USA!! Our future?? - We all live in America, America sometimes war...

"Economic Terrorism": The Consequences are Poverty and Mass Unemployment

by David DeGraw

“The (US-)American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.” — Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not

Yes, of course, we all have very strong differences of opinion on many issues.

However, like our Founding Fathers before us, we must put aside our differences and unite to fight a common enemy. It has now become evident to a critical mass that the Republican and Democratic parties, along with all three branches of our government, have been bought off by a well-organized Economic Elite who are tactically destroying our way of life. The harsh truth is that 99% of the US population no longer has political representation. The US economy, government and tax system is now blatantly rigged against us.

Current statistical societal indicators clearly demonstrate that a strategic attack has been launched and an analysis of current governmental policies prove that conditions for a large majority of US-Americans will continue to deteriorate. The Economic Elite have engineered a financial coup and have brought war to our doorstep. . . and make no mistake, they have launched a war to eliminate the US middle class.

Unless we all unite and organize on common ground, our very way of life and the ideals that our country was founded upon will continue to unravel.

Before exposing exactly who the Economic Elite are, and discussing common sense ways in which we can defeat them, let’s take a look at how much damage they have already caused.

I: "Economic Terrorism": Surveying the Damage

America is the richest nation in history, yet we now have the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world with an unprecedented amount of US-Americans living in dire straights and over 50 million citizens already living in poverty.

The government has come up with clever ways to down play all of these numbers, but we have over 50 million people who need to use food stamps to eat, and a stunning 50% of US children will use a food stamp to eat at some point in their childhood. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day. In 2009, one out of five US households didn’t have enough money to buy food. In households with children, this number rose to 24%, as the hunger rate among US citizens has now reached an all time high.

We also currently have over 50 million US citizens without healthcare. 1.4 million US-Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a 32% increase from 2008. As bankruptcies continue to skyrocket, medical bankruptcies are responsible for over 60% of them, and over 75% of the medical bankruptcies filed are from people who have healthcare insurance. We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, we are forced to pay  twice as much as other countries and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world.

In total, US-Americans have lost $5 trillion from their pensions and savings since the economic crisis began and $13 trillion in the value of their homes. During the first full year of the crisis, workers between the age of 55 - 60, who have worked for 20 - 29 years, have lost an average of 25% off their 401k. “Personal debt has risen from 65% of income in 1980 to 125% today.” Over five million US families have already lost their homes, in total 13 million US families are expected to lose their home by 2014, with 25% of current mortgages underwater. Deutsche Bank has an even grimmer prediction: “The percentage of ‘underwater’ loans may rise to 48 percent, or 25 million homes.” Every day 10,000 US homes enter foreclosure. Statistics show that an increasing number of these people are not finding shelter elsewhere, there are now over 3 million homeless US-Americans, the fastest growing segment of the homeless population is single parents with children.

One place more and more US-Americans are finding a home is in prison. With a prison population of 2.3 million people, we now have more people incarcerated than any other nation in the world - the per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000 citizens. In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000, France has 80 per 100,000, Saudi Arabia has 45 per 100,000. The prison industry is thriving and expecting major growth over the next few years. A recent report from the Hartford Advocate titled “Incarceration Nation” revealed that “a new prison opens every week somewhere in America.”

Mass Unemployment

The government unemployment rate is deceptive on several levels. It doesn’t count people who are “involuntary part-time workers,” meaning workers who are working part-time but want to find full-time work. It also doesn’t count “discouraged workers,” meaning long-term unemployed people who lost hope and don’t consistently look for work. As time goes by, more and more people stop consistently looking for work and are discounted from the unemployment figure. For instance, in January, 1.1 million workers were eliminated from the unemployment total because they were “officially” labeled “discouraged workers.” So instead of the number rising, we will hear deceptive reports about unemployment leveling off.

On top of this, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently discovered that 824,000 job losses were never accounted for due to a “modeling error” in their data. Even in their initial January data there appears to be a huge understating, with the newest report saying the economy lost 20,000 jobs. TrimTabs employment analysis, which has consistently provided more accurate data, “estimated that the U.S. economy shed 104,000 jobs in January.”

When you factor in all these uncounted workers — “involuntary part-time” and “discouraged workers” — the unemployment rate rises from 9.7% to over 20%. In total, we now have over 30 million US citizens who are unemployed or underemployed. The rarely cited “employment-participation” rate, which reveals the percentage of the population that is currently in the workforce, has now fallen to 64%.

Even based on the “official” unemployment rate, just to get back to the unemployment level of 4.6% that we had in 2007, we need to create over 10 million new jobs, and most every serious economist will tell you that these jobs are not coming back. In fact, we are still consistently shedding jobs, on just one day, January 27th, several companies announced new cuts of more than 60,000 jobs.

Due to the length of this crisis already, millions of US-Americans are reaching a point where the unemployment benefits that they have been surviving off of are coming to an end. More workers have already been out of work longer than at any point since statistics have been recorded, with over six million now unemployed for over six months. A record 20 million US-Americans qualified for unemployment insurance benefits last year, causing 27 states to run out of funds, with seven more also expected to go into the red within the next few months. In total, 40 state programs are expected to go broke.

Most economists believe that the unemployment rate will remain high for the foreseeable future. What will happen when we have millions of laid-off workers without any unemployment benefits to save them?

Working More for Less

The millions struggling to find work are just part of the story. Due to the fact that we now have a record high six people for every one job opening, companies have been able to further increase the workload on their remaining employees. They have been able to increase the amount of hours US-Americans are working, reduce wages and drastically cut back on benefits. Even though US-Americans were already the most productive workers in the world before the economic crisis, in the third quarter of 2009, average worker productivity increased by an annualized rate of 9.5%, at the same time unit labor cost decreased by 5.2%. This has led to record profits for many companies. Of the 220 companies in the S&P 500 who have reported fourth-quarter results thus far, 78% of them had “better-than-expected profits” with earnings 17% above expectations, “the highest for any quarter since Thomson Reuters began tracking data.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6% while the unemployment rate was 5.8%. With the unemployment rate now at 10%, median income has been falling at a 5% rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, US-Americans’ job satisfaction level is now at an all time low.

There are also a growing number of employed people who, despite having a job, are still living in poverty. There are at least 15 million workers who now fall into this rapidly growing category. $32,390 a year is not going to get you far in today’s economy, and half of the country is making less than that. This is why many US-Americans are now forced to work two jobs to provide for their family to hopefully make ends meet.

A Crime Against Humanity

The mainstream news media will numb us to this horrifying reality by endlessly talking about the latest numbers, but they never piece them together to show you the whole devastating picture, and they rarely show you all the immense individual suffering behind them. This is how they “normalize the unthinkable” and make us become passive in the face of such a high causality count.

Behind each of these numbers, is a tremendous amount of misery, the physical toll is only outdone by the severe psychological toll. Anyone who has had to put off medical care, or who couldn’t get medical care for one of their family members due to financial circumstances, can tell you about the psychological toll that is on top of the physical suffering. Anyone who has felt the stress of wondering how they were going to get their child’s next meal or their own, or the stress of not knowing how you are going to pay the mortgage, rent, electricity or heat bill, let alone the car payment, gas, phone, cable or internet bill.

There are now well over 150 million US-Americans who feel stress over these things on a consistent basis. Over 60% of US-Americans now live paycheck to paycheck.

These are all basic things that every person should be able to easily afford in a technologically advanced society such as ours. The reason why we struggle with these things is because the Economic Elite have robbed us all. This amount of suffering in the United States of America is literally a crime against humanity.

PART II

“The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.”
Noam Chomsky 

As a record number of US citizens are struggling to get by, many of the largest corporations are experiencing record-breaking profits, and CEOs are receiving record-breaking bonuses. How could this be happening; how did we get to this point?

The Economic Elite have escalated their attack on US workers over the past few years; however, this attack began to build intensity in the 1970s. In 1970, CEOs made $25 for every $1 the average worker made. Due to technological advancements, production and profit levels exploded from 1970 - 2000. With the lion’s share of increased profits going to the CEOs, this pay ratio dramatically rose to $90 for CEOs to $1 for the average worker.

As ridiculous as that seems, an in-depth study in 2004 on the explosion of CEO pay revealed that, including stock options and other benefits, CEO pay is more accurately $500 to $1.

Paul Buchheit, from DePaul University, revealed, “From 1980 to 2006 the richest 1% of America tripled their after-tax percentage of our nation’s total income, while the bottom 90% have seen their share drop over 20%.” Robert Freeman added, “Between 2002 and 2006, it was even worse: an astounding three quarters of all the economy’s growth was captured by the top 1%.”

Due to this, the United States already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the average worker much harder than CEOs, the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99% of the US population has grown to a record high. The economic top one percent of the population now owns over 70% of all financial assets, an all-time record.

As mentioned before, just look at the first full year of the crisis when workers lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. During the same time period, the wealth of the 400 richest US-Americans increased by $30 billion, bringing their total combined wealth to $1.57 trillion, which is more than the combined net worth of 50% of the US population. Just to make this point clear, 400 people have more wealth than 155 million people combined.

Meanwhile, 2009 was a record-breaking year for Wall Street bonuses, as firms issued $150 billion to their executives. 100% of these bonuses are a direct result of our tax dollars, so if we used this money to create jobs, instead of giving it to a handful of top executives, we could have paid an annual salary of $30,000 to 5 million people.

 

So while US workers are now working more hours and have become dramatically more productive and profitable, our pay is actually declining and all the dramatic increases in wealth are going straight into the pockets of the Economic Elite.

 

If our income had kept pace with compensation distribution rates established in the early 1970s, we would all be making at least three times as much as we are currently making. How different would your life be if you were making $120,000 a year, instead of $40,000?

 

So it should come as no surprise to see that we now have the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world and the highest inequality of wealth in our nation’s history. The backbone of America, a hard-working middle class that has made our country a world leader, has been devastated.

 

Now that we have a better understanding of how our income has been suppressed over the past forty years, let’s take a look at how the economy has been designed to take the limited money we receive and put it into the hands of the Economic Elite as well.

 

Costs of Living

 

Outside of the workplace, in almost all our costs of living the system is now blatantly rigged against us. Let’s take a look at it, starting with our tax system.

 

In total, the average US citizen is forced to give up approximately 30% of our income in taxes. This tax system is now strategically designed to flow straight into the hands of the Economic Elite. A huge percentage of our tax dollars ultimately ends up in their pockets. The past decade proves that — whether it’s the Republicans or the Democrats running the government — our tax money is not going into our community; it is going into the pockets of the billionaires who have bought off both parties - it is obscene.

 

For an example of how this system flows to the Economic Elite, just look at the Wall Street “bailout.” The real size of the bailout is estimated to be $14 trillion - and could end up costing trillions more than that. By now you are probably also sick of hearing about the bailout, but stop and think about this for a moment… Do you comprehend how much $14 trillion is?

 

What could be accomplished with this money is almost beyond common comprehension.

 

And this is just the tip of the iceberg that has hit us. On top of the trillions given to the Wall Street elite, we already have a record $12.3 trillion in national debt - and we now have to pay $500 billion in interest to the Economic Elite on this debt every year, yet another way they are milking us dry. When you add in unfunded liabilities owed, like social security payments, we actually owe a stunning $74 trillion. That adds up to a debt of $242,000 for every man, woman and child in America.

 

Trillions more, 25% of taxpayer dollars allocated to military spending goes  unaccounted for every year, not to mention the billions spent on overcharging and outright fraud. During the War on Terror, the Economic Elite have used our tax money to build a private army that has more soldiers deployed than the US military - a congressional study revealed that 69% of the “US” fighting forces deployed throughout the world in our name are in fact private mercenaries, 80% of them are foreign nationals. Private contractors regularly get paid three to five times more than our soldiers, and have been repeatedly caught overcharging and committing fraud on a massive scale. A congressional investigation revealed this and strongly recommended that we seize wasting tax dollars on these private military contractors. However, under Obama, there has actually been a drastic increase in total tax dollars spent on them.

 

In 2009, just over $1 trillion tax dollars were spent on the military. It’s safe to say that at least $350 billion of that was needlessly wasted.

 

When you research our tax system you see an unprecedented level of waste and fraud rampant throughout most expenditures. Our tax system is a national disaster of epic proportions. It is literally an organized criminal operation that continues to rob us in broad daylight, with zero accountability.

 

Politicians and mainstream “news” outlets will not tell you this, but most every serious economist knows that due to so much theft and debt created in the tax system, the only way to fix things, other than stopping the theft and seizing the trillions that have been stolen, will be for the government to cut important social funding and drastically raise our taxes. Other than the record national debt, many states are running record deficits and “barreling toward economic disaster, raising the likelihood of higher taxes, more government layoffs and deep cuts in services.” Our nation’s biggest state economies, like California and New York, are the ones in most trouble.

 

To merely say that things will not be improving economically is to be a delusional optimist. The truth that you will not hear: we have been hit by an economic deathblow and the United States lays in ruins.

 

It’s not just this criminal tax system; the theft is now built into all our costs of living.

 

Trillions more in our spending on food and fuel have been stolen due to fraudulent stock transactions and overcharging. Just ten years ago, in 2000, US-American families paid 7% of our income on food and fuel. We now pay 20%. This drastic increase is primarily driven by fraudulent market manipulation that drives up stock prices. Congress uncovered this in 2006, as part of the Enron investigation. They found that companies manipulated the oil market to create major spikes in stock values, but then Congress didn’t do anything about it. Nothing to see here, just move on.

 

As mentioned before, we have the most expensive health care system in the world and we are forced to pay  twice as much as other countries, and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world. On average, US citizens are now paying a record high 8% of their income on medical care.

 

One of the reasons why foreclosure rates are so high is because the percentage of income US-Americans pay on their housing has risen to 34%.

 

So for these basic necessities - taxes, food, fuel, shelter and medical bills - we have already lost 92% of our limited income. Then factor in ever-increasing interest rates on credit cards, student loans, rising prices for cable, internet, phone, bank fees, etc., etc., etc…. We are being robbed and gouged in all costs of living, in every aspect of our life. No wonder bankruptcies are skyrocketing and the number of people suffering from psychological depression has reached an epidemic level.

 

The US-American worker is screwed over every step of the way, and it all starts with the explosion in the cost of a college education. This is one of the Economic Elite’s most devastating weapons. To have any chance of succeeding in this economy, it is commonly believed that you must attend the best college possible. With the rising costs involved, today’s students are graduating with record levels of debt from student loans. At the same time, the unemployment rate among recent college graduates has risen higher than the national average, and those who do find work are making significantly less than they expected to make. This combination of extreme debt and reduced pay has crippled an entire generation right from the start and has put them in a vicious cycle of spiraling debt that they will struggle with for the rest of their lives. The most recent college graduates are now known as a “lost generation.”

 

The US-American dream has turned into a nightmare. The economic system is a sophisticated prison cell; the indentured servant is now an indebted wage slave; whips and chains have evolved into debts.

“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by sword. The other is by debt.”
–  John Adams

Concealing National Wealth

“Liberty in the concrete signifies release from the impact of particular oppressive forces; emancipation from something once taken as a normal part of human life but now experienced as bondage…. Today, it signifies liberation from material insecurity and from the coercions and repressions that prevent multitudes from participation in the vast cultural resources that are at hand.” — John Dewey 

When you take the time to research and analyze the wealth that has gone to the economic top one percent, you begin to realize just how much we have been robbed. Trillions upon trillions of dollars that could make the lives of all hard-working US-Americans much easier have been strategically funneled into the coffers of the Economic Elite. The denial of wealth is the key to the Economic Elite’s power. An entire generation of massive wealth creation has been strategically withheld from 99% of the US population.

 

The US public doesn’t have any understanding of how much wealth has been generated and concentrated into the hands of the Economic Elite over the past 40 years; there is no historical frame of reference. This withholding of wealth is truly the greatest crime against humanity in the history of civilization.

 

What could be done with all the money that has been hoarded by the Economic Elite is extraordinary!

 

Let’s consider what we could do with the money that has been stolen from us. On top of what should be our average six-figure yearly income, we could have:

 

* Free health care for every US-American,
* A free 4 bedroom home for every US-American family,
* 5% tax rate for 99% of US-Americans,
* Drastically improved public education and free college for all,
* Significantly improved public transportation and infrastructure,

 

The list goes on…

 

This is not some far-fetched fantasy. These are all things that Franklin D. Roosevelt talked about doing in the 1940s, long before the explosion of wealth creation in our technologically advanced global economy. The money for all this is already there, stashed into the claws of the Economic Elite. The denial of wealth to the masses is the key to the Economic Elite’s power. Outside of outdated and obsolete economic models and theories — and incredibly short-sighted greed — there is no reason why all this money should be kept in the hands of a few, at the immense suffering and expense of the many.

 

If US-Americans could just understand how much wealth is being withheld from us, we would have a massive uprising and the Economic Elite would be swept away, into the history books alongside the evil despots of the past.

“For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.” — George Orwell

Now that we have a better understanding of how the Economic Elite dominate our lives, let’s take a look at exactly who theyare….

... part 3 (of six) to follow)

gotowww.globalresearch.ca for this and other articles!

Govern by Terror - all nations do it...

WHO SAID THIS???

"The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened".

If you had followed the developments in Turkey - where RIGHT NOW government terrorists are in jail -- you would know that the European Union has dismantled the DEEP STATterror netwsorks, that still exist in the USA, UK and most other nations.
Turkey is currently doing it, because it is a condition of memebership in the EU.

Governments from around the world admit they carry out false flag terror:

• A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that - under orders from the chief of the Gestapo - he and some other Nazi operatives faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland. Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson
  

• The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950's to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister

• Israel admits that an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind "evidence" implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this)

• The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people's support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism. As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: "You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security" (and see this)(Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred)

• As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in the 1960's, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Official State Department documents show that - only nine months before - the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. Neither plan was carried out, but they were both discussed as serious proposals

• The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council found that, in 1989, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (a covert branch of the South African Defense Force) approached an explosives expert and asked him "to participate in an operation aimed at discrediting the ANC [the African National Congress] by bombing the police vehicle of the investigating officer into the murder incident", thus framing the ANC for the bombing

• An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author)
  

• According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.

• The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings

• As reported by BBC, the New York Times, and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admit that the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join the "war on terror".

• Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having "our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda's ranks, causing operatives to doubt others' identities and to question the validity of communications."

• United Press International reported in June 2005:

  U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.

• Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers

• Celle Hole - Wikipedia

• Operation Gladio - Wikipedia

From AGENT PROVOCATEUR to massacres, its all happening. YOU MUST PROTEST, you must stop it, embarrass your government by accusing them of synthetic terror. Download the pdf book by Webster Tarpley, its is a great collection in the subject. Tarpley is fluent in a few european languages. He also makes idiotic radio-shows, sadly.

Political causes you hold most dear will be derailed if false flag terror is carried out. To see that this is true, let's take a step back ..

Imagine, if you would, that you were a citizen in Germany right after the example of false flag terror by the Nazis discussed above had occurred. Do you believe you could have stopped the government from invading Poland by reminding Germans that war is bad and peace is good? Do you imagine you could have stopped the brownshirts and loss of domestic rights by writing about the desirability of civil liberties?

"This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector."
- Plato

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
- U.S. President James Madison

"Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death".
- Adolph Hitler

"Why of course the people don't want war ... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
- Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.

"The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened".
- Josef Stalin

Haiti - US Shock Doctrine - "The Indypendent" article

The Coast Guard, disaster relief, Oxfam world-wide civilian specialists... but the USA makes a totally inefficient military cock-up battalion MOVE IN.   Why?  Does the USA have no civilian disaster relief??

Here is why:

The U.S. in Haiti: Neoliberalism at the Barrel of a Gun

By Arun Gupta  From the February 19, 2010 issue

Illustrations by Lisa Lin

Official denials aside, the United States has embarked on a new military occupation of Haiti thinly cloaked as disaster relief. While both the Pentagon and the United Nations claimed more troops were needed to provide “security and stability” to bring in aid, violence was never an issue, according to nearly all independent observers in the field.

The military response appears to be more opportunistic. With Haiti’s government “all but invisible” and its repressive police forces “devastated,” popular organizations were starting to fill the void. But the Western powers rushing in want to rebuild Haiti on a foundation of sweatshops, agro-exports and tourism. This is opposed by the popular organizations, which draw from Haiti’s overwhelmingly poor majority. Thus, if a neoliberal plan is going to be imposed it will be done at gunpoint.

The rapid mobilization of thousands of U.S. troops crowded out much of the aid being sent to the Port-au-Prince airport following the Jan. 12 earthquake. Doctors Without Borders said five of its cargo flights were turned away, while flights from the World Food Program were delayed up to two days. By the end of January, three quarters of Haitians still lacked clean water, the government had received only 2 percent of the tents it had requested and hospitals in the capital reported they were running “dangerously low” on basic medical supplies like antibiotics and painkillers. Nearly a month into the crisis, the Washington Post reported, “Every day, tens of thousands of Haitians face a grueling quest to find food, any food. A nutritious diet is out of the question.”

At the same time, the United States had assumed control of Haiti’s airspace, landed 6,500 soldiers on the ground with 15,000 more troops off shore at one point and dispatched an armada of naval vessels and nine coast guard cutters to patrol the waters, and the U.S. Embassy was issuing orders on behalf of the Haitian government. In a telling account, The New York Times described a press conference in Haiti at which “the American ambassador and the American general in charge of the United States troops deployed here” were “seated at center stage,” while Haitian President René Préval stood in the back “half-listening” and eventually “wandered away without a word.”

The real powers in Haiti now are the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen; U.S. ambassador Louis Lucke; Bill Clinton (who has been tapped by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to lead recovery efforts); and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When asked at the press conference how long U.S. forces were planning to stay, Keen said, “I’m not going to put a time frame on it,” while Lucke added, “We’re not really planning in terms of weeks or months or years. We’re planning basically to see this job through to the end.”

While much of the corporate media fixated on “looters,” virtually every independent observer in Haiti after the earthquake noted the lack of violence. Even Lt. Gen. Keen described the security situation as “relatively calm.” Veteran Haiti reporter Kim Ives told Democracy Now! on January 20: “Security is not the issue. We see throughout Haiti the population … organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps.” In one instance, Ives continued, a truckload of food showed up in a neighborhood in the middle of the night unannounced. “It could have been a melee. The local popular organization … was contacted. They immediately mobilized their members. They came out. They set up a perimeter. They set up a cordon. They lined up about 600 people who were staying on the soccer field behind the house, which is also a hospital, and they distributed the food in an orderly, equitable fashion. … They didn’t need Marines. They didn’t need the U.N.”

A NEW INVASION

But that’s what Haiti is getting, including 3,500 more soldiers and police for the 9,200-strong U.N. force already there. These U.N. forces have played a leading role in repressing Haiti’s poor, who twice propelled Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency on a platform of social and economic justice. And the poor know that the detailed U.S. and U.N. plans in the works for “recovery” — sweatshops, land grabs and privatization — are part of the same system of economic slavery they’ve been fighting against for more than 200 years. Neoliberal reconstruction, then, will happen at the barrel of the gun. In this light, the impetus of a new occupation may be to reconstitute the Haitian Army (or similar entity) as a force “to fight the people.”

This is the crux of the situation. Despite all the terror inflicted on Haiti by the United States, particularly the slaughter of thousands by U.S.-armed death squads after each coup, the strongest social and political force in Haiti today is probably the organisations populaires (OPs) that are the backbone of Aristide’s party, Fanmi Lavalas. Twice last year, after legislative elections that banned Fanmi Lavalas were scheduled, boycotts were organized by the party. In the April and June polls the abstention rate was reported to be at least 89 percent.

A new occupation of Haiti — the third in the last 16 years — also fits within the U.S. doctrine of rollback in Latin America: support for the coup in Honduras, seven new military bases in Colombia, hostility toward Bolivia and Venezuela. Related to that, the United States wants to ensure that Haiti will not pose the “threat of a good example” by pursuing an independent path, as it tried to do under President Jean-Bertrand Aristide — which is why he was toppled twice, in 1991 and 2004, in U.S.-backed coups.

SWEATSHOP SOLUTION

In a March 2009 New York Times op-ed, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon outlined his development plan for Haiti, involving lower port fees, “dramatically expanding the country’s export zones,” and emphasizing “the garment industry and agriculture.” Ban’s neoliberal plan was drawn up by Oxford University economist Paul Collier.

Collier is blunt, writing, “Due to its poverty and relatively unregulated labor market, Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with China.” He calls for agricultural exports such as mangoes that involve pushing farmers off the land so they can be employed in garment manufacturing in export-processing zones. To facilitate these zones Collier says, Haiti and donors need to provide them with private ports and electricity, “clear and rapid rights to land;” outsourced customs; “roads, water and sewage;” and the involvement of the Clinton Global Initiative to bring in garment manufacturers.

Revealing the connection between neoliberalism and military occupation in Haiti, Collier credits the Brazilian-led United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH ) with establishing “credible security,” but laments that its remaining mandate is “too short for investor confidence.” In fact, MINUSTAH has been involved in numerous massacres in Port-au-Prince slums that are strongholds for Lavalas. Collier also notes MINUSTAH will cost some $5 billion overall; compare that to the $379 million the U.S. government has designated for post-earthquake relief.

Speaking at an October 2009 investors’ conference in Port-au-Prince that attracted dogooders like Gap, Levi Strauss and Citibank, Bill Clinton claimed a revitalized garment industry could create 100,000 jobs. Some 200 companies, half of them garment manufacturers, attended the conference, drawn by “Haiti’s extremely low labor costs, comparable to those in Bangladesh,” The New York Times reported. Those costs are often less than the official daily minimum wage of $1.75. (The Haitian Parliament approved an increase last May 4 to about $5 an hour, but it was opposed by the business elite, and President René Préval refused to sign the bill, effectively killing it. This episode sparked student protests starting in June of last year, which were repressed by Haitian police and MINUSTAH .)

ROOTS OF REPRESSION

In his work Haiti State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism, Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes, “Haiti’s first army saw itself as the offspring of the struggle against slavery and colonialism.” That changed during the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Under the tutelage of the U.S. Marines, “the Haitian Garde was specifically created to fight against other Haitians. It received its baptism of fire in combat against its countrymen.” This brutal legacy led Aristide to disband the army in 1995.

Yet prior to the army’s disbandment, in the wake of the U.S. invasion that returned a politically handcuffed Aristide to the presidency in 1994, “CIA agents accompanying U.S. troops began a new recruitment drive” that included leaders of the death squad known as FRAPH, according to Peter Hallward, author of Damning the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment.

It’s worth recalling how the Clinton administration played a double game under the cover of humanitarian intervention. Investigative reporter Allan Nairn revealed that in 1993 “five to ten thousand” small arms were shipped from Florida, past the U.S. naval blockade, to the coup leaders. These weapons enabled FRAPH to grow and to terrorize the popular movements. Then, pointing to intensifying FRAPH violence in 1994, the Clinton administration pressured Aristide into acquiescing to a U.S. invasion because FRAPH was becoming “the only game in town.” After 20,000 U.S. troops landed in Haiti, they set about protecting FRAPH members, freeing them from jail and refusing to disarm them or seize their weapons caches. FRAPH leader Emmanual Constant told Nairn that after the invasion the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was using FRAPH to counter “subversive activities.” Meanwhile, the State Department and CIA went about stacking the Haitian National Police with former army soldiers, many of whom were on the U.S. payroll. By 1996, according to one report, Haitian Army and “FRAPH forces remain armed and present in virtually every community across the country,” and paramilitaries were “inciting street violence in an effort to undermine social order.”

During the early 1990s, a separate group of Haitian soldiers, including Guy Philippe, who led the 2004 coup against Aristide, were spirited away to Ecuador where they allegedly trained at a “U.S. military facility.” Hallward describes the second coup as beginning in 2001 as a “Contra war” in the Dominican Republic with Philippe and former FRAPH commander Jodel Chamblain as leaders. A Democracy Now! report from April 7, 2004, claimed that the U.S. government-funded International Republican Institute provided arms and technical training to the anti-Aristide force in the Dominican Republic, while “200 members of the special forces of the United States were there in the area training these so-called rebels.”

A key component of the campaign against Aristide after he was inaugurated in 2001 was economic destabilization that cut off funding for “road construction, AIDS programs, water works and health care.” Likely factors in the 2004 coup included Aristide’s public campaign demanding that France repay the money it extorted from Haiti in 1825 for the former slave colony to buy its freedom, estimated in 2003 at $21 billion, and his working with Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba to create alternatives to U.S. economic domination of the region.

When Aristide was finally ousted in February 2004, another round of slaughter ensued, with 800 bodies dumped in just one week in March. A 2006 study by the British medical journal Lancet determined that 8,000 people were murdered in the capital region during the first 22 months of the U.S.-backed coup government and 35,000 women and girls were raped or sexually assaulted. The OPs and Lavalas militants were decimated, in part by a U.N. war against the main Lavalas strongholds in Port-au-Prince’s neighborhoods of Bel Air and Cité Soleil, the latter a densely packed slum of some 300,000. (Hallward claims U.S. Marines were involved in a number of massacres in areas such as Bel Air in 2004.)

‘MORE FREE TRADE’

Less than four months after the 2004 coup, reporter Jane Regan described a draft economic plan, the “Interim Cooperation Framework,” which “calls for more free trade zones (FTZs), stresses tourism and export agriculture and hints at the eventual privatization of the country’s state enterprises.” Regan wrote that the plan was “drawn up by people nobody elected,” mainly “foreign technicians” and “institutions like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank.”

Much of this plan was implemented under Préval, who announced in 2007 plans to privatize the public telephone company, Téléco. This plan is now being promoted by Bill Clinton and Ban Ki-moon as Haiti’s path out of poverty. The Wall Street Journal touted such achievements as “10,000 new garment industry jobs” in 2009, a “luxury hotel complex” in the upper-crust neighborhood of Pétionville and a $55 million investment by Royal Caribbean International at its “private Haitian beach paradise.”

Haiti, of course, has been here before, when the USAID spoke of turning it into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean.” In the 1980s, under Jean- Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, it shifted onethird of cultivated land to export crops while “there were some 240 multinational corporations, employing between 40,000 and 60,000 predominantly female workers,” sewing garments, baseballs for Major League Baseball, and Disney merchandise, according to scholar Yasmine Shamsie. Those jobs, paying as little as 11 cents an hour, coincided with a decline in per capita income and living standards. (Ban Ki-moon wants Haiti to emulate Bangladesh, where sweatshops pay as little as 6 cents an hour.) At such low pay, workers had little left after purchasing food and transportation to and from the factories. These self-contained export-processing zones, often funded by USAID and the World Bank, also add little to the national economy, importing tax free virtually all the materials used.

U.S.-promoted agricultural policies, such as forcing Haitian rice farmers to compete against U.S.-subsidized agribusiness, cost an estimated 830,000 rural jobs according to Oxfam, while exacerbating malnutrition. This and the decimation of the invaluable Creole pig (because of fears of an outbreak of African swine fever), led to displacement of the peasantry into urban areas, and along with the promise of urban jobs, fueled rural migration into flimsy shantytowns. It’s hard not to conclude that these development schemes played a major role in the horrific death toll in Port-au-Prince.

The latest scheme, on hold for now, is a $50 million “industrial park that would house roughly 40 manufacturing facilities and warehouses,” bankrolled by the Soros Economic Development Fund (yes, that Soros). The planned location is Cité Soleil. James Dobbins, former special envoy to Haiti under President Bill Clinton, outlined other measures in a New York Times op-ed: “This disaster is an opportunity to accelerate oft-delayed reforms” including “breaking up or at least reorganizing the government- controlled telephone monopoly. The same goes with the Education Ministry, the electric company, the Health Ministry and the courts.”

It’s clear that the Shock Doctrine is alive and well in Haiti. But given the strength of the organisations populaires and weakness of the government, it will have to be imposed violently.

.
For those who wonder why the United States is so obsessed with controlling a country so impoverished, devastated, and seemingly inconsequential as Haiti, Noam Chomsky sums it up best: “Why was the U.S. so intent on destroying northern Laos, so poor that peasants hardly even knew they were in Laos? Or Indochina? Or Guatemala? Or Maurice Bishop in Grenada, the nutmeg capital of the world? The reasons are about the same, and are explained in the internal record. These are ‘viruses’ that might ‘infect others’ with the dangerous idea of pursuing similar paths to independent development. The smaller and weaker they are, the more dangerous they tend to be. If they can do it, why can’t we? Does the Godfather allow a small storekeeper to get away with not paying protection money?”

The Matarese Circle -- "USA elite and USA secret police" Boggs - Speech before Congress (April 22, 1971)

QUOTE:
Over the postwar years, we have granted to the elite and secret police within our system vast new powers over the lives and liberties of the people. At the request of the trusted and respected heads of those forces, and their appeal to the necessities of national security, we have exempted those grants of power from due accounting and strict surveillance.   Hale Boggs -- Speech before Congress (April 22, 1971)

[FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover lied his eyes out to the [Warren] Commission -- on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it.   Hale Boggs -- Speaking to an aide, quoted by Bernard Fensterwald

Hale Boggs corpse was never found.

In viewing Abraham Zapruder's home movie of President Kennedy's assassination an observer can't help wondering why Jackie Kennedy was crawling out onto the trunk of the presidential limousine after her husband had been hit. What was she trying to do?   Was she simply reaching out to the Secret Service agent who dashed toward her, scrambling up onto the car's rear?
In a recent book, JFK and the Unspeakable, James Douglass pulls together the evidence and testimony that has emerged in recent decades from various sources: the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations, interviews with people who overcame fear in order to share their knowledge of some facet of the fateful event, the work of other writers, declassification of the Kennedy presidential papers, access to the files of the former Soviet Union, and information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
All told, it has taken nearly forty years to ascertain the exact words the president's widow used in her description of the assassination. In 1975, Harold Weisberg obtained through FOIA what he believed to be her complete Warren Commission testimony. Nevertheless, in 2001, filmmaker Mark Sobel through his FOIA request obtained the stenographer's original tape that revealed her statement in its entirety.
The part that the Commission wished to keep from the American people and the rest of the world was Jackie Kennedy's description of the fragment of her husband's skull that had been separated from the back of his head by the force of a bullet, a bullet that was later determined to have entered through his throat. She crawled out over the car's trunk in order to retrieve it, but it floated off the rear bumper into the roadway. One can only imagine her despair as she tried to stem the hemorrhaging by pushing his hair over the wound as he lay collapsed in her lap while the limousine sped toward Parkland Memorial Hospital.
Why did the Commissioners deep six this part of her testimony? The answer is simple. It blew to smithereens their Oswald-did-it postulation because a shot that caused this kind of damage to the President's head had to be fired not only from a position in front of the vehicle but also from below it in order to fit the bullet's trajectory. In other words, from the infamous grassy knoll. It could not have come from above and behind. That is to say, from a window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building.
There is another mysterious feature to the Zapruder tape. Where were the Secret Service agents that we customarily see running alongside the presidential limo, one hand gripping the car, whenever a president is on display? Zapruder's film shows none of them in place nor any standing on the two specially-constructed platforms built into the rear of the car. They are all riding in a car behind the limousine. We see the motorcycle escorts that had accompanying the presidential party pull back as the motorcade moves into Dealey Plaza. According to Douglass, these men had been instructed to leave the presidential car in this vulnerable position at this particular point.
In September of 1964, the seven member commission that President Johnson had appointed to investigate the assassination finished its work They included Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, John J. McCloy, former High Commissioner of Germany, Allen Dulles who had been fired by Kennedy from his post as CIA Director, and Gerald Ford, a longtime House member from Michigan and future president.
Although they signed the Report, the three remaining members - John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky and Richard Russell of Georgia, both US Senators, and Hale Boggs of Louisiana, the House Majority Leader - disagreed with the finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. Boggs was the most emphatic and outspoken about his disagreement. Douglass writes that Bernard Fensterwald in Coincidence or Conspiracy quotes Boggs saying to an aide, "[FBI Director] Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission - on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it."
In October of 1972, Boggs died in a plane crash in Alaska while on a politically-oriented trip. No trace of the plane was ever found.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hale_Boggs

He was one of the people associated  with Kennedy's murder who also met untimely deaths. (see below)
Douglass's research about Oswald's service in the Marines, his defection to the Soviet Union and return to the United States boils down to this: Oswald became a CIA employee sometime between September 1957 and November 1958 while a Marine stationed in Atsugi, Japan, a CIA installation and base for the illegal U-2 flights. He was then transferred to a base in Santa Ana, California, where he also had access to top-secret information.
Within months of leaving the Marines, he appeared at the American Embassy in Moscow on October 31, 1959, to renounce his American citizenship. Sent to the Soviet Union as an undercover agent, he supposedly gave the Soviets information about U-2 flights while gathering intelligence about Soviet activities. Oswald returned to the States in the same month as the April 1961 ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Oswald, under the direction of his CIA handlers, began his journey at that time to become the scapegoat for Kennedy's murder.
Like the steady drip, drip, drip of a leaky faucet, damning evidence accumulates showing that the CIA with tangential Mafia involvement and FBI help plotted to kill Kennedy and to set up the Soviets and the Cubans as instigators of the assassination, using Oswald as their hit man, in hopes that military retaliation would be taken against one or both countries.
President Johnson scrapped this part of the CIA plan. He did not want to get into a shooting war with the Soviets. But he did endorse their portrayal of Oswald as the lone assassin who was characterized as a troubled young man, unable to establish relationships with others, and who had rejected democracy in favor of communism, and had a need to be noticed.
What motivated the CIA to kill a president of the United States? Douglass explores the answer to this question at length, setting forth in his book a convincing argument that not only was the CIA furious with Kennedy for reneging on air support for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, but that the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted air strikes, even permission to use nuclear weapons, as a way of settling the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The Pentagon as well as others in Kennedy's administration wanted to ratchet up tensions with the Soviets, and wanted to increase troop presence in Vietnam rather than withdraw which Kennedy privately indicated he wanted to do.
Although Kennedy's public pronouncements led many Americans to believe that it was business as usual in fighting the Cold War, secret correspondence from the files of both Khrushchev and Kennedy tell us that after the missile crisis the two began working on plans to end the Cold War. A first step was the signing of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that took place in August 1963.
Douglass points time and again to Kennedy's first public revelation of his vision for a peaceful world - his June 10, 1963, commencement speech at American University in Washington, D.C. -and how remarkable it was. In an oft-quoted paragraph, Kennedy sums up the direction in which he intends to go: "So, let us not be blind to our differences-but let us also direct our attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal."
This book leaves the reader with several questions. Is the CIA an out-of-control rogue operation? If so, it does not act to enrich its own members, Mafia-wise. What powerful forces outside of government would feel that their interests were being threatened by Kennedy's objectives?
Perhaps Eisenhower anticipated this question when just before leaving office he warned us about the military-industrial complex although he himself did precious little to curb its growth. Phrases like "the elimination of war and arms," "check the spiraling arms race," and "arms can finally be abolished" that were sprinkled throughout Kennedy's commencement address must have struck daggers into the hearts of the war profiteers as they realized Kennedy was beginning a campaign to enlist the support of the American people in his initiatives for peace.
The CIA's covert operations in other parts of the world (Honduras being the most recent), have all been carried out in the interests of one or another faction of corporate America. Do we have one government for show and another that lurks in the shadows, using the CIA for its own private purposes?
JFK and the Unspeakable makes it very clear that the Warren Commission let the CIA get away with murdering a president of the United States that paved the way for pumping up profit-making via another war. In this, the twenty-first century, did the Bush-appointed National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States play the same role in regard to 9/11?

---

Deaths of Witnesses
 
  Some writers who have investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy have claimed that a large number of witnesses to the event have died in mysterious circumstances. The Sunday Times reported that "the odds against these witnesses being dead by February, 1967, were one hundred thousand trillion to one." When the Select Committee on Assassinations questioned the newspaper reporter who wrote the article, he admitted he had made a "careless journalistic mistake".

In his book Crossfire, the author Jim Marrs, provided a list of 103 people who he claims died in mysterious circumstances between 1963 and 1976. In reality, most of these people died of natural causes. Some of these people did die in accidents. Others were murdered or committed suicide. However, these people rarely had information that would have been important in helping investigators discover if there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

The first person to die linked to the case was Karyn Kupcinet. In his book, Forgive My Grief, W. Penn Jones reports that "a few days before the assassination, Karyn Kupcinet, 23, was trying to place a long distance telephone call from the Los Angeles area. According to reports, the long distance operator heard Miss Kupcinet scream into the telephone that President Kennedy was going to be killed." Karyn's body was discovered on 30th November, 1963. Police estimated that she had been dead for two days. The New York Times reported that she had been strangled. Her actor boyfriend, Andrew Prine was the main suspect but he was never charged with the murder and the crime remains unsolved.

Some researchers claimed that there was a link between the death of Kupcinet and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was argued that the conspirators were trying to frighten off her father and journalist, Irv Kupcinet from telling what he knew.

Grant Stockdale, a close friend of John F. Kennedy died on 2nd December, 1963 when he fell (or was pushed) from his office on the thirteenth story of the Dupont Building in Miami. Stockdale did not leave a suicide note but his friend, George Smathers, claimed that he had become depressed as a result of the death of the president. However, it later became known that four days after the assassination Stockdale flew to Washington and talked with Robert Kennedy and Edward Kennedy. On his return Stockdale told several of his friends that "the world was closing in." On 1st December, he spoke to his attorney, William Frates who later recalled: "He started talking. It didn't make much sense. He said something about 'those guys' trying to get him. Then about the assassination."

After the assassination of President Kennedy, Gary Underhill told his friend, Charlene Fitsimmons, that he was convinced that he had been killed by members of the CIA. He also said: "Oswald is a patsy. They set him up. It's too much. The bastards have done something outrageous. They've killed the President! I've been listening and hearing things. I couldn't believe they'd get away with it, but they did!"

 

Underhill believed there was a connection between Executive Action, Fidel Castro and the death of John F. Kennedy: "They tried it in Cuba and they couldn't get away with it. Right after the Bay of Pigs. But Kennedy wouldn't let them do it. And now he'd gotten wind of this and he was really going to blow the whistle on them. And they killed him!"

 

Gary Underhill told friends that he feared for his life: "I know who they are. That's the problem. They know I know. That's why I'm here. I can't stay in New York." Underhill was found dead on 8th May 1964. He had been shot in the head and it was officially ruled that he had committed suicide. However, in his book, Destiny Betrayed, James DiEugenio claimed that the bullet entered the right-handed Underhill's head behind the left ear.

 

There has been a significant number of people who have died who did appear to have important information about the case. This includes several journalists investigating the murder. On 24th November, 1963, Bill Hunter of the Long Beach Press Telegram and Jim Koethe of the Dallas Times Herald interviewed George Senator. Also there was the attorney Tom Howard. Earlier that day Senator and Howard had both visited Jack Ruby in jail. That evening Senator arranged for Koethe, Hunter and Howard to search Ruby's apartment.

It is not known what the journalists found but on 23rd April 1964, Hunter was shot dead by Creighton Wiggins, a policeman in the pressroom of a Long Beach police station. Wiggins initially claimed that his gun fired when he dropped it and tried to pick it up. In court this was discovered that this was impossible and it was decided that Hunter had been murdered. Wiggins finally admitted he was playing a game of quick draw with his fellow officer. The other officer, Errol F. Greenleaf, testified he had his back turned when the shooting took place. In January 1965, both were convicted and sentenced to three years probation.

Jim Koethe decided to write a book about the assassination of Kennedy. However, he died on 21st September, 1964. It seems that a man broke into his Dallas apartment and killed him by a karate chop to the throat. Tom Howard died of a heart-attack, aged 48, in March, 1965.

On 21st July, 1964, Dr. Mary Sherman was murdered in New Orleans. She had been stabbed in the heart, arm, leg and stomach. Her laboratory was also set on fire. The crime has never been sold. Later Edward T. Haslam published Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus : The Story of an Underground Medical Laboratory. In the book he argued that Sherman was working with David Ferrie. Haslam believed that this Central Intelligence Agency backed research involved disease intelligence gathering and cancer research using laboratory-made biological weapons. Haslam claimed this biological weapon was to be used against Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

Judyth Baker later began giving interviews aboout involvement in an anti-Castro conspiracy. She claims that in 1963 she was recruited by Dr. Canute Michaelson to work with Dr. Alton Ochsner and Dr. Mary Sherman in a CIA secret project. This involved creating the means to insure Fidel Castro developed cancer.

In 1963 Judyth moved to New Orleans where she worked closely with others involved in this plot. This included Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, Clay Shaw and Guy Bannister. Later she claimed she began an affair with Oswald. The research into this biological weapon was carried out in the homes of Ferrie and Sherman. Oswald role in this conspiracy was to work as a courier. However, the project was abandoned in September, 1963, and Oswald was ordered to Dallas.

 

Oswald kept in touch with Baker and in November, 1963, he had been forced to join a plot to kill John F. Kennedy. Oswald believed that the conspiracy was being organized by Mafia leader, Carlos Marcello and a CIA agent, David Atlee Phillips. Oswald told her he would do what he could to ensure that Kennedy was not killed. After the assassination of Kennedy and the arrest of Oswald, Baker received a phone-call from David Ferrie warning her that she would be killed if she told anyone about her knowledge of these events.


On 12th October, 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer was shot dead as she walked along the Chesapeake and Ohio towpath in Georgetown. Henry Wiggins, a car mechanic, was working on a vehicle on Canal Road, when he heard a woman shout out: "Someone help me, someone help me". He then heard two gunshots. Wiggins ran to the edge of the wall overlooking the towpath. He later told police he saw "a black man in a light jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap standing over the body of a white woman."

Soon afterwards Raymond Crump, a black man, was found not far from the murder scene. He was arrested and charged with Mary's murder. The towpath and the river were searched but no murder weapon was ever found.

The media did not report at the time that Mary Pinchot Meyer had been having an affair with John F. Kennedy. Nor did it reveal that her former husband, Cord Meyer, was a senior figure in CIA's covert operations. As a result, there was little public interest in the case.

During the trial Wiggins was unable to identify Raymond Crump as the man standing over Meyer's body. The prosecution was also handicapped by the fact that the police had been unable to find the murder weapon at the scene of the crime. On 29th July, 1965, Crump was acquitted of murdering Mary Meyer. The case remains unsolved.

In March, 1976, James Truitt gave an interview to the National Enquirer. Truitt told the newspaper that Mary Pinchot Meyer was having an affair with John F. Kennedy. He also claimed that Meyer had told his wife, Ann Truitt, that she was keeping an account of this relationship in her diary. Meyer asked Truitt to take possession of a private diary "if anything ever happened to me".

Ann Truitt was living in Tokyo at the time of the murder. She phoned Ben Bradlee at his home and asked him if he had found the diary. Bradlee, who claimed he was unaware of his sister-in-law's affair with Kennedy, knew nothing about the diary. He later recalled what he did after Truitt's phone-call: "We didn't start looking until the next morning, when Tony and I walked around the corner a few blocks to Mary's house. It was locked, as we had expected, but when we got inside, we found Jim Angleton, and to our complete surprise he told us he, too, was looking for Mary's diary."

James Angleton, CIA counterintelligence chief, admitted that he knew of Mary's relationship with John F. Kennedy and was searching her home looking for her diary and any letters that would reveal details of the affair. According to Ben Bradlee, it was Mary's sister, Antoinette Bradlee, who found the diary and letters a few days later. It was claimed that the diary was in a metal box in Mary's studio. The contents of the box were given to Angleton who claimed he burnt the diary. Angleton later admitted that Mary recorded in her diary that she had taken LSD with Kennedy before "they made love".

Leo Damore claimed in an article that appeared in the New York Post that the reason Angleton and Bradlee were looking for the diary was that: "She (Meyer) had access to the highest levels. She was involved in illegal drug activity. What do you think it would do to the beatification of Kennedy if this woman said, 'It wasn't Camelot, it was Caligula's court'?" Damore also said that a figure close to the CIA had told him that Mary's death had been a professional "hit".

There is another possible reason why both Angleton and Bradlee were searching for documents in Meyer's house. Were they looking for material that Meyer had been collecting on CIA's covert activities?

 

In 1963 Desmond FitzGerald was in charge of the CIA's Cuban Task Force. In this post he personally organized three different plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. According to Dick Russell, FitzGerald had a meeting in France with a Cuban code-named AM/LASH, finalising a plan to eliminate Castro, at the same time John F. Kennedy was assassinated. FitzGerald died of a heart attack while playing tennis in Virginia on 23rd July, 1967.


Lisa Howard died at East Hampton, Long Island, on 4th July, 1965. It was officially reported that she had committed suicide. Apparently, she had taken one hundred phenobarbitols. It was claimed she was depressed as a result of losing her job and suffering a miscarriage. At first no one associated Howard's death with the Kennedy assassination. However, it has recently emerged that Howard was involved in secret negotiations with Fidel Castro on behalf of John F. Kennedy. 

Winston Scott was the CIA's station chief in Mexico. Scott retired in 1969 and wrote a memoir about his time in the FBI, OSS and the CIA. He completed the manuscript, It Came To Late, and made plans to discuss the contents of the book with CIA director, Richard Helms, in Washington on 30th April, 1971. Four days before the agreed meeting Scott died of a heart attack.

Michael Scott told Dick Russell that James Angleton took away his father's manuscript. Angleton also confiscated three large cartons of files including a tape-recording of the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald. Michael Scott was also told by a CIA source that his father had not died from natural causes. Scott eventually got his father's manuscript back from the CIA. However, 150 pages were missing. Chapters 13 to 16 were deleted in their entirety. In fact, everything about his life after 1947 had been removed on grounds of national security.

Nancy Carole Tyler worked as secretary to Bobby Baker. At the time of the assassination she was living with Mary Jo Kopechne, who worked for George Smathers (she later became secretary to Robert Kennedy). According to W. Penn Jones Jr, it was Tyler and Kopechne who told Baker that John F. Kennedy planned to replace Lyndon B. Johnson as vice president. Tyler died in a plane crash, near Ocean City, Maryland, on 10th May, 1965. Kopechne was later to die in the car of Edward Kennedy on 18th July, 1969.

Dorothy Kilgallen, a crime reporter of the New York Journal, obtained a private interview with Jack Ruby. She told friends that she had information that would "break the case wide open". Aware of what had happened to Bill Hunter and Jim Koethe, she handed her interview notes to her friend Margaret Smith. On 8th November, 1965, Kilgallen, was found dead. It was reported she had committed suicide. Her friend, Margaret Smith, died two days later.

Two of the men that Jim Garrison believed were involved in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, Guy Bannister (June, 1964), David Ferrie ( February, 1967) and Eladio del Valle (February, 1967) died before they could be brought to court.

Roger D. Craig was on duty in Dallas on 22nd November, 1963. After hearing the firing at President John F. Kennedy he ran towards the Grassy Knoll where he interviewed witnesses to the shooting. About 15 minutes later he saw a man running from the back door of the Texas Book Depository down the slope to Elm Street. He then got into a Nash station wagon.

Craig saw the man again in the office of Captain Will Fitz. It was the recently arrested Lee Harvey Oswald. When Craig told his story about the man being picked up by the station wagon, Oswald replied: "That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine... Don't try to tie her into this. She had nothing to do with it."

 

Craig was also with Seymour Weitzman when the rifle was found on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository. He insisted that the rifle was a 7.65 Mauser and not a Mannlicher-Carcano.

Craig became unpopular with senior police officers in Dallas when he testified before the Warren Commission. He insisted he had seen Lee Harvey Oswald get into the station wagon 15 minutes after the shooting. This was ignored by Earl Warren and his team because it showed that at least two people were involved in the assassination. Craig, unlike Seymour Weitzman, refused to change his mind about finding a Mauser rather than a Mannlicher-Carcano in the Texas Book Depository. Craig was fired from the police department in 1967 after he was found to have discussed his evidence with a journalist.

In 1967 Roger D. Craig went to New Orleans and was a prosecution witness at the trial of Clay Shaw. Later that year he was shot at while walking to a car park. The bullet only grazed his head. In 1973 a car forced Craig's car off a mountain road. He was badly injured but he survived the accident. In 1974 he surviving another shooting in Waxahachie, Texas. The following year he was seriously wounded when his car engine exploded. Craig told friends that the Mafia had decided to kill him. Craig was found dead from on 15th May, 1975. It was later decided he had died as a result of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

When the Select Committee on Intelligence Activities and Select Committee on Assassinations began investigating Kennedy's death in the 1970s the deaths of potential witnesses increased dramatically. This included several criminals with possible links to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Those who were killed or who died in suspicious circumstances during this period included Malcolm Wallace (1971), Lucien Sarti (1972), Charles Willoughby (1972), Thomas Davis (1973), Richard Cain (1973), Dave Yarras (1974), Sam Giancana (1975), Jimmy Hoffa (1975), Roland Masferrer (1975), Johnny Roselli (1976), George De Mohrenschildt (1977), Charlie Nicoletti (1977) and Carlos Prio (1977).

William Sullivan, the main figure in the FBI involved in the Executive Action project, was shot dead near his home in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, on 9th November, 1977. Sullivan had been scheduled to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Sullivan was one of six top FBI officials who died in a six month period in 1977. Others who were due to appear before the committee who died included Louis Nicholas, special assistant to J. Edgar Hoover and his liaison with the Warren Commission; Alan H. Belmont, special assistant to Hoover; James Cadigan, document expert with access to documents that related to death of John F. Kennedy; J. M. English, former head of FBI Forensic Sciences Laboratory where Oswald's rifle and pistol were tested and Donald Kaylor, FBI fingerprint chemist who examined prints found at the assassination scene.

 Several important figures in the Central Intelligence Agency died before they could give evidence to the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigations. Sheffield Edwards, the CIA official who attempted to organize the assassination of Fidel Castro, died in July, 1975. William Harvey, head of the ZR/RIFLE project, died as a result of complications from heart surgery in June, 1976. William Pawley, who took part in Operation Tilt, died of gunshot wounds in January, 1977. David Morales, who some believe organized the assassination, died aged 53, on 8th May, 1978. Another important figure in CIA covert operations, Thomas Karamessines died of a heart attack on 4th September, 1978.

John Paisley was deputy director of the Office of Strategic Research. On 24th September, 1978, John Paisley, took a trip on his motorized sailboat on Chesapeake Bay. Two days later his boat was found moored in Solomons, Maryland. Paisley's body was found in Maryland's Patuxent River. The body was fixed to diving weights. He had been shot in the head. Police investigators described it as "an execution-type murder". However, officially Paisley's death was recorded as a suicide.

According to the journalist, Victor Marchetti, Paisley was a close friend of Yuri Nosenko. Marchetti also claimed that Paisley knew a great deal about the assassination of John F. Kennedy and was murdered during the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation because he was "about to blow the whistle".

  Open Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
 
(1) James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed (1963)

On that evening of November 22, 1963, Gary Underhill was a deeply troubled man. What he had learned, and the fact that they knew he had learned it, were too much for him. He had to escape. Once he was out of Washington, he could regain his equilibrium. Then he would decide what to do. He had friends in New York he could talk to without fear of the word getting back to Washington.

(2) Paul Golais, The Citizen's Voice (8th April, 2001)

Only hours after Kennedy was shot, CIA agent Gary Underhill left Washington, D.C., and drove to the home of friends on Long Island, N.Y. Underhill says he fears for his life and he must leave the country. "This country is too dangerous for me. I've got to get on a boat. Oswald is a patsy. They set him up. It's too much. The bastards have done something outrageous. They've killed the president! I've been listening and hearing things. I couldn't believe they'd get away with it, but they did. They've gone made! They're a bunch of drug runners and gun runners - a real violence group.I know who they are. That's the problem. They know I know. That's why I'm here.''

  (3) James DiEugenio, review of Gerald Posner's book Case Closed (1993)

Posner writes that there is no source for the claim that Gary Underhill was a former CIA agent, and "no corroboration that he ever said there was CIA complicity in the assassination." I hate to plug my own work, but in Destiny Betrayed, Posner would have learned there are several sources for Underhill's wartime OSS career and his later CIA consulting status, including Underhill himself. As for his accusations about the CIA and the murder of JFK, he related them quite vividly to his friend Charlene Fitsimmons within 24 hours of the shooting. She then forwarded a letter to Jim Garrison relating the incident in detail.

  (4) Penn Jones, Jr, Disappearing Witnesses included in The Rebel (22nd November, 1983)
 
Shortly after dark on Sunday night, November 24, 1963, after Ruby had killed Lee Harvey Oswald, a meeting took place in Jack Ruby's apartment in Oak Cliff, a suburb of Dallas, Texas. Five persons were present. George Senator and Attorney Tom Howard were present and having a drink in the apartment when two newsmen arrived. The newsmen were Bill Hunter of the Long Beach California Press Telegram and Jim Koethe of the Dallas Times Herald. Attorney C.A. Droby of Dallas arranged the meeting for the two newsmen, Jim Martin, a close friend of George Senator's, was also present at the apartment meeting. This writer asked Martin if he thought it was unusual for Senator to forget the meeting while testifying in Washington on April 22, 1964, since Bill Hunter, who was a newsman present at the meeting, was shot to death that very night. Martin grinned and said: "Oh, you're looking for a conspiracy."

I nodded yes and he grinned and said, "You will never find it."

I asked soberly, "Never find it, or not there?"

He added soberly, "Not there."

Bill Hunter, a native of Dallas and an award-winning newsman in Long Beach, was on duty and reading a book in the police station called the "Public Safety Building." Two policemen going off duty came into the press room, and one policeman shot Hunter through the heart at a range officially ruled to be "no more than three feet." The policeman said he dropped his gun, and it fired as he picked it up, but the angle of the bullet caused him to change his story. He finally said he was playing a game of quick draw with his fellow officer. The other officer testified he had his back turned when the shooting took place.

Hunter, who covered the assassination for his paper, the Long Beach Press Telegram had written:

"Within minutes of Ruby's execution of Oswald, before the eyes of millions watching television, at least two Dallas attorneys appeared to talk with him."

Hunter was quoting Tom Howard who died of a heart attack in Dallas a few months after Hunter's own death. Lawyer Tom Howard was observed acting strangely to his friends two days before his death. Howard was taken to the hospital by a "friend" according to the newspapers. No autopsy was performed.

Dallas Times Herald reporter Jim Koethe was killed by a karate chop to the throat just as he emerged from a shower in his apartment on Sept. 21, 1964. His murderer was not indicted.

What went on in that significant meeting in Ruby's and Senator's apartment?

Few are left to tell. There is no one in authority to ask the question, since the Warren Commission has made its final report, and the House Select Committee has closed its investigation.

  (5) Bill Sloan, JFK: Breaking the Silence (1993)
 
At approximately 2 a.m. on the morning of April 23, 1964, Hunter was sitting at his desk in the press room of the Long Beach police station and reading a mystery novel entitled Stop This Man, when two detectives - both of whom were later described as "friends" of Hunter - came into the room.

Initially, there was considerable confusion over exactly what happened next. One officer was first quoted as saying he dropped his gun, causing it to discharge as it struck the floor. Later, he changed his story to say that he and the other detective were engaged in "horseplay" with their loaded weapons when the tragedy occurred.

Whatever the case, a single shot suddenly rang out, striking Hunter where he sat. An autopsy later showed that the .38-caliber bullet plowed straight through Hunter's heart.

He died instantly, without ever moving or saying a word.

"My boss called me at 2 a.m. and told me Bill Hunter had been shot," Bill Shelton recalls. "He wasn't satisfied with the story that the cop had dropped his gun, and as it turned out, that wasn't what happened at all."

The newspaper charged police with covering up the facts in the case, which Long Beach Police Chief William Mooney vigorously denied. Detectives Creighton Wiggins, Jr., and Errol F. Greenleaf were relieved of their duties and subsequently charged with involuntary manslaughter. In January 1965, both were convicted and given identical three-year probated sentences.

Two weeks after the shooting, in a letter of resignation to his chief, Detective Wiggins wrote: "It is a tragic thing that this must come about in this manner, for I have lost a wonderful friend in Bill Hunter and so have all the police officers of the department... he was truly the policeman's friend."

While Hunter's death made sensational headlines in California, it was scarcely noted 2,000 miles away in Dallas. Jim Koethe surely mourned his friend, but if he connected Hunter's death in any way with their visit to Ruby's apartment five months earlier, he didn't mention it to any of his acquaintances at the Times-Herald.


  (6) New York Journal American (15th November, 1965)

The death of Dorothy Kilgallen, Journal-American columnist and famed TV personality, was contributed to by a combination of moderate quantities of alcohol and barbiturates, a medical examiner's report stated today.

As many personalities whose multiple duties and responsibilities demand unceasing attention, Miss Kilgallen experienced recurring tensions in meeting her deadlines for performances - both as a newspaperwoman and TV performer.

In his report today, Dr. James Luke, Assistant Medical Examiner, said that although Miss Kilgallen had only "moderate amounts of each," the effect of the combination had caused depression of the central nervous system "which in turn caused her heart to stop."

 

  (7) Jim Marrs, Crossfire (1989)

Whatever information Kilgallen learned and from whatever source, many researchers believe it brought about her strange death. She told attorney Mark Lane: "They've killed the President, (and) the government is not prepared to tell us the truth . . . " and that she planned to "break the case." To other friends she said: "This has to be a conspiracy! . . . I'm going to break the real story and have the biggest scoop of the century." And in her last column item regarding the assassination, published on September 3, 1965, Kilgallen wrote: "This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive - and there are a lot of them." But on November 8, 1965, there was one less reporter. That day Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead in her home. It was initially reported that she died of a heart attack, but quickly this was changed to an overdose of alcohol and pills.

  (8) Matthew Smith, JFK: The Second Plot (1992)


Roger Craig had been named Officer of the Year by the Dallas Traffic Commission and he was promoted four times. He was to receive no further promotion or commendation after his refusal to withdraw his identification of the Mauser and admit to being wrong about his identification of the man who ran from the Depository to be picked up by the Rambler on Elm Street. For this he suffered the most dire consequences. Craig was forbidden to speak to reporters about these things and when, in 1967, he was caught doing so he was fired. Thereafter he spoke of a consciousness of being followed, and was fired at by an unknown assailant. The bullet came uncomfortably close and, in fact, grazed his head. He began receiving threats and, in 1973, his car was run off a mountain road causing him a back injury, the pain from which was to become a permanent feature of his life. On another occasion his car was bombed. His marriage broke up in 1973 as a consequence of the continuing harassment, which did not abate. In 1975 he was shot at and wounded in the shoulder by another unknown gunman. At the age of 39, Roger Craig, suffering from the stress of the constant back pains he endured and the financial pressures he encountered because of finding it difficult to get work, succumbed, they said, and committed suicide. They said.

Enter keywords... NGfL, Standards Site, BBC, PBS Online, Virtual School, EU History, Virtual Library,
Excite, Alta Vista, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, AOL Search, Hotbot, iWon, Netscape, Google,
 Northern Light, Looksmart, Dogpile, Raging Search, All the Web, Go, GoTo, Go2net


http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKdeaths.htm  text with links to sources

---

Hale Boggs
 
>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 17th Majority Leader of the United States House of Representatives In office
 January 3, 1971 - January 3, 1973[1]

Deputy
Tip O'Neill (whip)

Preceded by
Carl Albert

Succeeded by
Tip O'Neill

3rd Majority Whip of the United States House of Representatives In office
 January 10, 1962 - January 3, 1971

Leader
Carl Albert

Preceded by
Carl Albert

Succeeded by
Tip O'Neill

Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana's 2nd district In office
 January 3, 1947 - January 3, 1973

Preceded by
Paul H. Maloney

Succeeded by
Lindy Boggs

In office
 January 3, 1941 - January 3, 1943

Preceded by
Paul H. Maloney

Succeeded by
Paul H. Maloney


Born
February 15, 1914
 Long Beach, Mississippi

Died
presumably October 16, 1972 (aged 58)
 Alaska, United States

Political party
Democratic

Spouse(s)
Lindy Boggs

Alma mater
Tulane University

Profession
lawyer, politician

Religion
Roman Catholic Thomas Hale Boggs, Sr. (February 15, 1914- Undetermined; presumably October 16, 1972, not declared dead until January 3, 1973) was an American Democratic politician and a member of the United States House of Representatives for Louisiana. He was the House Majority Leader.
 In 1972, while he was still Majority Leader, the twin engine airplane in which Boggs was traveling over a remote section of Alaska disappeared. The airplane presumably crashed and was never found. Congressman Nick Begich was also presumed killed in the same accident.
 

Early start in politics
 Born in Long Beach, Mississippi, Boggs was educated at Tulane University where he received a bachelor's degree in journalism in 1934 and a law degree in 1937. He first practiced law in New Orleans, but soon became a leader in the movement to break the power of the Long Machine, the political machine of late U.S. Senator Huey Long, who died in 1935. Long had previously broken the power of local New Orleans politicians in 1929. A Democrat, Boggs was elected to the U.S. House for the Second District and served from 1941 to 1943. At the time he was elected he was, at twenty-six, the youngest member of Congress. After an unsuccessful re-election bid in 1942, Boggs joined the United States Navy as an ensign. He served the remainder of World War II.
 Political career
 President Lyndon B. Johnson with House Majority Whip Boggs

After the war, Boggs began his political comeback. He was again elected to Congress in 1946 and was then re-elected 13 times, once just after he disappeared, but before he was presumed dead. In 1951, Boggs launched an ill-fated campaign for governor of Louisiana. Leading in the polls early in the campaign, he was soon put on the defensive when another candidate, Lucille May Grace-at the urging of long-time Louisiana political boss Leander Perez-questioned his membership in the American Student Union in the 1930s. By 1951, the ASU was thought to be a Communist-front group. Boggs avoided the question and attacked both Grace and Perez for conducting a smear campaign against him. Even so, Boggs placed third in the balloting for governor in early 1952, the last time he was involved in state politics.
 In 1960, the Republican Elliot Ross Buckley, a cousin of William F. Buckley, Jr., challenged Boggs but drew only 22,818 votes (22 percent) to the incumbent's 81,034 ballots (78 percent).
 David C. Treen, a Metairie lawyer who became the first Louisiana Republican governor in 1980, challenged Boggs in 1962, 1964, and 1968. Treen built on Buckley's efforts in the first contest, and Goldwater momentum in Louisiana helped in the second race. It was in the 1968 election, however, that Treen fared the best: 77,633 votes (48.8 percent) to Boggs's 81,537 ballots (51.2 percent). Treen attributed Boggs's victory to the supporters of former Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, Jr., who ran for president on the American Independent Party ticket. Treen said that Wallace supporters "became very cool to my candidacy. We couldn't really believe they would support Boggs, but several Democratic organizations did come out for Wallace and Boggs, and he received just enough Wallace votes to give him the election." Republican officials seemed convinced that fraudulent votes in some Orleans Parish precincts benefited Boggs and that Treen may have actually won the election[citation needed]. There were rumors[who?] of election officials who cast votes for people who did not show up at the polls and signed for them in the precinct registers.
 Boggs unsuccessfully sought the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1951-1952. He lost out to a field of opponents, including the eventual winner, Judge Robert F. Kennon of Minden, whom Boggs supported in the runoff. Kennon "adopted" Boggs's intraparty choice for lieutenant governor, C. E. "Cap" Barham of Ruston in Lincoln Parish. In that race, one of the candidates, "Miss" Lucille May Grace, filed suit in an unsuccessful attempt to remove Boggs from the ballot on the grounds that he was either a "communist" or had been a "communist sympathizer" in his earlier years. As it turned out, Miss Grace's maneuver was arranged by Boggs's long-term political rival, Judge Leander H. Perez, the political "boss" of Plaquemines Parish.
 During his tenure in Congress, Boggs was an influential player in the government. After Brown v. Board of Education he signed the Southern Manifesto condemning desegregation in the 1950s and opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yet unlike most Southern Congressmen of his era, he supported the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Open Housing Act of 1968. He was instrumental in passage of the interstate highway program in 1956 and was a member of the Warren Commission in 1963-1964.
 He served as Majority Whip from 1961 to 1970 and as majority leader (from January 1971). As majority whip, he ushered much of President Johnson's Great Society legislation through Congress. Boggs is one of numerous public officials known to have drinking problems during the time.[2]
 In April 1971 he made a speech on the floor of the House, strongly attacking FBI Director J Edgar Hoover, and the whole of the FBI. This led to a conversation between then President Richard Nixon and the Republican Minority Leader Gerald Ford in which Nixon said he could no longer take counsel from Boggs as a senior member of Congress. In the recording of this call, Nixon is heard to ask Ford to arrange for the House delegation to include an alternative to Boggs. Ford speculates that Boggs is on pills as well as alcohol.[3]
 Boggs's influence also led to charges of corruption. Controversy surrounded him, when a contractor who remodeled his home in Bethesda, Maryland, at a reduced cost sought his help for obtaining a $5 million extra payment for building a garage adjacent to the United States Capitol building.[citation needed]
 Disappearance in Alaska
 Disappearance and search
 As Majority Leader, Boggs often campaigned for others. On October 16, 1972, he was aboard a twin engine Cessna 310 with Representative Nick Begich of Alaska, who was facing a possible tight race in the November 1972 general election against the Republican candidate Don Young, when it disappeared during a flight from Anchorage to Juneau. The only others on board were Begich's aide, Russell Brown, and the pilot, Don Jonz;[4] the four were heading to a campaign fundraiser for Begich. (Begich won the 1972 election posthumously with 56 percent to Young's 44 percent, though Young would win the special election to replace Begich and won every election through and including 2008.)
 Coast Guard, Navy, and Air Force planes searched for the party. On November 24, 1972, after 39 days, the search was abandoned. Neither the wreckage of the plane nor the pilot's and passengers' remains were ever found. The accident prompted Congress to pass a law mandating Emergency Locator Transmitters (ELT's) in all U.S. civil aircraft.
 Both Boggs and Begich were re-elected that November. House Resolution 1 of January 3, 1973 officially recognized Boggs's presumed death and opened the way for a special election.
 Speculation, suspicions, and theories
 The events surrounding Boggs' death have been the subject of much speculation, suspicion, and numerous conspiracy theories. These theories often center on his membership on the Warren Commission. Boggs dissented from the Warren Commission's majority who supported the single bullet theory. Regarding the single bullet theory, Boggs commented, "I had strong doubts about it."[5] In the Robert Ludlum novel, The Matarese Circle, Boggs was killed to stop his investigation of the Kennedy assassination.
 Family
 In 1973, Boggs' wife since 1938, Lindy Boggs, was elected to the second district seat left vacant by his death, where she served until 1991.
 Hale and Lindy Boggs had three children: U.S. TV and public radio journalist Cokie Roberts, born December 27, 1943, and the wife of journalist Steven V. Roberts; Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr., a prominent Washington, D.C.-based attorney and lobbyist; and the late Barbara Boggs Sigmund, who served as mayor of Princeton, New Jersey. In 1982, Mrs. Sigmund lost a bid for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate to Frank Lautenberg.
 Tributes
 The Hale Boggs Memorial Bridge, which spans the Mississippi River in St. Charles Parish, is named in memory of the former congressman. The Portage Glacier visitor center, located at Portage Glacier in South Central Alaska is named the Begich-Boggs Visitor Center. The Hale Boggs Federal Building at 500 Poydras Street in New Orleans is also named after him.
 In 1993, Boggs was among thirteen politicians, past and present, inducted into the first class of the new Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield.
 Notes
 United States Navy portal


1. ^ As Boggs was missing and not officially declared dead until January, he formally retained an office after his disappearance.
2. ^ Steven Waldman (January 1988). "Governing under the influence; Washington alcoholics: their aides protect them, the media shields them". Washington Monthly. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_n12_v19/ai_6306545. 
3. ^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZmkwqEK9Kk&feature=related []
4. ^ "Hale Boggs - Missing in Alaska". Famous Missing Aircraft. Check-Six. http://www.check-six.com/lib/Famous_Missing/Boggs.htm. Retrieved 2007-04-15. 
5. ^ Epstein, Edward J. Inquest, (New York: Viking Press, 1966), p. 148.

References
 
Boulard, Garry, "The Big Lie--Hale Boggs, Lucille May Grace and Leander Perez in 1951-52" (2001)
Maney, Patrick J. "Hale Boggs: The Southerner as National Democrat" in Raymond W Smock and Susan W Hammond, eds. Masters of the House: Congressional Leadership Over Two Centuries (1998) pp 33-62.
Strahan, Randall. "Thomas Brackett Reed and the Rise of Party Government" in Raymond W Smock and Susan W Hammond, eds. Masters of the House: Congressional Leadership Over Two Centuries (1998) pp 223-259.
"Boggs, Thomas Hale, Sr., (1914-1972)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=b000594. Retrieved 2007-04-15. 

External links
 

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Hale Boggs
Hale Boggs at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
Transcript, Hale Boggs Oral History Interview, 3/13/69, by T. H. Baker, Internet Copy, LBJ Library. Accessed April 3, 2005.
"Hale Boggs - Freedom of Information Privacy Act page". Federal Bureau of Investigation. http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/boggs.htm. 
Hale Boggs Telex - Debunked

United States House of Representatives

Preceded by
 Paul H. Maloney
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
 from Louisiana's 2nd congressional district
 1941 - 1943
Succeeded by
 Paul H. Maloney

Preceded by
 Paul H. Maloney
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
 from Louisiana's 2nd congressional district
 1947-1972
Succeeded by
 Lindy Boggs

Party political offices

Preceded by
 Carl Albert
House Majority Whip
 1961-1971
Succeeded by
 Tip O'Neill

House Majority Leader
 1971-1972

 
Members of the Warren Commission

Earl Warren (Chairman)
 Hale Boggs   John Cooper   Allen Dulles   Gerald Ford   John McCloy   Richard Russell
 
Majority Leaders of the United States House of Representatives

Payne   Underwood   Kitchin   Mondell   Longworth   Tilson   Rainey   Byrns   Bankhead   Rayburn   McCormack   Halleck   McCormack   Halleck   McCormack   Albert   Boggs   O'Neill   Wright   Foley   Gephardt   Armey   DeLay   Blunt (acting)   Boehner   Hoyer
 
Democratic Party Leaders in the United States House of Representatives

Richardson   Williams   Clark   Underwood   Kitchin   Clark   Kitchin   Garret   Garner   Rainey   Byrns   Bankhead   Rayburn   McCormack   Rayburn   McCormack   Rayburn   McCormack   Albert   Boggs   O'Neill   Wright   Foley   Gephardt   Pelosi   Hoyer
 
Majority Whips of the United States House of Representatives

Tawney   Watson   Dwight   Bell   Knutson   Vestal   McDuffie   Greenwood   Boland   Ramspeck   Sparkman   Arends   Priest   Arends   Albert   Boggs   O'Neill   McFall   Brademas   Foley   Coelho   Gray   Bonior   DeLay   Blunt   Clyburn
 
Democratic Whips of the United States House of Representatives

Underwood   Lloyd   Bell   Oldfield   McDuffie   Greenwood   Boland   Ramspeck   Sparkman   McCormack   Priest   McCormack   Albert   Boggs   O'Neill   McFall   Brademas   Foley   Coelho   Gray  Bonior   Pelosi   Hoyer   Clyburn

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana
1st district

Livingston, E.   White   Johnson   White   Slidell   Sére   St. Martin   Dunbar   Eustis   Bouligny   Sypher   Lawrence   Gibson   Hunt   St. Martin   Wilkinson   Meyer   Estopinal   O'Connor   Fernández   Hébert   Tonry   Livingston, R.   Vitter   Jindal   Scalise
2nd district

Gurley   Thomas   Ripley   Chinn   Dawson   la Branche   Thibodeaux   Conrad   Bullard   Landry   Hunt   Taylor   Mann   Sheldon   Ellis   Hahn   Wallace   Lagan   Coleman   Lagan   Davey   Buck   Davey   Gilmore   Dupré   Spearing   Maloney   Boggs, T.H.   Maloney   Boggs, T.H.   Boggs, L   Jefferson   Cao

3rd district

Brent   Overton   Bullard   Garland   Moore   Dawson   Harmanson   Penn   Perkins   Davidson   Newsham   Darrall   Acklen   Darrall   Kellogg   Gay   Price   Broussard   Martin   Montet   Mouton   Domengeaux   Willis   Caffery   Treen   Tauzin   Melancon

4th district

Bossier   Morse   Moore   Jones   Sandidge   Landrum   Vidal   Newsham   McCleery   Boarman   Smith   Levy   Elam   Blanchard   Ogden   Breazeale   Watkins   Sandin   Brooks   Waggonner   Leach   Roemer   McCrery   Fields   McCrery   Fleming

5th district

Ransdell   Elder   Wilson   Mills   McKenzie   Passman   Huckaby   McCrery   Cooksey   Alexander

6th district

Sheridan   Nash   Robertson, E.   Lewis   Irion   Robertson, E.   Robertson, S.   Favrot   Wickliffe   Morgan   Sanders, Sr.   Favrot   Kemp   Sanders, Jr.   Griffith   Sanders, Jr.   Morrison   Rarick   Moore   Baker   Cazayoux   Cassidy

7th district

Pujo   Lazaro   De Rouen   Plauche   Larcade   Thompson   Edwards   Breaux   Hayes   John   Boustany

8th district

Aswell   Overton   Dear   Allen   Long, Doc   McSween   Long, G.   Long, S.   Long, G.   Long, C.   Holloway

At-large

Clark   Poydras   Robertson   Butler   Johnston   Sheridan
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hale_Boggs" Categories: 1914 births | 1972 deaths | American military personnel of World War II | Disappeared people | Louisiana lawyers | People from New Orleans, Louisiana | American Roman Catholic politicians | Louisiana Democrats | Majority Leaders of the United States House of Representatives | Members of the United States House of Representatives from Louisiana | Victims of aviation accidents or incidents in the United States | United States Navy officers | Members of the Warren Commission | Watergate figures | Tulane University alumni | Tulane University Law School alumni | Accidental human deaths in Alaska

Hidden categories: All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements from June 2009 | All articles with specifically-marked weasel-worded phrases | Articles with specifically-marked weasel-worded phrases from June 2009 | Articles with unsourced statements from April 2007