Tag: conspiracy

Nixon’s Plan to Threaten the CIA on JFK’s Assassination

The Washington Post dubbed it “the smoking gun tape.” It was the recording that doomed the presidency of Richard Nixon. The transcript of a conversation that took place on June 23, 1972, when made public by Supreme Court order in July 1974, became the climactic revelation of the Watergate affair, proving beyond all doubt that Nixon used CIA director Richard Helms to suborn the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate burglars.

Fifty years after the botched break-in that transformed American politics, the gangsterly dialogue of the smoking gun tape is less shocking than Trumpian. Blackmail as a mode of White House politics? President 45 had nothing on President 37.

“We protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things,” Nixon growled on the tape. “You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things, and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, [ex-CIA man and Watergate burglar Howard] Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.”

Nixon advised chief of staff H.R. Haldeman on how to get the CIA director to kill the FBI’s probe.

“Say, ‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that, ah, without going into the details … don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.’”

The June 23 tape was incontrovertible evidence that Nixon had obstructed justice. The last vestige of support for Nixon on Capitol Hill evaporated. Two weeks later, on Aug. 8, 1974, Nixon resigned.

But the “smoking gun tape” was not only the denouement of the Watergate affair. It was — and is — an unsettling glimpse into the dark heart of the Watergate scandal, and the workings of American power in the mid-20th century. The commander in chief voiced ominous threats that reeked of unspoken crimes to his intelligence chief, whose agency had employed four of the seven burglars. For the next 50 years, Nixon’s entourage, JFK conspiracy theorists, journalists and historians pondered the June 23 tape as a Rosetta Stone of Nixon’s psyche. What “hanky panky” was Nixon referring to? What did he mean by “the whole Bay of Pigs thing?” What story was going to “blow” if the CIA didn’t cooperate?

A long-overlooked White House tape provides the answers. The “hanky panky” referred to CIA assassination operations in the early 1960s. The “whole Bay of Pigs thing” was the Agency’s reaction to its most humiliating defeat. And the story that might blow was the connection between those events and the murder of JFK.

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Iraqi Man in Ohio Charged in Plot to Murder Former President George W. Bush

An Iraqi man living in Columbus, Ohio, has been charged by federal authorities for allegedly plotting to smuggle foreign nationals into the United States as part of a plot to assassinate former President George W. Bush.

Agents from the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, 52, Tuesday morning. He appeared in federal court at 2:30 p.m. and his case was unsealed at that time, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

Authorities caught Shihab in a sting set up under the direction of the FBI.

In August 2021, Shihab allegedly intended to help who he thought was an Iraqi citizen enter the country for a $40,000 fee.

“Shihab provided specific instructions on how he would smuggle the person into the United States after 60 days. In October and December 2021, Shihab accepted tens of thousands of dollars for the purported smuggling. In reality, the individual was fictitious, and the interaction was coordinated under the direction of the FBI,” the DOJ said in a release.

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9/11, Apollo, Covid — Lies, Lies, Lies

On September 7th, 2001 I was on a business trip to New York as an employee of Sprint. It was a beautiful blue-sky day, and I recall standing in a skyscraper on Times Square and looking down Broadway towards Lower Manhattan and the Twin Towers. Four days later I was hiking in Zion National Park when the world exploded into madness.

For years I had no reason to question the official narrative of that day, and accepted it without question. I was aware of “conspiracy theories” and alternative views, but I saw them as fringe and unimportant. My life revolved around professional advancement, small children, and personal dislocations.

The illegal and illegitimate wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gave me pause for thought. I remember giving Tony Blair the benefit of the doubt over the Iraq war, and dismissing the case made by peace protestors that the WMD pretext was fabricated. Clearly, I was wrong, and had been fooled.

Around the year 2010 I returned to the story of 9/11, and began to dig into these challenges to the widely accepted account. The more I looked, the greater was my concern. I could not be sure what had happened, or who really was behind the attacks, or what the real motive was. But I could not reconcile the hard data with the standard explanation given.

To believe the official version, you had to overlook a lot of very hard-to-ignore anomalies. The Twin Towers had free-fall collapsed, turning to dust on the way down, and leaving minimal piles of rubble (compared to their size) heaped upon molten rock that took months to cool. The suggested progressive collapse process breaks the law of conservation of momentum.

WTC7 also implausibly collapsed on itself due to “office fires”, with it being announced by the BBC before it happened. A secret engineering model was used to justify this unlikely and unique event. WTC6 had its core disappear, but that can be overlooked as unimportant. All the crime scene debris was hauled off to China for disposal rather than kept.

There was evidence of pre-planted explosives, and you could even see some going off prematurely on floors below the one that was failing. Multiple eyewitness reports also gave evidence of explosions before the collapse. The alleged aircraft flew implausible flight paths only to leave negligible debris. The towers were explicitly designed to withstand such an impact, yet both failed in exactly the same way.

Meanwhile at the Pentagon, another “aircraft” magically skimmed the grass only to disappear into a hold in the wall smaller than its fuselage, with no trace of impact of wings or engines. That wall just happened to have the audit team for the theft of trillions of dollars that had been announced the day before. The “crash” in Pennsylvania also (coincidentally I am sure) left no visible aircraft debris.

Speaking of money, the evidence of massive insurance fraud was self-evidently irrelevant. So was all the insider dealing in the stock market that presaged what was to come. All common sense questions about money and military matters could be overlooked, especially anything to do with the Saudis. Meanwhile, all this happened while the military stood down and no planes were scrambled. And just by coincidence (again) the CCTV cameras were all turned off at the Pentagon so there was no evidence to contradict the official version. Why so?

The biased and under-resourced investigation committee ignored reams of objections from military, pilots, architects, engineers, and first responders (who perplexingly seemed to be dying from conditions more associated with radiation poisoning). The patsy offered immediately and unquestioningly at the outset was accepted as the perpetrator. No alternative theories were entertained.

Nobody should ever consider this a pre-planned event, especially given decades of foreshadowing in the mass media. Indeed, the occult symbolism all over it — George Bush reading “My Pet Goat” for instance — is of no relevance whatsoever. We should automatically agree that the two wars and millions of dead that flowed from the official story are a price worth paying for our freedom.

Looking back it is hard to see how anyone can believe the official story, it is so ridiculous and full of holes. But a decade ago I still doubted myself, because to reject it raised two profound issues. The first was that our collective sense of reality was wrong, and our system of government was corrupt and criminal to its core, yet most people believed in it somehow. The second was why there was no objection from honest military people and no obvious counter-movement to depose these criminals from power.

These lingering questions meant I kept my views to myself and didn’t discuss them in my professional or public spheres. In the years that followed my first accepted “conspiracy theory”, I was involved in paradigm-busting and pioneering telecoms work. My expert colleagues were well versed in seeing through the nonsense of the mainstream ideology. Yet one day I suggested that the Apollo story was a bit off, and they looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

If you want to dig into the moon landing story, I suggest the wonderful essay series “Wagging the Moondoggie” by (the sadly departed) Dave McGowan. It is fabulous writing, and exceptionally funny once you dig into it. If the 9/11 story is tragically absurd, the Apollo one is astronomically comical. I cannot imagine any reasonable and rational person coming away from reading this and still having no questions about the offered version of events.

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One lie that hides an enormous conspiracy: Inside the trial that exposes Clinton’s plot to slander Trump

Special Counsel John Durham appears to have methodically built a case of historic consequence. It’s just not the case he has brought against bigshot Democratic Party lawyer Michael Sussmann.

Jury selection begins in Sussmann’s trial on Monday, in Washington, DC. It will be the first trial to arise out of the Russiagate probe, which began over three years ago. That’s when former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr assigned Durham, a longtime Justice Department prosecutor from Connecticut, to investigate how, in the middle of a heated presidential campaign and based upon scant evidence, the FBI came to suspect one of the candidates of being a clandestine agent of the Kremlin — to the point of opening counterintelligence and criminal investigations targeting Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

According to court filings in the Sussmann case, Durham has fingered the Hillary Clinton campaign as the culprit. The problem is that Durham has not charged that fraudulent scheme. Yet, he wants to offer evidence of the sweeping scheme in order to prove a comparatively minor and narrow offense — namely, that Sussmann lied to the FBI at a single meeting, on September 19, 2016.

Durham theorizes that the Clinton campaign concocted a political smear that Trump was a Putin puppet, then peddled the tale to a compliant media and to the FBI. This would enable Clinton to tout the “evidence” of corrupt Trump-Russia ties as so serious that the Feds were investigating.

Durham contends that the Clinton campaign left most of the scandal-mongering to its lawyers. Thus did Sussmann become central to the scheme, as did his law partner, Marc Elias. (Both attorneys have since left their white shoe international law firm, Perkins-Coie.) The deployment of lawyers in their schemes and scandals is a time-tested Clinton modus operandi, enabling them to claim attorney-client privilege to cover their tracks when controversy erupts and investigators start snooping around — a frequent occurrence over the last 30 years.

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Black Secret Service Agent, Jailed for JFK Plot Warning, Cleared: The Full Story

On April 26, President Joe Biden pardoned Abraham Bolden, an 87-year-old who was the first Black man to join the presidential Secret Service security detail.

Bolden’s presidential pardon — for a ginned-up 1964 bribery conviction based on the testimony of witnesses who later admitted to lying — was the first introduction for many Americans to Bolden. The pardon statement characterized him as a brave and noble advocate for racial justice, who spoke out against the racist behavior of other Secret Service agents, and who maintained his innocence during his bribery trials and subsequent prison term. 

But neither Biden nor the international news media that briefly picked up on Bolden’s pardon mentioned the explosive core issue: the ex-agent’s role in trying to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 

To this day, Bolden believes that it was his warnings about problems with the Secret Service prior to Kennedy’s death, his knowledge of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy in an early November trip to Chicago, and his efforts to share what he knew with the Warren Commission that led to his being targeted with false charges. 

This crucial context was not included in the White House press release, nor in most of the press coverage.

“I think readers don’t understand at all,” Bolden told WhoWhatWhy. “They just understand that I was pardoned. 

“They don’t have the details of what occurred and what it had to do with the assassination of President Kennedy, how I was treated, the reason for my incarceration, the effort to declare me insane. Or the fact that I wrote a book that explained everything. That’s not before the public.” 

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It’s Time We Get Answers About the FBI’s Involvement In the OKC Bombing

This past week marked the 27th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. As the worst terrorist act committed on U.S. soil at the time, we all know the reported facts of the horrific event well: a 27-year-old Desert Storm-vet, Timothy McVeigh, acting with minimal help from Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, detonated a 7,000-pound fertilizer bomb from a parked Ryder truck outside the federal Alfred P. Murrah building, killing 168 people, 19 of them children.

Two years later, in 1997, McVeigh was convicted of “Using a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death,” among other federal charges. For a time, he was held on the same cell block as the Unabomber and WTC-bomber Ramzi Yousef (who tried to convert him to Islam), before being put to death by lethal injection in 2001.

There is much we still don’t know about the case, however. Thanks to years of heroic work by people like Salt Lake City-based attorney Jesse Trentadue, writer and researcher J.M. Berger, and independent investigative reporter Wendy S. Painting, the American public is slowly learning more and more key (and disturbing) facts about the case. Facts involving the FBI’s possible incitement of McVeigh and the subsequent cover-up of these facts by Newsweek magazine.

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Who Whacked CIA Spy Chief William Colby?

On May 7, 1996, the Charles County Sheriff’s Office found the body of former CIA Director William E. Colby, 76, washed up on the shore of the Wicomico River near his canoe, about a quarter mile from his country home on Cobb Island, Maryland.

Colby’s death was ruled a drowning accident. Nine days earlier, he had allegedly gone canoeing at dusk, never to return.

A graduate of Princeton University who parachuted behind Nazi lines in France during World War II as a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) elite Jedburgh teams, Colby had spent most of his adult life as a cold warrior in his country’s clandestine service, “a soldier-priest,” as a colleague called him, on a covert crusade.[1]

According to his New York Times obituary, Colby “perfected the look of an invisible man: gray suits, graying hair, glasses with translucent frames the color of pale white skin.”

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