11/22/05 The New Watergate, and JFK Assassination Anniversary
Tom Dispatch
Judith Coburn on the Return of Watergate
Excerpt:
George W. Bush and his associates must have remarkably short memories. While he has been careful to mouth words of cooperation in the Plamegate case, he has depended on the Republican control of Congress to stonewall on just about every egregious misdeed that has seen the light of day, blocking public hearings into Abu Ghraib, the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, the CIA secret prison system, faux intelligence on Iraq, and Plamegate itself.
That felicitous Watergate phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" and the word "impeachment" are now heard in circles on the left, with the legal grounds for impeachment being explored by lawyers like Elizabeth de la Vega in the Nation magazine and at Tomdispatch. But what special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald may still lack to crack open the case for a White House-led conspiracy to manipulate intelligence, destroy the Wilsons, and get back at the CIA is a whistleblower like John ("there's a cancer on the Presidency") Dean or even Jeb Magruder, the top Republican campaign aide who helped plan the Watergate break-in and cover-up, only to finally cop a plea. Now that I. Lewis Libby and New York Times reporter Judy Miller, thick as thieves -- "entanglement" was the word that paper's Executive Editor Bill Keller used -- before the vice-presidential chief of staff's indictment, have been designated the fall folks in Plamegate and the administration's rush to war in Iraq, the question is: Could resentment for shouldering the blame alone (so far) lead Libby to disloyal testimony against his higher-ups as happened in Watergate?
What Really Happened
The Death Of John Kennedy
Excerpt:
The House Select Commitee on Assassinations concluded that John F. Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy based on the recording of the gunshots fired in Dealey Plaza, captured over a police radio. A total of 7 impulses were caught on the tape, but citing budgetary constraints, the HSCA only had 4 of them analysed. The analysis concluded that all 4 were gunshots, two of them occuring within 1/2 a second of each other, too close to be fired by one man. Comparisons of the echoes with test shots fired in Deakel Plaza confirmed that at least one of the recorded shots had indeed been fired from the Grassy Knoll. Needless to say, the existance of 5, rather than just 3, gunshots destroyed the Oswald as lone gunman cover-up. Warren supporters quickly tried to dismiss the audio record of the gunshots by claiming that the recording was actually of gunshots in another part of the city, and confused for Dealey Plaza shots because of a timing error. Without explaining just where the other shots had occured, or why the echo patterns matched matched the test shots fired in Dealey Plaza, the Warren supporters declared victory. New research has shown that the report that dismissed the audio recording of the gunshots was itself deeply flawed, and ignored evidence that confirmed both the locatrion and time of the recording as being in Dealey Plaza at the time of the JFK assassination. This means that the original House Select Committee on Assassinations conclusion is the correct one. There were at least four gunshots in Dealey Plaza, two of them within 1/2 second of each other, and at least one of the shots came from the Grassy Knoll.
