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Large wildfire engulfs forest in Chernobyl’s EXCLUSION ZONE

RT | February 17, 2019

A major blaze has broken out in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone – the site of the worst nuclear disaster in human history. The fire hit a forest some 20 kilometers away from the ill-famed nuclear power station.

The blaze inside Chernobyl’s ‘dead zone’ in northern Ukraine started on Sunday when dry grass caught fire, the Ukrainian emergency service said in a statement. The blaze then reached a forest near the abandoned village of Bychki located some 24km (15 miles) away from the damaged nuclear reactor.

Some 5 hectares (12 acres) of forest went up in flames. Three firefighting vehicles and 18 emergency crew members were dispatched to tackle the blaze, according to the emergency service’s statement.

The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, an area heavily contaminated by the disaster, has repeatedly witnessed wildfires over recent years. A large fire broke out there in June 2018. Another blaze, which scorched 25 hectares (60 acres) of land, hit it in 2017.

While the burning of possible radioactive wood and shrubs could release some dangerous combustion products into the atmosphere, the statement issued by Ukrainian officials mentioned no such risks for now.

Chernobyl became the site of one of the biggest nuclear disasters in history, when a local power reactor blew up during a safety system test on April 26, 1986, leading to massive contamination of the surrounding area and beyond. The catastrophic explosion released 400 times more radioactive material than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II.

The severely damaged reactor was sealed off by a protective ‘sarcophagus’ of steel and concrete, while the nearby town of Pripyat had its 50,000 population evacuated. A radioactive cloud covered a massive chunk of Europe in the wake of the disaster.

Today, Pripyat is a ghost town while the contaminated 30-kilometer (18.6 mile) area around the reactor has been turned into a no-go zone, which has for years been closed to any visitors, but is now booming with wildlife – keenly observed by scientists.

February 17, 2019 Posted by | Environmentalism, Nuclear Power, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Elliott Abrams ‘Cabaled Quietly’ to Spring a CIA-Connected Drug Trafficker

By Jefferson Morley | The Deep State | February 15, 2019

Surely, this is just another “loony left” headline about Elliott Abrams, the administration’s point man on Venezuela, whom some say has been unfairly pilloried on Capitol Hill.

If you read this September 1986 National Security Council email, written by NSC staffer Oliver North, you’ll see the headline is not over-stated but factually precise and faithful to the conspiratorial tone of the original source.

When U.S. policymakers needed to spring a convicted CIA-connected drug trafficker from doing hard time in federal prison, who did they call?

Trump’s appointed special envoy to Venezuela, Elliott Abrams.

On Thursday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) scorched Abrams for his covering up the infamous El Mozote massacre and lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra conspiracy in the 1980s.

Her interrogation drew rebuke from Max Boot, the apostate conservative, and a chorus of right-wing media commentators. Boot described Omar’s comments as a “disgraceful ad hominem attack.”

Actually the impertinent Congresswoman from Minneapolis could have gone much further about Abrams’ untrustworthy behavior. One of the most revealing stories about Abram’s hypocrisy comes from an impeccably right-wing source, Oliver North, former Republican senatorial candidate and Fox News talking head.

Bagman

The year was 1986. Abrams served as assistant secretary of state for Latin America under President Reagan. He was a 39 year old lawyer and foreign policy polemicist. Even then his perennial scowl and crooked grin managed made him look furtive and self-righteous at the same time.

The Iran-Contra conspiracy was in full swing. The conspiracy, permissively labelled “a scandal,” was a Reagan White House plot to subvert the U.S. Congress’s powers of the purse. North was the coordinator of what can fairly be described as an unconstitutional covert operation, while Abrams played the role of bagman.

To bypass the so-called Boland Amendment, Abrams took payments from the Sultan of Brunei, a petroleum potentate from South Asia, and passed them to the leaders of Reagan’s counterrevolutionary army in Nicaragua. When questioned under oath, Abrams lied. He later pleaded guilty to two counts of deceiving Congress.

As part of the conspiracy, Abrams also put in a good word for a convicted drug trafficker, General Jose Bueso Rosa. He was a Honduran general who had helped the U.S. government with  “sensitive operations” in Central America. As Murray Waas and I wrote in the Washington Post, North did “a favor for a felon.”

So did Abrams.

‘Sensitive Operations’

As an episode of CIA-sanctioned drug trafficking, the Bueso story was  typical. Bueso, it turns out, had helped put together a CIA-trained military intelligence unit known as Battalion 316, which served as death squad for U.S. policymakers.  A Honduran government investigation found that Battalion 316 had captured, tortured and executed some 200 suspected leftists.

Bueso had also trafficked multi-kiloton shipments of cocaine. As CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz documented in Volume 2 of his report on contra drug trafficking, the agency did business with more than 50 suspected drug traffickers in the 1980s.

(Lazy reporters sometimes say that the CIA was cleared of the allegation. They didn’t bother to read the Sections 800-1148 of Hitz’s report which detail how the agency took no action against four dozen suspected traffickers who aided Reagan’s–and Abrams’–anticommunist crusade.)

IG report that CIA reporters prefer not to read
(Credit: CIA)

Investigating the story for the Post, I spoke on background with law enforcement officials familiar with Bueso’s case. A  wiretap had picked up Bueso repeatedly talking about shipments of “flour” into central Florida, they said.

Given Bueso’s connections, no one in the Reagan Justice Department cared to make a big deal of his cocaine shipments, no matter how hefty. They just wanted a conviction that would put him out of business. Bueso got a generous plea bargain. He would only have to serve five years.

Bueso, however, was led to believe his American friends would save him from serving any time all.

In his September 1986 email, later uncovered by Iran-contra investigators, North worried Bueso might “break his long standing silence.” He might, in other words disclose unpleasant truths about death squads and CIA drug trafficking that might taint professed U.S. ideals of human rights.

So North “cabaled quietly” with Abrams, as well as top Pentagon, CIA and Justice Department officials.  A presidential pardon was out of the question but transfer to a comfortable “Club Fed” facility was arranged.

At a time when U.S. prosecutors meted out ten-year sentences to young black men for the possession of a few ounces of cocaine, Abrams was part of a gang that thought a multi-kiloton trafficker should be treated leniently. Such was his subtle advocacy of human rights.

Bueso got out of prison early–for “good behavior.” Abrams went on to a long career in U.S. foreign policy. Hundreds of thousands of black men remained in jails for years, if not decades.

Question

Rep. Omar could have asked an even tougher question of Abrams, namely, “Does Trump’s policy toward Latin America today involve protection of drug traffickers as Reagan’s policy did in the 1980s?”

She was certainly justified in questioning his veracity.

“I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony you give today to be truthful,” she said.

————————

Here’s the Omar-Abrams exchange.

February 17, 2019 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Iran’s Javad Zarif warns “risk of war with Israel is great” (MunichSecurityConference 2019)

ProductiehuisEU | February 17, 2019

Speaking in the Munich Security Conference, Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif blames Israel of violating international law after bombing campaigns in Syria, criticizes European powers for not calling out Israel and the US for their behavior in the region.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused Israel of looking for war and warned that its behavior and that of the United States was increasing the chances of a clash in the region.

“Certainly, some people are looking for war … Israel,” Zarif said at the Munich Security Conference.

Accusing Israel of violating international law after bombing campaigns in Syria, Zarif also criticized European powers for not calling out Israel and the United States for their behavior in the region.

“The risk (of war) is great. The risk will be even greater if you continue to turn a blind eye to severe violations of international law,” he said.

“Israeli behavior is putting international law on the shelf, US behavior is putting international law on the shelf.”

Zarif, who said Iran was committed to a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers for now, also accused France, Britain and Germany of not doing enough to ensure Tehran received the economic benefits of that accord.

Credit: Bayerischer Rundfunk 2019

February 17, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Laughter for All (Financial) Times

By James Petras | Unz Review | February 13, 2019

In these times, when the United States pursues an unprecedented military build-up, promotes coups and trade wars, breaks weapons agreements, organizes the illegal seizure of overseas financial accounts, building barriers and walls along the southern border, Washington can count on the mass media to provide a variety of propaganda messages, ranging from the predictable ‘yellow ’ to the sophisticated ‘serious press’ .

While the political class dismisses the sensational press, they are avid readers of the ‘prize winning’ propaganda newspapers and their columnists.

Among the perceptive readers who follow the serious press one can hear periodical outburst of laughter or observe cynical smiles.

The ‘serious’ newspapers which draw the greatest attention include the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Though they vary in the style and quality of their writers, they all follow the same political line, especially on issues pertaining to US imperial power.

For our purposes – and because I have been a long-time subscriber of the Financial Times (FT) –, this essay will concentrate on its journalists and their articles.

Armchair Militarists and “Western Values”

Gideon Rachman is a senior columnist for the FT who travels around the world and has a unique ability to preach ‘western values’ … selectively. Commentating on contemporary US and EU politics, Rachman attributes to them ‘western values’– representative democracy, individual freedom and the rule of law, overlooking two decades of imperial invasions, several hundred US bases around the world and countless violations of international law.

According to Rachman’s notion of ‘western values’ there is a historical legacy, a long tradition of constitutional government, – overlooking the conquest of five continents.

Moreover, while Rachman has consistently condemned Syria for human rights violations, he systematically avoids Israel’s weekly murder and wounding of hundreds of unarmed Palestinian protestors. Most knowledgeable writers wink and grin as they read his selective labeling of western values.

John Paul ‘Ratface’ Rathbone is one of FT leading contributors on Latin America who specializes in celebrating murderous regimes and promoting US policies which overthrow freely elected democracies. During the first decade of the 21st century, “Ratface” (as some of his loyal readers refer to him), wrote eulogies about Colombia’s murderous President Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010) as he slaughtered hundreds of thousands of insurgents and activists.

While Uribe’s death squads rain amok driving millions of peasants from their villages, Ratface frolicked in downtown night clubs and high-end bordellos enjoyed by oligarchs and tourists.

Consistent with the Ratface’s version of Colombia’s death squad democracy he condemned ‘the populist’ popularly elected democracies of Brazil and Venezuela.

Having distant ties to Cuba, Rathbone reminisces about the good times in pre-revolutionary Havana, its stately mansions and the fun city, as he ignores the common police practice of pulling fingernails of political dissidents.

Rathbone evokes occasional cynical smiles from columnists who are embarrassed by his toadying to Washington’s intelligence operatives.

Columnist Philip Stephens is the perennial bleeding-heart liberal who sheds tears for all of his pro-western martyrs, except those Downing Street designates as pro-Russian terrorists. Stephens wears his ‘liberal democratic’ credentials on his backside – from which he emits his defense of UK imperialist wars in Syria, Libya and Iraq.

Stephen’s uncovers ‘undemocratic values’ in Putin’s poisonous operations even in provincial English villages.

Russian journalists are not excited by Philip’s journalistic ejaculations. He is the occasional butt of after work banter and laughter.

The Dean of the Times economic reportage is Martin “Marty” Wolf, who is well-known throughout the craft as the thoughtful advocate of welfare plutocracy. Martin advocates equality, justice — free markets for everybody but only the rich can meet his criteria. Marty finds and condemns populists of every hue. He engages in serious debate with leftists and rightists. But Marty like Gideon has yet to condemn Israel’s settler ‘populists’ who practice ethnic cleansing.

Despite his statistical tables, Marty never links his facts with the western imperial pillage of Africa, Asia and Latin America. His concerns and moral indignation are very selective and flourish when he finds colonized people who call into question his western values.

Marty’s hostility to China is more than a broken financial love affair (that never was). It is part of the FT propaganda war to downgrade Beijing’s economic advances in the world economy. In the January 14, 2019 issue the entire editorial board went on a rampage, ranting about China’s technological theft, its ‘slow down’ and pending crises … always reaching gloomy conclusions.

The FT expert observers note ‘big facts’ — that China is declining, all of one tenth of one percent over the previous year. Most China observers chuckle over the FT’s China ‘crises’ and wonder how the EU is ‘robust’ when it touches two percent and the US a shade higher?

China’s so-called economic crisis is, in the eyes of the FT, a product of its bloated state sector even as it promotes science and high-tech growth — but they are part of a total war.

Jamil Anderlini tags China as a ‘colonial power’ with its single base in Djibouti and for financing hundreds of billions in infrastructure, while the colonialism label is not applied to the US with several hundred military bases in five continents. China’s crackdown on US funded Uighur terrorists, who have murdered hundreds of Chinese citizens, is described as genocide, a term more apt for the US intervention in Libya, Iraq, Somalia and Syria.

The FT has a stable of journalist hacks who specialize in ignoring US economic warfare against China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela etc.

All the economic ‘slowdowns’ among US adversaries are attributed to internal mismanagement never US intervention.

The one-sided propaganda pieces written by the FT leading hackers — Hornby, Feng, Politi, Kynge, Mallet, Anderlini, Bozorgmehr etc — are notoriously repetitive: China’s economy is on the verge of crisis — which prediction never occurs and smart investors ignore while smirking all the way to their bank accounts.

The FT would offer its subscribers plenty to laugh about over late afternoon beers, if it were not for the war crimes it endorses. Their apologies of bloody western imperial invasions in the Middle East are not laughing matters.

The FT joins the Anglo-American chorus accusing Russia of political assassinations on British soil, without evidence or witnesses.

The FT has yet to chastise their US and British paymasters for their prolonged economic war against the elected governments in Venezuela.

The upwardly mobile FT scribes, scrambling for senior posts, ignore the laughter at their pious claims of ‘democratic values’ because their columns reek of lies and denials of China’s advances, Russia’s economic recovery from the catastrophic decline which the Times celebrated alongside the oligarchs’ plunder during the lost decade of the nineties.

Conclusion

The difference between the articles in the FT and the handouts from the war ministry is a matter of source not substance.

As the US engages in a total war on China’s cutting-edge industries, particularly, the world’s most advanced telecom company Huawei, the FT parrots US threats and warnings without the least effort to sort out facts from propaganda.

The fact is, the Times is part and parcel of the imperial revival which attempts to block China from establishing its pre-eminence in the world. The FT echoes President Trump’s lies about economic theft as the basis for China’s Huawei’s global leadership in telecom technology.

The FT gloss over its overt political role, evokes smirks among knowledgeable insiders as they scoff their beer.

Anti-Trump rhetoric fails to obscure the fact that the FT fronts for most of his policies – from financial deregulations, pro-Israel apologetics and Middle East wars.

There is one caveat; the FT is more warlike than the President! The FT is for remaining in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and any other independent country! While the FT publishes upscale articles on wine tasting, the arts, literature, travel and jewel collecting, its ‘serious’ news promotes bloody imperial wars. There is nary a western war that the Times fails to support.

In truth, the FT are the print-police and gatekeepers overseeing the defense of ‘democratic values’ by any means necessary (including wars of untold destruction)!

The larger issue confronting the US public concern the link between the ‘serious press’, the educated reading public and Washington’s perpetual war strategy.

The ‘serious press’ like the FT is no stranger to propagandizing in favor of imperial wars, since its founding. Its lack of objectivity is a fact of life and is predictable. What is new and dangerous is that journalist-critics are few and far between, particularly as the US empire is challenged at home and abroad.

The turn to militarism and the decline in imperial economic dominance puts a premium on media propaganda; its job is convincing and activating the young, politically educated class, which does not have a commitment to the serious press.

Financial elites continue to subscribe but many laugh at the one-sided advocacy of US denigration of China – since most investors have made money on China’s robust growth.

Most investors are bored by the Times fables about ending wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It may come to pass someday that ridicule, loud and repeated laughter, will bankrupt the serious press, that its readers will be confined to Wall Street and the Pentagon.

Even today, readers are disgusted by the FT grotesque front page features. Madeleine Albright appears on the House and Home section which mentions her ‘hospitality’ omitting to include her murderous bombing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi homes and her claim that the murder of a half-million Iraqi children was ‘worth it’ to win the war!

February 17, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Let’s not talk about that, shall we?

Dissident Veteran For Peace | October 12, 2018
It’s 1987 and Rep. Brooks (D-TX) asks Lt. Col. Oliver North about Garden Plot, REX 84, etc. and, boy, is Ollie miffed. Sen. Inouye (D-HI) stops that line of questioning and the mainstream media, for the most part, dutifully ignore the story. And the American public, for the most part, dutifully stay asleep. As far as I can tell Brooks never again bucked the powers that be on the subject.

February 15, 2019 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Heart of Darkness Germany

By Linh Dinh • Unz Review • February 13, 2019

After Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar made an obvious point about Jewish power influencing American foreign policies, she was forced, by that same Jewish power, to recant, thus confirming, to all those who can still think, the awful influence of Jewish power.

Though Jewish power is quite out in the open, as in AIPAC and the existence of a racist state that’s sustained by terror and endless war, one can’t even say “Jewish power” without being immediately branded an anti-Semite, if not a Nazi.

If it wasn’t for Jewish power, Americans wouldn’t have so much Muslim blood on their hands, or being worse than bankrupt, having fought so many wars for Israel.

If not for Jewish power, questioning the Holocaust wouldn’t be a thought crime in 16 European countries. No other event in human history is so fascistically protected from scrutiny. None but the Holocaust, thanks to Jewish power.

Robert Faurisson conclusively dismantled the Nazi gas chamber myth, so Jewish power destroyed his academic career, put him on trial and bankrupted this brave, unflinching man. In 1989, three thugs claiming to be The Sons of the Memory of the Jews attacked the 60-year-old and broke his jaw.

The Holocaust does not explain genocide but enables it, but few dare to say so, for fear of Jewish power.

There are no scientific or even documentary proofs of the Holocaust, so the six million figure is just as much nonsense as the human skin lampshades and human fat soap.

Thanks to the Holocaust, Germany is forever shamed, but there is “an inherent right of every individual to defend the community to which he belongs—that is, his people—from false and wicked accusations including the wickedest,” so states the lawyer for Ursula Haverbeck, a ninety-year-old woman who is imprisoned for questioning the Holocaust.

Even if she’s completely wrong, a raving lunatic, shouldn’t Haverbeck be entitled to her own thoughts? Jewish power emphatically says no.

Proscribing thoughts, Jewish power deforms minds, distorts personalities and turns men into cowardly idiots, and when this happens en masse, as in Germany, an entire society can unravel.

Outside the West, nationalism is embraced as natural and necessary, but in most white countries, it’s become increasingly equated with Fascism, and nowhere is this attitude more salient than in Germany. There, I saw graffiti denouncing Deutschland and even calling for “volkstod,” or “national death.” So many Germans wouldn’t hate themselves so vehemently if it wasn’t for the Holocaust, it’s safe to say.

For several years, I’ve posted reports from a German friend, describing his country in crisis, so below is his latest. Burdened by Holocaust guilts, Germans are shamed into accepting millions of refugees, many of whom are Muslims fleeing from wars triggered by Jewish power.

While still enjoying prosperity, stability, even tranquility (at least in comparison to most countries in the world), there are more signs we are fast approaching the “heart of darkness.”

In Berlin and Hamburg, two German cities with a high and rising percentage of migrants, the news are sobering: In Berlin, a study of 24,000 ten-year-old students shows that about 75% didn’t reach the basic levels of reading, writing and math. The news from Hamburg were equally dismal.

Or take Duisburg. Formerly best known for a TV character (Commissioner Schimanski), it’s now famous for its constant rising percentage of Migrants (and the problems that come with it). A 2017 study shows that only 8% of all first grade students spoke accurate German, while 16% spoke no German at all! Might it have something to do with the fact that in 50% of Duisburg households, German was not the first language spoken?

Lo and behold, the solution is near, for we are told we just have to work harder on integration, and everything will be fine (one wonders where all the jobs for these pupils shall come from…).

A further glimpse into the future is provided by the lovely town of Pforzheim. With about 160,000 people, its percentage of migrants is now roughly 60%. In the last local elections, the conservative AfD reached 26%, which is very uncommon in western Germany. Though similar to American Republicans, the AfD is constantly accused of Nazism and racism by the media, with the effect that many Germans are convinced these evil Nazis must be stopped.

Christiane Quincke is someone who quite eloquently fights “Nazis.” A typical product of western Germany’s reeducation, she feels morally obligated to fight Nazis and to integrate migrants. To achieve these ends, she has allied herself with DITIB, an organisation financed by the Turkish state and accused of having rather revolting stances on women, equality and gender, etc. It doesn’t matter. Progressive Quincke sees no contradictions.

Meanwhile, the media are doing their best to show us the evil face of Germany. In Chemnitz, two Germans were stabbed to death by a group of refugees (a thing which happens now on a weekly basis). A few thousand Germans demonstrated to express their anger and rage, but the crowd was peaceful and no riots took place. Nevertheless, some Neonazis within the demonstration showed the Hitlergruß (the Nazi salute), and this was more shocking to the media than the crime itself.

Even more shocking were news some demonstrators had allegedly chased migrants through the streets. In a video posted on an Antifa channel, two Migrants were chased by some men for a few yards. The entire media came immediately to the same conclusion: It was “Dunkeldeutschland” (the dark Germany, as our former president had called it) or Nazi Germany showing its ugly head.

The deed was unequivocally condemned by all media personalities and politicians, and even Chancellor Merkel jumped on the bandwagon to state that she would not tolerate a mob hunting foreigners. Some media even claimed that a pogrom had taken place. We should keep in mind that during a real pogrom, people not only get beaten up, but often killed, while windows are smashed, houses burnt and the likes. Nothing of the kind took place in Chemnitz.

It’s funny but the media and politicians never said this incident should be thoroughly investigated by the police. Lo and behold, the alternative media finally interviewed the woman who had made the video. In it, she and her husband (who remained anonymous for fear of reprisals) explained that an argument had happened before the incident.

Two young migrants had repeatedly shouted “Piss off” at the demonstrators, who shouted back, “Shut up!” After a moment, some demonstrators started running towards the migrants, who fled. After a few yards, the demonstrators stopped and let the migrants escape. A German shouted after them, “Ihr seid hier nicht willkommen!” (“You are not welcome here!”)

So this was the horrendous incident! This was Nazi Germany, and so horrific that it had to be condemned by all good citizens! The mainstream media paid no attention to the interview with the maker of the video. Furthermore, the Director of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Herr Maaßen, had to resign for simply stating that no pogrom had taken place in Chemnitz.

So we now have two realities: A real one and a fake one. (He who reads Orwell might not be too surprised).

Another funny thing happened some weeks later: A group of young refugees were chasing Germans in the small town of Amberg. Drunk, they punched passersby, some of whom were running away. All in all about 12 Germans were punched and/or kicked, with two hospitalized.

While this was a real violent incident, it caused no media uproar, in contrast to the fake pogrom in Chemnitz. It’s no wonder why all the great newspapers in Germany are failing.

Two other examples to explain the difference between reality and the media’s picture: For years, German Christmas markets were cheerfully attended by many people (Germans and others). People drank glühwein, ate potato pankaces and shared stories. There was no police around, no fences, no guards, nothing.

In 2018, German Christmas markets are surrounded by concrete posts to prevent Islamists from driving into the crowds. Police is often around, sometimes heavily armed and closely watching everything. Yet, we are still told, all is quiet on the Western (and Eastern) front.

Only obscure bloggers bother to paint a different picture of the reality. Vera Lengsfeld is a former politician of the conservative German Christian Democrats. Born in the former East Germany, she was a critic of the Communist regime, so was jailed for speaking her mind.

After the fall of the socialist regime, she joined the Conservative party. As she once put it, she thought that the rest of her life would be spent on “beautiful things” like art, exhibitions, etc., and she would never have to speak out against another unjust regime.

To her great amazement, the Federal Republic of Germany underwent a change from a liberal country to a politically correct state, which began to follow suicidal polices in regards to migration, economics and the environment, etc.

Lengsfeld became one the staunchest critics of Merkel’s open door policy. Since it’s hard to paint her as a racist or a Nazi, the media simply ignores her. Her informative blog paints a rather bleak picture of present day Germany. She shows that during last New Year’s Eve, for example, there was much violence in many German cities, but since these incidents were buried in local news, most Germans did not know about them.

Since the media paint the right wing AfD as a menace, AfD members are most likely to have their cars burned or their offices smashed. They may also face problems at work or have bars and restaurants shun them. In Berlin, a posh restaurant put out a sign indicating it won’t serve members of the AfD.

It’s so funny how these patterns are repeated throughout history: I am quite sure these restaurant owners are convinced of doing the right thing, but doesn’t it rhyme with “don’t buy from the Jew”? Not yet, but we’re only a few steps behind.

The change in political climate can also be seen in the following incident: The boss of the AfD in Bremen, Frank Magnitz, was attacked and badly hurt. You can see the picture of him lying unconsciously in a hospital.

When the media reported about the attack by some thugs (probably Antifa), they were quick to mention that Frank Magnitz had it coming, for he was spewing vicious hatred… I don’t want to imagine the national hysteria had Magnitz been a Social Democrat or Green Party politician. An outcry of historic proportions would have ensued.

We have it coming too. Recently, our Minister of Finance told us that “die fetten Jahre sind vorbei” (“the fat years are over”). He meant that tax revenues will go down and an economic slowdown might ensue.

Danke, Herr Minister! With about 50 billion Euros a year for all the new programs for migrants and refugees, including housing, language and integration courses, social benefits and what-have-you, what shall we do? We must stop relying on the state for everything, that’s what, and get our lazy asses going!

Hmm, wise words, but I smell something fishy here… With taxes already at the highest level in German history, what should we expect? Even higher taxes! And more economic hardship, of course. On and on it goes…

Diesel is the new evil, Trump is evil, the AfD is evil, East Germans are evil, especially Saxons (though they started the uprising against Communism), and refugees are our shiny future, even if 65% of them are still unemployed, and the ones with jobs are overwhelmingly low-skilled.

Two young Germans were just pushed in front of a train and died? Who are the suspects? Ah, some Germans (sigh of relief), but they are of Turkish and Greek origins? The Germans were pushed because they had told the suspects to stop smoking there. Oh, well… It could have been the other way around, no? Unfortunately, statistics tell a different story.

So all in all, we are on our way to the heart of darkness. It will still take many years until we’ll finally get there, but we will, for sure. No revolution will stop this course, no reform, no rationality, no new thinking. Nothing.

Reality will matter still less in the years to come. We will swallow up all our resources until we reach complete pauperization, and on our way to the bottom, we’ll see our liberties vanished and our way of life, too. There will be more taxes, violence, hatred, bigotry, irrational behavior and modern witch hunts.

We are ruled by ideologists, not only in Germany but across the West, and they will not stop chasing paradise on earth as they create hell.

Will we learn from the epic downfall awaiting us? I hope and pray that some of us will hold up the light of rational thinking, the heritage of our forefathers, who gave their lives for freedom and justice. In Berthold Brecht’s Galileo Galilei, Galilei is threatened with torture for his heresy, so recants his observation that the sun is the center of the universe, and not the earth, which prompts a disappointed follower to blurt out, “Pity the country that has no heroes!”

The frail Galilei famously corrects him, “No, pity the country that needs heroes.”

Be that as it may, we will be challenged in the years ahead to become heroes of a true and decent humanity. Good luck to us all.

Linh Dinh’s latest book is Postcards from the End of America. He maintains a regularly updated photo blog.

February 14, 2019 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | | Leave a comment

‘Collateral damage’: The Amiriyah shelter bombing in Iraq should not be forgotten

By Neil Clark | RT | February 13, 2019

On this day in 1991, over 400 people lost their lives when the US dropped two 2,000-pound smart bombs on a Baghdad air-raid shelter. But because it was the ‘good guys’ who did it, the massacre is not remembered as it should be.

‘Collateral damage’. The first time I remember those words being used was in the first Gulf War. There was plenty of ‘collateral damage’ in that conflict. In other words, lots of innocent people were killed.

At around 4:30am on Wednesday February 13, 1991, US F-117 aircraft bombed an air raid shelter in Amiriyah, a suburb of Baghdad, incinerating 408 people, many of them women and children.

“Most of the bodies were burnt beyond recognition,” the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen reported. One poor man said 11 of his family had been in the shelter. Another wept as he said he had lost his wife and children.

The US ‘defense’ was that they had thought the shelter was a command and control bunker. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was using his people as human shields. Yet, as a Human Rights Watch report later noted, the Pentagon conceded that the bunker had been used for civil defense in the Iran-Iraq war, and US officials“gave no warning that they considered its protected status as a civilian shelter to have ended.”

Award-winning anti-war journalist John Pilger noted the interrogation that Jeremy Bowen received when he reported on the crime. “‘Are you absolutely certain it wasn’t a military bunker?” he was asked, or words to that effect. Without any trace of irony the White House spokesperson Martin Fitzwater declared “Saddam Hussein does not share our sanctity for human life.’”

Of course, it’s always a ‘mistake’ or ‘tragic accident’ when the US and its allies commit such terrible crimes, even when it most clearly isn’t. And we are always told we have to ‘move on’ very quickly from these ‘mistakes’ and ‘accidents’.

“Consider the dreadful toll of Iraqi civilian deaths in the intense bombing campaign in the first Gulf War. According to American and French Intelligence reports, over 200,000 died. All this was barely mentioned at the time, even on the BBC and the ‘quality’ press, and is now all but forgotten,” writes David Cromwell of Media Lens, in his book ‘Why Are We The Good Guys?’

The Iraqi press called for the US to be tried for war crimes over the Amiriyah strike. But of course it never happened. In 2001, on the 10th anniversary of the bombing, the US-funded Radio Free Iraq broadcast an interview with an unnamed Iraqi who claimed that there was something not quite right about the air-raid shelter. But even he said he did not know whether or not the bunker was a command and control center and admitted he was not in a “position to give an expert opinion.”

Two years later, the US and its allies assaulted Iraq again – this time falsely claiming that the country possessed WMDs. The second Gulf War has led to the estimated deaths of a further 1mn people.

What is revealing is how the Amiriyah Incineration has – outside of Iraq – disappeared down the memory hole. Let’s suppose that instead of America or one of its allies carrying out the attack it had been Russia, Iran, or another ‘official enemy’. Then we’d never have heard the last of it.

We can be sure that it would have been the subject of at least one major Hollywood film and we’d have annual reminders of the heinous crime. To their credit, the British band Radiohead did write a song about the massacre entitled ‘I Will’ which included the lyric “little baby’s eyes,” but you need to search very hard for other references in popular culture.

Isn’t that shameful?

Because by not remembering the dead of Amiriyah we are saying that those killed by the US and its allies are lesser beings than those killed by its geo-strategic rivals.

It’s not just in Iraq where this has happened.

In April 1999, during the war against Yugoslavia, NATO bombed a convoy of Kosovo Albanians, killing over 60 refugees. At first they tried to blame the atrocity on Yugoslav forces. But when evidence emerged that it was a NATO strike – the alliance claimed that the pilot had believed it to be a military convoy. And of course, the blame for this “tragic accident” was passed on to the ‘official enemy’.

“NATO regrets any harm to innocent civilians, and reminds that the circumstances in which this accident occurred are wholly the responsibility of (Yugoslav) President Milosevic and his policies,” said NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea, sounding just like Martin Fitzwater eight years earlier.

The US-led war in Afghanistan has also been marked by a high level of ‘collateral damage’. On October 9, 2001, just two days after the US and UK began Operation Enduring Freedom, four Afghans working for a UN mine clearing agency were incinerated by a US cruise missile as they slept in the agency’s building in a suburb of Kabul.

“My brother is buried under here. What can we do? Our lives are ruined,” said a distraught Mohammed Afzl as he surveyed the rubble following the US strike.

The bombing of wedding parties became a noted feature of the campaign – 44 people were killed in one such attack in July 2002.

Again, the US tried to blame others – questioning whether it had really been a wedding. It’s a tradition to fire celebratory shots in the air at Pashtun weddings, but the US claimed this was “hostile fire,” so it was ok to bomb. Later, President Bush expressed his ‘sympathy’ to the mourning families and his ‘hope that such kind of accidents won’t happen again’. But of course they did, with great regularity.

Dating back to Amiriyah, we can discern a clear pattern when ‘collateral damage’ occurs:

a) The hit is described as a ‘tragic mistake/accident’, made because we were fighting ‘the bad guys’ (indirectly blaming the ‘bad guys’ for forcing us to be there).

Or…

b) The hit is blamed on the ‘bad guys’ directly. We see this happen in Gaza with the ‘human shield’ claims made by Israel when their bombs kill civilians. Everyone Israel kills is Hamas’ fault, not Israel’s, in the same way that every death during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was the fault of Milosevic.

c) If there is a real outcry, then it’s a case of: don’t worry, we will hold our own internal inquiry! An internal inquiry which of course ends up exonerating the perpetrators.

What we don’t get and what the families of those killed in Amiriyah are still waiting for is justice.

So spare a thought for the 408 today and all the other innocent victims of ‘collateral damage’, because we’re really meant to have forgotten them.

February 13, 2019 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Was climate change alarmism always about fears of overpopulation?

By Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak | Watts Up With That? | February 11, 2019

[Note: The following text is adapted from the authors’ recently published book Population Bombed! Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Change in which the validity of the belief in the inherent unsustainability of economic growth is challenged more thoroughly.]

Numerous population control advocates have linked anthropogenic climate change to population growth, or tried to revive interest in invoking anthropogenic climate change as the key negative outcome of continued economic growth linked to, foremost among causes, an increasing population. One pioneer of establishing and cultivating population growth – anthropogenic climate change linkage was the “Population Bomber” himself, Paul Ehrlich, who during a conference in 1968 identified anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions as a “serious limiting factor” to economic growth.[1] By the 1970s, Ehrlich, his wife Anne and his collaborator John Holdren raised fears that carbon dioxide “produced by combustion of fossil fuels in quantities too large to contain” may “already be influencing climate” and, as such, constituted one of the “gravest threats to human well-being. . . [i.e.] the loss of natural services now provided by biogeochemical processes.”

What motivated the Ehrlichs and Holdren to worry about a looming disaster threatening humanity just twenty years after the end of the Second World War (1939-1945)? After all, the war had brought with it wholesale destruction of infrastructure and loss of life throughout the world on a previously unparalleled scale. Was it the tension of the Cold War? Was it a specific epidemic or a natural event? We argue that no specific trigger events were necessary to spark the anxieties of these activists as they already espoused a neo-Malthusian eco-catastrophist mindset that is part of a wider pessimist perspective.

Among others, the ecological economics theorist John S. Dryzek recognized at least two distinctive perspectives on the understanding of the nature, role, and future of humanity – the pessimist, and the Promethean or optimist – each possessing a distinct set of assumptions, narratives, values and ultimate goals.[2] The pessimists, like the Ehrlichs and Holdren, apply a limit-driven narrative to define the place and goals of humanity on earth. According to the pessimist view, the earth’s resources are severely limited while the balance between planetary health and disrepair is exceedingly tenuous. The pessimists model people as bacteria that, in their Malthusian exponential growth, tend to quickly outstrip the resources of their “test-tube earth,” swiftly destroying both themselves and their environment. Only – perhaps – the timely intervention of top-down expert planning may avert this preordained debacle. The optimists see resources as limited primarily by human ingenuity and ability to utilize them, and humanity itself as a gathering of creative individuals, each capable of being much more than a mouth to feed. Optimist individuals may be driven by seemingly local needs, such as the replacement of a scarce resource or the improvement of the efficiency of a process, but the outcomes of their individual efforts benefit others in a spontaneous diffusion process.

Thus, the Ehrlichs’ and Holdren’s preoccupation with human population numbers and their impact on global development or resource use did not need a specific cause or trigger. Population and resource use anxiety were part of their pessimist perspective that had them always on the lookout for humanity’s confrontation with the inflexible natural limits of the finite earth. The late 1960s and early 1970s belonged to an era when other pessimist scientists like the climatologist Stephen Schneider, a Stanford colleague of Ehrlich, were theorizing about impending glaciation caused by anthropogenic atmospheric pollution reflecting sunlight. The Ehrlichs – who, truth be told, were also worried about every possible (and always negative) impact of increasing human population numbers, including, for a time, the effects of population growth on global cooling – were casting about for a development-related scourge of humanity that would be, perhaps, less easy to redress with fundamentally optimist fixes than global cooling was thanks to technologies such as smokestack scrubbers. For this reason, anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions were the ideal villain – or, pun intended, windmill to tilt at – as their neutralization does require a fundamental reworking and re-thinking of humanity’s key stable technologies – including its electrical power grid – on a scale that, thanks to the quickly mounting “scientific consensus” and political pressure, poses a significant challenge to human innovation.

While admitting he was not a climate specialist – thus just as “qualified” as Ehrlich, a biologist specializing in entomology, to theorize about climate – the economist Julian Simon suspected over two decades ago that global warming was a dubious pessimist scare mostly rooted in older neo-Malthusian concerns about population growth. He observed then that the “latest environmental justification for slowing or halting population growth is supposed global warming.” Simon cited a World Bank paper on the new “global negative externality” represented by greenhouse gas emissions, which he summarized as follows: “[The] old rationales for World Bank population control programs – economic growth, resource conservation, and the like – having been discredited, a new ‘rationale’ has been developed on the basis of speculative assumptions about global warming’s economic effects derived from controversial climatological science.”

Simon then summarized the position of most environmentalists as follows: “But isn’t obvious. . . that additional people and additional economic growth will cause us to use more energy and hence emit more greenhouse gases? Therefore, even if we can’t be sure of the greenhouse effect, wouldn’t it be prudent to cut back on growth?” The economist Jacqueline Kasun similarly believed at the time that “by the 1990s the doomsayers had shifted their attack” as they could no longer invoke resource depletion as the key growth-limiting issue. As she wrote, “the alarmists didn’t miss a step. The problem, they now said, was that people were using too much energy and were causing Global Warming.”[3] Both Kasun and Simon thus identified pessimist limits-based thinking as the chief impetus behind the elevation of anthropogenic CO2-caused climate change to the status of a global catastrophe.

Closer in time to us, retired Canadian academic Michael Hart has commented that “for alarmists, climate mitigation policy is as much a means of achieving their larger goals as it is a matter of addressing a possibly serious issue.”[4] As another retired Canadian academic, historical climatologist Tim Ball, has long argued, the climate change policy agenda is based on certain assumptions ultimately related to a fear of reaching another terrestrial set of limits through overpopulation. Indeed, Dr. Ball goes so far as to argue that while global warming is a “contrived problem,” most of those “who know it is contrived still believe overpopulation is a problem.” It is indeed remarkably easy to find influential climate bureaucrats and scientists who will either admit this much or else acknowledge their neo-Malthusian pessimist stance rooted in enforcing limits to human (population) growth.

Maurice Strong (1929–2015), who was described by business journalist Peter Foster as “[m]ore than any other individual. . . responsible for promoting the [UN] climate agenda,” is the most obvious case in point. Strong first achieved some degree of notoriety in Canada as young deputy minister – a high-ranking civil servant – when he ended up on the record by stating that “with a growing global population, we will have to recognise that having children is not just a personal issue but a societal issue and at a certain point we may be faced with a need to have a permit to have a child.” He also referred to the need for “national population policies” in his opening speech at the 1972 Stockholm Conference. Strong reportedly stated the following Malthusian prediction at the 1992 Earth Summit: “Either we reduce the world’s population voluntarily or nature will do this for us, but brutally.”

Having started with the idea of limits to population growth, Strong eventually connected it to the limits of economic growth problem as defined by climate change. At the 2009 Copenhagen Summit, Strong declared: “The climate change issue and the economic issue come from the same roots. And that is the gross inequity and the inadequacy of our economic model. We now know that we have to change that model. We cannot do all of this in one stroke. But we have to design a process that would produce agreement at a much more radical level.” In one of his last extended interviews, Strong said that “growth in the world population has increased the pressures on the Earth’s resources and life-support systems.” He added that “China’s one-child policy is not a perfect policy by any means, but, on the other hand, how do you control growth in your population?” Strong viewed widespread aspirations for a better life as problematic, for if everyone “enjoyed the same patterns of consumption that we in the West do, then we would have an unsustainable situation, and we’re actually on the way to that now. We are in a situation that is unsustainable.” Thus, for Strong, the issue of population growth was clearly part of the pessimist narrative and a clear issue of limits to growth.

The first chairman of the IPCC (1988-1997), Bert Bolin, was not only an early convert to the alleged catastrophic impact of CO2 emissions,[5] but also a pessimist on population and resources issues, as evidenced in his stance on the controversy surrounding the 2001 publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist by the Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg. Bolin later wrote he “largely share[d] the gist of the . . . analyses” of Lomborg’s critics John Holdren and John Bongaarts.[6] Bongaarts, a demographer long associated with the Population Council and a former chair of the Panel on Population Projections of the National Academy of Sciences, had then opined: “Population is not the main cause of the world’s social, economic and environmental problems, but it contributes substantially to many of them. If population had grown less rapidly in the past, we would be better off now. And if future growth can be slowed, future generations will be better off.”[7] For his part, John Holdren contradicted many of his earlier warnings of imminent resource depletion by arguing that while the world was not “running out of energy,” it was “running out of environment,” by which he meant “running out of the capacity of air, water, soil and biota to absorb, without intolerable consequences for human well-being, the effects of energy extraction, transport, transformation and use.”[8]

The second chairman of the IPCC (1997–2002), Robert Watson, would later go on the record with the following line of reasoning: “The more people we have on the Earth and the richer they are, the more they can demand resources. There’s more demand for food, more demand for water, more demand for energy. . . So, there’s no question the threats on the Earth today are far more than, say, 50 years ago and in 50 years’ time, there will even be more threats.”

The third chairman of the IPCC (2002-2015), Rajendra K. Pachauri, was even more explicit when he stated in 2007 that humanity has “been so drunk with this desire to produce and consume more and more whatever the cost to the environment that we’re on a totally unsustainable path.” He was “not going to rest easy until [he has] articulated in every possible forum the need to bring about major structural changes in economic growth and development. That’s the real issue. Climate change is just a part of it” (our italics). When asked why Indians shouldn’t aspire to the same standard of living as westerners, Pachauri answered: “Gandhi was asked if he wanted India to reach the same level of prosperity as the United Kingdom. He replied: “It took Britain half the resources of the planet to reach its level of prosperity. How many planets would India require?” In his IPCC resignation letter (apparently no longer available on the IPCC website) Pachauri admitted that, for him, “the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.”

In Pachauri’s statements, and in others we have quoted so far, there is ample evidence of a passionate commitment towards the protection of the planet,but there is no sign of recognition that humanity can do, and has done, more than simply consume resources. At no point do neo-Malthusians like Pachauri admit the possibility that technological innovations and human creativity have a place among the things that deserve a place on Earth. What pessimist activists desire is a consensus on the classification of humanity as out of control and inherently driven by destructive greed, thus in need of top-down regulation by the few remaining clear-thinking and benign autocrats – that is, functionaries – of the global government.

Another important figure in the anthropogenic climate change institutional apparatus is former American senator Timothy E. Wirth, one of the main organizers of the 1988 James Hansen hearing on climate change, and from 1998 to 2013 president of the (hardcore Malthusian) Ted Turner-funded United Nations Foundation. While no longer in the news or on the frontlines of the US government, Wirth is still actively promoting a population control agenda. He is on the record as stating in 1993: “We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”[9]

Needless to say, many other influential politicians and bureaucrats share a similar outlook. In 1998 Christine Stewart, then Canadian Minister of the Environment, when speaking before editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald said: “No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits… Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”[10] More recently, Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action (2010–2014), argued that the European Union policy on climate change was right even if the science was not. As she put it:

Say that 30 years from now, science came back and said, “wow, we were mistaken then; now we have some new information so we think it is something else”. In a world with nine billion people, even 10 billion at the middle of this century, where literally billions of global citizens will still have to get out of poverty and enter the consuming middle classes, don’t you think that anyway it makes a lot of sense to get more energy and resource efficient… Let’s say that science, some decades from now, said “we were wrong, it was not about climate,” would it not in any case have been good to do many of things you have to do in order to combat climate change? I believe that in a world with still more people, wanting still more growth for good reasons, the demand for energy, raw materials and resources will increase and so, over time, will the prices… I think we have to realise that in the world of the 21st century for us to have the cheapest possible energy is not the answer.

Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, said “We should make every effort to change the numbers… obviously less [sic] people would exert less pressure on the natural resources,” and humanity is “already exceeding the planet’s planetary carrying capacity, today.” She also added that population control was not enough and that fundamental changes need to be made to our current economic system. Figueres, like Strong, Wirth, Bongaarts, Stewart and Hedegaard, was speaking from the depths of the neo-Malthusian pessimist limit-based perspective.

Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and an adviser to the encyclical Laudato Si, has long been on the record as estimating the carrying capacity of the planet at “below 1 billion people.” More recently, researchers associated with the Population Reference Bureau and the Worldwatch Institute stated: “Human population influences and is influenced by climate change and deserves consideration in climate compatible development strategies. Achieving universal access to family planning throughout the world would result in fewer unintended pregnancies, improve the health and well-being of women and their families, and slow population growth – all benefits to climate compatible development.”

Since leaving his academic appointment, prominent Canadian climate scientist Andrew Weaver has become the leader of the British Columbia Green Party. As could be expected from a pessimist activist, Weaver is on the record as stating: “Technology itself will not solve global warming. Individual behavior and consumption patterns will need to change as well. For too long we have lived by the axiom that growth is great. We strive for economic growth year after year. We drive it by increasing population. But infinite growth cannot occur in a finite system. Collapse is inevitable.”[11]

The late climatologist Stephen Schneider was a leading advocate for major reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. Schneider was sometimes derided by his critics for having switched, almost overnight, from being a major proponent of global cooling, as we mentioned earlier, to becoming one of the most prominent supporters of global warming. Less well known about him, however, is the fact that he never changed his Ehrlich-inspired belief in the existence of a “wide consensus that exponential growth, for both economies and human populations, cannot continue indefinitely,” and that “population growth must ultimately be controlled.”

Thus, Schneider was a classic neo-Malthusian pessimist thinker. As he wrote in a 1977 popular book mainly devoted to describing the perils of global cooling, the “obvious point about population growth [that] must be stated and restated” is that “population increases will only dilute the effectiveness” of achieving “rapid improvements in per capita living standards for the present 4 billion people on earth.”[12] Twenty years later, having become a major proponent of global warming, he still believed that “control of population growth has the potential to make a major contribution to raising living standards and to easing environmental problems like greenhouse warming.” Not surprisingly, he urged the United States government to “resume full participation in international programs to slow population growth” and to “contribute its share to their financial and other support.”[13]

Whether its goal was curbing anthropogenic global cooling or global warming, the pessimist narrative’s endgame was always to institute top-down expert controls over population and centrally limit the human impetus to grow, create and aspire to change. In effect, the pessimist goal was to combat and control the optimist narrative through fear and discrediting its foundational impulses.

 


[1] Shelesnyak MC (ed.) (1969). Growth of Population: Consequences and Control. Gordon and Breach, p. 141.

[2] Dryzek, J (2005). The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses. Oxford University Press, 2nd edn.

[3] Kasun J (1999/1988). The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of Population Control. Ignatius, rev. edn., p. 49

[4] Hart M (2015). Hubris: The Troubling Science, Economics, and Politics of Climate Change. Compleat Desktops Publishing, p. 289.

[5] Bolin is also on the record as stating in 1959 that the increase in carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations “caused by the burning of fuels by industry and transport” could have an “effect on climate” that “might be radical.” Original quote in Anonymous. “Experts discuss monsters of sea.” New York Times, 28 April 1959.

[6] See Bolin B (2007). A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press, pp. 183-185, quote on p. 183.

[7] Bongaarts J (2002). “Population: Ignoring its impact.” Scientific American, 286(1), 67–69, quote on p. 69.

[8] Holdren JP (2002). “Energy: Asking the wrong question.” Scientific American, 286(1), 65–67, quote on p. 65.

[9] Fumento M (1993). Science Under Siege. William Morrow & Co., p. 362.

[10] Original quote in the Calgary Herald, December 14, 1998. See also SEPP December 14-20, 1998.

[11] Weaver, A (2011). Generation Us: The Challenge of Global Warming. Orca Books, p. 108

[12] All quotes from Schneider SH, Mesirow LE (1977). The Genesis Strategy. Climate and Global Survival.

Plenum Books. By order of appearance in the main text, pp. 318, 25 and 318.

[13] Schneider, SH (1997). Laboratory Earth: The Planetary Gamble We Can’t Afford to Lose, HarperCollins, p. 150.

February 12, 2019 Posted by | Book Review, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Mass Protests in Haiti, Like France’s Yellow Vests, Threaten Modern Oligarchic Structure

By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | February 12, 2019

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI – Throughout recent Latin American history, it is hard to find a country that has been as thoroughly manipulated and plundered by the United States as Haiti has. After over a century of U.S. intervention — from the 19-year-long U.S. military occupation that began in 1915 to the 2010 election rigged by the Hillary Clinton-run State Department — Haiti has become the ultimate neoliberal experiment that has forced its people to live in conditions so horrible that rivers of sewage often run through the city streets.

Even Haiti’s own president, Jovenel Moise — who has presided over the most recent phase of U.S.-backed plunder — recently called the entire country a “latrine.”

Yet — much as in 1791, when Haiti was the site of the first successful slave revolt in the Americas — today the people of Haiti seem to have finally had enough of being slaves in all but name and are taking to the streets en masse in an effort to end the rule of the Haitian Bald-Headed Party (PHTK), the U.S.-backed political party with close ties to the Clintons.

For six days, thousands of Haitians have marched through the country’s capital of Port-au-Prince and other major cities, calling for Moise’s ouster for corruption and gross economic mismanagement in recent years, much of which can be traced directly back to the 2010 earthquake and the subsequent U.S.-UN “relief” effort that let to rigged elections, caused a deadly cholera outbreak and sought to turn the entire country into one massive sweatshop for American clothing companies.

More specifically, Moise has ignited popular ire after being implicated in the embezzlement of a $4 billion loan given to the Haitian government to develop the country via Venezuela’s PetroCaribe program and for his failure to combat the double-digit inflation that has further impoverished the Caribbean nation.

President Moise has thus far responded to the protests much like the president of Haiti’s former colonial ruler, France, where President Emmanuel Macron has sought to disperse the Yellow Vest popular protest movement with police violence. Similarly, Moise has ordered police to shoot tear gas and live ammunition into crowds of unarmed protesters, killing at least four people, including a 14-year-old boy who was not even a part of the protests, and injuring scores more.

Despite the violent response from the Moise-led government, protesters have continued to come out in force, even stoning Moise’s personal home on Saturday. That same day, Moise declared that he would “clean the streets” of every protester by Monday.

Yet the mass protests continued through Monday, when police were seen standing down in Carrefour (a suburb of Port-au-Prince), no longer willing to fire on protesters. In a video of the incident shared on social media, one female protester yells that “the police are afraid.” Late Monday afternoon, local reports asserted that PHTK ruling elite were evacuated via helicopter from the wealthy enclave of Petionville to the Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport, apparently planning to flee the country — at least temporarily. Other reports stated that at least one police officer had been shot during Monday demonstrations that turned violent and saw several businesses looted.

Local media on Tuesday reported high turnout for protests in several cities.

The international response to the protests in Haiti has been limited, with the UN warning Haitian protesters on Sunday that “in a democracy change must come through the ballot box, and not through violence.” This unintentionally ironic statement ignores the documented meddling of the United States in massaging vote totals and other manipulative tactics in the last two presidential elections. This, combined with the fact that the U.S. has kidnapped and overthrown Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a left-leaning populist politician, each time he won an election — first in 1991 and then in 2004 — has greatly reduced Haitians’ faith in their “democracy.”

The U.S. knows something about election meddling

Since he came to power in February 2017, Moise’s policies have resulted in several mass protests — including last July, when protesters forced Moise’s government to abandon a planned hike in fuel prices; and last November, when protesters demanded Moise’s ouster for the embezzlement of PetroCaribe funds. With so many protests in such a short span of time, the anger among the Haitian population at this unpopular president is pungent and will likely prove difficult to placate this time.

A large part of Moise’s unpopularity is likely related to the fact that he was never popularly elected to begin with. The 2016 election that Moise allegedly won was disorganized and had turn-out so dismal that Moise, the “winner,” received only around 600,000 votes out of a national population of over 11 million. Prominent Haitian politicians called the election an “electoral coup.”

In addition, that election was overseen by Ken Merten, former Obama administration ambassador to Haiti and then Obama’s Haiti Special Coordinator, and was wracked by accusations of vote-buying and -stealing and other fraudulent activities. Merten’s involvement is particularly nefarious given that he oversaw the previous Haiti election (2010) where the U.S. State Department had altered the vote count.

If that were not enough, in addition to the election fraud, Moise was widely believed to have been ineligible for office soon after having been “elected,” after it was revealed that he had laundered money through his personal bank account and was tied to a drug-trafficking operation.

Ultimately, Moise’s unpopular rule is the continuation of that of his predecessor, Michel Martelly, who chose Moise — then a political neophyte — as his successor. Martelly’s rise to power was similar to Moise’s but even more fraudulent. In the 2010 election that saw Martelly “win,” the Hillary Clinton-run State Department changed the vote totals in order to place Martelly in a runoff election for which he hadn’t in fact qualified. When the previous Haitian government resisted, Clinton herself traveled to Haiti and threatened to withdraw all U.S. aid from Haiti if Martelly did not replace the second runoff candidate, Jude Celestin.

After coming to power, it took little time for observers to realize why the U.S., particularly the Clinton-led State Department, had chosen Martelly. Not only was Martelly an avid supporter of neoliberal policies that impoverished his people, he also supported the outright theft of Haitian land by wealthy foreign corporations to create so-called “Free Trade Zones,” and brokered a deal with the Clintons to release Americans who had been arrested for child trafficking.

Furthermore, Martelly also helped squander much of the foreign aid that did make it into Haiti, cementing his reputation as notoriously corrupt, although most of that aid never even made it to Haiti and instead remained in the hands of corrupt foreign contractors.

In addition, Martelly was also a supporter of the Duvalier family — which ruled Haiti with an iron fist during the dictatorships of “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Indeed, when “Baby Doc” Duvalier returned from exile in France to attend a Haitian government ceremony, Martelly — along with Bill Clinton, who was also in attendance – rose to greet him.

Martelly’s government included several officials who were connected to the Duvalier dictatorship, including his prime minister, Garry Conille, whose father held a cabinet position in the Duvalier dictatorship. In addition, Conille served with Bill Clinton on the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission and had previously worked as a development manager for the United Nations before receiving his prominent position in the government installed by both the U.S. and the UN.

Thus, Haiti under Martelly and Moise has been little different in practice from the Duvalier era. Indeed, as Amy Wilentz noted in a 2014 article in The Nation, “[The Duvalier] political toolbox — authoritarianism, trumped up elections, distrust of free speech, corruption of the forces of order, and no justice — are the methods by which Haiti’s ruler [Martelly] still controls the country.” With Moise serving as the new face of PHTK and Martelly’s chosen successor, this neo-Duvalier era in Haiti that has largely been orchestrated by the U.S. is now in danger of falling apart.

Haiti puts the neo-colonial oligarchy on edge

If the movement to oust the U.S.-backed and illegally installed rulers of Haiti is successful, it could easily send shockwaves through the power structures of the United States and its client states, much as the Haitian revolution did to the colonial powers two centuries ago. Indeed, the Haitian revolution instilled fear in European colonial masters throughout the Americas and the world and inspired countless slave revolts in the United States alone. Today, it still serves as a reminder that the most repressed class of a society can rise up to declare their equality and independence — and win. Perhaps that is why the current oligarchical system has invested so much in robbing Haitians of their economic and political power.

Though today is unlike the late 18th century in the sense that those at the bottom of the rung are no longer called “slaves” and those at the top are no longer called “masters” and “kings,” the record inequality that now exists throughout the world, the U.S. included, has recreated in today’s power structures an ethos eerily similar to that of the feudal-colonial systems of centuries past.

As both Haiti and France have become the new epicenters of popular unrest against predatory elites, much as they were two centuries ago, it is time to see both of these current movements as part of the same struggle for basic human dignity in an era of neocolonialism, imperialism and global oligarchy.

Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and has contributed to several other independent, alternative outlets. Her work has appeared on sites such as Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire among others. She also makes guest appearances to discuss politics on radio and television. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.

February 12, 2019 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Integrity Initiative: New leaks show UK-funded project sought £5.5m for Balkans influence campaign

RT | February 12, 2019

Hackers have released a sixth batch of Integrity Initiative leaks, this time focusing on how the project sought £5.5 million in funding from the British government to establish an influence campaign in the Western Balkans.

According to the leaks, Chris Donnelly, who heads the Institute for Statecraft (IfS) — the Integrity Initiative’s parent organization — used his NATO contacts and extensive background in military intelligence to try to secure the money for the program.

The Integrity Initiative (II) had been positioning itself as an “independent” anti-disinformation charity until hackers began dumping batches of internal documents last November which revealed its government funding and the fact that it was running Europe-wide anti-Russia influence campaigns using “clusters” of cooperative journalists, academics and politicians. In response to the leaks, the II wiped all content from its website and claimed that while some of the documents were “genuine,” others were “falsified” — but did not provide any proof that this was the case.

The latest leaks show that the Balkan program would be run in conjunction with global marketing and communications firm Edelman, which Donnelly said could help produce “advertising campaigns on TV promoting change,” English-language training promoting the “right messages” and even “a TV soap opera looking at the problem of corruption.”

To aid ‘Her Majesty’s Government’

In a letter to former MI6 employee Guy Spindler and good governance expert Keith Sargent — who would be a key figure in the Balkan effort — Donnelly explains how the project would need “local partners” in the WB6 countries. The partners will help find journalists “who can be allies” in their efforts and who could be brought “on trips to London, HQ NATO etc.”

Donnelly’s letter is dated October 15, but no year is given. It appears, however, that it is from 2018, based on the fact that the proposal documents for the Balkan project make reference to the year 2018 and January 2019 as the potential start date.

The letter focuses on the efforts to set up the “anti-corruption” and “good governance” influence campaign across the Western Balkans, which a separate document says would “contribute to the aims and strategy of HMG” (Her Majesty’s Government) and would shield the region from corruption “being used as a method of external influence.”

Stumbling blocks and help from the BBC

Perceptively, the document — which lays out the projected three-year costs of £5.5 million ($7.87mn) — also recognizes that the program itself could be “identified as external interference” in the domestic affairs of the Balkan countries. Another leaked document notes “Russian hostility” and “traditional Soviet ties” as potential stumbling blocks to the Western influence campaign.

One serious concern is that many Serbian organizations “promote friendly ties with Russia” and it is suggested that BBC broadcasts could help to “counter Russian fake news” in the region. The fact that Serbia, Russia and a number of other countries do not recognize Kosovo’s independence is also cited as a “major problem” for the project.

‘A Bellingcat for counter-corruption’

To achieve success Donnelly said they would need to “identify a national goal” that could be used as a “lever”— citing Macedonia’s efforts to join NATO as an example. Donnelly boasts about his efforts in Slovakia in the 1990s using MPs to teach businesses how they could lobby government “legitimately in a democracy” rather than using “their then model of cash in brown envelopes.”

Part of the so-called anti-corruption program would entail building “training courses for journalists, students and wider public activists” to help them obtain the relevant investigative tools. Such a program could be “a Bellingcat for counter corruption,” the proposal document states. Bellingcat shot to prominence as a controversial one-man investigative website, which later expanded, received money from the notorious US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and was also linked to the II.

Anti-Russia entertainment

The latest leaks also reveal contacts between IfS fellow Euan Grant and a number of journalists, academics and think tank lobbyists. Grant sent a “memorandum of cooperation” to US writer Martha Bayles after a “detailed Skype call” in July 2018. He was looking for her “input into media documentaries and fictional entertainment” to counter Russian narratives.

Governments seeking help from writers and the entertainment industry to counter Russian narratives is nothing new. The 2014 hack of Sony Pictures revealed that the US State Department enlisted Hollywood’s help with “anti-Russia messaging” for movies and TV shows. It appears from these leaks that the British government is also trying to use thinly-disguised entertainment propaganda to promote divisive anti-Russia messaging onto TV screens in politically volatile regions of Europe.

The leaks say that the II should “alert” the press, radio and TV journalists to the “relevance” of already-made entertainment like the BBC series ‘McMafia’ which focuses on a London-based corrupt Russian family.

‘Sympathy for Russia’ in Scotland

There was also contact between the IfS and Neal Stewart, an adviser to the Scottish National Party’s Westminster front bench about “considerable sympathy for Russia” in Scotland in general, but particularly within academia. The “significant Russian speaking presence in private schools and in the Universities could fuel such attitudes,” the document warns. Another leaked document also cites “academic sympathies with Russia” as an indicator of “malign influence and disinformation.”

Targeting academics and students for their ‘Russian sympathies’ brings up rather negative historical parallels, particularly with the McCarthy era in the US, during which entertainers, academics and left-leaning activists were aggressively accused of being Communist sympathizers or agents and were placed on industry blacklists.

More recently, in Britain, a group of academics were smeared on the front page of the Times for similar sympathies, based on the fact that they publicly expressed doubts over certain anti-Russia media narratives. One of the academics involved called it a“coordinated smear campaign” against anti-war journalists and activists. The authors of the Times report were later named in Integrity Initiative documents, proving the existence of collusion between the British government and pro-establishment journalists to target those who do not stick to certain narratives.

High profile names & media ties

In an II“weekly report,” Grant names University of Exeter Professor Jeremy Black and Sunday Times journalist Roland White as two people who expressed interest in collaborating with the II. Roderick Parkes of the Paris-based ISS think tank and Nigel Gould-Davies, an associate fellow at Chatham House, were also named.

The leaks also say that Deborah Haynes of Sky News (a co-author of the aforementioned Times report) and Jonathan Beale of the BBC attended a speech by Air Marshal Sir Philip Osborn on the future of intelligence and information warfare in May 2018. The speech was described in the document as “manna from heaven for the Integrity Initiative.”

Grant writes that the government-funded IfS has “particular links with the Times, Telegraph, Guardian and BBC TV and radio” but says that it needs to “strengthen” its relationship with the Mail.

Times writer and CEPA lobbyist Edward Lucas also crops up in the latest leaks and due to his “considerable interest” is named as the II’s way into getting “articles and references” in the Times. Lucas recently defended the II in an op-ed for the newspaper and argued that criticism of the project would “play into the Kremlin’s hands.”

NGOs and the ‘Australian cluster’

The documents also reveal that the II wanted to provide NGOs with manuals on Russian corruption. Among the named organizations are Transparency International, Global Witness and the World Wildlife Fund.

One of the newly leaked documents also shows just how far the II has extended its reach, referencing an”Australian cluster.” Given the issue of Russian and Chinese influence in that region, Grant writes that there is “scope for a lot of crossover with media in Europe” and Australia relating to “Russian issues.”

Presenting the new leaks, the Anonymous-linked hackers claim that the Integrity Initiative has been trying to “divert people’s attention from the organisation’s wrongful activity” since the documents were made public. The leakers bash the II’s “pathetic attempt” to cover its tracks and say all its efforts have been “shattered to pieces by irrefutable evidence” of wrongdoing that has been shared with the public.

RT sent requests for comment to the people named in the story who were linked to the Integrity Initiative in the latest leaks.

February 12, 2019 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Being Marco Rubio

The boyish senator from Florida is owned by the Israel Lobby

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • February 12, 2019

Americans consistently indicate in opinion polls that they approve of congress less than any other part of the federal government. The approval rating is sometimes in the single digits. As the congress was intended, per the Founders, to serve as the direct link to the American people, there is a certain irony in its being the most despised branch of government.

One can blame the two major parties for much of the negativity, as the process whereby candidates for office rise through the system that seems designed to weed out anyone who has ever expressed any viewpoint that is not approved by the bipartisan establishment. Indeed, many Americans complain that Democratic and Republican congress critters differ only superficially, both being corrupt from top to bottom and largely driven to stay on top so they can continue to benefit personally from the spoils of office.

One of the emptiest of all the empty suits in the Senate is Marco Rubio of Florida. The boyish looking Rubio is, to be sure, ambitious, but his thought processes, if they exist at all, are hard to discern. He is, more than most congressmen, both totally ignorant and completely programed in what he says and how he says it. Anyone who doubts that judgement should watch the February 2016 debate with former New Jersey governor Chris Christie in which Christie totally destroyed Rubio, effectively ending his bid to become the GOP candidate for president. Christie criticized Rubio for memorizing a “25-second speech that is exactly what his advisers gave him.” The two argued, but Rubio seemed stuck with his stump speech, which Christie called him out on every time he launched into it. Christie eventually turned and told the audience “There it is. The 25-second memorized speech.”

Rubio is pretty much straight-line neocon in his pronouncements, his most recent policy statement being that the Venezuelan people have two choices – change their government or starve. He tweeted it with his usual eloquence: “Hunger & desperation is growing inside #Venezuela & people know the only thing standing in the way of $50 million of food & medicine is #Maduro. Military leaders should make a choice, before a choice is made for them. The window for a negotiated exit is closing fast.” Columnist Whitney Webb responded with “Marco Rubio is openly saying that if Venezuela’s military doesn’t turn on Maduro soon, ‘a choice will made for them’ by the United States. Scariest threat for an imminent invasion of Venezuela I have yet to see.”

Rubio, who is Cuban-American, is inevitably hard-line against taking any steps to improve relations with his ancestral homeland, is hostile to “enemies” Russia and China, and wants American soldiers to stay in Afghanistan and Syria forever. It is a formula for continuous conflict worldwide, with the United States paying the tab both in dollars and in casualties.

But Senator Marco Rubio’s greatest affection is reserved for the Jewish state Israel. Why? Because that’s where his money and political support come from, and, for its part, the Israel Lobby sees Rubio as a perfect simple-minded patsy to advance its agenda. Israel’s promoter with the deepest pockets, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, was pursued by Rubio who “… consistently championed Israel in speeches on the Senate floor while also pushing legislation aimed at supporting the cause” during the GOP nomination process. Rubio eventually received Adelson’s endorsement in February 2016.

Before acquiring Adelson’s support, Rubio had “already gained support from Miami billionaire Norman Braman and New York billionaire investor Paul Singer, among others.” Both Braman and Singer are known to be major supporters of Israel. Marco’s affection for both Israel and Florida Jews derives largely from his connection to Braman, a former Philadelphia Eagle’s owner and currently a billionaire Miami resident who owns Florida’s largest network of car dealerships. Braman, an active supporter and funder of the illegal Jewish settlements in the Middle East, has been Rubio’s major financial backer since his early days in Florida state politics and as a quid pro quo whenever Marco expresses his love for both Jews and Israel, he is speaking to and for Braman.

Rubio has recently written, or had written for him, an op-ed in The New York Times entitled “The Truth About BDS and the Lies About My Bill” that seeks to explain why recent legislation to protect Israel that the senator sponsored does not violate the First Amendment guarantee of free speech.

Senate bill S.1 for 2019 finally passed out of the Senate last week on a 77 to 23 vote with Rand Paul as the only Republican Senator to vote against it. The full title of S.1 is the Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019, which might be considered a bit of a fraud as it has nothing to do with the United States and is really all about giving Israel money and anything else it might desire, to include destroying the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that has targeted Israel’s apartheid. In his speech defending the bill, Rubio openly admitted that he was seeking to help Israel. He also registered his opposition to the impending pullout of U.S. troops from Syria because it would, according to him, “endanger” the Jewish state.

Rubio’s op-ed was written before the final vote on February 5th, but it predicted correctly that the bill would receive “a bipartisan supermajority” in the Senate. Anything having to do with Israel normally receives such “supermajorities” from congressmen who are intimidated, or expecting to be raptured shortly or on the Israel Lobby payroll.

The op-ed’s author comes out swinging, declaring that critics have “echoed false claims made by anti-Israel activists and others that the bill violates Americans’ First Amendment rights. That line of argument is not only wrong but also provides cover for supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, who embrace an international campaign of discriminatory economic warfare against Israel, a fellow democracy and America’s strongest ally in the Middle East.”

One supposes that “anti-Israel activists” consist of that increasing number of Americans who want to see Israel held accountable for its war crimes and crimes against humanity. Yes indeed, a boycott is “discriminatory economic warfare” using peaceful and non-threatening means to bring about change. And no, Israel is neither a democracy nor an ally of the United States. Has the Senate approved a treaty of alliance with Israel, Marco? You’re in the Senate and should know the answer to that one.

Rubio goes on to claim that “the goal of the movement is to eliminate any Jewish state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” Wrong again Marco. Even if some BDS supporters might like to see that, it is not a “goal of the movement.” The movement is non-violent and Israel has a large army that would make such an objective a fantasy.

The author then describes how “While the First Amendment protects the right of individuals to free speech, it does not protect the right of entities to engage in discriminatory conduct. Moreover, state governments have the right to set contracting and investment policies, including policies that exclude companies engaged in discriminatory commercial -or investment- related conduct targeting Israel… That’s why, since 2015, more than 25 states, including Florida, have adopted laws or issued executive orders to divest from or prohibit contracts with companies that wage discriminatory economic warfare against Israel.” Wrong again Marco. Free speech includes supporting discriminatory conduct. The American Civil Liberties Union has addressed the issue succinctly, arguing correctly that “Public officials cannot use the power of public office to punish views they don’t agree with. That’s the kind of authoritarian power our Constitution is meant to protect against.” And several state laws protecting Israel from the First Amendment have already been ruled unconstitutional.

Marco then expands on his argument, “The Combating BDS Act does not infringe on Americans’ First Amendment rights or prohibit their right to engage in boycotts. By design, it focuses on business entities — not individuals — … it focuses on conduct, not speech. Indeed, it does not restrict citizens or associations of citizens from engaging in political speech, including against Israel.” Indeed Marco, but how do you explain the fact that several of the well-publicized cases involving BDS legislation have involved individuals not “business entities” who refused to sign pledges regarding Israel, which, when last I checked, was not even part of the United States and has nothing to do with contracting in this country? Those individuals have been denied government benefits and have been fired from jobs they had held for years.

And then there is the hypocrisy issue for Marco Rubio. If openly and vocally opposing trade with or travel to Cuba should similarly be suppressed, would he and his Cubanos associates consider that to be constitutional or perfectly legal? I think not. And Cuba, as far as I know, does not line up snipers to shoot children and medical workers while also stealing land from its rightful owners. Israel is a racist apartheid state. Cuba, for all its faults, is not.

It would be difficult to find more insipid justifications for S.1 than those provided by Marco Rubio. He does not understand that the “state” at all levels is supposed to be politically neutral in terms of providing government services. It is not supposed to retaliate against someone for views they hold, particularly, as in this case, when those views are part of a nonviolent opposition to the policies of a foreign government that many consider to be guilty of crimes against humanity. Rubio clearly believes that you can exercise free speech but government can then punish you by taking away your livelihood or denying you services that you are entitled to if you do not agree with it on an issue that ultimately has nothing to do with the United States. How such a lightweight came to be a Senator of the United States of America eludes me.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

February 12, 2019 Posted by | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Broken Presidential Destiny of JFK, Jr.

Israel’s “Kennedy Curse”?

By Laurent Guyénot • Unz Review • February 11, 2019

On July 16, 1999, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior was flying his private Piper Saratoga II, with his wife Carolyn Bessette and his sister-in-law Lauren Bessette. He was to drop Lauren off at Martha’s Vineyard, then fly on with Carolyn to Hyannis Port for the wedding of his cousin, Rory Kennedy, the following day. At 9:39, as he was approaching Martha’s Vineyard airport, John radioed the control tower for landing instructions, giving no sign of difficulty. At 9:41 p.m., witnesses heard and saw an explosion in the sky, at the precise moment when John’s plane suddenly plummeted into the ocean at the radar-recorded speed of 4,700 feet per minute. The next day, pieces of luggage from the plane were found floating nearly two miles away from the point of last radar contact.

The search and recovery operations were conducted by the Air Force and the Navy under national security conditions, with news reporting controlled from the Pentagon. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded its investigation eleven months later, and announced as “probable cause” of the plane crash “the pilot’s failure to maintain control of the airplane”, with “haze and the dark night” being possible factors.[1] The corporate media amplified the implication that John was an inexperienced and reckless pilot who ignored the dangerous weather conditions and who is to blame for his own death and the death of his wife and sister-in-law.

But many facts and testimonies inconsistent with that story have been concealed, while some convenient ones seem to have been fabricated. Independent investigators have found enough omissions and contradictions in the official and mainstream narrative to ask the questions: Was JFK Jr., in fact, assassinated? Was he killed by the same cabal that had killed his father 36 years earlier, and for the same motive as his uncle Bobby 5 years later: his plans to conquer the White House and bring his father’s murderers to justice? (On JFK’s and RFK’s assassinations, read my article “Did Israel kill the Kennedys?” on unz.com ). I will examine the evidence of foul play and cover-up in JFK Jr.’s death in the second part of this two-part article. In this first part, let’s see if we can establish the following two things:

1) At age 39, John had made up his mind to launch his political career by seeking an electoral mandate in New York State, and he was about to announce it publicly. He had also expressed to his friends his ambition to ultimately reach for the presidency. Given his personality and his popularity, he had high chances to make it in less than 20 years. He might realistically have become U.S. president in 2008 or 2016.

2) Brought up in the worship of his father, John had taken a keen interest in “conspiracy theories” about his death at least since his late teens. His knowledge deepened in his thirties, made him aware of State and media cover-ups in other affairs, and motivated him to publish, eight months before his death, a cover article by Oliver Stone, director of the groundbreaking film JFK, titled “Our Counterfeit History”.

If those two things can be proven — and they will — they must be connected. John’s quest for the truth about President Kennedy’s assassination cannot be separated from his political ambition to reclaim the White House, anymore than it could be in the case of his uncle Bobby, who, as David Talbot has shown (Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, Simon & Schuster, 2007), was planning to reopen the investigation on the Dallas coup as he was campaigning for the presidency in 1968. These are two sides of the same destiny. The heir and the avenger are one and the same person. Therefore, the deep power network that had decided to eliminate Bobby on the threshold of the White House had every reason to make the same decision about John Junior.

True, John Junior was probably not yet ready for the presidency — although some, like Pierre Salinger, believed he would have run for president in 2000. But on the other hand, for many reasons, he was a more natural candidate than RFK, with more potential. If he had to be stopped, didn’t it make sense to stop him before he made his political ambitions public? July 1999 was the right time; after that, the motive would be harder to conceal. Even for media-brainwashed Americans, a second heir to JFK killed on the road to the White House would be hard to swallow. Not to mention the fact that to let JFK Jr. live longer would be taking the risk of having a JFK III coming into this world: more trouble in perspective. Indeed, Carolyn may have been pregnant when she died with her husband.

PART I: THE HEIR AND WOULD-BE AVENGER

JFK Jr. and the Camelot legacy

John’s life and personality are movingly presented in the film I am JFK Jr. (2016)

John Junior was literally born with the Kennedy presidency, precisely 17 days after his dad won the election. From the minute he came into this world, he had been in the national spotlight. As Americans watched him grow up in the White House, they developed a strong affection for him, which did not displease his father. While Jackie was trying to keep the photographers away from her children, “JFK had another view,” recalls Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s Press Secretary. Whenever Jackie was away, “he was in touch with me and told me that now it was time for the media to get some wonderful pictures of John Jr. and Caroline in his office in the White House. I arranged for Jacques Lowe, who had been hired as the photographer of the Kennedys, to do those photos.”[2]

Little “John John” turned three the day of his father’s funeral, and he broke the world’s heart when he solemnly saluted his father’s coffin. That iconic image encapsulated a nation’s grief, and impressed on millions of Americans the dream of seeing him reclaim the Oval Office one day. For in the American collective psyche, the Kennedys represented royalty, and JFK Jr. was the legitimate heir to the throne. He was, wrote the New York Daily News the day after his death, the “charismatic crown prince of America’s royal family.”[3] “He was the closest thing we had to a crown prince,” says Chris Cuomo in I am JFK Jr.

Little “John John” saluting his father’s coffin, on his third birthday

The Kennedys didn’t attain that royal status by just buying media coverage. It was conquered by the patriarch Joe Kennedy, whose philosophy Laurence Leamer has well captured in his great book Sons of Camelot: The Fate of an American Dynasty (2005). Joe Kennedy, he writes:

“believed that in each generation a few powerful men were the rightful leaders of their generation. He thought that he and his sons were part of this natural aristocracy. … Joseph P. Kennedy created one great thing in his life, and that was his family. With acumen as great as his wealth, and limitless purpose, he built a family of sons who sought to reach the peak of American political life. … Joe knew that he had achieved so much in America because of the liberty and opportunities. He believed that sons of privilege and wealth had an obligation to serve their country and to return something of the bounty that they had inherited. Joe taught that blood ruled and that they must trust each other and venture out into a dangerous world full of betrayals and uncertainty, always returning to the sanctuary of family. His sons took on part of Joe’s psychological makeup, the sense of lives without boundaries and ambitions without restrictions.”[4]

After their father’s death, their uncle Bobby played the role of surrogate father for John Jr. and his sister Caroline. When Bobby was assassinated in his turn in June 1968, Jackie said: “If they are killing Kennedys, my kids are the number one targets. I want to get out of this country.”[5] She married shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, whose assets included a seventy-five-member, machine-gun-equipped security force.

Jackie wanted her son to grow up knowing who his father was. As early as 1967, writes biographer Christopher Andersen in The Good Son,

“Jackie made sure that John was constantly exposed to the people who knew John [President Kennedy] best — from longtime pals like Red Fay, Chuck Spalding, Oleg Cassini, Bill Walton, and his ubiquitous sidekick Dave Powers to such New Frontier stalwarts as Pierre Salinger, Theodore Sorensen, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. These were the folks ‘who knew Jack well and the things Jack liked to do.’ As long as they were around, she reasoned, ‘each day John will be getting to know his father.’”[6]

And so, although John could hardly have kept real personal memories of his father, he was constantly, so to speak, steeped in the memory of him: “Whenever another child was visiting,” writes Andersen, “he would inevitably ask, ‘Would you like to hear my father?’ Then he turned to a small stack of records and selected one to play.”[7] In 1972, Jackie asked Pierre Salinger to join her and her children for a month: “I want you to spend an hour or an hour and a half a day with John Jr. and Caroline and explain everything about what their father did.” And so Salinger did.[8] John’s craving for information about his father was never quenched. His friend and French biographer Olivier Royant reports that, when running his magazine George, John hired Jacques Lowe, JFK’s official photographer, and kept questioning him about his father for hours.[9]

Even John’s irresistible yearning for flying, despite his mother’s plea not to do so, can possibly be traced back to his childhood, “when he and his mother watched as Daddy’s helicopter took off from the South Lawn in 1962,” or watched him reappear from the sky. When Nanny Shaw announced to little John in the morning of November 23, 1963, “John, your father has gone to heaven to take care of Patrick [JFK and Jackie’s third child, who did not survive his first month],” John asked, “Did Daddy take his big plane with him?” “Yes,” she answered. “I wonder,” John said, “when he’s coming back.”[10] Significantly, John gave his first private plane the registration number N529JK, a reference to his father’s May 29 birthday.

Did John intend to follow his father’s footsteps in politics? John Quinn, a pioneer researcher on his mysterious death, writes:

“Committed to the legacy of his compelling father, there was never any question about where John F. Kennedy Jr. was heading. Is there any doubt about the fact that it was only a matter of time before he claimed his father’s legacy? Anybody who claims that we will never really know, does not know anything about John F. Kennedy Jr.”[11]

We don’t know at what stage in his life John fully endorsed that responsibility. But the thought had certainly been in his mind for many years already when he introduced his uncle Teddy at the 1988 Democratic convention. Like millions of Americans, Salinger was “very excited about that speech”:

“I took John Jr. to meet alone with me for several hours. I was telling him that this speech showed strongly that he should start thinking about going into politics. He said he was interested, but he was still too young. He told me that he had an idea that he should go into politics in the next century.”[12]

Jackie, the guiding spirit in John’s life, definitely saw her son as Camelot’s standard-bearer. In her last letter to him before dying to lymphoma in 1994, she wrote: “You, especially, have a place in history.”[13] According to presidential historian Doug Wead, interviewed in the film I am JFK Jr., Jackie “knew in her heart that, some day, the stars are gonna line up, and he’s gonna be president.” “My mom sort of pressured me to get into politics,” John told Lloyd Howard in 1997. “She expected me to follow in my father’s footsteps, and of course I will. But I don’t think the time is right just yet.”[14]

In 1995, John launched his political magazine George. Under the appearance of superficiality, it engaged in controversial issues of deep politics that reflected John’s interests. His longtime friend Robert Littell wrote, in The Men We Became: My Friendship with John F. Kennedy Jr. (St. Martin’s Press, 2004): “George was also an opportunity for John to build a platform from which he might possibly move into political life.” After all, his father had also pursued a career in journalism before entering politics. George was also a means for John to interact with political actors and thinkers.

John didn’t avoid letting people know his interest for his father’s legacy. The September 1996 cover of George features Drew Barrymore grimed as Marilyn Monroe with the caption: “Happy Birthday, Mister President,” an obvious — and, to some, indecent — reference to Marilyn’ serenade in front of JFK at the Madison Square Garden in 1962. In October 1997, for the 35th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John travelled to Cuba to meet Fidel Castro (the interview he had wished didn’t materialize, but Castro invited him for dinner and for a swim in the Bay of Pigs, and rumor has that Castro gave him his view on his father’s death).[15]

John’s interest for the presidency also transpired heavily in George, particularly in the recurrent section “If I were president,” in which various personalities were asked for suggestions. For the October 1998 issue, for example, Tony Brown, author of Empower the People: A 7-Step Plan to Overthrow the Conspiracy That Is Stealing Your Money and Freedom, declared that, if he were president, he would repeal the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

John’s plans in 1999

In 1999, at age 39, John was trying to sell his magazine. He had new plans. According to Gary Ginsberg, a close collaborator who was with John the night before he died, “That last night he was very focused on two things: finding a buyer for George and his political future.”[16] Christopher Andersen writes in his biography The Good Son :

“There seemed little doubt in the minds of those who knew him that John was on the brink of a bright political future. ‘He was probably a more natural politician than any of the other Kennedys,’ David Halberstam said, ‘and that includes his father. John had all the makings of a political superstar — once he decided that’s what he wanted.’”

In July 1999, his decision was made. His closest friends have testified that he was preparing to enter an election contest. Pierre Salinger, who knew him well, declared on French radio Europe 1, on July 19, 1999:

“I felt that in the coming year John Junior would also become a politician. It’s my point of view. And with other people, we thought he was going to be a Democratic candidate for the next presidential election.”[17]

John Junior and Pierre Salinger in 1997

More plausibly, John Jr. would have started by seeking a political office in New York State, where he had lived since 1963. He loved New York, and New York loved him. A 1997 private poll ranked JFK Jr. as New York’s “most popular Democrat,” giving him 65 percent approval rating among fellow Democrats.[18] John had several options. One he excluded was mayor of New York City. His assistant at George, RoseMarie Terenzio, recounts that when New York Senator Al D’Amato suggested he should run for mayor, John laughed it off. When Terenzio asked him afterward if he would ever consider it,

“He said ‘Well, Rosie, how many mayors do you know that became President?’ I was so shocked I didn’t say anything. Then he smirked as if to say ‘That’s not the road you go down — we’ll see what happens.’”[19]

Terenzio also made the following comment to the news website TheWrap :

“I think he would’ve run for president. I thought he would’ve run in 2008. I had dinner with a friend from George last night who thought for some reason he would’ve waited for 2016. He would be 56.”[20]

Donald Trump and John Kennedy Jr. in 1999: Were they up to something?

According to Gary Ginsberg, JFK Jr.’s close collaborator at George,

“He had been thinking about running for the N.Y. Senate seat — he even had meetings about it that spring — but by July had concluded he would focus his attention on running for governor of N.Y. in 2003. By temperament and interest, John, I think, realized he was far more suited to being a governor than a legislator. He knew from running George that he could be an inspiring, strong chief executive of a state, setting the tone for government and successfully running a complex operation. That idea became very appealing to him at some point that summer. Had the stars aligned over the next couple of years, I’m pretty convinced that’s what he would have pursued.”[21]

Others around John believed he was about to enter the race for the Senate seat that Daniel Moynihan, a former assistant to President Kennedy, was going leave vacant in 2000. This is the seat that Bobby Kennedy had occupied from 1964 to 1968. On July 19, 1999, New York Daily News reporter Joel Siegel interviewed two unnamed friends of JFK Jr., who said “they believed he would have run for office some day. Earlier this year, in one of the best-kept secrets in state politics, Kennedy considered seeking the seat of retiring Sen. Daniel Moynihan (D-N.Y.) in 2000, friends confirmed yesterday.” Democratic Chairman John Marino, also quoted in Siegel’s article, did not believe he would have run for the Senate seat, but had little doubt that, if he did, “It would have been ‘Goodbye, anyone else. This is a guy who everybody recognized who would have had any nomination for the asking.’”[22]

Christopher Andersen supports the view that, after consulting with Democratic leaders, John had made up his mind for the Senate. It clashed with Hillary Clinton’s plan. The Clintons, who were to leave the White House in January 2001, were about to purchase a home in Chappaqua, N.Y., and Hillary was gearing up to run for the Senate as a stepping-stone to the presidency.

“In the end, John was still convinced his best shot was at running for Moynihan’s Senate seat. Hillary Clinton had hesitated to enter the race largely because she feared John, who was being touted behind the scenes as her principal rival for the nomination, would be a formidable foe. John was both heir to the Kennedy magic and People’s ‘Sexiest Man Alive,’ as well as the consummate New Yorker, a resident of the city since the age of three. Although New York had no residency requirements, Hillary, who had never spent more than a few days at a time in New York, would almost certainly be branded a carpetbagger. … As late as the summer of 1999, Hillary actively worried about JFK Jr. and sought assurances from state party officials that he would not be a last-minute entry into the race. … In early July, Hillary finally made her move and formally announced her candidacy. But she was still concerned about the possibility that John might decide to toss his hat into the ring. As it turned out, she was right. John was now more confident than ever that he could easily beat her at the polls. He believed Hillary was vulnerable not only because of the Monica Lewinsky affair, her husband’s subsequent impeachment, and a slew of brewing scandals in the Clinton White House, but mainly because she simply had no connection to the state he loved. As Hillary had feared, young Kennedy planned on making much of Hillary’s carpetbagger status. ‘Wait until she gets here,’ John told his friend Billy Noonan. ‘She’s gonna get her head handed to her.’ He was going to fill Noonan in on the details of his upcoming campaign for the U.S. Senate — how and when he intended to make the announcement, what advice he was getting from Uncle Teddy, the endorsements and backing he was already lining up — when they all got together on Nantucket to celebrate Noonan’s fifth wedding anniversary on July 16. Then they’d be off to attend his cousin Rory’s wedding in Hyannis Port. If, of course, all went according to plan.”[23]

Christopher Andersen’s interview on Eyewitness News:

Andersen relies on the testimony of John’s longtime friend Billy Noonan, who authored in 2006 Forever Young: My Friendship with John F. Kennedy, Jr. (Viking Press). Here is what Noonan writes precisely, referring to the last phone conversation he had with John, whom he was supposed to meet on July 16:

“He had been making vague references on the phone about shutting things down, and starting things up. During the week before our anniversary dinner, he told me that he had something pressing to talk about, but with curious ears in the office, John was cautious. ‘We’ll talk about it this weekend.’ … I asked him now what was up with that [1997] poll, to rib him about how the press was pushing for Hillary Clinton to replace Moynihan. ‘Wait until she gets here,’ John said. ‘She’s gonna get her head handed to her.’ He was in.”[24]

This is the only mention by Noonan of John’s intention to run for the Senate. On one hand, it is not much. On the other, it should be taken very seriously, coming from one of John’s most intimate friends. Given the importance of the issue, there can be no doubt that Noonan weighed every word he wrote. One gets the impression that he wanted to say what he knew for the record, yet felt restrained from saying it too clearly, even when hinting at John’s awareness that his telephone conversations were tapped the day before he died. In his 2009 article, Wayne Madsen quotes an unnamed “close friend of the late John F. Kennedy, Jr.” (who may be Billy Noonan), who said JFK Jr. “was about ready to announce his run for the U.S. Senate from New York. Kennedy was acutely aware of his vulnerability and hired on a personal security team just prior to his announcing for the Senate.”[25]

Noonan and Andersen are not the only ones to think that John was upsetting Hillary’s plans. Andrew Collins writes:

“Approaching the end of two terms in the White House, the Clintons began preparing for their political future. They focused their attention on developing Hillary as a politician (even though she had no actual experience), and selling influence while they had it — buy now, pay later — payable to what would become ‘The Clinton Foundation’. Hillary refused to return to Arkansas, and suggested the purchase of a home in New York which would allow her to run for the Senate in the upcoming election. There was just one obstacle…. JFK Jr. had entered the political scene. New York was electric with word of JFK Jr. reclaiming his father’s legacy! A piece of Camelot was still alive in America, and donors began to line up. She knew she could never defeat the son of JFK in New England.”[26]

April 1999: “Why Hillary won’t be senator”

November 1999: “Hillary Comes Clean”

After reviewing all those testimonies, I feel that no certainty can be reached about John’s immediate plan, other that he was at the dawn of a bright political future and that he had several options in New York State. If we believe Noonan — and why shouldn’t we — then Laurence Leamer, author of Sons of Camelot: The Fate of an American Dynasty (HarperCollins, 2011) is right when writing that “John watched with growing dismay as Hillary subtly insinuated herself into what he considered his state.”[27] It is easy to guess that, in return, Hillary saw John as a serious rival, on the state level in the short term, and on the national level in the long term. She stood no chance if John ever stepped across her way, and that was sure to happen sooner or later.

It is true, as some authors object, that John never frontally attacked the Clintons in his magazine George, perhaps out of Democratic loyalty. But one of the very last issues of George that he oversaw himself (April 1999) was hostile to Hillary’s bid on the Senate seat, posting on the front-page: “Why Hillary won’t be senator.” In April 1996, the cover had: “Why Women Will Dump Hillary.” But with John out of the way, Hillary did win the seat and, disturbingly, the November 1999 issue of George contained an exclusive interview of her, together with — in tragic irony — an article on “How Bobby Kennedy Seduced New York.”

JFK Jr. as conspiracy theorist

Let’s move on to the next question: how dedicated was John to getting to the bottom of his father’s assassination?

According to testimonies from his friends, John Junior was haunted by the death of his father and quite knowledgeable about independant investigations contradicting the Warren Report. In 1999, he was not a newcomer to JFK conspiracy theories; his quest for truth had started as early as the late 1970s. His old high school girlfriend Meg Azzoni, in her self-published book, 11 Letters and a Poem: John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Meg Azzoni (2007), writes that as a teenager, JFK, Jr. was questioning the official version of his father’s death: “His heartfelt quest was to expose and bring to trial who killed his father, and covered it up.”[28] Don Jeffries, author of Hidden History, claimed that “another friend of JFK, Jr.’s adult inner circle, who very adamantly requested to remain anonymous, verified that he was indeed quite knowledgeable about the assassination and often spoke of it in private.”[29] JFK Jr., said Jeffries in a radio interview, was on “a Shakespearian quest,” “to avenge his father’s death,” like young Hamlet.[30]

October 1998 “Conspiracy Issue” with an article by Oliver Stone

John is the only Kennedy to have shown a serious determination to pursue this truth, besides his uncle Bobby. And he took the risk of making his interest public in October 1998, when he released a special “Conspiracy Issue” of George magazine, which included an article by Oliver Stone titled “Our Counterfeit History,” introduced on the cover as “Paranoid and Proud of It!”

In an article published in 2009, journalist Wayne Madsen claimed that, two weeks after John’s death, “I was scheduled to meet with Kennedy at his magazine’s offices in Washington, DC to discuss hiring on as one of a few investigative journalists Kennedy wanted to dig deep into a number of cases, but most importantly that of his father’s assassination.”[31] (There is no confirmation of Madsen’s claim.)

As many truth seekers who had started with the Kennedy assassination, John had developed an awareness that other events of great historical consequence were the subject of State-orchestrated lies and cover-ups, with corporate media complicity. And so the JFK assassination was not the only “conspiracy issue” explored by George. It is worth taking a look at two others, for they may inform us on the direction John Jr. was taking in his quest for truth.

In December 1996, George delved into the theory claiming that TWA Flight 800, which had exploded on July 17, 1996, soon after leaving JFK International, had been downed by a missile, rather than as the result of a short-circuit near the central fuel tank, as the National Transportation Safety Board concluded. The claim was based on the testimonies of 375 witnesses who saw one or two bright flare objects hit the plane, many of them believing it was a missile (read Ron Unz’s 2016 article on the subject, or watch on YouTube the 2001 documentary Silenced: TWA 800 and the Subversion of Justice). Although I have not been able to read the George article on TWA 800 (I will appreciate a comment from anyone who has), I assume it supported Pierre Salinger, who had been the most prominent journalist arguing that TWA 800 was shot down by a missile fired from a US Navy ship. Salinger was severely attacked by his peers, and his notoriety suffered permanent damage. But in May 27, 1999, he reaffirmed his belief and asked to be vindicated in a Georgetowner column, based on new research confirming his views. In this piece, Salinger mentions that “retired Navy commander William Donaldson has also come out with a new view: TWA 800 was shot down by a missile — fired not from a Navy ship but a terrorist group.”[32] That could explain the presence of a mysterious ship caught on radar while speeding away near where the plane exploded. Details can be read in a piece written by Philip Weiss for the New York Observer in July 1999 (days before JFK Jr.’s death), titled “Radar Shows ‘Getaway Boat’ Fleeing Flight 800 Crash”:

“‘Radar data collected during the last minute of the T.W.A. flight revealed the two closest objects to the plane, both between three and four miles away, as a Navy P-3 airplane and what the exhibit called simply a ‘30-knot target.’ Radar data for the next 20 minutes showed the mystery boat heading on a beeline out to sea, on a south-southwest course, even as other boats rushed to the crash to try to help out. It was nearly 9 o’clock at night, not the usual time for an excursion. … [FBI officer] Lewis Schiliro acknowledged the presence of the mystery boat, which he said was at least 25 to 30 feet long and reached speeds of 35 knots, close to 40 miles per hour. ‘Despite extensive efforts, the F.B.I. has been unable to identify this vessel,’ he said. / The response is somewhat alarming given the F.B.I.’s assurances that it had turned over every stone.”[33]

Alarming, but understandable if the mystery boat was in fact Israeli. Israel’s LAP (LohammaPsichologit, the Mossad’s department of psychological warfare) had been busy blaming Iran from the day of the crash, and “thousands of media stories perpetuated the fiction,” recounts Gordon Thomas in Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad (2009), with the London Times claiming that land-air Stinger missile systems had been smuggled across the Canadian border into the United States by Islamic terrorists. A year later, the FBI’s chief investigator, James K. Kallstrom, would tell his colleagues: “If there was a way to nail those bastards in Tel Aviv for time wasting, I sure would like to see it happen. We had to check every item they slipped into the media.”[34]

Some researchers into JFK Jr.’s plane crash have suggested a connection to the TWA 800 crash, which happened three years earlier almost to the day, and in the same vicinity. Jackie Jura, author of Orwell Today website, wrote:

“I remember when TWA 800 exploded and Salinger was going to give a press conference in Paris to expose the truth. But then he cancelled it. The rumour on the net at the time was that the powers-that-be told him that if he gave the press conference they’d kill John-John, and so he backed down.”

“TWA Conspiracy Theories” (December 1996)

“Who was behind the killing of Yitzhak Rabin?” (March 1997)

Back down he did, but in May 27, 1999, he reiterated his claim, and John Jr. would die 50 days later. I don’t subscribe to that theory, but it is worth mentioning.

In March 1997, three months after the issue featuring the “TWA Conspiracy Theories” cover article, George magazine published a 13-page article by the mother of Yigal Amir, the man convicted of assassinating Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin had offended the Israeli far-right by wanting to trade land for peace. Amir’s mother revealed that her son had operated under the tutelage and training of a Shin Bet agent, Avishai Raviv, working for forces seeking to halt the peace process.[35] Canadian-Israeli journalist Barry Chamish, who investigated the Rabin assassination in his book Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin? (1988), agrees. He also believes that JFK Jr. was determined to “get the full story on the Rabin assassination,” and finds support in several news releases following JFK Jr.’s death:

“Catherine Crier of Fox TV’s The Crier Report, announcing that JFK Jr. was about to meet high ranking Mossad officers. Then the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, reported that Kennedy had met with the deputy chief of the Mossad, Amiram Levine, to get the full story on the Rabin assassination two days before his plane went down. Then Maariv ran an interview with JFK’s chauffeur, who happens to be Israeli. Then people started noting that Ehud Barak was in Washington at the time of Kennedy’s finale in life.”[36]

Barak’s visit to the U.S. around July 16, 1999 — with a battalion of Intelligence and security agents — is a fact, but I have not been able to verify Chamish’ sources in the Crier Report, the Frankfurter Allgemeine or the Maariv. Chamish concluded:

“Yes, I’m sure he [John] was murdered. And yes, the Israeli political establishment had a motive for involvement. The latest Kennedy to die violently was the only American editor to expose (in the March 1997 issue of his magazine George ) the conspiracy behind Rabin’s assassination. And he had every intention of continuing his exposes until he got to the bottom of the matter. We don’t know what drove him to stand alone in seeking the truth, but it may have had much to do with the information contained within Final Judgment.”[37]

There is no confirmation that John Junior read Michael Piper’s book Final Judgment blaming Israel for the Kennedy assassination, and released in 1993. But it is in the realm of possibility, given his personal quest for the truth on his father’s death, and his consideration for the theory that Rabin was assassinated by the Israeli Deep State, rather than by a lone nut.

So, was JFK Jr. himself assassinated? Here is man whose road to the presidency seemed traced. No other man of his age had better chances to reach the White House one day. And no other man in the world had more reasons to want the 1963 Kennedy assassination reinvestigated. He was already trying to educate the public through his magazine, at the risk of exposing his own beliefs, something no other Kennedy had ever done (even RFK had kept his doubt on the Warren report private, and his plan to reopen the case secret). And this man, his best friend Noonan believes, was just about to announce his candidacy for a New York Senate seat, which everyone would have understood as the first step toward the White House. Pierre Salinger and others even believe he would have run for president in 2000. What are the odds that he would die at this precise moment by accident? How lucky for his enemies to be spared the trouble of eliminating him, as they had his uncle in 1968! If that was an accident, then that alone deserves to be called a “Kennedy curse,” doesn’t it! If it was an accident, then the Devil caused it. Or was it Yahweh?

As I have argued in “Did Israel kill the Kennedys?”, John’s uncle Bobby had been assassinated because he was, in his own eyes and in the eyes of most Americans—and therefore also in the eyes of his brother’s killers —, the continuation of his brother, his heir and avenger. Even before David Talbot, Laurence Leamer has shown how close Jack and Bobby had been. He writes in Sons of Camelot:

“Bobby had been the president’s alter ego and protector. He could finish his brother’s sentences and complete a task that Jack signaled with no more than a nod or a gesture. He had loved his brother so intensely and served him so well that within the administration it was hard to tell where one man ended and the other began.”[38]

A bond of blood and spirit of a comparable nature existed between John F. Kennedy and the son that bore his name. Although John Junior could not speak with his father, nor even remember speaking with him, his love and loyalty to his father, nurtured by his mother, was the driving force in his life. From the point of view of JFK’s murderers, JFK Jr. was JFK redivivus, and RFK redivivus at the same time. All three were like one man who had to be killed three times.

PART II: EVIDENCE OF ASSASSINATION AND COVER-UP

Was JFK Jr. assassinated? As we are going to see, the evidence may not be absolutely compelling, but what can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt is that federal authorities and corporate media engaged in a massive cover-up of any facts that contradicted the theory of the accident due to the pilot’s error. And that is enough, I think, to decide between accident and assassination. The transgenerational cabal who had the motive, means and opportunity to murder JFK and RFK (and the power to get away with it) had the same motive, means and opportunity to murder JFK Jr. (and the power to get away with it). We know for sure that, in 1968, RFK had both the ambition to win the White House and the determination to reopen the investigation on the death of his brother (read my article “Did Israel Kill the Kennedys?”). I have now shown that the same can be ascertained about JFK Jr. in 1999. Obviously, that made him a target, the next Kennedy on the list.

The 9:39 call and the explosion

According to Wayne Madsen, “JFK Jr.’s Plane Crash Was Originally Treated As Murder Investigation” (the title of his 2009 article):

“The FBI had discovered that there was ‘suspicious boating activity’ in an area of Martha’s Vineyard where Kennedy’s plane was descending to 2000 feet for its final approach to the airport. The ‘suspicious’ boaters claimed to be fishing for striped bass. … after the plane’s wreckage was discovered, investigators found, according to Kennedy’s friend, that every light bulb, including that in the emergency flashlight, had been blown out on the plane and every circuit board, including those in the engine sensors and other electronic equipment, had been literally ‘melted.’ FBI agents on the scene preliminarily concluded that a ‘massive electromagnetic event’ caused Kennedy’s plane to crash. … Before the FBI could begin examining the ocean floor for any ‘special equipment’ that may have been thrown overboard from the fishing boat, their ‘murder’ investigation was abruptly called off by FBI headquarters in Washington.”[39]

Unfortunately, I have found no source supporting Madsen’s claim about an aborted FBI investigation (that’s always the problem with Madsen). But the fact that no news of a criminal investigation ever reached the public is in itself very puzzling, given the history of Kennedy assassinations and the natural assumption that JFK Jr. could be a target. That JFK Jr. had powerful enemies was well-known to the whole world, and the lack of a criminal investigation may be taken as confirmation of their power.

Independent investigators have gathered a fair amount of evidence that JFK Jr.’s death was a criminal act. I will summarize what I hold to be the most solid evidence, based on my reading of all the relevant articles I could find on the Net (including those by early researchers such as John Quinn), and of the following two books: first, chapter 7 of Donald Jeffries’s book Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics (Skyhorse publishing, 2016), which I recommend (you may also want to listen to Jeffries’s one-hour interview); second, John Koerner, Exploding the Truth: The JFK Jr., Assassination (Chronos Books, 2018), which adds little. In addition, John Hankey’s video “Dark Legacy II: the Assassination of JFK Jr” is very useful. However, I advise to skip Koerner’s Part I, meant to exonerate the Clintons and blame the Bushs; for the same reason, I recommend to start Hankey’s video at 15 minutes.

The basic fact that seems firmly established by radar data is that JFK Jr.’s plane suddenly nose-dived into the Ocean at 9:41. That cannot be explained simply by an engine failure, as the Boston Globe correctly asserted:

“Even if the engine died, a federal aviation source said, it is unlikely that the plane would reach such a high rate of descent, because the plane is designed to glide without power at a much slower rate for several miles. And if Kennedy had run out of fuel, it is likely he would have made a distress call.”[40]

The most likely explanation, apart from suicide, is that the plane suffered a structural damage, possibly by explosive, making it impossible to maintain in the air; blowing off a part of a wing or the tail would have been enough, and would have required only a very small device fixed to the plane.

The next element to consider is that, from the early hours of July 17, it was reported that JFK Jr. had made a call to Martha’s Vineyard airport at 9:39 pm, asking for landing instructions in a perfectly calm tone, less than two minutes before his plane suddenly dropped and disappeared from radar. That information was broadcast on Boston WCVB-TV and was relayed by ABC News. A United Press International article dated July 17 said:

“At 9:39 p.m. Friday, Kennedy radioed the airport and said he was 13 miles from the airport and 10 miles from the coast, according to WCVB-TV news in Boston. He reportedly said he was making his final approach. … In his final approach message, WCVB-TV said Kennedy told controllers at the airport that he planned to drop off his wife’s sister and then take off again between 11 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. for Hyannis Airport.”[41]

WCVB-TV repeated that information continuously during their first two days of reporting on the story. They broadcast, at 12:35 p.m. on July 17, a phone interview by anchor Susan Wornick of U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Todd Burgun, who confirmed the information. Here is a transcript of the footage, which Hankey has included in his valuable film (19:40):

Wornick: “We have been told by the Coast Guard that in fact there is now evidence of a last communication last night with JFK Jr.’s plane as he was making an approach to Martha’s Vineyard airport. Petty officer Todd Burgun joins us from the Coast Guard Base in Boston. He is a Petty officer, and a public information officer. Thank you for being with us, sir. What can you tell us about this last communication with JFK Jr.’s plane?”

Burgun: “All I really know at this time is that it was at 9:39 p.m. and it was with the FAA. And he was on his final approach to Martha’s Vineyard.”

Wornick: “So at 9:39, to the best of your information, JFK Jr. made a contact with the airport, with the flight controllers that he was on his final descent.”

Burgun: “That is correct.”

Todd Burgun’s interview on WCVB-TV Boston, from Hankey’s Dark Legacy (19:40)

That is all that remained of WCVB-TV’s report on the subject, when researchers later obtained archive copies; “hours of time on the tape archive of WCVB’s July 17 broadcast, during which information on Kennedy’s radio contact was continually reported, have been intentionally cut,” complained John Quinn.[42] According to Jeffries, the original interview of Burgun was much longer:

“On the uncut tape, Burgun went on to delineate all the points from the UPI’s article: Kennedy was calm, on approach to the airport, had provided his position and trajectory, and had even made a comment about dropping Lauren Bessette off at the airport. Some five hours of coverage was edited out.”[43]

This crucial information was reported by news services on Saturday July 17 and early Sunday, July 18. By Monday morning, the FAA claimed that there was never a communication from Kennedy to the tower. Todd Burgun became utterly unreachable. According to the Boston Globe, Martin Wyatt, a controller at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport tower the night of Kennedy’s flight “declined comment on whether he had radio contact with Kennedy’s plane.”[44] Simultaneously, on July 18, FAA and NTSB officials produced some “newly found” radar “evidence” which supposedly showed Kennedy’s flight exhibiting signs of difficulties and irregularities long before 9:39; obviously, Kennedy’s perfectly normal call at 9:39 did not fit with that new version of events.

Of course, it is not inconceivable that the crucial piece of information of JFK Jr.’s 9:39 radio call was mistaken, false, or fake. Yet it seems highly implausible that the Coast Guard would charge their spokesman Todd Burgun — whose identity is not in question — to release it to the public without double-checking it. The fact that the news was originally broadcast by a Boston TV station is perhaps significant, as is the fact that, among major newspapers, the Boston Globe was the most critical of the official story (I’ll mention other cases along the way). Since Boston is the Kennedys’ historical stronghold, we can conjecture that an information war of some sort was going on between Boston and Washington, Boston trying to resist the disinformation assault from federal agencies.

The only available photo believed to be of the wreckage of JFK Jr.’s plane

The second element to consider is the testimony of Victor Pribanic, a trial lawyer from White Oak, Pennsylvania, who was fishing for striped bass off Squibnocket Point that night. He gave an interview to The Martha’s Vineyard Times, cited in the New York Daily News, July 21, 1999: “I heard an explosion over my right shoulder. It sounded like an explosion. There was no shock wave, but it was a large bang.” He also said, according to the Daily News, “that just before hearing the noise, he noticed a small aircraft flying low over the water toward the island.”[45] Pribanic repeated his story to filmmaker Anthony Hilder of the Free World Alliance: “I heard a loud impact like a bomb.” The next day, when Pribanic heard the news of the Kennedy crash, he gave his information to Hank Myer of the West Tilsbury Police Department. Myer accompanied Pribanic to the site where he’d heard the explosion, which would turn out exactly where the plane went missing. Police, he was told, forwarded his information to the investigators.[46] Pribanic was apparently not the only witness of the explosion. The July 17 UPI article mentions:

“A reporter for the Vineyard Gazette newspaper told WCVB-TV in Boston that he was out walking Friday night about the time of the crash and saw ‘big white flash in the sky’ off Philbin Beach.”

When John DiNardo contacted the Vineyard Gazette in an attempt to talk with this reporter, a few days later, he was told that the “whole thing” was a mix-up due to some fireworks having been set off at “Falmouth”, and, when he insisted, he was told that the reporter was no longer employed by the paper.[47]

Like the 9:39 radio call, the ear- and eye-witnesses disappeared from news reports from July 18 on. The National Transportation Safety Board initial report, released on July 30, 1999 makes no mention of them. It states that there was no “in-flight break-up or fire, and no indication of pre-impact failure to the airframe,” which excludes an explosion damaging the plane. On June 7, 2000, eleven months after the plane crash, the NTSB released its final report. That report was announced to the press by a short official NTSB news release which included the following statement: “The probable cause of the accident, as stated in the accident report, is: ‘The pilot’s failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation. Factors in the accident were haze and the dark night.’” A first problem must be pointed out: that statement from the NTSB news release which is supposedly taken from the final report does not appear in the final report. In fact, as I will show, it is hard to see how the full report supports the conclusion of that news release. One gets the impression that the person who wrote the news release didn’t even read the full report.

For example, the sudden drop of altitude from 2,200 feet to 1,100 feet in 14 seconds, stated in the full report, is hard to reconcile with the news release statement. Disorientation implies that the pilot was not aware that he was flying straight into the ocean. But that is impossible, as the NTSB Investigator-in-Charge, Robert Pearce, had admitted as early as July 20, 1999: “They were aware they were going down. With that kind of descent rate, it is going to be noisier than hell in the cockpit.”[48]

Jeb Burnside, commercial pilot and editor-in-chief of Aviation Safety Magazine, did a careful analysis of the NTSB report and radar data and confirms that weather conditions and pilot experience (or lack of) fail to explain the crash:

“On paper, this accident shouldn’t have happened. Despite most of his time being in a training environment, a typical 310-hour instrument-rating student in a well-equipped airplane should have had no problem with this flight.”[49]

The mainstream media hardly paid attention to the full report, and focused on the short news release. But they even distorted it to make its hesitant conclusion (“probable cause”) more assertive and dramatic. “Haze and the dark night,” which are mentioned as “factors in the accident,” were exaggerated and declared totally unsafe for flying. “The pilot’s failure to maintain control … as a result of spatial disorientation,” became proof that JFK Jr. was incompetent to fly in such terrible weather at night. And the implication was that JFK Jr. was reckless and irresponsible to fly that night, especially with his wife and sister-in-law on board.

So, after the first step of crucial omissions in the NTSB report (JFK Jr.’s 9:39 call to the airport and Pribanic’s report of an explosion), the disinformation process continued in two more steps: first, a NTSB news release about the “probable cause” of the “accident” is falsely presented as “stated” in the NTSB final report, whereas it is in reality a far cry from the picture presented in the report; second, that relatively prudent statement is exaggerated and dramatized in mainstream news, while all contradictory details in the full report are ignored. Let’s see out that works for the two following crucial points: 1) weather conditions and visibility, 2) the pilot’s experience and cautiousness. My point is not so much to determine exactly the visibility and the level of JFK Jr.’s skill, but rather to demonstrate a concerted effort to distort credible reports on these matters, with the obvious intention to convince the public that the lack of visibility and John’s inexperience are sufficient explanations for his plane crash, although in fact, they are not.

Fake news on visibility

Even the NTSB initial report (July 20, 1999) noted that there was no report of “significant meteorological conditions” along the flight. We also read

“At about 6:30 on the night of the accident, the pilot received an Internet weather forecast for flight from Teterboro, New Jersey, to Hyannis, Massachusetts. The report was for VFR (visual flight rules) weather, visibility 6 to 8 miles.”

So two hours before taking off, JFK Jr. received a forecast of very good flying conditions. The NTSB final report also quotes the Martha’s Vineyard tower manager as stating:

“The visibility, present weather, and sky condition at the approximate time of the accident was probably a little better than what was being reported. I say this because I remember aircraft on visual approaches saying they had the airport in sight between 10 and 12 miles out. I do recall being able to see those aircraft and I do remember seeing the stars out that night.”

This tower manager must be Marvin Wyatt, interviewed for the Boston Globe: “Marvin Wyatt, a controller at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport tower the night of Kennedy’s flight, said visibility was good at the airport at Kennedy’s expected arrival time.”[50] Wayne Madsen quotes an unnamed close friend of JFK Jr. (probably Billy Noonan, who was supposed to meet him that night) who said “that visibility around the Vineyard was clear at 9:41 p.m. when the plane disappeared from the sky.”[51]

Mainstream news outlet, however, repeated over and over again, in contradiction even to the NTSB report, that the weather was so bad, the fog so thick, that John should have cancelled his plan to fly, had he been a responsible man. FAA Flight Specialist Edward Meyer, who had prepared for the NTSB the FAA’s official report of weather conditions over Martha’s Vineyard on July 16, 1999, and had determined that they were “at least very good,” was disturbed by the way his conclusions were distorted, and released a public statement:

“Nothing of what I have heard on mainstream media makes any sense to me… The weather along his flight was just fine. A little haze over eastern Connecticut. … I don’t know why the airplane crashed, but what I heard on the media was nothing but garbage.”[52]

One of the most dubious witnesses brought forward by the corporate media to support their claim of fatal visibility was Kyle Bailey. Here is how the Washington Post introduced him on July 21st:

“Kyle Bailey, 25, a pilot with more than a decade of flying experience who also keeps his plane at Essex County Airport and who frequently flies the same route as Kennedy — Fairfield to the Vineyard — took special note of Kennedy that night because Bailey had just decided against making the flight. / Bailey said he feared the combination of darkness and haze could be treacherous, causing him to lose sight of the horizon, lose his bearings, maybe even lose control of his plane. Visibility was four to five miles in Fairfield due to haze, near the margin for flying by visual rules, as opposed to instruments.”[53]

According to the NY Daily News of the same day, Bailey said:

“I saw him taxi [drive the plane on ground to prepare for take off], and I saw him take off. I [later] told my family, ‘I can’t believe he’s going up in this weather.’ At night, you don’t know where the sky ends and the ocean begins. You have no sight of the horizon. It can give you a false sense of flying level.”

“Bailey,” commented the Daily News, “was staggered by what he feared was another ghastly Kennedy tragedy. ‘It never seems to end for this family,’ he said. ‘He’s so young, with a life full of promise.’”[54]

How moving! But who is Kyle Bailey, “the last man to see Kennedy alive at the Fairfield airport”? I had no difficulty to find the answer to that question: it happens that Kyle Bailey later became an aviation analyst regularly working for major network and cable televisions such as Fox News, CBS, ABC, NBC, BBC. Bailey even appeared in the documentary Curse on the Kennedys? and very recently in the ABC documentary The Last Days of JFK Jr., aired in January 2019, in which he repeats his story. Can you swallow that blue pill?

Kyle Bailey at work

In the same documentary The Last Days of JFK Jr. appears another private pilot by the name of Bob Arnot, who claims to have flown the same night along the same route as John. He declares there was no visibility, to the point that, when approaching Martha’s Vineyard, he could not see any lights at all. Unlike Bailey, who somehow escaped the attention of NTSB investigators, this Bob Arnot is most probably the unnamed pilot mentioned in the NTSB report as follows: “when his global positioning system (GPS) receiver indicated that he was over Martha’s Vineyard, he looked down and ‘… there was nothing to see. There was no horizon and no light. … I turned left toward Martha’s Vineyard to see if it was visible but could see no lights of any kind nor any evidence of the island. … I thought the island might [have] suffered a power failure.’” That testimony completely contradicts Martha’s Vineyard tower manager (Marvin Wyatt), who is quoted in the NTSB report as saying visibility was great. Which shows that the NTSB report is self-contradictory in some areas.

Now, it is a very small world. You can find on Wikipedia that “Dr. Bob Arnot is a journalist, author, former host of the Dr. Danger reality TV series, and previously medical and foreign correspondent for NBC and CBS.” Can you swallow that too? Or do you start to smell a media conspiracy?

What JFK Jr. inexperienced and reckless?

Let’s now talk about JFK Jr.’s flying experience and skill. Kyle Bailey’s testimony implies that JFK Jr.’s is solely to blame for his own death and for the deaths of his wife and her sister. That view was reinforced by hundreds of comments on air about how inexperienced JFK Jr. was. Just like on weather conditions, the mainstream media gave a grossly negative view of JFK Jr.’s flying experience and skill, unrelated to the NTSB report and to the real testimonies of flight instructors who knew him. The NTSB report reckoned that JFK Jr. had a flight experience of “about 310 hours, of which 55 hours were at night.” During the last fifteen months, he had made 35 flights between Fairfield airport, N.J., and Martha’s Vineyard, including five at night. Three certified flight instructors (CFI) quoted in the report describe John as an “excellent”, “methodical” and “very cautious” pilot. In the early days, some newspapers echoed that view with their own research. John McColgan, JFK Jr.’s federal licensing instructor from Vero Beach, Florida, was interviewed for the Orlando Sentinel, July 18, 1999, and said: “He was an excellent pilot. … In fact, by now he probably has enough hours to be a commercial pilot.”[55] One the same day, the New York Daily News quoted flight instructors Ralph and Chris describing John as a careful pilot, always checking meticulously “every nut and bolt on the airplane. … He was very safety oriented. … John was a natural in flying.”[56] On July 21, USA Today published an article titled “Pilot Kennedy was ‘conscientious guy,’” whose lead paragraph said: “John F. Kennedy Jr. attended the Harvard of flight schools, may have had far more flight experience than has been reported and was known at his New Jersey airport for prudence in the cockpit.” The article quoted other people who knew Kennedy as a good pilot.[57]

But as days passed, major TV channels and newspapers gave a more and more negative assessment of John’s flying skills and of the weather conditions. They emphasized that he didn’t have the proper license to fly with instruments only, as the absence of visibility would have required. It is true that John’s license was for visual flight only, meaning visibility of at least 4 miles. But although John had not yet obtained the license allowing him to fly by instruments only, he had passed the written test and completed the training for the inflight test. According to the flight instructor who trained him, as quoted in the NTSB report, “the pilot’s basic instrument flying skills and simulator work were excellent.” So even if the visibility had been very bad — which it was not — John could have guided his plane safety to the airport, using his autopilot if necessary. According to Scott Meyers, a foremost expert on the death of JFK Jr. who was interviewed for the program “Encounters with the Unexplained: The Kennedy Curse, JFK, Jr.’s, Death – Accident or Assassination?” aired February 15, 2002:

“The fact that Kennedy knew how to use his plane’s navigational instruments casts serious doubt on the official explanation for the crash, because even if he had gotten lost, his knowledge of the plane’s instruments would have allowed him to flip a switch and allow the autopilot to guide him to a short distance from his runway destination. A little haze should have never stopped him from landing safely.”[58]

One question has been the focus of much attention from independent researchers: was there a flight instructor as co-pilot in the plane? Officially, there wasn’t. No fourth body was recovered in the wreckage. But strangely enough, one seat was also missing, and conspiracy theorists such as John Hankey have speculated that it might have had a flight instructor’s body seat-belted on it, which might have been spirited away for the sake of building up the story of an incompetent and reckless John. For if John had flown with a flight instructor, then the whole argument of his recklessness falls. Again, I am mentioning this issue here, not to make any definite conclusion, but mainly to point out evidence of a concerted effort to close the case and satisfy the public that JFK Jr. died—and killed his wife and sister-in-law—by his own recklessness.

JFK Jr. had owned his Piper Saratoga for a little more than two months, and he had never flown it without a flight instructor. He had flown to Martha’s Vineyard 8 times in the previous month with that plane, always with a flight instructor. Since he had his wife and her sister on board, it doesn’t seem like him to fly without an instructor, especially at night. According to Donald Jeffries, “Early reports, such as the one that appeared in the New York Times on July 17, 1999, indicated that a flight instructor was on the plane. JFK Jr.’s George magazine coeditor Richard Blow recounted that Kennedy had told him he was taking a flight instructor with him during their last lunch together.”[59] Then, from the next day on, any mention of a flight instructor on board disappeared. Different explanations were offered for the fact that John flew without a flight instructor that particular night, for the first time on his new plane. His biographer Christopher Andersen writes:

“On today’s trip up from New Jersey, Jay Biederman, the flight instructor who had recently helped John pass his written instrument test and was preparing him for his instrument flight test, was scheduled to go along as he had several times before. But when Biederman canceled to join his parents on a hiking trip in Switzerland, John made the fateful decision not to find a replacement.”[60]

Curiously, that explanation contradicts a key testimony included in the NTSB final report, of which John Hankey provides a good critical analysis at the end of his film. I quote here the shorter presentation from Donald Jeffries:

“… one of Kennedy’s flight instructors, Robert Merena, told the NTSB, some six months after the crash, that JFK Jr. had turned down his request to fly with him by saying he wanted to “do it alone.” These dramatic, ironic words were reported widely in the establishment press and solidified the image of JFK Jr. as an irresponsible daredevil. Merena’s own lawyer would deny he’d ever made such a statement, and the memorandum produced by the NTSB regarding it was suspiciously irregular, with no date, location, or signature on it. Most crucially, Merena had been interviewed five days after the crash by the NTSB, and he never mentioned anything about this, which would certainly seem to have been a pertinent fact. Merena did tell the NTSB in this early interview, however, that he’d never seen JFK Jr. fly without an instructor.”

The damning story of John rejecting the offer of a flight instructor and stubbornly insisting to pilot alone was included in the NTSB’s final report and became widely quoted.[61] Here it is from ABC News on July 7, 2000: “John F. Kennedy Jr. turned down an offer by one of his flying instructors to accompany him the night of his fatal flight to Martha’s Vineyard, saying he ‘wanted to do it alone,’ federal investigators say.” The same could be read in the Los Angeles Times on the same day, and in The New York Times.[62]

I personally feel that the question of whether there was a co-pilot in the plane or not cannot be conclusively answered either way. But the important thing here is the strong probability that Robert Merena’s testimony was fabricated or forced, to hammer in the point that there was no co-pilot and that JFK Jr. acted irresponsibly.

In this whole affair, we cannot prove directly that JFK Jr. was murdered. What we can prove, however, is that federal agencies and mainstream media conspired in a massive fraud, including the concealment of key evidence (the 9:39 call and reports of an explosion), the distortion of facts (visibility and pilot’s ability) and false testimonies (Kyle Bailey and Bob Arnot being the most likely). That can be taken as indirect proof that JFK Jr. was murdered.

Eight hours of video footage taken by recovery divers might have helped to solve the mystery, but the Navy preferred to destroyed them (Sidney Morning Herald, February 13, 2001)

The National Security protocol

Truth seekers such as Donald Jeffries, John Koerner or John Hankey have raised important questions concerning the 10 hours (they say 15 hours) it took for a search to begin after the plane was reported missing by Bessette and Kennedy relatives, at 10 p.m. on July 16th, and for the 4 or 5 days it took to locate and retrieve the wreckage and the bodies. The plane was equipped with an Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT), which sends out a beacon signal in the event of a crash. According to the original UPI article mentioned earlier, “the beacon was heard by the Coast Guard in Long Island, N.Y., at 3:40 a.m. But as the search went on, authorities seemed to discount the relevance of the beacon signal.”[63] Was the search intentionally directed away from the crash site during three days, in order for the perpetrators to secretly destroy the evidence from the cockpit voice recorder (the NTSB report says that “its backup battery was missing, and it had retained no data”), remove the log book which John kept in a waterproof box and, more importantly in Hankey’s view, remove the body of the co-pilot (together with the missing seat reported by the NTSB)? That is a possibility that finds support in the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Richard Stanley of the Civil Air Patrol, who “would report seeing what he thought were Coast Guard helicopters around the crash site at about 7 a.m., hours before the Coast Guard or anyone else arrived.”[64] For lack of space, I will not dwell on those issues, which are thoroughly discussed by the above-mentioned researchers.

Rather, let’s focus on the tight military control of all procedures following the tragedy, from the search and rescue missions to the news reporting, all conducted under national security standards. The search was done by military planes and vessels. According to John Koerner, “the military immediately instituted in the hours after the crash a 17-nautical mile no-fly zone, and no entry zone, around the crash site. No civilians or media were allowed in this area until the bodies and wreckage were recovered.” On July 20, 1999, we read in the NTSB report, “the airplane wreckage was located by U.S. Navy divers from the recovery ship, USS Grasp.” Why was the Navy, rather than civilian rescue craft, tasked with the retrieval of JFK Jr.’s crashed airplane?[65] More disturbing still, why did the Pentagon take control of news reporting from July 18?

Pentagon Press conference, from Hankey’s Dark Legacy II (24:08)

There are issues also with the autopsies. Joanna Weiss and Matthew Brelis of the Boston Globe wrote on July 23, 1999, in an article headlined “JFK Autopsy Rushed”:

“the autopsies in the Kennedy case were performed especially quickly, pathologists said. The remains were taken to a Bourne hospital at about 7:15 p.m. Wednesday night and released to the victims’ families at 11 p.m., according to the medical examiner’s office and the Cape and Islands district attorney’s office. / Many jurisdictions refuse to perform autopsies at night, said Robert Kirschner, a former deputy chief medical examiner for Cook County, Ill. The haste in this case, he said, could lead to questions about the investigation’s thoroughness. … The timing of the Kennedy investigation, Kirschner said, makes it unlikely that pathologists performed autopsies on Carolyn Bessette Kennedy or Lauren Bessette. ‘You can’t possibly do three investigations in four hours,’ he said.”[66]

But, to me, the most suspicious thing of all is the way the bodies were disposed of after their rushed autopsies: they were cremated in Duxbury’s cemetery crematorium. Then their remains were taken aboard the Navy destroyer Briscoe, and scattered into the sea, near the place where they had found their death.

Why? “The burial for the 35th president’s son,” noted local Duxbury journalist Paula Maxwell, “was reportedly carried out in keeping with his expressed wishes.”[67] The Boston Globe reported on July 22 , “Kennedy’s family requested a burial at sea, and the Pentagon granted that request.”[68] But, the next day, the same newspaper expressed surprise:

“The cremated remains of John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, and her sister were cast from a warship to the ocean currents in a manner not favored by the Catholic Church and in a ceremony that occurred only after the intercession of Pentagon brass. The Roman Catholic Church prefers the presence of a body at its funeral rites. And the Defense Department rarely accords the honor of burial at sea to civilians.”[69]

Moreover, no other Kennedy had ever been cremated. The reasons given for cremating JFK Jr. body do not make any sense and are contradictory. The New York Times wrote: “Kennedy family members, citing his wishes and hoping to avoid having a spectacle made of Mr. Kennedy’s final resting place, have decided to have his body cremated and his ashes scattered at sea in a Navy ceremony, a family adviser said.”[70] Can we believe that the Kennedy family, who had always showed respect for Catholic traditions, wanted no grave for JFK Jr., by fear that his grave might become a pilgrimage site? And can we believe that John, at age 39, had expressed “his wish” to be cremated? CNN added more bizarre explanations to that already incredible story:

“Sen. Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, had requested the burial at sea, saying it was his nephew’s wish to be cremated and his ashes spread on the waves. The request was approved by Defense Secretary William Cohen. / The family of the Bessette sisters requested that the two women be buried in the same ceremony, the Pentagon said. / John Jr., like his father, the late President John F. Kennedy, had a love of the sea. He spent many summers sailing and kayaking the waters where his plane crashed. / Pentagon officials tell CNN there are two grounds for granting permission for a naval burial at sea. First, there is a provision allowing for such burials for people providing “notable service or outstanding contributions to the United States. / Also, protocol allows sea burials for the children of decorated Navy veterans. President Kennedy was a naval officer wounded and cited for heroism in World War II.”[71]

How ridiculous! JFK was a decorated Navy veteran, and he surely loved sailing, yet he was buried in Arlington. It seems to me unconceivable that JFK Jr. would not have wished to be buried near his father. Even Pierre Salinger asked to be buried at Arlington Cemetery, not far from JFK. It is just as unbelievable that the Bessettes, who are said to hold John responsible for their daughters’ death, and to have received 10 million dollars in compensation from the Kennedys, would decide just the same. According to information found in RFK Jr.’s diary, published by the New York Post, Ann Freeman, Carolyn and Lauren Bessette’s mother, “began asking that her two daughters be buried near her home in Greenwich, Connecticut.” It was Edwin Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy’s wife, who convinced her to have her two daughters cremated and their ashes spread in the ocean. “He bullied, bullied, bullied the shattered grieving mother,” writes RFK Jr., also commenting: “All the Bessette family knows that Ed hated Carolyn and did everything in his power to make her life miserable.” After Carole Radziwill, the wife of Anthony Radziwill, JFK Jr.’s cousin and close friend, complained to RFK Jr. about Schlossberg, RFK Jr. wrote in his diary: “She says she wants to start an ‘I hate Ed Club.’ There would be many, many members. John & Carolyn would have certainly applied.”[72] That surely makes us wonder about Edwin Schlossberg’s interest in the whole affair.

Navy destroyer USS Biscoe, where the funeral ceremony took place

Who did it?

So, have we proven without a reasonable doubt that JFK Jr. was assassinated? Admittedly, no. None of the elements analyzed above is entirely conclusive by itself. Perhaps, after all, Todd Burgun was mistaken about John’s radio call to Martha’s Vineyard airport at 9:39 (but why didn’t he come forward to retract his statement?). Perhaps Victor Pribanic lied, or mistook the sound of John’s plane crashing into the Ocean for an airborn explosion (but what about the other witnesses?). Perhaps, among the conflicting reports about the visibility, we should give the benefit of the doubt to the worst reports. Perhaps Kyle Bailey, the last man to see JFK Jr. alive, was really there, before becoming an aviation analyst expert regularly appearing on Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, MSNBC, CNBC, The Weather Channel, CBS, ABC, NBC, BBC, CTV, I24 News, and HLN, as his LinkedIn account says. And perhaps we should trust Bob Arnot too. Perhaps flight instructor Robert Merena did suddenly remember in January 2000 that JFK Jr. had rejected his offer to fly with him because “he wanted to do it alone.” Perhaps John Junior, at age 39, did ask to be cremated and his ashes spread into the ocean he loved so much. And so on.

It is the accumulation of such doubtful elements that is hard to accept. It is also the military control over the operations, right down to news reporting from the Pentagon, which is odd. Add the fact that the regional director of the NTSB in charge of the investigation, Robert Pearce, according to his official profile, later “briefed State Department officials and the Egyptian Ambassador in the wake of the EgyptAir Flight 990 crash [the jet plane that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean after leaving JFK airport, with 33 high ranking Egyptian military officers on board, allegedly by the fault of a suicidal Egyptian co-pilot] as well as supported the FBI on scene at the World Trade Center in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001.” I sure wouldn’t trust Robert Pearce to investigate my own plane crash.

In the final analysis, it is the explanation of the crash that is strikingly implausible. As Anthony Hilder put it:

“A finely-tuned, well-kept first-class airplane doesn’t just drop out of the sky and head straight down into the ocean unless it’s blown out of the sky or the pilot deliberately sends it into a dive to kill himself and his passengers.”[73]

There is evidence of an accumulation of deliberate omissions, lies and false testimonies from the NTSB investigation to mainstream reporting, in order to blame the plane crash on the pilot alone, regardless of inconsistencies. And so, between accident and assassination, I lean strongly toward assassination.

Who orchestrated the plot, then? Behind every Kennedy assassination, John Hankey sees the Bushs, heirs to the Nazis, he insists. Hankey belongs to the category of half-truthers who would rather see the hands of Nazis than of the Mossad. He believes JFK Jr. named his magazine George as a way to “tell everyone who he thought killed his father, by hiding the answer in plain sight.” Hankey doesn’t suspect the Clintons at all. Neither does John Koerner, who starts his book Exploding the Truth by a chapter for “exonerating the Clintons”: the Clintons loved the Kennedys so much they would never have done them harm, he wants us to believe.[74]

Donald Jeffries is more rational when suggesting to add John F. Kennedy Jr. to the list of the notorious “Clinton Body Count”, which already includes quite many deaths by plane crash: Victor Raiser, the Clinton presidential campaign’s national finance cochairman (July 30, 1992), Dr. Stanley Heard, a member of Clinton’s health-care advisory committee (September 10, 1993), Hershel Friday, Clinton’s Finance Committee chairman (March 1, 1994). After all, the Navy takeover of the rescue and recovery missions, and the whole national security protocol around the case, can only have been ordered by President Clinton. Roger Stone, a longtime aide to President Richard Nixon and investigator into JFK’s death, believes the Clintons ordered the murder of JFK Jr.’s because he was planning to run for the Senate seat that Hillary coveted.[75]

Yet the Clintons certainly had nothing to do with JFK or RFK’s assassinations. So whatever role they played in the case of JFK Jr.’s assassination, they must have been part of a larger scheme. Even if Hillary had a motive to eliminate JFK Jr. from the New York Senate race, I don’t think she would have gotten away with it without higher protections. Let us not forget also that, in all Kennedy assassinations, the key factor for success is the complicity of the mainstream media for more 50 years. The Clintons don’t own the media.

Like Michael Collins Piper long before me, and like Ron Unz more recently, I believe that Israel assassinated both JFK and RFK. From there follows naturally the hypothesis that Israel also killed JFK Jr., and for the very same reason as they killed RFK: to prevent him from ever reaching the White House and reopening the investigation on his father’s death. When I say “Israel”, I mean it in the broad sense, as including all the Machiavellian crypto-Zionists infiltrated in all layers of the U.S. power structure, including corporate media.

Israel did not just assassinate Kennedys. They keep assassinating their memory, through a constant flow of anti-Kennedy books attacking their character and vilifying their family. This is what JFK researcher James DiEugenio calls “the posthumous assassination of JFK,” the obsession to “smother any legacy that might linger”; for “assassination is futile if a man’s ideas live on through others.”[76] Take for example pseudo-biographer C. David Heymann, who after working for the Mossad in Israel (from his own admission), returned to the U.S. only to write Kennedy biographies, including the salacious Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story, and went on, after JFK Jr.’s death, to claim a ten-year secret acquaintance with him in order to fill the media with rubbish.[77] Why do publishers and mainstream media keep taking Heymann seriously? Why does the New York Post give a positive review of his latest book, American Legacy: The Story of John and Caroline Kennedy (2007), which portrays John Junior as a “novice pilot” who boarded his plane half-drunk and under heavy medication (“Vicodin to relieve the pain of a recently broken ankle, plus Ritalin for attention-deficit disorder and medication for a thyroid problem”), who took off while “the haze had already grown thick and viscous,” and who spent the last 30 seconds of his life “not knowing up from down, frantically pulling at his plane’s controls in a panicked attempt to right its deadly spiral,” “with whirling instruments sending him messages he couldn’t read”?[78]

The Jewish elites have hated the Kennedys ever since Joseph Kennedy, as U.S. ambassador in London, tried to prevent Roosevelt from entering World War II, resigned when he did, and then complained that “the Jews have won the war.”[79] Kennedys must pay for “the sins of the father,” as Ronald Kessler titled his book (The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded, 1996), a not-so-subtle reference to Exodus 20:5 asserting Yahweh’s right of vengeance on three generations. The Jewish elites also hated the Kennedys for everything they represented, including a very strong sense of blood kinship that Jews prefer Gentiles not to have.

Paradoxically, in a nation founded on the rejection of monarchy, the Kennedys embodied the idea of ​​royalty, the highest form of a dynastic aristocracy founded not just on the accumulation of wealth and power, but on a patriotic dedication to civil service. It is as if the archetype of royalty had crystallized in the United States on this family, to the point that the name of King Arthur’s court, Camelot, has stuck to their legend. The Kennedys also embodied the Irish Catholic root of the American people, with its deep-seated antagonism to British puritanism, the more Israel-friendly branch of Christianity, which has come to dominate American politics since Lyndon Johnson (“Our First Jewish President” as one American Jewish newspaper calls him).[80] From this point of view, the triple assassination of President Kennedy, his younger brother and his only son are the equivalent in Western Christendom of the extermination of the Romanov family in Orthodox Russia. And I believe that, just like Russia with the Tsar family, America will only be great again when it opens the archives and honors the Kennedys as national martyrs of a foreign power.

But wait: there is still one male heir to John F. Kennedy: Jack Schlossberg, son of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg. Will he become “our first Jewish president,” asks Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure he won’t be assassinated.

Notes

[1] https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NTSB_NTSB_releases_final_report_on_investigation_of_crash_of_aircraft_piloted_by_John_F._Kennedy_Jr.aspx

[2] Pierre Salinger, “Mourned for what he might have been,” UPI, August 6, 1999, reproduced on http://www.orwelltoday.com/jfksalinger.shtml

[3] Dave Saltonstall, Austin Fenner, Helen Kennedy And Greg B. Smith, “John F. Kennedy Jr. went missing after taking a flight with his wife and her sister in 1999,” New York Daily News, July 18, 1999, on http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/plane-lost-vineyard-wife-sis-craft-t-article-1.846379

[4] Laurence Leamer, Sons of Camelot: The Fate of an American Dynasty, HarperCollins, 2005, kindle, k. 225-67.

[5] Jackie’s words reported by Pierre Salinger, quoted from Christopher Andersen, The Good Son, JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved, Gallery Boosk, 2014, kindle, k. 1912-4.

[6] Andersen, The Good Son, op. cit., k. 1645-52

[7] Andersen, The Good Son, k. 1962-7.

[8] Pierre Salinger, “Mourned for what he might have been,” UPI, August 6, 1999, reproduced on http://www.orwelltoday.com/jfksalinger.shtml

[9] Olivier Royant, John, le dernier des Kennedy, Éditions de l’Observatoire, 2018.

[10] Andersen, The Good Son, op. cit., k. 671-3

[11] John Quinn, “Like Father Like Son”, http://www.angelfire.com/ms/leg/JFK.html

[12] Pierre Salinger, “Mourned for what he might have been,” UPI, August 6, 1999, reproduced on http://www.orwelltoday.com/jfksalinger.shtml

[13] Andersen, The Good Son, op. cit., k. 4300-4309

[14] Andersen, The Good Son, op. cit., k. 4808-11.

[15] Read Robert D. McFadden’s report on https://ia801309.us.archive.org/10/items/nsia-KennedyJohnFJr/nsia-KennedyJohnFJr/Kennedy%20John%20F%20Jr%2002.pdf

[16] Liz McNeil, “Would JFK Jr. Have Run for President? His Best Friends Reveal His Last Days”, July 19, 2016, https://people.com/celebrity/john-f-kennedy-jr-for-president-jfks-sons-political-ambition/

[17] Dominique Page, “Kennedy Junior: La pure hypothèse de l’assassinat,” https://largeur.com/?p=147

[18] Joe Siegel, “JFK Jr. Mulled Run For Senate in 2000,” New York Daily News, July 20, 1999, http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/jfk-jr-mulled-run-senate-2000-article-1.847866

[19] Liz McNeil, “Would JFK Jr. Have Run for President? His Best Friends Reveal His Last Days”, July 19, 2016, https://people.com/celebrity/john-f-kennedy-jr-for-president-jfks-sons-political-ambition/

[20] Matt Donnelly, “JFK Jr Would Have Run for President in 2016, Top Aide Says,” The Wrap, July 29, 2016, https://www.thewrap.com/jfk-jr-would-have-run-for-president-in-2016-top-aide-says/ Asked for People magazine if she tought JFK Jr. would have run for president, Terenzio answers: “I do think that eventually he would have made the leap” (video on https://people.com/celebrity/john-f-kennedy-jr-for-president-jfks-sons-political-ambition/ at 3 minutes).

[21] Liz McNeil, “Would JFK Jr. Have Run for President? His Best Friends Reveal His Last Days”, July 19, 2016, https://people.com/celebrity/john-f-kennedy-jr-for-president-jfks-sons-political-ambition/

[22] Joe Siegel, “JFK Jr. Mulled Run For Senate in 2000,” New York Daily News, July 20, 1999, http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/jfk-jr-mulled-run-senate-2000-article-1.847866

[23] Christopher Andersen, The Good Son: JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved, Gallery Books, 2014, kindle k. 4918-44.

[24] Read on Google.books. The audio recording of the book is on Youtube: this passage starts at 7:52.

[25] Wayne Madsen, “JFK Jr.’s Plane Crash Was Originally Treated As Murder Investigation,” August 12, 2009, on http://www.whale.to/c/jfk_jr5.html

[26] Andrew Collins, “Hillary Clinton & The Mysterious Death of JFK Jr.,” May 8, 2016, http://pmnightlynews.com/index.php/2016/05/08/clinton-jfk-investigation/

[27] Laurence Leamer, Sons of Camelot: The Fate of an American Dynasty, HarperCollins, 2005, kindle k. 8297, quoted in Keith J. Kelly, “JFK Jr. Mad at Hill Senate Run: Book,” New York Post, March 16, 2004, https://nypost.com/2004/03/16/jfk-jr-mad-at-hill-senate-run-book/

[28] Quoted in John Koerner, Exploding the Truth: The JFK Jr., Assassination, Chronos Books, 2018, kindle k. 540-45.

[29] Quoted in Koerner, Exploding the Truth, op. cit., k. 540-5.

[30] https://midnightwriternews.com/mwn-episode-093-donald-jeffries-and-the-death-of-jfk-jr/

[31] Wayne Madsen, “JFK Jr.’s Plane Crash Was Originally Treated As Murder Investigation,” Wayne Madsen Report, August 12, 2009, on http://www.whale.to/c/jfk_jr5.html. Madsen told more details to Jeffries, who reports them in his book Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics, Skyhorse publishing, 2016, kindle k. 3981.

[32] Pierre Salinger, “TWA 800: The Truth Is Out There; Tell It,” Georgetowner, May 27, 1999, https://georgetowner.com/articles/2013/07/22/salingers-accusations-about-twa-flight-800-resurface-new-documentary/

[33] Philip Weiss, “Radar Shows ‘Getaway Boat’ Fleeing Flight 800 Crash,” The Oberver, July 12, 1999, https://observer.com/1999/07/radar-shows-getaway-boat-fleeing-flight-800-crash/

[34] Gordon Thomas, Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2015, p. 95-99.

[35] Guela Amir, “A Mother’s Defense”, George, March 1997, reproduced on groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/soc.culture.usa/P-mc7BFF1Nc/K3S6Bizg-U4J

[36] Barry Chamish, “The Murder of JFK Jr – Ten Years Later,” http://www.barrychamish.com, reproduced on http://www.rense.com/general87/tenyrs.htm

[37] Barry Chamish, “A Zionist Looks at Final Judgment,” http://www.barrychamish.com, reproduced on https://rense.com/politics5/zionist.htm

[38] Laurence Leamer, Sons of Camelot: The Fate of an American Dynasty, HarperCollins, 2005, kindle k. 225-67.

[39] Wayne Madsen, “JFK Jr.’s Plane Crash Was Originally Treated As Murder Investigation,” August 12, 2009, on http://www.whale.to/c/jfk_jr5.html

[40] Mitchell Zuckoff and Matthew Brelis, “Plane fell fast, probe finds,” Boston Globe, July 20, 1999, http://archive.boston.com/news/packages/jfkjr/072099_plane_fell.htm

[41] UPI article saved on http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/CRASH/JFK_JR/upi.html

[42] John Quinn, “Hard Evidence Obtained of Conspiracy, Cover-up in JFK Jr. Death,” on http://www.angelfire.com/wy/1000/HardEvidence.html

[43] Donald Jeffries, Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics, Skyhorse publishing, 2016, kindle k. 3908-14.

[44] Mitchell Zuckoff and Matthew Brelis, “Plane fell fast, probe finds,” Boston Globe, July 20, 1999, http://archive.boston.com/news/packages/jfkjr/072099_plane_fell.htm

[45] Dave Saltonstall and Bill Hutchinson, “Angler May Have Heard Crash,” New York Daily News, July 21, 1999, http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/angler-heard-crash-article-1.846018

[46] Anthony Hilder’s article, “The explosive story: a Second Opinion on the Kennedy Crash,” Free World Alliance, was recently accessible at http://netowne.com/conspiracy/konformist/kennedy.htm, from which I secured a copy, but is no more.

[47] John DiNardo, “JFK Jr. Sky Flash Reporter Unapproachable”, August 9, 1999, on https://rense.com/politics4/jekunap.htm. Also in John Quinn, “JFK Plane Explosion Eyewitness ‘Compromised’ And/Or Missing,” 8-6-99, http://pages.suddenlink.net/anomalousimages/images/news/news489.html

[48] Mitchell Zuckoff and Matthew Brelis, “Plane fell fast, probe finds,” Boston Globe, July 20, 1999, http://archive.boston.com/news/packages/jfkjr/072099_plane_fell.htm

[49] Jeb Burnside, “Revisiting JFK, Jr.,” Aviation Safety Magazine, June 2016, http://www.aviationsafetymagazine.com/issues/36_6/features/Revisiting-JFK-Jr_11190-1.html

[50] Mitchell Zuckoff and Matthew Brelis, “Plane fell fast, probe finds,” Boston Globe, July 20, 1999, http://archive.boston.com/news/packages/jfkjr/072099_plane_fell.htm

[51] Wayne Madsen, “JFK Jr.’s Plane Crash Was Originally Treated As Murder Investigation,” August 12, 2009, on http://www.whale.to/c/jfk_jr5.html

[52] First reported by John Quinn, “Hard Evidence Obtained of Conspiracy, Cover-up in JFK Jr. Death,” on http://www.angelfire.com/wy/1000/HardEvidence.html, reproduced by Donald Jeffries, Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics, Skyhorse publishing, 2016, kindle k. 3956-61, and by John Koerner, Exploding the Truth: The JFK Jr., Assassination, Chronos Books, 2018, kindle k. 1228-46.

[53] Dale Russakoffand Lynne Duke, “JFK Jr.’s Joyful, Fateful Final Hours,” Washington Post, July 21, 1999, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/07/21/jfk-jrs-joyful-fateful-final-hours/308a73e7-5bfb-4995-a25c-38e0f3cbbd08/?utm_term=.35b9f292747c

[54] Dave Saltonstall, Austin Fenner, Helen Kennedy And Greg B. Smith, “John F. Kennedy Jr. went missing after taking a flight with his wife and her sister in 1999,” New York Daily News, July 18, 1999, on http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/plane-lost-vineyard-wife-sis-craft-t-article-1.846379

[55] John Quinn, “Was JFK Jr Murdered?”, August 2, 1999, http://www.angelfire.com/wy/1000/WasJFKJR.Murdered.html

[56] Michael Daly, NY Daily News, July 18, 1999, quoted from John Koerner, Exploding the Truth: The JFK Jr., Assassination, Chronos Books, 2018, kindle k. 1211-19.

[57] Alan Levin, Kevin Johnson, and Deborah Sharp, “Pilot Kennedy was ‘conscientious guy,’” USA Today, July 21, 1999, quoted in Koermer, Exploding the Truth, op. cit., k. 1211-19.

[58] Quoted in John Koerner, Exploding the Truth, op. cit., k. 1179-95.

[59] Donald Jeffries, Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics ,Skyhorse publishing, 2016, kindle k. 3879-81.

[60] Christopher Andersen, The Good Son: JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved, Gallery Books, 2014, kindle k. 141-43.

[61] Ricardo Alonzo-Zaldivar, “Instructor Offered to Fly with JFK Jr., Report Says,” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2000, http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jul/07/news/mn-49042

[62] Koerner, Exploding the Truth, op. cit., k. 1392-1427.

[63] UPI article reproduced on http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/CRASH/JFK_JR/upi.html

[64] Jeffries, Hidden History, op. cit. k. 3930-32.

[65] L. C. Vinvent, “On the Elimination of Natural Leaders,” January 22, 2013, https://www.henrymakow.com/on-the-elimination-of-natural.html

[66] Joanna Weiss and Matthew Brelis, “JFK Autopsy Rushed,” Boston Globe, July 23, 1999, http://archive.boston.com/news/packages/jfkjr/0722_coroner.htm

[67] Paula Maxwell, “Kennedy Cremated in Duxbury,” Duxbury Clipper, July 28, 1999.

[68] Mitchell Zuckoff, “Bodies of 3 are recovered,” Boston Globe, July 22, 1999, http://archive.boston.com/news/packages/jfkjr/bodies_recovered.htm

[69] Quoted in Jeffries, Hidden History, op. cit., k. 4121-25.

[70] Mike Allen, “Bodies From Kennedy Crash Are Found,” New York Times, July 22, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/22/us/bodies-from-kennedy-crash-are-found.html

[71] “Remains of JFK Jr., wife and sister-in-law buried at sea,” July 22, 1999, http://edition.cnn.com/US/9907/22/kennedy.plane.07/

[72] Michael Zennie, “The Kennedys fought Over Where Bodies Would Be Buried… “, Daily Mail, November 3, 2013, on https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2486083/Kennedys-fought-bodies-buried-JFK-Jr-plane-crash-bullied-heartbroken-mother-wife-Carolyn.html

[73] Anthony Hilder, “The explosive story: a Second Opinion on the Kennedy Crash,” Free World Alliance, read on http://netowne.com/conspiracy/konformist/kennedy.htm.

[74] Another artile of the same vein: https://www.popdust.com/conspiracy-theory-thursdayjfk-jr-was-murdered-and-you-wont-believe-who-1892591783.html

[75] Darren Boyle “Conspiracy theorist claims Hillary Clinton ‘murdered’ John F Kennedy Jnr because he was planning to run for the same senate seat as her in shocking new book,” MailOnline, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3539583/Conspiracy-theorist-claims-Hillary-Clinton-murdered-John-F-Kennedy-Jnr-planning-run-senate-seat-shocking-new-book.html

[76] James DiEugenio, “The Posthumous Assassination of JFK”, in The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, Feral House, 2003.

[77] Andrew Goldman, Observer, August 2, 199, “Kennedy ‘Expert’ C. David Heymann: Do His J.F.K. Jr. Stories Hold Up?”, http://observer.com/1999/08/kennedy-expert-c-david-heymann-do-his-jfk-jr-stories-hold-up/ Read also David Cay Johnston, “C. David Heymann’s Lies About JFK and Jackie, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor”, Newsweek Magazine, August 27, 2014, http://www.newsweek.com/2014/09/05/c-david-heymanns-career-serial-fabulist-266876.html

[78] Elizabeth Wolff, “Inside JFK JR.’s Daze of Doom”, New York Post, June 17, 2007, https://nypost.com/2007/06/17/inside-jfk-jr-s-daze-of-doom/

[79] Quoted in Herbert Druks, John F. Kennedy and Israel, Praeger Security International, 2005, p. 10

[80] Morris Smith, “Our First Jewish President Lyndon Johnson? – an update!!,” 5 Towns Jewish Times, April 11, 2013, on 5tjt.com.

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