Warren Commission. Instead, he planned to go back through the critical evidence to see what more could be determined through hindsight and more modern investigative techniques - "and then put out a book that says, 'Read THIS book. Here are the four unresolved issues of the Kennedy assassination, with the evidence on both sides.'" Halfway through the allotted research time, Posner went to the editorial staff with a new idea: A book that says flat-out who killed Kennedy. "Who?" one of the editors asked, as Posner retells it. "Oswald," he answered. "And who?" "Oswald," Posner says he repeated. "And they literally looked at me as though I had just come in from Mars. And you could tell there was this feeling of, 'Oh my God. He's read the Warren Commission and that's all he's done.'" "Case Closed" went on to sell 100,000 copies in hardcover. "I would have never thunk it," Posner says. Unlike Posner, Vincent Bugliosi, author of 2007's "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy," embarked on his book expecting to vindicate the Warren Commission. What he didn't expect was for it to balloon into a 1,650-page behemoth - with a CD-ROM containing an additional 960 pages of endnotes - that cost $57. "STOP writing," he recalls his wife telling him. "You're killing the sales of the book." The 78-year-old lawyer blames the conspiracy theorists. "We're talking about people," he explains, "who've invested the last 15, 20, 25 years of their life in this. They've lost jobs. They've gotten divorces. Nothing stops them." "Like a pea brain," he says, he responded to all of their allegations. "It's a bottomless pit. It never, ever ends. And if my publisher ... didn't finally step in and say, 'Vince, we're going to print,' I'd still be writing the book." Despite its girth and hefty price tag, "Reclaiming History" had a respectable first printing of 40,000, says Bugliosi, best known as the former deputy Los Angeles district attorney who prosecuted Charles Manson. But in a 9,400-word review, Gary L. Aguilar, a director of the Washington-based Assassination Archives and Research Center, wrote that the only thing Bugliosi's book proved was "that it may not be possible for one person to fully master, or give a fair accounting of, this impossibly tangled mess of a case." Bugliosi omitted or distorted evidence and failed to disprove "the case for conspiracy," Aguilar wrote. Lamar Waldron is not surprised at the success of people like Bugliosi and Posner. "The biggest money has been generated for the authors ... who kind of pretend it all was right back in 1964 and nothing really has happened since," says Waldron, who has co-written two books on the assassination. "The large six-figure advances and everything like that don't go to the people who dig through all those millions of pages of files and research for years." In "Ultimate Sacrifice" and "Legacy of Secrecy," Waldron and co-author Thom Hartmann used declassified CIA documents to make the case that JFK (and later his brother Robert) were killed because of plans to overthrow Cuban dictator Fidel Castro - and the Mafia's infiltration of that operation. Waldron says the books have sold a combined 85,000 copies since 2005. And now, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are set to star in a feature film version of "Legacy of Secrecy" - with a reported price tag of up to $90 million. That's one of a pair of major movies - landing on opposite sides of the Oswald-as-lone-gunman debate - due out this year. Oscar winners Marcia Gay Harden and Billy Bob Thornton have signed on for the Tom Hanks-produced "Parkland," named for the Dallas hospital where Kennedy was pronounced dead. That project, which Hanks' website describes as "part thriller, part real-time drama," is based on a small portion of Bugliosi's magnum opus. A TV movie is to be made from another new book, "Killing Kennedy," co-written by Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, which had sold 1 million copies within four months of its release in October. In a note to readers, O'Reilly wrote: "In our narrative, Martin Dugard and I go only as far as the evidence takes us. We are not conspiracy guys, although we do raise some questions about what is unknown and inconsistent." Academy Award winner Errol Morris is working on a documentary about the assassination. He did not respond to an interview request. One film, critics say, has done more than anything to shape the public's perception of the assassination: That's Oliver Stone's 1991 drama, "JFK." "He made this kind of paranoid conspiracy theory respectable," says New York writer Arthur Goldwag, author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies." The movie tells the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, played by Kevin Costner . Garrison remains the only prosecutor to bring someone to trial for an alleged conspiracy to kill Kennedy. The film is "a remarkable litany of falsehoods and misrepresentations and exaggerations and omissions," Posner says. "The reason that I'm so hard on Stone is because he's such a good filmmaker. If he was a schlocky filmmaker, it wouldn't matter." Shermer, of the Skeptics Society, agrees that Stone's role in stirring the conspiracy pot is "huge." "You tell somebody a good story, that's more powerful than tons of data, charts and graphs and statistics," he says. "And Oliver Stone's a good storyteller. He's biased and he's very deceptive, and I don't trust him at all. But the movie's great." Stone's publicist said the director had "chosen to pass on this opportunity" to comment. "JFK" took in more than $205 million at the box office, nearly two-thirds of that overseas, and has since raked in untold millions more in television royalties, pay-per-view, and videocassette and DVD rentals. In the recent AP-GfK poll, respondents were asked how much of what they knew about the JFK case came from various sources. Only 9 percent cited movies or fictional TV shows, while the greatest portion, 37 percent, said history texts and nonfiction books. About two dozen JFK-related titles are due on bookstore shelves in coming months, says Patricia Bostelman, vice president of marketing for Barnes &amp; Noble booksellers. Among them is "They Killed Our President: The Conspiracy to Kill JFK and the Cover-Up That Followed," by former pro wrestler and Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura. Other authors are taking advantage of the anniversary to reissue or expand on previous works. Waldron is working on a book focusing on mob figures who confessed to being part of a conspiracy to kill the president. Summers is publishing a sequel to "Conspiracy," incorporating material released since 1980, while Bugliosi has a "Parkland" paperback to accompany the movie release. And "Case Closed" will soon appear for the first time as an e-book. Despite the mountains of documents released since its publication, and a mountain of criticism of his conclusions, Posner says there is no plan to update it, other than perhaps including a new foreword. "I moved on to other subjects," he says. On Nov. 22, 1963, John Kelin was a 7-year-old second-grader in Peoria, Ill. He says the Kennedy assassination is "my earliest clear memory in life." But he didn't really give the case much thought until 13 years later, when as a sophomore at Eastern Michigan University he attended a lecture by Mark Lane. It was the first time he saw the Abraham Zapruder film that captured the moment when Kennedy was fatally wounded. "Using slow motion and freeze frame, Lane made sure that all of us sitting in that hot, poorly ventilated auditorium understood that Kennedy's head and shoulders were slammed backward and to the left, and that Lee Harvey Oswald's alleged shooting position was behind the presidential limousine," Kelin wrote in a book, "Praise from a Future Generation," about early critics of the Warren Report. "In a way, that lecture was the genesis of this book." Kelin bristles at references to a conspiracy theory "industry," preferring to think of himself as part of a grass roots response to the government's "severely flawed, unsatisfactory explanations for what really happened in 1963." His publisher, Wings Press, has "made intimations" about releasing a digital edition of "Praise" for the 50th anniversary. Meanwhile, Kelin has written another JFK book - a fictional account of how he came to write the first one. "It's kind of a satire of the present-day research community," he says, "with a love story thrown in to try to broaden the interest level." The title: "Conspiracy Nut." http://omg.yahoo.com/news/50-years-finding-profit-truth-jfk-case-160632997.html http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=459_1368308526 Detroit Iron 50 years on, finding profit in 'truth' on JFK case John F. Kennedy Tue, 07 May 2013 13:32:03 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d59_1367945086 BloodyPeasant Very little information is currently available about the production of "SAC Command Post" by the the 1365th Photo Squadron, and no evidence has surfaced that it was ever shown. The film provides a detailed picture of the Strategic Air Command's command-and-control system lodged in the lower levels of SAC headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha, Nebraska. Describing tight civilian control over decisions to use nuclear weapons, the film emphasizes SAC's place in the chain of command and the mechanisms for preventing the "unauthorized launch" of bombers and missiles that could start a nuclear war. Internal evidence suggests that work on the film began during 1963 because the issue of the Omaha World Herald that one of the SAC officers is shown reading appears to have a June 1963 date on it. That production began in 1963 cannot have been coincidental. Air Force leaders were no doubt concerned that writers and film producers had been raising questions about loose command-and-control arrangements over nuclear weapons, even the scary prospect that a SAC commander could launch nuclear strikes on his own authority. In April 1963, only a few months before the Air Force was working on this film, The New York Times published an article about Kubrick's London studio, quoting the director that Doctor Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was about a "psychotic general, who believes that fluoridation of water is a Communist conspiracy to sap and pollute our precious bodily fluids, has unleashed his wing of H-bombers against Russia." Kubrick was working with British writer Peter George, who in 1958 had published Red Alert, about a deranged general initiating a nuclear attack on Russia. Also showing that fear of loose control over nuclear weapons was entering the popular culture, American novelists Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler had written Fail-Safe, published in 1962, about a U.S.-Soviet crisis caused by the accidental transmittal of attack orders to SAC bombers (That the plot was close to Red Alert led to a plagiarism lawsuit). In this context, Air Force leaders may have decided to present their side of the story to the general public and that is what "SAC Command Post" does. Depicting SAC as the "greatest deterrent to general war in the world today," the film depicts the Command's nuclear forces, ground and airborne-alert operations, and the decision-making system that controlled those forces. Taking the viewer into the underground command post, the narrator describes the component parts: the intelligence situation room, the entrance to the offices of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (which kept the "strategic war plan integrated"), and the SAC controllers with the Gold Phone that kept commanders in touch with Washington and which would relay Presidential orders to go to war. The coverage of SAC's alert procedures shows the warning systems used to detect incoming missiles (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System) and the detonation of nuclear weapons on U.S. territory (Bomb Alarm System). In the event of an attack, or warning of an attack, the "positive control" (or fail-safe) system would ensure that bombers would return to their bases if their pilots did not receive a "go" message. If SAC units received attack orders, presumably originating with the President, SAC bomber and ICBM crews could not drop bombs or launch missiles unless they acted together beginning with steps to authenticate their orders. In the event a nuclear strike took out SAC headquarters, the Command had established continuity of operations plans centering in an airborne command post that had been flying since February 1961. Through well established procedures, SAC would "prevail if we have to fight." A specific organizational need may have provided the impetus for the film's production, but why it was never used publicly needs to be explained. It is possible that by the time that the film was nearing completion it may have become a problem in its own right. With President Lyndon Johnson determined to avoid crises with Moscow, higher-ups may have seen an official documentary trumpeting SAC's readiness for nuclear war as off-message, even though it was consistent with the president's public rhetoric about centralized control over nuclear use decisions. Although "SAC Command Post" was not classified, perhaps the presentation of so many SAC activities raised the film's sensitivity making it more difficult to show publicly. Perhaps the film was used for internal training purposes but there is no evidence of that either. If any Air Force or other Pentagon retirees have any recollections of what might have happened with "SAC Command Post," they are welcome to share them. Viewers, however, should be aware of the degree to which the film slides over significant command-and-control and safety problems, for example, the extent to which bomber crews had the capability to make autonomous nuclear use decisions as well as the risks that inhered in the airborne alert program. Also unmentioned is the program initiated during the Eisenhower administration to predelegate presidential nuclear use decisions in the event of a emergency conditions; although predelegation figured prominently in Dr. Strangelove as Plan "R", it was one of the most sensitive official secrets of the Cold War. View similar videos at: http://declassified.liveleak.com http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d59_1367945086 BloodyPeasant (Declassified) Strategic Air Command: Command Post Declassified, Strategic Air Command Command Post, sac, history, nuclear war Mon, 06 May 2013 20:15:36 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b29_1367885574 Detroit Iron By Jon Wiederhorn Being a former president just doesn't come with the clout it used to. Bill Clinton may still have some sway when it comes to brokering piece between warring nations, but as a rock 'n' roll powerbroker, he recently fell flat. According to the CBS "60 Minutes Overtime" webcast, which ran May 6, Clinton was recruited to encourage Led Zeppelin to reunite for the Superstorm Sandy benefit concert last year and failed to convince the British rock royalty to give it one more go onstage. Robin Hood Foundation executive director David Saltzman told the webcast that he and film executive Harvey Weinstein flew to Washington to ask Clinton if he would personally make the request, since the surviving members of Led Zeppelin--vocalist Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page, and bassist John Paul Jones--were in Washington right before the benefit show for the Kennedy Center Honors. Considering the love the members of Zep have historically for the ladies, maybe they should have sent Hillary instead. That Clinton was unable to motivate Led Zeppelin to perform for the first time since their one-night reunion show in London in 2007 shouldn't exactly surprise anyone. During a press conference in London in September 2012 to promote the release of their Celebration Day DVD, which came out at the end of last year and captured the 2007 concert, the members of Zeppelin deflected questions about a possible reunion. When asked, "At any point, did you think, 'That was great. I can fancy doing more of this'--and if not, why not?" Jimmy Page replied, "Actually, can I ask you all a question? You've all been to see the film. Did you enjoy it? Then we've done our job, haven't we?" The following month in New York, the band was even more direct. When an AP reporter asked, "Is this in anticipation for something even bigger for the band?" Plant joked, "We'd been thinking about all sorts of things, and then we can't remember what we were thinking about..." before pausing and directing a single expletive at the journalist, "Schmuck." Toning the mood, Page added, "This time, four years ago would have been rehearsing to get to the O2 . In December it will be five years since the 02. So that's a number of years of passing between. So it seems unlikely if there wasn't a whisper or a hint that we would get together to do something or other, even two years ago, or whatever. Seems pretty unlikely, doesn't it?" http://music.yahoo.com/blogs/stop-the-presses/former-president-bill-clinton-unable-spark-led-zeppelin-215853602.html http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b29_1367885574 Detroit Iron Former President Bill Clinton Unable to Spark Led Zeppelin Reunion Bill Clinton, Led Zeppelin Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:25:39 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d94_1366741416 Marcux Isn't it interesting how things change...yet all remains the same. Dzokhar Tsarnaev: "I never done it, they set me up." Lee Harvey Oswald: "I didn't shoot anybody"..."I'm just a patsy." http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d94_1366741416 Marcux &quot;I'm Just a Patsy&quot; &quot;I'm Just a Patsy&quot;