Cynthia McKinney Invokes The Spectre Of The Attack Upon The U.S.S. Liberty

It's frankly amazing to me that this was allowed on the air...but...just maybe...the love affair between the United States and Israel is beginning to wear thin.

Mayhaps all of the dry anal raping without nary a kiss or a bouquet could have something to do with it.

I'm seriously considering going to the CBS/1010WINS studios with a bullhorn and chastising them on their one-sided coverage.

By the way - Cynthia McKinney has a MySpace page!

Did Israeli warships ram the aid ship Dignity?

ReidBlog

As word of the mounting death toll (375 Palestinians, 4 Israelis) and Gaza humanitarian crisis spread worldwide, news that a ship carrying medical supplies for Palestinians in Gaza, called the Dignity, was set to arrive spread around the Web. I remember hearing about the ship for the first time yesterday. Well this morning, CNN's Carl Penhaul, who was aboard the ship (as was former U.S. Congresswoman from Georgia, Cynthia McKinney...) confirmed accounts by the ship's captain that they were, in his estimation, deliberately rammed by an Israeli military vessel that observed the ship for nearly an hour, and which Penhaul said must have seen it because the Dignity had "full lights on."

Penhall reported that the Dignity's captain was not contacted by the Israeli ship until after the boat was rammed, and began taking on water. The ship re-routed to Lebanon, after the Captain was told in no uncertain terms that the Israeli ship would open fire if the Dignity continued. Penhall reported that the Israeli military on board the warship accused the Dignity of "being involved in terror operations." Scary stuff, and possibly a violation of maritime law. From the Guardian:

Activists trying to bring aid to Gaza today claimed their boat had been rammed by Israeli gunboats in a "criminal attack" in international waters.

The Free Gaza Movement said its vessel, the Dignity, was intercepted by several Israeli vessels as it was heading to the Gaza Strip, which has been under Israeli aerial bombardment since Saturday.

One gunboat rammed the Dignity on the port bow side, causing heavy damage, although no one was hurt, the group said.

"[The Dignity] is taking on water and appears to have engine problems," the movement said on its website. "When attacked, the Dignity was clearly in international waters, 90 miles off the coast of Gaza.

"The gunboats also fired their machine guns into the water in an attempt to stop the mercy ship from getting to Gaza.

The Guardian also reports that Israeli officials are characterizing the ramming accidental:

An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, told Reuters there had been no shooting, although two ships made "physical contact".

Palmor said the boat had failed to respond to Israeli naval radio contact and an Israeli vessel "clashed with the ship". He said nobody was hurt and the Israeli ship escorted the aid boat back to Cypriot territorial waters.

Israel declared the coastal territory a closed military zone after it launched air attacks on Hamas targets in Gaza on Saturday in response to Hamas firing rockets into Israel. Israel said the Free Gaza movement boat would not be permitted to dock in the Gaza Strip.

And this from UPI:

In a radio message, the Israelis accused the Gibraltar-registered Dignity of being involved in terrorist activity, the ship's captain said. The Dignity was carrying 16 passengers, including physicians from Britain, Germany and Cyprus and several human rights activists, including former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney.

The patrol boat rammed the Dignity after pursuing the vessel for about 30 minutes before the collision. Crew members said they believe the Dignity was intentionally struck, which Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor called "absurd."

Meanwhile, from Xinhua (a Chinese daily,) comes an account of the ship's arrival in Tyre, and a very different explanation of the ramming, which officially is being called "accidental"...

BEIRUT, Dec. 30 (Xinhua) -- The "Free Gaza" ship, "Dignity", rammed by an Israeli patrol vessel on waters near Gaza early Tuesday, arrived at Tyre port in south Lebanon in the afternoon, al-Jazeera TV reported.

The ship reaching the Lebanese water was escorted with a Lebanese navy boat and boats of the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL).

... Lebanese President Michel Suleiman gave orders to the Lebanese navy to escort the boat loaded with supplies to Gaza Strip, after it was rammed by Israeli gunboats.

... Sixteen people including rights activists, doctors and Journalists, along with a crew from al-Jazeera TV boarded the ship at Larnaca port in Cyprus late afternoon Monday, from where they made "Symbolic" attempt to cross the border into Gaza.

An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman appeared on al-Jazeera saying that its navy prevented the ship because it is full of Journalists and it is "an act of provocation and propaganda."

"This is a propaganda message which we refuse," the spokesman said.

So who was on board the ship (besides Penhall?) From a site called "Ten Percent," dateline yesterday:

The Dignity has left Cyprus & should arrive in Gaza tomorrow around 10am (local). Check the website for updates, www.freegaza.org Israel has declared Gaza a ‘closed military zone’, making sure no one can witness the atrocities. Our boat is going to challenge that closure.

The passenger list is below and includes Cynthia McKinney, a journalist from CNN and three physicians who will stay in Gaza to assist the overworked doctors there. We will also be sending out the list of medicines on board.

(UK) Denis Healey, Captain
Captain of the Dignity, Denis has been involved with boats for 45 years, beginning with small fishing boats in Portsmouth. He learned to sail while atschool and has been part of the sea ever since. He’s a certified yachtmaster and has also worked on heavy marine equipment from yachts to large dredgers. This is his fourth trip to Gaza.

(Greece) Giorgios Klontzas, Relief Captain
Cpt. Klontzas is an experienced sailor and human rights activist. This will be his fourth trip to Gaza.

(Greece) Nikolas Bolos, First Mate
Nikolas is a chemical engineer and human rights activist. He has served as a crewmember on several Free Gaza voyages, including the first one in August.

(Jordan) Othman Abu Falah
Othman is a senior producer with Al-Jazeera Television. He will remain in Gaza to report on the ongoing military onslaught.

(USA) Cynthia McKinney
Cynthia is a former U.S. Congresswoman from Georgia, and the 2008 Green Party presidential candidate. She is traveling to Gaza to assess the ongoing conflict.

(Australia) Renee Bowyer
Renee is a schoolteacher and human rights activist. She will remain in Gaza to do human rights monitoring and reporting.

(Ireland) Caoimhe Butterly
Caoimhe is a reknowned human rights activist and Gaza Coordinator for the Free Gaza Movement. She will be remaining in Gaza to do human rights monitoring, assist with relief efforts, and work on project development with Free Gaza.

(Cyprus) Ekaterini Christodulou
Ekaterini is a well-known and respected freelance journalist in Cyprus. She is traveling to Gaza to report on the conflict.

(Sudan) Sami El-Haj
Sami is a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay, and head of the human rights section at Al-Jazeera Television. He will remain in Gaza to report on the ongoing military onslaught.

(UK) Dr. David Halpin
Dr. Halpin is an experienced orthopaedic surgeon, medical professor, and ship’s captain. He has organized humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza on several occasions with the Dove and Dolphin. He is traveling to Gaza to volunteer in hospitals and clinics.

(Germany) Dr. Mohamed Issa
Dr. Issa is a pediatric surgeon from Germany. He is traveling to Gaza to volunteer in hospitals and clinics.

(Cyprus) Dr. Elena Theoharous, MP
Dr. Theoharous is a surgeon and a Member of the Cypriot Parliament. She is traveling to Gaza to assess the ongoing conflict, assist with humanitarian relief efforts, and volunteer in hospitals.

(UK/Tunisia) Fathi Jaouadi
Fathi is a television producer and human rights activist. He will remain in Gaza to do human rights monitoring and reporting.

(Cyprus) Martha Paisi
Martha is a senior research fellow and experienced human rights activist. She is traveling to Gaza to do human rights work and to assist with humanitarian relief efforts.
(UK) Karl Penhaul
Karl Penhaul is a video correspondent for CNN, based out of Bogotá, Colombia. Appointed to this position in February 2004, he covers breaking news around the world utilizing CNN’s new laptop-based ‘Digital Newsgathering’ system. He is traveling to Gaza to report on the ongoing conflict.

(Iraq) Thaer Shaker
Thaer is a cameraman with Al-Jazeera television. He will remain in Gaza to report on the ongoing military onslaught.

One wonders whether the Israeli government and security forces would have had access to the same information about what appears to be a very public, very high profile operation, and why, if they did, they would invite the public relations nightmare of possibly sinking a ship full of journalists, schoolteachers and human rights activists.

Previous:

* News reports from Gaza
* Israel waging 'all out war' in Gaza

Please see the article at the site - there are links embedded. I just want to remark upon a few things:

The rocket attacks are curiously timed, and serve the inhabitants of Gaza no good fortune; it should NOT, therefore, be taken as fact that HAMAS is behind them;

The ceasefire was broken on the day after our Presidential elections...you probably did not hear about the attack by Israel at the time;

If anything can be termed a HOLOCAUST, this massacre of civilians certainly can. Let's see if Gaza is retaken by Israel or not. This would put the absolute lie to the statement offered that "there are no efforts to re-occupy Gaza".

I think that I need to listen to another news station - my stool becomes runny every time I hear the lies proffered by 1010WINS in regards to the attack on Gaza. I can only imagine what the survivors of the attack upon the U.S.S. Liberty are thinking.

In other news...looks as if the Holocau$t industry is drying up - many tales are now not being taken as fact.

Oh...in case you didn't hear this on Rush Limbaugh's show...I present to you, dear readers...Barack, The Magic Negro!

Hunt, JFK and Obama

2008 was — or should have been — a landmark year in the long quest for truth about the JFK assassination. Finally, a long-suspected conspirator confessed from the grave, but save one exception, his indictment was effectively quarantined by a mainstream media that has stubbornly suppressed or ridiculed all evidence about the conspiracy... As Barack Obama takes office, he faces the same powerful vested interests that JFK struggled to curtail.

Hunt, JFK and Obama

by Travis Kelly

On the 45th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, we stand much closer to a final truth in the case, thanks to E. Howard Hunt’s posthumous confession this year (published in the March edition of Rolling Stone*, with videos released in October), corroborating what many researchers have long concluded. Finally, the self-deluding “someone would have talked by now” mantra sung for five decades with stubborn rectitude by the MSM — which has never lifted a pebble in this case — should have ended. Hunt has been a prime suspect in the assassination for 30 years, and his guilt had already been established in the landmark 1985 Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby trial. Haven’t heard of it? Nor the Hunt confession? If a tree falls in the forest, and the MSM doesn’t hear it... there’s no sound and little fury.


The confession should have been adequate occasion for an honest journalism to at least examine the evidence (abundantly researched by 2008) for Hunt’s involvement; or if that’s too distant now, for some of our university historians, most of whom still swear allegiance to this most moribund of myths with the fealty of Catholic priests for the Holy Trinity. Curiously, several of the last bastions of the dying faith can be found in left-of-center venues: an editor at Salon rejects this proposed article, uttering obeisance to the Lone Nut dogma; at Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn still fervently clutches his ragged bible from the Warren Commission; Justin Raimondo at AntiWar.com grudgingly refers to the “still-lingering mystery” on occasion; Noam Chomsky will have none of it (he’s above this riff-raff, too). I won’t mention the whole chorus of hacks in our major dailies and channels — one can only adopt Mencken's detached amusement and laugh bitterly. He wasn’t only speaking of American rubes as “the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages” — a majority of our journalists and historians are at the center of the herd.


Among my favorite of the herd’s Pavlovian triggered (by the mere utterance “conspiracy”) grunts and calls:

“We couldn’t face the truth then — now we’ll never know.”

“Occam’s Razor unerringly dictates that Lee Harvey Oswald did it solo.”

“Someone would have talked by now.”

Which brings us to an examination of the evidence for the talking Hunt and his named co-conspirators’ guilt...


But first: why should we care now, about an event half a decade ago, with the nation reeling from a tsunami of crises demanding our urgent attention? Aside from the cliched admonitions (”Know the past is prologue, and it will set you free.”), there is the new man whom we’ve elected to solve these crises, and there is more than a superficial resemblance in the global adulation greeting Obama’s and JFK’s elections: Obama faces conditions very much like those confronting the man elected in 1960 — entering office in a recession, with an agenda to curb the speculative excesses of Wall Street, and managing an imperialist War Party determined to intervene wherever corporate interests are challenged, whatever the ideology — communist, social democratic, Islamic or merely nationalist.


Rendered by the nuance-free binary thought endemic to American thought, JFK was either a Cold War hawk, or the seminal peacenik of the ‘60s. Actually, his Irish Catholic ancestry determined his general anti-imperialism: he opposed both Soviet domination and Western neo-colonialism, favoring national economic development and political reform as the surest bulwark against communist importunity, inciting a furious WASP nest of old-boy bankers and militarists — the British-inflected Eastern establishment, headquartered in the Council on Foreign Relations (and its London parent, the Royal Institute of International Affairs), determined to carry on the global Anglo empire via the “shock doctrine” of USAF carpetbombing and World Bank/IMF carpetbagging. Domestically, he enraged Wall Street with investment tax policies encouraging domestic productive investment, curtailing off-shore tax shelters and punishing speculation. This was a double blow to the “economic royalists” epitomized by Allen Dulles, chief of the CIA, aka the “private army of the Fortune 500.” (for the best account of this conflict, see Donald Gibson’s Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency).


That reactionary aristocracy has come a long way since, over the minor speed bump of Carter and the hiccup of Clinton, culminating in the totally unbridled “feed-the-good-ole-boys” regime of George Bush, and the crippling overextension on both the domestic and foreign fronts that Obama inherits. Will he muster the resolve to reign in the insatiable predators in Halliburton/Blackwater and the financial cannibals on Wall Street? More costly surges and bailouts, or the genuine reforms demanded by the public that elected him? Like JFK, Obama cannot be totally deaf to his own ancestry — surely there is an anti-imperialist animus in his bones. But like JFK, he is surrounded by a ruthless plutocracy capable of extinguishing pluralistic progress at home as effectively as it has done around the third world for half a century.


If Obama continues to staff up with more hawks (Joe Biden, Rahm Emmanuel, Zbigniew Brzezenski, Hillary Clinton, Gates), yet struggles to fulfill his principle mandate, to end the fraudulent War on Terror, he may be heading for his own Bay of Pigs — the proximate cause of JFK’s demise. Will he eventually confront the War Party as JFK did, or will the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (Eisenhower’s unedited term, reflecting the density of defense industry stocks in Capitol HIll portfolios, the Democrats leading), enriched and entrenched ever deeper after a decade of fructifying privatization, cross the Rubicon again and commit another Roman coup? And most importantly: could our bewigged Lords get away with it again? Given our punditocracy’s steadfast evasion and denial about JFK’s takedown over five decades, the praetorian guard must feel confident that it could contain and reverse any excess populism by the Afro-American president.


Ultimately, Mencken’s sardonic chuckle rings hollow: the defenders of the faith choose to let the insidious precedent stand as a beacon for the future — that the ultimate sanction against an American president is not impeachment by a congressional majority, but homicide by a powerful minority of war hawks. So, yes, I accuse all of them, the whole pusillanimous pack of pravda chihuahuas, of a criminal dereliction of conscience and duty. For half a century, they have persisted as accomplices after the fact, in the most grievous of crimes against the polity.


THE “WHOLE BAY OF PIGS THING”

According to one of his chief lieutenants, H.R. Haldeman (in The Ends of Power), Nixon was using “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” as a euphemism for the JFK assassination in this segment from the Watergate tapes:

...this Hunt, that will uncover a lot of things. You open a scab, there's a hell of a lot of things...This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky...Just say...very bad to have this fellow Hunt, ah, he knows too damned much, if he was involved...If it gets out that this is all involved, the Cuba thing, it would be a fiasco. It would make the CIA look bad, it's going to make Hunt look bad, and it's going to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing which we think would be very unfortunate-both for the CIA and the country...


Hunt was blackmailing Nixon for hush money at the time, as he along with Frank Sturgis and a few Cuban operatives were taking the fall for the Watergate burglary.


In another of those inexhaustible satori revelations that populate this greatest of all murder mysteries: Nixon was in Dallas on Nov. 22 (he couldn’t recall exactly at first). And so was E. Howard Hunt, if we are to credit the verdict of a Miami jury in 1985 in which Hunt lost a libel appeal against the allegation that top CIA brass had discussed “a limited hangout” with Hunt as the fall guy during the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation, which was burrowing dangerously close to the truth. Ex-CIA agent Victor Marchetti (The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence) authored the article in the Liberty Lobby’s publication, The Spotlight, referring to a memo between DCI Richard Helms and counterintelligence chief James Angleton, stating: “Someday we will have to explain Hunt's presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963.” Curiously, it was Angleton himself who supplied the memo to both Marchetti’s source, New Jersey reporter James Trento, and to HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi.


Hunt won the first trial, but faced the seminal JFK conspiracy researcher and attorney for the deceased assassin, Mark Lane (Rush to Judgment, 1966), in the second — and lost. Among other damages, Hunt claimed that the Dallas allegation had alienated the affections of his three children, who came to him demanding to know if it was true — had he been in Dallas on Nov. 22? On the witness stand, Hunt was crucified by Lane with the glaring contradiction of this claim against his stated alibi: that he had been in Washington with his now deceased wife and three children (two of them teenagers) on Nov. 22... yet they all seemed to have forgotten this small detail on a day for which everyone else alive at the time enjoys near perfect recall. None of them were called to testify in Hunt’s defense.


The forewoman of the jury, Leslie Armstrong, stated to the local media afterwards: “(Lane) wanted us to say our own government had killed our president. We listened to the evidence very carefully. We discussed it. We concluded that the CIA killed President Kennedy; and I call upon the United States government to do something about that." That de facto verdict, and news of the trial itself, never escaped the enduring MSM quarantine on the case. But Hunt knew that it was the final judgment against his legacy, and it is against this backstory that we must judge his final confession to his eldest son, St. John Hunt, who has since publicly recalled that his father was not in Washington on that day, but had left town for “a business trip” to Dallas that week.


Hunt names this chain of the command in the assassination: LBJ, and CIA agents Cord Meyer, David Atlee Phillips, William Harvey and David Morales, with his own role limited to that of “benchwarmer” — probably a coy admission that he didn’t actually pull a trigger or spot a sniper that day... a “limited hangout” to the one child he was still close to, but who knew too much to swallow the “plausible denial” canards offered to the public.


Circumstantial evidence that he was on the team in some capacity, along with his longtime CIA partner David Atlee Phillips, Chief of Station in Mexico City, co-conspirator in the Iranian and Guatemalan coups, and fellow planner of the Bay of Pigs fiasco (all under the aegis of Nixon), includes:

• In 1963, Hunt was deputy chief of the CIA's newly created DOD, Domestic Operations Division (whose very title seems to violate the CIA's charter against domestic ops), and Chief of Covert Operations. He had set up the Cuban Revolutionary Council, a far-right anti-Castro Cuban group, in New Orleans. Witnesses have placed Hunt visiting its headquarters — the same 544 Camp Street address where “pro-Castro” defector Lee Harvey Oswald operated under the tutelage of anti-Castro ex-FBI agent Guy Bannister.

• In September '63, Hunt moved to Mexico City as temporary CIA Chief of Station — presumably the permanent Chief there, David Atlee Phillips, had gone elsewhere while Lee Harvey Oswald arrived in town on his trail-laying mission to the Cuban and Soviet embassies, all observed 24/7 by CIA surveillance. (Hunt’s biographer, Tad Szulc, is the source, although Hunt later denied this temporary duty under oath to the Rockefeller Commission. But in a deposition for the Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby trial, Phillips cagily admitted that he had seen Hunt in Mexico City sometime between Sept. '61 and March '65.

• Where might Phillips have been vacationing while Hunt took over his duties in the Mexican capital? It appears he was in Dallas sometime earlier in the month, meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald before his departure south. This was the bombshell revelation given to HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi by Antonio Veciana, head of the most radical anti-Castro militia, Alpha 66. Veciana only identified his CIA controller as "Maurice Bishop" — an alias now definitively known to have been used by Phillips — but he never specifically linked the two, or spoke of them ever again subsequent to his near assassination in Miami’s Little Havana after the confession.

• Kerry Thornley, an ex-Marine stationed with Oswald in Japan who also lived in New Orleans for two priors prior to the hit, had conversations with two mysterious middle-aged men there named "Gary Kirstein" and "Slim Brooks," among them the subject of how one might assassinate President Kennedy. Thornley’s post-Marine path eerily paralleled Oswald’s — he believes he may have been groomed as a backup patsy. Jim Garrison questioned him in his 1967 investigation. Thornley has stated "Kirstein" was actually E. Howard Hunt.

• In 1975, Texas JFK researcher Penn Jones, Jr. receives a photocopy of a handwritten letter mailed from Mexico City, the original dated 11-08-63:

Dear Mr. Hunt,


I would like information concerning my position. I am only asking for information. I am suggesting that we discuss the matter fully before any steps are taken by me or anyone else.


Thank you, Lee Harvey Oswald


Three handwriting experts testified it was Oswald's writing, although the HSCA came to no definite conclusion.

• In the Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby trial, CIA contract agent and former Castro lover Marita Lorenz testified that she had met with Hunt in Dallas on Nov. 21, '63, along with fellow Watergate conspirator Frank Sturgis and anti-Castro Cuban exiles who had driven from Miami (she also gave this testimony to the HSCA, which again came to no definite conclusion about her veracity). She identified Hunt as the paymaster of the operation.

• Hunt’s final identified conspirator was an anonymous “French gunman” on the grassy knoll. This would almost certainly be Jean Souetre, a French OAS right-wing terrorist suspected in assassination attempts against DeGaulle (for sacrificing Algeria). Souetre was arrested by the FBI in Dallas that day, and promptly deported, apparently without interrogation (another “coincidence” to bedevil the WC apologists). A French investigator has reported that Hunt met with Souetre in Paris in May ‘63.

• In a 2004 Havana conference between American assassination researchers and retired Cuban intelligence officers, former chief Fabian Escalante testified: “By mid-1963, we had infiltrated a special group of exiles working with the CIA. A CIA official came to a safe-house in Miami and said to a group of Cuban exiles, `You must eliminate Kennedy.’” The Cubans identified this CIA officer as “Maurice Bishop,” with corroborating evidence that his true name was David Atlee Phillips.


A SINGULAR CAULDRON OF PARANOIA AND HATRED

The “whole Bay of Pigs thing” resulted in a cauldron of delirium and fanaticism after the Cuban missile crisis — long after his Watergate convictions, Hunt believed that the missiles were still hidden in Cuba, and that Castro’s survival ranked as the greatest tragedy in American history. In the Pentagon, bizarre plots were hatched: submarines firing special high-altitude fireworks to simulate the Second Coming, abetted by agents spreading the panic, and the good Catholics would rise up and overthrow their heathen leader in time for salvation. Even more Machiavellian were the Operation Northwoods schemes, including false-flag terrorist acts against American planes and citizens to spark the next invasion. Meanwhile, a certain faction of CIA officers, eager and desperate to rehabilitate themselves after the massive bungling of the Bay of Pigs, were hatching a plot of their own with the return of an asset freshly repatriated from the U.S.S.R — Lee Harvey Oswald (for the most thorough examination of Oswald as CIA asset, see history professor Philip Melanson’s Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. Intelligence).


By mid 1963, eight assassination attempts against Castro had failed. One of Hunt’s accused con-conspirators, William Harvey, directed them in alliance with Santos Trafficante and Johnny Roselli — mobsters who wanted their casinos back — through his ZR/RIFLE program. (Oswald was also well-known to the Mob: his uncle, Dutch Murret, was a numbers man for Carlos Marcello in New Orleans). Then the feverish Cubans and their CIA handlers learned of the ultimate betrayal: JFK’s secret back-channel detente talks with Castro and Khruschev. The missile crisis had sobered this Cold Warrior, but not the cadre of fanatics in the south, who did not have to deal with Khruschev’s threat to retaliate against another Cuban invasion by engulfing West Berlin.


David Morales, the last named in Hunt’s hierarchy, is the man most likely to have plotted the tactical hit, as he had personally assassinated a number of Communists and leftists in South America, and orchestrated the Bay of Pigs invasion. A Native-American from Arizona, he was known as “El Indio,” a courageous front-line agent and heavy drinker whose expressed hatred of JFK even exceeded Hunt’s — 114 of the men he personally recruited had been sacrificed on those beaches, and it was all JFK’s fault for failing to send in American jets. Actually, there was air support: a “contra” air force of ancient B-26 bombers flying from Nicaragua with no insignia, but the CIA tacticians (perhaps Morales?) had forgotten to calculate the time-zone difference. They arrived an hour late. With little genuine experience in military operations, the CIA had also miscalculated the tides, forcing the whole marine brigade to wade in at low tide against murderous shore fire.


Former anti-Castro CIA contract agent Gerry Patrick Hemming, has suggested to me that some operations, including the Bay of Pigs, were designed to fail — and that thought certainly occurred to JFK, just as a similar suspicion about the summit-sabotaging U2 affair had prompted Eisenhower to deliver his odd Military-Industrial Complex speech. JFK did threaten to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces.” And the CIA, or at least it’s compartment directed by Phillips, vowed to “force JFK’s hand” in the fight not to abandon Cuba.


But the CIA was not alone in facing extinction: both LBJ and Hoover were facing political mortality if JFK had lived — LBJ embroiled in the Bobby Baker scandal, with the headline in the Dallas Morning News on Nov. 22 reading “Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson.” Hoover faced mandatory retirement in a second Kennedy term, and there was no chance of a reprieve, as they despised each other. These were the two most powerful men in Washington in real terms, and their hatred of the president burned almost as hotly as David Morales’. It was not only the survival of the nation against Castro’s influence (the example of his health care system as dangerous as his nukes), but the conspirators’ personal survival as well that brought it to the tipping point. The actual operation, no more radical and violent than the Northwoods false-flag plans that JFK had scotched, may have originated with Phillips, Hunt, their Cuban pit bulls and Mob asssets, but LBJ and Hoover almost certainly got wind of it and tacitly approved it at the least. Hoover had an inside source — none other than LHO himself (Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr identified Oswald as an FBI informant to the Warren Commission, throwing that august body into a panicked en camera session.) Both LHO’s and Jack Ruby’s curious pasts were airbrushed out of existence in the WC’s final report.


November 22 solved all these problems efficiently: Castro had obviously Svengalied Oswald in the assassination of a president, who could no longer impede this final casus belli for Cuba Libre. This was the line being disseminated by Phillips’ and Morales’ propaganda assets in Miami, even before the police in Dallas knew anything but Oswald’s name. Grilled about these connections by HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi, Phillips nearly came unglued — he had 3 cigarettes going at once, according to Fonzi (basically, they had their man on the run, but how the HSCA was sabotaged in a beltway coup is recounted in Fonzi’s book, The Last Investigation). Fabian Escalante sums it up: “We believe Kennedy became an obstacle to US military aggression against Cuba. There were two objectives to the plot — to kill Kennedy and to blame Cuba for the crime.”


Two other points of evidence corroborate Hunt about LBJ’s involvement:

• On the night before the asssassination, LBJ attended a gathering in Dallas millionaire Clint Murchison’s home, according to the video testimony of his long-time mistress Madeleine Brown before her death. Also there: Nixon and Hoover (she didn’t mention Clyde Tolson, or what striking ensembles they might have worn to this gala). When LBJ emerged from the private power confab, he told her: “After tomorrow, those SOBs will never embarrass me again. That’s a promise.”

• The fingerprint of LBJ’s longtime enforcer, Mac Wallace (convicted of one murder of an early LBJ enemy, and suspected in another) has been identified on one of the boxes from the TSBD sniper’s nest — one that had eluded all identification until certified fingerprint expert Nathan Darby compared it to Wallace’s prints in 1998 and came up with a legally viable 12-point match (it’s been disputed by the ever reliable Warren Commission acolytes).


That leaves the last named conspirator, the most dubious on Hunt’s list: Cord Meyer. In the now vast literature on the assassination, Meyer has never been suspected, and there is not a shred of evidence to connect him with the other players named by Hunt, or their motivations. Meyer was one of the more liberal leaning officers of the CIA — he had been investigated by the McCarthy witch hunters for his association with several leftist “subversive” groups. Adding a potboiler element to his confession (as in his many novels), Hunt alleges that Meyer was furious over JFK’s affair with his former wife, Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was murdered in a park in 1964 (the M.O. had all the markings of a professional hit). The affair did not begin until 1961, three years after their divorce. In 2001, writer C. David Heymann visited Meyer in a nursing home and asked him of his suspicions about Mary’s unsolved murder. “The same sons of bitches that killed Kennedy,” he hissed. It’s highly doubtful that he was referring to himself.


In the final analysis, Hunt’s history as a masterful propagandist, criminal and forger of evidence to accuse another innocent man of assassination (JFK for the Vietnamese president Diem, using fabricated cables), must be taken into account. It is probable that Hunt was adulterating the hard truth in his final days — as much of it as he dared tell the one son who still loved him. Substitute Hunt himself for Meyer in the hierarchy — a far more likely candidate and no “benchwarmer” in the Cuban/CIA “hate-Kennedy” mobs — and we have a more credible cabal.


LBJ, Nixon, Hoover and Hunt, all convened in Dallas on Nov. 21-22 — no adult should believe the coincidental innocence of that gathering, any more than the innocence of Jack Ruby prowling the DPD basement.


And no adult should doubt that it could easily happen again. The first victims of the War Party are always the peacemakers. Obama will walk point on that dangerous route, and only a mature, undeluded and discerning public at his back will see him through.


It’s far past time that the nation’s intellectual class muster the courage of its counterparts in Argentina, Chile, Russia and Germany, and deliver a candid historical judgment on these conspirators: 45 years later, Castro’s regime is still in power. Florida has never flown the red flag. Vietnam — which JFK refused to escalate beyond the Green Beret advisors** — fell and the predicted dominos didn’t, after the unnecessary sacrifice of 56,000 men. The men who perpetrated this atrocity, and all the iniquity spawned by it, should be identified and condemned utterly.


* Also alone among American journals, in the 1970s Rolling Stone published Carl Bernstein's exposé about the CIA penetration and co-optation of the media — Operation Mockingbird. It's agents of influence, and many sympathetic fellow travelers in the press, have effectively promoted the notion of "conspiracy" as fevered delusion, and actively disparaged researchers and authors investigating the assassinations of the '60s.

** A mother lode of tendentious obfuscation and revisionism on this point. For the definitive account, see ex-Army intelligence officer John Newman’s excellent book-length doctoral thesis, JFK and Vietnam, and the most highly regarded recent book about both the JFK presidency and the assassination: JFK, the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass.

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Talking to the Police - DON'T DO IT!!! - by Professor James Duane

Excellent video!

I found an interesting bit of info in regards to Gerald K. Smith:

There Could Have Been A Very Different World

Henry Ford would have financed Lindbergh for president, Gerald Smith's 'America First Party' would have ran his campaign, and he would have won. There never would have been a WW2. All Hitler wanted was to reunite the Sudetenland, a corridor to West Prussia, and stop the Communists.

In 1934 Smith was active in revealing the people behind the 1913 Federal Reserve act, and how its real rulers caused the Great Depression. In the 1936 election cycle Roosevelt wasn't that popular, and Huey Long was a great orator, people were mad, and ready to listen. Smith gave Americans a choice, the aristocratic Jew from New York, or an articulate self made reformer in Huey Long.

Long would have repealed the Federal Reserve, redistributed the wealth scammed in the 1929 depression, and let the Communist revolution in Europe stall.

It could have been a VERY DIFFERENT WORLD, indeed.

9/11 Debunking for Dummies (Special Thanks To Debunking The Debunkers)

Special thanks go to Debunking The Debunkers

In other news...open-air fires still cannot melt steel. Film at 11.

I Fully Support Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich!

I'm still waiting for a list of his crimes...here's a link to the indictment.

At this point, shouldn't we do away with lobbying?

Lobbying exists only to defraud the average citizen of his voting power.

We The People were cheated of our power to have our voices heard when Woodrow Wilson was blackmailed into allowing corporations to have the rights of a "person".

The tax burden for the corporations was then passed onto the PEOPLE.

You tell me why Halliburton was given a by on their $500 MILLION tax debt, yet Harvey Forbush's salary is being garnished to retrieve a lousy $3,000?

Aside from Dick "Skeletor" Cheney having a hand in it...

15 questions 9/11 ‘truthers’ now need to answer

B.J. Edwards has replied to my Pilots For 9/11 Truth Debunk NIST with the crapfest seen below:

One of the standard claims of 9/11 “truthers” is that they are merely sceptical individuals with a healthy and understandable desire not to swallow US government propaganda at face value. The mantra “just asking questions” allows them to pose as wary and intelligent souls too accustomed to the concept of duplicity in high places to accept the “official story” of Al Qaeda’s role in planning and perpetrating the largest mass casualty terrorist attack in modern history. It also allows them to adopt an indignant tone when dealing with their critics, and to conflate attempts by debunkers to undermine their claims with both unquestioning acceptance of an “official cover-up” (irrespective of whether the debunker happens to be a supporter of the current US administration or not) and a systematic effort to deprive them of freedom of speech. It goes without saying that in the process the “truthers” set up two straw-men for them to knock down, but then they’re not very good at dealing with tougher critics.

The “just asking questions” approach has three further advantages to those of a paranoid mindset and a less than scrupulous approach to evidence and facts (if George Orwell were alive today, he’d appreciate the irony of serial disinformation merchants like Dylan Avery and David Ray Griffin posing as members of a “truth movement”, given their fast and loose approach to the historical record and scientific fact). Firstly, conspiracy theorists know that mud sticks: if you can make an accusation against an individual or group through innuendo and sly hints the latter has the hard task of proving the calumnies against them to be false. Film buffs will no doubt recall George C. Scott’s performance as the malevolent prosecutor in Anatomy of a Murder, and his repeated question to the defendant Ben Gazzara: “Exactly when did you stop beating your wife?” This approach sums up “truther debating tactics nicely.

Secondly, the claim that one is “just asking questions” is liberating, as it frees the truther of the obligation of actually constructing a coherent alternative theory - based on the evidence at hand - which is more convincing than the “official theory”. Why worry if the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolitions or not? Why worry if the hijackers were patsies or ghosts? Why worry if the Pentagon was hit by a missile or a jumbo jet piloted by remote control? Why worry if the passengers of the four planes are alive or not? With one or two exceptions (notably Michael Ruppert), 9/11 conspiracy theorists and their supporters do not actually outline a scenario which explains how and why the US government (in cahoots with the Israelis, or the military-industrial complex, or whoever else) slaughtered nearly 3,000 people - most of whom were American citizens - in a co-ordinated series of attacks which were then blamed on Arab Islamist terrorists. Most truthers lack sufficient moral courage to produce a real theory about 9/11 being an ‘inside job’ which combines motive with method and which can be tested against the evidence. Deep down, they know that once they venture into specific claims their case will be torn to shreds, and they will be exposed as ignorant frauds.

Thirdly, it makes the task of a truther an easy one: all he or she (there seem to be few female truthers around, which hopefully means that they won’t reproduce) has to do is google to get the appropriate “story” from Prison Planet, 9/11 Blogger, What Really Happened or a similar website. Hey presto, they get what they want: “The FBI said there were no phone calls from AA77!”; “4,000 Jews didn’t turn up to work at the WTC on 9/11!”; “Silverstein ordered the demolition of WTC7!” And so on and so forth.

Any genuine sceptic dealing with truthers - whether online or in the flesh - then has to (1) work out what the hell his or her interlocutor is talking about, and (2) ask themselves how exactly they made this claim, and if it has any substance. Anyone lacking either patience or detailed knowledge of the events of 11th September 2001 may be tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt. Debunkers are left with the time-consuming task of researching the historical background, and trying to assemble the relevant technical and scientific information, before they can actually verify the facts for themselves. In short, the truther can throw out a red herring or an outright distortion in a matter of minutes, leaving it up to other net users to take the time and trouble to verify their origin and accuracy.

Fortunately, yeoman work has been done by scores of individuals to actually put the record straight. Pat and James from Screw Loose Change, Mark Roberts, 9/11 Myths, Debunking 9/11 and 9/11 Guide in particular provide a valuable resource. The James Randi forum is particularly useful in that it provides commentators with specialist knowledge - military veterans, pilots, flight engineers, physicists, architects, forensic experts etc - with a platform to expose the anti-scientific claptrap and historical illiteracy of the truthers. This is the main reason why the JREF and its commentators arouse such hatred from the 9/11 conspiracy ghouls.

It’s time to turn the tables on the truthers. Rather than accept a situation in which the nutjobs and kooks who subscribe to 9/11 conspiracies can make their accusations willy-nilly, it is high time that their critics decided that they can “just ask questions” too. This particular debunker has decided that maybe, just for once, the onus for actually demonstrating the validity of their theories on the basis of systematic and critical analysis of the evidence belongs to the truthers, not to those who wish to expose their fallacies. As someone whose academic bias is based on history, I would like to pose the following challenge to the conspiracy-mongers:

Let’s take your thesis (that 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by the Bush administration, and covered up by a coalition of US government agencies, allied powers, big business and the media) as read. The following questions point to logical and factual gaps within that thesis. It is now up to you to answer these questions and explain why your theories are still valid. For your answers to be credible, they need to be detailed and based on verifiable evidence. No suppositions, no speculation, no unsupported assertions, just the facts. Stop “asking questions”, and provide answers. These fifteen initial questions will do for starters.

(The questions and proposed answers are below)

So...instead of answering very cogent questions, instead, we are faced with information far out of the mainstream, peppered with the usual stupidity (Osama bin Laden video confessions, MOSSAD agents so "stupid" that they would celebrate openly, etc.); now, I could entertain every questions posed here...but why waste my time? B.J. sure didn't answer any of my queries, so why should I indulge in explaining that which B.J. and his ilk will simply dismiss out of hand?

Here, now, is what I will counter his proposed shite-fest with:

The bin Laden video confessions were all FAKED (fatty bin Laden?!?);

The so-called "hijackers" in Florida and New Jersey were patsies and red herrings to cover the needed presence of the Israelis running their operations (Zoom Copters, other assorted mall kiosks, "Art Students");

The classification of all video evidence of the flyover at the Pentagon was to obfuscate the actual flight path and identity of the "craft" that struck the Pentagon;

Russia and the other world powers are still in a state of shock, as they watch our elected officials completely drop the ball in regards to ensuring the true safety of American citizens - they still can't believe that anyone believes the absolutely retarded cover stories being used to cover up outright treason and malfeasance;

The complete denial of physics and chemistry (building collapses, the effect of fire on steel);

Simply put, I can go on and on as to why your denial of reality is the true issue here...don't use dopey-ass terms like "islamofascism" that are made up by idiots like David Frum here and expect to turn anything around, especially considering what is occurring in Gaza right now...it's actually worse than what has happened in Africa! There is no question at all as to who the real murderers are here...and you should thank your gods that those people actually believe that something good will occur without their direct intervention...don't you idiots realize how easily you could be overrun, regardless of the weaponry you've finagled from America? Those people that you call offal and garbage exemplify the ideal of good neighbors. Try that crap here, and watch how fast your stupid carcasses are strung up for all to see.

It boggles the mind when I am confronted with such outright stupidity...and then to hear people almost mumbling in unison: "Take your meds."

I've an answer for you: go ahead and take ALL of your bloody meds, and fuck off to an asylum, because that's where idiots who blot out reality with reason-altering pharmaceuticals belong.

Update: See...someone else can completely see through the subterfuge of crap that these so-called "questions" posit...without further ado, here is what Rism said (posted at CounterKnowledge) on 17 December 2008:

This is what we call a straw man argument. None of these questions legitimately counter the question being asked about the official 9/11 story.
These questions are completely speculative and circumstantial.

I will demonstrate.

1. If Al Qaeda were not responsible for 9/11, then why was Ahmed Shah Massoud’s assassination so well co-ordinated with the attacks on New York and Washington?

We never said they weren’t responsible. Some did yes but others simply stated that it was allowed to happen. Also It is well known that Al Qaeda was created by the CIA to carry out operations against the soviets. This is done so the US cannot be easily tracked back to wrong doing. The US is doing the same thing right now in Iran by funding and arming anti-Iranian rebel groups to carry out attacks within Iran in order to provoke a response.

As for him being assassinated, there are many reasons why it could have happened. He could have had information that would compromise the mission or maybe would have been suspected of talking afterwords.

In conclusion this question is irrelevant and unanswerable by us truth seekers who are simply asking questions.

2. If 9/11 was a “false flag” operation intended to justify a pre-determined plan to invade Afghanistan, then why didn’t the CIA and other US government agencies do more to facilitate ties with the NA?

Again another unanswerable question. We do not know the inner workings of compartmentalized government operations.

A possible answer is not wanting to incorporate certain groups in the operation in fear of not being able to control the flow of information within these certain groups.

3. Why did bin Laden and al-Zawahiri suddenly leave their known locations and go to ground, if they were not anticipating imminent military action by the USA?

Again, Who knows, we aren’t in a position to be able answer questions like this.
Maybe its the same reason members of the Bin Laden family were flown out of the country. They need to protect their assets and since Al-Qedea was created by the CIA than surely certain people within in it are assets who cannot be compromised.

4. If 9/11 had been an inside job, and if there was a long-standing intention by Bush and his advisors to invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban, then why did they have to scrabble around for a workable plan?

It was reported that they did have plans to attack Afghanistan before 9/11 Check the following links below for more info.
Its highly possible they pretended to be disorganized and not ready for a retaliation in order to further the idea that this attack was a complete surprise.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4587368/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1550366.stm

5. We are being asked to believe that the conspirators behind 9/11 decided that they would make the hijackers citizens of allies of the USA, not enemies. Why were they not given Iraqi, Iranian or Syrian identity?

Again, another question that is completely unknowable and unanswerable to someone simply asking questions about the official version. We do not know the inner workings of compartmentalized govt. black op programs. There are hundreds of reasons why they wouldn’t or couldn’t have given the hijackers different identities or country origins.

6. If the identities and the nationalities of the hijackers were faked, then why did the Saudi, Egyptian, Lebanese and UAE governments accept that citizens from their own countries were involved?

Answered above but to further reiterate my point we do know that the US and Saudi Arabia have intimate connections. You scratch my back I scratch yours. Why would Saudi leaders care if the hijackers were from their country wouldn’t be attacked? In fact that point alone gives the US more reason to use Saudis. Use patsies from a country that they know wont cry wolf about it. Any other country not in on it could have opened an investigation about the anomalies.

7. Assuming againt that 9/11 was an inside job, how could the US government realistically presume that the Russians and Pakistanis would actually permit the USA to effect regime change against the Taliban?

Because the world thought that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda was behind it. No country in the world following 9/11 doubted what had happened and who had did it. But again still we don’t know the true relationship of these countries or their prior knowledge of the attacks. We do know the head of Pakistan ISI had funded Muhammad Atta and was meeting with US politicians and officials the weeks leading up to the attack. So right there that shows a conflict of intrest on all sides.

These questions are straw men arguments that cannot be answered and does not dissprove in anyway the legitimate questions being asked about 9/11.
But I digress and will continue.

8. Assuming that claims of Mossad complicity in 9/11 (”dancing Israelis”, etc.) are correct, can the truthers suggest a feasible motive for the Israeli government conniving in an act of mass murder on US soil?

Again we do not know who perpetrated the attack or the true relationship between the US and Israel. However we do know that the attack on the USS liberty was a false flag event committed by Israel. This fact has been cooborated by survivors of the USS liberty.

Eye witness and whistle blower reports can be found here:
http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0693/9 …

9. Following on from this, assuming that the “five dancing Israelis” story isn’t a complete fabrication, what kind of secret service recruits undercover agents who compromise themselves by acting so ostentatiously in public?

Again a question that is unknowable with a cornucopia of possible answers. But my logic would say that the best recruits are those who know the least about the operation. Those who cant give up any real knowledge or information about the event.

10. If the WTC towers in New York City were destroyed by controlled demolitions rigged by US government agencies, then why were the fake terrorist attacks used to cover up these controlled demolitions so insanely convoluted?

Again another speculative question that doesn’t discount the physical impossibilities of that day. We do not know the reasons thought. Maybe for effect, maybe to shock people so much as to not question the events. There are so many reasons as to why things happened the way they did as well as assuming that things didn’t go as fully as planned. These are questions that cannot be answered by truth seekers who are simply pointing out holes in the official story.

11. where were the 17,000 Russian troops who were supposedly ready to invade Afghanistan when it came to the commencement of military operations in October 2001?

Again unknowable by anyone on our level. But its not hard to believe that plans and operation change or are even planted to spread dis info. We do not know how compartmentalized black op programs are run and we do not know these details or claim to know, we are simply asking questions about the anomalies of the events surrounding 9/11.

12. We are either supposed to believe that the CF personnel assigned to NORAD were too stupid to notice anything amiss in their headquarters - and query it - or that the Canadian government and the CF were complicit in 9/11. Which of these scenarios is true?

We dont know if they were told to stand down. However we do know there were multiple war game scenarios being carried out that morning involving hijacked airplanes. This could have led to confusion and scrambling of jets to the wrong place. Confusion works a lot better than blunt stand down orders wouldn’t you think?

13. If Al Qaeda were set-up for the 11th September attacks, then why have its leaders and spokesmen repeatedly affirmed their responsibility for - and pride in - these attacks?

Why wouldn’t they? Al Qaeda was created by the CIA and obviously just an arm of the agency. Why wouldn’t they use their proxy terrorist group to further the evidence that it was Al Qaeda? Also a child can tell that the video of Bin Laden are not of the same person. Refer to the following image:
http://www.911lies.org/911PRESS/which_bin_laden_fa …

14. If the hijacking and crashing of four passenger planes was engineered by the US government, then why did UA93 crash into an empty field in Pennsylvania?

We don’t know if a plane even crashed there. First responders on the scene reported no debris and no bodies, simply a hole in the ground. The following video shows evidence from satellite pictures that the scar in the ground where UA93 supposedly crashed had been there for years before 9/11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-59kouBgO_s

15. Finally, if the US government is institutionally ruthless enough to organise the massacre of thousands of its own citizens in a series of “false flag” attacks, then why is it too squeamish to arrange for the deaths of the supposed “truth-seekers” (David Griffin, Kevin Barrett, Steven Jones, Richard Gage, the Loose Change team, Alex Jones, etc.) who have exposed their complicity in one of the most heinous crimes a government can commit against its own people?

Because all that would do is raise more flags. If you were involved in a covert operation that resulted in the death of thousands of Americans why would you then go around killing all the people talking about it. These people are crazy and ruthless but they are far from stupid.

Now everyone needs to logically and objectively ask themselves why these types of straw men arguments are being brought up and presented. Supposedly to disprove the real questions being asked by us truth seekers. I would recommend everyone look at the following website and see for themselves the type of people and the types questions that are being asked. Its not just kids on the internet asking these questions its govt officials, scientists, aerospace experts, and family members. Do not let this piece of disinformation propaganda lull you into not searching for yourself about the truth that happened that day.

http://www.patriotsquestion911.org

Sweet, and to the point.

Take That, Monkey Boy!

Now there's a guy with a wheelbarrow full!

Excellent stuff, guy!

In other news...SNL is COMPLETELY UNWATCHABLE. Now, let me tell you about something you don't already frickin' know:

Three Chinese Herbs could Put an End to Statin Drugs

Wednesday, December 10, 2008 by: Christopher Gussa, citizen journalist

(NaturalNews) The statin drug pushing scam is going for the throat with its all time lowest assault! It is becoming more and more evident that people of all ages are being lied to day after day by doctors as a way to push the deadly protocol of Big Pharma. If you believe all the hype about statins from pharma reps and TV commercials then you will believe that the whole reason our livers make cholesterol is simply to give us a heart attack sometime down the road! That is just about exactly what they tell you.

LDL or so called "bad cholesterol" is not a type of cholesterol at all. It is in fact a protein. Low density lipoprotein to be exact. LDL is a binding protein that is necessary to carry this cholesterol to the body as needed. (Because the waxy cholesterol is not soluble in our watery blood)

HDL is another (high density) protein designed to help carry the used-up cholesterol back to the liver (Not to "get rid of" cholesterol as the pharma-medical system would have you believe but to recycle it so we can re-use it) The simple facts are we need all three! Cholesterol, LDL protein and HDL protein are all essential to good health.

The truth is cholesterol is just cholesterol. (A fatty, waxy chemical created in the liver used in the construction of cells) In fact new cells cannot be made without it. There is now evidence that Alzheimer's and many other diseases are linked to the popular use of statin drugs over the last 30 years due to lack of cholesrerol.

The only "bad" cholesterol is cholesterol that has become oxidized and the only way to undo this oxidation is by feeding our bodies with anti-oxidant rich foods and herbs. See Video: Exposing the Cholesterol Myth with Dr. Ron Rosedale.


Now when extra help (Beyond food) is required to balance cholesterol a formula of three Chinese herbs has been shown to take care of the situation masterfully. Two herbs in the formula that help move and thin blood without stopping the clotting factor are Tien Qi and Dan Shen. These two herbs are remarkable for blood behavior and heart balance. These herbs are then combined with another amazing herb called Jiao Gu Lan that will get rid of blood-fat and plaque as well as prevent and stop oxidation of cholesterol. (An article on Jiao Gu Lan at Natural News can be seen here: http://www.naturalnews.com/023077.html )The combination of these three herbs (In equal parts by weight) becomes a formula which is called "Low Chol" and it is truly a remarkable combination.

If you want to bring the "LDL numbers" and "cholesterol numbers" down to satisfy the drug-pushing doctors (A very stupid reason when all you have to do is say, "no") or if you need the numbers down to pass a job physical or something, then there is a built in "safety valve". The fact is this formula will actually bring these numbers down. However it is not the actual cholesterol you are bringing down. (Thank God) but it does get the doctors and insurance companies "off your back" while you are doing a world of good for your blood health.

Cholesterol and LDL that have become rancid, oxidized, or otherwise corrupt causes the particles to become smaller (So they tend to get stuck together and clog things up) This causes inflammation. (which is dangerous as far as heart atacks are concerned) Also when the particles are unhealthy and small this causes a higher number reading in blood tests. When they are healthy and large the numbers will be smaller even if you have lots of cholesterol!

Now if you were actually bringing down cholesterol itself (Like statin drugs do) you would be doing major harm to your cellular reproduction factors. This unfortunately goes on daily and the drug pushing doctors say they have "saved lives" when in fact they have taken thousands of lives.

This form of deception has ruined and shortened the lives of hundreds of thousands of people seeking better health through the medical system. It is one of the saddest things the author thought he would ever see. Then, like a one-two punch came the FDA's announcement that melamine in small amounts was just fine for babies. How low can they go? Does one dare ask where it will end? Well, all one can do in this war that has been raged on our health is take on one thing at a time.

So for those with unhealthy blood cholesterol, the author would strongly recommend the right healthy antioxidant rich foods, (Mike Adams has a tremendous list of these) taking herbal formulas like "Low Chol" and most importantly of all, if you ever see a doctor, please learn to say the words, "No, It is my health not yours".

Christopher Gussa, Is a TCM practitioner and Certified Master / Clinical Herbalist for 25 years. He is certified in both Western Herbal Therapy and Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine with over 25 years experience. Chris founded Plant Cures Inc. which handcrafts over 150 Serious Herbal Medicine Products for Specific Disorders all created through clinical application. Their products are for Serious Disease and also Powerful Tonic Health. Please visit Plant Cures at WWW.PLANTCURES.COM or call them at 1-800 979 2027

http://www.naturalnews.com/025048.html

Pilots For 9/11 Truth Debunk NIST

Okay...I am of the mind that ONE LIE disproves the entire "official" story of what happened on September 11th, 2001.

If we work along those lines...we prove that the "official" story is so much offal.

Scumbags Behind AntiSpyware 2009 And Its Cousins!

I believe that I have found a page that leads to a malware infection of PCs; here is a link: [http://avi-beshvil-israel.org.il/showthread.php?f=62&s=56773] - obviously, I am not hyperlinking the page. However, it does open a dialogue box that indicates that an infection has been located on your PC; this is a LIE. Do NOT click OK, whatever you do. So, of course, you would click on the red X closing said dialogue box, but then, a window opens with what appears to be a scanner locating malware on your PC.

It is a sham.

I am reporting this link to Google, Yahoo and MSN. Let's see what occurs.

Google Malware Report

StopBadWare

Destroy All Malware

Peter Schiff - Analogies To Our Economy

The Chimp-In-Chief Thanks The Cattle For Wasting Their Lives In His Name

Is This Why Benazir Bhutto Was Murdered?

Does This Give You Douche-Chills?

MC Rove, indeed!

The only "MC"-ing Karl Rove should be involved in is "Making Ca-Ca" in his prison pants when Big Bubba comes by to make "Miss Piggy" squeal.

Mother Justice - by Christopher Ketcham

On a street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Doreen Giuliano, 46, reprises her role as “Dee Madison Quinn.” Photograph by Harry Benson.

Mother Justice

When her son was sentenced to 25 years for Brooklyn’s 2003 “grid kid” slaying, Doreen Quinn Giuliano was sure he’d been wrongfully convicted. To prove it, she went undercover, testing her sanity, her marriage, and the justice system. It was a desperate move—and it may have worked.

by Christopher Ketcham January 2009

November 2007, an apartment in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn: Dee Quinn is partying with a man she often identifies in her journal as “Target.” Dee is 46 but doesn’t look it. She is tiny, girlish, with golden-blond hair. Her breasts are high in a push-up bra. Wearing heels, she arches her back. Target, who is 32 and has a shaved head, doesn’t want sex. He’s hungry. Dee cooks. They talk at the bar in the kitchen.

Hidden in her handbag on the nearby table is a digital recorder. She will secretly tape their discussion that night, and will eventually gather countless hours of conversation. She cooks Target dinner. They drink wine. They smoke weed. Target likes marijuana. At two a.m., Target leaves the apartment with a full stomach.

Only then does Dee let the mask fall. Her body shakes. She breaks into tears, overcome with the stress of months of deception. She has had Target under surveillance for an entire year before making contact, going so far as to rent an apartment around the corner from the house where he lives with his mother.

She stops crying, steadies her hand, reaches into the handbag, turns off the tape recorder, tests the sound, douses the lights, sits on the couch, and waits. She waits for Target to get on his way. She can’t be seen leaving the safe house, not at this late hour.

When she finally steps into the cold Brooklyn night, she drives five miles—not far, but in Brooklyn that distance can mean traversing cultural continents—to a three-story house in a neighborhood of old Colonial and Victorian homes, an area called Prospect Park South. Her husband, Frank, has waited up for her, as he has for the past six months, worried that she wouldn’t make it home.

Dee’s real name is Doreen Quinn Giuliano.

“What’d you get outta him tonight?” asks Frank.

“Nothin’,” says Doreen. “Nothin’ that helps.”

They’ve been married 18 years, but neither has ever experienced this kind of strangeness, this disquiet of a double life. They lie in bed awhile, but Doreen can’t sleep, and by six a.m. Frank has to get up for work. “I’ll get breakfast,” she says.

Four years earlier, on the morning of October 12, 2003, two blocks from Doreen’s home, a 19-year-old Fairfield University sophomore named Mark Fisher was found shot to death, his body splayed on the sidewalk, his face and chest riddled with bullets. He was draped in a yellow blanket and his shirt was torn open, the buttons gone.
Mark Fisher, who was slain at age 19

Mark Fisher, who was slain at age 19. From MCT/Landov.

The blanket, it turned out, was the property of Doreen Giuliano. It apparently had been given to Fisher by Doreen’s son from her first marriage—20-year-old John Giuca—to keep Fisher warm against the night chill. Doreen had been in Florida vacationing with Frank that evening, and her son John had thrown a party while she was gone. Fisher ended up at the party, introduced to John’s circle by a friend of a friend. He was, in reality, a complete stranger, far from his home, in Andover, New Jersey. Fisher had too much to drink and by night’s end he needed a place to crash. John Giuca would later claim he last saw Fisher around five a.m. falling asleep on a couch in the house, wrapped in the yellow blanket. Sometime between five and seven a.m., Fisher had made his way out into the Brooklyn morning. By seven a.m., police were already retrieving his remains.

New York’s tabloids called it the “grid-kid slay” because of Fisher’s prominence as a high-school football star. John Giuca would soon become the prime murder suspect. More than 100 articles would run in the dailies, and a book would be published about the case, a supermarket softcover by Robert Mladinich, an ex–N.Y.P.D. detective, and Michael Benson, called Hooked Up for Murder. The book bore the tagline “First you party … then you die.”

According to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, the strapping Fisher had fallen victim to a penny-ante teen gang, run by Giuca, called “the Ghetto Mafia”—a possible offshoot of the notorious Crips. In the hours before dawn on October 12—so the story went—Giuca sent one of his “capos,” a 17-year-old high-school dropout named Antonio Russo, to “get a body” for the gang. The New York Post followed the D.A.’s lead and ran a banner headline: gridder slain to boost gang’s rep.

Investigators lined up several witnesses who said Russo had confessed to being the gunman. What’s more, Russo had acted suspiciously immediately afterward, suddenly cutting off his dreadlocks and taking a trip to California. The case against Giuca, however, was circumstantial, fragmentary, contradictory. Almost a year after the killing, in late 2004, two arrests were made: first Russo, then Giuca. A year later they went to trial before two separate juries on robbery and murder charges.

Doreen sat in the courtroom for three weeks during her son’s trial. Many of his friends attended in “Free John Giuca” T-shirts. “Six hours a day I was there. And every day I thought the truth was gonna come out,” she now says. “I kept waiting for it. Then, day after day, it didn’t. And it never did.”

What did come out was the testimony of four witnesses against Giuca, each of whom told the court a somewhat different story implicating him in the killing. One witness, a friend of Giuca’s who had attended the party on Mark Fisher’s last night alive, claimed that Giuca called him at six in the morning the day of the murder and later confessed he’d directed Russo to commit the crime. A second witness said that around the same period Giuca told her he had lent the gun to Russo but did not order the killing or the robbery. A jailhouse informant, meanwhile, was brought out to testify that while in lockup with Giuca, many months after the murder, Giuca actually admitted to pistol-whipping Fisher and standing by as “one of his other friends” pulled the trigger. Giuca, in fact, admitted to getting rid of an illegal gun after the shooting, though the weapon was of a different caliber than the one used to kill Fisher.

“This case begins, continues, and ends with John Giuca,” stated Assistant D.A. Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, during her closing remarks. “All roads in this case lead back to this defendant. If it were not for this defendant, Mark Fisher would still be alive today.”

The jury that heard the Russo case—listening to evidence pointing to Russo as the triggerman—took two days to find him guilty, nearly deadlocking. The jury that deliberated John Giuca’s fate had taken just two hours to convict him. Doreen couldn’t help thinking that the jury had been primed for a guilty verdict.

The judge sentenced both men to 25 years to life. “This was a callous crime, and the defendants’ reactions were callous—brutal, callous, and shockingly senseless. So my sentence will be callous,” the judge addressed the courtroom. The date was October 19, 2005, a little more than two years after Fisher’s murder. Doreen felt as if she had been through this before. When she was 31 years old, in 1992, she lost her four-year-old daughter, her second-born with Frank, to cerebral palsy. Frank was at work, Doreen was preparing dinner, and Mallory was in her stroller in the living room. Doreen looked up and saw the girl wasn’t right. “And I knew then she was dying. I rubbed her head and talked softly to her and held back my tears. She took one last deep breath. Then I laid her down on the sofa and knelt beside her.”
Hardscrabble Roots

Doreen grew up in an Irish working-class family of eight in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, back when the neighborhood was truly rough. She knew what it was like to see families ruined by drugs, poverty, alcohol. Doreen’s first serious romance, at age 18, with Giuca’s father, John senior, had many of the rotten ingredients of Red Hook: he was a drug user and a criminal, in and out of jail. (He is now rehabilitated with a new family of his own.) She wanted a better life for her son.
John Giuca

Doreen’s son John Giuca, 25, stays in shape in an upstate New York prison. Photograph by Harry Benson.

She left John senior and got herself into school, at Kingsborough Community College, in Brooklyn, studying early-childhood development. She started a home day-care business, and for a time worked as a professional clown—painting faces, inflating animal balloons, doing magic tricks, sampling outrageous costumes. When she was 23, she met Frank Giuliano and fell in love. He was in construction. She did the books; he worked the job sites. They had a son, Matthew—John Giuca’s half-brother—in 1987, and their business blossomed. They invested in real estate, becoming landlords of some Brooklyn properties, just as the New York real-estate boom of the 1990s came into swing.

John Giuca graduated from high school with good grades and went on to John Jay College to study criminal law. Due to his good looks, he would land occasional roles as an extra in feature films, most prominently Spider-Man, School of Rock, and Sleepers, and on TV’s Ed and Law & Order. Like many kids in their early 20s, he wasted his time, too: smoked a little weed, drank, juggled girlfriends, slept late, and sometimes hung out with kids who weren’t as fortunate as he, kids who got into trouble—among them Antonio Russo.

Much of this was immaterial as investigators homed in on Giuca. Cops started watching him, following him, frisking him. Doreen contends her phone was tapped. When detectives searched her house in the wake of the murder, she says, personal items somehow went missing. Before long, Giuca claims, the cops wanted him to implicate Russo and to testify against others who might have been involved. Giuca says he refused. He stood by his story: he knew nothing about the killing, because he’d been asleep when it happened. (Asked to respond to these accusations, the D.A.’s office refused comment and denied a request for an interview with the prosecutor of the case.)

By the summer of 2005, the Fisher matter had become something of a political liability for District Attorney Charles “Joe” Hynes, who was fighting to get re-elected. The D.A.’s investigators and Brooklyn homicide detectives had joined forces in a special squad to solve the Fisher case, interviewing scores of witnesses and sources across five states, with little to show for it. The tabloids harped on Hynes’s failure to bring the killers to trial in an era when murder rates in Brooklyn had dropped to historic lows. Then, just weeks before the election, both Russo and Giuca were tried and convicted.

The dailies covering Giuca’s trial, as if taking their cues from Hynes’s office, painted Giuca as a mini-Soprano. Giuca, the D.A. claimed, had ordered the hit on Mark Fisher as part of a gang-initiation ritual. Trial testimony, however, suggested that the “gang” was merely a loose group of tough kids hanging out. And while it was indisputable that the alleged triggerman—the dreadlocked Russo—was a friend of the defendant’s, during the trial Giuca’s lawyers insisted that if Russo had done it, he had acted on his own. (Neither Russo nor Giuca gave evidence or testified against the other, behavior indicative of extreme loyalty, ignorance of the events—despite their proximity to the murder—or gang members’ code of silence.)

The tabloids didn’t buy Giuca’s defense. The Post denounced Giuca as a “skinny creep” and the “head of a street gang,” and often misspelled his name. A Daily News article erroneously reported that Giuca had once been arrested for drug dealing. Doreen would never believe another word she read in the tabloids. “I hated those fucking [reporters],” she says. “The drugs were one bag of pot and one pill that was found on his friend—not even on John! So there’s five guys. What—were they all gonna break the pill apart and sell it?”

While Giuca’s arrest record is murky, it is not clean. Prior to the murder, Giuca, then 17, had been written up for an incident which he now insists was benign: he says he was just lighting firecrackers on a Brooklyn street. But following Giuca’s arrest in 2004, unnamed witnesses, produced by the D.A.’s office, suddenly came forward to attest that the incident, in fact, had been gunplay. Giuca pleaded guilty to firearms charges, claiming he feared 15 years might be added to his sentence.

One day during a lunch break from court testimony, Doreen’s brother Eddie and husband, Frank, were in line at a food wagon parked in front of the courthouse. They heard someone make the comment “Boy, I could sure use a blunt.” They turned around to discover it was a juror with a shaved head and dark eyes and earrings in both ears. Eddie went over and told Doreen. It didn’t seem right, Doreen thought, that a man deciding the fate of her boy wanted to go out and get stoned.

The family of Mark Fisher also came to doubt the veracity of the case presented by the Brooklyn district attorney. Fisher’s mother, Nancy, was particularly vocal. A devout Catholic from Colombia who immigrated to the United States, Nancy publicly charged that D.A. Hynes had shied away from going after all the parties who played a role in her son’s slaying. In their book on the case, authors Mladinich and Benson write that Nancy believed that “some of those responsible for her son’s death were not prosecuted because they had political connections and were able to pull strings.” In October 2006, on the third anniversary of their son’s death, the Fishers filed a civil lawsuit against Giuca and Russo, and reportedly claimed that Hynes had held back crucial information from the couple in the course of investigating Mark’s murder. “I won’t go away until I get answers,” Nancy told the New York Post. “I know that, and Hynes knows that.” At the time, District Attorney’s Office spokesman Jerry Schmetterer said, “It is totally inaccurate to say that there’s any information that they’ve asked for that we haven’t shared. The D.A. and the prosecutor have both said that if any information developed that would indicate that there were more suspects in this murder, we would move very aggressively.” (The lawsuit is ongoing.)

Watching Nancy in the courtroom during the trial, Doreen had thought about what her own mother had gone through when Doreen’s brother Brian was murdered, in Park Slope in 1980. Brian was standing on a corner outside a bar at four a.m. when someone jumped him and stabbed him. He made it home, only to collapse in the hallway of the house. He died at the hospital an hour later. “My mother was never the same,” says Doreen. “When I remember that pain in my mother, I thought, If my John killed someone’s son, he should be in jail forever.”

Doreen started having a recurring nightmare. “I’ve had this dream maybe 50 times,” she says. “[There’s] the dreaded knock on the door. I’m told my son is dead, and I feel my stomach collapse and the blood drain from my body.” In the dream, Mark Fisher transforms into her son Matthew, and Matthew transforms into her brother Brian, and Brian becomes her son John. She wakes up and remembers it’s not her son who is gone, but Nancy Fisher’s. “And when I wake like this I feel selfish for being grateful my sons are still here,” she says. “I sit up in the bed and I wake Frank and he rolls over and puts his arms around me and asks if it was that dream again. I say, ‘Yes,’ and he asks what can he do, and I say, ‘Nothing.’ I know Nancy Fisher’s pain so well, and there is nothing I can do, nothing.”

When John Giuca was hauled away to serve his sentence, he asked his mother, “Mom, what are they doing to me?” Doreen’s life went into a tailspin. She smashed up her bedroom. Frank thought she was having a nervous breakdown. The day of Giuca’s conviction, his half-brother, Matthew, disappeared for three days, sleeping on park benches. Frank held the family together, going to work every day. Doreen cried herself to sleep, sometimes burrowing in her bed until dark, when she’d emerge to make dinner for Frank. Every other weekend, she would travel eight hours by bus to see her son at the Upstate Correctional Facility, near the Canadian border.

Giuca went in thin, 135 pounds, weak and tired and scared. The food was “unrecognizable slop, inedible,” he now says. “They fed you through a slot in the cell.” The drinking water came out rust-brown, sometimes viscous. The showers were freezing. Only three hours a day of recreation were allowed. He double-bunked with a coke-addict burglar, who was doing 12 to life. “A good guy,” Giuca recalls. “I was lucky.” Another friend was stabbed, but survived the attack. Though Giuca’s jailhouse world was racially polarized and tense, he managed to stay out of trouble, landing a job in the prison library, working 30 hours a week and making $7 every two weeks, which was considered generous. He missed his mother’s cooking. She tried to compensate, bringing him canned tuna, green tea, grape juice, and as much fruit as the guards would allow, though he claims a good amount was pilfered along the way. (He has since been moved to a less severe environment at Green Haven Correctional Facility, in Dutchess County, New York.)
The Sting

It went like this for a long time, Doreen in a daze, doing what needed to be done and feeling hopeless. Then, one day in early 2006, Doreen awoke from her stupor. The jurors, she told herself. Find something on the jurors. It was a desperate thought. She’d watched television cop shows: if you prove a juror engaged in misconduct, it could overturn the case. She obtained the jury sheet, which listed the names and neighborhoods of the jurors. She got her hands on a transcript of the voir dire, the pre-trial review of potential jurors’ fitness to serve on a case. She even managed, through a contact, to come up with a list of some of the jurors’ addresses. And so it began. She called her mission “the Sting.”

Over the next eight months she spied on jurors. Mostly it felt like grasping at air. Without explaining her real motives, she asked a good friend, an African-American man, to approach one juror, an overweight black woman. The man flirted with the woman on her way to work. Not much came of it. Another juror, a black man in his 20s, worked in a grocery store in an African-American section of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Doreen decided she would start buying her fruit there. It was an odd scene: Doreen, a bleached blonde, bicycling miles from her home to shop at a far-off Brooklyn grocery. The guy worked in the meat department. “I charmed him and gave him my number, and he said, ‘How about we meet sometime?’” She met him that night in a park nearby. It was dark; she kept her bike close. They got to know each other. She was new to the neighborhood, she said. They had a second date. Nothing came of that either.

Next on her list of jurors was a 31-year-old Brooklynite named Jason Allo. He variously made a living as a truckdriver and a construction worker. He was the same shaved-headed guy Doreen’s brother Eddie claimed to have overheard talking about smoking a blunt. She didn’t think he would be much different from the others. But a memory began to nag at her. She recalled that a friend of her son’s, who had attended the trial for days, later realized that the bald-headed juror was someone from the neighborhood—someone whose circle of friends occasionally crossed paths with John’s. Was this a key oversight, she wondered? Before a trial, jurors are asked if they have any connection with the defendant, the kind that might jeopardize their objectivity in reviewing evidence. During the jury-screening process, Allo said he knew nothing about John Giuca. Perhaps the man had lied.

In Doreen’s mind—and in the notes she kept—Allo became known as Target. Doreen came up empty when searching for public records on Allo. She knew he was from Bensonhurst, an insular Italian neighborhood. Warily, she sent out friends to snoop. Finally, one of the juror’s acquaintances gave up his address.

Her main surveillance spot was the corner nearest his house, at 79th Street and 17th Avenue, where she could see both his front door and the window of his top-floor room. “I went through the seasons watching that house—Halloween 2006, Christmas 2006, Easter 2007,” she says. “He decorated his windows to the fullest for every one. His cat sat in the window, so I knew I’d say I was a cat-lover when I met him. He’d leave at 7:15 in the morning, always with a backpack, and get on the train across the street from his house.”

She followed Allo everywhere, in her car, on foot, on her bicycle. She discovered where he bought his marijuana; his dealer was the same old Spanish woman frequented by two of Doreen’s relatives. She followed him to bars in Manhattan, to the supermarket, to the restaurant around the corner. If he ate, she watched. When he did nothing, she watched. Most days were long and boring. Target usually didn’t return home until four in the afternoon. She learned not to drink coffee, “’cause you have no place to pee. For a woman, this is not good.”

One day in summertime, Doreen dressed up in a burka—only her eyes showed—and stood on the corner eavesdropping on a conversation Allo was having with a friend. “When you’re in a burka,” she says, “people ignore you.”

Finally, in October 2007, she realized she was putting off the inevitable. Her son was in prison, and she was dancing around the edges. “Enough,” she told herself. “I have to move on this guy.” First, she needed to transform her appearance, because Allo might recognize her from the courtroom or from her days tracking him. She went to a tanning salon, got much too dark for her Irish skin. She worked out at a gym, rode her bicycle everywhere she went. She gathered a new wardrobe. “Sexy clothes only,” she says. Short-shorts, tight blouses, push-up bras. She dyed her hair gilded blond.

She went to an espionage-supply store in Manhattan and bought the most expensive kind of hidden recording device she could find. She created a fake ID, set up a fake cell-phone account, rented an apartment that Frank paid for. John Giuca’s two oldest friends helped her set up the apartment with furniture that she took from her house: a television with a DVD player, a bookshelf filled with books from John’s room. She had a small table for the kitchen, and barstools at a countertop; an Oriental rug from her upstairs living room; two smaller tables that she decorated in découpage—with newspaper clippings glued together that said “innocent man” and “freedom” and “a mother’s love.” Her small refrigerator was usually barren, a façade—like her name, like her cell phone, like the apartment. Her bed was only a futon. It was a playgirl’s pad. When the friends hauled in the furniture, they didn’t ask why she was moving in, and she didn’t tell them, assuming they figured she was splitting up with Frank.

Frank said she was crazy. He was against the whole scheme. Doreen remembers that he started yelling at her one day in their bedroom. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” she recalls him saying. “You’re gonna fuck this all up.”

“I ain’t gonna sit here and do nothing,” Doreen replied.

“Well, I know you’re gonna do it anyways—you’re thickheaded,” Frank finally conceded, “so I might as well help you.”

The next day, dressed in her short-shorts, she bicycled up and down Target’s block, waiting to catch his eye.

Doreen had always put faith in the integrity of the American judicial process. “I was a believer in the system,” she says. “What a joke! What a sad joke! How little did I know. This was a crash course in dirty tricks for me, in how the system really works.”

The system, as Doreen perceived it, seemed to consist mostly of cops and prosecutors doing whatever it took to get convictions. Prosecutors do this regularly, according to Bennett L. Gershman, a professor at Pace Law School and one of the nation’s leading experts on prosecutorial misconduct. “Whereas a prosecutor’s motivation should be to vindicate the truth and administer justice,” Gershman points out, “too many prosecutors seek to win a conviction at all costs by engaging in conduct calculated to produce a wrongful conviction.”
Giuliano reflects on her ordeal

Giuliano reflects on her ordeal during a quiet moment on a neighbor’s porch in Brooklyn. Photograph by Harry Benson.

John Giuca’s counsel, Manhattan defense attorney Lloyd Epstein, has pointed out some of the most glaring problems in the case of People v. Giuca. Law enforcement in Brooklyn, Epstein wrote in an appellate brief filed last March, “was under enormous pressure” from the public and the media. As a result, the prosecutors directed by the Brooklyn D.A. did what prosecutors too often do: they “made a mockery of Mr. Giuca’s right to a fair trial.”

“The prosecution presented the jury with multiple, contradictory theories of Mr. Giuca’s role in the crime,” according to Epstein. The first theory was that John had lent Russo the gun with which Russo shot Fisher. In this scenario, John provided the weapon but never ordered the shooting or the robbery. A second theory was that John had ordered the shooting, but it’s uncertain where the gun came from. A third theory was that Giuca had pulled the trigger himself—for $20, to be shared with Russo. There was no physical or forensic evidence to back up any of this. (No murder weapon was ever found.) Instead, the prosecution relied on the testimony of its witnesses. The D.A.’s office had subpoenaed 150 people, but the D.A. culled just four to specifically vouch for Giuca’s involvement. Their individual accounts were often at odds. Three of the four had cases in the courts pending against them or family members. “All of these witnesses had significant criminal records and/or motives to fabricate,” Epstein wrote in his court brief.
Setting the Trap

During the Indian summer of October 2007, Jason Allo stood on a corner near his apartment as Doreen, in short-shorts, “happened by” on her bicycle. Allo was drinking coffee with a friend, Richie. It was Richie who whistled as she passed.

Doreen wanted to ride on. She was terrified. But she could not back down now. She turned the bike around and pedaled up to Richie and Allo. Arching her back, she smiled her sweet smile.

She was new in town, she said, just in from California. She gave the impression of a lost and lonely thirtysomething getting to know the neighborhood. Where could she drink at the bars and eat at the restaurants for cheap? Where could she go dancing? She admitted she was a party girl, winking as she spoke. On a hunch, she purposely ignored Target and turned all her attention to his companion. The ploy worked. Within 10 minutes, the prey was asking for her number: “If you need anything,” Allo said, “just give me a call.”

According to Doreen, Allo suggested he could get her marijuana if she needed it. She saw an opening. “Yeah, I could use a bag,” she said before speeding away.

She called him up a week later and arranged to buy $20 worth.She gave him a fake business card. “Dee Madison Quinn,” the card said. “Business Management Specialist.” And they were off.

Over the next six months, through the spring of 2008, she became Allo’s secret pal. She’d stay out till five a.m. with him and come home to Frank smelling of alcohol and the meals she had cooked in her pied-à-terre. Most nights, Doreen recalled, Frank would listen to the recordings: Had Doreen been able to steer the conversation toward the facts, toward the trial? Had she come up with any hard evidence that Allo or his fellow jurors had railroaded John Giuca? Had Doreen ever gotten just a little too close to this bald-headed stranger?

In Doreen’s mind, he didn’t have a name beyond Target. Yes, he was Jason Allo, a human being. But to her, he was T., an object, the means to save her son. She was a liar and a fraud and she was deceiving him at every moment. She hated what she was doing.

They’d go out drinking in Manhattan but never in Brooklyn. She couldn’t risk bumping into cousins, sisters, aunts, friends. “Nobody except Frank really knew,” she says. “I gave up family. I gave up holidays, birthday parties. Most of my family still don’t know what I was up to. I lost a lot of friends—they all took it personal.” When she finally told John about the ruse, she had to do it in a coded letter—all communication with her son in prison was monitored. She and John had developed a secret language that they embedded in their correspondence. For a desperate mother and son, the Sting provided a semblance of hope.

Doreen says her husband demanded she hew to one rule in her relations with Allo: no sex. “Don’t ever cross that line,” he told her. Doreen agreed. But in her mind she had already decided she would do whatever was required. “I woulda had sex with him if that’s what it took,” she says. “But the tension was never there. He was never into me.”

“Friends, just friends,” Allo would say when she got too close. She was repelled by Allo. She found him shallow, yet she pretended to be interested in everything he said.

Early on in the Sting, she knew very little about digital recorders and computers, and she knew nothing about how to transfer the recordings to a laptop. She relied on her brother Eddie, in upstate New York, to transfer the recordings and keep them safe. The drive up to her brother’s place scared her, because she had an irrational fear of losing the tapes in a car wreck. With a black felt-tip marker, she wrote across her body—on her legs, arms, stomach—the name of her brother, his address, his phone number, with instructions that whoever found the tape recorder was to deliver it to Eddie. “It took me three days to wash that off of my body,” she says.

One night that fall Allo wouldn’t leave the apartment. “I made up every excuse. I had to work in the morning. I had a headache. Finally, he left at two a.m., drunk and high, and I poured the rest of the wine down the sink and threw out all the food, and I took off my aching high-heel shoes, ripped off my stupid tight pants—all woman stuff to fool men—and I locked the place up and was going home.” She was heading to her car with a handful of clothes when Target sneaked up behind her.

“Where are you going?”

She froze.

“I’m … dropping off these clothes at the Chinese laundry in the morning,” she told Allo. “Keeping ’em in the car so I won’t forget.” Allo insisted on walking her back to the house, which was locked and dark. She was in flip-flops and jogging pants—no longer the blonde in heels. “I know he sensed something wasn’t right.”
“We Convicted the Guy”

A few weeks later, they were in Doreen’s Sting apartment at one a.m. The music was loud. She heated up store-bought meatballs and pasta in a wok and told him, as usual, that she had made it from scratch. He said it was one of the best meals she’d cooked. Then he lit up a joint. Doreen says she hates pot. She contends she hadn’t smoked in 25 years. But she smoked because he smoked. She told him she was working for a group called Second Look, which advocates for the release of prisoners who have been wrongfully convicted. “You know, I was on a murder case before,” said Allo. The recorder, she knew, couldn’t pick up everything he was saying—the music drowned their voices. “We convicted the guy,” said Allo. Doreen was high from the smoke. She couldn’t speak.

But by December they were coming back again and again to Giuca’s trial, how glad Allo was to have served on it. “I’ll tell you this, but I’d never tell anybody else,” Allo said. Cooking at the wok, Doreen hung on every word, knowing the recorder was capturing it all. “I had some type of information [about the case],” he continued, later adding that he “used to hang out with these guys, not these two exactly. But, like, the clique. I know them since high school.”
Doreen Giuliano poses with Jason Allo

During their final encounter, “Dee” poses with Jason Allo, 32, in a Brooklyn bar.

Doreen’s brain raced. The juror had admitted, on tape, that he had had some connection with the defendant prior to the trial. This was the opening she had been pursuing. She smiled and drank the wine and felt sick. “Then I pushed every emotion deep into my gut and continued on,” she says. “Remember, this guy I am meeting took my son away from me, and I have to laugh at his jokes, agree with everything he says, and all along I want to punch him in his face. One day I went into the bathroom and cried and when I came out he asked me if everything was all right. I said I have allergies.”

New Year’s Eve came, and Allo wanted to spend it with Doreen. She made her best excuses: she was tired, overworked, staying in. Allo liked the wine that Doreen showered on him. She was a California girl, so she drank the best California Chardonnays and Pinots. When he got drunk now—he trusted her—he went on and on about the Giuca case, how the jury couldn’t agree on a verdict. “The funny thing,” Allo said, “is I was the first one to be, ‘All right, guilty!’ They were like, ‘I don’t know,’ they were debating.” Doreen trembled. She was in the kitchen cutting garlic and onions. She wanted to stab him.

“Technically, by law, I shouldn’t have even been in that jury,” Allo said. “Because they ask you in the beginning when you go to jury duty, they read you a list of all the witnesses.… And if you know or are affiliated with these people in any way you have to let them know.” And Allo hadn’t.

“I felt like vomiting,” she now says. “I saw stars. I had to lean against the sink not to fall down.”

That night, she says, she rushed home to Frank and jumped up and down screaming in the darkness.

“Calm the fuck down. What happened?”

She told him.

“So he said he shouldn’t have been on the jury? Well, we don’t know the law,” said Frank. “We don’t know if that’s good.”

It was, in fact, very good. The law is clear: John Giuca, based on the evidence secretly gathered by his mother—along with other discrepancies in witness testimony—may very well be entitled to a new trial. Even if Allo didn’t understand the questions during voir dire of a connection to Giuca, under his oath as a juror he was obliged, once their intersecting circles became apparent, to inform the court of this conflict.

In addition, according to Doreen’s affidavit, which attorney Epstein has prepared to file in court, Allo also admitted on tape that he used to hang with members of the Ghetto Mafia (the gang prosecutors contend Giuca belonged to), that Allo’s cousin had dated a woman whose family’s house was used for Ghetto Mafia meetings, and that during the trial this cousin and Allo discussed events related to the case, referring to Giuca as a gang big shot named Slim. “It virtually demands a reversal of the conviction,” says Ezra B. Glaser, a legal adviser to Doreen. “There are New York State and U.S. Supreme Court precedents. He [Allo] knew what he did was improper.”
The Endgame

May 3, 2008, was the last time Doreen saw Jason Allo. A few months earlier, she had recruited a media-savvy acquaintance for assistance. The friend told her, “Get pictures of you and Target.”

So they did. Doreen arranged a final rendezvous. Allo was out on Long Island, working a construction job, but he’d take the train in to see her. The friend would shoot the photos. They would pretend not to know each other. Doreen didn’t expect that Allo would chirp his head off that night.

It was in a crowded Brooklyn bar on a Saturday night, and it took the friend, whose name was John, 20 minutes to land a spot next to Doreen and Target as they drank.

“Hey, mister,” said Doreen. John turned around. “Would you mind taking some pictures?” She handed him her digital camera. John took several photos. The three of them started talking. Doreen steered the conversation to lawyers and the courts.

Allo spoke up. He had a braggart’s tone. “You know, I served on a high-profile case, the Fisher case,” he said. At one point, he leaned forward and said, “Yup, 25 years to life. I got no regrets.” Doreen seemed ready to let the mask fall, as if this final insult would break her. Then, her voice cracking, she threw her arms around Allo and turned to John and the color came back to her face and she was again Dee Quinn: “Isn’t he something?” she said. Dee and Target laughed.

Afterward, at four a.m., Doreen sat in her car talking with a reporter about the encounter. She wore a formfitting red chiffon blouse and tight jeans, black suede three-inch heels, chandelier earrings, and a beaded white choker. Soon it was five, and her husband was calling on the cell phone. Then her son Matthew rang. They were asking about breakfast. “Gotta go. I’m old-fashioned,” she said after hanging up. “I always have breakfast for my guys.”

In October, John Giuca’s attorney, Lloyd Epstein, made preparations to file a motion to overturn his client’s conviction. And Doreen’s own lawyer, Joshua Dratel, working with a private investigator, had her place one last phone call to Allo to get him to repeat some of his admissions, which he did, as a digital recorder caught it all.

“What do I learn from the case?” Epstein asks rhetorically. “Sometimes a mother’s love will reveal things that the most diligent lawyers and investigators can never imagine.”

Christopher Ketcham writes for GQ and Harper’s, among other publications.

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Couple of links:

Free John Giuca

Juries

Sign the petition!

I have checked out a number of articles regarding the case, and they all seem to indicate that the verdict should stand, irrespective of prosecutorial and juror misconduct. I absolutely disagree with this premise.

This conviction was politically motivated to give Brooklyn District Attorney Charles "Joe" Hynes a leg up during his re-election efforts in 2005 - other efforts in this regard were the arrest/bankruptcy of former Brooklyn Judge John Phillips, the "Kung-Fu" Judge, and the arrest of Jon Kennedy O'Hara for a crime that he himself committed.

Let us concert our efforts into having this conviction overturned, and reuniting Doreen Giuliano with her son, John Giuca.