Author: Real History Lisa

While I do not have enough evidence to know if Obama knew or agreed with the opinions in the paper referenced below, it’s certainly cause for question and concern, especially given his longtime association with one of its authors, Cass Sunstein.

Glenn Greenwald sums it up nicely here:

It’s certainly true that one can easily find irrational conspiracy theories in those venues, but some of the most destructive “false conspiracy theories” have emanated from the very entity Sunstein wants to endow with covert propaganda power: namely, the U.S. Government itself, along with its elite media defenders. Moreover, “crazy conspiracy theorist” has long been the favorite epithet of those same parties to discredit people trying to expose elite wrongdoing and corruption.

Who is it who relentlessly spread “false conspiracy theories” of Saddam-engineered anthrax attacks and Iraq-created mushroom clouds and a Ba’athist/Al-Qaeda alliance — the most destructive conspiracy theories of the last generation? And who is it who demonized as “conspiracy-mongers” people who warned that the U.S. Government was illegally spying on its citizens, systematically torturing people, attempting to establish permanent bases in the Middle East, or engineering massive bailout plans to transfer extreme wealth to the industries which own the Government? The most chronic and dangerous purveyors of “conspiracy theory” games are the very people Sunstein thinks should be empowered to control our political debates through deceit and government resources: namely, the Government itself and the Enlightened Elite like him.

It is this history of government deceit and wrongdoing that renders Sunstein’s desire to use covert propaganda to “undermine” anti-government speech so repugnant. The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned — rationally — to distrust government actions and statements. Sunstein’s proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is. In other words, people don’t trust the Government and “conspiracy theories” are so pervasive precisely because government is typically filled with people like Cass Sunstein, who think that systematic deceit and government-sponsored manipulation are justified by their own Goodness and Superior Wisdom.

For whatever reason, this bizarre paper’s co-author, Adrian Vermeule, has been flying under the wire. I decided to address him directly.

I emailed the letter below to him and a number of others over the weekend. I wanted to share it with all of you as well. I only wish I’d thought to ask by what method and under what conditions he thought the government should “silence” conspiracy theorists.

– – – – – – – –
Dear Professor Vermeule:

I’m reading the paper you and Cass Sunstein wrote about Conspiracy Theories (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1084585), and had a few questions I hope you can answer.

1. Who wrote which parts? Did one of you write most of it and if so, who was that?
2. Why do you say “as a general rule, true accounts [of conspiracies] should not be undermined.” Which true accounts should be undermined, and under which circumstances?
3. If we say “all Asian people” do something, aren’t we being racist? When you generalize about conspiracy theorists as if they are a homogenous set of people (and trust me, that’s far from the truth), aren’t you being, shall we say, labelist? Assigning characteristics of some individuals to an entire group, without justification?
4. Which statement would you agree with more, and why?

        a. All conspiracy theories should be dismissed at first glance.
        b. All conspiracy theories should be investigated, and evaluated on the evidence.

5. There was a time when the Watergate affair was characterized as a “third-rate burglary.” Would the public have been better served by not pursuing what really happened?
6. If a conspiracy theory becomes consistently predictive, does that make it valuable? Isn’t that how we judge scientific theories, by their consistently predictive value?
7. Did you ever consider the possibility that it is not a lack of information, but rather a supply of information, that gives birth to some conspiracy theories? That conspiracy theory is sometimes simply pattern recognition?
8. There was a time when the notion of an arms-for-hostages deal, i.e., Iran-Contra, was considered a crazy conspiracy theory, until, of course, it was proven to be true. Some people had the information before others, and were denigrated as conspiracy theorists. Should we then acknowledge that some conspiracy theorists can be very good researchers?
9. If the CIA really did kill Kennedy, isn’t that worth investigating? As someone who knows for fact that the CIA lied about what they knew about Oswald, because I have the records from the CIA to prove it, isn’t it worth pursuing WHY they lied about Oswald? Isn’t that an act of patriotism, not paranoia?
10. Why do your talking points sound so similar to the ones published in this CIA memo? (And yes, I have a copy of this memo from the National Archives. I’m not relying on some Internet page. I typed this in from the document myself.)
11. How can you say that we can’t keep secrets in this “open society” when CIA people know they lose their job, their pension, and can be sent to jail for revealing them?
12. What is redacted here, or is this still a secret, nearly forty years after the document was first shown to members of Congress? Why can’t I know what’s redacted in this “declassified” report of the CIA’s “family jewels”? This is jewel #1, of all things.)

For the record, I too am frustrated with how gullible people are, and how quickly they can jump to unsupported conclusions. Why do some people refuse to believe a conspiracy happened, even when the evidence is there (e.g., Holocaust deniers)?

Some conspiracy theorists are indeed too gullible, are not skilled in the evaluation of evidence, and see shadows where none exist. But to group all conspiracy theorists into this bucket is to miss the fact that there are serious people — professors, lawyers, judges, presidents — who believe these theories precisely because of the evidence, not in spite of it.

As someone who has spent nearly twenty years studying the actual conspiracies of Watergate, Iran-Contra, Smedley Butler’s account of the plot to overthrow FDR, and in great detail, the CIA’s full history (mind control, infiltration and manipulation of the media, using academics to promote practices favorable to the agency, etc., bugging schemes, exotic weaponry, coups and assassinations and yes, the CIA’s curious obfuscations regarding its potential role in the assassination of President Kennedy), it seems that an honest investigation of conspiracy theories is the only way to dispel false conspiracy theories. Dismissing them out of hand without a proper hearing is anti-intellectual and simply compounds the problem.

Opening records, providing access to witnesses, conducting an honest inquiry — isn’t that the simple way to either prove or disprove conspiracy theories? The trick is to find an honest group to hold an honest investigation. I’ve known very few truly honest people in my life. This will forever be a challenging task, especially when money and power are at stake.

Conspiracy theories aren’t the problem; they’re the symptom. And they’re not the symptom of “mental illness, such as paranoia or narcissism” that you suggest. They are the symptom of a government that lies to the people, often through the mainstream media. Most people aren’t stupid. And you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

We know the CIA lied about what they knew about Oswald to other agencies of the government just a month before the assassination because we have two communications drafted within hours of each other, by the same people, with one describing Oswald as older, fat and balding, and one describing him accurately. That’s not an accident, because the inaccurate description was escalated to nearly the Deputy Director’s level for approval, indicating, as one of the signees said on the record, sensitive information that was closely held and revealed only on a “need to know” basis. Those were the CIA officer’s words, not some screenwriter’s.

Does that prove the CIA killed Kennedy? Of course not. But it proves people are not crazy to suspect such. And it proves people who automatically discount that either haven’t seen the CIA’s own records to this effect for themselves, and understood them, or that they are suffering from, to borrow your words, a “crippled epistemology.”

What we really need is conspiracy literacy. People need to be taught how to evaluate evidence. There’s a hierarchy of evidence. For example, most people should believe sworn testimony over unsworn testimony, for example, if there’s a very real chance the person not only could but would be prosecuted for perjury. And to demonstrate why that caveat is needed, since there was no chance Richard Helms was going to be prosecuted for perjury when he lied about the CIA’s role in overthrowing Allende in Chile, he lied in his testimony. And while he was initially charged, it was dismissed, despite his outright admission of lying — calling it a “badge of honor.” Is it any wonder people imagine hidden conspiracies when they see this kind of behavior flaunted openly, instead of punished?

What we really don’t need is what you suggested: “cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of those who subscribe to such theories. They do so by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity.

Been there, done that. It was called COINTELPRO when the FBI did it and Operation Chaos when the CIA did it. And neither worked. Which leads to my final question:

13. Why would you suggest the conspiratorial infiltration of groups by government operatives as a means to combat conspiracy theory? Can you appreciate the irony there?

I’m cc’ing this to many people, and will post this publicly. I will do the same with any response you provide.

Thank you for your time.

Lisa Pease
Conspiracy Realist
http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/

This is so incredibly relevant, still, re our choices and their consequences when it comes to supporting, opposing, or remaining silent about war.

(There is no video here – just audio. But this is well worth listening to.)

Of the 84,000 chemicals in commercial use in the United States — from flame retardants in furniture to household cleaners — nearly 20 percent are secret, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, their names and physical properties guarded from consumers and virtually all public officials under a little-known federal provision.

The policy was designed 33 years ago to protect trade secrets in a highly competitive industry. But critics — including the Obama administration — say the secrecy has grown out of control, making it impossible for regulators to control potential dangers or for consumers to know which toxic substances they might be exposed to.

At a time of increasing public demand for more information about chemical exposure, pressure is building on lawmakers to make it more difficult for manufacturers to cloak their products in secrecy. Congress is set to rewrite chemical regulations this year for the first time in a generation.

Read the rest here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/03/AR2010010302110_2.html?waporef=ak

It’s nice to see the Obama administration doing something so helpful by trying to fix this serious loophole that the chemical companies are exploiting.

The film “Invictus” dramatizes the real-world events of 1995, when newly installed South African President Nelson Mandela urged his country to come together behind its rugby team, the Springboks, when South Africa hosted the once-every-four-years Rugby World Cup.

The team had been, to many South Africans, a hated symbol of apartheid, cheered by the white Afrikaners but rooted against by the oppressed natives.

Mandela had learned in his years in prison that sports had the power to bring people together across political and color boundaries. When the newly empowered natives wanted to change the hated team’s name and colors, Mandela argued against that, noting that in this case, the emotional concerns of the vanquished should outweigh those of the victor.

The film starts a bit slowly and awkwardly. It looks like a lower budget production than it is (the film was shot entirely on location in South Africa).

As the real life leader of the Springboks, Francois Pienaar, told the BBC in 1995, “no Hollywood scriptwriter could have written a better script.” And none did. The script is the weakest part of the film.

The dialog seems artificial and stilted in the early scenes. And yet, none of that matters. The real-life story itself is the star here, and kept me mesmerized throughout, and the experience was well worth the money and time, something I find increasingly hard to say about the majority of films these days.

Read the rest at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/121609b.html

If there’s one book I wish President Obama would read over the holidays, it is JFK and the Unspeakable.

Obama, like President John F. Kennedy, has had his first encounters with the permanent warfare establishment, and so far, has been persuaded by their arguments. This book could open his eyes – and ours – to the possibility of another path.

In this eloquent, remarkable book, longtime peace activist and theologian Jim Douglass uses Thomas Merton, a prominent Catholic monk, to elevate the study of Kennedy’s presidency to a spiritual as well as physical battle with the warmongers of his time.

In 1962, as Douglass records in his preface, Merton wrote a friend the following eerily prescient analysis:
“I have little confidence in Kennedy. I think he cannot fully measure up to the magnitude of his task, and lacks creative imagination and the deeper kind of sensitivity that is needed. Too much the Time and Life mentality ….

“What is needed is really not shrewdness or craft, but what the politicians don’t have: depth, humanity and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe Kennedy will break through into that someday by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination.”

Merton coined the term “the Unspeakable” to describe the forces of evil that seemed to defy description, that took from the planet first Kennedy, then Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, and which tragically escalated the war in Vietnam.  

Merton warned that “Those who are at present too eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of the Unspeakable. This is what too few are willing to see.”

The Unspeakable represents not only willful evil but the void of an agenda for good, an amorality that, like a black hole, destroys all that would escape from it.

Douglass defines the Cold War version of the Unspeakable as “the void in our government’s covert-action doctrine of `plausible deniability,'” that sanctioned assassinations and coups to protect American business interests in the name of defeating communism.

Douglass traces Kennedy’s confrontation with the Unspeakable and his efforts to escape that trajectory. Kennedy came to understand that peace through war would never bring us true peace, but only a “Pax Americana,” which would foster resentment among the conquered, sowing the seeds of future conflicts, a fear that has proven true over and over in the years following his death.

Douglass opens with a sort of mea culpa, noting that by failing to see the connection between Kennedy’s assassination and his own personal fight against nuclear weapons, he “contributed to a national climate of denial.”

Douglass explains that the cover-ups of the assassinations of the Sixties was enabled in large part by denial, and not just by the government, but by those of us who never clamored for the truth about what happened.

Douglass reminds us that “The Unspeakable is not far away. It is not somewhere out there, identical with a government that has become foreign to us. The emptiness of the void, the vacuum of responsibility and compassion, is in ourselves. Our citizen denial provides the ground for the government’s doctrine of `plausible deniability.'”

Douglass quotes Gandhi on the principle of satyagraha, how truth is the most powerful force on earth, and how, as Gandhi said, “truth is God.” If you want to see God, you must first be able to look truth in the face.

Douglass frames Kennedy’s assassination as rooted in our Cold War past. Our collective failure to demand accountability for the crimes done in our name came back to haunt us in the most visceral of ways on Nov. 22, 1963, when the President was shot dead in the street in front of us.

With astonishing moral clarity and elegant prose, Douglass lays out Kennedy’s multiple battles with the military, industrial and intelligence establishments, which are not really separate entities, but deeply interdependent on each other.

The well-documented (and footnoted and indexed) book opens with a succinct chronology of major events during Kennedy’s administration. Seeing all the events laid out simply, end-to-end, makes the book’s conclusions all the more powerful.

The answer to the question implied in the book’s subtitle of “Why he was killed and why it matters” seems self-evident when you strip away all the false history and distractions that have been injected into the record to muddy the waters and look simply, finally, at what happened.

Douglass takes us back to what may well be the source of John Kennedy’s courage – the sinking of his PT boat and his heartbreakingly difficult but ultimately successful efforts to rescue his comrades. Kennedy faced his own death several times during that first long night, and told his fellow crewmembers when he got back to shore that he’d never prayed so much in his life.

Even after he was safe, Kennedy plunged back into the ocean a second time in an attempt to signal another boat. Kennedy’s utter selflessness was not some liberal fantasy; it was an actuality, for his PT crew.

As Robert Kennedy wrote later, at least half of John Kennedy’s life he suffered some form of pain. He had scarlet fever as a child, and suffered from back trouble most of his life. He was beset with illnesses, often at the most inconvenient times.

But he never complained, and few realized what he dealt with. Perhaps these experiences shaped John Kennedy’s own sense of compassion for others.
And perhaps these experiences, in which death seemed always nearby, gave him the courage to do what few others would attempt, as the Cold War nearly exploded into a hot one during the Cuban missile crisis.

Kennedy’s first confrontation with the Unspeakable came during his first 100 days in office with the Bay of Pigs operation he inherited as a going concern from the Eisenhower Administration. The CIA convinced Kennedy that the operation would be successful, and that no American troops would be needed (Kennedy’s prerequisite for launching the operation).

The Cuban exiles were trained and ready and well supplied, he was told. Kennedy approved the plan, and the plan was a disaster.

In the Bay of Pigs account, Douglass referenced something I had never read before – coffee-stained notes from Allen Dulles leftover from an unpublished draft of an article, discovered by Lucien S. Vandenbroucke. In the notes, Dulles acknowledges the plan had no chance of success, but that he and others in the CIA drew Kennedy into the plan on the assumption that when it failed, Kennedy would send in the military to finish the job.

Dulles and the CIA had vastly underestimated Kennedy’s capacity to absorb defeat rather than to escalate a situation.

Douglass also cites an NPR report by Daniel Schorr to support this notion. Schorr attended a special conference on the Bay of Pigs in 2001, and reported on NPR additional details supporting this thesis, concluding that, “In effect, President Kennedy was the target of a CIA covert operation that collapsed when the invasion collapsed.”

The CIA even had a plan to circumvent Kennedy if Kennedy had not agreed to the Bay of Pigs invasion. Under the plan, Kennedy would be maneuvered into rubber-stamping it through the careful stage-managing of his ignorance.

But the one thing the CIA could not do was order the military’s direct intervention. For that, they needed the President. And that is where Kennedy won his first battle with the Unspeakable. He refused to choose more death and destruction over defeat.

Read the rest at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/121409a.html.

Can people really influence the physical world with thought alone? And if so, dare we use that power for evil, instead of good? Or will the effort come back to haunt us?

That is the quandary posed by the film “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” and, even more so, by the book of the same name that inspired the film.

First, run — do not walk, do not pass Go — to the theater to see “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” Films that are both hilarious and intelligent, provocative yet madcap, are hard to come by.

And because this film teaches us, in a wildly entertaining manner, about recent military and intelligence history, I have a feeling certain people will work hard to rush this movie right back out of the theaters. So see it before showings of it, like some of the characters in the film, disappear.

The film presents a largely fictitious story based on all-too-real projects and programs conducted by various agencies of the government. Very little of it is literally true, yet many of the stranger events in the film happened in a manner similar to the one portrayed.

See my breakdown of the true facts behind the film here.

Wow. I could have predicted this. Gerald Posner, the guy who got all the publicity during the thirtieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination for his awfully misleading book “Case Closed,” is now chums with Karzai’s bro–you know, the one the NYT just said was receiving CIA help.

But how stupid is Posner? Or worse, how stupid does he think we are?

Given the situation, I wouldn’t have led with this, as Posner did:

Early Wednesday morning at nearly 1:00 A.M., I checked my email for a final time and saw notice of a newsbreak from The New York Times that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and the man often called the Pablo Escobar of the country’s heroin trade, has been on a CIA payroll for the past eight years. I immediately called him.

I reached him on his private cell number.

Where do you think Posner got that number? The phone book? The local drug store? Of course he got that through contacts at CIA. Why would he get that number? Because the CIA trusts him.

And if the CIA trusts him, we definitely should not! If there’s one thing we don’t need, it’s yet another reporter whose real agenda is to promote the CIA.

Has Posner always been this chummy with the Agency?

Um, yeah. Where have you been?

One of his earliest books was a novel called “The Bio-Assassins” and featured a Cold War CIA oldie fighting a bureacratic newbie in the changing CIA. Guess who wins? I don’t really have to answer that, do I? The old fart, the one willing to break any law to do what needs to be done, in his view.

Another of his early books was about Mengele. He received wide praise for this, but some not so widely distributed criticism. Essentially, the book is an apologia that attempts to explain why the poor ol’ CIA just couldn’t find Mengele to bring him to justice. It reads like the cover story it probably is. If the CIA really wanted to find him, they could. They found Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle, for Chrissakes. They cold have found Mengele, if they had the will. They could have found Bin Laden, long ago, too, if they had the will.

And of course, I won’t bother to bore you with the many wrongs in Posner’s awful book on the Kennedy assassination, “Case Closed.” But if you’re curious, read this article, by an actual historian, Professor David Wrone: http://www.assassinationscience.com/wrone.html.

The reason I included Keith Olbermann in the title is because Olbermann is a fan of Posner’s, and has had him on his show many times. Every time he does, my opinion of Olbermann’s intellect goes down. I hope someday Olbermann opens his eyes about this guy, before Posner lowers his credibility even further.

FYI, I started to review C. David Heymann’s book Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story but found the entire book relies on Heymann’s credibility as an honest broker, because all his key witnesses are dead, and the families of dead people can’t sue for libel. So I started researching Heymann and his previous works. I’ll give you a hint as to what I found. He lies right on the cover of his book, claiming to be a three-time Putlizer Prize Nominee. The Pultizer Prize committee never nominated him for anything. His book was sent in to the committe. That makes him a multiple entrant, along with thousands of others. Not a nonimee.

I wrote a long, in-depth piece, and will talk about it on Black Op Radio next week. Please take a gander at it here: http://www.ctka.net/reviews/heymann.html. Then listen up next Thursday night at http://www.blackopradio.com as host Len Osanic and I discuss Heymann’s works.
Here’s a snippet but please check out the whole thing. This guy has made a career writing books that no one has fact checked:

I submit that even the title is false, because Heymann doesn’t even attempt to paint a love story. He paints a lust story, and a lopsided one at that. And really, the title should have been: Heymann and the Kennedys: A Hate Story. That would have been a more honest description of the book.

Heymann goes after nearly all the Kennedys, starting with the father, who he accused of being an “ardent admirer of the Third Reich,” a gross misrepresentation of Joe Kennedy’s views. Joe was an ardent pacifist, who feared that another world war would bring socialism not just to more of Europe, but to America as well. For his reluctance to go to war, or, as historian Will Swift puts it, for his willingness to explore every avenue for peace, he was branded an appeaser. And for that, people made the leap that an opponent of war was a friend of Hitler, when in fact that is an unjustified leap. Those of us who opposed George W. Bush’s war in Iraq did not do so out of any admiration for Saddam Hussein. It’s a ridiculous meme about Joe Kennedy that has persisted for reasons beyond the scope of this book review.

Heymann goes after John Kennedy, portraying him in such sexual terms one wonders when the guy had a chance to govern. He even claims Kennedy’s youthful glow in the debates was due to his having had sex just prior to the debate, saying “The results of the exercise were obvious to anyone who watched the debates. Kennedy looked refreshed and composed on camera, whereas Nixon seemed nervous and out of sorts.” And pre-debate sex is his only possible explanation? Whatever else Kennedy was, he was ambitious as hell and believed in preparation. It’s just not credible that he would have allowed a moment of pleasure to interfere with the most important political moment of his career.

Heymann sources this episode to “a longtime congressional and senatorial aide to JFK,” Langdon Marvin. Author David Pietrusza, in his book 1960 – LBJ Vs. JFK Vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies, challenged Marvin’s credibility on this episode, which first appeared in Heymann’s book on Jackie.

Pietrusza notes that in the original account, Heymann’s version in the Jackie book claims the sex happened at the Palmer House in Chicago. Pietrusza notes that the Palmer House is nowhere near the studio in which the debate was filmed. He also noted that the route there would have taken Kennedy “perilously close” to Nixon’s “Pick-Congress” headquarters. As Pietrusza puts it, “There are risks, there are John Kennedy risks, and there are risks not even a Jack Kennedy would take.”

Pietrusza also questions Marvin’s assertion, conveyed by Heymann, that just prior to the debates, Jack Kennedy had sex with a stripper in New Orleans while her fiancé, Governor Earl Long, held a party in the next room. The problem with that is that the debate was filmed September 26, Long had left office in May, and had died September 5. So either Marvin or Heymann’s account of what Marvin said is simply not credible.

Pietrusza notes that Marvin did have a motive to attack the Kennedys. Marvin was an aviation consultant. But for whatever reason, Bobby Kennedy wrote the following to reassure airline industry representatives who expressed concern about Marvin having a role overseeing their industry. Pietrusza quotes the following letter from Bobby Kennedy:

I assure you that Langdon Marvin will not be a part of the administration. He will not have a job of any kind and will play no role, directly or indirectly, in the policies of the administration.

Your sentiments regarding Mr. Marvin are exactly in accord with mine, and I assure you that, when I say that Langdon Marvin will have nothing to do with the government for the next four years, I mean what I say.

As Pietrusza summarized, “Langdon Marvin’s story is a good story. Repeating it uncritically is not very good history.”

Heymann paints Jackie as, forgive the words, a royal bitch. There is no nuance. There are no other colors. He has her throwing fits at publishers, threatening to sue, demanding payments from the Kennedys for her wardrobe and expenses after John’s death, and, of course in the centerpiece to the book, sleeping with Bobby. Of course, Heymann has no direct source for that. He has all kinds of innuendo, but not one credible account from anyone who can verify their quote to show that the two were in love or had any sexual contact of any kind.

One of his racier episodes, where he claims a witness spied Bobby with his hand on Jackie’s naked breast at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach, has already been disputed by Andrew Goldman in his review of Bobby and Jackie in the Daily Beast (July 24, 2009). The witness in question is Mary Harrington, who, according to Goldman, died a year before Heymann ever quoted her. Heymann has Harrington supposedly watching the two on the grass from Harrington’s third-floor window next door to the Kennedy estate.

The problem with this, Goldman notes, is that, according to Ned Monell, the listing agent for the Kennedy residence when it was sold in 1995, the entire property was walled. The only place, therefore, from which Harrington could have been staying would have been a beach shack which was 10 feet lower than the Kennedy house. And given that heavy vegetation surrounded the house, she couldn’t have seen anything on the lawn at all.

Many of Heymann’s sources for the affair between Bobby and Jackie are people saying they heard it through the grapevine, so to speak. Here’s a typical factless piece of innuendo:

Film producer Susan Pollock had a friend who occupied a suite opposite Jackie’s at the Carlyle. On several occasions, the friend saw Bobby and Jackie return to the suite late at night, then leave together in the morning. “You can look at people and tell if they’ve been intimate,” said Pollock. “My friend could tell. In any case, their affair was an open secret. Everyone knew it.”

What standards of proof does this meet? That is sheer speculation. And of course, there’s a very innocent explanation for overnights. Bobby had taken over the responsibilities of father for his brother’s two children. He read to them at bedtime. He took them to school in the morning. It makes sense he’d spend the night. Anything else is unproven speculation.

I wanted to share this, because we’ve been discussing the story here, and some of the media’s distortions were repeated as if they were fact, when they were not. Please read, and then take action as requested. It will only take a minute or two of you time.

USA Today, AP Mislead on Honduran Coup
9/24/09

This week, ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya returned to Tegucigalpa–though not to office. Unfortunately, press accounts are still misreporting the story behind his ouster, relying on those who supported the coup to supply the explanation for their actions.

Some of the most misleading coverage has appeared in the Associated Press dispatches that have run in USA Today. The paper’s September 22 edition ran this from the AP:

The legislature ousted Zelaya after he formed an alliance with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and tried to alter the nation’s constitution. Zelaya was arrested on orders of the Supreme Court on charges of treason for ignoring court orders against holding a referendum to extend his term. The Honduran Constitution forbids a president from trying to obtain another term in office.

Besides being confusing (is an “alliance” with Hugo Chávez illegal?), this formulation repeats the unsupported case that pro-coup forces in Honduras have made: that President Zelaya was seeking to extend his term in office. While his critics may have accused him of this, there is no reason why AP should treat their charges as fact.

Indeed, the referendum that Zelaya was seeking in late June was a non-binding poll about whether to revise the constitution. Zelaya hoped that a “yes” vote on that referendum would have led to a binding vote on the November ballot–at the same time voters would be choosing Zelaya’s successor–about whether to hold a constitutional convention. In other words, there was no plausible way that this process could have resulted in Zelaya extending his time in office. As Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic & Policy Research (7/8/09) pointed out:

The belief that Zelaya was fighting to extend his term in office has no factual basis–although most people who follow this story in the press seem to believe it. The most that could be said is that if a new constitution were eventually approved, Zelaya might have been able to run for a second term at some future date.

On September 23, USA Today ran another AP report (appearing on the “print edition” section of its website) making the same claim: “Zelaya was put on a plane by the military in June for trying to force a referendum to change the constitution’s limit of one term for presidents.” This is simply not what the referendum called for. In fact, before the coup took place, the Associated Press seemed to know this. On June 26, the wire service noted that “Sunday’s referendum has no legal effect: it merely asks people if they want to have a later vote on whether to convoke an assembly to rewrite the constitution.”

So when did the AP’s understanding of the referendum change, and why? And is USA Today comfortable with publishing such material?

ACTION:

Contact the Associated Press and USA Today and ask them why their reporting on Honduras this week has advanced falsehoods about the removal of President Manuel Zelaya.

CONTACT:

Associated Press Tom Kent, Standards Editor tkent@ap.org

USA Today Brent Jones, Reader Editor accuracy@usatoday.com

I’m always disappointed when the film doesn’t match its advertisements, no matter how good the film or important its message. So I have to admit I was a little disappointed with The Informant! because I was expecting a comedy, but got something quite a bit darker.  

Had I expected instead to see a smart, suspenseful drama going in, I’m certain I would have enjoyed the experience more. I’m hoping this review will help reset your own expectations, because you really should see this movie.

There are funny moments, to be sure, but, despite some valiant attempts to lighten the mood through quirky music (from Marvin Hamlisch of A Chorus Line) and sometimes amusing and informative voiceovers in inappropriate moments, ultimately what happens is distinctly unfunny.

The film tells of the rise and fall of biotechnologist cum mid-level manager Mark Whitacre, who, through a series of events, becomes an informant for the FBI against his employer, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), one of the world’s largest agricultural processors.

Whitacre seeks to expose a global price fixing scheme by high-level managers at ADM. But he exposes more than he planned, and that’s where the complications, and to some degree the fun, come in.

(Read the rest at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/092009a.html)