Good new article at Kennedy and King about how Kennedy's ideas on Vietnam originated. And the author follows through on how they then dictated what Kennedy did in the White House. Compare that to what we have today. Yech.

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kenne...in-vietnam

[URL="https://youtu.be/t5hUaBmxAtY"]https://youtu.be/t5hUaBmxAtY
[/URL]

Good short interview, and not just about RFK.

I have not seen the questions but Erick saw them in the NY Times online and told me yesterday that one question is asking what Trump knew about Seth Rich and Wikileaks. Hmmmmm. Most curious.

I started watching this the other day and into second video one idiot remarks that LBJ inherited JFK's Vietnam war, that it was JFK who put in the forces. I turned it off. Disgusted.

http://www.northdallasfuneralhome.com/obituary/15814/

Was this him?

If it is, did I miss the obituary?

I may be behind the curve here, but if I understand Jos. McBride on the BOR episode entitled Additional Facts on the Tippit Shooting, Capt. Westbrook switched out the pistol taken from LHO after his arrest for the pistol actually used by the real killer. But doesn't there have to be a paper trail for the gun? A record from the store that sold it, a receipt for payment, something? And wouldn't it be different from the gun in evidence if they were switched? Serial numbers and all that.....or am I missing something?

Porkins Policy Radio episode 140 In Praise of Blood by Judi Rever

[video=youtube_share;RTxeaqaZxXQ]http://youtu.be/RTxeaqaZxXQ[/video]

Freelance journalist Judi Rever joins me this week for an in-depth discussion of her new book In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Judi talks about her first experiences in the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide while reporting in Congo in the late 1990s. Judi discusses what it was like to uncover the true nature of both the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and its actions before, during, and after the genocide. We then move onto Paul Kagame himself and the structure of the RPF. Judi and I talk about Kagame's life in Uganda, his close relationship with Yoweri Museveni, and his time as head of Ugandan intelligence. Judi also talks about the much feared Directorate Military Intelligence (DMI). She talks about the structure of the DMI and how it functioned as the nervous system of the genocide. We then move onto the political ideology of the RPF and what it would ultimately achieve. Judi and I discuss its extreme views which saw the mass slaughter of Hutus all across Rwanda and the seizing of land as a result. Judi talks also talks about how Kagame and the RPF have turned Rwanda into a nation of spies and informants.

In the second hour Judi and I talk about the Byumba Stadium Massacre, and how it acts as a template for RPF's crimes throughout the genocide and afterwards. Judi explains how the RPF tactic of luring injured and starving Hutus into a central area under the pretense of providing aid was used through about the genocide. We discuss how under Kagame's direction, burning bodies avoided the existence of mass graves, which could be discovered on satellite photos. Later on we talk about the assassination of Juvenal Habyarimana. Judi explains the reality of the assassination, which was in fact carried out by the RPF on orders from Paul Kagame. We talk about the significance of this event and how the media is beginning to openly talk about the true nature of the assassination. Judi and I also touch on western collaboration with Rwanda. Judi explains the CIA's role in aiding Rwanda during the genocide and afterwards during its military operations in Zaire that overthrew Mobutu. We also talk about the exploitation of minerals in Congo by western companies under the auspices of the Rwandan military.

We finish the conversation by talking about Kagame's silencing of activists, whistleblowers, and journalists in both Central Africa and Western Europe. Judi discusses the importance of speaking out and what we can do to expose Kagame and the RPF's massive crimes.

https://www.amazon.com/Praise-Blood-Judi...0345812093

There is an excellent vis of Chris Hedges at Truthdig interviewing Mark Crispin Miller. Miller is a professor of media studies at New York Uni.

I highly recommend watching although it is almost 30 minutes. It confirms my own view that we are nearing the end game of US global power and I agree entirely with Miller's assessment ---- these are, indeed, the maddest times I can ever recall in my 70 year life.

The western elite have become fascistic in their ways as they desperately attempt to hold on to power even as it slips through their fingers like water. The fact is that the US is de facto finished as an economic power and everyone knows it. And they hate it. But they let greed become their all powerful god and greed won out in 2007/8.

The US now has a $21 trillion and counting national debt. This will be approx $30 trillion (on projections) by 2025.

Servicing this debt in a world where US dollar reserve currency status is now rapidly facing its imminent mortality is the real fear that makes the balls of the Washington power elite shrivel. And so it should.

The day will arrive in the not too distant future (Prof. Alfred McCoy believes it will happen as early as 2025) when the US can no longer service their debt and will, consequently, be forced to repudiate all their debt. When that happens the Pentagon system will collapse due to the most severe budgetary restrictions and constraints --- and the greatest military power that the world has ever known will dwindle and collapse as a world force.

The Hedges-Miller was broadcast by RT, the Satan of American righteous and indignant neocon-nery and is currently available on Youtube, as below.



The report that both Hedges and Miller discuss, Democracy Lost can be freely downloaded as a .pdf file HERE.

I found this report about a man, whose name is redacted, who reported to the RCMP that he saw an ad in the Winnipeg Free Press about a meeting textiles meeting at the Winnipeg airport. The meeting was to be held on February 13, 1964. The RCMP confirmed that the ad had been placed in the newspaper on 3 separate dates but decided not to investigate who placed the ad even though this lead was connected to Kennedy's assassination. First link is the RCMP report and the second one is the story about the airport meeting published in the Winnipeg Free Press on May 2, 1964.

https://archive.org/download/RCMPWinnipe...nnipeg.pdf


https://archive.org/download/RCMPWinnipe...rticle.pdf

Speaking the Unspeakable: The Assassination and Martyrdom of Thomas Merton

in Book Review by Edward Curtin

April 27, 2018

https://countercurrents.org/2018/04/27/s...as-merton/

A Quasi-Review of The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton by Hugh Turley & David Martin

Quote:"Killing a man who says No!' is a risky business," the priest replied, "because even a corpse can go on whispering No! No! No! with a persistence and obstinacy that only certain corpses are capable of. And how can you silence a corpse?" Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine

Fifty years have elapsed since Thomas Merton died under mysterious circumstances in a cottage at a Red Cross Conference Center outside Bangkok, Thailand where he was attending an international inter-faith monastic conference. The truth behind his death has been concealed until now through the lies and deceptions of a cast of characters, religious, secular, and U.S. governmental, whose actions chill one to the bone. But he has finally found his voice through Hugh Turley and David Martin, who tell the suppressed truth of Merton's last minutes on earth on December 10, 1968.

This is an extraordinary book in so many ways. First, because the authors prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Trappist monk and anti-war writer Thomas Merton was assassinated and did not die in a fabricated accident, as has been claimed for all these years.

Second, because it is so meticulously researched, sourced, documented, and logically argued that it puts to shame and the lie to so many works, including academic ones, that purport to be profound but fall apart once carefully inspected, especially all those that have been written about Merton and his alleged accidental death.These false accounts of his death, obviously presented purposely by the key players that he was electrocuted by a fan while wet from a shower have been repeated ad nauseam over fifty years as if curiosity were reserved for cats and a writer's job were to repeat commonplace absurdities. And of course the mainstream media, the prime organs of propaganda dissemination, have carried out their function by repeating these lies at every turn. The transparency of Turley and Martin's presentation is greatly enhanced by the presence of footnotes, not endnotes, which allow readersto easily check sources as they read. Most footnotes refer to primary documents letters, police reports, etc. that are reproduced in an appendix that is, however,in need of enlargement, but whose contents have, for some odd or not so odd reasons, escaped the thousands of writers who've penned words about Merton.

Third, because it greatly expands our understanding of that fateful year 1968 by adding the prophetic Merton's name to the list of well-known anti-war leaders MLK and RFK who were slain that year by U.S. government operatives intent on crushing the growing opposition to their genocidal war waged on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The links between these assassinations are made manifest as one follows the authors' brilliant analysis that allows an informed reader to see the template common to them all and one that clearly leads to intelligence agencies practiced in the arts of murder and cover-up.

Fourth, because it proves that in the long run the pen is mightier than the sword, and the spiritually powerful poetic words of a God-entranced man living in seclusion can rattle the cages of men who embrace the void of violence while rejecting the spiritual essence of all religions that non-violence and love are the laws of existence. Merton may be dead for his killers, but not for those who hear his voice whispering on every page: "The very thoughts of a person like me are crimes against the state. All I have to do is think: and immediately I become guilty," Merton wrote in "A Signed Confession of Crimes Against the State."

Lastly, because The Martyrdom of Thomas Mertonmarkedly forces the reader to face its harsh truths and examine one's souland complicity in evil as one learns of the perfidy and betrayal of Merton by friends, associates, and biographers whom a naïve person might assume are beyond reproach, until, that is, one reads this book. It is a very hard lesson to accept and understand. But Hugh Turley and David Martin sequentially force the reader to contemplate such matters; to conjecturewhy some have conspired and abetted in Merton's murder and especially its fifty year cover-up.

Thomas Merton (Fr. Lewis) was a Catholic monk, poet, writer and theologian who became very well-knownin 1948 with the publication of his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, which became a bestseller. Over the next dozen or so years, he published many books on religious themes, mainly avoiding social or political subjects. But although he lived in a monastery, and eventually by himself in a hermitage nearby, he corresponded widely and was tuned in to worldly events. He became a friend and mentor to religious/political activists such as Martin Luther King, Fathers Philip and Daniel Berrigan, James Douglass, among many others. He was a friend of Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker. He corresponded with Boris Pasternak and Ethel Kennedy; wrote about Albert Camus and Eugene Ionesco. During the 1960s his writing turned more overtly political while remaining rooted in a deep mystical and contemplative spirituality. He became a major inspiration for radical activists who opposed nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, and the materialist way of life fostered by capitalism that relied on the spread of the American empire through world-wide violence. Although living far away from the din and drama of day-to-day politics, his writing, encouragement, and influence were profound, and he became a major impediment to the propaganda and policies of the military-industrial-political-intelligence complex. He was an inspiration whose spirit disturbed church and state in the most radical way. Turley and Martin say of him:

Merton saw clearly that devotion to truth could not help but bring a person into conflict with sinister special interests. The effectiveness of the truth-seeker would, of course, be greater to the extent he could rally others to his cause, but ultimately, he said, the truth seeker's strength lay in trust in God.

Merton died on the afternoon of December 10, 1968 when those sinister special interests snuck up on him. He had just given a talk, had lunch, and returned to his cottage shortly before 2 P.M., accompanied by Fr. Francois de Grunne, O.S.B. (Order of Saint Benedict) from Belgium, who shared the cottage with Merton and two others, Fr. Celestine Say, O.S.B. from the Philippines, whose room was across from Merton's on the first floor, and John Moffit, a journalist editor whose room was directly over Merton's on the second floor adjacent to de Grunne's. The walk from the dining hall to the cottage took 10-15 minutes. Say and Moffit were walking a good distance behind Merton and de Grunne and arrived at the cottage about 5-7 minutes after them. When they entered the unlocked building, they did not see Merton and de Grunne and presumed they had gone to their respective rooms.

Shortly after de Grunne and Merton entered the cottage, Merton was killed. The actions of de Grunne, a mysterious figure who, according to the authors, "seems to have fallen off the face of the earth" and whose "abbey will not even respond to our questions about him," clearly make him a prime suspect in the crime. His actions and story are not believable and are contradicted by the most reliable witness, Fr. Say,whose statements have been absolutely consistent.

Beyond speculation, however, are the facts gathered by the authors that clearly prove that from the start there was a concerted effort to make a crime look like an accident. These efforts were initiated by de Grunne, who was the first to call it an "accident," but ably assisted by many others, including the Thai police or their surrogates, whose police report was released by the U.S. Embassy seven months after Merton's death and has no title, author, date, photographs, laboratory reports, or investigators' memos, and omits the testimony of the first two witnesses on the scene, Fr. Say and Fr. Egbert Donovan, who viewed Merton lying in a position and dressed in shorts totally inconsistent with the accidental death scenario. Most importantly, this "report" omits an autopsy report since no autopsy was conducted, a dead giveaway that a cover-up was underway. When a person is found dead, the first assumptionof a competent investigation is that a crime may have been committed, and when the victim is found with a sever gash on the back of his head, is lying in a position inconsistent with an accident, an autopsy becomes essential. But none was performed in Thailand or when Merton's body arrived back at the Abbey of Gethsemani. That the United States Embassy, at the request of Most Reverend Dom Rembert Weakland, O.S.B., who was presiding over the conference, had the U.S Army take possession of Merton's body shortly thereafter, embalm it, and five days later fly it back to the U.S. aboard a military plane together with the corpses of American casualties of the Vietnam War is not only supremely ironic but downright suspicious.

The first public report of Merton's death was delivered on December 11, as Turley and Martin report:

On December 11, 1968, the Associated Press reported that Merton had been electrocuted when he touched a short in a cord while moving an electrical fan, according to anonymous [my emphasis] Catholic sources. The initial news reports did not include any important details such as whofound Merton, the names of any witnesses or officials at the scene, or who determined itwas an accident.

The Thai doctor's cause-of-death certificate and the official death certificate said Merton died of sudden cardiac failure, but failed to mention the bleeding rear head wound seen by witnesses.

Most importantly, when Say and Donovan first saw Merton lying on the floor on his back, his legs straight, and his arms straight down by his side with palms to the floor as if placed in a coffin, with a floor fan lying across a thigh to the opposite lower waist, Donovan urged Say to take photographs of Merton before the crime scene was subsequently disturbed. They were very suspicious. Through great detective work, Turley and Martin have acquired a copy of these two photos, but they have been prohibited by the current abbot of Gethsemani from publishing them or even an artist's rendering of them. The authors say:

The photographs taken by Say are the best available evidence of the actual scene of Merton's death….The reason the monks took the photographs, as we have emphasized, was to document exactly how they found the body. As we have seen, people whom they would hardly have ever suspected, have consistently done their best to suppress those images. The photographs are an essential resource to anyone interested in knowing the truth about how Merton was killed.

But it is clear that many people would like to suppress that truth and have been hard at work doing so for half a century. But since this is intentionally a quasi-review because one must read this book from beginning to end to grasp the intricacies of this murder mysteryand the cast of characters that comprise it (no review can do justice to such a detailed and brilliant investigation,and, even so, attempting one would spoil the book), I will end with the authors' words:

Contrary to the common view, there is really no mystery about how Merton died. The best evidence indicates beyond any serious doubt that Merton was murdered. It's a simple fact that the average person is far more likely to be murdered than to be killed by an electric fan, and Merton was no average person. The story that a fan killed Merton is so preposterous that a series of fantastic stories have had to be invented to make it believable….Who did it and why? The CIA had the motive and the means." 1968: It was a very dark year: MLK, RFK, and Thomas Merton martyrs all.

If we want to see clearly and revive hope, the time has come to face the faces of the ghastly gallery of liars and deceivers guilty of these crimes. Only then can we live the truths their victims suffered and died for.

Then we too can confess with Merton that we have thought "Crimes Against the State."