This post is a part of our series on Tom Horn – full collection of links at the bottom of the page.
“ …anyone born in Missouri is bound to see trouble.”
There might not have been a worse time to be born, or into a family whose father had already created enough trouble for himself. And the baby’s instincts, seemingly already flowing through his veins, seem to have destined him for enough trials in the “fifteen ordinary lives” he felt he lived.
Tom Horn was born in northeast Missouri east of Scotland County’s seat, Memphis, on November 21, 1860 – “a troublesome time,” he said, “to be sure; and anyone born in Missouri is bound to see trouble – so says Bill Nye.”
Notwithstanding his parents’ troubles, when they left Ohio for Missouri in 1852, accompanied by Tom’s uncle, Martin C. Horn, and grandfather, Hartman, Mary purchased their first parcel of land. It was approximately 240 acres of rural farmland east of Memphis, in Harrison Township northeast of a small hamlet, Etna.
Mary Miller Horn, Tom Horn’s mother (author’s photo).
They invested a two hundred-dollar down payment and signed a mortgage for six hundred dollars. It is believed they purchased it in her name to shield it from their creditors in Ohio.
Tom Horn’s Birthplace, as it looked ca. 1903 and today (Author’s photos).
Northeast Missouri was neutral during the Civil War. As the war ebbed and flowed, locals tended to favor “the side of the uniform that was knocking at the front door,” one authority said. At one point during the war, a Confederate captain and enlisted man had stayed at the Horn home. After leaving, they were ambushed and the enlisted man was killed.
In 1869 Hartman was taken ill, and moved into the family home with Thomas, Mary and their family. They cared for him until his death in 1874. Thomas was named administrator of his estate, which was valued at $275.75.
Etna Cemetery, where Tom Horn’s grandfather and other family are buried.The barn still standing at Tom Horn’s birthplace (author’s photos)
In 1874 they started selling some of their land to sons Charles and Martin. By 1876 their holdings had grown to 1,250 acres in the Etna area and were estimated to be worth over twenty thousand dollars. On January 16, 1884 they purchased four lots in the southeast part of Memphis for $1,700.
Young Tom was the child of a large family. At least one of Thomas’ and Mary’s children died at a young age; one son, whose name is not known, died on October 20, 1854 and is buried in the Dennis Church cemetery in Knox County, Ohio.
This essay was originally published on Chip Carlson’s personal website, which has since expired, and is re-published here as a way to preserve some of the content of this historical figure. If you would like to continue learning about Tom Horn, please explore the links below. If you’d like to read the complete story, and help to support the author, his book can be purchased here.
This post is a part of our series on Tom Horn – full collection of links at the bottom of the page.
“Troublesome.” It was a word Tom Horn himself used, first to describe the times at his birth and his early years, and later to describe Willie Nickell’s father. It was appropriate.
His father’s – and grandfather’s – troubles, of their own making, started in the 1840s in Ohio, where both Tom’s father and mother were born. Father Thomas Horn was born in Knox County in 1825, and mother Mary Ann Miller was born in Coshocton County in 1831.
Thomas Horn (author’s photo)
Thomas’ father, Hartman Horn, was born in Washington County, Pennsylvania, in 1794 and was a descendant of German immigrants who had settled in that part of Pennsylvania.
Years after Thomas and Mary had secretly left Ohio for Scotland County, Missouri in 1852, a former partner of Thomas found and continued legal action against him. On November 21, 1867 John Thompson filed suit against him at the Scotland County Circuit Court for $1,650. He had entered a bill in chancery in 1851 in the Knox County Court of Common Pleas in Mt. Vernon against Horn and others, requesting settlement of a dispute that dated to a transaction in October 1849, when Horn was still living there.
Thompson’s suit alleged that Horn and he had been partners in a deal to buy cattle in Knox County and drive them to Baltimore, sell them, and split the proceeds. Hartman Horn, Elijah Patterson and Harris Thompson, John’s brother were part of the arrangement.
Thomas Horn was to buy cattle but had to borrow a thousand dollars from the Knox County Bank in Mt. Vernon in order to finance the deal. He had proposed that Thompson borrow a similar amount and that each provide a guarantor. The arrangement proceeded; Thompson’s guarantor was Harris, while Horn’s was Hartman. The idea was that Thompson’s experience in the cattle business would be of major importance, “to some extent offsetting skill capital”, but that both would give equal attention to the project. The loan, a “Bill of Exchange,” was procured at the Bank of Baltimore, Maryland. The entire cost of the cattle plus expenses of the drive to Baltimore was $1,927.93 plus a few small expenses paid in Baltimore by Horn.
Horn left the cattle with a man “by the name of Gregory,” according to the Knox County court records. Gregory was to sell the cattle, and deposit the money to an account Horn had set up in his own name at the Bank of Baltimore. The cattle were sold for $2,110.72, and Gregory deposited the amount to Horn’s account.
Horn, together with his father and Elijah Patterson, then withdrew the money, the bank having failed to encumber it. Thompson claimed that Horn next purchased a drove of hogs that Hartman and Patterson were already feeding; Thomas drove them to the East, sold them and loaned the proceeds to his father and Patterson. Apparently Thomas Horn’s plot was to shield the money from John Thompson by having Hartman and Patterson become indebted to him – a plot that implies that the three had together set it up in advance….
This essay was originally published on Chip Carlson’s personal website, which has since expired, and is re-published here as a way to preserve some of the content of this historical figure. If you would like to continue learning about Tom Horn, please explore the links below. If you’d like to read the complete story, and help to support the author, his book can be purchased here.
This post is a part of our series on Tom Horn – full collection of links at the bottom of the page.
Tom Horn (author’s photo)
“Innocent!”
The word rang out like a gunshot in the crowded Cheyenne courtroom in September 1993, almost a hundred years after Tom Horn’s hanging for first-degree murder.
Light is fading on the early Twentieth Century, but even as that light dims it has become more apparent as time passes that Tom Horn was not the killer of Willie Nickell on July 18, 1901. It took a hundred years to exonerate him, if only in a mock trial at the same locale where he was convicted.
There were no witnesses to Willie’s murder. At the first trial — the only trial that really mattered — the prosecution had an alcohol-induced “confession,” weak circumstantial evidence and perjured testimony.
Tom Horn had been in the general area at the time of the murder. He had been at the neighboring Miller ranch, the homestead of a family who had been feuding with Willie Nickell’s, the previous morning. Other questionable scraps of circumstantial evidence were added to the mixture.
The linchpin for the prosecution was a questionable “confession” given by a drunken Tom Horn to a federal officer operating out of his jurisdiction, Joe LeFors. The conversation was recorded, but only in part, by a legal reporter who, together with a deputy sheriff, was a witness. LeFors had planted them for a single purpose – to “cinch” Tom Horn. LeFors himself acknowledged that he was operating under the instructions of the district attorney, Walter Stoll, whose own ambitions perhaps exceeded Joe LeFors’. His apparent obsession with winning a conviction gained him reelection to office.
The prosecution had, as well, a jury tainted with prejudice against Tom Horn’s employers and the power they represented and had misused. And it had an elected judge presiding, who himself had a clouded history, and whose rulings and instructions to the jury were anything but impartial. His ambitions led to election to a seat on the Wyoming Supreme Court.
Tom Horn had a legal defense team whose work in 1902 was described by the lawyer who represented him in the retrial as the “worst he had ever studied.” And Tom Horn’s own foolish statements in cross examination, driven by an ego that Walter Stoll played as if on a musical instrument, helped drive one of the nails into his own coffin.
The three shots that rang out in an early summer morning in 1901 near remote Iron Mountain, Wyoming were more than mere gunfire. They were, figuratively, the sound of a hammer driving final nails into the coffin of a Wyoming cattle business as it had existed for over thirty years.
Willie Nickell was the second fourteen-year-old Iron Mountain boy to die of gunshot wounds within a few months.
The Nickell family at their homestead, Willie at right.location of the homestead
In the spring Frank Miller, son of hostile neighbor Jim Miller, had died when a shotgun in a spring wagon in which he and a younger sister were playing accidentally discharged. The sister, Maude, carried the buckshot and scars from her wounds the rest of her life. It was stated that Jim Miller placed the blame for Frank’s death solely on Willie Nickell’s father, and that he swore that if the law did not avenge the death, he would.
Willie Nickell had saddled his father’s horse at six thirty the morning of July 18, 1901. He was going to try to find a man to replace a sheepherder who was quitting his father’s employ. Kels, Willie’s father, had ordered Willie to find the man who had ridden through the area looking for work. The unwitting order led to Willie’s death.
Willie mounted the bay and headed from the family cabin northwest of Cheyenne toward wire gate three-quarters of a mile to the west. Reaching the gate, he dismounted, led the horse through and turned to loop the gate closed.
The murder site (author’s photo)The murder site (author’s photo).
Three shots rang out. Two followed in quick succession, then a pause, and then another. Two reached their mark. They smashed into the boy’s left back, and exited. Blood sprayed on the gate, the ground and the post, a tree now lying today at the site. Willie stumbled sixty-five feet toward home before he dropped facedown on the rough granite gravel. Blood seeped from the exit wounds.
Someone, no doubt the killer, rolled Willie’s body over and pulled open his shirt. The reverberations of that gunfire through the Wyoming hills signaled the beginning of a long search for Willie Nickell’s killer. And they marked perhaps the largest setback, one of several that began with the lynching of Ellen “Cattle Kate” Watson in 1888, for the so-called cattle barons’ and their fiefdoms. They, along with the industrial, railroad and mining barons, were unwilling players in the drama of economic and social changes marking an evolution in America from an agrarian to an industrial society.
Historic court in session (author’s photo)
Two years, three months and two days after Willie Nickell’s assassination Tom Horn strangled to death in a hangman’s noose in the Laramie County jail on November 20, 1903. He would have been forty-three years old the next day.
Tom Horn’s execution may symbolically mark the passing of the Old West in Wyoming, poignantly described in the forward of Owen Wister’s The Virginian, written while Tom was in jail in 1902:
It is a vanished world…. A transition has followed the horseman of the plains; a shapeless state, a condition of men and manners unlovely as that bald moment in the year when winter is gone and spring not come, and the face of nature is ugly….
The controversy over whether Tom Horn “shot that kid… the best shot that I ever made and the dirtiest trick I ever done,” his so-called confession, trial and failed appeals still rages on in Wyoming almost a century later.
This essay was originally published on Chip Carlson’s personal website, which has since expired, and is re-published here as a way to preserve some of the content of this historical figure. If you would like to continue learning about Tom Horn, please explore the links below. If you’d like to read the complete story, and help to support the author, his book can be purchased here.
With findings never before published, Chip Carlson presents the documented history of the career of Tom Horn, Wyoming’s notorious stock detective. Chip Carlson’s monumental research draws the reader into questioning whether Tom Horn was actually railroaded for a murder he did not commit – but could have.
Tom Horn was a death sentence to rustlers and the devil incarnate to homesteaders in late nineteenth-century Wyoming. The most notorious of Wyoming’s range detectives, he is the pre-eminent name in Wyoming history.
He operated unchecked until he was arrested for the 1901 murder of the fourteen-year-old son of a sheep-ranching settler. The murder and questionable nature of Tom Horn’s controversial conviction still ignite firestoms of controversy among historians and Wyomingites in general.
This is an archived article preserved as a guest op-ed and does not represent the opinions of namedat.com staff.
On This Page:
IGNORAD:The Military Screw-up Nobody Talks About Scott Shuger A Pioneer Of Internet Journalism Scott Shuger, Pioneer Internet Journalist, 50, Dies (NY Times Obituary) What The Press Isn’t Covering: WNYC Bob Garfield Interview With Scott Shugar
IGNORAD
The Military Screw-up Nobody Talks About
by Scott Shuger,January 16, 2002
For all its successes, the U.S. anti-terror war was conceived in sin, the sin of U.S. government negligence. As much post-9/11 journalism has pointed out, there was the foreign-policy error of abandoning post-Soviet Afghanistan after having infused it with weapons, the CIA’s failure to act more forcefully on tips and intercepts regarding al-Qaida operatives overseas, and the FBI’s and INS’s similar failings regarding suspicious characters already in the United States. And the FAA’s (and the airlines’, the airports’, and security firms’) breakdown on airport security. However, there has been a good deal less focus on another federal fubar, that perpetrated by the Air Force’s North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
The NORAD home page declares its mission to include “the detection, validation, and warning of attack against North America whether by aircraft, missiles, or space vehicles.” It may seem ungallant to say the obvious, but since no one else has, I will: At the aircraft part of this mission, NORAD sucks.
How does NORAD explain its failure to intercept any of the hijacked airliners on 9/11? Its commander, Gen. Ed Eberhart, pointed out in congressional testimony that the FAA has the primary responsibility for hijackings in U.S. airspace, that NORAD can only help respond once the FAA notifies it, and that on 9/11 the FAA delayed precious minutes before doing so. Eberhart has also said that while before 9/11, NORAD had practiced responding to a hijacked plane trying to slam into a target in the United States, the exercises assumed that the flight had originated overseas, giving intercepting jet fighters more time. More important, he also said that even if his aircraft had practiced the domestic scenario, it wouldn’t have mattered. Why? “I really think that, for sure in the first two instances, and probably in the third, the time and distance would not have allowed us to get an airplane to the right place at the right time.”
It’s certainly true that the FAA didn’t give the Air Force the speediest heads up: Newsday reported that the FAA delayed 29 minutes (!) before telling the military about the third (!) suspicious plane, the one that ultimately hit the Pentagon. And before 9/11, a domestic-hijacked-airliner-suicide attack was admittedly not the most probable of worries. But it’s simply wrong to say that therefore, there probably wasn’t anything NORAD could have done to change history.
According to NORAD’s official 9/11 time line, the FAA notified NORAD at 8:40 a.m. Eastern time that there was something peculiar going on with American Flight 11. But NORAD didn’t issue an order for fighters to scramble until 8:46 a.m., the time when American Flight 11 hit the first WTC tower. Six minutes later, at 8:52 a.m., two F-15 fighters responded to the order by launching from a base 153 miles from New York City. They still were not on the scene at 9:02 a.m. when the second airliner, United Flight 175, hit the second WTC tower. They wouldn’t get there for another eight minutes, at 9:10 a.m. A NORAD senior officer, Major Gen. Larry Arnold, told NBC that when the fighters took off, they were flying straight to New York City. He also said that they were going “about 1.5 Mach, which is, you know, somewhereâ€11- or 1,200 miles an hour.” But note that the F-15 fighters took 18 minutes to cover those 153 miles, which comes out to more like 510 mph. Yet, according to the Air Force, the F-15 has a top speed of 1,875 mph. So, you have to wonder, why were they flying at less than a third of what they’re capable of?
According to NORAD, the FAA notified it at 9:24 a.m. that there was something suspicious with American Flight 77. Two F-16 fighters were immediately ordered launched, and they got airborne at 9:30 a.m. The New York Times reports that at first, they were headed to New York at “top speed” reaching “600 mph within two minutes,” before vectoring toward Washington instead. These planes didn’t arrive in the vicinity of the Pentagon until 9:49 a.m., 12 minutes after American Flight 77 hit it. (They then stayed in the skies above Washington to protect against the fourth errant airliner, United Flight 93, with orders to shoot it down if necessary, a command mooted by an apparent passenger insurrection that caused that plane to crash in a Pennsylvania field.) The F-16s covered the 130 miles of their journey in 19 minutes, which would be an average speed of about 410 mph. Now, that’s artificially low because these fighters spent several minutes flying toward New York, but even allowing for this, you don’t come up with anything like what the Air Force (which may know better than the New York Times) says is the plane’s top speed of 1,500 mph. So, again, why didn’t NORAD feel the need for speed? It wasn’t because of FAA regulations prohibiting supersonic flight over land in U.S. civil airspace. A NORAD spokesman told me that fighters violate that speed restriction “when circumstances warrant.”
That is, in both cases where NORAD launched fighters, a closer look suggests that it’s just false that there was nothing they could have done. For one thing, they could have flown faster.
But the flawed time/distance argument isn’t NORAD’s only excuse. Gen. Arnold told NBC that even if U.S. jets had intercepted the airliners, “No one would have known the intent of the hijackers. And without that, I don’t think anyone would have been able to order them to shoot down thatâ€that aircraft.”
That may be true, but it’s misleading. Arnold leaves out other tactics the jet fighters could’ve tried. According to a Boston Globe article, when intercepting aircraft, NORAD practices a graduated response. The approaching fighter doesn’t immediately shoot down the bogey: It can first rock its wingtips to attract attention, or make a pass in front of the plane, or fire tracer rounds in its path. So even though on 9/11, the NORAD pilots working the first three airliners didn’t have shootdown authority (they got it only after the Pentagon was hit), they would or should have been ready to try these other techniques, which might well have spooked or forced the hijackers into turning, which might have given the fighters a chance to force them out to sea. And even if the hijackers decided instead to fly right into a fighter in their way, wouldn’t an airburst have killed fewer people than two collapsed flaming skyscrapers did?
After 9/11, NORAD said it adjusted to the new realities. In October, Gen. Eberhart told Congress that “now it takes about one minute” from the time that the FAA senses something is amiss before it notifies NORAD. And around the same time, a NORAD spokesofficer told the Associated Press that the military can now scramble fighters “within a matter of minutes to anywhere in the United States.”
But lo and behold, earlier this month when 15-year-old student pilot Charles Bishop absconded with a Cessna and flew it into a Tampa skyscraper, NORAD didn’t learn of it until it overheard FAA radio calls about the situation, and it wasn’t able to launch its fighter jets until 15 minutes after Bishop had already crashed into the building. Those fighters didn’t arrive on the scene until 45 minutes after Bishop took off.
When we hired Scott Shuger back in 1997 to try his hand at a new Slate feature called “Today’s Papers,” we thought we were doing him a favor. Scott, who died Saturday at the age of 50 in a scuba diving accident, had been a casual friend of several of us from the small world of Washington journalism, and the even smaller world of alumni of the Washington Monthly. Scott at that time was a respected free-lance writer and was having some success moving into television. For a while he was under contract to develop stories for 20/20 on ABC. Scott was doing OK.
But he was not having the blistering career that he, among others, felt he deserved. One reason may be that he did not suffer foolsan essential tolerance for someone who needs to be in good favor with several editors and TV producers at the same time. Also, he had lovingly followed his wife, Debora, out to Los Angeles when UCLA offered her a professorship in medieval literature. Scott enjoyed L.A.for the convenience of pursuing his passion for diving, among other reasonsbut it was not the best place from which to peddle meaty articles about government policy. Scott could be cynical or playful, in life as well as in his writing, but an intensepatriotic, reallyearnestness about defective weapons or intelligence reform or homeless policy was one of Scott’s endearing characteristics.
We asked Scott to do Today’s Papers for two banal reasons: He was available, and he lived in the Pacific time zone. The job, we imagined, was a fairly straightforward one of reading the new editions of the five national newspapers as they were posted on the Internet throughout the night and summarizing them for Slate readers by early the next morning. Someone on the West Coast, we figured, could achieve this by staying up very late rather than getting up very earlywhich most journalists would regard as a big advantage.
It turned out that the favor we were doing by hiring Scott was for ourselves. “Today’s Papers” quickly became our most popular feature. The idea (from the staff member who is now Slate’s editor, Jacob Weisberg) was a good one, but the execution was brilliant. Like a cook who knows instinctively just how much spice to put in a stew, Scott turned out to be a natural at knowing exactly the right balance between telling it straight and adding his own insights. He developed a style and a set of conventions that allowed him to deliver a tremendous amount of information in few words, without making the result seem like a deadly summary.
Some of Scott’s best insights were about the press itself. TP, as we call it, became a daily course in how the media think, what they get right and wrong, all illustrated by the day’s news. He used the different ways the five papers covered (or didn’t cover) the same story as a controlled experiment in journalistic practice. Scott actually stopped writing TP last September, in order to become Slate’s principal writer about the war on terrorism, but Scott’s style and method were stamped so strongly on the feature that many readers thought Scott was still writing it.
It didn’t take us long to realize we had a huge hit. In fact, it took less than 24 hours. The first day Today’s Papers appeared, we got a message from Bill Gates asking when we were planning to make it available by e-mail. We had been planning to do this within a year or so, if possible, given our limited resources and other priorities and technical difficulties and so on. Miraculously, following the chairman’s inquiry, we had e-mail delivery going within barely a week. Soon hundreds of thousands were getting Today’s Papers by e-mail, and similar numbers were reading it on the Web. William F. Buckley e-mailed, distraught and begging for reinstatement, when his e-mail delivery was accidentally canceled.
One night early on Scott posted a notice, in place of the column, that he had a terrible cold and was too sick to write. By the next morning there were dozens of alarmed e-mails from loyal readers inquiring nervously about his health. The concern was human but also practical: They had come to depend on Scott to introduce the world to them each morning. One e-mail came to the editor (me, at the time) from Bill Gates Sr., the chairman’s father, who spoke of “Scott in Los Angeles” with such personal affection that I thought at first that he was referring to another of his children, not to a Slate writer he had never met.
Scott Shuger was, in a way, the first complete Internet journalist, in that the Internet was essential to both his input and his output, and the result was something new and useful that couldn’t be done before. Without the Internet, Scott couldn’t have read five newspapers from across the countryand done it before the paper editions were even available. With the Internet, Scott could even write the columnabout the day’s major American newspapers, rememberfrom Berlin, where Debora Shuger had a visiting fellowship in 2000-2001. Scott used to say that the best place to write Today’s Papers from would be Hawaii, where, he claimed, it would almost be a normal 9-5 job.
Having gathered his material from the Web (with the help, as it became popular and influential, of faxes and phone calls from the various papers’ newsrooms), Scott would push a few buttons that would essentially publish his column to our Web site, where it could be read within seconds all over the world, and send it out by e-mail automatically. This is in the middle of the night, mind you, when editors and technicians prefer to be asleep.
(One rival claimant to the crown of first pure Internet journalist might be blog and scandal pioneer Matt Drudge. As it happens, Drudge first came to national attention in a Los Angeles Times story written by Scott Shuger shortly before he came to Slate.)
Scott became a regular visitor to Seattle, a friend of all his Slate colleagues, and a close friend of several, including me. A fitness buff, a master of judo and karate, an experienced scuba diver, he enthusiastically added the local sports of hiking and rafting to his repertoire and shared memorable adventures with several of us. On these outings he would delight in talk and argument as only a writer who ordinarily works alone all day can.
One subject that often came up was that of risk. Scott was an odd combination of macho daredevil and supercautious worrywart. (On one hike he carried a full-sized chair several miles up the side of a mountain, along with a heavy packan impressive feat of strength in service of a fastidious desire not to sit on the ground.) He was obsessed with personal security, carried various weapons (not firearms) for self-protection, and loved any opportunity to train women to repel attackers.
But he also was an explicit and adamant believer that experiencing life vividly is worth taking risks. Pending an autopsy, we do not yet know exactly what happened yesterday afternoon. I would be very surprised if this tragic accident were the result of some negligence or failure on Scott’s part. At the same time, he was about as realistic as any human being can benot all that realistic, I suppose, but still … about the unavoidable dangers of his avocations. He was not a gratuitous risk-taker, but he knew what he was doing and had thought intelligently about the potential cost.
Scott might not have enjoyed growing old. He treasured his good health and mental acuity and would have disliked watching them slip away even more than most of us will. He was in a good place in his life. He loved his job. He brimmed with pride in his daughter, Dale, who graduated from Harvard last year. He looked forward to a new period when he and Debora (who were married for 29 years) could adventure together, unfettered by child-rearing and tuition bills. He certainly wouldn’t have chosen a sudden exit yesterday. But all of us who shared Slate editorial meetings with him can well imagine Scottpuckishly, tentatively at first, but perhaps even adamantly as he got swept up in his argumentmaking the case.
Scott Shuger, Pioneer Internet Journalist, 50, Dies
N.Y.Times Obituaries, June 18, 2002
Scott Shuger, an early Internet journalist who wrote the popular column “Today’s Papers” for the online magazine Slate, died on Saturday while diving off the coast of California just south of Los Angeles. He was 50 and lived in Los Angeles.
His body was found in the water a little off the shore by kayakers. The cause of his death was not known, his family said; an autopsy is pending.
In 1997, Microsoft’s publication Slate hired him to write a new daily column, described by Slate as the first to depend on the Internet for both its subject matter and its distribution; it was a sometimes controversial assessment of the latest Internet editions of several national newspapers. He wrote the column until September, when he became Slate’s chief writer about the struggle against terrorism.
Born and raised in Baltimore, he held a bachelor’s degree from Carleton College and a doctorate in philosophy from Vanderbilt. He was a naval intelligence officer and was on the staff of The Washington Monthly before becoming a freelance writer in Los Angeles.
Survivors include his wife, Debora; a daughter, Dale Shuger of Brooklyn; two sisters, Nancy Shuger of Baltimore and Lisa Shuger Hublitz of McLean, Va.; and his parents, Sewell and Virginia Shuger of Baltimore.
BOB GARFIELD: Of course the reporting on the terrorist attacks and the aftermath has continued apace, covering the rescue efforts, the death toll, the criminal investigation and the preparation for what is being called America’s War against Terrorism. Here to update us on the coverage is Scott Shugar who writes the Today’s Papers column for Slate.com Scott, welcome back to On the Media.
SCOTT SHUGAR: Hi, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: The coverage of these events, television and the print media has been pretty phenomenal and quite expansive, but I’m just wondering, as someone who reads the papers all the time, have you detected anything particular that’s missing?
SCOTT SHUGAR: I see two big holes, Bob. I see two stories that are crying out to be done that I think in other contexts would have been much further along than they are now. The first one is the question of exactly how it is that no Air Force fighters were able to intercept any of the four airplanes. I mean that’s an incredible fact if you think about it. We have a North American Defense Command that has a budget of some large number of dollars and has fighter aircraft that are on alert — yet basically they weren’t able to bring any of their assets to bear.
That could be scandalous, but it certainly bears looking into.
BOB GARFIELD: Well I have seen some stories, for example, that there were fighters that were on their way to intercept the plane that had hit the Pentagon but were 8 minutes away when the crash occurred.
SCOTT SHUGAR: I’ve seen some coverage of this story also, but basically it’s been incredibly complacent. The AP moved a story late in the week giving the times at which the Air Force scrambled planes.
But that very story said: but it’s not clear what they could have done if they’d gotten there anyway. That is incredible to, to think that we have this whole air defense establishment — planes with missiles connected to the FAA — and the whole point is really maybe they can’t do anything. That, that’s not what they say when they ask for the money for the budget.
So I think it’s been pretty lazy reporting. It was partially deflected by the White House because they rolled out Dick Cheney last weekend to basically dazzle the press on Sunday when he appeared on Meet the Press when he said that the President authorized shooting down airliners that didn’t respond to–commands from the fighters.
BOB GARFIELD: “Take them out,” as the vice president put it.
SCOTT SHUGAR: Which of course was very dramatic and seemed to divert the press from the basic issue.
BOB GARFIELD: You said there was another story that you thought got under-covered.
SCOTT SHUGAR: Yes. It has been reported that the FBI had identified two people who turned out we believe to have been among the hijackers as being people that they didn’t want in the country, and they notified the INS, and the INS reported back basically sorry — too late – they’ve already come in. And the reporting seemed to basically stop at that point!
This seems very complacent to me. It’s as if once the FBI had determined that the people have gotten into the country, that’s it. That’s it, that’s it investigatively. Which of course we now know is false. They arrested so many people on the days afterwards that it raises the crying question: why didn’t the FBI do these other things then?
BOB GARFIELD: For our purposes the, the crying question is: why did journalism pull up short? What makes these news organizations less aggressive than they might have been on these subjects in the past?
SCOTT SHUGAR: I think that there’s a– two-fold answer. One is there are a lot more obvious doable stories right now. When you have 5,000 murder victims you can do incredible human interest stories from now until doomsday.
The other reason is that journalists are afraid — either consciously or subconsciously — of appearing to be unpatriotic. To think that being a patriotic journalist requires you to have missed stories like this I think is a huge mistake.
After all, if a story like this leads to the improvement of how the FBI investigates suspicious characters once they’re in the country or if a story like I was mentioning before about how the FAA and the NORAD handle hijacked aircraft would improve that system, both of those would be of great benefit to the country.
BOB GARFIELD: Well I must say that my suspicion on this is that the New York Times and the Washington Post and the L.A. Times and the Boston Globe and maybe, you know, ABC News are actually working on these stories right now to try to do a post-mortem on What Went Wrong.
But as to the larger question of when a misguided sense of patriotism gets in the way of basic journalism, do you see that happening a lot?
SCOTT SHUGAR: I think in the Gulf War it happened quite a bit. I think basically journalists are aware that nowadays they are reasonably unpopular among ordinary folk, and I think that they’re aware that one of the things they’re most unpopular for is the widespread belief that journalists are in it for the “big story” and the “big paycheck,” so I think it’s not too far from the conscious mind of most newspaper reporters and news anchors to avoid reinforcing this impression.
BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well thank you very much!
SCOTT SHUGAR: Sure.
BOB GARFIELD: Scott Shugar writes the Today’s Papers column for Slate.com.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up: Hollywood rewrites history to protect our delicate sensibilities; comedians in confusion; and what audiences want now on screens big and small.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media from National Public Radio.
This is an archived article preserved as a guest op-ed and does not represent the opinions of namedat.com staff.
Harken Energy And Insider Tradingby Stephen Pizzo, Mother Jones, September / October 1992None of George Bush’s offspring is more his father’s son than George W. Bush. George Jr., or “Shrub” as Molly Ivins refers to him, began his own Texas oil career in the mid-1970s when he formed Bush Exploration. Like the business dealings of his brothers, George’s company was not a success, and it was rescued in 1983 by another oil company, Spectrum 7, run by several staunch and well-heeled Reagan-Bush supporters. But by mid-1986, a soft oil market found Spectrum also near bankruptcy.Many oil companies went belly-up during that time. But Spectrum had one asset the others lacked — the son of the vice-president. Rescue came in 1986 in the form of Harken Energy, just in the nick of time. Harken absorbed Spectrum, and, in the process, Junior got $600,000 worth of Harken stock in return for his Spectrum shares. He also won a lucrative consulting contract and stock options. In all, the deal would put well over $1 million in his pocket over the next few years — even though Harken itself lost millions.Harken Energy was formed in l973 by two oilmen who would benefit from a successful covert effort to destabilize Australia’s Labor Party government (which had attempted to shut out foreign oil exploration). A decade later, Harken was sold to a new investment group headed by New York attorney Alan G. Quasha, a partner in the firm of Quasha, Wessely & Schneider. Quasha’s father, a powerful attorney in the Philippines, had been a staunch supporter of then-president Ferdinand Marcos. William Quasha had also given legal advice to two top officials of the notorious Nugan Hand Bank in Australia, a CIA operation.After the sale of Harken Energy in 1983, Alan Quasha became a director and chairman of the board. Under Quasha, Harken suddenly absorbed Junior’s struggling Spectrum 7 in 1986. The merger immediately opened a financial horn of plenty and reversed Junior’s fortunes. But like his brother Jeb, Junior seemed unconcerned about the characters who were becoming his benefactors. Harken’s $25 million stock offering in 1987, for example, was underwritten by a Little Rock, Arkansas, brokerage house, Stephens, Inc., which placed the Harken stock offering with the London subsidiary of Union Bank — a bank that had surfaced in the scandal that resulted in the downfall of the Australian Labor government in 1976 and, later, in the Nugan Hand Bank scandal. (It was also Union Bank, according to congressional hearings on international money laundering, that helped the now-notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International skirt Panamanian money-laundering laws by flying cash out of the country in private jets, and that was used by Ferdinand Marcos to stash 325 tons of Philippine gold around the world.)Stephens, Inc., also helped introduce the BCCI virus into US banking in 1978 when it arranged the sale of Bert Lance’s National Bank of Georgia to BCCI front man Ghaith Pharoan. (The head of Stephens, Inc., Jackson Stephens, is a member of President Bush’s exclusive “Team 100,” a group of 249 wealthy individuals who have contributed at least $100,000 each to the GOP’s presidential-campaign committee.)If any of these associations raised questions in the mind of George Bush, Jr., he had little incentive to voice them. Besides getting Harken stock through the deal, Junior was paid $80,000 a year as a consultant (until 1989, when his wages were increased to $120,000; recently they were reduced to $45,000). He was also allowed to borrow $180,375 from the company at very low interest rates. In 1989 and 1990, according to the company’s Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Harken’s board “forgave” $341,000 in loans to its executives. In addition, Junior took advantage of the company’s ultraliberal executive stock purchase plan, which allowed him to buy Harken stock at 40 percent below market value.Such lavish executive compensation would suggest a company doing quite well indeed. But in reality, Harken had little going for itself. One Wall Street analyst called Harken’s web of insider stock deals and mounting debt “a lot of jiggery-pokery.” Harken was not making money and could not have continued into 1990 without at least some means of convincing lenders and investors that the company would soon find a lot of oil.Suddenly, in January 1990, Harken Energy became the talk of the Texas oil industry. The company with no offshore-oil-drilling experience beat out a more-established international conglomerate, Amoco, in bagging the exclusive contract to drill in a promising new offshore oil field for the Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain. The deal had been arranged for Harken by two former Stephens, Inc., brokers. A company insider claims the president’s son did not initiate the deal — but feels that his presence in the firm helped with the Bahrainis. “Hell, that’s why he’s on the damn board,” the insider says. “…You say, ‘By the way, the president’s son sits on our board.’ You use that. There’s nothing wrong with that.”Junior has told acquaintances conflicting stories about his own involvement in the deal. He first claimed that he had “recused” himself from the deal; “George said he left the room when Bahrain was being discussed ‘because we can’t even have the appearance of having anything to do with the government.’ He was into a big rant about how unfair it was to be the president’s son. He said, ‘I was so scrupulous I was never in the room when it was discussed.'”Junior alternately claimed, to reporters for the Wall Street Journal and D Magazine, that he had opposed the arrangement. But the company insider says, to the contrary, that Junior was excited about the Bahrain deal. “Like any member of the board, he was thrilled,” the associate says. “His attitude was, ‘Holy shit, what a great deal!'”Through the Bahrain deal, the ties between BCCI and Harken Energy grew tighter. Sheikh Khalifah, the prime minister of Bahrain and brother of the emir, was also a shareholder in BCCI — and it was Khalifah who played the key role in selecting Harken for the job. Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, in turn, was a business associate of BCCI front man Ghaith Pharoan; he bought a chunk of Harken’s stock and placed his representative, Talat Othman, on Harken Energy’s board of directors.Did Junior or any of the other Harken Energy executives trade on the Bush name in these speculative business deals? None of the principals will answer questions. But this much is known: after the Harken-Bahrain deal was settled, Othman was added to the list of fifteen Arabs who met with President George Bush and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft three times in 1990 — once just two days after Iraq invaded Kuwait — while serving on Harken’s board of directors.The promise of hitting it big in the oil-rich gulf was certainly critical for Harken. News of the Bahrain deal kept investors buying stock and lenders making loans. Still, Harken had nowhere near the capital required for such a large offshore operation halfway around the world. This required real money. But not to worry: The billionaire Bass brothers stepped up to the plate and said they’d be happy to underwrite the cost of the drilling in return for a piece of the action. (Robert Bass is a member of President Bush’s Team 100; he and other Bass family members have contributed $226,000 to George, Sr.’s, cause since 1988.)But even well-heeled friends like the Bass brothers could not protect Harken from the troubles of the world. Just four months after the Bahrain deal was sealed, storm clouds developed over the gulf region, threatening the oil-exploration deal. In May 1990, the U.S. State Department sent a chilling but still classified report to Scowcroft. The report warned that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was out of control and was threatening his neighbors:May 16, 1990 SECRET Attached is a paper containing a list of options for responding to recent actions and statements by the Government of Iraq. …We ask that you pass this paper to Robert Gates [CIA] for his review.Under “options” the memo suggested: Ban Oil Purchases: The largest benefit Iraq receives from the US is through our oil purchases… PRO — A total ban on oil purchases would have some short-term impact. CON — Such action might also have an impact on US Oil prices.Oil companies had learned, during the years of the long Iran-Iraq war, that trouble in the gulf hurts companies with oil interests because, for one thing, at the first sound of a rifle shot in the gulf region, Lloyds of London jacks up insurance rates on oil tankers and company installations. The “wartime” rates are very high and cut deeply into company profits and investor confidence. If things really get out of hand, pipelines are destroyed and waterways are mined.The secret memo augured ill for Harken’s fledgling venture. To compound matters, that same month, Harken’s own financial advisers at Smith Barney produced a hand-wringing report voicing alarm at the company’s rapidly deteriorating financial condition. (A former company official told Mother Jones that Harken owed more than $150 million to banks and other creditors at the time.) Since Harken wasn’t producing anything, it was hard to find a revenue stream, unless you count the river of fees, stock options, and salaries running into the pockets of Junior and other top Harken executives. Junior, as a member of Harken’s restructuring committee, could not have been ignorant of the report, since the board had met in May and worked directly with the Smith Barney consultants.In June 1990, Junior suddenly unloaded the bulk of his Harken stock — 212,140 shares — for a tidy $848,560. A former business associate says that Junior’s motivation was his desire to buy an expensive new house in Dallas, for which he wanted to pay cash. The June 1990 transaction was an insider stock sale, and security laws required that it be reported no later than July 10, 1990. But Junior filed no such report, at least not then.Then, in August, Iraqi troops marched into Kuwait, and Harken shares plummeted 25 percent. Junior would have lost $212,140 if he’d waited to sell his shares until then. Still, he didn’t file his SEC disclosure until seven months later, in March 1991 — well after U.S. troops had finished fighting and the gulf war had moved off the front pages. Harken stock rebounded briefly, but quickly collapsed again.Were government secrets discussed, directly or indirectly, that would have given Harken Energy a leg up in exploiting the Bahrain deal? The White House won’t say. If Junior traded on exclusive, nonpublic, insider information, he committed a gross violation of SEC rules. Taken together, the company’s critical need for success in its Bahraini deal and a possible oil embargo to be imposed by his father provided Junior with strong motivation to bail out of Harken stock before the public discovered either piece of news. (SEC spokesman John Heine says he is unaware of any enforcement action pending.)The folks at Harken Energy weren’t the only ones in Texas taking care of Junior during the 1980s. He was appointed the managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, even though his partnership contribution was only a fraction of the team’s purchase price. Among those coughing up the money to buy the Rangers were William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds, major contributors to the president’s campaign who had also been in on the rescue of Junior’s oil company.Junior doesn’t deny that being a Bush has helped him become a millionaire. “I recognize what my talents are and what my weaknesses are,” he told Texas reporters last year. “I don’t get hung up on it. Being George Bush’s son has its pluses and minuses in some people’s minds. In my thinking, it’s a plus.”Junior might have been thinking that among the minuses were questions about his role at Harken. As this article was being prepared — and in the midst of extensive interviewing of former and current Harken business associates — Junior announced a six-month leave of absence as a consultant and member of the Harken board. His role in the presidential campaign, the statement said, precluded Junior’s active involvement at Harken through the remainder of 1992.In any case, Junior is stepping away from a company in deep trouble. Harken stock is trading near its all-time low. Recently, test wells in Bahrain turned up dry and the company has not produced anything else. “Harken is not hard to understand — it’s easy,” says Charles Strain, an energy-company analyst in Houston. “The company has only one real asset — its Bahrain contract. If that field turns out to be dry, Harken’s stock is worth, at the most, 25 cents a share. If they hit it big over there, the stock could be worth $30 to $40 dollars a share. It’s a pure crapshoot.”
This is an archived article preserved as a guest op-ed and does not represent the opinions of namedat.com staff.
ST. LOUIS — Someone went to great lengths to ensure the backdrop for President Bush’s sales pitch Wednesday on his economic stimulus plan sent all the right messages — and none of the wrong.
Bush delivered his remarks from a warehouse floor at JS Logistics, a trucking, courier and warehouse business that provided a visual image for his argument that his proposal carries economy-boosting benefits for small businesses. The audience was flanked on all sides by piles of cardboard boxes — with additional piles in front of and behind his podium.
Each one of the hundreds of boxes had a piece of paper obscuring its “Made in China” label.
White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan laughingly attributed the clearly gargantuan paper-affixing effort to an “overzealous volunteer” on the president’s advance team.
A backdrop made-to-order for the White House filled the space directly behind Bush, which is most likely to show up on TV news clips of the event. Blaring a logo of “Strengthening America’s Economy,” it exactly mimicked the real-life box piles, down to perfectly aligned shelves.
Except the boxes on the backdrop were labeled, “Made in the USA.”
This is an archived article preserved as a guest op-ed and does not represent the opinions of namedat.com staff.
Where Are They Hiding Geronimo’s Skull?
by Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji), The Lakota Nation Journal, August 28th – September 3rd, 2000
San Carlos Apache Reservation, Arizona – Ned Anderson is the former Chairman of the San Carlos Apache of Arizona. He is on a one-man campaign to get the skull of his beloved Apache warrior, Geronimo, returned to its rightful burial place.
Anderson is convinced that the skull has been used in wierd fraternity rituals at Yale University since about 1918 after it was taken from Geronimo’s grave at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, by Prescott Bush, the grandfather of Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush.
In 1983 several Apache leaders discussed the idea of having the bones of Geronimo returned to Arizona for reburial. The meeting between the Apache leaders at Fort Sill resulted in several papers picking up the story and putting Ned Anderson’s name temporarily in the spotlitght.
A short time later a disgruntled member of Yale’s Skull and Bones Society contacted Anderson by letter and suggested that the remains of Geronimo had been pilfered by Prescott Bush while he and five other officers were stationed at Fort Sill in 1918. The stolen prizes were taken back to New Haven, Connecticut to a place known as the Tomb, the home of the Skull and Bones Society. The bones, a horse bit, and stirrups were placed in a glass display case where members and visitors could view them as they entered the building.
The secret informant sent pictures of the bones on display along with a copy of a Skull and Bones ledger which held notations about the 1918 grave robbery. The informant provided the information that the bones were used in the Thursday and Sunday night rituals of the Society and Geronimo’s skull was always placed on a table in front of the participants during the ceremony.
Hardly believing his own ears, Anderson went to New Haven to confirm the allegations and satisfied that it was true he contacted the FBI to take controll of the issue.
According to Anderson, his attorney informed him that if he would turn over every bit of evidence he possessed to the FBI, they would then take on the case. Anderson rejected this offer. Anderson then met with Jonathan Bush, the brother of George Bush, in Manhattan in 1986 with nothing of substance happening from the meeting.
Instead Anderson believes the meeting was used as a stalling tactic in order to give the Society time to conceal the remains of Geronimo. The secret letter that revealed the whereabouts of the bones mentioned that Prescott Bush and the other grave robbers used carbolic acid to rid the skull of the remaining flesh and hair.
Attorey Endicott P. Davison representing the Skull and Bones Society denies that the club had Geronimo’s skull. He claimed the ledger describing the theft of the bones was a hoax.
Ned Anderson considers the concealment and cover-up as, “a sacrilege and national disgrace.” “Everywhere I have turned for help I have run into barriers. I contacted Arizona Congressman Morris “Mo” Udall before his death and Senetor John McCain and they were not able to help me. I just want to get my day in court, so to speak, and have a congressional hearing so I can present my case and my evidence,” Anderson said.
Anderson is angry that he has been accussed of orchestrating the whole scenario and his detractors have tried to convey the message that it is all “make believe.” Although he served as chairman of the San Carlos Apache from 1978 to 1986, he is reluctant to go to the tribal council for support because of the political turmoil now permeating his tribal government. “The situation at San Carlos is getting worse and it is much worse than it was several years ago when your newspaper covered the story,” he said.
Anderson said he feels that he is being held in abeyance. “I do have the so-called smoking gun and that can bring all of this into perspective and I am sure that the evidence I have will substantiate all that I have said about this.” The former tribal chairman was adamant in his charges and angered over the fact that some would accuse him of seeking to get personal publicity for his actions.
At press time he was about to call Valerie Taliman, the producer of the national radio talk show, Native America Calling, based in Albuquerque, N.M., to get air time to make his views known to the other tribal leaders in America.
Where are the bones of the revered Apache warrior, Geronimo? I must agree with Anderson that if his bones and skull have been used for childish rituals by the Skull and Bones Society at Yale, it is indeed sacrilegious and barbaric.
If George Herbert Walker Bush, the former president of the United States participated in midnight rituals using the skull and bones of this great warrior, he owes every Indian in America an apology.
Website of “The Lakota Nation Journal: http://www.lakotanationjournal.com
This is an archived article preserved as a guest op-ed and does not represent the opinions of namedat.com staff.
Please read these 2 important articles on Operation Northwoods New book on NSA sheds light on secrets U.S. terror plan was Cuba invasion pretext (You will find this article after the first article)
Operation Northwoods “Meet the New Boss Same as the Old Boss”
Pentagon Proposed Pretexts For Cuba Invasion in 1962
In his new exposé of the National Security Agency entitled Body of Secrets, author James Bamford highlights a set of proposals on Cuba by the Joint Chiefs of Staff codenamed OPERATION NORTHWOODS. This document, titled Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals – part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose – included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington, including sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated), faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a Remember the Maine incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. Bamford himself writes that Operation Northwoods may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.
Are Americans The Victims of a Hoax?
The time has come to stop using the flag as a blindfold, to stop waving our guns and our gods at each other, to take a close look at the facts which have emerged from the attacks on the World Trade Towers and to recognize the very real possibility, indeed probability, that We The People are the victims of a gigantic and deadly hoax.
In a normal terrorist event, the terrorists cannot wait to take credit, in order to link the violence to the socio-political intent of the terrorist organization. Yet the prime suspect in the New York Towers case, ex(?) CIA asset Osama Bin Laden (whose brother is one of George W. Bush’s Texas business partners), has issued only two statements regarding the September 11th attacks, and both of those are denials of any involvement.
Huge problems are emerging in the official view of events. It’s known that the United States was planning an invasion of Afghanistan long before the attacks on the World Trade Towers. Indeed the attacks on the World Trade Towers perfectly fit the timetable of an invasion by October stated by US officials just last summer.
The 19 names of suspected hijackers released by the FBI don’t point to Afghanistan. They come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates; all across the middle east without a focus in any one region. Indeed, even as the FBI was admitting that its list of 19 names was based solely on identifications thought to have been forged, Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Prince Saudi Al-Faisal insisted that an investigation in Saudi Arabia showed that the 5 Saudi men were not aboard the four jetliners that crashed in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania on September 11. “It was proved that five of the names included in the FBI list had nothing to do with what happened,” Al-Faisal told the Arabic Press in Washington after meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush at the White House. A sixth identified hijacker is also reported to still be alive in Tunisia, while a 7th named man died two years ago!
FBI Chief Robert Mueller admitted on September 20 and on September 27 that at this time the FBI has no legal proof to prove the true identities of the suicidal hijackers. Yet in the haste to move forward on the already planned war in Afghanistan, our government and the FBI (which does not have the best record for honesty in investigations to begin with, having been caught rigging lab tests, manufacturing testimony in the Vincent Foster affair, and illegally withholding/destroying evidence in the Oklahoma Bombing case) are not taking too close a look at evidence that points away from the designated suspect, ex(?) CIA asset Osama Bin Laden.
In particular, the FBI, too busy harassing political dissenters to find spies in its midst, the long rumored mole inside the White House, or plug leaks in high-tech flowing to foreign nations, has willfully and criminally ignored the implications of some vital pieces of information the FBI is itself waving around at the public.
We are being told that this crack team of terrorists, able to breeze past airport security as if it wasn’t there, wound up leaving so much evidence in its wake that the bumbling Inspector Clouseau (or the FBI) could not fail to stumble over it. The locations where the terrorists supposedly stayed are so overloaded with damning materials that they resemble less a crimes scene, and more a “B” detective movie set, with vital clues always on prominent display for the cameras.
Yet another problem lies with the described actions of the hijackers themselves. We are being told on the one hand that these men were such fanatical devotees of their faith that they willingly crashed the jets they were flying into buildings. Yet on the other hand, we are being told that these same men spent the night before their planned visit to Allah drinking in strip bars, committing not just one, but two mortal sins which would keep them out of Paradise no matter what else they did. Truly devout Muslims would spend the day before a suicide attack fasting and praying. Not only does the drinking in strip bars not fit the profile of a fanatically religious Muslim willing to die for his cause, but the witness reports of the men in the bars are of men going out of their way to be noticed and remembered, while waving around phony identifications.
Because of the facts of the phony identifications, we don’t really know who was on those planes. What we do know is that the men on those planes went to a great deal of trouble to steal the identities of Muslims, and to make sure those identities were seen and remembered, then to leave a plethora of planted clues around, such as crop dusting manuals, and letters in checked baggage (why does a terrorist about to die need to check baggage?) that “somehow” didn’t get on the final, fatal, flight.
Fake terror is nothing new. According to recently released files, our government planned Operation NORTHWOODS to stage phony terror attacks against American citizens in the wake of the Bay Of Pigs, to anger Americans into support for a second invasion of Cuba. The plan was spiked by JFK. If our government has ever actually carried out such plans to stage phony terror attacks, the documents have remained classified. But given the reality of Operation NORTHWOODS, or the manner in which FDR maneuvered Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor, one cannot rule out the possibility that, once again, the people of the United States are being lied to by their own government, to manufacture consent for a war of invasion already being discussed with other nations the previous summer.
It is also quite possible, indeed likely, that the United States is being spoofed by a third party to trigger a war. It has happened before. According to Victor Ostrovsky, a defector from Israel’s secret service, Mossad, Israel decided to mount a false flag operation designed to further discredit Libya, and provoke the US to attack an Arab nation. A transmitter loaded with pre-recorded messages was planted in Tripoli, Libya, by a Mossad team.
The `Trojan Horse’ beamed out fake messages about Libyan-authorized bombings and planned attacks that were immediately intercepted by US electronic monitoring. Convinced by this disinformation that Libya was behind the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco in which a US soldier died, President Ronald Reagan ordered massive air attacks on Libya, including an obvious- and illegal (under US law) attempt to assassinate Qadaffi himself. Some 100 Libyan civilians were killed, including Qadaffi’s two year old daughter. Libyan officials had no idea why they were attacked.
It is worth remembering the motto of the Mossad is, “By way of deception, thou shalt do war.”
Whether they were involved in the attacks or not, it cannot be doubted that Israel has benefited from the attacks in New York. While world attention is focused on what the US will do in Afghanistan, Israel has escalated its attacks against Palestinians towns. Israel has repeatedly tried to claim that Palestinians were involved in the New York attacks, hoping to bury the Palestinian cause under the rubble of the World Trade Towers.
Because of the faked IDs and stolen identities, we don’t really know who planned the World Trade Towers attacks. We only know who they wanted us to blame.
And we know that the United States has been tricked in the past into bombing someone who did not deserve the attack, and that those who were bombed then embarked on what from their point of view was justified retaliation that culminated over Lockerbie. And while bombs were falling and planes were crashing, Israel was laughing at us that we had been so easily fooled into bombing Israel’s targets for them.
Are we being hoaxed again, by Israel, or by our own government, or by both? It’s impossible to rule that out. Right now there are a lot of people who want war. Oil companies want Afghanistan’s petroleum products. Our corporations want “friendlier” markets. The CIA wants all that opium. And all those war-mongers, with all their greed and agendas, will not hesitate in the least to pour your tax dollars and your children’s blood all over Afghanistan, to get those “friendlier” markets, oil, and opium.
Because of the vested interests at work here, American citizens must, more than at any other time in recent history, rely on themselves to decide what is happening in our nation. Too many of those who purport to report the “truth” to us are eager to grab more tax money and more children to pour into a war of invasion, poised at a region which has swallowed up every army that has tried to conquer it since the time of Alexander The Great.
And one more thing. Take a good look at the map of Eurasia and plot out where the United States has military deployments. They march in a straight line through the middle of Eurasia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenia, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan.
The United States is prepared to cut the Russian Federation off from the oil rich middle east, and to control transportation routes from China and India into the Middle East. When Russia realizes that this is the real agenda, that’s when “Dubya Dubya Three” will really get going!
WASHINGTON – U.S. military leaders proposed in 1962 a secret plan to commit terrorist acts against Americans and blame Cuba to create a pretext for invasion and the ouster of Communist leader Fidel Castro, according to a new book about the National Security Agency.
“We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” said one document reportedly prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” the document says. “Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of indignation.”
The plan is laid out in documents signed by the five Joint Chiefs but never carried out, according to writer James Bamford in “Body of Secrets.” The new history of the Fort Meade-based eavesdropping agency is being released today by Doubleday.
NSA regularly picks up the conversations of suspected terrorist financier Osama bin Laden, says Bamford, and has monitored Chinese and French companies trying to sell missiles to Iran. He provides new details about an Israeli attack on a Navy eavesdropping ship in 1967, suggesting that the sinking was deliberate. And he reveals the loss of an “entire warehouse” full of secret cryptographic gear to the North Vietnamese in 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War.
Bamford, a former investigative reporter for ABC News who wrote “The Puzzle Palace” about the NSA in 1982, said his new book is based mostly on documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act or found in government archives. “NSA never handed me any documents,” he said. “It was a question of digging.”
He said he was most surprised by the anti-Cuba terror plan, code-named Operation Northwoods. It “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government,” he writes.
The Northwoods plan also proposed that if the 1962 launch of John Glenn into orbit were to fail, resulting in the astronaut’s death, the U.S. government would publicize fabricated evidence that Cuba had used electronic interference to sabotage the flight, the book says.
A previously secret document obtained by Bamford offers further suggestions for mayhem to be blamed on Cuba.
“We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). … We could foster attempts on lives of Cubans in the United States, even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized,” the document says. Another idea was to shoot down a CIA plane designed to replicate a passenger flight and announce that Cuban forces shot it down.
Citing a White House document, Bamford writes that the idea of creating a pretext for the invasion of Cuba might have started with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the last weeks of his administration, when the plan for an invasion by Cuban exiles trained in the United States was hatched. Carried out in April 1961, soon after Kennedy became president, the Bay of Pigs invasion proved a fiasco. Castro’s forces quickly killed or rounded up the invaders.
Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, presented the Operation Northwoods plan to Kennedy early in 1962, but the president rejected it that March because he wanted no overt U.S. military action against Cuba. Lemnitzer then sought unsuccessfully to destroy all evidence of the plan, according to Bamford.
Lemnitzer and those who served with him in 1962 as chiefs of the nation’s military branches are dead. But two former top Kennedy administration officials said yesterday that they were unaware of Operation Northwoods and questioned whether such a plan was ever drafted.
“I’ve never heard of Operation Northwoods. Never heard of it and don’t believe it,” said Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy’s White House special counsel. “Obviously, it would be totally illegal as well as totally unwise.”
Robert S. McNamara, Kennedy’s defense secretary, said: “I never heard of it. I can’t believe the chiefs were talking about or engaged in what I would call CIA-type operations.”
Bamford writes that besides the Joint Chiefs, then-Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze also favored “provoking a phony war with Cuba.”
“There may be a piece of paper” on Northwoods, said McNamara. “I just cannot conceive of [Nitze] approving anything like that or doing it without talking to me.”
The book contains many other revelations in its detailed account of NSA, the biggest U.S. intelligence agency and Maryland’s largest employer, with more than 25,000 personnel at Fort Meade, site of its global eavesdropping efforts.
Among them:
In recent years, NSA has regularly listened to bin Laden’s unencrypted telephone calls. Agency officials have sometimes played tapes of bin Laden talking to his mother to impress members of Congress and select visitors to the agency.
In the late 1990s, NSA tracked efforts by Chinese and French companies to sell missile technology to Iran, particularly the C-802 anti-ship missile. The eavesdropping led to U.S. protests to the Chinese and French governments.
When U.S. troops evacuated Vietnam in 1975, “an entire warehouse overflowing with NSA’s most important cryptographic machines and other supersensitive code and cipher materials” was left behind. It was the largest compromise of such equipment in U.S. history, Bamford writes, but the agency still has not acknowledged it.
This is an archived article preserved as a guest op-ed and does not represent the opinions of namedat.com staff.
Model Emergency Health Powers Act (MEHPA) Turns Governors into Dictators
Dr. Mercola’s comment:
Since this is a bit of an unusual type of article I thought I would put my comment first.
It appears some very dangerous legislation is being prepared to be implemented in the US.
If this legislation passes, in brief:
1 – You will have a mandatory vaccination or you will be charged with a crime.
2 – You will get a mandatory medical exam, or you will be charged with a crime.
3 – Doctors will give the exam or you will be charged with a crime.
4 – Your property can be seized if there is ‘REASONABLE CAUSE TO BELIEVE” that it may pose a public health hazard… it can be burned or destroyed and you will NOT have recourse or compensation.
Summary
This Act would:
a.. broaden government access to private medical records; a.. greatly weaken protections against the taking of private property without compensation;
b.. criminalize refusal to be conscripted for public service or to take medical treatment; a.. potentially increase the risk of infection to many individuals on the pretext of protecting the common good; a.. subjugate scientific analysis and deliberation to the raw assertion of power; greatly expand the power of government to interfere with commerce; a.. and immunize state officials from sanctions against gross abuses of power. Although certain extraordinary government interventions might be warranted in a true emergency, the government already has significant emergency powers as well as the ability to convene a special session of the legislature. It is highly inadvisable to completely suspend our delicate system of checks and balances upon the word of a Governor that an emergency requires it.
This Act, in effect, empowers the Governor to create a police state by fiat, and for a sufficient length of time to destroy or muzzle his political opposition.
The most telling sentence is: “The public health authority shall have the power to enforce the provisions of this Act through the imposition of fines and penalties, the issuance of orders, and such other remedies as are provided by law, but nothing in this Section shall be construed to limit specific enforcement powers enumerated in this Act.” Article VIII Section 802.
It is unlikely that the vast expansion of governmental powers would be restricted to combating a smallpox outbreak. Once the precedent is established, it could be expanded to other types of “emergencies.”
This proposal violates the very principles that its author, Lawrence O Gostin, has previously outlined, while giving them lip service. His article recommends that “public health authorities should bear the burden of justification and, therefore, should demonstrate
(1) a significant risk based on scientific evidence;
(2) the intervention’s effectiveness by showing a reasonable fit between ends and means;
(3) that economic costs are reasonable;
(4) that human rights burdens are reasonable….” (see JAMA 2000;283:3118-3122).
Background
HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson is urging State legislatures to adopt the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, prepared by the Center for Law and the Public’s Health at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This Act grants unprecedented and unchecked powers to the Governors of the 50 States. It can be downloaded from www.publichealthlaw.net.
It is likely that HHS will tie passage of the Act to billions of dollars in federal funding: the usual method of bribery/coercion to get States to pass legislation that would otherwise never be considered.
Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation said: “Tommy Thompson, whom I have considered a friend for thirty years, should be ashamed of himself for advocating this kind of Big Brother legislation. This is not the Tommy Thompson we knew as a four-term governor of Wisconsin.”
HHS is using the 9/11 emergency as a pretext to rush passage of an Act that has been in the works for more than a year. Its main author, Lawrence O. Gostin, was a member of Clinton’s Task Force on Health Care Reform, whose secret documents were exposed to public view as a result of the AAPS lawsuit (AAPS et al v. Hillary Rodham Clinton et al.)
He was a member of Working Group 17, Bioethics, of Cluster V, The Ethical Foundations of the New System, and also a member of the informal group promoting Single Payer. It is odd that Tommy Thompson should be urging adoption of a plan originating with the most extremist left wing of Clinton’s Health Care Task Force.
This legislation is a serious threat to our civil liberties. Indeed, “this law treats American citizens as if they were the enemy,” stated George Annas, chairman of the Health Law Department at the Boston University School of Public Health (San Francisco Chronicle, 11/25/01). It must be exposed to the light of day in the next month and a half.
“If protests are sufficient and if conservative legislators in state legislatures are properly alerted, perhaps there is a chance to beat back this monster,” Weyrich said.
Major Provisions
Declaring an Emergency: Under this Act, any Governor could appoint himself dictator by declaring a “public health emergency.” He doesn’t even have to consult anyone.
The Act requires that he “shall consult with the public health authority,” but “nothing in the duty to consult … shall be construed to limit the Governor’s authority to act without such consultation when the situation calls for prompt and timely action.”
The legislature is prohibited from intervening for 60 days, after which it may terminate the state of emergency only by a two-thirds vote of both chambers. (Apparently, it does not have the authority to find that the state of emergency never really existed.) Article III, Section 305(c). There is also the possibility that the Governor could declare a new emergency as soon as his powers were about to expire.
What is a public health emergency? It is whatever the Governor decides it should be. By the definition in the Act, it could be an “occurrence”-or just an “imminent threat”-of basically any cause that involves a biological agent or biological toxin that poses a “substantial risk” of a “significant number” of human fatalities or disability. Article I, Section 104(g). Terrorism need not be involved; any threat of an epidemic would suffice.
The Act does not define “substantial risk.” Could it mean a 1-in-1,000,000 chance? Risks of that magnitude are already being invoked as a cause for alarm, say of a measles outbreak with transmission through an unvaccinated child, and a pretext for removing exemptions to mandatory vaccines. The EPA also uses such low (and purely hypothetical) risk as the rationale for very costly regulations, so the precedent is well-established.
Is a “significant number” five (the number of deaths from anthrax as of the date of this writing); 24 (the number of deaths from chickenpox in 1998 and 1999 combined, 12 of them in persons under the age of 20, used as a reason for mandatory childhood vaccination); 100 cases of AIDS; or is it thousands of deaths from smallpox, as most readers may assume-or a single case?
It could be any of these because the definition is at the sole discretion of the Governor. The most plausible of the dire threats generally cited is a smallpox outbreak.
However, given the nature of the disease and advanced medicine and sanitation, such an outbreak could be contained without any of the extreme measures in this Act, just as in the 1970s. (See, for example, “Super Smallpox Saturdays?” by Michael Arnold Glueck, M.D., and Robert J. Cihak, MD, http://WorldNetDaily.com, Nov. 15, 2001.)
Because of the adverse side effects of the vaccine (including death), more harm than good could be done by an ill-advised, unnecessary mass vaccination campaign.
Patient Privacy Abolished: The Act would impose significant new reporting requirements on physicians and pharmacists, further diminishing the confidentiality of medical records.
Personal identifying information would have to be reported in writing, without patient consent, in the event of “an unusual increase” in prescriptions related to fever, respiratory, or gastrointestinal complaints that might represent an epidemic disease or bioterrorism, or of any other illness or health condition that could represent bioterrorism or epidemic or pandemic disease. Such conditions are legion.
Gostin concedes that his privacy provision is based on his own model privacy act of 1999, which apparently no state has adopted. Like the Clinton privacy regulations that AAPS is now challenging in court, Gostin’s view of privacy is to allow unrestricted disclosure to federal authorities. Section 506.
Unlimited Power: How would the Governor handle the emergency? By whatever means he chose. He is under no obligation to use scientifically valid methods, or to choose the least destructive method, or to perform any kind of risk-benefit analysis.
He may suspend any regulatory statute, or the rules of any state agency, if they would “prevent, hinder, or delay necessary action.” Article III, Section 303(a)(1). Among the laws to be suspended would probably be those permitting religious, medical, or philosophical exemptions to mandatory vaccines.
The Governor may not only utilize all the resources of the State and its political subdivisions, but commandeer any private facilities or resources considered necessary, and “take immediate possession thereof. Such materials and facilities include, but are not limited to, communication devices, carriers, real estate, fuels, food, clothing, and health care facilities.”
Article IV Section 402(a). He may “compel a health care facility to provide services,” but it is not clear what means he may use to compel its personnel to work (Article IV Section 402(b)), except that any physician or other health care provider who refuses to perform medical examination or testing as directed shall be liable for a misdemeanor. Article V Section 502(b).
The Governor may destroy any material or property “of which there is reasonable cause to believe that it may endanger the public health.” Article IV Section 401(b). And while the State shall pay just compensation to the owner of any facilities that are “lawfully taken” or appropriated (Article IV Section 406), there is a huge exception:
“Compensation shall not be provided for facilities or materials that are closed, evacuated, decontaminated, or destroyed when there is reasonable cause to believe that they may endanger the public health pursuant to Section 401.” Article IV Section 406.
The Governor is in charge of determining “reasonable cause.” There is a strong incentive for him to declare any losses to private owners to be noncompensable.
“Reasonable cause” might mean “contaminated.” Is the Senate Hart Office Building contaminated with anthrax? Yes. Should it therefore be destroyed, or subjected to fumigation with chemicals that would destroy much of the equipment and furnishings? Most think not.
The problem is that given a sufficiently sensitive testing method, everything is probably “contaminated” with almost everything else. Moreover, every testing method has some level of false positives.
The late Conrad Chester of Oak Ridge National Laboratory stated that any place that has ever supported cattle has anthrax contamination (lecture before Doctors for Disaster Preparedness annual meeting, 1996). The same probably applies to any land that has supported sheep or goats, or any land that has had the wind deposit soil from such an area.
In other words, anthrax spores are probably ubiquitous, though at a concentration that very rarely causes any harm. Such harm as was done may have been misdiagnosed by physicians who were unfamiliar with anthrax and not specifically looking for it.
Under this law, nothing would stop the Governor from ordering a citizen to turn over his house to be used as an isolation facility, and later destroying the house on the grounds that it is contaminated. This order, like any other, could be enforced at gunpoint by any law enforcement officer.
In a time of public hysteria, fanned by press coverage based on the “if it bleeds, it leads” policy, common sense is likely to be an early casualty. It is even possible that terrorists-or persons bent on radical transformation of society and the American form of government-could deliberately raise a false alarm and influence a Governor to take action that would result in more damage to freedom than the terrorists themselves could ever accomplish.
Or radical environmentalists (who haven’t, to date, generally had the label of terrorist applied to them) could bring about the destruction of an activity that they object to (such as logging, cattle ranching, or modern farming). There are no checks and balances in this Act to prevent such an occurrence, and no meaningful accountability for the public officials who carry out a basically misguided policy, however destructive.
Command and Control: The Act assumes that the best method to use in an emergency is force and central control. There is no evidence that force works better than leadership, which can bring out the best in citizens coming together to meet the crisis, just as firefighters, police, medical professionals, hotel owners, and other businessmen did in New York City.
Totalitarianism is not only evil but has had uniformly disastrous results.
Although the world has 40 centuries of experience to show that the effect of price controls on the economy is comparable to that of an asteroid impact on the earth, the Act empowers the Governor to ration, fix prices, and otherwise control the allocation, sale, use, or transportation of any item as deemed “reasonable and necessary for emergency response.”
This specifically includes firearms. Article IV Section 402(c) and Section 405(b). Moreover, the Governor can simply seize such items. Article IV Section 402(a).
The Act grants Governors the exclusive power to control the expenditure of funds appropriated for emergencies; the intent and priorities set by the Legislature would be irrelevant.
The Governor may delegate powers at his sole discretion to unelected political appointees.
Criminalizing Refusal of Medical Treatment: The Act empowers the public health authority to decide upon medical treatment or immunizations and to impose its view on individuals, who are liable for a misdemeanor should they refuse.
Article V Section 504(b). Although it might in some circumstances be prudent and justified to quarantine a person who refuses immunization during an outbreak, it is tyrannical to criminalize the medical choice to decline a treatment.
An immunization or treatment might well cause serious harm to certain individuals even if the public health authority does not recognize that it is “reasonably likely” to lead to “serious harm”-another two important undefined terms. Article V Section 504(a)(4).
The Act gives the public health authority the right to isolate or quarantine a person on an ex parte court order, with no hearing for at least 72 hours. If the public health authority decides that an unvaccinated person is a risk to others, even if uninfected, he could be quarantined.
Article V Section 503(e). It is quite possible that public health authorities could force such a person from his home to a place of quarantine, where he will be exposed to infected persons. Such places shall be maintained in a safe and hygienic manner “to the extent possible,” and “all reasonable means shall be taken to prevent the transmission of infection among isolated or quarantined individuals.”
Article V Section 503(a). The Act itself thus implies that an uninfected person is at risk by being placed in such a facility; it is quite likely that he could be at greater risk than if he had the freedom to protect himself as he saw fit. It is assumed that public health authorities will be “reasonable”; however, this assumption is questionable.
Even now, children not vaccinated against hepatitis B are being excluded from school even though there is NO risk that an uninfected child can transmit the disease and a minuscule risk that he can acquire the disease at school.
Zero Accountability: If the State does more harm than good through unfettered use of its draconian power, it can rely on the state immunity clause:
“Neither the State, its political subdivisions, nor, except in cases of gross negligence or willful misconduct, the Governor, the public health authority, or any other State official referenced in this Act, is liable for the death of or any injury to persons, or damage to property, as a result of complying with or attempting to comply with this Act or any rule or regulations promulgated pursuant to this Act.”
Article VIII Section 804.
Note that the law would grant certain immunities even for deaths improperly caused, and allows such immunity even for advisors who made recommendations based on conflicts of interest.
An Alternate Proposal
States can and should improve their ability to respond to disaster, including bioterrorism. However, having the Governor play doctor and dictator is not the right response. Citizens should distribute information about the actual content of the Model Emergency Health Powers Act to opinion leaders, newspaper editors, columnists, the Chamber of Commerce, business groups, medical society officials, legislators, and the Bush Administration.
Action Step
You can go to http://www.aapsonline.org/ and click on the Emergency Dictorial Powers act in the left column. Then click on the December 13th Action Alert which will provide information on how to respond to your legislators on this issue.
